Dee Hock on Control

For decades, Old Monkey and I have puzzled over the essential nature of desire for certainty and control, and where it originates. Why do we strive to structure institutions as though they were predictable, controllable machines, and labor to make people behave as though they were predictable cogs and wheels? It led to a fascinating question. What would it be like if one had perfect ability to command and control?

It would be necessary to know every thing and event that ever had happened, for how could one know what total control meant without infinite knowledge of past events and their consequences? It would require omniscience about the future; necessity to know with absolute certainty every thing that could ever be and every event that could ever occur, when and how it would happen, and every nuance of what its effects would be. One could never control that which could not be known until it happened. Mystery and surprise could not be tolerated.

Perfect knowledge of past, present, and future would not be enough to achieve perfect control. It would be necessary to know the thoughts, emotions, and desires of every human being: their hopes, joys, fears, and urges. And not just those other folks. It would be necessary to know everything self might ever feel, think, know, or experience, past, present, and future. Even beyond that, it would be necessary to be rid of all emotions, feelings, beliefs, and values, for such things catch us unaware and affect our behavior. Compassion must go, love must go, admiration, envy, desire, hate, nostalgia, hope - along with every aesthetic sensibility. If perfect control existed, couldn't emotions be called up and controlled at will? But how to know which to call up, to what degree, and why? Such encumbrances would be intolerable. Perfect control would require absolute knowledge of everything that came before every before, and everything to come after every after, and so on ad absurdum.
But all that reveals nothing. It is only conditions. It still leaves the question unanswered. What would it be like to be the possessor of total, infinite, absolute control? The first thought is that it would be akin to being a god, at least as gods are normally perceived. With more intense thought and a good deal more intuition, it hits like a bolt from the blue. It would be death. Absolute, perfect prediction and control is in the coffin. It requires complete denial of life.

Life is uncertainty, surprise, hate, wonder, speculation, love, joy, pity, pain, mystery, beauty, and a thousand other things we can't yet imagine. Life is not about controlling. It's not about getting. It's not about having. It's not about knowing. And it's not even about being. Life is eternal, perpetual becoming, or it is nothing. Becoming is not a thing to be known or controlled. It is a magnificent, mysterious odyssey to be experienced.

At bottom, desire to command and control is a deadly, destructive compulsion to rob self and others of the joys of living. Is it any wonder that a society whose worldviews, whose internal model of reality, is based on belief of the universe and all therein as machine should turn destructive? Is it any wonder that a society that worships the primacy of measurement, prediction, and control should result in destruction of the environment, maldistribution of wealth and power, mass destruction of species, the Holocaust, the hydrogen bomb, and countless other horrors? How could it be otherwise, when for centuries we have conditioned ourselves with ever more powerful notions of engineered solutions, domination, compelled behavior, and separable self-interest? Tyranny is tyranny no matter how petty, how well ratiopnalized, how unconscious, or how well intended. It is that to which we have persuaded ourselves for centuries, in thousands of subtle ways, day after day, month after month, year after year. It did not need to be so, ever. It need not be so now. It cannot be so forever.