Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Control:
Is the expectation that violence and coercion allow us to bend other actors – humans and others – to our will.
We expect benefits that outweigh the costs – we ignore the costs.
We aim control at anything and everything, including ourselves.
Arise from our desire to be effective in the face of conditions we want to influence or change.
Then they diverge:
Understanding that changing ourselves, our outlook, our expectations is more effective than attempting external changes without
considering their unintended consequences.
Mastery exerts focused and measured force:
It exhausts itself in the attempt – destroying the self along with all the rest – ultimately the same result.
Mastery works:
This is why we are surrounded by the noise and fury, the violence and destruction, of control; while mastery is rare.
Humans are capable of mastery:
As a result, great swaths of reality are ignored and pushed aside as “externalities.”
This feeds a self-generated impoverishment of awareness.
This supports a self-imposed delusion that only what remains within the realm of technique has value.
Eventually this attitude overpowers its practitioners’ sanity.
Insanity maintains them on their destructive and useless course until there is nothing left.
Mastery avoids this trap:
Acting on the self is the preferred path, so long as one does not subvert the integrity of the self – which is inseparable from the
integrity of the whole.
To be clear:
The “self” on a path towards mastery does not see its needs in opposition to the totality of the world.
If a “lesser” necessity, no matter who it appears to serve, is in opposition to a “greater” one, it is modified or abandoned.
This extends to the continuation of one’s own life, the life of the “individual” self.
This choice is never taken lightly; but it is always there.
It cannot be assumed by any other for another.
It represents a debt to the world that will ultimately be paid.
Even the most well-intentioned tend to fall into controlling strategies as they work to isolate and “fix” “problems.”
This reflex is hard to avoid:
This does not rule it out either, but we need to break out of the futility trap.
Control’s power has been, and continues to be, destructive of life at all levels and at all scales.
It has been extremely successful at destroying or co-opting its opposition:
Every failed defense by an indigenous people, every attempted overthrow by some “enlightened” faction, has failed.
They’ve all failed:
So long as the destruction proceeds at an ever quicker and more thorough pace, the need to make an effective resistance
grows.
What form should that resistance take?
At this point the answer can only be a reluctant and tentative negative:
Gandhi was able to accomplish incredible feats as did his heirs in South Africa.
Even these few supreme efforts have not borne full fruit.
Their beneficiaries are still caught up in cycles of oppression.
However, it does provide the only example of a non-controlling strategy based on self-mastery:
It’s unfair to lump these efforts in with the failure of “hobbyist non-violent protests.”
Mastery:
Points to the need to look for difficult actions that can have disproportionate results.
Emotionally satisfying Pyrrhic action with no chance of success only provokes the oppressors.
We need a masterful response.
Mastery is humble:
It is a profound realization that we do not know the mysteries of the world and cannot presume to take control.
Even when others, acting in a controlling manner, are destroying everything we care about.
This is where the trap of control bites the hardest:
One is rushing down a path which will ultimately and irrevocably lead to becoming the next oppressor.
Look at every revolution, every resistance that has ever “succeeded.”
This is why our predicament is so daunting:
Mastery is the only way to avoid this trap and discover what can be done.
It is an ongoing habituation: