Control is an illusion

America has a split personality. I say this with confidence as the evidence is all around us.

• We want less government involvement in our lives yet we happily whiz down roads paid with Federal highway money.
• We think “entitlement programs” should be slashed, slashed, slashed, yet 40 million people are receiving food stamps, 50 million are on Medicaid, and 4.4 million are on welfare.
• A vocal number of us are increasingly so concerned about “illegal immigrants,” ostensibly because they take away jobs that could be going to “real Americans,” that some of us are calling for building a huge wall between us and Mexico and we’re even willing to flirt with fascism by allowing police to detain people who can not prove on the spot they are in the U.S. legally yet when the United Farm Workers issued a challenge to Americans to “take our jobs” only 16 people showed up (video) out of the 4,000+ applications they received.

The other, more insidious, indicator doesn’t really appear on the news. In fact, all of the more visible indicators are evidence of an underlying attitude dissonance in American philosophical thought.

Here’s the thing: shit happens. And when I say “shit” I don’t mean just any stuff. I mean bad things, things that are scary, discomfitting, and enraging, and often have a direct, negative impact on the quality of your life. There are two basic philosophical approaches to a series of these occurrences in your life: take them personally or don’t.

Take them personally manifests itself in two ways, the most obvious being the victim mentality that is also so prevalent in American society today – this is happening to me because I’m poor/a different religion/a minority and has nothing to do with my heroin addiction or the fact that I didn’t work in school so I now am not qualified for any job at all.

The other less obvious but in some ways more detrimental outgrowth of the idea that the bad things that affect your life are personal is the idea that everything that happens to you is a direct outgrowth of your choices.

The idea that everything that happens to you is influenced or able to be influenced by you is a meme brought to us by the positivity movement, exemplified by the bestseller The Secret, and it is seductive. Right thought leads to right consequences. Concentrate on money and the universe will give it to you. Project a good attitude and you will attract happy people. But the dark side of this is that all the bad things that happen to you are an outgrowth of wrong thought.

If your job sucks it’s not because Management are being total assholes and giving you no support whatsoever, or better still outright abusing you; your job sucks because you choose to work for a bad employer and the consequences of Management’s misbehavior are under your control. If you don’t get a raise it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or “sell yourself” enough. If you get cancer it’s because you didn’t focus on being healthy.

Despite its seductive nature and the ultimate appeal of the lure of control, and despite the small grain of truth inherent in its philosophy because after all actions do indeed have consequences, the idea that we can control or influence the bulk of what happens to us is utterly false. It places the onus of others’ behavior on the person being affected by that behavior which in and of itself is contrary to its own philosophy.

Yes, your life is affected by the choices you make and bearing the consequences, both good and bad, of those choices would in a perfect world be your responsibility alone. We don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world with other people and we are affected by the choices they make not only with no malice toward us but often with no idea of our very existence.

The woman who decides to have a second cup of coffee Tuesday morning which means she leaves the house 15 minutes later than normal which puts her on the freeway at a time when she might not normally be there so she is in the path of the tractor trailer driven by the guy who has been up 40 straight hours to just happens to fall asleep and lose control drifting into her lane and pinning her car against the concrete barrier crushing her to death is affected not only by her choice to have a second cup of coffee but also by the choices of the truck driver, and the person in the lane ahead of her, and by the shipper who put the driver’s load on the truck and set the delivery schedule.

And in the world of The Secret she, and she alone, is responsible for her own death because she chose to have that second cup of coffee.

The simple fact of the matter is that life is chaos. We can control what we can control, which is no where near as much as we think or we would like. But just because life is chaos doesn’t mean that we don’t have a right to bitch about it a little when bad things happen to us. It means that we have to recognize when complaining has taken the place of working to change your circumstances.