Control is the DNA of the culture. This may be why there is an obsessive message of freedom built as a dome over this radioactive truth. Freedom seems mostly a fantasy an abstraction like pristine forest and humane treatment, often dreamt about, written about, but rarely occurring. It is enhanced coloration on a big screen. It goes along more believed-in than reality. I’ve met few free thinkers who haven’t spent at least a little time against their will in a barred institution.
Control is the goal in every boardroom, precinct, sports event, classroom: of markets, people, opponents, subjects. It is never not the goal. There is no reason to exist except through the exercise of control. Therefore every day is a kind of war play. The practice of war is the ultimate attempt of control. The result is always chaos. When a culture of control creates chaos it reacts with more elaborate and wider methods of control thereby creating ever more chaos.
The idea of control exists in happiness as a pursuit; for it must be dragged down from behind, skinned and cutup for use – controlled. You can go anywhere, but your mind stays right here, in place, gleaning beginning, middle and end with linear brains, myopic by design, through bad stretches and good, a smiley face for the moon, a crooked road made straight.
Happiness through pursuit and Freedom through control are the prevailing messages. Freedom to control those curls, frizz, dandruff, in pursuit of said happiness. Dicks, diabetes, wandering minds, high blood pressure, asthma, all can be controlled. All is happiness with a job well done. Freedom to control the road in a SUV, All Wheel Drive, control the borders, money, time, global warming. You may as well control a ghost; and indeed there are efforts in that regard.
Often paralleled with freedom is privacy, here again, it’s hardly a veil for your nether regions (certainly not at the airport) because control lies at the heart of everything. It is map and grid and grid and map for greater and greater control. It is bit and parse and split and smash with ever increasing – uh huh – control. To what end? Control of course. There is no other end for the west but a tightly scripted happily ever after, a myriad of colorful sunsets, experienced everywhere from the same chair, straight jacket, sippy straw between the lips, mechanical hand to lift the veil and do the dirty.
If you were to ask just about any American what freedom meant to them they would almost certainly say one way or another: the freedom to “control” their destiny. They got it deep down in their bones. Freedom and control are so intertwined it’s likely more often than not that when one pursues freedom one is licking the lolly of control.
After a couple thousand years under the strict supervision of an all knowing all seeing all controlling celestial king, science came along and tossed him aside more or less, but it turned out that control was king and the king remains. One can readily see that we are returning to the bosom of an all knowing, all seeing, all controlling entity.
So for a dog on an island or a man in a tree there is no backing away. There is no being left behind, alone, you will be controlled accordingly. There will be a rescue whether asked for or not. A beginning, middle and end will emerge to order the chaos. Control is freedom and freedom is control.
