Who's in Control

I realize that inspiration for some ideas don't always seem related, so bear with me here. I was listening to the Savage Love podcast, an online broadcast of a sex advice column by Dan Savage. Savage Love is the name of his popular newspaper based advice column that has been around for years, usually in some little local newspaper you find in a rack next to the gum machines in your favorite Bar & Grill.

What I heard in passing in the middle of a explanation was a bit of a revelation. The idea resonated with me and later evolved into a different train of thought. Dan was saying, "This is about control and dominance, so much of sex really is, isn't it? ...humans are all about domination and control. Human society is all about domination and control, why shouldn't human sexuality [also be about domination and control]...." He mentioned marking your territory, taking possession, submitting to someone else's authority, and demonstrating control over others. The context here was sexuality, and Dan Savage didn't dive into the way that this mirrors society as a whole or human traits in non-sexual situations, but you could immediately see the connection.

Later, on a long road trip, my wife and I were talking about how parents try to control their children. I told her that I thought that parental control was only an illusion. You can try to shape your children's behavior, but you can't control their thoughts and desires. You can exert influence, and you can modify behavior through punishments and rewards, but you can't change what they think or what they want to do. We acknowledge that people grow up and are given their own freedom and independence gradually over time, but what many parents don't recognize is that their children have already developed their own way of doing things and thinking long before the parent finally realizes this. We also discussed abuse (parental and spousal), which is a sick twist on control, but that is another subject.

Human society is all about control.

My wife recently graduated from nursing school and started working at a university (teaching) hospital. Before graduation, she was required to shadow a working nurse. She was assigned to a hospital in a system in our city has struggled to maintain profitability. Their hospitals have a reputation as horrible places to work. The atmosphere is bullying, and management never offers the carrot, but is always quick to use the stick - or maybe the sledge hammer. This was a health care system being run primarily as a business, and failing miserably.

While there, basically as an unpaid intern, they started bullying her to come to work for them. This period, just prior to graduation, is when most of my wife's class was busy searching for a job, sharing their experiences with each other. My wife was certain of one thing, she did not want to work for this hospital. It wasn't just that the atmosphere was dismal, it was also that the pay and benefits were nowhere near as good as other hospitals, and the workload was higher. Things kept getting creepier. Managers would "announce" to groups in front of my wife that she was going to work for them, when she wasn't. She finally had it out with the HR manager, when he wouldn't leave her alone. She listed all the better benefits with the hospital she was going to work for. He remained unconvinced, which was his own fatal flaw. If he couldn't see the problem, how could he hope to correct it?

I told her that it was all about control. They mistook the temporary control they had over her during the intership as the same complete control they thought they had over their own employees. They thought that they could just dictate to her to take a job with them because she was assigned to go there like she was working for them. That's the way they treat their employees, so why should they treat her any differently? They were so lost in their warped mindset of controlling others that they didn't understand why she didn't do what they told her to do with her life.

Although she is working for an educational hospital now, and she doesn't get bullied, it is still all about control. This is a different type of control. The school/hospital tries to teach their nurses everything that they will need to know, so that they will understand the best way to do things. This is a more subtle kind of control. They seek to control the way people think through their influence. Given enough free access to information, they trust that people will learn the truth. Understanding should make employees do what is right without being told every step and it will also make them better employees. This is a better type of control, one that recognizes that the person being controlled must ultimately come to the same conclusions themselves and agree that their duties are the best course of action.

And I think this speaks to the great divide in our country right now. I believe the blue/red, republican/democrat, or conservative/liberal debate is also one of freedom versus control. Look at what conservatives attack nowadays. "Liberal" professors on campuses trying to subvert young people's minds. "Liberal" media trying to bring down the conservatives. Attack conservatives are people that are trying desperately to maintain the control of the worst aspects of capitalism in our society.

Capitalism in it's pure form means everyone is voting with their pocketbooks, and only economically viable ideas survive the Darwinism of the marketplace. But excesses and breakdowns in our form of capitalism make it easy for people with lots of money to exert too much control over government and society. In an overly controlled workplace, you see this with a tough profit minded boss trying to dictate what all the employees say and how they act. In our society, you see big companies trying to bend government to their will, restricting regulation and lowering taxes. They don't want any government control of business's behavior. All the while they demand government supports them handsomely with tax breaks and subsidies. We have anything but a pure form of capitalism when you consider that everything goes easily in favor of those that already have the overwhelming majority of the capital. They usually get the best government money can buy.

So the people that support this system (most notably those that benefit handsomely from it) would like everyone to believe that taxes are always bad, regulation is crippling society, our education system is trying to imprint a liberal way of thinking on our youth, and the media is actively against everything they stand for. It's all about control. If you try to impose any kind of control over them, taxes or regulations, for example, they scream bloody murder. If you try to let people explore the truth about the world, and they read up or educate themselves and then learn that things aren't that great, they get really angry. They feel themselves losing the control that they are seeking to impose on society.

My wife summed this up quite simply: one seeks to keep you down, the other seeks to lift you up.

This reminds me of several parallels. Remember how the Soviet Union sought to control their population through oppression, fear, misinformation, and propaganda? In the end it didn't work. Religions don't want you to think too hard about or question what they say, they want you to blindly believe in their gospel so they will continue to have control over you. And look at the way that the interpretation of Islam is used control women in Muslim countries. The common thread here is that people with free will are able to learn the truth. They will then act from the lessons learned and take control of their own lives. This will remove the illusion of control from oppressive governmental, business, and religious leaders. Those that think they are in control now stand to lose everything they care about. Desperate people will say anything to stop from losing that control.