Nature has produced a lot of extremely groovy stuff. Gravity is very cool. Lightning is neat. And Aurora Borealis is stunning.
Nature’s most beautiful accomplishment by far, however, is control. Control is what keeps our cars on the roads, our shoelaces tied, our projects on schedule, and our relationships intact. Control is something that only living things do. Actually, some nonliving things like cruise control systems control as well. The crucial difference is that for any nonliving controlling thing, what it controls is determined by a living controller. Cruise control systems do nothing at all until someone turns them on and sets a desired speed. No-one else can set the desired standard for a living controller.
Control is like air. It’s all around us all the time and it’s essential to life. Control, in fact, is the process of living.
Control is nothing other than the business of making things right.
To make things right, controllers have “right” standards, they can tell when things are or are not right, and they can act to keep things in their right state or to bring them back to their right state if outside forces move them away.
Control always occurs relative to some standard. There must be a goal or an outcome or an expectation or some other specification of a desired state of affairs. This desired state can only be specified by the controlling entity. Someone else might have some ideas about what the controller’s standards should be but until the controller adopts those standards, control will not occur according to those criteria. Parents can plead and poke and punish to change their teenagers’ standards of tidiness but the adolescents will only ever control relative to the standards they have set for themselves.
Interestingly, the actions by which a control system controls are established jointly by the control system and the environment within which it is controlling. The way I drive myself to work on Tuesday will be different from the way I drive myself to work on Monday because the environment is different on both occasions. To maintain the same level of accuracy, the way I hit my serves in the second set of tennis will be slightly different from the way I hit them in the first set because my muscles are in a different condition, the sun is in a different position, and a slight breeze has sprung up.
By pausing and looking around, you might be able to appreciate that almost nothing about the environment you are in would be the way it is if controlling agents weren’t occupying it. The office blocks, the roads, the hedges, the light bulbs, the parks, the café menus, the canals, the cathedrals, the subway, the fields of wheat, the mountain track, and the motorway all exist because one or more people decided they should and then set about to bring them into existence. It is true that, on occasion, one or more of Nature’s other little surprises can change situations. Earthquakes, cyclones, bushfires, tsunamis, tornadoes, snow storms, and floods can all wreak havoc on what we have assembled and constructed. Despite what can sometimes be the enormity and devastation of these events, they rarely slow us down for very long and, more often than not, they actually help us create new and improved ways of building and being.
Control is about producing outcomes. These outcomes might not be fathomable to other people but they are essential to the controller. The outcomes will be realised despite changing conditions and unpredictable circumstances.
By each of us controlling the worlds of our experience that we only ever know individually we can create events and spectacles requiring mindboggling coordination, meticulous planning, and sometimes just good old fashioned fun. A performance of Swan Lake, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, a Sunday family roast, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, a recital of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, a picnic in the park, the Wimbledon tennis final, and five cents left by the Tooth Fairy all occur because people control.
By recognising, understanding, and learning about control we might be able to resolve problems more efficiently and make our controlling experiences more harmonious and satisfactory more of the time. We might be able to help others more and hinder them less. A book that helps explain control and what it means to live as an autonomous controller amongst other autonomous controllers is called Controlling People: The paradoxical nature of being human.