You scroll through the Internet and land here. Your choice, your control. I create an essay, choosing topic, slant and wording. I’m in control of what you’re reading now. Hah!
The wife reminds the husband about some chore. “You are so controlling,” he says. The husband expounds so about his day that the wife is left little time to talk about hers. “You are so controlling,” she says.
Say you’re a nice person, which means often as not you’re cornered at a gathering by a troubled person who tells you their woes in detail, usually including having “controlling” people in their lives. It would appear this whiny, soft person has control over you, Mister Man.
“Control” is babble. (Unless it’s Joy Division’s brooding “She’s Lost Control“: “And walked upon the edge of no escape,
And laughed I’ve lost control.”) It lacks clear meaning in these all too common examples. Call a bore. Call a person overbearing, blame insecurity if you want to be less judgmental. Say he or she is manipulative, or trying to be.
National Public Radio’s All Things Considered on June 17 aired an interview with two magazine journalists, Mark Seal and David Margolick, who’ve focused on confessed swindler Bernard Madoff.
Host Robert Siegel asked, “Did he orchestrate the appearance of other people’s innocence?” Siegel was referring to Madoff’s own arrest and how family members who worked for him were not charged immediately, how he tried to protect them from the law. Seal answers:
Eleanor [Bernie’s secretary] went on to say he staged the arrest. I believe he staged it, and he wanted it to go down the way exactly the way he wanted it to go down. He is a very controlling individual, and a very calculating individual. And he just did it his way. And I think what we’re seeing is the result of that. He’s the only one in jail, right, so far.” [Italics mine]
As the chief executive of a huge investment firm, Madoff should be controlling. That’s what CEOs do. That’s what the people who gave him money wanted him to do. As an admitted swindler, he would be controlling. That’s how con men get money; con here is short for confidence.
That the ideal is to be in control, to have no one in control of us, is childish but natural. Being in charge of our destinies, having equal or better footing with others, is what we spend our first 18 or 20 years scheming for: “When I get out of school I’ll, I’ll. …” Then we spend our last decade or so dreading its diminishment: the surrender of the driver’s license, the diet and movement restrictions, all leading to loss of independence.
It takes only a brief reflection to admit that control nearly always goes both ways in most interactions. The person outwardly exerting control at a given moment is being controlled by the other person, because the latter permits it. Sure, it’s not true for children and adults in truly limiting situations.
Adults gain satisfaction — having needs and wants fulfilled — in some matters by ceding control in other areas to individuals or groups — security, affection, paychecks.
In 2003, My Beloved and I went on the South Beach diet. Diets are where you control yourself. Every year or so I do its Phase One for a while, and this past Sunday we finished a week of that. It means no starches and no sugars, processed or whole foods. You’re not happy but you’re not malnourished, either — limits to permitted low-fat proteins and dairy with unlimited green vegetables. The first time, Phase One is for 14 days.
A colleague back then asked me all about it, then bought her own copy of the original South Beach book. A couple of days later she told me she couldn’t do it. She read that Phase One forbids alcohol (due to sugar and empty calories). I’m no drunk, she said, and I know she’s not, but I’m to have absolutely no beer for two weeks? No way, she said. By the way, this woman then and now is fit and slender.
Yesterday the scale said I’d dropped four pounds, my goal. MB had proposed the week of Phase One, for both of us. I said yes at once, grateful that I wasn’t the first to suggest it, because I might have been accused of you know what.
We cede control at work. We cede control in love. We cede control with friends. That person at the party? Happy to listen for a while, maybe it helps. I move on to another conversation after a while.
The key to being in control of situations, not just with finesse but also to remain on good terms with folks, is etiquette. Right, Miss Manners?
The key to subjugating control without losing your temper, your self-respect or your job is grace. Empathy helps.
I am so controlling. And so are you.
