Controlling Interests
In my adolescence I couldn’t get enough of the cultural fad sweeping the country in the early 1960s: science fiction. So when ABC began airing a weekly sci-fi anthology in prime time, my interest and curiosity were piqued. Every Monday night at 7:30 p.m. I shut out the rest of the world, fixed my gaze on our small, black and white living room TV, and allowed myself to be captured by the shifting test patterns, oscillating lines and authoritative baritonal narration that commanded my attention:
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image; make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. …You are about to experience the awe and mystery that reaches from the inner mind to The Outer Limits.
My twelve-year old eyes were hooked the moment I saw the premier of this low-budget but thought-provoking series. And, at least for several memorable episodes, I did experience both awe and mystery. Being a one-hour TV show, cast in the medium of Hollywood make-believe, it never was all that scary. But played out in our everyday lives, its introductory narrative made crystal clear the source of our greatest satisfactions and our worst nightmares: CONTROL. I’m not talking about the staged control of a television screen, but the control we seek to exercise over our own lives, the control that we—more than anything else—fear losing.
Who controls what happens in and to our lives? Who controls us? Is it the anonymous “we” mentioned in The Outer Limits’ preamble, or the ubiquitous “they” whom we are so quick to blame whenever circumstances render us powerless? What control do we think we have, try to have or really have over the events and people with whom our lives intersect almost every moment of every day?
At the risk of being too reductionistic, I think I can say that all of us, from the time we start to assert our independence as infants until the time we find ourselves bargaining with our caretakers in the declining years of old age, wage a battle for control: over self, over others, over circumstances, perhaps even over God. On the one hand we are driven by a desire to be our own boss, set our own rules, do what we want to do and think as we choose. And on the other we live out our days in relationships with people like us, both known and unknown, and with forces seen and unseen, under whose power and authority we exist.
From our first infant utterance of “No!” and “mine” to our last elderly protests about being put to bed or being forced to get up, we are engaged in a tug of war with others over who is going to tell us what to do, where to go, what to wear and eat—even how we should look. I’m not decrying the fact that this is our lot. Without parents, friends, teachers, coaches, neighbors and employers setting expectations for us and enforcing them with their compliments, smiles and hugs as well as their criticisms, frowns and cold shoulders, our lives would be an ordeal in which trial and error—some of them fatal—would be our only means of learning, surviving, and finding happiness.
If you’re like me you never want to be in situations that seem out of control. At the same time, you bristle when people accuse you of being a control freak in asserting your will or trying to arrange things the way you like or that seems best to you. If these represent the extremes within the continuum of controlling interests in which we live, then it is safe to say that all of us have control issues with which we contend almost every moment of our conscious existence.
We can easily recognize the control issues that punctuate the relationships that grownups have with children, both at home and in schools. It is hard to think of any situation in which we’ve felt tension, frustration, disappointment or worry over a child in which our adult instincts to protect and care were not in play. Who can’t recall a moment of temper, rebellion or disaffection with our parents in which our desire to be in charge didn’t collide with their judgment and authority. Students wage control battles with teachers in every class, some in open defiance and others in wars of noncompliant attrition. Clothing, hair, tattoos, piercings, curfews, music, substance use, and gender identities all become lines drawn in the sands of battlefields in which control is both the means and the ends of our generational struggles.
We are bombarded with control issues in the political environment in which we are so fully immersed. Individual citizens joust with local authorities over lines of ownership and freedom affecting our property, our wealth, and our conduct. If my freedom really does end at the touch of my fist on your nose, and if my speech is mine until it intimidates or threatens another, then the limits of self-control and group control are always blurry and moveable determinations. The lines of demarcation between local, state, national and international sovereigns are drawn on ever-shifting maps in which control hides its face, if not its spirit, in lofty terms like liberty, justice, and equality.
Who’s in control is an ever present if often unspoken dimension of all of our relationships with others. It can be recognized in the space that exists between us and those who count the most in our lives: friends, partners, and spouses. Have you ever had a friendship in which control over what we’re going to do, whom we are going to include or exclude in our insiders circle, what things we like and what things we deplore was not part of the negotiations of daily life? Understanding what is mine, yours and ours is a control issue that we work out in our homes, our neighborhoods, and our courts, not to mention on our borders, along our coastlines and in our air space. CONTROL is in the very marrow of our personal and social identities.
In perhaps the most personal yet far-reaching of our relationships, we seem compelled to want to bargain with, dance with, and sometimes even box with God. If our theology grants the Deity ultimate control over all things, then we must submit to it, even when it confounds or hurts. Or we may choose to protest, like Job, in silent resignation or with clenched fists or broken hearts. Such faith is not so much an exercise in reasoning why, as it is believing in and conforming our will to do or die. If in our theology God yields control to nature and its creatures—including us—empowering or condemning us with freedom, we will then seek the Lord’s grace in understanding and forgiving us for the harvest of our error-prone independence. Such faith will then direct us not in adherence to providential designs controlled on high but in the trusting acceptance of an underlying Love that wilt not let us go.
When it comes to control, which we so ardently covet yet so fleetingly possess, it may be that all of our moments fall somewhere between the inner and outer limits of what is controllable. And whenever or wherever we find ourselves tussling for control with people, systems, governments or even God, we would do well to keep in mind that wisdom and serenity lies in that middle ground between what we can and cannot control, and what we must be willing to share and accept.
