|
Noah -> RE: Controlling Yourself (12/10/2006 7:36:25 PM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: kyraofMists
quote:
ORIGINAL: Noah
If you look at it another way, MagiksSlave, the control that an individual has reliquished is just laying there for anyone to pick up and take--unless the out-of-control person in question reasserts him or herself.
That little bit right there just put several pieces in place for me. Thanks, Noah.
The downside that I see to this, is that "anyone" could turn out to be very unhealthy for the individual who is out of control. Of course they could also be very healthy as well.
Well that's right too, I think.
As for the notion that someone who lacks all self-control cannot relinquish control to another, I think there are other problems with a sentiment stated so broadly.
Clearly, no-one lacks all self control. Even the incontinent can pin on their own diapers, or ask someone else to. So why can't we see that this applies just as well to financial incontinence, say, or emotional incontinence?
Anyone who accepts the control of another person in in fact controlling herself in accord with that person's wishes, isn't she? Unless he is grasping her appendages and physically guiding her every action, pouring her thoughts into her head, etc. Which of course cannot happen.
Every act of acquiescence--beyond submitting to sheer overpowering physical control--is indeed also an act of self control. The claims people make about how an out-of-control person can't relinquish control just fail to acknowledge a lot of what goes on within and between people, things which aren't simple, nor are they black and white.
"Control" isn't a word which applies to just one sort of thing, in one sort of way.
A certain kind of person tries to paint the world in black and white and then declare the painting reality. Whether this arises from an inability to deal with ambiguousness, vagueness, and complexities -- or whether it arise from a fear of them, either way it blocks the view of life's gray areas and--to milk the metaphor dry--it makes the colors in life very hard to appreciate.
Oversimplifying things and needlessly complicating things are the ravines sitting on either either side of this road we're all walking along. The less we slip into them the further we can go and the better the view along the way.
Sometimes, in response to a certain kind of threat, it might be adaptive to oversimplify or overcomplicate a thing--to slide temporarily into one of those ravines. It might preserve us from a threat we can't handle in a more elegant way at the moment or it might allow us to scramble around some impediment in the road. But by and large I think it tends to be the best policy to acknowledge a thing just as it is, with whatever degree of complexity, vagueness or ambiguity it might happen to have.
|
|
|
|
