Marilynne Robinson in her new book, “The Givenness of Things”, says
Suppression tends to obscure evidence of its own failures, since fear is as likely to inspire ingenuity and stealth as it is compliance
Just before I read that I was reflecting on how much attempted power and control there is in our world.
We see it in the way fear is used – to control behaviour and to suppress diversity and difference.
But no living creatures can be controlled. You’ll have encountered the phrase “as difficult as herding cats” before, but maybe there is no creature harder to control than a human being.
You can suppress human beings, manipulate them, enslave them, make life difficult for them, but you can’t control them. There isn’t an empire in the history of the world which hasn’t disappeared. I heard Ursula Le Guin accepting a reward recently and she said whilst it was difficult to imagine living under a different regime from the current capitalist one, there was once a time when people believed in the divine right of kings and it didn’t look then as if that could change. She was making a plea for writers of imagination to help us to imagine a better system.
Can we use our fears to inspire our ingenuity rather than the pursuit of power?
Especially since control over Nature or over others is always such a transient delusion.
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