Heroes Not Zombies

There’s a way of looking at history where you can trace the development of a theme over decades, or even centuries. One of the themes I’m aware of is control.

Maybe the control issue has become particularly apparent because of this pandemic……in two ways.

Firstly, there’s our inability to control the spread of the coronavirus. Yes, I know, governments around the world and thousands of scientists are trying to exactly that – control the spread of the virus. But they can’t really. They can bring in measures which enforce changes in personal and collective behaviour to try to reduce the opportunities for the virus to jump from one person to another, and some countries are managing that better than others. But we can’t get rid of the pesky thing from the whole planet and as we live in a hyperconnected age reducing the incidence to zero in one country doesn’t guarantee it won’t make its way back.

Secondly, we are now subject to more controls, more restrictions than most of us have ever known. We are being monitored, surveilled, documented and followed to unprecedented degrees.

This second kind of control is not specific to infections of course. In many walks of life we are now subjected to increased levels of control. I retired from clinical practice as a doctor almost six years ago now, but in the last few years of work the level of monitoring and control of my daily “performance” increased many fold. A combination of “annual appraisal”, “revalidation” and “job plans” with an emphasis on what can be measured eg patient numbers and consultation length, diminished professional autonomy and steady forced everyone to somebody’s declared “norms”.

A lot of the desire for control is extremely well intended, but a lot of it isn’t. I’m not sure where the balance lies these days, but I suspect most money and resources go into enabling those with power and influence to keep and increase what they have through the control of the rest of us. A lack of transparency creates the suspicion that extra controls “in your interest” aren’t really in our interest!

But all this goes a long way back doesn’t it? And I’ve been thinking this morning how one of the origins is the idea that Man is separate from Nature and that we are either chosen to, or that we are choosing to, dominate and control Nature. Nature is seen as something separate from us, something to be exploited, a resource to be tapped, and potentially damaging phenomena are to be fought and controlled.

But that’s not right is it?

We are not separate from Nature. We emerge within all that is. We exist within the existence of the whole world. We are unfathomably hyperconnected with the whole of Planet Earth.

When you look around, you see that other forms of life thrive without having such an emphasis on control. Look at this photo I’ve shared today. It’s one plant which uses a particular form of seed dispersal – wind. It gambles the whole of the future existence of its species by letting go. It creates the forms and methods which give it the best chance of working well with the rest of the planet, from the wind, to the sun, to the soil, and holds its sons and daughters up to the heavens, then waits. Waits for the wind to blow, and to carry them to fertile lands.

OK, so we aren’t plants. And I’m not saying we can live the same way that they do, but there’s a lesson here, don’t you think? Something to reflect on. It’s in that action of “letting go”. Letting go in a way which maximises your ability to survive and to thrive.

How are we going to do that? How are we going to shift away from obsessive desires to control to learning to work with, to collaborate, to share, to learn with humility that we can’t control nearly as much as we’d like to?