Table of Contents
A. Fear of Loss
There exists no one who doesn’t have a fear of loss. Fear of losing life, fear of losing relationships, money, job, parents, children, and of course partner.
Our life gets oriented around what we have, and whom we have in life. Our world does not get oriented around us. So, any loss may cause significant changes in emotion, livelihood, family, life, and well-being. And the more one invests in something, the more one wants to control it, so as not to have to start new without it.
Investment and Fear of Loss
Another key reason for fear of loss is the investment. We invest time, energy, money, and more than anything emotions into people and objects. For instance, building a business or raising a family not only requires extraordinary physical and mental labor but also at the same time tremendous emotional investment.
The human brain is very specific to remember the investments we have made, but not so good at remembering the return we are getting. So, most people think that they are doing more than what they are getting. Losing an investment means the waste of the investment, and therefore we are always afraid of losing.
B. Why the Brain Desires to Control Things?
The more brain fears a loss, and the harder a loss is to replace, the more the brain wants to control it.
In the business world, an analogy of this can be found in customer acquisition and customer retention. Businesses acquire customers by investing in marketing, and sales, and then offering service to the customer. Acquiring customers, providing them service, and satisfying customer needs tremendous cost, human, and technology investment. This investment doesn’t give a return on one-time service. Therefore businesses try everything in their capacity to retain the customer. It is easier to acquire and lose a customer, and extremely hard to retain them.
This business principle also applies to the real world, as our brain also keeps transactional accounting of hormones. Let us see a real-time scenario of why the brain wants to control things.
Example: If parents have a single child, they will do everything, not necessarily always with awareness, and not necessarily always unknowingly either, to control their children.
If the children are controlled, they will find it hard to leave their parents, which gaurantees a safer old-age.
C. What is Control
Control is the primal desire of the brain to have an outcome that the brain thinks is fair. However, as brain can measure what it gives and invests and not so much as what it gets, it wants to keep getting returns out of any investment, and for life!
Key controlling behaviors and techniques
The brain doesn’t like anomalies and the possibility of investing without return. This desire is the key to:-
- Impulsivity: Anything that threatens any investment loss makes one impulsive, and one immediately wants to react to a situation even without evaluating the situation.
- Compulsiveness: Keep doing the same thing over and over again, without the ability to come out. Compulsivity is when the brain doesn’t allow one to lose focus and attention from an object or a person, or certain action.
- Paranoia: Paranoia is the imaginative fear of being plotted, schemed, and betrayed by the world and the universe with the intention to snatch away the investment. Even distinctively uncorrelated people, news, and events appear to be correlated with a plot to snatch away the investment.
- Aggression: Whenever there is fear and the perceived threat of losing an investment, there is irritation, and sustained irritation results in aggressive behaviors(which may be suppressed, or expressed as a reaction such as screaming)
- Manipulation: There are several tools of manipulation that are used to change the perception and reality of people and put them in a frame designed by the manipulator. If people don’t live their lie but live in the world of the controller, then the controller can pull the strings of such people and control them as puppets.
- Stalking: Stalking comes from paranoia and anxiety about losing a human investment. It is a freaking desire to peek through the pinhole to see each and everything the invested human being is doing in life so that anything he/she does that may result in losing him/her can be intervened easily.
- Convincing: Convincing is repetitive sentences that target the reinforcement learning of the human brain. By repeating the same messages over and over again, but with different stories and actions, the control freak wants to ensure that the human investment remains convinced to be in life with the controller.
- Forcing: This is the oldest controlling technique where humans are subjugated and subjected to willful control(called slavery) through sheer force and power like war.
- Threatening: Threatning differs from forcing in a way that threatening is trying to convince the human subject to refrain from doing what he/she is doing, and instead follow the command and control of the controller so that the controller wouldn’t apply force.
- Pleasing: Every brain seeks pleasure. So if someone keeps pleasing others, they would remain in life just to get the pleasure back.
- Group Identity: By grouping people with other similar people into caste, religion, and occupation, one doesn’t have to control individuals, but rather can control the entire group, which returns a magnitude of times more return than wasting energy on individuals. Corporations and politicians use this all the time.
Insecurity is the key to control
So the more one feels insecure about the situation, he/she will stalk:- (check others’ belongings, follow them, cross-check, and remain suspicious).
At the same time, one will always conceal his/her insecurity by exactly contradicting statements like “I want him to be happy” (in reality one wants him to be happy only when he/she gives that).
Any sign and the control freak will get paranoia of losing. And that’s exactly why they react impulsively, rather than respond. The sheer fear of loss.
And that’s why one wants a Security-structure, everything ordered, no anomalies, and compulsive life.
D. Childhood traits leading to control mania
Children who even for a second felt that “my mother has dumped me” will be an insecure control freak. Not their fault, but that’s how the core layer of the brain forms(fear of being a bad child rejected by the mother). No exceptions here. Such children when grow up will either be avoidant and won’t invest any emotions, but will pretend, or become Control-freak.
E. Why Controlling is a Paradox
We already understood that controlling is a human desire and associated sets of techniques and actions with the motivation of keeping people and objects in life, as well as avoiding any unwanted unpleasent future events.
Therefore controlling has distinct thinking patterns:
- I invested a lot and deserve more returns.
- The world takes away anything I have and want, and therefore such snatching should be prevented at all costs.
- Everyone ends up hurting me and inflicting pain. Such pain needs to be avoided and people are to be deterred from doing so in the future.
- How can anyone live with so much of pain? I have to ensure that the future is filled with happiness and there are no pains.
- If I don’t control the future, others will. If the future is unpredictable, how can we live in the present?
- I have worked really hard to achieve this, I am not going to let anyone take away this from me.
- My mother rejected me in childhood; she did not love me; I will not let this happen ever.
There are other thought patterns, but the point to remember here is that these are rooted thoughts and insecurities in the brain. These are the reference points from which the brain starts thinking and then taking action. These are the commands to the brain.
Fear, anxiety, big plans but less action, seeing the entire world as a conspirator(paranoia), and a circle of negative thoughts engulfing life. No one will dump me. I will have from life what I want. Then my mother will see how great a child I am and will come back.
Over a period of time, such thoughts that are miles and lightyears away from any reality take over the brain.
An insecure person tries to overcome his/her insecurities by controlling the entire brain through the subconscious brain, and therefore before one even starts implementing control mechanisms (the schemes and plots), one games his/her own brain.
If you read this section again from the beginning, you will notice that the controller even though appears inhuman is essentially like a small insecure child from the inside, who is trying to hide his/her insecurities from the world through controlling.
So the reference object itself becomes life, life doesn’t have the object.
Because getting the mother back is the core, and an object represents that desire, and because a mother controls a baby’s whole life, the object controls the individual.
What you want to control, controls you in reality because
The outcome controls life. But because the outcome had already happened in the past, early childhood, irrespective of the effort, the mother or the controlled object will always go away. Because the brain knows only and only one emotion “I am a rejected child.”
E. How to break the control paradox
1. Accept:– Mothers give birth, and may not necessarily carry you on their lap. You are alive. She already has played a part in her role. You remain alive and play your part.
2. Understand:- We all are insignificant and merely bridges between two generations. The world existed before you and will exist after you too. Your success, failure, nothing will change the course of the earth or humanity.
3. Travel:- Life is a journey; the journey is more important than the co-passengers. Life doesn’t promise you to give the passengers of choice. But it ensures an oasis even in a desert.
4. Outcome:- You can influence an outcome to a limited degree, but still an outcome is independent of your effort, desires, wishes, knowledge, and precautions because the sheer number of variables on play onto anything is so infinitesimal that no human or humans can alter it. The outcome is a mirage.
For instance, the British ruled the world as a pocket reality for 1.2 million years of the modern human race. But they eliminated the future generation’s ability to work hard is reality.
5. Horse:- Use your negative emotions like a horse leash. Let it too loose and the horse will jump off the cliff, pull it with anxiety and the horse won’t stop even when it knows the end of the mountain.
F. Conclusion
Wisdom
If you are to control anything, that was not yours at the first place, and one that was not yours to start with, will not remain yours even at the end;
you couldn’t control which parents to born from, the place, the date of your birth, and you can’t control your death, the age, time, place, and the method;
When the life itself is not yours, and you can not control the life itself, how can you control anything that you get from life?
Life will provide you with anything and everything you need to live because if and when you don’t have what you need to live, you won’t live in the first place. Because energy is not infinite, the way life will give you everything you need, it will take away anything that you do not need, because if it doesn’t then life can’t give you what you need.
Do you not think that if youu think yourself wiser than life, and knowing what you need more than your life knows, life will think “whats my role here? let me be somewhere else”?
