The Control Cult

Whatever explanations or remedies various “experts” offer for the problems that beset mankind, the common thread connecting them is that both human and physical nature are capable of being causally understood and, therefore, subject to interventionist correction. Universities are the temples of faith in this proposition, with students enrolling for their stated purpose of “making the world a better place.” It is not surprising, therefore, that immediately following these atrocities, the Virginia Tech campus became an attractor for the proponents of this Weltanschauung. “If the university had intervened after this man turned in some disturbed writing to his English professor;” “if we can just control guns;” “if police had had access to his mental health records beforehand”: these were the oft-repeated concerns of those who are convinced that the world is predictable and, hence, controllable. In the latter vein, NBC news anchor, Brian Williams, reportedly vocalized the catechism in proposing a new federal program to monitor the mental health of all college students, in order to prevent occurrences such as this one.
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But recent inquiries into the nature of “chaos” and complexity are revealing the baseless foundations of this faith in control. Our world – including each human being – is simply too complex, too subject to a myriad of too many influences over which we can never have sufficient awareness to predict outcomes. If physical and human nature are too complicated to be predictable, the rationale for state control is swept away. To the controllists, the expression of this fact is a heresy that must be exorcised from our thinking.

Those who cling to a faith in their dying secular deity remain convinced that all that is needed to make a complex world more predictable is more information. This is the essence of much of the babbling of tongues disguised as “expert analysis” in the days following the killings at Virginia Tech. What we tend not to understand is that the more information we possess about anything, the more questions and uncertainties that arise. Albert Einstein understood this quite well in saying that “as a circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it.” Bertrand Russell provided the social meaning to this when he declared: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
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There is nothing this [control] crowd fears more than the specter of ordinary people retaining decision-making authority over their own lives.

That's why I enjoy continually pointing
out that soon there will be nothing
they can do about it.

The whole essay.