Tip-Off #152 - Losing control
Tip-Off #152 - Losing control
Perhaps the greatest irony now is being earnest — knowingness the latest arrogance.
Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois falls apart as she clings to illusion, refusing to face reality. Her descent into madness is tragic and oddly beautiful, revealing the frailty and poetry of human existence as she surrenders to her own desires and delusions. Rather than condemning Blanche's loss of control, Williams leaves the audience to view it with a kind of reverence for the emotional intensity it brings to life, showing a troubling grace in relinquishing control.
Characters like Blanche DuBois can make losing control almost cathartic— just as antiheroes in modern literature and television do. From Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye to Meursault in Camus's The Stranger, and more recently, Walter White in Breaking Bad and Fleabag's unnamed protagonist, these complex figures embody the tension between control and chaos. Their allure lies in the freedom that losing control seems to offer.
Tyler Durden from the iconic Fight Club pushes this further, declaring, "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." Losing control and being at least a little crazy can be fashionably ironic, even as maintaining control is a conceit. "The things you own end up owning you." In other words, the things you control end up controlling you—as also in conforming to nonconformity, blending in by standing out, rallying under the banner of irony or rebellion. Fragmented, self-conscious, and always critically aware of both the absurdity and the significance of the every day, many today seek to forge authentic identities in a hyper-curated online environment. Perhaps the greatest irony now is to be earnest and knowingness the latest arrogance.
The more we try to manage the challenges in front of us, the more they manage us. Many of us still chase "inbox zero," obsessively organizing emails to control our workload. Even saving a message to answer later becomes one more task to remember. Ultimately, it's a to-do list that controls us, not the other way around.
Whether it's mastering schedules, optimizing work performance, or maintaining order in our personal lives, we act as though everything will fall into place if we manage it well enough. This pattern plays out on a political level, too. Take the example of mandating "diversity, equity, and inclusion." When our differences become statistical targets, we confuse the means with the goal, losing sight of the equity that matters. It's as though ensuring that everyone has a seat at the table is the purpose of the meeting instead of what anyone has to say.
Michael Sandel, a leading political philosopher, criticizes "proceduralism" in liberalism for prioritizing process over substance. It favors fairness in how things are done but begs questions of democratic governance. Controlling the process is simpler than concentrating on its outcomes. How something is done becomes the measure of success, as if meaning well ensures doing well, and good intentions guarantee good outcomes.
A sign in a rehabilitation facility's reception area asked, "Do you want to be right or get well?" In rehab, the need to relinquish control—over substances or certain life situations—is essential for progress. The sign reflects a familiar tension between the desire to stay in control and the need to surrender to the process of getting better, a dilemma similar to the one Sandel identifies. Trying to control the process screws up the deeper purpose.
Latin American author Mariana Enriquez, a new voice in global literature, spoke of her struggles with certainty and control. Known for her uncanny explorations of trauma and violence, she said in a recent interview, "In life, I find myself becoming too certain, but in literature, I want the ambivalence that I can't have in life to be more present."
The curse of modernity is the tendency to prioritize certainty over clarity, decisiveness over deliberation, and control over collaboration. This often places innovation at odds with tradition, as though we can expect a tree to grow with its roots in the sky. What we call “talent” or “merit” may be as much a stroke of luck. Letting go may reveal that what we believed we controlled was never truly ours.
Uncertainty may be a more reliable bond than certitude. What we don't know might unite us more than what we do. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, famously urged the deferral of answers, suggesting we live with the questions themselves:
"Be patient with all that remains unsolved in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves—like locked rooms or books in a foreign language. Do not seek the answers now, as they cannot be given to you; you are not yet ready to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Notes and reading
Fight Club (1999) is a cult classic directed by David Fincher and based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel. Brad Pitt stars in the film, which explores themes of consumerism, identity, and masculinity. Tyler Durden, the anarchic figure, represents freedom from social control. - Breaking Bad and Fleabag are two critically acclaimed TV shows. While Breaking Bad explores the moral decline of a man driven by desperation, Fleabag (British series) is a witty exploration of a young woman's struggles with love, loss, and self-worth.
Michael Sandel - Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2009). Sandel critiques procedural liberalism, exemplified by John Rawls, whose work reshaped modern discussions of justice, fairness, and a “neutral state.”
Mariana Enriquez is a writer and journalist based in Buenos Aires. She is the author of Our Share of Night most recently. “A bewitching brew of mystery, myth, wealthy occultists and mediums who can summon ‘the Darkness.’” - Danielle Trussoni, The New York Times (February 9, 2023).
"The curse of modernity..." - See The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom (1997): How creativity contends with the legacy it inherits—echoing modernity's push for newness and mastery over its history.
Rainer Maria Rilke - excerpt from Letter 4, written on July 16, 1903. Letters to a Young Poet (1934, 2024). “Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since, after all, you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you?” Letter 8.
[The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes (2012). The protagonist, Tony Webster, reflects on how much he spent his life trying to maintain control over his feelings and relationships. “What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt—and inflicted for precisely that reason.”]
[Irony - For a rigorous discussion see Lauren Oyler’s novel, Fake Accounts, and her collection of essays, No Judgement - and criticism of Oyler in Art Review, “Things that Annoy Me” (March 8, 2024).]
About 2 + 2 = 5: https://williamgreen.substack.com/about - revised