why has control freakery increased?

I remember the first time I heard the word 'control freak'- I was in my 20s- so this was the late 1980s. The term itself had first appeared in the US in the 1970s and had gradually filtered through to mainstream use in the UK and elsewhere. Before 'control freak' we had the more Freudian 'anal'. X is really 'anal' people said. Then anal sex became a mainstream topic (even featuring in Family Guy) and this term disappeared to be replaced by 'control freak'. 

Control freakery has increased in my lifetime. The less you FEEL in control the MORE you have to ACT as if you are in control. Control freakery is micromanaging things that don't need this approach. It is different to being a 'details' person. A control freak wants every leaf on their lawn hoovered up by a menial every day. A detail person is more concerned about the trees and plants and lawn as they interact. A control freak is someone concerned about details that don't matter. A details person is someone for whom a specific detail can call forth a whole vision. When doing a portrait such a person might start with a detail and expand out of that rather than making an overall sketch. An actor might construct a whole character from a certain pair of shoes and a cane. A details person is someone who sees the whole VIA the parts. A control freak only sees parts.

Control freaks see a scarey world in which everything is changing fast. Things have always changed, it is the nature of reality, but now the things that are changing affect basic security: shelter, health, family. Instead of embracing a radical form of flexibility the control freak doubles down and tries to change their little world in order to give meaning to their lives. As the nihilistic notion of a random world gains universal traction through the education system in the industrialised developed world the idea of a unified meaningful existence becomes shattered. When you disregard even theorectical notions of deep unity, meaning becomes harder to find. But micromeaning can be derived from being creative and building things and being a control freak is the form creativity takes in destructive people. They scrabble for meaning by imposing their will on others. It is a mild form of sadism...

But why has it increased? Because the overcomplicated nature of modern living encourages it. If your day is spent sitting in front of a computer screen sending emails that basically have no great meaning in the context of reality then you are going to look for alternatives. Micro meaning comes from caring for others, building things or how you face up to adversity. Modern institutions have weakened human ties and made caring a bureaucratic procedure, further diluting meaning. Building anything is another overcomplex dilute process. Suffering exists of course but victim culture tends to undermine a stoical response- so another path of meaning is closed.

America, anecdotally, is modestly rich in control freaks- one clue is the name having originated there. In as much as the US leads us down the path to modernity we can expect it to lead in exhibitons of control freakery. An additional reason more relevant to the US than elsewhere, is the insecurity of Americans in regard to identity. Like any colonial power they used their superior power to acquire the land from non-industrialised indigenous people. They then reneged on treaties in order to get even more land. It is a country in which the lies and deception (they are not alone in this, few countries are squeaky clean) on which it expanded are in the historical record- an uncomfortable fact for anyone trying to work out their 'US Identity'. Add to this the way status is determined in America by financial or media success. Of course this is a feature of everywhere in the world- but places with more 'history' and a population who are mostly indigenous allow for easier identity formation. In some places you only have to lived there a long time to be a somebody: there are no towns in the US that can boast churches built on sites that are thousands of years old- which is the case in the UK. And in Europe, to have a business for a long time (hundreds of years) even if it is small, is a meaningful thing. In America if you still only had a single shop after 400 years you'd be classed a loser- why no franchise? the American dream is to invent some product or business and then work out a way to mechanically reproduce it like a viral infection. Every high street with a Macdonalds and Subway and noting else...All this is good, as they say, for business, but it means that your status (which is a behavioural need of the human animal) is not assured by birth alone. You have to work to get it (rather than simply work to get food and goods). And that puts additional psychological pressure on everyone. Halfway through life you may wake up and realise you will never get the status you crave. The solution is start acting like a boss even if you aren't one. Start bossing your environment- in other words become a control freak.

It feels good to be the boss. In charge of something. But only if you are scared and a bit desperate. Welcome to the world of the control freak.