The Illusion of Control

Abstract

Why are societies (partly) adopting the scientific, Western intellectual perspective so little inclined to accept that their vision of the world is much more uncertain than they assume? This paper views the illusion of control as the result of a long-term coevolution in which, in Euro-American society, the basic categories of thinking have shifted from “open” to “closed,” from a focus on exploration of the unknown to the exploitation of the known. Such closed categories are to a large extent anchored in technologies, because in the interaction with technologies, human actions are routinized and adapted to the technology, so that it is difficult to deal with changing circumstances. Thus, as part of the technology explosion of the last two centuries, Euro-American societies have undergone a massive shift from exploration and comprehension of the changing world they deal with to competently repeating known responses to known challenges without understanding the underlying dynamic. This shift makes them (wrongly) assume that they control their world. Any attempt to break this illusion of control must consider how categories are formed and assembled into narratives, and in particular the nature of the relationship between information (cognized signals and categories) and noise (signals excluded from cognition). That relationship has been fundamental to the dynamic of niche construction that has shaped both our thinking and the environment to which it relates.