The Master Betrayed

Power & Control

The harder we try to command the world, the less it listens. Understanding begins where control is laid down.

Power and control are often spoken of as virtues, even necessities, in a complex world. We are encouraged to manage, optimise, and secure our lives, as though existence were a system that could be mastered with sufficient foresight and force. Yet McGilchrist draws our attention to a quieter truth: that an obsession with control is usually a symptom of lost confidence in understanding. When meaning thins, power rushes in to fill the gap.

This confusion has a long history. Civilisations nearing exhaustion tend to replace lived, embodied practices with abstract systems that promise order. Ritual gives way to regulation; myth to ideology; wisdom to technique. The shift is subtle at first. Life becomes something to be explained rather than entered into, administered rather than responded to. Power becomes the organising principle because it offers a semblance of certainty where trust has eroded.

The two hemispheres approach this problem from different angles. The left hemisphere is oriented toward control. It prefers plans that can be imposed and outcomes that can be predicted. When reality resists, it assumes the remedy is greater force or tighter regulation. The right hemisphere, by contrast, seeks understanding. It attends to the whole situation, including what cannot be anticipated in advance. It does not reject structure, but it insists that structure remain answerable to what is actually unfolding.

This distinction matters deeply for mental health. Many people come to suffering with the belief that they ought to be in control of their lives. When illness, loss, or limitation intrudes, as it inevitably does, the sense of failure can be crushing. McGilchrist notes that some of the most relieving moments in clinical practice occur when individuals recognise how little control they truly have: over their birth, their bodies, their capacities, even their thoughts. Relief follows not from mastery, but from relinquishment.

The conversation approaches suicide with care and restraint. McGilchrist resists any attempt to reduce it to a single explanation. To frame suicide simply as an act of control is to misunderstand the depth of despair that often precedes it. Psychic pain can narrow the field of attention until no alternatives appear possible. In such cases, the language of choice and agency risks becoming cruel.

An important distinction is drawn between suicide and parasuicide. The latter, far more common, often functions as a cry for help—a desperate attempt to communicate distress or reclaim a sense of agency. Completed suicide, statistically more prevalent among men, reflects a different tragedy. Men, McGilchrist suggests, are increasingly rendered invisible in modern culture, their vulnerabilities overlooked under the assumption of strength or privilege. This neglect becomes its own form of harm.

The same control-driven mindset shapes our relationship with the natural world. Nature is often spoken of as an environment that surrounds us, something external to be managed or exploited. Yet the word itself points elsewhere. *Natura* refers to that which is coming into being. We are not outside this process; we are expressions of it. To imagine ourselves as masters of nature is to forget what we are.

McGilchrist describes the sensory and psychological relief that comes from leaving dense urban spaces for open landscapes. Vision widens. Sound changes. The body reorients. These experiences are not luxuries but necessities for a nervous system shaped by evolution in relation to land, weather, and seasons. Psychiatry, after all, means care of the soul, not merely the adjustment of faulty mechanisms.

Technology promises liberation through control, yet history offers a more ambiguous picture. Tools introduced to save time often end by consuming it. Labour-saving devices extend working hours. Paperless offices generate more paper. Behind the rhetoric of efficiency lie hidden costs: exploitative supply chains, ecological damage, and new forms of dependence. Technologies meant to serve quietly begin to dictate the terms of life.

McGilchrist does not argue for rejection, but for discernment. He describes himself as a hopeful pessimist: committed to meaning, wary of easy optimism. Exponential growth, finite resources, and ecological limits demand not simply better systems, but a change of heart. Control cannot substitute for wisdom.

In the end, power reveals its paradox. It promises safety, yet breeds fragility. It offers certainty, yet generates fear. Understanding, though less secure, allows life to move and respond. The task before us is not to abolish structure, but to restore its proper place—subordinate to relationship, responsiveness, and the living world from which we arise.