In our capitalistic, neoliberalism culture, we tend to focus on controlling things: ourselves, the people around us, and the environment. We want to focus on being productive so we can become our best selves: if only we exercise 3x a week, we sleep 8 hours, and we do our skincare, we have everything under control. We want to control our friendships by planning ahead and trying to catch up as best as we can while also feeling very busy, leading us to have very high-stakes friendships. Both of these topics are talked about in how a community disrupts routines.
And this tendency to control goes further. In the last decade, parents raising their children are more involved than ever. Because car-less cities are in the past, and we know more about what could happen to our children because of the news, we're scared to let them go out by themselves. Therefore, we want to protect them and always supervise or keep them home more often. Even though studies has shown that letting children roam free, make mistakes, and letting them fall once in a while, could be very beneficial in raising these children into confident adults.
It's this bit where we might be confusing protecting with control, and we cover it with this blanket of "being caring". Even though the true force of people caring is very strong. Capitalism runs on scarcity, and I think care promotes abundance.
Gijs de Boer mentions in this blogpost⤴:
It’s one of many interactions with my plants where I realised I had to deal with an inherited modernist idea of what it means to care. A masculine one too. A protective 'I got this, let me handle it' attitude. In trying to care for my plants, I assumed a role based on control. Control of their growth, the organisms they interacted with, their sad moments – and then I cut off an old leaf.
I recognise my attitude in responses to ecological crises. Geo-engineering, green tech and eco-design are here to fix it for us. And I’ve started to distrust this control paradigm. Not just because it's based on a power hierarchy that strips the care recipient of agency and keeps them dependent. It also just fails. It assumes the knowability of the world, so it can intervene in the best way. And then I scoop out the mould and kill my plant.
In teaching, collaborating, making, I learn ways to hush my inner control freak. Ways of caring that respect and even support the agency of the other, instead of overruling it. Timothy Morton talks about a 'care less' attitude, but in a way that I interpret as meaning something like 'trust more'. I want to get to this mode when relating to plants. Not just care, but care based on trust rather than control.