Control and the Just World Theory

I get irritated with the philosophies that say you are in complete control of your life, and that everything is a byproduct of your decisions. Sure I would say the bulk of things, but not everything. To believe that EVERYTHING is within your control is a slippery slope to victim blame and the just world phenomenon, which is a sign of a personality disorder.

"The just-world hypothesis (or just-world fallacy) is the cognitive bias that human actions eventually yield morally fair and fitting consequences, so that, ultimately, noble actions are duly rewarded and evil actions are duly punished. In other words, the just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to, or expect consequences as the result of, an unspecified power that restores moral balance; the fallacy is that this implies (often unintentionally) the existence of such a power in terms of some cosmic force of justice, desert, stability, or order in the universe." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_world_phenomenon

Control is an illusion, and the very nature of this philosophy does not acknowledge the free will and decisions of others. It is in fact very narcissistic - as in problems distinguishing the self from others (see narcissism and boundaries) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism - and naive to believe that you have complete and utter control over everything that happens to you.

You can control yourself, your reactions, your choices, but it in this exaggerated perception that lays responsibility on the victim for every wrong thing that happens to them. In that over-assertion is what I have a problem with, because I am a big advocate of personal responsibility in general. However to say every bad thing that befalls you is your fault, negates the influence and will of any other person, whose own will should be just as far reaching, if you accept that premise. Tell that to the jews of the holocaust, the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, or a child who was raped by their father. There are things that are truly beyond your control. You are not the center of the universe and there are limits to everyone's influence, even yours.

For example, there is a book that makes claims on your disposition causing certain ailments, but the problem is that it's not a diagnosis.  It's always hindsight, and never works the opposite. In these books is the claim that people who end up with multiple sclerosis get it because they are stubborn and closed minded. My aunt died of MS, and had a very severe case. She was extremely gullible and if there was anything stubborn about her, it was her faith in everything that came along to heal her. A faith that should have healed her, if that were the way of it. Therefore she was the antithesis of what the book claimed was the cause. This same book attributes whatever is ailing you to some personality flaw, which is ridiculous. If there is any sense of validity, perhaps that something might lead one to smoke and then get lung cancer. Therefore it is a byproduct of a destructive behavior, but to say that someone has breast cancer because they are too motherly is excessive. It leaves no room for actual scientific causes, which have been proven repeatedly, as opposed to this random assertion.

BAD THINGS HAPPEN, and sometimes they happen to good people. 

That does not mean that they deserved it. In fact I have seen more bad things happen to good people than bad people over the years. Often I have seen more people take the side of the abuser than the victim for this very reasoning.

It makes people comfortable to believe that someone deserved something bad, even if they are the ones doing the mistreating. In the Milgram experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millgram_study they showed that 65% of participants "hurt" people under orders to the point of giving a final lethal shock. They were unaware that the other participant was acting. The descriptions of the subject before and after were shockingly different, attributing some deficiency in the person they "hurt" (ugly, stupid, etc) that was not there before. It's soothing to the soul to think that there's a reason such as that, because if bad things happen to good people... and they viewing themselves as good... anything could happen to them. It makes one feel vulnerable and insecure to recognize that someone might randomly target them.

The world is simple. People do make decisions and they are responsible for those decisions. They do produce reactions of equal and opposite natures, but to extrapolate from that to say you are responsible for ever single thing that happens to you, is extreme absurdity. The person doing it to you is responsible for their own actions, and you are responsible for yours.