By Adrian Wooldridge | Updated on Oct 09, 2026 at 01:00 PM
A clever interviewer recently asked me which piece of music I would choose to sum up our times. I am afraid I opted for the clichéd answer of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung , even though Wagner’s genius did not extend to summing things up. As I left the interview a better answer came to mind.
Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control seems to go to the heart of our out-of-control times: the hypnotic repetition of the phrase “she’s lost control again;” sinister lines about “confusion in her eyes that says it all” and “the voice that told her when and where to act;” and, in videos of the live performance , lead singer Ian Curtis’ disturbing, demented arm-waving dancing and half-closed eyes. Curtis, a severe epileptic, hung himself in his sitting room at the age of 23.
Consider some recent headlines. Donald Trump threatens to “annihilate” Iran in a speech to the United Nations, constructed as a temple to peace. Vladimir Putin talks about using “strategic” nuclear weapons to end the impasse in Ukraine; meanwhile, t he death of a laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East has prompted concern over a possible plague outbreak . Bill Gates says that AI has the potential to cause “a billion deaths” if it gets into the wrong hands. In France, school children are burning down their schools and anything else they can lay their hands on. In Germany, the far-right AfD leads in nationwide opinion polls.
The most emotive political problems focus on the question of control or the lack of it. A tide of refugees suggests that we have lost control of our borders. An epidemic of petty crime suggests that we have lost control of our streets. A drama in the sky, when a rogue pilot tried to seize control of an Israel-bound plane, plunging it 14,000 feet toward the earth, reinforces everybody’s darkest fears of air travel.
It is possible to debate whether the world is more out of control today than it was during, say, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis or the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. But today’s all-singing and all-dancing news cycle contributes to our feeling that things are spinning out of control: Competing platforms engulf us with snippets of disasters from across the planet without a moment’s pause. And this feeling casts a reverse halo over real events: The British are convinced that we are amid a crime epidemic even though incidents of the most serious crimes such as murder are in decline. Who bothers to reflect on murder statistics when the local Tesco has been forced to put up a reinforced glass screen to protect its staff from yobs?
The question of how to regain control in an out-of-control world is at the center of global politics. But the three most popular answers to the conundrum are not just wrong but counterproductive, offering the illusion of control while exacerbating the opposite.
Strongmen all come to power by appealing to our most primal instinct: embracing the alpha ape to protect us from internal disorder and external threat. Putin is both the earliest and most relentless exponent of this style of government: In 2000, he appealed to Russians, who were sick of the chaos of the Yeltsin years, with the slogan “dictatorship of law;” since then, he has channeled Peter the Great with his pledges to reclaim Russia’s supposedly ancestral lands.
But everywhere that strongmen have promised their citizens order, they have delivered the opposite. Russians are terrified that they will be press-ganged into the army and dispatched to the meat grinder in Ukraine. Non-White Americans run the risk of being grabbed up by ICE. The Strait of Hormuz and its surrounding regions are rife with risks. The world of the strong men is undoubtedly more volatile and disorderly than the world of the rules-based global order, not least because strong men are so bad at controlling their own appetites.
The liberal solution to loss of control is to multiply rules and regulations. The European Union (EU) has nearly 20,000 legislative acts in force , which affect not just member states but anyone who wants to trade with the bloc. In the US, the Code of Federal Regulations has metastasized from almost 400,000 restrictive words in 1970 to more than one million today. The UK has more than 90 regulatory bodies. But rather than increasing people’s sense of control, this multiplication of laws and regulations often does the opposite.
Perhaps the most persistent complaint of democratic politicians is that they are elected to deliver change but then find themselves bogged down in procedure, trussed up in red tape and blocked by interest groups. Take Britain, a country that left the EU to “take back control.” Boris Johson complained that the levers of power were made of chocolate or jelly. Keir Starmer, the ultimate process man, got so frustrated with the system that he denounced the “cottage industry of checkers and blockers” who specialized in making sure that nothing got done.
A third solution is to retreat from the public sphere and focus on improving your own lives. When I take my dogs for a walk on Clapham Common early on a Saturday or Sunday morning, I am struck by the crowds of young people who are working out or going for a run. “When life feels out of control,” Psychology Today advises us, “focus on yourself.”
The obvious problem with this approach is that, if sensible people leave the public sphere, the only people left running it will be fanatics and fools. This private order/public chaos problem is the modern version of J.K. Galbraith’s private affluence/public squalor. A more subtle problem is that exercising control over your personal life is of only limited benefit if you are reduced to an automaton at work, forced to spend your life obeying the diktats of your manager, particularly if your manager is an AI rather than a human.
It is easy to pronounce that all roads lead to chaos given the amount of chaos that surrounds us. What is more difficult is to point ahead to a more sustainable order. Here it helps to summon up another paradox: sometimes the best way to gain control is to loosen control. If you trust people to do the right thing rather than trying to micromanage their every movement, more often than not they will not only do the right thing, but do it willingly and indeed cheerfully. This approach might involve putting up with more mistakes than we are used to in our risk-averse culture. But that will be more than compensated for by unleashing the creativity that compliance and procedure tend to suppress.
The dawning age of AI makes the case for loosening top-down control particularly urgent. AI can be used to reorganize work in two different ways: to help managers to micromanage workers more ruthlessly, monitoring their every move and even employing AI agents to act as pacesetters; or instead, to empower the workers to do their jobs more creatively. The first approach is the tech-equivalent of the strongman approach to politics. It offers immediate control but may well unleash the kind of discontent that could threaten social stability. The second approach reduces short-term control but, by giving workers more control over their own lives, is more likely to promote social harmony.
The central intellectual problem for liberals in recent decades has been freedom. The central problem today is control: How can we produce solutions to the problem of losing control without either empowering strongmen, strangling society in regulations or robbing work of all its charm. The natural advantage in the age of control lies with strong men just as the natural advantage in the age of freedom lay with liberals (the word “liberal” comes directly from the Latin “liberalis,” meaning “of a free person).
But liberals are finally adjusting to new times. Centrist mayors such as San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie are enjoying success restoring order to the streets. Centrist governments such as Denmark’s Social Democratic Coalition are addressing out-of-control borders. And centrist thinkers are zeroing in on the problem of control in books such as Sarah O’Connor’s We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work, which warns about the dangers of employing AI to turn people into robots and, Claire Ainsley’s Control: How We Lost it and How to Win It Back , which comes out next month. Past dismal solutions to the problem of control have forced us to live Ian Curtis’s words for far too long and walk “on the edge of no escape.” We must step back from the edge before it is too late.
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