Mikhail Pozharsky has released a very good video about the illusion of control. Be sure to watch it in full if you haven’t already, and I, as usual, will provide the key points as I understand them.

1. The experience of falling into a hopeless situation (one in which the subject’s position does not depend on their efforts) triggers the development of learned helplessness.
2. Learned helplessness sharply reduces the subject’s competitive potential in situations where their actions actually do make a difference.
3. An important psychological defense against learned helplessness is the illusion of control. In a hopeless situation, one can believe that something still depends on them, and thus learned helplessness will not arise.
4. However, the rituals of psychological defense designed to create an illusion of control can themselves worsen the hopeless situation.
5. Therefore, the skill of reflection is more effective, where the subject analyzes what they can actually control and what they cannot, and does not waste strength on the illusion of control, accepting force majeure as it is.
6. Such a skill is formed through the experience of independently finding a way out of difficult situations, and in no other way.
7. Therefore, creating cumbersome centralized structures and shifting the responsibility for everything onto them is an illusion of control, whereas a real fight against difficulties implies a decentralized approach based on personal responsibility. Period.

This is why, having outlined three main paths toward ancap — minarchism, panarchism, and agorism — I pay special attention specifically to agorism.

One can start a political party, like the big shots do, hold rallies, like the big shots do, and believe that through political pressure you are somehow influencing the policies pursued by the authorities — and when asked why life isn’t getting better, answer that the efforts undertaken are insufficient, and not a hundred thousand, but a million people must take to the streets.

One can propose reforms to create functional competing jurisdictions, dream of Facebook citizenship or the Bitnation project, and when asked why none of this is being implemented, answer that everything is heading that way anyway, but it would be good to double the propaganda efforts.

Or one can simply make a deal and not pay a tax. Or bypass an inconvenient ban. Or invent a service that is useful to people but invisible to the state’s servants. This is no longer an illusion of control. This is control itself. Through such things, a person learns to independently find a way out of difficult situations. And if they find themselves in conditions where they cannot control the possibility of getting out of the situation, they will already be resistant to learned helplessness, and will not fall back on rituals for the sake of an illusion of control.

One can remain an atheist in the trenches under fire. While one is shitting their pants and another is praying, the agorist digs the trench deeper.