When you think of yourself, it's always a comparison of your current personality relative to one of your other personalities (which may include your mind-echo of another person or external object) so the judgement is powerfully tainted by that.
Yesterday, I read about the locus of control, the judged amount of control we have over our lives. On one level, we don't have any control. When something bad happens out of the blue, it was always destined to happen and there's nothing we could have done to prevent it. When something good happens out of the blue, it was always destined to happen and there's nothing we could have done to prevent it.
Yet, on another level we can, just about, do anything. Can I, I imagined, put a man on the moon? Well, as part of humanity, my (meagre) taxes and compliance with western civilisation has and does, to some tiny degree, contribute to the current space program, so a tiny part of me is working to put a man on the moon. Yet, on a daily basis, it's hardly a concern or considered within the scope of my control. I'd never think that I was consciously acting to put a man on the moon (although today, I might!).
So it seems that our actions and influence on the world are one thing, and whether we consider those under our control is quite separate. This reminded me of a childhood belief that the television news people relaxed and stopped reading the news when I switched the set off or to another channel. I'd try to catch them out by switching back at unexpected moments, but - bah! I think they were on to me. They were always there reading the news.
Also, I thought of the belief that me watching a Wimbledon match was a transformation to the fate of the player, that Andy Murray's fortunes had turned because I'd started to watch at that point and that, before this, his performance was tired and lacklustre. So it seems that belief in control can occur even when there is no influence, just as influence can occur with no belief.
A twist of this is that Andy Murray as a player feeds off an audience, so one could say that, the more people who watch one of his tennis matches and believe that they are helping, the more he will become inspired and improve; so, like the moon concept, even a casual watch of a tennis match may, to some tiny degree, contribute to its outcome. This may be true only if that glance was registered, but even mere television audience figures may be inspirational to those on screen, and our belief of the importance of our glance may be picked up by those around us, and also spread.
