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THE
CONTROL
FACTOR
Our Struggle to See the True Threat

BILL SIEGEL

FrontPage Interview’s guest today is Bill Siegel, a lawyer and business
executive. He has been a producer of several documentary films and assists numerous non-profit
organizations. He is the author of The Control Factor: Our Struggle to See the True Threat.

FP: Bill Siegel, welcome to FrontPage Interview.

Congratulations on this brilliant book. It is without question one of the most vital works of our time.

Let’s begin with what inspired you to write it.

Siegel: Thanks for having me Jamie. As a young boy born in the mid 1950s, I was fascinated with footage of
Hitler and the Third Reich and could never understand how the Jews of the time could not see the evil that
seemed so obvious. Not yet appreciative of the benefit of hindsight, I could not comprehend the blindness.
Following 9/11, like so many others, I began to study Islam, its history, its current movements, terrorism and
so on. As I would learn one stunning aspect after another, I would discuss them with friends and associates.
Rather than confront the facts I would present, they would find one clever way after another to avoid the
frightening truth of what America and the West truly face. Their fear appeared obvious to me. I began to
catalog many of my friends’ different maneuvers to dispel the anxiety that they found so difficult to endure.
The more I focused on their mental processes (as well as my own) the more I began to see a structure to the
mental endeavor and to understand what I had, as a child, found so difficult to explain.

FP: Tell us about the Control Factor, what you describe as “that effort our minds enga ge in in order to keep
us blind” and that “process of a voiding seeing the threats we face.” It’s also about, as you state, trying to
believe that the threat is under our control, when in fact it is not. Kindly enlighten us as to these profound
insights you make in terms of the Control Factor.

Siegel: First, let’s distinguish the ”real world” where real battles are taking place from the mental battlefield
which occurs in each of our minds. We tend to believe our perceptions are simply clear realizations of what is
“out there” and overlook how much our internal worlds can literally determine what we see. When our
internal minds become anxious and sense a loss of “control,” they tend to concoct ways to distort our
perceptions so as to restore that sense of inner control. I describe the Control Factor as an “active and
continuous process” designed to maintain that sense, if not illusion, of control. We natural ly think that our
thinking and feeling processes are passive; that they just happen. Yet when faced with truly frightening
prospects, the mind is geared to actively distort.

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