This philosophy makes me wonder what concept you think is communicated by the word "control". In a sense you're not wrong, but in that same sense my thermostat has no control over the temperature of my house. If I believed that, I'd look for ways to reinterpret the word "control" to make it a useful concept again.

Human society is often imbued with a desision making powers that don't really exist. Why do we xxxx?! (insert damaging human behaviour here) people say, it makes no sense!

It makes intuitive sense to us that "humans" collectivley can and should make rational desisions, because we feel as thought we can do this individually. The reason we extrapolate this from 1 individual to many is because we don't see ourseleves or our society as a natural chaotic system, we see it as a rational desision making system that's broken and we're wrong.

Well, I'd say society is neither chaotic nor rational. It's trapped by game theory into predictable suboptimal outcomes.

But I think we still have much more control over our destiny than ants do, basically unless you grind down to the level of physical determinism where nothing has control over anything and we're all dancing to the tune of some Lagrangian.

To argue otherwise, I think you'd have to make the case that no individual or small group has ever hatched a successful plan to create social change. I'd point to the Montreal protocol as one of many counterexamples. We've also managed to, so far, not blow ourselves to smithereens with nuclear weapons, having limited ourselves to only one nuclear war so far.

It's not self defeating, it's enlightening. The separation is rooted in post Christian Western philosophy and is false. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what we are.