Fate is Way More Powerful Than You

“The Fates Lead the Willing, and Drags Along the Reluctant” — Seneca

The modern Western man has a deeply-bred abhorrence for the concept known as “fate.” It is archaic at best, but to most (especially to Americans) it is an offensive heresy. Does fate control your life? Are you a pawn of the gods, or the whims of overpowering cosmic forces you cannot see? Heresy!

We are “free-will agents”, endowed by evolution with the right to determine our life path, our future, our circumstances. We can ALL be that iconic “Self-Made Man,” especially in America, the glorious land of opportunity. That is the self-aggrandizing propaganda we absorb from the umbilical cord in our agnostic, human-technology worshipping, modern Western culture.

Did you choose your parents, socio-economic background, or the country you were born into? Did you (in some nebulous pre-birth state) hand select your primary gifts and weaknesses? Did you choose your gender, height, sexual orientation, or ethnic background? These traits were dealt TO you by the Cosmos. You did not have shit to do with that choice. That, my friend, is fate. A concrete, unalterable destiny which was imposed on you regardless of any intrinsic merit (or lack thereof) on your part.

The very thought rattles our modern sensibilities and asserted self-autonomy. I remember being in a large (100 students plus) undergraduate lecture on philosophy. The atheist instructor (who was under the mistaken impression that he was loved by all the female students, and a demi-god himself) was pejoratively teaching about Calvinism.

The zany professor broke down John Calvin’s stance on “Free-Will” vs. “Predestination.” I literally heard a rumbling of grumbling, anger, and indignation from a 100 people reverberating through the cafeteria the class was held in. The students were visibly and audibly angry at the very thought of our destiny being something outside of our direct control, and fully in the hands of a judgmental deity who was omnipotent.

Such a perspective makes one feel rather feeble, mortal, and certainly dis-empowered. The opposite of what we are…

Related posts:

Even if you have a smaller portfolio, the beauty of surface patterns is that they work well with many different products. By thinking about the various applications of your surface pattern designs…

It came in a 9x12 box with a chipboard print (usually of a horse since that was my obsession), a plastic pot set of 8 colors, and a paint brush. I could sit for hours painting those prints, but you…

It was a warm summer evening — a weekday after work — and my 16-year-old daughter and I were knocking on doors in a working-class neighborhood tucked under the Verrazano Bridge. I’d been crossing…