“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook”.
Carl Gustav Jung
In exactly fifteen days, I will turn forty. Consequently, I have decided to include—within the series of articles I will publish this year on this blog—a handful of pieces dealing with the questions a man should ask himself (or, preferably, should have already asked himself) by the time he reaches this age.
I believe I have been asking myself the question that serves as the title of this article for my entire life. For a reason that lies beyond—or perhaps on this inner side of—words, I cannot conceive that a universe so marvelously governed by physical laws of such incredible beauty could be ruled by pure chance when it comes to the affairs of the human soul.
In a previous article titled On Free Will, I examined the problem of human freedom. One of the keys to what I attempted to express back in January of last year is that man often claims to desire freedom, but he never asks himself what he should be free from and for what purpose.
If a man observes himself even slightly, he is immediately forced to admit that what he calls “being free” consists of doing what he desires. Yet, if he makes the small effort to observe himself further, he is likewise forced to conclude that his desires are not decisions. A man does not control what he desires, for better or worse. The most he can aspire to is to inhibit certain desires in favor of others. Decisions (from the Latin de-cidere, meaning “to cut off” or “remove from”) consist precisely in the progressive removal of various possible options to reach a goal.
In other words, man claims he “wants to be free from the obligation of dedicating himself to X in order to be free to do Y.” The point is that Y is, in itself, an object of desire. This means it is an agent acting upon the human mind in a way not so different from the duties imposed by society or the emotional conditioning a man carries with him (which would be X).
Therefore, anyone wishing to analyze the problem of freedom and destiny is forced to confront this dual problem: How much freedom can I hope for, and where does that which I desire most deeply originate?
My answer regarding freedom, though formulated differently before, is this: I can hope to bring order to my desires so that I may pursue the best ones to reach my inner peace, but I cannot aspire to act without desire. Desire is the essence of life, the engine of every human action. As such, it can be disciplined, but never eliminated.
The other question is: why do I desire some things and not others? It is under the light that this question sheds on the problem of destiny that I would like to discuss it, without fatalism.
The Search for Control
I’ll start with a fact: man instinctively attempts to control his life and direct it in the way he judges best for himself. He pursues this goal by using information—the knowledge available to him about the world—and deciding how to behave based on the interaction between his knowledge and his preferences.
For those who are introspective, or even for those who simply take an interest in financial markets or weather forecasts, it is evident that in real life, no matter how much information is available, predicting the behavior of nature or human masses is not easy at all—not even with the most sophisticated mathematical models run by the best computers available to humanity. How much more evident should it be, then, that the decisions we make individually will almost never have the effects initially hoped for? Instead, they will imply consequences or unforeseen events that will force us to adapt on the fly.
The question that introduces the core problem of this article is: is that which we fail to control purely random, or does it follow a determined logic—a theme written by forces that, while not manifest in the physical world, we cannot exclude from existence?
Rather than boring those who take the trouble to read this with philosophical hypotheses, I will share two anecdotes.
Accidents and Illnesses
One of the most shy and reserved people I have ever known is the ophthalmologist who surgically treated my juvenile cataracts. For obvious reasons, he shall remain anonymous. During my last check-up —which I have roughly every two years—, and during one of his demonstrations of sociability that I have witnessed emerging in him over the course of nearly two decades, he asked me about my father, who had passed away in the meantime. Those who knew him knew how naturally empathetic my father was with everyone he met. I was not surprised, therefore, to hear the doctor say, with a hint of emotion, how fond he had become of the face of this kind and evidently charismatic man.
To be equally polite, I asked him in return about his parents. I then listened to the following story about his father. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember the essence of the events vividly.
His father was a military pilot during World War II who was involved in a plane crash that ended in a fire, leaving him disfigured. Saved by a miracle rescue and after undergoing extensive plastic surgery to “patch up” his features, he found a job as a civil servant, facing many difficulties related to the indelible marks the accident left on his appearance. Over the years, he faced repeated health problems, including cancer and heart issues. However, thanks in part to his son’s connections in the medical field, he managed to obtain the best care, which saved him repeatedly until he eventually died, still relatively young, in a car accident.
Rather than jumping to conclusions about the direction I intend to take, I suggest the skeptical reader behave toward this person’s fate as one typically does at a funeral wake: death has taken the individual in the coffin and many others we have known, but it hasn’t taken us yet—so one can calmly talk about it with a shrug and, perhaps, talk about football instead.
Let us say provisionally, just as an exercise, that this gentleman had a “difficult destiny”… after all, destiny only exists, if at all, for others. Yet, there is no doubt that in the story of this person’s life, there is a recurring theme of accidents and physical problems. Is it truly just a coincidence?
Expansion Through Resistance
If someone were to ask me how I remember perceiving myself during my childhood using no more than two spontaneously evoked images, I would answer: reading a lot and maintaining order. Rather than books and the search for knowledge—which are obvious to anyone who knows me today—I want to talk about how the trait of order and control (a trait that is less jovial and more saturnine, more hidden to those looking from a distance) manifests in my personality and my way of acting.
As a child, I was extremely good at video games and, apparently, quite famous for it among my friends (though I wasn’t quite observant enough to realize it). For my eighth birthday, I received a Super Nintendo console from my parents. It had two long cables: one for power and one for audio/video. If I try to spontaneously remember my interactions with that console, the first image that comes to mind is not of me with the joystick in hand, but of me straightening the cables every time a tangle formed. Once the cables were in order, I would calm down and play with great satisfaction.
Whatever the game, I approached it the same way: the same fighter in combat games, the same football team, the same tennis player. I would repeat the same Super Mario level infinite times until I completed it more and more perfectly. This is how I built my reputation as a skilled player: getting better and better, but with the same tools. Experimentalism was not part of the initial conditions of my personality.
Fast forward fifteen years: I am a first-year PhD student, sitting at my computer verifying equations intended to check the correctness of a calculation performed by the student who preceded me in my research group’s hierarchy. Slowly and timidly, I move terms in the equations and, cycle after cycle, I let the computer verify that the result approaches zero, as it should. Through days spent in this verification, months spent perfecting it for publication, and more years spent expanding my understanding of that branch of physics, I built a career—one that ended in 2018 for personal reasons I’ve shared elsewhere, leading me to my current role.
Add another nine years to this image: I am in my father’s place here at Dentoni, bringing order to administrative backwardness. I change consultant after consultant, but only after carefully weighing the choices. I change the internal accounting software, introduce corporate welfare for our permanent employees, develop my own software for takeaway orders, and invest in subsidized finance.
Everything moves slowly, but it always goes well. The few times I make decisions dictated by excessive enthusiasm or anger, I make mistakes—fortunately, always small ones. Reckless gestures simply do not suit me. As much as I try to embrace them from time to time, they only result in disorder. Experimentalism plays a much larger role in this phase of my life, but it is a role earned through hard work, year after year.
Crucial for what follows: I have no problem acknowledging that, in certain domains and for certain people, impulsive decisions work perfectly well and I see nothing wrong with this. Period.
Add three more years, bringing us to four years ago. I am thirty-six. I have been reading about finance for eight years and derivatives for two, but for over a year, I have had an account open on a broker’s platform without ever depositing a cent. I finally start with small amounts after a long observation of my own indecision and after attending a course with serious, specialized trainers. Slowly, following them, I invest. After a year, I stand on my own feet and no longer follow their signals, though I still compare my choices with theirs. After two years, I move completely independently. I have made my mistakes here too, but learning what options and derivatives are has infinitely enriched my vision of the world—not just the financial one!
Over the years, my hesitation to embrace novelty has moved progressively from the mental plane to the operational one: the fundamental prudence remains, but I embrace new ideas with increasing ease and spontaneity.
In a word, there is certainly a tension within me between a tendency to seek growth through novelty and an opposite tendency to slow that growth down by exercising constant prudence. In my eyes, it is undeniable that my life is permeated by the theme of this constant tension between these two forces.
I have focused on the professional and “public” aspects of my life, where moderation has mostly reigned supreme. In other areas, I have made mistakes out of an excessive haste to grow, for which I paid a much higher price. Suffice it to say that the evidence of the “theme” is just as clear there.
Calling these traits “character” takes nothing away from the problem of why one person possesses them and another possesses completely different ones, nor does it resolve the central question: Where do they come from?
Counterpoint: What is “Chance”?
Again, the skeptical reader is more than welcome to think that this is the narcissistic exercise of a half-madman writing about abstruse things like destiny on a bakery’s blog.
Personally, when I hear explanations for such phenomena along the lines of “it depends on character,” “it depends on the parents,” “it depends on childhood trauma,” or “it depends on a combination of overly complicated circumstances,” I am reminded of a quote by a great physicist regarding the interpretation of quantum mechanics: “When we don’t understand something, we invent a new word to convince ourselves we have understood it.”
My sister and I had the same parents, who loved me no less than her and vice versa, yet we are two completely opposite individuals, united only by the deep values our family instilled in us. The same is true for millions of siblings raised in the same households. For countless pairs of twins. For countless groups of people who suffered extremely similar traumas and shocks but manifested long-term adaptation responses that were polar opposites.
The last refuge of “chance,” which even has mathematical dignity, is in Chaos Theory via the famous Butterfly Effect: minimal differences in initial conditions lead to extremely different circumstances and behavioral patterns. Even if we accept this, it only moves the problem one logical step further: What caused these differences in initial conditions in the development of two otherwise identical children? Chance? We never escape the loop.
But the first anecdote I shared is even more significant. Even if one believes the Butterfly Effect explains the unpredictability of an individual’s psychological evolution, it certainly wasn’t the conscious psychological part of my ophthalmologist’s late father that went looking for a plane crash, then assorted chronic illnesses, and then a fatal car accident. Perhaps it is a statistical anomaly, as many exist… what won’t we do to escape a confrontation with the idea of destiny!
Literature and history are filled with the stories of individuals marked by memorable destinies, for better or worse. The highest poetic expression of Western wisdom literature is the Book of Job, but the idea of destiny is equally present in epic poems, Greek tragedies, and so on. In his search for meaning—without which he cannot endure existence—man identifies recurring themes in the lives of literary heroes that he calls destiny. He sees the greatness and dignity of the hero in their ability to meet their own theme, their own destiny, and accept it.
The central question that anyone seeking the meaning of their life must ask is therefore only this: Do these recurring themes in my life exist before me, or are they merely mental constructs created after the fact, which I need to cling to only to justify my behavior?
This, in turn, opens the central theme in the problem of destiny. The idea of “chance” appears sophisticated, intelligent, and supposedly supported by “science.” Upon more dispassionate examination, however, it seems more convenient than it is coherent.
Destiny and Personal Responsibility
The examination I have presented in my own case is accessible to any mentally healthy human being. Anyone can see which challenges systematically recur in their own life, if only they stop and think seriously. It is not the purpose of this blog, nor its author’s, to convince anyone of this possibility. In fact, it is the only possible filter to experience the subject firsthand, without reading or listening to others’ opinions—least of all mine, which are destined to die with me when the time comes. If this sounds paternalistic, it is no more so than a mathematics teacher inviting a student to prove theorems and solve problems themselves to truly learn the subject. For reasons due, in my view, to a simple cultural illness, man understands this very well for specific disciplines but refuses to understand it when it comes to his own inner life.
If there is truth in what I think and write, then it will live after me—but it has existed since time immemorial before me, and I am only reporting it in the language of my time using the tools at my disposal. Otherwise, it will follow my body into the grave. It is really that simple.
However, I want to linger on why the world insists on treating destiny as a purely mental phenomenon that exists only in the observer of someone else’s life, or in a man looking back at his own.
Imagine knowing that destiny—this mysterious force spoken of in literature throughout the ages—actually exists and influences the choices you make and their consequences.
For some reason, you have never been distressed by the fact that being 190 cm tall makes you incapable of becoming an excellent gymnast, or that being 172 cm tall (like me) excludes the possibility of excelling in basketball.
The first realization (destiny) causes anguish; the second (height) does not. But why?
Usually, the answer is that matters like height are objective because they exist in physical reality and cannot be changed. To get closer to the answer regarding the anguish caused by destiny, I will simply reformulate that statement in a different but equivalent way. I know that height depends on a combination of genes and childhood nutrition; therefore, it is not my responsibility.
This formulation touches the central idea of destiny: if there is a theme in my life to be developed between the cradle and the grave, it is evident that, unlike height, I cannot rid myself of its influence with a one-time adjustment. I must adapt to it until I die. It is also clear that the choices I make and the desires I cultivate are inextricably linked to this theme.
Framed in this way, the anguish and annoyance generated by the idea of destiny in modern culture—obsessed with seemingly infinite possibilities of choice—appear in a different light. Man is not afraid of the existence of static forces that bind him, but of the responsibility implicit in a dynamic, omnipresent force that adapts to his actions. A force that returns to him, through the world, the consequences of his alignment or misalignment with a pre-existing life task.
Such a force, if real, compels man to free himself from the illusion of “freedom to” and to pursue only the “freedom from” everything that prevents him from following his path. Better yet, it forces him to look inside himself for a long, long time to find the clues of what path belongs to him and to adapt his behavior accordingly. And this is, in most cases, what man desires least of all.
Is it Just a One-Time Ride?
The next obvious question would be: where does this life task, existing at birth, come from? And why must one man, and not another, develop certain life themes? If questions about the nature of destiny are heavy when referred to earthly life, those referring to what happens before and after are overwhelming. Frankly, I do not feel I have matured enough personal understanding to speak of them with anyone.
I will only mention that this attitude of anguish toward the responsibility implicit in destiny has not always been present in our culture. The Homeric and Roman epics, Greek tragedies, Shakespeare’s tragedies, or the greatest novels of authors like Dostoevsky—even when not explicitly using the word “destiny”—all deal with the problem posed by the search for meaning in an existence that seems to pin a particular individual against situations they cannot escape, no matter how hard they try.
Furthermore, in other cultures—most notably Indian culture—the idea of destiny is so rooted in their vision of the universe (based on reincarnation and the cyclical nature of existence) that it is almost trivialized.
Personally, the anguish caused by the problem of destiny to Westerners does not bother me—being one of them—because I have experienced it as a stimulus to search for the meaning of life.
A search that, having reached the age of forty, I can say has not, at least so far, been in vain.
Happy Easter everyone !
Mirko serino
Accedi con Google