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“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it”
-Jean de la Fontaine
A great counter to the idea of personal agency is destiny. An unavoidable call from the divine seems to trump our ability to avoid it. No greater example of this exists than the story of the Greek hero Oedipus.
The Oracle of Delphi prophesied to the King and Queen of Thebes that their newborn son Oedipus would one day kill his father and marry his mother. In an effort to avoid this tragic future, Oedipus’s parents abandoned the infant on a mountainside only to be rescued by a shepherd in a nearby village. When Oedipus was a young man he learned of the prophecy and decided to flee from his hometown to stop the prophecy from coming true. Unaware of his true parentage he fled to his true birthplace, Thebes.
On the way to Thebes he encountered an old man and killed him in a quarrel. The man was his father, without realizing it, he fulfilled the first half of the prophecy. The city could not mourn the king because they had a more dire problem. Outside the city walls stood the mythical creature, the Sphinx. The Sphinx was terrorizing the people of Thebes and killing travelers that were unable to answer its riddle. It was so bad that the city of Thebes had declared that anyone who could rid the city of the Sphinx would be made king and given in marriage to the recently widowed queen. Unfortunately for Oedipus he was quite good at riddles. After besting the Sphinx, Oedipus unknowingly fulfilled the prophecy and was married to his mother.
What’s the takeaway in all of this? That we’re all hopelessly being pushed to marry our mothers and accidentally kill our fathers? I certainly hope not. The story of Oedipus isn’t one of determinism but rather one of poor agency. Avoiding difficult circumstances, conversations, or choices is a catalyst to catastrophe.
Meet life head on or be caught in the weirdest fable of all time.
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