Of Prognostications

As to oracles, it is certain that long before the coming of our Lord, they had already begun to lose credit. For Cicero is troubled to find the cause of their decay, and he quotes Demosthenes, who says they had already declined in his time. But as to all other prognostications and divinations — the reading of birds, the entrails of beasts, the positions of stars — I think we ought to approach them with more suspicion than our age commonly brings.

The human desire to know the future is understandable, even sympathetic. Life is uncertain; uncertainty is uncomfortable; anything that promises relief from it will find customers. The astrologer, the soothsayer, the man who reads palms — all of them sell the same thing, which is not knowledge but the feeling of knowledge, the sense that the shape of things to come is not entirely opaque to us. This feeling is pleasant. It is also entirely fictitious.

“There is no man so weak that he may not, in an hundred trials, hit right twice or thrice; and all prophets together, in the many predictions they make, cannot fail sometimes to be true — and this truth is what their customers remember.”

Consider how prophecies are constructed: broad enough to fit many outcomes, phrased so that the confirming event will always seem to match them better than the disconfirming one. The oracle at Delphi was never merely wrong; it was always subtly right, if you read it correctly. This is not prophecy — it is rhetoric in the service of a comfortable deception.

I would rather live in honest uncertainty than in the false security of a predicted fate. If my fate is to die tomorrow, knowing it today will not improve tomorrow, and will certainly ruin today. The man who consults no oracles and reads no horoscopes is not, in this, more ignorant than the man who consults them all — he is simply more honest about the limits of what can be known.