Delphic Maxim 142: Do not trust fortune
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
142. Do not trust fortune
We’ve encountered fortune in the maxims a number of times during this journey. The first was maxim 68 (recognise fortune), and then again number 77 (be fond of fortune). In both of those maxims I noted that fortune presents in positive (fortunate!) ways, but also in ways that aren’t so good. Fortune is capricious, much like the Greek gods. Fortune gives and fortune takes away. So today’s maxim serves as a reminder that fortune isn’t an unalloyed good — she can’t be trusted.
This isn’t a revelation for most people. We’ve all been dudded by bad luck from time to time, and quite often that bad luck comes in threes so we feel like we’re being persecuted by the universe. There’s probably a degree of mindset-consciousness in there s well: if you tend to lean in to pessimism you’ll probably understand fortune as being more cruel than kind. If you’re an optimist like me, you tend to read the world as a boon, bestowing luck. Those mindsets are themselves a product of fortune — your upbringing, family environment and social world strongly influence your mindset.
There’s another sense in which we could understand fortune, and that’s as material wealth. I’ve noted in a number of maxims that Plato didn’t trust material wealth. Lucky for him, because he came from a relatively privileged family, given the chance to mix and mingle with the Athenian elite. But he didn’t trust fortune. He understood the way wealth tends to corrupt people, the way that greed can influence and shape a person’s character. Fortune can have perverse effects like this — possibly even dull us to the disadvantage people who are less fortune face.
So there’s both an interpersonal sense in which we shouldn’t trust fortune, and then there’s the cosmic sense. How strongly should we hew to the lesson of this Delphic maxim? I’d say to the degree that allows us to be strategic, safe, and to live a happy life. The maxims aren’t rules, they’re guidelines. Taken in total, many of them provide an insight into the building of character — particularly character as it would have been understood in ancient Greece. But at the same time, the maxims can be contradictory and confusing. Some of them are anachronistic.
We might feel like we have fortune completely under our control these days, but that’s just an illusion. Chance intervenes in ways we cannot know and can’t predict — the black swans are the most dramatic changes and they are the ones that we are often most unprepared for (whether they’re positive or negative). Not trusting fortune doesn’t mean wrapping ourselves in cotton wool and refusing to go outside. It means thinking carefully, minimising the downside and maximising the gain from those black swans — riding the capriciousness of fate, and always looking, difficult as it may be sometimes, on the bright side of life.
