FORTUNE
by Alex Benini
The force of fate, of chance, of that which changes without rest, blind and terrifying force. For centuries, we have strived to explain it, predict it, and finally contain, govern, and manipulate it to our advantage. From the reading of the stars, of the entrails of animals, and of the flight of birds, there has been a relentless search for signs and signals, omens, unmistakable indicators that would allow those who know how to read them to consult the script of what is already written and must simply happen. For he who today rules and commands the armies, be they the Persian or the Macedonian ones of Alexander the Great, might fall tomorrow, and with him, his kingdom, his empire, the fruit of civilization’s desperate attempts to resist the inexorable and invincible assaults of time and history, which creates everything and reduces everything to dust once more. The rich may find himself destitute tomorrow, the poor may break free from his chains and finally inhabit lands of his own, the healthy may suddenly succumb to illness, the sick may find himself the sole survivors of an epidemic.
Fortune is blind, neither good nor evil; it bestows its favors and misfortunes indiscriminately and unpredictably, without distinction of class and merit. The luck of one moment may quickly turn into bad luck in the next and perhaps become the luck of someone else. Such is the meaning of the Rota Fortunae, that fearsome cosmic carnival that, far from theatrically expressing itself only once a year, conceals and reveals at every single moment the infinite possibilities of the world’s upheavals, with no one and nothing being able to escape its sentences. The mutability of human affairs that, in this sense, can never be considered definitive or absolute. No matter how small or drastic, this changing is inevitable and unstoppable. Only change itself is eternal, the circular motion of the wheel of fortune, constantly following and accompanying the perpetual movement of the cosmos.
For Machiavelli, fortune was an unpredictable power with which any ruler must inevitably deal –thereby distinguishing between the things a Lord can determine and alter through his own will and foresight, through ingenuity and governance, and the things that lie beyond any capacity for human influence. Modern states, born from the science of statistics and the emerging economic sciences – just as from the scientific method in general – have turned their ability to analyze, quantify, and incorporate reality in the structures of calculation into a formidable tool for predicting and domesticating chance and
misfortune. No longer the universal tragedy of humanity, subjected to the relentless thread of fate woven and cut by the divine Greek Moirai. A new nature, emptied of its gods, first allows itself to be read, broken down into localized, measurable, quantifiable parts, and then lets itself be modified by the intervention of human techniques. Fortune now takes on the more reassuring guise of probability; the prophetic reading of signs becomes the statistical forecasting of data; the mortal fate of a man is now contested by the physician, who may manage to wrest him from an initially inevitable outcome; the sudden impetus of an overflowing river can be countered by the prudent raising of its banks through engineering. And in the same way, what happens can be traced back to a probable number of causes that no longer stem from the blind will of a divine fate but from the alignment of elements and phenomena within an order that can be reconstructed, as if one could finally trace the Moirai by following their thread, or enter and exit the labyrinth by following Ariadne’s thread.
Only where we can no longer follow our thread, where it hides in the cracks or dark and steep abysses, this thread seems to rest again in the mysterious and obscure hands of the gods, of an inexplicable or senseless fate that we are not given to measure. In truth, our threads have never been alone and isolated, each one intertwining infinitely with infinite others in a universal tangle that has nothing to do with the orderly skein of fate, or with the deterministic mathematical calculation of a few variables, methodically and singularly extracted from the tangle. The world unfolds and gives free rein to its forces, infinitely complex and intricate, branching out ceaselessly in every direction where it is given the chance to do so.
Neither merely divine, nor purely mathematical: fortune is the expression the world gives to itself at every moment. Trying to understand it would mean embracing with the mind the immense complexity of the cosmos itself, attempting to glimpse in a single moment universal history and its forces down to the tiniest details. Never-ending work and research of a human mind that heroically (in the tragic sense of the term) strives to reach the edges of a cosmos it can only glimpse without ever fully seeing.
Nevertheless, to rely on fortune or wait for it would be perfectly vain, just as it would be perfectly useless to wait to exist in order to exist. As the ancient saying goes: “God helps those who help themselves”.
