I went through an extraordinarily cool passage from Lucian’s Alexander, or the False Prophet the other day. To give some context, the essay in question chronicles the career of a religious pretender, the founder of a successful cult whose relics and statuary are still coming out of the ground today; Lucian aims to discredit the titular Alexander, apparently, by airing his dirty laundry and revealing the tricks he employed to convince people that he really was transmitting oracles from Apollo (via a giant snake muppet with Trump-style hair.) It’s a deeper text than that, as everyone always says, but the surface story is one of the funniest longform anatomies of a con man that has ever been written.
Well, here’s the passage in question, which records the reasoning that leads Alexander and his accomplice to try to establish a fake oracle in the first place:
“As Thucydides would say, the war began then and there. For, when these two men most evil and daring and eager to do wrong got together, they easily observed how human lives were ruled by these two tyrants, hope and fear, and that anyone who was able to use each of these as necessary would very soon become rich. For they saw that knowledge of the future was most necessary for both of them – that is, the hopeful man and the coward – and most desired, and that, of old, Delphi and Delos and Klaros and Branchis had all gotten rich and renowned that way, since men frequented temples and begged to know what was to come and sacrificed hecatombs and set up golden statues on account of those tyrants which I mentioned before, hope and fear.”*
The framework, and the hope-fear opposition, is Thucydidean, but Lucian links it to the universal quest for knowledge about the future in what I believe is an original way. Thucydides takes hope and fear to be what drives human action, supposing that we act either to secure an advantage we hope for or to avoid a harm that we fear – as Athens and Sparta do, respectively, in the opening stages of the Peloponnesian War. Lucian, by contrast, treats hope and fear as objects of a therapeutic concern, sad passions which humans try to suppress not by acting – since that would only reproduce the conditions under which they first emerged – but by knowing. Hope and fear thrive on uncertainty; knowledge about the future, says Lucian, will quell them both.
The critical suggestion here, that oracles are a means of dealing with risk and its associated anxiety, is one that has been profitably addressed by Esther Eidinow in a volume on the anthropology of risk among the Greeks. What struck me about Lucian’s argument, though, was not so much its explanatory value for the history of Greek religion as a certain concinnity with an idea of Lacan which I also recently encountered. In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (and maybe at greater length elsewhere), he posits that the conscious mind is in the position of an observer with respect to its own thoughts, which come to it, not as it wishes, but as the subconsscious supplies them – or, better, in a kind of interplay between the conscious and unconscious that mirrors the productive, homeostatic conflict of the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
I wondered, reading Lacan after having read this Lucian, whether this relationship that constitutes our thoughts might founder on the future, a temporal domain where uncertainty renders the claims of the reality principle liable to all kinds of doubt and criticism. The reason I thought this was because I’m always wrestling with a kind of thought-pattern that you’ll probably recognize. For instance: I imagine what would happen if I run into a racist at the grocery store, maybe while he’s hassling the checkout person. Of course, I intervene aggressively, and this fantasy provides a deep libidinal satisfaction. But what if the reality isn’t like that? What if, for instance, I get owned by some dumb cracker in the checkout line? What if I stutter? What if I faint? Well, the only solution for that is to rewind the fantasy and run it from the beginning, so that I get to the pleasurable part again. But then, inevitably, I hit the same log-jam of doubt, which means I have to start again, and meanwhile I’m getting jittery from all the adrenaline. This cycle can go on for hours. It’s now the leading cause of insomnia for all members of my household except the cat.
The thing that keeps it going, I think, is an egocentric desire on the part of my conscious mind, the part that identifies as myself, to know what will happen, and more importantly to know what I will do. In this instant, I’m tyrannized by hope and fear with respect to the thing over which I ought, in theory at least, to have more control than over anything else: namely, how I’m going to turn out to be.
That’s pathetic, but time more or less normal for people living in these stupid, stupid times. The same mental process would turn pathological if, in the face of this cycle, I took the coward’s way out by positively asserting, aloud or in print, that I would act the way that my libido drove me to imagine myself acting, and that my performance would get results. You can see people doing this online after any mass shooting; they’ll post saying that they would have stood up to the shooter and stopped him, that they wouldn’t have run or gotten shot. In saying these things, they’re delivering false oracles about themselves, to themselves, using the public as a kind of masturbatory prop.
* with apologies for the poorly-integrated accents: καὶ κατὰ τὸν Θουκυδίδην ἄρχεται ὁ πόλεμος ἐνθένδε ἤδη. Ὡς γὰρ ἂν δύο κάκιστοι καὶ μεγαλότολμοι καὶ πρὸς τὸ κακουργεῖν προχειρότατοι εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ συνελθόντες͵ ῥᾳδίως κατενόησαν τὸν τῶν ἀνθρώπων βίον ὑπὸ δυοῖν τούτοιν μεγίστοιν τυραννούμενον͵ ἐλπίδος καὶ φόβου͵ καὶ ὅτι ὁ τούτων ἑκατέρῳ εἰς δέον χρήσασθαι δυνάμενος τάχιστα πλουτήσειε ἄν· ἀμφοτέροις γάρ͵ τῷ τε δεδιότι καὶ τῷ ἐλπίζοντι͵ ἑώρων τὴν πρόγνωσιν ἀναγκαιοτάτην τε καὶ ποθεινοτάτην οὖσαν͵ καὶ Δελφοὺς οὕτω πάλαι πλουτῆσαι καὶ ἀοιδίμους γενέσθαι καὶ Δῆλον καὶ Κλάρον καὶ Βραγχίδας͵τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἀεὶ δι΄ οὓς προεῖπον τυράννους͵ τὴν ἐλπίδα καὶ τὸν φόβον͵ φοιτώντων εἰς τὰ ἱερὰ καὶ προμαθεῖν τὰ μέλλοντα δεομένων͵ καὶ δι΄ αὐτὸ ἑκατόμβας θυόντων καὶ χρυσᾶς πλίνθους ἀνατιθέντων.