The concept of fate, or the idea of fatefulness, seems to crop up everywhere we look in one form or another. Fate is a key belief enduring across cultures and generations. What is fate? Generally speaking, fate is thought of as a power or agency determining events and destinies, acting beyond our control.
An Amazon search for books in print centring on fate generates over 50,000 entries. They are mostly potboiler novels, modern mythologies, paranormal speculations, self-help manuals, and studies of specific historical events and eras. This astonishing figure should not surprise us, because talk about fate has no limits of time or space, confining the notion to a particular age, society, or type of worldview.
Fate, quite simply, is an essential part of the way people think and talk about the universe and their place in it. Fateful ideas drive the disturbing visions of terrorists and cultists, energise the followers of millennial social movements, and endlessly inspire pundits, futurologists, utopian and dystopian theorists, and storytellers. Such ideas resurface as well in today’s debates about environmental collapse, pandemics, the possibility of World War III, and other issues.
Many of us picture fate as a towering, aloof, controlling force or identify it with cataclysmic scenarios such as Armageddon and Ragnarok . This idea of a remotely acting fate haunts everyday expressions: “she was abandoned to her fate”; “as fate would have it”; “what fate decreed”; “i.