Fatalism

Published by

Clarissa

September 7, 2012

The kind of worldview that I hate with a passion and despise with a vengeance is the one that is based on fatalism.

The idea that everything in the world happens by pure chance, that you can in no way control anything that happens to you, that no matter what you do the outcome is completely beyond your control is, in my opinion, wimpy and pathetic. It is a very good excuse never to do anything with your life, never to address your issues, never to solve any problems. Why make an effort if it’s all useless by default?

Of course, I don’t think that we are in complete control of everything that happens to us. There are forces beyond out control that mold our lives. There are influences that we neither requested nor welcomed that have a deep impact on our psyche, an impact that can be profoundly negative.

Ultimately, however, I believe that it is the duty of every rational, thinking human being to try as hard as we can to solve our problems. If you tell people around you, “I will not do anything to address my issues because it’s all useless anyways,” you are engaging in a deliberately abusive behavior where you force others to pay the price of your intellectual laziness, emotional sloppiness, and profound self-centeredness.

A fatalist very easily slips into the role of an emotional abuser.

P.S. This is not a post on politics or economy. This is a post on interpersonal relationships and individual psychology. So if you have an urge to blame me for promoting a “lift yourself by the bootstraps” mentality, you are wide of the mark.

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11 responses to “Fatalism”

Titfortat

September 7, 2012

I pretty much agree with everything you say in this post. Woohoo……… 🙂

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musteryou

September 7, 2012

Australian culture, at least the anglo-irish version of it, which is the original one, is very fatalistic, because so many resigned themselves to being convict-slaves and never seeing their homelands again. There is a desperate resignation in the face of the nastiness of life in so many quarters of this society. Thankfully, this attitude is constantly being diluted by a new influx of immigrants.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  September 7, 2012
  
  The Russian culture is notoriously fatalistic but I can’t find it in myself to look at it culturally. For me, this is simply an abusive format of a lazy personality.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    September 7, 2012
    
    Just because you see the cultural roots of something doesn’t mean you’re not permitted to condemn the hell out of it. The genetic fallacy does not apply here.
    
    Freedom from resentment and the understanding of resentment-who knows after all how greatly I am indebted to my long illness for these things? The problem is not exactly simple: a man must have experienced through both his strength and his weakness. If we are to bear any grudge against illness and weakness, it is the fact that along with it there decays the very instinct of recovery, which is the instinct of defense and of war in man. He does not know how to get rid of anything, how to finish anything, how to cast anything behind him. Everything wounds him. People and things obtrude too closely, all experiences strike too deep, memory is a festering sore. Illness is a sort of resentment in itself. Against it the invalid has only one great remedy-I call it Russian fatalism, that unrebellious fatalism with which the Russian soldier, when a campaign becomes unbearable, finally lies down in the snow. To accept nothing more-to cease entirely from reacting. The high sagacity of this fatalism, which is not always mere courage in the face of death, but which in the most dangerous circumstances may work toward self-preservation, is tantamount to a reduction of activity in the vital functions, the slowing down of which is like a sort of will to hibernate. A few steps farther in this direction we have the fakir, who will sleep for weeks in a tomb. . . . http://www.yuga.com/Cgi/Pag.dll?Pag=146
    
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2. David Bellamy
  
  September 7, 2012
  
  “Australian culture, at least the anglo-irish version of it, which is the original one, is very fatalistic, because so many resigned themselves to being convict-slaves and never seeing their homelands again.”
  
  The original one? I had no idea. I thought people had lived in Australia for many years before anyone ever set foot in England or in Ireland.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    September 7, 2012
    
    Yes, there you go. Got me there. Woohoo.
    
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musteryou

September 7, 2012

Perhaps the major ideological ally of fatalism is the idea that we all have essential natures that are unchangeable. Oh, perhaps I’m wrong. I’ll start again. Perhaps the major ally is the ideological notion that we are all born into sin and we are all evil. Why bother trying to rectify something that is going wrong if it was bound to go off course anyway, due to inherent evil?

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  September 7, 2012
  
  I have to share that the person who inspired this post is a passionate atheist born into a family of passionate atheists. These are people who practically never heard words like “sin” and “evil” in their lives.
  
  I’m looking for an explanation of this tragic (to me) phenomenon but religion isn’t it. (In this particular case.) In many other cases, I’m sure you are right.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    September 7, 2012
    
    Hmm. Okay. There is a difference between metaphysics and religion, though. Even the professed atheist, Richard Dawkins, appears to hold the metaphysical view that women are not free to define necessary ethical structures or to give form to things. Only men can do that, and it has perhaps been done once and for all by male rationality.
    
    So, many professed secularists and atheists are still quasi-believers.
    
    I’m sure that in the absence of metaphysics, some people would still find a way to be passivists, though.
    
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2. bloggerclarissa
  
  September 7, 2012
  
  Thank you for discussing this traumatic issue with me, though.
  
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kelly

September 8, 2012

I’d agree with the entirety of your post. Maybe there is an observation missing coming to mind. And that is that there are also few people, who recognizing deficiencies by the way of personal past human experiences, have tried to solve them actively and yet definitive issues still remain unsolved. Rather than becoming bitter or resentful, they might try to cope with the situations in an implicit hopeful way: “Maybe something will happen that will turn things for the better”. That, for me, would not be passivity or fatalism but full, conscious and responsible awareness that “Of course, I don’t think that we are in complete control of everything that happens to us”, even in the face of having tried very hard. Because human life, behavior, inner aspirations and understanding of personal growth are complex. So much as our human interpretation of how those processes evolve and resolve.

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