“Fatalism is not just a belief in causality or an expectation of disaster. It is essentially a view about effort. Fatalism says that our efforts must always be useless because a power outside ourselves controls our destiny and will override all our attempts to act.” ~Mary Midgley.
Fatalism is a rather interesting concept to me because of our rather complex relationship to it: intellectually we reject it while traces of it remain. As an “ism” it carries with it a great deal of negative connotations by virtue of what Midgley identifies as a systematized declaration of the futility of effort; nonetheless, it is something that we often default back to in moments of failure or uncertainty. How often has it been said, “oh it was meant to be,” “I couldn’t help it,” or “it was her time,”? Whether we are aware of it or not, the language and thought-system of fate is in different ways intertwine within in our collective consciousness because of its root causes which are indifferent of our cultural apprehension to fatalism as a system of thought.
What this highlights is our pervasive tendency to lay the blame of our actions on any scapegoat necessary. Beginning with the shifting of Adams guilt upon Eve—and by extension God—and continuing to the scapegoats of fate, government, environment, thought, or circumstance, we have proven that we are deftly skilled at using the freedom of our will to blame its expression on anything other than ourselves. Fate can indeed be, as Midgley observed, a worldview of apathy; but such apathy is given existence when the responsibility of all actions (egardless of the role played by those whose hands are actually dirty) are placed upon whatever force is chosen to be the puppet master.
In a Mirror Dimly 