Who does not love a good prophecy? There is something enticing about the determinism of it all. The ever-looming murk of the future gets a through line. Order to the chaos. Imagine bumping into someone as you exit the East Dining Hall; they grab you, their eyes rolling into their head. “You will get an A on your colloquium,” they whisper, all possessed.

I bet you would feel more confident before a submission. You would think you know what’s going to happen now that it’s been foretold — inexplicably but inescapably foretold. After all, that is why horoscopes dot our morning papers and phone-scrolls. They are access points, feeding off our desire to tame temporal uncertainty. It is also why fortune telling is called soothsaying — there’s something “soothing” about knowing. Life is all over the place and having a script, any script — even a basic outline with a half-formed third act and no plans for how to get there — helps.

We have been in a relationship with prophecy for ages. A usual suspect: popular culture’s love for a knotty augury. Game of Thrones had the prince that was promised. Star Wars was all about the chosen one. Dune’s Paul Atreides glimpses his victorious destiny. In fantasy and science fiction — our realms of imaginary escapism — we are surrounded by voices speaking authoritatively about what is to come.

But Nostradamus was doing it in real life a long time before Dan and Dave on TV. Though the Frenchman’s apothecarial activities have faded, his prophecies persist. He wrote Les Prophéties — The Prophecies, in English — in 1555, a collection of 942 poetic sibylline quatrains. While he was never keen on being identified as particularly prophetic, people continue to allege that many of his claims, often concerning disasters, have come true. Believers credit him for foreseeing events ranging from the French revolution to the moon landing, to Trump contracting Covid-19, as if his words have leaped out of the book, shaping history.

This takes us to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, an early canonical text of the West, where the problem with prophecy emerges. In the play where a great King was brought low, we begin in a plague-stricken Thebes. Everyone wants a cure for the sickness, hypothesized to be a godly curse meted out in punishment for the ex-king’s murder.

Oedipus, the current monarch, summons the clairvoyant Tiresias. He hopes the old man’s supernatural sight will help him solve the mystery. Tiresias is initially reluctant to engage, but Oedipus’ angry questioning annoys him. He identifies the king as the culprit. “Those eyes of yours/ which now can see so clearly, will be dark,” he threatens. “So go on —/ keep insulting Creon and my prophecies,/ for among all living mortals no one/ will be destroyed more wretchedly than you.”

As the story progresses, Oedipus, in line with these visions, goes blind and is made wretched by the revelation of his patricide and incest. Even though he has all the power while meeting Tiresias, in enraging the seer and insulting his capabilities, Oedipus secures his doom. In fact, the king pursues self-destruction as if unable to stop. Prophecy, here, distorts reality, bending nature to ensure its own fulfillment.

From Sophocles and Nostradamus to modern horoscopes and Star Wars, all follow the same line of reasoning: Prophecy is reality-bending, insurmountable. Thinking this way, I argue, poses a unique peril in today’s world.

An issue appears in the modern offshoot of future-telling, a method growing out of exceeding prophecy: prediction — specifically the statistical analyses used to predict things like election results, sports matches, weather events and the like. The problem is that modern predictive practices share an imaginary zone with prophecies — both try to enact our dreams of control, both are concerned with identifying and charting elements of an uncertainty-laden future. But one is much more embedded in the stories we use to make sense of the world. Prophecy and its effects inundate our lives; it is an industry that sells us illusions of control. Its reality-bending antics are widespread and well understood; the [self-fulfilling prophecy] (https://www.thegazelle.org/issue/182/opinion/sartre-and-the-appeal-of-horoscopes) has become a socio psychological phenomenon.

Today, we risk slipping between the two concepts. Suddenly, a statistical prediction saying who will win on election night might sometimes sound like a prophetic enunciation. Even when you know the difference, subconscious conflation is possible. There is, after all, such comfort to be had in knowing.

But actualities do not shift in unbelievable ways to fulfill the predictions of a modern-day analyst-Tiresias. Model-based predictions do not bend reality; they abstract from the present to project progressive patterns onto the future. It is all about data. It is about having enough of it and making strategic compromises because you will never know all the variables.

If anything, in a reversal of prophecy, predictions try desperately to match what really happens. And when models fail, as is sometimes the case when there are too many variables at play, it is part of a process that makes them better the next time around. Yet, predictors run the risk of misidentification as seers and things get tricky when they get it wrong.

In a recent video, Donald Trump criticizes the statistician Nate Silver. “This pollster, this great genius,” intones a mocking Trump, “he never called one wrong, he called that one wrong…” Trump is talking about Silver’s forecast for the 2016 elections, one predicting a Hillary Clinton win. Trump beat Clinton and the analysts that year. He went on to label unfavorable polls suppressive and “fake,” bolstered, no doubt, by his victory. What we see here is a sort of anti-Oedipus emerging from the ruins of a shattered conflation. In proving the predictions wrong, he has accessed a unique sort of power — that of being above our attempts to structure the future. Of course, he did nothing especially unprecedented besides proving current methods flawed, as future-telling always is.

But confusion, rage, awe or a sense of betrayal are natural reactions when prophecy infects prediction in our minds. To avoid chaos, to avoid people rising to undeserved power, we must be more critical of these unnoticed blends. The goal is to remain vigilant, reexamining constantly our relationship to the contingent seas of futural cartography. Even if this means semesters filled with uncertain submissions and lives spent knowing less beforehand.