There’s a non-zero chance I read too much this weekend.
Maybe that’s the wrong way of framing it.
This last week was horrible. If you’re trans or a member of any of the other groups conservatives are scapegoating you know what I mean, and for the rest of you… Well, you’re reading my work, so you’re probably “aware” even if you can’t ever walk a mile in our shoes, not really anyway. But last week also included major personal strife as well.
It left me craving an escape. I’d felt the dread creeping through me for longer than I cared to admit. I’d like to think that folks are aware of Cassandra, a Trojan priestess “blessed” with accurate visions of the future, but doomed to never be believed. I bring her up because her condition has been shared with all trans folk willing to look. At this point I must resist the urge to discuss the long history of trans women as oracles, largely because those with the eyes to see it already do, and the rest won’t read this.
But those perfect visions of the future, ignored until they come to pass, reverberates with me for another reason, the self fulfilling prophecy. That particular phrase has been cropping up in my lexicon more frequently than I’d like lately, but it continues to be an issue for me, and I suspect, others.
While my experiences with the idea comes directly from BPD where the things a part of my mind creates false interpretations whose insouciance eventually leads to the same outcome they were trying to prevent, for more context I’d recommend my essay from last week, How? I think there is another flavor of self fulfilling prophecy we’re all struggling with, though I expect a different phrasing would work better. I’m speaking of the vast systems whose point is to profit. The military industrial complex, and prison industrial complex, the healthcare industrial complex. Systems who’s point is not to make something or better society or even a subsection of it, but rather to profit off the necessity, or perceived necessity, of another system.
In 1961president Eisenhower’s farewell address coined the term “military-industrial complex” to describe a theoretical system that would seek to endlessly emulate the American weapons development and manufacturing industry during and post WWII, or at least their profits.
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.”
While some would charitably call Eisenhower prophetic, maybe even Cassandra-esque, what he and many others willfully ignored, is that the Military-industrial complex already existed. The infantry weaponry overhaul which would eventually lead to US forces entering Vietnam in 1965 with the M16, a gun that for a myriad of reasons was functionally inoperable in a jungle environ, was started before Eisenhower even took office. Hells, the selection of and focus on the M16 as the most likely infantry weapon of US infantry through the Cold War was done by his administration. Come 1958, what would be known as the M16 had cost at least $1.45 million in development costs, $11 million converted for inflation, and produced a gun whose barrel burst when fired in the rain.
This might sound surprising as the M16 is still used to this day and is considered one of the most reliable and consistent weapons today. Because the US government paid for it’s further development. When they put a gun in the hands of young men and found it did not magically start working in a harsher environment there really were only two choices.
Retool the entire military infrastructure that had been itself reshaped to support this new standard infantry weapon, likely including having to pull out of Vietnam. Or,
Keep paying Colt Industries to further develop the weapon, and then of course buy the replacements too.
I’m not naive enough to think weapons aren’t necessary, I’m a trans woman living in the US for crying out loud! But their development has always been a commercial enterprise, a system built to profit off machines whose purpose is to kill.
So, is that not a self fulfilling prophecy?
A system’s purpose is what it does, not what it’s “intended” to do. When a system develops non-functional weapons so it can use armed forces for field testing, then sell them the fixed products, when the company that owns and operates prisons calls for stricter punishments, when health insurance companies take our money then choose to deny us access to health care, are those not self fulfilling prophecies?
Personally, I’d say no. They’re systems, built by and for those who profit off of them. They are self fulfilling, but only because they have the power to forcibly impose their will. (Give or take some sunk-cost fallacy as well)
See, there’s a little detail I left out about Cassandra. While there are variants in her tale, one element is always key and often ignored. Cassandra was not the one in power. Her prophetic visions were given to her by Apollo who lusted after her. One version of the story maintains he gifted her visions in return for her promise to be his, and like any sane woman, she ran the hell away from a man with absolute power over her, and thus he cursed her.
The other tellings actually hold that there was no agreement, Cassandra did not consent to the visions, but Apollo forced them on her and still cursed her when she refused to bed the man who’d just violated her in a way that could never be undone. Do you really wonder why we all would rather deal with the bear?
And of course, the other issue, Cassandra’s prophecies weren’t self fulfilling. The foresight itself wasn’t what made Cassandra’s visions come to pass. In truth even without Apollo’s curse, if the visions were perfect depictions of the future, they would still have played out as expected.
I think that’s why I dove into stories the last week or two.
I could feel the charge in the air, the taste of bile in my mouth, and my own hopeless desperation in the face of the world the last week has revealed. I hoped to immerse myself in worlds where women like me are not cursed with foresight, where we can have agency over our own lives. But I brought all my fear with me.
I can bury it, try to grasp at fleeting moments of joy and hold them tight, but there in lies the trap. I hold so tight to those little moments, flattening them, and crushing the experience they’re merely a piece of. Yes, as with so much I write lately this is partially about what’s wrong with me, the ways I hurt others by trying to keep them close. But this is also about all of us.
Many things are outside of our control, and often our attempts to rectify that will have cascading consequences we may never fully understand. I can’t stop the US government from spending billions developing planes and ships that have never worked. I can’t even really call out the individuals responsible, half their names are classified and the ones we do know are often just the folks forced to use the broken machines so they can be blamed when said machines fail, or they’re billionaires and politicians.
I don’t honestly know what I can do about my BPD and it’s self fulfilling prophecies, what I can directly do to meaningfully improve the lives of others or even myself. But I can share my experiences, share what I’ve learned. I can listen to the Cassandras, learn from them, connect with them, build something for everyone.
There’s a concept in philosophical alchemy and the Hermeticism it stemmed from, of the All. It’s in many ways similar to abrahamic religions’ God, but it’s both the creator, and their creation. It’s the idea that we are not the same as each other nor the same as a squirrel, but to use a word Dan Olson drove into my skull VERY effectively, we are homousian. People, planets, animals, rocks, everything is a fragment of existence, of creation, experiencing itself, and while our experiences are unique and our own, we are still part of a greater whole. What is to be gained by making another’s experience worse?
No that doesn’t mean billionaires and nazis are fine, rejecting the humanity of a people strips you of that honor. Despite what so many seem to believe, tolerance has never required tolerating intolerance. Nuance exists, and there are steps between altruism, individualistically driven self preservation, and the exploitation and destruction of one’s fellow people. The flattening of tolerance to mean one must tolerate those who seek to do harm for their own gain is the exact thing that lead us to today, January 27 2025, where a convicted felon is sitting in the highest office in the USA, blaming trans women and immigrants for the price of eggs.
