Cassandra's Curse

Richard Ostrofsky
(March, 2010)

In 1935, two years after Hitler had come to power and four years before
the outbreak of the Second World War, Jean Giradoux wrote a play called
La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, for some reason retitled in its English
translation as Tiger at the Gates. Its opening line, spoken by Andromache,
Hector's pregnant wife and soon-to-be widow, is: "There isn't going to be a
Trojan War, Cassandra."
They are discussing politics. Greek envoys, led by Ulysses, have just
arrived in Troy to demand the return of beautiful Helen, the wife of King
Menelaus who had run off with Prince Paris. The bitter comedy is that no
one who counts wants a war. Ulysses and the Greeks (supposedly, in this
play) don't really want a war, but they feel gravely dishonored and will
fight unless Helen is returned. King Priam and Prince Hector (destined to
be slain by Achilles) don't want a war, and are determined to give her
back. Helen is tired of her fling, and would be happy to go home. Her
boyfriend Paris, already getting bored with this magnificent but ditzy
broad, has been convinced to give her up. And yet belligerance rises and
war draws inexorably closer, speech by speech, and act by act, until the
play's end when the Gates of War are flung open, and the fighting begins.
All these characters are fascinating and have been worked and
interpreted endlessly since Homer's time. For that matter, the actual story
predates Homer, who was himself re-working it. But the character who
really interests me is Cassandra, who had been given the gift of prophecy
by Apollo, but later cursed by him because she would not return his love:
She would always see and speak truly, but she would never be believed.
She would be powerless to prevent the evils she foresaw.
The most difficult lesson for intellectuals to learn is the ultimate
impotence of experience and knowledge in human affairs. There is a
ratchet effect in our decision-making: The steering wheel of governance
tends to turn much more readily in one direction than in the other.
Knowledge that furthers the currently predominant interests and
enthusiasms is taken up and used. Knowledge that might save these
interests and enthusiasms from disastrous over-reach and folly is shunted
aside and ignored. For that reason, speaking truth to power is a
proverbially thankless task. In the largest affairs of state and the smallest
personal choices, it's as Hume said: Reason tends to be the slave and
handmaiden of the passions.
A secondary result of the curse is the so-called Cassandra effect: a
voluntary self-censorship by persons who have come to expect (rightly or
wrongly) that their counsel will be ignored. Why beat your head against
the wall? Why run the risks of speaking unwelcome truths to powers who
would prefer that these to be buried as deeply as possible? In this way,
whole classes of people allow themselves to be marginalized; whole
bodies of experience drop out of consideration. Such losses occur just as
well in families and small groups as in the highest corridors of power, but
they happen most readily in board rooms and privy council meetings
where incumbents are competing for influence at the same time that they
must represent the perceptions and requirements of their departments. It's
not just in war that truth is the first casualty. Truth becomes inconvenient
or dangerous (at least to some factions, and sometimes to everyone)
whenever power is being won and lost. The outcome is sometimes called
group-think, or conventional wisdom, but neither name does justice to the
perverse tenacity, the sheer insanity of what can happen. Charles Tart
called it consensus trance – a kind of spell that can possess a whole
society, coloring everyone's perceptions and choices with virtually
irresistible hypnotic suggestions.
For the fact is that we are social animals – influenced to an amazing
degree by one another's emotions, perceptions, behaviors and subtlest
mannerisms. Sometimes consciously, most often not, we "go along to get
along," as members of a species that made a specialty of doing so. What
we call culture is the positive apect of this evolved trait – our propensity
for mimicry, for emotional contagion, for interpretive and behavioral
suggestibility, for attending to what the people around us are attending to.
That gift, coupled with tool use and the use of symbols, made us human
and gave us the planet – for the time being, at least. Its downside, manifest
in economic bubbles and panics and mob behavior of every description, is
the consensus trance as a form of collective insanity.
It is possible to shake off the worst effects of this trance and, in some
degree, awaken from it – but the price for doing so is 'Cassandra's curse':
to see and speak truly, but have to watch and suffer foreseen stupidities as
they unfold regardless. 'Stupidity' is the right word here, because
Cassandras don't have to be particularly intelligent. With ordinary
experience of 'human nature,' a grasp of relevant facts, and a suspicion of
wishful thinking, you can often make a good guess at the disaster about to
happen – and/or suggest precautions that could be taken to prevent or
mitigate the worst that could happen. Albert Einstein once remarked that
stupidity is the strongest force in the universe. In one of his plays, Schiller
makes a character exclaim: "Against stupidity, the gods themselves
contend in vain," and Isaac Asimov wrote an SF novel around that line.