Some people seem to think that the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy is a 20th century idea, a product of the emerging social sciences. Several thinkers have been credited with “discovering” the phenomenon, including sociologists W.I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. They formulated the Thomas Theorem in 1928: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
Here’s Montaigne’s 440-year old treatment of the idea, based on an almost 2,000-year-old story by Plutarch. The ancient Greek writer told how Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, came up with a defense against plots.
A foreigner came to town and bragged that for a good sum he would show Dionysius an infallible way of uncovering plots and rooting out conspirators. Dionysius called the fellow in.
The man said his method was for Dionysius to make a spectacle of paying him a huge sum. The story would get around. It just wasn’t believable that a stranger could get so much money without passing on a very useful art.
Dionysius considered the idea and paid up.
The Greeks had many good stories about self-fulfilling prophecies. Sophocles told one about a guy named Oedipus.
We have long known that human beings are capable of acting on erroneous beliefs and bad information. We recently had a president who liked to act on “alternative facts.” When he took action, some people responded to his confidence, not to his wisdom.
Are these generalizations about human nature the kind of things that one person or a team of scholars discovers? It seems to me that facts about human nature are simply broad agreements about what constitutes a characteristic human feature. The significant thing is not that one person discovered this feature about human beings, but that countless people have seen it an agreed it’s important.
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