The Eclipse and the Cloak
Before setting sail on a naval expedition, Pericles, the Athenian statesman, found the helmsman in fear. The sky had darkened. It was an eclipse. It was taken as a bad omen.
In an attempt to remedy the situation, Pericles took out his cloak and covered the man’s eyes.
“Then what’s the difference between the two events?” Pericles replied. “Other than the sun being eclipsed by a larger cloak?”
In that moment, the man was freed, if only briefly, from his deep-rooted existential anxiety.
What Pericles did was simple.
He didn’t try to explain the theory behind the eclipse, or the mechanism by which it happened.
He didn’t try to analyze the seaman’s dread.
Instead, he reframed the problem through a gesture. He didn’t erase the fear. He gave it a shape. Not through explanation, but by telling a story, albeit in gesture form.
In doing so, he made the unfamiliar feel familiar. He gave it, in a way, a name. Using something the seaman could hold onto, if only for a moment.
I came across this fascinating anecdote in Work on Myth by Hans Blumenberg. I read it over a decade ago. Something about it resonated with me, and I keep coming back to it whenever I’m thinking about myth, stories, uncertainty, and risk.
The premise is as follows: as humans, we are faced with the overwhelming, chaotic, uncertain, and incomprehensible nature of existence. It creates an existential dread in us. Not the panic of immediate danger, but a more subtle fear. It’s the kind of fear the seaman felt when the sky darkened during the eclipse.
Blumenberg suggests that, in the face of the unknown, we try to make sense of reality and make it more bearable by naming it. We frame things in a way we can relate to. We create narratives, and tell stories not to solve the mystery of existence, but to soften the silence of the universe and the uncertainty surrounding it.
Framing the Unknown
An eclipse today might not cause the same stir in us anymore. We now understand the mechanism and what it implies. We’ve named and framed it.
However, it still isn’t easy for us to navigate complexity, uncertainty, and outcomes we cannot control.
New business ventures might not go the way we want them to. Halfway through a personal goal, we find ourselves pivoting because things didn’t turn out as we had expected or hoped. A portfolio, no matter how hedged, might still take a hit, especially during times of extreme economic and geopolitical uncertainty.
Just like Pericles, we develop and reach for frameworks, strategies, and different plans to wrap our heads around this uncertainty.
We craft narratives that aid us in understanding what is happening around us. We try to give things names to turn the unknown into something graspable.
In the case that things may not turn out to be as we had hoped because of all the uncertainties around us, we call that risk.
The Story of Risk
Our relationship with risk has evolved over time. In Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, Peter Bernstein traces the evolution of the concept. In ancient Greece and Rome, risk was seen as Tyche, Fortuna or Lady Luck. Measures could be taken to navigate that luck, but risk was seen as a fateful event, not something people could actively change. It was something to navigate rather than eliminate.
Over time, our relationship to, and the story we told about, risk changed. Through math and the development of probability and statistics, we could think about the likelihood that things may not go as planned.
Over decades of research, this led to the development of precise mathematical tools, methodologies, models, and eventually sophisticated software to put a number on risk, and the probabilities associated with it.
Just like the cloak, we managed to frame risk within clear mathematical parameters, helping us make more informed decisions across different personal and professional spheres. We define our risk aversion and factor it into an equation that aims to optimize the best return possible given our risk tolerance.
Before starting a new product line, we gather data, crunch it, do a risk evaluation session, scenario analysis, with the aim to hedge our risks before we embark on a new venture.
Uncertainty Beneath the Frame
And these tools, calculations, and models work. Until they don’t.
They don’t fail because the frameworks are useless, but because beneath risk, there’s uncertainty and complexity.
We may have managed to develop a more complex understanding of the likelihood of events happening or not. Along the way, all we did was simply tell ourselves a different story about risk and uncertainty.
Instead of navigating uncertainty and the risk that comes along with our decisions and ventures, we told ourselves the story that we could tame uncertainty by naming and calculating risk. In doing so, we often create a major disappointment — not due to the events that happen, but because our stories stop holding together.
This is why, I think, we are consistently surprised when ‘eclipses’ happen in the form of a market crash, business failure, a personal goal missed.
‘The experts said this was an unlikely event.’ ‘The risk is factored in, and the models suggest this is the best course of action.’ Then uncertainty hits and our framing crumbles.
Maybe what we fear most isn’t the event of the eclipse, but the underlying uncertainty and the existential risk that comes with it.
There seems to be a more fundamental risk that we’re taking and which we don’t often account for. That is the risk of disappointment, when our worldview falls apart. The risk of overconfidence in the frameworks. The risk of inaction, when we know our frameworks and ways of thinking are not working but we are afraid to change them. And the most important of all, the overconfidence that we have a clear grasp of our relationship to risk, because we think we have developed the necessary frameworks to deal with it.
When we do set sail, there are things we know we can control and clear frameworks and stories that help us deal with that which we can’t control.
Even when we plan well and calculate things, sometimes the result is unfavorable. When things don’t go as planned, though, it’s not just the outcome that hurts. It’s the disappointment that our stories may not have worked — not because we couldn’t name and calculate risk properly, but because uncertainty implies that there will always be things that we may not be able to account for.
This is why the ancient Greeks preferred to take it for granted, named it something closer to luck, and attempted to navigate it instead of control it. Their stories about risk and uncertainty helped them move through it.
Pericles didn’t change the eclipse. He just reframed it. We do the same with our frameworks. But perhaps the greater risk isn’t in the events we try to control, but in the underlying stories we craft around them.
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