Fate or Destiny — A Short Guide for Jonah Plays#

Every Jonah Play stands between two ways of hearing bad news. One says that nothing can be done: that is fate. The other says that something can be tried: that is destiny. A Jonah Play’s job is to move a room from the first towards the second, without pretending that trying guarantees success. This page is for anyone who writes, stages or talks about a Jonah Play, the seed play or any other in the Jonah Carnival.

Two ways of hearing the same news#

Fate (passive)	Destiny (active)
“It will happen anyway.”	“It may happen. I hope to help stop it.”
“Someone else will deal with it.”	“I’m aware of the challenges, but I refuse to ignore them, and I explore what I can actually do.”
“Nothing happened, so nothing is wrong.”	“Nothing has happened yet. That tells me very little.”
“If it ends, it ends.”	“Who knows? Perhaps it is not too late.” (the King of Nineveh, Jonah 3:9)
Ends in waiting.	Ends in a next step, however small.

Fate is not the same as chance. Chance is real: the die in a Jonah Play is honest, and nobody can promise how any year will fall. Fate is the conclusion that because chance is real, what we do does not matter. Destiny keeps both in view: the die is real, and so is the hand that can stop the rolling.

The third line of the table is a trap with a name on this site: ASON, the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing. “Nothing happened” fits a safe world and a doomed one equally well, so it cannot tell you which one you are in. Fate reads the nothing as good news. Destiny reads it as no news.

Fear is not danger#

Fear is a feeling. It is real, but it is made in us, by our nerves and our brain chemistry. Danger is the thing out in the world that can actually hurt us. The two often come apart. A play city falling under a bedsheet can frighten a whole room and endanger nobody. The real rolling of the dice endangers everyone and frightens almost nobody, because nothing has happened yet (ASON again).

Telling fear and danger apart is a skill, and it can be learned. It lets us calm the fear that has no danger behind it, and take seriously the danger that has no fear attached to it yet. A Jonah Play is a safe place to practise both: the fall on stage may frighten, but it is not dangerous; what it points to is dangerous, even when it frightens nobody.

The trap on the other side#

Fatalism is one way to go wrong, and there is a second. Grandiosity says “only I can save the world.” It sounds like destiny, but it is the same mistake in reverse: fatalism over-simplifies (“nothing can be done”), grandiosity over-reaches (“everything depends on me”), and both tend to end the same way, in exhaustion, or in blindly following a guru. Destiny is narrower than either: your own part, taken seriously, and done together with others, who each take their own limitations and abilities seriously as well.

From passivity to responsibility#

Nobody moves from “someone else will deal with it” to “I refuse to ignore it” in one step. The road is personal, a hero journey of one’s own, and it is usually walked in small steps:

Hear the news without killing the messenger.
Check it yourself. The arithmetic is public: check it here.
Name what is yours to do, and what is not.
Do the next small thing: a conversation, a question to someone who decides, a play. Do it even if you feel that there is infinitely much to do and your tiny bit of work may look like nothing. That is the nothing you control and only you get to vote on whether you allow it to go wrong.
Find others. No single hook lands Leviathan (Job 41:1); it takes many hands, working form many perspectives to build a large enough network of ropes. Learn to work with those who have very different views, even if your in-group traditionally thought of them as “foes”. Learn to love your enemies, especially the truth.
Learn to coordinate. This is the bit that inspired a ResearchCity for helping with the necessary technical analyses for connecting all the dots that matter most. Since ResearchCity is about doing everything that is else left undone, everyone can reduce that global research workload by gentle kind reasonably starting locally to ask the right questions, especially about oneself. Like Jonah had to.
Keep going. One brave night does not end the danger. The watch goes on until a new day dawns and everyone can reap the benefits from working together in order to define what the next Jubilee ought to look like.

This site maps the whole road from various perspectives, stages from darkness to homecoming, in SD7. Its column on grieving is condensed on the Jonah Carnival page, under Holding the Room.

Putting it on stage#

The seed play already holds every position:

Jonah is fate turned sour. He expects the disaster, sits down to watch it, and even falls to the low of sulking when it does not come.
The Captain does what is sensible and within reach, before anyone asks him to.
The Watchman and the Nineveh grass-roots movement that supports him acts on no grounds he can give, and offers to take the dice of doom out of play.
The King is destiny under uncertainty: “Who knows? Perhaps it is not too late.” He acts with no guarantee and legislates to take the dice of doom out of play
The Busy-Slumber chorus, saying “Later”, is fatalism at its most comfortable. Nobody in it thinks of themselves as a fatalist, but because all its members think that they are too busy with “keeping up with the Joneses” (and other competitive traps), they believe that they cannot do anything to prevent disaster. This disbelief and lack of true hope lock in the disaster by imprisoning the agency of those called by Reality to wake up and fight ASON, the worst enemy.
ASON Crocodile. The true enemy that can hijack anyone, friend or “foe” or AI. It’s hard to represent this worst enemy, because it is abstract (and most people hate abstractions). Hence, this Leviathan-length probabilistic causality chain may be represented as a Crocodile. Because the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing appears to lie well-hidden in its context, motionless until potential prey unwittingly wanders close enough for an ambush attack that unleashes all ferocity without warning.
The dice represent chance. Chance (or whatever looks like it) is real, if only because we don’t know all the reasons for whatever is happening. Whatever chance is doing, it cannot decide whether we try to avert a disaster. We may not succeed if we try. But if we never try, we are guaranteed to fail.

A play that ends with the city fallen can still teach helpful lessons about destiny, if the audience gets to see the moment when somebody could have stopped the disaster but didn’t. A play that ends with the city spared can still promote a misguided view of fate, if the rescue looks like pure luck that required no changing of hearts and minds. The key question about averting disasters tend to be about sufficient inner agility for allowing to change hearts and minds fast enough to connect all necessary dots in time.

Before and after the play#

When you talk with people before or after a performance, and especially with anyone who may find death, disasters, or questions about the end of things frightening:

Listen first. Fear is not a mistake to be corrected.
Separate fear from danger. The fear in a room can be real, and be allowed to look at it without panic. Note that the play is not dangerous. But what it points to is a clear and present danger, even if it has been widely ignored and hence not feared. Reality deserves attention rather than panic.
Name the difference. Fate claims nothing can be done, usually because someone believes that nothing is wrong here. Yet, if nothing can go wrong, and nothing moves, beware, because the ASON Crocodile is about to strike. Destiny says here is the best thing I can try to grow true hope for a shared future for all.
Promise nothing about the outcome. Nobody can. Say only that trying is not pointless.
Offer one or more potential next steps, however small, and let everyone choose, each as they see fit.

Sources. Jonah 3:9, BSB. Job 41:1 (40:25 in Hebrew numbering), BSB. The seven stages of healing: SD7. ASON, the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing: defined in the e7day model. Further sources, including on causal networks and on fear appeals, are listed at the foot of the Jonah Carnival page.

Free to share: the Jonah License

Everything on this page is under the Jonah License (JoLi): CC0, public domain. Copy it, perform it, change it, translate it, sell tickets or not, keep none of the words or all of them. No permission is needed. Credit is welcome but not required.

The Jonah Licence’s one twist is about nothing. Doing nothing with it is not nothing. The license asks a single thing of all who use it, and cannot enforce it: “Prepare to explain on Judgement Day what you failed to do with any material you received under the Jonah License.”