We’ve talked enough about fate itself—so it’s the time to talk about the beauty that lingers around it.
Imagine a person who is well-read, thoughtful, and possesses a complete sense of aesthetics—and who also believes that every detail of his life has been meticulously arranged by destiny. For him, fate might be a kind of liberation. In this way, the real world becomes fragmented, while the imagined one forms his truest reality. The old order loses its power, and a new order, one that belongs only to him, becomes irresistibly alluring. It rises from the ruins—ten thousand people may each have their own perfect ideals born in the moment of destruction. The beauty of fate lies right there, beating in sync with ten thousand hearts.
From this story, we first see that absolute fate is, in essence, the total destruction of reality. It’s easy to understand: if every choice a person makes ultimately leads to the single ending already written by fate, then his life becomes a story that belongs only to him, yet has nothing to do with him. Such a fate naturally signifies the collapse of the real world. Thus, the beauty of fate is akin to the beauty of destruction. When people feel stirred by works filled with a “sense of fate,” perhaps what they’re really sensing is the taste of destruction itself.
To discuss where this beauty of destruction comes from in today’s context, we need to take a detour. Bernard Stiegler once said that humanity’s fascination with stories and fables—its obsession with fiction—has always belonged to the old and is fulfilled in the young. This obsession is passed down through generations, binding them together. Because desire can never be fully satisfied, this obsession drives future generations to keep creating, keep inventing, and write new chapters for life to come.
This ancient desire for storytelling still governs modern society, keeping its most intricate mechanisms running. Yet the conditions that satisfy it have drastically changed.
Now, storytelling has become the object of a global industrial enterprise. The “culture industry,” as Horkheimer and Adorno called it, has become the core of economic development—its most direct engine is still that age-old desire for stories. And that narrative desire, in turn, lies at the heart of all human desire. Today, this desire has become deeply subservient to the communications industry. At the turn of the 21st century, as transmission technologies flourished, one could say they became a new form of inheritance—a link connecting generations, yet one that also questions its own permanence.
Global trade thrives on persuasion, and all persuasion owes itself to the art of storytelling. Every event depends on narrative desire. Media networks and programming industries have systematically used audiovisual technologies to cultivate this astonishing appetite.
But social reality can’t fulfill everyone’s wish to play a role. Those desires are harmonized, packaged, and sold as dazzling commodities—taming the very people they came from. This model has clearly succeeded. Desire is written into human nature; reason is merely its instrument. In other words, fate may be seen as a narrow gorge between nature and culture, where individual power is nearly negligible. In the ebb and flow of the collective unconscious, the “self” is shelved—or shattered—and hidden inside these commodities, like fragments of a soul. To glimpse it, one must chase its shadow among those consumer goods. It’s almost like a horcrux setting.
Yet these commodities are not logically solid or indestructible. On the contrary, their over-symbolized nature makes them easy to mass-produce, but also deeply dependent on people’s blind loyalty to their meaning. Once an individual escapes the script—steps outside that alluring Matrix—they can only look back and sneer (thankfully, this isn’t The Matrix for real). And here we notice something: what makes the Matrix so tempting—the beauty we see within it—are precisely those shattered pieces of the self.
Now we can return to fate. The beauty we feel when fate takes over, or even destroys reality, comes from the fleeting moment when we glimpse that hidden, restless self beneath everything. It hides too deeply, and we are too enchanted. So, “fatefully,” we chase illusion after illusion—just to catch the scent of roses drifting over the sea, the beauty that was always already part of ourselves.
