DURING the current presidential race in the United States, we keep hearing various candidates from different parties wax lyrical about the Great American Dream.

You know how it is. America is the Land of the Free, where her citizens are guaranteed by their Constitution in the free pursuit of their happiness. As long as they are prepared to work hard, and keep to a set of moral values, they can achieve whatever they want in life.

This optimistic belief is ubiquitous in American pop culture, especially in the deluge of movies pouring out of Hollywood every year. I cannot think of an American movie in which good does not triumph over evil, the hero does not conquer the villain, the power of love does not prevail over despair and self-doubt, and the story does not have a happy ending. Hollywood is indeed aptly named the ‘Dream Factory’.

The energy of that belief in the American Dream is certainly the driving force in making that nation great within a short historical span of over two centuries. It represents the energy of a relatively young nation, and American enthusiasm is exceeded only by its naiveté.

For instance, American detractors will point out the many tragic contradictions incurred in the pursuit of that happy dream. The slavery of the Afro-Americans, the deadly American Civil war, the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia, and now Iraq and Afghanistan all spring to mind.

But there is another, more philosophical, reason to cast aspersion on the Great American Dream.

We who live in other parts of this troubled world have been nurtured by more ancient and more spiritual cultures and traditions. We know that our pursuit of personal happiness is full of twists and turns, and often end in disappointment and regrets. A successful designer life from the cradle to the grave is the rare exception rather than the rule.

Indeed, life is more likely to be tortured by the pains and sufferings of trials and tribulations than a journey of plain sailing. We may have all kinds of grand visions in our youth of what we want to be one day. But looking back in our middle or old age, how many of us have ended up with the wrong career, the wrong spouse, and the wrong children?

Generally, we accept our predicament with a huge dose of stoic calm, kowtowing to the god of reality, and blaming it on fate. Fate has a way of predetermining our lives, irrespective of whatever is wished for by our puny human will.

You know how our Muslim brothers and sisters console themselves in the face of tragedy or adversity. They say, “Semua ini ditakdirkan Tuhan.” (Everything that happens is the will of God.)

Indeed, in all forms of monotheism, God is the cause and creator of all things, and the way he goes about it is never clear to human mind.

This has caused a lot of confusion among believers and non-believers alike, and there has been no shortage of theologians who racked their brains down through the millennia trying to grapple with the contradictions of God’s plan for man.

In the Catholic Church for instance, the argument of free will and determinism has perplexed Christians for centuries. If God is all knowing, then he would know beforehand the actions of every human being on earth. If that is so, the idea of human free will must be a self-delusion. Without the freedom of will, why should anybody be responsible for his moral actions?

The idea of predetermined fate is particularly entrenched in ancient China, and many Sarawakian Chinese have since inherited that long tradition of dealing with, and even changing one’s fate. That is partly why fortune telling, feng shui, and seeking the help of medium have stayed so popular among the Chinese people.

Another ancient civilisation also had a pretty good grip on the idea of fate. In ancient Greece, even the gods on Mount Olympus had to abide by the working of fate and necessity. Fate and human choice constituted a complicated mesh of tragic human conditions defining such things as heroism.

No work of art in ancient Greece can rival the succinct portrayal of fate bearing on human will than the tragic plays of Sophocles, especially Oedipus Rex. A short synopsis is called for here.

Oedipus was born to a royal household. At his birth, the prophetic Oracle predicted that he was going to murder his father and marry his mother when he grew up. So his father gave the baby to some court servants with instruction to kill him. Those servants took pity on the baby, and instead left him in the wilderness. He was rescued and came to be adopted by another king elsewhere.

When Oedipus grew up, he learnt about the morbid prophecy about his future. Thinking his adoptive father to be his biological father, he decided to go travelling faraway, and thus avoiding the horrible future waiting for him.

Along the way, he met his blood father without recognising him. They got into a fight, and Oedipus did kill his own father.

He then came to a land which had been plagued for three years. The plagues could only be removed if a puzzle posed by a Sphinx could be solved. The queen would marry any man who could remove the scourge.

The puzzle posed by the sphinx was this: “What is it that has 4 feet in the morning, 2 at noon, and 3 at dusk?” Oedipus came forth and answered correctly, “man”. The Sphinx jumped off the cliff and died, and Oedipus married the queen, and ruled as the new king of the land.

Later, Oedipus learned to his great shock that the queen, now his wife, was his biological mother, and he had killed his father on the road. The queen killed herself out of guilt and shame, and Oedipus tore his own eyes out.

The story tells us that no matter how we try to escape the long tentacles of Fate, we will finally succumb to its power. Of course, we are all fated to die, and there is no way to get out of this life alive!

The immediate moral dilemma that arises from this realisation is this: why then try at all? Why make any moral choice in the course of our life. Is it not better just to accept everything that life has dealt to us, instead of trying to change our lot, and strife for the impossible, in the celebration of our indomitable human spirit?

In the end, as the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre has pointed out, we are all condemned to be free.

However we feel about our mortality or our fate, we are condemned to make numerous choices everyday, some more important than others. In fact, defiance and even the embracing of our tragic existence is a way of dealing with our fate. If life is indeed a tragedy, as Sophocles would have us believe, than the existentialists’ reply is to live this tragedy to the full.

The great German philosopher Nietzsche also has this line of thought in mind. Fortunately for him, he went insane in the last 10 years of his life. But then, if the whole world is insane, the one person diagnosed as medically insane may be just the only sane person on earth! The same can be applied to Vincent Van Gough. I wonder what Nietzsche and Van Gough would say about present-day American politics.

Eventually, we have to admit that as long as there is human civilisation, the idea of fate presiding over human affairs in some form or another will always be present. Perhaps fate is nothing but the manifestation of our realisation that the freedom of our will is a brittle gift from God. It can lead us to great good, or it can lead us to great evil, in spite of our intention. Worse still, our freedom can be reduced to the choice between different brands of toilet paper in the supermarket.

Now that is a humbling sobering thought.