The New Fortune-Tellers Sell Us Fear

Prediction and Power, from Antiquity to the 19th Century

In Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (Doubleday, 2026), Carissa Véliz describes a mechanism of prophecy and power that has repeated itself for thousands of years. The Delphic oracle spoke in verse, obscurely enough that any politician could interpret it to his own advantage.

As Publishers Weekly notes in its review of the book, the oracle’s priestesses were known to accept bribes in exchange for politically convenient prophecies. Astrologers at royal courts predicted the movements of the planets, but their real task was to calm kings.

In the 19th century, social statistics, as Publishers Weekly also writes, “helped spur the development of race science and the creation of the insurance industry”: tools for categorising people and managing them. Véliz does not claim that these prophecies were accurate. Many missed the mark. What mattered was something else: someone claimed to know what would happen, and by doing so, gained power.

Véliz’s book describes humanity’s ancient fascination with prediction and its ties to power.

Algorithms as Modern Fortune-Tellers

Today, algorithms and geopolitical forecasts play the same role. Recruitment algorithms, credit scoring, and predictive policing do not pursue truth. They predict the most likely answer on the basis of what they have already seen. The problem is that, in public perception, the difference between probability and truth begins to blur. The more we trust algorithms, the less we decide for ourselves.

Geopolitical Forecasts and the Emotion Industry

Véliz’s observations also allow us to look at certain contemporary phenomena in a new way. In recent months, we have seen a surge of geopolitical forecasts. Think tanks, intelligence agencies, investment banks, and media outlets compete to predict the coming years. Most of these forecasts extrapolate trends, based on the assumption that the future will resemble the past.

War, crisis, economic collapse: these sell better than stability. Prediction markets offer an extreme example. As we have written in Holistic News, some allowed people legally to bet on the timing of a nuclear weapon’s detonation, making profit from global catastrophe.

Of course, not all forecasts are equal. Structural analyses, based on deep trends, can increase the reader’s agency. George Friedman offers one example: in 2009, he predicted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That was structural analysis, not an emotional prophecy.

And yet accuracy does not change the mechanism. Friedman sold his analyses, and whoever buys a forecast gains a tool for directing the decisions of others. The point is not whether a forecast is “good” or “bad.” The very act of formulating and selling a forecast, even a structural one, is an act of power.

Popular geopolitical podcasts work in a similar way. They format public opinion and social emotions, setting expectations around the supposed inevitability of wars or crises. In such an environment, any turn of events different from the one predicted, even a positive one, becomes psychologically unwelcome.

This industry of pop-forecasting does not so much predict the future as produce emotions: fear, excitement, the feeling of participating in something grand. What it rarely provides is knowledge that would increase the audience’s agency.

Belief in a Forecast Changes Reality

Véliz points to a pattern: the more people trust a given forecast, the more likely it becomes that their behaviour will start making reality resemble it. This does not mean that every prophecy comes true. It means that belief in a prophecy itself has causal force. It changes decisions, sets movements in motion, and shifts capital.

When investors expect a crisis, they withdraw money, and a crisis may indeed follow. When a society believes war is inevitable, it may take actions that help bring war about. A forecast does not merely describe the future. It helps create it. This mechanism is not a law of physics. It is a social reflex. Fear of what is supposedly coming can change reality more powerfully than the thing that is supposedly coming.

Billionaire Bunkers and the Insurance Crush

Véliz exposes the paradox at the heart of our faith in forecasts. Predictions do not so much reduce risk as move it elsewhere. Ordinary people pay higher insurance prices or fight insurers over denied claims. Tech billionaires build luxury bunkers. Each side tries to protect itself against the future it has predicted. Véliz argues that flight from community does not work. Individual bunkers cannot protect anyone from the collapse of a system.

Viewing the world through the lens of prediction has one fundamental effect: it weakens agency. Every forecast that says what will happen suggests that human beings have no influence over it. And the more they believe this, the more the forecast becomes self-fulfilling. This is not a paradox. It is a mechanism of power: whoever formulates the forecast gains a tool for directing the behaviour of others. A forecast can trigger panic, lull people into complacency, or justify decisions that would otherwise have had little chance of broad acceptance.

Preparation Instead of Prophecy

Véliz points to an alternative. The Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette, when designing London’s sewers, did not try to predict when a flood would come. He doubled the calculated dimensions, not because he expected one specific disaster, but because he wanted the city to be ready for one. This is a philosophy of resilience rather than a philosophy of prophecy. Preparation instead of prediction.

The difference is fundamental. Prophecy concentrates on the future and suggests that we receive it passively. Preparation concentrates on the present and assumes that we can influence it. Véliz does not ask us to abandon prediction altogether. She asks us to distinguish between forecasts that serve understanding and those that serve authority. That distinction matters because prediction and power still travel together, especially when the future is sold to us as certainty.

Read this article in Polish: Geopolityczne prognozy to sprzedaż emocji. Nowi wróżbici