Ecclesiastes 9:11 names five forms of excellence and declares none of them sovereign over fortune.

Plato's Laws ranks three forces governing life: God, chance and occasion, and skill, in that order.

The therapeutic task is not controlling circumstances but governing the mind that meets them.

Last week, a veteran told me something I have heard in various forms over the years: "I did everything I was supposed to do. And it still went sideways." He was not complaining. He was genuinely bewildered. The contract he had been operating under his entire adult life: Work hard, train hard, follow the rules, and the outcomes will track your effort. That contract had been broken, but not by him.

I have written previously about the convergence between Ecclesiastes and Plato. Here I want to dig deeper into the two passages that speak most directly to the man sitting across from me.

Ecclesiastes 9:11: "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Five forms of human excellence. Not one of them rules over fortune. The Hebrew is worth pausing on. The word for "time" is et: not clock time but the appointed moment, the season that arrives unbidden. The word for "chance" is pega, from a root meaning to meet, to fall upon. Pega is what meets you on the road: the encounter you did not plan for and cannot prepare against.

These are not two separate forces. Et and pega are two faces of the same reality: fortune's timing and fortune's content. What falls upon you and when it falls. Time folds into chance. The seasons change, and you do not get to pick which one you are in.

Anyone who has sat in my chair long enough recognizes this. The veteran who deployed four times and came home intact, only to have his marriage collapse six months later. The woman who ate right and exercised and still got the diagnosis. Excellence does not insulate you. Ecclesiastes is not cynical but honest.

The colloquial version is two words: "Sh*t happens." It captures the diagnosis perfectly. What it leaves out is the response. Both Ecclesiastes and Plato supply one.

Plato's response to fortune runs throughout the Republic: the dice and deliberation, tyche and psyche, the rough versus the smooth road. I have built my clinical framework around that material. What was new to me was a passage in the Laws where the Athenian Stranger states the same case in compressed form. No man ever makes laws, he says: Chances and accidents of all kinds make all our laws for us (709a). War, poverty, pestilence: These create the conditions that compel humans to legislate. The point is not that we are helpless but that the occasions that demand our response are not of our choosing (709b).

Then he names what does govern. Three forces, in descending order. First: theos, God: the ordering principle beyond human reach. Second: tyche kai kairos, chance and occasion: what happens and when it happens, arriving as an inseparable pair. Third, and explicitly the least: techne, art or skill.

His analogy: The pilot's art should cooperate with occasion (709c). The Greek word for pilot is kubernetes: helmsman, governor, the root of "cybernetics." The kubernetes does not control the storm or its timing. He governs the ship within it.

On ancient coins, Tyche, the goddess of fortune, is regularly depicted holding a rudder. Fortune herself grips the mechanism that steers.

On ancient vessels, the rudder and the helm were the same object (a large oar). Modern usage has split them. The rudder is the blade in the water, the force that turns the ship. The helm is the wheel on deck: the point of command, where governance happens. That split gives us something both teachers understood but neither had a single phrase for:

Fortune holds the rudder. Take the helm.

Fortune holds the rudder. Take the helm.

This is not theory for me. On January 5, 2023, I woke up to my house on fire. I fought it until the fire department could take over and paid the price in severe burns. Weeks later, I woke up in a burn center facing a second and third skin graft surgery. I had gone to sleep in a life I had built over decades and woken up inside Ecclesiastes 9:11. What I had was Plato: the psychology of auto politeia I had been studying for years. Each morning, the choice was concrete: Stay in bed as a victim of tyche or get up and govern what I could govern. I got up. When I heard a podcast about Ecclesiastes recently, the connection between these two traditions was easy to recognize.

This is the clinical insight I keep returning to. The people who struggle most in my office are not those facing the worst circumstances. They are the ones who staked everything on controlling the rudder: on making the world yield to their merit and effort. When it does not yield, the problem is not the emotion that follows. Anger, sadness: Those are real and appropriate feelings. The anxiety that accompanies them is a survival response, fight or flight. The problem is the expectation that preceded them: the assumption that fortune owed them something in exchange for their excellence. That assumption is the contract, and it was never valid.

Ecclesiastes broke that contract 24 centuries ago. Plato's Athenian did the same. The therapeutic task is not to rebuild the contract. It is to help the person find the helm.

The helm is auto politeia: constitutional self-governance. On a ship, the helm turns the rudder. They are connected: The helmsman does influence the direction. But the sea, the wind, and the current have their hands on the rudder, too, and they are stronger than any pilot. You are not pretending your wheel overrides the sea, and you are not resigning yourself to drift. Sometimes you have to tack: You cannot sail directly into the wind, but a skilled pilot knows how to work with it, adjusting course to make progress through conditions he did not choose. You are governing what you can, adjusting to what you cannot, so that when pega falls upon you—and it will—you engage with your full might from a well-ordered constitution rather than from the wreckage of a broken expectation.

Ecclesiastes puts it directly: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (9:10). Not because doing it with your might controls the outcome. Ecclesiastes has just demolished that illusion. Because the engagement itself—full, governed, present—is the only thing that was ever actually yours.

Fortune holds the rudder. Take the helm. That is still the most useful thing I can tell the person sitting across from me.

This article is a companion to "The Ancient Cure for 'Is This Really It?'"

Plato. Laws, Book IV (709a–709c). Trans. R. G. Bury.

Ecclesiastes 9:10–11. King James Version.

Sunde, C. H. (2025). Platonomy: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Self. Archway Publishing.

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