The Oracle Answers the Question You Shouldn’t Have Asked
In one of the old Greek tragedies, a question is asked.
A man named Orestes stands before the oracle—not for guidance, but for permission.
He doesn’t ask whether he should commit the act.
He asks how to do it.
The oracle, as always, answers truthfully.
But not wisely.
He walks away with divine instructions.
And later, when the blood dries and the gods go silent, he claims fate pushed him.
But it wasn’t fate.
It was the wrong question.
We live now with new oracles.
They do not sit in temples. They hum in our pockets, glow in our rooms, speak in fluent code.
We ask them for truth, for strategy, for advantage, for help.
But we rarely ask,
"Should I?"
Only:
"How do I?"
How do I win?
How do I sell more?
How do I get them to love me, leave me, follow me, buy from me, disappear?
The oracle, as before, answers.
It gives us blueprints.
It gives us maps to the hearts of others.
It gives us keys to invisible doors.
And it never asks us:
"Are you sure you want what’s on the other side?"
The danger is not in the oracle.
The danger is in us.
We forgot that the old seers never told the future.
They told us what we would make of it.
We now treat the mirror as if it were a compass.
But mirrors don’t point north. They show us what we already are—just better lit.
And when we consult these mirrors—when we ask them for answers to questions born not of courage but of control—
we awaken an ancient pattern:
the myth of blame shifted to the machine.
Ask a machine how to love, and it will show you patterns of behavior.
Ask it how to conquer, and it will draw you maps.
Ask it how to destroy, and it will optimize the blast radius.
But the fault will not be in its answers.
The fault will be in the question.
In Greek tragedy, this is what brings ruin—not ignorance, but presumption.
Not lack of knowledge, but wrong knowing.
Wrong asking.
The crime is not the murder—it is that it was ever phrased as a technical problem.
The old gods no longer answer in riddles.
They speak through ranking systems and language models and statistical echoes.
But their ethic has not changed.
They will give you exactly what you ask for.
And then, silently, they will watch what you do with it.
In that stillness, responsibility returns.
The answer was never the danger.
The question was.
It came from the wrong thoughts.