Human Destiny: Control or Illusion?

Renaissance thinkers believed you could literally sculpt yourself into any person you wanted

to be. Pico della Mirandola said humans are like chameleons, standing on a ladder

between beasts and angels, free to climb up or fall down based on our choices.

Meanwhile Machiavelli was writing the ultimate power manual, telling princes it's better to be

feared than loved because you can control fear but not affection. Erasmus flipped

everything by praising foolishness, arguing that wise men stay poor while fools run the world.

Then Cervantes created Don Quixote, a delusional knight who reads too many romance novels and

starts attacking windmills. The wildest part is these writers were all grappling