…The Trojans Were
By Annette Simmons
If you have ever risked speaking truth to power, you may recognize yourself in the myth of Cassandra.
In this archetypal war story, Cassandra warned the Trojans that an upcoming victory was a farce. They refused to listen and threw open the city gates to accept the Greek’s victory gift of a Trojan Horse. They were blind to the reality that pursuing this victory willingly invited the seeds of their own destruction. Inside the Trojan Horse were Greek soldiers who only had to wait for nightfall to emerge and kill the Trojans drunk from celebrating their “victory.”
Many interpretations of this story blame Apollo for cursing Cassandra with the ability to see the future without the hope of convincing anyone in power to listen.
A magical curse on a difficult woman is one way of explaining the Trojans’ failure to save themselves. But myths are complex. Perhaps there is more wisdom embedded in Cassandra’s story than a curse that magically silences women.
Let’s start by questioning if women do indeed have an ability to see and predict dangers that men might consider irrelevant as a battle strategy.
Judging from the true stories I’ve gathered from men and women sharing when, how, and where they use power, it appears that women — more often than men — use power to warn of avoidable harms that men either don’t see looming or worse, justify as the acceptable cost of a desired win. When winning is the only thing that matters, any resulting harm done (particularly to strangers) tallies up as a justifiable price of winning. Likewise, harms predicted too far in the future to show up on spreadsheets are not deemed urgent. In a war narrative, risking great harm to win is glorified as courage.
The Blind Spots of Competitive Reasoning
When battle narratives prevail, people who want to protect against harm — say, by protecting social safety nets or advocating for immediate action on climate change — are often treated like losers who seek to undermine desired victories. But we might also see these so-called losers as courageous enough to risk personal harm to protect the collective.
From a battleground perspective, it is no wonder the Trojan “winners” didn’t want to heed Cassandra’s warning. Her news undermined what they saw as a glorious victory. The Trojans were primed to ignore Cassandra, no curse required. Later it was easier to pretend Cassandra was cursed than to examine how the Trojans ignored a warning that might have saved their and their children’s lives.
The setting of a myth is at least as important as the characters.
As this story begins, an army of Greek ships sets out to exact revenge after Paris of Troy stole Helen (whose face launched a thousand ships) from her Greek husband. From the beginning, the war is motivated by lust, greed, public humiliation, revenge, and a clear disregard for women’s rights. The fake gift of the Trojan Horse is an ancient example of a fake news campaign. The Trojan war narrative focused on a single goal: winning. Anything less than a decisive win would be interpreted as a loss. At the height of battle, heeding Cassandra’s warning undermines the Trojan’s tunnel-vision focus on the pursuit of victory — a focus that prevents a bigger picture point of view.
Wikipedia repeats the suggestion that Cassandra was cursed specifically because she reneged on a promise for sex. Really? That’s a #metoo story. My own research indicates that Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy as an infant when she was far too young to make a deal. The sex for power story denies Cassandra’s honorable motives to protect her tribe.
What rings truer, or more in line with the stories women tell today, is that rejecting Apollo’s advances triggered enough rage that Apollo would rather destroy her than allow her to warn against harm. It happens every day: women who sound alarms that short-term wins will lead to great harm (for example, the dangers of unregulated social media) are cursed by criticisms that their point of view is somehow weak, naïve, emotional, or unfocused. But this curse only works when these forms of intimidation and humiliation convince the Cassandras among us to stay silent.
The Cycle of Distrust
When the only narrative used to plan and strategize prioritizes winning at all costs or insists that failure is not an option, it devalues attempts to de-escalate anger, prompt dialogue, and promote empathy for everyone. When collaborative strategies are allowed enough air to breathe, warriors can then see good reasons to back off, reconsider the risks, and seek collaborative ways to resolve differences. When everyone matters, winning at all costs no longer makes sense and self-restraint no longer feels like a failure. It becomes a strength.
But rather than allow female perspectives to de-escalate cries for battle, those who enjoy these battles silence and discredit them. Women (and men) who highlight opportunities to collaborate are so targeted and discredited that many of us remained silent — until lately.
Women are Speaking Up
The cycle of teaching women to distrust their perceptions has finally reached a turning point. What we see today is an uprising of women’s voices no longer willing to be silent or agree that resistance is futile. Women who clearly see the harms that result from short-sighted “wins” are using our voices. We no longer cower when battle narratives undermine civil dialogue.
Suddenly the story is about why the Trojans were stupid enough to invite their own demise. It makes a far better analogy for our current lack of collective action than some magical curse. The inevitability of great harm ends when we change the way we interpret this story.
The Price of Arrogance
In Henry V, Shakespeare famously illustrated how battle narratives change priorities:
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility,
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage …
Every day, news outlets stoke hard-favored rage just when we most need modest stillness and fair nature. We, like the Trojans, fight unnecessary wars and pursue false victories at great risk to our collective wellbeing.
Arrogance Versus Insight
At one level, this is a story about arrogance vs. insight. Once a group expects to solve a problem by framing it as a war between winners and losers, they nullify their ability to hear and combine multiple narratives that widen the perspective. Vulnerability (i.e., the willingness to listen) is translated as a willingness to be exploited. Neither side wants to risk the vulnerability of listening because, within the coercive logic of a competitive perspective, all vulnerabilities are bad.
I remember hearing about an event at a regional religious conference for a denomination fighting about homosexuality when a church choir with gay members sang about God’s love. Someone shouted a warning, “Don’t let these people worm their way into your hearts.” The very idea of finding a peaceful, harmonious solution to their differences felt humiliating to those who started the war. They only wanted to win — and a mutual resolution could only be interpreted as a loss. So they took great effort to undermine empathy and dialogue.
In war, trust feels irrational.
When the military uses the term “collaborator” to describe helping an adversary as a betrayal, it questions the motives of helping anyone with a win/win perspective. Labeling investments in social safety nets as inviting exploitation is a good example.
Failure of the Imagination
Speaking louder or finding the perfect story for power brokers who are motivated to refuse to listen doesn’t really address how compartmentalized thinking (i.e. win/lose) narrows the imaginations of those trapped within battle narratives. For example, when the Greeks sent word of their “surrender” and offered a gift to celebrate the Trojan victors, the Trojans’ obsessive desire for a win blocked their ability to imagine the consequences of failure.
Any belief that “failure is not an option” is patently irrational, but worse, it discourages the flow of information that could reveal great risks hidden within a highly anticipated victory. When a tight-knit group of imaginations is fully occupied with planning victories to humiliate their enemies and gain dominance, it leaves little room to imagine the harm being done in the name of winning.
Ever since the post-9/11 inquiries suggested that our failure to anticipate the attacks reflected a “failure of the imagination,” I’ve been fascinated with this explanation. I take it literally. If our imaginations organize our daydreams and nightmares according to plots that can only resolve with clear winners or losers, we fail to imagine that there might be some wisdom within the perspectives of those labeled enemies. An imagination that only craves to be a hero who defeats all dragons is unlikely to spend much time imagining the insights gained by taking time to ask a dragon to tell its story.
The Mental Load of Predicting Unnecessary Harm
The original source for the story of Cassandra isn’t known. Mosaics about the Trojan war are still being discovered. But I don’t think it does harm to challenge the implicit message that women’s warnings about collective survival are cursed to fail. The real message here is that we can better avoid wins that do great harm once we understand that these harms are unseen (even un-see-able) from the perspective of win/lose reasoning. It is natural to expect competitive power brokers to try to silence warnings of danger, but it is time to stop believing that our warnings are cursedly ignored. That’s not the only way to interpret this story.
If we pay close attention to how and why battle narratives silenced Cassandra, we might just figure out that the real curse is treating problems like battles to win instead of invitations to be curious. The moral to this updated version of the story is to trust your ability to anticipate harm — and keep speaking up. If women silence themselves, all of us lose.
Annette Simmons is a keynote speaker, consultant, and author of four books including The Story Factor, listed in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. She got her business degree from Louisiana State University in 1983, spent ten years in Australia in international business, got an M.Ed. from North Carolina State University (1994), and founded Group Process Consulting in 1996. Her new book is Drinking from a Different Well: How Women’s Stories Change What Power Means in Action. Learn more at her book’s website.