Member-only story
Of Icarus and Ignorance
The inevitability of flying too close to the sun
Dædalus had a problem. His son had coopted some wings he’d assembled from wax, feathers, and wood and decided to fly without proper instruction. On the one hand, Icarus was proving the theory he’d longed to test: a man could become a flying beast, an angel feathered resplendent, a faux Hermes. On the other, he hadn’t considered the consequences of deterioration, the sun’s radiance, and the corruptibility of hastily assembled contrivances. In essence, he’d accidentally created a perfect folly for humanity, with the unstated consequence of death. And therein lay his problem.
The rest is easy to follow if you’re unfamiliar with the story. In stealing his father’s wings of feather and wax, Icarus flew too high in the air against his father’s stated wishes. As the sun melted the wax binding feather to wood, he plummeted to his death in the arms of the waiting world. This is a poetic end, some might say, given humanity’s consistent attempts to achieve godhood.
From the realm of fiction, we arrive at fact. We’re faced with similar stories to that of Dædalus. We build technologies, have them coopted for use by the masses, and end up with the inevitable successes and failures from the story. We’ve even built case studies around the allegory: have you ever heard of the trough of…
