Analysis Of The Consolation Of Philosophy By Jeffery Locker

How desperate can bad fortune make a human? If you are Jeffery Locker, desperate enough to pay someone to kill you. Jeffery Locker was a motivational speaker who suddenly found himself in substantial debt. He decided the only way out was to commit suicide so that his family could receive $14 million dollars in insurance money. Locker proceeded to convince a random passerby to hold a knife, which he repeatedly plunged his body into. If that isn’t horrifying enough, his family was not only aware of his plan but they were utterly unaffected when notified of his death. When the police informed his wife and children, his daughter reportedly answered with, “I’m going back to bed.”
Human beings obsess over the whims of Lady Fortune. We hinge our lives on her favor. We’ll break our necks just to buffer her blows. However, in our pursuit of good fortune, we lose everything lasting. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy contends with this tendency. She condemns our lust for Fortune and offers an alternative to her slavery. To leave the bondage of …show more content…
But what does freedom from Fortune actually look like? For Boethius, it was freedom from fear. He wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while he was waiting to die and, from a temporal perspective, he had every reason to be afraid. Nevertheless, Boethius broke through his fear and teaches others to do the same. However, if someone told Jeffery Locker in his moment of desperation, “you must reject the whims of Fortune,” that would hold no meaning for him. And so the question becomes how do we actually convey this process to people who are struggling? The news today is full of hurricanes and wildfires and earthquakes that take away everything the world values in one moment. How do we bring the calm assurance of truth to a world ravaged by the uncertainty of