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alt title(s): Self Fulfilling Prophecies What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?
DOW JONES PLUNGES ON NEWS OF DOW JONES PLUNGE...
Whenever anyone tries to avert a prophecy, for good or ill, the end result of their actions is to bring the prophecy about. The harder he struggles to prevent it, the more inescapable his destiny becomes. Fate, it seems, loves irony.
When a hero tries to prevent the prophesied release of an ancient evil, his actions will help it escape because You Cant Fight Fate. When the Big Bad tries to slaughter all the members of a given people in order to kill the one among them who is prophesied to end him, he will only manage to create the hero that he fears, Because Destiny Says So.
One common mechanism for this is a Prophecy Twist. If no one understands the real meaning of the prophecy, any attempts to avert it will naturally be futile. A cynic will point out that by this measure, a prophecy must be vague. Otherwise how to defeat it would be easy, or else those it affects must carry an Idiot Ball and not take the direct approach that would have no room for failure.
The archetypal Older Than Dirt example is the myth of Oedipus. A prophecy says the king will be killed by his own son, so the king orders his infant son killed. (He has him crippled and abandoned in the wilderness, instead of just breaking his neck.) Oedipus is rescued, and brought up not knowing he's the prince. Twenty years later he learns his fate: he will kill his father and marry his mother. Wanting to protect his adoptive family — who he believes are his natural parents — Oedipus leaves home. On the road, he doesn't recognize his father, gets into an argument, and kills him. Shortly thereafter he comes to the city his father ruled, and frees them from the Sphinx; as a reward Oedipus is made king of the city and marries the widowed queen...his own mother. The other version of this myth involves Oedipus becoming an athlete, and a thrown discus killing his father, who was watching, by pure coincidence (another myth has another ancient Greek hero, Perseus, doing this to his grandfather, whom he was prophesied to kill).
Most of the real-world prophecies that come true are also self-fulfilling — simply stating that something will happen often ensures that it will happen someday, whether by accident or because someone read your prophecy and decided he'd make it happen. An example sometimes given is that a prediction of a bank becoming insolvent becomes true because everyone tries to withdraw their money from the bank, which (since the bank uses fractional-reserve banking) they don't have at that moment (they'd have to recall all the loans they'd given), and this then causes the bank to become insolvent. Another popular example is the fear that there will be a shortage of a commodity (especially gas). Everybody stocks up on the commodity, resulting in a shortage. Viewers Are Morons, after all.
Compare Prophetic Fallacy. Often an integral part of Tragedy. May cause a Clingy Mac Guffin.
Examples
Anime
- In Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, Fei Wong Reed goes through a rediculously complex Xanatos Roulette to prevent Yuko's death from catching up with her, in the process creating two clones, then discarding them (essentially killing them). The woman he was trying to save then embraces her long-delayed death as payment to bring the two clones into the cycle of reincarnation. In other words, had he not tried to save Yuko, she never would have died.
Comic Books
- Comedic variant from Captain Britain:
Zeitgeist: You didn't warn us because I was going to insult you? You mean I hadn't even insulted you at that point? You just predicted I was going to and didn't warn... Cobweb, you are the most thoroughly irrational squack-head I have ever set eyes upon.
Cobweb: There! I knew you were going to say that!
- A couple of Spider-Man stories deal with his Time Police counterpart from the year 2211 and his archnemesis Hobgoblin 2211. It's revealed the Hobgoblin 2211 is really his daughter Robin, who, while researching breaks in the "multiverse" throughout history, and how to stop them from continuing to destroy reality, is arrested by her father for things she is innocent of now, but will do in the future (namely murder and screwing around with reality), and placed in a virtual reality prison/paradise. Her boyfriend, however, attempts to free her by using a virus to shut down the computer she's attached to, which also drives her completely insane as her mind is effected by the virus. Now totally nuts, she then dons a dimensional/time traveling suit and goes on a rampage through time and reality, erasing people (usually Spider-Men) from existence with Ret Con bombs. As a result, not only do her father's attempts to stop her from becoming the Hobgoblin directly cause her to do so, but she herself becomes the cause of the very breaks in reality that she had discovered (though that's less a prophecy than merely an ironic turn).
Fairy Tales
- In The Fish and the Ring
 , Vasilii the Unlucky, The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs, The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate, and many other fairy tales, a man who discovers finds his child doomed to marry a poor child tries to kill them with many tasks, before and after the wedding. It never works.
- In Sun, Moon, and Talia, an older variant of Sleeping Beauty, wise men prophesy that Talia will be harmed by flax. Her father therefore orders it all kept of the castle — which means Talia doesn't know what it is and finds it intriguing.
- In Madame d'Aulnoy's Princess Rosette, the fairies (reluctantly) predict that the princess will cause grave danger, or even death, to her older brothers. So her parents lock her in a tower. When they die, her brothers immediately free her. She learns that people eat peacocks and, in her innocence, resolves to marry the King of the Peacocks. Her loving brothers try to bring this about and end up in grave danger (though they do survive).
Film
- The entire plot of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. This was done to contrast with Luke later being confronted by the same sorts of troubling prophesies, but ultimately deciding to Screw Destiny and avoid the path his father took.
- In The Matrix quote above, The Oracle tells Neo not to worry about the vase. Neo turns around to see what vase she's talking about, and in the process knocks it over.
- As a more serious theme, however, it's subverted when Neo, The Messiah "prophesied" by the Machines to perpetuate a cycle of death and rebirth of Zion that had repeated several times before, he rebelled against the prophesy and later broke the cycle.
- Another self-fulfilling prophecy, Trinity said that the oracle had told her she, Trinity, would fall in love with the guy who was The One from the prophecies. When Trinity fell in love with Neo, she used this to justify her belief that Neo was The One. But maybe she only fell in love with him because she thought he was The One? She was so fixated on the idea of the prophecy that she was unable to fall in love with anyone else, but once Morpheus announced Neo as The Chosen One, Trinity wanted desperately to believe in it.
- Similarly, when the Oracle told Neo that he wasn't The One the first time he met her, she was probably speaking the truth. He wasn't. Not at that point in time, anyway. But by giving him the choice, to chose whether he wanted to rise to the challenge or not, he became exactly what she wanted and did what she needed him to do.
- The Oracle was a memetic program designed to understand and manipulate human emotions. Go figure. The Architect even admitted that the whole religious prophecy crap was just another control mechanism.
- It's mentioned that the Oracle may see the future, but she usually doesn't tell the future. That is, she doesn't tell the Zionites what the future actually holds. She just tells them what they need to hear in order for that future to come about. Case in point: She told Neo he wasn't the One because that would lead him to realizing he was. Presumably, if she'd just said, "Yes, you're the One," things wouldn't have worked out so well.
- Case more in point, she told Neo "no, not in this life". And then he dies, and gets resurrected in blatant Christian metaphor, and at that point he becomes the One. And, of course, gets himself crucified a few films later.
- Or this is a complete subversion, because this was a Self Denying Prophecy. The only way to make Neo become The One was to tell him that he's not. Neo is really the king of reverse psychology.
- The bank insolvency example was mentioned in Sneakers.
- In the first Terminator film, John Connor would not have been conceived if the T-800 hadn't traveled back in time and attempted to kill Sarah Connor, while Skynet wouldn't have been created if T-800 hadn't traveled back in time and attempted to kill Sarah Connor.
- Similarly, in the third film he likely wouldn't have been in position to survive a nuclear war and assume command of the widespread human survivors (or get together with his future wife and second-in-command) if the T-X had simply gotten on with covertly helping the rise of Skynet and left him alone.
- He would have done that anyway, eventually. T-X just sped it up.
- In Willow, the local evil sorceress inadvertently causes her own downfall by trying to kill the infant prophesied to... well, be her downfall.
- Subverted in The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari: Cesare predicts that Alan has until dawn to live, and then goes and ensures the accuracy of his prediction. With a knife.
- Minority Report exemplifies this trope.
- ''Except that the original short story is about free will. The protagonist finds a prediction that threatens his future with the company (we do not learn what he has learned). He hides the evidence and leaves. A retired General (who wishes to take over the country) has him captured, as his illegal access to the predictions means he knows the protagonist is the man who will kill him. They talk; general realises protagonist had no intention to kill him, and is in a position to help him after the coup; so releases him. Later, at the military veteran's parade that gathers the general's army for the coup; special guest protagonist decides to kill the general, realising what will happen if he does not act. He succeeds, kills the general, is arrested; coup defeated by security forces operating with precrime knowledge. Protagonist shows he had evidence of what would happen, is NOT PROSECUTED for murder, but must leave. He chooses to move his family to an off-world colony, where there is no precrime organisation.
- The movie plays it straight for most of it but subverts it near the end.
- In Wanted the Loom of Fate causes Sloan to fall into this. The loom marks Sloan for death, but Sloan is the only one who interprets the loom's coded marks, so he simply hides it away and manufactures targets to make money as well as shape the world as he sees fit. In the end, the loom also marks the entire Chicago Fraternity for death; one tries to say Screw Destiny, but is killed by the Action Girl just after, who kills herself with the same bullet, in the same shot, as her name is on the list. Though Sloan survives this scene, his attempt to turn the Fraternity into assassins for money and his failure to succeed allow the main character to survive and kill him in the very next scene.
- In Weapons of Fate, Wesley shows some Genre Savvy and ridicules the Immortal for the Fraternity's reliance on the concept of fate; his mother died by his father's hand, at her own insistence, because the loom of fate marked her, and he went along with it. Wesley finds this absurd and doesn't think the problem is self-fullfilling prophecy so much as members of the Fraternity having serious problems with common sense and a lack thereof.
- 12 Monkeys.
- Paycheck. And not Paycheck. Depending on the scene more than depending on logic.
- The Sandra Bullock film Premonition, mixed with Anachronistic Order via Unstuck In Time.
Literature
- In Piers Anthony's Split Infinity, the protagonist eventually ends up killing the Red Sorceress, primarily out of self defense. Turns out that the only reason she was attacking him, is because of a prophecy that said he would kill her. Oops. This is later revealed to be a Xanatos Roulette by an overly sentient computer.
- Done with a Prophecy Twist in Peter David's Star Trek New Frontier novel Martyr. A prophet 500 years in the past predicts the savior of his people will come when certain events happen. When those events do happen, Captain Calhoun is revered as that Savior.. The Twist? The actual Savior is the man who thinks he's appointed to kill the Savior, whose traits include a scar (which Calhoun has...and gives the appointee while he's struggling). He does kill the Savior—himself—accidentally. And then it's subverted by the fact that The prophet was cheating by using Advanced Alien Technology to look into the future.
- In Fire Logic an army attacks the peaceful Ashawala'i people because an oracle told them that someone from there would defeat them. Naturally, the lone survivor does just that because they killed off her people.
- Inverted in I Claudius. A prophecy is made that Caligula (yup, that one) can "no more become Emperor that he can ride across the bay from Baiae to Puteoli". One of Caligula's first acts as Emperor involves a very long bridge...
- Subverted and lampshaded in Calderon's Life is a Dream, where Segismund - subject of an Oedipus Rex type prophecy - points out that it would be a Self Fulfilling Prophecy, while preventing it from getting fulfilled.
My father, who is here to evade the fury
Of my proud nature, made me a wild beast:
So when I, by my birth of gallant stock,
My generous blood, and inbred grace and valour,
Might well have proved both gentle and forebearing,
The very mode of life to which he forced me,
The sort of bringing up I had to bear
Sufficed to make me savage in my passions.
What a strange method of restraining them!
- In the Harry Potter books, Voldemort hears half of a prophecy about a boy about to be born who will be his nemesis. With two possible choices, he chooses Harry, but in the process of trying to kill him, gives him both the power to defy him and a reason to. What's the best way to turn an otherwise unimportant young wizard into your mortal enemy who's well-equipped to defeat you? Well, murdering his parents and spending the better part of a decade sticking him in convoluted death traps is not a bad start.
- Whats more, Dumbledore hints that not all prophecies have to be fulfilled. If Voldemort never heard the prophecy or ignored it, it might have been meaningless.
- Even MORE is that Harry doesn't have to do anything at all, the prophecy is meaningless because nothing is forcing Harry to comply. This is touched upon in the books; The only reason Harry is going to fulfill the prophecy is because he would never rest until Voldemort was dead, and the same goes for Voldemort.
- In the Wheel Of Time series Mat learns he would marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons. Much later, she comes across him trying to flee from a city and has to be tied up. When Mat finds out what she is, having already learned the hard way that You Can't Fight Fate, he changes his mind about hiding her in the lofts and kidnaps her instead. And much later, Tuon only completes the marriage ceremony Mat accidentally started because of the marriage prophecy she got.
- Greek Mythology adores this trope. A prophecy that Paris will cause Troy to burn down? His parents abandon him in a remote area, but he gets found and raised by someone else, eventually returns home by which time his parents have forgotten the prophecy, and due to things he did when abandoned, causes a long chain of events that ends with Troy burning. Many times this trope in Greek Mythology results in an Idiot Plot; for example, Chronos (father of many of the Greek gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades), in an attempt to avert the prophecy that one of his children will overcome him, decides to swallow them as soon as they're born. His wife finally gets tired of it and smuggles the sixth (Zeus) off after he's born, tricking Chronos into swallowing a rock instead. After growing up, Zeus defeats Chronos and frees his siblings. Now, rather than eating the children when they're born, wouldn't it have been far more logical to just not have any children in the first place?
- Given the lack of contraceptives, even divine ones, that would entail keeping it in his toga. And how many of the Greek gods ever did that?
- None, especially considering that it was the Romans who wore Togas!
- Greek tragedy often revolves around the idea that You Cant Fight Fate. Those who attempt to do so suffer grisly punishments for their hubris. If you consider Oepidus et al., Paris got off lightly.
- Then there's King Croesus, who was told that if he attacked his neighbor, a great empire would fall. Think about that for a moment—obviously it's going to come true, since whichever empire lost the war would fall. Croesus just didn't consider that it might be his empire...
- See also the myth of Perseus' birth. See, the oracle at Delphi told King Acrisius that his grandson would kill him, so he decided to prevent his daughter Danae from ever bearing a son by locking her up in a brass tower, where her weeping drew the attention of Zeus...
- In addition, this is not helped by the fact that in ancient Greek times, it was considered a huge sin to kill your own family directly, no matter what the circumstances. So, most rulers and such didn't really have a choice in leaving their children out in the wilderness.
- Of course, you've gotta mention Oedipus. Before his birth, someone cursed his parents, declaring that their child would kill the father and marry the mother. When little Oedipus was born, they spiked his heels and left him on a hill to die of exposure - only for the rulers of another nearby region to find the child and take him in. The rest, as they say, is history. Or maybe mythology.
- This is the cause of Baldur's death in Norse Mythology. Baldur has visions of his death approaching, so he turns to his mother Frigg for help. Frigg makes all things in the world swear not to harm Baldur, making him invulnerable to any form of attack, so the other gods start a game out of throwing things at Baldur. Loki gets frustrated by this and discovers that Baldur is not invulnerable to misteltoe, makes an arrow made of misteltoe and tricks Baldur's blind brother Höður into using it to kill him.
- Paycheck offers examples of these as reasons why the machine that sees into the future is a really bad idea.
- Specifically, the machine sees in the future that there will be a plague. So, leaders use the machine to see who will get the plague, round them all up and keep them together to prevent it from spreading. Surprise! They all get the plague. The machine predicts a war with another country, so leaders launch a pre-emptive strike against the evil country and the result is a war. By seeing the future, the leaders create the future, which they then see. It's weird and circular, but makes sense: the machine doesn't so much see the future, it sees the future that the machine will create merely by existing.
- Again, the movie is an inversion of the original short story. In the original; protagonist has an envelope of items, which will help him to survive. The time scoop is being used for one political party to improve their candidate's chances in election. At all times, there is the appearance of free will; only at certain moments do the items reveal how they are useful, and always the protagonist must find this out for himself. Simply by existing, he causes the defeat of those employing the time scoop.
- In The Bible, Joseph has prophetic dreams saying he will one day rule his older brothers - so they fake his death and sell him into slavery. But this then starts a chain of events which lead to him becoming prime minister of Egypt and controlling the only source of stored food when a famine hits, leading to his brothers having to beg him for help.
- Not only that. There is a prophesy that Jesus would be known as "Emmanuel". People only call him that because of that prophesy. Try to wrap your head around that.
- Dune takes this trope quite literally. "True" prophets (Paul Atreides and his descendants) don't predict the future so much as create it, locking themselves (and everyone else) into an inescapable destiny. It takes Leto II almost four thousand years to break humanity free from the consequences of this.
- A fable from the Middle East tells of a wealthy man of Baghdad, whose servant begs for his master's fastest horse to flee the city to Samarra. The servant tells his master that he saw Death in the marketplace that morning and that she had made a threatening gesture at him. The master acquiesces, then hunts Death down for an explanation as to why she'd threatened his servant. Death replies that she was not threatening, only surprised to see the servant there...because she had an appointment with him that night in Samarra.
- Retold by W. Somerset Maugham in "The Appointment in Samarra."
- That story is played with in Discworld when Death runs into Rincewind and tells him they have an appointment in another city and asks Rincewind to please hurry and go there. Rincewind refuses :).
- The very city Rincewind was planning to run to in the first place, even. So a sort of accidental self-defeating prophecy.
- Also in Discworld: Princess Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling. This unusual name was the result of her mother Magrat Garlick's attempt to correct a mistake made by her own mother, who had intended for Magrat to be named "Margaret" but was unable to spell the name properly when she wrote it down for the priest. In an effort to ensure the proper naming of her child, Magrat appended "Note Spelling" in the note she passed to the priest. This back-fired when he read out the complete sentence, but the deed had been done and by their culture or law could not be changed.
- All prophecies in the Sword Of Truth series are self-fulfilling. In fact, that's the entire point of prophecies- they wouldn't be much good if they didn't actually change things.
- C.S. Lewis' book The Horse And His Boy is, in theory, based around one of these; the revelation of the content of the prophecy is supposed to set in motion the very events that were predicted. It's all a bit of a cheat, though, as Aslan had a carefully judged thumb (claw?) on the scales of the universe throughout - pushing boats to shore, scaring the horses, propping up the central character's failing morale, and generally messing about in a way that really shouldn't have been necessary if he'd just done the job right in the first place. Still, This Troper rates it as the best of the books...
Live Action TV
Tabletop Games
- In Warhammer 40k, the primarch Horus gets infected with a damonic plaque that causes him to fall into a coma and get visions of the future from the Chaos Gods. In the visions he sees a world where the Emperor is worshiped as a god and his name is not mentioned anywhere. This, combined with his anger about the Emperor returning to Earth and leaving him and the other primarchs fighting to expand the Imperium, causes him to turn to Chaos and start a civil war that nearly destroys the Imperium. As a result of the war (known as the Horus Heresy), 10000 years later the mortally wounded Emperor, now confined in the life-supporting Golden Throne, is venerated as a god and the names of Horus and other traitorous primarchs have been removed from Imperial records.
- Which is also deliciously (especially from the Chaos Gods' perspective) ironic, because the Emperor had been an opponent of religious dogma.
Video Games
Web Comics
- Durkon in Order Of The Stick has one of these in his background. He's going to cause bad things to happen when next he returns to the dwarven kingdoms, so his bosses send him away without telling him why, and tell him never to return. But he would never have really been able to return if he hadn't left. (Handwaved when they pointed out the possibility of him buying groceries or somesuch.)
- The kobold Oracle, on the other hand has prophesised that Durkon WILL return home... Albeit posthumously. Meaning that the 'bad things' may for instance be due to him not being able to defend the place or simply that his own death and the subsequent mourning may be those 'bad things
- The dwarven clerics lampshade this (not exact words since this Troper doesn't have the book with him):
Dwarven cleric 1: 'Tis risky business screwing with prophecy.
Dwarven cleric 2: Aye, don't I know it.
Western Animation
- Arguably inverted in Teen Titans season four. Raven is troubled by her destiny to destroy the world and, along with Slade and her father, repeatedly insists that no matter what she does, there's nothing she can do to prevent it. She fails to realize that the only way the prophecy can come true is if she willingly goes along with it, as the destruction of the world is completely dependent on the conscious actions she makes of her own free will.
- Her friends even call her out on this, but she shrugs them off each time. During a telepathic conversation with Trigon, she even suggests that she could stop him by refusing to cooperate with the prophecy, but willingly goes along with it when he tells her that, as her creator, he decides her destiny.
- Her willingness to go along with the prophecy could probably be justified by the fact that Slade would have killed the other Titans had she not cooperated.
- Kung Fu Panda has the Old Master Oogway warning that he had a premonition that the villainous Tai Lung will escape his prison. Master Shifu has a bird messenger sent to the prison to increase the security, when he gets there, he inadvertently provides the essential element (a feather, used as a lockpick) that puts Oogway's premonition in motion and Tai Lung escapes. Oogway even tries to warn Shifu of this possibility before the fact.
- Arguably, Tai Lung's descent into darkness is itself something of a Self Fulfilling Prophecy: if Oogway had not foreseen such darkness in him and denied him the Dragon Scroll, he would not have gone mad with desire for power and sought to steal it. And the snow leopard would never have believed himself destined for it in the first place if a) his father-figure Shifu hadn't filled his head with dreams about it and b) he hadn't been given a name which rings the knell of destiny.
- Yet, he actually GETS the scroll during the last fight, and Po goes as far as explaining to him the meaning of the scroll. Considering his violent and not so smart reaction after that Oogway may have had a point.
- This editor more saw Tai Lung's reaction as a refusal to believe the truth, because it would mean he'd wasted twenty years of his life for nothing since he didn't need the scroll to prove he was a great warrior himself. To find out the goal you had, in his own words, broken bones to achieve, was actually unnecessary would make anyone pissed. Anger and darkness aren't the same thing. In any case, this just proves him to be stubborn and proud, not inherently evil or unworthy. And it'd be nice to think, if he survived the fight, that Tai Lung would have calmed down afterward and realized the wisdom of what Po told him.
- There's an old cartoon this troper used to watch, where the empress went after a pair of "twins" who were prophesied to be her downfall. The prophecy was that the people would turn against her when they saw how mean was to two innocent kids.
- The Twins of Destiny?
- Not the first troper, but if it is the show they were thinking of, then it is not an example, as the overthrowing was done with a lot of help from freedom fighters.
- The episode "The Fortune Teller" from Avatar The Last Airbender focuses on a town that hangs on the every word of their fortune teller, Aunt Wu. Aunt Wu's predictions are almost always right, but what the villagers don't realize is that it's what they do after hearing her predictions that cause them to happen. Like the old man who was told that he would be
holding a certain umbrella wearing red shoes on the day he meets his true love... so he brings the umbrella with him everywhere he goes so he wears red shoes, every day.
- Danny Phantom may have been this if you read The Movie a certain way.
- Justice League Unlimited's Project Cadmus arc is all about averting a Superhero-Government war that happened in an Alternate Universe. Lex Luthor and Brainiac take full advantage of the paranoia to trigger one.
Real Life
- Economics: Investors' fears of a downturn in the stock market are one of the most common reasons for a downturn in the stock market.
- Recessions in general work similarly, since consumer confidence is a major factor. Once the news media alerts the general population that there might be a recession coming, people start spending less money, and before you know it, we're in a recession. The longer and louder the media goes on about it, the worse it's likely to be, in part because of the warnings.
- That's actually one of the main points of Keynesianism: since private individuals and companies will resort to excessive saving, thus making the recession worse by diminishing the market's activity, Keynesianist advocate that the State, bigger and way more resilient than any given company, act as a pro-active economical actor to counter the Self Fulfilling Prophecy. Basically, Keynesianism is a Self Fulfilling Prophecy used to counter Another Self Fulfilling Prophecy. The fact that we are talking about Real Life economics is the icing on the cake
- Both Jews and Christians donate money to organizations dedicated to building the third temple in order to usher in the foretold Messianic era. However, exactly what happens during the "Messianic era" depends on which side you ask. Will it be as foretold in Ezekiel, with God reinstating the Aaronic priesthood, the temple sacrifices, and taking the Jewish people under His proverbial wing again? Or will it be as in Revelation, with the golden cube-city of New Jerusalem descending from the heavens to bring God's eternal presence to Earth? Only time will tell...
- "Many" Christians is more then a little exaggerated. This troper has never met, read, heard, or even known the name of anyone who believes in trying to "bring about the end times" and he is more familiar with Christians then most tropers here. Most of what this troper has heard about this idea has come from outsiders.
- Banking Runs are considered to be often impacted by the perception of a bank being solvent. In reality most banks can't withstand all of their liquid money being hit at once. The FDIC knows this, and their list of banks most likely to fail is considered to be top secret since publishing the list will cause runs on those banks and cause them to fail. The most recent example is the Washington Mutual bank failure. Basically, it was going relatively okay until a bunch of people heard the bank might fail with the recent economic downturn. Then, in one day, 10% of its assets were withdrawn by panicky account holders, causing the bank to fail and get bought out by Chase.
- A recent real life example of a bank run was seen in the UK with Northern Rock. The bank quietly asked the Bank of England if they could have an extended overdraft (effectively), even though they didn't actually need it at that point. Word got out, leading to every branch in the country being besieged by savers desperate to take all their money out before the bank collapsed - which it wasn't in danger of doing until people panicked.
- An example from the UK in recent weeks: a two-day strike at an oil refinery in Scotland wouldn't have affected petrol distribution in the slightest as several days' reserves are stored off-site. However, as soon as news of the strike got out, queues appeared at petrol stations all over the country - even those areas which got their petrol from completely different refineries. This of course meant they sold out of petrol quickly, leading to local news stations running stories about petrol stations running short, which led to more people trying to fill up before the nationwide fuel drought struck their beloved motor...
- Currency Units of Exchange in general are semi-examples. Things work out pretty much okay if everyone accepts that the certain shiny rock or certain green piece of paper legitimately represents a store of value, and if people don't, then things may very well start going down hill. We'll leave it at that.
- The Induced Traffic theory. City fathers and developers argue for the building of new roads and highways and the expansion of current ones to both relieve current traffic congestion and prepare for traffic increasing in the future. In truth (for some people), it's building the roads themselves that causes the increase in traffic by encouraging more and more people to drive (especially since many of the roads built are not pedestrian friendly).
- The biggest subversion of this may be San Francisco's Embarcadero freeway. The city fought endlessly against activists' demands to tear down the freeway, claiming city traffic would be a mess without it. When the freeway collapsed in the 1989 earthquake and traffic did not subsequently get worse, the city agreed to not rebuild it.
Web Original
- Done 'spectacularly' in Opifex's The Storm Dragon series, a fanfiction series based on the Inheritance Cycle world. Most Elves and Dragons know a legend about a black dragon born during a storm that will cause a great deal of evil for the world. Both races attempt to kill the black dragon Ravana, but not only does he prove himself extremely hard to kill, but their attempts to do so drive him over the edge of insanity when he realizes every living thing is his enemy, turning him into exactly the kind of vengeful and murderous creature that the prophecy spoke about.
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