In my never-ending need to make sure billionaires have sufficient extra capital to purchase the essentials—like penis-shaped rocket ships—I found myself this morning buying what I like to think of as stupid shit online. These things were not completely without value; I have an office to decorate and a team to draw together and motivate. But my purchases were by no means things I required in a hunter-gatherer sense of my life.
I found a small statue of an ancient mythological character and thought, now this is something that not only would look good in my office, but has a lot of deeply symbolic meaning, which made it even more perfect for the bookshelf behind my desk. It was a small statue of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill. If there was ever a symbol for the work I do, this is it.
I am, as I have written many times before, a clinical psychologist. It’s a profession I actually love, but I also recognize the futility of it. In a general sense, a clinical psychologist (as opposed to a forensic psychologist) helps a person get in touch with and process the feelings emerging from some traumatic event in their life. This process requires a lot of courage on the part of the patient because these events were pushed into (in some cases drawn into by the psyche itself) the unconscious for a reason: they are often terrifying and always painful to discover and then deal with. Most people never engage in any self-exploration of any fundamental kind for this very reason.
This process also requires a lot of patience on the part of the clinician because often we will figure out (or guess with some freaky accuracy) what the source of the patient’s dilemma is, but we can’t just shout it out, because the patient will likely not believe us and often will terminate therapy rather than continue to sit with the idea that their therapist was correct when they blurted out something like, “Don’t you see you are trying to replicate the relationship you had with your father who abused you, and that is why you keep choosing abusive men to fall in love with?”
As the meme says, sometimes the reason your life sucks is because you are dumb and make bad decisions, and nobody wants to hear that. However, if they realize it themselves someday, they will likely change in ways that improve their lives.
We of the psychotherapy clan often describe our work as an exercise in masochism because we have to watch the patient grapple with their issues—approaching ever so slowly and getting so very close before giving up and running from the discomfort of the process. A task we also refer to as Sisyphean, after our old pal King Sisyphus.
Sisyphus is one of those ancient Greek mythical characters who is more famously remembered for what happened to him than for how he got there. For example, Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and made queen of the underworld, but only for part of the year because her mother Demeter could not stand to be without her. That’s the part everyone remembers: what happened to her. How Persephone got into this mess, however, started when the gods were having an argument about who was the strongest and most powerful, and Aphrodite said she was.
Being the goddess of love, want, and desire, she was soundly ridiculed for even suggesting she was as powerful (let alone more powerful) than, say, Ares, the god of war.
Aphrodite said she could prove it by controlling the most cold and unloving among them, Hades. She promptly had her son (or lover, depending on the version of the myth you read) Eros shoot poor Hades with his sharpest, most pure golden arrow. Hades, in a fit of lust and desire, fell deeply in love with the first person he saw, which was poor Persephone, and, well… you know what happened next.
Sisyphus was doomed to push a large boulder up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down just shy of reaching the top, for all eternity. This is a fairly commonly known story, but how many of you know how poor Sisyphus got into such a predicament?
Like many human characters in ancient myth, Sisyphus angered the gods and was punished. Keep in mind, mythology—like all stories—was invented as a way of teaching children how to behave in the society of the day. As society evolved, the myths evolved, but the purpose was always the same. To paraphrase Marie Louis von Franz, mythology explains what happens to people who don’t learn the lessons taught to them as children through the hearing of fairy tales.
Sisyphus was the king of Ephyra, later known as Corinth (yes, that Corinth of Bible letter receiving fame—myths evolve, remember?), and he was known during his life as a very cunning and crafty king. Homer described him as “the most cunning of men” or “the craftiest of men,” depending on the translation. Now, for those who don’t know, “cunning” is not the word Homer used. He used the word aiolemetes, which is today translated as “crafty,” but back in ancient Greece the word would be better translated as “bold in the worst possible way.” Another translation would be “presumptuous” or “audacious”—both used to describe a person who, in more modern language, we might simply call an asshole.
Homer’s choice of words paints Sisyphus as the most full-of-himself, arrogant, and disrespectful man—who unfortunately also may have been described as the luckiest.
Sisyphus’s path to boulder-rolling fame began when he decided he hated his brother Salmoneus enough to kill him (also sounds familiar biblically speaking, doesn’t it?). Unlike other versions of the archetype of the warring siblings—where one is more or less innocent—Salmoneus is described in ancient myths as a wicked and unkind man, and there really is no explanation as to why these brothers hated each other, but they did.
Sisyphus, not wanting to bear the wrath of the Harpies for the crime of killing his brother, sought a loophole from the Oracle at Delphi (the wisest of the ancient oracles). The oracle told Sisyphus that if he married Salmoneus’s daughter Tyro, their children would rise up and kill Salmoneus. A long game, perhaps, but it would save Sisyphus from being tormented for all eternity by the Harpies, so I suppose he believed it to be a worthwhile gamble.
In the end, Tyro discovered the plan and put an end to it by killing her own children, an act I am sure did not go over well with the Harpies—but that is a tale for another time.
Sisyphus also brought the wrath of Zeus down on himself by telling the father of Asopid, the river god Asopus, where Zeus had hidden her, in exchange for an ever-flowing fountain in his palace. Of course, Zeus wanted Sisyphus to die, and he sent the god of death, Tartarus, to kill him in the worst of possible ways, but Sisyphus somehow tricked the god of death and ended up chaining him to his fountain.
Of course, with the god of death chained to a fountain, this meant no one died on earth. But this being a Greek myth, no one dying does not create a utopia of endless youth. The old and the sick are said to have suffered and wailed so loudly that the gods on Olympus were annoyed and begged for Zeus to put an end to this noise. Zeus didn’t, of course. Maybe he was waiting for Sisyphus to get old or injured, assuming that since death was coming for no one, Sisyphus would eventually let Tartarus go so he could bring the sweet relief and then Zeus would have him. Or perhaps Zeus would have denied Sisyphus death and let him suffer with never ending life and aging. Zeus was pretty famous for his cruelty.
Eventually Ares, god of war, became disheartened that none of his opponents would die and set Tartarus free—thus, I suppose, making war great again—but also allowing Sisyphus to escape Zeus’s wrath.
Sisyphus escapes the wrath of the gods multiple times, which would be bad enough, but he started to think of himself as untouchable and smarter than the gods. This was the final nail in the coffin for our egotistical king. Eventually Zeus, tired of Sisyphus’s shenanigans, had Hermes drag Sisyphus to the underworld, where he was cursed to push his boulder for all of eternity. No matter how much cunning and craftiness he employed, the boulder would always slip from his grasp just before reaching the top and roll back to the bottom of the hill where he would have to start over again.
Like many ancient myths, the moral ultimately is something along the lines of “quit while you’re ahead.” If Sisyphus had stopped after any one of the times he had gotten one over on the gods, we might never have heard of him or his boulder. For the ancient Greeks, the greatest sin humans could commit was hubris.
Today, “hubris” means excessive pride or self-confidence, but to the ancient Greeks it meant an attitude of pride in defiance of the gods. To the ancient Greek, there could be no greater sin than thinking of oneself as better than the divine—and that is what so many of the ancient myths taught. Through the story of Sisyphus, or Arachne (the weaver who challenged the goddess Athena to a weaving contest and won but was turned into a spider), or Narcissus (who refused love because he was too good for anyone), or Icarus (who flew too close to Apollo’s chariot—the sun), or countless others, all gave the same lesson: be good at what you do, be great at what you do, but don’t be so full of yourself as to challenge the gods to a duel, because if you do, you will lose—and lose big.
Surely there is no modern example of Sisyphus? Surely we have taken the lessons the ancients passed down to us and have learned not to push our luck?
Weeeeeeeellllllllll… maybe not.
Trump is a man who could quite literally be compared to Sisyphus. He has gotten away with a lot in his life. He has been found guilty in court for numerous things—from tax issues and bank-related fraud to interfering with an election—and though never brought to court for it, the evidence and four years of congressional hearings convinced many that he incited the riot which attempted to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021—an act of treason, for those legal beagles out there—yet he has never been punished in proportion to the scale of these alleged crimes. Not even the crimes he was actually found guilty of.
His businesses have ripped off and defrauded countless citizens and contractors, both large and small, yet every time it appears he might finally be held accountable financially, he has slipped under the protection of bankruptcy laws and escaped any real punishment.
It is understandable, I suppose, that Trump would become a bit overconfident with such a track record, but like Sisyphus, he should have quit while he was ahead.
When the Epstein sex trafficking scandal hit the press in a 2018 Miami Herald article, the pictures of all the famous “friends” of Jeffrey Epstein started coming out as well. Famous actors and businesspeople—even a prince—were all part of the supposed files Epstein kept, which indicated these people were likely customers of his child sex trafficking racket (I refuse to call it a business). The denials and dismissals came as fast as the pictures, none louder than from the politicians who were documented as having associated with Jeffrey Epstein over the many years of his crimes against children.
And none dismissed louder than Donald J. Trump, then the President of the United States.
Of course, with his track record of getting away with, well, everything, Trump probably expected this too to eventually go away and leave him unscathed. But it hasn’t gone away. While he may not yet be dragged into court over his alleged involvement—not with this current Congress anyway—the evidence, in the form of bits and pieces of documentation, keeps coming out and keeps making him look worse.
With the most recent release, this time in the form of emails from Epstein himself, a new and salacious piece of “evidence” was brought to public attention. According to the email the denier-in-chief may have actually been on the giving end of an oral sex act with the most famous receiver of said act in history, Bill Clinton.
Yes, dear readers, in what I will forever refer to as the fellatio heard round the world, the MAGA movement’s lord and savior, Donald BJ Trump, may have actually given good old Bubba a blowjob on Epstein Island. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.
My point here is that, like Sisyphus, Trump should have quit while he was ahead. He had one term as president, got away with trying and failing to overthrow the country, even made a ton of money while in office, and should have taken his wins and stepped away from the table. Instead, full of hubris, he went all in on the “it wasn’t me” argument, and now, for the rest of his life, he will be known as the other person rumored to have given Clinton a blowjob. Worse still, it doesn’t even matter if he did it, to be honest. The damage has been done, and “sucked Bill’s dick” will always be a footnote attached to his name.
He could have just gone back to Florida and spent the rest of his days in relative obscurity, but he had to challenge the gods at their own game. And now, like Sisyphus and his boulder, the world has to forever live with the knowledge that he was—at the very least—accused of performing oral sex on a former president.
