네 마음속의 프로크루스테스(Procrustes) 침대를 버려라

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네 마음속의 프로크루스테스(Procrustes) 침대를 버려라



■ 프로크루스테스(Procrustes)의 침대

프로크루스테스는 그리스 로마 신화에 나오는 악당이다. 케피소스 강가에 살던 프로쿠루스테스는 '늘리는 자'라는 뜻의 이름으로 그의 길을 지나가는 여행자들을 집으로 초대해 놓고 쇠로 만든 자신의 침대에 눕히고는 여행자의 키가 침대보다 작으면 여행자의 다리를 잡아당겨 침대에 맞추고, 침대 크기보다 크면 침대 크기에 맞도록 다리를 잘라 버렸다.

'프로쿠루스테스의 침대'라는 말은 자신의 기준에 맞추어 다른 사람의 생각과 행동을 강요하거나 고치려하여 고통을 주고 있는 것을 말한다.

'프로쿠루스테스의 침대'는 내가 세상을 바라 보는 하나의 잣대를 상징한다. 그 잣대는 자신이 가지고 있는 고정관념에서 생긴 가치 판단 기준이다. 고정관념은 복잡한 세상을 인식할 때 , 될 수 있으면 빠르게 판단 하도록 돕는 이점이 있다. 반면, 융통성을 잃어버리면서 다양한 생각, 다른 입장을 받아들이지 못하게 하는 단점이 있다.

침대의 크기에 맞지 않는다는 이유로 프로크루스테스(Procrustes)가 여행객의 다리를 자르거나 늘리는 것처럼, 자신의 생각에 동조하도록 다른 사람에게 강요하거나 그렇지 않을 경우 힘을 가해 상처를 주게 될 경우 자신의 고정관념은 무기로 변질되어 버린다.

신화에서 프로크루스테스는 결국 테세우스라는 영웅에 의해 자신이 만든 침대에서 자신이 사람을 해치던 것과 똑같은 방식으로 죽게 되듯이, 개인의 잘못된 고정관념은 세상의 지식이나 다른 사람의 의견들로부터 단절되어 잘못된 판단을 하게 됨으로써 타인 뿐만 아니라 스스로의 삶도 파괴될 수 있다.

폴리페몬(Polypemon) 또는 다마스테스(Damastes)라고도 한다.

다른 도적들과 달리 지나가는 나그네를 극진히 대접하고 잠자리까지 제공한다. 그는 자신에게 모든 이에게 사이즈가 맞는 침대가 있다며 손님을 눕힌 다음 사이즈가 안 맞으면 프로크루스테스는 상대의 남는 다리를 잘라버리거나(침대보다 키가 클 경우) 침대 길이에 맞춰 늘려버리는 방법(침대보다 키가 작을 경우)으로 상대를 살해했다. 한 마디로 거짓말은 하지 않는다.

딱 한명 그 침대와 크기가 꼭 맞아 살아남은 사람은 노예가 되어 시중을 드는 걸로 나온다.


침대와 길이가 똑같은 테세우스가 나타나서 프로크루스테스를 똑같은 방법으로 죽였다. 이후로 사람들은, 어떤 절대적 기준을 정해 놓고 모든 것을 거기에 맞추려 하는 것을 ‘프로크루스테스의 침대’라고 부르고 있다.

자주 쓰이는 표현은 아니지만 자기 멋대로의 기준으로 남을 핍박하는 자들을 상대로도 비유되는 인물. 간단히 말하자면 "옷에다 몸 맞추기."

플루타크 영웅전에서도 등장하는데 세상을 떠난 제 아들 친구를 만들어준다면서 위와 같은 짓을 저질렀다. 전령 레오스가 이 자에게 잡혀있다가 테세우스에게 구출 된다


Procrustes


"Damastes" redirects here. For the spider genus, see Damastes (spider).
For the Larry Niven story, see Procrustes (short story). For the statistical analysis technique, see Procrustes analysis.

Theseus and Procrustes, Attic red-figure neck-amphora, 570–560 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Inv. 2325)
In Greek mythology, Procrustes (Προκρο?στη?) or "the stretcher [who hammers out the metal]", also known as Prokoptas or Damastes (Δαμαστ??) "subduer", was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who physically attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed. In general, when something is Procrustean, different lengths or sizes or properties are fitted to an arbitrary standard.

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In Greek mythology

In the Greek myth, Procrustes was a son of Poseidon with a stronghold on Mount Korydallos at Erineus, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis.

There he had a bed, in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night, and where he set to work on them with his smith's hammer, to stretch them to fit. In later tellings, if the guest proved too tall, Procrustes would amputate the excess length; nobody ever fit the bed exactly. Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, travelling to Athens along the sacred way, who "fitted" Procrustes to his own bed:

He killed Damastes, surnamed Procrustes, by compelling him to make his own body fit his bed, as he had been wont to do with those of strangers. And he did this in imitation of Heracles. For that hero punished those who offered him violence in the manner in which they had plotted to serve him.

Killing Procrustes was Theseus's last adventure on his journey from Troezen to Athens.


Cultural references


"It is impossible to establish universal uniformity of hours without inflicting very serious injury to workers."—Motion at the recent Trades' Congress. Cartoon from the Project Gutenberg eBook of Punch, Volume 101, 19 September 1891, by John Tenniel

A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced. In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter", the private detective Dupin uses the metaphor of a Procrustean bed to describe the Parisian police's overly rigid method of looking for clues. Jacques Derrida, in "The Purveyor of Truth", his response to Jacques Lacan's seminar on "The Purloined Letter" (1956), applies the metaphor to the structural analysis of texts: "By framing in this violent way, by cutting the narrated figure itself from a fourth side in order to see only triangles, one evades perhaps a certain complication." This is one of deconstruction's central critiques of structural (and formal) literary analysis. Slavoj ?i?ek draws upon the metaphor to critique poetic form: “The most elementary form of torturing one’s language is called poetry—think of what a complex form like a sonnet does to language: it forces the free flow of speech into a Procrustean bed of fixed forms of rhythm and rhyme.” Poet Hollis Robbins draws upon the metaphor to structure a sonnet about cutting lines to fit meter and rhyme.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms is a 2010 book by philosopher and probability theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Antifragile. Giving continuation to this idea, in Antifragile, the author uses the image of the Procrustean Bed as an allegory to modernity, linking it to nowadays´ man fear of randomness.

Procrustes analysis is the process of performing a shape-preserving Euclidean transformation to a set of shapes. This removes variations in translation, rotation and scaling across the dataset in order to move them into a common frame of reference. This is generally the precursor to further statistical analysis. A related problem in linear algebra is the orthogonal Procrustes problem of finding the closest orthogonal matrix to any given matrix.

A Procrustean solution is the undesirable practice of tailoring data to fit its container or some other preconceived structure.

In a Procrustean solution in statistics, instead of finding the best fit line to a scatter plot of data, one first chooses the line one wants, then selects only the data that fits it, disregarding data that does not, so to "prove" some idea. It is a form of rhetorical deception made to forward one set of interests at the expense of others. The unique goal of the Procrustean solution is not win-win, but rather that Procrustes wins and the other loses. In this case, the defeat of the opponent justifies the deceptive means.

In computer science, a Procrustean string is a fixed length string into which strings of varying lengths are placed. If the string inserted is too short, then it is padded out, usually with spaces or null characters. If the string inserted is too long, it is truncated. The concept is mentioned in the Sinclair ZX81 and Sinclair Spectrum user manuals, where a portion of a string is replaced by another string using Procrustean assignment—the replacement string is truncated or padded in order to have length equal to the portion being replaced. Although the term did not catch on in wider usage, it appears in some references, notably FOLDOC.

The film editor Walter Murch refers, not entirely negatively, to a certain style of film editing as "procrustean". If the first assembly of a film is too long by a certain amount, that amount is removed quickly, sometimes brutally. Then the film is viewed at this new length, and progress afterwards is aimed at smoothing out the amputations without adding length.