SELF HYPOCRISY: THE LIE OF LUCK
March 12th, 2008
Are you feeling lucky? I hope so. But don’t press your luck, because there is no such thing. There is only blind chance and randomness. Luck is a purely historical concept. It only works when you look backwards.
When the dice come up seven, then you know you were lucky. Luck is a word we use to describe the past, it has no meaning for the future.
People have a terrible ambivalence towards chance. On the one hand, we play with it. Blind chance is recreational, from the craps tables to the pick-up bars, we love to play the odds.
But blind chance also terrifies us. Humans need an explanation for everything, a reason. We need that reason because we like to think we’re in control. That’s what humanity is; we’re the animal that controls things, manipulates the environment, makes effects out of causes.
We realize that blind chance plays a big part in our lives, but as soon as it happens we explain it away. That’s where the self-hypocrisy comes in. We look back and attribute a cause to that which had no cause at all; it was merely the working out of random chance.
The upcoming baseball season will give you dozens of opportunities to see what I mean. Baseball is a game of skill and strategy, but it’s chance that makes all those strategies stupid or brilliant.
A fly ball tinks off the foul pole and becomes a grand slam. The pitcher goes from being a gamer to a choker, his manager goes from being a gutsy genius who sticks with his players to a blockhead idiot who froze when he should have yanked the pitcher.
That’s what the broadcasters will say, the sportswriters will write and that’s what we fans will believe. But it was really just a random gust that brought that foul ball back a quarter inch so it hit the pole. It was blind chance. But that’s not the way we’ll remember it. We’ll give it meaning, because that’s what we do.
The inexplicable drives us crazy. We can’t stand it, so we don’t.
We make up stories instead. The trendy, semiotic phrase for it is “the narrative.” People tell nice stories to make sense of the world. We write histories and attribute a cause to everything that happened. And when a better reason eludes us, we call it luck.
Darwin talked about survival of the fittest. He might have added a codicil to that profound thought—survival of the luckiest.
Once upon a time there was a trilobite who was smarter than all the other trilobites, but you never heard of him. He fell into a fumarole and boiled before he could reproduce. Maybe you were born because the two fastest sperm collided and let number three get to the egg first.
“Why me?” people say after a bad break. Well, sometimes it’s because you let yourself get fat, sometimes it’s because you drove drunk—those are reasons, things you could control—but the guy in the car you hit? That was just his bad luck.
Chance can reach out and grab you by the neck at any moment. No wonder we lie to ourselves with hypocritical morality tales about fate and luck, they are very comforting.
They are also highly dangerous. We need to be very careful when we look for reasons why whatever happened—by chance—happened. Because we are going to find some.
When things go our way we cheer our luck like it was real, like we earned it. Acting like we believe in our good luck is a silly hypocrisy, but it’s harmless enough. The real damage comes when things go badly and we look for reasons, for someone to blame, for a scapegoat.
Like, “the witches,” or “the black helicopters,” or “the Jews.” That’s when reason becomes hypocritical and bad stuff happens. Humans have been doing it since the first lucky, mutated ape picked up a rock and slew the first unlucky member of his new species because Zog had an ugly blotch on his forehead that angered the gods.
None of this is an excuse to give up, to do nothing, let the chips fall where they may. Quite the contrary, when you can’t control everything you better control as much as you can as effectively as you can. But save a little space in your worldview for blind chance. It will save you a world of trouble.
Heck, if you’re a politician it could save the world a world of trouble.
