Prizes

I won the raffle. I never win raffles. Indeed, that is what I said when I won the raffle, which seems self-evidently incorrect with hindsight. It occurs to me that it is one of the most platitudinous inaccuracies in modern speech (and that's saying something), being statistically provable as incorrect. Of course, now that I have actually won a raffle, the statistics are much more provable, and I may be bound to say that I win raffles with a frequency that is roughly consistent with the aggregate probability of all the raffles I have taken part in. This is clearly nowhere near as neat as saying you never win raffles and is probably a cast iron conversation killer. So I guess next time I'm short of things to say in a raffle situation I'll just have to remain mute, or possibly relay the story of how I used to believe myself incapable of winning raffles until I won one. Yep, being stood next to me at a raffle is going to continue to be a conversational goldmine. 

I think I might have viewed the statement about never winning a raffle as a bit of a family heirloom, as it is a favourite of my mum's, deployed most inaccurately on the occasion she won a trip to New York in a free raffle. I think for me there was a sense of familial entitlement to the downtrodden enoblement of being an eternal loser. But this outlook itself is all about a sense of entitlement: the idea that the fact of our 'never' having won is somehow a universal injustice, that raffle upon raffle has been weighted against us, denying us our rightful prize. This is only an extension of the mindset that allows successful entrepreneurs to believe that their success is entirely due to their hard work and genius, whilst it allows everyone else to feel resentful that their hard work is not similarly rewarded. It is common knowledge that we have to hold an opinion of ourselves as in some way special so that we may avoid the crushing depression that will inevitably come from realising that we are just one of 7 billion idiots bumbling about the planet with no real idea what we're doing or why we're doing it. However, this opinion must also be one of humanity's greatest stumbling blocks: if we're so clever, why would we need to listen to others? Time after time we collectively suffer the consequences of this surfeit of hubris, "never again" we all say before getting straight back to thinking we can shit gold and giving ourselves chronic constipation. 

Would changing our attitudes to raffles, the lottery or any other games of chance change any of these things? There is a chapter of the excellent '10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10' that deals with our relationship to the random, looking briefly at its transition from a cause of fear throughout the majority of human history (largely because the unknown generally brought death and/or destruction) to a source of entertainment and stimulation in the modern era through games of chance. Whilst the chapter is not explicit on the point, it seems as if taking the danger out of the random has somehow convinced us we have control over it. We are probably no more superstitious than our ancestors but in all likelihood we have a stronger belief in our ability to influence random chance than them. We have more agency over our lives than ever before, although possibly not as much as we think we do. So much of what we think we know about the world we live in is based on assumptions about how much technology, government or corporations impact on our lives and we have little, if any, evidence to support these assumptions. Our understanding of the world seems as informed by James Bind as Edward Snowden, and it is through this agglomeration of fact and fiction that we arrive at our understanding of our control over our destiny. Given our propensity to overestimate our own abilities and agency, is it any surprise we believe that we can tame chance and, when we fail to, we feel cheated? I'm fairly certain that much of the frustration underlying the social media rages that wash across our age is due to this misconception of the limits of our possible agency in fate. 

In my defence, I'd like to think that my surprise at winning the raffle was a genuine surprise that random chance had resulted in my favour despite the logic of the odds telling me that it was unlikely. I genuinely don't think that my raffle winnings are reparations that the world should pay me for all the statistical wrongs it has influcted on me thus far in my life; I just think it was a nice surprise. I guess if we can view as many as possible of the good things in life like that, then we're probably doing OK. Certainly if we view less of the setbacks as personal sleights, we'll be less angry.