Every day promptly at five o’clock, our two dogs rouse themselves from their relentless relaxation and trot up to Nick’s office to agitate for a walk. At the very least, the dogs have a good sense of time, but I wonder if they also have a sense of a hopeful future – do they hope that they are going to have a nice long walk, that there might be a squirrel to chase, or another dog to sniff? Or is their sense of the future measured in mere minutes, perhaps driven by a swelling bladder? Certainly a sense of the future is one of the defining characteristics of humans. Perhaps our cave-dwelling ancestors had a more limited outlook – wondering if the winter was going to be cold, or if they had enough wood to keep the fire going – but as cognitive abilities and communication improved, helpful tips were passed to future generations. Now a good chunk of our day is thinking about the future – for ourselves, our parents, our children, our grandchildren and even our planet. And with this focus on the future comes another uniquely well-developed human characteristic. Hope.
At some level, contemplating the future involves assessing probabilities, determining which ones can be manipulated and then devising the best strategy to improve the odds. This is what gets us out of bed in the morning – continuously working to assure a full and productive life and a safe environment for ourselves and future generations. Then there are risks that cannot be manipulated – like our health or odd twists of fate. And this also gets us out of bed in the morning – the idea that an unfettered future cannot be guaranteed and we must all seize the moment. And finally, hope is what fills the cracks between what we do today to improve tomorrow, and that stretch of time until the future morphs into the present. But even the most clear-eyed master of the universe, who has a firm and manipulative grasp of all the probabilities, has to sit back and wait. At some point we all have to do what we can and then just hope for the best.
All of these thoughts were prompted by the recent mega-millions lottery which was offering a prize of some $600 million dollars, instantly propelling the lucky winner onto the Forbes richest Americans issue. All you needed to do was buy a ticket and then hope for the best. Government run lotteries have been around since the Roman Empire and have often provided funding for civic projects. For example, Augustus (31 BC – 41 AC) relied on lotteries to rebuild Rome. Most recently, lotteries have been used to fund the 2012 London Olympic games. Supporters have positioned a lottery as a benign “voluntary tax,” but critics point out that the probability of winning is essentially nil, and say that lotteries are a “tax on stupidity,” primarily attracting the poor and uneducated, who are the least able to afford such an indulgence. And then there is the curious argument that the sudden, unearned wealth of lotteries undermines the work ethic. England banned its state lottery in 1823, and theUnited States followed in 1892. Eventually, these governments could not afford to ignore the windfall funding of a “voluntary tax.” Lotteries reemerged in theUS in the 1960s, but it was not until 1992 that England reinstated its national lottery.
The argument over lotteries has focused on whether or not government should be promoting gambling with such impossible odds – basically selling bogus and irrational hope. Humans are considered rationale beings, but the flip side is that we also are perfectly capable of being totally irrational. There is a very funny scene in the movie Dumb and Dumber where the totally inept doofus, played by Jim Carrey, pursues the unattainable Lauren Holly character. She turns him down for a date, and then he inquires as to his future probabilities:
“What are my chances?”
“Not good,” says the Lauren Holly character
“You mean like 1 in 100?”
“No, I’d say more like one in a million,” she says, trying to brush him off for good.
Jim Carrey then exults, “So you are telling me that there is a chance – Yeah!!”
We all laugh at the stupidity of Jim Carrey, who believes the odds of one in a million give him a realistic hope, and yet we all go out and buy lottery tickets when the chances are at least one hundred times worse. And Jim Carrey has the opportunity to improve his odds, although truly remote, by getting a better haircut and fixing his chipped tooth. In contrast, lottery players can do nothing to improve their odds. Even buying more than one ticket won’t significantly improve your odds and statisticians also helpfully point out that it is more likely that you will die in a car crash on the way to buying your lottery ticket, or that it is more likely that you will be hit by lightening.
However, even the most uneducated must know that they are not going to win, but cheerfully buy tickets anyway. We bought four. The hope of winning is irrational, but this isn’t the point, because lotteries operate at the very remote end of the spectrum where hope turns into pure fantasy. And fantasy is still an important human attribute, a necessary escape from the rigors and anxiety of hope. We indulge in fantasies every day by reading a book or going to a movie, but for the low, low price of one dollar the lottery lets me fantasize for an entire week and lets my imagination run wild planning what I would do with untold riches. The essayist Charles Lamb (whose name I am familiar with since his pen name “Elia” often appears in crossword puzzles) was an enthusiastic supporter of the lottery and envisioned it as a spiritual force that freed the imagination and delivered many from a humdrum existence. In the 1820s he wrote:
“Let the [lottery] be termed a delusion … which instead of beguiling its followers into swamps, caverns and pitfalls, allures them on with all the blandishments of enchantment to a Garden of Eden, an ever-blooming Elysium of delight.”
I do take exception with Lamb’s word, “delusion,” a word that to me describes a harmless fantasy that is mistaken for reality, i.e. someone who truly believes that they are in possession of the winning lottery ticket. A delusion can become dangerous; after all delusional thinking is a psychiatric diagnosis and is also a legitimate defense in a murder trial. At the very least it can turn you into the worse version of yourself, which happened to me one Christmas. Every year our family has a Christmas grab bag which consists of cheap or amusing gifts contributed by family and friends. The presents are wrapped and put into a pile. In the first round of the game, everyone rolls dice, and if you get a 7, 11 or doubles you select one of the gifts and open it up. When everything is opened, each person showcases their gifts to the group in preparation for the more frantic second round. Once again the dice are thrown and if you get a 7, 11 or doubles, you get to select someone else’s item or offload one of your losers onto someone else’s pile. There is a time limit of five minutes, and typically, one of the gifts emerges as the “must-have” item that is madly exchanged as the time winds down. One memorable year it was two lottery tickets. Quietly and collectively, the entire family group had the same delusional thought that these were in fact the winning tickets. The race was on. The dice were passed around the room faster and faster and anyone with a winning roll snatched the lottery tickets. One of the participants was a sister-in-law whose sense of entitlement would become absolutely unbearable if she won. Even though I knew it was totally irrational, I was going to do everything in my power to prevent her from getting those tickets. After all, as the lottery might whisper, “it could be her.” Our children, Ned and Frances, aged 10 and 6 were also playing, and would have preferred to use their winning rolls to grab the fancy chocolate bars or other treats among the gifts, but I screamed at them, “Get the lottery tickets!” only to have them snatched away moments later by my sister-in-law. The lottery tickets must have changed hands 20 times in the last two minutes and we were limp with exhaustion when the final buzzer went off. But there was Ned, triumphantly holding the tickets with a winning grin on his face. He turned to me and said, “We won Mom, we won! What are we going to do with all this money. Can I at least spend part of it?” Poor kid, he thought that we were actually vying for real winning tickets and didn’t realize that I had made the leap from a fun family fantasy to vindictive delusion in five quick minutes.
Nick bought four lottery tickets for the recent mega millions lottery and at dinner that night, told his mother that she could select two of tickets to keep as her own. She looked at the tickets very carefully and in that moment I knew that we were thinking the same thing – I thought about how foolish I would feel if I had the winning lottery ticket and then just gave it away, and I knew that she was thinking, “Boy it would be so stupid if I had the winning lottery ticket in my hand and didn’t pick it.” After several moments of contemplation, she turned to Nick and said sweetly, “Honey, why don’t I just keep all these tickets, couldn’t you just get a couple more for yourself on your way home?”
So maybe it boils down to this. When the dogs go for a walk in the winter, they like to hunt for slow moving voles, and are occasionally successful. So perhaps that is hope. In summer they like to chase squirrels who merely scamper up a tree, but sometimes the dogs come close. So maybe that is fantasy. But when our pampered dogs howl with the coyotes at night, they are just as delusional as I am.
The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters. Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.
Critics say state-run lotteries head down a moral abyss on a slippery slope,
That government has ********* off its soul based on the lure of irrational hope,
That people must be ********* that they are just throwing money out the door,
And that lotteries only appeal to the most vulnerable like the downtrodden poor.
But wait, you don’t need a college ********* to see that your chances are slim to none,
Just as long as you avoid the delusion, you can sit back, fantasize and enjoy the fun.
After all, it could be you!
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auctioned, cautioned, education
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