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| Jonas Burgert, Roulette |
Predating all of the wonderful props at
Harry Potter's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (HSWW), the
original Wheel of Fortune surfaced in Monday Begins on Saturday,
a Soviet-era science fiction novella by brothers Strugatsky, where we
find it installed at a the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery
and Magic (НИИЧAВO). It looks like the side of a moving conveyor
belt protruding out of a wall: since it never repeats its course, the
wheel must rotate slower than one RPE (revolutions per eternity)
meaning that its radius must be infinite, and its edge, projected
into our physical universe, appears as the edge of a conveyor belt
moving past us.
Unbeknownst to most of our
contemporaries, Fortune is actually a deity, like Allah or Jesus, but
unlike them she has been worshipped since most ancient times, as Tyche in Greece and as Fortuna in Rome. She continues to
be worshipped in the present times, around the world, but especially
in the US, where her temples and shrines are everywhere, from the
humble lottery machines at every corner shop, gas station and liquor
store to the casino capitalists who inhabit the glass towers of Wall
Street. Millions of mortals supplicate before Tyche daily. Virtually
unnoticed, the cult of Tyche dominates the religious landscape in the
US: just compare the sizes of the casino buildings in Las Vegas and
Atlantic City to the country's largest cathedrals and temples: except
for a few mega-churches, the former consistently dwarf the latter.
The essential act of worshipping Tyche
is by drawing lots, from which derives the term “lottery.”
Tyche's promise is that you too may win some day, and this simple
promise is powerful enough to allow her to hold much of the
population captive to her every whim, ready to gamble away their last
dollar. Tyche's spiritual solace is that, whatever happens, it is
never your fault, just your luck. Tyche also keeps the peace,
allowing us to overcome the envy and rancor we inevitably feel
against our betters: they succeed not because of their superiority,
but because of sheer dumb luck; we could all be just like them, if
only the all-powerful Tyche would favor us.
Of our two biggest religions, Islam was
far more successful of purging all the older polytheistic deities, locking up their
idols within the Kaaba at Mecca. (I would love to take a peek inside
the Kaaba to see if Tyche is imprisoned there, except that, being an
infidel, I would get beheaded for even trying.) While the Christians
have attempted to negotiate with Tyche, thinking that there is room
in the universe for both God's will and Tyche's random chance, Islam
did no such thing: Allah is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent and omni-licious, so, if you please, check your
questioning mind at the gate and prostrate rhythmically in the
general direction of Mecca. Wagering is allowed, but only at camel
races, and only among the participating camel jockeys, while
“intoxicants and games of chance” are, according to the Quran
[5:90-91], “abominations of Satan's handiwork,” and so they are
haram (verboten). In a strict Moslem society the cult of Tyche
can gain no purchase.
Meanwhile, Christianity seems to have
utterly failed at resisting Tyche's charms. In the middle ages
Fortuna and her wheel were temporarily absorbed into Christian dogma,
making her a servant of divine will. But this gambit has failed, as
we recently saw when the Pope tried and failed to answer a simple
question posed by a young girl from a war-ravaged land: “Why did God
allow my friends to be killed?” Why does a just and merciful God
allow the murder of innocents? The real answer (“They were
unlucky”) cannot be spoken, because it would indicate that Tyche's
authority supercedes that of the supposed Almighty, causing cognitive
dissonance within the flock. At a less intellectual level, salvation
can be seen as an infinitely long winning streak, and the faithful
feel luckier from being sanctified in the blood of the Lamb. At the
almost completely non-intellectual level of superstition wherein many
believers dwell, Jesus is a sort of good luck charm. But what all of
this points to is that, in Christianity, nobody is really in charge
up there, so Tyche feels free to step in and fill the void,
incidentally absolving God of any responsibility for what actually
happens. He may be all-merciful and love mankind, but then He is not really
the one issuing the orders on a day-to-day basis. Bewildering, isn't
it?
More bewildering yet, Tyche's claim to
dominance is not limited to religion or gambling or finance. In
modern science, randomness (that is, chance, which is Tyche's domain)
is at the heart of all explanations of what happens at the level of
elementary particles. The functioning of the transistor—the device
at the heart of all electronics—is explained by saying that the instantaneous location of any given electron is not a point in space but a
probability distribution, with the actual location picked at random.
In spite of this, the observed behavior of transistors is quite
deterministic (except for a bit of hiss which we ignore).
As Einstein famously said, “God
doesn't play dice with the world.” And he was right: it is not God
who plays dice with the world, it's Tyche, and she is not shy about
it. The scientists are certainly keeping her busy with the so-called
Monte-Carlo models that are widely used in particle physics, which
are driven by randomness. The gigantic particle accelerators at
Fermilab and at CERN are the largest prayer wheels ever built,
praying that Tyche might show us an exotic particle or two.
Impressive though these are, perhaps the largest playground science
has given over to Tyche is in evolutionary biology: we are who we are
thanks to a sequence of random mutations. Thank you, Tyche, for the
opposable thumb, for bipedal locomotion, binocular vision, and for the
fact that we possess language! Without you, not only would we not
exist, but life itself would not have evolved out of primordial ooze
incessantly zapped by lightning.
I see all of this particularly clearly
because I am by nature highly resistant to Tyche's charms. The idea
of gambling revolts me, and I have never gambled, or purchased a
lottery ticket or a raffle ticket, or made a bet. To me, chance and
randomness are noise and garbage. I try to construct pockets of
difference and meaning within what appears to me as an indifferent and
meaningless universe. Any explanation that hinges on the work of
chance strikes me as one lacking explanatory depth. I do whatever I
can to eliminate chance from my life, and I actually detest the very
idea of luck. This puts me at quite a considerable advantage vis à
vis those who waste their energies on Tyche. This has nothing to do
with luck; it just has to do with conserving energy, because that is
precisely what Tyche is (in my opinion): a demon that haunts feeble
minds, forcing them to expend their energies in futile pursuits, in
order to keep other, even worse demons at bay.
Such futile pursuits can be quite
pleasant (not to me, but then I will concede that I am unusual) when
there is plenty of energy left to squander. But when that energy
starts to run out (along with most other resources on this
overcrowded, depleted, polluted planet), which it is currently
showing every sign of doing, then everyone's luck starts to
run out at the same time. As the situation goes from bad to worse,
people gamble away their savings and drop out of the game. The US
labor market since the financial collapse of 2008 is a case in point:
the labor pool has shrunk to the point that something like 10% have
lost their jobs, never to gain them back. There is a term for that:
it is called a decimation.
Decimation is a Roman military practice
that was used to discipline legions that did not perform well in
battle. Soldiers were organized in groups of ten and drew lots. Out
of each group of ten, one comrade drew the shortest stick, and was
promptly bludgeoned to death by the others. This, to them, made perfect sense.
In a superstitious culture, victory is a matter of luck, and so to
achieve victory, all one needs to do is to identify and purge the
unlucky ones, by the luck of the draw. Once they are gone, then by
definition all those who remain are lucky, and can go on to victory
confident in the knowledge that Tyche is on their side.
The decimation in the labor market has
had a similar effect: a lot of people are gone and have faded from
view, but the ones who were dismissed as companies “trimmed the
fat” are seen as the unlucky ones. Those who remain are, by
definition, lucky, and try to make the best use of their luck by
working ridiculously long hours. That may work once, but what if the
cycle of decimation is to repeat endlessly? The only historical case
of repeated decimation (the Legion of Thebes) was an act of
martyrdom, and so is not relevant. If a single round of decimation
fails to rally the troops to victory, the next one should drive them
to mutiny.
The labor market is just one example of
this sort; the retirement debacle is another. Those people in the US
who have managed to save for retirement are gambling with it, by
investing it in stocks (whose upside is limited by the economy's
inability to grow) and bonds (whose upside is limited by runaway
public debt, currency debasement, and eventual sovereign default
and/or currency devaluation). The financial collapse of 2008 has
decimated their retirement savings, and yet they are still gambling
with them. At what point will they refuse to keep playing? When all
of their savings are gone, or at some point before then?
At what point does a society made up of
gambling addicts refuse to gamble? Once they have lost everything? Or once it has become clear to them that the game has degenerated into
“Heads you lose, tails you lose”? Tyche's charms are appealing only
when she isn't cheating. But if you are invited to play, although you
(and just about everyone you know) always loses while some
perpetually “lucky” group always wins, then that fails to satisfy
the gambling urge, and Tyche fades away, to be replaced by the far
more destructive demons of envy and rancor which she previously held
in check. It will be very interesting to see how this will (pardon
the pun) play itself out. Obviously, I am not making any bets.
I walked through Times Square today, the Digital Canyon, the High Altar of Waste, and remembered something I had said to a friend years ago while in school. We were both tripping out minds out on LSD and watching CNN. An image of an African man who had been crushed by a tank flashed on the screen and I spent the rest of the night with that image burning like a nugget of molten iron in my mind. Burning, mind you. His legs and lower torso were all that remained, the rest had been neatly cut off and ground to a white speckled bloody paste by the tank's treads.
(Note to all: NEVER do LSD and watch the international news...)
At one point in my very real agony, I turned to my old friend, a lefty like myself and a newshound and a reader of books about US atrocities in South America and Africa etc. and I said
"Do you know how much fucking pain we are letting ourselves in for?"
My point was that the more we learned about the world, the worse it was going to be for us because we would never be able to escape that knowledge. Look at a shiny new gift and you see the starving kids who made it in Taiwan. Thrill at the latest action adventure flick and you come away with a sour aftertaste of militarism, sexism, and racism. Buy a bag of cookies and you buy a bag of pesticides, GMOS, and corn syrup. Nothing can escape your critical eye, including yourself.
The constant whittling away of all illusions, or at least the attempt to do so, changes a person incrementally, so slowly you don't notice but suddenly you are outside of it all. Your critical eye has reached critical mass: now you see all things inside out and upside down that are supposedly right side right.
"Through the veil!" as one old history professor used to say. You no longer get elated at the latest iPhone commercials with your friends or marvel at the magic that is Disney or worship the Kennedy brothers in a secret crypt under the stairs. People begin to suspect something is wrong with you, you openly mock the SuperDuperBowl, you make cracks about Baby Jesus helping you to find your car keys, you refuse to Buy Now!at your local Toyota Deal-Athon dealer. Curmudgeon, Crackpot, Grumpy, the accolades pile up at your feet....
This came back to me as I watched the crowds watching the enormous digital monitors and billboards in the Square. The pain of not being able to slip into the biggest lie of all, the lie that everyone else around you has allowed to flow into and through themselves, that this is somehow an ok situation, that this waste and constant jabber of lies and hucksterism, this smear of harsh light and consumption, body counts and scenic views with advertising, disposable people and trash mountains represents some kind of healthy beating heart of something. I felt a twinge of that old pain, the alienation, the sense of not being plugged into the coolest Kool-Aid around. But then I said "Who fucking cares?" These people are lost, not their fault, they aren't all idiots but rather lost in an illusion, a maze of lies and pictures and warped mirrors. They can't see the man behind the curtain and they sure as fuck cannot see that the machine he is operating is nearing it's breaking point.
But when I watched that damned cartoon tonight it hit again. It's good to know these things because I like to know whats up, I'm a bad news first kind of guy. It's just hard to be the bearer of such knowledge, in a sea of indifference and fantasy. Gaze into the abyss and the abyss gazes into you, right?