Against Merit
The religious metaphor makes God and the Virgin the bestowers of the lottery’s miracles.
.. It was the culture of Catholicism, after all, that invented the probability calculus.
.. Playing the lottery means trying to make a connection with divine providence, giving God a chance to intervene in our lives, rejecting the narcissistic idea that success is due solely to our own efforts—in short, accepting grace over merit.
.. Even when it leads to success, merit is merciless, lonely, bleak. Luck, meanwhile, is grace unbidden, whether it heaps Job with blessings or strips him of everything.
.. The lottery is a yearning for paradise: for the age of hunters and gatherers, before agriculture and work. According to Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics, hunter-gatherer tribes (which still inhabit some parts of Australia) don’t work: they talk (while they’re out shopping in nature) and they play (while they’re hunting and fishing). To live like this is to be “another being” (as Johan Huizinga says of play)
.. Play is a simulation of need (goals, resources, rules, ambition, traps, success, or failure), happily divorced from need. It’s like the exercise of animals who attack each other but not in earnest, or who trap something they don’t need.