Episode Details

We’ve turned the basement into a casino!

A man who turns to fortune-telling to assuage his conscience. A society that chooses its victims through a lottery. Does “mathematical fairness” absolve the citizens of Omelas, or does it simply creates a more sophisticated illusion of justice?

Today it’s the dark philosophy of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Lottery in Babylon” and Machado de Assis’s “The Fortune-Teller.” How do we use fate, destiny, and algorithms to justify systemic inequality and sacrifice, unsettling our modern reliance on “chance” to explain the suffering of others?  

Episode 6.31 –

Tyranny of Chance: Assis, Borges, and the Randomized Bargain

Readings & Resources:

• Assis, Machado de. “The Fortune-Teller” (“A Cartomante”). Gazeta de Notícias, (1884).  [Waywords PDF]
• Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Lottery in Babylon” (“La lotería en Babilonia”), (1941). [Internet Archive PDF]
• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).
• Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche, (1944).
• Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, (1971).

Some Key Terms from this episode:

• Capitalist Realism – The internalization of an exploitative system—such as Babylon’s lethal lottery or modern economic structures—so completely that citizens cannot even imagine a viable alternative reality.
• Democratic Scapegoat – Definition: The process of sanitizing our guilt by mathematically equalizing the probability of suffering across everyone, masking deliberate, systemic violence as a fair game of chance.
• Will to Chance – Radical embrace of the absolute unknown that rejects utilitarian exchange, according to Bataille.

Listener’s Guide Reflection Questions

1. When you encounter a story of someone else’s “luck,” does your mind look for a pattern of justice, or does it shrug at a meaningless universe?
2. How does the process of “outsourcing” a decision to an algorithm or a coin toss change the physical sensation of responsibility in your body?
3. In what ways does the concept of “equal opportunity” prevent us from seeing any actual human extraction suffered?
4. If the suffering of a victim is determined by a “bad draw,” does that change the moral outrage to demand a change in the system?
5. What parts of your own daily “certainties” are actually just “bullseyes” you’ve painted around the random bullet holes of your experience?

Complete Resources: