![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() If we experience good fortune, we want to believe it is because we did something to deserve it: perhaps it’s karma paying us back for some good deed we did, or perhaps our hard work and diligence paid off and we’re now being rewarded, however indirectly. We humans don’t tend to like random chance: we want there to be a reason for things that happen. Even nature itself, such as the number of grains of sand on a beach, is supposedly controlled by the Company through its lottery. For it is also about the human instinct to see things as more than mere blind chance, to attribute a guiding hand or a controlling force to events which are in actual fact the result of mere coincidence.Ī death from natural causes becomes impossible in Babylon, because the Company ‘must’ be behind all things. Even setting aside totalitarian regimes, how much control do we have over our lives? And those things which we don’t have control over: are they merely the result of random chance, or is someone else pulling the strings?īut even to restrict an analysis of ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ to the political is to do the story a disservice. So, rather than just being a story about totalitarian political power, ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ invites us to ask important questions about human agency. ![]()
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