Like all men in Babylon, I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave. I have known absolute power, public disgrace, and imprisonment.
Source: Borges, Jorge Luis “The Lottery in Babylon.” In: Jorge Luis Borges The Garden of Forking Paths. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Open Source 2014.
current affairs
In The Atlantic article “Why luck matters more than you might think” Robert H. Frank asks to what extent good or bad luck play a role in life’s successes and failures. If we acknowledge that good luck plays a large role in success, does this make us more prone to feel grateful and to give something back to society?
links
questions
1. What idea does Borges want to present by means of the allegory of a lottery determining all aspects of our lives?
2. Does the last paragraph of the story map onto the ways that different people view the role of luck in life? How so?
3. Robert H. Frank invokes Tom Gilovich’s analogy of tailwinds and headwinds to explain why we tend to discount luck in our successes. Explain.
4. If our successes are not all due to talent or hard work, but to a large part also to luck, then does this give us more of a reason to be grateful? Why shouldn’t we be equally grateful for our talents and the opportunity to put in hard work?
5. Robert H. Frank argues that with the realization that our successes are largely due to luck comes public-spiritedness. Why might this be the case?