'Because darkness,' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things - all things! - but only so long as it remains invisible.'"* - R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye
What goes up must come down - a far more ancient aphorism
Have you ever gambled before?
Doesn't matter what kind. Dice, cards, crypto, bonds, Manchester United goals, fists on the playground, bullets on the battlefield (or the university campus if you were a cultist), proposing to a girl while unsure of her "yes" - all of those were and are gambles. Have you? Ever done those? If you haven't, you certainly will one day, one way or another.
How will it feel?
I can tell you. Your palms will prickle with sweat. You heart will flutter frantic in your chest like a trapped hummingbird. Your nostrils will flare like those of a horse at the chase, you breaths coming faster and faster, eyes sharpening, world widening to a vista -- or narrowing to a single tabletop, a single number on a screen, a single face that means the world. It will be exhilaration and danger and confidence and fear all rolled up in a ball.
YES?
Why do you suppose that is? To answer that, let me ask a different question: wouldn't gambling be so much easier if you knew with certainty what the outcome would be?
Okay. Once upon a time, there was a cavewoman (or Australopithecus or whatever) Then there was a caveman. And another and another. They banded together because killing each other would leave the survivors doomed to die alone from a thousand forces of snow and wind and red-clawed nature. What did they do?
Consider what's involved in hunting: you have to identify the hunting ground, where the animals are likely to be found. You have to know their behavior, you have to recognize their tracks and you have to be able to hide from their senses until you're close enough to strike.
Either way, the fundamental ability behind all that? The thing you must do first, last and always until the very end? To track, you must anticipate. To pursue, you must prospect. To hide, you must expect. In short, you must predict.
And if you think prediction was important to hunters, well then, it was a thousand times more important when we developed agriculture. When you could no longer escape bad conditions by relocating, you had to adapt in place, learn to recognize the cycles, fortify against the future through knowledge. Crop rotation, soil erosion, weather and droughts; you can see how a farmer might be really really interested in knowing as much of the future as possible.
If you really think about it, all of human action in history is inseparable from the concept of and the need to look into the future and see what is there. Every sphere of human endeavour entails being able to better know what comes next. Hammer hits nail, nail enters wood. That which comes before precedes that which comes next. Effect after cause.
NOPICTURES
I will take it a step further and say that not just human action but human cognition is inseparable from prediction. Look into a baby's eyes sometime and know what is it to be perpetually and continuously stunned by the world around you, to be but a nervous system moving through time. Everything is new, nothing is understood and all is unexpected. The patterns of the world push their way in through eyes and ears and tongue, pushing back the darkness of absolute holy ignorance step by step, pain by pain, fall by stand, until the child looks around and realizes: "I am a person. I begin here and end here and the rest of the world is out there. I am this and the rest of y'all are that." Throw a ball up, it falls back down. Touch a hot stove, feel pain. Push a chair, hear a squeak. Read the next sentence and know that a noun will come after the word "the." The gap between cause and effect, between past and future that is papered with this knowledge? That's prediction.
Anyway, back to history. No, skip that. Let's be a little more interesting and look at mythology.
For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. - 2 Peter Chapter 1 Verse 21
If you look into the legends, religions and myths born of our history, prophets and oracles and seers and augurs and diviners are all over the place. Greek mythology has Tiresias (blinded to the present, seer of the future), Cassandra (always right, never believed), the Oracles of Delphi (through whom the gods spoke) not to mention the three Moirae, goddesses of past, present and future (aka The Sisters of Fate for those of you that played God of War). The Norse Vikings too had their Norns (three goddesses of - you guessed it - past, present and future.) Igbos have their Agbala and Ngeledibe. The Hindu have their Akashwani oracles, to say nothing of the veritable cavalcade of prophets that fill the pages of the Christian Bible.
NOPICTURES
Beyond that, we have practices of divination and augury such as Roman haruspex and the Chinese I-Ching, Jewish Kabbalah, Tarot cards and Norse futhark. Like an inversion of the proverbial flashlight that looked for darkness everywhere and found it not, humans look for omens and find them everywhere: in birdsong and the coming of vultures, in campfires and entrails, by looking up at the stars and by pondering the remnants of tea. Mediums spoke to the dead, dibia spoke to the ancestors and Joseph spoke to dreams themselves.
I could talk about real-life 'prophets' like Nostradamus and that fellow that started the Mormon Church or David Koresh but that would just be gilding the lily. Long story short, humans have always been obsessed with seeing the future -- and why not? The future is the only game in town.
The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice is so pleasurable, that I assume it must be evil. - Heywood Broun
We mentioned gambling earlier. Now perhaps we can tackle the answer to my question: with gambling as intense, addictive and fun as it is, would it be more so if you had all the answers?
There's the money of course. There's the seeking of desperate advantage, the dramatic transformation of circumstance that can come from running animals, the card table, the slot machine or the little cardboard ticket bought in a gas station. The big win. There's that.
That's a piece of it but not the real answer.
There's the challenge of it, the competition, the thrill of beating the guy on the other side of the table or "the house" if you're playing in a casino, of your team winning La Liga while the other guy's team loses, of surviving when death is flying at you in bullet form.
We're getting closer.
Here's what I think: if you want to ruin gambling for the gambler, make him a perfect winner. Let him count cards infallibly. Let his roulette balls always land on black. Let her figure out the lottery number algorithm. The first time will be shocking, the second time orgasmic, the third time incredible and the fourth?
Routine.
They'll win the money, yes, but quickly find the rush is gone, the joy of victory has turned to ashes in their mouth. The money is in pocket but the game is now in developer mode. He has stepped past the velvet rope and found an empty throne, crossed into the inner circle and found it to be a cog.
(screen-grabbed from my legally-acquired copy of the Matrix Reloaded)
If you've read Frank Herbert's Dune, then you know what a disaster truly infallible precognition would be. To know the future is to be trapped by it; absolute prophecy constrains absolutely. The joy of gambling, of successfully taking the chance and winning is in the not-knowing, in taking the chance. Humans don't want to see as a god sees, we want to be loved as a god loves, to leap into the unknown and be caught in the palm of a divine hand because we are worthy, not infinite. Seeing the future is something we reserve for non-participants, for people and things, gods and high priests and oracles, that we can consult without actually being. The more they work, the more we seek them, until we can't take a decision without them -- or until they give a future we disagree with.
If you want to spoil the gambler's fun, give him the power to never lose. If you want to spoil the future, then make us prophets.
i.e. broken up into two parts for your convenience. You're welcome.
References
None - Excluding the pics and the quotes, this part was written off the top of my head. See next rock.
Elsewhere
You might also enjoy previous entries in this series (which is apparently a series now):
Human History X: The Mapmakers
Human History X: The Users and The Used
Human History X: The Forgetful Storytellers
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