will get you so far andluck always runjs out

Nonetheless, the lottery still ensured that political office in the various legislative bodies (although military generals and other similar positions were always elected) did not rest in the same hands for too long (helping to prevent corruption), and also that all demes (district/constituencies), tribes (administrative and military units) and classes were represented relatively proportionally to their size. Take the Athenian example – women or slaves were not allowed to be selected by the lottery, so the lottery was not ‘fair’ in a substantive sense. Lottery is certainly democratic in this sense, but lottery is not always fair. For example, military drafts often use lottery in order to treat every citizen eligible to serve equally – without bias such as age, wealth, race, or ‘who you know’ (note the anti-Iraq war slogan ‘Draft the Bush twins!’, which expresses the idea that if Bush used a lottery to draft soldiers for his invasion of Iraq, risking his own twins being selected, then Bush would less of a war-hawk).

Yet we also agree that lottery is an eminently fair way of making a decision when we want to remove reasons from the process. The judge sentenced the sailors to death, stating that they would have escaped guilt had all three men drawn lots to decide who would be eaten.įor many of us today it would seem ridiculous and even dangerous to introduce a chance mechanism into the heart of the political process. Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens, the two sailors pleaded guilty to having killed and eaten cabin boy, Richard Parker, with whom they were shipwrecked, after supposedly he fell into a coma. In the 1884 High Court case of The Queen vs.

God instructs Moses to distribute land by lot. That is how Jonah ends up in the whale – he picked the short straw. The Bible has numerous references to lot. Ancient Athens, Renaissance Venice and Florence used lotteries to randomly select citizens to rule, and present-day San Marino still does. Societies used to be on far more friendly terms with luck, no doubt some still are. We need to think seriously about randomly selecting people to fill political offices. Rather than fighting the inherent randomness of our world, is there not a way we can use this unstoppable force to our advantage? Is the only option to swim upstream against the current? One alternative is to re-embrace chance, or luck, or whatever you want to call it.

Since at least Plato, political organization has been theorized as a means with which to order the world. The world can be a scarily unpredictable place, and for many people, the point of politics is to make society more rational in some way, to collectively ensure that human existence is more steady and harmonious, so as to try and cushion some of the impact of the chaotic world we live in. Nature throws us major curve balls all-too-often, with tsunamis, floods and earthquakes causing utter devastation and loss of life with little or no warning. Human existence is frustratingly and sometimes terrifyingly arbitrary.

Will get you so far andluck always runjs out