Lottery of Birth
What is your luck?
I’ve been thinking about luck lately. I’m lucky I don’t live in a war-torn country, and never have. I am also lucky to be born into a loving, supportive family. I am unlucky in other ways, but it is all relative. We are all given a deck of cards and born into circumstances and environments that can vary vastly, and had no choice in. There is almost nothing internal or external to you that is a totally blank slate when you are born. What are some things you did not have control over when entering the world? Aspects like:
Your existence in general
Where you were born
What era you were born into
Who you were born to
What health you were born with
Which values you were born into (ie. language(s)/symbols you speak and think in, education, religion/ideologies)
Your social sphere (who you grow up around, go to school with)
Traumatic experiences or miracles that happened outside of your control
And certainly many more
The work of political philosopher John Rawls’ work explains why the concept of luck has had a central place in discussions of justice. In his well-known A Theory of Justice he discusses ideas around social and natural lotteries. The underlying idea is that every person’s starting point in society is the outcome of a social lottery (the political, social, and economic circumstances into which each person is born) and a natural lottery (the biological potentials each person is born with). Rawls says that the outcome of each person’s social and natural lottery is, like the outcomes of ordinary lotteries, a matter of good or bad “fortune” or “luck”.
This is not to say that a person’s life cannot be also controlled and sculpted through intentional decisions and choices. This is the trope of every motivational speaker—"create your own luck”, but the access to this sculpting comes later in life, and the scope of tools we have to create decisions that better our circumstances are also to some degree determined by the perspectives we developed early on. Some may have to do more or less work to reach a similar position. And some may have more or less resources both internally and externally to do the work to reach the same position. Although we may be closer in a position with those around us on some aspects, the closer you look the more you realise every person is on mind-boggingly different planes of this spectrum, only connected by our messy humanness.
With this in mind, it is difficult to see how any one can fully and meaningfully judge another person, positively or negatively. We can and should always keep each other in check, and we can and should always be trying to make better choices, but with an idle concept in the background to know that your luck may have given you different resources and positions than the person next to you. Not all luck is equal.
This writing was based on and informed by this piece by Sloww.