The Tyranny of Chance: Assis, Borges, and the Randomized Bargain
About this episode
This episode explores the dark philosophy of chance and its implications on justice and systemic inequality through the works of Borges and Assis.
We’ve turned the basement into a casino! A man who turns to fortune-telling to assuage his conscience. A society that chooses its victims through a lottery. Does “mathematical fairness” absolve the citizens of Omelas, or does it simply creates a more sophisticated illusion of justice? Today it’s the dark philosophy of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Lottery in Babylon” and Machado de Assis’s “The Fortune-Teller.” How do we use fate, destiny, and algorithms to justify systemic inequality and sacrifice, unsettling our modern reliance on “chance” to explain the suffering of others? Episode 6.31 – Tyranny of Chance: Assis, Borges, and the Randomized Bargain Readings & Resources: Assis, Machado de. “The Fortune-Teller” (“A Cartomante”). Gazeta de Notícias, (1884). [ Waywords PDF ] Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Lottery in Babylon” (“La lotería en Babilonia”), (1941). [ Internet Archive PDF ] Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche , (1944). Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice , (1971). Some Key Terms from this…
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