I won the lottery tonight. At least I won according to one of my friends methods. What he said was pick a set of numbers and then never play them. Then every time your numbers don’t come up you have won the price of a ticket.
The lottery costs £2 a ticket and there are 100 or so games a year, so you can only win £200 this way – but the big advantage is that you can play any number of times. The chances of winning any prize in the UK lottery is just over 10%, so actually you will win only £180 for each set of numbers.
There is a technique for roulette (best for wheels without a double zero) where you bet both odd and even. You double the bet on the one you lose. If you win then you go back to your initial stake. You are guaranteed to be able to win almost nothing and lose almost nothing. The only problem is that if you have a long losing streak then you need a lot of money.
But people don’t work that way. The people running the games depend on greed – we want that jackpot prize. Success for those running the games relies on one of the seven deadly sins.
I was thinking about the seven deadly sins. One of the interesting ones is envy. Apparently it is about feeling sad (about the success of others). Another is sloth, which might actually have meant depression originally – and many depressed people can find it hard to get motivated so you can see the link.
What it sounds to me is that the seven deadly sins as a concept included things we would now never think of as a sin.
Seeing depression as something people are doing wrong would be strange today. You don’t expect people to “choose” not to be depressed.
There was an Italian case (Forzano et al., 2010) where a judge accepted there was a genetic predisposition to murder. Will the future mean some of the crimes we believe in today will be seen as conditions in the future. I heard a talk by somebody recently that effectively said our lives are psychologically pre-determined when we are born.
There are a couple of songs I like. The first is John Mellencamp – Hotdogs and Hamburgers. A song about choosing right or wrong – and how that fits in to history. I hope we never see the near extermination of a people group as anything other than wrong.
The second is a song by Alice Cooper. He wrote it about the Columbine school shootings. Essentially it is the same message – we choose between good and bad. Many people have the same influences but react to them in different ways.
It may be old fashioned, and maybe the idea will become sneered at in the future, but for now I believe people can choose right or wrong.
But what if society moves on from that? Would it change how we treat a murderer? Well if somebody has a genetic predisposition to murder (or anything we currently see as wrong) then we have no hope of changing them – there is no rehabilitation possible. The only answer would be to exclude them from society for life.
And that is the other side of believing people can choose wrong – it means we can believe in redemption – that people can change.
This is one reason I find it hard to condemn people for text messages they sent 10 years ago. I don’t believe how you acted 10 years ago needs to have any relevance to who you are now. I mean, a jail term of up to 6 months for a crime means it is considered “spent” after 7 years (you don’t need to declare it), but a text message or a tweet seems never to be “spent”.