The fact that the Irish media last week published the results of a British MORI survey which found that people who had won the National Lottery were no happier than before implies that someone expected us to be surprised by this.
Certainly, those of us who have never won the Lotto are deeply gratified by the news, especially if we are not in the habit of buying lottery tickets. We enjoy this vindication of our ill-fortune and lack of motivation. (My own rationale for my weekly failure to invest in the Lotto is that my chances of winning are only marginally better if I have a ticket than if I have not. I know there's a flaw in this somewhere, but I don't lose any sleep about it.)
But I doubt if many people really believe that winning the Lotto will make life better or that this is the purpose of it. The most it would achieve is the elimination of a few headaches, or rather their replacement with aches of a different kind.
There used to be a television advert for the National Lottery which showed two different families at getting-up time. One family was in the deepest throes of the bedlam which is the lot of any normal family at this hour: alarm clocks, bathroom battles, cereal murder. The other, a couple without children, were shown turning over in their immaculately white bed as the clock ticked on.
The advert cut between the two scenes, from the uproar of one to the tranquility of the other, before finally settling on the couple still in bed. Once you saw the National Lottery logo, you understood: the couple still in bed had won the Lotto. The slogan was: "It could be you".
The idea, which illustrates perfectly the nature of the illusion on which the Lotto is based, is that most people would like nothing better than to stay in bed all day. But is there a single person in the country who would trade the life they have created or been allotted for one without even a reason for getting up in the morning?
Most people like the idea of staying in bed all day, so long as they don't have to actually do it. One day in the year would be more than enough. And most people, in the heart of hearts, also identify with the bedlam of toothpaste and Rice Krispies, because this is what they recognise as healthy normality. In as far as they think of winning the Lotto at all, what they long for is to have this daily struggle made easier by a windfall.
Most families with two or three children, a mortgage, a car and an average income, would have their major financial worries relieved by a win of, say, £100,000. This would allow them to pay off their mortgage, replace the family car and buy those few extra comforts they've had to do without. This would enable their lives to go on, somewhat easier, as before.
ALTHOUGH most of us might, if asked, profess a desire to win £2-ú3 million, this is the last thing any of us needs. Such an amount would be far more likely to decimate the lives we have put together, which after all are the only ones we know. For if you have £3 million in the bank, earning close on £1,000 a day, how do you get yourself out of bed to earn a small fraction of this?
It should be obvious that the National Lottery is not geared to maximising human happiness, but to maximising profits. It would be possible, in any given week, to give upwards of a dozen families the means to transform the humdrum struggle of their lives, but this would not lend itself to the kind of promotion on which the Lotto depends. Single prizes of £1 million to £4 million are much easier to promote, much more appealing to the fantasy which the Lottery has created.
And it is a fantasy. Most people are either incapable of imagining a life radically different from the one they already have or incapable or creating such a life no matter how much money they're given. The idea that such a life can be created by money alone is the most insidious illusion of all. We in Ireland are especially susceptible to this kind of fantasy, and of course the National Lottery works assiduously on this predisposition through its promotion of the Lotto.
But it goes much deeper than this. I don't know how commonplace it is in other parts of the world, but Irish people seem to have this idea that the capacity to improve life for ourselves in utterly dependent on the amount of money we are able to extract from external sources. We think of money almost as a direct measure of the capacity to realise dreams.
THE funny thing is that for all the present public obsession with the alleged greed of the business community, if you listen to a successful business person, it will almost invariably strike you about them that they are not interested in money in this way at all. A truly great businessman tends to see money as a tool, something to be employed to extract hidden or otherwise inaccessible value from hitherto inert substances, places and processes.
In Ireland, we have traditionally looked to the external source for the means to create our own survival, whether through soup kitchens, cohesion funding or computer factories. Even in the most positive forms of community action, there has been a tendency to see our salvation purely in the amount of funding we are able to "draw down", rather than perceiving the potential wealth of talent, energy and creativity which, with the help, by all means, of a few bob, something can be made to exist which did not exist before.
In this regard Lotto culture is deeply dangerous, not merely to our capacity for self-starting, but to our ability to imagine ourselves better off in ways which would make us truly happy. Lotto culture either has us going around depressed because we feel we will never be rich or, in the case of the "lucky" few, moping in bed worrying that some crooked banker is going to siphon off all their money.
It is strange that, whereas the media are anxious to discuss greed in almost all its other incarnations, there is a marked reluctance to focus on the Lotto culture's creation of appetites which have only the flimsiest possibility of realisation, and the not very attractive transformation of collective aspirations which this involves.
I don't suppose this reluctance has anything to do with the size of the National Lottery's advertising budget.
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