A Somewhat Literary Lunch

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On my way to lunch today, I, for no reason whatsoever, became obsessed with whether it was 1984 or Brave New World that had the lottery as an opiate of the masses.

I asked my lunch companions, and they were pretty much split down the middle, as no one had read either in many years. One of my companions, a 6’4″ or 6’5″ programmer with long hippy hair was pretty sure it was Brave New World, because he had been in a staged reading of 1984 as the Voice of the Screen, and he didn’t remember any mention of a lottery.

So, literate types, which was it?

42 thoughts on “A Somewhat Literary Lunch”

      • I believe you are right about that.

        I had to read that for Honors Seminar. And then write a 10-page paper about it. All over Christmas break. Along with five other books pitting Utopia vs. Dystopia.

  3. 1984. Part 1 Chapter 8

    “They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In the absence of any real inter-communication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.”

    http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/1984/1984_c8.htm

          • Re: 1984. Part 1 Chapter 8

            It won’t, but I don’t even know what Adware is. Must be some PC thing, and I’m a Mac girl, living in a Mac world.

          • Re: 1984. Part 1 Chapter 8

            Ah. Well, since it’s important to learn the language of any foreign country you might have to visit, Adware is Evil Software that installs itself on your machine when you visit some websites, even seemingly benign ones. It then goes out and installs other software on your machine, all of which is tailored to pop up ads or otherwise market stuff to you.

            It’s evil. Really evil.

    • Re: 1984. Part 1 Chapter 8

      As a side note, I knew a batch of assembly line workers at Panasonic that, in between making cellphones, actually and truly believed that the winning lottery numbers could be found encoded in Snuffy Smith and Family Circus comics.

      I kid you not.

      The belief revolved around the fact that one of the line workers had once indeed won $300 from lottery numbers found in a Snuffy comic.

      As my roommate once said, the lottery is a tax on those who can’t do math.

      • Re: 1984. Part 1 Chapter 8

        The woman in charge of me at the paper got the numbers from Ziggy. She won all the time.

        I thought the lottery was the surcharge for stupidity. For many it’s a financial plan.

  4. In any event, the pissy Marx brother, Karl, started the whole thing with Religion being The Opiate of The Masses.

    So does the discussion turn to The Masses leaving religion for something else, thus essentially (depending on what you believe) making themselves inconsolable?

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