Rabbi Harold Kushner believed he had always led an essentially blameless life. Being human he had undoubtedly broken some of God’s laws and man’s, but not many and not big ones. He thought he was, in general, a good man. He was demonstrably holier than most. Despite his human flaws and transgressions, he certainly did not deserve any terrible punishment.
But terrible punishment is what he got. Worse, the punishment was not inflicted on him directly but on his son, Aaron, an innocent child.
When Aaron was three, doctors determined that he was afflicted with a disease called progeria, or rapid aging. The horrified rabbi and his wife were told that there was no known cure. Their little boy would probably never grow much beyond three feet in height, would have no hair, would develop a wizened, aged appearance while still a child, and would probably not live beyond his early teens .The elements of this discouraging prognosis all happened as expected. And the boy died at the age of fourteen.
Filled with grief, and rage, Rabbi Kushner asked: Why? Why was this done to him and his family? Why to a child? Why at all?
Seeking a plausible an acceptable answer, he embarked on a long, difficult, intellectual journey. He described this journey in the 1981 book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
At the end of the journey, he found that the answer he sought was the simplest of all possible answers, yet the hardest for a religious man to believe. It was this: The affliction of his son happened for no reason at all. It was just a random stroke of bad luck. Bad luck is just – well, bad luck.
It was not the answer most clergy people are taught, nor the one they lay on their flocks. Nor was it the answer asserted in the Bible.
The Bible says not once but many times that God runs a fair world. “Consider, what innocent ever perish, or where have the righteous been destroyed?” asks the Book of Job. And in Proverbs it says, “No ills befall the righteous, but the wicked are filled with trouble.”
Unfortunately, I believe it simply isn’t true. There is a lot of wishful thinking in the Bible in my opinion, and I thin this is a particularly stark example of it. Ills do befall the righteous and conversely the wicked are often allowed to live happily ever after. The Bible does explain this, too, but I think that all of us, the good, the bad, and the in-between, are equally likely to realize our fondest dreams or contract cancer.
It is essential that you grasp my opinion on this, for failure to do so is a leading cause of bad luck. We will see why later. For now, just fix the suggestion firmly in your mind. The fact is that fairness is a human concept. The rest of the universe knows nothing of it.
It took Rabbi Kushner a long time to arrive at this conclusion. Along the way, he had to consider and reject a dozen or more religious explanations of bad luck – which, since they had been his gospel (not to be confused with the Gospel), he had always assumed to be the truth. All of us get these explanations handed to us as kids, and nearly all believe them for a time in our young lives; but I reckon the consistently lucky eventually tend to reject them as the rabbi did.
To me, they really do not make a great deal of sense. The three most common religious explanations – so common that they amount to clerical cliches – are that God sends us bad luck to punish us for our sins, to teach us moral lessons, or to strengthen our characters.
All these explanations are intended, in Rabbi Kushner’s words, “to defend God’s honor.” They are meant to convince the skeptical that God is really fair after all. The only reason why he seems unfair, we’re told is that we are too dumb to understand his great plans and purposes.
But one can ask why a three-year-old child needs to be punished with a fatal disease. If the little boy was guilty of a sin of some kind, wouldn’t a slap on the wrist have been enough? Or if the father was the one being punished, and if his sin was bad enough to warrant a sentence of death, why was the sentence carried out on the youngster? In any case, why was no explanation ever offered as to the nature of the supposed sin? How can it teach a moral lesson to punish somebody without saying what lesson is supposed to be learned? Any sensible parent knows that if you are going to spank a child, you should make sure the child know what it’s for. Is God less sensible or less fair? One can ask, too, how it can have strengthened Aaron’s character to kill him. I hope I’m not being insensitive!!
Millions of words of religious sophistry have been read from the world’s pulpits in answer to such questions in the same way. “God is too fair! You just don’t understand God’s reason!”
Rabbi Kushner, as we’ve seen, arrived at a simpler and almost certainly truer explanation – truer because it is supported by the plainly observable facts of human life. In the rabbi’s theology, God may be fair, but isn’t as powerful as everybody has always thought. He either can’t or won’t control all the details of what happens to us. Our lives are filled with random events. If you contract a fatal disease or win a million-dollar lottery prize, therefore, don’t kook for the hand of God in the event. God didn’t cause it. Nothing caused it. It just happened.
Rabbi Kushner thinks God may still be in the process of creating order from chaos. In the six days of creation it’s still Friday afternoon. God may bet the universe straightened out a few billion years from now, and then life will be orderly and fair. Meantime, we’ve got to deal with what we see around us today, and that is chaos.
You don’t have to buy the rabbi’s theology if you don’t want to. It is essentially irrelevant to our study of luck. The observable facts of human life can be explained just as well by postulating that God is out to lunch, is dead, or never existed in the first place. Or invent your own theology. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you feel comfortable with it and as long as it doesn’t try to argue away the facts.
For no matter how earnestly we talk, the facts won’t change. The universe isn’t fair and never has been in all the time men and women have been grappling with it. By accepting that truth instead of arguing with it, you take one more step on the road to becoming consistently lucky. Conversely, by arguing with it you buy bad luck.
One way in which unlucky people commonly do this is to punish themselves for their own bad luck, thus, making i into worse luck. They get themselves stuck on a down-spiraling slide, sometimes stuck for life. I learned of an unusually stark example of this syndrome while studying some life-story material dealing with my college classmates.
I went to Princeton University right after the Second World War and graduated with the class of 1949. The Forty-niners, as we call ourselves, are all men, since Princeton did not start admitting women as undergraduates until exactly 20 years after we graduated. We are today in our late fifties or early sixties, looking back on nearly 4 decades of adult life.
Being a somewhat introspective group, we poll ourselves from time to time in order to find out how we’ve been doing and what we’ve been thinking. As one of the class scribes and as a student of luck, I have written up the results of these polls and have also interviewed individual class members and their wives. My files on these polls and interviews are a fascinating collection of lessons on getting lucky.
The 750-plus members of the class have of course had widely diverse life experiences since we left the campus with our diplomas clutched in our young hands. Some have risen to national prominence: for example, Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker; and one-time New Jersey governor, Brendan Byrne. Others – myself, for one – have enjoyed good fortune without any accompanying fame. But a probably equal number of other Forty-niners have been hit by bad luck in one form or another. Somewhat more than 100 have suffered the ultimate misfortune of a too-early death in war, by accident, and by disease.
It is one of the latter who is the subject of the story I want to tell. This man and his wife – we’ll call them John and Mary – were married in a Catholic church early in the 1950s. They were not particularly observant Catholics back then. Though they had no doubts about their religious orientation – if you asked them what church they belonged to, they would reply “Catholic” without hesitation – they were fairly casual in their approach to church rituals and forms. They sometimes skipped the Sunday morning service if they had been up late at a party the night before, and they didn’t participate conscientiously in sacramental acts such Holy Communion. This troubled Mar a good deal more than John. She would remark often that they were losing something good from their lives because of sheer laziness. He would agree, then shrug, and the following Sunday they would skip the Mass again.
Despite this slow loss of religious commitment, both of them clung firmly to the belief that God runs a fair universe. This is an element of religious teaching that every Catholic child learns from priests and nuns in catechism classes. Whatever happens in human life is God’s will. If you want good luck in a certain chance situation, you say a prayer, and if God decides you deserve to be rewarded, you will be. If you get walloped by bad luck, on the other hand, that is God’s hand at work, too. You are being tested, or are getting your character strengthened, or are being punished.
John and Mary had a daughter whom they loved. When she announced that she found catechism boring, they didn’t force her to attend. They knew from their own experience that religious instruction, inspiring when well taught, can be stupefyingly dull when taught by rote – and this is particularly true of Catholic instruction. And so John and Mary’s daughter grew up on nominal Catholic but not an actively participating one.
Shortly after her eighth birthday, on the very day when she would have received her First Holy communion if she had followed the normal schedule, she was abducted, raped, and killed.
It was a case of particularly ghastly bad luck – random evil reaching out and seizing an innocent victim for no reason except that she was there. John and Mary, however, could not accept a universe so unfair. In the theology that had been pounded into them since childhood, God was everywhere. Holding this view, they saw their daughter’s horrible death as their fault. God had caused it to punish them for their impiety.
Bad luck is hard enough to take when you recognize it is bad luck. When you blame yourself for it, it can destroy you.
John, the least pious of the pair before the tragedy, reacted the most strongly. He became so grimly devout that Mary found herself trying to pull him in the opposite direction. “I got over the guilt thing after a while, or almost did,” she told me later, “but with him it was an obsession. I tried to get him to talk to a psychiatrist about it, but he wouldn’t . He did talk to a priest, but the priest wasn’t any help.”
John grew moody and depressed. Bad luck was turning to worse luck. In time, it became still worse. His career a a bank executive started to suffer as colleagues and customers noticed the souring of his disposition. He became irritable, uncooperative, sometimes rude. Then a new stroke of bad luck came crashing into his life. Through a chain of events that he had no hand in, the bank got itself tangled up in a scandal involving foreign-currency operations. The affair was not only embarrassing to the bank but also fearfully costly. It was necessary to find somebody to blame, and John was it. He had angered many of his fellow executives in recent months, so they found it easy to make him the target. They all scurried for cover, leaving him exposed. He lost his job.
Once again he analyzed the situation in terms of a fair universe. There had to be a reason for this new disaster, he believed. What could the reason be? Obviously, God was punishing him again.
If you lose your job because of events that are not of your making, the unhappy episode may knock you down but needn’t knock you out. It needn’t, that is, as long as you see clearly that what has happened to you is only a case of bad luck. But if you automatically assume that every bad thing that happens to you is in some way your own fault, then bad luck will almost always become worst luck.
Discouraged and hopeless, John slunk home to sit in an armchair and watch TV for the rest of his life. Mary could not get him out of that chair. He was convinced, she believes, that he deserved what had happened to him. It was God’s will, so why fight it? He ate, drank, and smoked too much and was dead of a heart attack before age 60.
Rabbi Kushner tells a similar story of Jewish couple who, bit by misfortune, concluded that they were being punished for a too-casual approach to religious observances. “Religion made them feel worse,” he notes sadly.
Does the rabbi counsel you, therefore, to shun religion? Of course not. He says only that you should recognize chaos when you see it. Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly. That is the lesson of the Eleventh Technique. Look around a human life and accept it the way it comes: disorderly and unfair. Don’t shun religion if it appeals to you. Shun only the ancient belief that God plans and directs every event in your life.
Just as it is misleading to blame yourself for bad luck, you also delude yourself when you come to a belief that you “deserve” good luck. You may well deserve it, but whether you will get it is a matter of – well, luck.
Shakespeare’s difficult but powerful play King Lear has offended many critics, including Charles Lamb, mainly because it is the story of a lot of people who deserve good luck but don’t get it. As we’ve noted before in this book, literary critics and college English professors hate to acknowledge the role of luck in novels and dramas. In their view, bad luck isn’t “tragic” enough. They prefer stories in which heroes and heroines bring about their own doom through their own wickedness or foolishness. However, such an orderly arrangement of events bears scant relationship to real life. In real life, people don’t get what they deserve. They get what they get.
Shakespeare evidently understood this. The unfortunate Lear, his loving daughter Cordelia, and his loyal follower Gloucester are all good people who deserve good luck. What do they get? Gloucester is blinded, Cordelia is killed, and Lear goes mad and finally dies of grief. What is this supposed to teach us? Generations of English professors have tried to convince skeptical students that Lear and the others are brought to these bad ends by “fatal flaws” in their own characters. However, these fatal flaws are mainly in the professors’ imaginations; they aren’t in the play. In the play as written, the main cause of the character’s doom is sheer bad luck.
Never go into a venture thinking it will come out right for you because you “deserve” it. That is a common expectation of the unlucky. The universe has no interest in what you deserve.
Nor is the universe interested in the “my turn” expectation, also common among the unlucky. This too, comes from the assumption that the universe is fair.
“All my college friends have lucked into super jobs. I’m the only one of our group left out in the cold. My turn must be coming soon!”
“My first two marriages were nightmares. Surely, I’ve had my share of misfortune. The third time has got to be better.”
Such expectation might be reasonable if the sharing out of good and bad luck were under human control. Humans would make a mind-numbing bureaucracy out of the Luck Administration but would instinctively try to run it fairly. That is the way humans are. Our sense of fairness is powerful. The universe, however, is not under human control. It is indifferent to the concept of fairness, which we prize so highly, and so it is always confounding and enraging us.
Go to a casino any day or night, and you will see the pockets of unlucky gambles being inexorably emptied by the expectation of fairness. If a roulette wheel turns up odd numbers three or four times in a row, at least half the players are likely to think some kind of “debt” is building up. The wheel supposedly “owes” it to the cause of fairness to produce an even number next time around.
Unfortunately, the wheel doesn’t know this. It has no memory and would have no interest in fairness even if it did keep score. The probability of an even number next time around is exactly the same as it always was: 50:50.
This paradox of unfairness confuses a lot of people. In any situation such as the repeated spinning of a roulette wheel, fairness seems to crop up over a long period of time. If you spin the wheel 1,000 times, you can expect that odd and even numbers will turn up roughly 500 times each. That seems fair. It is the same with any other series of events in which there are two or more equally likely outcomes: tossing a coin, for instance, or rolling a die. If the die is properly balanced and if you roll it 6,000 times, the six sides will turn up very roughly 1,000 times each.
But if you try to work this apparent fairness into a system for betting on individual rolls of the die, you are setting yourself up for a loss. The rolls are unrelated to each other. Each is a separate event. It is not influenced in the slightest by rolls that preceded it, and it will have no effect on rolls that follow.
This is an outrage to our human sense of fairness. It is always tripping crapshooters. They will note that no sixes have turned up on either of a pair of dice during a long period of play. The dice, therefore, are said to be “six heavy”. Some cosmic force is supposedly building up a six-weighted tension in the dice, and this tension will get stronger and stronger until the dice pay off their debt. Many players will adjust their betting accordingly.
The idea is entirely fallacious. Like the roulette wheel the dice have neither a memory nor a sense of fairness.
Bridge players delude themselves in the same way. “The last two times I tried to finesse, the card that killed me was to my left. This time, it’s bound to be to my right.””
As we saw in our study of the Seventh Technique, constructive supernaturalism, this kind of semi superstitious thinking can be useful sometimes. In a situation in which there is no rational basis for making a choice, it can save you from paralysis. When you’ve got to do something, it can help you reach a decision – but be sure you know precisely what you are doing and why. Maintain a keen awareness that you are resorting to a supernatural device because it is the only way out. Never fall back on the supernatural in the belief that it is science or will give you a probable advantage. And never use it when a rational analysis would serve instead.
In the game of bridge, there are various kinds of rational clues that can be used to pinpoint the location of a feared card. These clues pop up in both bidding and the play. They may not make you perfectly certainly who is holding the queen of spades, but they can lead you to a solid, analytic conclusion: “Odds are it’s to my left.”
Never fall back on the supernatural when think kind of analysis is possible. Only when there are no clues at all or when clues of equal weight seem to point in opposite directions, should you trust your fate to any irrational decision-making process such as notion about fairness.
“Never expect anything,” said one of the luckier Forty-niners, Alvaro Cruz. “Anything can happen no matter how outrageous it seems. And anything can not happen no matter how much you think it should.”
Cruz was talking about a friend of his and mine, Bob Baumer. Bob had served with the Fifteenth Air Force in Europe during World War II and had been shot down twice, narrowly escaping with his life each time. “There were guys who flew more missions than I did and never got touched,” he used to say. “If I ever fly in a war again, fate won’t dare do it to me a third time.”
Bob went back into the air force during the Korean War. On June 10, 1952, the unfair universe did it to him again. His B-29 was shot down while on a bombing mission, and he was killed.