BMJ 1995;311:1225 (4 November)

Letters

Lottery has Orwellian resonances

EDITOR,--The fact that the National Lottery collects disproportionate amounts of money from poor people would not have surprised George Orwell. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four he describes the effect of a lottery on the "proles," the non-party members who constituted 85% of Oceania's population.

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. Wherethe 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 by selling systems, forecasts and lucky amulets . . . the prizes were largely imaginary. Only . . . [Full text of this article]


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