My Views on Gambling
Most of life is a gamble. Very many of the things we do involve taking some risk in order to achieve a satisfactory result. We undertake a new job with no idea of the more indirect consequences of our action. Marriage is certainly a gamble and so is the bringing into existence of children, who could prove sad liabilities. A journey, a business transaction, even a chance remark may result immediately or ultimately in tragedy. Perpetually we gamble-against life, destiny, chance, the unknown, call the invisible opponent what we will. Human survival and progress indicate that usually we win.
So the gambling instinct must be an elemental one. Taking risks to achieve something is a characteristic of all forms of life, including humanity. As soon as man acquired property, the challenge he habitually issued to destiny found an additional expression in a human contest. Early may well have staked his flint axe, his bearskin, his wife, in the hope of adding to his possessions. The acquirement of desirable but nonessential commodities must have increased his scope enormously, while the risk of complete disaster lessened.
So long as man was gambling against destiny, the odds were usually in his favor, especially when he used commonsense. But as the methods of gambling multiplied, the chances of success decreased. A wager against one person offered on average even chances and no third party profited by the transaction. But as soon as commercialized city life developed, mass gambling become common. Thousands of people now compete for large prizes, but with only minute chances of success, while the organizers of gambling concerns enjoy big profits with, in some cases, no risk at all. Few clients of the betting shops, football pools, state lotteries, bingo sessions, even charity raffles, realize fully the flimsiness of their chances and the fact that without fantastic luck they are certain to lose rather than gain.
Little irreparable harm results for the normal individual. That big business profits from the satisfaction of a human instinct is a common enough phenomenon. The average wage-earner, who leads a colorless existence, devotes a small percentage of his earnings to keeping alive with extraordinary constancy the dream of achieving some magic change in his life. Gambling is in most cases a non-toxic drug against boredom and apathy and may well preserve good temper, patience and optimism in dreary circumstances. A sudden windfall may unbalance a weaker, less intelligent person and even ruin his life. And the line of something for nothing as an ideal evokes criticism from the more rigidly upright representatives of the community. But few of us have the right to condemn as few of us can say we never gamble-even it is only investing a few pence a week in the firm’s football sweep or the church bazaar "lucky dip."
Trouble develops, however, when any human instinct or appetite becomes overdeveloped. Moderate drinking produces few harmful effects but drunkenness and alcoholism can have terrible consequences. With an unlucky combination of temperament and circumstances, gambling can only become an obsession, almost a form of insanity, resulting in the loss not only of a man’s property but of his self-respect and his conscience. Far worse are the sufferings of his dependants, deprived of material comfort and condemned to watching his deterioration and hopelessness. They share none of his feverish excitement or the exhilaration of his rare success. The fact that he does not wish to be cured makes psychological treatment of the gambling addict almost impossible. He will use any means, including stealing, to enable him to carry on. It might be possible to pay what salary he can earn to his wife for the family maintenance but this is clearly no solution. Nothing-education, home environment, other interest, wise discouragement-is likely to restrain the obsessed gambler and even when it is he alone who suffers the consequences, his disease is a cruel one, resulting in a wasted, unhappy life.
Even in the case of the more physically harmful of human indulgences, repressive legislation often merely increases the damage by causing more vicious activities designed to perpetuate the indulgence in secret. On the whole, though negative, gambling is no vice within reasonable limits. It would still exist in an ideal society. The most we can hope for is control over exaggerated profits resulting from its business exploitation, far more attention and research devoted to the unhappy gambling addict and the type of education which will encourage an interest in so many other constructive activities that gambling itself will lose its fascination as an opiate to a dreary existence. It could be regarded as an occasional mildly exciting game, never to be taken very seriously. |
