Lottery, Oh Lottery, How I Love You

Over the past week, the lottery has evolved into a national craze—a high-stakes monetary game with lower costs, faster returns, and stronger gambling tendencies than the stock market. It has taken center stage in a new wave of speculative fever, sweeping across Taiwan with a more aggressive posture than gossip news, briefly making the lottery a more hopeful bet than the new Cabinet.

This betting pool, which draws winning numbers twice a week, vividly portrays Taiwan's penchant for gambling. Consequently, we witness winding queues for ticket purchases, devout believers performing rituals on the streets to beg for divine revelation, and statues of Earth Gods discarded and soaked in mountain streams. Next, we might even see statues of deities with severed arms and heads, or shamans and charlatans profiting off lucky number tips. In short, desires run rampant and greed spreads.

Such a cultural landscape is truly alarming. What is alarming is not the dream of getting rich overnight itself, but rather how this speculative culture corrosively destroys the rhythm of daily life and easily replaces the focus of everyday attention. Even the most crucial redistribution of power cannot rival the fervor of public concern. What is worrying about this phenomenon is not merely the temporary lottery craze, but the values that follow in its wake: ridiculing hard work and believing in speculation.

If the mindset of pursuing overnight wealth merely overflows the bounds of routine life in anticipation of accidental good fortune, it is not actually frightening. What is frightening is when the majority of people look to overnight wealth to rescue themselves from a limited (please note: not impoverished) economic situation. This perhaps foreshadows the intolerability of real life: when hard work goes unrewarded, when progressing step-by-step becomes impossible, and when having money is paramount, speculation becomes the sole hope of ordinary life. The lottery merely reflects the mindset of society, offering a new hope for belief.

It appears that the lottery craze will not subside anytime soon. Back in the day, the "Dajiale" illegal lottery similarly paralyzed telephone lines every Tuesday and Thursday, and the scenes of empty streets as people gathered around bookies during the drawing of numbers remain fresh in our memory. The lottery seems to open up more than just an outlet for venting desires; it releases the genie of desire from Pandora's box. What we ought to ponder is that perhaps the lottery itself is not what is terrifying, but rather what on earth has gone wrong with this society. If the lottery becomes the final hope of this society, and people who work hard become a minority of outliers, what else is worth striving for?

※ Published in: Taiwan Daily