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I recall the day Tyche birthed the lottery.
It was not long after Palamedes created the first pair of dice and gave them as an offering to her.
She decided it should offer monetary prizes for a select few with fortunate numbers.
However this was not popular enough so she introduce risk by instituting fines for those who drew unlucky numbers. The potential to either win or lose made the lottery more representative of the concept of chance, and more people played as a result.
Because many people did not wish to pay the fines for unlucky numbers they were subsequently sentenced to time in prison.
The lottery eventually stopped publishing fines and began simply publishing the length of imprisonment. From this precedent, people began to think that monetary gain was not a gain of magnitude equal to the loss of one's freedom.
So the lottery subsequently began awarding positions of status, the opportunity to exact revenge on others, and so forth. The scope of its power expanded proportionately.
The Lottery grew into an entity which operated in secret, orchestrating all events through complex designs based on the chance drawings. Single events would revolve around the fortunate and unfortunate drawings of multiple participants. People would seek to gain influence over the Lottery at various secret locations rumored as points of communication with them, though the Lottery disavowed these forms of communication as a matter of liability. In this way, all events in life became the purported design of the Lottery.
What is noteworthy is the juxtaposition of chance with a determinism directly derived from the notion of chance. The Lottery's ultimate authority came from its capacity to determine fate, and yet this capacity is based on chance.
This means one of two things: either the Lottery does not function by chance and is riddled by corruption, or the corporation of the Lottery is actually no more powerful or important than chance itself.
In either situation, the important point to glean from this is the proclivity of society and institutions to capitalize on the nature of life.
Chance is an inevitable component of life, whether it is perceived as pure quantum randomness or the will of g-d too complex for humanity to comprehend or anticipate.
The secret society of the Lottery takes advantage of that existential absolute and claims its authority; because no mortal man can hope to challenge metaphysics, no one can challenge the institution of the lottery.
