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But many compulsive gamblers admit that their strongest drive is to lose, not win. The classic example of this self-destructive type was Dostoevsky, whose incentive to write was often to get money for gambling; when he had it, he would boast that he was going to give fate "a punch on the nose!" Fate, of course, always ducked. In Dostoevsky and Parricide, Freud suggested that for the writer fate represented the father figure from whom he was asking punishment.
It is not necessary to accept Freud to see gambling as a challenge of fate, an existentialist insistence on man's freedom to waste himself and his substance, if he so chooses. Others see in gambling an essentially childish desire for unearned reward, and a yearning for magic—which may explain why gamblers are notoriously superstitious.
Perhaps the most persuasive theory is advanced by Sociologist Erving Goffman, who worked for a year in Las Vegas as a dealer. He describes gambling as a "meaning machine that grinds out random decisions very rapidly. Betting on the outcome transfers mere random decisions into fateful ones. This provides an essentially meaningless but exciting situation that allows people to read into the action whatever fantasies they want, to groove, to go crazy in an intensely personal way." In other words, gambling becomes life itself, made into whatever one wants it to be.
Some want to make gambling into a prototype of capitalism; after all, runs the argument, capitalism is based on some form of gambling or at least risk taking. True enough. Thrift and savings are essential to capitalism, but so is daring investment. The gambler's blind challenge of fate is different from the investor's bet on the future. Still, the gambler and the man who "plays" the stock market have certain things in common: a desire to make money without working for it in the ordinary sense, and a desire to reach beyond the monotony of life by deliberately embracing the unpredictable. Some see gambling as a cosmic, even a spiritual principle: "I think luck as well as freedom must be counted in the salvation of man as well as in the fall," says Albert Hammond, former philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins. "I believe that luck should be counted in the story of Jesus. God may have known he had a good bet, but he had to wait for the finish."
To Legalize or Not
Most Christian ministers would scarcely put it that way but, in general, churchly condemnation of gambling seems to be softening. While the Methodists' latest "Disciplines" states that gambling accentuates the desire "to acquire wealth without honest labor [and] encourages a primitive, fatalistic faith in chance," California's Bishop Gerald Kennedy says of his fellow ministers: "The boys today don't particularly make an issue of it." As for the Catholic Church, it has always held that gambling itself is neutral, that it becomes evil only when it involves excess, damage to one's family or connection with crime. Boston's Richard Cardinal Gushing says that if Massachusetts passes a lottery bill, he will be the first to buy a ticket.