Jul 30, 2009
LUCKY CONFIDENCE
What is luck? Do some people have more of it than others? If they do, where do they get it?
The new Harry Potter film is tremendous – no matter what the reviews say. I can’t say what it would be like if you weren’t a massive fan who’d read all the books several times, but I enjoyed it.
The film features one of J. K. Rowling’s best creations: “liquid luck”, or felix felicis. This potion gives anyone who drinks it good fortune for a short period. Harry wins a small vial in a contest and takes it in order to convince Professor Horace Slughorn to give up a memory. You can see the results in this bootleg. It looks very much like confidence.
In another scene, Harry pretends to slip some felix felicis in Ron’s drink, to boost his morale before an important Quidditch match. Ron plays perfectly, embued with near-magical powers by his mental state:
The link between luck and confidence is made explicit elsewhere. Taking too much of the potion, we are told in the book, can cause giddiness, recklessness and overconfidence. When Harry does have a sip, Rowling writes:
Slowly but surely, an exhilarating sense of infinite opportunity stole through him; he felt as though he could have done anything, anything at all … Harry got to his feet, smiling, brimful of confidence.
Chance, by definition, is what we cannot control. But luck is not wholly implacable. A little observation of our lives tells us that some people attract more of it than others.
In his book The Luck Factor
Wiseman erroneously gives a list of actions, instead of the disposition they spring from. But he is correct to say that Fortune has likes and dislikes. Above all, she is attracted to confidence.
The idea that Fortune cannot be influenced comes from Christian philosophy. Ever since the Christian philosopher Boethius first called Fortune the sightless goddess in the sixth century AD, people have liked to imagine that she is thoughtless and indiscriminate in the bestowal of her gifts. In Titian’s painting, Fortune is symbolised by the wheel, turning inexorably, careless of who it crushes.
Classical philosophers saw more clearly. Luck is not blind. As the Roman historian Livy recognised, she prefers certain individuals.
Livy gave us the phrase “Fortune favours the brave”. Courage, however, is not so valuable for us. In our time, Fortune prefers the confident.
[...] Wiseman erroneously gives a list of actions, instead of the disposition they spring from. But he is correct to say that Fortune has likes and dislikes. Above all, she is attracted to confidence. [...]
Interesting connection between Harry Potter and Wiseman, particularly the point that “lucky people listen to their hunches and gut feelings”. The film demonstrates this quite well: when Harry takes the potion, he doesn’t use his new ‘luckiness’ to go and find Slughorn, but rather follows an apparently unrelated urge to go and visit Hagrid, and stumbles upon Slughorn on the the way. The point seems to be that luck can’t be applied instrumentally – it finds you, not the other way round. Which seems to raise a paradox about luck and conscious will: had Harry ‘wanted’ to find Slughorn, and gone to his office, he would have missed him. Only in following an irrational impulse did he achieve his goal.
So does desiring an outcome prevent luck from acting on us and impel failure? On the other hand, if we have no preferences, luck becomes meaningless, as inherent in the concept of luck is improvement. In short: is it impossible for a lucky person to have goals?
This thing about lucky people being magnets definitely applies to someone like Titanic Thompson, the last gambler in “Fast Company” and the biggest high roller of the twenties and thirties – in fact, he needed to seem lucky in order to maintain a constant crowd of schmucks around him to have a punt on one of his bets, despite knowing that they’d get fleeced – just to see how he’d pull it off. (The crowd also contained a number of people bent on killing him and stealing his roll, but he was a good shooter and killed 20 or 30 would-be muggers in his time.) One of his life rules was that ‘you’ve got to have something going for you, something that makes you feel good about yourself’ and he turned this natural sense of superiority into some incredible gambling propositions, like winning hundreds of thousands by throwing walnuts over houses.
On the subject of the Harry Potter, I have to say that when I watched it, the phrase that cropped up in my mind most commonly was ‘This is a paedo’s dream.’
“You said he’d try to collect me. Should I let him?”
“I was chosen! I’m the chosen one!”
Come on! A 3 hour film, a third of which is about grooming.
I think you could isolate the scenes with Jim Broadbent and some with Malfoy and make a pretty competent Nonce’s Cut.
[...] Circle has alerted me to an interesting blog about luck, and reminds us of the scene in the latest Harry Potter film where Harry pretends to slip [...]
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