In a recent chronicle (HS 1.11.2016) professor of communication Anu Kantola refers to the ”deep life narratives” of some Trump-supporters who feel that society has let them down. Many feel that they have kept their share of the societal contract their whole life; they have been good patriots, served their country, paid their taxes, obeyed the law; they have worked hard and been good neighbours. According to their own calculations, a fulfillment of the American dream should be a plausible road ahead. Still, people who neither act nor look like them — migrants, slick youngsters, persons of color — are now passing them on the avenue to the main gains of a good life. These ‘new’ people were not part of the scenery within which the white middle classs had originally envisioned their own life path.
The mantra that is broken is the one of ”if you live in the right way and as a good person, good things are likely to happen to you”. This outlook is familiar and natural to anybody living in the Christian world – in fact, it is crucial for the moral ethos of all human societies. Life is a game that involves elements of calculation, odds and wins: if you live in certain ways, your odds of well-being and fortune will improve.
Creating good odds
The deep life narrative’s destiny image can also appear in other formats. For example, the “creating the best odds”-game is a thought model that permeates outlook on life in a world of high life standards, where knowledge and science play a great role in the calculations and negotiations of people’s being-in-the-world. In line with the very basic enlightenment idea of knowledge and awareness enabling control over risks, we can choose our path. We choose the right partner and job, we can exercise, eat right and be good and smart people and by being and doing right we can minimize problems and avoid harm and trouble and be happy. Being smart and knowing the right things to do is part of being successful.
When it comes to questions of lifestyle-related health there are at least three fundamental dilemmas attached to a too rigorous appliance of this thought pattern: the first most obvious one is that it downplays the fact that a lot of things, especially health-related hardship, are unpredictable and happen by chance. While the likelihood of things happening to you can be manipulated by informed choices, individuals tend to use the wrong basis of information for outsmarting the system. This, then, is the second dilemma. The kind of knowledge that builds on correlations in large data sets, however strong the evidence, cannot say anything about the individuals place in the statistics. Of course, there is greater likelihood that you may belong to one group or another — heavy smokers are more likely to develop lung cancer than non-smokers – but single cases are always unique. The awareness of both circumstances make people think according to different odds logics in different areas of life. The logic underpinning the internalization of health advice works similar to the reasoning of a gambler who plays games of chance: For example, you can enhance the odds of winning something by spreading your bets on many different numbers on the roulette table. You can exercise, eat healthy and sleep eight hours a night and be thinking that you are three times more likely to extend your life than if you only took care of one of these three matters.
The third dilemma of the odds manipulation myth is that while the systems of chance and likelihood can make up explanative patterns they are seldom on their own sufficient for taking into account societal structures and human culture (even if an infinity of factors are added to the equations). Alcohol drinking patterns in terms of consumption levels, choices of products and typical harm can take you far in seeing the type of culture a jurisdiction may operate with(in), but it may be difficult to use that information if you have no insight into likely scenarios of the alternative political roads ahead.
Beating cancer
Last Saturday Kelly Turner, PhD and author of the best selling book “Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds” (2014) visited Finland and kept a presentation before a large audience of cancer patients, their relatives and interest organizations. In her acclaimed book, Turner reports about interviews that she has conducted with people who have survived the severest forms of cancer, many of which were told by medical expertise that there was nothing left to do but to await the ending. Taylor summarizes nine critical factors that are common for the against-all-odds-survivors of these severe cancer diagnoses. Some of them are undoubtedly helpful for people battling the disease. In fact, the book might already in itself be important in that it provides hope and positive emotions to people who might have lost their hope. These sort of positive notions are, according to Turner, crucial for the recovery process.
The problem with Turner’s book occurs when it is read as a manual for survival. There are likely to be people who think that they can “beat the house” by doing exactly what the book describes. They might think that they are significantly enhancing their odds of surviving by taking supplements, taking control over their treatment and releasing suppressed emotions. But the circumstance of “having a social support structure” may, for example, not be the easiest one to accomplish for a lonely elderly person with no social or economic resources.
Turner’s book contains stories left out of the cancer research dogma, all that which is medically and rationally unexplainable, the lottery win against millions of other more likely outcomes. Also, it can be seen as providing a social framework and acknowledging the importance of human agency for recovery. Still, it moves in a foggy landscape of selected knowledge (not always well-argued or scientifically reliable) and emotions related to the odds of life that all individuals want to steer and control.
The house always wins
To return to where I began this text: having an impact on ones own life course is an important human construct. The feeling of being punished even though you have done the right life choices has shown to be a destructive point of departure for the social self. The myth of purpose and reason needs to be uphold in order for life to make any sense. Still the amount of irrationality in our own rational reason seems inconceivable to us.
The rare cases of the ones who hit a jackpot or win at the lottery — the ones who experience the unlikely — serve as inspiration and symbols of hope. At the seminar last weekend, a cancer survivor shared his story of recovery. He had, against the advice of the medical expertise, not allowed a larger surgery on his body, but instead he had listened to his own inner reason, taken control over his therapeutic path and only proceeded with a minor incision. Today, he is cancer free, and in his own words thanks to the bold choices he had made, which were all rather in line with Turner’s nine points of survivors.
The “improving the odds” narrative is just the other side of the coin of the ”against all odds” one. For the casino gambler the choice of not gambling at all will mean zero likelihood of winning, so all gambling is seen as involving the chance of winning. This outlook can be more or less deceitful. In fact, in the game of life we have little influence over our own destiny as mortal humans: sooner or later, the house always wins.
References
Kantola, Anu (2016) Liian kunnolliset ihmiset ovat vaarallisia. Helsingin Sanomat 1.11.2016. Available at: http://www.hs.fi/paakirjoitukset/a1477891294987
Turner, Kelly (2014) Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
