Lipton’s Journal/January 25, 1955/255

The predictor, the prophet, and the gambler are cousins. The prophet has a saintly confidence—he is so certain he is right that he can afford to wait until he is dead before his prediction will be realized or confounded. The predictor is a gambler operating with social sanction. The gambler is a man (or woman) who feels in his bones that he is right and the whole world is wrong—but he also feels that he is wrong and the world is right. The uncertainty is so intense that he must make prophecies about events which occur in the next hour, for he must have the objective correlative. (In that sense he is a scientist.)

I think Bob Lindner is right and yet not right in his assessment of the gambler playing with destiny—defeat one side, insanity the other. It may not be so desperate as that. The gambler feels his soul, he also feels society—he is essentially betting that his intuitions, his sensitivity, is greater than the world’s. And the reason certain gamblers lose is not necessarily their fear that if they’re right they will go mad, as the analysts would argue, so much as their fear that they will have to become all-out rebels, and pit themselves against the world. So, painful as it is, they invariably lose. After all, the value of losing is that one can tell oneself that one was right except for bad luck. So one can remain a conformist and still maintain one’s deep private respect for one’s intuitions. But to win does not permit such ambiguity, such “double” profit. It lays down an imperative. “You were right,” says victory, “Go ahead and rebel.” Which is why victory often produces deep depression.

Certainly this is true of victories one has not sought—like my victory in having The Deer Park published. What I have said above applies mainly to the long-shot player, the man who roots for the underdog. There is the other kind of gambler who plays favorites, and his psychology is also fascinating. Victory tells him the world is right which is what he wants to hear because he suspects the opposite. Defeat is unbearable because it tells him he was wrong; such a man often flies into a rage.

Yet, I wonder if he is not secretly thrilled by the underdog defeating his favorite. He would not be a gambler in the first place if her were not unconsciously obsessed with the whole business of the soul’s insights against the world’ insights. He gambles malgré lui (despite himself), he is drawn into it cautiously, slowly, reluctantly. Gambling on favorites is his defense against gambling on underdogs, gambling on his own intuitions. Men who bet on favorites are invariably successful men who are beginning to be deeply dissatisfied with their success; long-shot players cover a great range of what seem to be cranks, sneaks, weird-o’s, rummies, whores, junkies, etc.