A Culture of Control vs. A Culture of Chance

The centuries-long tug-of-war between two orientations towards luck

I’m a guy who likes a plan. I like knowing that if I put X amount of effort into a project, I will get Y results. The idea of a cause-and-effect universe is satisfying. It feels safe. It makes the world feel manageable.

I took that worldview with me to law school.

When I decided to go to law school, I set a goal to completely dominate it. I wanted to be at the top of my class so I could get on law review and land a prestigious internship at one of the silk-stocking firms here in Tulsa, which would then lead to a job offer as an associate and a path to becoming a partner. I’d live in midtown in some luxurious home built in the 1920s by a boom-time Tulsa oil baron. I’d be a baller.

To accomplish this, I spoke with lawyers who lived that life. They told me I needed to treat law school like a job. Clock in at 8 am and clock out at 8 pm. They gave me notetaking and outlining strategies, exam practice schedules, and guidance on writing answers to ace my finals. The message I received was this: if I followed their plan, I’d get what I wanted.

So I followed the plan. And it worked! In my first semester, I finished first in my class. In my second year, I got on law review and landed two summer internships at two of the biggest firms in Tulsa.

All summer, I worked hard writing memos and trolling through discovery. The work was stressful, and the days were long. Knowing that job offers weren’t just contingent on doing good work, but also that the partners saw me as the kind of person they’d want to work with — i.e., that they simply liked me — I did my best to schmooze. I joined the softball teams. I went out to eat with my colleagues. I even sang “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” on karaoke at a partner-thrown house party, stone cold sober (because Mormonism), while the other interns did it with a dose of liquid courage.

But when the summer ended, I didn’t get any job offers. I just received cordial letters saying, “We really enjoyed working with you, and you did a great job, but we’ve decided to go with someone else.”

What had happened?! I did everything I was supposed to do! I jumped through all the hoops and then some. I followed the plan!

When discrepancies between input and output happen, we usually have two reactions. The first is to double down on effort: I just need a better system. I need to grind harder.

The second is to throw up our hands and mark life down to chance.

I went with the latter.

Boy, did I get jaded. I felt like it didn’t matter what I did; it broke the spell I had been living under since youth that I could determine my future — that my fate was entirely in my hands.

Historian Jackson Lears suggests that I found myself flip-flopping between two orientations that have tugged on each other for thousands of years: a culture of control and a culture of chance.

A culture of control is marked by the conviction that the world is intelligible and, thus, controllable. If you’ve got the right habits, virtues, and systems, you can domesticate uncertainty and be the master of your destiny.

A culture of chance holds that randomness and serendipity govern the world. Chance is seen “as a source of knowledge and possibility,” according to Lears. Chance is scary, but exciting.

For the last few centuries, the culture of control has been winning this tug-of-war in a landslide. We have systematically tried to kill off the idea of luck. We try to enumerate, analyze — and ultimately optimize — every variable in life. Recently though, some cracks in the culture of control have begun to emerge.

As we continue our series on the dynamics of luck, today I’ll explore the historical tension between the cultures of chance and control. Let’s dive into where we’ve been and may be going, and how and why societies have shifted back and forth between a world ruled by a fickle goddess and one where luck hardly exists.