Day in, day out, the average punter lines up for his/her regular kick in the backside. I've often wondered why it happens. Some say addiction, yet others claim entertainment. We all have our views as to what's actually going on, and make allowances for our actions. Then today I came across a thought or two by Friedrich Nietzche which just seemed to fill the bill. It's on a more pressing matter, but it nevertheless rings true with those who can't seem to escape the punt. What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequenceâeven this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Nietzche was a nutter not a genius, though it does appear he had a way with words. I wonder, did he ever get all 4 legs of a lucky 15 up, with at least 2 of runners returning at double figure odds? I suspect he did,then spent the rest of his life trying to recapture the rapture.
Barking mad at 45. Saw a horse being whipped, threw his arms around it's neck and it was mentally all over. Still, a great mind early on though.
To try and answer your headline question cyc, I think it has to be an obsession bordering on madness. Why else would anyone bet on the Cesarawitch? Still, "whatever gets you through the night" as my dad would say (quoting the mentally unstable John Lennon).
I think there are many things at play as to why we punt and addiction does play a part in it. This addiction can be harmless, harmful and of course moving between and touching both at times. An addiction of the harmless type is when we use this particular thing as a distraction and escapism but it does not cause suffering, so having a look at the cards each day and picking out two or three horses and having a punt with a sum that win or lose is not going to make any difference to you affording what you need for yourself or your family. The harmful is obviously when the sums prevents the ability to pay for the essentials as it's been spent on a luxury such as a punt. It's a little like someone who distracts himself by going to the pub each night, if he has a couple of beers and a chat all well and good, but if he gets drunk every night and loses friends and cannot get up for work then that addiction is a different thing. The point I make is that even the harmless one can be an addiction if we are attached to doing it and would feel a void at not being able to. On a physiological point I recognise that there is a low level addiction to the feeling of the concentration of our own awareness when watching a race. Generally speaking concentrated attention feels nice regardless of what it's concentrated on and watching a race you have had a punt in concentrates attention. I notice this in myself as I am very unlikely have a bet on days I cannot watch the racing live, not expressly but mostly. I work from home at times and other times at an office and days at home I usually bet, days away I tend not to unless it's a big meet like Royal Ascot etc. I believe internet addiction and such like is all attention concentration addiction. As an aside meditation is a concentrating of attention on your own self awareness, and so taking the attention away from objective stimulus to the purely subjective self awareness, conscious presence. On the subject of Nietzsche, his later mental frailties were ascribed to either syphilis or brain cancer. The well known episode of him breaking down upon the sight of a horse being whipped in the street should not be placed into this era however. In my experience there are two types of people (of course it's not defined by a clear black and white line), one type sees themselves only objectively they are utterly convinced they are this physical frame, personality and the psychological narrative (me) through which they join the two together. To others however this is secondary and they identify with an essential consciousness or beingness which is distinct and which the body and idea of objective self appears in. When identified with this beingness it gets recognised in everything else. The first person described can whip a horse because he cannot see it, only himself. To a viewer (in this case nietzche) he sees the beingness and pain and suffering in the horse at the cruelty and it was too much. Most of the time even those who can see have learnt to ignore their pain at the harshness witnessed as an emotional survival mechanism as other wise the pain would be intolerable, every now and again however it breaks you down. Only last week I was pulled up alongside a transport lorry filled with calves which I presume were going to slaughter, they were packed in very tight and you could see in the eyes a confusion at the noise and traffic, as well distress and helplessness. It broke my heart but what could I do, someone however profits from this. and likely to be fair has never noticed that the animals have an experience of themselves as he himself does, when he himself becomes able to see them then compassion rises, which is to say when we recognise something as alive and able to feel pain and suffering we then safe guard it's experience as we would and do our own. Gandhi once said you can tell how civilised a society is by how it treats it's animals, this I feel eluded to what I have pointed to above.
