Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [327]

The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 327

Note

The anaphoric tetrad ‘their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant’ lands as a catalogue of modern mass-distraction culture, and the irony is sharpened by the immediately following observation that the same ‘illiterate’ proles who can’t read are capable of ‘staggering feats of memory’ tracking lottery numbers — the very cognitive ability that might threaten the Party gets redirected into a rigged game.