A recurring theme is the notion that we play this game with loaded dice. A bunch of cultural and material benefits constitute those bootstraps we boast about. I suspect that our sense of worth and our sense of victimhood is nourished by what we don’t know about luck.
Of course, there’s agency. I have to Believe it. Free will is a conceit, though I admit I hold it loosely. The question then becomes: How much of it do we have?
Andrew Boardman shared a Basic Instructions that made me smile. It might help you make some sense of things the next time you talk to a self-made man. The last panel does a better job of expressing the feelings that orbit luck than anything I’ve written. Go read it. 
Many centuries from now, our understanding of chance will have evolved. Maybe it will inform our social and political life in a way that would seem positively alien to us now.
Maybe, a few hundred years from now, our distant progeny will marvel at our ignorance. Maybe they’ll stand in amazement of the rhetorical gymnastics we employ to justify an unfair order. And they’ll think that of all the possible orders, because all of them lack what is, for them, settled science.
Far into the future, what if our distant progeny pities the whole lot of us? Our distant past, our near-future visitors, and the future further than that. Our progeny from that far future will draw a line under the first 30,000 years of civilization, and name it The Stupid Ages. It will be 10% ironic, because they’ll know that that period led to the now they enjoy. It’s just, well, embarrassing.
It sucks to live in a transitional time. It sucks harder to know that this transition’s will probably take at least the next few thousand years.
[End uncomfortable, random thought, fueled by wine]
