In Babylon a lottery began as a simple paid game with prizes, but a secret Company progressively added adverse outcomes (fines, then imprisonment and death) and eliminated the entrance fee, making participation universal and compulsory. Over time the drawings expanded to assign every circumstance of each person's life, so that every event could be read as a secret move of the lottery.
When an agency subjects every event to random drawing, the random and the inevitable collapse into one: outcomes feel decreed yet are arbitrary. The narrator can no longer tell whether his circumstances are accident, design, or chance mechanically applied, because the system makes all three descriptions equally true.
To approximate true chance, the lottery subdivides each outcome into endless further drawings, so a single win branches into more drawings that modify and qualify it without end. The result is that no outcome is ever final or clean; every result is provisional, awaiting the next subdivision.
Because the Company operates in secret and may not even exist, people read all of reality as possibly its intervention, and this unfalsifiable attribution is self-sustaining: its presence and its absence look identical. The belief persists precisely because it can never be confirmed or refuted.