GoT S5E8: Insurance = Betting On Your Own Death
In Game of Thrones S5E8 one of the POV characters sees a man selling insurance. You wouldn't know it at first, though, because it's described literally as gambling. Furthermore it's characterized as macabre.
The character narration goes something like this (paraphrased):
"The man is a gambler. Ship captains bet with him on whether they will return from their voyages. The man bets they will, the captains bet on their own death."
This is called defamiliarization. It's a narrative technique of making an otherwise familiar concept (virtually all adults in the US use insurance) seem strange by using purposefully abstruse terminology to describe it.
It's not wrong, though. I've described insurance as legitimized gambling myself. And I've pointed out the irony that unlike typical forms of gambling, with insurance you're effectively betting against yourself.
While the scene starts by implying that the practice is somehow sinister it does at least clarify that what's evil about this insurance salesman is that he's cheating. He's taking the bets (i.e., selling insurance) but not paying out (paying compensation to the widows) when he loses.
Some GoT viewers/readers wonder if including insurance sales in a story setting based on the European Middle Ages is an anachronism. Actually it's not. While life insurance only started to become common in the 19th century there are documents of it dating back a few hundred years before that. And maritime insurance, the kind of insurance being bought and sold in this episode, has written history dating back over 2,000 years in multiple civilizations. Source: Wikipedia insurance page. So, yeah, ship captains have been betting on their own deaths for thousands of years.
The character narration goes something like this (paraphrased):
"The man is a gambler. Ship captains bet with him on whether they will return from their voyages. The man bets they will, the captains bet on their own death."
This is called defamiliarization. It's a narrative technique of making an otherwise familiar concept (virtually all adults in the US use insurance) seem strange by using purposefully abstruse terminology to describe it.
It's not wrong, though. I've described insurance as legitimized gambling myself. And I've pointed out the irony that unlike typical forms of gambling, with insurance you're effectively betting against yourself.
While the scene starts by implying that the practice is somehow sinister it does at least clarify that what's evil about this insurance salesman is that he's cheating. He's taking the bets (i.e., selling insurance) but not paying out (paying compensation to the widows) when he loses.
Some GoT viewers/readers wonder if including insurance sales in a story setting based on the European Middle Ages is an anachronism. Actually it's not. While life insurance only started to become common in the 19th century there are documents of it dating back a few hundred years before that. And maritime insurance, the kind of insurance being bought and sold in this episode, has written history dating back over 2,000 years in multiple civilizations. Source: Wikipedia insurance page. So, yeah, ship captains have been betting on their own deaths for thousands of years.