Part Two: The Nature of the Game

2.1 The Function of Metaphors

When we hear the phrase, “level the playing field,” as in discussions about a progressive income tax or raising the minimum wage, we’re hearing a metaphor. Society is metaphorically a game, being played on a metaphoric field, which is tilted in such a way that the ball is always, as assisted by gravity, moving more easily towards one set of players' goal. We know this is a metaphor because the on-goings of society take place not just on fields, but also in software, the cloud, on craps tables, in grocery aisles, on Islands—everywhere. 

“Games without frontiers, wars without tears.”

I’ve argued in Section I that society is non-metaphorically a game, and I think referring metaphorically to society as a game can serve to disguise its nature as a literal game. When we hear metaphors, we denote them as such and move forward, expecting the real nature of x to be something that is revealed or pointed to by the object to which x is being connected to via metaphor, but not likely sharing essential features with it. If I analogize football to war, if I say about a match: “It was a real battle out there,” I’m not saying that football players are being killed with weapons, that resources are being permanently appropriated, that certain political agendas are being met—all of which we might expect to be essential features of war. 

Yet, playing on a field is not essential to being a game, but R—S is, and our society is defined by R—S. Is there an advantage to some players in having others not think of society as a game? In other words, is there an emancipatory for those who struggle to “win” in seeing society as a game value (which would threaten the typical “winners”)? I’ll argue in this part that it does and discuss some deeper mechanics of the money game.

Games, at least when they are constructions, as ours is, can be changed. The rules are, in that sense, arbitrary. Those who are winning a game would like the rules, of course, not to be changed. It serves the winners, then, to have the other players believe that the rules are immutable, whether that is because they are divine or because they are determined by our genetics.

This is actually the second-best option for them. More to the point would be to have the rest of those playing to not realize they are in a game at all, making them all the easier to dominate in that game (as long as they are playing their position well: e.g. showing up to work).

Third best would be to make the game praiseworthy (e.g. the American dream), and heap shame onto anyone who wants to change the game as weak, entitled, or vicious in some other respect.

“You just want to change the game because you are a loser at this game.” Implied in such sentiments is that the game is not worth changing from a universal perspective, given principles of equity or fairness, or even from a democratic / majoritarian perspective. Implied in that sentiment is that it is either (A) not in the interests of players who are disadvantaged—and were either not authors or not beneficiaries of authors, of the rules, and have the deck stacked against them—to change the game rather than play it, thereby playing into the hands of the winning set; or (B) it is only in their interests in a limited material sense (as it may be in your interest to steal), but it is not virtuous.

1.     It is not a game

2.     It is a game with immutable rules

3.     It is a virtuous game (though the rules could be changed)

Yet, if masses of people are struggling to “win” the game (which they presently are), do not feel like they have a choice to play (which, as I’ll argue in a moment, they effectively do not), and the rules are largely arbitrary, then it is in their interest to change the rules of the game, or to abolish the game entirely.

Let's examine these claims more closely. This section is to examine the nature of the game as something compulsory, oppressive, and hidden, to lay the groundwork for Section 3 where we will discuss the apt response.

             2.2 P as a Moving Target

If we want to show that the masses are justified in wanting to change the playbook, we should answer: what does it mean to win (or struggle to win) the game? The simplest answer is to achieve P, a pleasurable mental state, but this is a moving target for many people. P’s being a moving target is for several reasons, including (A) the influence of reference groups[1], or the idea that people determine their value and that of their lives based on their surroundings. As they move into a higher social group, their standards and their P-target change (this, in practice, leads to “lifestyle creep”). This process is aided by (B) “want creation,”[2] the institution in-place since the New Deal where America shifted from a need-to a want-based society. The concept of a “standards of living” itself has been critiqued as a post-war invention of the advertising industry (entwined with the state’s attempt to stave off another depression).[3] 

P is a moving target, then, when one’s conception of P is highly impressionable. When P is a moving target, it’s obviously more difficult to satisfy (though, I’ll argue shortly, the struggle to win operates on a deeper level and can’t likely be resolved by a static P. Also relevant here (C) is that many people grow their wealth, and the economy itself grows, new inventions enter the market and our standards change (and again, are encouraged to change). Historically, this has been a highly unequal process, where a minority have access to the best consumer advances (and have the leisure time to enjoy it), hence why a “rising tide does not always life all boats.” To illustrate, cars and color TVs used to be the standard of wealth, but no longer. This is simply because millions own cars, TVs, and IPhones, while a tiny minority can book trips to space and own 500-million-dollar yachts.[4] The tide has been “lifted,” but so has the standard, so in a relative sense, not everyone has benefited. Again, in a relative sense, they may even be worse off—it depends on how they appraise the value of going to space. 

The actual winners of the game—those with the capacity to exit the game anytime they want and with the power to change the rules of the game in their interests—create the conditions where the goalpost is always moving, the standard is always rising, making the game difficult but still desirable to “win” for the masses of other players. As I’ll argue, what it would mean to “win” for most people is simply to exit the game.

2.3 The Motivational Distortion

I’ll point briefly to one further result of the variable-P dynamic, which is a kind of motivational inversion. Consider the following: our hominid ancestors, prior to the agricultural revolution, were largely nomadic hunter-foragers, stockpiling being largely impractical. In such a scenario, “work” (picking berries, slaying a deer) is instrumental. However, I suspect a task’s being necessary for survival overrides the alienation/dissociation endemic to much of modern labor (discussed further below). For example, if your plane crashed in Arctic tundra, making a fire & helping the wounded is “instrumental,” in a sense (it’s not inherently rewarding, but undertaken specifically for survival).

However, the necessity of the situation cancels out the psychological disconnection you’d feel if you were getting paid to make fires & bandage wounds as a job (say, as a campground host when your true passion is to be chef). We can assume the surplus time for our ancestors was spent undertaking autotelic activity—that which is inherently rewarding. What we would have then, if this is true, is a non-alienated psychological profile of an individual hominid, where instrumental work is necessary for survival reasons and all other work is inherently gratifying. (Even if this is an idealization of preindustrial hominids, we can imagine such a population and contrast it against our own). We have an unalienated population.

Today, the situation is the inverse, and I’ll point to three aspects of this:

Firstly, most of the work we do is instrumental but removed by innumerable degrees from our survival needs. For most jobs, if one stopped showing up, they would not go hungry or cold immediately (and if ever, only after a long cascade of events involving maxing out credit cards, delinquency, foreclosure/eviction, etc.). Therein lies the alienation, I believe, as a part of our mind struggles to answer: “Why am I doing this?” We devote unspoken (unpaid) labor in the form of cognitive resources to uphold the symbolic scaffolding that explains why x task is necessary. We do what we do not want to do, not for direct survival reasons, but for money. To understand and remember this, and convince ourselves that this is acceptable requires executive functioning. It takes work of its own order.

Secondly, much of our leisure time is also spent doing “activities” that are largely instrumental as well, e.g. self-improvement, team-building exercises, researching better jobs, etc.  We alienate ourselves, by degrees, even in our leisure time.

Thirdly, in industrialized countries, most survival needs are all but guaranteed. Your standard of living may drop below a threshold tolerable to most people, but you’re unlikely to starve or die from exposure in the USA (barring disability, mental health crisis, or severe addiction, which makes up much of the homeless population and does lead to deaths). This means you do not technically have to work (if you loiter or refuse to pay debts, you’ll eventually go to jail where again, your survival needs will be met).

Three aspects of motivational inversion:

1.     Instrumental work is disconnected (by degrees) from survival needs (thus alienation is not overridden).

2.     Leisure time is filled with instrumental activities.

3.     In most advanced countries, basic survival needs are insured (even in fully capitalistic countries).

             2.4 P as a Moving Target (continued)

This motivational distortion serves as another demonstration that our modern life is  radically out of sync with our evolutionary history and adaptive tendencies, a dynamic which has been discussed extensively for its relationship to modern suffering.[5] This distortion persists for three reasons:

(A)  Psychological influence

(B)  Blowing off steam

(C)  Objective value of a higher standard

(A) the subscribing to certain norms and standards of living, which are perhaps arbitrary and unnecessary on the one hand but psychologically difficult to resist. Advertising works for a reason, and subscribing to a norm is not always volitional. It takes work to unsubscribe and resist a changing goal post.

(B) There is a lot that is unpleasant about much of modern, industrialized life (E.G. the air is dirty, there’s constant stimulation, the presence of police, people losing their minds in the street), that even if xyz might be superfluous in a state of nature, and the result of manufactured desire, it is often seen (perhaps correctly) as necessary to compensate for what is unpleasant about living in modern life. 

(C) Going space and watching the sun rise over the earth in zero gravity while listening to Mozart (or Tycho), for many, is desirable. Skiing in the alps, private patio concerts, and gourmet dining—these are not neutral things that advertisers made us think are good. They are good things (for many) that advertisers made us think are needs by tying them to our actual needs, namely self-worth and inclusion. But it’s not blameworthy to want to experience even a mere residue of the lifestyle that is an average Tuesday for the superrich. As more of these P-objects are discovered and invented, it is inevitable that people will continue to want. This is especially true given the rise of secularism, with it’s implication that (A) this is the only life there is to live and (B) there is no divine right of Kings or rich, no “great chain of being” where some are inherently more deserving.

Sidebar: neoliberals have tried to replace this myth with notions of meritocracy, but it doesn’t even a fraction as well as the idea of divine endowment. For one, it’s incompatible with liberal values of “all people being equal fundamentally,” and for two, it’s clear that material success of individuals is largely the product of luck, e.g. their families, schools, upbringing, even  in some sense their natura aptitude. It’s a philosophical problem where “dessert” enters into it, if even aptitude and will and other virtues are environmentally determined or conditioned. I address this more below).

For reasons A-C, we continue to play the game with an inverted, or radically out-of-sync motivational structure from what we evolved in, in environments that are equally divorced from our evolutionary ancestry. This suggests that playing the game, for many, will be a struggle on multiple dimensions. Work itself can be difficult, achieving P (as a moving goal target) can be hard, the motivational structure we’re in is distorted, our environment conflicts with that which we’ve evolved to be comfortable with. All of this points to struggle for most players as they collectively grasp for P. This functions, of course, to further disadvantage them, much to the satisfaction of the winning players.

            2.5 P as a Receding Target  

It is worth calling attention to the obvious fact that under our current version of the money game, which is capitalistic, that the more people compete to “win” the game—whether “winning” is achieving some arbitrary P or whether it is simply to exit while maintaining some rational standard of living for one’s self—the more people compete, the harder they make it for themselves.

A first way that this happens is as follows: grinding entrepreneurs, self-starters, and side hustles require the use of loans, credit cards, and other debt instruments. Interest is paid back to lenders, further enriching them. A second example is, for salary workers, working harder / performing better (for raises, promotions, etc.) creates greater surplus values for the shareholders. A third is that a strategy is to utilize a “winning organization,” sell product to or through them (e.g. on Marketplace or Amazon), or even selling your business to them. There are in-between cases where smaller companies become so entangled that they lose much of their autonomy to these larger behemoths: e.g. Amazon’s price parity rules where third-party vendors are prevented from selling items for less on their own website.[6] A fourth is for consumers: as we consume more, prices increase and goods become harder to come by. (There are psychological reasons as well, namely increase tolerance, but we’ll leave those aside).

In all cases, as wealth concentrates, there is (in an overly-simplified way) less existent money for anyone else to squeeze out of the system. More money can be printed, or produced through compound lending, but that tends to follow the same flow as existent money. It takes money to make money, and for those who have a lot of it, it’s easier to collect the rest.

In short, left to its own devices (e.g. absent regulation and redistributive mechanisms) the capitalist version of the money game has always led to massive concentration of wealth and power (see the concentration of financial power after the Wall-Street bail-outs in 2008, or the giant economic gains of top companies during the pandemic). Therefore, P (especially when P is wealth itself) does not just move, it recedes as it concentrates. This is true even as the economy grows. Piketty’s famous R/G formula, that rate of return on investment overtakes economic growth, so those who’ve already invested money make more than what those who are theoretically gaining from greater productivity and potentially higher wages are getting. A separate but related issue is when growing economies do not entail higher wages, as wages have been largely stagnant when adjusted for inflation for decades, even while productivity (GDP) has increased.

A powerful illusion is that as society is cluttered with more consumer goods that “P” is more accessible than ever. Again, I refer to my response to the “rising tides” arguments. Economic growth does not always entail a higher standard of living (consider Japan),[7] it does not always guarantee P (especially as a moving target). In many cases, the more people try to “win,” the goal recedes. It’s like swimming for a life raft, creating little waves with your swimming, and pushing it further away.

2.6 The Game as the Opponent: To Play is to Lose 

So, to answer the original question, we could ask: are people by and large achieving their target P? Are they happy? Satisfied? What does the data show? A Gallup poll from Feb 2024 shows that less than ½ of Americans are very satisfied with their own lives (satisfaction being highest among upper income folks). In the same year, Axios showed that America was the 23rd-happiest country in the world, and on the decline. If you were to just ask people under 30, America wouldn’t make the top 60. At work, only 30% of employees feel engaged. While a lot plays into this last poll, fewer than a quarter of Americans feel their country is headed in the “right direction.” Kids today are less likely to out-earn their parents. “In 2023, the bottom 60% of households by income fell well short of the threshold for a minimal quality of life.”

These statistics are disturbing, but they also, I feel, miss a slightly deeper point about the money game. This game is peculiar in that you are born into it, and play is not optional, as I discuss more below. Thus, and in addition to the instrumental nature of much of the work in question, as you are playing, you are losing or struggling to get out (unlike other games where you may play just to play). In other words, there’s a sense in which the money game is zero-sum. Even though P is a construction or subscription (imposed from without or within) for many, and they could effectively exit the game board long before they choose to, as long as a person feels as though they must play to achieve P, they cannot be said to be free or “winning.”

I suppose “winning” could be making meaningful strides towards exit, but “meaningful” is ambiguous. Someone making minimum wage and squirreling away a dollar a week in savings could be “winning.” The money game is peculiar in that it is often the players pitted against the game itself, and they lose until they exit. (Think of games like Russian Roulette or Battle Royale: to be playing is already to be in a losing position). A different way of making the same point would be to say that for most players, if they could stop playing, they would (especially controlling for habit or the Stockholm syndrome-like attachment people get to their employers).

When you win Settlers of Catan with ten points, you stop playing. Other players could continue to play, to see who is the runner-up, but you do not. When you win the money game, you exit the game or “retire.” Simply put, you no longer have to work, or jump through the hurdles of R—S to achieve P. Even for the 30% of Americans who feel “engaged” at work, it’s a different question entirely to ask would you continue working if you had amassed enough wealth to achieve P on its own. My guess is the percentage would be smaller.

Work would have to be truly auto-telic, or, as in flow states, inherently rewarding (where the activity is itself the “ends” or reward), or there be some greater moral imperative the worker has subscribed to (plugging a dam, completing work on a vaccine—something motivationally analogous to treating wounds in our crashed plane on the tundra), for the person to continue absent the need of money. At such a point I wonder: is it still considered “work.” At least colloquially, “work” seems synonymous with “I don’t want to do it,” as in, “this vacation is starting to feel like work.” 

            2.7: Two objections: The fairness of trade and virtue of work

            Objection 1: Fairness of trade

            Some may balk at the idea that “work” is a form of oppression in-and-of itself, because the alternative seems to be also unfair, i.e. giving away freely what others have to work to create. Consider the following dialogue:

Mike: There is nothing oppressive or immoral about having to work to buy eggs or           Iphone. Someone took the time, the risk, spent the energy, to design and create and  ship those products. Do you think that Iphones and cars just grow on trees? Why should  they be free to you?

Ken: Imagine, Mike, that there was once a common space that you had both (i) free access to hunt, gather, graze, farm, and harvest from, and (ii) the cultural know-how to do so. Then one day a group of powerful people enclosed this space, and said you no longer had access to it. Your people began to starve. Then, one day, you saw tents and tables in front of the walled-enclosures. On the tables were many of the products that  you could once gather / harvest from the area on the other side of the wall: mushrooms, apples, fish from the streams, etc. But there were also other strange artifacts that had been made by various modifications and combinations of those resources: chairs and  tables made from the wood cut from the forest and nails made from iron dug from the    ground. Art pieces like sculptures also cut from the forest, and painted from the clays  found by the river and dies from the eggplant; Many other things as well.

You naturally want these artifacts, but are told to get them you need slips of paper with  symbols on them, called money. “How do I get money?” you ask. You need to go work or someone who controls sections of the enclosed areas. “Okay, I’ll pass then on the  tables and chairs and sculptures. I just want the mushrooms and fish, which I used to get  for free.” Sorry, you have to pay money for those too.

This dialogue, an idealization of the “Great Transformation,” the enclosure period that marked the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in the 16^th century England, illustrates the fact that even basic necessities require submitting ourselves to someone more powerful (i.e. getting a job) and selling our time, our minds, our intentionality, our personhoods. It’s important to not be distracted by the fact that, while we have to pay for luxury extra stuff (e.g. sofas, Iphones, electric bicycles) that’ve been invented and built (from the same materials that may have otherwise been held in-common, e.g. cobalt, iron, wood etc.), we also generally have to pay for essentials as well.

It’s a separate, but interesting question whether it’s fair to be expected to pay for luxury items when those items were (i) the product of a long history difficult to demarcate, of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and capitalist exploitation (e.g. paying workers starvation wages, possible only because the alternative for them was starvation); this being true even (ii) for products that are not directly the result of a slavery or exploitation, but deeply entangled with such processes (e.g. a bank loan was taken to start a small boutique shop with locally sourced ingredients, but the money from the loan came from the saving’s accounts of individual’s whose wealth came from exploitative or extractivist projects); finally (iii) when the rules which govern who controls what and gets to develop what are largely arbitrary.[8] 

For now, however, it’s sufficient (in response to Mike) to note that even essential needs require work.

Objection 2: Virtuousness of Work 

An initial response here, derived perhaps of the Protestant work ethic, is some sense of the nobility in active struggle or effortful activity—seemingly an essential feature of work  (where remuneration or exchange is likely also essential, and possibly instrumentality). Americans are suspicious of pleasure, as Ursula Leguin showed in “The Ones Who Walk from Omelas.”[9] 

Consider the following thought experiment: were you to feel the satisfaction you get from work without work, would you quit? One might respond, “You need to work to get that satisfaction. A cold beer at the end of the day tastes better because you’ve earned it. Your vacation feels better because you earned it. Your question is like asking, Would the euphoria of lifting weights feel the same if you didn’t lift the weights?’ It’s a contradiction.”

Put aside here the obvious conflation between work and effortful activity (perhaps a necessary, but certainly not a sufficient feature of work, i.e. there is plenty of effortful activity which could not be considered “work,” e.g. climbing a mountain for sport). The instinctive association of pleasure-without-work is onanism: the effortful “runner’s high” is esteemed in contrast with the junkie’s high, who cheats their way to the dopamine rush.

Keeping with that example, it’s again important to notice that one can run cause they’re a paid mail carrier, or they can run because they like to run. But again, putting a pin in that distinction, let’s assume there is something else that comes with the pleasure from effortful activity (whether from work or play). We can ask: if you could feel that without actually doing effortful activity, would you? Is there something virtuous about effortful activity in-and-of-itself.

Two likely responses to this: First, that’s impossible. You’re asking to imagine a square-circle. And even if it is possible, I can’t imagine it. Second, no, I wouldn’t want it, or at least it wouldn’t be necessary. What literally, feels good is the effortful activity. And if you’re asking me to imagine feeling that without the effortful activity itself, well then, back to my initial reply: I can’t imagine it.

These two responses might be successful, but if nothing else I hope they’ve loosened the (unpinning) distinction between voluntary effortful activity and work. We can see that in most cases this definitely would not be true of most jobs. The reply when it comes to work is: yes, if I could keep my wage but not do my job, I would. What of the satisfaction I feel from my job? Well, I’d keep doing those aspects I find satisfactory, and much more so, on my own terms.

You can approach this problem from a different direction: would you continue to work if you did not get the reward of struggle (you may still make money, but the feeling of being satisfied from work would be gone)? Would you continue to lift weights if you did not feel the euphoria after—if you did not feel good after (again, you may still build muscle which is useful, like money, but the feeling of satisfaction is gone)?

These, as being telic or instrumental activities, are inherently dispensable. If we could achieve the telos without them, we would. If we could achieve P without R—S, we would. And once again, for the point of argument, assume you not only get pleasure from lifting weights or rewards from working without weight lifting or working, respectively, but imagine you get the P from having felt like you lifted weights, or the rewards from having felt like you worked, meaning you take a drug that makes you feel exactly, identically as you would have if you’ve lifted weights, if you’ve worked, if you’ve struggled (including all the health benefits). Would you not? 

What I’m trying to illustrate is that playing the money game itself is not desirable in itself, or at least it's unlikely to be for many, even for those who truly enjoy hard work and struggle. It's a different thing entirely when this activity is a feature of a game you’re born into and largely forced to play. Whether or not people are inching towards retirement in their sixties, assuming it’s just a “thing that will happen” like marriage or children, or whether they are maximizing their RothIRA contributions and saving every penny to hit Financial Independence and Retire Early (FIRE), I believe most people want to exit the money game, they are trying to get out, where to win is to exit. This is why people fantasize about winning the lottery, why the lottery is popular, (and, I argue, why apocalyptic movies are also popular, as this is also a form of the game being ended prematurely, even in place of a different kind of more brutal game that is at once more abstract and unbelievable).

There are cases where active struggle is virtuous, and that active struggle may look indistinguishable from work: digging a ditch, writing a computer program, mending a wound—it takes effort, in a variety of contexts it is honorable, dignified, inspiring. In a variety of contexts, its counterpart, indolence and parasitism, are viscous. This is certainly the case when struggle is necessary, as in our crashed-plane scenario, or when struggle is elected for some higher purpose, as in composing a piece of music or solving a complex physics puzzle.

But rarely are either relevant in the money game, for most players. For many, they scantly have the time or resources to elect higher, difficult pursuits (although this does vary across echelons). They are also rarely in true survival situations, as mentioned above. The work undertaken is the product of a complex and largely arbitrary set of circumstances, almost always top-down processes that have at their center the desire for wealth extraction of the winning players (e.g. Google, Nike, Hilton), and the maintenance of a society that allows for that continued extraction (e.g. healthcare, garbage-pickup, policing).

Again, even if one chooses to continue a form of “work” or productive, creative activity after retirement, even if struggle is inexorable from reward, we must distinguish between the kind of struggle one takes up voluntarily, as in choosing to go to the gym, and being forced to smash rocks in a Siberian work camp. It is this latter form which is relevant here, and crystalizes the reason why to win the money game is to exit it, and why as long as you are playing you are in a sense “losing,” or struggling, and that is because, by definition, no one (or at least very few, I argue, as it cuts against the grain of autonomy needs) wants to play a game they are forced to play (even if they might have otherwise wanted to play it, e.g. reactance theory[10]).

No one wants to play a game where the rules and conditions - even the objectives are entirely determined by other players, other parties, and where penalties include degradation and death. Very few, I argue, want to play this game, in large part because of their having very little choice in whether they play it. I’ll turn to this point now. 

             2.8 Forced to Play 

People need five things to live: hydration, nourishment, shelter from the elements, fire / heat, socialization. These first four items people (players) can largely acquire without playing the game. That is, they can acquire them without utilizing Strategies, trying to avoid Penalties and win Rewards that are themselves a means to or are the procedurally prior Objective—money, all within the game Space, according to the set of Rules (ever changing as determined by one set of players, i.e. politics). The fifth element, though, is society, or company. With rare exception, people need others. Kimberlee Brownlee discusses this in vivid detail, where she notes that those who are isolated for long periods of time lose their minds, befriend inanimate objects, and will even beg to be interrogated in order to have some social connection. 

To achieve time, space, and freedom — in the interests of achieving P, you need money. In the money game, you need money to buy the four things you need to survive, first and foremost. In industrial and post-industrial societies, most people are born in metropolitan areas, and their education does not include how to start a fire with the bow-drill method, how build shelter, how to purify water in nature, how to hunt, trap, forage, or grow food. Money, and strategies to get money (as simple as working) are required to achieve these means of survival, even if you could theoretically derive them without money (unlike everything else which is manufactured within society—cars, houses, iPhone, etc.). This, again, is due to the absence of cultural knowledge on how to derive these things without money outside the game, which is true for most people. 

However, the fifth need of socialization plays an interesting role here. For most people, in most places, the first four items needed for survival could be derived from the state. They exist—regardless of how unpleasant a place they may be: homeless shelters and jails, soup kitchens and pantries—these places where, in an industrialized society, you can get your first four needs met without working, without participating in the game. If you just sit down on the ground and stare until you start to starve, eventually someone will either arrest you or pick you up and commit you to an institution where those needs are met (though the experience has risks and is unpleasant).

In the same way, we could derive needs 1-4 from nature. Depending on where we live there is a spectrum of difficulty and training required, but it is there (I think the fact that this has been excluded from cultural knowledge is important over its being obtainable as technical knowledge. That point is relevant to the fifth need below—knowledge understood here as something that is not only derived from, but reinforced and afforded status and meaning through culture).

Our fifth need, the social need, which I argue is a survival (or at least sanity) need, creates a sense of shame around being a “free loader,” benefitting from others who are playing the game and likely struggling thereby. Likewise, to go into the forest and forage / hunt / trap: i.e. “live off the land,” is likely to be alone, or at least to sacrifice major components of your social circle. 

Players are liable to underestimate the power of the fifth need for a few reasons. One is that we resent the company of others that we’re forced to be around, and have a strong desire to be alone (illustrated well in the finale of the film Snowpiercer). We fantasize about being away from others, such that we forget how strong the social bond is. In reality, most people in the modern day, in industrialized countries, have never been without contact (personal, electronic, etc.) or close proximity to another human for more than 24 hours, and were they to try, they would likely be surprised to discover how much comfort undergirds the annoyance they might have felt in the mass company of others.

A second reason is simply that we don’t consume socialization in the same way that we consume other needs – food, warmth, etc., so its harder to measure in material terms. It is, above all else, the proximity to other harmless-seeming homo sapiens that reassures our nervous systems that we will probably be okay, and this is correct. Regardless of how atomized we become, when someone is truly in need (e.g. a bicycle accident, a theft) at least one or two others in a crowd likely will come to aid (bystander-effect notwithstanding).

There are many reasons why people do not leave the game-board—physical addition to what society offers (sugar, phones, caffein, drugs) is another major reason, but I’m focusing just on our most basic needs (to be charitable, maybe). Without people and especially without training, most people would likely fall apart and retreat to the game board quickly.

One may posit a hybrid approach: something like subsistence farming. Can I not homestead, still very active or “working” to grow food, hunt on my property, but not be part of the “system” or on the game board, yet still close enough to society that I can have friends visit? This is the ideal for many young people, yet you still need money to buy the land (except perhaps in very remote places), the equipment to run the homestead, and likely for many other aspects of the project. Unless you are literally doing everything from the ground up, making your own primitive tools (which requires the lost cultural knowledge) you just talking about winning the game—making enough money to buy your way off the gameboard. 

So, I argue that we are indeed forced to play the game. We are born into a system where we need to make money to live, and though it may be theoretically possible to get our first four needs met outside the system, it is almost impossible to get our fifth need met in any deep and meaningful way. That fifth need creates a sense of shame of deriving our first four needs without playing the game, and that sense of shame is not entirely unjustified. When masses of players are “selling their souls” to play the game, there’s something to the intuition that, to divert the yield of their souls to one’s self so that one can avoid selling their own, is off-putting, but we’ll examine this more closely in the next section under the discussion of the apt response. If the rewards of the game are one’s survival and sanity needs, and those needs are near impossible to get elsewhere, then one is not choosing in a meaningful sense to play that game, the same way one does not choose to open the safe when they are being held at gunpoint. 

2.9 Human Nature the Need for Freedom 

Why does it matter if the game is compulsory? I argued above that no one wants to feel pain, that the idea of wanting a state that is in-and-of itself negative N contains a contradiction, and that we only desire pain as a means to a greater pleasure. In the same way, I argue, though I think this is likely more contentious, that no one wants to be forced, controlled, or dominated. Perhaps, like “desire,” it is contained within the semantic content of “dominate” that the person who is being dominated is resistant, that it is not domination if the subject consents to it, that it is not coercion when one is doing what they want to begin with.            

Again, someone may “consent” to being dominated superficially: in a BDSM context, in joining and taking orders in the military, in swearing an oath when becoming a nun or disciple of some religious order. But we can recognize this is categorically different from being abducted or born into slavery. I think there are important differences between the money game and slavery (critically, the ability to become free for many players within the game, as well as freedom of movement. Exiting the game is technically and legally possible). Yet, there is an analogy where both are compulsory, and where we consider what an apt response is to a structure that is domineering and forceful.

There are few areas where I think it’s safe to invoke an appeal to nature, both because of the ought-is fallacy, but also because of the difficulty in determining what counts as “human nature” outside the context of society’s influence, which is often impossible to achieve (there are deeper problems too where we’d consider whether, metaphysically, x is the same entity when in a vacuum vs in a social setting. This is certainly relevant for discussions of the “self,” for instance). Such appeals are almost always self-serving, e.g. “Look at how most people just plod along and get a job, with little interest in resisting. Doesn’t this show that most people are passive and want to be told what to do?” Such appeals, for example, miss the broad influence that society, particularly our education and religious systems, has in rewarding and thus conditioning subordination[11], and that our media systems play in distracting and pacifying.[12] I do, however, believe that there’s a stronger case to be made for the innate desire for freedom.

From a selfish-gene perspective, predictability is paramount, and there’s increasing evidence that our brains are largely prediction machines,[13] where the main function is to construct the world based on prior models, using as little energy as possible to maintain the models as we navigate reality. There is much predictability in being in a controlled environment, such that it might serve some evolutionary advantage to submit to a dictatorial regime. However, even loyalists are rarely truly safe, as Stalin’s purges showed. Also, inside the artifice of an organized, authoritarian regime, an enemy can always grab the helm and suddenly turn the heat against you, or your ally can become your enemy.

The greatest gene-replication advantage is likely where one has more power, not less. I think we likely hold the genes of those who survived and reproduced with the following trait: tolerate domination while necessary, but always aim for more freedom. Balance is important, as in the balance between power (or efficacy) and autonomy (self-governance). High autonomy but low power is dangerous: giving a seven-year-old an iPhone or a fourteen-year-old the keys to the car, for instance, or giving me the controls of a 747. Yet, high-power (i.e. efficacy) combined with high-autonomy is exactly what helps us survive and reproduce, proliferating our genes.[14]

In our prehistory, very few may have had this disposition, but we would have had the desire for it, recognizing its advantage. With high power (in our modern context: money for both security / defense and sustenance/acquisition), one can live a long time. With high autonomy, one is insulated from the whims of a more powerful organization, and can make effective decisions from what they know is right for them (provided they also have high-self-knowledge, which should perhaps be classified as a type of power, if not a precondition of lasting power).  

We can observe that people, especially children, generally resist being dominated and controlled. They only do so as a means to avoid greater pain. People do not live vicariously through media characters who are servile. Heroes in books and movies are not those who obey, they are those who resist and achieve liberation without penalty. It is in our nature to want to be free, and this includes from the requirement to work. One of the greatest predictor of human happiness is control over one’s time.[15] 

The ability to exercise agency—to freely make decisions as a goal-forming conscious being, is to exercise a feature that distinguishes persons from rocks or simple non-human animals. It is to exercise humanity. There is safety and appeal in submission and following, but only for those who lack the efficacy to pair with autonomy, to then amount, perhaps, to a full expression of agency.

Observe that humans become depressed when they are confined, as slaves, prisoners, and employees. They become anxious when put into positions of high-autonomy (as I would if handed the controls of a 747 mid-flight, or most people would if they were suddenly appointed president) but this is because the ratio of responsibility to skill (power) is low. High-autonomy, high-efficacy / power, high-self-knowledge (to inform goal creation), amounts to agency, where one can act meaningfully and effectively. This action, though it may aim towards a positive ends,[16] is an ends in itself—perhaps one even more valuable than the goal. Perhaps, along with deep connection with others, it is the most valuable.

2.10 Time, Space, Freedom, and Happiness

I’ve noted (A) the intuitive distinction between being an employee (where one may aspire to financial freedom) and being a slave. I’ve also noted (B) that evolutionarily, it may have served some purpose to be subordinated in the short-term, but always with the desire for greater power and autonomy, especially as one gains self-knowledge and knows what’s best for them.

There also seems to be a close relationship between happiness and being present.[17] Constantly guarding against the next threat takes us out of the present. As I’ll discuss as the end of Section 3, it is guarding against threats that largely motivate our temporal schema period, as we consult the past to help guard against the anticipated future (or escape into an idealized past). In the money game, we need to do this constantly as scarcity and precarity is built into its structure. At any moment, given the whims of more powerful players or the winds blowing against the infrastructure of the game, you can be plunged fathoms below your current station of security. This is true despite being surrounded by apparent abundance (a homeless person stares inside a grocery store with food so plentiful it’s on sale to try to off-load it before it expires, or at a warm hotel with empty beds). The ensuing disorientation itself is incidental power-functional (IPF) (discussed below) reinforcing the structure and the winning position of the players (e.g. “look at all this abundance.

There must be something wrong with me that I can’t figure out how to get it!).

Perhaps happiness itself is pleasure derived from / constituted by the freedom derived by autonomy and power. This freedom is valuable as it is both (i) stored with all its positive possibilities for creativity and sense-satisfaction (licking an ice cream cone, playing the fiddle), but also (ii) enjoyable in-and-of-itself, because it allows for thought, observation, and the experience of being (e.g. the sun on your face, the smell of the ocean, or just being alive[18]) without interference, and the knowledge that you can change your circumstances when things are unpleasant or painful. The sun and ocean smell are positive, but when these things become negative (a dark cloud, a mosquito) you know you have the power and autonomy to change your circumstances. You are free to do so, unlike a slave or employee trapped in those circumstance that are unpleasant. Just knowing this is a kind of pleasure, before you have actually changed your situation. Pleasure of this kind without any concept of when and if it will end, is like a boundless and beautiful sea. It is a strong candidate for happiness (if there is a distinction to be made between the two). Pleasure, without the concept of time, in virtue of having freedom, that is the function of Autonomy+Power+Self-knowledge.

Happy individuals have:

·      Self-knowledge (they know, at the end of the day, despite their biases, what they want and need better than others because of their singular powers of introspection and reflection).

·      High-power (money, skill, capacity; this does not mean power over others, but power to affect their reality, including in democratic organizations.

·      High0autonomy (self-governance and freedom from interference)

            The money game generally robs most players of all three attributes, as does any fixed and arbitrary hierarchy. It rewards players with incremental increases of these things, but in general, unless you are in a winning position, all three attributes are limited in some respect. Their limitation is often to the advantage of other players. This will be relevant for 3.1, on the apt response.

2.11 Function vs Intention

Quick aside: It’s easy to sound conspiratorial when we confuse function with intention, as in below when I mentioned how disorientation is Incidental-Power Functional. Below I’ll discuss the “charge of hypocrisy” and “denial of asymmetry” as further case studies of IPF. In all these examples, a norm, law, process, or isolated and then repeated behavior can function a certain way, and survive and be replicated (or not be challenged) because of its function (or its outcome or the role it plays in the broader machinery of game play and society), without ever having been brought into being intentionally for that outcome. Schools might create obedient worker-bees lacking class-consciousness or bargaining skills by accident (though that’s unlikely), but be unchallenged as such (and even maintained and reinforced as such) because they function to successfully maintain a class hierarchy. The ostensible purpose of NPR and podcasts are to inform, but the function is to distract people (and thereby deplete productive rage) from the misery of their wholly unnecessary traffic-packed commutes.

We can call a phenomenon (a process, a norm, a law) incidental-power-functional (IPF) when it reinforces an existing hierarchy, survives or is not eradicated, and perhaps is even protected for this reason, despite its coming into existence for another reason, or as analogous to a mutation.

2.12 No Escape from the Game

We’re discussing what it means to struggle to win the game, and we’ve come to a place where we’re seeing that the game is not only a struggle because of a non-static P, but because of the nature of the game itself as something one is born into and forced to play. Have we fully demonstrated that one is forced to play the game?            

A different way of answering the question: “is one forced to play the game?” is, for those born into the game, which is nearly everyone, “is one free to exit the game?” Exiting the game, again, would be grabbing a rifle and a rough sack and heading out into the bush to live in the forest, hunting, trapping, foraging, fishing; or, finding a plot of land that is unclaimed and developing it. While this is a fantasy for many, the same way that our social fifth need creates shame around begging for cash, it may also create a sense of shame around digging in the dirt to get your needs 1-4 met, living like a “barbarian,” or like you’re from the 18^th century. “We invented technology so you don’t have to do that anymore.” This shame, whether or not it is ultimately arbitrary or itself a feature of the game, remains a real psychological barrier that it takes work to circumvent (like the manufactured desires for arbitrary P objects and services).            

The fifth need makes it difficult to exit the game and subsistence farm, hunt/forage, or otherwise live off the land. Where you can do this for “free” are places that are remote, not owned or policed by the state or private parties. In the vast majority of places, you still pay property tax, you pay for the land, you pay for water, sewage, or electricity, and you will likely pay other taxes. You will also pay for the equipment to run the land. Any time you begin talking about amassing wealth to pay for these things in advance, you are talking about winning the game, not escaping it. It may be ultimately possible for those unique individuals who do not have high social needs and who are already very skilled in bushcraft and very handy, to break away and homestead. There have been books and documentaries about such people, notable for how rare they are. There have also been stories of the alternative (Chris McCandless being perhaps the most famous), those who thought it much easier than it really is to “go off grid.” In reality, most people would struggle to spend even a night or two by themselves in the forest, without the comforts (even beyond what are actual survival needs), available at the check-out counter.            

We like to think that we could easily overcome such psychological hang-ups, but we cannot. Fear, anxiety, and loneliness are physical experiences before they are feelings. They cannot just be life-hacked through, especially for those who want to get off the board in the ways we’ve been discussing. For comparison, ask anyone whose quit smoking cigarettes, or who has a phobia of flying, just how easy it is to “get over it.” That which leads to withdrawl in it’s absence are not often not even needs (phones, cigarettes, coffee), and neither are our specific groceries or electric heating—you could sustain yourself on grubs, squirrels, and rain water, cooking and heating with fire. To do so, and to do so in isolation, would likely provoke a similar panic one feels when withdrawing from cigarettes. We can set aside the semantics of “disorder” and addiction and just recognize that in both cases people’s nervous system is tied to a particular state of being, and that there is a nervous reaction that kicks into gear when the state is changed (a cigarette is withdrawn, a plane is approached; one is living in the dirt, denied of groceries and a roof).

So much of what constitutes modern life is like this—our nervous systems geared in such a way that we rely on things that are not actually needs, but the panic and withdrawal is real. In few cases can one simply “will” themselves through it to the place where they realized it was not a need, but a dependence. It may be the case that if there was a gun to their head they could (or, substitute a survival situation), but I would say that’s not “willing,” that is the adrenaline of the situation overriding their other impulses. Given this, the thought of “escaping the game,” into the wild is little more than a fantasy for those who indulge it, another form of escapism.

That the knowledge of how to live outside the game is excluded from the education we receive when we are most plastic, and the idea that the space to live outside of the game is limited, is unlikely to be accidental. It’s not a conspiracy by GE (don’t teach people the bow-drill method lest they stop paying for gas and electric!). Public and private education systems are funded with the understanding that they will create producers of value[19] (and, in some idealistic read, participate democratically),[20] not those who will escape the game board. It does not serve those who would like to derive taxes and sell property to have “Free space” where people can homestead. As a result, very few people know how to live outside the game, to live “off grid,” and there is little space to do so legally and completely freely.

Very few people can do anything like this without already having money stored to pay for the aforementioned expenses. Likewise, many are not educated on personal finance either, and for good reason – it is to the advantage of one set of players to have another set who are inept. This creates a legion of flexible labor who will work for low-wages, failing organize or to advocate for themselves, or compete for higher positions, who are probably trapped in debt. Whether this latter example is a “happy accident” that no one in the department of education bothers trying to correct or actually something intentional and conspiratorial is irrelevant. If we (or rather, the players with the power) wanted to organize to teach primitive skills or personal finance effectively to the masses, they would. In fact, it’s not in their interests to do so.

Returning to the skill of exiting the game into nature, even those who do are tied to the game by their social needs, unless (unlikely) they live in a community of others who have similar knowledge and / or similarly already stored wealth to be able to do some hybrid version of this. But that, again, is winning / exiting the game, not escaping it. For all intents and purposes, there is no escape from the game. The only way out is to win the game, or to abolish it. 

It’s worth noting briefly that, in our current capitalist iteration of the money game, there is an inescapability specific to this model. It’s often lauded that one can quit their job (where their surplus value is being expropriated, their agency hijacked, autonomy violated, consciousness alienated). They have the freedom to quit, unlike serfs, slaves, or indentured servants. Of course, they go across the street and find themselves in the exact same position. An apologist will then say, “well they can start their own business, then.” Even if this is true, if they have access to the start-up capital and the education to do so (both of which are limited for systemic reasons discussed above per education), perhaps it’s not universal that having a boot on your neck leaves you with the sense that power means the ability to do so to someone else.[21] 

We can say now that, in the game, P is a moving target (because of reasons A-C), and the pursuit of P is out of sync with our evolved tendencies and environments, and that achieving P in general is difficult—especially when P is finite (beach front property) and many are trying to get it at once, and that we’re forced to play this game - which is inherently unpleasant for one’s being forced (and for the reasons specific to this model, e.g. alienation, exploitation, competition and thus distrust with your close kin, and the ever-receding P and comparison/frustration/inferiority that follows). This means, yes, in its very nature, to play the game is to struggle, and there is an interest for many or most players in abolishing or changing it (though an interest for the winners in preserving it).

2.13 The Arbitrary Rules of the Game 

I’ve argued that one of the reasons why a set of players might be motivated and justified in wanting to change the playbook is that the game is a construction where rules are arbitrary (as is, of course, money itself as a token in the game[22]). This implies the rules can be changed, and to the extent that they the game is a struggle for the vast majority of players, they have grounds to change it. Put more simply, one set of players is consistently dominated by another, much smaller set in the money game. What does domination entail?            

One definition of “domination” is arbitrary interference with liberty.[23] Does the money game interfere with liberty? In the sense that it is inescapable and compulsory, of course, but what about the rules themselves? Politics has been famously defined as “deciding who gets what, when, and how.”[24] Put slightly differently, from the money game perspective, politics is the attempt by some players of the game to change the rules (laws, norms, and policies for how the game is played, or perhaps, who gets what, when, and how) in their own favor, so they get more. This is another reason why I shy away from terms like capitalism, socialism, etc. Any system is a money game system which includes R—S, and where each stage is coded monetarily, particularly the “objective” being first and foremost money.

The rules are arbitrary, then, in two senses (A) because they are created, not out of any logical, physical, or moral necessity—but in the interest of some players over others (B) because the money game, this particular game, is itself arbitrary: even if other systems seem less preferable (e.g. we all become foraging monks), the production and allocation of resources according to R—S just does not need to exist. It has existed for perhaps 10,000 years or more, but you can imagine an alternative without contradiction, without any violation of the actual laws that are inescapable. We are not trying to imagine traveling faster than the speed of light, or a three-sided square. 

             We accept then, the following three claims: 

1.     The masses struggle to win the game (P as a moving and receding target) 

2.     Game-play is compulsory and inescapable (It is necessary to achieve basic needs 1-5, with 5 conditioning how 1-4 is achieved)

3.     The rules of the game are arbitrary (players can change the rules, through the political process or force, in their interests; the game itself is a construction and non-necessary). 

Returning to a question posed at the outset of this chapter, given 1-3, we can see why it would be a winning strategy for some players to discourage the awareness that this game is being played at all. We saw that the third-best option for winning players is to present the game as necessary, the second-best option is to treat the game as virtuous, but best option is to limit the number of players who are aware they are playing a game. It is hard to win, to really win, or to abolish the game, when you don’t know you’re playing, and it is hard to become motivated to change the rules. The result is what we see: for the older generation it’s as follows: show up to job for 40 years, punch a clock, and wait for the day where maybe you get your pension and your kids can take care of you until you die; the current generation is perhaps more multiplicitous: work until your burnt out, have multiple degrees, multiple careers, work at a coffee shop, be homeless, delete Instagram, move back in with your parents, have roommates at thirties, don’t have kids but maybe adopt, have a cat, be on several medications, go to protests, work at Nike, be nihilistic and confused, redownload Instagram, be anxious and numb, babysit, watch Netflix, try bartending, live off credit cards, go in circles, learn to code, work at Google, sell your crafts on etsy, drive for lyft, wonder what is happening.

2.14 Self-authored Domination in an Arbitrary System

There’s a particular kind of insult that comes through being crushed by something constructed, like a game. You feel it when you lose a Monopoly, or football. It’s different from being unable to summit a mountain, or being batted back to shore by winds in a sailboat. In the money game, the crushing is real. There’s an experience of looking at a bank account, bills, a credit card statement, and—in one reality, seeing it as ink on a piece of paper, not tied to anything material about the world (like winds batting you back to shore). There’s the dual consciousness, however, of recognizing that there are very material impacts. Your possessions and house can be taken from you, you can go to jail, you can have your income docked; in some societies, your social credit score can plummet, barring you from other aspects of society. You are “forced to play along,” in this instance, playing along to your own crushing. You are forced to believe, to do the cognitive and imaginative work of subscribing to the construct—the symbols and rules and patterns of the money game, to your own destruction, when you’d rather just walk off the board.

The disorientation that comes from living in a society that is at once real and unreal is IPF. One lives a disorganized reality where they author their own domination. There is a kind of turning-oneself-in for an imaginary crime, when we accept eviction, termination, deportation, etc. Of course, “accept” here is loose. The ultimate driving force of these processes is threatened or actual violence, by police or private security forces, or the simple exercise of power over which the individual has no control (e.g. a frozen bank account). But we do accept this process as a potential by default, by participating in systems that are tied into these norms. Which is to say, we accept the rules of the game when we play the game, knowing full-well the threat they pose to most players.

We accept them, and they become normalized, background assumptions, so that when penalties do occur we often feel less entitled to object. “These were the rules of the game you chose to play.” But of course, no one is given the option whether or not they play, and there is “no escape.” Not for natural reasons, as there may not be an escape from an advancing flood when you’re trapped in a canyon, but because of the way that certain kinds of knowledge are excluded from our culture, the way that space is controlled through laws (rules) and threats of violence, the way that shame is used as a mechanism of control, and because of lines of deep social dependency with their biological roots.

My point with this sub-section is not to make this argument, but to question what this does to the subject psychologically. What does it mean to author your own domination? To subscribe by-default to a set of rules that will almost certainly disadvantage you? If it’s true that players do, and the rules do, what further effect does this have on the player as they move across the game-board? That at various intervals and penalties and set-backs, they have to say, in a way, that “I did this to myself. I chose to follow these rules. I am choosing this consequence even.”

We believe that we chose those rules and these penalties because it gives us a sense of control. We “consent” when there is no other choice, but that “no other choice” is the function of violence that is implied, suggested, threatened, looming. So much of it is violence by subtraction – subtracting access, opportunities, etc. The function of that belief is to make it easier to not resist in the moment, or across time.            

Regardless, without truly taking stock of the fact that we’re in the game, we can’t ever win it, and we can’t ever change it. Knowing this is a game, and knowing 1-3 from 2.12, we return to another question: would it mean to win the game?

2.15 To Win the Game: Comparative Lifestyles and Leaving the Game

I want to posit that to win the game is to exit it, while maintaining some basic standard of living for yourself, that is, the product neither of the prizes that advertiser-players would have you believe is a need (rather than a good), nor the absolute bare minimum that is needed for existence. There are things that are good in this world to have, and many of them are advertised and are products of the game. But I posit that time, space, and freedom itself are rewards in themselves, because they allow one to do so much of life that is good that is actually free or practically free: freedom to play, to have sex, to think, to day-dream, to exercise, to read, to write, to paint or create art, to wrestle, to travel (in a more limited way) to hike and swim, to spend time with animals, to garden.            

So much of this stuff barely costs anything. There are goods, pleasurable things, and many of them are products of the game. I would argue that to win is to be able to do many of these things and more, without needing to rent one’s time and mind to a more powerful player—without needing to play the money game, which, in itself, requires so much capitulation to norms or values that may conflict with your own. To take the most obvious example: it is simply impossible to participate in this global market in a way that is not contributing to climate change, which, if left unmitigated, will murder 80 million people before the century’s end. Add in American taxes going to the war machine, sweat shop labor that produces most consumer goods, Congo mines to make batteries for ebikes and cars, billions of sentient creatures trapped in the brutal animal industrial complex, etc. 

Many stay in the game because they want to have freedom + luxury, and players need to accept that other players, a tiny few, who were born winners, who never really had to work ever, may in some sense win objectively better lives. Those with time, space, freedom, plus limitless luxuries are in a place to enjoy more of what life has to offer, the beautiful and interesting combinations of energy and material accessible to a conscious mind, pushing more dopamine buttons in different combinations.            

I’m not totally even sold on this. I think the goal post moves quickly, people adapt, plateau, gain tolerance – the glamor wears off, often leaving people chasing some elusive better. There’s a reason why some choose to live like monks, even forgoing middle class lifestyles to do so. Combine all this with the empathy we experience as social creatures, I think there’s a natural guilt that cuts into people’s happiness when they realize that much of the rest of the world is suffering, even sensing it subconsciously, even if they don’t realize its etiology – but especially if this suffering is traceable to rules of the game that also made them rich. Otherwise, a numbness blankets the guilt but also diminishes what of the pleasures can be had.

The point is, I’m both skeptical of how possible it is to truly achieve “luxury” as an informed, social animal—to make staying in the game worth one’s TSF. However, we should never assume that the rich are secretly unhappy lest we fall victim to adaptive preference, which can lead weaker players to excuse inequality and incentivize actually trying to win, to gain TSF.

We can ask two questions: will a life taken as a whole be better if we strive for more riches, when we otherwise could have just walked off the game board? I have issues with this “life as a whole” outlook, which comes from Aristotle, because we don’t experience our lives that way, rather we cast our perspective from specific intervals across our life-time – at no point to we have a third personal point of view of the entire thing.            

The second question we can ask is, though, will our future-self be glad for our striving? If we burn up years, decades, an accomplice in much of the harm that playing the money game causes others, our eyes always on the future – will there be a moment when our future self thinks “I’m glad my past-self did all that, for me to get here now where I have all this luxury.” Will the future self be able to purge the guilt, the stress that the thriving cost, and the knowledge of lost time? Is the striving self be content giving up large chunks of their own life, their own chance to have walked off the board and enjoyed freedom and the goods that are free, striving for their future selves’ opulence?

I want to settle on two claims, illustrated by Bill and Rich. Bill reaches the point where he can exit the money game at age 30, but he doesn’t exit with “thin fire,” with enough just to pay for a modest lifestyle, he exits with oligarchic wealth, yachts, plane trips, access to the best education, museums, technology, etc. Rich exits the money game at 40, with enough just to afford a modest home in a quiet rural area. He can pay for his food, his property taxes, his mortgage, and healthcare – all from the capital gains of his investments and the passive income of books which sells, and he rest from savings. He can travel maybe once a year.

All things being equal (relationships, mental health, etc.), Bill’s life might be better than Rich’s. To really boost the thought experiment, let’s assume that the universe splits into two and Bill is in one, Rich in another. Rich can’t even feel guilty for not donating more of his money to people who are destitute (or, for that matter, to Rich!). I think most people would choose to be in Bill’s shoes, rather than Rich’s. That’s claim 1.

But claim 2 is this: Rich’s life is still great! The real value comes when they both walk off the money board. Freedom over one’s time in the greatest predictor of happiness.[25] It’s like the way that the jump from walking to riding a bike seems to increase the rate of travel more than jumping from bike to vehicle.[26] The car is shiny, fast, and nice, but the real value (in terms of speed, in this analogy) came when you went to a bicycle. The real value in terms of well-being is freedom.            

Without freedom from the domination structure of the game, you cannot move through the world without self-consciousness, without the anxiety of precarity and dependence on a boss. You cannot be fully human. You live a half-kind of life, a life where you constantly have to do other than what you want, or go against what you want. True, if you are in Rich’s shoes, you can’t do anything you want, but you don’t have to do things that go against your desires. You are free from interference, and from the domination structures that could interfere with your liberty, block your desires, at any time. That is true wealth.

I doubt that were Rich to truly relish in that freedom, and every other good thing that is free that one can do with their time, he’d look upon Bill with overwhelming envy. And given that the universe would not be split, if Bill has empathy, he may actually find himself living worse off than Rich, knowing that he didn’t just exit the game, but he kept wealth that could have been used to help others escape (or survive) as well.

Winning the game is exiting the game, to live a life where you have good things, but have the TSF to enjoy them, without compromising your values (to say nothing of objective morality). 

 The problem, however, is that a game that is compulsory, difficult, arbitrary, and finally: hidden—this, to many, does not sound like a game that that feels good to play (I think any moral system one subscribes to: utilitarian, virtue ethics, Kantian, for example would take issue with it); to say nothing of the fact that the game in its current iteration contains within it degradation—human, animal, and environmental, at a level that is unfathomable (regardless of what features of it may also provide plenty of P: penicillin, Gatorade, iPhone, trips to space—all the red herrings loved by apologists, perhaps morally asymmetrical with the pain itself that is caused.[27] One does not necessarily “cancel out” the other, especially when the degradation is avoidable).

Is it problematic, then, to try and win? What is the apt response to our circumstance of finding ourselves in a system of arbitrary rules we were born into, forced to play, hidden from us, where much of what constitutes the game is degrading and oppressive (if not directly to us, then to the multitudes across the planet and across time)? 

I’ll turn to this question in the final section.

[1] Mindscape

[2] Understanding power

[3] BBC, Money or Life

[4] Vox

[5] Nature Fix, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sex at Dawn, Mating in Captivity, Civilization and it’s Discontents.

[6] Amazon, The Wal-Mart Effect  

[7] Growth book

[8] Kroputkin made similar points about the arbitrary demarcation of space and resources

[9] Joel

[10] Psych of Money

[11] Bowles and Gintis

[12] Orwell, Chomsky

[13] Andy Clark

[14] Domination structures strip away autonomy (through law and force) after destroying efficacy through traumatization and injury. The latter functions to justify (or even require) the former. “You are clearly not capable of governing yourself, so we are going to withhold the right to vote and run for office until you prove yourself. Never mind that this is the case because we’ve been assaulting your people relentlessly for decades.”

[15] Psych of money

[16] A goal is not even necessary, as one can act intuitively or reflexively if they’re response comes from an organized set of values, or abilities achieved for some value set, given some stimulus.

[17]

[18] Interesting question whether this is a state which is a function of various metabolic processes, or something else – without invoking the idea of a vital spirit.

[19] Bowles and Gintis

[20] Horace Mann

[21] Omar Ekad

[22] Jacob Goldstein, Yuval Harai – money is the greatest story ever told.

[23] Reinier Forst

[24]

[25] Psych of Money

[26]

[27] Bennitar