Archive for the ‘The Game’ Category

When asked about what my books are about my short answer is The Hidden Game that lies behind all our social interactions. The three most common replies to my response seem to be:

1. Will the book make money?
2. How is that knowledge useful?
3. No reply.

As I wrote the books I am more than a little put off by this general lack of enthusiasm towards my ‘revelations’. There are a number of different reasons why we might wish to find out more about the inner workings of the Game, these include:

• The desire to Win
• The desire to be Free
• The desire for Revenge
• The desire to Know

Different people with different temperaments, at different stages of life will have their own unique mix of motivations from the menu presented above. However, there is no one who can really afford to take the position taken by so many here in North America, that they are immune to the Game.

The Game literally defines our existence –that little box of reality we inhabit over the course of our lives. Ironically, those of us whose lives are most profoundly impacted by the game, those who have been so ensnared by the Game’s smoke and mirrors that it has come to define their world, resist it most.

To demonstrate the point; the moment you say to someone “Life is a Game!” -you are pretty well guaranteed to provoke a reaction of some sort. The Pragmatist will likely say, “I already know the Game” However, if you take it one step further and suggest that what they know is but the outer shell of the Game, the misdirection created to conceal the inner Game, then their smugness will usually turn to defensiveness and anger. Pragmatists have a deep need to believe that they are in control. A need to believe that they see all that there is to see. The notion that others might see what they do not, and then use it against them, is so off-putting, that they will not engage with it in any shape or form. Even framing it as an academic exercise, a kind of “What If?” scenario, is a non-starter.

The Idealist, the kind of person who celebrates all things green, those who live their lives loving their neighbours, will accept the existence of the Game as some conspiracy- something reserved for the elite. However, the moment you present them with the possibility that the Game is part of the human condition itself, and that there is no group, no matter how green, or high minded, that is of free from it, their eyes will glaze over, and they will simply disengage from any further discussion on the topic. In the battle between good and evil these individuals need to believe they represent good, their need for moral superiority is their Achilles’ Heel. The Players are very adept at turning this against them.

It is our own conceit, our own need to believe we are winners according to some definition, be it the desire for omniscience of the Pragmatist, or the moral superiority of the Idealist, that is one of the great hopes the players use the playoffs. It would no doubt come as a great shock to both groups to realize that they are both being played, and in equal measure.

It works in the following way – the Players set up a lime – something as arbitrary as the dictum “Hairy people are smarter!”. Those who are hairy become fans immediately. They will argue that they always suspected this to be the case, but society had not evolved to the point where they realized it. Those who are smooth-skinned will be inclined to resist this discovery. If they are stronger in character their opposition will be more militant. They will either directly oppose it with demonstrations in the street or will attempt to subvert it in some way. If they are of a more passive, compliant nature they will buy into this perception, and come to see themselves as inferior, lacking in some way. From time to time they will fall for slick pitches like “Look like a baboon within a week!” selling chest wigs or special elixirs designed to induce prolific hair growth on limbs and torso.

It would appear that in the Hairy Game there are also winners and losers. What all will be missing is that they are all being played, all being led by the nose; that in the final analysis, to the extent that they place any importance on herrings at all, they’re all losers!

The last part of this series I wish to devote to what I regard as the most insidious and venal aspect of the Game –that being what I refer to as the ‘knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing’ syndrome. the gigantic marketing machine of the Game, pumps out an endless stream of images of the good life – beautiful, svelte, youngish people, bearing their teeth in the midst of orgasmic joy. They thank their Creator not for being alive, but for being who they are. All that is subtle or serene,; all that might ennoble or inspire us; is drowned out by all the noise.

The Game’s architects, not content to simply bombard our senses, go to great lengths to prove to us that our seeking something more than their fabricated reality they ram down our throats is sheer folly on our part. Polemicists like Richard Dawkins devote years of study and hundreds of pages of text to enlightening us, helping us to see that our faith in something innately good in our fellow man is completely misplaced. When one person gives another a helping hand, with no apparent benefit to themselves, we are not allowed to simply take it one face value as being a spontaneous act of kindness. They must somehow taint it the selfish impulse. The Selfish Gene, no less! It well may be that there is not an ounce of human kindness in Richard Dawkins, but why must he condemn us all to the same fate.

Such books are presented as breakthroughs, yet the main thrust of Dawkins argument was anticipated by Freud over 70 years before, Nietzsche before him, and Schopenhauer before him. This is precisely the kind of seductive logic employed by the snake in the Garden of Eden. In pulling God down from the heavens, they seek to ascend to the Heavens and take their place. In the 19th century, Gogol wrote a famous parody entitled The diary of a Madman. It is a first hand account of a day in the life of low level clerk in Saint Petersburg who wakes us up one morning believing himself to be the King of Spain. This would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that those around them show no inclination to share his delusion. Clinging to their own sense of reality, they fail to see him as anything more than a low level clerk. even when the clerk is taken away, and incarcerated in a mental asylum, he still clings fast to his delusion, feeling a kind of pity for those around them in a kind of ‘Forgive them Lord they know not what they do’ sort of way.

Maybe Dawkins has it all backwards; it is not we who are deluded, but they themselves. The only difference is that in our world the ‘Kings of Spain’, instead of being incarcerated, sit atop thrones!

At some point in the course of our journey through life, we all encounter those people who simply cannot think ill of others. So pure of heart are these folks, that even entertaining the notion that those who do harm to others should do so out of malevolence, rather than misguidedness, is simply unfathomable. These good Christians will steadfastly maintain that those who steal, those who lie, those who manipulate others, suffer from a distorted worldview – they basically mean well, but either through mental defect, or lack of education, are not able to fully think through the consequences of their actions. Ever since childhood I have been frustrated and intrigued by this particular quirk of the Anglo-Saxon culture. I have come to refer to it as the ‘see no evil’ syndrome.

Over the last few months I had the privilege of having lengthy discussions with two prominent members of the London Financial scene, one an international risk management specialist, the other the dean of a prestigious business school. Both men are acknowledged experts on corporate malfeasance, regularly invited to give keynote addresses on the topic.

In both cases the discussion was most enlightening and stimulating. However, when I broached the possibility that much of this malfeasance was the result of collusion at the highest levels, meticulously planned and choreographed, rather than the result of a few bad apples in a basically sound system – both men had a conspicuously similar reaction- finding the notion simply inconceivable, and the suggestion on my part tasteless and off-putting.

The position shared by both, delivered most eloquently, in exquisite prose, and Oxbridge accents, was that this was all the result of gross ineptitude at the highest levels. I, incredulous, argued that it would seem beyond the boundaries of plausibility to imagine that people educated in the finest academic institutions, with decades of experience behind them, could have, let all what has come to pass take place out of sheer oversight.

Looking back, in my naiveté, what I was failing to see was the positioning of those I was speaking with in relation to the big Game – the dean being a gatekeeper to, the consultant, a gray eminence for the very Players who perpetrated the 2008 Crash.

At the risk of coming off as a tad ‘negative’, I would suggest that this ‘see no evil’ attitude is far from benign. This brings to mind a memory from my time as a builder, when I had occasion to ask an architect (British, as it turns out) to explain the principles behind chimney constructions – specifically, how one ensured that the smoke from the fire went up the chimney instead of into the room. The architect’s response was the following: “Entire books have been written on the topic of chimneys”. He delivered this sentence with such profound solemnity, and with such self assurance, that I immediately aborted any further investigation, convinced that the knowledge I was seeking was the sacred domain of an elite sect of geniuses who guarded their secrets closely (lest this knowledge should fall into the wrong hands, and the world would be consumed by chaos).

The motivation behind this high minded stance, in fact the mandate of these esteemed experts, is to obfuscate the problem, rather than fix it. Experts at blinding us with science, generously spicing their rhetoric with the jargon of high finance, they wax poetic on the complexity of today’s financial world, and the difficulty of sorting all of this out.
All this posturing on the part of esteemed experts is meant to distract us from the ugly reality- that being that the system spawned by these poseurs is rotten to the core, and beyond redemption. No new set of regulations, no new investigative committee, no change of government, will ever set it right.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.[1]