The Game Is Rigged

You know it, I know it, we all know it; late stage capitalism, the plutocracy, whatever name you want to give our modern socioeconomic arrangement, is the result of a rigged game. And I honestly don't believe that scientific research is needed to prove this obvious fact; anyone with eyes, ears and a handful of active brain-cells knows this to be true.

But it's still nice to see scientific proof of the things we already know. Especially when capitalism, the rigged game in question, is still seen as our only option. Margaret Thatcher called it "TINA" (There Is No Alternative), and in 2009 Mark Fisher dubbed it "capitalist realism" in his book "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" There's this famous quote, describing what capitalist realism is: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." Capitalist realism is a hurdle I often run up against in daily conversations or responses to my posts; in my experience people generally can't even imagine an alternative to the paradigm of capitalism and its associated concepts like the meritocracy, targets and incentives, "free" markets and competition. Mark Fisher summarizes this as follows:

Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.

That's exactly right: it's a pervasive atmosphere that determines all our thoughts and actions. It's funny to me how the proponents of capitalism are also big on freedom, but fail to realize just how much this ideology shackles all our behaviors to its terms and goals. And on top of that, we all know this game is rigged against 99 percent of the world's population, but we're still conditioned to believe its apparent lies. One of capitalism's biggest lies is the one about the meritocracy, the belief that economic success hinges on a combination of hard work and some talent. If there's one thing we can appreciate, one thing we've been taught, conditioned to appreciate, it's winners. Growing up we quickly learn that everything in life is a competition, starting with the grading system at school. This is fine as long as it's about sports and games, but becomes a huge problem when life itself is the competition.

This unspoken, unwritten, but lived and experienced meritocracy has made us accept that there are, that there always have to be losers in the game of life. The meritocracy teaches us that if we're successful, it's our own achievement, and it follows that if we're not successful, it's our own fault. The meritocracy has no room for environmental or social causes for success or failure because of capitalism's partner-ideology: individualism. We know this is wrong, because we know that we are mostly the product of our environment. We know it's wrong because we can predict people's future income level just by the zip code in which they were born. Here's an excerpt from a 2015 article on this subject:

Today, the state of the American Dream—the ability of anyone to work hard and get ahead—largely depends on one’s zip code. That is more than a little troubling, given that 97 percent of Americans believe everyone should have an equal shot at success.

As President Obama put it earlier this year: “In this country, of all countries, a person’s zip code shouldn’t decide their destiny.”

But what makes this trend even more problematic, as a new Center for American Progress report indicates, is that now—due to a lack of affordable housing and enduring patterns of residential segregation—the zip code where people live is largely determined by income, race, and ethnicity.
_{source: Talk Poverty}

I started by saying it's nice that science shows all this to be true, which is why I include the below linked video. It describes a comprehensive set of studies on the influence of economical success on people's behavior. The one experiment I want to highlight here is the one in which random people were invited to play a game of monopoly; it's the same experiment mentioned in the above linked video about the meritocracy scam. One of the players in these games was given double the money, received double the income when passing "start" and were allowed to throw both dice instead of just one. All players knew that the game was rigged. What I, and the researchers, find interesting is the behavior of the winners, the ones who got all the advantages. They became ruder, less compassionate and so on. But most interestingly, when discussing the game afterwards, they discussed how they won the game on their own merit, how their actions resulted in the win. I kid you not; this is just how our real life billionaires believe deeply that they are the sole architects of their success, and that they truly deserve their insane wealth... Watch both videos, preferably in the order in which they're linked.

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