Let me invoke Nina Simone before proceeding:
"But I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh, Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood"
The late great James Earl Jones would tell aspiring actors to "take no advice, including this." Most advice is wasted breath.
Predominantly, we are asked to "play the game."
Delusional entitled game players suffer from the expectation of others to behave in ways they never could. Lacking compassion, drunk on privilege, they believe it is natural for others to settle for conditions, or "rules of the game", they themselves would fight tooth and nail against.
Proud game players - for lack of a better collective noun - glide ahead on systemic privileges while ignorant of the human cost and experience of others. They remain relatively unburdened. Since the game is accessible to them, they presume participation is optional and well-defined.
Yet the - intergenerationally traumatized and disadvantaged - black child from the freezing, unplumbed shacks works right next to the executive's nephew who has never known material hardship.
That is not the same game being played.
Games, by definition, have one to few, commonly predetermined, winners. Most participants are losers. Games are also inherently trivial. Thus working is not a game; certainly, not for most of us.
It is survival, it is obligation; it is the sacred application of labour necessary to power lives.
Games are routinely rigged and adjusted in favour of power players. Who "wins" games?
The prick who brings his own pool cue to the game shop, the silver spoon who owns the bat and ball; who, when you bowl him out, throws a tantrum like a child then takes his equipment moodily back home: if he cannot always win and dominate, he thwarts the game; once the game no longer serves his ego, he no longer wants to play: no one must play. They would rather burn crops instead of letting others eat.
Nonstop, the game waxes and wanes without your permission, without just negotiation, without any mutually-beneficial mission. Influence over our incomes happens only through the game, instead of sincere application of craft and trade. Professionalism and productivity take a backseat to brown-nosing and bureaucracy - the domain of chronic non-producers.
How are those forced to play supposed to play? Under duress? By camping outside the boardrooms? By shameless networking up fickle ladders? Through compromise and pandering? Desperately asking: "Whose arm to twist?" "Whose backside to kiss?"
Decades of that dynamic will foul the soul of even the most sincere aesthete. And that is just the emotional toll, preceding the debt and power dynamics one has to navigate in the so-called game to keep up with advantaged players. Yet we join organizations to scale human efforts to a grand scale and contribute to something larger than ourselves (a need the game often fails to meet).
Sure, our narrow definition of freedom does imply the option of non-participation. It just means you must do without money. People who have never really experienced a lack of money cannot understand how trapped one is in a dictatorship of capital. All things fall victim to commercial interests. We pay to play.
The amount of money one possesses is directly proportional to the political, social and economic power, mobility and thus freedoms they enjoy. Think about who travels, does art, enjoys recreation, multiple citizenships, dependable transport and cutting-edge medicine. Those luxuries are tap water for fat cats with money.
To honestly tell people, that in order to do the work required to meet human needs, en masse, to advance civilization (the point of society), we must pander to and fall prostrate before those with the power to marshal the resources required for human problems and their large-scale solutions. Fat cats, through various epochs and mechanisms of theft, deception and violence have hoarded resources and set up finance-based power hierarchies to preserve concentration (of wealth/power) and perpetuate its accumulation (in dirty cat paws).
With zero cringe, we tell children, "To do great things, young person, you must figure out how to tickle the balls of the investor class, then be fine with eating shit every day."
It is a perverse arrangement, fixed at all levels: good people, consciously and unconsciously, shout “NO!”
To play the game, one must self-inoculate daily with toxic levels of apathy, put away their humanity, care less, and grind more. Then surrender to ego, greed and competition. The game breeds stupidity and engenders barbarism.
When the game forces you through the narrow gap of the prevailing incumbent bureaucracy, I advise two alternatives: undermine or transcend - pull them up or drag them down (you should be able to fly or swim yourself in order to survive). Out-level them up and down. Bend and break every rule - as-needed - within the acceptable parameters of your own morality and sanity. Reject culture dictated or implanted by marketing weasels and corporate shills.
Game riggers employ every social, economic, cultural and institutional instrument available in order to shape the game and secure vested interests, comforts and privileges. You will find no beast more barbaric than a fat cat put in his place.
One must endeavour to turn the machines back on the rich pricks.
Corporations, where most of us settle for work, merely reflect the pathologies of society, chiefly: unmerited, unaccountable power. And likewise: hierarchies of inequality (reflecting the status quo), elite capture, overpaid and unproductive layers of middle men, paternalism and patriarchy - ultimately generating, from precious resources and labour, mass inefficiency and ineffectiveness.
Games, played across the whole spectrum of humanity, pay for fat cat profits and comforts using public misery and maldevelopment. The game is just for a handful of micropenis-afflicted dudes.
The chorus of know-it-alls that echo nonstop the virtues of this arrangement throw out there this belief that the game is natural, normal or satisfactory, none of which is true. They insist, that if one endeavours to be their best, if they listen quietly to the fat cats and old men, simply do good (whatever that means in isolation), and "play the game" then life is easy - and where it is not, you must "suck it up" (they say with chests puffed up by pissant chauvinism), then the game opens up and the obstacles to infinite (sanctioned) happiness - that is your realistic assessment of reality and sense of justice - will be overcome.
It has been a heartbreaking realization that, generally, people don't want to know better and thus do better, as Maya Angelou encourages. They have high tolerance for shit-eating and have mastered self-delusion.
Perhaps it is a grim outlook, but I cannot imagine most people living as anything more than wretched pitiful creatures perpetually twisting in agony and ignorance.
They will wake up daily, unconscious, frustrated, hurt, and go out into a world they do not understand, where work is heaped upon them that does little, if anything, for their spirit, that will then elicit endless bitching and moaning. They grapple neither with their life, which is taken for granted, nor history which demands justice. They never noticed the noose put around their neck by a system built to suck labour out of them.
Steinbeck exposed the phenomenon of ordinary people believing themselves "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Thus they identify, behave and line up behind the interests of wealthier people or those they consider to possess enviable status. We are set up for failure, conditioned against our own interests.
So people lean into the game, identify with it and when it is exposed as sham, farce and crime, their insecurity plus the effort of imagining, then fighting for different arrangements, invokes fear. Cowardly, they run back to the only game they know like an abusive partner.
You cannot blame people to an extent as systemic indoctrination and cultural hegemony are ever-present forces. The chaos of ordinary life combined with nonstop ideological force-feeding represses consciousness and rewards apathy and ignorance. What chance do people have? It is difficult to pick up your head and look at things as they are: the game does not encourage the hamster off the hamster wheel.
Here is the actual game:
The game produces losers and waste. The game is an adult daycare for incompetents. Don't play the game. Frustrate the game, challenge the game. CHANGE the game.