Let’s Play the Game-of-Life
4 July 2025 Leave a comment
Giving $15 or $20 to a hundred candidates by hundreds of thousands of people, while probably necessary, isn’t what will break the oligarchic locomotive. It hasn’t been the winning element in many races; it has simply been pay-to-play for candidates. The DNC needs to understand that the party and its cash-pile aren’t what wins and loses elections. It’s voters – living beings.
That money has always been so important is pretty well-established. We are so deeply immersed in our nearly universal belief the money is how we measure ourselves and others, that when we ask, “What are worth?” we don’t mean, “How much do you contribute to your various communities?” We don’t mean “How are you doing with the condition of your soul?” We mean, “How much have you got in the bank?” I once saw a church that had opened in an old bank building. How poignant!
We aren’t all this way. Some individuals are or have been in the past. Perhaps when they die, they should have their remains buried in a safe-deposit box. Oh, wait! They do. They call that bank a mausoleum. Maybe that should be “mau$oleum.” However, for much of the world and a lot of the U.S., this is how it is – some living humans and some walking ATM’s. The point is, more money isn’t going to be the critical straw that breaks the oligarchs’ back. What is going to be required is that all the people who understand that we are not worth any amount of money.
Money isn’t worth anything. Money is paper. Money is numbers recorded is electrons. Money is the set of pieces in a Game-of-Life. Money is not really real.
The greedy have for millennia gathered up all they could of the necessities of our corporeal lives—food, clothing and shelter – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—fenced it in, guarded it with a chosen few—knights, armies, oligarchs—and dispensed something like Monopoly money. If one gave much or all of what one had or produced, one could be given a few such money tokens to buy back some of the products of their own labor. The masters in the castles—the rich, rationalized by the notion that “Greed is good.” (Calvinism)—need only figure out how to keep the masses sufficiently oblivious to the real rules of the game. “Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.” (B. Franklin – maybe) The cleverest part is that, even today we, who produce the wealth, are all allowed to deceive ourselves—believe ourselves empowered by using our tokens among one another, just like the big boys.
When did this start? Somewhere between the cave and the Bible – give or take. And what do we do about it now? We give tokens received from the masters, for our production of their goods and services, to campaign funds that we hope will get people elected who will change that distribution of wealth. Why would one think that? Money is not leadership, but it is power, if we allow it to be. The exchange of money is the game of the rich. Exchanging a little money to change the rules for the real exchange of money is probably doomed to failure.
How likely is it that one who is elected going to change any part of the system he thinks got him elected? After all, how often have people in positions of power been successful in altering the exchange of money as they said they would – or even, would have liked to have done, after being elected? How likely are we to know the real feeling of someone running for office in any case? Might they not be just as blind as anyone else to seeing the contrast of worth and wealth? Soul and credit score? How many politicians have simply lied to us outright about what they planned to do for us and how it would benefit us? How many have simply lied repeatedly?
Marx actually did have something right. Take money out of the system altogether and let government coordinate the production and welfare of it all. All players win. Nice idea; works in the commune, but Lenin demonstrated that it breaks down at scale. Communism is almost a conspiracy theory now. Did what they said ever really happen? It may have happened in name, but there was never any real economic breakthrough. It was just a novel venture in tyranny.
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.” —
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
The vulnerability in this system is ignorance then. Tyranny of any kind depends on ignorance. The master will always attack the enlightened and when trying to gain control will go after the informed. Killing off the educated might be a little awkward, however. Some of those educated might be the ones carrying out such a task. Oops. A better approach is to pull back resources to schools, control the media, make college only for the already rich. This is one way to help secure one’s dictatorship.
To change the situation will take time. To change the situation will take thinking. To change the situation will take patience. To change the situation will take a whole lot of committed people. People need to be talking to people – talking one-on-one, in small groups, on zoom conversations. People need to be talked with, not at, not to. People need not be told what to do, unless they ask. Being told what to do erodes trust. People need to be helped to understand what might or will happen, why that might happen, when, where and to whom. The press can’t do anything like the job of achieving this when no person, neighbor or friend is talking with them about it. People can certainly disagree about expectations or opinions, but facts are facts. Facts can be denied, as they often are, even when they’re biting one on the nose. And people should be encouraged to ask candidates about issues they have with what they hear. Mostly people should be encouraged to demand of candidates and representative when they are not there answering questions, “Why not?” Even if all one can do is to help people understand how the Game-of-Life economy works in broad strokes and how it has been in play though out history, one has moved the dial. So, yes, it will take more than one. People need to understand the basic rules of the game, because, like it or not, we are all players in the game. It is not a strategy to change votes; it is a strategy to level the playing field. It is a strategy to help restore any semblance of real democracy. Information – the truth makes players stronger.
Blaming and shaming and collecting campaign contributions will accomplish little to change things. Democracy depends on an informed electorate. Give up on monetized isolation voting. Build community. Some will not come, not listen, not anything. Well, they won’t. The ones that do show up and do listen and do think will therefore gain right away. Inform people. Empower them. They will make the right choices, and they will look for and deserve the right results.
... JAEZZ Views 
Is the ship sinking?
4 May 2025 Leave a comment
There is an article from The Guardian (“Trump’s Truth Social posts make no sense – what do they say about his mentality?”) that looks at Chairman Trump’s mental state through his social media. One of those “funny if it were not so frightening” things. I’ve long harbored pity for what it must feel like to be him, but it appears he might not have the mental clarity to see his own suffering. After all, his agony may be his driving force; it seems it’s all he knows. So, it must feel normal, even correct.
While I would never willingly kill anyone, I have actually wished Trump were dead. I think now that it would be better if he somehow just faded away. Maybe he could have a stroke or be found wandering the grounds of the White house naked and then be quietly institutionalized. Whoever took over couldn’t be any worse, but they could be worse at “it,” I guess. The hope would be that the chaos Trump’s shattered mind has sown would then infect the regime itself, disrupting if not paralyzing it.
I don’t fear Trump will be the next Putin or Xi, as he is clearly not as astute nor as coherent as either of them. Trump doesn’t see that he is trying to make a new government while governing from the crumbling remains of the old government. A government recycler. A one-man revolution. The task is way beyond any apparent capacity of the man, and it seems very unlikely that he has any grasp of the scope of such a thing. Trump and his band of sycophants are attempting to recycle the ship of state from the damaged pieces of the old craft while sailing the high seas, full steam ahead. Yet as can be seen from his Truth posts, his thinking is so disjointed and delusional, not to mention superficial, that we’re heading for a serious shipwreck.
I’m not without hope, but I’m expecting irreversible change. The damage has been done to the hull, however, and the ship of state is taking on water. Unless all efforts are made to save our ship, we’re going to go down. “All efforts” are not, I believe, any longer likely in the Divided State of America. There is not an “All” in our country anymore.
All things are mortal. Even the mountain crumble back toward the seas. Who are we to think that anything we make or do or are will last forever. Everything is subject to the laws of physics. The tension between order and entropy is everything: the overarching universal driving force. Change is constant; stasis is nonexistent. All of us — you, me, Trump, Jesus – are in constant change in every way from everyone and everything else. Who or what we are at any moment is defined but those changing relationships to everything else. We are all as motes in a massive dust storm.
In the kitchen sink, a molecule of detergent can reach out and grasp a molecule of water with one hand and a molecule of pork fat with another, and they can flow away together down to the drain to grey-water afterlife. If this linking doesn’t happen, the water molecule may evaporate, leaving the fat and detergent unbound to fend for themselves. These two, bound to one another, may just be left behind on the empty sink bottom – in housekeeping purgatory. No one goes to the Grey Haven that day. The bonding is order; the failure to bond or have a bond be broken is the effect of chaos. Yet time and change will go on for each of these molecules, other bonds will form and be broken, over and over, until the end of all things.
We worry mightily over one washing up. We experience those few “seconds” that could be any time in the sink, in the world in a migration, in our minds in an agreement called a country. We can’t choose the coming in nor usually our going out. Over time we have some opportunities to reach out our hand and bond with other people, things, places, activities. We have some control over these bonds, but that is still very little control in the greater scheme of things. Yes, there are those who can cast shockwaves that break bonds and also form others, and other nonhuman forces create shockwaves, but shock waves are not bonds. Shockwaves threaten bonds; so, if we value our bonds, we must hold tightly. Individuals who send out chaotic shockwaves may be, and I believe often are, lightly bonded, even unbonded — isolated in their own universe and frequently, if unknowingly, very lonely.
Holding out hope may be donning a robe of futility. Engaging in the orderly holding tightly to what we have will resist change, but change will still happen. Otherwise, the only way to resist change is with active resistance – sending out one’s own shockwaves. That, of course, may precipitate retaliatory shockwaves aimed at breaking your hold on what and whom you hold on to. Aligning with many others to create a more shocking impact may be strategic. Yet, this may get an enlarged blowback and a greater challenge to many more close bonds. For every thinking individual, there must be a reckoning of what is at stake and what there is to gain. There will be change and it may be challenging. Bonds may well be broken. Of course, in time, all things will be wiped away. In the meantime, how to respond is always based in speculation. “Time will heal all wounds.” “When good people do nothing, bad things happen.” “It can’t happen here.” “People only change when it hurts.”
Is the ship sinking? Have you counted the lifeboats?
jay@jaezz.org
Filed under Philosophy, Reflections, Social Commentary Tagged with Existentialism