Games People Play
Virtuous or Venal?
I never liked the game of Monopoly. Never. I didn’t like the way people got flushed with excitement when they cost another player. I didn’t like that the strategy was so combative.
It wasn’t about the competition. I enjoyed checkers, Parchisi and backgammon which also involved dinging another player. There was just something about Monopoly that seemed to bring out the worst in people - utter greed.
Once in college, we were tasked with writing an essay about what we’d put into a time capsule to be opened 500 years in the future that would best describe our 20th century American culture. I chose Monopoly. Later, I learned that Monopoly was initially designed in 1903 as the “Landlord Game” in order to demonstrate that an economy that rewards individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth, but was later corrupted to be more aggressive and monopolistic by Parker Brothers who predictably cheated Lizzie Magie, the originator of the game. Apparently, I chose well.
The last time I played the game was during the 2020 Covid spring lockdown. As usual, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I was fine with playing Chess and any other game that I was just as likely to lose as win. I most enjoyed Scrabble and honestly didn’t care whether we kept score or not- creating good words was its own reward. But I found the lust for total control over the Monopoly board and other players that comes to the forefront in Monopoly very disturbing.
Today in the 2023, as we watch the American presidential primaries play out and listen to the rhetoric that comes from all quarters of not just America, but also the Middle East and Ukraine, I feel that same disquiet. That the World Economic Forum (WEF) and World Health Organization (WHO) has joined in the fray with their own interpretations of governance over others is highly alarming.1
People play games. Business, corporations, politics, and war are all games. But so is making music in a garage band, putting together a en plein event for local artists or running a Farmer’s Market where everyone wins through their coordinated participation. These are virtuous games.
Exerting control over others, pressuring 11 year olds to take a vaccine without parental consent, insisting on ineffective masking, medicating our water with fluoride2, insisting membership in our society requires an oath of allegiance to CDC vaccine schedules and adopting agendas of monopolistic entities are venal games. They strip us of our personal agency in favor of a monopoly.
It seems to me, that all of these venal games provide narcissistic supply to insatiable players who lack empathy and compassion. Many of us have noted that the virtuous posturing of these players who lie through their teeth while using propaganda techniques perfected by Edward Bernays is positively Machiavellian.3
None of us should want to live in a world where the winner gleefully takes all and everyone else struggles to feed their families or faces bankruptcy, but it seems that is exactly where we are.
Maggie Russo is the author of “Dance with the Devil: Love in the Age of Covid”
Globalists Know They’re ‘Extremely Unpopular’ — But That Won’t Keep Them From Seeking ‘Total Control’ Over Global Population, Michael Nevradakis, CHD, January 24, 2024
Fluoride on Trial: The Censored Science on Fluoride and Your Health, CHD-TV, January 13, 2024.
Did Liberalism Fail the Test of Covid? Toby Rogers, Brownstone Institute, January 24, 2024
‘Our Choice Is Clear’: Holocaust Survivor Outlines History of Propaganda in the U.S. and How It Led to Today’s Globalists’ Power Grab. The Defender Staff, CHD, January 12, 2024.
I think it is inevitable that leaders are controlling personality types, many on the dark triad. It takes huge drive, an almost obsessive desire for money and/or power, a thick skin, charm, the ability to manipulate, the ability to exploit situations for one's own advantage (and situations easily become people), the ability to deflect from scrutiny etc....to leverage up to these powerful positions against other combatants. And, the public will vote them in, because the average Joe or Jane could never climb such a treacherous ladder and admire those who do.