The only way out of a double bind is to smash it. That’s what we must do.

― Derek Jensen, Bright Green Lies

I’ve always been awful at Monopoly. The board game of course. Somehow, even though I understood the rules of the game really well I could just never win.

I remember this clearly both as a child and teenager, as well as a young adult in my twenties, playing against friends of a similar age. I haven’t played in quite a few years now but I’m fairly certain I’d most likely lose again should I try.

Exactly why that is always escaped me.

Because I’m not generally bad when it comes to games. I never invested time in learning chess properly but at most strategy board games, card games, and other table-top games I would back myself to win. (Or at least do well.) But something misfires in my head when playing Monopoly.

This would not be such a big deal except for the fact that for years I’ve felt quite ashamed of this failing.

It may seem strange to feel ashamed of being bad at a board game. After all it’s not like being bad at counting or speaking. We’re not required to win at Monopoly to graduate, get a job, be a parent, or eat out at a restaurant.

Except that Monopoly is actually a cartoonish reflection we’re shown in the looking glass that our society holds up to life. Which one creates the other is a nature/nurture (or chicken and egg) debate I am not getting into here. But like it or not it presents a dilemma. If you suck at Monopoly and you play, you lose. If you don’t play, you lose anyway because you’re stuck in the game whether you like it or not.

A double bind.

***

A few months ago I went to collect my daughter from school. We usually cycle home  and when the weather is nice it’s a great time to chat and let her tell me about her day. She’s nine.

On this particular day she began explaining to me a new game she was playing with her friends and one of the teachers. Piecing together bits and pieces from her meandering narrative I realised she was talking about Monopoly. (She didn’t know that name because in Austria, where we live, there is a homegrown version with a different name, but identical in essence.)

But when I asked her who won her brain seemed to misfire. She seemed to both know and not know at the same time. She knew who was winning according to the teacher at the time they stopped playing. She knew who had the most properties and who had last money. But she couldn’t make peace with the concept that the person who was forcing everyone into debt was the winner. After all this behaviour goes strictly against what we teach children. A child is told off for hoarding all the sweets or toys not rewarded.

And yet here I found myself trying to explain to my daughter why the winner in her game should be the biggest asshole.

***

The winner in Monopoly is the player who forces everyone else into bankruptcy. In other words the goal is destruction through domination.

But what makes Monopoly pernicious is that unlike many other games, including most sports, after just a few rounds it becomes almost impossible to catch up and have a realistic hope of winning. This is described most eloquently by Donnella Meadows in her book Thinking in Systems:

This system trap is found whenever the winners of a competition receive, as part of the reward, the means to compete even more effectively in the future. That’s a reinforcing feedback loop, which rapidly divides a system into winners who go on winning, and losers who go on losing.

In a game of tennis or poker, at each stage of the game every player, irrespective of their score, has a reasonably level playing field. They have a chance, through bluff, skill, or grit, to recoup their losses. A classic example is perhaps the 1966 FIFA World Cup final between England and West Germany. Germany pushed the game through to Extra Time with an equalising score at the 90th minute. (A football match is 90 minutes ICYMI.) Of course England won anyway — but not because they had scored their first goal early in the match. In fact you could perhaps have expected that they should have been more likely to lose in Extra Time because of the disheartening last-minute goal.

But in Monopoly, no amount of pep talks and tactics can put you back on a winning track because early on in the game, you are either in a self-reinforcing downward spiral or in a self-reinforcing upward one.

Moreover, it is against the rules to co-operate, which really is the only way to recover.

So very quickly, the choice becomes one between losing by carrying on playing, or losing by quitting.

A double bind.

***

The way out of a double bind is to smash it.

In the case of the board game, this is easy. Play a different board game. (No need to physically smash the box 😉) But in daily economic life this is less easy. Particularly since the self-reinforcing feedback loops that pre-determine ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ in the capitalist economy are in place at birth for most people.

Advocates of capitalism have been successful in creating a cultural monoculture within which only one type of success in rewarded. But as we know from agriculture, monoculture is the death knell of life. And it is guaranteed to eventually (and quickly) fail.

Therefore the way we smash this double bind is to work towards having a plurality of models for economic and wellbeing success.

All this to say that I don’t feel so bad at sucking at Monopoly anymore.

***

Cover Photo by Kathy Marsh on Unsplash