I read Squid Game costumes are likely to be popular this Halloween.
How can I not comment? These are my sorts of themes.
First off, there is a homology between this and the Highlander. There can only be one. This is the theme of the show Survivor, and of the Hunger Games.
When there is no longer any true tribalism, complete with tribal loyalties, there is no reason tribes cannot be assigned to us, with the understanding that we are still solitary and alone monads, facing a universe largely without any mercy not granted us by conforming or succeeding according to arbitrary and mutable rules.
If it is not Us versus Them–which is most of human history–then it is each of us against the world, with along the way many temporary alliances of expediency but not loyalty or principle.
And this thing is about MONEY, in the end. Money. Nothing more.
As I read the plot summary, the contestants, once granted the right to leave, in the main choose to return back. It’s sort of like buying a lottery ticket where you either win or die. It’s tantamount to committing suicide with a mildly better excuse, and granting the final act to someone else.
Is the “there can only be one” motif not somehow appropriate to our hypercompetitive culture? The thirst to be the best, something which is regularly and closely watched and measured?
There can be value in competition, in moderation. Within rules. Within boundaries. Within REAL games. Not in life and death situations, not in comparing the absolute value of one human life to another.
Capitalism is about competition, but also multiplicity of outcomes, and many players. Capitalism, in the end, is about the freedom to follow your own dream, and the right to claim the fruits of that labor.
Properly speaking, it is about saving the money for paint and canvas, painting something beautiful, then selling it. This is a literal example, but should be understood figuratively. It is about taking materials of some sort, adding information and form and USE to them, and then selling that creative act for a profit.
No sane person can or should object to this process.
But consider that in this series most of these people are IN DEBT. Who are the debt collectors? The people not just with money, but ultimately those who MAKE THE MONEY.
As I continue to insist, our system has a HUGE leak. It is not true Capitalism, if we choose to use Marx’s word to describe a benign system. The value of all people’s labor is not stolen by the Capitalist–who created their jobs in the first place, and enabled them to share in the profit taking process through wages–but by the person who devalues their money.
We just witnessed theft on a truly globally unprecedented scale. Hundreds of billions if not trillions were stolen from us in this process of money creation. Historically, never has so much been gifted directly to the public, but I still suspect most people on balance in the past 18 months increased their personal indebtedness. The people making the loans own yet more of the world than they did, and most of them received huge amounts of money directly from the Fed themselves.
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Some more comments. I was reading an interview with Laird Hamilton, the surfer, and he talked about everyone needs to feel from time to time like they may die, doing something other than driving. He surfs enormous waves, that pound him under water, and force him to hold his breath, sometimes for a minute or more, in continual turbulence.
I think many people stuck in boring jobs, living boring lives (which by the way they have CHOSEN to make boring, since even broke people can find interesting ways to spend their time), wonder what it would be like when life and death are truly on the line. This is most likely part of the fascination.
And more ominously, many people have been conditioned to what amounts to vicarious, sacrificial sadism, in that their anxiety eases momentarily seeing acts of cruelty and violence inflicted on others.
This show in theory, within the show, is for the elites, but in reality anyone watching it is also in that category. It’s not different in many ways from the orgies of violence the Romans fell into consuming regularly. Christians fed to lions. Gladiatorial combats. People filled stadiums and watched these.
As you likely know, the Panem from The Hunger Games was from Panem et Circenses.
David Icke, who over time is seeming less and less nuts to me, says that the Hunger Games–and an elite group overseeing it spread in exclusive and hyper-wealthy and technologically sophisticated, if also culturally and morally decadent, enclaves around our connected world–is the goal of the people pushing the COVID nonsense. The same thing underlay the overreach following 9/11, which was an event manufactured by them.
What we have learned is that terror was not the real threat of 9/11: it was the government, using it to metastasize in its overreach.
And COVID-19 was not the real threat: it was government, USING it to push us into yet a smaller freedom space.
I will end this ramble by asking: what would average people from the 1950’s or 1960’s thought of the Squid Game? I think they would have rightly seen it as vaguely demonic. Ultraviolence, all the Halloween movies–and for that matter Clockwork Orange itself–was unknown to them, and I think most of us have forgotten how long it took for us to become numb to it. It’s not natural.
But I think the sadists for a New World Order already exist among our youth. They have not become socialized in a proper sense. They have been participating in vicarious violence all their lives. Their parents were somewhere else. They have been indoctrinated to an extent that would have warmed Goebbels cold heart to hate “the haters”.
Who are the haters? Anyone they are TOLD are the haters. Any temporary and mutable target of the State. Against those people all crimes are condoned.