11 On Games

Then a day trader said, Speak to us of games.
He answered:

Some of you are poor. There is no shame in this. But shame on us, for having created a new and bitter kind of poverty. It is this impoverishment of the mind and of the soul, against which we ought to wage fierce battle.

Through play, our children become adults, and adults may once more be children. Is not the Lego truck fully recyclable into a fire station? Fain would I live in Legoland, where nothing is created that cannot be re-invented as something else. We must cease to manufacture that, for which the final intended resting place is the landfill.

Forget not that global economics is a game also. The rules were invented by the rich to keep them that way. But they are arbitrary rules and could easily be re-written from scratch.

Does the elm grow forever, until the world knows naught but shade? Do not be deceived when economists equate prosperity with economic growth. That which grows unchecked, is surely cancer.

By now the prophet had worked up some steam. The people of Orphalese read in his incessant bouncing a kind of passionate fervor, but actually, after such a long journey, the poor prophet longed to utilize a bathroom.

You are mistaken, if you believe that it is money which makes the world dance on its axis. For just like it is not energy, but free energy, which is required to do work, so it is the unequal distribution of wealth, which keeps the planet spinning. Thus to imagine a communist utopia is to imagine a world which does not rotate. Which is another way of saying that the answers to these lofty questions can never by found by substituting one ideology for another, shuffling from left to right and right to left, like an orator who forgot to relieve himself.

And now the prophet himself could bear it no longer. He had to excuse himself, and the people of Orphalese politely averted their eyes, as he pissed into the harbour. Then he resumed:

And you who would earn a living by shuffling money about, from blue chips to pork bellies and back again, I ask you this: In “making” money, what have you truly created? What is your contribution to society, even as you pad the gross domestic product, which the economic scientists take to be an indicator of our collective well-being?