class division Archives - Prindle Institute

October 14, 2021August 8, 2023

‘Squid Game’, Class Struggle, and the Good Life

[SPOILER WARNING: This article discusses several plot details of Netflix’s Squid Game.]

Throughout the fall months of 2021, the Korean series Squid Game was a top ten listing on Netflix. It shares elements in common with movies such as the 2005 Eli Roth film Hostel and the entire Hunger Games franchise — the suffering of the poor and downtrodden serves as perverted entertainment for the incomprehensibly and unconscionably wealthy. By situating the class struggle in a 9-episode hypothetical thought experiment, the series distances the viewer from the reality behind the metaphor and prevents their analysis from being clouded by pre-existing political commitments.

The main idea of the series is that participants compete for a growing pile of cash, contained in a giant transparent piggy bank, hanging over the room in which contestants spend most of their time. Every time one of the players dies, more money is added to the bank. They participate in a variety of traditional children’s games. The winners live another day to compete for the whole pot, while the losers are exterminated and become for the others simply more money in the pile. Often the contestants are put in a position to kill one another and are frequently more than eager to do so.

Hundreds of players choose to participate in the Squid Game, all of them down and out in some way or another. The word “choose” is used loosely here. The candidates enter the competition, are allowed to leave, and then when given the option to participate again, almost all of them do. The common line of reasoning is that life is worse outside of the game — intense suffering is bound to happen, but at least in the game that suffering is more ordered and predictable. In the world outside, a person can follow all of the “rules” or, in any case, the set of norms that we’ve come to expect will point the direction of their lives away from misery and toward happiness. They can do all that and still be hit in the face with the absurdity of lived experience — with the machinations of an indifferent universe that doesn’t care about the rules and deals out misery, suffering, and death indiscriminately to rule followers and rule breakers alike. In the game, players don’t know who will go first or last, nor do they know which skills and abilities will be useful for success in the highly contingent circumstances in which they find themselves. The recognition of the absurdity of their condition is clear to the viewer from the very beginning. As the series highlights throughout and stresses in the final episode, the condition of the human person surviving in the real world is different only in the respect that it is worse while masquerading as better. We have no control over the circumstances into which we are born: whether our parents are kind and supportive or cruel and destructive, whether they have wealth to pass along, whether we are born into environments with stable and fair political systems, whether those environments have sufficient resources, whether we are born a member of an oppressed group, or whether we have skills and abilities that will make us well positioned to survive in the environments into which we are born (to name just a few). If this is what we can expect out of life, why not sign up for a game one stands a fighting chance of winning?

The idea that the characters “choose” to participate in the game motivates reflection on the nature of coercion. To how much misery and manipulation can a person be subjected before their decisions no longer count as truly free? If you think playing a game is your only way to survive another day, or your only chance to protect your mother or your child, odds are that you will end up playing. To do otherwise is to select an alternative that is not a reasonable second option. The viewer knows what is at stake in the game, and we can empathize with the fact that the players end up back inside. No one is likely to think that the characters that finance and run the competition are heroes — they are exploiting the dire circumstances of desperate people. In the real world, the losers of life’s socioeconomic lottery, like the players in the Squid Game, are often trapped in a state of unfreedom. While powerful people wearing the masks of representatives and leaders enact policies to make the rich richer on the backs of the poor, the least well off are often left, through no fault of their own, to “choose” between only bad options. Then we blame them for it. Rather than recognizing the contingency of all of the facts of our existence, we tend to treat those that suffer as if they do so purely as a result of their own life choices.

There is no justice in the game — wrongdoers engage in selfish and harmful acts with impunity. Far from being punished, such people are actually rewarded. The kindest and most empathetic people gain nothing from their good works. If people choose compassion and fellow-feeling, they’ll have to do so in recognition of the intrinsic value of those things rather than because of what they hope to get out of them. In this way, Squid Game is another manifestation of Glaucon’s challenge from Plato’s Republic. In Book Two of this most famous of Plato’s dialogues, the conversants attempt to answer the question “why be moral?” Glaucon makes the argument that, if people could get away with it and avoid the consequences, they would behave selfishly to the point of doing terrible things. He provides the fictional case of a man who is given a ring — the Ring of Gyges — that renders him invisible. Glaucon claims that the man would use it to steal all of the king’s riches and to rape his wife. Why should he care, if he will never be caught? Similarly, participants in the Squid Game either die or live to tell the tale exactly as they prefer with no one to correct them on the more gruesome details. Why shouldn’t participants behave in exactly the way they think will help them win?

Socrates’s rejoinder is that being good is valuable for its own sake, and the main character of Squid Game — Seong Gi-hun — is a Socratic hero. With one notable exception, he refuses to harm or kill other participants and seems to keep the humanity of others in full view throughout the proceedings. When he feels an impulse to deviate from this norm, he is quickly reminded by a friend, “that’s not you.” Though he seems blind to his own virtuous character, his behavior demonstrates an unwillingness to give up on virtue for virtue’s sake or on the inherent value of life and friendships. The game concludes with the Socratic hero as the winner; all of the money is now his and all he wants to do is use it to improve the lives of the people he cares about. Unfortunately, when he emerges from the game, they are all gone. His mother lies dead on the floor of the squalid apartment that they once shared. His daughter has moved to the United States with her mother and stepfather. He is left alone with more money than he ever imagined having in his wildest dreams. Under these conditions, it’s all worthless. What constitutes the good life? Even if we allow (as we should) for a pluralism of views on this topic, most well-considered accounts will agree that it involves delight in knowledge, awe in beauty, joy in hobbies, and the contentment that comes with spending substantial and meaningful time with the people we care about.

Material comfort is not identical to the good life, but economic stability is a necessary condition for people to have the freedom to participate in the goods of life. We can’t spend time with our loved ones if we’re constantly pushing a rock up a hill or, what amounts to the same thing, working for exploitation wages. Squid Game provides us with a hypothetical thought experiment to help us to recognize that what’s true in this fictional universe is no less true in the actual world. If we think just conditions of human life require providing a structure in which everyone has reasonable access to the basic goods of life, then we desperately need to make modifications to our current socioeconomic systems. Otherwise, we’re all just playing a rigged game.

September 29, 2020December 14, 2022

The Ambiguous Perspective of HBO’s ‘Succession’

photograph of cast of Succession after Golden Globes

Succession, one of the most popular recent additions to HBO’s stable of prestige dramas, dominated the drama category at the 2020 Emmys. But despite critical acclaim, the show inspired complicated and even unpleasant emotions in viewers. Equal parts pleasure and disgust contribute to Succession’s allure, and if articles like “How embarrassed should you be about your ‘Succession’ crush?” are any indication, guilt is the price fans often pay for their investment.

The Roys are a treacherous and amoral clan of one-percenters dominated by aging patriarch Logan Roy, a media mogul who made his fortune disseminating right-wing propaganda through a FOX-esque news network. The central conflict of the show, as its title suggests, is who will inherit his sprawling media empire. The main contenders are Logan’s three children, recovering drug-addict Kendall, cunning political analyst Shiv, and wisecracking playboy Roman. Other possibilities include various cronies and extended family members, like Greg, an unpolished (and impoverished) Roy cousin who stumbles into the family’s orbit in search of a job.

The closer we get to the family, the more our discomfort grows. We’re drawn in by Kendall’s perpetual sadness and vulnerability, Roman’s darkly funny sense of humor, and Shiv’s resentment at being passed over in favor of her brothers. We can’t help but identify with and even pity them, but our identification is constantly challenged by the wickedness of the Roy family. In the show’s first episode, Roman invites the young son of a staff member to participate in the family’s baseball game. When he seems reluctant, Roman writes out a check for one million dollars, offering it as a prize if the kid can hit a home run. Of course, he gets tagged out just inches away from home base. Roman rips up the check with a flourish and offers the boy a fragment, or a “quarter of a million dollars,” as he puts it. In his review of the show, writer Jorge Cotte asks if “As viewers, do we separate our ethical concerns from the conniving and calloused amorality of the Roys’ business machinations? This is related to another question: is there something suspect in feeling for these fictional power brokers who are so similar to those causing actual harm and systemic violence in the world?” In other words, how can we identify with the child and the spoiled billionaire taunting him at the same time?

The show’s engagement with wealth and privilege offers no clear moral perch for the viewers to situate themselves upon. The show seems to set up bumbling and well-intentioned Greg as an alternative to the Roys, yet he is purposefully difficult to identify with. His scenes, though invariably funny, are excruciatingly awkward. He can never read a room, and always seems to take up too much space. But over the course of the series, he proves to be as mercenary and self-serving as his cousins, illustrating the impossibility of achieving affluence without dirtying one’s hands. In Succession, we are never allowed to rest too comfortably in one place. The audience is situated everywhere at once, ricocheted from viewpoint to viewpoint.

This discomfort is built into the very fabric of the show. The camera is usually handheld, and its gaze feels shaky and restless. When characters move from one location to another, we often see them from a distance, as if through the perspective of the paparazzi. In this way, Succession borrows much from Veep, another show filmed in a mockumentary style without in-fiction justification. In Veep, the handheld camera is used for comedic purposes. It allows for quick reaction shots and zooms, which provide extra flair to jokes. But in Succession, the effect is disorienting, even nauseating. While the mockumentary style usually suggests verisimilitude, here it suggests voyeurism and instability. There is a fundamental clash between how the Roys see themselves and how they are perceived by the world, or on another level, a clash between how they perceive themselves and how the audience perceives them. We learn that as children, Kendall frequently locked Roman in a dog cage and made him eat kibbles. Roman insists that this was sadistic torture, but Kendall insists that Roman enjoyed it too. Storytelling is central to this family, which made its fortune spinning yarns, but even the Roys can’t agree on their own narrative.

Critic Rachel Syme points out that “While Succession does not glorify wealth, it also makes no apologies for it. The Roys are not like you and me. They have SoHo lofts and trust funds and cashmere everything, and they own theme parks and movie studios and shady cruise lines . . . They have everything anyone could want, but they are all empty and lonesome, neglectful and neglected.” Syme describes the ambiguity at the heart of the show, an ambiguity that is mirrored in audience reactions. While we may cheer them on, we derive equal pleasure from watching them fail. As a character from an equally rich but far more old-money family tells Kendall in season two, “Watching you people melt down is the most deeply satisfying activity on the planet.” The amoral world of Succession allows for both disgust and identification, which is perhaps a more honest way of depicting the rich and famous than complete disavowal or complete worship.

November 27, 2018December 14, 2022

Should Pointless Jobs Exist?

Photograph of people at a booth in front of a partially obscured sign that says "Welcome Business Advisors"

Editor’s note: This article contains use of a vulgarity.

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen published “A Theory of the Leisure Class.” Veblen was a Norwegian-American economist who coined the famous term “conspicuous consumption.” Veblen argued that the ostentatious freedom from useful occupation and its symbols, such as excess possessions and elaborate hobbies, established and organized one’s power and status within a social hierarchy. Conspicuous consumption signals social status by displaying one’s dispensation from productive labour.

One manifestation of such status for high-ranking persons (or organizations) is the proliferation of decorative underlings. These are “specialized servants…useful more for show than for service actually performed…[their] utility comes to consist, in great part, in their conspicuous exemption from productive labour and in the evidence which this exemption affords of their master’s wealth and power.”

Veblen’s unflinching analysis contrasted with optimistic predictions for social and economic progress in his time. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Marxian and capitalist theories foresaw a reduction of labour in the future which would free up workers for self-directed, human-centred pursuits.

Unfortunately, these prophecies have not been fulfilled. Marx’s proposed six-hour day was never implemented by Soviet regimes. Contemporary capitalism similarly shows little sign of diminishing work hours, flatly contradicting John Maynard Keynes’ prediction that the twenty-first century would usher in a fifteen-hour work week.

Instead, Veblen’s anthropological observations have again become relevant. Labour has not been reduced commensurately to technological advances, in part due to an increase in service industries. David Graeber, in his recently published book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon and Schuster, 2018), notes that despite increasing automation of many fields, new service sectors have emerged. These include financial services, academic and health administrators, human resources and public relations professionals, managers, clerks, salespeople, members of traditional service sectors, and what Graeber calls the “subsidiary industries.” Subsidiary industries maintain service sectors by providing still more specific services, such as all-night pizza delivery or dog-washing, for example. All of these fall under the definition of what Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.”

A bullshit job, according to Graeber, is generally indicated by the secret belief of the person who does the job that their work is unnecessary. He acknowledges that this definition can be somewhat subjective – as “there can be no objective measure of social value.” But Graeber expands his definition. He notes that ill effects to society would be felt fairly quickly if nurses, garbage collectors, teachers, mechanics, and even fiction writers were disappeared. But, he asks, would anything change – or change for the worse – if administrators, public relations personnel, hedge fund managers, subcontractors for subcontractors, sales representatives, telemarketers, and many service industries were eliminated?

In making his analysis, Graeber highlights the inverse proportion between the social utility of work and its financial recompense in a move that is reminiscent of feminist economic critique (regarding the unpaid or underpaid work of women in health, education, and caring work). The most essential workers – i.e. those who do jobs without which society could not function – are generally underpaid and under-respected (with the notorious exception of doctors). In contrast, many of the “bullshit jobs” Graeber describes are well-compensated. This phenomenon could certainly be read in light of Veblen’s analysis that inessential workers are luxurious expenses designed to prop up the reputation of their employers, corporations, or clients.

Graeber attributes this state of affairs to a still more disturbing explanation – class division to maintain the power structure of finance capitalism:

“Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.).”

This account is reminiscent of that of philosopher Iris Young, who noted a “professional class,” i.e. those who benefit from the exploitation of the working class and yet are not a part of the capitalist class. According to this part of the theory, bullshit jobs would function as a buffer between the capitalist and the working classes.

While many who belong to this “bullshit job” class could be considered as privileged relative to most essential workers (always saving the exception of doctors), the existence of bullshit jobs points to a spiritual malaise that Graeber discusses in his text. “How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?”

While Graeber and others point to power structures as the root cause of “bullshit jobs,” like Marx, he ascribes an ideological component that justifies them culturally. The cult of work for work’s sake is one such cultural idea, which Graeber also links to social power structures as their root cause:

“The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.” (Graeber, page xviii).

While Graeber’s analysis of “bullshit jobs” deserves further analysis, this lens provides a deep look at the distribution of power, labour, capital, leisure, and prestige in contemporary economies. This lens strongly indicates that nineteenth-century observations on capitalism, classism, and consumerism continue to be relevant in theorizing and strategizing solutions to contemporary inequality and to the problem of alienated labor.