I’ve long thought board games were a good educational tool. However, my own experience of Monopoly sowed the seeds of capitalism in my young and forming brain. It took some years functioning in the actual real ‘big bad ‘world and Thatcher rule to realise that capitalism was designed to keep me in my place and that money doesn’t figure if you don’t have the capacity to enjoy it and share it with others.
Now decades on and my fully-formed adult brain more in tune with jigsaws than board games – I’m witnessing the destruction of our planet and the accumulation of my country’s wealth in the pockets and offshore bank accounts of the ‘rentiers, monopolists and banksters, as Professor Michael Hudson refers to the already rich in his book “Killing the Host”.
Fitting the pieces of a jigsaw together is a real challenge when there are thousands of pieces. Imagine your own life as one big jigsaw and your own everyday struggle is to get all the pieces to fall into place. There are real challenges. You can lose focus and pieces of the jigsaw are misplaced or lost forever. Add more pieces or acquire a larger jigsaw, but the edges of the pieces have lost their edge and become worn or faded. Imagine if that jigsaw is the planet – the pieces are becoming fewer and cannot be replaced.
Creating a new jigsaw puzzle
That’s where we are. Those of us who have outgrown Monopoly and come to appreciate that a completed jigsaw is the only option to save the planet are up against it. The capitalists have monetised everything including that which is immovable. Our natural resources have been acquired, extracted and exploited sometimes to extinction. This cannot continue. The pieces we need to complete our planetary jigsaw are in the hands of the monopolists. How can we loosen their vice-like grip?
Being from a generation that wore budgie bells around our necks on ribbon and whose message to the entire world was ‘make love not war’ the current world order and the continuing destruction of our world is not what we envisaged growing up.
It doesn’t have to be this way though. Jigsaws can take on any shape. If we could alter the shape of the game board into a circular jigsaw, more closely representative of our world that would be a good start. Ask anyone who has ever completed a jigsaw what pieces they chose to start with. Most people will tell you they start with the pieces that create the overall shape of the finished product and fill in the missing pieces from there.
What if in creating our jigsaw, our new world order, we have damaged or lost some of the pieces or there are those pieces that simply don’t fit? What if as is likely, we are left with a gaping large hole in the middle? This is where we are – a circular jigsaw with a hole in the middle more akin to a doughnut shape.
Living in a doughnut – safe space between planetary and social boundaries
Kate Raworth, an economist used a doughnut-shaped graphic in a discussion paper A Safe and Just Space for Humanity: Can we live within the Doughnut? to illustrate a safe space between “planetary boundaries” and “social boundaries” in which “humanity can thrive”.
Derived from the UN’s sustainable development goals, the inner ring of Raworth’s doughnut shows the minimum requirements needed for a good life. It’s worth noting that these development goals were agreed by world leaders of every political hue. Any human not achieving these minimum standards is living in the hole of the doughnut. The outer ring of the doughnut highlights the boundaries which humans should not breach to avoid damage to the climate, our soils, water supply, air quality and biodiversity.
Playing by a different set of rules – ensuring the doughnut has a smaller hole
How many of us read the rules of Monopoly before we started? Be honest! A cursory glance at them, a grasp of the basics appeared all that was required to start building our own make-believe property portfolio, everyone eager to get on with the game. One rule that was overlooked was that if the Banker ran out of money, he could create more by writing on pieces of paper, keeping note of players’ transactions. The ‘bank’ never goes bankrupt.
However, when we played as children, when the bank ran out of Monopoly money, the game came to an end and the player with the most money and property holdings was the winner.
Had we paid more attention, we could have played for as long as we wanted before getting fed up. We were conditioned at an early age to think that when the Banker had no more Monopoly money left, it was game over. If only we knew then what we know now! Or indeed paid more attention to the real rules of the game, which were buried and kept from us. Perhaps an occasional game of Monopoly using the original set of rules is what’s needed to remind us that in the real world, a Central bank (CB) that issues its own currency cannot go bankrupt and an independent country with its own CB and currency, which has the necessary resources can ensure that the doughnut has a smaller hole or that the jigsaw has at least an outside chance of being completed.
The collective challenge for the human race is to create a world where everyone lives a life without want – a jigsaw in which all the pieces come together. A seemingly impossible goal but one which needs our urgent cooperation if the hole in the middle, is to get smaller and the missing, hopefully recycled and refurbished pieces of the puzzle start to come together to complete the whole. The planet cannot be recycled, but the pieces of the jigsaw can be. For now, I will stick with jigsaws and continue the search for pieces that fit together to ensure we survive to keep playing the game. That said, it’s now time the adults were back in the room!
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