Accept the Game, Then Play It Better
One thing I’ve never understood is people spending their entire lives complaining about a game they refuse to learn.
They’ll tell you capitalism is rigged, banks are bastards, politicians are thieves, employers want as much work as possible for as little money as possible, supermarkets are taking the piss, landlords want your kidneys and the taxman would climb through the bathroom window if he thought there was twenty quid hidden behind the toilet.
Fine.
Now what?
Because if all of that is true, standing there being furious about it doesn’t seem much of a strategy. If I discover the pub is charging eight quid for a pint, I can be offended by the price, but the barman isn’t going to lean across and say, fair point mate, capitalism has gone too far, have this one for £2.40.
The price is the price.
This is what I like about Anton Kreil’s principle of acceptance. Accept the game, then play it better. There’s no requirement to admire every part of the game. There’s certainly no requirement to believe everybody playing it is decent. You just have to recognise what’s sitting in front of you.
I’m a capitalist. I believe in private property, ownership, free enterprise and people having as much control as possible over their own lives. I have absolutely no interest in replacing a system containing greedy bankers and crooked politicians with one where the crooked politicians also own the fucking bank.
That has never struck me as progress.
But capitalism isn’t your mum. It doesn’t care whether you’ve had a difficult week. It doesn’t know that you work hard. It doesn’t give out prizes for turning up. The market doesn’t sit beside the bed with a wet flannel when things go wrong.
It’s a mechanism.
Once I started looking at it like that, rather than expecting fairness from it, a lot of things made more sense.
I’ve lived in enough countries now to realise that most things people regard as fixed are held together with string and local convention. Tax rates, salaries, property prices, pensions, working hours, currencies, regulations, what constitutes a good income, what constitutes an expensive meal. Cross a border and half the rules change before you’ve collected your suitcase.
Yet people often treat the economic arrangement where they were born as though Moses brought it down the mountain.
This is what a house costs.
This is what I earn.
This is when I retire.
This is how much tax I pay.
This is how life works.
No, that’s how life works there.
There’s a difference.
Living overseas for years made that impossible for me to ignore. I’ve watched currencies rise and fall. I’ve seen governments change regulations and entire industries start moving around like somebody has kicked an ants’ nest. I’ve seen things considered luxuries in one country treated as ordinary in another. I’ve seen salaries that sound enormous until you look at what housing costs, and salaries that sound modest until you see what they buy.
After enough of that, you stop thinking of economics as a concrete building and start seeing it as a market stall. Prices change, people haggle, somebody is shouting bollocks at the other end and the bloke selling fish has decided his fish are worth 30 per cent more this morning.
You deal with what’s there.
Inflation is a good example.
People talk about inflation as though it’s some mysterious bastard that crawled under the garden fence during the night.
Nobody invited Inflation. We woke up and there he was eating the begonias.
Meanwhile governments have spent years creating money, borrowing enormous amounts and promising everything to everybody. Then prices rise and politicians stand behind a lectern looking surprised.
It reminds me of somebody filling the bath, going downstairs for three hours and returning genuinely astonished that the kitchen ceiling has come down.
I can get angry about it, but anger isn’t an inflation hedge.
Acceptance means I’m interested in what the thing does rather than what somebody tells me it ought to do.
The same applies to banks.
I don’t expect a bank to love me. I don’t want a relationship with my bank. I already have relationships. What I want from a bank is for the bloody thing to work.
Banks exist to make money. Once I accept that, their behaviour becomes much less mysterious. The friendly emails, loyalty offers and photographs of smiling couples buying their first home are wrapping paper. Underneath is a calculator.
That’s fine.
Just don’t mistake the wrapping paper for the present.
The same goes for politicians. Whatever party they belong to, I’m interested in incentives. What happens if they do this. Who pays. Who benefits. What behaviour does it encourage. What happens five years later when the ribbon cutting ceremony has finished, everybody has gone home and somebody discovers the new bridge needs maintaining.
Politics loves the ribbon.
Capitalism eventually sends the maintenance invoice.
Consumer culture is another part of the game that becomes funny once you notice it. Companies spend billions trying to convince us that perfectly functional objects have somehow become embarrassing.
Your phone is two years old.
Christ.
Are you all right?
Perhaps there’s a support group.
Cars are even better. A car can be sitting outside your house working perfectly well, starting every morning, carrying people and shopping around without complaint. Then somebody puts a slightly larger television in the dashboard of the new model and suddenly the one on the drive looks like it escaped from a museum.
Again, I’m not morally offended by any of this. I actually admire the machinery of it. Somebody has worked out how to make a functioning adult feel inadequate because his headlights are the wrong shape.
That’s impressive.
But I don’t have to participate in every transaction offered to me.
That’s the important distinction.
Acceptance isn’t obedience.
I can accept the existence of advertising without believing it. I can accept inflation without holding all my wealth in cash. I can accept that governments want tax without pretending they always spend it wisely. I can accept that businesses want my money without handing it over every time somebody puts the word premium on a cardboard box.
Once the moral outrage disappears, the whole thing becomes easier to examine.
And frankly, moralising about capitalism has always seemed odd to me because the alternatives tend to require far more faith in politicians than I possess.
I’m supposed to worry about a businessman becoming too powerful, which is reasonable, and then solve the problem by giving more power to a government.
That feels like discovering a fox in the chicken shed and bringing in a fucking bear.
No thanks.
I prefer dispersed power. I prefer ownership. I prefer choices. I prefer being able to tell somebody no.
None of that guarantees a comfortable life. Capitalism never made that promise. It gives people room to make decisions, including stupid ones. I’ve made plenty. Everyone has.
But they’re my stupid decisions.
I’ll take that.
So when I hear accept the game, then play it better, I don’t hear some motivational slogan about getting rich. I hear something much simpler.
Stop shouting at the weather.
See where the rain is coming from.
Then decide whether to take an umbrella, stay indoors or go somewhere it isn’t fucking raining.