The world’s a stage, said Shakespeare, and all the men and women merely players.
Well, not all. Images of Clarence Thomas smoking a cigar with Harlan Crow. Elan Musk
hobnobbing with the President of India. The gathering at Davos, Aspen, Sun Valley. Them’s
that have, dividing up the known world.
In the movie Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds’ character is what’s called in the gaming world a
“non-playing character,” an NPC, confined to the sidelines of the stories, just there as backdrop
for the players with agency who handle the controls, the ones that can pull the triggers, whose
choices matter, whose decisions have impact. The NPCs are simply acted upon, pawns to the
kings and queens who move them for their own purposes; blown up, annihilated, smashed, or
simply ignored.
Most of us, it seems, are NPCs.
How little impact we have on any stage larger than our very local one. We move
through town and country, we eat and drink, we sleep and work. Rinse and repeat. While the
decisions that affect us most are well out of our purview, let alone control.
Our world abounds with narratives of success that hold the promise of empowerment.
Like modest income people who vote for lower taxes so that the day they hit the lottery they’ll
pay less, these stories are hallucinations well-designed to keep in place the vast majority of
society that operates within a limited trajectory.
Most of us, we know better. But all we can do, it seems, is watch, helpless. We’re NPCs,
letting a few masters of the game dictate the contours of our world.
So many decisions made that treat us like chum for those in power. Sending troops for
ill-advised adventures, putting our children in harm’s way in Iraq, for example. Sets interest
rates that knock most people on their backs. Makes what at the time, let alone in retrospect,
are phenomenally stupid decisions -- supporting bad actors around the globe for dubious
purposes. Allowing guns everywhere, with mockeries of justification while children are
murdered. Overriding the rights of women, of blacks, to impose moral judgements that
facilitate staying in power well beyond a natural expiration date.
Take the hoax of globalization. The promise -- if you put production where it’s the
cheapest, that will make the world’s economic engines the most efficient. Corporate-backed
free trade Republicans and Silicon Valley besotted Democrats pushed through NAFTA and
similar trade policies. The results -- mammoth increases in corporate profits lining the pockets
of the masters of capital, distributed overwhelmingly to management and large investors, with
about as much planning for the fallout as the US had post war in Afghanistan, such as absurd
notions of retraining textile or steel workers to turn them into computer programmers.
So whole communities were decimated, decent jobs lost. While the taxes foregone
from lost wages and lower community business’s profits lead to poorer government services,
worse schools, closed libraries. With a concomitant extraordinary rise in income inequality that
poisons the social air around us.
Policies that created incentives for keeping wages low in other countries competing to
host the manufacturing and production facilities. Mass population agendas that produce
automatons making dollars a day, with no resources to rise up and seek a modicum of a fair
share. So that the NPCs can buy a cheaper shirt at Walmart’s while having to work at
McDonald’s
You can search the missions of civil rights actions for the past 50 years, and the
headlines remain pretty much the same. Now as then, voter suppression, discrimination in
workplaces, in housing. There were seven years of protests against the Vietnam War that
didn’t do a damn thing to end it. Most Americans would prefer to let women choose to control
their bodies, would rather guns weren’t so easily accessible and so often used to murder
children. Would like the nation and the world to actually do something to keep climate change
from destroying the planet’s future.
And yet....
None of it happens, because most of us are simply NPCs. We live in structures which
strip us of impact and agency, which give enormous power to a very very few who have gamed
the system to have wealth and power sufficient to insulate them from the consequences of
their actions on us. Sometimes they’re smart, sometimes they’re lucky, perhaps cunning or
visionary. We can admire their skills without conceding our territory. But that would be hard,
and for most of us, we’re not zealots -- thank heavens -- we don’t want to sacrifice such
pleasures as we can obtain from the family, friends, activities we can enjoy. Particularly as the
struggle to break free from the scripted roles we are assigned most often ends in frustration or
concession, occasionally with worse consequences as societies moves to squelch challenge.
It’s similar in Russia and Iran, South Korea and China. Despots have been around as long
as humanity has organized itself in any way; democracy can just create a better semblance of
freedom. There’s a Zen Buddhist saying - if you want to keep your cows in the pasture, make
your fences very wide.
Moo.
So as one NPC to another -- what can we do about it. Short of rising up and taking some
kind of arms.
I don’t know.
But successful therapy begins with observation. So let’s observe how we are being kept
in our pastures, while those building the fences enrich their selves at our expense, threaten our
well-being with impunity, bully through their imposed moralities, tell us we should be grateful
for what we have so don’t ask for more -- whether some share of their wealth, or some impact
on the policies and programs that affect our lives.
Like the guy in Network said -- get mad as hell and don’t take it anymore. There’s a
difference between legitimate authority and the raw untrammeled exercise of power, and
individually and en masse we need to acknowledge what deep in our hearts we know, we’re
being screwed, out interests ignored, and start making all the noise we can in all the places we
can to end it. There is a road to empowerment, riddled with obstacles. It requires courage and
audacity to keep marching on it.
Would you rather be an NPC to be exploited, or have your finger on the controller?