What is wrong with the liberal moral philosophy?
By MA Iliasu
The first thing about Squid Game that captured my attention was the currency that feature in the series. To be honest, I was left wondering how valuable it must be for millions to be represented by a few currency papers. It’s very different in Nigeria. And may be in there we may learn the relative economic disparity between the country of the watcher – Nigeria – and the country of the television series – South Korea.
At face value, Squid Game tells an important story of cruel game that takes advantage of people’s desperation to get them to sign a very clear yet wicked agreement that majority will not even live to regret. The series show how daring a desperate person can be even at the face of uncertainty and how feelings can dominate reason. Likewise the flaws of individualism and advantages of cohesion. But then at the advanced stages of the game, it was shown that information and cohesion can only travel a certain distance, from which they may become obsolete to allow distinctions such as luck and chance to take over.
It was shown that players who had a certain proportion of knowledge about the game to be played and the sharpness to remember it’s tricks would enjoy preliminary advantages. Likewise the players who had the mind to bypass the hurdles of the game even when they don’t know anything about it beforehand. The players who believe they could win alone perished earlier than everyone. While the ones who survived made it to the stages in which their knowledge and cunning become obsolete, yet they couldn’t have survived up to the stage if they didn’t posses the mentioned advantages.
In there, I felt like the watcher was being given an extra moral lesson on the dynamics of success. Which was categorised into relevant stages. Knowledge (a byproduct of preparation) and mind (a byproduct of nature & environment) and luck (a byproduct of preparation, environment and fate).
In another hand, while the face value of Squid Game lessons about the categorical dynamics of success, it’s the intricacies of the advanced stages of the game that captured my attention more. Because to me, they say something very relevant in moral philosophy.
The first instance was when the players were assembled in a space where they were instructed to choose numbers to prepare for the game of glass. During that game, the watcher was given an opportunity to understand something important. The way they hesitate or rush to choose numbers clearly show that they were betting on chance. While their mindfulness towards beating their opponents expose their inherent selfishness. But then it should be noticed that there were few among them who hold the interest of others at heart.
Those few number of players can be divided into two; rational expectationists who want their teammates to survive for their own selfish interest and benevolent players who want others to survive mainly because they’re merciful. That can be understood better during the preparation to play the game of stones, when each player was asked to choose a teammate without knowing which game is to be played and the rational expectationists chose the smartest and strongest while the benevolents choose on the basis of friendship, bond and what’s right. These two groups were the best players and survive longer than others.
Another important angle is how the game of stones exposed the personalities of the players, which is very important if the thesis of the show is to be determined logically. Cunning players, who are mostly rational expectationists, tricked their opponents, like what happened to the Pakistani player. While the agents of fair play, the benevolent players, had difficulty cheating, just like what happened between the protagonist and the old man.
The watcher should have been mindful that the very moment the protagonist was allowed to win despite the old man catching his attempt to cheat, was the time to understand the old man was up to something. How they buried a glass inside the girl’s tummy even though she made it into the final three after the game of glass, to isolate two finalists, also defined their intention.
The final between two players with two totally different personalities and exhibitions; a rational expectationist and a benevolent player; uncovered the series last attempt to say it’s part in the debate of Moral Philosophy between Adam Smith with his moral friend Socrates, and Plato with his friend John Maynard Keynes.
Adam Smith, in his book, ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, said that: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”
In that regard, Adam Smith, like Socrates, was arguing that people are generally good and will do what’s right regardless of the situation. And the position explains the conduct of the benevolent player who won the Squid Game.
However, Plato disagreed and he proved that by narrating the “The Ring of Gyges” in his book, ‘The Republic’. In the Ring of Gyges, a shepherd named Gyges stumbled upon a secret cavern with a corpse inside that wore a ring. When Gyges put on the ring, he found that it made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behavior, Gyges proceeded to do woeful things — he seduce the queen, murder the king, and so on. The story posed a moral question: could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?
This assertion of Plato dominates the argument of John Maynard Keynes when he opines that the organised authority must interfere to regulate the wickedness of people if stability is to be achieved, because as a rule, people respond to incentives and will never do what’s right, only what’s to be gained.
The position, deduced from Ring of Gyges, is anti-thesis of Theory of Moral Sentiment. It’s also the position of the rational expectationists like player who cheated the Pakistani guy, the woman who switched sides, the pawns who fuelled violence and the antagonist who pushed people down during the glass game.
At the last episode of the series, the old man, who was later discovered as the organiser of the game, made utterances similar to that of a moral philosopher who agree with the position of Plato and Keynes, and rejected the thesis of Socrates and Adam Smith.
His belief was that people would never do what’s right regardless of the situation, which he experiments by going to the extreme of organising a dangerous game that tests the resolution of the players. And they all prove him right, except the winner.
Therefore to him, that’s enough coefficient to declare his thesis correct. Though the winner disagree and aim to play the game again to prove the thesis wrong.
Squid Game to me is a radical attempt to correct the notion that said man is a moral animal. And it succeeds by proving that even though the philosophers like Adam Smith and David Hume, the founding fathers of capitalism who made the notion made it in good in faith, the consequences of their ideas has successfully breeded economic tragedies like poverty, inequality, debt and significant fallacies of materiality and compositions that successfully changed man from a moral animal to a wicked specimen that’s controlled by the degree of his desperation. The tragedic development has therefore turned the socioeconomic and cultural reality a function of what to gain rather than what’s right. And knowing the country the television series come from, South Korea, it’s hardly a coincidence.
