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Ethics and Morality
How People Shed Their Conscience
Treating life as games without consequences.
Posted December 5, 2022 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Life is not a game because games are self-contained and life isn't.
- It's temptingly convenient to treat life as a game with a clear object and rules for maximizing your score.
- Business, law, and politics encourage a gamer attitude, playing two games with opposite objects: private profit and positive public appearance.
- Were ambivalent about treating life as a game in that it puts us at ease but we don't like game-players.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the recent decades is discovering that despite society’s abundant promotion of conscientious behavior, many people can shed their consciences as easily as they shed a coat. They do more than shed it, they become absolute cynics posing as absolute saints.
How do they do that? What’s their secret? Do these total jerks honestly believe they’re saints? Are they that dumb? Or are they so cynical that they can pretend they’re saints without wincing? Not dumb, but playing dumb like a clever fox?
I begin to suspect what’s going on is the gamification of life, treating life as a game.
Though life has plenty in common with games, it isn’t one. Games are self-contained, and life isn’t. What happens in games stays in games. If we lose or die in a game it has no consequence in reality other than a little disappointment. When a game’s over we get over it and move on with our lives. In contrast, life’s decisions have repercussions, consequences that ricochet in all sorts of directions, foreseeable or not.
Even the hardest games are simpler than life in fundamental ways. The rules and object of the game are straightforward. It’s clear who won and who lost. We know our score, and our only goal is maximizing it. With life, we’re compromising more than maximizing. There are tradeoffs to most of what we do. There is no one object in the game of life, which, again, isn’t a game.
Given gaming’s relative simplicity, it’s tempting to treat life as a game, and many people get away with it. They claim there’s one simple object to life in this arena or that. They ignore the consequences of their actions beyond their score.
When we hear people say that life is just a game, we might relax. Hey, no biggie. Just a game. Or we might fret because no one likes being played. Hear the ambivalence? Life is just a game, but please, no game-playing.
Many jobs are performed like games. Business is profit maximizing. Lawyers try to maximize wins and billable hours. Politicians, often trained in business and law, can alternate between two games—backroom cunning and public moralizing. The object of the backroom game is simple. Maximize profit by any means necessary with points scored in money, power, and status. The object of the public game is simple too. Maximize the appearance of being a superhero by any means necessary, with points scored for appearing wise, lofty, saintly, and strong.
Two opposite games. You win one by role-playing as the devil and the other by role-playing as an angel. Since games are self-contained, politicians can alternate between these two games without noticing that they’re opposites. In public, they might actually feel like holy winners for being like Jesus or Moses leading their people out of bondage and into the promised land. Then they switch, retreating to their backroom lair where they feel like cunning winners like Gordon Gecko or Bernie Maddoff. It’s all just a game or, rather, two opposite games. Winning both is all that matters.
Alternating between backroom cynic and public saint games is not limited to politicians. Corporate execs and spiritual leaders often have their private scheming and public loftiness. And it’s contagious. Corporate employees and spiritual followers learn by example how the game is played—as if it’s holy war. There’s no deed too dirty for saints like them, all the ruthless, mercenary, lawlessness of war, and all the heavenly virtue of holiness.
Cult followers and ideologues learn quickly to imitate their leaders. If gaming is good enough for their heroes, it’s good enough for them. One can transfer this double-gamification to any supposed cause or ideology, including just being an independent a-hole, a personality cult of one with no cause greater than “'cause I said so.”
We all need insulated games as refuges from the complexities of real life. Games are a healthy kind of escapism. As with fantasy and fiction, we can pretend we’re heroes engaged in holy-war, ruthless power grabs with some fictional high purpose.
But it’s best to keep in mind the difference between games and life and return to reality when we’re done playing, or else our consciences fall out. “No deed too dirty for a saint like me” is a tempting but deadly way to live in reality, because consequences have a way of ricocheting and biting us in the ass.
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