How many of you have played the game of Monopoly? Do you like it? I have to confess I never really have. To be perfectly honest I am not sure I have ever finished a game of it. We usually just get too tired to keep going after a while. The average amount of turns in a game is in the thirties. Games can stretch on.
The game’s origins are a story in itself. The “official” record has its inventor being Charles Darrow. He is the one who got the royalties from it. But he wasn’t the creator. In 1932 he was introduced to what was then called the “Real Estate Game” by some friends in Philadelphia. Back then it was more of a grass roots affair, and Charles’ friend (Charles Todd and Olive Todd) agreed to make a game for he and his wife too. The real inventor was Lizzie Magie. At the turn of the century she created the board game as a tool to teach people the evils of monopolists. It is quite the irony the game became so popular for the very reason it was made to teach against. People played to get rich with their playing piece. They didn’t much care about learning about societal ills with divisions of wealth.
There are hundreds (thousands?) of variations of the game of Monopoly. There is even a braille edition. The most valuable version was created by Sidney Mobell, an artist commissioned to make a variant of the game “fit for a King.” Much of it is solid gold. Its estimated value is 2 million dollars.
The game has been used for more than just entertainment (and showing off) though. In 2013, at the University of California Berkeley, a man named Paul Piff put together an experiment where he would pit two random people against each other in a game of Monopoly. The two players were by themselves in a room with the game, and were being monitored by hidden cameras and microphones. The setup was hardly fair. A coin toss was used to determine which of the two people would receive special advantages. The lucky player started with twice as much money, got to roll two dice instead of one for movement, and also got double the money for passing “GO.” Piff repeated this experiment several times with many different pairs of participants. And he observed how they played. He noticed some interesting things.
* Privileged people started to bang their token as they went around the board
* They started to brag about their wealth in the game
* They started to put down the other player’s misfortune
* They ate more pretzels (a bowl of pretzels was put out on the table along with the game)
Piff also surveyed the players at the end of the game. He asked the winning person (always the privileged player) why he or she won the game. Not one of the winners said it was because they had special advantages. They said it was their own skill and acumen that won them the game. Here is what Paul had to say in an interview on the subject:
“They don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,” And I think that’s the kicker. At the end of the study, we ask rich players why they inevitably won, and they don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision or that thing that they did.
Piff did other experiments too. In one he had people identify themselves as wealthy or not based on their income. People were put in a room with a bowl of candy in it and were told not to eat any of it. The candy was meant for children who would be participating in a different experiment, they were told. The people who identified themselves as rich took twice as much candy as those who did not say they were wealthy.
He did other experiments too but they all pointed to the same conclusion for him. These outcomes convinced him that the more people have, the more they think they deserve.
Is that right? Do we deserve what we have?
Here is what I think. Maybe. There is definitely a part of our success that we can contribute to our hard work and wherewithal. But I can’t deny that luck also has a role. Circumstances over which we have no control can often contribute to our success in life. And this is true on a big, thousand foot high level too. Consider this. Bill Gates is a very successful man. But what if we were born 100 years earlier? Would he have been equally successful? I doubt it. Computers weren’t around 100 years before he was born. We don’t have any control over when we were born. We don’t determine where we born or what family we were born into. We don’t have a thing to do with the amount of money we started out in life with. But we somehow discount all of this when we become successful. We may think it is all because of our own work.
I might be able to tolerate that line of thinking to some extent, but there is usually another belief that comes with it. If those who have a lot deserve what they have, does that mean that those who have little don’t deserve much? Here is the real trouble we can get into. What if we become very successful and as a result look down upon those who didn’t become so?
Matthew 6:24
24 “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
It is interesting that Jesus is elevating money to the rank of master. He is definitely saying that money can master you. And people who do choose money always seem to want more. After all, they deserve it don’t they?
But what if you made the other choice? What if you choose God as your master instead? Wouldn’t you want more of that relationship? I think so. I think you always want more of what you choose to be your focus in life.
The great thing about choosing God is you don’t really need luck. There isn’t any reason to think others don’t deserve God either. Choosing God leads to a lot of benefits, and a big one is you don’t think of yourself as better than anyone else.
God Bless,