SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

If historians wanted to give a name to the twentieth century a few years later, they wouldn’t be able to find a better word than “Monopoly”.

We used to play Monopoly not only when we were young but also when we got older. Back then, we would sit down to play Monopoly as a board game. How could we know that it was the quintessential game in real life?

Monopoly is a board game that was developed and marketed in 1935 after the Great Depression of 1929. (Let’s just say it is rather meaningful.)
Players are fake, they do not play in their own identities!
Money is fake.
The central bank is fake.
We bought houses and hotels thinking that we owned them although they belonged to a virtual central bank!
Even when privatisation was not in our agenda, we had the directorate of waters, the directorate of electricity and train stations.
We bought them, sold them and we went bankrupt. However, we would get into debt again and again by taking out loans from the central bank, which was like a safe, in order not to lose the game.
Interesting but true. We could even be “happy” when we were playing the game. Just like our situation now. We think that we are “happy” when we are actually in such a debt that even our kids will not be able to pay!

Life went on;

• when the recession of 2008 which was just one of the global financial recessions, neither the first nor the last, buried some financial institutions worth billions of dollars in the dusty pages of history,
• when hundreds of thousands of people ended up homeless, and lost their cars, their jobs and their future in the so-called developed countries as a result of that recession,

• when all of the people who were responsible for these things got their compensation ending with at least six zeroes by claiming that it was “in accordance with their contracts” without standing trial or accounting for their doings under law.

Roll the dice; once again!

The only valid rule is “to roll the dice once again” as in Monopoly! When writing about the twentieth century, historians will have difficulty in calculating how many times the dice had been rolled!

The problem is that everything that leads us to money has become “virtual and fake” after the Phrygians defined money as a tool of exchange. This is such a voracious appetite that it does not have to be called USD, euro, yen or Turkish lira. When they are not enough we have bonuses, top-up cards or miles!

Central banks, which entered our lives as the key player of economy in 1913, are just a little bit better than an average printing house in terms of functionality. They print something and claim that it is valuable, but it is not possible to understand and interpret how valuable that thing is in a world which is becoming poorer and poorer every single day.

On the other hand, being ethical has always been a problem since humans started to live together. However, it has become a circle of problems that we cannot solve once the Industrial Revolution introduced technology / inventions and comfortable lives to humans. Yuval Noah Harari says that this process started with the agricultural revolution. The concept of ownership entered life. Then, there were the matter of “our and their”!

Should we blame the industrial revolution?

Humans’ courage was broken at three main points after the Industrial Revolution:

1. It was discovered that war was a “business model focused on money” by managing financial tools efficiently not a matter of governments’ expanding their lands and getting richer through loot. (It started with the First Opium War between the UK and China from 1839 to 1842. Hong Kong was rented and the first global financial trust was built.)
2. The concept of equities, which was designed as the value to give meaning to this financial richness although it had no value, was determined as the foundation of this business model. Enron, which was worth USD 37 billion, turned into an 80-cent company in 24 hours!
3. Performance had to be named. That’s why, they called it growth based on USD income per capita in terms of GNP. They herded the people to a racetrack. It was like throwing “a virtual bone” in front of a hound. Iceland, which used to be the richest country in “the developed Europe” with its $67 thousand income per capita, went bankrupt in 2008 (as many other European countries). It still doesn’t know how to get out of this debt spiral!

As the game was called Monopoly, its rules and the people who set and audited those rules were adapted to the game, of course. All the laws, regulations and legislation and all the institutions including political parties, which would ensure that the aforementioned were put into practice, were designed to serve that model regardless of national boundaries. All of us are still rolling the “dice” on this Monopoly board! Depending on the number we see on the dice, we live in a suitable way for our given roles in a corner of social life.

What is the problem of all these events and what was told above with the concept of ethics?
We all know what it is, but…
Let me explain it by giving very simple current examples.

We all pay our taxes cent by cent on the basis of our incomes without any objection. Then, what kind of ethical behaviour can clarify the fact that some business people use their offshore bank accounts on the islands, whose names they cannot pronounce, in order to evade taxes?

Unethical behaviours are honored!

There is nothing unknown about the recognised fraud of VW and FIFA. Greed, money worship and “so-called earnings” to be acquired as a result of these two are served as performance on a silver plate. Doesn’t this create unfair competition against people who earn an honest penny by our side?

Encouraged by banks, university students get student loans especially in the USA. As a consequence, they graduate from university with a debt that they will never be able to pay even if they were born into this world seven times in a row. How could this situation make year-end profitability of a bank, its partners or its shareholders ethical?

Credit rating agencies, which sit at the very centre of the world of finance as a teacher who accepts nothing but zero as a grade, easily give A to the banks which have already gone bankrupt and have nobody to turn to, and save their non-existent reputation as in 2008. Can we say that these agencies are more ethical than the contractors who constructed the buildings causing thousands of people to be trapped in wreckage during the earthquake in Marmara?

The owner of Fukushima nuclear plant, TEPCO, didn’t talk about the radiation leakage in the plant, which was in the spotlight after the great Tsunami, since they thought it would have a negative effect on their shares in the Tokyo stock market. What sort of conscience can account for such a thing?

The tragedy in the African countries is obvious. Their underground and overland riches have been exploited for one hundred years. Africa, which experienced another tragedy in its own land after the slavery tragedy of the nineteenth century, suffered from racism a lot. However, since it does not have a say in the global economic policies, its people pay the price by fleeing into the European countries as refugees due to AIDS, famine, poverty, destruction of agricultural land, civil wars served to the arms industry as appetisers and genocide.

Asik Veysel Satiroglu, a poet born in Turkey, wrote and said “I’m entering a dead end”. Rumour has it that it was the last poem / folk song that he had written a few days before he passed away. What he really meant was the troubles that humans “who were entering a dead end” blatantly got themselves into.

Climate change caused by global warming,
Unforeseen, uncontrollable population growth,
Consumption of potable water sources,
Destruction of agricultural land caused by humans,
Epidemics,
Plant and animal species becoming extinct one by one,
Famine, poverty and hot wars caused by the above,
And mass migration, refugees, war and terror served as dinner!

The tide ebbs in order to flow. Then, it flows and ebbs again. If we cannot understand the message sent by nature when the tide ebbs, the tide will flow in order to raze and destroy as an inevitable natural event.

“You actually buy it with your time!”

Humans have almost never pondered on the dilemma over “possessing” and “managing the time”.
Jose Mujica (Pepe), the ex-president of Uruguay, simply summarised the humans’ dilemma during his visit to Turkey:
“Pollution is a result of the consumption society. If a person wants to be rich, s/he will eventually sell her/his soul to the devil. It is the affliction of our age. The consumption society captures us as a cobweb. We think that happiness is buying things with a never-ending desire. It’s very easy to be corrupted in such a system!
…When you buy something, you don’t buy it with money. You actually buy it with your time. I mean you spend some time of your life to earn that money. Then, you buy whatever you want with that time. What happens then? Let’s say you buy a car or furniture, but you cannot buy time! You cannot go in a supermarket and say “Can you please give me 500 years?” I’ve found out that I have to have time to be free.”

The high walls of modern jails that humans build in the name of development and call cities cannot protect them from the tide. Because when the tide ebbs for the first time, there comes another human tragedy such as tsunami, flood, hurricane, epidemics or hot war.

Humans never learn their lesson. They never learn anything. They know all the facts, they live among them, and they can even become a part of these facts knowingly and voluntarily. They are entering a dead end.

We cannot say that there aren’t any cracks on the edges of the global lifestyle which has been shaped by Monopoly and is associated with this game. There are role model companies such as Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s and Green & Black’s.

In 1980s, they designed life around the trio of profitability, humans and the planet. The concept of “guilt-free products / brands with no criminal record” invented by Green & Black’s joined the concept of “ethical trade”. The rules of Monopoly are being pushed since first coffee companies and then every big or small company from every industry started making and effort to get “an ethical trade certificate”.

These are other players who don’t like to play monopoly!

It is against the entire logic of Monopoly that Mars, a chocolate and confectionery brand, recalled and destroyed all his products in 55 countries without any official pressure since some plastic pieces were found in some of their products. We can clearly see who is “dragging us to a dead end” when we compare Mars recall to the lead paint that can harm babies which was found in the products of Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie dolls, or to the policies of Toyota, which wouldn’t recall its vehicles although it was reported that there would be fatal accidents. The gem brands, which are the catalysts for the fashion world, share the concept of “green carpet” instead of “red carpet”. This situation can be counted as one of the evidence about the expiry date of Monopoly.

Let me finish this article with a quote from the ex-president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica (Pepe), one of the role model leaders of this century:

“Here is what the history of mankind taught us: Cultural change is so important that it gets ahead of material richness. Spare yourself ten minutes every night. Think about what you have done during the day. Do you feel good or bad? Be the judge of your own acts, because you are the judge of yourself. Because we can never create a better society without making ourselves better.”