Squid Games as a reflection of the capitalist system
Everything has a hidden meaning
Netflix has become one of the main sources of entertainment for people of all ages worldwide.
A wide variety of TV shows can be found on this platform. However, Squid Games stands out with a clear critique of our current system of social relationships: capitalism.
Why? You would ask.
In this article, I try to answer two questions: What is the deeper meaning of this TV show, and how it can help us to see society differently?
Squid Games, with its 2 seasons, has become the most-watched TV show of all time on this platform, accounting for a total of 265 million views.
The Korean TV show released its first season in 2021 creating a major impact among viewers and becoming a must for most Netflix users.
The main topics touched upon are:
- Money
- Debt
- Individualism
- Collectivism
- Democracy
The premise is simple: there are an X amount of players, who willingly entered the game, and with each one who dies in each round, the total prize accumulates. If there are 456 players, each one contributes to 100.000.000 accounting for a total prize of 45.6 billion won.
The second season starts with the main character Seong Gi-hun trying to stop this game by going back to the island, to try and solve this puzzle.
Money
This is no surprise, this show is an explicit critique of how money can make us forget any type of learned humanitarian perspective.
From my comfortable bed, I always reacted disgusted with each individualistic action some characters took, knowing the impact that it would have on others. However, that’s simple to say when you are not in that desperate situation.
Nobody wants to be poor, and everyone wants to pay off their debts, with some people having to go to extremes in order to achieve this.
I believe that one major aspect of the show is related to gambling. I mean, it's a game, with no access to the external world, strong colors are depicted, and after every game, the prize accumulates like a sloth machine, giving you that extra dopamine boost even though you just saw hundreds of people die.
But again, the majority of people are not into statistics and probability, so they recur to gamble their own or their family's life savings with not one single guarantee that they will win. That’s the casino scheme, I don't have to explain it to you.
What I like about this show is that it reflects the aftermath of making bad choices in life. How most of us don’t even realize the real consequences until it’s too late, to then realize
how vulnerable we really are.
Capitalism rewards individuals who compete for one simple goal: short-term gain. Of course, there’s a trick. The dependence on you selling your labor force in order to make a living restricts you from finding what is best suitable for you depending on your skills and education, something which a vast amount of the population didn't have the opportunity to develop in the first place.
As a consequence, they opt for easier, quicker, and more profitable options: stealing, gambling, riping off others, doing drugs, even selling your organs, or ending one's life. I know it’s quite extremist, but that's the reality.
The worst thing is having a full-time job, which requires a certain level of expertise and education, and still not being able to reach ends meet, turning one into the bank door asking for a loan. You can’t pay the loan, well debts accumulate. You can’t pay off your debt, bad luck, you end up on the street.
The World Bank is not the most reliable source out there, but nevertheless, let's use it for this example.
It doesn’t have to come as a surprise that this TV show was made in South Korea. A country born after the Korean War, led by a brutal dictatorship that, with the use of a planned economy, made South Korea go from an agrarian society to one of the largest economies in the world, with a GDP per capita higher than Japan, their previous invaders, in just 40–50 years.
This came with a prize. Workers' rights were almost nonexistent, which combined with low wages, made this country the perfect backyard for capitalist companies to flourish.
The low extreme poverty portrayed is tricky. If we look at fiction, movies like Parasite also portray this binary division in South Korean society: extreme poverty on the one hand, with multimillionaires on the other. A class division heightened at its most in an extremely hierarchical society.
Society
However, the thing that stood up the most for me was the main reason for the game: entertainment.
There’s no argument for the class division that the show shows us. But the striking point was what happened after each game: people had to vote.
- X → stop the game leave and with your part of the prize
- O → keep playing and accumulate more
Surprisingly (or not…) voting never favored the X population, with some of them changing sides as games went on, the reason being: we can take the risk and accumulate more.
This leads us to want the best monetary outcome for us as an individual, without taking into account the collateral damage that society might take on. In this show, it’s reflected in an extreme fashion: death.
This is extremely easy to reflect in Latin American societies. Because of our colonial past, plus the mismanagement of the capitalist class, we have become a very individualistic society, with presidents stating that “collectivization” is the worst of sins.
Dear reader, I don’t know where you are from, but let me tell you from first-hand experience, that individualism only leads to certain types of individuals accumulating more power, while other individuals generate resentment, bitterness, and hate for their class counterparts.
This consumer-oriented society makes us want and believe that we can achieve the top, although we have to destroy some lives along the way, its all worth it if capital keeps accumulating and circulating. This precise feeling is intrinsically engrained in the way this system works, and Squid Games has mastered portraiting this sensation on the TV screen.
Individual freedom is only possible when basic material conditions are fulfilled, simply. Capitalism can’t offer that.
To conclude, Squid Game I believe is the perfect example of how a society can turn violent and bitter by introducing the main source of competition and rivalry: money. When money is at the top of your priorities, humanitarianism is out of your interest, and democracy, well, it can wait.
