Having and Being Had
by Eula Biss
Free time in my standard suburban childhood saw me playing a slew of board games that centered the accumulation of property and depended on creeping power imbalances—things like RISK, or Monopoly. I don’t dislike those games as such, but I tended to mildly infuriate those few of my friends that had what I will call ‘the eye of the tiger’; they wanted to win, but I wanted to play. If I was decisively ahead or in a position to knock another “threat” out of the game, I would hesitate on the killing blow, leaving an avenue open for the beleaguered player to stage some sort of comeback. I wanted everyone to stay at the table and have a chance—up until the moment the game actually ends—to have some fun (“fun” defined as *I* saw it, which meant “making a good play,” or “doing something cool.” I concede that if you only equate “fun” with winning, it might be kinder to just get knocked out and perhaps play a new round). It’s not that I don’t like winning, but I would prefer the road to victory remain for a long as possible. I don’t find inevitability very fun, even if I’m the one left holding the trophy.
There is joy for some in the parade-march to victory in a low-stakes board game; I know, because as a teen, those more bloodthirty players would vocally loathe my pacifism: “The game will never end if you keep letting them build up in Australia.” “You can’t give them a free night in your hotel just because they’re broke.” “Get them out of the game or we’ll be playing all night.”
Imagine my surprise when I read Having and Being Had and was shown that the way I play Monopoly might actually be considered an original and intended playstyle, perhaps even the entire point of the game:
The Landlord’s Game, the game that became Monopoly, was designed in the early 1900s to expose the problems with an economic system in which property owners “win” by impoverishing renters.
The woman who invented the Landlord’s Game, Elizabeth Magie, was an advocate [that profits made from the ownership of property should be heavily taxed].
[Maggie] hoped that children who played her game would grow up understanding the injustice of our economic system. To help illustrate this injustice, she designed two sets of rules. Following one set of rules would create an equal distribution of money among players, with no winner. Following the other rules would create an accumulation of wealth, allowing one player to win. The rules that survived, the rules we still play by, are winner take all.
Monopoly was created as a tool to show children that absolute control of marketplaces—and things like landlords—are bad, actually. That pushing people out of the game and siphoning benefits toward the person who got lucky with the dice (or the person born into property, say) is fundamentally damaging to the whole of society. That rules of a game, as they represent our laws in society, can keep everyone at the table indefinitely, if we choose to make it so.
I feel seen.
That is not the only time Having spoke directly to my sense of self:
The book Bill and I are reading now is The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. I’ve marked every passage about precarity.
Ah, yes, me too, me too. Boy did I love that book. Having it simply plopped into the pages of Having and Being Had was one more piece of evidence supporting my eventual hypothesis that this book holds a mirror to my mind more closely than anything I’ve ever read beforr. It’s not that I think I could have written the book, it’s that the way it is phrased and presented—the way things are considered and applied—felt natural. Reading Having and Being Had was the most frictionless experience I’ve ever had with text. It strolled into my brain like it owned the place.
Statistically there are maybe six other people running around the planet right now with your face, so it is certainly possible there is someone out their with a match for your brain:
The protestant ethic describes the moralizing of work and the privileging of property, not, as I used to think, the belief that work is, in and of itself, good. All this time I’ve been using that term to describe my faith in work.
Ah, yes. Exactly! Finding your author-doppelgänger is a unique form of bliss, a level of synchronicity between interior and exterior forces that lacks the feeling of the uncanny that I would expect from a book the reads like your own mind. And it wasn’t like I was reading my own writing, nor like I knew the substance of the pages. It was the flow—the uncertainty, the tone, the slim but poignant connection from one vignette to the next—that all felt like the most natural things in the world to me. Simple, like walking when you’re not thinking about how awkward it feels to walk.
Credit goes to the Green Apple Books recommendation shelf, which, as always, informs my library requests. I ended up having a hard time physically finding the book, as I kept searching On Having and Being Had. It wasn’t until I saw the “also by” page that I realized I had read the author before: On Immunity: An Inoculation. Interesting how the mind works, appending that “On” to the front of this title, even if I didn’t consciously recognize the author or connect Having and Being Had to On Immunity.
I do not have the qualms with Having that rereading my review makes me think that I did with Immunity, and that’s not because Having lacked depth with which to move me. It seems like I am no longer coming into a book searching for an angle at which to approach the text, no longer looking for an end-around to format my critique or justify my presuppositions. Eight years later, I feel more comfortable letting a book say what it wants rather than argue over what I think it should say.
It seems to me that I no longer play by the “winner take all” rule of book reviewing; I am simply happy to be part of the game.