Balls

Just to pre-empt any feverish gleeful anticipation or righteous indignation from anyone at the presentation of subject matter of a sexual nature, I hate to disappoint any and all of the above but there’s no sex involved in this bit. Neither, I regret to say, potentially disappointing an even greater number of people, is football of any description.

The balls I’m thinking of are tennis balls. And no, that is not like a tennis elbow. Tennis balls, more specifically, as a metaphor for economic theory and ideology. So if this appears boring to anyone now would be a good time to go and order another beer, have sex in the toilets or go smoke crack in the bushes outside. Please be my guest.

The other day I was running an activity for kids involving tennis balls. Running activities for kids is my job, it’s what I do for a living. This particular activity involved kids working together in groups of six people to build a functional catapult-style mini siege weapon and shoot ballistic projectiles at an archery target, thereby scoring points for their teams. While the kids have a good time doing this and enjoy themselves, the activity is also used to bring into focus and provide a learning experience for the life skills required to be able to function happily and effectively in a wider group of people. Things brought up and discussed in these sessions include things like communicating with each other, listening to others, giving other people plenty of time and respect to express their views, finding ways to solve problems and think around issues, being tolerant of other people’s idiosyncracies and annoying habits, and envisaging the wider picture and the common goal beyond the wants and desires of the individual. All of this and more can be extrapolated from what might, at first glance, seem like a brainless militaristic and aggressive activity: shooting projectiles at a target.

The projectiles in question were tennis balls. As the kids were busy tying knots the wrong way, hitting each other over the heads with brightly painted logs of treated pine, and arguing at the top of their voices, I set myself to the task of distributing the available supply of tennis balls. I tipped out the bucket holding them, counted them, divided the number by four for the four groups, and put an equal number of balls in each group’s little ball-bucket. Any excess balls not dividable by four were removed from the equation, so that there would be an equal number of balls for each group, and all groups would have the same chance and opportunity to score points, in all fairness.

And then it hit me.

This was a microcosm of society and of economic theory. Here I was, The Mighty Lord And Master, holding in my hot little hand all the resources available to the sprawling masses at my command, i.e twenty-four kids, with them fully dependent on my judgement and authority in terms of the distribution of material. I took it upon myself to distribute the available goods in a fair and equitable manner, so all parties involved would receive a fair share, would have the same even chances at achieving the established goals of the activity, would all be happy, and, importantly, would all be clearly aware of the fact that everyone was getting the same amount and the same opportunities.

In the framework of a children’s game the importance of such observance doesn’t need stating. Any and all rules for any and all games and activities for kids need to be transparent, clear, and fair across the board for everyone. Any game set up deliberately to askew this balance will immediately invoke a storm of protest and indignation, because kids can see immediately when something is not fair and is rigged to favour one or some parties over others. You just couldn’t get away with it. In another brilliant, concrete and concise application of real-life situations and strategies to a kids game, if you tried to rig the rules the children would immediately refuse to play on. That is, they would go on strike. Because, as a very broad and generalising rule and not withstanding unfortunate exceptions, kids, young people under the age of twelve or thirteen, have not yet been conditioned to put up with shit. To dissemble and pretend to like something they don’t, and to grovel and tolerate unacceptable situations and conditions under pressure from outside agencies. Where there are exceptions to this state of affairs, as of course there are heaps, it is unfortunately and regrettably usually the case that those kids in question have been subjected to unfair treatment at the hands of others, usually adults or older kids, and have grown to accept that as the norm. That is, they have been beaten, bullied and abused until their natural sense of justice and fairness was distorted and destroyed, and they prematurely achieve a sense of cunning, conniving and deception more usually associated with teenagers and adults.

Because kids, if left to their own devices, see things as black and white. They have a keen and righteous sense of fairness and justice. They can clearly tell if something is not fair. If one group of six people receives six tennis balls, and another group of the same number receives twelve, they know immediately that it’s not fair. That there’s cheating going on. And they can see, through their big baby blue eyes (or green, brown, black or red) that it’s not how things are supposed to be, plainly and clearly. Anyone who tries to impose such conditions on a group of kids will immediately lose any respect and cooperation, and either such a person will be removed from the game or the game will end there and then.

For the life of me I cannot understand why anyone would want to see the world in any other way. If it’s not fair it’s not fair. And, very importantly, as we raise our children, as parents and teachers and instructors and educators and guides and mentors, at every step of the way we try to instill in them these very qualities that they to a large degree already possess: share fairly with everyone else. Be nice to everyone. Be polite and respectful. Follow the rules, because the rules are fair and apply to everyone. Play with everyone, and include everyone in the game.

And yet, that is not how “the real world” works.

I realised as I divided these tennis balls that my own natural inclination is to divide the available resources fairly and evenly among the people there. To make sure that everyone has enough to meet their needs. I did not have any intention of auctioning these balls off, and awarding them to the highest bidder, to the group that, somehow, was able to pay the highest price for the resource. I was not going to be indifferent to the fact that, if that happened, inevitably some people would go wanting, without the needed resources, because other people had gotten more than their fair share. Neither was I going to set one group against another to get them to fight it out, fisticuffs, kicks, punches and bites, subsequently awarding everything, the whole lot, to whichever group would come out on top, in a might-is-right style of adjudication. If I did, I would be liable to get sacked immediately, and possibly get prosecuted for child abuse.

And yet that is how “the real world” works.

As soon as kids become adults, or teenagers, they are told to forget everything they have been told since they were born, and instead prepare themselves for bitter competition for everything all day every day for the rest of their lives, with no expectation of fair treatment at any step along the way. Of fair adjudication. Of fair and equitable distribution of the resources they will need to live their lives. On the contrary, they will be imbued with the philosophy that everything resolves around competition, that everything is a market place where all outcomes are decided by whoever or whatever can pull the dirtiest trick the quickest, can swindle the best, can deceive the most successfully. And, rather than expecting an equitable distribution of resources, that they will have to fight to get everything they need to live, thrive and survive, at the expense of everyone else. Anyone who refuses to do so or who doesn’t feel up to the task is labelled a loser, and is discarded by society, looked down upon and denigrated.

So that begs the question: “why?”.

If our kids are going to have to learn to live like feral rats anyway, killing or being killed, metaphorically if not literally, then why do we bother to pretend for the first twelve years of their lives that we want them to be fair and nice? Why not just train them up to be merciless, competitive self-serving egotistical maniacs, since that’s what we are going to want them to become anyway?

Or, conversely, we can ask the question “why don’t we stick to the rules we teach our kids?”.

My great big bucket of tennis balls is our planet earth, with all of its available air, water, food, shelter: the resources people need to live. All people have the same needs. No one human being is intrinsically in need of more or less food or water than another. Yet, instead of devising a system where we, as a species, as a global population, work together to ensure that everyone has enough and that there’s plenty left to go around in case of mishap and for future generations, we go by a system that is designed specifically to maintain inequality, and where rewards are accorded to those who display the most greed with the highest degree of ruthlessness and efficiency, laughing in the face of those who starve as a result.

Our national and international economies are not based on a notion of equitable distribution of resources, aiming to meet the needs of everyone. On the contrary, they are based on a system that specifically pitches everyone against everyone, in one great big dog-eat-dog battle. It is claimed that such “healthy competition” is the best possible way of distributing resources around the population, that competition will drive prices down, and that these prices will be determined by an ephemeral, disembodied, non-existing non-entity that exists only as a figment of people’s collective feverish imaginations: The Market. Market Forces. The divinity of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In essence, the more people fight for something with each other (that is, “demand”), the more what they want (that is, “supply”) will be worth more and become more expensive. By artificially reducing supply demand can be intensified and as a result, ever higher prices can be charged for an unchanging commodity. Fortunes can be gathered at the expense of all those who fail to kick, punch or bite as hard or as long, and those who come out on top with the big money will be applauded as heroes, instead of being denounced as the scumbags that they are. It is a telling fact that people’s value is expressed with the phrase “they are worth so-and-so many millions”, indicating that a person’s value as a human being is gauged by the amount of money they have managed to accumulate: the bigger the bank account, the more worthy the human being.

While this model has now been forced down the throat of the entire world for well over seventy years under the auspices of America (and its sycophant nations, including most unfortunately Australia), and its notions of trade and commerce, I violently disagree with it. Morally it is reprehensible: the system constitutes no more than a pimped-up version of right-is-might, outruling all notions of fairness. Socially it is unjust and unjustifiable: resources, including such things as education, the key to a decent life, and health, another key component of a decent life, are made available only to those who can pay the most for it, to wit the perceived prominence of private schools and private health providers. And environmentally it is unsustainable. There is a limited amount of resources that can be used to sustain human life on earth. These resources are determined and bound by what the earth can provide in terms of food, water and shelter. If these resources are not allocated based on equitable needs-analysis across the board, as was the case with my bucket-full of tennis balls, but instead are distributed according to the whims and purchasing power of the highest bidder, as is the case at the moment, and these highest bidders are actively encouraged by society to consume as much as they possibly can, than for one these resources will not reach the people who need them most, and for another they will run out.

If and when these resources run out the current system of global resource allocation, which is based on tooth-and-nail, dog-eat-dog, winner-takes-all, might-is-right competition under the guise of market forces’ supply and demand, will, sooner rather than later, lose its thin veneer of apparent civilisation and will descend into armed conflict with no holds barred. The current situation in the Middle East is a very good example of what the immediate future will look like.

Therefore, in summary, if we don’t replace our global resource allocation system and international economic models of mindless competition with one of collaboration and fairness, there will be hell to pay.

And people will suffer. And it will be those who are the least to blame for the situation: the poor and dispossessed, the “outcompeted” ones, the ones without “private education” and “private health”, the ones caught in the crossfire of the wars over oil, over water, over forests, over food. Not the ones with the big bank accounts.