#also don't mistake my comments about Musk for pity. he is currently reaping the conses of his quences.

[rosinasnoot]

Walter White and Capitalism

I'm almost to the end of Breaking Bad and it's curious from a scientific perspective to see how greed fuels Walter's actions. Anything, and I mean anything, goes, so long as it ultimately gets him more money. The money doesn't have any external value at this point—he could cash out right now, put his earnings into the stock market or whatever, and he and his whole family could live comfortably off of the interest. Ostensibly, that's the kind of security he got into the meth business to achieve.

He wants money for its own sake. It's all a game to him and by god, he's going to win. The people who die, lose. It's of course bad to take a competitor out of the game without cause, that would be cheating and Walter's not going to cheat. If he doesn't earn the money fairly, he doesn't win, so cheating is out of the question. But a competitor who tries to take him out of the game has broken the rules and that makes them fair game. A reasonable sacrifice. The DEA and other law enforcement (if they knew everything he'd done, anyway) would remove him from the game, so he has to avoid them and distract them. Losing by death and losing by prison are effectively the same thing in his mind. It's all part of the game. Walter's no quitter. He quit the game once and look where that got him. No, he's in it for good this time.

The problem with Walter's method, using his own logic, is that he never sets a win condition. $5 million isn't enough if he could have $300 million. $300 million wouldn't be enough if he could get a billion. So he can play the game, and he can avoid losing, but he's never actually going to win. He's stuck.

However, I'm not going to call this state of affairs tragic, because I fucking hate Walter White and he dug this grave himself. I sincerely hope he dies in the hole he's digging. Tragedies involve rooting for the main character in spite of everything, and this is not that kind of story.

Anyway, Walter (I will grudgingly admit) is a pretty smart guy. So it's very interesting to me how big a blind spot he has around his greed. See, he assumes that every other person he's ever met and will meet is also equally motivated by greed and the desire to win at capitalism. I suspect that he's managed to hold this opinion for so long because he knows that he's smart, so he assumes that most people are too stupid to see how they could get closer to winning the game. This includes Mike and Jesse, two inarguably intelligent men; one who's learned over long experience how to stay in the game (because he realized early on that the goal of the game isn't winning, it's not losing), and one who is motivated by morals but is willing to achieve financial security by cooking meth.

Walter doesn't have friends. People like to talk about how the game Monopoly is a quick way to ruin friendships. Monopoly simulates capitalism at a small scale in a couple of hours. It's meant to be unfair, and you can build alliances but you ultimately win by screwing everyone else over. Walter is playing capitalism, and it's the same thing. He might feel a little bit of loyalty toward Jesse, and I'm sure a part of him still loves his family (he is human, after all), but his first and most important goal is to win the game. His family is his team, and they all win or lose together, so they're fine. But Jesse? Jesse is only around as long as he's contributing to Walter's ability to win the game. Walter will stab him in the back in a second if it's profitable enough, and whatever he thinks Jesse would actually do, Jesse's smartest move in the game would be to screw him over right back. So if he does betray Jesse, it's fair. It's not what Jesse would have done, but it's what he should have done and that's close enough. See the logic? Anything Walter would do is fair because he's making the best decisions to win capitalism (and he's a smart guy, so he can feel pretty confident that he is actually making the best decisions), so everything he does that hurts someone else is what they should've done to him if they had the chance, so it's basically what they would've done, so it's fair.

This whole mindset is why Walter gets so upset when Jesse has his umpteenth moral dilemma about what they're doing. Jesse doesn't understand that causing other people to permanently lose the game (killing children) is all part of it. It's not against the rules, you just have to be careful how you do it so the Law doesn't come after you. If you can get away with it it's often the best thing to do. And they CAN get away with it, so trivial things like morals shouldn't stop them from making the perfectly reasonable (dare I say, optimal) decision to remove a threat to them winning the game. Since everyone else is also playing the game (again, Walter's blind spot), they knew what they were signing up for. So it's fair, see?

From an antropological perspective this is a fascinating insight into the minds of people who are rich-rich. Considering how few people get to be rich-rich (let's arbitrarily say that I'm talking about people with more than $100 million in any form) and how many human rights violations have to do with people who are winning at capitalism, it seems likely that a lot of those people have the Walter White mindset of "this is a game and I'm winning and if other people lose it's because they're not good enough at it to win."

Ordinary people would then be clamoring for regulations simply because they're jealous that they're losing the game, so they want to make it harder to win. Human rights violations are an acceptable sacrifice if they increase profits by enough to offset any costs. Taking away things like DEI is a good way to both reduce legitimate competition and to stop the undeserving from cheating—a win-win if you're already winning. Taxes are the government trying to make it harder to win; tax evasion (especially the technically legal kind) is what you do if you're good enough at the game to know or find out how. The game isn't fair and it isn't supposed to be.

Among many problems with this worldview is that most of the people who are winning are convinced that it's because they deserve it. They were good at the game and they did everything right so of COURSE they're winning! Much like the gambling addict who won a little bit right at the beginning and is now thousands in debt, they mistake dumb luck for skill. They think that the people who win the game earn it, and to some extent that's true but it also involves a whole lot of luck.

I wanted to write out this character analysis of Walter fucking White because this worldview is fundamentally incompatible with my own. I can't understand how anyone could actually think this way (though I can't deny the evidence that many people do), so I'm trying to get a decent cognitive grasp on what this worldview entails. But let's be real here for a second. We don't get to live our all-too-brief lives on this beautiful planet just for the purpose of winning at fucking capitalism. I mean, look at Elon Musk. By all reasonable metrics he's won the game, and since he's forced just about everyone to know about him, he is popularly disliked. He's won and he has no one to share his victory with (which is one of the things he wants most) because a core tenet of the game he decided to play is "screw everyone else over to win." Lo and behold, he won and therefore screwed everyone else over in the process and, surprise surprise, most people don't like being screwed over and therefore don't like him.

Capitalism is a game that everybody loses.