Moa Jamir
In the classic book, “Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships” published in 1964, Dr. Eric Berne dissects the “secret ploys and unconscious maneuvers that rule our intimate lives.” He, thus, developed the “transactional analysis,” which a 1965 Life Magazine review described as “a brilliant, amusing, and clear catalogue of the psychological theatricals that human beings play over and over again. When someone creates a commonplace social disturbance in order to gain some secret relief or satisfaction, Dr. Berne calls it a game.”
He defined a game as “an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome.” It involves a hidden motivation and results in a 'payoff' explaining why “people do not readily rid themselves of the games they play.”
Perhaps, its popularity influenced the Grammy Award winning protest song, “Games People Play" by Joe South in 1968, whose lyrics “speak against various forms of irresponsibility, hatred, hypocrisy, inhumanity, and intolerance in both interpersonal and social interactions between people.”
“Oh the games people play now Every night and every day now Never meaning what they say now Never saying what they mean”
Likewise, Karl Marx famously wrote in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” that History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, explaining that, “The class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque and mediocre personality to play a hero's part.” The unique circumstances whereby human beings refuse to learn from past errors and repeat the same over and over again.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past,” he wrote, adding that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” As a result, when they seem to be occupied with “revolutionizing themselves and things…precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
As one observes the unfolding political drama in Nagaland, one is shockingly aware of how aforesaid narratives continue to influences our societal interaction and polity. Schadenfreude, as the German would say, denoting pleasure “derived by someone from another person’s (often considered deserved) misfortune.”
Everyone seems to be playing two persons ‘zero-sum game’ in which what one gains is equivalent to the loss of the other – a situation contrary to a ‘win-win’ that is based on agreement (or dialogue) but a stand-off thwarting the progress of society. Consequently, it is creating a paradoxical state of affairs, where a society which proudly asserts itself as ‘egalitarian and communitarian,’ is gradually gladly embracing the maxim of the “Survival of the fittest." As the society continues to grapple with these contradictions, “tradition of all dead generations” is weighing like a “nightmare on the brains of the living.” History, not only repeats itself, but pulls us further downhill. For any comment, drop a line to moajamir@live.com
