Money...

Wow. Saturday's Playing in the Matrix session took us to places that I am still struggling to make sense of. Busting Loose players and Matrix people may welcome the feelings of discomfort as opportunities to reclaim power and effect change but Saturday's experience was like being dropped into a scene from Lord of the Flies.
Put a bunch of schoolboys on a desert island and watch them descend into cruelty and separation and ultimatelty war. More shocking was to put a bunch of 'spiritually aware' people in a simple game involving money and watch it descend into an allegory of a society divided by lack and an economic system based on scarcity.
The game had only two rules. People had to look one another in the eye as they exchanged money. The money was real and from their own pocket. As the exchanges began in a jovial space people soon started to experience the different and surprisingly intense feelings involved with the exchange process. Had there been rules and certainty the game would have felt a lot safer but then the 'charge' would have been less.
What soon emerged was a brilliant demonstration of the limitations of the monetary system. As with the monetary system when the game was stopped most of the money in circulation was concentrated in 20% of the players. Most people expressed discomfort at taking more than they started with and resentment towards those able to do so. Few people enjoyed the game and many actively disliked the experience, falling into one of the three points on the passive aggressive triangle: victim, rescuer and (less obviously) persecuter (the blaming of someone else).
Despite an intense learning experience things got more interesting when the game recommenced. People had experienced a consequence of their decision making and adjusted their behaviour. What happened was startling to me. The most common course of action was to re-dress the balance, which to most meant getting their money back. Once this was achieved half of the participants actively stopped exchanging. The other participants carried on and when the game ended the concentration of money was even more polarized and the holder of the most money was able to dictate the terms of exchange, 'rewarding' pleasing behaviour from the other participants and refusing to participate in anything but the most beneficial of exchanges.
One participant had talked of love in the eye contact in the exchange, the implication being the contact was more important than the consequence, however in the second half of the game the same person having restored their 'balance' refused to exchange, love not so important all of a sudden.
To me the dynamics here are startlingly similar to the actual economy. What we saw in the first half was a free flow of money around the group and a sort of functional 'economy'. What happened in the second half was akin to protectionism which lead to a recession which actually concentrated all the resource, and power, in one place. People refused to exchange and there was even one case of theft! The game seized up as people held onto what they had.
The whole group showed tremendous courage in their willingness to share their experience and their feelings about it, which were often intense.
On a personal note I was shocked at the emotions this seemingly simple game had stirred within me but they were nothing to those I subsequently felt as I learned that after the game the balance was not redressed. I am not sure I could have even played if I had honestly believed that people could actually 'win' or 'lose'.
To see people leave enriched at the expense of others has been one of the toughest challenges I have faced in a long while and while I struggle to process these events I realise the intellectual understanding of the'creating your own reality' world is often a long way from accepting perceptions of injustice.
Personally, as a host to the event, I felt responsible for other people's discomfort and jumped straight into the rescuer archetype. This is a tremendous opportunity to move to a different place on this and I am grateful for the experience.
From a broader perspective it is clear how difficult it is to build a meaningful society when the means of exchange carries such a charge and the system itself is built on scarcity. Time for a change I feel.