Zero-Sum Game

Thanks to the mysterious ways of the subconscious mind, I awoke this morning with the phrase zero-sum game dancing through my brain like wind blowing through the leaves of a tree, rustling my thought patterns in an erratic dance. Under the winter weight of my comforter, I ponder, what the hell is a zero-sum game?

Luckily, confused wonderment can be revolved with a few clicks of the keyboard, and voila! Wikepedia resolves the conundrum. "One person's gain is equivalent to another's loss, so the net change in wealth or benefit is zero."

This definition makes no sense at all to my primitive brain. There will always be a winner and a loser in a zero-sum game, and that neutral, amoral no man's land of zero doesn't mean shit to the loser. (Thank you again Chris Rock for giving me permission to be street-expressive.) You have simply lost your shirt to a smug victor.

Obviously, an economist would explain how this is a useful tool for analyzing "growth," a euphemism for getting the most from the other fellow in the greed game, whether on the street corner or inside multinational corporations that extract life force from Mother Earth using the most advanced technologies.

While zero-sum game is an edgy concept that sounds cool rolling off the tongue, it is actually an oxymoron. Zero is the fulcrum between positive and negative, the balance point between minus and plus. When you are on the minus end of the equation, pain and poverty are its fruits. So the use of zero-sum game as an analytical tool actually becomes an insult to the dignity of human beings in their struggle to survive and thrive.