REFLECTIVE INSIGHT #015 - THE STOLEN RULES: WHY THE GAME IS RIGGED
The Game We All Know
We have all been there, sitting around the table on a rainy Taitokerau afternoon, the Northland Edition Monopoly board spread out. The tension rises as one whānau member starts hoarding all the hotels, while the rest of the players slowly go broke. We were taught that this is just "how the game works", that for one person to win, everyone else has to lose. But what if I told you that the game we were given is a stolen explanation? What if I told you the original version had a second set of rules, one designed to prove that we can all prosper together?
The Stolen Blueprint
The game we know as Monopoly was actually patented in 1904 by a woman named Elizabeth Magie. She called it The Landlord’s Game, and she did not design it to celebrate greed. She designed it as a wero to the extractive systems of her time. Her original game featured two distinct sets of rules: "Monopolist" and "Prosperity." She wanted to show that how we organise our society is a choice, not a destiny.
Extraction vs Prosperity
In the "Prosperity" rules, every time someone acquired a new property, every other player earned something too. The game was not won by bankrupting your cousins; it was won when the person with the least amount of money had doubled their original wealth. It was a simulation of "Ekonomia", the ancient art of household management where the goal is the well-being of the whole collective. However, when the game was eventually bought out, the Prosperity rules were buried. Only the "Monopolist" version remained, teaching us that winner-take-all is the only way to play.
Reclaiming the Real Rules
When we look at our communities in the North, we see these "Monopolist" rules in action every day. Large corporations and city-owned businesses come into Taitokerau to extract value, taking our resources and leaving us with the "waste." This is what we call a high-entropy economy. It is a system that creates disorder by concentrating wealth in the hands of the few while the flax-roots struggle. We are not failing at the game; the game is simply working exactly as it was designed after the rules were stolen from us.
Building the Economic Pā
To fix the soil of our region, we have to reclaim the "Prosperity" rules. We have to shift from money-making for the sake of hoarding to true home-stewardship. This is the heart of Te Ōhanga Mauri, our economy of life force. In this model, we realise that my prosperity is tied to your prosperity. When our whānau and hapū succeed together, the mauri of the entire land is lifted. We are building the Economic Pā, a circular system where wealth stays home and nourishes our own people instead of leaking out.
A Future of Shared Wealth
Taitokerau can lead the transition to a better society by proving that equity is more powerful than growth. We are reclaiming our ancestral mind and realising that our tūpuna already understood these "Prosperity" rules. They practised whanaungatanga and kaitiakitanga, ensuring that the collective was prioritised over the individual. By returning to this original logic, we stop playing a rigged game and start building a household where everyone thrives. We are not just dreaming of a better world; we are pragmatically building the engine that will sustain us in peace and goodwill.
