Cody A Friesen
Snakes and Ladders
Salman Rushdie’s book about India’s transition to independence, Midnight’s Children, turns on the idea that: “All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you hope to climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega.”
Most of us know the game as Chutes and Ladders, but it is an ancient game originating in Vedic India, potentially over 4,000 years ago. Its original name, Jnana Chaupar, roughly translates to “Game of Self-Knowledge” and it was used as a teaching tool about morality, with advancement leading to ever higher levels of spiritual enlightenment. There are Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim versions of the game.
In 1943, Milton Bradley released a secular version of the game, which replaces the snakes with more child-friendly slides, the “chutes.” One progresses on the board by the number of spaces dictated by the spinner, and, when lucky, lands on a ladder to climb or, if unlucky, a chute and slides a little or a long way back. You complete the game by avoiding the chutes while climbing the board and the ladders to the end.
One of the beautiful things about the game is that with enough rolls of the dice, or spins of the spinner, everyone eventually reaches the finish. It is only a question of how many ladders the player may climb or chutes they may suffer as they progress toward the goal.
We can see this game in life: we tend to think that building the life we want is simply a matter of steady progress toward our goals. But this view fogs the reality that our progress in life is far more determined by effectively random accelerations: privilege, unique abilities, place or time of birth, etc., and somewhat random setbacks: sickness, job loss, circumstance of birth, etc. The difference, of course, is that through effort and focus we can add ladders to our life, mitigate potential snakes, and hopefully bias the outcome to our favor.
Imagine the game without the snakes, only plodding progress with intermittent ladders that allow you to jump toward your best life. Or imagine the opposite, the game without ladders, steady positive progress interrupted by major life setbacks. Obviously, these extremes dramatically impact the outcome, but even if we shifted the ratio of snakes to ladders only slightly, we’d see a significant impact on the statistics of the game. And as importantly, the size of setback or amount of lift that each snake or ladder, respectively, imposes also has a big impact on the game.
For all of the above, so too in life.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
The metaphor of Snakes and Ladders is cast literal by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which, interestingly, was published as part of Abraham Maslow’s paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” the same year Milton Bradley released its game. Stated simply, Maslow’s Hierarchy is a categorization of pre-requisites to a quality life. Each necessity that’s met leads to an incrementally better life. The foundation starts with our most basic needs (physiological needs): air, water, food, shelter. Once one has met their physiological needs, the next increment in a quality life is safety. With physiological needs and safety needs met, we have the capacity to experience love and belonging. And if we are healthy, safe, and have love, we may then develop esteem. And once that is achieved a person can focus their energy on living their best life (self-actualization).
The concept of Maslow’s Hierarchy is simple, a reasonable criticism is that it oversimplifies, and perhaps feels obvious. But what is often missed is the fact that one may be at the level of self-actualization, the peak of human existence, and suddenly some lower-level need becomes unmet and the nature of the hierarchy becomes clear. If your safety is violated, or suddenly the water supply to your home is cut, or your shelter burns down, the layers above matter little until the gap is bridged. And only once that problem is solved, can you continue building toward the next level of human fulfillment.
So, it turns out we’re all playing the exact same game: a Maslow’s Hierarchy version of Snakes and Ladders. But we all see a different arrangement of impediments (snakes) and advantages (ladders), of different magnitudes and number. If you happen to be further along in the gameplay, having lucked upon a long ladder, or series of long ladders and, importantly, if your ladders were sitting on strong foundations or held up by others, with few snakes along the way, you might have only concerned yourself throughout your life with love, belonging, and building your best self. But if there were fewer ladders or more snakes in your game, slithering you sideways, pulling you down, constricting your free breath, you, at best, have had to spin the spinner many times to achieve the same position on the board and in the hierarchy of needs. And no matter where you are on the ladder of life, a single unfortunate spin can drag you back down.
As Rushdie pointed out in reference to the game: every next level up is a ladder, and once achieved, becomes a potential snake if it were taken away. This is the essence of his fundamental “twoness” of things.
What if we could, by our own actions and effort, directly swap a snake for a ladder on another person’s gameboard? A good society does this, technologies can do this, conscious capitalism and companies focused on solving fundamental problems do this. And by doing this, by lifting others up starting with their most basic needs, we collectively gain greater levels of security, health and economic well-being. We have a larger well of connection, love, respect, freedom and strength to draw on. Ultimately, we can create a self-actualized society, one with far more ladders and far fewer snakes, for everyone.