The changes in the dynamics of ‘Squid Game’ in its second season accentuate and extend critical readings of certain conceptions of freedom and democracy.
In recent years, there has been much discussion of a concept of political freedom that is often subsumed under very specific manifestations of political freedom, such as freedom of expression. Freedom is thus summed up as the ability to express one’s opinion and the ability to choose. The question of choice, of what it means to choose, is another melon that could give rise to much, but for now let’s focus on something more concrete: that freedom that is exhausted in the ability to express one’s opinion.
In the recently released second season of Squid Game, both the purely individual and the collective dimensions of this concept of freedom are sufficiently explored.
In this sense, at the individual level, freedom is presented as the possibility of freely choosing to participate in the games. And at the collective level, as the articulation of a majority that decides whether or not to continue playing after each round.
In principle, given the formal scheme proposed, one might be tempted to think that the participants in the game are indeed respected in their freedom, both individually and collectively, and that therefore, since the responsibility for starting and continuing the game is entirely theirs, the consequences (the deaths of so many participants) are also entirely theirs, excusing the morbid organisers who, in any case, seem to be merely conducting a social experiment so that the players can get to know themselves.
The problem with this approach is that it assumes that the exercise of freedom is something that is given, in the name of the classics, in a pure form: one exercises freedom insofar as one chooses. It does not take into account the different circumstances and conditioning factors that predispose to this choice: personal character, education, family and economic situation, socio-political factors, etc.
In its most extreme form, this approach, which ignores all special circumstances, leads to such controversial ideas as the possibility of selling one’s own vital organs, proposed by Javier Milei in his electoral campaign. According to him, if a person freely decides to sell a kidney to a third party, who should stop him? The cost of intervention would be to restrict a freedom that would not harm a third party (principle of non-interference). In reality, these examples given by Milei, however bizarre and macabre they may seem to us, are extremely useful to observe, albeit intuitively, that there is something wrong with this approach: if the freedom of a person who voluntarily sells a kidney is reduced to doing so or starving to death, for example, are we not dealing with a quite obvious coercion?
On the other hand, as far as the collective dimension of freedom is concerned, we have, of course, based our liberal representative democracies on the power of the majority. That is, since the end of the Second World War, this democracy has been presented uninterruptedly as the paradigm on which all political societies in the world should be based, because it sees itself as the highest form of taking into account the judgement of each citizen. However, as various theorists, including Žižek, have argued, for a democracy to work it needs a common framework in which all parties respect each other and in which what is voted on is not an affront or something unacceptable to one party. To a certain extent, democracy works well in that it acts as a tie-breaker: given a certain consensus, day-to-day decisions must be made somehow, and perhaps the fairest and least arbitrary way of doing this is to consult the social majority.
In Squid Game, by contrast, something as crucial as whether to continue playing a game that could lead to the immediate death of those taking part in the vote (the players, of course) is put to a vote. To what extent can a majority be empowered to make such a decision? Here we are undoubtedly running into the danger that Tocqueville warned of long ago: a social majority cannot be empowered to take abject decisions that directly affect the life project (literally) of the other members of a society, because in doing so it falls into the tyranny of the majority.
Finally, and as if the organisation’s desire to legitimise what is done on the basis of the sole responsibility of the participants were not clear enough, the infiltration of player 001 constantly reminds us that, despite the efforts of player 456, the participants do not deserve to be saved from themselves: they are selfish, capricious, cruel, etc. But is this really the case? But is this really the case, and can the nature of these people be summed up without considering the circumstances that condition them? And above all, can barbarity be legitimised on the basis of a supposed freedom of choice?
