The Doglion

So this has nothing to do with gaming.

Lately I’ve been looking into the Zeitgeist Movement again. If you read one of my older posts, you will know that I am in deep support of the movement and the values that it stands for. I felt like expressing some of my own observations and thoughts on the reality of living in Mongolia.

I’m constantly angry and frustrated about how things are here. If you live in Mongolia, and especially in the capital, you most likely feel this way too. There’s just too much to be pissed off about in this society. I will highlight a grievance at a time, but will try not to keep it not too whiny, but rather objective with some distance.

My sister studies in one of the most expensive high-schools in Mongolia. I won’t say which one because, well, she’s still studying and I don’t know what kind of consequences it could have for her if I named her school.

Anyway, so this school is so expensive, that by design, you have a high concentration of the richest kids of Mongolia in one single place. Those kids are brought up by their parents to be good at the capitalist game. These are kids who own the latest fancy gizmos like iPads, wear expensive clothes and get picked up and brought to school in Hummer trucks. They are  grotesquely disconnected from the general population, and often have the view that they’re better than other Mongolian kids.

Clearly this is a direct consequence of being raised by parents who mostly became rich after the communist breakdown, a time when society was in chaos. The introduction of the free market paradigm allowed the most opportunist people in Mongolia to quickly get rich, at the cost of other people. Basically, you have a bunch of assholes who got rich by fucking up others, which is the way the game is played. Get rich or die trying, etc.

You see, Mongolia is now a country with an extremely capitalist society. Politicians are businessmen who went for power to serve their own ends, rather out of a genuine desire to lead the country. There are lots of children of politicians in that school, too. And they will play the game the way they learned from their parents.

In that school, children are pressured to pursue their undergrad degrees in the most prestigious schools. They are brainwashed to believe that only in those schools they will be able to reach something. Only if you go to Harvard, or Yale, or another Ivy League School can you become anything of worth. Consequently, they look down upon Mongolian universities (which clearly aren’t that great in comparison), and the people who study there as the lower class. Oh what an embarrassment it would be to end up in a Mongolian uni!

Even average or less prestigious school in the US are out of the question for these kids. They are as snide and arrogant as their parents. It’s a mindset that they’ve grown up in, and it’s appalling. And the competition that takes place between them, it’s fucked up. Student A wants to apply to Harvard, and asks student B to proof-read her essay. Student B will see Student A as a direct competitor for her own prospects of getting into Harvard (as if there were limited places available for Mongolian students). Therefore, student B will actually change and sabotage the essay of student A. Then student C would see that A’s essay was sabotaged and tell her that. Student A will then look at student C and say: “You’re trying to backstab me!”. Where is the togetherness and cooperation? Mutual respect and trust? All fucking gone!

This happens in high-school for these kids already. The observations are:

• teenage kids will back-stab and betray each other for their own gains, even if the threat is only perceived
• they will think of themselves as ‘better’ and others as ‘lower’ people simply because they are richer. They think of themselves as the “Elite” of Mongolia, something that is hammered into their brains by the school itself
• kids who don’t like this environment are forced to either partake in it or be outcasted and they fall into depression, this petty subculture becomes their whole world. they just don’t know any better environment!
• the pressure applied on the kids by the school and their parents is ridiculous to begin with
• the behavior shown by these kids indicates that this is just the mirroring of the way their parents act, who are incidentally the people with money and power in Mongolia (politicians and/or business owners, etc)