Wealth – Lester Smith, best-selling, award-winning, tabletop game designer (& poet)

Stairway or Highway to Where?

January 3, 2026January 3, 2026Lester

Pilar Romero Meza, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Last night on YouTube I listened to an operatic singer and teacher reacting to her first hearing of the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven.” As a singer, she focused mostly on Robert Plant’s performance, of course. The emotion of it, conveyed by his masterful technique. (The sheer length of time he could hold a note without breathing!) But she also had much to say about the beauty of the song’s overall composition, its slow build from a restrained wistfulness to an eventual crescendo of wild energy.

And the power of the drums. Which don’t enter the song until about minute four of its full eight minutes. I hadn’t realized what a legend John Bonham is among drummers. His inventiveness and performance in this song prove why.

Last night I heard “Stairway to Heaven” for the umpteenth time in my life, but this time with a deeper appreciation for the creativity and expertises threaded all through it. This time I was pretty much awestruck, misty eyed even, at the sheer creative beauty accomplished by these four human beings.

Last night I went to bed feeling better about the world.

This morning I woke to the news that my nation had performed a wide-scale military strike on Venezuela, blown up parts of Caracas, and captured their President and First Lady. That we’ll be “running their country” for the foreseeable future. A land and resource grab under the pretense of a drug war. Or smoke and mirrors to hide the Epstein files.

So much for my feeling better about the world. Today I’m once again heartbroken, frustrated, and angry.

I find myself perpetually confused that the human race can contain at the same time people of such creativity, and those of such destruction. How we continually put into positions of power people who add nothing to human accomplishment, but whose only skills are hoarding, destroying, and propagating the myth that they’re the cream of the crop.

These words don’t express the depth of my dejection right now.

There are old friends and family members whom I’ll never again be able to look at in the same light. Whose innermost hearts have been revealed, and I’ll never again be able to give them my trust.

Many of them are Evangelical Christians. Some of them even pastors. But their religion has proven itself a servant to their politics, and their reading of holy texts a servant of that debased religion. To paraphrase the Hebrews 11:1 of my youth, “Now faith is the [rationalization] of things hoped for, the [pretense] of things not seen.”

I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the fact that some people are so full of goodwill and creation, and others so tightfisted and destructive. How desperately ignorance protects itself from enlightenment. How tradition, the peer pressure of the dead, is so often used to excuse hatefulness toward the outsider.

At times like these, I wonder what’s the point of existence. If we aren’t here to help one another—everyone another—then why bother.

I suppose because of “Stairway to Heaven”s. At least until the last copy of that masterpiece is buried in the rubble of war, along with so much other art, as sacrifices to the merchant princes who would be gods.

Span or Tandem?

November 6, 2025Lester

Image by bafritch from Pixabay

In my head are two horses. One is a creative force, prone to enthusiasms, award-winningly clever, easily bored, easily dispirited. The other a disciplined adult, clear-eyed, trained as an editor and educator, tempered by experience. Faithful, honest, enduring.

As a writer, I’ve learned to nurture the first when starting a project. After all, it’s the one that came up with the idea in the first place, the one with a view beyond the horizon.

And when the creative horse falters, the disciplined one nickers encouragement: “This really is a genius concept, and only you can envision where it’s headed. Only you can carry it through.” But once the first horse is knackered, it’s the disciplined one who analyzes the product, polishes the language, fills in any holes, and trots it out for others’ feedback, before carrying it over the finish line. (Meanwhile, the first horse is dreaming up something new.)

As to the metaphor, I’m unsure whether span or tandem best suits. Are the two horses walking side-by-side in span the whole time, or am I switching the lead horse in a tandem fashion?

Whichever. The point is that there are two very different horses in my head, working together to write things. And of late they’re being forced to haul two very different loads in the same wagon.

One is a load of joy. Not just from creating my own games, essays, and poems, but also celebrating and promoting other people’s creations. It’s fascinated by well-crafted things, from a clever choice of words, to the perfectly timed rotation of a microwave. (Have you ever noticed that punching the “30 second” button brings your coffee cup handle conveniently back to where it started?) It stands in awe of the transcendent art of humankind. And of the simple kindnesses shared.

The other is a load of horror. That while some create beauty, others build bombs. That a millenia-old sculpture can be forever destroyed in seconds. That a museum’s worth of art and knowledge can be crushed and burned in minutes. That a hospital devoted to healing can be targeted for cannonade. And all at the direction of a few highly placed people, either hoarding wealth or seeking to leave their mark on history. Those few, and the many they convince to support them, through fear or greed (which is just another type of fear).

Beauty is difficult and ephemeral. Brutality is easy and lasting. And I can’t champion the one without actively opposing the other.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that if you’ve noticed my social media lurching from announcements about new games to shaming or lampooning tyranny, it’s the same two horses as always.

The nation is just on a really rocky path right now.

Fitzgerald, the Very Rich, and the Game of Monopoly

June 25, 2025Lester

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald says, “They are different from you and me. … They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

A study with a rigged game of Monopoly set out to test that theory. Here’s a summation by Pat Copeland:

“Psychologist Paul Piff and colleagues at UC Berkeley developed an experiment to demonstrate how privilege works. In a modified version of Monopoly, participants were randomly assigned roles as ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ players through a coin toss. The rich players received more starting money, could roll two dice instead of one, and earned more each time they passed ‘Go.’ These advantages quickly produced noticeable disparities and behavior.

“Researchers observed a consistent shift in how the rich players conducted themselves. They became more assertive, louder, more boastful, and even physically took up more space, eating more snacks, and slamming game pieces with greater confidence. More troubling, they began to belittle the poorer players and failed to acknowledge that their advantage was arbitrary. Despite the initial coin flip, none of the rich players cited it as the cause when asked why they won. Instead, they rationalized their dominance with merit-based explanations.

“This research illustrates an important insight: when people experience material advantage, they tend to adopt behaviors that justify their position. They become less empathetic and more entitled, suggesting that inequality doesn’t just affect outcomes, it distorts perception and self-worth.”

(Copeland goes on to apply it to management practices here, but I’d rather not dilute the main point of the study itself.)

The “American Dream” is in essence a pursuit of wealth, and far too many who don’t yet have it will defend, nonetheless, those who do—suffering in effect a financial Stockholm Syndrome.

The very rich are different from normal people. Through luck of the draw, they are a distorted version of the human race. Fitzgerald’s point isn’t to blame them, but instead to pity them:

“They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

If only their long shadows didn’t so blight the earth, stunting or killing so many of their fellow creatures, I might be moved to pity them, too.

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