[COLUMN] In Its Second Season, Squid Game Puts Democracy on the Ballot | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the second season of Squid Game, now on Netflix. It’s fine. It is basically an over-extended first half of a season that has been cut in half. However, if you want to watch the season blind, feel free to bookmark the piece and come back.

In its second season, Squid Game turns its gaze towards the limits of democracy.

Squid Game is about capitalism. It depicts a brutal tournament in which 456 contestants compete against one another in a series of life-or-death games in the hopes of winning a prize fund of ₩45.6 billion for the amusement of a collection of wealthy spectators. Although the individual challenges themselves are lethal variations of children’s classics like marbles or “red light/green light”, the real game is played outside the arena, as players sort themselves into groups and alliances.

The first season dabbled with ideas of collective action and democratic mandates, but only fleetingly. In the show’s second episode, realizing that they are literally gambling with their lives, the players are allowed to vote to return home. However, most opt to return because they have no other choice. While a few of the games are team sports like tug-of-war, most of the games during the first season are tests of individual skill and resourcefulness in which every player is out for themselves.

In contrast, the second season foregrounds the idea of the players as a community rather than as a set of individuals. This is most obvious in the biggest structural change to the games themselves. Now, the players are presented with the option of voting to leave the games after every round with their share of the winnings. The players are marked according to their votes. Those players who vote to leave are given an “X” to wear on their chest, while those who vote to stay receive an “O.”

This season’s interest in teamwork extends beyond this recurring vote. Of the three games featured during the second season, only the returning (and introductory) “red light/green light” is a solo sport. The season’s two other games, a six-legged race and a partnering game on a carousel, are designed to force players to sort themselves into groups in order to work together to have any chance of surviving the round.

This is very clearly intentional. The second season finds protagonist Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) returning to the contest after winning the previous competition. Gi-hun hopes to rally the players against the games and to topple the whole operation from the inside. To counter Gi-hun, the challenger’s organizer, Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), inserts himself into the contest by posing as a contestant. The second season is a contest of wills and ideology between Gi-hun and In-ho.

Gi-hun believes that people are good and that they can be convinced to stand against this grotesque tournament. In contrast, In-ho seems to truly believe that the games reflect the reality of human psychology and that the contest taps into humankind’s base nature. Over the course of the season, Gi-hun finds his belief in basic human decency to be challenged, as the players vote time and again to remain in the games, despite the absurd mortality rates, clearly voting against their own interests.

“I felt that this season is not really about classism, but it's really about the choices that people make,” explained actor Lee Seo-hwan. “Choice, in and of itself, becomes very important in Season 2 because we have a voting system. And it may look like a democracy from the outset, but there's a lot of psychological warfare going on behind the scenes. And it's not a vertical, hierarchical situation, but it's horizontal. There are a lot of different sides, people taking sides and being in silos, and when you make a choice, you understand that you have to be responsible for your choice.”

In this sense, the second season of Squid Game is remarkably timely. Democracy is under threat around the world. A few weeks before the second season premiere, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, although he quickly backed down when it became clear he could not hold power. Yoon’s tenure had been rocked by scandal, and there was some speculation that he had acted rashly in the hopes of avoiding prosecution.

However, such threats to democracy aren’t always so overt. Instead, democracy can be weaponized against itself, with citizens exercising their democratic right to vote in such a way as to undermine their country’s democratic freedoms. Last year was a year of global elections, with many observers noting that democracy itself was “on the ballot.” In September 2022, the European Parliament argued that Hungary was “no longer a democracy” under democratically elected Viktor Orbàn.

This is one of the paradoxes of democracy, the ability to vote away one’s freedoms. Of course, it is also arguably the difference between a democracy and simple majoritarianism. Democracy theoretically contains institutional bulwarks designed to protect minorities and rights from the tyranny of the majority, structures like constitutional rights and the separation of power. However, theory and practice are different things. Those bulwarks can be eroded and decayed.

The modern world is full of groups that have voted (and continue to vote) against their own self-interest. Despite being warned about what would happen ahead of time, the fishermen in the United Kingdom who voted for Brexit have found their industry turned upside down by their decision. This is something of a general trend. The communities that voted for Brexit were also those communities that suffered most dramatically from the consequences of Brexit.

In the United States, many of those who voted for Donald Trump were exactly the kind of people who would suffer most from his policies. There was a spike in internet searches of the question “who pays tariffs?” after Trump’s election, while two thirds of Americans believe that Trump’s tariffs will lead to higher prices. There are multiple accounts of undocumented migrants supporting Trump because they don’t believe that he will deport them, often fueled by resentment of newer arrivals.

Around the world, why do so many people vote for the “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party”, knowing that they have faces that are likely to be eaten? Writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk, who described the American election as “the ultimate O-X event”, pondered this question. He explained his pitch for the season, “We live in a democratic society, and everyone has their own right to vote, but the dominant side rules. So I also wanted to pose the question: Is the majority always right?”

Squid Game wrestles with this question directly. “Do we have the willpower and strength to try to make the world a better place?” Hwang asked. He might as well be articulating the philosophical conflict between Gi-hun and In-ho. “The one thing that I had most in mind was this current world and how it makes all of us divided, it separates us from the other group, creates different sides to become hostile.”

In the world of Squid Game, the divisions are rooted in capitalism and greed. As ever, the system is structured to coerce the participants into acting against their own interests. The pool of money is determined by the number of people who die – the pool increases by ₩100 million for every dead person. The size of the individual shares of that prize fund also increases as the number of players dwindle. As such, there is an incentive for contestants to keep playing, winnowing the pool.

The players who vote to remain in the game rally themselves – and attempt to persuade reluctant supporters – with the chant of “one more game!” They accuse those who would vote to leave of being selfish cowards. When the final vote of the season produces a tie, with the promise of a second vote the following morning, those who vote to remain decide to engage in an overnight campaign of terror to dwindle their opponents’ numbers and seize power. It has a certain resonance.

Squid Game suggests that those who vote to remain within the game are each convinced that they can win, and so have no concern for any of the other players. Those who vote to continue won’t be satisfied with some money, they want all the money and are willing to gamble not just their lives, but the lives of others in pursuit of that. There is no incentive for any individual player to want to share as part of the larger group if they truly believe that they can come out on top.

The second season sets up this idea in its premiere, as Gi-hun tries to find his way back into the games. He does this by tracking down a recruiter (Gong Yoo), who identifies potential candidates at subway stations. In his spare time, the recruiter visits homeless communities in local parks. He offers every homeless person a choice. They could have some bread to eat, or they could choose a lottery ticket. Every homeless person takes the lottery ticket. None win. The recruiter destroys the food.

It is not a particularly subtle metaphor, but it is at the heart of the season. It recalls John Steinbeck’s observation about the difficulties in organizing a labor movement in America.  “I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians,” Steinbeck opined. “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” This explains why, as George Carlin famously put it, “people of modest means continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them.”

The second season of Squid Game remains a commentary on the corrosive power of capitalism, albeit one less focused on what it does to individual people than in the way that it turns them against one another, the pursuit of personal riches making it next to impossible for players to work together in their own collective interests. Everybody is so desperately chasing the remote possibility that they can be a winner that they don’t care they’re more likely to be counted among the losers.

It's a sucker’s game.