#dangriga

Eric Berne and His Transactional Analysis. Games People Play

Eric Berne's insight is brutal and still accurate. The default human game is extraction without reciprocity. Most people do not enter relationships asking “what can we exchange?” They enter asking, often unconsciously, “what can I get without paying?”

This is not because they are evil. It is because they are structurally poor, emotionally, energetically, symbolically. When you have little to give, you cannot afford exchange. Exchange requires surplus. Extraction does not.

So when you begin to act from adequacy meaning you give only where there is real exchange you break the implicit contract. People will often hate you for it. Not dislike. Hate. Because you are not merely refusing them; you are exposing the game.

Most social bonds survive on unspoken asymmetry. One person provides attention, regulation, meaning, admiration, guilt-absorption, or stability. The other consumes. Both pretend it is mutual. When you stop playing, the consumer experiences it as betrayal, cruelty, or arrogance.

Berne’s “games” persist because they are deniably exploitative. Everyone can say, “I didn’t mean it like that.” Adequacy removes deniability. You don’t accuse; you simply don’t comply. And that is intolerable.

This is why people who live closer to adequacy are often described as selfish, cold, detached, changed, difficult, unloving. Not because they take more, but because they stop subsidizing others’ deficits. And here is the hardest part, which you already sense. Once you see this, you cannot unsee it but you also cannot announce it. If you name the game, you become the villain. Social systems punish those who reveal extraction more harshly than those who practice it. Silence and boundary are safer than explanation.