Squid Game: debt as a weapon and the anomie that turns ordinary people lethal

The hook of Squid Game is as simple as it is diabolical: hundreds of ordinary people, all drowning in impossible debts, agree to play children's games —red light green light, marbles, hopscotch— knowing that losing means dying, in exchange for a dizzying prize. Netflix's South Korean phenomenon swept the planet not because of its gore, but because of its diagnosis: the sense, shared by millions of viewers in dozens of countries, that this macabre lottery looked disturbingly like their own lives. The question it leaves behind isn't «how can they do this to themselves?», but a far more uncomfortable one: what has to go wrong in a society for normal people to voluntarily sign their own death sentence?

Before we go on, this house's axis: to explain is not to excuse. Understanding why a desperate debtor enters the game doesn't erase the horror of what happens inside, nor does it dissolve the responsibility of whoever pulls a trigger. But there is a prior responsibility, harder to see because it has no face: that of those who design the game and profit from it. The series is fiction that exaggerates so we can see a real mechanism, and that mechanism has a name in criminology: it's called anomie, and it explains why structural pressure can turn lethal someone who, under other conditions, would never have harmed anyone.

// The theoryMerton: when the goal is sacred but the means are closed off

In 1938, Robert Merton wrote one of the founding texts of the sociology of crime, starting from a very concrete tension. Every society, he said, transmits two things to its members: cultural goals (in capitalism: success, money, advancement) and legitimate means to reach them (study, work, effort). The problem arises when society preaches the goal to everyone with religious fervor but distributes the means in a profoundly unequal way. That gap between what we're commanded to desire and what we can actually obtain is what Merton called anomie: a deregulation that generates strain, and that pushes some toward what he christened innovation —pursuing the sacred goal by illegitimate routes—.

The word comes from further back. Émile Durkheim, in Suicide (1897), described anomie as the state of a society whose norms have loosened to the point of leaving the individual without a compass, with desires that no rule contains or satisfies. Squid Game is a perfect narrative machine for visualizing both things at once: its players have internalized the goal down to the marrow —money to settle the debt, to exist— but have every legitimate route blocked. They are bankrupt, indebted to loan sharks, excluded from credit and decent employment. The game then presents itself as the only «innovation» available: an extreme route toward the goal that society denied them through normal channels. They don't choose death; they choose the only door left open, even if that door is poisoned.

// The intimate versionAgnew: strain isn't a statistic, it's a biography

Merton thought at the scale of society; Robert Agnew, in 1992, brought the theory down to the level of the person with his general strain theory. For Agnew, crime springs not only from the gap between goal and means, but from the accumulation of concrete strains: the inability to achieve what is valued, the loss of something positive (a job, a home, dignity) and the arrival of negative stimuli (humiliation, threats, violence). Those strains generate emotions —rage, despair, fear— and, when they pile up without a release valve, they push toward deviant conduct as a way of relieving them. It's not cold calculation; it's emotional pressure looking for a crack to escape through.

Every player in Squid Game is a walking catalog of Agnew's strains: the ruined protagonist separated from his daughter, the disgraced financial mastermind, the defector without papers, the swindled migrant worker. None of them arrives at the game from a void; all drag a biography of chained losses. The series is honest about this: it doesn't show us born villains entering for pleasure, but people eroded to the point where survival logic devours everything. And there a third key concept appears: the relative deprivation theorized by Walter Runciman. Misery doesn't hurt only in absolute terms, but comparatively: it hurts to see the prize gleaming above, to know how much others have, to measure one's own fall against someone else's success. That comparison is fuel for strain.

// The real terrorthere are no monsters in the game, and that's what terrifies

The most disturbing finding of Squid Game is that, save for the odd exception, its players are not psychopaths: they are neighbors, parents, workers. The series forces us to ask what we ourselves would do with the same knot in the throat, the same debt, the same ultimatum. That is the force of the structural reading: when pressure is intense enough and legitimate exits are closed off enough, deviant conduct stops being an anomaly of a few «bad» people and becomes a predictable response of many. Not because people are bad, but because the system, in its extreme version, is designed to squeeze out exactly that response.

Here the series dialogues with other portraits KRIMINIS has dissected. Wilford, the architect of the train in Snowpiercer, embodies the other half of the equation: he is the designer who justifies a brutal class system as «natural order», the one who manufactures the misery of the tail and then presents it as inevitable. And Todd Phillips's Joker is the case study of general strain taken to the limit: a man accumulating humiliation, loss and abandonment until the pressure finds its most destructive crack. Between the designer (Wilford) and the product of strain (the Joker), Squid Game places hundreds of normal people who are neither one thing nor the other: they are the flesh the machinery grinds.

It's worth adding one more layer. Messner and Rosenfeld, with their theory of institutional anomie, argued that when market logic invades and subordinates the rest of the institutions —the family, the school, the community—, the result is a society where «win at any cost» drowns out any other value. Squid Game takes that idea to its literal form: a world where money measures everything, where even a person's life is priced, and where the institutions that should protect have been replaced by a giant piggy bank hanging from the ceiling. Debt isn't just the trigger of the plot; it's the symbol of a society that has turned economic failure into a social death sentence.

// The honest limitthe structure pushes, but the person still exists

And here the line that is not crossed. That anomie explains despair doesn't turn anyone into a will-less automaton. Inside the game, some players keep their decency, sacrifice themselves, protect others; others turn cruel far beyond what survival demands. Structural strain raises the probability of harm; it doesn't guarantee it, nor does it erase the choice of whoever commits it. The theory of anomie is not an alibi machine: it's a tool for seeing why crime concentrates where despair concentrates, and why truly fighting it requires touching the structure —debt, inequality, the blocked access to legitimate means— and not just punishing the symptom.

That's why Squid Game is, under the disguise of a bloody survival show, one of the most effective criminological arguments in recent pop culture. It makes us feel in the body what Merton wrote in an academic article almost a century ago: that a society which universalizes the desire for success and rationalizes the unequal distribution of the means is, without knowing it, cultivating its own deviance. The series doesn't simply ask us to pity its players. It asks us to look upward, toward whoever hung the prize and wrote the rules, and to ask ourselves how much of the violence we call «individual» really begins in an office where someone decided that losing should cost a life.