Beating the game with meditation in Billions
What the depiction of the practice says about its characters
The first time I ever heard about Billions was in an article by Vince Fakhoury Horn on modular meditation. A simple image depicts billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and United States Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) doing concentration meditation. This is a practice that occurs briefly, but notably within the earliest seasons of the show. It says something about these two characters. In another era, before meditation became so popular in high performances spaces, these two characters would have simply been depicted playing chess with other people and demolishing them. It's a way of making them seem especially intelligent in contrast to the other characters, especially their underlings. They seem..."above it all" with a meta awareness of the games that they play. The show also features a performance coach who works between these characters, Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff). In contrast, she is seen as accessing this meta game through the strength of her training as a psychiatrist, and makes use of this to push the other leads and their underlings further through performance coaching.
Despite having the greater access to awareness of the mind, all three of these characters quite frankly do some fucked up shit throughout the series, specifically in their manipulations of other people for their own ends. As rough as it can be, it's quite entertaining, without being morbidly extreme as a Scorsese take would be. I highly recommend watching it if you haven't, but the show supports a critical observation for many who are interested in meditation and similar practices to benefit their health and development.
The show makes it clear that to practice meditation does not make one “good”. A person can spend their entire life doing every variation of the practice and still live a life where they routinely hurt others and themselves. Spiritual Materialism, in many New Age communities, commonly presents the idea that to practice is to be "good". This very mindset sets the stage of seeing peers and teachers as being beyond reproach, the more advanced they are in practice. This is the ground in which people are routinely exploited and destroyed.
The show presents a very grounded take on the practice. While the characters aren't perfect, none of them are presented to be authorities when it comes to moral judgement. Chuck definitely sees himself as morally superior to Axelrod, but he is more than willing to get his hand dirty if it means destroying him.
The show’s primary intent isn't to depict meditation as a moral choice, but it's role in performance enhancement and increasing personal agency.
Concentration isn't limited to being developed through meditation. Meditation is the most direct means to develop it. It's not unreasonable to think that someone who's excellent at archery will also have a lot of the same benefits that come from the practice. The mind, like an instrument, works best when properly honed. Intelligence is often depicted in culture through the basis of raw access to a high IQ. This framing tends toward creating an exclusivity that barres anyone who didn't win the genetic lottery. IQ matters, but the capacity to self-actualize requires more. Plenty of people have high intelligence, but struggle to influence themselves and the world around them, due to a lack of focus and creativity that unfolds from a place of being focused and present.
Billions very much makes high concentration ability a typical facet of its most intelligent characters. It's one of those shows where the average baseline of even its least intelligent characters is higher than the general population (looking at youse Brian and Mafee). It's a neat trick to have the most intelligent characters exhibit some degree of personal and professional development due to their concentration ability and the ability to read others.
In addition to the other leads, Taylor Mason (Asia Kate Dillon), introduced about midway through the show’s run, has a history of being a proficient poker player, playing into the show’s emphasis on reading other people and situations as critical for success with the greater games at play.
Wendy Rhoades is the constant thread throughout the series that brings the aspect of high performance into greater focus. The application of her skills to performance enhance those in her care puts specific characters at an advantage. She helps Bobby Axelrod and his employees, but she is also married to Axelrod's nemesis, Chuck Rhoades. Anyone who doesn't get her support is disadvantaged in the game of acquiring capital, leverage, and surviving the cat-and-mouse between the state and the ultra-wealthy.
In order for the show to have worked as it did, it needed to distinguish itself from similar dramas. Of the stories I’ve seen that take place in the world of finance (Wall Street being the best example), Billions avoids the morality play trap. Yes, we all know that the world of finance is fundamentally absurd and amoral. It’s easy to focus on that common perspective because it’s outside looking in, and it’s tempting to go into explanatory dumps to understand the financial workings at play. Billions ultimately is not about finance, it’s about the psychology of extreme success, how one maintains that success, and how far one is willing to push themselves and those around them to play game, after game, after game. All of its characters constantly swing from winner to loser throughout the entire series, but the one constant is that they absolutely do it because they love it for its own sake, whether they want to admit it or not.