Is seo fair?

Is seo really a fair game? I was recently looking at this basic list of seo rules you should abide by over on india daily.. and my gosh is there a lot of rules that you must follow so that you dont get penalized by search engines. And it easy to see why so many small businesses have to either hire a seo company to survive or face being kicked down by google and other search engines. All these rules make it seem as though the internet is a dictatorship and you must follow evil google's rules to survive. I am lucky as yet my site has not been penalized but I guess it is only a matter of time with things like negative seo and all that site by site people are destroying others websites.. maybe this small blog will survive as I am only small and not worth someone time to destroy.. I dont even think I rank for many keywords at all the only real people to read my blog is seo.. But more to the point I do feel that big businesses who pay search engines a lot of money seem to do just fine.. Google seems to even display big businesses multiple times putting websites number 1 on the search results and number 1 in the ads as well which isn't fair.. Not only that but small businesses just cannot pay for places anymore because they end up giving away all their profits to the search engines meaning seo is there only option but you not allowed to build links or even ask for links apparently.... Which just makes thing impossible as how can people find and link to your website if you nowhere to be seen on the search results in the first place.. hmm doesn't make any sense to me not unless you build links initially yourself breaking search engines rules! Anyway I guess seo is not fair and only works for those who are already known and big and can afford ads... or people already come to there website because they have seen them on tv and through that they get natural links thus helping them boost their positions in the search results. I really is impossible seo.. no doubt about it! Small businesses are going down the pan.. maybe politicians should do something about all this but then again they are plutocrats so dont think they care! Oh another point is that search engines are against duplicate content.. even though search engines are duplicate content and search engines are against automated content even though all of search engines are create automatically.... HAHA see what I mean who ever has power is the one that can make the hypercritical rules to rule over others!