The Opposite of Survivor
by Noni Mausa
The Opposite of Survivor
I hated the very idea of “Survivor” from the beginning, and happily
avoided seeing any more than a cumulative 30 minutes over the years of
Survivor shows worldwide.
Dropping people on desert islands isn’t the problem. It’s one of the
oldest folk and literary stories around, full of danger and learning
and suffering and occasionally success. In actuality, surviving is a
story repeated thousands of times in human history, as we left Africa
and learned to live everywhere else. We sought new fields, or ran
away from each other, or simply got lost, but whatever the motivation
we left our old ways and learned new ones and became scattered tribes
of heroes. I confess I was excited when I first heard the “Survivor”
idea, it could be wonderful.
Ah, no. They spoiled it, but they spoiled it by stacking the deck.
To win on the show required the very strategies guaranteed to torpedo
a real survivor situation. It’s like having parachute competitions
where the goal is to fall the fastest. You can contrive such a
situation, but your safety nets better be damn good.
Since 1992, the hugely popular Survivor franchise set before us a
falsehood, demonstrating and rewarding behaviour that is the
antithesis of real survival. And we are now living out the results of
that anti-story in our economy.
Seeing our predator enemies as powerful leaders, seeing our fellow
citizens as competitors to be scorned or scuttled, seeing long term
planning as fairytale thinking while praising short term looting — by
almost any measure, the “Survivor” economy is guaranteed to make us
poorer, weaker, and less safe.
Only one Survivor-type show that I know of tried to do the real thing.
The Canadian broadcaster CBC did a show about homesteading in 1850s
Manitoba, a prairie province just north of North Dakota. You’ve never
seen the show, nor have the rest of the Survivor fans, I bet. It had
real worry, real privation, real hard work. One of the two families
had to bail out due to illness. That was the only safety net the show
provided. 150 years ago that family might have died instead. They
surely would have died if they had hit upon a strategy of eliminating
their neighbours one by one in order to be the only survivor. If the
untreated illness hadn’t killed such players, the surviving neighbours
surely would have.
We need to remember that if something is fictional, that doesn’t mean
people don’t learn from it. Stories map out our patterns of thought,
as individuals and as societies. If those stories are warped to
become their opposites, flavoured with gossip, excitement and
competition, packaged and then force-fed to happy consumers for a
couple of decades, is it reasonable to expect nothing would come of
it?
Thanks Noni
It’s good to hear a sane voice on a Sunday morning.
I never saw the show in question. Threw the damn TV away years ago. Finally threw NPR away too when I realized they were part of the lie.
But as for the real survivor show, I would like to add that the real pioneers weren’t parachuted into the situation from Mars. Those folk had grown up learning the skills that would keep them alive even in the new situation which was generally not that much different from the one they left.
To draw, unfortunately, a similar moral from the Canadian show as you draw from Survivor, I would point out that we have been ruthlessly destroying the skills that we inherited from our even recent ancestors. We call it education and are damn proud of ourselves when we have educated ourselves into a state of complete stupidity, which not only includes the inability to plant a crop, but even to talk to our neighbors.
And we elect Presidents who listen to experts whose knowledge of what it means to be human is autistic at best. Come to think of it, back in the old days they accomplished the same thing with a system called aristocracy.
now we call it “meritocracy” … apparently from the word meretricious.
There were a couple of previous stories which taught similar lessons. The over-crowded life boat theme. “Who will decide who stays in the life boat…” More recently, we developed the deadly pandemic idea which solves the overpopulation proplem but is “….the end of the world as we know it.” New stories are spinning off from the changes in climate being seen around the world. In the American versions of these stories, rugged individuals save the day, sequel to follow. The unwillingness of some politicians in Congress to extend UI benefits reflects this thinking. The American life boat isn’t big enought for GS, AIG, Citi and the unemployed. Nancy O.
My take; when the draft was eliminated, then the majority of eligible male bodies became free to dream of what might be. The flood gates were opened because during the prior Vietnam War, only the eligible 1 A males were taken, leaving the 4 F’s to fill in at the work place. This snow balled into academic community, teachers taught on a different plane, values were lost, never to be regained. Today, it’s only the “old folks” that seem to retain that lost value. What we see today, is the result of not a progressive moral value, but something akin to a rotting disease, or cancer that has gone balistic. One wonders how many generations are involved, whether it’s too far advanced, is it leading to the total oa simi destruction of the country?
Appologies for the mistakes in spelling, but I’m old, over seventy, and my two finger use of the keyboard just isn’t what is desirable. Sorry again, I guess my brain & fingers are in some different dimension!
Norman, I disagree because I don’t believe that it is necessarily true that the distant past is the best future, morality-wise or other-wise. Perhaps it’s time for humans to quit worrying so much about the enlargement of appendages, whether medically or by brawn.
Let the old folks and their values die and let the young people decide on their own values. It is their world to make or break.
Values, generational or otherwise, are not the only factor in the timeline of history. Some old values actually turn out to be quite sick when measured in the present.
I can agree that the fair draft which never really existed does make one take pause when deciding to pursue adventures.
norman
hang in there. my brain ain’t what she used to be either. but if i admit that, the young guns will think i have nothing useful to say. because you see, what we have here is a shoot out, not an effort to solve the problem.
Anna
you appear to believe that experience has nothing to teach us. or that what got our remote ancestors through hard times won’t be needed in our start trek future.
yes there is some value to change and “evolution,” but letting the autistic elite determine the future for innocent children may not be the wisest use of human potential.
Anna
you appear to believe that experience has nothing to teach us. or that what got our remote ancestors through hard times won’t be needed in our start trek future.
yes there is some value to change and “evolution,” but letting the autistic elite determine the future for innocent children may not turn out to be the human use of human beings. It is not “their” world. It is the only world we know about, and we have a responsibility to try to preserve for posterity into the infinite future the best human values as we understand them. To
Of course the past has a lot to teach us — generally what not to do. Human nature hasn’t changed much in historic memory, so we don’t have to allow for that.
We have knowledge of historic strategies of survival and social structures. In fact, our level of understanding today, which Diamond tells us is unprecedented, ought to allow us to make better choices than ever before.
What we lack now is the viewpoint of seeing social systems and long-range strategies as real choices that have predictable results. Very unequal societies with the majority at or below the poverty line, for instance, WILL have corruption and bribery and institutionalized theft embedded in the system. Cannot be otherwise. Conversely, societies with shared wealth and most people well above the poverty line will be more respectful of law, less open to bribery, and more caqpable of making selfless, long term, intentional decisions as a people.
People sometimes raise the phrase “social engineering” as a bugbear to be avoided in the name of freedom. But we can’t avoid making choices — isn’t it better to do so with understanding?
“My take; when the draft was eliminated, then the majority of eligible male bodies became free to dream of what might be. The flood gates were opened because during the prior Vietnam War, only the eligible 1 A males were taken, leaving the 4 F’s to fill in at the work place. This snow balled into academic community, teachers taught on a different plane, values were lost, never to be regained.”
This is ignorant on so many levels, it is difficult to know where to start.
There is not an atom of evidence that the Vietnam-era draft had any effect on the US workplace. The vast majority of males in the US workforce at the time of the Vietnam war were unaffected by the draft. The majority of American males eligible for the draft did not serve in Vietnam (see, e.g., Bush, George W.). And no women were even eligible for the Vietnam war draft, yet women (even then) were a significant segment of the US workforce.
My take: you have no idea what you are talking about.
Joel–It is bad manners to say that other commenters are ignorant when they have a good point. The point is that an all volunteer army means that politicians no longer have to account for starting a war in which your fellow citizens’ and their kids would likely participate even if you and yours didn’t. Ilsm has spoken of the volunteer military as the largest jobs program now run by the fed. govt. That only works if there are no wars. Under our current volunteer system, every war is a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. Just like the American Civil War was for poor whites in the South and recently arrived immigrants in the North. NancyO
I’ll come to Norman’s defense, thank you. I don’t think you “heard” what Norman said, perhaps because you are too young or not reading carefully or whatever. I won’t use the word ignorant–I try not to be rude. Norman wrote about a change in values after the draft ended, and his observation is absolutely accurate. (Reflecting the change, Reagan didn’t say “Ask not what your country can do for you . . . ” and JFK didn’t say “Government IS the problem.”) I don’t know to what degree the end of draft was a cause or an effect of this change, but I don’t dismiss Norman’s views. Oh, and everyone was affected by the draft and the end of the draft–in the way they perceived the world and their places in it back then, and as a consequence almost certainly “in the workplace” in ways that are quite subtle but fundamental.
I think i saw that show, it had a black father & son team with a rich white guy who quit when the show would allow him a rifle he had bought especially for the show
pjr
thank you for defending Norman. I should have, but i couldn’t get more than a vague feeling that what he was saying was correct, or at least part of what we are seeing.
i think joel needs to take a deep breath and consider that when something isn’t making sense to him, it may be because he isn’t understanding it.
Interesting idea Dan, though I’m not sure which way the causality flows. I agree with how you identify Survivor’s lesson, but I’m not sure where to take this. Perhaps Survivor succeeded because we already had these ideas of how cut throat and zero sum society is in our head, and the show just expressed them in tropical settings. I think that’s probably more likely since Survivor is a pretty recent show and we’ve had this neoliberal view of the workplace and market for at least thirty years.
Zach
we’ve had them since even before Marley’s ghost went to Ebeneezers house one snowy Christmas Eve.
Fact is human societies need a mix of entrepreneurship and community…or, though they are not exactly the same, selfishness and sharing.
Either one of them can get oppressive, but lately the forces of darkness have all been encouraging us to believe that “enlightened selfishness” is the path to universal happiness… only we can’t seem to manage the “enlightened” part.
Noni could have mentioned the success of the Dirty Harry meme, in which the lone hero saves us from “scum” in spite of a stupid government which protects criminals. I think a part of what has happened is that… thanks to the New Deal… most of us have become rich enough to behave exactly the way bad bosses and the frightened rich have always behaved. Only our relative poverty kept us sane.