Re: Survivor

[Joel Blau <jblau@xxxxxxxxx>]

All true, but you omitted the key social ethic of "Survivor:" all alliances are
temporary, and no friendships are real. When people work cooperatively to build a
shelter, their real goal is to be the last one sleeping there. As a consequence,
there can be neither genuine trust nor  genuine human connections. "Survivors" is
a uncannily accurate ( but I assume unintentional) case study of what "looking out
for number 1" does to the social fabric and our sense of community.

Joel Blau

Louis Proyect wrote:

> For the last two evenings I have watched the first two episodes of the
> over-hyped "Survivor" television show, now in reruns. As unpaid chronicler
> of the decline and fall of the American empire, I was curious to see how
> such a cultural phenomenon fit into the big picture.
>
> It is interesting that the show depicts two groups of people organized into
> "tribes" on a South Pacific desert island. For capitalist economics, this
> is the ideal framework. It not only eliminates all ties to factors beyond
> the island, it also makes "survival" the goal of human economic activity.
> For the Adam Smith tradition, the economic actor is Robinson Crusoe rather
> than classes with a historically defined relationship to the means of
> production.
>
> The two tribes compete in various games in order to win prizes such as a
> spice rack, pillows, hammocks, etc. that make life on the island more
> comfortable. Not only do you need to be athletic, you need a certain amount
> of ingenuity. For example, one of the competitions last night was to
> capture the attention of an airplane circling the island. The winner--in
> this case the tribe that danced Busby Berkeley-sytle while lying on their
> backs on the beach--received a trunk full of goodies.
>
> At the end of each episode a member of the losing tribe is voted off the
> island. The final "survivor" of all this receives one million dollars as a
> prize. For those of you who are fortunate enough not to live in this
> Babylon called the United States, it might be news that the winner was a
> gay man in his forties who worked as a 'corporate trainer'. In the second
> episode he is depicted building alliances with members of his tribe in
> order to avoid being voted off the island. Speaking as somebody--prior to
> my employment at Columbia University--who has seen this kind of behavior in
> corporate America his entire adult working life, it is not surprising that
> this show has become so popular. It tends to resonate off of most people's
> everyday experience, except in an exotic setting where the subjects also
> walk around skimpily clad and talk about sex a lot.
>
> This business about competition and getting ahead is deeply engrained in
> American society to an amazing extent. This was driven home to me the other
> evening when I ran into my next door neighbor coming up in the elevator. As
> I have mentioned, my apartment complex is locked in a big legal battle with
> the landlord who is trying to take the subsidized building into the private
> market, as is his entitlement after 20 years of being in the Mitchell-Lama
> program. The net effect would be to triple most peoples' rent, including mine.
>
> My neighbor has worked with the tenants committee, so there is no question
> about her loyalties. Despite that, when the subject of the legal battle
> came up as it so often does, I told her that the landlord seemed stupid to
> be so greedy. If he had simply proposed a rise in rents that would have
> increased his profits, while leaving nobody in danger of eviction, then
> everybody would have been spared needless expenses and aggravation.
>
> Her response startled me. She said that "He needs to make money. He is in
> business." This despite the fact that she was one of the people who simply
> could not afford to live there, if the rents went up. I suspect that she is
> probably employed as some lower-level manager down in the bowels of Wall
> Street, where identification with the boss is pervasive. In brokerage
> firms, bonuses are awarded at the end of the year. This kind of
> paternalistic gift tends to make the employee identify strongly with the
> employer.
>
> All of American society is flooded with messages like this. We are in a
> struggle for survival. Competition is what makes the system work. Without
> it, we are doomed to stagnation and unhappiness. Meanwhile, the evidence of
> unhappiness with the current system continues to pile up all around us:
> prozac has become as common as alcohol while popular music virtually
> screams out its hatred for the system, although not in precise scientific
> Marxist terms.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
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