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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