Why I Hate “Survivor”
From the editors…
I know I know, bazillions of people think “Survivor” is the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel. Personally, though, I can’t bear to watch it.
It celebrates all that is venal, selfish and cruel in the human psyche.
To “win” on this “show” you have to value the money above all else…not relationships, or community, or love.
This creepy paradigm reflects the reality that the banksters and rulers of the world want us all live. To be utterly in service to self and the hell with everybody else, or in other words, to be just like them!
Of course, if you really got stranded in some God-forsaken hole and actually wanted to get out alive, you’d co-operate with your fellow castaways.
You wouldn’t recreate some horrible “Lord of the Flies” scenario…you’d work together to form a community that made the best use of everyone’s talents.
Unless, of course, you had a psychopath in your midst and he took over and enforced his utterly self interested and narcissistic version of reality on you. Which is what is going on in our world right now…we have fallen into the nightmare of a few wealthy psychopaths, and they want us to keep believing in their twisted version of reality…where everything is about service to self, and not service to others.
Because that’s how they see the world. In fact, that’s the only way they can see things. They are utterly incapable of empathy and indeed think folks who show care and compassion are weak and expendable!
The only way to overcome this bizarre and twisted version of reality is to love instead of living in fear.
Charles Eisenstein is a social activist who is helping people to see the world with new eyes.
The following is an excerpt from an article he wrote last year called “To Build Community, an Economy of Gifts”:
“Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is “community.” What happened to community, and why don’t we have it any more? There are many reasons—the layout of suburbia, the disappearance of public space, the automobile and the television, the high mobility of people and jobs—and, if you trace the “whys” a few levels down, they all implicate the money system.
More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don’t depend on your neighbors—or indeed on any specific person—for anything. You can just pay someone to do it.
In former times, people depended for all of life’s necessities and pleasures on people they knew personally. If you alienated the local blacksmith, brewer, or doctor, there was no replacement. Your quality of life would be much lower. If you alienated your neighbors then you might not have help if you sprained your ankle during harvest season, or if your barn burnt down. Community was not an add-on to life, it was a way of life.
Today, with only slight exaggeration, we could say we don’t need anyone. I don’t need the farmer who grew my food—I can pay someone else to do it. I don’t need the mechanic who fixed my car. I don’t need the trucker who brought my shoes to the store. I don’t need any of the people who produced any of the things I use. I need someone to do their jobs, but not the unique individual people. They are replaceable and, by the same token, so am I.
That is one reason for the universally recognized superficiality of most social gatherings. How authentic can it be, when the unconscious knowledge, “I don’t need you,” lurks under the surface? When we get together to consume—food, drink, or entertainment—do we really draw on the gifts of anyone present? Anyone can consume. Intimacy comes from co-creation, not co-consumption, as anyone in a band can tell you, and it is different from liking or disliking someone. But in a monetized society our creativity happens in specialized domains, for money.
To forge community then, we must do more than simply get people together. While that is a start, soon we get tired of just talking, and we want to do something, to create something. It is a very tepid community indeed, when the only need being met is the need to air opinions and feel that we are right, that we get it, and isn’t it too bad that other people don’t … hey, I know! Let’s collect each other’s email addresses and start a listserv!
Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today’s market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. , people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a “circle of the gift.”
Stephanie kelley
