PSYCHOSCAPES: Communities have become places to escape

Pittsfield, NH
CC Jean Stimmell

Have you ever noticed your status in your local community no longer depends so much upon your behavior, character, and reputation. In fact, you may be vilified for just trying to be a good citizen. Look at how poll workers and school board members across the nation are being threatened just for volunteering to serve their community.

In my lifetime, communities, rather than something we hold dear, have become something to escape.

I first noticed this trend in the 1980s when I took my young family to Disney World because my mother-in-law conveniently happened to live nearby. Over and above the thrill of the Disney rides, participants loved the experience because all the employees were super nice, everything ran on time, and the streets were spotless. There was no trash, graffiti, protests, or dissenting voices. Some claimed it was a perfect world.

What a missed opportunity, I thought. How much better it would have been if all our families had stayed put back in our communities and devoted, over the course of the year, the amount of time equal to the vacation—plus the amount of money the Disney vacation cost—to work alongside our neighbors to make our own community better.

Disney was an early example of offshoring local community to corporate interests.

This suspicion that we were being exploited came to the surface again in the 1990s when I saw the movie The Truman Show. It starred Jim Carrey, who played a character unwittingly living on a TV program. As time has gone on, it’s like we’re all becoming like Carrey’s character, bit actors on a mass media stage.

Things went further downhill when “Survivor” became a major hit after its premiere in 2000. Once again, rather than cheering for our fellow Americans working together against obstacles to achieve a common goal, we were snookered into rooting for them ruthlessly competing against each other—lying and cheating as necessary—until only one was left standing. And that person was declared the winner! While that may be the principle of capitalism, it is a death sentence for a community.

“Survivor” has spawned a swamp full of imitators until today. It's estimated that 80% of adult viewers watch such shows. That’s according to Emily Nussbaum, the author of Cue the Sun, a history of reality TV.^⁠1 While she notes this genre is often written off by its critics as trivial, reality TV’s cultural influence is undeniable. In fact, as the author acknowledges, it is shaping American politics.

And I think that’s an understatement!

While in early programs like “Survivor,” the producers and directors were flying off the seat of their pants, over time, they got more sophisticated. By the time “The Apprendice” came along, they had mastered their craft.

As Nussbaum said in a PBS interview: “The Apprentice” was “a beautifully made season of TV, and it was made by skilled, polished professionals, because at that point it was an industry. Like, people knew what they were doing. It wasn't anymore like the spaghetti-on-the-wall period for reality TV where everybody was making it up from scratch.”^⁠2

As such, the spinmeisters behind “The Apprentice” created one of the most successful marketing schemes of all time. But, more ominously, it exposed, as Nussbaum points out, a dark truth: “They took an extremely rotten product and polished him up and sold him to the world.” Then Trump, rebranded by these marketing whizzes, was able to exploit this scam to propel him to the presidency.

If the Trump story had been published as a work of fiction, no one would believe it. And if he manages to win again, truth and fiction will have switched positions, mass rallies will have replaced community, and democracy will be a thing of the past.

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