Who Wants to Be a Voyeur?

OK, so who wants to be a millionaire?

Well, let’s be honest: a lot of us. I certainly would. Like Tevya, the poor milkman of “Fiddler on the Roof,” I too wonder what it would be like “to be a wealthy man.” It’s hard not to in a society that keeps telling us that it’s money that matters. Just listen to a Fortune.com radio advertisement some time.

So, next question: Who would be willing to risk humiliation on national television to become a millionaire? This one’s trickier. Personally, I’m not sure. Maybe if I could be guaranteed that I’d win the top prize . . . that might push me over the line.

But now the, if you will, $64,000 question: Who would want to watch a group of people humiliating themselves as they compete for the chance to become instant millionaires? Who would want to see the pain of the losers? What’s worse, who would want to watch as the other contestants decide who the next loser will be?

Not I. And yet, as I witness the explosive popularity of so-called reality-based television shows in which groups of people are thrown together to compete for a jackpot through a self-selection process in which contestants and television viewers alike decide who the loser will be, I can only conclude that millions of people not only are willing to watch such fare, they’re avid for it. And that’s a problem.

It’s a problem because the desire to be rich and the desire to ogle other people in their desperation to become rich are two very different things. The desire for wealth, ultimately, stems from our own instinctive drive for self-survival. Certainly the desire for wealth can be unhealthy when it becomes sheer greed, but it is hard to deny the validity of the fundamental drives that help us to survive, and the desire for economic security is surely one of them.

But watching other people struggle for security? That’s not survival based. Rather, the desire to watch others in their most intimate struggles is, quite simply, grounded in voyeurism, or, to use Freud’s word for the phenomenon, “scopophilia.” Scopophilia is, literally, the love of sight, but we’re not talking about scenic nature worship here. The scopophilic pleasure par excellence is sexual (we really don’t need a pornography industry to tell us this). The fact that it is part of the appeal of reality-based programming is demonstrated by the ratings that an episode of “Big Brother”--a Dutch reality-based television contest--apparently enjoyed. One contestant had sex with another one as millions of viewers watched them compete in a 100-day ordeal that pitted 10 people against each other to see who would be the last one left to win the big prize.

But the fact that the audiences of such shows often get to help choose the winners makes me feel that voyeurism is not even the worst of it. I suppose that the people who watched the poor doomed souls who competed for pitiful prizes in Depression-era dance marathons were voyeurs too. But they didn’t step out onto the dance floor and drag competing couples off the stage. They didn’t decide who would win and who would lose. Viewers don’t decide who wins or loses on ordinary quiz shows either: Only the contestants’ luck and ability decides that. But a certain line in human decency is crossed when the audience, through interactive opinion polls, gets to participate in deciding who wins and who loses on the new reality-based contests. And make no mistake about it: This isn’t only about determining winners. That can only happen on the last installment. In between, there is the drawn-out agony of choosing the losers, episode after episode. That’s not voyeurism; it’s sadism, the taking of pleasure in inflicting pain on someone else.

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This business of slowly selecting out the losers on national TV reminds me a little of the presidential primary season, except that I don’t really feel much sympathy for the kinds of people who put themselves up for that sort of humiliation. If they want power that badly, they have to be able to pay the price. Harry Truman put it best: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

I suppose the same thing could be said for anyone who risks him or herself on one of these reality programs. After all, no one forced them to be on the show. But I’m not really so concerned about the contestants. I’m much more concerned about the viewers who watch and make judgments, who choose who wins and who loses. Because the whole thing reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s eerie classic “The Lottery.” That’s the story in which we see the townspeople of what looks like an ordinary, wholesome American village gather together annually to choose the person who will be stoned to death that year. Is that the kind of society we’re becoming?

I hope not. At any rate, you won’t find me watching any of these “reality” programs. It’s enough for me to cope with my own setbacks and disappointments: Why on earth would I want to watch you as you confront yours, or, worse yet, contribute to them?