In 1976, a new sort of game show was unleashed onto the hapless American public. Like many game shows, contestants were asked questions with the opportunity to make money. Of course, if you really look at game shows, nearly every one of them follows a basic format: The host asks a question, the contestant answers the question. The question may be a number of things: “What is the capital of the United States?,” “Deal or no deal?” or whatever, but essentially it’s a question-answer scheme.
“Family Feud,” however, had one important distinction. The answers provided by contestants didn’t actually have to be true. In fact, in some cases, they shouldn’t be. In a show like “Jeopardy” or “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” (yes, game shows are also recognizable by their corny names), a wrong answer often means there’s no hope for the contestants. But in this show, you only had to get the answer that was most popular.
Allow me to read too much into this concept: The suggestion is that the truth of the answer is not often as valuable as the popularity of it. Many of the questions, to be fair, were subjective – usually, “What do you like to eat for breakfast?” or something of that sort. But some were not, and so, neither were their answers, and there were a number of times when people could walk away winners after blatantly answering a number of fact-based questions incorrectly.
The questions were surveyed from a 100-person focus group, which provided the data for the “correct” answers. Whichever family got the most popular answer supplied by this 100-person group was awarded points for their answer based on its popularity. So, for example, if the question was “Who was the second president of the United States?” and your group answered “John Adams” (the name of second president of the United States), you could still lose the precious prize money to a group answering “Thomas Jefferson,” so long as more of the idiots in the focus group answered that way.
It would be interesting if this was the way life worked. Say, for example, that professors graded midterms and finals against the answers of the rest of the class, and you got points if you came up with the answer supplied by most of your fellow students. You could then try to rig the test, conspiring with other students to answer “A” to every question. And essay questions would be a real mess. I guess you’d be judged on how much your essay sounded like that of others? I’m sure these details could be worked out.
Doctors diagnosing illnesses would no longer be required to accurately identify the ills of their patients, but instead concur with the majority of their fellow doctors. Therefore, your heart attack could easily be treated with chemotherapy, so long as most doctors thought your heart attack was caused by cancer and not by the fact you weigh 800 pounds.
Teachers wouldn’t have to answer their students’ questions correctly either. They would just have to agree with their fellow teachers. If a student asked his teacher why leaves are green, and all of the teachers had conspired to answer that Martians painted them green, the existence of chlorophyll would no longer matter. Or perhaps they could be expected to answer with whatever most of the class thought, so every inquiry could then be put back out to the class.
Garbage men could drop off their garbage wherever their majority decided, and they wouldn’t be constrained to the political correctness of established landfills and recycling facilities. The bookworms out there may scoff at the notion of having garbage dumped in our city parks, but it’s the will of the majority that gets you the pot of gold, not whatever the bookworms want.
Maybe this sort of behavior is what we’d also expect from politicians. Politicians wouldn’t any longer concern themselves with the truth, but instead simply answer questions with whatever nonsense most people wanted to hear. In this way, actual facts and observations of reality would bend to popular fictions and traditional dogmas. Just as with doctors, teachers, garbage men and students, politicians could throw out total falsehoods, along with “facts” directly opposed to the findings of science, so long as it got them more votes. Maybe, in the few short years, after the horrible political events of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, it would be the only political structure whereby we could continue believing comfortable political fictions rather than uncomfortable realities.
This, of course, may have some consequences. You could potentially end up pursuing unrealistic policies, maybe even worsening problems. But this is how you win the prize money. So I don’t see why not, as long as the people answering the 100-person survey don’t get it right either.
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You don’t have to be right … just popular
Daily Emerald
May 31, 2007
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