174. THE TRAITORS AND EPISTEMOLOGY - Why We're All Floundering In The Dark About Knowledge
Like many people, I have become addicted to the BBC TV show, The Traitors. It is a show where the simple theatre game of ‘wink murder’ or ‘werewolf’ has been heightened into an episodic elimination reality competition: twenty-two people vie to win a large cash prize. The only catch is that some of them are ‘traitors’. If a traitor is still in the group by the end of the competition, they win all the money. If the traitors have all been eliminated, however, then the prize is shared between the remaining ‘faithful’ victors. The group gathers each evening to ‘banish’ suspected players and eliminate all the traitors, and each night the surviving traitors get to ‘murder’ one of the faithful, eliminating them from the game.
As a philosopher it is the nightly banishments that I find fascinating. The object here is to sniff out traitors who have been lying to you all day, and what this means in practice is players presenting their best arguments about who they think is, or isn’t, a traitor. It is epistemically wild to watch how fellow human beings construct seemingly viable theories of knowledge out of the flimsiest of observations and inferences.
Consider: a player said one thing to one person, and another thing to someone else…
“Traitor behaviour”, identifies one player.
“Evidence they are a faithful who thinks one of the people they were speaking to is a traitor”, says another.
Both versions of reality as plausible as each other. And both versions then look for further evidence from their fellow players to tip the balance in one direction or the other…
“They seem quite quiet - like they’re not coping with the pressure of being a traitor”
“They seem quite quiet - like they’re a faithful scared of standing out and being chosen for murder”
“They have quite a big personality - like they’re trying to hide the fact they’re a traitor”
“They have quite a big personality - the traitors are going to target them for murder because they’re such a strong player”
“I saw that player chatting in private with another - it looked conspiratorial”
“I saw those two players chatting too - I think they were strategising how to vote tonight to expose a traitor”
Whatever theory one player builds can be torn down in seconds by the competing thoughts of another as the whole group flounder with half-guessed ‘facts’ and try to claw out something closely resembling the truth.
Or, the so-called ‘facts’ can add up to a shared majority view that becomes suddenly undeniable…
“I’m sorry but there’s just something about the way you defended yourself that seemed a little too defensive”
“I also noticed that, and thought they were a little shifty last night when we were talking about the last murder.”
“I thought that too - and did you notice the way they smiled when we banished the wrong player yesterday?”
“It was really interesting that was the person murdered - because they have absolutely no connection to them, so it’s almost like they were killed to put us off the trail.”
“Yeah - killing someone they argued with or publicly called a traitor would be too obvious. They had to kill someone random. It’s definitely them.”
“One hundred percent. I thought it this morning when you didn’t seem surprised at who didn’t make it to breakfast after last night.”
All this careful construction of a compelling narrative, only to have the post-banishment reveal of some actual facts that blow the whole thing up: “sorry guys - I am a faithful. You got it wrong.”
The crestfallen faces of the misguided faithful reveal the power of the stories we tell ourselves about the world. Of course determining the traitors from the limited information that you have makes it highly unlikely that you will get it right. That’s why games like this work! The traitor’s entire job is to deceive and misdirect you. They are actively trying to mislead and provide red herrings and dead ends. The moment the banished faithful reveals that the story they had fallen for was false, the group should laugh at how gullible they all are and say “oh well - that was always the most likely outcome. That’s why they put this stuff on television. It is dependably unpredictable.”
But they don’t.
Because despite the absurdity of their endeavour, once the story is told, it is all too easy to buy into the pseudo-reality which we have constructed for ourselves.
The players weep instead - fooled again! They gasp. They hang their heads and wring their hands. “I was so sure of it!”
And even more bizarrely, they do the same thing all over again the very next night. The same offered nothings masquerading as a theory. No deeper lessons about the nature of knowledge have been learned. The players are just as adamant about their hunches, assured about their inferences and observations, confident in their conclusions. They make the same flimsy arguments on all-new cockamamie observations and half-baked theories, and they make the same confused faces when it turns out they were wrong, yet again…
The philosophical lesson I take from The Traitors (despite its role in continuing the message that our entire culture these days is Stanley Milgram’s white-coated authority figure, calmly telling us over and over again to crank that dial higher on our fellow humans and not worry about their screams) is that the show only works because it can dependably rely on the poorly constructed realities of all human beings. That in our own way we are all at The Traitors’ table every day, cobbling together our theories of best-fit about the world as we perceive it and seeking others to believe it too. Guessing what is going on within the black boxes of other people’s minds. Assuming a version of the world which, in a single sentence, might any moment be tipped on its head.
And if that happens? Just like the contestants on The Traitors, we gather around the table once again. The new information subsumed into the overall narrative of our lives and the momentary confusion and disequilibrium made sense of. Incorporated into the ongoing story that we tell ourselves to ensure life can go on without having to simply discard the whole idea that we can know anything at all.
And, on those rare occasions when we get it right and stumble upon an actual traitor, we utter the same words we said when we claimed an innocent to be guilty only the night before: “I knew it”.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.
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