'The Traitors' offers lessons in real-world politics

The latest hit franchise in the guilty-pleasure pantheon of trash TV, "The Traitors" is similar to the party game "Mafia": a bunch of strangers get together in a house, where a few of them are secretly chosen to be "traitors." Every day the group votes to "banish" one member, and every night the traitors "kill" someone. Whichever handful of players are left at the end split the prize money, but if a single one of those left is a traitor, they steal all the money for themselves.

So the object for most players is simple: find out who the traitors are and vote them out. The object for the traitors is equally simple: avoid detection and survive.

Begun in 2021 in the Netherlands, the show has since been made in 20 countries around the world. The Canadian English version launched late last year, and the other English-language versions (U.K., Australia, New Zealand, U.S.) are available to stream here.

It's a fun show. Full of the intrigue and backstabbing and big personalities that are reality TV staples, with a fascinating strategy and deduction element added.

Watching the group behaviour and political dynamics also offers a lesson in politics that feels both familiar and depressing.

What's not depressing is that across countries and continents, the strangers thrown together do not devolve into every-person-for-themselves dens of selfish backstabbers. With some notable exceptions, "the faithful," as the non-traitorous players are called, genuinely seem to bond with each other and earnestly try to work together to win something they can share.

This would be kind of inspiring, except that they are terrible at it. Aficionados of the show might point to New Zealand as an exception, but overall, again and again, you see the faithful vote each other out. In most cases, they would have more chance of success finding traitors by drawing names out of a hat than they achieve by voting based on their logic and gut feelings.

Part of this is built into the structure of the game: the faithful have no information to go on in determining who to trust. But another part of it seems to be built into patterns of human behaviour: the players are blind to their own ignorance and act with absurd levels of unjustified confidence.

Early in each season we see parades of players telling the confessional camera that they are excellent at detecting liars — some are police detectives or hostage negotiators or psychics or salespeople; one is a political analyst. We hear from each how their job depends on reading body language or spotting inconsistencies in stories to root out BS. And then we see them, one after another, fall for BS by the truckload.

Another big trend you notice is that their complete lack of useful insight does not prevent them from pursuing elaborate theories and then building what appear to be political movements around those theories. The players keep saying they want to avoid "witch hunts," but then they pile on in rival teams of witch hunters come the voting sessions — accusing people based on odd personality quirks or misheard one-off comments or petty squabbling.

What's obvious to viewers is that the "evidence" these players are indignantly insisting is ironclad is very often a simple misunderstanding, and even more often irrelevant to the question of who is or is not a traitor. The players are often trying to base their decisions on evidence, but they don't even really know what evidence would apply to the decision they are making.

Still, rival groups form behind one flimsy theory or another, campaigning against different opposed candidates for banishment. The most entertaining parts of the show are when opposed pitchfork-wielding mobs come for two players who are clearly (to the audience) innocent, while the real traitors sit back quietly and smile. They hold epic debate sessions based on patently false premises.

The power of the groupthink is overwhelming, and obvious watching the show. The most chilling exchange in all the seasons (at least if you're viewing it as a kind of political laboratory) is when one player challenges another about why he did not vote with the majority to banish someone who had turned out to be faithful. The accuser said something like, "Even if you didn't think they were a traitor, why would you go against the group?" This person's independent thinking — which the accuser knew had turned out to be correct, remember — is here held up as evidence of traitorousness. The other players nodded in agreement.

An inability to detect BS, a focus on evidence that is flimsy or irrelevant, groups pitted against each other despite common interests by third parties who benefit from their conflict, an insistence on group loyalty above all reason — I could cite a long list of parallels to Toronto city politics or U.S. or Canadian or world politics. But I suspect you can come up with your own list.

If there's hope, it is in the widespread, apparently sincere desire to work together toward common goals. It's just that in the game and out of it, there'd be more reason for optimism if people could avoid falling into the predictable traps that keep us from working together productively.

I'm not particularly optimistic that a reality TV show is going to teach us all how to do politics better. But for those of us who watch "The Traitors," it might at least offer some reminders of how these things work, and especially how they don't — things that we can keep in mind as real-world political debates rev back up in the year ahead.