Torture As Entertainment

Would you torture someone for money and a chance at having your face on TV? Many people would, it turns out. Game show contestants in France this month were instructed to electrically shock other contestants when they answered quiz questions incorrectly, and 80 percent dutifully carried out their orders, some even to the point of death. Of course nobody was harmed and the “victims” were paid actors. It was part of a psychological experiment for French television that brings much to light about how our culture is changing our humanity.

This article off the wire explains:

The game: posing questions to another “player” and punishing him with up to 460 volts of electricity when he gets them wrong — even until his cries of “Let me go!” fall silent and he appears to have died.

Not knowing that the screaming victim is really an actor, the apparently reluctant contestants yield to the orders of the presenter and chants of “Punishment!” from a studio audience who also believed the game was real.

Nick said 80 percent of the contestants went all the way, zapping the victim with the maximum 460 volts until he appeared to die. Out of 80 players, just 16 walked out.

This premise was more or less laid out by Stephen King (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) in his sci-fi novel The Running Man (later a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger), in which convicts are forced to vie for their freedom by fighting opponents to the death before a live studio audience.

Part of the effectiveness of this horror rests in the audience’s goading. Humans gleefully watching other humans being maimed and killed is a nightmare that has all-too-often manifested in the real world. And this French psychological test proves how quickly humans’ compassion for each other dissipates at the promise of even nominal personal gain.

But this isn’t all that au courant. Spy TV, which lasted only 2 seasons on NBC in 2001, was a Candid Camera-type show that I happened to tune into as unwitting contestants trying out for a fake show called “Cannibals”, engaged in the ultimate taboo: eating what they were told was human meat (actually pork) for money. And most of them did it!

If I had just landed on Earth and turned on the TV, I might presume this planet was populated by animalistic, compassionless creatures who will do almost anything to be delivered from the dreary anonymity of their lives . How close that is to the truth is the real horror.