Who’s your 100%? Who do you trust the most?
Like many others, our family has been hooked on the BBC series The Traitors. The runaway success story of pre-Christmas broadcasting (helped by its positioning alongside the football World Cup), The Traitors has enjoyed an even stronger afterlife thanks to word of mouth and BBC iPlayer.
The premise of the programme is to place 20 strangers in a Scottish castle with up to £120,000 on offer. Each day there are team missions to complete which will add money to the prize fund. To win, you must survive to the finish without being ‘murdered’ by the traitors.
Three of the players are the aforenamed traitors and their task is to survive without being detected, whilst simultaneously eliminating anyone who they see as a threat. The beauty of the series is that the viewers know which contestants are the ‘faithfuls’ and which are the ‘traitors’ and get to watch the contestants try to figure it out or scheme their way to success.
Tears and shock
There are lots of wrong guesses, juxtaposed with impressive strategy, followed by tears and shock as the wrong people are eliminated; or a traitor who has previously gone under the radar is revealed. We had a sneaking admiration for the traitors who had to work as team players during the day only to revert to targeting their competition at night. It was a difficult balancing act and, despite it only being a game, their guilt was often too much to bear.
Bad at spotting imposters
What was really interesting was just how bad normal people are at spotting imposters. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers is based on this very premise. He takes in historical examples alongside case studies from the New York City Parole Board and the CIA, which all show us how bad human beings are at judging someone’s intentions from their demeanour.
When contrasting Chamberlain and Churchill’s very different responses to whether Hitler could be trusted, Gladwell ascribes Churchill’s cynicism to the fact that he never met him face-to-face the way Chamberlain did; and so was able to evaluate his behaviour without being swayed by social interaction.
Trust versus paranoia
Gladwell concludes that, in most instances, human beings fail to identify untrustworthy people, but believes that trust is necessary for human society to function, as a paranoid populace soon disintegrates into anarchy. This is borne out by The Traitors, where the ‘faithfuls’ who got the furthest in the game were the most trusting - or perhaps the most gullible, depending on your viewpoint!
Looking at our hearts
We all like to think we are good judges of character but, as 1 Samuel 16:7 reminds us: ‘The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.’ Sadly, we are very quick to judge others, often wrongly, and perhaps we need to remember this verse alongside recognising, like the contestants on The Traitors, how wrong we can get things.
Yet the LORD does know our hearts. Many times in the Gospels we are told that Jesus sees people’s hearts or knows what they are thinking. Jesus sees through our respectable veneer and knows that we are all traitors at heart, rebels against God and burdened with guilt. He is the only faithful one who endured until the end, but amazingly He takes the place of an exiled traitor and gives the guilty their rightful prize. He is our 100%. The most trustworthy friend of all.
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