Survivor’s paranoia is self-fulfilling prophecy

Later, he expressed the same sort of paranoia to another member of his alliance. “Are we good? We solid?” Jamie asked Judd, the one person who ultimately didn’t vote against him. “There’s nothing to freak out about,” he promised Jamie. Judd’s loyalty to the person who was questioning everyone else’s loyalty ultimately hurt him, as he was kept out of the decision-making process. As his face suggested after Jeff Probst read the votes, Judd was just as blindsided as Jamie.

Ultimately, Jamie admitted that he was worried that, as a strong male, he’d be targeted. “Eventually they’re going to catch on that I’m a serious threat, so I’m trying to work it where they keep the six that got here together,” Jamie told us. “I’m working that card a lot.” But his work was unnecessary, as his alliance was happy to keep him around, at least until he started second-guessing everyone.

Playing the game involves predicting other player’s actions; like a game of chess, it’s impossible to play “Survivor” well without at least thinking of possible moves your opponents will make.  Even in a solid alliance, the day will come when that alliance will be forced to turn on itself, and lack of planning for that moment will lead only to the “Survivor” walk of shame.

The same sort of second-guessing occurs in everyday life. When you drive on the interstate, amid hundreds of other cars going 60 or 70 or 80 miles per hour, you have to be able to predict what other cars might do to keep yourself safe. (As my dad says, you have to essentially drive everyone else’s car for them.) But if you’re so completely focused on every other car that you stop driving your own, you’ll end up in a ditch with a deflated airbag.

That’s what happened to Jamie: In his alliance, he was metaphorically sitting in the driver’s seat of a Hummer that was chained to a car carrier. Even if he’d slammed on the brakes and jerked the wheel to the side, he would have been okay. But he was so completely insecure that he felt like he was atop a remote-controlled toy car tooling down the middle of a 10-lane highway, surrounded by 18-wheelers.

That’s the way he behaved, and he so baffled his fellow alliance members that they retracted his membership in the alliance and gave him the second seat on the jury.

It’s certainly possible that Jamie would have been ultimately stabbed in the back by his team; nearly every season, we’ve seen multiple examples of duplicity. For many players, lying is part of the game, and that often involves lying to people who are their friends or with whom they have an alliance.

Thus, Jamie’s skepticism was warranted. But he signed his own “Survivor” death warrant by making sure everyone knew just how skeptical and paranoid he was.

Andy Dehnart is a writer and teacher who publishes reality blurred, a daily summary of reality TV news.

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