Orwell would be proud

I was watching Big brother last night before I went to bed, and apart from all the usual mindless stuff that goes on in the house; there was an interesting incident with the shopping. Maxwell removed a chicken from the list and added several cans of cider. When the shopping was delivered, Maxwell and Anthony took the cider and hid it; of course this made the other housemates angry. Whilst I don’t think that this in itself is interesting news, the point it makes is.

The house runs very much like a commune, everyone must pull their weight with the chores and act in a subservient way to the group as a whole, for instance, during tasks, should a particular housemate not want to take part, then they will hurt the entire group by not doing so, as they would fail and their food money will be cut. A more equal system would of course to have individual passes and fails for the members of the group and to allot shopping money to individuals according to their performance.

The current setup however means that some people begin to feel as if their own needs are being ignored, which creates an incentive to use the rules to benefit at the cost of others. Maxwell felt that his need for cider was being ignored, so he took the chicken from the other housemates to increase his stock of cider. This was the only way that Maxwell could get his cider, to take it in preference of something else that the group needed, this would have been the same as if he had managed to convince the group to place it on the shopping list. Had the money for shopping been divided between the housemates for them all individually to make choices on how to spend their own money, then these arguments would not occur, this cannot happen in the big brother house because of the way that it is set up, but it does show that collective organization doesn’t work, not because the people who run it aren’t good enough, but instead that it ignores the individual. Of course when the individual is ignored on a grander scale, bigger things than cider and chickens become the problem.