We are told that marriage is a sacred institution. Yet the producers of Married at First Sight Australia have revealed that they deliberately withheld information about their participants’ criminal convictions for drugs and violence from their partners. This is not merely a lapse in editorial judgment.
This is a symptom of a culture that treats the most intimate of human bonds as fodder for entertainment, where the pursuit of ratings justifies any violation of trust. We have seen this before. In the late Roman Republic, the sanctity of marriage was eroded by a series of cynical laws that allowed for easy divorce and remarriage, all in the name of political expediency.
The result was a society that lost its moral compass, a society ripe for tyranny. Today, we mock the ideals of fidelity and honesty, and we are surprised when our institutions crumble. The producers of MAFS are not villains.
They are merely the most visible exemplars of a decadent age, an age where we have forgotten that the public square is not a marketplace for our basest instincts. We demand transparency in our banking and our politics, yet we tolerate a reality television industry built on deception. The tragedy is not that these participants were lied to.
The tragedy is that we are not shocked. We have been conditioned to accept the hollowing out of our common life, one season at a time.
