“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, / In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52).

The millennials and Gen-Xers merged last week on Survivor: Millennials vs. Gen X. To the casual viewer, it might have looked like any other Survivor outing in the program’s 33 seasons to date. Timing is everything, though, in TV as in life.

It’s easy to forget now, but in the weeks and months following the 9/11 terror attacks, Survivor was dismissed as just another reality-TV series, an empty-headed exercise in contrived drama, all the more grating for the fact that it traded on the term “survival,” glorifying me-first narcissists in a time when actual, real-life survivors put their lives on the line to save others from harm’s way.

It’s also easy to forget that Mark Burnett (left), during the filming of the original Survivor on the remote island of Pulau Tiga, Borneo in March and April 2000, turned down a request from a group of university psychology professors to sit in on the filming. The psychologists were intrigued by the idea of 16 individuals stranded on a remote, desert island for 39 days, where they would vote each other out, one by one, until just two remained.

The ejected castaways would then decide which of the final two was most deserving of a $1 million grand prize and the title of sole survivor.

Fast-forward 16 years, and Survivor still has lessons for the amateur psychologist in all of us that transcend its pulp origins. We still tune in to see who will win the $1 million in any given season — but those with a more discerning eye understand that the real strength of the show is not who wins, necessarily, but how.

In last week’s Millennials vs. Gen-X, the tribal council vote turned on an act of betrayal, as an alliance of paranoid millennials cannibalized one of their own. (Figuratively speaking, of course; had Survivor been a tale of actual survival, the half-starving castaways might well have cannibalized one of their own in the literal sense.)

How did we get to tribal council president-elect Adam Klein over ousted would-be council president Michelle Schubert? For years, as longtime watchers of Survivor know, players advances in the game by making promises they have no intention of keeping. It takes a collective groupthink — or mob mentality — to wake up the remaining castaways, but by then it’s almost always too late.

The final tribal council in any Survivor season is both a summoning-up of all that has come before and the pivotal moment of the entire season, as the final candidates listen to the competitors they had a hand in casting out and make an all-out effort to, if not deliver their many broken promises, explain why they broke them.

Among the ejected castaways, “the (angriest) man in the room” — as Bill Clinton famously described U.K. Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn — can often sway the jury to his way of thinking. The eventual winner of Survivor as often as not is a protest against someone rather than for someone.

Survivor reflects American society in microcosm, with all its local prides and regional prejudices. The U.S. does not have the class system that has traditionally divided the U.K., for example, but there are other divides, including those based on economic opportunity.

In 2003’s Survivor: Amazon, Pittsburgh swimsuit model Jenna Morasca (left), that season’s winner, convinced the Survivor jury that Washington D.C. restaurant designer and world traveler Matthew von Ertfelda didn’t need the money and so didn’t deserve to win Survivor’s $1 million.

Morasca won the jury vote decisively — in a shutout — even though, by most objective standards, Von Ertfelda was by far the more qualified candidate, being an actual outdoor survival expert, among his many other skills and qualities to go along with a Cornell graduate degree. If Morasca and Von Ertfelda had been dropped into the Amazon jungle with nothing but their wits to save them, it’s clear who would’ve survived in the real game of survival.

On the rare occasion when promises are made and kept on Survivor, strange things can happen. In 2008, on Survivor: Gabon, Maine high-school physics teacher Robert “Bob” Crowley became Survivor’s oldest winner, at age 57, by emphasizing moral values and keeping one’s word, no matter the cost.

In a private interview, several years later, Survivor host Jeff Probst (below right) told me that was an unusual season, in which a group of older, like-minded adults — he stressed the word ‘adult’ — got together very early in the game and decided among themselves that, this one time, someone ‘good’ should win the $1 million prize in the end, if only to show the outside world that morals and treating your fellow human being with empathy and dignity can indeed win on Survivor. To Probst’s surprise, the agreement held firm to the end, aided by lucky breaks along the way that saw many of those like-minded adults land on the all-important jury. Probst said it was one of Survivor’s more unlikely outcomes, though not terrific as entertainment.

Survivor: Gabon, for any number of reasons, would prove to be the most arduous season to film, in part because of the shatteringly remote location — equatorial Africa, on the Atlantic coast, with no cities or even large towns for literally hundreds if not thousands of miles in all directions. Probst vowed never again, and Survivor has stuck to tropical beaches ever since.

The “how” of winning Survivor tells us as much about group decision-making as “who” wins in the end. Pluralism rarely works in a game based on outwit, outlast, outplay: People don’t make decisions rationally. No one ever won Survivor by telling their fellow castaways what they needed to know. It’s all about what they want to hear.

That said, if you watch Survivor closely — really closely, honing in on every word, every reluctant flicker of emotion, every pained expression — you can see the internal debate about inequality, inclusion, and fear of the other.

The rabble-rousers and firelighters take center stage around the tribal-council flame, but what really matters is how they got there — by exercising the raw and dirty energy of demagogues, as one letter-writer put it this past week in The Guardian, while the rest of the group wring their hands at being out of touch with the prevailing populist anger.

Survivor is a game where revealing private confidences almost always has unintended consequences, whether it’s admitting to being gay in a group of closeted homophobes or blurting out to whoever’s within earshot that they have a hidden immunity idol or, in Millennials vs. Gen X’s case, an as yet unrevealed, never-before-used advantage in the game. The needy are drawn to the narcissist. It’s all about personality. Actual survival skills will only get one so far on Survivor; in the end, it’s convincing a jury of fellow castaways that you’re more deserving of the grand prize than they are. How many times has the longtime Survivor viewer heard one of these jurors tell the two final candidates, “You’re both unworthy, but one of you is less unworthy than the other, and so that’s why I’m voting for that person.” On Survivor, there’s no staying home and choosing not to vote: It’s either one or the other. They can hold their nose if they want and vote for the least objectionable, but vote they must.

From time to time, Survivor’s makers tweak the game’s rules, but they’re careful to keep those tweaks simple — small, minor changes that won’t affect how the game is played. No superdelegates or Electoral College here.

The tweaks are designed to keep the game entertaining, so that viewers at home will continue to watch, rather than from a desire to change the outcome. Donald Trump would do very well on Survivor, one suspects, even though it’s obvious to anyone familiar with Robinson Crusoe or even Lord of the Flies that he wouldn’t last a day on a jungle beach without his valet to bring him a prawn cocktail or artisanal pizza, monogrammed napkin and silver fork in tow.

Survivor is about ordinary people, though, not millionaires or billionaires. It’s that ordinariness that has kept it so popular this long. It has little time for the liberal elites, but it also has little time for those with power and privilege as trucker Sue Hawk famously told corporate motivational speaker Richard Hatch in that memorable confrontation in one of the original Survivor’s very first scenes. Survivor is working class. It’s one of the few places, on TV or anywhere, where someone of little means but an ability to coerce and manipulate other people can go from being a nobody one minute to a millionaire the next.

What makes Survivor important, though — arguably the most important series in the history of American television — is the journey, not the destination. Once one understands the journey, whether it’s a reality-TV popularity contest or a presidential election, all outcomes become explainable.