Chomsky and Outer Life on Spectator Sports: An Odd Confluence, Or Strange Bedfellows

And spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing, they’re a great way to build up chauvinism — you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life, and they translate very nicely to other areas. I mean, I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high school football team wins? I don’t know anybody on the team. They don’t know me. I wouldn’t know what to say to them if I met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team wins and all downcast if it loses? . . .

All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology. I mean, they’re there; there’s no doubt that they’re there. But they’re emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things.

Noam Chomsky, speaking of "Spectator Sports" in Understanding Power, reprinted at "Spectator Sports" (Soul Pacific). Link via "Chomsky on Sports" (Elliptic Blog).

See "Taking the Spectator Out of Spectator Sports" for Outer Life's take on spectator sports.

Comments

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