WARNING: Contentious message ahead. As Mark Twain once said, "If you find yourself agreeing with the majority, take time to pause and reflect."
When growing up, adolescent sports are great for young rugrats to get exercise. It’s a light recreational group activity which teaches kids to work in teams to cooperate as well as instill drive and passion about goal accomplishment through physical activity. Individual physical accomplishments like running, cycling, skiing, or weightlifting are good because they create a dynamic where you are engaging in exercise with the only one you really need to compete with being yourself. It’s fun if it stays minor and lite, but things go weird when that dad on the side of the field at the little league game is really seriously emotionally involved in the game’s outcome. We here at the student of life essays have spoken on being process oriented over being goal oriented. Process orientation is expansive and leads to personal growth. Goal orientation is contractive and fueled by competitiveness. We’ve also discussed the child asleep robot factor of many who are essentially little kids in adult bodies. This overly invested little league dad is the prime amalgam of these two concepts and his personality type can be fractaled out into many other sheeple currently in manifestation worldwide. In no area is this more apparent than that of sports fans.
When sports go from being a few kids on the field to someone getting their own personal exercise for health reasons into collegiate, professional, or Olympic leagues with giant stadiums, annual statistics, audience in-fighting, doped up athletes, celebrity worship, corporate sponsorship, and exorbitant salaries than we have a big problem because they are too big. Not coincidentally it’s the same problems caused by big religion, big government, big science, and big corporations, which are ultimately all about the dollar signs and restrict human consciousness. Money is the partial root of all evil in its current centralized structuring, the pure profit motive is the core problem of professional “big everything”. Evident by the fact that the National Football League, which up until recently was a tax-exempt organization, making billions of dollars a year, has proven to care more about covering up the long-term effect of traumatic brain injuries of its players than their true long-term health and well being because the dollar signs are king.
American sports logos are red, white, and blue to try and subconsciously imply being a fan of your local city's team is patriotic. When in reality they are really there to stagnate human potential. If a sport player’s life growing up is so void of spirit that they are constantly fighting the boredom of small town USA or inner city urban unfortunateness that their only options other than working at the local minimum wage job are to try and excel into professional sports or join the military, then it’s time to upgrade the societies’ operating system to a new version.
Sports scholarships have a silver lining of a potential subsidized or even freeride schooling, which is good because all schooling should be free anyway. However, the college player’s life on the field is held to the highest importance regardless of their academic performance or behavior off the field. Ergo, the university that covers up the sexual abuse of female students at the had of a star athlete who brings in the big dollars for the university. The endless profit motive which ramps up at the university level and then skyrockets at a professional level conceals the innocence of the joy of the game by instilling an endless profit goal orientation motive. This is no more evident when watching a team which has lost a big game look like the sky has fallen. Even with all that back hard work by the players which is to be honored and respected, ultimately the championship trophy or ring they would attain means nothing to their soul growth. Professional teams themselves also do not bring economic prosperity or massive revenue to their cities. They instead enrich a few ultra-rich team owners in the current low bandwidth, heavily corporate chronic centralized capitalistic system which grossly mis-distributes wealth upwards.
The profit motive is not the real tragedy with grossly overinflated sports. The real tragedy is their ability to waist fans as individuals, groups, cities, and even the majority of entire countries’ time. Big money sports are there to waste your clock when consumed. They are consumption without creation events, soap operas without end, which ultimately do nothing, are void of substance, and have little to no ultimate importance to the society, to then only be recycled the next season. Professional sports are a very useful tool for the power pyramid of control because it knows an ignorant dumbed down populace loves the distractions being put in front of them. It takes exorbitant amounts of time to follow a team, and all its players, and even deeper their statistics. Romans called this “bread and circuses”. They have always been used as a tool to distract and mindlessly entertain. Since the days of the gladiators battling in the Coliseum of Rome, to modern day small town USA, the profane have always revolved around the sporting ring and it’s modern day oily tentacle arms of dive bars which broadcast sporting events.
Larger still are those at home who pop a beer and happily waist two to four Sunday hours watching the game in a larval like state. Watching TV is essentially the same as sitting sedentary staring at shapes and sounds given to you by the joker spirals of miss information while gazing at the wall. Then the remote viewer may also burn another hour or two watching a post-game show. Never in history have some many men talked about so little as a sporting post game show. Since I was a little kid and first heard about and saw friends and their parents doing a fantasy baseball team all I could think about is what a staggering waste of time it was and how boring it would be to be that invested in something with so little ultimate meaning and personal return.
During the days of the Wild West, American saloons have always been sad places of sorrow and personal destruction. Since the dawn of the don’t think tube, otherwise known as the television, one will usually always find a bar with a telly existing with a game on inside if not even an array of multiple televisions. European pubs have a more sophisticated and welcoming interior with a more family-friendly orientation over the seediness of an American dive bar, yet ultimately only result in the same dynamic of a business full of passion filled males watching European football matches while drinking copious amounts of mentally mind contracting sanctioned liquid drugs to make their guts grow.
Sports arenas are grossly low resonate places which waist yet even more time and energy. People can easily burn an entire day, commuting going to a game, tailgating in the parking lot, sitting at the game eating fecal filled processed Franken fried food such as hot dogs or rice based American beer. Then sitting in massive gridlock traffic upon conclusion of the event. Most sports tickets are three figure costs, so not only have you waisted three hours by watching at home, you’ve wasted nearly an entire day due to the planning, and travel. My parents once got free tickets to an NFL game and all my mom had to say about it was “it was such a long day and we don’t think we’ll do it again.”
Season ticket holding is the lowest common denominator. Someone who goes to every game, devoting time and time week after week, month after month. If you know a season ticket holder, it’s likely that person's whole life will only consist of their slave job and their sports team they are a fanatic follower of. The rest of their undeveloped cup will likely be shallow and empty.
Aleister Crowley wrote in the introduction to his seminal book The Book of the Law, “Consider the popularity of the cinema, the wireless, the football pools and guessing competitions, all devices for soothing fractious infants, no seed of purpose in them. Consider sport, the babyish enthusiasms, and rage which it excites, whole nations disturbed by disputes between boys.” Sports trap us in a juvenile and male-dominated nature of those days growing up on the field and collecting baseball cards. Through my young childhood, I continued to play sports for years beyond when I really wanted to because that’s what the other kids were doing. When I actually wanted to be reading comics, drawing, or doing something else that resulted in creating over just consuming. As I moved into my teens, I matured beyond sports and especially sports fansmanship consumption because of strong desires to continue passions and creating a body of artistic works. Which, sadly, many boys in grown men meat suits never do.
Imagine an entire sport stadium of fans spending that time in other healthy ways of comradery getting grassroots organized to help improve their local community, or getting locally politically active, building housing together like the Amish do, group exercising like large marathons, restructuring society via an event like a festival gathering, being in shamanic ceremony, or even engaging in a group meditation. Higher ladder efforts instead of just the base chakra cheering with primal lust at multi-millionaires running back and forth around on a field or ice rink.
I Know a dad who spent years of his son’s growing up being so into coaching, team organization, following college and pro seasons, only in his later life upon being asked “Hey Bob, are you still doing all that sports stuff?” with him maturely saying “no, I’ve got better things to do with my time now.”
So he grew up a bit later in life. Our society always can as well.