(AKA how many people can I offend in one post?)
I launch into this subject in frustration with the endless time, money and resources spent on the irritant that is sport. I object on numerous grounds but principally that of irrelevance to many people’s lives and of the damaging tribalism that sports engenders in many otherwise functional adults.
In my (vigorously denied) joyless feminist state, I find nothing to celebrate in the emotional outpouring of those who insist on following individual sports teams and whose sense of national identity seems somehow welded to the progress or otherwise of their national sports team. As a Scot, I find this particularly inexplicable.
In a conversation on this subject this afternoon with a New Zealander, she too agreed that it was potentially unhealthy, at least on a collective level if not individually to have a sense of patriotism so bound up with a bunch of (almost always) fallible males and their (normally) balls. As in foot/base/tennis etc. Even the success of the NZ rugby players was apparently not temptation enough for her to succumb to national sporting pride. We further agreed that sitting watching sport on TV is boring.
One potentially damaging element is the emotional rollercoaster ride that supporting a sports team/person causes, not least to the sensitive and vulnerable amongst us. Nevertheless, for those with a need for external excitement, then supporting a sportsperson might provide a useful distraction from the tedium of their lives and they accept the downs with the ups. (Ok, I have tried to write that without sounding patronising, but can’t find a way, so just take the patronising as read.)
There are interesting personality typings to be done on those who support an always-winning team/person compared with those who cleave to a losing side. There are also societal theories to be concocted about belonging and peer pressure. There may even be something positive for some people in following their sporting hero’s, but I’m not about to investigate the mental processes of the Barmy Army who are apparently those committed to following the mediocre England men’s cricket team rather than the England cricket team which wins all the time.
http://www.ecb.co.uk/news/womens/
Returning to the negative aspects of supporting sports, perhaps worst of all, for Scottish sensibilities, is the case of those blue and green excrescences polluting Glasgow with entrenched and frequently violent sectarianism. The resources spent combating this brutal behaviour and belief system are not working and change will not happen without a level of courage alien to any politician because of their innate fear of the howling of the primitives on both sides of that manufactured gulf.
https://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/160254/0043618.pdf
Oddly, every time they misbehave there are grown adults who feel ashamed for their country and think foreigners will judge the Scots by the actions of the hooligans. Why? I most certainly do not. They are deluded if they imagine that they are representing this or any other country on my or other sane people’s behalf. They are individuals displaying their inadequacies and desperate need to belong and to define themselves and their tribalism in an absurd and wholly inappropriate manner. They fit Freud’s descriptions of savage primitives.
And I feel a lot better for getting that off my chest.
While I accept that my NZ pal and I may not be amongst the sports-philiacs majority, I thought it was worth thinking more laterally about the phenomenon. And, despite not being a Freudian analyst, I am reminded of his Totem and Taboo in which the dear old chap expounds his now somewhat neglected (can’t think why !?) theory of tribalism.
http://www.answers.com/topic/totem-and-taboo-psychoanalysis
Not direcely relevant to this discussion, but worth comment, he also provides an entertainingly baroque discussion about taboo. His concept is that at some time in the dim and distant, some bloke had a lot of sons and all the women of the tribe. When they reached adulthood, he expelled the sons who had become jealous of his control of the women. His disgruntled sons therefore used this as a reason to kill off Papa. All of this explained with a splendid disregard for early modern anthropology and blatant disrespect of the 19th/ 20th C feminist movement. There is no doubt that the active sisters of the first decade of the 20th century would have had another view of this. Although, I do have a sneaking suspicion that there is something in the boys killing Pater theory, but the whole Freudian taboo theory is best left for another day.
In case anyone imagined I have any expertise in this subject, I can cheerfully state that is not quite the case. How I interpret this part of Freud’s thinking is that he examined religion as a primitive tribal phenomenon. He saw the early development of religion as a response to a primitive need to project insecurities onto a magical omnipotence. His theory is explained in the third essay of the T & T book, Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought.
In this essay, he links superstition, projection of an inner mental system onto the outer world and a level of delusional, even obsessional thinking. Taking this on a superficial level, I think it might be possible to make the case for analysing the striking similarity between belief in the magical abilities of the sports team/person and value/resilience/mental health of the inner personality. On the other hand, this is my equivalent of thinking aloud and perhaps, if I am being honest, I will clutch at any straw to affirm my dislike of sport being used as a tool for affiliation with the nation.
Should these teasing glimpses into Freud’s writing prompt any sensitive soul to rush off and read that work, I feel I should counsel you to his exceptional and unjustifiable racism. While there can be no excuse for his ignorant attitudes, he was a white, over-privileged male of his time reflecting the prevailing attitudes.
I launch into this subject in frustration with the endless time, money and resources spent on the irritant that is sport. I object on numerous grounds but principally that of irrelevance to many people’s lives and of the damaging tribalism that sports engenders in many otherwise functional adults.
In my (vigorously denied) joyless feminist state, I find nothing to celebrate in the emotional outpouring of those who insist on following individual sports teams and whose sense of national identity seems somehow welded to the progress or otherwise of their national sports team. As a Scot, I find this particularly inexplicable.
In a conversation on this subject this afternoon with a New Zealander, she too agreed that it was potentially unhealthy, at least on a collective level if not individually to have a sense of patriotism so bound up with a bunch of (almost always) fallible males and their (normally) balls. As in foot/base/tennis etc. Even the success of the NZ rugby players was apparently not temptation enough for her to succumb to national sporting pride. We further agreed that sitting watching sport on TV is boring.
One potentially damaging element is the emotional rollercoaster ride that supporting a sports team/person causes, not least to the sensitive and vulnerable amongst us. Nevertheless, for those with a need for external excitement, then supporting a sportsperson might provide a useful distraction from the tedium of their lives and they accept the downs with the ups. (Ok, I have tried to write that without sounding patronising, but can’t find a way, so just take the patronising as read.)
There are interesting personality typings to be done on those who support an always-winning team/person compared with those who cleave to a losing side. There are also societal theories to be concocted about belonging and peer pressure. There may even be something positive for some people in following their sporting hero’s, but I’m not about to investigate the mental processes of the Barmy Army who are apparently those committed to following the mediocre England men’s cricket team rather than the England cricket team which wins all the time.
http://www.ecb.co.uk/news/womens/
Returning to the negative aspects of supporting sports, perhaps worst of all, for Scottish sensibilities, is the case of those blue and green excrescences polluting Glasgow with entrenched and frequently violent sectarianism. The resources spent combating this brutal behaviour and belief system are not working and change will not happen without a level of courage alien to any politician because of their innate fear of the howling of the primitives on both sides of that manufactured gulf.
https://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/160254/0043618.pdf
Oddly, every time they misbehave there are grown adults who feel ashamed for their country and think foreigners will judge the Scots by the actions of the hooligans. Why? I most certainly do not. They are deluded if they imagine that they are representing this or any other country on my or other sane people’s behalf. They are individuals displaying their inadequacies and desperate need to belong and to define themselves and their tribalism in an absurd and wholly inappropriate manner. They fit Freud’s descriptions of savage primitives.
And I feel a lot better for getting that off my chest.
While I accept that my NZ pal and I may not be amongst the sports-philiacs majority, I thought it was worth thinking more laterally about the phenomenon. And, despite not being a Freudian analyst, I am reminded of his Totem and Taboo in which the dear old chap expounds his now somewhat neglected (can’t think why !?) theory of tribalism.
http://www.answers.com/topic/totem-and-taboo-psychoanalysis
Not direcely relevant to this discussion, but worth comment, he also provides an entertainingly baroque discussion about taboo. His concept is that at some time in the dim and distant, some bloke had a lot of sons and all the women of the tribe. When they reached adulthood, he expelled the sons who had become jealous of his control of the women. His disgruntled sons therefore used this as a reason to kill off Papa. All of this explained with a splendid disregard for early modern anthropology and blatant disrespect of the 19th/ 20th C feminist movement. There is no doubt that the active sisters of the first decade of the 20th century would have had another view of this. Although, I do have a sneaking suspicion that there is something in the boys killing Pater theory, but the whole Freudian taboo theory is best left for another day.
In case anyone imagined I have any expertise in this subject, I can cheerfully state that is not quite the case. How I interpret this part of Freud’s thinking is that he examined religion as a primitive tribal phenomenon. He saw the early development of religion as a response to a primitive need to project insecurities onto a magical omnipotence. His theory is explained in the third essay of the T & T book, Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought.
In this essay, he links superstition, projection of an inner mental system onto the outer world and a level of delusional, even obsessional thinking. Taking this on a superficial level, I think it might be possible to make the case for analysing the striking similarity between belief in the magical abilities of the sports team/person and value/resilience/mental health of the inner personality. On the other hand, this is my equivalent of thinking aloud and perhaps, if I am being honest, I will clutch at any straw to affirm my dislike of sport being used as a tool for affiliation with the nation.
Should these teasing glimpses into Freud’s writing prompt any sensitive soul to rush off and read that work, I feel I should counsel you to his exceptional and unjustifiable racism. While there can be no excuse for his ignorant attitudes, he was a white, over-privileged male of his time reflecting the prevailing attitudes.
I know it is not possible, but consider how his theory might have evolved if instead of posturing in Vienna about South Seas traditional people’s, he could have witnessed the fanatical tribal behaviours of the more extreme modern sports fans.
This post is entitled Men and Balls (1), in the expectation that I will sometime get around to writing subsequent post(s) on my views about sport. You cannot say you haven’t been warned. But it won’t be in the immediate future as I am not coherent at all about the *%”+@ Oh my god my blood pressure … olympics.
This post is entitled Men and Balls (1), in the expectation that I will sometime get around to writing subsequent post(s) on my views about sport. You cannot say you haven’t been warned. But it won’t be in the immediate future as I am not coherent at all about the *%”+@ Oh my god my blood pressure … olympics.
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