Tyranosopher: Human beings have evolved to group up and do things collectively, and the main task was fighting. This means that there is great deep down inside pleasure to group up and go out, kill something. These instincts can’t be changed, but they can be harnessed to, say, colonize Mars, or play soccer.
Soccer diverts this tendency to collective mayhem into an innocuous game which creates psychological binds. Soccer binds people again, re-ligare, worldwide. As international matches happen, national teams get beaten, bringing respect for the other, and even appreciation. If X beats Y, partisans of Y may attach themselves to X, because it’s more pleasant to have been beaten by the strongest team.
A soccer superstar who never won the world cup (like Ronaldo) may win sympathy, even while one may want Portugal to lose, and so on.
So soccer lifts empathy towards foreign groups… and thus teaches how to extend sympathy to aliens.. Not just that: it brings strong emotions, but forces people to relativize these emotions. So soccer cultivates emotional gymnastics and the ability to master them through logic.
Simplicia: Why do we need these battles on green grass? Why do we need battles? Let’s forget about the primitive past! Let’s celebrate new man! New Homo!
Tyranosopher: Human neurology is the product of hundreds of millions of years of brain evolution. Of battling evolution, one should say. To be an animal is to be at war. Actually some behaviors of bird species such as parrots and crows are broadly similar to human behavior and our common ancestors lived more than 350 million years ago.
Simplicia: As usual, a diversion into la la land… Stick to soccer, please.
Tyranosopher: Please don’t interrupt too much my complexity with your simplicity. The point is that we can’t change our brains from will alone. To be an animal is to be at war, so not being at war means one is not even an animal. Soccer is a good war: it’s innocuous, everybody can partake, and learn to respect the others.
Simplicia: Humans are not animals.
Tyranosopher: Of course humans are animals. Those who think that, through the sheer force of will, they can change the reality of the human condition radically are idiots. They reason like Hitler and his Nazis, who believed that will could change the world at will.
Simplicia:… Or they reason like Nietzsche.
Tyranosopher (*sigh*): Or Nietzsche, indeed. I don’t like to attack Nietzsche too much, but he seems to have believed that will could be the end all be all, although he also believed the exact opposite, namely that the “Ubermensch”, the overman, should embrace “Amor Fati”, the love of fate… So I think Friedrich was so confused here, his views on will are self-contradictory. Unfortunately, the Germans embraced them. I do believe that will can change a lot of brain management, and brain organization, but will can’t change the fundamental nature of the brain willy-nilly. One has to be subtle.
Simplicia: How so?
Tyranosopher: The brain was evolved for battle. One needs to provide the brain with battle to keep it fully provisioned. Conventional humanism basically says that there is a good side to humans… And, if there is a bad side, a dark side, it is to be avoided at all cost. But that’s quite a bit like saying a shadow is bad, so one should avoid one’s own shadow. Avoiding the dark side is not how the human brain works. One can’t avoid the human brain. One has to shepherd the brain.
Simplicia: Is it what soccer does?
Tyranosopher: Yes that’s what the soccer world cup does. It pits nations against nations, but so doing it forces new emotional alliances, as I already said… So it teaches how to use the bad side, the Dark Side… for the good, namely in this case watching great soccer..
The international mix is powerful. Many changed their minds about Arabia when Saudi Arabia beat Argentina 2-0. Also 138 players were playing with a country they were not born in.
I had a heated argument with some guys who called the French team “African”… When in truth the French players were born French, and these guys, US guys, need I say, were judging origins based on the color of skin… Mbappe is a Parisian, born Parisian…. France is a mental state, not a skin condition.
And there is nothing wrong with emigrating to another country and becoming a national there. It’s actually excellent, a factor of progress and advancement, because it fosters the competition of ideas and emotions, worldwide…
Simplicia:”Do you think soccer can replace middle age religions?“
Tyranosopher: Of course. Fundamental Islam has been a disaster for the Middle East, which, for millennia was arguably the world’s wealthiest and most innovative region (that’s where cities, cats, wheat, bi-cameral representative democracy and the alphabet are from). Saudi Arabia would do well and persists in trying to beat the likes of Argentina. Saudis proposed a 200 million dollar contract to attract Ronaldo. Not only did SA make it to Qatar, but so did 5 African nations, and Morocco finished 4th of the Qatar world cup.
Simplicia: I am surprised you love Qatar so much. Their Human Rights record… Europeans have been criticizing Qatar a lot.
Tyranosopher: Europeans couldn’t exist without Qatar: they would die of cold without Qatar gas, and all European ecologists would have to scrub the toilets of invading Russian mercenaries. What counts with Human Rights is the speed and intensity of progress. Absolute measurements are inappropriate, because the human brain and the culture which made it, can’t instantaneously change. Why should we care about LGBQRBDSMTXYZ rights? What about the rights of those who like to kill flies?
Simplicia: Stop being obnoxious. What’s BDSM for?
Tyranosopher: BonDage-Sado-Masochism. Sade and Maso called attention to the fact that cruelty was part of the human experience. And even death. Curious nobody noticed that anymore at some point. Talk about denial!
Simplicia: You are the weirdest of them all, and should have more respect for your peers. You are basically a Goblin.
Tyranosopher: Latin Gobelinus, Norman-French gobelin (12th Century), is an old French word a spirit haunting the region of Evreux, in the chronicle of Ordericus Vitalis; a word and concept derived from the Greek kobalos “impudent rogue…” kobaloi “wicked spirits invoked by rogues”.
Seriously, we have all the rights already. The law is there to prevent injury, everything else is permitted. Promoting this, that or the other minority of this, that, or the other thing is not out to do it best, because it rises the question of being unfair to those who are left out. So Europeans should appreciate the progress of their Arab protectors, and encourage them further.
Simplicia: Arab protectors?
Tyranosopher: Yes, Arab protect Europeans from the cold, and also starvation, because without oil, no food. Many countries are in crisis from not enough fertilizers from Ukraine…
Simplicia: Do you then view the campaign against Qatar as a form of racism?
Tyranosopher: Absolutely. The propaganda against Qatar was pure and simple racism. It was an excellent world cup. And the first one I watched thoroughly.
Simplicia: What triggered your interest? Old age? Infirmity?
Tyranosopher: The certainty that Qatar was treated in a racist manner by European self-declared ecologists, who look like hypocritical deviants paid by Putin. Also my 13 year old daughter loves soccer and the world cup. The (generally but not always) excellent French philosopher Onfray professed his contempt of sport in general, and the world cup, understanding nothing. He claims he has no time for anything but writing books. Top notch thinkers, though prefer thinking obsessively in a creative manner to writing like a deranged AI program. Onfray’s wife took 14 years to die of breast cancer, and he himself had strokes, before a terrible bout with COVID. I am not saying soccer would prevent all this, but physical activity and proper living reduces health problems in the average. So by preaching the couch potato, Onfray preaches death. The Roman poet Juvenal mentions this: “Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano”, he wrote, “A man should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.”The best way to corpore sano is a modicum of exercise.
Simplicia: Do you play soccer?
Tyranosopher: No, but I shall preach from now on. Today I ran in the wilderness and took pictures of the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean. Put one on Instagram to share the love.
Simpliscia: Amen.
Patrice Ayme
And now for the flying Parisian Kylian Mbappé, best player of the Qatar world cup (8 goals); much of the team got a contagious disease in the days leading to the final:
P/S: Religion is the noun for the concept of Re-Ligare: What ties up again. So fascism (in the original meaning: fasces tied by law around the axe of justice) and soccer fan(aticism) are religions. So can be fly fishing or solo climbing (at the limit). Cicero tied re-ligio to relegere, read again, but that’s an obvious mistake, not the most outrageous one he made. Now true, re-reading the same thing perpetually will bind people together again. But it’s a restrictive meaning.
Tags: Qatar, racism, Soccer, World Cup, World Religion
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