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Jan. 27, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:32
2084 Survival and Sports

The many reasons why people become obsessed with sports. From Freedomain Radio

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So a good question has arisen.
Why are people so crazy obsessed with inconsequential and unimportant things?
Think politics, think sports teams, and fly fishing, and all kinds of nonsense that people talk about.
Well, I sort of try to take a biological approach to these kinds of things.
It's not the last place to look, but I think it's a pretty good first place to look.
So a good question has arisen.
Why are people so focused on such inconsequential trivia?
And why are they so obsessively focused on inconsequential trivia?
Well, I think I'm in a fertile area of study, which I lack the time and Quite probably the mathematical expertise to pursue would be, you know, there's a lot, maybe lots of work has been done in this that I'm sort of not aware of, but I think it's very interesting to think of the biological aspects of evolution.
In other words... What got you killed in a tribe and what got you advanced in a tribe?
And to see the degree to which that has become what we call culture.
And I suspect that it's a very, very close relationship.
It's a very tight relationship.
Or as my daughter would say, tight!
Because you can't just say it.
You have to act it out. So, I mean, look at something like sports.
Well, sports is training for war.
And also sports is a way of striving...
To give people the capacity to conquer each other without violence.
So in lots of resource situations, it's win-lose, right?
If I cut down the tree and use it to make my log cabin, you cannot cut down the same tree and use it for your log cabin.
And so there's a lot of very important calculations and conflict resolutions that Had to be developed prior to the free market where you could sort of bid.
Now, of course, even in the free market, it's a win-lose situation a lot of times.
Now, the majority of them are win-win situations, but if, I mean, I just remember this from my own career, if I'm interested in selling a product to a particular company and they only need one, and, you know, sort of big stuff that I was selling would be only one, well,
the issue would be that they'd only buy one and we'd be up against Our competitors and our competitors would have all of that sort of stuff and we wouldn't be able to make our own sale at the same time.
So there's lots of win-lose.
So how do you deal with win-lose in this kind of situation?
It's a very important question.
It's a very, very important question.
Sports is a way of striving to do that.
Religion, in a weird way, I think, also strives to do that.
How do you resolve conflicts over land?
Well, you know, in some ways you just slug it out.
You know, in the way, way olden times, you just sort of kill each other.
But in more modern times, i.e.
with the rise of religion, you would go to the priest, you'd pray to God, there'd be some way of trying to resolve these disputes...
Without just slaughtering each other, and religion would be not too bad a way of doing that.
So the question of morality, or how do you live, or what is right and what is wrong, there's a way of answering that in a biological sense.
In other words, there's a way of answering that in a way that minimizes outright slaughter of other people, and it's, you know, it's called religion, and it's called statism to some degree.
I generally do believe, I don't want to be a Panglossian, but I do generally believe that there is advances.
It's, you know, not exactly a smooth line upwards, but there are advances up, and I think that's very helpful.
I think that's very helpful.
So, how do you resolve conflicts in a way that doesn't require outright murder?
These are sort of very, very important questions.
Well, the first thing you do is you substitute ritual combat for real combat.
And this serves two purposes.
The first is that it allows you to resolve disputes without slaughtering each other.
And I mean, lots of animals do this. You think of sort of the The caribou and so on who engage in this sort of mock combat to figure out breeding priority with the females.
It's, you know, locking horns is called, right?
It's a way of engaging in combat without actually killing each other.
Killing each other is pretty much a big waste of resources in the world of animals and so you find a way of doing it in a ritual sense.
Sports does that. It allows you to resolve disputes And to satisfy your lust for dominance without actually killing other people.
And so that's the first thing it does.
And second, of course, what it does is it trains young men, usually young men, for war.
And so that's also quite a useful thing, again, from a sort of biological conquering standpoint.
One of the reasons I think that religion spreads is it is a way of organizing society without murder, or at least without direct...
I mean, you move the threat in a sense of murder to the afterlife, not to say that there wasn't a lot of sort of murder going on in the religious world, but less, I think, in many ways than the sort of Neanderthal club-over-the-head kind of world.
I realize, you know, just all the caveats in the world, I'm speaking far beyond any kind of expertise.
This is all just theory, at least about, I don't know, what was the level of violence in the Antithar world?
Well, I know there was a lot of human sacrifice.
That, of course, would be involved with religion.
But even going further back, a lot of people died of broken skulls and spears and broken bones and so on.
So I think it's fair to say that there was a fair amount of violence.
In the sort of prehistorical world.
But again, if you have more expertise on this, please let me know and I'll be happy to transmit it as much as I can.
So the intensity, when you sort of look at it from a philosophical standpoint, let's just sort of pick on sports.
The intensity of sports addiction is genuinely mental.
But if you look at it from a biological standpoint, it's a way of training for war and resolving disputes or allowing for The fanning of or the exercise of the dominance drive without actual murder.
So, for instance, if you look at something like duels, well, duels does result in the death of someone, but it results in the death of fewer people than before.
But the reason I would imagine that duels gained any kind of popularity was because it prevented Klan reprisals.
So, Bob and Doug would get into a duel situation.
This would be sort of publicized and known.
Pistols at dawn, swords at dawn.
And what would happen is the Klan would know that this was a challenge put down, a challenge accepted.
And what would happen then is one of them would die, but the Klan would not view it the same way as a surprise murder.
You know, Bob...
Who died, had a fighting chance.
He voluntarily agreed to get into it.
So it lowered the sort of Hatfields and McCoys clan reprisals.
That was the big escalation, right?
Some guy pisses you off, you club him over the head, and then his brothers come after you, your brothers go after his brothers, and next thing you know, there's just a bunch of weeping women all around.
And the clan is kind of toast.
So a lot of it is to avoid either direct murder and then followed by clan reprisals, or if there are two people who are going to violently disagree with each other, at least you can lower the possibility or eliminate the possibility of the ever-escalating clan reprisals through something like a duel.
And gambling, of course, was invented for this as well.
Gambling is a way of transferring property Without direct violence.
That's important. So, if you...
I mean, you know, the typical thing is if you want someone else's car, then you race for your pink slips, you know, if you're in that particular kind of culture.
And that's a way, again, of not just having outright club you over the head and take your car, but it's a way of organizing things so that there is a property transfer, but it is through...
A competition, a contest.
In one of my favorite movies, Remember the View, there's a scene where Freddy Honeychurch's friend is over and they're giving money to a woman and the woman wants to give the money back and the guy says, flip you for it, Honeychurch. And they're going to flip a coin to figure out who gets the money.
It's a game, but again, it's a way of transferring resources online Where there's an alternative to murder and theft.
And, you know, winner take all.
So you can gamble for things.
You can have an arm wrestling contest for things.
You can have a strength contest of some other kind for things.
You can... Have a skill test.
Again, these are all just ways of transferring resources without killing off the testicles that bear the seed for the next generation.
And that is...
So there is a kind of intensity around this.
And the intensity comes from the alternative to this is a murder-based society.
I mean, I think that's really...
So if you have a way of organizing property transfers and you have a way of Organizing the resolution of disputes and giving people the vent for their dominance drive.
Then, yeah, you can go the sports route.
You can go the gambling route.
You can go... I mean, there are drinking contests.
I mean, there's a way...
Everybody's... All cultures are searching for ways to assert dominance, to allow its adult males to assert dominance and...
Organize the resolution of disputes that doesn't involve direct killing.
And so a lot of, I mean, if you sort of look at what culture is, culture is a lot of these kinds of things.
I mean, when I was younger, I don't know if these are probably not still going on, but there were, you know, that sort of young thuggies had breakdance competitions.
So who was the better break dancer was the guy who got the bragging rights.
Again, that's a massive step forward from just threatening to kill people unless they obey you.
There are, of course, those aspects to the thug culture as well.
But this is what people did.
Rapping is, again, a way of...
Because rapping is all about braggadocio, right?
It's all about, I'm the greatest that ever was, and so on.
Again, this is a way of allowing people to assert dominance through verbal domination, through verbal abuse, through verbal bragging, that doesn't involve actually just killing people.
Because, you know, the tribe puts a lot of resources into raising children.
And so if children grow up and the dominance drive ends up with them all getting killed or half of them getting killed, that's a massive loss relative to some other tribe that's found a way to organize these things without direct murder.
And again, from a sort of violence reduction standpoint, If you mock sports or you point out how ridiculous sports are, people kind of get tense, right? They get kind of tense because deep down they get that this is the best way in a non-philosophical society to organize conflict resolution and the drive for dominance.
And understand, when I say conflict resolution, I don't mean sort of win-win.
I just mean a way of getting people to cool off without killing each other.
And, I mean, jousting.
A way a step better up than direct war or duels.
I mean, jousting, you'll get some bruised ribs or a broken rib, but you won't die.
You won't at least die from getting a joust through the chest.
Joust? Are they called jousts?
Big harpoons? Yeah, it's got to be called jousting.
I'm thinking of the video game. God help me, I'm such a geek.
Anyway. Because if you say, well, the sports are ridiculous, well, obviously sports are ridiculous, but they're far better than the alternative, right?
So if you get rid of the sports addiction, you don't mature the tribe.
You don't suddenly provide people with better childhoods where they can have win-win negotiations and don't have that same hysterical dominance drive.
That is the characteristic of an abused childhood.
Well, one characteristic. So when you mock sports, people get kind of tense and have a desire to ostracize you because they're like, shit, man, don't take the sports thing away because otherwise we could end up clubbing each other.
Because we have no rational, intelligent way to resolve disputes.
We have no free market. We have no philosophy.
So if it isn't a ball, it's a club.
So don't mock the ball or we have to switch to the club.
And this is, I think, and this is all sort of deep down why people have this intensity.
And that's obviously crazy.
It's obviously irrational when you look at it philosophically, but when you look at it biologically, it kind of makes sense.
Now, I, of course, have spent a few minutes here and there roundly attacking the sports thing.
And that's because it really is not needed anymore, because now we have a pretty free market, right?
And once we have a pretty free market, we have alternatives far superior.
And we have philosophy 2,500 years ago, right?
I mean, we have philosophy, we have reason, we have all of this kind of good stuff.
And so, because of that, we don't really need this.
In fact, it's counterproductive now.
It's counterproductive now to have this stuff.
And so, I would say that now is the time to sort of really diminish the sports thing, because...
A substitute doesn't solve the problem.
So if you graduate from thumb-sucking to cigarettes, that doesn't mean that then cigarettes are okay.
I mean, it's still a big problem.
You get the idea.
So a substitute doesn't solve the problem.
It may be an improvement, right?
So sports is an improvement over clubbing people over the head in terms of what it does, but It doesn't actually bring people to reason.
It just brings them a little bit further away from murder.
It doesn't sort of bring people to a positive and healthy way of interacting with each other.
So now that we have philosophy, we have some aspects of the free market, we have, I think, good communications paradigms, we have therapy, we've got psychology, we've got all these kinds of good new things.
We don't really need this stuff anymore.
You know, there's not...
I mean, society in a sense is run by its lowest common denominator, which is why in some ways, you know, I don't mean to make this all collectivist and so on, but in a very general sense, I don't think society can be richer than its poorest member or healthier than its sickest member.
And I'll sort of explain that before I get the owls of collectivist tripe coming from everyone, which, you know, I can sort of understand, but let me sort of explain what I mean.
I certainly don't mean that everyone has to have the same income, but...
If a child is raised in a society and is horribly abused, and that society, the people in that society, in that family, in that building, in that church, in that school, you know, the friends, the aunts, if they don't sort of intervene to do something about the abuse, then the child is going to grow up very likely unwell with intense, deep and pathological psychological problems.
And so, you have a society that is not healthy because members of that society do not understand the need and the virtue of intervening in situations of child abuse.
And so, that's sort of what I mean.
And so, if somebody is really broke and nobody's...
They're going to be broke largely because they've had a bad childhood and...
If the society...
So that's sort of an effect of the people not intervening in the bad childhood.
So I think that's kind of important.
And so you really...
You can't as a culture or society really be healthier than your sickest member because your member is sick only because the society hasn't intervened or doesn't have a habit or structure of intervening in these kinds of situations.
So that, I think, is a very important consideration.
Now, to let go of these things, though, means that people have to deal with their dominance drive.
I mean, you take away sports and gambling, maybe you provoke criminality, because the dominance drive is going to need to find something else.
Now, in order to have people deal with their dominance drive, they're going to need to pursue some pretty intense self-knowledge.
Because, of course, the dominance drive...
It's driven by humiliation.
It's driven by... I mean, why do people seek out or believe that win-lose negotiations or win-lose dominance paradigms are the way that they must live?
Well, because that's what they experienced as a child.
That's what they experienced as a child, continually, with win-lose interactions with parents and other adults.
A typical example is, I'm right because I'm an adult.
That's a complete win-lose situation.
I, as the adult, win, and I am not getting you to understand why I am right and why you should do what I say.
I'm simply asserting power over you and dominating you.
And I'm right because I'm bigger.
I'm the adult. I have more experience.
I'm wiser. I'm older.
I'm whatever, right? That is a dominance paradigm.
Because you're not explaining to the child why he or she should do what you're saying, what you suggest.
And children from a very, very early age can understand these things.
So I think that's really, really important.
And so if you're going to break the win-lose paradigm, Then you have to deal with the humiliation of having been bullied and dominated as a child.
And you have to deal with the pain of that and the injustice of all of that and start to work with win-win negotiations.
But those are very painful. And you try to bring win-win negotiations to parents who have bullied and dominated you as a child, and the significant, vast likelihood is that those parents are going to take a long, slow mental dump all over your Lighted up glowing and ascending soul.
Because you're going to try and bring win-win negotiations to people who've dominated and bullied children with win-lose negotiations, and that's going to provoke their own shame and their own guilt.
Their own history of humiliation and their guilt at having done it to their children.
And in my experience, you can work with shame, you can work with self-hatred, you can work with the experience of humiliation, but the experience of guilt, and I really significantly mean guilt over harming children for many years and That seems fundamentally and functionally unrecoverable.
Because there's no restitution.
If you put yourself down for many years, you can give yourself restitution, right?
You can treat yourself better.
You can do things that are nicer.
You can apologize to yourself and all of that.
So that's one possibility.
You can deal with that stuff. But can you really...
You can't provide restitution for a brutalized childhood.
You just can't. Which is why, not all, but most parents, when confronted with this stuff, tend to harden up, double down, and attempt to use the strategy called, well, we'll get that kid back in the box, even though he's an adult.
We'll get him back in the box somehow.
And that is... That is a risky strategy.
It may work, but it becomes less likely to work as time goes forward.
And, of course, another thing that comes along with sports, gambling, and other kinds of addictions is a relentless trivialization of life.
It really does. I mean, sports idiots, you know, you talk about sports, the Thanksgiving dinner, and then you retire to watch sports on the TV. I mean, there's no conversation about anything of any importance or anything real.
And that's because in a sort of pre-philosophical, pre-free market society, talking about anything real is going to result in unresolvable and potentially violent disagreements.
And all of these rituals are designed to resolve conflicts and allocate property without violence, without direct sort of kill the Heavily invested in tribal members outright without any of that stuff.
And so there is this...
You can't talk about anything of importance if you don't have philosophy.
If you don't have a methodology for resolving disputes with an objective third party called reason and evidence, then you are going to have to have these bizarre, intense rituals for resolving disputes because you have no way to resolve disputes, but you create imaginary ways of resolving disputes, you know, called sports and gambling and other nonsense ritual stuff.
I mean, it's rituals or reason, basically.
That's what I'm trying to say.
And if you bring reason to ritual, then the great fear is it's going to collapse into outright violence.
And everyone's kind of terrified of that, so they reject the reasoner and cling to ritual.
And, I mean, it sounds like I have a lot of sympathy, and in some ways I do.
Not that my sympathy or lack thereof has any particular importance.
But what I will say...
Is that, and we'll sort of leave it here because it's a big, complicated topic, but what I will say is that I don't have any, you know, problem with people who want to say, I'm terrified of philosophy.
You know, I really feel the urge to blah, blah, blah, right?
But the people who just sort of market and add harm in it and all that, I think they're particularly problematic because one of the ways that they are Pretending to resolve disputes is through an appeal to pseudo-philosophy.
And that, of course, is religion and other forms of moral control.
And that is pretty hypocritical.
And that I have much less patience with.
You know, in the short run, yes. In the long run, not so much.
Thank you so much for listening. Look forward to donations.
I love you all so much.
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