TURN OFF YOUR
TELEVISION!
by L. Wolfe
executiveintelligencereview.com
PART 3
The Making of Sports
Into
A Secular Religion
We're back again for another
dialogue. I'm sure by now most of you know the
way this works -- since watching television lowers your capacity to reason, we
keep the set off while we have our discussion. So, if it's
not already off, as I hope it is, go over and turn it off.
In this section, we are going to discuss the way
you are brainwashed by spectator sports and the way television has facilitated
that brainwashing. I have a sense that what we are going to say might
anger some of you, but bear with me and see the argument through to the end.
We might as well get right to the point -- those
of you who call yourselves 'fans' of one or more teams of any sport, be it
baseball, football, basketball, hockey or of players in more individualized
games such as tennis or golf, are "addicted to a mind-crippling
infantilism that reduces your power of creative reason". And it is that power and 'only' that power of morally
informed, creative reason that makes Man different from the animal.
Let's make some preliminary
observations to support our thesis.
As we have stated time and
again in this series, Man is created in the living image of God and has
been given by his Creator the Divine Spark of reason. It
is that quality, that Divine Spark, in each of us that makes us truly human.
Anything that reduces our capacity to reason makes us less human, more like an
animal.
Organized sports in this country, and especially
professional and college level sporting events, are
"mass brainwashing experiences", precisely along the lines outlined
by Gustav LeBon and Sigmund Freud in earlier parts of
our report. They cause the individual personality to regress to a more
infantile, more irrational state; while watching a sporting event, a person
becomes part of a mass of similarly addicted infants who fixate on events taking
place within the defined
boundaries of a "playing field", in a 'game' whose rules are
arbitrarily defined.
Each sporting competition is a thinly disguised
celebration of what your brainwashers have called "instinctual human
aggressiveness", the same kind of aggressiveness that people like Freud
say 'proves' that you are an 'animal' driven toward destruction. These
aggressive, destructive drives, says Freud, are "part of Man's animal
nature". Sooner or later, Man must succumb
to the power of such drives, Freud and neo-Freudians claim. The purpose
of society, according to Freud, is to regulate and control through various
forms of coercion, the outbursts of this innate bestiality against which the
human mind is ultimately powerless.
Christian civilization is premised
on a contrary view of humanity. Man, created in the image of His Creator, seeks
to perfect His existence through use of creative reason in search of Truth;
that is the only acceptable definition of perfection as a human process.
Society is organized to provide Man the means by which
to accomplish this task, nurturing those powers of creative reason and
affording the opportunity for Man to act on that reason in an effective manner.
To the extent that one
needs a fit body to serve the power of reason, exercise and sports can play a
'limited' role in Man's search for Truth. But
muscular activity can 'never' be a substitute for nurturing one's creative
powers. Morally informed reason rules the body.
Modern sports, especially when organized as a
mass spectator event, serve a contrary purpose. Besides acting as
'ritualized' celebrations of aggressiveness, sports create an 'illusion' of
perfection, acted out within the measured boundaries of the "playing
field" and according to the arbitrary rules of a 'game'; perfection
becomes something that is 'counted', a thing which is measured, that has been
severed from Man's relation to Truth and to His Creator.
Mass organized spectator sports, as presented
and marketed through television, thus work to undermine the most basic concepts
of Christian civilization. With their endless piles of statistics, with
their arbitrary rules, with their mass spectacle, with their celebration of
power of muscles and instinct over the human mind, and with their worship of heroic
deeds in the absence of reasoned activity, they create a form of "pagan
ritual", that has become a "substitute
religion" for most Americans. So that's our
thesis restated -- sports is "a mind-destroying pagan religion".
I warned you that it might be hard for some
people to swallow, since I know how addicted many of you are to 'your'
sports. After all, if you are an American, and especially an American
male, you have been raised in a
"sports-dominated" culture. We're
going to take a look at that. We'll first
examine the penetration of spectator sports into our culture, before
re-examining the psychological underpinnings of the mass brainwashing
operation.
The 'Sporting' War
As we have said before, the most effective
brainwashing of Americans is the kind that they don't
realize is happening, the so-called soft brainwashing.
I want you to think back to an image we referred
to earlier. In February 1991, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf gave an
internationally televised briefing on the strategy and tactics of the ground
war component of Operation Desert Storm. At the time, the press compared
the general to a "successful Superbowl
coach" giving a description of the "game plan" that had earned
him victory.
Schwarzkopf had conceived the war "as if it
were a football game" and had redefined a classic military flanking maneuver in "football terms" as a Hail Mary
play. He had first explained what he was doing in those "football
terms" to his staff; he reiterated that explanation to the American
people. He was speaking a 'language' -- the language of sports -- that
"he knew" most Americans would understand.
In fact, most of the war
was presented to the American public as "if it were a spectator sporting
event", complete with statistical analysis that measured every aspect of
the fighting -- the numbers of dead, the numbers of bombs dropped, the numbers
of bullets used -- This was the 'scorecard', as the Pentagon and other briefing
officers called it, and as the press, and especially the television news,
reported it.
In the end, the American people followed General
Schwarzkopf as he tallied up the 'score' -- according to the numbers, our side
had "clearly won", just as the football team
that scores more points wins its game. And just
like with a televised football game, the
Left off the 'scorecards' were the horrific
casualties to innocent Iraqi women and children and the devastation to that
nation's vital 'civilian' infrastructure. Such pictures have, for the most part even today, been kept from the
American people in order to preserve the image of the "clean war"
fought within the bounds of "good sportsmanship".
How well did this presentation work? Think
about your own responses to the war and to the Schwarzkopf briefing. Didn't you find yourself 'rooting' for the "home
team", the Americans and their allies? And
didn't you feel elated when you were told and shown the results with maps and
charts, in much the same way that you might feel if your favorite
team won a championship like the Superbowl?
Around the country, in the same bars where the
television sets feature Monday Night Football or the Basketball Game of the
Week, there were reported to be raucous celebrations after the
"victory" in the Gulf War, similar to what occurs when the home team
wins such televised games. "I feel like we've won the Superbowl", one middle-age bargoer
told a reporter that night. "No, better, like
we've won two Superbowls."
Remember our Hal Becker, the brainwasher from
the Futures Group who disdainfully calls all of you "homo the
saps." Back in 1981, he commented on the Vietnam War
experience.
When a survey was taken
after the war asking Americans to name a figure from history to which they
compared General Schwarzkopf, few people named military leaders like General
Dwight Eisenhower or General Douglas MacArthur.
Instead, "many people" named the late Green Bay Packer football
coach, Vince Lombardi, the winner of the first two Superbowls
in 1967-68. Lombardi is, among other things, famous for a quote that
General Schwarzkopf admires: "Winning isn't everything. It is the only
thing."
The "sports psyche" that Becker refers
to is imbedded deep within American culture. It
is why people understood what General Schwarzkopf was talking about with his
"Hail Mary Play" and it is why "he himself understood what he
was doing in that way". It is reflected in
that Lombardi quote about winning. It should more appropriately be called
the "jock persona", a mythical mass "universalized addiction" to all these
sports. Most 'fans' will watch all the sports named, with the possible
exception of hockey, which still lacks franchises and therefore fans in many
parts of the country. This universalizing process is the result of a proliferation
of teams fueled by television revenues and a
television-created mass audience.
Sports and TV
At the dawn of the television age in 1950, there
was only one truly national sport, baseball, which had a 152 game season,
running from April to October, when the World Series is
played, for 20 teams divided into two leagues. The National
Football League had a schedule running from September to December, with a
single championship game. The National Basketball Association had many
fewer teams than it does today, playing a shorter season culminating in a
championship series, while the six-team National Hockey League, with teams only
in New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Montreal and Toronto playing from
October to March in a 50-game season, culminating in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Now, 40 years after the mass proliferation of
television and 15 years after the start of the mass penetration of pay cable
networks, football and basketball have joined baseball as truly national
sports, with hockey expanding its regional base.
There are now 28 baseball teams playing a
162-game season, extending from April to October, with a
spring training from February through April that features some televised
games; the season culminates in playoffs which, in turn, end in the World
Series. The NFL now has 28 teams in two
conferences playing a 16-game schedule running from September through the end
of December when playoffs are held which end in the
single-most viewed sporting event, the Superbowl in
late January. The NBA has 27 teams playing an 82-game schedule, which
runs from October to the beginning of April, with playoffs that can run until
May. The NHL now has 24 teams in an 82-game season running from October
to mid-April, with playoffs that can run until early June.
There is now a total, year-round brainwashing
immersion of huge numbers of Americans in televised spectator sports -- As the
sports' leagues expand, as the seasons enlarge, the addicted are becoming
"more addicted" and the television set is the major source for their
'fix'.
Before television, the four mass spectator
sports under discussion had a total yearly attendance of 30 million (1950
figures, approximate). Now, their total in-person attendance is more than
triple that figure.
However, well over "1 billion" people
watch such events on television. The television audience for the Superbowl 'alone' is more than 100 million in the
We are not talking here about so many billion
viewers who each watch a single, different sporting event. We are talking
about the "habituated viewing" of several hundreds of events by a
segment of the population that numbers in the several "tens of millions",
and the viewing of a hundred or so events by another population segment double
or triple that figure.
The Psychology of a Fanatic
As we learned in the previous sections of this
report, the soft brainwashing process that alters or creates social values relies on
'habituated' viewing habits. And this brings us
to the first point of our thesis, which many of you sports addicts may have
challenged when we first offered it. Your repeated habituated viewing of
sports, especially televised sports, has altered the way you think. In
fact, the more you watch sports, the less capable you are of morally informed
reasoning. You are losing your mind to your 'fanaticism', to your
addiction to sports.
Sports are a totally unimportant and meaningless
activity for human existence. Whether one team or another wins a
particular game, whether it be a minor league baseball game or the Superbowl, it is totally and
absolutely 'meaningless for the present and future existence of human
civilization on this planet.
The problem is that most of you don't really believe this. Oh, you can accept it in
the 'abstract', all right. You know that whether the Redskins or the
Cowboys win won't make a bit of difference as to
whether the depression is ended. But sports are
a part of your "private mental life", they are like a "personal
possession" that has little objective real value, but to you has a great
deal of subjective, emotional value. And you
really don't like someone telling you what to do about these "personal
parts" of your life. You sort of resent it,
don't you?
But now take a good look at
yourself.
It's Sunday afternoon. You sit in front of
the television set, your hands sweating, as your favorite
football team is locked in a tight game with their
bitter rival. The clock is ticking down. One more good play, and they'll be in range of the winning field
goal. The pass is completed. You thrust your fist in the air, as
the home stadium crowd roars its approval through the television set's speakers.
Your hands are wet with sweat; the crowd is
cheering. They line up for the field goal. You can't
sit still; you rise from the chair. Now, you can't
even watch and you look away from the screen. The kick is up.
"It's...it's goooood,"
says the announcer and you jump up and down, as the fans in the stands are
shown celebrating. They've won, you think, and
you 'feel' great.
If the kick had missed its mark, and 'your' team
had lost, you would have 'felt' bad and dejected, and so would all its other
fans, both in the stadium and watching on their television sets.
For the three or so hours of that game, the
world outside the television set "did not exist". People were
dying in Bosnia. Others were starving in Africa. Within a few miles
of the stadium, youths were destroying themselves with drugs. The economy
continued to go to hell. But for those three
hours and especially those last few moments, that world, "the world that
matters", did not exist.
'Emotionally' this game and all other games, to
one degree or another, do 'mean' something to you. This
is the "infantile emotionalism" that we are talking about.
It does not involve your "reasoning capacity" at all; it bypasses it
completely, putting you into a state of emotionalized fantasy, disfiguring your
creative "reasoning power" in much the same way as an intense sexual
fantasy.
If someone should try to deny you your 'fix', to
turn off your 7-30 hours of sports on television a week or reduce your viewing
hours, you'd scream bloody murder and maybe even physically assault whoever
tried to enforce such an unwanted change in your addictive behavior.
That is how 'addicted' you are to your "emotional fix" on
sports. And this is one of the ways in which you
are 'brainwashed' by television.
The Making of Sports
Into
A Secular Religion
The same theoretical outlook that was behind the
mass brainwashing of Nazi Germany is found in the mass
crowd phenomenon of spectator sports. Sigmund Freud's principal point in
"Mass Psychology and the Study of the I" was
that masses of people can be organized around appeals to the emotions.
Mass rallies, for example, appeal not to reason, but to the emotions, in order
for the appeals to be successful. The most powerful such appeals are to
the 'unconscious', which has the power to dominate and throw aside reason.
"The mass has never thirsted for
truth", he writes. "They demand illusions and cannot do without them.
They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as what
is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the
two."
Freud further states that under this condition,
with Man's reason dominated by 'emotionalism' and unable
and 'unwilling' to look for Truth, the individual in a mass or crowd loses his
moral conscience, or what Freud calls his "ego ideal". This is
not necessarily a bad thing for the individual, [the evil Freud claims], since
the moral conscience which he later named the 'Over I' or 'superego',
causes Man to "unnaturally" repress His basic animal instincts; this,
Freud claims, produces neuroses.
In a crowd organized around people's emotions,
the individual will exhibit a tendency to "let himself go", to free
himself of all moral and social inhibitions:
"Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual;
in a crowd, he is a barbarian -- that is, a creature
acting by instinct... Nothing about it [how a person behaves under such
crowd condition] is premeditated..."
"It [a crowd] cannot tolerate any delay
between its desires and the fulfillment of what it
desires", writes Freud, stating that this is why the individual is so
willing to let himself become a part of a powerful
mass experience which can gratify those emotional desires.
Such crowds, observes Freud, have regressed to
"the mental life of children". They operate, not according to
reason, but according to irrational, emotional desires. In this mindless,
emotional state, individuals are easily manipulated by
leaders who can shift the values of the masses to coincide with the crowd's
infantile fantasies.
We'll take a look at a
typical sports crowd.
You're watching a professional
hockey game. Sitting next to you are an
accountant and a school teacher, each in declining middle age. Below you is a teenage couple; over to the side is a banker, and just
behind you are a couple of lawyers, with their young sons.
It's a close game.
"Knock that bum down", screams the lawyer,
"Don't let him skate like that."
"Kill him", screams the lawyer's young
son. "Put the body on him."
A fight breaks out on the ice between two
players. The crowd rises, cheering wildly as the home team player lands
punch after punch, bloodying his opponent. The lawyers cheer the
loudest. The announcement of penalties is greeted
with more cheers for the home team combatant, as the referees escort the
players to the penalty boxes.
Finally, the action begins again. A home
team player breaks in for a clear shot on the goal. The little black puck
shoots into the net behind the opposing goalie. A goal.
Lights flash all around and pandemonium breaks out in the crowd. The
banker gets so excited that he spills his beer all over the teenage
couple. Everyone is laughing. Everyone is happy, as they celebrate the home team's goal.
Was there any difference in the behavior in that crowd of the adults and the
children? Not really. What has been described is a common example of the "mass
infantilism" that we have referred to.
Now think for a moment about the televised
football game we described earlier. The person described was not 'in' a
crowd per se, but was watching a televised game in his living room.
"Yet he displayed the same kind of emotional responses as if he were
present at the stadium". This demonstrates the power of televised
sports to induce behavior in what the brainwashers
call an "extended crowd".
In the television era,
there are two audiences for every sporting event -- one that is present at the
event and one that is viewing the event, usually, as it happens, on the
television screen. The first audience is limited by
the size of the stadium, and even the largest stadiums are limited to well
under 100,000 people. The television audience, especially for a major
sporting event like a football game, numbers in the millions.
The spectator in the stadium,
as well as the viewer in the living room, are linked by the common
perception of the events on the "playing field". They are aware
of each other's existence -- The fanatic at home hears the crowd noise on the
television set and sees shots of the packed stands. The fan in the stands
knows of the massive television viewership
"through his own and his fellow fans' habituated viewing
habits". "If I were home, I'd be watching", he
thinks. If he is at the game, he hopes to attract the attention of the
television camera crews, so that he might be seen by the fans
at home.
The television brainwashers like Fred Emery of Tavistock have noted this phenomena.
Someone watching his favorite show is only 'vaguely'
aware that others are watching as well, giving rise to a sense of
isolation. The viewer of a sporting event is 'keenly' aware of the
existence of others, the brainwashers say, and therefore participates in a
common "mass experience of enormous perceived importance". The
perception of importance is self-validating -- If one million people are doing
the same thing, at the same time, it 'must' be important.
Each sporting event, therefore, takes on a "psychoiogical
significance" to the viewer. It becomes a common, emotional bond
between him or herself and "one million or more" other people.
Some recent psychological surveys of Americans between the ages 15 and 50 found
that when they were asked to list significant events that occurred within their
lifetimes, an extremely large number listed "sporting events", and
many listed several such events.
Similarly, among American males especially, this
'co-participation' in spectator sports, creates a sense of 'identity' with
fellow 'fanatics'. A Mets fan walking down the street seeing another
person wearing a baseball cap with a Mets logo develops a sense of
'comradeship' with this unknown other. He gives him a wave, and maybe a
raised fist, signifying solidarity with "the cause". The same
person will routinely avert his eyes from the gaze of a homeless person and
even another person dressed the same as he. Thus, the "mass
spectator experience" extends beyond the time-frame
of any single game or even season, to become a part of the personality, a
process of childlike 'identification' with objects and feeling states.
The point to be made here is that viewing
spectator sports in a habituated way, over an extended period
of time, does alter a person's personality, because it causes him to
respond to situations from an emotionally determined set of reference points.
As we said, it makes you stupid and more animal-like.
This is not something that can be turned on or
off like a television set. Just as we have explained previously that the
"hidden messages" of the television stay with you even when the set
is off, "playing back" even years later, so does this pattern of
"emotional, non-thinking response", caused by habituated viewing of
sports, stay with you.
Playback
Now, think back to what we had said about the
Gulf War and the briefing by General Norman Schwarzkopf on how the plan of
attack against Iraq secured military victory. Try to remember "your
response" to this briefing, that so openly and
consciously was made to resemble a football coach's victory press
conference. Didn't it call up the same kind of
emotional response that you had when 'your' team won an important game?
Didn't you want to raise your fist in the air and say: "We really knocked
the crap out of the Iraqis, didn't we. We really
took it to them." "This is your sports mentality playing back,
on cue."
The people who organized that press conference
'knew' that you had been programmed to respond that way. By using the
'language' of sports to describe the war, they were triggering a 'playback' of
infantile emotions associated with spectator sports, thereby limiting your
critical reasoning capacities.
A month earlier, the 1991 Superbowl
between the New York Giants and Buffalo Bills had featured a halftime
spectacular, staged by Hollywood producers, with the
"nothing-should-be-spared" cooperation of the U.S. Department of Defense, "celebrating the dedication" of the game
to the war effort, then in its savage aerial bombardment phase. With
80,000 people in the stands wearing yellow ribbons for the troops standing and
cheering, waves of military planes flew over the Orange Bowl. More than
"150 million" people in this country watched the halftime
extravaganza end with rock singer Whitney Houston screeching her way through
the National Anthem. "Her rendition, complete with fireworks, was turned
into a rock video and was soon the number one song in sales in the United
States."
As several commentators noted, the Superbowl had been turned into
"the largest war rally in the history of the world". It was the 'spirit' of that Superbowl
"war rally", that "coach" Schwarzkopf evoked, quite
consciously, with his briefing.
Be Like Mike
Let's shift focus
slightly. You and your son are watching a close basketball game, in its
final seconds. The clock ticks down, as Michael Jordan, the superstar of
the Chicago Bulls, takes the ball at mid-court.
"It's all down to one play", says the
television announcer. "It's all up to Michael. They're clearing out the
lane for him."
Then the announcer is silent, as the clock ticks
off the time in tenths of a second. It's under
ten seconds now. Jordan starts his move toward the basket.
Suddenly, near the foul line, he feints to his left, then
twists around to his right, launching himself into the air. Somehow, he is propelled through a maze of arms, to the rim and he slams
the ball through. The clock reads no time left.
"He's done it", screams the announcer.
"Or should I say, he's done it again!
Amaaazing!"
Did you ever think about what goes on in your
son's mind as he watches the game? On the one hand, he is 'fixated' on
the screen, taking in the action as it happens. But
something else is going on as well -- He is fantasizing that he could "Be
Like Mike", as the ad for the sports drink says in its jingle, that he
could be famous and spectacular like Jordan or another athlete. He will
try to act out this fantasy, perhaps by trying to practice and copy some
"move" or mannerism of the superstar athlete,
or under certain circumstances by buying some product the athlete
endorses. In such ways are sports 'heroes' copied by the young.
But what about you?
How do you watch the same events? You're in
middle age or slightly younger. Superstardom has passed you by. In
your heart of hearts, you know that you can't really
"Be Like Mike", in that 35 to 45 year old body of yours. But the "dream" dies hard -- You still can connect
with fantasies and times of your youth, through the sports viewing
experience. "You could have been like Mike, if only things were different",
you fantasize.
You have been "transported" to an
infantile state, through associations and identifications with experiences of
youth. This is made possible by the
now-universal mass culture of sports, and especially television sports; you
remember some game that you may have seen or even played in, some experience
akin to what is taking place on the screen in front of you. It is this
power to make associations with an infantile, fantasized past, that is a key to
much of the power that spectator sports has over you. "It is a way
to shut off the reality of the current world, by calling forth a fantasy world
in which your infantile self participates".
Often, the habituated viewing of spectator
sports will have the effect of creating a "false past" for the
individual, in which he or she has so strongly imagined some fantasy from his
childhood, that he now believes it to be true. Many males who never made
it close to a football field will tell their friends that they actually played
for their schools.
The habituated viewing of spectator sports calls
forth the most infantile part of a person, and that infantilism often leads to
a distortion of one's true self and past, further crippling creative reason.
None of this started with television; it has been
going on far longer than that. But, as we have
said before, the mass proliferation of sports through television has
universalized this 'neurosis' throughout much of the adult male population.
Brainwashing by Numbers
We have also noted that fanatics have their
unique way to communicate with each other. The 'language' of sports,
meaning the terms used to describe various actions, rules, etc. of the major
sports, have become a part of popular language. It is for this reason
that the Schwarzkopf briefing could be understood by those
watching it.
A major portion of the "sports
language" is 'numbers' -- the endless amount of statistical information
used to quantify and therefore analyze the events
taking place on the "playing field". These numbers are totally useless for the conduct of human affairs on a
day-to-day basis. They tell people nothing about the real world or things
that might truly matter in their daily lives. Yet, it is a simple fact, that more people can tell you what the records of the
starting pitchers are in today's Yankee-Orioles baseball game, than where the
dollar closed in Tokyo.
My father once tried to impress on me the
frivolity of sports "numbers". He told me that when he was a young clerk in a
shipping firm he was riding the elevator with a friend. He and his friend
were rattling off a comparison between the batting averages of the then
Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants starting teams, arguing furiously over the
merits of the players.
Later that day, my father was
called to the office of the president of the company to bring some price
quotes on brass valves. There was one missing.
"What's the price on this?" the
president asked him.
"I don't know," my father
replied. "I'll have to go look it up."
"I was on the elevator with you a little
while ago", said the president, quite angrily. "Id have gotten an answer immediately if I asked you Willie
Mays' batting average. That you know by heart, but what I pay you to know
you have to look up!"
But aside from creating
useless and meaningless clutter in the minds of millions of sports fans, the
statistical explosion around sports has had another, more important
mind-destroying effect. It has tended to cause people to try to judge
everything by numbers, by 'counting' and, in so doing,
it has made them more prone to brainwashing through "public opinion
polls" of the type we have discussed in previous sections of this
report. The pollsters themselves have noted this. They say that
Americans have been conditioned by sports statistics
to accept the statistical results of polls as "inherently true".
It is easy to see why from a typical sports
argument. "Listen", says one fellow. "I say that Conseco isn't half the player that Cal Ripken
is."
"Oh yeah?",
says the other guy, "Well just look at his numbers. He has more
career home runs, more runs batted in..."
"Right, but Ripken
has a higher lifetime batting average and he has played in 1,730 consecutive
games", the first fellow answers. And so on.
These "debates" take place 'millions'
of times every day. In each, statistics are used
as "accurate measurements". They are accepted
as 'facts', to be used in argument.
Poll results are presented
in the same way. As a result of your
brainwashing by sports and sports statistics, you never bother to question
whether such results are fraudulent. "Hey, just
show me the numbers", says the sports fan.
"If it's a statistic, then it's a fact."
Such "statistical reasoning", with
everything placed into neatly counted categories, with "facts" represented
as columns of counted objects, is coherent with an 'Aristotelian'
representation of the universe. It leads to a linear interpretation, to a
fixed reality.
"Truth", as we have been discussing
Truth in this series, can "never be defined from such arrays of
statistically presented facts". Truth is located in the 'process' of
creative reason that determines the hypothesis governing the means by which
hypotheses 'change'. The "Socratic method", as practiced by
Plato and the great Christian thinkers, like St. Augustine, seeks Truth in
"what cannot be counted", and in the rejection of a fixed, counted
universe. It is "a quality of mind",
the same quality of creative reason that allows Man to participate in God's
creation, and that distinguishes Him from the animal, that alone determines
Truth.
Habituated sports viewing leads to a fixation on
'numbers' and the statistical representation of Truth. This fixation
'neurotically' reduces the ability of the mind to reason in the
"Socratic" manner necessary to discover Truth.
The Gambling Disease
The fixation of the sports fanatic on numbers
also leads to another addiction -- Gambling. Sports gambling, both legal
and illegal, through an organized-crime controlled network of betting parlors, is a "multi-hundred billion dollar annual
business". Like sports itself, it is controlled and encouraged
through the oligarchy's Dope, Inc., the international drug cartel which uses
the betting process to launder dope monies.
The sports fanatic turned serious bettor, begins to associate 'only' with the numerical
content of the games, reduced to the so-called 'odds'. According to
studies, they care little about actual teams and tend only to have a "favorite" team if it wins money for them. To do
so, to "win" money for the bettor, the team "need not win"
its games, only "beat the point spread", to lose by fewer points than
the odds had predicted.
In the end, the sports gambler gets his 'fix'
from the thrill of putting himself at the "mercy of the gods of
Fate". He may pretend that there is science to what he does, that there is a "system" by which one carefully places
his or her bets to beat the "odds". But
any gambler knows that what drives him to continue to bet is the sensation that
when one has won, that he has somehow defeated the gods of Fate.
Figures show that the number of people afflicted
with the "sports gambling neurosis", a variant of the overall sports
neurosis, is growing. While some government officials profess concern
about this, the fact is that it is the government itself
which is increasingly directly sponsoring the growth of sports
gambling. Several states, such as Washington, have now legalized betting
point spreads on football and other games; it is justified as a means to
generate revenue, with the argument being that if the state didn't
tap the gambling cash flow, the monies would simply be bet elsewhere.
Some preliminary studies have revealed, however,
that well-advertised, state-sponsored sports betting 'encourages' gambling
among people "who would not have thought to bet otherwise".
Learning to 'Root'
This leads us back to a discussion of 'who' is
responsible for the growth of the mind-destroying sports addiction in the
United States, and the role that television has played in that process.
As we have shown, before the advent of
television, there was only one truly national sport, baseball, and its
brainwashing effect on the population was limited. Not surprisingly, it was found in that pre-television period that sports
fanaticism within a given population was dependent on the ability to attend
games, be they at a "major league" or "minor league"
level. The highest-penetration mass media of the time, radio, provided a
means to maintain fan interest when it was impossible to attend games, but the
effectiveness of that medium in promoting fanaticism depended upon the
'possibility' of attendance at games.
This brings us to an important observation about
how the brainwashing process works. The process by which someone becomes
an obsessive sports fanatic is culturally learned. You are taught by
American culture how to 'root', how to respond to the 'cues' that
bring forth the "emotional, infantile" responses from the
individual.
A few decades back, I was in attendance
at a Mets game at the old Polo Grounds in New York. By baseball standards, it was an
"exciting" game, with the cheering crowd very much "into"
the events on the field.
I couldn't help notice
one fellow in our section of the stands who seemed quite "out of
it". He sat in silence as fans all around him rose to cheer a home
run by the home team. At first, I thought he was rooting for the other
team. Then, I saw him sit in the same stony silence when they, too, hit a
home run. I decided to ask him if something were wrong.
"I'm from England, you see", he
said. "I thought if I read some books about your baseball, I could
follow what was happening. But I just can't get what you chaps are all so
thrilled about."
Such examples tend to disprove LeBon's contention that crowd behavior
is based on what he called 'contagion', or simple
"copy cat" type responses to what fellow crowd members were
doing. Freud's observation that a crowd must be 'cued' to respond to
events, or directed by a 'leader' is more to the point. The baseball
crowd is "culturally led", conditioned by a mass sports culture to
make the "proper" infantile emotional responses to the events on the
playing field.
The Englishman, whom I learned was quite a
sports fanatic within his own culture -- cricket and soccer were his obsessions
-- was completely "lost", looking for 'cues' in baseball.
The 'intensity' of a person's connection to the
sports experience -- "how deeply you are addicted" -- has some
relationship to a 'visual' experience, not just reading about them or listening
to radio broadcasts. Stated another way, spectator sports must be watched to "hook" you. The more you
watch, the more intensely you become hooked, the more infantile your potential responses, and the more impaired your creative reasoning
powers, for the reasons previously discussed.
Television provides the perfect vehicle for the
mass promotion of spectator sports brainwashing. It fixates the mind on
the images on the "playing field", totally immersing the brainwash
victim in the sports experience. As studies done by media analysts have
shown, television recreates the excitement of being at the event, while it is
happening, establishing an identity between all those who are watching and all
those present in the stands, in a way that even the most skilled radio sports
announcers could only approximate.
Think for a moment about how you learned to root
for a sports team. Isn't it true that your first
memory of spectator sports is watching a game with your father or brother?
You learned that it was alright to respond emotionally
to what you saw at the stadium or on the screen. You followed the
'infantile' behavior of your elders in rooting for
your team. Isn't it also true that among your
first discussions about seemingly adult events, centered
on the exploits of one of those teams that your brothers, sisters, or parents
were interested in?
This pattern of behavior
is true even for areas where in-person attendance is not possible, or only
possible in a very limited way. It is true because of the widespread
availability of spectator sports on 'television'.
Who Controls Your Pusher?
As we have shown elsewhere, everything that you
see and have seen on television is a result of decisions by a
small elite. This elite controls the major
television networks, the cable channels and the major production studios.
This elite is, in turn, controlled, both directly and
indirectly, by oligarchical banking and financial
interests centered in New York, London and similar financial centers.
These are the people who
deploy the brainwashers at such places as the Tavistock
Institute and the networks of the Frankfurt School. They were patrons and
promoters of such people as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and were ultimately
responsible for putting Hitler into power. As we have shown, they have
promoted 'television' as their principal means of mass-brainwashing control.
It is this "oligarchical elite" who have sanctioned the massive
proliferation and promotion of spectator sports on television in order to
brainwash you, in much the same way that their factional ancestors used the
"Roman spectacles", with their gladiator and other sports
competitions, to control the masses. With the approval of this
elite, billions of dollars in television money was channeled
into the promotion and expansion of the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the
National Hockey League (NHL), as well as major league baseball.
Starting in the late 1940s and continuing
through much of the 1950s, sports programming on television represented the
single largest block of any programming type, enabling sports to achieve a
saturation of the population as had never occurred before in history.
The sports teams themselves, until the most
recent period, were owned by powerful families, many of whom
had connections to either the "oligarchical
elite" itself or to organized crime networks, sanctioned and controlled by
this oligarchy and the organized crime-linked Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL).
The Mara family -- which owns football's New York Giants -- and the Yawkey family -- which owns baseball's Boston Red Sox -- are examples of this. Sports teams were often passed on as possessions from one generation to
the next in these families, much as the oligarchs transfer their other
possessions.
In the beginning, much of the money came from
brewery-linked interests who were, in turn, connected
to criminal organizations during the Prohibition period, such as the Rupert
interests that formerly owned the New York Yankees. Some of these
"beer" connections remain today, for example, between the Busch
family and baseball's St. Louis Cardinals.
In the more recent period, there has been a
growing interlock with interests associated with Dope, Inc. and its propaganda
and defense arm, the networks of the ADL. Often these interests are included within
financial groupings that own teams; for example,
George Bush's family involvement in the Texas Rangers baseball team.
Occasionally, they appear undisguised, as in the form of
organized-crime-connected George Steinbrenner, the once and future owner of the
Yankees.
Overlap With Media Elites
There is now also a direct overlap between media
and sports elites. One example is television mogul Ted Turner, the owner
of Cable News Network and the Atlanta Braves. Another example is
Time/Warner's ownership of Madison Square Garden, along with the New York
Rangers hockey team, the New York Knicks basketball
team, and the MSG sports cable network.
At the behest of the oligarchs who control our
political establishment, professional sports has been given important
exemptions from anti-trust provisions, enabling the major sports teams
collectively to operate "as if they were a trust", in the worst robber-baron
tradition of that term. Sports team management rigs ticket prices,
establishes television contracts, sets salary and compensation rates, etc.
This has created a pool of "billions of
dollars" for the massive promotion of the nation's sports addiction.
As is usually the case with mass addictions, the 'addicts' -- the sports
fanatics themselves -- fund both the profit and the expansion of their own
addiction. At this point, sales within the U.S. economy alone related to
consumer "sports purchases" -- tickets, equipment, cable services,
and literature, but excluding the costs of the salaries of players, television
contracts -- are estimated in the "several
hundreds of billions of dollars" annually.
Getting Your Daily Fix
If sports are a mind-destroying addiction, then
television is your "main pusher". It is the principal means by
which the majority of the nation's sports addicts get
their "daily fix".
on any given day, no
matter what the season, there will be approximately 30 million 'different' sets
tuned to sporting events, according to an industry study. Obviously, on
certain days, with "special" games like the World Series or
basketball playoffs, those numbers will double, triple, or even quadruple. For an event like the Superbowl, the figure might go higher still.
While early television sports programming helped
expand interest in mass spectator sports, it also helped 'hook' our population
on habituated television viewing. In the early 1950s, when Americans
first bought television sets in large numbers, more than half the purchasers
listed "sports programming" as their main reason for the
purchase. That was not surprising -- More than 30 percent of all people
buying newspapers say that they do so for the sports pages, and well more than
half say that they read the sports pages first and longer than any other
section of the paper.
The sports seasons are to be
compared to a "serialized story", whose conclusion is unknown,
lasting over a period of several months. Thus, each sports contest has a
'past', a history that involves the teams in the event and their records and
deeds prior to the game. It has a 'present', in the events of the game
itself. And, it has an "anticipated
future", the implication being that even though the result of a particular
contest might be final, the outcome of the season, as a whole, remains in
doubt.
When the season concludes, there is always next
season: "Wait 'til next year" is the refrain of the fans of losing
teams. A variant of that for a person who roots for 'many' teams in the
same area, is "Wait 'til the next season", when he hopes that a team
in another sport will do better than the one that has just "failed"
him.
In this way, the viewer is 'programmed' to move
from game to game, from season to season, without leaving his couch.
Sports contests, especially major sports contests, are thus the perfect
"soap opera television serial", and as such, encourage habituated
viewing. It should not surprise anyone that the brainwashers who profiled
response to television knew this from their earliest studies.
None of this would work if television couldn't bring the mass-brainwashing experience to the
subject in an effective way. The television camera limits the field of
view. It can create isolation from the common crowd experience described
by Freud and others in his "mass psychology".
Early television, while capturing the excitement
of seeing a sports event as it was happening, often underplayed the sense that
millions were watching as the viewer was watching. In part, this was
because of the limits of the new technology -- The single camera tended to
fixate on the prime point of action in each game and the crowd miking was
poor. In part, it was because early announcers tended to chatter too much.
Having come from a radio experience, they described the events on the field, thus
duplicating what the camera could see.
Much of this has since been
corrected, from the brainwashers' standpoint. New camera
technology has made available an explosion of 'viewpoints' of each game, with
the development of slow-motion instant replay and multiple camera angles.
The first games featured a single camera; now there might be as many as 10-15
at a single football game, for example. Crowd miking and modern sound
mixing bring the action closer to realism and directly into your living
room. And more importantly, the improvement in
the quality and size of the images on your screen draws the mind deeper into
the audiovisual event.
There are still some problems with announcers and
commentators who, from the brainwashers' standpoint, don't
know when to allow the images and sounds from the "playing fields" to
speak for themselves. The balance is still being "fine tuned",
so to speak. If the mix still offends the true sports fanatic, there is
always the mute button on the remote control.
Roone Arledge,
the former head of ABC-TV Sports, and the man who developed the format for
"Monday Night Football", talks about sports programming needing to
capture the full sense of the "spectacle." The idea, he says,
is "not to bring the game to the viewer, but to bring the viewer to the
game". There are variations on that theme, but the concept is the
same -- You must "grab the mind of the fan" and then hold it within
the fantasy world being projected on the screen.
If successful, your efforts will succeed because the "infantile
emotional connection" to the event will be made by the viewer -- He
will get his 'fix'.
By the way, Arledge no
longer heads ABC Sports -- He now heads ABC News!
And Now to the Videotape
Before we move on to the last section of our
report, we should make some observations on the role of television news in
promoting your sports addiction.
The sports slot is usually the longest single
slot in the local evening news program. It features highlights of the
local teams' games, as well as highlights from other games of sports in
season. According to profiling information, the local sportscast is most often given as a reason for watching a particular
station's local news programming. Such surveys found that viewers cared
most strongly about how their sports news was reported.
In addition, while, as we have reported
elsewhere, viewers had trouble remembering details of news stories reported,
studies have also shown that most sports fans "will remember the major
sports story of a given night". They will also remember the scores
of their team's games.
In large part, this is because much of the
language of sports is 'numbers', and the 'scores' are the major content of
sports news programming. Sports addicts are like idiot savants; they have
a surprising memory for otherwise useless numbers. The more television
gives them such numbers, the more they will clutter their minds with them, and
the less they will be able to exercise their power of reason.
Instead, they will use them to communicate the
next day with their fellow brainwashed victims:
"Hey, did you see McGuire's 40th homer on
the news last night? 475 feet over the left field wall.
Some shot, huh?"
"I know how to make everyone go crazy,
completely nuts", the brainwasher Hal Becker said a while
back. "Just have a phony highlight tape of
a big football game. It's easy to do. Then run the wrong score.
People will go crazy. They won't be able to
figure out what happened. They need the television sports news to
'confirm' the results of what they saw with their own eyes in the
afternoon. If they don't match, they'll go into a loop."
Now we are ready to look at our national sports
addiction -- an addiction 'pushed' through habituated television viewing --
from another vantage point.
Let's set the scene,
again. It is the last game of the World Series. The last inning, the last chance
for the home team, "your team", and they trail by one lone run.
Two men out. Men
on second and third. A two-strike count on the
batter. Another strike and it's all
over. A hit will win the game. The camera brings you a shot of the
pitcher, as he gets ready for the pitch. Another camera shoots the
batter, as he cocks the bat, waiting. The score, a reminder of the
proximity to an outcome, flashes on the screen.
The palms of your hands are wet with
tension. You think to yourself, "Come on, you can do it. Just a hit. That's all we need."
The pitcher winds, and as he does, "you
cross your fingers and say a little prayer". The ball is delivered, and "you pray a little stronger, a little
harder" in that instant before it arrives at its destination.
Now let's freeze that
for a moment.
Who, or better yet, "what"
were you praying to? To God, the Divine Creator of all
the universe? Not really. A
religious person would hardly think that God should waste his time on such
trivial matters. A less than religious person would not think to ask for
Divine intercession.
No, at that moment, in the bottom of the ninth,
with two outs and two strikes, you were probably asking for help from "the
gods", those mystical forces who control the 'Fates', which we are told by
those who study such matters, play such an important role in sporting contests.
The sports fanatic believes in such things as
the 'Fates' and the control of events by mystical forces outside the laws of
the Universe. Sports and sporting events, in the minds of these fanatics,
exist, to use a sports term, "out of bounds" of normal religion, and
most decidedly 'outside' Christianity.
The religion of sports is a "mystical
cult", based on the infantile emotions. It posits a universe outside
that which is governed by the laws of the Universe
that can be known by the powers of creative reason. It is a cult which has its "rituals and celebrations of that
which can never be known". It teaches Man that He is ultimately
helpless against "the Fates", the mystical gods of "irrational
emotions".
Judeo-Christian civilization has taught us that
Man is made in the image of his Creator, and that what
distinguishes Him from the animal is His power of creative reason. By
that power, Man can discover the laws of the universe and participate in the
Creation.
Most importantly, all men are
created equal -- not in the corporeal sense that their bodies are equal,
but equal in the "potential of their creative capacities" at
birth. It is the responsibility of society to assure that each individual
is given the maximum opportunity to fulfill that creative potential, and thereby to contribute
to Mankind's search for perfection of its knowledge.
The "pagan cult" of sports preaches
the opposite -- Man is a two-legged animal, whose reason must ultimately fail
Him before mystical gods of fate, and who is driven by
a brutish, animal-like aggressiveness. Such "men" are decidedly
unequal, with some men created more equal than others,
as evidenced by the god-like athletes of the various playing fields.
While such views most clearly undermine
Christian thinking, they are promoted by many sports
ideologues as the celebration of the highest good of human culture -- an
organized, ritualized competition, in which men submit to arbitrary
rules. This, we are told, represents the essence
of human beauty and ethical conduct. American sports, we are told, as
represented by the major spectator sports, are the best of American culture,
and contain ail the basic truths that America needs to impart from one
generation to the next.
Such a sports ideologue is Michael Novak, a
failed seminarian, who has become a "theologian" within conservative
American Catholic circles. Novak fashioned himself into an apologist for
the degenerate American conservative culture of the Reagan-Bush years.
Novak sees Anglo-American capitalism as the highest form of Christian culture,
and views sports as a necessary component of that culture.
Given who Novak is, we shall argue that his
thinking represents the outlook of that pagan, oligarchical elite responsible for your sports addiction.
When he speaks of an 'ethics' of sport, he is speaking of an Arisototelian ethics, a mere set of arbitrary rules and
codes. In his many writings, Novak alludes several times to his affinity
for the work of Aristotle. Novak's repeated attacks on the concept of the
'infinite' as being inferior to what he calls the "ritual limits" of
sports are a denial of the possibility of the existence of universal truth.
Novak's views on these matters and his
"image of Man as an animal" are identical to those of the evil
brainwasher Sigmund Freud. Much of Novak's theology of sports is derived from Freudian notions of repression and sex
drives.
Novak's moral outlook is the same as that of the
Spartan state, which also idealized and promoted sports and competition.
His "mystical gnosticism" is akin to the
outlook of the "Nazi state", put into power by the same oligarchy
that sponsors and promotes American sports, through its brainwashing tool, television.
Novak's 1975 book "The Joy of Sports",
from which we will quote extensively, therefore provides us with some insight
into how your brainwashers and their controllers view the effect of sports on
your mind and society.
A Secular Religion
In this book, Novak lays out the thesis that
American sports, especially since its mass penetration into the population with
the advent of television, have become a "civil or secular religion",
holding sway over the masses:
"In the study of civil religions, our thinkers
have too much neglected sports.... Sports are a universal language
binding our diverse nation, especially its men, together. Not all our
citizens have the gift of faith. Even so, The
religion is an ample one, and it allows great freedom for diverse
interpretations and mutual dissents. Our sports are liturgies -- but do
not have dogmatic creeds. There is no long bill of doctrines to
recite. We bring the hungers of our spirits, and many of them, not all, are filled -- filled with a beauty, excellence and grace few
other institutions now afford. Our sports need to be reformed -- "Ecclesia semper reformanda". Let not too much be claimed for
them. But what they do so superbly needs our thanks, our watchfulness,
our intellect, and our acerbic love."
"The institutions of state generate a civil
religion", writes Novak. "So do the institutions of
sport. The ancient Olympic games used to be both festivals in honor of the gods and festivals in honor
of the state -- and that has been the classical position of sports ever
since. The ceremonies of sports overlap those of state on one side and
those of the churches on the other... Going to a stadium is half like
going to a political rally, half like going to a church..."
But Novak is not saying
that sports are mere 'symbols' for religions. They satisfy
"religious needs" of the masses of the population, needs which he claims the churches are unable to satisfy or at
times even grasp:
"I am saying that sports flow outward into
action from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious -- an impulse of
freedom, respect for ritual limits, a zest for symbolic meaning, and a longing
for perfection. The athlete may of course be pagan, but sports are, as it
were, natural religions..."
"They do serve a religious function -- they
feed a deep human hunger, place humans in touch with certain dimly perceived
features of human life within the cosmos, and provide an experience of at least
a pagan sense of godliness."
"Among the godward
signs in contemporary life, sports may be the single most powerful
manifestation... Sports drive one in some dark and generic sense 'godward'..."
"Sports are religious in the sense that
they are organized institutions, disciplines and liturgies; and also in that
sense, they teach religious qualities of heart and soul. In particular,
they recreate the symbols of the cosmic struggle, in which human survival and
moral courage are not assured. To this extent,
they are not mere games, diversions or pastimes... To lose symbolizes
death, and it certainly feels like dying, but it is not death... If you
give your heart to the ritual, its effects on your inner life can be far
reaching."
Novak sees sporting contests as teaching Man of
the existence of death through the concept of 'losing'. In assigning such
importance to death, Novak is mirroring Freud, who argues in several locations
that life is the struggle between two opposing instincts --- Eros, or the
sexual drive for perpetuation of the species, and Thanatos,
or death, a drive toward Man's own destruction. The death instinct,
claims Freud, is diverted from the individual toward
the external world, and manifests itself as human "aggressiveness and
destructiveness" --- two qualities of the "human animal" which
Novak says sports "joyfully" celebrate!
The New Priesthood
Arguing against a concept of sports as 'mere'
entertainment, Novak says that the relationship between the individual fanatic
and the athlete is psychologically the same as that between a priest and his
disciples. But the priesthood being described is
a "gnostic and pagan" priesthood, not that
of Christianity. The priests are elevated into a god status:
"Athletes are not merely
entertainers. Their role is far more than that. People identify
with them in a much more priestly way. Athletes exemplify something of a
deep meaning --- frightening meaning, even..."
"Once an athlete accepts a uniform, he is,
in effect, donning priestly vestments. It is the function of the priests
to offer sacrifices. As at the Christian Mass, in athletics the priest is
also the victim -- he who offers and he who is offered is one
and the same. Often the sacrifice is literal -- smashed knees,
torn muscles, injury-abbreviated careers. He is no longer living his own
life only. Others are living in him, by him, with him. They hate
him, they love him, they berate him, they glory in
him. He has given up his personal persona and assumed a liturgical
persona. That is, he is now a representative of others. His actions
are vicariously theirs. His sufferings and his triumphs, his cowardice
and his courage, his good fortune and his ill fortune become theirs. If
the Fates favor him, they also favor
'them'. His deeds become messages from the beyond, revelations of the favor of the gods..."
"Being an active player is like living in
the select circle of the gods, of the chosen ones who act out liturgically the
anxieties of the human race and are sacrificed as ritual victims. The
contests of sports...are the eucharists."
Novak is describing 'cult' practices, and he
knows it:
"A religion, first of all, is organized and
structured. Culture is built on cult..."
Americans, Novak writes, have little connection
to the Renaissance traditions of European civilization and the values it places
on Man and the power of creative reason. Turning our Revolution on its
head and ignoring the Declaration of Independence, he claims that
"The streets of
Having broken with that Renaissance tradition of
Man created in the living image of God, Novak says that sports present the true
image of Man -- an aggressive beast, the most powerful and
pernicious of animals.
"The human animal is a warlike
animal", he writes. "Conflict is as near to truth about human
relations, even the most intimate, as any other feature. Sports dramatize
conflict. They help us visualize it, imagine it, experience it..."
"Play [as in sports] is part of the human
beast, our natural expressiveness. It flows from inner and perennial
energies, and needs no justification..."
Football, for example, teaches reality in a way
that no church or Renaissance thought can, Novak claims. It shows us that
"human life, in Hegel's phrase, is a butcher's bench. Think what
happened to the Son of God, the Prince of Peace; what happened in the
Holocaust; what has happened in recent wars, revolutions, floods and famines..."
"What is human?" asks Novak.
"What has human experience been in history? A fully humanized world,
gentle, sweet and equitable has never yet been seen on
this earth... One of 'football's' greatest satisfactions, indeed, is that
it violates the illusion of the enlightened educated person that violence has
been or will be exorcized from human life..."
Thus, Novak is telling us that sports teaches us
that Man cannot perfect His existence beyond that which is most animal in him, that the best
that can be done is to celebrate his animal nature as his "Aristotelian
true self":
"There is no use despising part of our
natures. We are of earth, earthly; descended, so they say, from other
hominids; linked by neurons and cells and organisms to
the teeming chemical and biological life of this luxuriant planet. We are
not pure minds, nor rational animals, nor separate individuals.... We are
part of the earth. And sports makes visible to
the human mind the great struggle of being and non-being that constitutes every
living thing..."
Here, Novak displays a Freudian disdain for the
Judeo-Christian concept of "imago viva Dei". Freud states in
"Civilization and Its Discontents", that Christians, in particular,
behave like "little children" who refuse to face a harsh "reality",
when "there is talk of the inborn human inclination to 'badness', to
aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well. God has
made them in the image of His own perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how
hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence of evil -- despite
protestation of Christian doctrine -- with His all-powerfulness or His
all-goodness."
All Men Are Unequal
Since it teaches us that Man is nothing more
than an aggressive animal, Novak claims that sports also 'must' teach us to
discard as meaningless the concept of all men being created equal; it teaches
the precise opposite, he claims.
The athlete, especially the professional, is
clearly not the equal of the average man -- He is a
superman, a godlike figure, with qualities that the average man can only dream
about:
"Life is not equal- God is no
egalitarian. Prowess varies with every individual."
Aristotle, says Novak, teaches us to perceive
value and beauty from this inequality. On this basic and fundamental
principle of "human inequality", says the pagan Novak, all sports and
all life are premised.
Men are not equal, according to Novak, nor are
they capable of loving humanity. Sports teaches,
he says, that aggressiveness and the drive for dominance are the most basic of
animal-like human instincts. In life as in sports, love, especially
Christian love or 'agape', hardly matters. Certainly
such a universal concept does not provide us with motivation to live a certain
kind of life, Novak claims.
"But we are not infinite... The human
imagination, heart, memory and intelligence are finite. The nature of the
human psyche is to proceed from what is close to us outward; we cannot without self-deception begin by embracing
everything. To claim to love humanity is to carry a very large and thin
pane of glass toward a collision with someone you can't abide."
Here we find Novak in total agreement with
Freud. In his "Civilization and Its Discontents", Freud argues
that the concept of universal love, on which Christianity is premised, causes a
neurotic distortion of Eros, the libidinal instinct of
"A love that does not discriminate seems to
me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing injustice to its object; and
secondly, not all men are worthy of love..."
it is wrong "to love
thy neighbor as thyself", says Freud, unless
there is some purpose as defined
by Eros, for this. "For my love is valued by all my own people as a
sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger
on a par with them. But if I am to love him (with this
universal love), merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, like
an insect, an earth worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small
modicum of my love will fall his share -- not by any possibility, as much, as
by judgment of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself. What
is the point of a precept "love thy neighbor"
enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfillment
cannot be recommended as reasonable?"
But it is the Christian
command to "love thine enemies" which Freud finds even more abhorrent
to his brand of anti-humanism. He recognizes that both commands emanate
from the same principle -- that Man is more than an animal and and that He is governed by universal laws more powerful
than His instincts. For those, like Novak, who attack this principle,
Freud finds "the element of truth behind all of this, which people are so
ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures that want to be loved,
and who at most can defend themselves when they are attacked. They are,
on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments
is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness... Who in the
face of all his experience of life and history, will
have the courage to assert this assertion? As a rule, this cruel
aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some
other purpose, whose goal might have been reached by
milder methods. In circumstances that are favorable
to it, when the mental counter forces which ordinarily
inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and
reveals Man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is
something alien...
As we have seen, this is precisely the view of
Novak, who sees sports as putting Man into contact with his true, bestial
nature. For Novak -- and for his oligarchical
masters (the same people who promoted Freud and put Hitler into power), in
sports one finds 'negation' of the principles of Western Christian civilization
and the 'affirmation' of a pagan, gnostic religion
based on Freudian concepts of the innate destructiveness of the "human
animal". To be a sports fanatic is to worship Novak's pagan gods of
Fate and to 'celebrate' what is 'inhuman'.
A Pagan Rite
The word 'fan' is derived
from "fanum", which is Latin for a local
temple. To be a fan is, for Novak, to participate in a pagan rite of
passage and sacrifice. He sees the process of 'rooting' as putting Man in
touch with Himself and His species, in a way that no religion can offer:
"A human goal more accurate than
enlightenment is 'enhumanment'. Sports like
baseball, basketball and football are already practiced
as expressed liturgies of such a goal. One religion's sins are another's
glories. Some 'enlightened' persons feel slightly guilty about their love
for sports. It seems less rational, less universal,
than their ideals; they feel a twinge of weakness. The 'enhumaned' believe that man is a rooted beast, with feet
planted on one patch of soil, and that it is perfectly expressive of his nature
to 'root'. To be a fan is totally in keeping with being a man. To
have particular loyalties is not to be deficient in universality, but to be
faithful to the laws of human finitude."
Much of this is restatement of Freud's analysis
of mass phenomena. Freud also claims 'rootedness'
is a natural expression of Man's basic aggressiveness. He likens it to
ethnocentricity and xenophobia, which he claims reflect an instinctual
identification with one's "own kind". For Freud and Novak,
universal Man, the man of the Renaissance, is a neurotic. Man is more appropriately organized into animal-like formations,
which act in their own, narrowly defined interests, rather than for the
"good of Mankind." The emotions of rooting coincide with the
desire to be loved in a mass. The psychosis
produced, which Freud calls "the narcissism of minor differences",
becomes at once an approved outlet for Man's basic aggressiveness, which one
must be careful to regulate so as not to allow excesses in either the
individual or the mass. While he is making a more general point, the
applicability of such brainwashing formula to sports 'rooting' is obvious.
Novak also "warns" that sports rooting
can be carried to excess, which he cautions against:
"Of course, there are fanatic fans, fans who eat and sleep and drink (above all, drink) their
sports. Their lives become defined by
sports. So some politicians are devoured by
politics, pedants by pedantry, pedarasts by pedarasty, drunks by drink, compulsive worshipers by
worship, nymphomaniacs by phalluses and so forth. All good things have
their perversions, good swollen into Good, idols into God. Every religion
has its excess. Sports, as well."
(One wonders whether Novak thinks pederasty
"good" if not overdone.)
Undermining the Church
Novak sees the "pagan, secular
religion" of sports as enhancing the other established churches, providing
something that they do not. But a "pagan
religion", whose teaching and practice is opposed to Christian doctrine,
as he describes sports, can "only undermine Christianity".
To be sure, sports and religion in
The relationship between religion and mass
spectator sports is that of a victim and a disease. It is a failing of
the church -- all churches -- that they have not seen how sports
has become a powerful counter pole to Christianity, one whose dogma is
irreconcilable with Christian teaching.
Through mass spectator sports, our population is
being brainwashed that Man is an animal, that universal truth and love are
meaningless concepts. A large section of our population is reduced to a state of infantile emotional obsession with
the sports fantasy world, such that it is incapable of comprehending profound
ideas. Our churches do nothing to fight this. As Novak says,
churches have the "good sense" to have their Sunday sermons over in
time to allow people to get to their television sets for the afternoon football
games.
Some of you may argue with what we have just
presented. I warned you that you would find some reason to
disagree. "I don't buy this stuff about an addiction and sports
being a pagan religion", I can hear some of you saying. "I just
watch it to be entertained."
You may 'think' that is the case. As we
have said repeatedly during this series, the best brainwashing victims are
those who most loudly claim that they cannot be brainwashed.
Think back to that example of the ninth inning
of the last World Series game. The last at bat, two outs -- one strike
and it's all over; a hit wins the game for 'your'
team.
The pitcher
winds and releases the ball towards the plate. The batter cocks the
bat. Your hands are wet with tension. You offer a silent prayer,
thinking to yourself -- "Please, just let him get a single. Please, that's all we need. That's not too much to ask".
To whom did you offer that prayer, if not to
Novak's "gods of Fate"?
"Ya gotta believe", was the rallying cry of pitcher Tug
McGraw as the 1973 New York Mets came from way back to win the National League
pennant, only to lose in the seventh game of the World Series.
"Believe what?", he was asked.
"Just believe", he replied. "Believe in destiny, in
Fate. Just believe, without question, without thinking -- Without any
reason. To 'will' victory. That's the power, man. That's
the force. That's our magic..."
Our boys were well prepared, "Coach"
Schwarzkopf told us in the famous briefing on the Gulf War. They had the
best "gameplan", and they executed it
perfectly, he said, as we beamed our approval, as we sat glued to our
television sets.
Was it a just war? Did we fight for a
morally defined principle? And what about all
those innocent women and children that were slaughtered in this "best of
all game plans?"
"Who the hell cares," says the man
watching the television set, his beer cans piled at his feet. "We
won, didn't we? That's all that counts.
You know what they say about winning..."
Our brainwashed people, their eyes buried in
their television sets, know little that cannot be reduced
to the rules of the "playing field". As the statesman and political
prisoner Lyndon H. LaRouche has warned, a people so debased
is in danger of losing the moral fitness to survive.
The next time that you find yourself watching a
sporting event on television, and you get that sense of being totally caught up
in the 'game', remember what you have read here. When your hands start to
sweat, when you find yourself starting to pray to Novak's god of Fate, try to
"pull yourself out of it". Go over and turn off that set.
Believe me, you'll feel much better in the long run
going cold turkey on sports.
And if you live with a
sports addict, show him this article. Don't give
in to his or her addiction. When you recognize the symptoms, go over and
turn that set off. Be prepared to duck a flying beer can or two. But at some point, an 'adult' must put his or her foot down.
The Cult of Physical Fitness
If sports, and especially spectator sports, have been turned into a pagan religion, then a large number
of our fellow citizens are members of a 'sub-cult', the "cult of physical
fitness".
Let's be precise about what
we are talking about. The human body requires a certain amount of
'exercise' in order to remain healthy. To the extent that one is not hampered by illness, a 'moderate' amount of daily
exercise, in consultation with one's physician, is both useful and necessary to
keep the body healthy and to deal with the stress of daily life. Such
exercise is as necessary for the young as it is for the old, but again, the
operative principal is the goal of maintaining a healthy and vigorous
body. By so doing, a person maintains his body in a state of readiness to
act as directed by morally informed reason. In that sense, to be physically fit, is never an end in itself -- it is subordinated to reason,
and the program for fitness is so designed by reason.
A person who acts to keep his body as fit as is
"reasonably possible", who, if his or her daily life does not contain
sufficient exercise, designs a 'reasonable' exercise program, is clearly acting
in his or her best interest.
From this type of 'reasonable' physical fitness
goal, we must distinguish the current "obsessive neurosis" of many
Americans with physical fitness. In these neurotic cases, physical
fitness becomes an end in itself, severed from reason. One becomes
'obsessed' with one's own body and the perception of that body as a manifestation
of one's 'identity'.
While there are examples from history of
physical fitness being used in cult practices on a
mass scale, such as in the Spartan state or, more recently, in the Nazi state,
the current fitness craze dates back no more than 15 to 20 years. It is intrinsically linked to the degenerate moral outlook of
the so-called "Me-generation" of the 1970s, with its obsessive,
infantile fixation on the gratification of sexual desires.
The emergence of the "Me-generation"
is the result of the brainwashing -- the first "rinse cycle", if you
will -- of the "baby boom generation" by television, as we have
described elsewhere in this series. The concepts of morally defined right
and wrong, the bedrock of western Christian civilization, were
given a modern "neo-Freudian" twist through television
programming and popular culture. It told us that we must have no 'guilt'
or 'remorse' for our actions, even if they violated Christian morality.
This "moral imbecility" lit the fuse on an explosion of hedonism.
The erotic component of that hedonistic
explosion, pushed, in part, through the "sexual revolution" of the
1960s counterculture and its infusion in the popular culture, led to a fixation
on the body as an expression of one's fundamental identity. Mass or
popular culture had always ascribed a disproportionate value to how one looked,
but now Americans were told that "image is
everything". The drive for an improved personal appearance, and
enhanced carnal gratifications, pushed the Me-generation
into their jogging shoes, onto their bicycles, and into fitness and health
clubs in record numbers in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The key recruiter to the cult was
television. From the 1970s through the 1980s, the fitness message was inserted into television programming. Stars of
shows, including the daytime soap operas, were shown
at fitness clubs, or jogging, or in some other form of exercise. There
was a heavy sexual content to the message -- Those exercising were usually
dressed in revealing exercise outfits, and clubs and other places were shown as a place to flirt and attract members of the
opposite sex.
The association between sex and exercise was made early on in the creation of the craze with the
promotion of the now-famous and enormously profitable Jane Fonda
"workout" videos. Fonda is credited with recruiting more males
to the fitness cult than any other person; marketing
studies show that her videos, as well as the other exercise videos which, like
hers, feature women in tight-fitting and revealing exercise clothes in various
provocative positions, sell in huge numbers to middle-aged men. As one
reviewer commented, such videos represent "socially acceptable
pornography".
But more was being
"sold" than cheap voyeurism. The fitness cult has helped with
the promotion of the 'disease' of environmentalism within the American
population.
From the beginning of the 1970s, television and
other media associated "fitness" with the concept of Man, as a part
of Nature, being in harmony with the laws of the kingdom of 'Nature' -- all
members of the fitness cult were "initiated" into regimens of
"healthy diets" and spiritual concepts relating to "natural ways
of living". Perusal of any of the many fitness magazines reveals
articles with this message.
The not-so-hidden message of such magazines and
related television programming and advertising was that Man did not have
dominion over nature, but that he was merely "nature's
steward". Nature, or so we were told, dominated
Man, and if its laws were not obeyed, even in the realm of the body, Man would
pay the price with His "health" and "wellness".
Before some of you jump down my throat, let's
again clarify that we are not talking about medically proven facts about
healthy eating habits or moderate exercise programs, conducted under
supervision of doctors; we are dealing with "obsessive behavior",
and are here talking about an "ideological outlook" that became a
justification for that obsessive behavior. So
stay in your seats, will you, and read on.
According to this 'spiritual' message, exercise
brought Man into closer communion with his 'animal' nature; this was even said to have a "therapeutic" effect on
Man's consciousness, giving Him a sense of inner peace. In the
counterculture of the late 1960s, this same nonsense was contained in the
preachings of "holistic medicine", "transcendental
meditation", "EST" and other
cults. The operative concept was a "high without the drugs" or
a "natural high". This was being played
back in a slightly altered context, winning some old and many new recruits.
By identifying Man as part of Nature and by
focusing Him on His least-human aspect, His corporeal body, the proponents of
the fitness cult created people with sympathy for environmentalism.
Television programmers inserted characters into shows who are both fitness nuts
and radical environmentalists.
At first, the ads and the television shows
imprinted these images subtly, through the infusion of shots of people on
bicycles or jogging within other actions or with people eating
"healthy" cereals, etc.
Now, the message is more literal. Ads
openly pitch to this fitness-environmental market: "I exercise to take
care of my body. I eat the right food. And I want to make my town environmentally
safe for my children", says a young mother in an ad for a laundry
detergent in a crushable, recyclable container. That string of predicates
seems totally "natural" to you, doesn't
it? That's how well brainwashing works.
It works so well that most people don't even
remember that they used to associate Jane Fonda, prior to her workout videos,
with the word "kook" or "nut" for her various leftist or
environmental stands in the 1960s and 1970s. She's
still a nut, but a recent survey found that most people now associate her name
with "exercise" or "fitness".
Pain and Agony
As we said earlier, a properly defined exercise
regimen can help an individual maintain his health. More often than not,
for a member of the physical fitness cult, an exercise program driven by
'infantile' obsession with one's body and appearance can be destructive to
one's health; it can even threaten one's life.
Doctors involved with sports or fitness related
medical practice have noted a large number of debilitating and even crippling
injuries directly attributable to obsessive exercising. They note that in
the last few years, the numbers of such injuries are rising.
In many cases, typical of obsessive neuroses,
the individual 'cannot' stop exercising, even when injured, even when he is told to by doctors. The person is driven by the obsession, which overpowers his
reason. The similarity to a "programmed"
brainwash victim has been noted by some clinical observers. In the
worst cases, those obsessed with their exercise are unaware of their
destructive behavior, and even when it is pointed out, cannot halt it themselves.
But lest someone say that
these are only extreme cases, the majority of those involved with the fitness
cult suscribe to the oft-repeated credo: "No
Pain, No Gain". While this 'masochism' has been
soundly denounced by medical authorities, it has been reinforced by
popular culture, including television programming. According to one
doctor, "Nothing we say seems to matter. People believe what they
see and hear on television. They believe that people should exercise
beyond the point of physical breakdown and pain."
Pain is often the subject of boasts and
discussion among members of the cult. Even agonizing injury becomes a
cathartic experience, to be greeted with both sympathy
and awe by the cult members.
In part, this fixation on pain reflects the mass
brainwashing of the population around the Freudian concept of the
"pleasure principle" -- that pleasure is inexorably linked to unpleasure, and that a pleasurable experience is merely the
absence of unpleasure or, in this case, pain.
By this twisted logic, one derives pleasure from the end of a painful
experience; hence, the pain 'leads' to one's pleasure.
This outlook has its political and economic
correlative in the demand for economic austerity and suffering. The same
kind of Freudian logic is summarized in the famous
call for sacrifice of Lazard Freres's
ersatz Hjalmar Schacht, Felix Rohatyn;
the choice, he told New Yorkers during the New York City bankruptcy crisis of
the mid-1970s, was between "Pain and Agony".
But the problem is even
worse than that. The cult of physical fitness, or more precisely one of
its sub-cults, is going to kill or physically destroy millions of our young
people.
Over the last half of the 1980s, there has
arisen a vast teenage subculture driven by an obsession with the size of
muscles and "pumped up" with bodybuilding drugs. Experts who
have profiled and studied this trend estimate, on the conservative side, that
there are "at least" 5 to 10 million young people involved with this
obsession. Of that figure, somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million
adolescents are involved with the use of black market, or illegal, steroids.
The numbers are even more startling since recent
widespread publicity campaigns have identified steroid and other bodybuilding
drug use as potentially harmful and even fatal. Studies have shown that
the majority of users do not dispute the medical claims. They are using the drugs anyway, and even welcome the perhaps fatal
outcome. The credo of this "death cult" is "die
young, die strong", according to a recent article in "U.S. News &
World Report".
In part, this usage is attributable to images in
recent popular culture of "pumped up" heroes, such as Rambo or
Terminator, as well as football players and others, with their enormous paychecks. But these images
alone, and their mass-brainwashing effect, cannot explain the existence of this
cult. The deeper psychological impetus for this phenomenon lies in the
"infantile nature" of adult society as a whole, with its own
obsession with "physical fitness" and carnal desires. It is not
the drugs that drive the obsession, but the other way around. The
obsessive behavior of the youth mirrors adult
society, with its own 'infantile' desires for gratification of the flesh, at
the expense of creative reason, and as a sub-feature of this, a fixation on sports and the human
body.
In our youth, that fixation leads to a
destructive 'narcissism', with a focus on the size of the body muscles.
It starts with an insecurity about one's body; it is
followed by an attempt to correct this insecurity through regimens of
weightlifting and diet. But when that fails, and
the insecurity continues, the drugs become an alternative.
In the case of young athletes, the
hyper-competitiveness of high school and other organized sports creates the
insecurity that drives this cycle. The driven athlete turns to drugs as a
performance enhancer or to "bulk up" to meet the challenge of intense
competition. It must be stressed, however, that the majority of steroid
users are white, middle-class males who "have never been" serious
about an athletic career, and more than one-third have never even been on a
high school team.
It had been hoped that
publicizing the dangers of the drug use would deal with the problem. It
appears instead to be having an opposite effect. The athletes who have
used steroids have merely become "anti-heroes", who are revered by
the hard-core of this "death cult".
The growth of this subculture has
been promoted vigorously by the mass media, especially television. One
of the most popular shows among young adolescents is "American
Gladiators". It features competitions among "pumped up"
men and women in tests of endurance and strength in a futuristic setting.
Adolescents are the largest number of 7 million
regular readers of so-called muscle magazines, as well as wrestling magazines,
which are promoted through television
advertising. This same age group helps make huge box office successes of
movies featuring "pumped up" heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Again, it is wrong to look at those figures and
conclude that such programming is 'only' directed at
kids. The Me-generation, now middle-aged adults,
also watch "American Gladiators" and go to see the Terminator movies
or rent them for home viewing. There is no possibility of breaking this
sub-cult in our youth, without adults breaking from the much larger, but
equally mentally destructive, physical fitness cult.
Think about that as you leer at your next
exercise video or watch with great interest those commercials for various
health foods. Try to imagine what the 'next' generation is going to be
like -- or, if there is going to be a next generation, at all.
That's all for now. When
we return, we'll talk to you about Satan's own
television network, MTV, and what it and similar fare are doing to our
children.