Rivalries

"World" events such as the soccer/football World Cup and the Olympics are puzzling. Their goals are to unite fans from all around the world, no matter what race, religion, or country, and get them to rally behind a common ambition. On the contrary, it appears that the results of these competitions is taken so personally, that fans of different teams will insult each other and argue on the merits of each other's team -- eventually degrading to insulting each other's cultures and countries. Eric told me a story a few days ago about such an incident where two men resolved an unrelated dispute by insulting each other on soccer terms. Having twenty flags from your home country taped to the roof of your car and driving around does not in any way unite people, it simply encourages divides between essentially imaginary state lines.

I always recall Noam Chomsky's comments in the documentary film on Manufacturing Consent, during which, as an anecdote, he presents his case against sports fanaticism. He says that he does not understand why people should feel so sentimentally attached to a specific team. He recalls how he was one of the few people in University that didn't care about their football team. His reasoning is that he didn't know anybody on the team or anybody related to the team members, nor did he have a vested interest in the game. Therefore, why should he care about the outcome, other than for it be an entertaining game?

Formula 1 is another interesting case. People attach themselves to pilots because of their nationalities, but their talents have almost nothing to do with nationality -- it's all for bragging rights. The team members are rarely of the same nationality as the driver, the car chassis and engine were not designed by people of the same nationality, etc. Therefore, we seek to identify ourselves with someone that we have something in common with, but the only thing we have in common is a meaningless symbol.