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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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I wouldn't be so sure that Sports tribalism is healthy.
Tribalism in Sports repeatedly leads people down certain mental pathways in contexts involving many people divided in groups and were one has chosen a groups, as well as personal identification with a group based on things with would otherwise be irrelevant, which familiarizes people with such ways of thinking about oneself and others.
Because the choice of the mental pathways we use when confronted with a situation is not conscious, it leads itself to us favouring what's familiar from similar contexts, so repeatedly leading people down the tribalist route in Sports can be an insidious way to predispose them to go down the exact same route in contexts were the same kind of pattern exists, such as nationalism, politics, race and so on.
All this, by the way, is not too dissimilar to some of the psychological levers used by Modern Marketing.
Consider the possibility that the culture created around the circus both feeds from and feeds in the equally mindless cultures that have been created in things like politics and nationalism.
The crux of this is whether Us vs Them is instinctual or learned. I don't think we yet have a definitive answer, but certainly Us vs Them is so ingrained in our ways of life that removing it would be extraordinarily difficult.
Again, I may be excessively cynical, but my belief is that some people, maybe even most people, WILL take these mental pathways you describe no matter what, and the best we can do is provide distractions. Bread and circuses. At their best, these distractions channel our self-destructive tendencies into harmless oceans of impunity. At their worst, they are hijacked by ne'er-do-wells to transform the apathetic into frothing zealots of a cause they don't even care to understand. It becomes the responsibility of those who are paying attention to design a system that is resistant to abuse.
Presuming I am wrong, that means that there is a path for society to eliminate competitiveness from its apparent nature. I agree that would lead us toward utopia, but I am very skeptical such a path exists, and that those who attempt to follow it will simply be eaten by the wolves they believe they can train.
I mainly agree with you on that.
I expect people might learn to "decorate" those things differently (i.e. cheerful well humoured competitiveness rather than the kind were the fans of the opposing team are almost treated as "badies") but I doubt most people will ever loose or overcome what are probably well rooted instincts.