I’ve been debating the value of professional sports with a friend. He says professional sports are useless and professional athletes are grossly overpaid.
As we all know, I’m the least athletic person in the universe and don’t follow any sports. However, I disagree that professional sports are useless. Have you ever seen sports fans at a game? If all that aggression and rage didn’t go into sports, where would it go? Would you like it to be turned towards you?
It’s the same thing with violent computer games. The rage has to go somewhere, and these safe, legitimate ways of releasing it are better than the alternative.
I only wish I somehow could muster enough interest in sports to channel my aggression towards them. But I just find them boring.
Clarissa's Blog 
Subsidized professional sports is detrimental.
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And if we look at it as an anti-crime strategy?
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The best anti-crime strategy is to giving food and shelter to all of us and stop criminalizing non-crimes, not subsidizing professional sports.
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The rage I’m talking about has nothing to do with hunger or lack of shelter. Go to a game, do you see many hungry and homeless people there?
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This rage has something to do with their boring lives.
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Obviously. But this way at least it can spill out safely (for the most part.) Look at the British. They kept invading all over the world. And then they found football. 🙂
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…and sexuality-based repression.
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“They kept invading all over the world. And then they found football.”
So there’s not enough professional sports in USA?
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Imagine what would happen if the sexually repressed USA didn’t have professional sports. We’d already be on World War five.
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I talk about subsidizing sports, not banning them.
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Another legitimate venue of releasing aggression is the army. I think it’s better to subsidize sports than the army. At least, less people die.
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Of course.
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I can’t blame sports fans for getting emotionally invested and obsessive about what they love without being a hypocrite, considering how much time, money, and emotional energy I’ve poured into, say, the fates of characters in book series, movies, or TV shows that I love.
I still think hockey is boring, but there are probably Canucks and Habs fans who think that I’m ridiculously goofy for obsessing which Hogwarts house I’d get sorted into on Pottermore. 🙂
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Sport fans are into a religion. Are they better off than your average churchgoer? It’s just a necessary evil for the masses as “little Lenin” said 😉
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If you have a strong sense of identity you wouldn’t follow any sport, only perhaps ocassionally, to be “social”. The fun part about sports is playing them.
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“The rage has to go somewhere, and these safe, legitimate ways of releasing it are better than the alternative.”
I’ve never understood this approach. If you “release your rage” often and regularly, wouldn’t you just accustom yourself to an attitude where it’s okay to lose your temper?
“Have you ever seen sports fans at a game? If all that aggression and rage didn’t go into sports, where would it go? Would you like it to be turned towards you?”
It’s not like human beings have a finite capacity for rage. If they’re aggressive at a silly social occasion like a sports game, that probably indicates they’re aggressive people in general. If “releasing” your anger makes you feel good, your brain will want more of it. Your rage doesn’t get used up, it gets reinforced.
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“I’ve never understood this approach. If you “release your rage” often and regularly, wouldn’t you just accustom yourself to an attitude where it’s okay to lose your temper?”
– It is much much healthier to lose it than never to lose it and have a stroke at the age of 45. There is no third possibility here. You either find legitimate areas to channel the aggression or your health will suffer.
” If they’re aggressive at a silly social occasion like a sports game, that probably indicates they’re aggressive people in general.”
– Everybody is an aggressive person in general. Those who release the anger during sports events are much healthier and a lot less silly than those who never do.
” If “releasing” your anger makes you feel good, your brain will want more of it. Your rage doesn’t get used up, it gets reinforced.”
– This is absolutely not how the human psyche works. The rage is always present. All one has to do is find legitimate healthy places where to channel it.
I know this man who kept insisting he had no anger. Always spoke in a quiet voice, was always ultra polite, gentle, and kind. When his best friend betrayed him, he smiled. When his father died, he consoled everybody else. And then he ended up in the emergency room with a stroke. Seriously, it is SO MUCH BETTER to yell at football games.
There is no need to stigmatize anger. It is a normal emotion that should not be feared or repressed. There is nothing shameful about being angry. As long as you don’t victimize people with it, anger is perfectly fine.
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“The rage is always present. All one has to do is find legitimate healthy places where to channel it.”
That’s not how the human psyche works, either. Anger isn’t a physical resource that builds up and then has to be released. Anger is a response to a stimulus. If you respond to anger in a violent way, and you feel better, that’s your brain kicking you with dopamine to reinforce your behavior. Anger feels good, so your brain wants more. I know as well as anybody else that the rush of anger is fucking addictive as hell (ESPECIALLY because it makes you feel good), and letting yourself lash out to satisfy your rage is like drinking to satisfy your drink addiction.
What has to be asked is, why is anger the only emotion that gets this special treatment? People know that if you if condition yourself to have a positive attitude, you’ll be happier. Why, then, do people think forcing an aggressive attitude makes you less aggressive? If I allow myself to experience intense happiness, I don’t let all my happiness out, I become a happier person.
So yeah, if you scream and shout at let yourself get pissed at the fans of your rival team, you’re probably gonna want to punch them in the face by the time the game’s done. Screw it, why not? You’ve put so much effort into hating them until now, and you know it feels good to hate them, so you might as well. That’s why sports hooliganism is a thing.
“You either find legitimate areas to channel the aggression or your health will suffer.”
Sure, but why is it legitimate to let the anger take hold of me? All that will do is feed it. The proper way to respond to anger is the same to respond to any negative feeling – acknowledge it, ask yourself why you’re feeling it, and then ask what you can do about it. Of course, anger can be reasonable and productive, but only if you reserve that anger for important stuff and resolve to fix it. I allow myself to be angry when homophobes try to undermine my rights because I’m gay. There’s every reason why that SHOULD piss me off. If I channel that anger into anything, I channel it into my activity in the LGBT rights community, because then I feel like I’m doing something productive to make my anger stimulus go away, and that makes me happy and not angry anymore.
That’s WHY it’s important that I only let myself get angry at stuff I should be angry about, and not stupid shit like sports and video games. I don’t extend that rage to the aliens I shoot in Halo; that would only make me dwell on the anger more and more. If I do that, I feel suffocated. Recognize the anger, understand why you’re angry, and move on, in a quickly and orderly fashion (then again I’m British so I think everything should be done quickly and orderly).
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“Anger is a response to a stimulus. If you respond to anger in a violent way, and you feel better, that’s your brain kicking you with dopamine to reinforce your behavior. Anger feels good, so your brain wants more. I know as well as anybody else that the rush of anger is fucking addictive as hell ”
– I’m sorry, this is not the “chemical imbalances in the brain” place. 🙂
“What has to be asked is, why is anger the only emotion that gets this special treatment?”
– Who said it is??? It works exactly like this for every single emotion.
“People know that if you if condition yourself to have a positive attitude, you’ll be happier.”
– I don’t know who these people are. This sounds like a deeply masochistic behavior that I do not recommend. Is it some new-fangled American claptrap? What you describe is precisely what will lead to a lot of repressed, accumulated anger that will one day explode in a stroke.
“Sure, but why is it legitimate to let the anger take hold of me?”
– It already has. It has taken hold of all human beings as a price we pay for living in a civilization.All I’m suggesting is that we all collectively look for ways to stop repressing it.
“The proper way to respond to anger is the same to respond to any negative feeling – acknowledge it, ask yourself why you’re feeling it, and then ask what you can do about it.”
– Intellectualizing emotions leads to poor health.
“That’s WHY it’s important that I only let myself get angry at stuff I should be angry about”
– Ay yay yay. It just physically makes me ache when I hear something like this. You are still young, so this is not a big deal for you now. But once you get older and if you notice that the BP is climbing, try doing what I suggest before you go on medication. There is no return from the meds.
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“I’m sorry, this is not the “chemical imbalances in the brain” place.”
I don’t mean this stuff pops out of nowhere like the “chemical imbalance” brigade would have you believe. The mind is a physical, chemical thing, but it only works in response to input, which is what I was saying. If you want this in less biological terms – human beings have habits. When something makes them feel good, they demand more of it. Then they learn that that exercising their anger via aggressing makes them feel good. What do you think happens? They’ll just be encouraged to lose their temper more often, and they’re not always going to have a violent video game at hand to direct it at. This is why the general consensus among psychologists is that catharsis is a dangerous myth.
“It just physically makes me ache when I hear something like this. You are still young, so this is not a big deal for you now. But once you get older and if you notice that the BP is climbing, try doing what I suggest before you go on medication.”
All I know is, indulging my anger when playing violent video games made me feel suffocated. Speaking as someone who’s kinda prone to anxiety problems, it didn’t make me feel good to try all the stress-relieving tactics like catharsis people recommend, because it just reminded me that I was anxious in the first place. I’m a lot calmer without it. 😛 Not that I still don’t enjoy stomping on goombas in Mario, it’s just not an anger thing for me. I’m better if I know what’s eating me, and the focusing myself on positive stuff to do. It just kind of seems like common sense to me that dwelling on anger less makes you calmer?
There is no return from the meds.”
I did try anxiety meds when I was 13 but they made me throw up, so we stopped using them. Maybe I should have counted my blessings? 😛
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// – It already has. It has taken hold of all human beings as a price we pay for living in a civilization.
What do you mean by that? Don’t animals have inborn inner aggression too? Aggression followed us during the entire evolutionary process.
To Benoli: I recommend reading “On Aggression” by Konrad Lorenz. The book is mainly about animals, but the final chapter deals with humans. His books can be easily found online freely in Russian, not so in English, but may be you can loan from a library. His politics and science were criticized in many cases, but “On Aggression” has many things, which ring true. He does state aggression is inborn and accumulates regardless of environment, also supposes that there may be biological differences among people in some cases, giving the example of a warring tribe with very violent life, whose members felt depression, similarly without any reason, when a situation became peaceful in a modern world. Lorenz supposed repressed aggression was the reason. I am unsure about this tribe’s example, but why can’t level of aggression be raised via biological selection, like he claims? To prevent misunderstanding, everybody has aggression. What he claimed that after warring for generations this tribe’s people were selected to be more inwardly aggressive than usual.
Here is “On Aggression” in Russian (can use Google Translate, if wish):
http://lib.ru/PSIHO/LORENC/agressiya.txt
And here a short article in Russian, “Civilized man’s eight deadly sins”, which also can be Google translated –
http://igrunov.ru/vin/vchk-vin-discipl/ecology/books/vchk-vin-discipl-ecol-Lorenz.html
Clarissa, if you read the article, would love to hear your opinion.
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To Benvoli: in “On Aggression” from chapter 13 on, he begins to talk about people, if you want to translate. (Actually in Chapter 12 he already leaves animals and talks how people shouldn’t be afraid or insulted by his book, but really begins about people in Chapter 13).
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Also wanted to say that while I think that some level of aggression is not environment dependent, I saw Benoni as saying that people shouldn’t f.e. let politicians manipulate their natural aggression (and imo increase it too in the process). Weren’t fascist regimes loving of sports, processions, displays – all calculated to channel and increase natural aggression into Us vs. Them? But, Benoni, if some aggression is evolutionary, I think accepting it makes you less likely to be manipulated and out of control. Instead of thinking “I am angry at my friends in expedition because I and/or they are Bad” (one of examples Lorenz gives), you think “I have been alone with them for X days, objectively all is great, feeling angry at how someone moves /eats /sneezes is because of X amount of accumulated aggression, instead of killing somebody – I will go and cut this peace of wood into small pieces”.
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Found may be idea for another post in “Civilized man’s eight deadly sins”:
Одно из величайших преступлений псевдодемократической доктрины состоит в том, что она изображает естественный ранговый порядок между двумя людьми как фрустрирующее препятствие для любых теплых чувств: без рангового порядка не может существовать даже самая естественная форма человеческой любви, соединяющая в нормальных условиях членов семьи; в результате воспитания по пресловутому принципу “non-frustration” тысячи детей были превращены в несчастных невротиков.
Как я уже объяснил в упомянутых работах, в группе без рангового порядка ребенок оказывается в крайне неестественном положении. Поскольку он не может подавить свое собственное, инстинктивно запрограммированное стремление к высокому рангу и, разумеется, тиранит не оказывающих сопротивления родителей, ему навязывается роль лидера группы, в которой ему очень плохо. Без поддержки сильного “начальника” он чувствует себя беззащитным перед внешним миром, всегда враждебным, потому что “не фрустрированных” детей нигде не любят. И когда он в понятном раздражении пытается бросить родителям вызов и “просит ремня”, как это прекрасно говорится на баварско- австрийском диалекте, он, вместо инстинктивно ожидаемой им обратной агрессии на которую подсознательно надеется, наталкивается на резиновую стену спокойных, псевдорассудительных фраз.
Без фрустраций (англ.). – Примеч. пер. Без фрустраций имеется в виду популярная в США начиная с 20-х гг. система воспитания, в соответствии с которой полагалось избегать любых ситуаций, способных вызвать у детей ощущение подавленности, вынужденного сдерживания эмоций (лат. frustratio).
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Yes, I agree that this is a really detrimental system of upbringing. After the age of 2, a child is more than ready (and actually is in great need of) learning to deal with negative emotions and frustrations of varying degrees. This is all part of human experience, and the parent who doesn’t help the child to learn these things is being lazy and irresponsible. Such parents alleviate their own anxiety caused by seeing the child suffer some minor disappointment at the expense of the child’s future development and future happiness.
Also, when children know that there is a hierarchical relationship between them and the parents, this reduces their anxiety at the early age and makes them better adapted to entering the workplace later on in life. A hierarchical relationship doesn’t mean that somebody beats people or yells at them. It just means that parents know how to exercise authority and are not afraid of it.
Thank you for bringing up this important issue!
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