The CyberPhilosopher

Last night at the bar, Ultimate Fighting Championship was on and like many other I was unable to look away while one person allowed themselves to be voluntarily beaten senseless by another person while somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of people watched him.

This prompted one of my co-workers to say how that sort of thing should not be allowed in a free society.  I asked what he meant, and he went on to explain how this appeals to the basest of things in the human mind and in fact it is just two animals fighting each other rather than anything resembling what it is that we prize as human nature.

Now, I immediately disagreed with him, but I have to admit I understand the mentality.  Where I disagreed with him is that it shouldn’t be allowed; I agreed that it plays out to the basest of human emotions.

Here is the thing, they are 2 individuals that get a thrill out of this and want to do it.  They are not slaves in roman times that are being forced to fight for others pleasures; they are in it because they want to be in it.  I truly wonder about the mental health and stability of these types of individuals (I am not saying they are dangerous or anything, simply that I can’t conceive of what would allow them to do it!).  Plus, since its a given that there are people are in society, its better to give them an outlet for those urges that’s within the framework of society.

The next question is what it means that we watch it.   Now this somewhat plays into the general bias I have against sports in general, but watching it is in a similar vain as above.  We are civilized animals; we are the rulers of our planet and we got here because we had certain tendencies.  Those tendencies just happen to include a non-aversion to war against the ‘other’.  We see a manifestation of this every day as we see political parties point the finger at each other, when we see nationalistic pride over-ride individual rights, and we see it when people rally around a sports team that happens to loosely relate to a geographical location where someone lives or used to live.   In this latter case it is common to see a person ‘hate’ another team or even city.  

I think this type of aggression is a healthy outlet for a need for that type of behavior.  Those that don’t like sports perhaps have less of that type of tendency (or maybe they just always got picked last for teams and are still resentful) while individuals with this tendency have the opportunity to express it in generally non-harmful ways.  The behavior generally (not always) extends to a ‘team’ which is really a non-existent entity so that people can dis-associate their hatred of say ‘City X’s Baseball team’ from ‘City X’ itself.