Should Sports Be Illegal?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

It’s an addiction. People spend thousands of hours on it. People spend all their money on it. In the most severe users, it becomes their identity, it takes over their entire life.

Sports are a scourge on our society. It’s grown men playing with balls. It’s pathetic.

Men should spend their time working, building things, raising families, performing acts of charity, and fighting against the forces of evil. Sports players are throwing their lives away on idleness and dissipation.

That’s not to say you can’t have hobbies. A lot of people spend all their spare time on video games, for example. But there’s a huge difference between sports and video games. With video games, it’s widely acknowledged that it’s a vice. Everyone knows that a guy who spends 20 hours a week on video games has a problem and he needs to cut back. Sports are much more pernicious than video games because it’s NOT widely acknowledged that sports are a vice – actually many people think that sports use is a positive good. They make it part of their identity, they take pride in their team’s successes and feel bad about its losses. And because they foolishly attribute this level of importance to sports, they’re much more likely to become obsessed, and once obsessed, a sports user is much less likely to try to reform their behavior than a video game user is, because the sports user it encouraged in his vice by society and the video game user is not.

I’ve been using the term “sports use” in this video, and you could argue that the word “use” is pejorative – but you could also argue that the term “drug use” is pejorative. Alcohol use is commonly called “drinking”, because it’s socially accepted. Cigarette use is commonly called “smoking” because it’s socially accepted. The reason why we say “heroin use” rather than “heroin enjoyment” or “injecting” or whatever, is because most people INTEND to describe heroin use pejoratively.

A few years ago I had a coworker from Pakistan. She mentioned that her husband loved to play cricket, and I later learned that cricket was basically the center of their lives. She said that they spent all day at her husband’s cricket matches every Saturday and every Sunday. My coworker and the other wives liked to socialize with each other while they watched their husbands play, but I got the impression that she would have rather been doing something else. When I heard about the cricket-obsessed husband, I remembered that the word “fan” as in “sports fan” comes from the word “fanatic.”The word “fan” is relatively new. According to the online etymology dictionary, the earliest recorded usage is in 1889. Team sports are a relatively new phenomenon. People have always played games of course, but 200 years ago, “sport” meant things like hunting or boxing. Organized team sports like baseball and football only became popular in the late 19th century.

I’m going to say more about how sports are a historically new phenomenon, but first I need to tell you about Niko Tinbergen’s experiments with seagulls. Tinbergen was a Dutch biologist who studied a species of seagull that laid light-blue, gray-dappled eggs. He noticed that the birds preferred to sit on their slightly brighter blue eggs, rather than their slightly duller blue eggs. Tinbergen made fake eggs that were bright blue and had black polka dots, and he found that the birds liked to sit on the fake eggs more than the real eggs. Tinbergen also noticed that the birds preferred to sit on larger eggs rather than smaller ones. Tinbergen made a giant fake egg, and the seagulls kept trying to sit on it even though the egg was so large the seagulls slid off it repeatedly. Tinbergen’s fake eggs were what biologists call “Supernormal Stimuli”. Seagulls evolved to respond to the normal stimuli of slightly more brightly colored eggs and slightly larger eggs. The fake eggs are exaggerated versions of those stimuli which evoke exaggerated responses.

Drugs are Supernormal Stimuli for humans. So are sports. Male humans have an instinct to be fascinated by war and other forms of physical conflict, but for hundreds of thousands of years, tribes would only fight a battle about once a year. With modern sports, you can participate in a battle every weekend, or every day.

When a new Supernormal Stimulus becomes available, it can totally overrun a society. I believe that sports became enormously popular in the 20th century for a similar reason that alcohol became popular with Native Americans in the 19th century. Native Americans had never encountered alcohol, so they had no resistance to it. When alcohol became available to Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries, it decimated their societies. Men who should have been out fighting, hunting, raising families, and building things instead spent their time in the bottle, addicted to the fire water.

Many societies around the world have been ravaged by alcohol addiction, and over time, societies have built up defenses against it. In some places, there was a social norm that a husband would give his whole paycheck to his wife as soon as he got paid. The purpose of that custom was to make sure that the husband would not be tempted to blow his whole paycheck at the saloon. Some societies restricted drinking to certain places and certain times. Other societies banned drinking altogether. When the term “sports fanatic” was coined in the 1880s, I wonder if sports users were even more obsessed than they are now. Since modern team sports have only been popular for a little over a century, maybe our society hasn’t had enough time to build up defensive customs against sports addiction.

I wouldn’t want to push this point too far. You could argue that EVERY new thing which people enjoy is a supernormal stimulus, so merely labeling something as a supernormal stimulus is not very insightful. What I’m saying is: Two things:

1.When we have something that plays on our instinctual drives in a hyper-exaggerated way, it is very easy to get obsessed by it, because the fact that it plays on our instinctual drives tends to depress our natural ability to remember our real priorities in life.

2. The comparison of sports to hard drugs is entirely reasonable.

I’m sure some of you still think I’m exaggerating. How could sports use be comparable to hard drug use when the average sports user is so much more functional than the average hard drug user? The answer is that the typical person who becomes a heroin addict is not the same as the average member of the population. The people who become heroin addicts usually were pretty messed up even before they started using heroin.

Moreover, while the average sports watcher may be representative of the average member of the population, the average sports player is more healthy than the average member of the population. College and professional athletes are some of the most genetically gifted and physically fit people on Earth, and people with lots of physical energy tend to have lots of mental energy as well. These people could be living highly productive, eudaimonic lives, and instead they’re wasting their time on ball games.

Sports have turned our society from industry to idleness. Sports are the graveyard of a million wasted childhoods, they have distracted tens of millions of men from the real business of life. If there’s a case for banning hard drugs, there’s a case for banning sports. So, should sports be illegal? Should the organizers of football games be thrown in jail? Personally, I’m a libertarian; I wouldn’t support banning either drugs or sports. However, let’s be logically consistent. If someone supports banning drugs, let’s ask them if they also support banning other forms of dissipation. And above all, let’s be clear that sports are a social ill. Sports ought to be eliminated. Sports fans and players are participating in a vice, and they ought to change their behavior.