The Psychology of the Super Sports Fan

January 14, 2013March 29, 2026 Rilaly5 Comments

Sports are an institution in America today. If you are a male, you are almost required to be a sports fan. I’ve seen numerous males try to escape this fact of life in America, but I’ve seen very few pull it off successfully. Those who are able to escape this super sport fan requirement deserve a hat-tip, in some ways, because they don’t have to endure the pain and sorrow watching sports can inflict on a person. It’s too late for me. I’ve had too many teams disappoint me to ever enjoy watching sports in the manner we all should. Super sports fans hate sports as much as we love it, but we’ve found no cure for this ailment other than more sports and other disappointments that help us forget the past ones.

In 2012, The Atlanta Falcons won their first playoff game in four years of unsuccessful attempts. As a fanatic Falcons fan, I’m prepared for the discussions that will follow. I know that the discussions will involve attacks that I’ll deem personal, as a result of my life-long affiliation with this team. If they lose in the next three weeks, I will be guilty by association. If they win, I will be permitted a temporary amount of basking, but I will soon have to reconfigure my psychology in preparation for the next game, and the next season. A super fan’s job is never over.

Immersing one’s self in the world of sports’ super fandom can be stressful, for a super fan is required to remain perpetually unsatisfied with their team’s progress, regardless how well they do. A super fan is never happy. A casual sports fan can enjoy a good tussle between two opponents, measuring one another’s physical abilities, but a super fan doesn’t enjoy a good game that involves their team, unless their team blows the other team out. Close games are stressful, as they suggest an obvious deficiency in their team that must be rectified before the next game. Unadulterated blowouts confirm superiority.

A coach says they’re not satisfied with their team’s accomplishments, and the teams’ players echo this sentiment. The two factions echo this sentiment so many times that super fans have now incorporated it into their “we” lexicon. I can understand a player, or a coach, issuing such statements, for they are always on trial, they are always pushing themselves to be better today than they were yesterday. It’s the very essence of sports for the participants to remain unsatisfied. Why does this mentality also have to exist for those of us who are watching them on TV? A super sports fan doesn’t question why they have this mentality, they just have it.

Most normal people regard watching sports as a frivolity, a conversation piece to engage in with friends and family. To them, sporting events provide a simple event, or an excuse, to get together with friends and family. For these people, sports is little more than background noise that cover the lulls that may occur at get-togethers. They may keep up on some sport’s headlines, but they often do so to engage in superficial, meaningless conversations. They also use what little knowledge they have to needle the obnoxious diehards on their team’s loss.

There’s nothing wrong with this needling on the surface. Needling is what super sports fans do to one another, but in the world of super sports fans everyone has something on the line. When you mock a super sports fan’s team, you had better be ready to take as well as you give for a super sports fan will always come back ten times as hard. It’s as much a part of the super sports fan culture as watching the sport itself. For the non-sports fan, for whom sports is but a casual conversation piece, needling a super sports fan is revenge for all the years that super sports fans have ridiculed them for being non-sports fans, or if they haven’t been ridiculed, they have at least been ostracized from the all of the conversations that revolve around sports, and they’ve built up some resentment for sports fans that comes out in these needling sessions. It also gives them great joy, when the conversation turns back on them, and the super fan says, “Who’s your favorite team?” that they don’t have one. The fact that they don’t have one gives them an immunity card against reprisals. It’s what they’ve dreamed of dating back to their pre-pubescent days when their peers ridiculed them for preferring Star Wars and Lego to sports.

In the world of the super fan, it is seen as a testament to their character that they remain unsatisfied with their team’s performance? Even a fan of a traditional doormat, such as the Atlanta Falcons, is informed that the best record in the regular season should mean nothing to them, and their first playoff victory in almost a decade should mean nothing to them. You want that ring. If we’re in any way happy with the progress they’ve made, we’re satisfied, and being satisfied equates to being weak, and soft, and everyone around us knows this, and they won’t have much time for us if we don’t demand perfection of our team.

I once heard that the reason the Chicago Cubs are perennial losers is that their fan base will turn out regardless how they perform. I’ve heard it said that they’re more concerned with beer than baseball, and that they enjoy the confines of Wrigley Field more than they do a winner. There is a certain amount of truth in this when one considers the actual attendance figures in Wrigley Field, of course, but are they saying that a Cubs’ General Manager is apt to forego a prized free agent signing, because he knows that the fans will show up anyway? Is a manager going to inform the organization that he is not going to call up a star prospect, because he knows that the fans will show up regardless if the team is better or not? Their job is on the line every year. Get in the playoffs or get out is the motto in most of professional sports, and I dare say this is no different in Chicago regardless of their team’s ‘lovable loser’ tradition.

The radio show host who said this about the Cubs was making a general point that there isn’t the sense of urgency in the Cubs organization that there is in the Yankee organization. Yankee fans are adamant that their team win the World Series every year, and they’re quite vocal with their displeasure when the organization puts anything less than a championship team on the field. I can’t say that this is without merit, but should this same requirement be made of the fan sitting in a bar discussing sports with a fellow super fan? Why is it elemental to the respect of his peers that the super fan maintain an unsatisfied persona to maintain the respect of his super fan friends?

Super fans who have listened to sports talk radio for far too long, have had it pounded into our head that there’s no glory in meaningless victories … if you don’t have that ring. If you were a Buffalo Bills fan, in the 90’s, and you were happy with an appearance in the Super Bowl for four straight years, you were soft, because those teams lost all of those Super Bowls. The super fan of the Bills would’ve preferred that the Bills failed to make it to the playoffs in the face of all that losing. That was embarrassing. The Bills proved to be historic choke artists. Nothing more. It didn’t matter to the superfan that they were able to do something unprecedented when they made it to the Super Bowl again, after three consecutive losses. They lost the fourth one too! Bunch of choke artists is what they were.

Did it matter to anyone that the Atlanta Braves made it to the playoffs fourteen consecutive years in a span that stretched from the 90s to the 00s? It didn’t to the super fan. They grew tired of all that losing. Did it matter to the super fan that they made the NLCS nine out of ten years? It did not. Did it matter that they made it to the World Series in five of those years? If you’re a loser it did. They won one World Series throughout this stretch, and the super fan remained unsatisfied throughout.

“No one remembers the team that lost in the championship.” “One team wins, and the other team chokes.” These are some of the most common tropes of the language of the super fan that you’ll have to adopt, if you ever hope to garner the type of respect necessary to sit with super fans in bars discussing sports.

If our team loses, but we’re satisfied just to be there, that says something about our character. In these conversations, we are our team, and our team is us. If such conversations make us uncomfortable, the best way for us to retain our identity will be to distance ourselves from our team by informing our friends that we disagreed with a move or a decision that they made, but often times this is not enough to leave us unscathed. Regardless what we say, we cannot avoid having them consider us a choke artist based on the fact that our team “choked” in the championship. We could switch teams, of course, but that is what super fans call a fair weather fan, and a fair weather fan is the lowest form of life in the world of super fandom, save for the needling non-fan. Our best bet is to just sit there and take it. Our friends will enjoy that a lot less than our struggle to stick up for our team.

Even if our team wins it all, we super fans will have no glory. We’re never satisfied, and winning it all for one year, just means that our concentration flips to next year. We don’t just want a championship, back-to-back championships, a three-peat, and then a dynasty. The definition of a dynasty is also perpetually beyond reach, as it is often relative to the individual and often only assigned in the death of the dynasty. By that point, however, we can only reminisce about what once-was, which is a horrible feeling for the superfan.

The true fan is the superfan, always seeking definition of their character through constant calls for perfection. Even if their team wins a championship, they didn’t win by much. Our team should’ve slaughtered that bunch-a-losers. There is always room for improvement, and we’ll scour the draft pool and the free agent list, to find that perfect component for next year’s run. If our team doesn’t do what we think they should do, we gain some distance by proclaiming that the team doesn’t know what they’re doing. We know this because we’re super fans, but most of us have never played the game, or had to deal with team play, salary caps, or prima donnas who generate excellent stats with no regard for the team.

The one thing that every fan, and every super fan, should be required to recite before every game is “You’re just a fan”. I don’t care if you wear your hat inside out and backwards, or you sit on half a cheek for a week, and you don’t speak of your team’s progress for fear of jinxing them, you’re just a fan. I don’t care if you have seven different jerseys for the seven days of the week, that you paint your face, or brave the cold and go shirtless. You’re just a fan. You’re no more instrumental in the way they play the game than the guy at the end of the bar who doesn’t care for sports. So, does this line of thought make it any easier to be a super fan? It does not, because as a super fan, we know that our reputation is on the line every time our team takes the field, court, diamond, or rink. We know that our friends are just dying to call our team (i.e. you) a loser, a choke-artist, and that can make it super stressful to be a super fan.

Are You Competitive?

“I’m sorry I’m just sooo competitive,” Mark said after yelling in anger because our favorite team lost a game on the television set (TV). As men, we’re biologically predisposed to respect competitive men, but Mark was so competitive that he couldn’t control his anger over images on a TV screen. Is that odd? I never thought of it as odd, my whole life, until Mark did it. ‘Who cares if you’re competitive while watching a game on TV?’ I thought in Mark’s general direction. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve said it, and I’ve heard maybe a hundred people say it before Mark, but for some reason it struck me as so odd when he said it. I don’t know if it was how Mark said it, the environment around us, or our respective ages, but this moment opened my mind’s eye to the foolish nonsense I believed about my sense of competitiveness when it came to watching images on the screen wear my favorite laundry.

I’ve recently discovered that it doesn’t matter how competitive I am watching while my favorite teams play sports on TV. I used to think it was a testament to my character that I refuse to accept second place from my teams. “It says a lot about you that you’re willing to accept just being in the championship game,” those who watch sports say. “You should want to win that championship game.”

“You do understand that I’m not playing in that championship game,” I told one friend to try to calm myself. It worked, and I use this line now when someone confronts me about my team losing a game. Of course I want my team to win that championship game, I want my team to win every single game, but what do I do if they don’t? What do I do if they do? It turns out, I’m not playing in that game, and it doesn’t matter what I do, it doesn’t matter what I think, and my emotional investment in my team will not affect how they play. If my team is in a championship game, it’s the team I chose to support that is. What that in mind, we need to mentally rewrite what those who watch sports say, “It says a lot about you that you’re willing to accept that your favorite team is in the championship game,” those who watch sports say. “You should want your favorite team to win that championship game.”

We all know and love the “WE” jokes. A guy watches too much sports for too long, and he accidentally, incidentally becomes a part of that team. “WE” can’t help it. “WE” love them so much that when we watch them on the screen “WE” know when we need to run the ball more often, “WE” know when we need to put the ball in the paint more, and “WE” know what everyone else knows … we really need a hit here.” We want our favorite team to win so badly that we scream out hundreds of miles away from the players, in a bar of unsuspecting customers after “WE” make a horrible mistake, and we apologize after our embarrassing display, “I’m sorry, I am just so competitive.” Does it really matter how competitive we are while watching sports on TV? Does it really matter to anyone that we’re not able to accept second place, a “good” season, a “good” game, or anything less than absolute domination of the opponent in a championship game.

One key component to the fanaticism of the typical fan is the underlying psychology of said fan. I can only use my own embarrassing rage as an anecdotal example. When I was most unsatisfied with my life, I was a raging fan. To my embarrassment, I would have anxiety issues watching another slow progression of my team losing a game. I was miserable to be around. I scared my dog, and my wife no longer enjoyed watching sports with me. Now that I’m more satisfied with the general direction of my life, I’m finally starting to see how foolish it was that I got SO UPSET!!! over some team losing a game on a television program. I love sports, always have, always will, but I don’t know if I really enjoyed watching sports.

I hear what my new friends like Mark say, but I hear it from a newfound perspective, and I cannot believe how foolish I used to be. When one of my teams just barely lost the championship on a last second field goal, I left the party and drove home, “Because I didn’t want to sit there and talk about how close we were to finally winning our first championship in my lifetime.” I didn’t want to talk about the loss, but we probably would’ve spent three minutes talking about it and move on. The thing about my childish temper tantrum was that it was caused by a television program not turning out the way I wanted.

Throughout my life, I’ve thrown remote controls across the room, and I got mad at a fella who said, “Well, it was a good game.” I didn’t want a good game, I told him, I wanted my team to win. Then, after one of my teams finally FINALLY won a championship, I remained purposefully and stubbornly unsatisfied, because I wanted to focus on next year. I thought about the natural attrition of losing some talent, and how we were going to replace them, and if we had a chance at a repeat. When we repeated, I wanted a three-peat, and I was miserable when that didn’t happen. Being a super sports fan should be fun and enjoyable, but it’s not, and if you take it as far as I did, it can actually make you a little miserable.

I’ve recently discovered that it doesn’t matter how competitive I am while watching my favorite teams engage in sporting activities on the television set. It doesn’t will them to win, it doesn’t exert some force on them to do better when I steadfastly refuse to accept a mere winning season, a post-season appearance, or second place from my teams. “It says a lot about you if you’re willing to accept being in the championship game,” we super-sports fans say to establish our bona fides in our group. “WE” want to win that championship game every…single…time!”

Of course I want my team to win that game, I want my team to win every single game, but what do I do if they don’t? What do I do if they do? It turns out, I’m not playing in that game, and it doesn’t matter what I do, it doesn’t matter what I think, and my emotional investment in my team will not affect how they play in any way. If my team is in a championship game, it’s the team I choose to support that is in a championship game. I’m not playing in this game, and their performance is not a reflection on my character, and if we they make a mistake, it is not a statement on ~~our~~ my ability in any way, and the outcome of this game should have no bearing on my emotional stability. What that in mind, we need to mentally rewrite what those who watch sports say, “It says a lot about you that you’re willing to accept that your favorite team is in the championship game. You should want your favorite team to win that championship game.” I know this sounds odd, but some sports fans need to learn to detach themselves from the “WE” mind meld that leads them to say, “I’m sorry, I am just so competitive,” when watching a game on TV.

One key component to the fanaticism of the typical fan is the underlying psychology of said fan. I can only use myself as an anecdotal example. When I was most unsatisfied with my life, I was a raging fan. To my embarrassment, I would have anxiety issues watching another slow progression of my team losing a game. I was miserable to be around. I scared my dog, and my wife lost her love of watching sports with me. Now that I’m more satisfied with the direction of my life, I’m finally starting to see how foolish it was that I got SO UPSET!!! over my team losing a game on a television program. I love sports, always have, always will, but I don’t know if I ever really enjoyed watching sports.

I hear my friends now from my newfound perspective, and I realize how foolish I was. When one of my teams just barely lost the championship on a last second field goal, I left the party and drove home, “Because I didn’t want to sit there and talk about how close we were.” I threw my remote control across the room after we choked another game away, and I got mad at a fella who said, “Well, it was a good game.” I didn’t want a good game, I told him, I wanted my team to win. Then, after one of my teams finally FINALLY won a championship, I remained purposefully and stubbornly unsatisfied, because I wanted to focus on next year. I thought about the natural attrition of losing some talent, and how we were going to replace them, and if we had a chance at a repeat. When we repeated, I wanted a three-peat, and I was miserable when that didn’t happen. Being a super sports fan should be fun and enjoyable, but it’s not, and if you take it as far as I did, it can actually make you a little miserable.

Conquering Fear: A Few Tips from Psychopaths

January 9, 2013April 25, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“99% of the things we worry about never happen,” says a mental patient in the best-known psychiatric hospital in England called Broadmoor. “Yet, we spend 99% of our time worrying about them? What’s the point? Most of the time our greatest fears are unwarranted.”

What is a psychopath? The word drums up horrific images of serial killers, cannibals, and Hannibal Lecter in an old hockey mask. Some shudder at the mere mention of the word, and for good reason in some cases. If we dig through all of the cinematic and medical definitions we find two traits that most psychopaths share, they don’t care, and they don’t feel guilty. The exaggerations of these traits often alarms medical professionals and law enforcement officials on a case by case basis, but are there any elements of the way a psychopath thinks that we could use to live a more fruitful, eventful existence with less fear? Is there something we could learn from an otherwise twisted sense of reality to better our lives?

Author Kevin Dutton believes we can, and he conducted an interview of four different psychopaths –for a book called The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success– to prove it. “What is a psychopath,” the thesis of this book asks, “but an individual who exhibits ruthlessness, charm, mental toughness, mindfulness, and action.” The psychopath also exhibits a level of fearlessness unknown in most quarters.

“Who wouldn’t benefit from kicking one of two of these (characteristics) up a notch?” Dutton asks.

The theme of Dutton’s piece, and the interviews he conducted with these psychopaths –he lists simply as Danny, Jamie, Larry, and Leslie– is that fear rules much of our lives, and the fears of what others might think of us.

Most of what we say is ninety-percent narcissistic gibberish, and psychopaths are no different. Their gibberish receives further damage by their other hysterical rants. Before dismissing them entirely, however, we might want to consider delving into the gibberish –that can border on hysterical at times– to see if they have something we could to add to our discourse. In doing so, we might gain some perspective on ourselves and learn how fear has rooted itself deep into our decision-making process.

Most psychopaths don’t wallow in from the past most of us do in our guilt-ridden lives. Most psychopaths don’t have fears about the future either, at least in regards to how it might govern their present, in the manner the rest us do. Most psychopaths have a callous disregard for the plight, the feelings, and the emotions of their fellow man, unless it serves them to do so. For this reason, the author doesn’t focus on the crimes these men committed. This may seem to be a crime of omission by some to placate a controversial argument, others may deem Dutton’s argument incomplete and immoral, and the rest may not want to consider the wisdom of those that have committed unspeakable atrocities to be worthy of discussion, but Dutton did not consider their crimes germane to his piece. It may also be worthy to note, that the crimes these psychopaths committed are not germane to their presentation either. They appear, in the Scientific American summary of Dutton’s piece, to have simply moved on. They don’t appear to relish, or regret, their acts in the manner a Hollywood production would lead us to believe psychopaths do. They just moved on in a way we might suspect from someone who truly doesn’t care. They appear to have gained a separation from their acts that allows them to live a guilt-free life. Dutton quotes an unnamed lawyer to further illustrate this point:

“Psychopathy (if that’s what you want to call it) is like a medicine for modern times. If you take it in moderation, it can prove extremely beneficial. It can alleviate a lot of existential ailments that we would otherwise fall victim to because our psychological immune systems just aren’t up to the job of protecting us. But if you take too much of it, if you overdose on it, then there can, as is the case with all medicines, be some rather unpleasant side effects.”

Although the patients Dutton interviewed do not appear to relish, or regret, the specific incidents that led to their incarceration, this reader believes that they do appear to enjoy the result. They appear to enjoy the fruits of their actions: our fear of them.

“We are the evil elite,” says the patient named Danny.

“They say I’m one of the most dangerous men in Broadmoor,” says another patient named Larry. “Can you believe that? I promise I won’t kill you. Here, let me show you around.”

The question this reader has is do psychopaths simply enjoy the idea that we’re fascinated with the freakish nature of living a life without fear, or do they enjoy the fear others have of their thoughtless and impulsive capacity to cause harm?

Fear Causes Inaction

The patients named Jamie and Leslie received an “every day” scenario by the author in which a landlord could not get an uninvited guest to leave his rental property. The landlord, in question, attempted to ask the guest to leave the property in a polite manner. When the tenant ignored the landlord, he tried confronting the man, but the man would not leave, and the man would not pay rent either. That landlord was stuck between doing what was in his best interests, and doing what he considered the right thing.

“How about this then?” Jamie proposed. “How about you send someone pretending to be from the council to the house? How about that councilman go to the house and say that they are looking for the landlord to inform him that they have conducted a reading of that house? How about that councilman asks the uninvited guest to deliver a message to the landlord that his house is just infested with asbestos Before you can say ‘slow, tortuous death from lung cancer,’ the wanker will be straight out the door.

“You guys get all tied up trying to ‘do the right thing’,” Jamie continued after being informed that his resolution was less than elegant. “But what’s worse, from a moral perspective? Beating someone up who deserves it? Or beating yourself up who doesn’t? If you’re a boxer, you do everything in your power to put the other guy away as soon as possible, right? So why are people prepared to tolerate ruthlessness in sport but not in everyday life? What’s the difference?”

“You see I figured out pretty early on in life that the reason why people don’t get their own way is because they often don’t know themselves where that way leads,” Leslie continues. “They get too caught up in the heat of the moment and temporarily go off track. I once heard a great quote from one of the top (boxing) trainers. He said that if you climb into the ring hell-bent on knocking the other chap into the middle of next week, chances are you’re going to come up unstuck. But if, on the other hand, you concentrate on winning the fight, simply focus on doing your job, well, you might knock him to the middle of next week anyway. So the trick, whenever possible, is to stop your brain from running ahead of you.”

Most unsuccessful boxers lock up when considering the abilities of their opponent. They want to knock their opponent out, before the extent of their opponent’s talent is fully realized in the ring.

“Our brains run ahead of us,” Leslie points out.

Our fear of how talented the other guy might be gets in the way of us realizing our talent, in other words, and this causes us to forget to employ the methodical tactics that we’ve employed throughout the career that brought us to the bout in the first place. We have these voices in our head, and the voices of our trainers, telling us to knock our opponent out early, before they get their left hook going, while forgetting to work the body and tire them out to the point that our own knockout punch is more effective.

The gist of this, as this reader sees it, is that we end up fearing failure and rejection so often that we fail to explore the full extent of our abilities in the moment. We care about the moment so much, in other words, that we would probably do better to just shut our minds off and execute.

If we place a goldfish in a tank, we may see that fish knock against the glass a couple of times, especially early on, but sooner or later that fish learns to adapt to its parameters, and it no longer bumps into the glass as often. We may believe that there is some sorrow, or sadness, involved in the goldfish’s realization of its limits, but there isn’t. We’re assigning our characteristics to the goldfish, because we know our parameters, and we’re saddened that we can’t break free of them. Even though we have the whole world in which to roam, we stay in the parameters we’ve created for ourselves, because everything outside our goldfish bowl is unknown, or outside our familiar, routine world.

Asking for a raise, or a promotion, can be a little scary, because we know that such a request will call our abilities into question. The prospect of quitting that job is scarier, and the idea of hitting the open market is horrifying, because we know the limits of our ability will come into play in every assessment and interview conducted. The ultimate fear, and that which keeps us in a job we hate, lays in the prospect of landing that other job for which we are either unqualified, and/or ill equipped to handle. What then? Are we to shut out all those worries and fears and just act, and is it possible for a human to do so without some fear?

“When we were kids,” Jamie says, “We’d have a competition to see who could get rejected by the most women in a tavern. The bloke that got rejected the most, by the time the last call lights came on, would get the next night out free.

“Funny thing was,” Jamie continued, “Soon as you started to get a few under your belt, it actually got harder to get rejected. Soon as you started to realize that getting rejected didn’t mean jack, you started getting cocky. At that point, you could say anything you wanted to these women. You could start mouthing off to these women, and some of them would buy into it.”

“I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what could go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present,” Leslie says. “They completely overlook the fact that, actually, right now, everything is perfectly fine.”

Fear can also get you injured

On the subject of fear, a Physics teacher once informed our class that fear can actually get us injured in some occasions:

“Fear causes us to tense up, it causes muscles to brace, and it usually puts us in a position for injury when, say, another car is barreling down on us. This is why a drunk driver can plow into a light pole, demolish their car beyond recognition, and walk away unscathed. With that in mind, the next time you fall off a building, relax, and you should be fine.”

What is a psychopath was a question we asked in the beginning of this article. There are greater answers, in better, more comprehensive articles out there, that spell the definition out in more clinical terms, but the long and short of it is that psychopaths don’t care. They don’t care about the people that they’ve harmed, they don’t care about the pain they caused their victim’s family members, or the communities that their actions alarmed, and they don’t care that they have a greater propensity to harm more people in the future. They may know why they need to be incarcerated, on a certain level, but they don’t care what those reasons are.

Naysayers might suggest that empathy, sympathy, guilt and regret are almost impossible to shut off entirely. Caring is what separates us from the alligator, the bear, and just about every other life form. They might also suggest that psychopaths are not as immune to emotions as they suggest, but that they’re playing to the characteristics of their psychological categorization. It would be impossible to deny this in all cases, as the individual cases of psychopathy are so varied, but it could be said that these people are, at the very least, so unaffected by their deeds that they are not incapacitated by them. We could also say that when casual observers evaluate the characteristics of others, they often make the mistake of doing so through their own lens. We all experience moments in life when we do not care as much as we should, and some of us experience moments of exaggerated apathy that others might characterize as psychopathy. These moments are few, however, and loosely defined as psychopathic. Yet, our own limited experience with the mindset suggests that there are limits, and we find the exaggerations listed in Mr. Kevin Dutton’s book as incomprehensible, yet these psychopaths find it just as incomprehensible that we are so inhibited by the exaggerations of the opposite that we are left incapacitated by it.

These psychopaths may currently live confined in the world of a psychiatric institute, and they may be preaching to us from an insular world in which they don’t have to deal with the real world consequences of pursuing their philosophy. They do believe that they lived a portion of their lives freer than we’ve ever known, however, and that the only reason they’re locked up is that they may have been granted a little bit too much of a good thing.

To B or not to B

January 2, 2013April 1, 2020 RilalyLeave a comment

Having a philosophy can provide one a sense of fulfillment, a discipline, a code, and a foundation for a way to live through the extensive knowledge of the various minds of philosophy. A student of the mind can delve so deeply in a philosopher’s thoughts, or philosophical thought in general, that they can eventually reach a point where they believe they have an answer for everything that plagues them in life. For most of us, however, philosophy simply provides a plan ‘B’ in life.

“Renowned philosophers have never helped me!” say those who don’t believe philosophers can ever provide a decent plan B. “They are not specific enough.”

But some of the times they get close. Some of the times they get so close it can be frustrating. It would be one thing if they said nothing, but some of the times they get so close to the heart of all that ails us that it almost feels like they’re tantalizing us with their brilliance. They write something that captures our attention, and then they further that original thought with another thought that brings us kicking and screaming to a point of identification. It’s almost as if they read our minds when they wrote that, we think. They’re pouring our heart out. We’re breathless with anticipation. We’re turning the pages of their book so quickly that we’re getting paper cuts.

“Yes!” we scream. “Ohmycreator yes! That’s it! Sing it to me sista!”

Then, we arrive at the solution, if there ever was one, and we think we somehow got lost in the weeds, somewhere along the line. We retrace our steps, we turn back two of three pages, then twenty to thirty, and we can’t find where we lost the point. “What did he say?” we ask, and we hate ourselves for asking that. We hate it, because it reveals us as one of those who don’t understand. It lowers our ego just a tad, but we know that that philosopher was onto something —in some form of English that we barely understood— that left us hanging off the cliff, because we just didn’t understand their proposed solution. Somehow or another they didn’t do anything but correctly identify the problem without attempting a solution. We didn’t exactly drop off the cliff with disappointment, but the philosopher didn’t quite help us off it either. Not in the manner we thought they would when they swam so close to our Sun. What happened?

A scene from the television series Taxi captures this dilemma perfectly. In the scene, the character Latka is experiences a multiple personality disorder. Latka assumes a number of personalities in the episode, until he assumes another character’s persona. He assumes the Alex Reager characteristics, and he believes he’s Alex Reager in every way, shape, and form. Latka reaches a point, in this disorder, where he’s figured out a solution to all that ails Alex, and he says so in a counseling session. He does so by listing all the flaws with Alex’s character, flaws Alex confirms, until Latka states that he’s found a solution to all that ails this Alex persona. This captures Alex’s attention. “It was so simple!” Latka says with an anticipatory Alex goading him on. “It was staring me in the face the whole time!” To each progression, Alex nears the Latka character saying: “Yes, ohmycreator yes!” until the two are inches away from one another with Alex panting in anticipation. Much to Alex’s disappointment, Latka snaps out of the personality disorder just short of revealing the solution, and he turns back into Latka. At that point, Alex begins griping Latka by the face, screaming at him to go back to being Alex for one more minute when Latka says: “Alex you’re squeezing me!”

The answer to the frustrations most agnostic consumers experience with philosophy, say philosophy students, is that it would be impossible for a philosopher to provide specific solutions to all of your individual problems. The purpose of philosophy, they would say, is to lead their subject into asking questions that they may have never considered before, to give them another viewpoint on their problems, and to provide its adherents an all-encompassing blueprint for life that the reader can use to interpret and relate to their individual problems. The purpose is to get the consumer to thinking different. The purpose is to get us thinking.

Why do we do the things we do? Why do we make choices and decisions in life? How do we make them? Who is affected by our decisions, and do we factor them into our decision making process? The purpose of philosophy is to get us to ask these questions and other questions of ourselves. Only by asking ourselves questions can we ever arrive at an answer that may suit our individual needs. Philosophy requires extensive participation. It requires active listening, and reading, and most of the solutions one finds in life will not be specifically lined up for the reader. Don’t take it out on philosophers, students of philosophy will say, if you are too lazy to interpret and relate such concepts and propositions to your life.

The problem for most of philosophy’s agnostics is that most philosophical concepts are espoused in such an academic sense. The philosophies of Nietzsche, Kant, Sartre, Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles, and Freud and Jung might apply to the modern day, and they may be the greatest thoughts man has ever had, but getting to the nut of what they’re saying requires too much interpretation for most modern day consumers. Most of the philosophers listed here spoke, and wrote, in a more proper, less relatable form of English, if they spoke in English at all. They also spoke/wrote in a vague manner that would be, and could be, so open to interpretation that it seems they never said anything specific. Some regard this as brilliant in that a reader could interpret the words for their own needs. Others regard it as frustratingly vague for the same reason. If these others, these agnostic types, do attempt to subject a philosopher’s thoughts and ideas to their problems, they get slapped back by strict interpretations provided to them by a Philosophy professor. These strict interpretations may take the vagueness out of the material, but it also takes away the individual’s joy of forming a belief on the philosopher’s concepts that may differ from the professor’s. The professor gives a “correct” interpretation and pulls out a red pen on any student that goes off that trail. “I can see what you’re trying to say here,” the professor writes in red, “but it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

All of the philosophers listed here are much smarter than us, and they’ve developed some theories on the decisions and choices we make that could just blow our minds if we understood them properly. But those who teach and interpret their theories get a little too far into the weeds for most of us. They get too professorial, they talk over our heads, and they fail to relay their concepts to us. Philosophy is viewed by the eager, young minds thirsting for new knowledge, as overly complicated, or so narrow that it doesn’t apply to them, irrelevant in the modern era, and something to be studied for a test … Nothing more and nothing less. Philosophy and psychology doesn’t have to be this way.

Philosophy also doesn’t have to be that which is espoused by an egghead, hippie type that attempts to intimidate the listener with punctuation-less sentences that contain as many multi-syllabic words as the hippie can think up that are backed up by obscure quotes from a similar philosopher that was obscure 400 years ago. These people also get a lot of mileage out of telling a listener what philosophy is not, based on these obscure quotes and references, that exhaust you, until the reader is left with the empty feeling that it’s all too complicated for them to ever understand. We don’t want to admit such a thing though, so we just quietly walk away from philosophy with the idea that we’re just not smart enough to understand it. It shouldn’t be that way.

It should be the goal of all of those that love philosophy to carry the torch to the next generation. It should be their goal to drop the indulgence of proving their intelligence while proving their mastery of the subject matter at the same time. Combining these two appears to be too much for most philosophy lovers. They get so caught up trying to impress their peers that they forget to make the message appealing. They have a gift for draining the elemental gifts these philosophers have provided us right out of their lesson plans, but they don’t appear to care about the subject matter in this way. They appear to prefer the credo: “If no one knows what you’re talking about, no one can refute you.”

The question becomes how does one reach an audience of young computer-game, Google searchers with a limited attention span? Certain individuals in the entertainment milieus have done it in bite-sized morsels. They have used comedy to lubricate what is generally perceived to be the incomprehensible, rougher edges of philosophy, as witnessed in the episode of Taxi provided above. The clever minds of Taxi/Cheers fame, the writers of Seinfeld, and the Philosophy and… series of books have taken the relatively difficult concepts of Nietzsche, Kant, Sartre, Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles, and Freud and Jung and put them out to the mass consumers in comedic form to open the door to greater understanding. It can be done, in other words, and it should be done. A look through the best seller list, and the television ratings, shows that modern consumers are just as hungry for knowledge as they are entertainment, and the richest rewards lie out there for those that are able to do both in a highly skilled juggling act.

When our friends detail the plot line of such a comedy, and we inform them that it’s based on a philosopher’s concept, they’re intrigued. They may not care that it came from a man named Rousseau, and they may never turn around and read a single word of that man’s writings, but the idea that this man’s concept reached them intrigues them to learn more about the concept and the way it might affect their life. They may not have reached that concept in the manner a philosophy professor, or an uppity beatnik, would care for, but they still learned it, and their lives may eventually be all the better for it, and it may provide a window that once opened might lead eager young minds to explore for more knowledge.

The alternative to grasping these concepts, and subsequently living without a philosophical sense of life, is nihilism —the belief in nothing. Some nihilists even condemn atheists for their beliefs. Atheists may share the metaphysical belief that God doesn’t exist with nihilists, but where they divert is in the meaning of life. Atheists believe that one doesn’t have to believe in God for life to have meaning. Nihilism maintains that life has absolutely no meaning, purpose, or value, and the godfather of nihilism even went so far to write that Christianity may actually have more in common with nihilism than they know, based on the fact that Christians place less value on this life than they do the afterlife.

This absolute belief in nothing, when used in conversation, can be a contrarian tool that a self-proclaimed nihilist can use as a shield against attack. It may allow them to sit back with a smug smile while atheists and Christians attack one another with the mindset being that they may not believe in anything, but at least they’re not foolish enough to believe in something.

Nihilists usually wage a philosophical war on believers, studying up on our beliefs, our philosophy, or our religion, until they reach a point where they can proudly claim to know our belief system better than we do, or at least those that believe the same as us. The latter is an important distinction to make, for most nihilists usually don’t single us out for their criticism. They may actually go so far as to single us out for support by saying that we’re not one of those they’re talking about, because we’re more open-minded, erudite, or one of the few that can speak about such a hot button issue rationally. Whatever guise they use to avoid further confrontation, they do so to complete their life’s mission of knocking everything everyone else believes in, by trying to keep it impersonal. To suggest that all nihilists operate in a nefarious manner with the sole goal of undermining belief, would be as incorrect as the comprehensive labels they attach to believers, but they do seek some sort of validation for their mindset from the believers.

One of the reasons they need validation, is that when everything goes wrong in their life they know that they will be left with total devastation. The nihilist’s world exists on a precarious plane that there are certain truths that keeps them afloat. Most of their truths can be found in the routines of life: work, marriage, kids, friends, weekend fun, and politics. There is, however, no underlying foundation to nihilism, no meaning of life, no purpose, and no substantial reality in their lives to help them overcome a shakeup of one of these routines. There’s an old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes, and that cliché is based on the idea that in times of total devastation the human mind needs a plan B, a sense of life, a philosophy, a religion, or something to fall back on. Some say the need to believe in something might be biological, or anatomical, but whatever the case is, it’s undeniable that we all need something to believe in, something greater than ourselves, and a plan B to fall back on when things don’t go as planned.