Slaughtering the Condemned in Front of a Cheering Crowd
Let’s consider the value of Roman blood sports in society. It’s time to put criminals to use for our entertainment.
To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.
— Louis Althusser
Roman bloodsports are legal.
Experts of morality, judgment, and goodness got together and lobbied to revive Roman blood for the United States.
Go to a sporting arena this month during combat week and see the old favorites ancients enjoyed reinstated for our attendance. Get to your seats early to see the preshow. On any given night during combat week, you might see:
Boxing — One on one unarmed combat with fewer rules than what we have today.
Pankration — 8th century B.C. form of unarmed combat — “No biting or gouging” all else is fair play.
And get comfortable for the main event.
Gladiator contests — Choreographed fighting to the death between two or more men, or a man and a beast in an arena. The most popular Roman entertainment combat.
Why did we ever stop bankrolling this one?
Not everybody is into Roman blood sports, but everywhere you go, anywhere in the United States, you can find a venue hosting Roman blood sports. You can see people walking around with fake blood splatter T-shirts and stupid giant foam hands holding foamed spiked clubs and gladiator helmets that hold 40 ounces of beer that funnel into the wears mouth by tubes draped over the ears.
Nearly half of Americans want to see gladiators fight other gladiators to the death.
Sometimes a lion or a tiger eats a man alive.
It’s pretty horrible to see it — but you have to remember — the victims are not citizens, but the condemned, evil folks responsible for acts such as armed robbery in the accidental shooting death of a cop, narcotics abuse, hopping turnstiles, and auto theft — so they deserve to be eaten alive.
But don’t worry because a little more than half the population doesn’t condone Roman blood sports, and we don’t want to be around people who are into Roman blood sports. 55% of the nation says, if you’re into Roman bloodsport, I can’t be friends with you because what you find entertaining; it’s just disgusting.
That’s right, people who don’t watch people get slaughtered for sport are still the majority in the United States.
But since Roman blood sports are legal, they’re a part of our culture, and we will be subjected to seeing them. If Roman blood sports were legal, we would not be able to get away from being much more familiar with that culture than we would like.
But think of how easy it would make social situations. I would have a good reason to break the acquaintanceship of somebody I found out was in the Roman blood sports. Third date, I’m at her apartment and saw all the pictures and memorabilia. She’s been to twenty fights this year? She’s got one of the blood-splatter T-shirts on her bed. No time for a fourth date because we’d no longer be talking.
Another thing is we’d find out that friends of friends were in the Roman blood sports and question our friend.
“Why are you friends with Paul? Dude’s into seeing people get decapitated.”
“Paul and I have a lot in common. He’s funny and thoughtful. We just don’t talk about Roman blood sport.”
“But he laughs when people are executed. How can you have dinner with a guy like that?”
You wonder why your friend Johnny stays friends with Paul.
Can you separate the funny and thoughtful from the evil and only associate funny and thoughtful? Is your association with Johnny tainted because he’s friends with a guy who’s into decapitation?
Yes, it is. Get out of that friendship. Johnny is no friend of yours — Johnny’s friends with a guy that laughs when people get decapitated.
We have an unspoken common interest against bringing back Roman blood sports. It’s not because we’re not Romans that we don’t bring back Roman blood sport: it’s that we just don’t do that kind of thing in society anymore. Nationality has nothing to do with it. You could argue that certain prisons are a sort of replacement for Roman bloodsport. We don’t work prisoners for the purpose of death, we just work them for their sentence, and any pay they get goes back to the prison. Come on, somebody’s gotta pay for the food.
We’ve got something other than Roman bloodsport at stake, but I swear it is just as deadly. Once in a while, we notice opinions turn into rules that we don’t like. In a while will look back at today and say: “That’s how we got to here!”
What seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological.’ — Louis Althusser
A war of ideas
We’ve entered a new Puritanical time. This is an age where you can be condemned for what you say rather than being recognized for what you believe. Puritanical in its astringency, not its Faith.
We are decades into an era of word policing, and we should consider what cancel culture is and what it can become.
Cancel culture delegitimizes what is undesired by a percentage of a population. By acting through cancel culture, one denounces the actions and speech of the representation of an ideology by their representation of an ideology. This combination removes all but a nominal human element from the interaction.
Ideological language is created to frame the way we are to think about given attitudes without any situation being present. Preemptive responses to stimuli are given. They become inborn in the ideologue. Cancel culture language activates the motivation to shut people of different views out by framing situations and responses to those situations.
Robotic reactions — such as placing your hand over your heart when singing the Pledge of Allegiance or yelling thief! at the person who steals your purse — leads to robotic thinking and robotic action. You can see this in the way groups of people are judged when they are found living within a larger group of people, such as the Rohingyas in Malaysia, the Uighurs in China, or racism in the United States.
We will not see reform in rules-we’ll stay away from laws for now and just say that a rule is anything publicly issued by authority.
As language becomes stale, we find that ideology becomes stale — in the case of endearing, what might be called exceptionally potent ideologies — the languages refreshed by commentary from its followers.
Discontinued words — stewardess, for example — become the target of attack from people who feel they’ve moved on from that language. Stewardess was a word with a definition 30 years ago. Today, it is a retired designation with the same definition as its replacement, yet it exists along with its replacement — flight attendant — and continues to have purposefulness, though it is retired.
Stewardess now creates a framework for ad hominem arguments by accepting change at the irrational negation of what’s being replaced, this is leading us toward becoming robots engaged in a war of ideas.
Why shun its use by shunning the person using the word instead of excepting its existence and the person using the word. A clean alternative to shunning someone for using the word Stewardess would be to recognize how and why it’s being used. Why strengthen pugilist thought when if we relax our tendency for contention we can accomplish more for society?
Consider the word woke. What about using the word enlightenment in place of it? After all, woke people have become enlightened about the disastrous effects of the patriarchy. The woke mind sees the injustices of the society that it lives in and a better way of life that can be enjoyed if we are efficient enough to create it.
That better way of life is possible by adhering to an idea. The idea is that the patriarchy is evil. All people are equal, there should be no debate about what women do with their bodies, and many other things, you can chip in your contributions here. Enlightenment never goes out of style, but woke’s power changes. From coining the term to a newly widespread term to an officially important buzzword, to fading, datedness, later obscurity, rediscovery, reappropriation — gaining acceptance into mainstream usage again, and so forth. Woke has a cycle of popularity and effectiveness, but once it is retired its potentiality for meaning and usefulness remains.
Enlightenment never goes out of style.
But enlightenment is not a good cognate for woke because the enlightened mind would be detached from the antagonisms of earthly communication while the woke mind is reactionary to them.
While much of the thought of woke culture is vital to our happiness, the mentality has an intolerant agenda that would not be a suitable guide for happiness but rather a suitable mindset for fighting a war.
It may be suitable to use woke culture to fight a war against patriarchy and capitalism, but there’s still a problem along the way, the intolerance that the woke mindset creates.
Woke ideas are good healthy expressions of injustice, though if they are used to undermine them so that their presence is negligible, that power can be used to impress people to impress intolerant laws, which would lead to waves of mass incarceration. Imagine how many people would never go to jail if nobody had ever gone to jail for smoking marijuana, having it on their person or selling it.
Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana. Nationwide, the arrest data revealed one consistent trend: significant racial bias. Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana. — ACLU
1/5 of the United States prison population is made up of drug offenders. That’s about 400,000 people locked up, away from their families, from the opportunity to live their life freely. Since 1980 the number of people incarcerated for lower-level drug offenses has ballooned.
The problem is that organized intolerance leads to authoritarianism. As we create a single word or phrase to denote a variety of behavior, we end up not dealing with the offense but the label the offense carries. It’s not that Roman blood sports aren’t abhorrent, it’s that charisma, reason, and intelligence can make people follow anything. The human mind is mutable. Opinions can be formed and swayed. Religions and political affiliations swapped, allegiances have a sly way of changing. It’s easy to see the brainwashing of others but challenging to pinpoint objectivity, and more difficult to see where we are in error in serving just causes.
Originally posted in Original Philosophy on Medium
