Now we are ready to look at our national sports addiction--an
addiction {pushed} through habituated television viewing--from
another vantage point.
Let's set the scene, again. It is the last game of the World
Series. The last inning, the last chance for the home team,
{your team}, and they trail by one lone run.
Two men out. Men on second and third. A two-strike count on
the batter. Another strike and it's all over. A hit will win
the game. The camera brings you a shot of the pitcher, as he
gets ready for the pitch. Another camera shoots the batter,
as he cocks the bat, waiting. The score, a reminder of the
proximity to an outcome, flashes on the screen.
The palms of your hands are wet with tension. You think to yourself,
``Come on, you can do it. Just a hit. That's all we need.''
The pitcher winds, and as he does {you cross your fingers and
say a little prayer}. The ball is delivered, and {you pray a
little stronger, a little harder} in that instant before it
arrives at its destination.
Now let's freeze that for a moment.
Who, or better yet, {what} were you praying to? To God, the
Divine Creator of all the universe? Not really. A religious
person would hardly think that God should waste his time on
such trivial matters. A less than religious person would not
think to ask for Divine intercession.
No, at that moment, in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs
and two strikes, you were probably asking for help from {the
gods}, those mystical forces who control the {Fates}, which
we are told by those who study such matters, play such an important
role in sporting contests.
The sports fanatic believes in such things as the {Fates} and
the control of events by mystical forces outside the laws of
the Universe. Sports and sporting events, in the minds of these
fanatics, exist, to use a sports term, {out of bounds} of normal
religion, and most decidedly {outside} Christianity.
The religion of sports is a {mystical cult}, based on the infantile
emotions. It posits a universe outside that which is governed
by the laws of the Universe that can be known by the powers
of creative reason. It is a cult which has its {rituals and
celebrations of that which can never be known}. It teaches man
that he is ultimately helpless against {the Fates}, the mystical
gods of {irrational emotions}.
Judeo-Christian civilization has
taught us that man is made in the image of his Creator and that
what distinguishes him from the animal is his power of creative
reason. By that power, man can discover the laws of the universe
and participate in the Creation.
Most importantly, all men are created equal--not in the corporeal
sense that their bodies are equal, but equal in the {potential
of their creative capacities} at birth. It is the responsibility
of society to assure that each individual is given the maximum
opportunity to fulfill that creative potential and thereby to
contribute to mankind's search for perfection of its knowledge.
The {pagan cult} of sports preaches the opposite: Man is a two-legged
animal, whose reason must ultimately fail him before mystical
gods of fate, and who is driven by a brutish, animal-like aggressiveness.
Such ``men'' are decidedly unequal, with some men created more
equal than others as evidenced by the god-like athletes of the
various playing fields.
While such views most clearly undermine Christian thinking,
they are promoted by many sports ideologues as the celebration
of the highest good of human culture: an organized, ritualized
competition, in which men submit to arbitrary rules. This, we
are told, represents the essence of human beauty and ethical
conduct. American sports, we are told, as represented by the
major spectator sports, are the best of American culture and
contain all the basic truths that America needs to impart from
one generation to the next.
Such a sports ideologue is Michael Novak, a failed seminarian,
who has become a ``theologian'' within conservative American
Catholic circles. Novak fashioned himself into an apologist
for the degenerate American conservative culture of the Reagan-Bush
years. Novak sees Anglo-American capitalism as the highest form
of Christian culture and sees sports as a necessary component
of that culture.
Given who Novak is, we shall argue that his thinking represents
the outlook of that pagan, oligarchical elite responsible for
your sports addiction. When he speaks of an {ethics} of sport,
he is speaking of an Arisototelian ethics, a mere set of arbitrary
rules and codes. In his many writings, Novak alludes several
times to his affinity for the work of Aristotle. Novak's repeated
attacks on the concept of the {infinite} as being inferior to
what he calls the {ritual limits} of sports are a denial of
the possibility of the existence of universal truth.
Novak's views on these matters and his {image of man as an animal}
are identical to those of the evil brainwasher Sigmund Freud.
Much of Novak's theology of sports is derived from Freudian
notions of repression and sex drives.
Novak's moral outlook is the same as that of the Spartan state,
which also idealized and promoted sports and competition. His
{mystical gnosticism} is akin to the outlook of the {Nazi state},
put into power by the same oligarchy that sponsors and promotes
American sports, through its brainwashing tool, television.
Novak's 1975 book {The Joy of Sports}, from which we will quote
extensively, therefore provides us with some insight into how
your brainwashers and their controllers view the effect of sports
on your mind and society.
A Secular Religion
In this book, Novak lays out the thesis that American sports,
especially since its mass penetration into the population with
the advent of television, have become a {civil or secular religion},
holding sway over the masses: ``In the study of civil religions,
our thinkers have too much neglected sports.... Sports are a
universal language binding our diverse nation, especially its
men, together. Not all our citizens have the gift of faith.
The religion, even so, is an ample one, and it allows great
freedom for diverse interpretations, and mutual dissents. Our
sports are liturgies--but do not have dogmatic creeds. There
is no long bill of doctrines to recite. We bring the hungers
of our spirits, and many of them, not all, are filled--filled
with a beauty, excellence, and grace few other institutions
now afford. Our sports need to be reformed--{Ecclesia semper
reformanda}. Let not too much be claimed for them. But what
they do so superbly needs our thanks, our watchfulness, our
intellect, and our acerbic love.
``The institutions of state generate a civil religion,'' writes
Novak. ``So do the institutions of sport. The ancient Olympic
games used to be both festivals in honor of the gods and festivals
in honor of the state--and that has been the classical position
of sports ever since. The ceremonies of sports overlap those
of state on one side and those of the churches on the other....
Going to a stadium is half like going to a political rally,
half like going to a church....''
But Novak is not saying that sports are mere {symbols} for religions.
They satisfy ``religious needs'' of the masses of the population,
needs which he claims the churches are unable to satisfy or
at times even grasp: ``I am saying that sports flow outward
into action from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious:
an impulse of freedom, respect for ritual limits, a zest for
symbolic meaning, and a longing for perfection. The athlete
may of course be pagan, but sports are, as it were, natural
religions....
``They do serve a religious function: they feed a deep human
hunger, place humans in touch with certain dimly perceived features
of human life within the cosmos, and provide an experience of
at least a pagan sense of godliness.
``Among the godward signs in contemporary life, sports may be
the single most powerful manifestation.... Sports drive one
in some dark and generic sense `godward'....
``Sports are religious in the sense that they are organized
institutions, disciplines, and liturgies; and also in that sense
they teach religious qualities of heart and soul. In particular
they recreate the symbols of the cosmic struggle, in which human
survival and moral courage are not assured. To this extent,
they are not mere games, diversions, pastimes.... To lose symbolizes
death, and it certainly feels like dying, but it is not death....
If you give your heart to the ritual, its effects on your inner
life can be far reaching.''
Novak sees sporting contests as teaching man of the existence
of death through the concept of {losing}. In assigning such
importance to death, Novak is mirroring Freud, who argues in
several locations that life is the struggle between two opposing
instincts, Eros, or the sexual drive for perpetuation of the
species, and Thanatos, or death, a drive toward man's own destruction.
The death instinct, claims Freud, is diverted from the individual
toward the external world, and manifests itself as human {aggressiveness
and destructiveness}--two qualities of the {human animal} which
Novak says sports ``joyfully'' celebrate!
The New Priesthood
Arguing against a concept of sports as {mere} entertainment,
Novak says that the relationship between the individual fanatic
and the athlete is psychologically the same as that between
a priest and his disciples. But the priesthood being described
is a {gnostic and pagan} priesthood, not that of Christianity.
The priests are elevated into a god status: ``Athletes are not
merely entertainers. Their role is far more than that. People
identify with them in a much more priestly way. Athletes exemplify
something of a deep meaning--frightening meaning, even....
``Once an athlete accepts a uniform, he is in effect, donning
priestly vestments. It is the function of the priests to offer
sacrifices. As at the Christian Mass, in athletics the priest
is also the victim: he who offers and he who is offered is one
in the same. Often the sacrifice is literal: smashed knees,
torn muscles, injury-abbreviated careers. He is no longer living
his own life only. Others are living in him, by him, with him.
They hate him, they love him, they berate him, they glory in
him. He has given up his personal persona and assumed a liturgical
persona. That is, he is now a representative of others. His
actions are vicariously theirs. His sufferings and his triumphs,
his cowardice and his courage, his good fortune and his ill
fortune become theirs. If the Fates favor him, they also favor
{them}. His deeds become messages from the beyond, revelations
of the favor of the gods....
``Being an active player is like living in the select circle
of the gods, of the chosen ones who act out liturgically the
anxieties of the human race and are sacrificed as ritual victims.
The contests of sports ... are the eucharists.''
Novak is describing {cult} practices, and he knows it: ``A religion,
first of all, is organized and structured. Culture is built
on cult...''
Americans, Novak writes, have little connection to the Renaissance
traditions of European civilization and the values it places
on man and the power of creative reason. Turning our Revolution
on its head and ignoring the Declaration of Independence, he
claims that America was born not in rebellion against the British
Empire, but against {the Renaissance tradition of man}. As such
we need a new ethos and have found it in sports: ``The streets
of America, unlike the streets of Europe, do not involve us
in stories and anecdotes rich with a thousand years of human
struggle. Sports are our chief civilizing agent. Sports are
our most universal art form. Sports tutor us in the basic lived
experiences of the humanist tradition.''
Having broken with that Renaissance tradition of man created
in the living image of God, Novak says that sports present the
true image of man: an aggressive beast, the most powerful and
pernicious of animals.
``The human animal is a warlike animal,'' he writes. ``Conflict
is as near to truth about human relations, even the most intimate,
as any other feature. Sports dramatize conflict. They help
us visualize it, imagine it, experience it....
``Play [as in sports] is part of the human beast, our natural
expressiveness. It flows from inner and perennial energies,
and needs no justification....''
Football, for example, teaches reality in a way that no church
or Renaissance thought can, Novak claims. It shows us that
``human life, in Hegel's phrase, is a butcher's bench. Think
what happened to the Son of God, the Prince of Peace; what happened
in the Holocaust; what has happened in recent wars, revolutions,
floods, and famines....
``What is human?'' asks Novak. ``What has human experience
been in history? A fully humanized world, gentle, sweet and
equitable has never yet been seen on this earth.... One of [football's]
greatest satisfactions, indeed, is that it violates the illusion
of the enlightened educated person that violence has been or
will be exorcized from human life....''
Thus, Novak is telling us that sports teaches us that man cannot
perfect his existence beyond that which is most animal in him,
that the best that can be done is to celebrate his animal nature
as his {Aristotelian true self}: ``There is no use despising
part of our natures. We are of earth, earthly; descended, so
they say, from other hominids; linked by neurons and cells and
organisms to the teeming chemical and biological life of this
luxuriant planet. We are not pure minds, nor rational animals,
nor separate individuals.... We are part of the earth. And sports
makes visible to the human mind the great struggle of being
and nonbeing that constitutes every living thing....''
Here, Novak displays a Freudian disdain for the Judeo-Christian
concept of {imago viva Dei}. Freud states in {Civilization and
Its Discontents}, that Christians, in particular, behave like
``little children'' who refuse to face a harsh ``reality,''
when ``there is talk of the inborn human inclination to `badness,'
to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as
well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection;
nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the
undeniable existence of evil--despite protestation of Christian
doctrine--with His all-powerfulness or His all-goodness.''
All Men Are Unequal
Since it teaches us that man is nothing more than an aggressive
animal, Novak claims that sports also {must} teach us to discard
as meaningless the concept of all men being created equal; it
teaches the precise opposite, he claims.
The athlete, especially the professional, is clearly not the
equal of the average man: He is a superman, a godlike figure,
with qualities that the average man can only dream about: ``Life
is not equal. God is no egalitarian. Prowess varies with every
individual.''
Aristotle, says Novak, teaches us to perceive value and beauty
from this inequality. On this basic and fundamental principle
of {human inequality}, says the pagan Novak, all sports and
all life are premised.
Men are not equal, according to Novak, nor are they capable
of loving humanity. Sports teaches, he says, that aggressiveness
and the drive for dominance are the most basic of animal-like
human instincts. In life as in sports, love, especially Christian
love or {agape@ma}, hardly matters. Certainly such a universal
concept does not provide us with motivation to live a certain
kind of life, Novak claims.
``But we are not infinite... The human imagination, heart, memory,
and intelligence are finite. The nature of the human psyche
is to proceed from what is close to us outward; we cannot without
self-deception begin by embracing everything. To claim to love
humanity is to carry a very large and thin pane of glass toward
a collision with someone you can't abide.''
Here we find Novak in total agreement with Freud. In his {Civilization
and Its Discontents}, Freud argues that the concept of universal
love, on which Christianity is premised, causes a neurotic distortion
of Eros, the libidinal instinct of man. It does so because it
is based on a false and deluded view of one's fellow man: ``A
love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part
of its own value, by doing injustice to its object; and secondly,
not all men are worthy of love....''
It is wrong ``to love thy neighbor as thyself,'' says Freud,
unless there is some purpose as defined by Eros, for this. ``For
my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring
them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on
a par with them. But if I am to love him (with this universal
love), merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth,
like an insect, an earth worm or a grass-snake, then I fear
that only a small modicum of my love will fall his share--not
by any possibility, as much, as by judgment of my reason, I
am entitled to retain for myself. What is the point of a precept
[love thy neighbor] enunciated with so much solemnity if its
fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?''
But it is the Christian command to ``love thine enemies'' which
Freud finds even more abhorrent to his brand of antihumanism.
He recognizes that both commands emanate from the same principle:
that man is more than an animal and and that he is governed
by universal laws more powerful than his instincts. For those,
like Novak, who attack this principle, Freud finds ``the element
of truth behind all of this, which people are so ready to disavow,
is that men are not gentle creatures that want to be loved,
and who at most can defend themselves when they are attacked.
They are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual
endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness....
Who in the face of all his experience of life and history, will
have the courage to assert this assertion? As a rule, this cruel
aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at
the service of some other purpose, whose goal might have been
reached by milder methods. In circumstances that are favorable
to it, when the mental counter forces which ordinarily inhibit
it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously
and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards
his own kind is something alien....''
As we have seen, this is precisely the view of Novak, who sees
sports as putting man into contact with his true, bestial nature.
For Novak--and for his oligarchical masters, the same people
who promoted Freud and put Hitler into power--in sports one
finds {negation} of the principles of Western Christian civilization
and the {affirmation} of a pagan, gnostic religion based on
Freudian concepts of the inate destructiveness of the {human
animal}. To be a sports fanatic is to worship Novak's pagan
gods of Fate and to {celebrate} what is {inhuman}.
A Pagan Rite
The word {fan} is derived from {fanum}, which is Latin for a
local temple. To be a fan is, for Novak, to participate in a
pagan rite of passage and sacrifice. He sees the process of
{rooting} as putting man in touch with himself and his species,
in a way that no religion can offer: ``A human goal more accurate
than enlightenment is `enhumanment.' Sports like baseball, basketball,
and football are already practiced as expressed liturgies of
such a goal. One religion's sins are another's glories. Some
`enlightened' persons feel slightly guilty about their love
for sports. It seems less rational, less universal, than their
ideals; they feel a twinge of weakness. The `enhumaned' believe
that man is a rooted beast, feet planted on one patch of soil,
and that it is perfectly expressive of his nature to `root.'
To be a fan is totally in keeping with being a man. To have
particular loyalities is not to be deficient in universality,
but to be faithful to the laws of human finitude.''
Much of this is restatement of Freud's analysis of mass phenomena.
Freud too claims {rootedness} is a natural expression of man's
basic aggressiveness. He likens it to ethnocentricity and xenophobia,
which he claims reflect an instinctual identification with one's
{own kind}. For Freud and Novak, universal man, the man of the
Renaissance, is a neurotic. Man is more appropriately organized
into animal-like formations, which act in their own, narrowly
defined interests, rather than for the ``good of mankind.''
The emotions of rooting coincide with the desire to be loved
in a mass. The psychosis produced, which Freud calls ``the narcissism
of minor differences,'' becomes at once an approved outlet for
man's basic aggressiveness, which one must be careful to regulate
so as not to allow excesses in either the individual or the
mass. While he is making a more general point, the applicability
of such brainwashing formula to sports {rooting} is obvious.
Novak also ``warns'' that sports rooting can be carried to excess,
which he cautions against: ``Of course, there are fanatic fans,
fans who eat and sleep and drink (above all, drink) their sports.
Their lives become defined by sports. So some politicians are
devoured by politics, pedants by pedantry, pedarasts by pedarasty,
drunks by drink, compulsive worshipers by worship, nymphomanics
by phalluses and so forth. All good things have their perversions,
good swollen into Good, idols into God. Every religion has its
excess. Sports, as well.''
(One wonders whether Novak thinks pederasty ``good'' if not
overdone.)
Undermining the Church
Novak sees the {pagan, secular religion} of sports as enhancing
the other established churches, providing something that they
do not. But a {pagan religion}, whose teaching and practice
is opposed to Christian doctrine, as he describes sports, can
{only undermine Christianity}.
To be sure, sports and religion in America are wedded together.
Churches sponsor sports teams, even offer organized prayers
for the outcomes of important games. Perhaps the most famous
of all football teams, the ``Fighting Irish'' of the University
of Notre Dame have a loyal following in the scores of millions
around the country and have made millions for the university
in television monies each year. Novak himself commented that
the most important thing that the University of Notre Dame ever
did, its most important contribution to humanity, is ``the {myth
of Notre Dame football.''}
The relationship between religion and mass spectator sports
is that of a victim and a disease. It is a failing of the church--all
churches--that they have not seen how sports has become a powerful
counterpole to Christianity, one whose dogma is irreconcilable
with Christian teaching.
Through mass spectator sports, our population is being brainwashed
that man is an animal, that universal truth and love are meaningless
concepts. A large section of our population is reduced to a
state of infantile emotional obsession with the sports fantasy
world, such that it is incapable of comprehending profound ideas.
Our churches do nothing to fight this. As Novak says, churches
have the ``good sense'' to have their Sunday sermons over in
time to allow people to get to their television sets for the
afternoon football games.
Some of you may argue with what we have just presented. I warned
you that you would find some reason to disagree. ``I don't
buy this stuff about an addiction and sports being a pagan religion,''
I can hear some of you saying. ``I just watch it to be entertained.''
You may {think} that is the case. As we have said repeatedly
during this series, the best brainwashing victims are those
who most loudly claim that they cannot be brainwashed.
Think back to that example of the ninth inning of the last World
Series game. The last at bat, two outs: one strike and it's
all over; a hit wins the game for {your} team.
The pitcher winds and releases the ball towards the plate. The
batter cocks the bat. Your hands are wet with tension. You offer
a silent prayer, thinking to yourself: {Please, just let him
get a single. Please, that's all we need. That's not too much
to ask}.
To whom did you offer that prayer, if not to Novak's {gods of
Fate}?
``Ya gotta believe,'' was the rallying cry of pitcher Tug McGraw
as the 1973 New York Mets came from way back to win the National
League pennant, only to lose in the seventh game of the World
Series. ``Believe what?'' he was asked. ``Just believe,'' he
replied. ``Believe in destiny, in Fate. Just believe, without
question, without thinking. Without any reason. To {will} victory.
That's the power, man. That's the force. That's our magic....''
Our boys were well prepared, ``Coach'' Schwarzkopf told us in
the famous briefing on the Gulf War. They had the best ``gameplan''
and they executed it perfectly, he said, as we beamed our approval,
as we sat glued to our television sets.
Was it a just war? Did we fight for a morally defined principle?
And what about all those innocent women and children that were
slaughtered in this ``best of all gameplans?''
``Who the hell cares,'' says the man watching the television
set, his beer cans piled at his feet. ``We won, didn't we? That's
all that counts. You know what they say about winning....''
Our brainwashed people, their eyes buried in their television
sets, know little that cannot reduce to the rules of the {playing
field}. As the statesman and political prisoner Lyndon
H. LaRouche has warned, a people so debased is in danger of
losing the moral fitness survive.
The next time that you find yourself watching a sporting event
on television, and you get that sense of being totally caught
up in the {game}, remember what you have read here. When your
hands start to sweat, when you find yourself starting to pray
to Novak's god of Fate, try to {pull yourself out of it}. Go
over and turn off that set. Believe me, you'll feel much better
in the long run going cold turkey on sports.
And if you live with a sports addict, show him this article.
Don't give in to his or her addiction. When you recognize the
symptoms, go over and turn that set off. Be prepared to duck
a flying beer can or two. But at some point, an {adult} must
put his or her foot down.
The Cult of Physical Fitness
If sports, and especially spectator sports, have been turned
into a pagan religion, then a large number of our fellow citizens
are members of a {sub-cult}, the {cult of physical fitness}.
Let's be precise about what we are talking about. The human
body requires a certain amount of {exercise} to remain healthy.
To the extent that one is not hampered by illness, a {moderate}
amount of daily exercise, in consultation with one's physician,
is both useful and necessary to keep the body healthy and to
deal with the stress of daily life. Such exercise is as necessary
for the young as it is for the old, but again, the operative
principal is the goal of maintaining a healthy and vigorous
body. By so doing, a person maintains his body in a state of
readiness to act as directed by morally informed reason. In
that sense, to be physically fit, is never an end in itself:
it is subordinated to reason, and the program for fitness is
so designed by reason.
A person who acts to keep his body as fit as is {reasonably
possible}, who, if his or her daily life does not contain sufficient
exercise, designs a {reasonable} exercise program, is clearly
acting in his or her best interest.
From this type of {reasonable} physical fitness goal we must
distinguish the current {obsessive neurosis} of many Americans
with physical fitness. In these neurotic cases, physical fitness
becomes an end in itself, severed from reason. One becomes {obsessed}
with one's own body and the perception of that body as a manifestation
of one's {identity}.
While there are examples from history of physical fitness being
used in cult practices on a mass scale, such as in the Spartan
state or more recently, in the Nazi state, the current fitness
craze dates back no more than 15-20 years. It is intrinsically
linked to the degenerate moral outlook of the so-called {Me-generation}
of the 1970s, with its obsessive, infantile fixation on the
gratification of sexual desires.
The emergence of the ``Me-generation'' is the result of the
brainwashing--the first ``rinse cycle,'' if you will--of the
``baby boom generation'' by television, as we have described
elsewhere in this series. The concepts of morally defined right
and wrong, the bedrock of western Christian civilization, were
given a modern ``neo-Freudian'' twist through television programming
and popular culture: It told us that we must have no {guilt}
or {remorse} for our actions, even if they violated Christian
morality. This {moral imbecility} lit the fuse on an explosion
of hedonism.
The erotic component of that hedonistic explosion, pushed, in
part, through the ``sexual revolution'' of the 1960s counterculture
and its infusion in the popular culture, led to a fixation on
the body as an expression of one's fundamental identity. Mass
or popular culture had always ascribed a disproportionate value
to how one looked, but now Americans were told that ``image
is everything.'' The drive for an improved personal appearance,
and enhanced carnal gratifications, pushed the Me-generation
into their jogging shoes, onto their bicycles, and into fitness
and health clubs in record numbers in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The key recruiter to the cult was television. From the 1970s
through the 1980s, the fitness message was inserted into television
programming. Stars of shows, including the daytime soap operas,
were shown at fitness clubs, or jogging, or in some other form
of exercise. There was a heavy sexual content to the message:
Those exercising were usually dressed in revealing exercise
outfits, and clubs and other places were shown as a place to
flirt and attract members of the opposite sex.
The association between sex and exercise was made early on in
the creation of the craze with the promotion of the now-famous
and enormously profitable Jane Fonda ``workout'' videos. Fonda
is credited with recruiting more males to the fitness cult than
any other person; marketing studies show that her videos, as
well as the other exercise videos which, like hers, feature
women in tight-fitting and revealing exercise clothes in various
provocative positions, sell in huge numbers to middle-aged men.
As one reviewer commented, such videos represent ``socially
acceptable pornography.''
But more was being ``sold'' than cheap voyeurism. The fitness
cult has helped with the promotion of the {disease} of environmentalism
within the American population.
From the beginning of the 1970s, television and other media
associated ``fitness'' with the concept of man, as a part of
nature, being in harmony with the laws of the kingdom of {Nature}:
all members of the fitness cult were ``initiated'' into regimens
of ``healthy diets'' and spiritual concepts relating to ``natural
ways of living.'' Perusal of any of the many fitness magazines
reveals articles with this message.
The not-so-hidden message of such magazines and related television
programming and advertising was that man did not have dominion
over nature, but that he was merely ``nature's steward.'' Nature,
or so we were told, dominated man, and if its laws were not
obeyed, even in the realm of the body, man would pay the price
with his ``health'' and ``wellness.''
(Before some of you jump down my throat, let's again clarify
that we are not talking about medically proven facts about healthy
eating habits or moderate exercise programs, conducted under
supervision of doctors; we are dealing with {obsessive behavior}
and are here talking about an {ideological outlook} that became
a justification for that obsessive behavior. So stay in your
seats, will you, and read on.)
According to this {spiritual} message, exercise brought man
into closer communion with his {animal} nature; this was even
said to have a ``therapeutic'' effect on man's consciousness,
giving him a sense of inner peace. In the counterculture of
the late 1960s, this same nonsense was contained in the preachings
of ``holistic medicine,'' ``transcendental meditation,'' ``EST''
and other cults. The operative concept was a ``high without
the drugs'' or a ``natural high.'' This was being played back
in a slightly altered context, winning some old and many new
recruits.
By identifying man as part of nature and by focusing him on
his least-human aspect, his corporeal body, the proponents of
the fitness cult created people with sympathy for environmentalism.
Television programmers inserted characters into shows who are
both fitness nuts and radical environmentalists.
At first, the ads and the television shows imprinted these images
subtly, through the infusion of shots of people on bicycles
or jogging within other action or with people eating ``healthy''
cereals, etc.
Now, the message is more literal. Ads openly pitch to this
fitness-environmental market: ``I exercise to take care of my
body. I eat the right food. And I want to make my town environmentally
safe for my children,'' says a young mother in an ad for a laundry
detergent in a crushable, recyclable container. That string
of predicates seems totally ``natural'' to you, doesn't it?
That's how well brainwashing works.
It works so well that most people don't even remember that they
used to associate Jane Fonda, prior to her workout videos, with
the word ``kook'' or ``nut'' for her various leftist or environmental
stands in the 1960s and 1970s. She's still a nut, but a recent
survey found that most people now associate her name with ``exercise''
or ``fitness.''
Pain and Agony
As we said earlier, a properly defined exercise regimen can
help an individual maintain his health. More often than not,
for a member of the physical fitness cult, an exercise program
driven by {infantile} obsession with one's body and appearance
can be destructive to one's health; it can even threaten one's
life.
Doctors involved with sports or fitness related medical practice
have noted a large number of debilitating and even crippling
injuries directly attributable to obsessive exercising. They
note that in the last few years, the numbers of such injuries
are rising.
In many cases, typical of obsessional neuroses, the individual
{cannot} stop exercising, even when injured, even when he is
told to by doctors. The person is driven by the obsession, which
overpowers his reason. The similarity to a ``programmed'' brainwash
victim has been noted by some clinical observers. In the worst
cases, those obsessed with their exercise are unaware of their
destructive behavior, and even when it is pointed out, cannot
halt it themselves.
But lest someone say that these are only extreme cases, the
majority of those involved with the fitness cult suscribes to
the oft-repeated credo: ``No Pain, No Gain.'' While this {masochism}
has been soundly denounced by medical authorities, it has been
reinforced by popular culture, including television programming.
According to one doctor, ``Nothing we say seems to matter. People
believe what they see and hear on television. They believe
that people should exercise beyond the point of physical breakdown
and pain.''
Pain is often the subject of boasts and discussion among members
of the cult. Even agonizing injury becomes a cathartic experience,
to be greeted with both sympathy and awe by the cult members.
In part, this fixation on pain reflects the mass brainwashing
of the population around the Freudian concept of the {pleasure
principle}: that pleasure is inexorably linked to unpleasure,
and that a pleasurable experience is merely the absence of unpleasure
or, in this case, pain. By this twisted logic, one derives pleasure
from the end of a painful experience; hence, the pain {leads}
to one's pleasure.
This outlook has its political and economic correlative in the
demand for economic austerity and suffering. The same kind of
Freudian logic is summarized in the famous call for sacrifice
of Lazard Freres's ersatz Hjalmar Schacht, Felix Rohatyn; the
choice, he told New Yorkers during the New York City bankruptcy
crisis of the mid-1970s, was between ``Pain and Agony.''
But the problem is even worse than that. The cult of physical
fitness, or more precisely one of its subcults, is going to
kill or physically destroy millions of our young people.
Over the last half of the 1980s, there has arisen a vast teenage
subculture driven by an obsession with the size of muscles and
``pumped up'' with bodybuilding drugs. Experts who have profiled
and studied this trend estimate, on the conservative side, that
there are {at least} 5 to 10 million young people involved with
this obsession. Of that figure, somewhere between 500,000 and
1 million adolescents are involved with the use of black market,
or illegal, steroids.
The numbers are even more startling since recent widespread
publicity campaigns have identified steroid and other bodybuilding
drug use as potentially harmful and even fatal. Studies have
shown that the majority of users do not dispute the medical
claims. They are using the drugs anyway, and even welcome the
perhaps fatal outcome. The credo of this {death cult} is ``{die
young, die strong,}'' according to a recent article in {U.S.
News & World Report}.
In part, this usage is attributable to images in recent popular
culture of ``pumped up'' heroes, such as Rambo or Terminator,
as well as football players and others, with their enormous
paychecks. But these images alone, and their mass-brainwashing
effect, cannot explain the existence of this cult. The deeper
psychological impetus for this phenomenon lies in the {infantile
nature} of adult society as a whole, with its own obsession
with {physical fitness} and carnal desires. It is not the drugs
that drive the obsession, but the other way around. The obsessive
behavior of the youth mirrors adult society, with its own {infantile}
desires for gratification of the flesh, at the expense of creative
reason, and as a subfeature of this, a fixation on sports and
the human body.
In our youth, that fixation leads to a destructive {narcissism},
with a focus on the size of the body muscles. It starts with
an insecurity about one's body; it is followed by an attempt
to correct this insecurity through regimens of weightlifting
and diet. But when that fails, and the insecurity continues,
the drugs become an alternative.
In the case of young athletes, the hyper-competitiveness of
high school and other organized sports creates the insecurity
that drives this cycle. The driven athlete turns to drugs as
a performance enhancer or to ``bulk up'' to meet the challenge
of intense competition. It must be stressed, however, that the
majority of steroid users are white, middle-class males who
{have never been} serious about an athletic career and more
than one-third have never even been on a high school team.
It had been hoped that publicizing the dangers of the drug use
would deal with the problem. It appears instead to be having
an opposite effect. The athletes who have used steroids have
merely become ``anti-heroes,'' who are revered by the hard-core
of this {death cult.}
The growth of this subculture has been promoted vigorously by
the mass media, especially television. One of the most popular
shows among young adolescents is {American Gladiators.} It features
competitions among ``pumped up'' men and women in tests of endurance
and strength in a futuristic setting.
Adolescents are the largest number of 7 million regular readers
of so-called muscle magazines, as well as wrestling magazines,
which are promoted through television advertising. This same
age group helps make huge box office successes of movies featuring
``pumped up'' heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone,
and Jean-Claude Van Dam.
Again, it is wrong to look at those figures and conclude that
such programming is {only} directed at kids. The Me-generation,
now middle-aged adults, also watch {American Gladiators} and
go to see the Terminator movies or rent them for home viewing.
There is no possibility of breaking this subcult in our youth,
without adults breaking from the much larger, but equally mentally
destructive, physical fitness cult.
Think about that as you leer at your next exercise video or
watch with great interest those commercials for various health
foods. Try to imagine what the {next} generation is going to
be like--or, if there is going to be a next generation, at all.
That's all for now. When we return, we'll talk to you about
Satan's own television network, MTV, and what it and similar
fare are doing to our children.
