Are Sports Just a Distraction?

Care2.com - Kevin Mathews, 2/02/13

I used to get fairly worked up about my favorite sports teams; after one particularly distressing loss, I finally asked myself: why do I care? As a spectator, I realized that the importance of the game extends no further than the value I choose to assign to it. From then on, I devoted less of my time to sports and made a conscious effort to prioritize pursuits that seemed more worthwhile.

While I considered sports to be a distraction in my own life, Noam Chomsky argues that sports are a distraction for the masses. The renowned intellectual, activist and linguist believes that spectator sports are a form of propaganda designed to divert society’s attention. In his book “Understanding Power,” Chomsky says:

“In our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way—so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folk. So what’s left? Well one thing that’s left is sports—so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that’s also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.”