Sunday, July 11, 2010
World Cup Mania is an example of a dangerous marketing phenomena
Here we are on the verge of maniacal morning of soccer. Looking around me I am amazed at the human propensity to be led by marketing hype into states of madness. Wow!
The same kind of extravaganza as the Olympics. Hugely overblown, insane display of human competitiveness, elitism and greed. All the while these modern gladiators enthrall the world, we are blind to the injustices and suffering of the very people from whence they are drawn.
Do people really understand that it is not their own personal abilities expressed through talent and skill which they are mad over? The only thing that these horn tooting marks are expressing is an implanted marketing campaign.
To be able to sit back in the executive seats of the World Soccer Institution and smile at the lucrative success of a world gone mad in response to your money bilking efforts, must stir up some feelings of awesome power.
At the core of it is money and power, not sport.
The meaning of sport has been eroded by the addition of the adjective "professional." Now it all about organization for the purpose of marketing to make fortunes.
Sport in its purest form is friendly play between competing people for the purpose of having fun in the participation. When huge pools of money are to be made using sport as an industry, it perverts the fundamental nature of it from play to bitter conflict, stylized war.
And all is fair in love and war.
When large spectator attendance is achieved we are really seeing human herd instincts being manipulated for the purposes of marketing. This is further training in human gullibility, making people receptive/responsive to all kinds of suggestions in every area.
It's what the Roman emperors found works best to keep the population self absorbed and malleable, ready to pledge their allegiance to Rome. Constant gory reminders of the deadly struggles for survival sharpened their lust for blood.
Just as easily as the marketers can get billions of people to support one team over another in a ritual battle, so too can they do the bidding of political masters and support war on the basis of any lie. Take Iraq as an example. Americans embraced the lies causing the deaths of a million human beings. Take for instance the difference between our forefathers being able to discern the folly of Prohibition of alcohol and revoke it in only a few short years, and today's world where people can't tell the difference between a marketed lie "the war on drugs" and the facts. That is why it was marketed as a war, because this is how we are trained to think, to align ourselves, by the marketers: One side, or the other, painted in a hue of true blue loyalty. Exactly like Fadden's xenophobic appeal to loyalty for Canada.
War, conflict and professional sports all rely on the same human mechanism being stimulated in the same way. Only the degree of stimulation is slightly, incrementally different.
Does that mean I won't watch the world cup final or go down the Drive to mix with the drunken crowd. You bet! Me and the Wolf have other things on the agenda and mass marketing of any kind turns me off.
A bit of unstressed exercise, some happy communication and perhaps a bit of interesting video or photography and what ever comes our way, is on the agenda. The crows are calling, the roads and streets promise to be quieter than usual.
Staying away from the alcohol influenced crowd is a goal of mine.
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