Another NFL match-up between the Detroit Lions and the Greenbay Packers is ‘on tap’ for today. I chose to find a table at Barnes & Noble for some writing, rather than view the game. A NFL contest between two top ranked teams is exciting, something I enjoy. Nevertheless I felt compelled to think and write. Each activity seemed contradictory to the other. How so?

Everyone seeks escape, diversion, which are down-to-earth terms for ‘entertainment’. Nowadays we are awash in entertainment. Video content enough for more than one lifetime appears to be available on streaming services. The variety, types of story telling, reality shows, appeal to every taste, every imagination.  Nietzsche observes in these lines, that without the filtering, the patina of story and entertainment, – raw reality would engulf us. We’d loose ourselves as if in a flood. We shouldn’t fool ourselves — “reality” accessed straight, is more violent than we would bear.

Plato is offered as an example. Plato conceived a way of thinking that depended upon the notion of a perfect standard of everything, (the really-real). All that we encounter in experience, from everyday objects to moral judgments are imperfect, flawed representations… At least this is my thumbnail description of Plato’s idealism.

The backstory usually unknown and unappreciated is Plato was a survivor of a war between Athens and Sparta that continued for 27 years. Is it any wonder that Plato sought a means of softening his memories of the slaughter and deprivation of that experience? Those years of war, experiences too terrible to express were somehow unreal by comparison to the perfect and unchanging version of this life, existing somewhere.

I do get it. I understand why sports, especially the spectacles of the NFL, or NASCAR, or F1 racing, or FIFA soccer are compelling. Consider, America as well as other countries have gravitated away from democracy, a sharing of power and responsibility, toward a single party, toward strongman rule. Political power by definition means violence, some interests are disappointed, even when compromise is affected.

Soon, in America we will learn from experience what it means to be subject to the whims of a single individual. An individual who is patiently cruel, oblivious to the consequences for others in the execution of what he desires. Just how violent, more violent can circumstances become?

Hang on. Anything, anything at all to divert us from the nightmare of this hubris…

How can we look
at this exulting multitude without
tears and acquiescence?

–at one time we
thought little of the object of their exultation,
and we should still think so
if we ourselves had not come
through a similar experience.

And what may these experiences lead us to!
What are our opinions!

In order that we
may not lose ourselves
and our reason
we must fly from experiences.

It was thus that Plato fled
from actuality,
and wished to contemplate things
only
in their
pale
mental
concepts:

he was full of sensitiveness,
and knew how easily
the waves of this sensitiveness
would drown his reason.

—Must the sage therefore say,
“I will honor reality,
but I will at the same time
turn my back to it
because I know
and dread it?”

The Dawn of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 448

What about a tune to hold onto to? Perhaps you suspect that I would chose this one: Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who. An anthem of resistance.