An essential component of team sports populism is accelerating moral panics. Mob rule, when huge numbers of…

An essential component of team sports populism is accelerating moral panics. Mob rule, when huge numbers of people suddenly pile-on to a chosen scapegoating target. This is a critical thing to understand. /1 https://t.co/hQqBRdf863 https://t.co/ReJVcnFUN3

Unceasing team sports leads to a level of rage in communities that eventually reaches a fever pitch. Fight, fight, fight all day and night unsurprisingly leads to rage as the dominant social mechanism. This is where Rene Girard is so important. He saw it. /2

Girard pinpointed what he called imitative rivalry (what I call team sports to simplify) as the root of all social life. The competition for status between rival groups. Girard also saw that this process will not end of its own accord. Violence and anger will escalate. /3

Girard identified that this will destroy societies, for the obvious reason that violence is destructive, and uncontrolled violence breaks everything. He then identified how societies and groups (it’s fractal, at every scale) avoid this destruction, at least temporarily. /4

They identify a scapegoat. For the anger and violence. This triggers an instant tipping point in social relations. The teams stop fighting each other and suddenly people are unified behind hatred for the scapegoat. Unity at last! /5

The scapegoat is then destroyed, either figuratively or quite literally. This dissolves the pent up anger, in a sort of orgiastic release. The collective returns to a lower level of emotional intensity. And what happens then? The team sports begin again. /6

These scapegoating episodes, what some call moral panics, are a crucial component of team sports culture. They’re what allow it to continue indefinitely. Right now for example Tesla and Tesla owners are being scapegoated. This will seem like social progress, to the teams. /7

The appalling things Musk and Trump are doing create rage. The anger and violence then intensifies, into mob behaviour, which is just another name for the scapegoating mechanism. The mob is now unified, against the scapegoat. It feels like progress is being made. /8 https://t.co/lzPDWNF9ks

It’s not progress, it’s just the release that will allow the restarting of more team sports. The scapegoat isn’t the solution to any problem, the scapegoating mechanism is not about any particular detail. It’s about the imitative rivalry of social life. /9

Team sports is never about ‘information’. Why the misinformation and disinformation focus is so misplaced. Team sports is about the status of the teams, and the people on them. They’re not interested in the things they fight about. The ‘content’ is irrelevant. /10

Ordinary people right now, observe them. How the crystallisation of a new scapegoat fires them up, gives them a sense of ‘this will fix it’. That’s the delusion of team sports life. Mob rule, scapegoating, simply releases pent up rage, to allow more team sports to start. /11

You can see here a new scapegoat firing up in response to anger about the Queensland floods. Insurers. A common target. Politicians are shrewd and cynical. /12 https://t.co/BStX0Zf7g0

It’s their action and inaction that allows people to build on flood plains, and does nothing against climate change, which drives these disasters. The team sports rage in the community against the disasters has to be quickly refocused away from politicians. /13

So politicians create a scapegoat. Insurers, in this case. It ‘takes the heat off’ them. You’ll see this same mechanism in every facet of our lives. The relentless team sports, especially now with social media owning our social lives. /14

And then the scapegoat, to temporarily unify and disperse the rage in an orgy of destructive mob righteousness. Then it starts all over again. We had two world wars that followed a similar model. But you can see it at every level of human life. It’s fractal. /end