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Comment by AndrewMoffat | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, sports fanaticism is kind of a dangerous thing. It seems to me to be mostly about reinforcing "us vs 'them'" mentality, which in itself is a diluted "good vs evil."

To take it to the extreme, us-vs-them-good-vs-evil seems to be one of the biggest basis of most large scale oppressions ("the jews/blacks/muslims are less than us, less than human. it's us vs them."), and it facilitates the justification of war and the entrenching of religious bigotry through subconscious (and sometimes conscious) dehumanization.

I know I took your post off topic and to the extreme, but it just doesn't seem like a good mentality to grow up with. Thoughts?

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I disagree. I think the "us vs them" mentality will exist in many people, and sports fanaticism creates a harmless outlet for it. If we deprive the "us vs them" minded people of harmless outlets like team sports, they may instead focus their attention on political or ethnic teams.

If there is any substitution affect at all, I suspect sports fanaticism is highly beneficial - compare the damage done by rampaging celtics fans to the damage done by rampaging communism fans or rampaging hutu fans.

An "outlet" is one of those Freudian concepts that hasn't been proven and Wikipedia says that scientific opinion is divided.

It just seems illogical to me.

When your options for spending time and energy are infinite, are we required to include a certain number of angry activities to expend anger? A certain number of negative activities to expend negativity? Then why should it be necessary to have a certain number of "us vs them" activities?

Sources:

Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? - https://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf

Catharsis on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses

I see sports fanaticism as an extension, or an abstraction, of a hard-wired tribalism that I expect was a defining feature of social life for pre-modern humans and probably pretty useful in that environment. (In much the way allenp notes below.)

I try to avoid loutish public expression of it as much as possible. But I still find myself impulsively taking sides in sports contests whether it's Packers vs. Bears on tv, or Android vs iPhone in my favorite online forum, with all the attendant assignments of good and evil.

It's hard in my experience to avoid tribalism but easier to hide. I like people who take a side (well, my side, anyway) where it counts and I recognize that where it counts is a slippery matter. Being able to suppress the expression of gratuitous tribalism is, for me, one of the markers of a cultivated mind.

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