Category | Op Ed

Ultimate Fighting: America’s latest moral doctrine

Published on February 2, 2010 by James Swift

Why the MMA craze is an unsettling indictment of today’s culture
I was watching a mixed martial arts event this weekend, and it suddenly dawned on me that the spike in MMA popularity is something more than a passing sensationalist fad. I mean, sure, we said the same thing about televised poker and professional wrestling, but this “ultimate fighting” is an altogether different entity.

During the commercial break, I glanced at a copy of Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” upon my bookshelf and began putting the two together. In the vaunted psychoanalyst’s magnum opus, the father of modern day psychiatry determines that the individual, by his or her nature, is besotted by certain primal instincts, such as sexual desire and violent hostility towards aggressors. Thusly, per Freud, it is society’s obligation to curb these absolute urges vis-à-vis intra-communal regulations. In other words, it’s the responsibility of the collective to keep an eye on the individual and his or her animalistic wants.

But wait, isn’t the collective just a gathering of individuals, who by Freud’s own system, are carriers of the innate, primal rages that threaten to tear apart humanity at any moment?

Precisely, and that’s where the collective gets creative with its methods of repression. For example, if humanity is genetically nothing more than testosterone-infused baboons, why not find a way to turn that primitive bloodlust into a spectator sport?

I guess the Romans were quite the innovators in this field; after all, they were the ones who came up with the idea of tossing Christians into lions’ cages for cheap entertainment. A few centuries later, public executions were all the rage in Europe. Even Shakespeare used authentic plasma as a selling point for his stage productions.

And so, here we are, not in the era of Julius Caesar or Henry the VIII, but in the age of Dana White and Brock Lesnar. Sure, the gilt armor may have been excised, but on a weekly basis, we as a nation are exposed to what is, in essence, modern day blood sport. Empirical wisdom states that perhaps a company would want to downplay the resemblance to barbarism of yore in its product. That being said, every Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event begins with a gladiatorial throwback.  Of course, we are a saner society than our Athenian forerunners; our battles are not fought to the death, just until the point of cerebral hemorrhaging. Hey, we’re not a bunch of brutes, you know. This has become our new form of entertainment; long-removed from the days of John McCain calling the UFC a form of “human cockfighting,” the UFC has become a bona fide, mainstream sensation. Its pay-per-view buy rates outsell boxing, and event results are covered on ESPN ahead of NFL games. You can’t walk down a hallway without bumping into someone sporting a MMA-branded T-shirt. It has become a respected, legitimate aspect of our culture.

I wonder, just how much the ethos of ultimate fighting will permeate our national conscience. Perhaps in a few years, our school will have an officially recognized “MMA Team,” and we can all gather around a modified dog kennel and hoot for our brethren as they attempt to yank the ligaments from one another’s sockets. How long until Little League Baseball is replaced by Pee Wee cage fighting? Oh, imagine the incomparable bliss upon a parent’s face as the fruits of his or her loins smashes the orbital structure of the neighbor’s child with elbow strikes from the full mount!

You know, this could spark an entire paradigm shift in the way Americans operate. I mean, why bother with things like “legal statutes” and “civilized discourse” when we can act like our heroes Georges St. Pierre and Kimbo Slice and settle our disputes with fists and Muay Thai kicks? Negotiations and understanding are for pansies; real men make sure their disputes end in puddles of blood and teeth. What a great message for children. What’s the worst that can happen when we instill our offspring with the virtues of nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia in tandem with fervent competitive instinct and proclivities for physical aggression?

But, I digress. As Freud stated more than eight decades ago, it’s just catharsis, a simple way for society to get its giggles sans widespread hooliganism. The two guys bashing each other’s brains in on Saturday night are mere representatives of the internalized libido of the 2.2 million viewers across the country, and I suppose it’s better to have two yahoos pummeling each other senseless as opposed to living in a nation rife with fisticuffs.

I guess I’m just worried about what those fans are doing with their pent up enmity when ultimate fighting isn’t on the tube.