Thursday, September 25, 2014

The NFL Reflects The State’s Omerta Culture Of Violence

In a post a couple of years ago I wrote that it is possible that the NFL may not actually survive longer term.   The NFL has become a gladiator sport and as noted many times, including that post, our dying corporate state created society has adopted many social values and pastimes that involve amusing itself to death.   Professional sports is one of those amusements.  Beyond professional sports, let me count the ways.  This is an esoteric topic and a reflection of class,  hierarchy and violence associated with institutions of the ego.  I will continue to post more depth on this topic.   Including why this dynamic of amusing ourselves to death is a creation of class and the state.

I have put up some very lengthy posts on the personality type of aggression (dysfunctional) that is rewarded and even glorified in this society.  And, also passive and passive-aggressive personality types which are equally dysfunctional and also substantially a result of our violent society.    The assertive personality type is the only functional one.  And, dare I say that I suppose no one escapes childhood with that ability.   In other words, it only achieved via mindfulness and through an endless journey of inner discovery and responsibility for our own emotions and the beliefs they create.  

This culture of aggression is necessary for both corporate capitalism and empire to flourish.  The glorification of war, violent sports, violent battle of competition between corporations and nations in economics, politics, forcing people to compete for food, shelter, money and countless other institutions of the ego glorify aggression.    Corporate CEOs want to hire people who have well-developed sociopathic qualities.  In other words, those who will do anything to compete aggressively on behalf of corporate interests.  Even when that involves violence against humanity, employees in other corporations,  coworkers or the natural world.   24 hour news is substantially based on argument and debate.  These too are forms of aggression.  As noted by Socrates, I believe from memory, two thousand years ago, debate appeals to the base animal instincts and emotions of the ego and proves nothing.  Ambition aka “to get ahead” of your fellow man and in the process stomp on his face to please class and hierarchy, which corporations, politics, a standing army and other hierarchical and class-based institutions of the ego glorify, is the manifestation of an unstable and disconnected mind.   These are examples of a dying social system. 

Now onto an example of the aforementioned aggression that pervades our society.  That is, the systemic culture of violence that is now being exposed in the NFL.    To implicate the NFL as causational in this is absurd.   This violence is everywhere and it is a function of state violence.   The only way to get beyond our culture of aggression and violence is to see this culture disappear.   How that disappears, whether it is collapse or mindful replacement, matters not.   But the universe will not wait forever.  What humanity refuses to have the courage and values to do, it will eventually do itself.

The NFL is under attack right now.  And, frankly, the reasons are just.   There is no reason to single out the NFL as any more violent than any part of our society.   Is the military-industrial complex not magnitudes more violent?   Its hidden secrets of massive violence against women, our society and the world make the NFL look like preschool daycare.    Ditto for the politicians who endlessly use military violence wantonly and ignorantly.  

But what is under attack that that the NFL can take responsibility for is the culture of Omerta that defines all institutions of hierarchy and power.   It is everywhere in the world.  Not just the U.S. by any stretch of the imagination.    It is specifically part of any club of entitlement.  Lawyers, police, doctors, Wall Street, the Vatican, Congress, Islamic theocracies, corporations, religious hierarchies, universities, big union leadership, the state and on and on.  (As I noted on here years ago, the solution to our dilemma is not to replace the Jamie Dimons of the world with Jimmy Hoffas.)  All have essentially been left to regulate themselves.  And, that creates a secrecy that buries corruption, violence and aggression and allows this violence to perpetuate itself.   The Vatican has had an Omerta culture of pedophelia and child abuse within its ranks for 1600 years.  Of course, the largest and most violent Omerta culture is the state.  So it should be no surprise that all of the aforementioned Omerta cultures and many more are granted their power through the force of the state.

Lawyers reporting to a bar that is staffed by lawyers to hear cases of crimes and wrongdoing hides the massive corruption in the legal establishment.  Ditto with police who do their own internal investigations.  Need I even mention Washington?  And, Alan Greenspan operated under the belief that a market is best that regulates itself so they dismantled Wall Street’s regulatory structure.   And, who is regulating the Omerta culture of the Federal Reserve?   The NFL is now too being exposed as an Omerta culture of silence.   And their recently announced “internal” investigation whose leader is hand-picked by the head of the NFL is no different than than the hand-picked investigatory panels in government used to investigate countless failures in government.  Or the Vatican’s internal investigations into pedophelia and abuse that have covered up massive crimes for 1600 years.    These internal investigations have absolutely nothing to do with finding the truth but rather to protect the Omerta culture.  The NFL, a tax exempt organization of privilege and class, is essentially run by a central bureaucracy and just about 32 plantation owners.   Obviously, Green Bay is a different scenario given it is owned by the city and more recently by the public directly.   But the recent fiasco with the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA exposed this plantation owner culture.  The owner viewed those who worked for him as property and chattel whom he graciously handed money to out of the kindness of his heart.  Or so he remarked.  This is no different than how many corporate executives and business owners view their employees. 

The violence in the NFL, that we now know has been shoveled under the rug forever, has been accomplished through managing perceptions and managing the flow of information.   The NFL has created a managed image purely out of marketing propaganda that has no reflection of reality.  Who else does this?  Corporations.  The state.  Hitler, Stalin, Monsanto (every major corporation on earth), the corporatocracy, the Chinese communist party, etc.  And, as the Washington Post recently exposed, the NFL does this through a huge, outsized and complex security apparatus.  When I read that article, I was surprised at how much comparative there is between the NFL,  corporate capitalism, the corporate state and Nazi Germany when it came to its outsized security apparatus used to project a propagandized “created” view of reality.  Is this any different than the policies of the state?  Of the national security state?  Class, hierarchy and the violence that comes with it is highly consistent throughout history and throughout countless bureaucracies around the world.   That is because these are institutions of the ego and, thus, reflect the sameness of the ego’s endless foibles and even outright evils based on its primary intent of control driven by fear.    

When Barack Obama and Congress personally became involved time and again over the last six years to subvert the wheels of justice for what happened in the 2008 Wall Street collapse, is that any different than what is happening in the NFL?  It’s the exact same Omerta culture of silence.  That culture perpetuates violence on behalf of those who benefit from it.  That is, the state and its manifestations of class and hierarchy and resultant privilege.   The rabbit hole goes all of the way to the basic precepts and tenets of the state and and its institutions including corporate capitalism.   There is absolutely no way this system is going to reform itself.  It exists for only one reason.  That is, to perpetuate violence on behalf of hierarchy, class and privilege protected by the state.

Contrarily, a good dose of sunlight and citizen government or citizen watchdog regulation and true criminal punishment for those who should be punished, that is state actors and not the useful idiots who do their will, would clean up all of this self-interested corruption.  Right now our society is wildly corrupt due to this Omerta dynamic created through self-regulation of class and hierarchy.  Were the truth to actually be brought to light, and if lawyers, doctors, politicians, police, Wall Street and the like answered to citizen-led watchdog groups or true classless citizen government, as espoused by Enlightenment Principles, I am quite confident a large proportion, if not the majority, of state actors in positions of hierarchy would be in prison under the very laws they incarcerate record numbers of  Americans under.

Lastly, the calls from people to have the NFL be the lightning rod to solve social issues is an undertaking that is gargantuan in nature.  Can the NFL make positive changes?  I suspect any changes it can possibly make are more to ameliorate its Omerta culture rather than stopping social violence that it too glorifies.  To do so would require it to dismantle its security apparatus that is used to hide truth and perpetuate propaganda.   I am dubious of any structural changes within the NFL other than window dressing given it is a private club of ultra-wealthy people with one primary intent.  That is, to make money by the propagandized marketing of a culture of violence. 

posted by TimingLogic at 2:59 PM