I apologise for not having posted for five days, but I have been away. I live in Scotland, but I frequently go to England to watch football. I was down in Milton Keynes this week, watching my team being thrashed three nil. I say thrashed, because they were lucky it was only three. I often ponder why I should travel 400 miles to watch a team lose, as, when I am leaving the ground on such occasions, wet, cold and thoroughly disappointed, I recognise that I am probably quite insane (though I must say I watch them win more often than see them lose). At home I watch football every week. I follow a team that plays in what is known in Scotland as Junior football. It is a semi-professional form of the game. I used to watch my home team in the Scottish senior leagues, but I gave that up as I came to increasingly realise how corrupt senior Scottish football is and how all the teams that play in Scottish senior football are in reality only expected to provide opposition to the old firm of Rangers and Celtic. Have you ever noticed how, according to the Scottish media, Rangers and Celtic are never beaten, they only lose games. In other words, when they lose it is their own fault, they are never beaten by a better team.
I appreciate that travelling to watch a team from the lower leagues in both England and Scotland is rather irrational, but, as I have posted before, the human being is a profoundly irrational being and I recognise that in myself, and, where appropriate, quite enjoy allowing my irrationality to lead me. I love the cruelty of football, where a team can be very dominant in a game and still get beaten. I love its tribalism when thousands of people who do not know one another are best mates and kindred spirits for an hour and a half each week. Football is a very social activity and a powerful source of social cohesion. It is particularly focused and in our age where the ruling elite are determined to atomise society and destroy the social and cultural ties that present barriers to financial crime it forms a powerful social role of communalism and solidarity. It is also a very working class sport where even the Manchester United's of the world are still dependent on their working class roots for their survival. The Junior leagues in Scotland are particularly working class and are not forums for the faint hearted or easily offended. They are supported by real people with a very defined cultural philosophy. Football is a powerful antidote to what sociology calls, anomie. In that context I have gained a grudging form of respect for those Rangers supporters, who, when their team was forced to begin playing in the bottom tier of Scottish football, refused to abandon them and travelled to Alloa, Cowdenbeath, Brechin etc. in numbers to show their loyalty and their love, thereby displaying an inordinate irrationality and proving the philosophy of David Hume whilst torpedoing free market economic dogma.
Another fascinating aspect of football is how it is frequently refusing to be bullied by the market. How supporters, if they dig their heels in, are forcing business interests to rethink what they assumed would be an easy target for asset stripping and a quick profit. You see, contrary to what business and financial interests believe, football is not a business and does not have customers. It has supporters who can follow teams even when the team is quite unsuccessful, and that is irrational, it does not mirror the supposed rational consumer model of free market economics. In that sense I am irrational. Football is a community based voluntary activity, because, as I said, supporters are not customers, they are people who voluntarily turn up at their chosen ground every week and pay to watch an activity that they have no possibility of influencing and that often fails to reward them with a result. No business could survive under that form of economics. Because a thing is irrational it is not necessarily stupid, I am going to watch my English team again on Boxing Day, and, because I am succumbing to my irrational self, am supremely confident they will win. I will report in due course.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
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