Chapter Eleven: Soccer as Mirror

This is the first of the final five chapters discussing the remedies for simplex society developed today. The cases are welded together into a comparative ethnography on life-sensing. Why would football serve the purpose of surrogacy for mass violence? Conflict between nations is predicated on simplicating peoples into nations, and among all sports football excels in replaying life and its multiplexity. Corroborating the argument, audiences of the most powerful nation, the US, have been less keen on watching the matches between national teams. Furthermore, international football competitions excite audiences for organizing a moment of the real, away from simplex society. Like democratic elections, public contests are unpredictable moments with major impact that announce a collective choice, reachable in this way. They intensify, through the public duel, the vectorial energy of antagonism and then something happens. The winner for all to see emerges out of that highly contracted event, and the feeling is shared about witnessing a collective reason that no sum of educated individual opinions could match.