Prime Time
05-24-2010, 12:08 PM
Huh. All outta bubblegum.
How free are you?
I know, I know, I’m not meant to ask questions, I’m just meant to speak myself, but humour me for a second, and think about the question. How free are you?
Most of us probably think we are free. There may be some people out there reading this who are under 18, who may think that they have certain freedoms denied to them, freedoms they’ll get when they reach the age of suffrage. I’m not sure it’ll happen here, but when I was on the main page I used to occasionally get feedback from American service men, who may think something along the lines of their freedom being dependent on it not interfering with their orders. It seems unlikely, but there may be someone reading this in prison right now, who will certainly not consider themselves free.
But most people reading this will consider themselves free. I have to ask you again though, how free are you?
Freedom is a trickier concept than most people consider it to be. Take freedom of speech. Most of us accept our freedom of speech as a given, we consider it a right, not a privilege, but in reality does it really even exist to begin with? It’s a nice idea, but how free are you when you speak?
Someone who owns a business is free to voice a controversial opinion. In the eighteenth-century, we would have said that they have freedom of speech. However, if other people then voice their displeasure and utilise their own freedom of expression and boycott that business, they are impacting on the freedom of speech of the business owner. One freedom means the other is, strictly speaking, impossible.
The Dixie Chicks boycott was a pretty good example of this. To someone from the enlightenment, they would have been free to say what they did because they weren’t punished by the state, but to any contemporary study of philosophy or power relations, that old model doesn’t go far enough. The Dixie Chicks voiced an opinion and a boycott was what followed.
People are free not to buy the records of anybody they want to. In reality though, since this case is a reaction, it is people using their freedom of expression to punish others for using their own freedom of expression. The inference is obvious; you have freedom of speech, but only to use it in a way that people like, or you will be punished economically. There is an economic reality that transcends freedom of speech, and it is little more than a tyranny of the majority.
It’s not just freedom of speech, but freedom of choice, and that’s the specific inference of freedom I want to talk about because I think it has far more significance for wrestling. Though there people who believe in predestination in the world, the majority of us believe in our own individual freedom of choice. If I stand in front of you, and I hold a ball in my hand, it is my choice whether I choose to hold onto it or drop it, right? I mean, with no outside agent acting on me, that is a decision that I alone can make, and it is a choice.
How often does that situation occur is perhaps a more important question. How often are you ever in a position where no outside agent acts on you? I’d wager more often than not your decisions are motivated not through real choice, but through informed choice; by which I mean your choices are informed by the money in your pocket, or feelings for your loved ones, or even simple experience.
Experience informs everything. I’m a big believer in the philosophy that you don’t know anything naturally, that everything you know you learn. Everything natural, like eating, sleeping, shagging and shitting, if you’ll excuse the alliteration, is all done by impulse. Everything conscious, and as a consequence every real choice that we make, isn’t natural. Rather, it’s done based around what we’ve learned, how we’ve learned it, and perhaps as or more crucially who teaches it to us.
I’ll give an example. When you are born, you know nothing. You learn to speak and walk by imitating other people. Hunger is a feeling, and by instinct you put something in your mouth. You then learn what you like the taste of, and what you don’t, and its this bit that you learn that makes your choices. You never really have the choice of not eating, because those instincts of self-preservation will kick in. Hunger strikes are the exception, but invariably they are based around something you’ve learned, and something you’ve taken so dogmatically and intently that it can out-do your own nature. Most of us will never have the option of eating or not, eventually we will have to eat. Our only choice will be what we eat, and that is based on what we have learned.
Even that isn’t free. Your food choices will be determined by the food around you in your early life. I mean sure, we all experiment a little more as we get older and tastes change, but for long portions of your life, especially the first ten years or so, you are effectively held hostage by the choices of others.
A more extreme example; this is why brainwashing kids works. This is why the kids around the Westboro Baptist Church hold up signs saying god hates fags, and why the Hitler Youth were so successful. Our lives and our choices are framed by the people around us and those who we learn from. I wouldn’t mind betting it’s also a big part of why certain parts of countries vote one way, and other parts vote another, almost on some sort of uniform basis, from generation to generation.
So what does this have to do with pro-wrestling? Well, it’s as simple as this. We are all more responsible for the atrocities in wrestling than the wrestlers themselves.
Yes, us. You, me, us as individuals, and we’re in an unholy alliance with Vince McMahon. Realistically though the buck stops with us.
Yes, wrestlers can just walk away from the WWE schedule if they want to. They aren’t free to though. An easy answer is that nobody makes them, but of course they are made to by the same reasons we all are. We all have to work, or starve. A lot of these guys will not have the best career prospects elsewhere either, so simple economic reality and the need to feed their families keep them at it. It’s also important to remember that most wrestlers, pretty much any of them that aren’t main event level, don’t actually take home all that much, by the time all the ridiculous year long expenses are factored in. It’s not bad money, but not all that great considering the hours, you know what I mean?
Wrestlers have learned that they will never get the adoration they get from us anywhere else. It is theatre but on a much larger scale, a scale of thousands and millions rather than hundreds. We’ve created a situation where people like us grow up to be wrestlers, and then learn they will never get the career satisfaction anywhere else. They’ve also learned that we won’t turn off if they are mistreated. The WWE schedule has been criminal for years and we don’t turn away. We don’t insist on Vince McMahon cleaning up his act. We continue to watch. They’ve learned that we don’t really care.
Most wrestlers have learned over the years that if they want to get ahead with Vince McMahon they need drugs, and that is why wrestlers keep getting caught even now the wellness program is in effect. After years of it a simple change of policy isn’t going to have the effect. For years, you needed to be huge to make it in the WWE, so steroids were rampant. For years the schedule has been heinous and people have been encouraged to work injured, and so painkillers have been allowed to flourish.
It’s kind of like Pavlov’s dog. Vince is Pavlov, and the wrestlers are the dogs. Drugs are the bell. When Vince rang the bell for years and years, the dogs would get fed. Now, even though they get a shock when Vince rings the bell, they still come because the lesson from the early years is too well learned. The first thing that suspensions did was highlight just how great the problem was in the company. It wasn’t just the people we’d always called roid freaks that were getting done, but smaller guys, like Edge, who had never even been on the radar before.
Vince has to take some responsibility for the steroid problem, and the painkiller problem, and the wellness program can be called little more than a deathbed conversion. When even your smaller guys like Bret Hart have admitted to being on steroids because they felt they needed it to get ahead in the company, it does make something of a mockery about the new found concern of the owner. Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, British Bulldog, Crush, and a whole host of other stars over two decades have been pushed to the sky while on the juice. There may be a wellness program now, but the rewards were always there for people who took the extra chemical step to gain an advantage, and you can’t change an entire culture in the space of a few years. Vince always pushed his large wrestlers, never reduced schedules.
We have to take our share of the responsibility too. Vince has always treated his wrestlers pretty badly by working them into the ground and pushing the needle freaks above smaller workers, but I’ve always continued to give him my money. In this respect, I don’t only teach wrestlers that there is nothing to be gained by swimming against the tide, I also teach Vince McMahon there is no need to change. I don’t protest, I don’t petition, I sit here quietly with my moral outrage and do absolutely fuck all, except occasionally write another piece of self-important verbiage.
We know more than we did in the enlightenment. We shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand and protest our own innocence at the state of wrestling. Ultimately we are the people with the real power to affect the destiny of wrestlers, not the wrestlers themselves. They are bound up in an economic system, and have next to no freedom to fight against it. If we protested against steroids and painkillers, by not paying for ppv’s, by remaining silent in matches that feature massive needle freaks, we’d take away the incentives.
As it is, we leave them were they are. We.... no, I am as culpable as Vince, and at least, if not more, culpable than the wrestlers, for some of the horrible positions the sport finds itself in. I’m not going to protest my own innocence anymore. I give Vince McMahon my money, so I am most definitely as guilty as he is. I am the agent acting on him, as he is the agent acting on Owen Hart, Eddie Guerrero and others.
How free are you?
I know, I know, I’m not meant to ask questions, I’m just meant to speak myself, but humour me for a second, and think about the question. How free are you?
Most of us probably think we are free. There may be some people out there reading this who are under 18, who may think that they have certain freedoms denied to them, freedoms they’ll get when they reach the age of suffrage. I’m not sure it’ll happen here, but when I was on the main page I used to occasionally get feedback from American service men, who may think something along the lines of their freedom being dependent on it not interfering with their orders. It seems unlikely, but there may be someone reading this in prison right now, who will certainly not consider themselves free.
But most people reading this will consider themselves free. I have to ask you again though, how free are you?
Freedom is a trickier concept than most people consider it to be. Take freedom of speech. Most of us accept our freedom of speech as a given, we consider it a right, not a privilege, but in reality does it really even exist to begin with? It’s a nice idea, but how free are you when you speak?
Someone who owns a business is free to voice a controversial opinion. In the eighteenth-century, we would have said that they have freedom of speech. However, if other people then voice their displeasure and utilise their own freedom of expression and boycott that business, they are impacting on the freedom of speech of the business owner. One freedom means the other is, strictly speaking, impossible.
The Dixie Chicks boycott was a pretty good example of this. To someone from the enlightenment, they would have been free to say what they did because they weren’t punished by the state, but to any contemporary study of philosophy or power relations, that old model doesn’t go far enough. The Dixie Chicks voiced an opinion and a boycott was what followed.
People are free not to buy the records of anybody they want to. In reality though, since this case is a reaction, it is people using their freedom of expression to punish others for using their own freedom of expression. The inference is obvious; you have freedom of speech, but only to use it in a way that people like, or you will be punished economically. There is an economic reality that transcends freedom of speech, and it is little more than a tyranny of the majority.
It’s not just freedom of speech, but freedom of choice, and that’s the specific inference of freedom I want to talk about because I think it has far more significance for wrestling. Though there people who believe in predestination in the world, the majority of us believe in our own individual freedom of choice. If I stand in front of you, and I hold a ball in my hand, it is my choice whether I choose to hold onto it or drop it, right? I mean, with no outside agent acting on me, that is a decision that I alone can make, and it is a choice.
How often does that situation occur is perhaps a more important question. How often are you ever in a position where no outside agent acts on you? I’d wager more often than not your decisions are motivated not through real choice, but through informed choice; by which I mean your choices are informed by the money in your pocket, or feelings for your loved ones, or even simple experience.
Experience informs everything. I’m a big believer in the philosophy that you don’t know anything naturally, that everything you know you learn. Everything natural, like eating, sleeping, shagging and shitting, if you’ll excuse the alliteration, is all done by impulse. Everything conscious, and as a consequence every real choice that we make, isn’t natural. Rather, it’s done based around what we’ve learned, how we’ve learned it, and perhaps as or more crucially who teaches it to us.
I’ll give an example. When you are born, you know nothing. You learn to speak and walk by imitating other people. Hunger is a feeling, and by instinct you put something in your mouth. You then learn what you like the taste of, and what you don’t, and its this bit that you learn that makes your choices. You never really have the choice of not eating, because those instincts of self-preservation will kick in. Hunger strikes are the exception, but invariably they are based around something you’ve learned, and something you’ve taken so dogmatically and intently that it can out-do your own nature. Most of us will never have the option of eating or not, eventually we will have to eat. Our only choice will be what we eat, and that is based on what we have learned.
Even that isn’t free. Your food choices will be determined by the food around you in your early life. I mean sure, we all experiment a little more as we get older and tastes change, but for long portions of your life, especially the first ten years or so, you are effectively held hostage by the choices of others.
A more extreme example; this is why brainwashing kids works. This is why the kids around the Westboro Baptist Church hold up signs saying god hates fags, and why the Hitler Youth were so successful. Our lives and our choices are framed by the people around us and those who we learn from. I wouldn’t mind betting it’s also a big part of why certain parts of countries vote one way, and other parts vote another, almost on some sort of uniform basis, from generation to generation.
So what does this have to do with pro-wrestling? Well, it’s as simple as this. We are all more responsible for the atrocities in wrestling than the wrestlers themselves.
Yes, us. You, me, us as individuals, and we’re in an unholy alliance with Vince McMahon. Realistically though the buck stops with us.
Yes, wrestlers can just walk away from the WWE schedule if they want to. They aren’t free to though. An easy answer is that nobody makes them, but of course they are made to by the same reasons we all are. We all have to work, or starve. A lot of these guys will not have the best career prospects elsewhere either, so simple economic reality and the need to feed their families keep them at it. It’s also important to remember that most wrestlers, pretty much any of them that aren’t main event level, don’t actually take home all that much, by the time all the ridiculous year long expenses are factored in. It’s not bad money, but not all that great considering the hours, you know what I mean?
Wrestlers have learned that they will never get the adoration they get from us anywhere else. It is theatre but on a much larger scale, a scale of thousands and millions rather than hundreds. We’ve created a situation where people like us grow up to be wrestlers, and then learn they will never get the career satisfaction anywhere else. They’ve also learned that we won’t turn off if they are mistreated. The WWE schedule has been criminal for years and we don’t turn away. We don’t insist on Vince McMahon cleaning up his act. We continue to watch. They’ve learned that we don’t really care.
Most wrestlers have learned over the years that if they want to get ahead with Vince McMahon they need drugs, and that is why wrestlers keep getting caught even now the wellness program is in effect. After years of it a simple change of policy isn’t going to have the effect. For years, you needed to be huge to make it in the WWE, so steroids were rampant. For years the schedule has been heinous and people have been encouraged to work injured, and so painkillers have been allowed to flourish.
It’s kind of like Pavlov’s dog. Vince is Pavlov, and the wrestlers are the dogs. Drugs are the bell. When Vince rang the bell for years and years, the dogs would get fed. Now, even though they get a shock when Vince rings the bell, they still come because the lesson from the early years is too well learned. The first thing that suspensions did was highlight just how great the problem was in the company. It wasn’t just the people we’d always called roid freaks that were getting done, but smaller guys, like Edge, who had never even been on the radar before.
Vince has to take some responsibility for the steroid problem, and the painkiller problem, and the wellness program can be called little more than a deathbed conversion. When even your smaller guys like Bret Hart have admitted to being on steroids because they felt they needed it to get ahead in the company, it does make something of a mockery about the new found concern of the owner. Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, British Bulldog, Crush, and a whole host of other stars over two decades have been pushed to the sky while on the juice. There may be a wellness program now, but the rewards were always there for people who took the extra chemical step to gain an advantage, and you can’t change an entire culture in the space of a few years. Vince always pushed his large wrestlers, never reduced schedules.
We have to take our share of the responsibility too. Vince has always treated his wrestlers pretty badly by working them into the ground and pushing the needle freaks above smaller workers, but I’ve always continued to give him my money. In this respect, I don’t only teach wrestlers that there is nothing to be gained by swimming against the tide, I also teach Vince McMahon there is no need to change. I don’t protest, I don’t petition, I sit here quietly with my moral outrage and do absolutely fuck all, except occasionally write another piece of self-important verbiage.
We know more than we did in the enlightenment. We shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand and protest our own innocence at the state of wrestling. Ultimately we are the people with the real power to affect the destiny of wrestlers, not the wrestlers themselves. They are bound up in an economic system, and have next to no freedom to fight against it. If we protested against steroids and painkillers, by not paying for ppv’s, by remaining silent in matches that feature massive needle freaks, we’d take away the incentives.
As it is, we leave them were they are. We.... no, I am as culpable as Vince, and at least, if not more, culpable than the wrestlers, for some of the horrible positions the sport finds itself in. I’m not going to protest my own innocence anymore. I give Vince McMahon my money, so I am most definitely as guilty as he is. I am the agent acting on him, as he is the agent acting on Owen Hart, Eddie Guerrero and others.