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| | | -- By CMcKinney - 23 May 2015 | |
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< | Comparable Histories, but Disparate Reactions | >
> | Mid-May: Unconsciously Seeking Repose{{ | | | | |
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< | Ray Rice, An Atlantic City Casino Elevator, and a Grainy Surveillance Tape | >
> | Fighting Repose. | | | | |
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< | On September 8, 2014, TMZ published footage of then-NFL running back Ray Rice burying a left haymaker into his fiancée’s jaw. Janay Palmer was unconscious before her head careened off the Atlantic City Casino’s elevator tiles. Rice was indicted for third-degree assault in March, and the NFL issued a suspension for one-eighth of the upcoming season in July. | >
> | Then | | | | |
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< | Everything changed on September 8. The footage sparked a firestorm that consumed the attention of the country’s leading media outlets and the public alike. The New York Times’ Editorial Board labeled the affair “disgraceful.” The media demanded a revised, just punishment for Rice. This plea was bolstered by the general public, who broadcast matching sentiments across social media. The NFL wasted little time with parliamentary procedure. On the same day the video was released, Rice’s contract was terminated and the NFL turned the two-game suspension into an indefinite ban. Yet, as Rice’s self-induced ruination accelerated in the days after the footage was released, some voiced support. | >
> | We spent a lot of time thinking about repose in this course. But as I scrawled out an essay on pay-per-view boxing in Mid-May, I hardly realized I had taken shelter under logical form.
I wrote a paper addressing a simple question: Had the American public mind reacted inconsistently to Ray Rice and Floyd Mayweather? There were only two possible answers: yes or no, rational or irrational. | | | | |
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< | Floyd Mayweather was perhaps the most noteworthy of Rice’s defenders. Mayweather is best known for the $420 million he has earned fighting inside of a boxing ring. On September 10, he told the Associated Press that the NFL had “overreacted:” “I think there's a lot worse things that go on in other people's households . . . it’s just not caught on video.” | >
> | This was the wrong question to begin with. Not only because there was more important question to be answered about the phenomenon. “If you believe there are only two options, then you have posed the wrong question.” There was a larger issue. I turned away from one of the most important question posed in this course: “What is the state of your practice?” | | | | |
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< | The Unfortunate History of Floyd Mayweather | >
> | Now | | | | |
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< | Between 2002 and 2011, Mayweather faced seven sets of criminal charges related to domestic violence. The most notorious of these seven episodes came in 2010, when Mayweather ruthlessly attacked the mother of three of his children and kept mistress, Josie Harris. The police, Harris, and the children all corroborated the details that follow - No specific point has ever been contradicted. | >
> | It has been 92 days since I finished my first year at Columbia Law School. With this reprieve has come ample opportunity for reflective meditation. With this prolonged temporal and physical removal, my insecurities have lessened. Now, for the first time in months, I set rediscover the answer to that question. | | | | |
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< | Although Mayweather took up with another woman, he maintained a home for Harris and his children. It was that home which Mayweather entered at 5 a.m. one Sunday morning, parsed through Harris’s cell phone, and discovered texts from another man. Enraged, Mayweather launched a brutal assault upon Harris. He wrestled her to the floor and repeatedly struck the back of her head - This is known as “rabbit punching,” and it is both extremely dangerous and virtually certain to leave no facial bruising. The children were startled awake by their mother’s cries and raced into the living room, where they watched their father continue his attack unabated. Eventually, the eldest child eluded Mayweather’s entourage, fled the home, and dialed 911 from a neighbor’s kitchen. Mayweather pled guilty to domestic assault that December and was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Outside of court, Mayweather has denied any fault in the incident to this day: When questioned, he will retort, “show me the bruises on her face.” | >
> | Why I came to law school | | | | |
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< | 440 Million Orders. The Rational Who? | >
> | I came to law school to become a criminal defense attorney. That is what I have wanted ever since I spent a summer adding record citations and making other menial contributions to a habeas petition in 2012. http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-mother-freed-spending-years-prison-foster-sons/story?id=26186920. And, immeasurably less importantly, it kindled an interest in criminal justice in me, which drew me to various roles with criminal defenders in the years after. With time, I formed a still hazy, but indeed clarified image of what I hoped to become. | | | | |
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< | The Largest Payday in the History of Pay-Per-View Broadcasting | >
> | Fall | | | | |
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< | Four years after Mayweather was imprisoned for assaulting Harris, he squared off against Manny Pacquiao in the “Fight of the Century.” In the months leading up to the bout, the wolf was stripped of his tattered sheep’s clothing. Spurred on by a public that had for months held itself out as staunch opponents of domestic abusers, the media hammered Mayweather’s past. More than 20,000 articles documenting his history of domestic violence hit the web in the month leading up to the fight. But Mayweather proceeded unfazed. | >
> | By December 2014, I had nearly lost sight of the reason I came to law school. I made it to mid-September before I was exhausted with fear. I was self-assuredly duller than my classmates, so I strained and titrated my way toward an obsessive memorization of law, legal theory, and my professors’ views of law and legal theory. Chemical dependence and mental ruin were a small price to pay for continued cover - My intellectual inferiority went largely unnoticed. Thoughts of the future I had mortgaged away to make tuition payments hardly helped the situation. And, that fall, my vision became trained upon a publicized escape route: a law firm job, secured by way of EIP. | | | | |
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< | When questioned about Harris at a pre-fight press conference, he challenged, “show me the bruises on her face.” This attracted further scrutiny, but, as always, Mayweather persisted. This should come as no surprise– he stood to make a lot of money. For the Pacquiao bout, Mayweather contracted for 42% of all Pay-Per-View revenues. The fact that Mayweather would receive this slice of the pie was published by every relevant news outlet prior to the fight. | >
> | Spring
Last fall, I stopped thinking about my own identity, purpose, and how my winning the birth lottery and moderate capabilities might allow me to improve someone else’s existence. I divorced what I had hoped to gain in law school from what I believed I had to become, what Columbia expected me to become. And then I took this course. | | | | |
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< | Yet, even after Mayweather was exposed, even after the fact that he was expected to make nine figures from Pay-Per-View sales became a matter of common knowledge, something inexplicable happened. Americans purchased more than 4.4 million Pay-Per-Views, which priced in at $99.50 each. Mayweather took home $180,000,000. One hundred and eighty million dollars in one night. A boundless mass – surely populated by many of the same individuals who demanded retribution for Rice in September - paid $180 million to Mayweather. That is a joke. | >
> | I realized that there was no exclusive route forward because of this class. Our discussions vigorously reminded me of that truth, and Joshua Horowitz personified it. He taught me that we can build the exact type of practice that we would want to call our own. Joshua did just that by combining a precise set of skills, a sense of humility, and an appetite for networking. | | | | |
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< | Hedonistic Impulse and Status Anxiety: What Even Weber and Hedstrom cannot rationalize. | >
> | Now | | | | |
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< | There is a certain self-satisfaction attendant to taking-up with the angry mob, proclaiming outrage, and advertising your morality by way of tweets or statuses. And it is not so hard when someone else – someone like Roger Goodell – is the bad guy, the one condoning domestic violence. But things sure do get a bit tougher when a boycott of Saturday night’s trendy happening is required. What is one to do? Be one of those people not at that gathering? Why not just chip-in for the pay-per-view, forget about how much you said you hate domestic violence, and become one of the people who witnessed that thing. Personal values and trumpeted ideals bow to hedonistic impulse and status anxiety. Rational actors, where art thou? | >
> | As my first year at law school has grown into a memory, my anxieties and insecurities have dissipated. I have no grounds to complain. I was benefitted by the lottery of birth. Whatever unhappiness I felt was the product of decisions that I made. No one forced me to be here. | | | | |
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< | A Touch of Moderation | >
> | I finished my first year at Columbia Law School thirteen weeks ago. I have frequently meditated on the kind of lawyer I want to become ever since. I have always returned to the same conclusion. I came to law school because I wanted to defend people who caught a bad break. I plan to build a practice that sustains itself by defending individuals accused of white-collar crimes, and then uses those resources to advocate for those who cannot pay a legal bill. These individuals are owed advocacy regardless of mens rea, actual innocence, or proof beyond a reasonable doubt. | | | | |
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< | I am no rational actor. I make an effort to ‘vote with my dollars,’ but there is no doubt I have contributed money to things and people I despise. But there is no rational actor. There is no identifiable value system-based rationality lying at the bottom of the human psyche. No one can fully, truly explain why we do what we do. Obviously, some of our decisions reflect personal experiences. I am the product of a home that was first marred by domestic violence, and then single parent. I am more sensitive to the issue than most. Nonetheless, innumerable Americans executed a full 180-degree turn from social media activists in September to social gathering connoisseurs in May. That cannot be denied, and it should matter. | >
> | I am a strong believer that we get the world we deserve. People try to draw a line between criminals and civilians, between culpable and innocent mental states. But everybody is guilty. Some just catch a bad break. And as for the state of my practice? I know exactly what I want, and now I must clarify exactly how I am going to do it. But I have a couple ideas. Construction may have stalled briefly, but I have two years to seek practical experience and engage bright peers with a similar vision. I will press forward. }} | | | | |
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> | In the wake of Ray Rice firestorm, the American public mind condemned domestic violence and its perpetrators wholesale. The vitriol was palpable. It was uniformly evidenced by the brand equity indexes, public approval polls, and social media case studies published that September. The NFL egregiously violated its audiences’ conscious social and political beliefs. But then, something peculiar happened. I am not referring to the $180 million signed, sealed, and delivered to Floyd Mayweather nine months later – although that is relevant. This peculiar thing happened much sooner. Nine days after the American public mind excoriated Ray Rice. Nine days after countless individuals paraded their outrage and advertised their morality by way of tweets and statuses, the NFL’s ratings boomed. Two million new viewers tuned in, sat through advertisements, and spurred league revenue. | | | | |
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The strength of the draft is the forcefulness and clarity of the rhetoric. The argument, however, could use basic clarification. The point we are most clearly receiving is that some people who paid money to watch Floyd Mayweather fight another boxer probably (and, to your mind, inconsistently) demanded that another well-remunerated thug be punished for hand-to-head violence against his fiancee. But the reader is aware that many more of the people who called for or approved the NFL's punishing Rice never bought a ticket to any boxing match, or would. So it isn't clear whether you are offering an example of the general fact that consumption patters are not well-correlated with peoples' conscious social and political beliefs, commenting on a particular form of confusion among people who like to watch fistfights (without discussing the unconscious motivations of boxing fans), or something else.
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> | This paradox rattled me. And I sought to assuage the discomfort by punching out an essay about pay-per-view boxing in mid-May. With stinging rhetoric, I attempted to illustrate a clear example of the fact that consumption patterns are not well correlated with peoples’ conscious goals and political beliefs. But as I typed away, with vision blurred by animus and insecurity, I missed the point. Not only because many of the people who called for the NFL’s punishing Rice never bought a boxing pay-per-view or sat through an NFL broadcast. More fundamentally, I missed the point because this phenomenon should be analyzed far beyond a “rational” or “irrational” classification. There is a more important question. | | |
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>
> | The Real Question
Why were 4 million Americans willing to pay $99.50 to watch a fistfight on television? Why did 21 million Americans watch the first game of the 2014 NFL Season? And why did they do each shortly after the American public mind unequivocally denounced watching domestic-abusers engage in athletic rituals? The answer lies in unconscious motivations driven by biological, intra-psychological, social-psychological, anthropological, and historical influences. Even if they do not realize it, countless Americans are unconsciously captivated by blood sport.
The Unconscious Motivations of Blood Sport Viewers
Understanding the Audience
Any discussion of unconscious motivations must be preceded by an identification of the target group. National consumer studies show that the vast majority of individuals who watch football on TV and purchase pay-per-view boxing matches are males, aged 35 to 49. They are predominately white, and they are predominantly Christian. Overwhelmingly, these men watch in a group setting, surrounded by other males. And their initial attraction to blood sport probably inheres at birth.
Biological Influences, Archaic Response Tendencies, and Adaptive Impulses
Scientific evidence indicates that humans are biologically predisposed toward violence. Violent stimuli trigger dopamine secretion and engage the same reward pathways associated with the satisfaction of food, sex, and drug cravings. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2648522/ This biological predisposition seems consistent with evolutionary theory.
Early humans persisted by continually screening their environment for danger. Over millennia, this heightened concern for potential violence proved adaptive. The trait endured in the brain’s older structures, especially the limbic system. And this biological influence elicits a continued interest in observing violence.
Intra-psychological Impulses and Historical Influences
Prominent intra-psychological influences explain why blood sport viewers are primarily male and further reveal the athletic rituals’ appeal. Cultural guides, downloaded during early childhood, instruct American males to suppress emotion and excitement. Violent sports occasion an opportunity for males to shout, jeer, and cringe in a hyper-masculine context, free from the social pressure to suppress emotion and excitement. The expression of these routinely contained emotions offers viewers a reprieve from the aversive, subjective cost of suppressing behavioral impulses. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440575/#R37. Historical developments have made these opportunities increasingly rare.
For centuries, extravagant participation was both socially accepted and typical at operas, dramas, and symphonies. Audiences cheered, jeered, and threw objects. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the highly participatory audience was sacralized. Silence was expected, and outward emotional expression was repressed. Operant learning and contextual priming now instruct males to suppress emotion. And the social gatherings occasioned by violent sporting events afford a unique opportunity to express emotion in a generally prohibited fashion.
Social-psychological Tendencies
The appeal of violent sport is increased by a social psychological impulse to establish a masculine identity. Beyond the opportunity for male bonding, watching boxing matches affords males the opportunity to prove to their peers that they are unperturbed and self-assured as they watch hostile athletic rituals, prone to cause bodily injury and devastation. They might outwardly express emotion while watching, but they are present and engaged.
Anthropological Influences
At an anthropological level, violence shares an intimate connection with Christianity. One need not look further than the Act of the Apostles for a prime example, with its tale of Ananias and Sapphira, the couple struck dead by God after they embezzled income from a property sale. The Old Testament features many accounts of battles, killings, and damnation. Perhaps many NFL viewers and boxing fans have unconsciously linked spirituality with images of war, carnage, and malediction.
A New View: Ray Rice, Floyd Mayweather, and the Rational Actor
During an era marked by a lexicon vehemently opposed to domestic violence, why did millions of Americans indirectly compensate a league that harbored domestic abusers and directly remunerate Floyd Mayweather? Answers lie at biological, intra-psychological, social-psychological, anthropological, and historical levels. But this is about something more than blood lust.
There is a certain confusion among people who like to watch violent sports, and it is a confusion occasioned by a belief that the rituals’ participants indicate their passionate commitment by willingly taking the greatest of risks for sport. Participants are unperturbed and self-assured in the face of aggression – which is precisely what these viewers seek to become. Like Freud’s playwright, participants in violent sports afford viewers a certain schienwelt – Fans identify with them, take center stage, and satiate their unconscious impulses. And, in 2015, the American public mind’s conscious social and political beliefs-proclaimed through all forms of signs, symbols, ceremonies-were no match for a deeply rooted predisposition toward violent sport. Rational, conscious choice? It had little to do with it.
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