There is another, deeper, way to describe Democratic Sport: Intentional Family [IF].
That term has been used in the past to describe groups of people who are not traditionally “related,” but decide to come together with social bonds like what we ideally think of as “family.”
We say ideally because the modern family is less like that ideal today than ever.
The family unit has long been imagined – and for many for a long time lived – as the ideal, supportive, integrated social unit. It had only birth as its entrance requirement and death as its cancellation. And it was the core element of individual meaning in society. When all other relationships or affiliations failed, one was always a father, a mother, a husband, a wife, a daughter, or a son… and those roles meant something important.
Those things are no longer true for more and more people every day. The family is disintegrating, and social data confirm that disintegration.
More important, family has been the most powerful integrative element in society.
Every other integrative element has always been less so, including work, school, faith, sports affiliation, and now, in the modern world, media and information sources and technology-driven social networks.
They are also disintegrating, and at faster rates than family.
These integrative social elements are falling apart because of the dissolution of entrance and cancellation requirements, like birth and death for families.
Those requirements have been dissolving for years because their common foundations have eroded.
Just as we once got our information about and confirmation of reality from common sources, we also defined our roles in society around our long-term work. Neither of those social integrations are functional now.
Just as our faiths once united us in at least a shared sense of the divine [even if those “divines” differed], we also shared common emotional cause through affiliations with sports teams [on which we never remotely had a chance to play ourselves]. These affiliations too are falling apart.
And the tech-based social networking that was supposed to unite us in universal connection has blown us all apart into a million social fragments.
It is no surprise, then, that the rising malaise of the times is the ironic epidemic of loneliness in our hyper-connected society.
The good news is that all of these disintegrations are about to be melted away by the annealing fire of AI.
It will make superfluous most of the divisions that support our fragmentation today.
Work, of course, will itself become superfluous for most people as AI replaces human ingenuity and operational skill.
The same will apply for schools, which will no longer be preparations for vocational combat, but human gymnasiums of the mind.
And conventional sport, which has always been occupied by the tiniest of human minorities, will remain as spectacle but will fade beside the active participation of the world’s majority in their own teams, leagues, and families of athletic accomplishment [and income]: Democratic Sport.
People will still want and need something uniquely and avowedly human to share, to relate individuals to each other and to groups that have a common purpose.
We believe that common purpose will, for most people, be athletic competition: the joint, shared effort to accomplish a goal, arrayed against other humans in a kind of physical recreation with meaning: competitive victory.
However…
The focus of traditional and conventional competition has always been on the result: winning or losing. First and longest ago, because the winner won the spoils of victory, whether it was land or food or money or whatever was in sufficiently short supply to engender conflict. Some method was needed to rationally distribute the “spoils.”
The first competitions, in this light, were wars… battles over limited resources. When “sport’ emerged, it was a metaphor for war: a battle over the spoils.
It was no coincidence that the spoils of war were replicated in sports as the gold medals of victory. How many have actually wondered why the reward for winning a social, non-violent competition needed to be another metaphor for the spoils of war?
None of these results will be necessary in the not-distant future, when “spoils” themselves become superfluous in a society of plenty.
History’s sport was necessarily focused on the RESULT of the competition: who won and took the spoils.
Future’s sport – Democratic Sport – will be focused not on the result but on the PROCESS of competition: the marshaling of resources and cooperation to compete effectively: the making and management of teams… teams that are fundamentally differently constituted and managed than those of yore.
Our teams will be more like FAMILIES… with no entrance requirements and no dismissals.
In traditional families, the new entrant – the baby – has no choice. In our teams/families, the new entrant will have total and arbitrary choice, to join any team/family in the world and to join multiple families if they are not competitive opponents.
Those teams will span the globe, and cross every boundary of what today is difference and social fragmentation.
The social need for conflict – in work, in school, in families – will be low, but the natural human need for engagement in common causes will still be high.
Democratic Sport, and our global Intentional Family, will serve that need… for everyone.
The Future is Now.
