Comment by riehwvfbk

Comment by riehwvfbk 19 hours ago

That's right, they do not deserve loyalty. All of these things hijack our loyalty to people in the name of some higher-order goal. Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more. Loyalty to a country gets us to be reliable cogs in someone else's grand project. Loyalty to a philosophy gets us to be a cult leader's acolyte.

Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.

bumby 15 hours ago

>Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more.

A less cynical take: there seems to be some research that following sports fosters greater social connectivity and well-being. It may just be that we're hardwired to be tribal. From that context, sports seems to be a relatively benign way to tap into that.

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lo_zamoyski 19 hours ago

Your examples are bizarre (sports teams are a matter of petty entertainment, not proper objects of loyalty). Philosophy isn't an object of loyalty either.

However, you should acquaint yourself with the principle of subsidiarity. Loyalty, duty, and love radiate outward from those who are owed the most diminishing to those who are owed the least (spouses, then children, then parents, etc., all the way through extended family and then community and nation and finally the human race). The loyalty is to the objective good. How that is expressed will be modified by contingent factors particular to a given person's situation.

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bee_rider 18 hours ago

They didn’t come up with the sports team example, it comes from the comment they are responding to.

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riehwvfbk 5 hours ago

Hey, you can do a real-world test to see if I'm right or you are right. Go to a football match (soccer for Americans), find a group of hooligans and tell them their team sucks. If you are right and it's just petty entertainment - you'll be just fine.

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