Do you like sports? I don't. Here are my reasons why.

I declare that any competition at all is incompatible with the very idea of reason. Competition belongs to the animal world, while consciousness is essentially what distinguishes humans from the animals.

So far, people still have to fight for a place in the sun. The level of production is not high enough to satisfy everybody's needs, and the system of distribution is far from perfection. This leads to the dominance of the animal in humans. The higher is the value of the deliberate refusal to compete, to struggle for life in the animal way. This makes one a conscious being rather than a male or female representative of a biological species.

Sports do exactly the opposite. They serve to feed the animal instincts, to suppress the truly human motives and feelings replacing them with a number of surrogate activities that are harmful in almost any respect.

For the sportsman, this means harm both for the body and for the soul. The body gets over-exercised and stuffed with metabolic drugs. The soul is corrupted by the idea that it must serve to the body. Some sportsmen could be really creative if they would not have chosen sports; so much human resource is thus wasted!

For the humanity, the damage is beyond any measure.

Sports weaken the human race, since they have long since become a competition of drugs, rather than people; moreover, they induce people to train the skills that are of absolutely no use thus leading to the lack of practical training.

Sports divert people from socially valuable activities, wasting their time and effort. False values are substituted for real values. Interest for silly records and illusionary achievements supplants the attentiveness to the burning social problems.

Sports undermine the economy. They absorb both material and creative resources in tremendous quantities. This is an entirely unproductive business, and hence an additional load for both the public wealth in general and the individual well-being. On the other hand, sports feed the army of operators who can do nothing but feed on sports, the dregs of humanity.

Sports are all commercial. Commerce and sports sprout from the same idea of competition. They do not care for improving people's life; their only purpose is making money, or pursuing any other profit. Amateur sports differ little from professional sports in this respect.

Sports distort the system of public values, assuming that a sportsman (or a sports manager) gaining millions of dollars a year is more important for the society than, say, a scientist, a gardener, a miner, a shoe cleaner. In fact, the relation is exactly the opposite, since sportsmen never produce anything.

Sports cripple the public morals since they impose the idea of permissiveness. The only goal is to win by any means, with no restraint. This psychology gets readily transferred to the other domains.

Sports produce the ugliest phenomenon of the modern culture, the fans. The dull observers who don't go in for sports themselves while pretending to deeply know or understand anything. The admirers that do not much care for what they admire. The defenders that do not care for what they defend. The mold. The dust. But this dust is dangerous, since it is ready to choke the slightest germs of the free thought. Fans cannot love, they can only hate. This is yet another side of any competition at all. Sports raise violence and aggression. There are winners, there are losers. Hence, the idea of social inequality and oppression.

I could enumerate on and on. Eventually, the sports set a social pattern that becomes replicated in any human activity at all, transforming it into animal competition. Competition kills creativity. A scientist, who enters a competition, starts thinking about profit rather than truth. A dancer at a competition would dance to appeal to the judges rather than to produce an instance of beautiful perfection. A worker in a competitive business is bound to work for sale rather than satisfy people's needs.

To disguise the destructive nature of sports, the official propaganda plays up the idea of individual recreation and exercise. It slurs over the principal difference between, say, skiing for sport and skiing for pleasure. The former is harmful as any other competition. The latter is nothing but a kind of airing, like a walk in a forest; it will be healthy as long as it does not lead to strain. On the other hand, the apparently the same activity can carry quite different charge depending on the motive. One can play chess (or soccer) in a cooperative (creative) or a competitive way; this will make it either conscious activity or animal behavior.

As for training, there are many ways to support one's vitality that do not require artificial movements repeated to the level of stupefaction. In a properly organized society, the everyday activities of each member will provide enough muscular exercise. There are special techniques that combine muscular training with any common activity, including the rest; to master them is a matter of education. However, spreading this knowledge is not in the interests of the ruling classes.

Sports cannot even pass for an experiment designed to investigate the biological limits of the human body. Such an experiment would not need all the commercial side of sports, and, of course, the hordes of fans.

Trying to identify recreation with sports, the ruling circles also aim at bringing people under control in the form of life standards, fashions, corporate spirit etc. That is, those who obey the formal demands are treated as taking the right way, while the deviators are despised and expelled. One part of the society is thus set against another, in the line of animal (and sportive) competition. Many people go in for sports just to conform to the social standard; otherwise they would risk losing everything.

In a way, the existence of sports is an indicator of the underdevelopment of the society. Someday, or some millennium, the humanity will get rid of this relic of the animal past, to open the new horizons for consciousness and reason.