Soccer was erected as a serious thing and politics as a tragic spectacle

The National Soccer Team during the World Cup celebration caravan (Ariel Torres)

The World Cup passed and left a bunch of videos, photos, posts, tattoos, sensations and reflections. If something has been clear since years, it is that soccer is not a mere anesthetizing circus for the giles. However, it does seem that, when analyzing this great “sports” event in light of what is happening in our country, the lazy intellectual simplism, so typical of our days, returns to take the lead. We are reluctant to take a step back, to capture the big picture, and a step in, to read ourselves individually and collectively.

That the songs and the scenic spectaculars do not block the vision of the most significant truth that the World Cup experience leaves us: it is possible to build a national community. And seriously rethinking ourselves is the first step to it.

Several questions circulated and others should have done so: Why does soccer satisfy collective aspirations while politics does not achieve its corresponding tasks for the most transcendental objectives of the country? What material is made of the “political class” that is immune to the universal values ​​of man, which the players of the national team embody? What place do we give to football? What place do we give to Politics? What do we do about culture and education? What relationship do we really have with power, love and justice? Why is success achieved in football and not achieved in Politics?

Every game directly replicates experiences or captures experiential connotations. Soccer as a collective sport represents a society with a common goal and also a dispute. Watching football is contemplating a reduced and partial expression of community work.

Angel Di Maria and Lionel Messi hold the cup during the closing ceremony of the World Cup in Qatar after winning the final in Lusail on December 18, 2022 (Photo by Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)

On the marked lawn you can see various virtues and human capacities. All technical strategy is governed by the key of solidarity. Competitiveness makes discipline and perseverance the most precious weapons to sharpen talent to excellence. The clubs, for their part, are the training plants that make the individual a key part of a collective watchmaking.

This social micro-phenomenon is completed by the fixed and expectant eye of those who from the stands do not accept passivity in this, since they commit passionate paths very deep within themselves, to be part of that community for a moment. This peculiar compenetration entails the logic of sensing significant underlying traits of humanity in all this sporting event.

Far from any doubt, sport and soccer in a particular way in our country, shape the person and partly our society.

Speaking of the national team, all these accusations take on a much higher level, since the fragmented forces in each local club are unified under the albiceleste cloak that devastates all factional dynamics, greatly expanding the sense of the popular. This question was never manifested in the last World Cup.

A long-suffering final established a glory denied in 36 years of fighting. Unique and immortal moment. Such a triumph shook the consciences and made the chassis of each one of us tremble.

The heritage built in each neighborhood, each pasture, each plank; the drive of each family and the work of sports improvement, finally forged a national success. It was not only 47 million people who supported the selection, it was the push of the entire Argentine history, the pressure of being a national finding a crack to emerge in our time. It was a popular work.

Argentina deserved it, deserved an existential break. An electrifying feat. The joy of one of the most massive demonstrations ever seen contained a society in need of relief, passion for the national and hunger for fulfillment.

Image of an unprecedented mobilization: five million people took to the streets to celebrate the World Cup (Télam)

Ours, a town that breaks its back daily in an unfortunate daily life, saturated with insubstantiality and drowned in political boredom, is perceived as more of a beast of burden than a dignified Creole. This town, which cannot hit the key of real development, left to the evil of the devil more than the good of God, found its heroes in a group of soccer players whom it does consider its representatives. The soccer player finished shredding the image of the political leader.

The political subject has suffered in the course of the last years a sufficient devaluation as to leave without force all national leadership. And here, we tend to rush to distance ourselves from “the politicians”, but it hurts to realize that we are closer than we think. We permanently denounce “a crisis of representation.” There is? Political culture is determined -not only- by the general culture in which it is embedded. Are we at the cultural height of the political circumstance?

We suffer from the social chaos of a truncated spirituality, undermined by a superstitious religiosity without a community cross, family alienation, excessive techno-instrumental mediation, cultural hypersexualization, pandemic drug addiction, the abandonment of the classic and the tourist incontinence that shuns the questioning roots of the terroir.

In this way, any complaint is inadmissible before the monster that we made of the current Argentine (anti)politics. Well, with these behaviors and expressions, we affirm: there is no spirit, nor love, nor the Homeland. The actions of the political leader will be alien to our wishes but it is typical of our structure of habits, customs and thought. Let’s not demand from politics what we don’t give to culture. We live, sadly, waiting for a governmental patriotism that we never produced.

Next, it should be noted that soccer is feeling and popular culture, it is entertainment and a profession. But Politics is not a profession, but where all of them converge. Sport is a formative and recreational necessity. Politics is an anthropological necessity. It is the matrix where human forces merge to resolve the core tension between the individual and the collective. Constituting the highest degree of duty to be community.

Celebration and delirium on 9 de Julio avenue in the city of Buenos Aires (Adrián Escandar)

Let us assume, thus, that we have denatured politics. It no longer excites, but fanaticizes. Because serving stopped being socially relevant. Patriotic heartbreak opened an unfathomable distance between collective responsibility and individual “happiness”.

On the other hand, in politics there are adversities and moral demands that are abysmally superior (to those of football). The operational frameworks of political work in general and public service in particular, national and international, are riddled with tortuous complexities that are not protected by the patent laws present in sports, but are sustained by the laws of the Human nature. And the latter recognizes exclusively the conduction of the spirit.

It is from that spiritual preparation that we suffer from, the one that allows us to morally resist power, which, according to the Greek sage Pittacus, “does not corrupt, it unmasks.” Power sheds light on each interior corner, unfolds each fold of being.

Vastly rich is our company in the generation of soccer players, but let’s not deny that we gave up producing true political cadres a long time ago.

Today’s leaders quickly gain fame and artificial power. Arising from the massive communication apparatus or from networks that do not exceed the public catharsis that dissipates participatory energies towards nothing. Few modern leaders escape the deception of the virtual cathexis, which provides a pseudo-entity to that which does not possess it. Notoriously, due to media determination and civic abdication, soccer was established as something serious and politics makes up a (tragic) spectacle.

It is urgent to finally recover the forgotten art of political leadership, the one that confers order and fruitful directionality to all social energies. Allowing a full sense of national culture, where soccer has its place but not privileged. Let’s encourage vocations and professions conducive to contributing human wealth in all order. Integrating the native intelligentsia to provide cultural reins to social operation, thus ceasing to give opinions from the intellectual blindness of inaction.

“Boys”, let’s restore the ideal of Nation. We owe it to our heroes, to the Malvinas fighters, to the Ara San Juan divers, and to all the anonymous heroes who transit our soil daily and keep Argentina beating.

Keep reading:

The National Team also won the cultural battle: officials and ultrafeminists out of the gameArgentina champion: secrets of a historic celebration and an operation that bordered on disaster

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