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It’s pancakes and waffles.
“Genocide A is bad.”
“So you’re saying you support Genocide B?!?!?”
Tribalism is great because its actually sportsism.
Tribal relations are varied and nuanced among plethora tribes, but Sports is a zero-sum A-B, the limit of ways things can be.
I’ve always hated sports. Sports fans to me appear to be little more than neanderthals. “Think with your muscles, not with your brain, cause life is a zero-sum game. My team better than yours. If you ain’t first you’re last.”
Philosophically speaking, every part of that is just the complete opposite of everything I believe in.
The meta of this is if you put philosophy toe-to-toe against sports. In that case, philosophy is better. A sports fan might say “but athletes can score more points than philosophers!” But a philosopher would say “What kind of points? What game are we even playing? What’s the objective? How does one win?” and question the assumption that “points” and “winning” would have anything at all to do with physical prowess in the first place.
Sports demand real cognition, not less than philosophy, arguably more, since it happens live, under time pressure, with a body that must execute the conclusion instantly. A point guard reading a defense while the shot clock runs down is doing applied game theory. A boxer managing distance is running live Bayesian updates on an opponent’s intent every half-second. “Think with your muscles” gets it backwards: muscles are just the output device: what’s upstream is pattern recognition and split-second reasoning under uncertainty, the kind philosophers usually get to do slowly, with a pen and no clock.
As for competition being some corrupted, zero-sum betrayal of philosophy’s higher aims, Nietzsche would say you have it exactly backwards. He didn’t see struggle as an unfortunate feature of life to be reasoned away; he saw it as life’s basic structure. “Life is will to power,” and where there’s no resistance to overcome, there’s no growth. “What does not kill me makes me stronger” wasn’t a locker-room slogan to him, it was near his actual metaphysics.
He also admired the Greek agon, the competitive contest underlying their tragedy, philosophy, and athletics alike. In “Homer’s Contest” he argued the Greeks needed structured competition to keep ambition from curdling into destruction, the contest channels will to power into something generative rather than annihilating. Sport isn’t philosophy’s opposite; it’s an old technology for making competition survivable, even beautiful.
So framing this as philosophy-versus-sports, which wins, may be the more “neanderthal” move, it smuggles in the same zero-sum, must-crown-a-victor logic you’re accusing sports fans of, just relocated to the seminar room. Nietzsche’s real challenge wasn’t ranking pursuits; it was asking why you need a hierarchy at all, rather than seeing both as arenas where the same drive, to test yourself against resistance and become more, gets expressed.
That’s why I called it “the meta,” it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. I was poking fun at myself for the seeming inconsistency there. I probably could have left out that entire last paragraph and it would have been better but sometimes I forget that my oddball humor doesn’t always come across the way I intend it to