WHEN THE INCIDENTAL BECOMES THE ACCIDENTAL BECOMES THE NORM!

WHEN THE INCIDENTAL BECOMES THE ACCIDENTAL BECOMES THE NORM!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 12, 2014

Longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “If you want to understand a society, study the games they play and how they play them.”

The “game of life,” which sociologist Irving Goffman wrote about in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” (1959) more than fifty years ago, still resonates with incredible perspicacity:

Goffman “On reality and contrivance”:

If a performance is to come off, the witnesses by and large must be able to believe that the performers are sincere … we find that a rigid incapacity to depart from one’s inward view of reality may at times endanger one’s performance. 

I have witnessed senior management lying through their teeth in addressing the troops as far back as the 1960s, and saw it repeated several times after that.   

In the recent scandals associated with General Motors over ignition switches, we learned of engineers lying to management, management lying to investors, and Wall Street acting as if they had no complicity in the exercise when this was all uncovered.

Goffman on “teams”:

In a recent study of the police, we learn that a patrolling team of two policeman, who witness each other’s illegal and semi-illegal acts and who are in an excellent position to discredit each other’s show of legality before the judge, possess solidarity and will stick by each other’s story, no matter what atrocity it covers-up or how little chance there is of anyone believing it.

If this sounds ancient, but is it?

A lad told me recently of his father, an attorney, who has made a habit of taking tickets his wife, daughter and son have gotten for traffic violations, and because he once was a police officer himself, uses his influence so that those police officers, who wrote the tickets, are sure not to show up when the violations appear on the court’s docket.  This recently extended to the lad’s girlfriend who got a ticket for a violation on university grounds, and was told “not to worry about it.” 

Imagine how the tens of thousands of Floridians feel who have gotten tickets for speeding or being clocked and pictured going through one of those cameras at red lights.  Florida collects over one million dollars a year in these camera red light violations, alone.

Then we have the Ray Rice incident, where the NFL football player hit and knocked out his then girlfriend, now his wife in a casino elevator. 

Before a blanket of television cameras backed by his National Football  league teammates of the Baltimore Ravens, he apologized, as it turns out insincerely, to a multi-million fan based audience watching across the nation if not the world.

The incident occurred in the spring of 2014.  The NFL commissioner Roger Goodell met with Ray Rice and now his wife, and gave the football player a two game suspension.  The commissioner claimed he gave such a light suspension because Ray Rice was “ambiguous” in his recapping of the incident.  That was May.  It turns out if was also a lie.

Now we learn that in June Rice told Goodell that he hit his fiancée in that elevator and knocked her unconscious, something that is quite unambiguous.

In September, the celebrity news website TMZ released the video of what happened inside that elevator to the shock of the nation.  It should not have been shocked given the millions who saw on television Rice dragging his limp unconscious fiancée from the elevator. 

As Goffman would say, we want to believe what we want to believe despite what our minds and better sense tell us.

Goodell has been riding the NFL economic bandwagon if precariously ever since, that is, until the police revealed this past week that the video inside the elevator was sent to the National Football League headquarters several months ago.  Denial is never far from self-deceit and cover-your-assness.

Now, we come to where the rubber hits the road. 

Roger Goodell in his ten years as NFL commissioner has husband the phenomenal growth of the NFL to eclipse all other national sports in popularity, audience, and most of all, wealth. 

Goodell has made NFL owners super rich, and like the football players standing behind Ray Rice in unison support, thinking there go I but for a little luck, now stand the owners in support of Goodell, as he has been a most beneficial meal ticket to those addicted to greed.

This shows the ugly head of capitalism where no one worries about what is ethical or right while disturbing the line in the sand as to what is legal. 

I don’t expect many to read Arundhati Roy’s book, “Capitalism: A Ghost Story,” but I can tell you it is chilling story when it comes to social justice where money trumps morals and decency. 

It is a story of a place in India where poisoned rivers, barren wells, clear-cut forests that lead to mudslides, and hundreds of thousands of famers unable to feed their families escape punishing debt with suicide, a place where hundreds of millions of people make less than $2 per day. 

These are author Roy’s ghosts of a nation of 1.2 billion that continues to be exploited by the West with no conscience and virtual impunity.

When you think that our children and young adults are addicted to games, surreal games, to fantasy football, and to other activities without meaning or consequences, you get a sense when the incidental becomes the accidental becomes the norm.

*     *     *