| Man-made things are real! Finance is the lazy abstraction we use to represent "resources." Competition also does not exist for competitions sake, it exists as a result of multiple agents within a specific context engaging in activity that has "winners" and "losers" (this is not a great way to put this but I'm trying not to think too hard about the specific theoretical nuances of what competition _is_, but more what it's used _for_). For sports, this context is highly constrained to whatever game is being played and so its impacts are limited to the scope of that game and those involved with its orchestration/spectacle (definitionally!). On the other hand, global trade is unconstrained by a specific range of activity (there are states with laws that try and combat this but ultimately money is money). This is much closer in effect to the "real" physical violence of war. By controlling an entity financially, you control that entities ability to exist in a financial context and so when that world of finance becomes the dominant form of interaction you are effectively enacting violence upon and limiting the expression of that thing (i.e. the conquest and subjugation of people/land but with money instead of swords). In contemporary hyper-reality it is a common mistake to ascribe "unrealness" to things like money or the internet, in such a way that we can box out their effects from our understandings. Then, when those systems are employed to reinforce and/or expand existing hierarchies that layer of smoke and mirrors is able to effectively divert attention away from their _very real_ impacts. At the same time they become both non-things and the backdrop on which everything else exists. "Just turn off the computer" "Just don't purchase exploitative things" "Just do your own research" [Ad infinitum...] These bits of rhetoric shift the unfathomable inertia of Things™ onto the shoulders of the individual, be it a person, organization or state without recognition as to why that entity is doing the thing that it is doing in the context of everything else that is doing something around it. There is probably already a term for it but this seems to itself be a kind of logical fallacy ("ex homine"?) that collapses the scale of a problem down to the decision of an individual. Thus it enters the scope of opinion and so is unreal and unworthy of discussion or understanding. Nuance and complexity are shunted away systemically because complex solutions and understandings do not engage well with efficiency. Because things that are economically efficient are those things which can be spread through economics, even the ideas around what it means to be economic can be distorted by this effect in such a way to detach people further and further from reality while assuring them that they are the only ones that _really_ understand how the world works (in "economic" terms). It is a battlefield that is at war with all other battlefields--and it is winning. |