“It’s a good thing that all of those people are well behaved. They could easily get out of control and take the venue over.” My brother made a good point. We were watching the WWE Royal Rumble 2019. The event was held in a baseball stadium, Chase Field, with over 48,000 fans in attendance. It’s rather interesting that people are primitive enough to watch other men and women beat each other up — albeit the violence is staged and choreographed — for their entertainment, yet civilized enough to respectfully sit in their seats and not bother anybody.
The fans in the stadium were not themselves violent; instead, they took out their violent urges vicariously through the wrestlers who acted out on each other in ways that the spectators could not act out on others in their own lives in the real world. Those violent parts of our minds are very real parts of us. How could they not be? Our DNA is only a few mutations away from being identical to that of chimpanzees, and chimpanzees are not so well-behaved; they are likely will rip each other limb from limb if put in the close proximity of baseball stadium seating. It turns out the that small difference in genetic material makes all the difference.
Wrestling fans may be barbaric, but they are still pro-social, something that cannot be said of our apish kin.
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