Why do men love “fantasy leagues” so much? Because it allows them to assert their own human logic over something too variable to explain. We have come to the point we can reduce a player’s entire performance to statistics, as well as the coaching staff, and we can even account for the vagaries of pure luck with a certain manageable statistical variation. What we can’t account for is when a team wins against all that data. So the fantasy leagues are a way of asserting our control over that one, immeasurable factor on the field.
Almost all sports talk is nonsense. The color commentators might really know a lot of stuff, but in the long run, if you simply turn off the sound, you don’t miss a thing. Most sports writers are actually entertainers. While they know a lot about sports, it seems very few of them every really did any of the sports they write about. Being a good entertaining writer usually precludes the ability to play, and vice versa. So when a writer misses his prognostication for a game — as they almost always do — he simply changes the story to account for things he forgot, didn’t consider, or simply to justify why his loyal readers should keep coming back for more.
Even players blather on and on these days, echoing the canonical chatter about what makes a game. Have you ever read a transcript of such blather, and noticed how repetitious and empty it is? The few who are actually very bright people tend to color outside the lines, so they don’t get to talk on camera. Really good players can see patterns and react, but even they will tell you, sometimes you just can’t win.
One of the major factors within that set of improbabilities is not even the magical factor we call “teamwork” or “team spirit.” It’s something much more subtle. Within the human psyche is a place where petty conflicts between each other somehow are pushed aside. When it really works, almost no one is conscious of it. What they get on the surface is some warm feeling for their teammates that makes the game work, whether they win or lose. However, it typically means they play far better than they themselves expected. There are a dozen different names for it, but it amounts to unspoken negotiation between each other which frees each player to exert maximum effort where he’s best prepared to go. The team avoids things they do poorly. On some level below the conscious, they just interact almost as a single body. You can’t teach it, but you know it when you see it.
Where does that unity come from? Nothing we can account for in our knowledge of human nature explains it. But we do know when it’s missing. It shows up in all sorts of human endeavor. How about that EU? Who knew centralized control could be so utterly hopeless?
According to the Commissioner for Enterprise, Gunther Verheugen, the benefits of the single market are worth around 180 billion euros a year, while the cost of complying with Brussels rules is 600 billion euros. In other words, by its own admission, the EU costs more than it’s worth.
What’s missing is that failure of unity under the conscious level. The reason it costs so much is because nobody really wants to do it the way the EU has decided it must be done. So they have to pull in a vast army of enforcers. Not the kind with guns and such; that would actually be pretty efficient. No, we are all adults, and it’s simply a matter of closing all the sneaky loopholes, capture the dissembling, the lies, the niggling legalisms, and so forth.
Yeah, teamwork.
Humans will tend to self organize. Sure, you’ll have those who swim against the tide just because there is a tide. We should realize that’s generally the cost of doing business with other humans. Stop nickle-and-dime chasing. You can’t afford it. Regardless of the particular thing you are trying to get going, you’ll find it works a whole lot better when, as much as possible, the team or market organizes itself. Yes, some will need help, but not everyone needs the same flavor of help. You can’t have a team without individuals. There will always be that messy negotiation on the front side, and all throughout the process. Embrace it.
With all the vast abilities we have to ferret out the obscure details of human nature and human behavior, we still end up with that one element which makes most fantasy leagues bring different results from what’s on the ground of reality. The EU is one big attempt at fantasy league play, and it fails miserably.
