First Principles

For their global sponsorship of the Olympic Games, Visa has gone with the sepia toned ad campaign they call simply “Go World.”

Blech.

The whole campaign has some cool moments profiling individual athletes, but what I assume is the flagship ad talks about how we aren’t really pulling for people because of their nationality, or to hear our national anthem, etc.  “Maybe it’s because… we’re also human,” says Morgan Freeman profoundly.

Well, not me.  I’m rooting for the Americans, and when there isn’t an American in the competition, I’m rooting for athletes from western-style liberal democracies.  And when Old Glory rises on top as the Star Spangled Banner plays from those communist speakers, my heart swells in a way that the Hymn of the Russian Federation just can’t quite match.

The Olympics is all about nationalism, but directed in a more healthy way than, say, rolling tanks across a border.  If we didn’t care about seeing our respective flags or hearing our national anthems, they wouldn’t be part of the pageantry.  I don’t know when it became unseemly to admit that, but I think most Americans are perfectly OK with a little national pride.

That isn’t to say that one can’t or shouldn’t honor the individual athletes no matter where they come from.  True champions are masters of themselves, and no medalists could be where they are without the personal dedication and discipline that comes from the realization that a person is ultimately responsible for himself.  We honor champions wherever we see them because we understand this innately, and we stand in awe of this level of individual achievement.  Hopefully, it inspires us to reach for goals of our own.

Indeed, I think the individualistic nature of Olympic sports is part of what has always made them so compelling to me.  Even where there is a team involved, like in the gymnastics competitions, the final scores are conglomerations of individual achievements more than a group effort.

But I still love cheering for the good ol’ Team USA.

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Beyond the individual dramas, the Olympics are a showcase of what countries are able to produce, given their various governmental philosophies and attitudes towards individual freedom.  The Games seem tailor made for a huge governmental propaganda program, where children are raised from childhood to become national symbols of countries with the power, wealth, and inclination to make it a priority.  China, like the Soviet Union before it, can simply draft promising young athletes.  The US has to hope they choose to play.

And yet, despite the fact that China has four times as many people to find talent amongst, the US beats them every time in the medal count.  Looking at the all time count, we have nearly twice as many as the Soviet Union, and even if you combine the post-USSR Russian and 1992 “Unified Team” medals, we still have 44% more.  We get substantially better results by simply letting individuals who chose to compete make their own choices.

And the contrast doesn’t stop there.  If you look at the all-time list, you have to get to the 12th placed Japan before you get away from a culturally European country.  The first Muslim country doesn’t appear until number 31 Turkey, and Turkey can arguably still be counted culturally European.  36 other countries appear before the first African nation cracks the list, and that one, too, is largely culturally European (South Africa). For all their wealth, Saudi Arabia doesn’t even make the top 100.

So I cheer for our team because not every country in “the world” is on the same plane.  Some are better than others.  Some treat their people better.  Some have systems that respect freedom, and others try to control the economy for “equality” – which only makes everyone equally impoverished. The Olympic scoreboard symbolizes the end results of these clashing principles with glorious clarity.

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I cheer for us, because every time our anthem is played, every time our flag is raised in triumph, and every time individual achievement is associated with individual freedom, the rest of the world can draw these same conclusions.

Perhaps they can even decide to join us.