Victim Culture is Crippling Modern Athletes

(Edited)

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The progressive worldview that has permeated American culture is breeding inferior athletes. Not inferior athletically but mentally—they are unable to fully harness their athletic potential because of mental weakness. The most prominent recent examples come from the NBA: Ben Simmons and Zion Williamson, two of the most talented basketball players of their generation (the Zoomer generation). Yet they are afraid to play the game of basketball.

They have been inflicted with a weak-minded ideology that is squandering their athletic gifts. Simmons has all the tools: a great passer, ball-handler, rebounder, and defender. He does everything except perhaps the most important part of basketball: shooting the ball. It is not that he is a poor shooter (though he is), but he doesn’t shoot at all. Simmons is literally afraid to shoot for fear of missing badly. When Simmons was criticized by his coach and teammates for hurting the team by not shooting in a critical playoff game, he faked an injury so he wouldn't have to play at all the next season. That was three years ago and he hasn’t recovered since. He supposedly has a back problem, but his primary problems are more mental than physical. Simmons was a former All-NBA talent but may never be the same again—and he’s only 26 years old—what should be the prime of his career.

Zion Williamson, meanwhile, does not have a shooting problem. He can score the ball in bunches and is an absolute freak athletically. Zion has all the skills to succeed in basketball and become the best player in the world. He was supposedly physically healthy to play in the New Orleans Pelicans recent NBA playoff “play-in” game in 2023, but he wasn't “mentally ready” so he opted out. In the past, great players ruined their careers with substance abuse issues (cocaine in the 1980s), but great players these days are ruining their careers with mental health issues (which really aren’t their fault).

Simmons and Zion are microcosms of a greater trend with Gen-Z. Jonathan Haidt illustrated this in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. Schools are teaching children to become weaker mentally, essentially teaching them the opposite lessons of cognitive behavioral therapy. This results in people who are more anxious, more depressed, more mentally frail, and unable to cope with the pressures of life. Their irrational beliefs are reaffirmed and encouraged by society, compounding the problem.

Athletes are natural Chads or alpha males. In the parlance of Frederich Nietzsche, they have a “master morality”—that is strong-minded, follow their instincts, do not overthink or overanalyze. This leads to them having a warrior-like mentality. In athletic competition they want to dominate their opponents, just as soldiers would do on the battlefield in war. But in this case, the “battlefield” is a sports game. Most professional athletes naturally have a master morality—it’s what propelled them to the top of their sport. In previous centuries, star athletes would have been sword-wielding warriors on horseback.

You can see the warrior mindset most evidently in someone like Michael Jordan, who was one of the most competitive athletes ever, and (contrary to LeBron stans) is the basketball G.O.A.T. Jordan not only dominated his competition but got in fights with his own teammates due to his overly competitive nature. But our modern progressive culture would diagnose someone like a young Michael Jordan as “problematic.” He’d have his alpha male “toxic masculinity” drilled out of him in grade school, so that when he came of age he’d be like Ben Simmons: weak and submissive. Kids today are taught that it is more important to be liked by your opponents than to win. When Simmons got called out by his teammates to step up his game, did he fight back or answer the call? No, he simply quit.

Modern society is a culture full of trigger warnings where everyone is taught to be over-sensitive, avoid hurting others’ feelings, and never offend anyone. In essence, they are taught the opposite of master morality: slave morality, where weakness is idolized. Weak-minded teachers with a slave morality are brainwashing our would-be warriors to adopt a submissive mindset as well. They are reprogramming the natural alpha male Chad athletes to become weak-minded betas, to ignore their instincts to dominate. They're instead teaching them to overthink, overanalyze, and be more considerate. "It's called just being nice."

Young Zoomer athletes who grew up in this super-woke educational system are coming of age with a weak-minded slave morality that is crippling them in life. To succeed in athletic competition, you need to have the killer instinct of master morality. You need to be strong-minded to ignore criticism from the press and social media that athletes today are bombarded with. To win you need to have a warrior’s mindset; instead they have a social justice warrior’s mindset—a victim/loser mentality. This is making them anxious, depressed, and afraid to utilize their athletic gifts to dominate others.

Compare today’s culture to the culture of the 1980s when Michael Jordan came into the NBA. The movies then portrayed jocks as strong and powerful winners who dominated the weak-minded nerds and losers. The jocks got the girls, were popular, and rode that winner’s mindset to success in life. Donald Trump was viewed as an American hero in the 1980s, and now he is viewed as “literally Hitler.” But Trump hasn’t changed since then—America has. We are living in the “revenge of the nerds,” where the classic jock heroes of the past are now considered bullies and contemptible villains. It is no longer acceptable to win if you are mean and inconsiderate. We are taught to be like the weak-minded nerds of the past: to be nice and lose.

There will be exceptions to the rule, as some Zoomer athletes do not have this weak-minded demeanor and are able to dominate in sports. Ja Morant is one such example. Some are naturally that way while others worked to overcome the slave morality taught to them in school. It is no coincidence that the best athletes often come from the roughest neighborhoods. A strong mindset is needed for mere survival in the hood, where "nerds" who listen to their schoolmarm teachers are beaten up and mocked. Ja Morant became strong-minded from the rough area he grew up in, but now the NBA is belatedly trying to drill the master morality out of him by suspending him for merely flashing a gun with his bros on Instagram—in a country where guns are legal!

Some might argue that Simmons and Zion are actually the exceptions themselves, and most young athletes do not have these mental problems that are holding them back. That might be true now, but I think as time goes on, as long as victim culture continues to fester in the educational system and mass media, more and more of the athletes America produces will be weak-minded losers like Simmons and Zion. Star athletes from rough neighborhoods are often scooped up early and whisked out to wealthy prep schools where they not only learn about crossovers and threes but critical race theory. Before long, any pro athlete without mental health issues will be a rare exception. It is also no coincidence that most of the best recent NBA players have come from overseas (Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Luka Dončić) because the progressive dogma has not yet spread to the outskirts of Eastern Europe. Just give it time, though. America's top export is ideology.

In a previous post, I wrote about how Chad athletes could help win the culture war. But such Chad athletes will be few and far between if they continue to be brainwashed by the woke educational system. It will be a more difficult task to save them and build a strong mind that is necessary to match their strong bodies. We need more Nietzschians and Bronze Age Perverts to mold the minds of our young athletes, to train them to be mentally stronger and adopt a warrior’s mentality. To become an ubermensch in body and mind. Make Athletes Great Again.



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