The Olympics = suppression with a hefty dose of nationalism.
Why is this still a thing?
Short answer: because it works.
Longer answer: because it works too well on brains that evolved to bond through tribes, spectacle, and shared rhythm.
The modern Olympics are a strange chimera. On the surface, they are about human excellence, bodies doing improbable things, the poetry of motion. Underneath, they are a pressure-release valve wrapped in flags.
Here is the mechanism, stripped of ceremony.
Large systemsโstates, economies, institutionsโproduce stress. Inequality, precarity, anger, grief, boredom, resentment. None of that disappears on its own. So you need somewhere to put it. The Olympics offer a socially approved container: chant here, cry here, feel proud here, rage here, but about this.
Nationalism is the glue. It converts diffuse emotion into a simple story: we are winning, we are special, we are good. That story is comforting. It does not require analysis. It does not ask uncomfortable questions about who gets funded, who gets excluded, who is exploited to make the spectacle run on time.
And yesโsuppression is part of the deal. Not always consciously, but structurally. When attention is absorbed by spectacle, it is not available for critique. When people are emotionally full, they are politically quieter. This is not a conspiracy so much as an old trick humans keep reinventing because it is efficient.
What makes the Olympics especially sticky is that they hijack genuinely beautiful things. Discipline. Cooperation. The awe of watching a human body transcend its usual limits. Those are real. The problem is that they are framed through nation-states, medals, rankings, anthemsโturning collective human achievement into a zero-sum scoreboard.
Why is it still a thing?
Because it gives governments legitimacy (โlook, we produce championsโ), corporations visibility (โlook, we sponsor greatnessโ) andย audiences catharsis without confrontation
And because many people are exhausted. When life is heavy, spectacle feels like oxygen. It is easier to cheer than to reckon.
There is also a quieter reason: ritual. Humans do not stop needing ritual just because we pretend to be rational moderns. The Olympics function like a secular festivalโpredictable, cyclical, symbolic. Flags replace gods. Medals replace relics. The opening ceremony replaces myth.
The trouble starts when ritual masquerades as meaning.
