Majority’s Sacrifice for “Collective” Pride?

And with the flames shooting out of the stadium, songs, and mass choreographed dances a little bit too reminiscent of what occurred in Beijing 2008 (albeit with a Western, kitschy rural British twist), that once-in-four-years spectacle begins once again in a city that some London residents (including many of previous year’s LSE students) have already left behind, while others painfully adjust to the suddenly inflated costs dished out by opportunistic shop and real estate owners.

As previously mentioned, the idea of sports have, inrecent years, been geared toward some form of active patriotism, with athlete performance no longer simply tied with individual or team achievement but a clear, if indirect, indication of national superiority, reflecting everything from the citizenry’s health, good infrastructure, economic well-being, to, God forbid, the genetic disposition of the dominant race to excel in certain forms of athletic competition.

And hosting the Olympics, despite increased financial costs of labor wages, raw materials for construction, and disruptions for normal businesses, as well as negative externalities stemming from simply having too many visitors at once that slow down traffic, ups the noise levels, and turn the entire host city into a month-long festival against the will of many of her long-time residents, is proving to be just as important, if not more, than the nation’s spot in the medal table tally.

Yet, aside from those opportunistic shop and real estate owners than prey on visitors with high willingness to pay, realistically speaking, everyone in the Olympic host city is bound to make massive sacrifices to help the city display itself as a proud successful destination, economically capable of comfortably welcoming the sudden influx of people while operating a globally broadcasted international event.  To show its pretty side to visitors and the international audience, the city residents will surely be making endless concessions to the crowd.

Normally, such high amount, extensiveness, and level of sacrifices asked for will certainly lead to a collective grumble and perhaps, as shown in the most extreme cases in the Middle East,protests, riots, civil wars, and even downfall of governments.  But it is interesting to see that those same sacrifices, made under the banner of the Olympics, would make any action opposing their coming-into-being without effective popular consent (after all, citizens do not get to vote on whether their government choose to host the Olympics) seem purely ludicrous.

In other words, making large amount of sacrifices, in decrease of personal freedoms, higher financial costs, and outright disruptions in normal life even for a short period of time, is widely considered completely appropriate, even if truly limited to short amount of time, when national pride is concerned (like in the case of Olympics) while the same, both in intensity and genuinely undemocratic nature, is worthy of global condemnation and violent opposition when similar rationalization can be completed.

Such dichotomy brings into question just how often in our daily lives can such glorified justifications for sacrifices can be found.  The Olympics is, of course, an exceptional case that would happen to a city not even once in a hundred years.  But consider the prevalence of the exact same progression of thought at a smaller scale.  The idea of “accepting individual sacrifice for glory of the collective” actually permeates all everyday actions, at a disturbingly high frequency, with overwork at the office and even parties at home.

Especially in cases of overwork at the office, it is simply curious to see just how supposedly extra accomplishment of the office can be achieved through extra work by individual employees.  The justification is especially dubious when there are only extremely ambiguous ties between labor and resulting collective accomplishment, and even more so when there is little connection between the collective accomplishment and resulting benefits to the individual.

Perhaps, as people express pride in seeing those fleeting moments of national pride and even global unity in the stadiums of London, they can think a bit deeper into exactly what does all that have to do with their individual benefits.  Whether they are for the Olympics as well as more mundane matters in everyday life, are those sacrifices leading to substantial individual benefits beyond vague facades of pride and glory, benefits that can tally up with the grave costs of individual sacrifices they made?