Gladiatorial games are a constant theme in our culture and there are a sensible amount of movies, novels and any form of modern art representation about the gladiators, their fierce enemies, and those who send them to fight. For the gladiator predicament not only is persistent in contemporary art across its time-span and spectrum but gave also iconic masterpieces. Yet there is a great majority that is part of this game that is scarcely represented or is usually misrepresented: the spectator.
The spectator is usually portrayed as either struck with terror and fear or is sadistically cheering to the slaughter and gore. This is somewhat true because this is the way usually a helpless person behaves when is temporarily exposed to gratuitous violence. That the reaction of outrage or protest against the senseless blood-shed is absent is understandable given that the spectator wouldn’t dare to go against the status-quo agenda: keeping violence relevant in time of peace, without risking to witness the games much closer than the first row.
There is one kind of spectator that is not represented and I
would say extrapolating to the present it could represent if not the majority
at least a significant portion from the spectator base. To reconstruct the
profile of this type of spectator we need to see what constant violence
exposure, as a witness not as a part of it, does to the human psyche. That the
gladiator, the referee, even the animals might have suffered some kind of
chronic post-traumatic disorder would not surprise anyone. But not this
spectator, the conspicuous spectator, the ancient equivalent of the violent
evening news watcher that sadistically teases also his family and neighbors,
was not stressed, not even thrilled, but was becoming blasé, wanting the same
emotional punch for the content but, being unable to receive it. This would
resonate with what Seneca observed this in his writing (
taken
from an interesting read by Keith Hopkins):
All the previous fighting had been merciful by comparison. Now finesse is set aside, and we have pure unadulterated murder. The combatants have no protective covering; their entire bodies are exposed to the blows. No blow falls in vain. This is what lots of people prefer to the regular contests, and even to those which are put on by popular request. And it is obvious why.
There is no helmet, no shield to repel the blade. Why have armour? Why bother with skill? All that just delays death.
In the morning, men are thrown to lions and bears. At mid-day they are thrown to the spectators themselves. No sooner has a man killed, than they shout for him to kill another, or to be killed. The final victor is kept for some other slaughter. In the end, every fighter dies. And all this goes on while the arena is half empty.
You may object that the victims committed robbery or were murderers. So what? Even if they deserved to suffer, what's your compulsion to watch their sufferings? 'Kill him', they shout, 'Beat him, burn him'. Why is he too timid to fight? Why is he so frightened to kill? Why so reluctant to die? They have to whip him to make him accept his wounds.
Why civilization go back to rubble given enough time is one of the great mysteries of the Universe, but people like Arnold Toynbee speculated that is the failure of the elites ("
creative minority") to inspire the masses, and this is what makes the weaving to unravel, the elites main preoccupation, in his own words, becomes: "
sustaining and expanding their own wealth and power."
I would argue that the elite remained creative enough given that they always came with ingenious solutions to keep the crowd entertained and thrilled, to cite again from the
above
mentioned article by Keith Hopkins:
The quality of Roman justice was often tempered by the need to satisfy the demand for the condemned. Christians, burnt to death as scapegoats after the great fire at Rome in AD 64, were not alone in being sacrificed for public entertainment. Slaves and bystanders, even the spectators themselves, ran the risk of becoming victims of emperors' truculent whims. The Emperor Claudius, for example, dissatisfied with how the stage machinery worked, ordered the stage mechanics responsible to fight in the arena. One day when there was a shortage of condemned criminals, the Emperor Caligula commanded that a whole section of the crowd be seized and thrown to the wild beasts instead. Isolated incidents, but enough to intensify the excitement of those who attended. Imperial legitimacy was reinforced by terror.
In the above setting, when all the variations have worn out we can easily go back in time with the mind eye and probably easily hear people mumbling or screaming: “Fake !”, “Staged!”, “He deserves it ”, “Boring!”, “That’s what you get for being on the wrong side!”, “He looked for it!”.
That upping the game by wanting to get an emotional kick from trying to stir the unsuspecting other spectator, or by massively annoying him if he is aware, would not have be strange to this ancient spectator is a very probable guess. Here we can easily zoom out back to the present and bring up the modern equivalent of this ancient conspicuous spectator to the Gladiatorial games that has become blasé to all forms of violence and injustices and thrives on more:
the troll.
That being troll is not some form of mental illness (yet, just wait for
DSM 6) is not enough for people to take the phenomenon for serious study, and
a recent study found:
trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior.
(
source for the above image)
The troll comes as the greatest (yet) level player in this game of passive participator that the violent Internet arena can provide. That this is the case, and trolling is a force to be reckon with, is confirmed by recent revealed cases where
government and
army use it.
Trolls I am sure recently came again stridently loud into everybody’s focus with the events in Gaza and Ukraine, where reported mingled corpses, scattered brains, and open bowels, children carried like rags were met with, “Terrorists!”, “Fake”, “They looked for it”, “God punished them!”, “They chose the wrong side!”, etc
But psychologically the phenomenon goes much deeper than just trolling and it is here to stay, and as psychology professor Phillip Zimbardo showed with his
experiments, given the right conditions people quickly fill in the roles.
To come back to the ancient terror games, it is clear that the gladiator, the stage animal, and some spectators are the abused, the terror system, and a limited circle of the elite is the abuser, and the gladiatorial game abstraction the majority agreed upon is the enabler.
The very fact that everybody agrees on who the sides are, where is the arena and that there is a fight carry on: eliminate the evil opponent, is enough to make the things roll, the rules of engagement will most likely bend over time.
People might look back in time and look to the gory youtube fresh videos from Gaza and Ukraine, the hateful tweets and heartless comments as our modern form of gladiatorial games. There’s no secret that
social media can make us shallow and less empathic, but the recent level of trolling shows that there is a next level to this. And as we discussed earlier certainly there are also professional trolls in this bloody PR games, to spice it up a bit or just spin it in the right direction, but there certainly are a handful of “naturals” too, all making the comment sections, and some hashtags, un-breathable.
In the arena of gladiatorial games some fights can be seen as great victories, but in the greater game of Life we are all losers, and at stake might be our own civilization and culture, as for the past certainly was. Now the roman gladiator arena is a quiet and dusty ruin, no way to know what tragic stories happened there if not for the history.
As
James Carse put it: “War is the ultimate finite game. Religion is the ultimate infinite game,” …
“Evil does exist: it is when an infinite game is absorbed utterly in a finite game. All evil is an attempt to eliminate evil.”
I would use a similar metaphor for our discussed theme: Empire is the ultimate finite game. Life is the ultimate infinite game. And evidently we are all trying to absorb Life in this finite game of Internet, pretty much like the Romans tried with their glamour gladiatorial arena, with all the golden Caesars, thousands of ferocious beasts and brave fighters, beautiful women. And it was evil, and now its easy to see, but back then all those contributions made with passion, art and blood by everyone made it seem alive, but beyond the meaning that was given by the system that owned it was meaningless. Pretty much like Internet is today and we don't get it. The satisfied sadistic Roman spectator like our troll is a blessing in disguise because it shows us what it means to be at the apex of the system, shows the real face of the "Arena".
P.S. I sometimes wonder if the latest stream of botched executions in the United States has less to do with technical reasons and more to do with feeding the trolls, and making the hate game run, providing thus a fresh stream of troll victims, outraged about the issues. Thus pointing out that activism, outrage and protest not only has very low impact on the way the events but it is rather effectively feeding the trolls.
The Nazi salute may have had many reasons, but the most obvious one should have been to show that the man giving the Nazi salute received the propaganda and is acting on it.
