Football: The New Opiate Of The Masses
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I watched the 2022 World Cup when I was in pain, and football helped opiate it. Our uncle had just been murdered back home in Sri Lanka, my children had scarlet fever, and I was stuck in godless England. Football is the closest thing they have to a religion in Europe and is the most widely available opiate for the masses. So I took it.
When Karl Marx called religion the ‘opiate of the masses’ it was this effect that he was talking about. Relief from a world of suffering. Marx said,“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
This language of suffering pervades all religion as, indeed, suffering pervades life itself. The Buddha’s said the life is suffering, and offered a path out. Jesus Christ bore unbearable suffering upon his own body, and people still worship the cross he bore it on. The language of suffering also permeates football, as you can hear from the post-modern messiah, Lionel Messi.
