[The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen]@TWC D-Link bookThe Theory of the Leisure Class CHAPTER Ten ~~ Modern Survivals of Prowess 21/41
It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture.
Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires sedulous training or breeding.
The material used, whether brute or human, is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which are characteristic of the ferine state, and which tend to obsolescence under domestication.
This does not mean that the result in either case is an all around and consistent rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian habit of mind and body.
The result is rather a one-sided return to barbarism or to the feroe natura--a rehabilitation and accentuation of those ferine traits which make for damage and desolation, without a corresponding development of the traits which would serve the individual's self-preservation and fullness of life in a ferine environment.
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