On March 8, 2009, at age 44, I saw my first soccer match. It was the match between ADO Den Haag and AJAX Amsterdam and it took place in the ADO stadium near the residence.
Soccer is gaining some goodwill in my psychology, because my son is a player. But before my own offspring ever hit the field, I was one of the three Italians who did not like the game and didn’t care to watch it even at gunpoint. I still pity my father, a full blooded Italian Soccer Lover, for this.
But there I was, sitting in a crowd of a few thousand people who had one common interest: to butcher those bloody “Amsterdammers” and show them their place. And at some point, I noticed something very interesting: I felt a kind of bonding creeping up on me, with all these people I had never seen before in my life. I felt as if we had a real common purpose, and a real common enemy too.
I now understand why it is said that “soccer is war”. It is not because of what happens on the pitch, but it is because of what happens to the crowd around it. Suddenly I had a very clear vision as to how a guy like Hitler could play the people like puppets, if they would only be primed into this binding feeling of a common destiny.
And this was of course what Adolf Hitler mastered better than any of his contemporaries. It was this dangerous human attribute of placing oneself within an imaginary, ad hoc community, that I saw at work yesterday.
Whatever the socio-political implications of my brush with mass-psychology might be, the feeling itself was like a toke of ecstasy. And it felt great. It also rubbed my nose into the fragility of ones own individual independence in the face of a roaring crowd. We are, as I had to admit to myself yesterday, very susceptible to the pressure of the masses when we find ourselves right in the middle of it. One can hardly resist to go along with its sentiments.
It is time, I have decided, to do some serious reading into this riveting phenomenon of crowd psychology, and I have just the right book for it. At some point I will have to choose: I either am a puppet or I am the puppet master. I’d prefer the latter, to be honest. And it is fully in line with the idea of one day becoming President of the World.
My first course of action: free soccer games for the people!
