The boxer John Cooney died from a brain injury after losing last week’s super-featherweight bout in Belfast. The spectacle of boxing is symptomatic of a society that fosters reckless individualism and violence and calls it ‘sport’. There was no condemnation of this organised brutality, just empty talk of how sad and unfortunate it was.
How symptomatic of a society that presents as entertainment and ‘natural’ the spectacle of two human beings beating the hell out of each other. Never has it been more urgent to create a new society without pervasive insecurity and the cheap thrills offered as a way of patching it over – a society of cooperation and reciprocity, where capital no longer controls people’s lives.