Cue horn sections. Dramatic drums roll. It’s 2010!

You probably know it only recently became 2009, but in this commercial-driven world where Christmas always begins in November, just turn on the TV and BELIEVE!

If you’ve managed to avoid inundation, “Believe” is the CTVglobemedia and Canadian Olympic Broadcast Consortium’s recently launched promotional campaign for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. And if you didn’t use your internationally-unifying VISA to join our athletes on the Coke side of life in Beijing, fear not. You’ll get many more opportunities to answer the call from Olympian passion and determination on Samsung Mobile.

Already this year, cute kids tumbling on skis and eating Wonder bread have been encouraging Canadians to let the dreams begin. Petro-Canada has been reminding us to dream big. McDonald’s “Hopefuls” have given rousing speeches. Air Canada has announced they’re proud to fly our athletes around. Royal Bank exhorts: carry this torch proudly, Canada. (If you actually enjoy this kind of stuff, you can find many of these ads on YouTube.)

Yet we can be sure mega-billion-dollar corporations like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola aren’t that excited about seeing an upward sales blip in Vancouver for several weeks in 2010. (And this propaganda blitz is a uniquely corporate phenomenon. Small businesses more typically get sued for trademark infringement for suggesting they make “olympian efforts” to satisfy customers.) So why do corporations and major media adore the Olympics even more than Christmas?

Firstly, big sporting events are unbeatable in their ability to consistently captivate the public.

This January, the IIHF World Junior Championship hockey final was the most watched program of Canada’s broadcast season, drawing double the audiences of top shows like Criminal Minds, CSI and House, while pummelling elections and wars. Nearly one-third of Canadians watched at least part of the game. In February, the NFL Superbowl: In the age of hundreds of channels, it’s been the only show repeatedly capable of occupying sixty per cent of viewers.

The Olympics draw well, too. But they provide much more than big audiences. The Olympics allow governments and advertisers to link themselves to ideals we associate, rightly or wrongly, with the Games: dreaming, skill, hard work, achievement, peaceful world community and, most powerfully of all, patriotism.

That’s why China worked hard for the Games and why the Nazi Games still generate controversy. It’s why our own supposedly fiscally-conservative provincial and federal governments still declare themselves “proud” to host this notorious sinkhole for public dollars, even after BC’s auditor general assessed the costs as “a moving target” already billions higher than promised. (This January, security cost estimates alone quadrupled to $1 billion.) And it’s why corporations see the Games as the golden opportunity to associate their names with home team branding on a planetary scale.

What’s “home team branding”?

Well, picture a black dot on a white screen. When the dot moves a few centimetres, millions of people cheer joyfully. When the dot moves in another direction, people collapse into stunned quiet. That’s televised hockey. Clearly, though, not any dot can engage so powerfully. People’s reactions to that darting puck are built up over years through learned psychological-behavioural conditioning, until we’re reacting like Pavlov’s hungry dogs to bells.

Even sport-haters can easily be programmed in this way. Just learn the game’s rules, then bet your savings on an outcome or imagine your own child in the competition. You’ll quickly start responding very emotionally to performances. That’s why all sports coverage involves educating viewers about the athletes. Like with movie characters, we soon find ourselves rooting for those who overcame setbacks and troubled childhoods, live by high moral standards, or recently survived chemotherapy. We start relating to certain athletes as friends, and caring affectionately about the “home team”. Without engaging such personal sympathies in viewers, sports would never be as popular as they are.

Corporations similarly use creative advertising to try to get onto your personal home team of products and services. So they relish the opportunity to associate themselves positively with many nations’ premier “home team branding” process: patriotic Olympics hype.

However, home team loyalty is actually a form of self-centredness, isn’t it? We begin caring more about the successes of the people we know and adore than about those we don’t know well. We’ll even hope others fail.

This may be innocuous surrounding what’s basically just friendly games. But when it morphs into a “proud to be Canadian” thrill when our athletes crush foreign competitors, it becomes more questionable. And when governments, corporations, and billons of people actively promote and strengthen this pattern of patriotic self-centredness worldwide, it becomes toxic.

After all, this same kind of learned, conditioned self-centredness makes us demand our economic well-being be prioritized, even at the expense of other people or nations, doesn’t it? It makes us give everything to protect our children from terrorism, but be thickly insensitive to how our airstrikes victimize others’ children and create desires to strike back at us.

I’m not blaming the Olympics for that. But are they helping? The run-up to the Olympics could be a platform to discuss these very serious social problems caused by conditioned self-centredness. If we actually believe in the Olympic ideals we espouse, for example, why not remove national labels from all athletes?

Unfortunately, in the way governments, corporations and media currently uphold them, the Olympic Games instead exalt competitive brand loyalty as a righteous operational principle for nationhood and life itself. That turns what should just be a fun game into another fanatical competition between self-centred cultures.

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Originally published in Focus, February 2009.