You mentioned on the podcast that you don't understand why fanbases, even ones with successful teams, always devolve into an "everyone is out to get us mentality." I think I may have an answer.
I've been working on a theory in my head for several years and maybe someone has already published a paper or even a book on it, who knows. It goes like this:
We were hunter-gatherers living in small communities for 100,000+ years, so I feel that a lot of our human behaviors can be traced back to those days.
Therefore, the reason humans (almost universally) love sports so much is that it serves as a modern proxy for tribal warfare. For all those thousands of years we lived in small communities that could only continue to exist with a strong "us vs. them" mentality. Since we don't go around fighting and raiding enemy camps anymore, we channel that competitive instinct into sports. Thus, even if you are a strong "tribe" (read: fanbase), you still are instinctively going to be equipped with that "us vs. the world" mentality. That is why people got so defensive when their team gets trashed: you are attacking or mocking their tribal unit.
I've been working on a theory in my head for several years and maybe someone has already published a paper or even a book on it, who knows. It goes like this:
We were hunter-gatherers living in small communities for 100,000+ years, so I feel that a lot of our human behaviors can be traced back to those days.
Therefore, the reason humans (almost universally) love sports so much is that it serves as a modern proxy for tribal warfare. For all those thousands of years we lived in small communities that could only continue to exist with a strong "us vs. them" mentality. Since we don't go around fighting and raiding enemy camps anymore, we channel that competitive instinct into sports. Thus, even if you are a strong "tribe" (read: fanbase), you still are instinctively going to be equipped with that "us vs. the world" mentality. That is why people got so defensive when their team gets trashed: you are attacking or mocking their tribal unit.
