Hard work, ownership and conservative deserts: Crossfit and the Protestant work ethic are oddly similar
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Version 0 of 1. Back in February, I noted with some amusement that the organised fitness class Crossfit, famous for its demanding workouts and evangelical participants, functions as a sort of full-throated challenge to health and safety culture. Crossfitters, who can afford to pay rather large membership fees, cough up such sums specifically because its discipline is demanding. If aquarobics is for your nanna, Crossfit is for that guy you work with who manages his stock portfolio while logging 10 miles at the treadmill desk during lunch. Its exclusive focus on becoming the best, most extreme version of yourself encourages forsaking trivialities like tendon integrity and eating bread. Ideally, you want to be the kind of ripped, muscular Man of Action who could sling two squealing Nanny State weaklings over each shoulder in the event of a natural disaster (not that you would, because they should’ve thought about that before they chose not to commit themselves to a life of rugged self-improvement). At the time, I was fascinated by why anyone would pay serious money to torture themselves this way. What kinds of ambient conditions produced the widespread uptake of Crossfit, a sport that would’ve been considered socially unacceptable and indicative of possible pathology just a few years ago? Well, my question has been answered, to some extent, thanks to this piece in the AFR: The fitness craze, booming in Australia and around the world, is American founder Greg Glassman’s grand experiment in libertarian economics. [...] “You set it up however you want, you run it however you want, you teach whatever you want – carte blanche,” says CrossFit Brisbane co-owner Wendy Swift. “The free-market model is such that they believe the good coaches, good gyms will thrive, and the poor coaches, poor gyms will go out of business. Simple as that.” Our enthusiasm for this particular hobby, at this particular time, is not arbitrary. If anything, when Joe Hockey declared that the Age of Personal Responsibility had arrived, he was a few decades behind. His values, the government’s values, and the values that underpin Crossfit – a thoroughly Protestant work ethic, distrust of the state, and an abnegation of collective responsibility for mitigating market failures – are very similar. Crossfit is simply a captivating, sweaty Petri dish in which these beliefs are cultured to produce a display-quality specimen (his name is Pukie the Clown.) You can see these beliefs everywhere. Young people are lazy and need to get a job. Tax is basically theft when you really think about it. Welfare is unsustainable. Stinging the rich with higher taxes is class warfare, but a budget that leaves poor Australians worse off is justified because they didn’t work hard like rich people do to earn their income on the open market. This is a re-ordering of priorities. Crossfit world and federal budget 2014 world both elevate the virtues of hard work, ownership and conservative deserts: everything else has to be squeezed in around those fundamental ideological commitments. Welfare, equality, fairness, gym instructor training standards: we might get to these later, but really, shouldn’t people be looking out for number one? Perceiving ourselves as atomistic projections of a fixed inner agency, dismissing structural and common concerns as afterthoughts or conspiracies, allowing mad libertarians to open hundreds of Strain ‘N’ Sprain barns – well, the capitalism is getting later as we speak. I only hope that when the going gets tough, someone remembers poor Pukie the Clown. |