It became apparent to me during the 2024 Paris Olympics of a contradicting message in sports’ commercials in order to peddle products like Coca-Cola and Nike.
Let’s take the examples given, starting with the Coca-Cola ad (“It’s Magic When the World Comes Together”), which starts with a tri-fold rivalry in women’s swimming: Schoenmaker, King and Corbett. The commercial changes mood when Schoenmaker turns to hug one of her competitors. Suddenly, random people all over the world begin hugging one another, ending with two astronauts holding each other in space as the song concludes “I can’t do this on my own.” To borrow a few words from the late, great Scottish author and poet George MacDonald, this ad speaks to “the fantastic imagination” of what we’re capable of.
Now let’s contrast this language and imagery with something more raw and edgy like the Nike ad shown during the same commercial break—a pseudo-inspirational mantra of “Am I a Bad Person?” narrated by Willem Dafoe (or what sounded more like the Green Goblin) as clips of star-studded sports figures dominate their fields. Dafoe lists a string of peculiar adjectives: “I’m single-minded. I’m deceptive. I’m obsessive. I’m selfish.” Shamelessly, he continues, “I have no empathy. I don’t respect you. I’m never satisfied. I have an obsession with power. I’m irrational. I have zero remorse. I have no sense of compassion. I’m delusional. I’m maniacal.” He finally ends the transvaluation of vices with slogans such as “I think I’m better than everyone else,” “I want to take what’s yours and never give it back” and “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.” The commercial finally concludes with bright red words in all caps: “WINNING ISN’T FOR EVERYONE.” Clearly, a contradicting message from the previously discussed commercial whereby respect is shown to one’s competitor that culminates in manifesting compassion with the reminder that we cannot succeed on our own and greatness is a cooperative venture.
What makes the Nike ad so disturbing is that adults and even children are seen playing a sport while the audience is asked to judge whether or not the athlete depicted is “a bad person” if s/he is, say, “selfish,” “disrespectful,” “maniacal,” etc. It’s confusing to say the least because we like to think that some of these athletes would never endorse this type of redefined “greatness.” But here they are being used by Nike to say “No! I’m not a bad person if I’m maniacal,” which is another way of saying, “I am justified in exhibiting extremely wild or violent behavior as long as ‘WINNING’ is the end-goal and the end justifies the maniacal means.”
At this point, I’d like to introduce excerpts from MacDonald’s article, “The Fantastic Imagination,” which I think will be helpful in understanding the psychology that makes the imagination soar and morality spiral. According to MacDonald, when writing fairytales (excluding magical realism), there’s a law that must be obeyed in order for Imagination and Fancy to tailor and dress Truth in a color wheel of Beauty:
Law is the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed; and you may, if you will, call Imagination the tailor that cuts her garments to fit her, and Fancy his journeyman that puts the pieces of them together, or perhaps at most embroiders their button-holes. Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a church.[1]
The “law” he is referring to is the law “of the world of the senses” that breathes imagination to life; it’s an other-worldly law of physics whereby all the fairytales invented can make sense without tearing the imaginative although metaphysical fabric of those fairytales; it’s what an artist does when s/he creates a new world whereby the novel laws of that new world must be kept, otherwise, that world quickly unravels and is no longer believable. Simply put, it’s being consistent with the physical laws one brings into his/her invented universe without breaking the fourth wall.[2]
But the same does not apply to morality. This is where artists tend to get confused, thinking they are creating new worlds with new metaphysical possibilities, which they are, but immediately spoil those possibilities with talk about reinventing morality to exclude so-and-so or include such-and-such. Admittedly, it’s only natural to transcend the boundaries of imagination onto everything we believe to be real. It’s only natural to create God according to our own image or imagination. It’s only natural to reinvent heroes into anti-heroes, who cross moral boundaries in order to avenge a moral wrong done to them. But, as the ethical adage goes, just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Or just because we want doesn’t mean we should.
Allow me to quote MacDonald in full.
In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were no offence to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of attracted the things around it; it would [however] be wicked to write a tale representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey–and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.[3]
This is the moral lesson artists and apparently Nike needs to understand even if it translates to a loss in revenue.
Of course, the Nike ad was not reinventing a metaphysical world but a moral one while keeping the metaphysical world the same. For some of us, this is more offensive, since this is the actual world we live in with grave consequences for ourselves, having skin in the game, when we tamper with God’s moral laws.
It’s with these germane questions I leave you: If God’s moral laws stem from His own nature, obeying them, Himself, not calling evil—good, or good—evil, then shouldn’t we also follow His moral laws that were designed for our flourishing? What if obeying is flourishing? What if flourishing is more like the first commercial where athleticism and compassion run tandem? And what if flourishing is not WINNING? At least not the WINNING of the Green Goblin.
[1] George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,” The Works of George MacDonald, https://www.worksofmacdonald.com/the-fantastic-imagination.
[2] Of course, breaking the fourth wall can be done on purpose, usually for comedic purposes, but that’s not what MacDonald is talking about. I believe he’s admonishing artists to take their craft seriously and not make the mistake of accidentally breaking the fourth wall.
[3] George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,” The Works of George MacDonald, https://www.worksofmacdonald.com/the-fantastic-imagination.