Opinion: A Call for Recalibration

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media. No line of work is without its own brand of bulls—. It’s ironic that, despite the celebratory status of puritan work ethic, the Good Book states that the very concept of work was created as a form of punishment. Even the evolutionary necessity of work — the idea that we must work in order to survive — doesn’t really apply to humankind anymore; we’re so ahead on the species power rankings that survival on a macro scale is no longer a pressing issue. Yet for whatever reason, there is something essential to our being that demands work, and even craves it. Idleness is the devil’s workshop, as it goes, and prolonged periods of no work can unhinge the mind and divorce us from what it means to be human in powerful ways. That makes it all the more strange that we can’t seem to help ourselves from polluting this inescapable, vital thing with political B.S. The world of mixed martial arts has been brimming with it lately. Whether it’s fighter pay, the ever-growing demands of so-called “independent contractors,” including how much they’re allowed to weigh after weighing in, or the potential sale of the largest MMA organization on the planet, these stories have dominated the landscape of fighting as much — if not more — than the actual fights. To be sure, this phenomenon is not endemic to MMA, and I certainly am not trying to downplay the importance of these discussions. The sport as we know needs these issues to see the sanitizing light of public discourse in order to improve. I, too, have thrown my two cents into the wishing well of open conversation a few times, hoping that it adds some forward momentum to the equitable development of a sport I care about, however small it may be. At the same time, though, it’s easy to …

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