We should acknowledge the Super Bowl and the NFL not as “sports,” but as one of the cleanest mirrors capitalism has ever built—a weekly ritual where a game becomes a proof-of-concept for profit as the only sacred value.
The NFL is now a business generating roughly $24 billion a year—tens of millions of dollars every single day—not because football is holy, but because attention is. And in modern economics, attention is not a human experience; it is inventory.
The league understands this deeply. In 2015, the NFL voluntarily abandoned its tax-exempt status after public filings exposed how much its commissioner was earning. Rather than accept transparency, the organization chose opacity—because in capitalism, shame is not a moral problem, it is a branding problem. Once the league no longer needed to disclose its finances in the same way, the inner workings of the machine became harder to see.
Then comes the Super Bowl—the cathedral service of corporate America. Advertising now costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per second. The halftime show itself is tied to massive corporate sponsorships worth tens of millions more. This is not simply entertainment or music; it is a fully industrialized spectacle where culture, identity, and emotion are turned into tradable assets.
So when people celebrate moments of “inclusivity”—such as the selection of Latin artists for the halftime stage—we must be honest about how corporations make these choices. The NFL is not a moral institution that occasionally does marketing; it is a marketing institution that occasionally hosts a game. Its compass is ratings, reach, and profitable demographics. If the story feels like representation, the business translation is expanded market share.
This leads to a harder question. If the NFL wraps itself in the language of dignity and inclusion, where does that dignity appear in the distribution of its wealth? Not a single dollar of Super Bowl profit was directed toward supporting immigrant communities or challenging the systems that some of the performers themselves have publicly criticized. Inclusion becomes aesthetic rather than material—a symbol you can display, not a reality you are willing to fund.
This also implicates the artists. The NFL does not pay halftime performers because the exposure is considered payment in itself. Did any artist use that stage to demand tangible commitments? Did they insist on resources, protections, or structural change? Or did they accept the familiar bargain capitalism offers: moral language in exchange for global visibility?
Compassiviste thinking pushes us beyond easy villains. It is simple to call the NFL an evil corporation. But that misses the deeper truth. If the league is a mirror, what is it reflecting back to us? The machine only thrives because we feed it—with our attention, our loyalty, our consumption, and our celebration of spectacle.
And now we must ask: Is it only the NFL? What about Milan’s Olympics? What about this summer’s highly anticipated FIFA World Cup—an event so vast that the NFL’s entire fiscal year looks like a month’s worth of ticket sales in comparison? These spectacles are different in color, language, and culture, yet identical in their economic logic. They sell unity while deepening inequality, celebrate humanity while extracting from it, and call themselves global while operating as corporate empires.
So we arrive at the deeper Compassiviste question: What is truly the route to harmony? Is it found in sports, which often monetize identity and emotion? In music, which is increasingly owned by platforms and algorithms? In film, where storytelling is filtered through profit? In nonprofit organizations that must often contort themselves to fit donor priorities rather than human need?
Or is the route to harmony something more internal, more collective, and more courageous—a shift in how we relate to power, money, attention, and one another?
So who is the real enabler of disharmony?
Perhaps it is not “them” alone. It is the relationship between “them” and “us”—our daily consent when we treat exploitation as entertainment and domination as tradition. We like to point outward because it feels righteous. But transformation begins when the finger turns inward—not in guilt, but in awareness.
We already know what the outside world looks like. What we forget is that this outside exists in the shape we collectively permit and maintain through our inner choices, habits, and attachments.
If we want harmony, we cannot only critique the system. We must change how we participate in it—and sometimes, how we refuse to.
In recent years, researchers have shown that fasting can weaken and destroy cancerous cells by depriving them of the nutrients they require to survive. Fasting is a religious tradition found in most ancient cultures (mainly purposed to spiritual and physical purification). In the same way, disharmony is not defeated by shouting at capitalism—it ends when we refuse to feed it. If we want a healthier world, we must consciously withhold our attention, our dependence, and our consent from a system that thrives on excess, extraction, and hunger. To heal society, we have to starve the structures that make suffering profitable.
