For the uninitiated, the European Super League sounds like the lamest ever collection of Marvel supervillains and, actually, that’s not far from the truth.

Twelve of the world’s richest soccer teams had a series of Zoom meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic and colluded to upend European club soccer by playing mostly among themselves.

Luckily, the public’s response was such a visceral eruption of scorn that the project died in a matter of days.

The group proved Adam Smith’s point that when people of the same trade get together the conversation invariably turns to “a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

The ambition of any business is to crush the competition but for these teams the goal was to crush the very idea of competition itself. With a super league, there would be no risk of relegation to lower leagues and no fear they wouldn’t qualify for the top tier cup competition.

Any business would happily take a monopoly or some massive hedge against failure, but there is always the problem of offending the public’s sense of fairness in the process. That’s what the super league did and that’s why angry fans streamed into the streets and even onto the pitch at Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium causing a match to be postponed.

It was likely former Manchester United player Gary Neville’s furious response to the super league plan that sparked the country-wide protests.

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” fumed Neville, from his perch as a commentator on Sky Sports, when the story broke. “It’s criminal. It’s a criminal act against football fans in this country, make no mistake about it.”

Liverpool FC’s manager Jurgen Klopp later accused Neville of “winding people up” and endangering the safety of stadium workers and police officers with his rant.

Neville’s role in the saga is a reminder that even in an irony-soaked social media age, we are still susceptible to a certain kind of rhetoric. The Tea Party in the United States started, after all, when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli launched into a tirade about personal responsibility on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Every now and then a Howard Beale figure pops up to articulate some formless grievance rattling around in our brains.

And although Neville was pillorying the “pure greed” at the heart of the push for a super league, he wasn’t suggesting people shouldn’t make money off the sport and he shot back when Klopp called him a hypocrite for cashing in as a pundit.

“I’ve benefited from football hugely. I’ve made money out of football and I invest money in a football club,” said Neville. “I’m not against money in football but the principles and ethos are of fair competition.”

The idea that a relative minnow like Leicester City FC could win the English Premier League, as they did in 2015-16, is one side of the competitive coin in European soccer. The other side is that teams can tumble into obscurity out of the top league.

There are consequences to being bad and, unlike American sports, there is potentially no limit to how far a team can fall.

Arsenal, one of the super league hopefuls, will miss out on top tier European games next season after a dismal showing this year, costing tens of millions of dollars. Some other team, possibly a “lesser” team like Leicester City or West Ham United could take Arsenal’s place.

That’s the kind of fairness we expect from sports and from the economy itself. Studies show that what people want from the economy is not necessarily equality, but some sense that everyone is playing by the same rules and that we can all be rewarded for our successes.

A study in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour by Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom argued that recent research showing people favour equality was making a big oversight. In those experiments, equal distribution was favoured because it was the fairest outcome but, of course, that’s not always the case.

For example, if kids are asked to hand out prizes to two boys who cleaned their bedrooms, they will distribute the prizes equally. That suggests we favour equality. But tweak the study a little bit and tell the kids that one of the boys worked a lot harder and did a better job cleaning his room and the kids will reward the hard worker.

We see this in the real world, too. People want to reduce the levels of inequality in the United States, but that comes from fairness concerns, not necessarily a blind urge for equality. The problem isn’t so much that some people are making more than others, but that “the system is rigged” against the little guy, as both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were happy to tell people. In other societies, such as the former USSR people bristled at the high level of enforced equality because that feels unfair too.

“It turns out that there is no evidence that people are actually concerned with economic inequality at all. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness,” the authors argue.

That’s why Neville struck a chord with his incensed response to the super league. He correctly diagnosed a “conspiracy against the public,” a deeply unfair proposal and called it out with the ferocity it deserved.

C.S. Lewis begins one of his best-known non-fiction works, The Abolition of Man, with a scathing review of an elementary school textbook.

The authors of the textbook write about two tourists visiting a waterfall and analyze the tourists’ different reactions to it. One tourist reacts with a simple description (he says it is “pretty”) and the other with a value statement (he says it is “sublime”). 

The textbook authors make the argument that the tourist who called the waterfall “sublime” was not in fact making an objective statement about the waterfall, but rather just describing how the waterfall makes him feel. They write:

“This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.” (Author’s note: Did these guys design Twitter?)

CS Lewis takes issue with the textbook authors “subverting” objectivity with subjectivity. Over the course of the short book, Lewis argues that pretending the only thing that is real is how we feel at any particular moment has all sorts of confusing and damaging consequences — especially as it relates to how people interact with, and relate to, each other. 

I thought of this passage recently while once again shaking my head during a government press conference. Does anyone mean what they say anymore? Or say what they mean? 

We seem to have entered a bizarre period of hyper-inflation when it comes to words and meaning. The sheer volume of information and opinion (often indistinguishable) has never been greater, while at the same time it feels like words themselves have never had less real meaning. As the meaning of words becomes ever more diluted, the language we see used by individuals, the media, politicians and corporations is increasingly hyperbolic, brash and absolutist. 

Seeing absolutism grow and ultimately consume the progressive project in recent years has been a surprise. Progressivism promised openness, tolerance and an escape from the dogma and cruel objectivity of traditionalism. Within certain bounds this has certainly been true and many lives are better for it. But establishing and prosecuting the boundaries of openness and tolerance has come to dominate the progressive project in a way that looks more like tribalism than it does liberalism. The dogma, it turns out, also lives loudly in progressivism.

As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote (in a column the Times declined to publish), “we are living in a period of competing moral certitudes, of people who are awfully sure they’re right and fully prepared to be awful about it.” 

Take a look at how much of the outrage machine is fueled by statements of historical absolutism, as an example. Are race relations the worst they’ve ever been? Is wokeism the greatest threat to freedom of speech in a generation? Has income inequality reached all-time highs? Is the science settled? None of these kinds of statements convey objective facts, yet we hear them constantly. They are disguised as factual by individuals in pursuit of personal or political agendas.

There are countless examples of the media accelerating the devaluation of words. In two separate cases, Rachel Maddow (a left-wing MSNBC host) and Tucker Carlson (a right-wing Fox News host) were able to save themselves from the financial consequences of defamation lawsuits by arguing that what they say should not be taken literally. In Maddow’s case, the judge wrote that the mix of news and opinion on the show meant “a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact.”  It bears noting that Maddow is a Rhodes Scholar and has won three Emmy Awards, two of which were for “Outstanding News Discussion and Analysis.” 

COVID-19 has similarly laid bare how the careless use of language can render words meaningless. In instructing individuals not to wear masks and declining to restrict borders in early 2020, politicians and health officials disguised policy preferences as facts (the reality was that there were not enough masks to go around, not that masks were ineffective). Canada’s borders have never actually been “closed,” but you’d be forgiven for thinking they had.

Contradictory messaging around the recommended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine is another good example. The chair of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) recently went as far as saying on national television that she wouldn’t want her own family members to take the AZ vaccine due to risk of death, while at the same time assuring viewers that AZ is “very effective” and that the risk of thrombosis is “very rare.” As if to assist in the writing of this column, the chair of the NACI went on to say in the same interview that she didn’t think her advice would contribute to confusion or vaccine hesitancy. Yet, just this week, several provinces announced that they will no longer be administering the first dose of AZ.

Readers who enjoy precise language will be able to provide countless examples of COVID-19-inspired vocabulary that reject meaning in favour of sloganeering and, at times, misdirection. We are told to “practice social distancing” when it is in fact the law, and the law states that we must keep a physical distance.

At the time of writing, the “Reopening Ontario (A Flexible Response to COVID-19) Act” has forced the closure of most Ontario businesses for the third time. Ontario’s golfers — who are permitted to walk alone in a field so long as that field is not a golf course and they are not carrying clubs — may quibble with the description of the legislation as “flexible.”

So what is there to do? Is it time to chain ourselves to the Oxford dictionary and shout “Stop!”?

The bad news is the HMCS Hyperbole is not a ship that can be turned around quickly. That said, in a world in which what we say means a little less than it did yesterday, our actions mean a heckuva lot more. 

The first step is to focus more on what is done rather than what is said, both in how we conduct ourselves and in how we interpret what we are told. We can also take care to speak plainly, truthfully and with humility, and to value others who do the same over those who shout loudest. 

In a lesser known collection of letters to fans, C.S. Lewis gives advice to a young writer that may be part of the prescription for hyper-inflation of this kind:

“Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very;’ otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”