From the time that there were human beings, a need for violent assertiveness amongst males of our species to express dominance over others.

Hunting, inter-tribal conflict, nation building, war, inevitably, violence has been a way to express a dominant nature,and to spread our viewpoints and ideals to others, by force if necessary.

However, we as a species must have seen that most violence led to death, and wanted to fulfill that desire without actually killing someone. Hence, the birth of sports.

Violent sports are not an inspiration for violence in our society. If anything, they are the vehicles of catharsis, and they get people who want to be active, who have that hunter’s instinct but who just want to compete, a way to express themselves physically.

Sports fills a need to express the physical side of ourselves and to do so dramatically, beautifully, gracefully.

The Olympics exemplify this in a wonderful manner.

On the other hand, you do have extreme mixed martial arts competitions, but they have been going on around the world for centuries, and the nature of them has not changed since then.

What has changed has been the amount of exposure people have had to violent images. Whether discussed and then shown in glimpses as they are on any of the numerous crime investigation shows, or whether on reality television between strangers, acts of violence have existed long before sports.

As I mentioned previously, sports actually channels that aggressive, competitive spirit, and gives people goals to achieve though hard work and intense training.

Violence in society stems from anxiety,stems from drug abuse, stems really from the human condition in general.

Among certain populations people have created an acceptance of violence in popular culture, although again it can be argued that even the violent lyrical content in songs or on television is more a depiction of our violent natures.

If anything,blaming the violence in sports for any violent act in society is absurd, because had a person never watched television and only read books and looked at art, one would still see and learn of great violence in human history.

Acts of heinous murder, genocide, and patricide, even wartime suicide (e.g. kamikaze pilots of world War II) are scattered across human history, and a great deal of information was spread this way, and many people were brutally destroyed to establish any nation that exists today.

If anything, we fear that aspect of ourselves to a great degree, and have a word for this fear and the type of behavior that stems from it. Horror.

Instead of trying to understand or correlate the violence in sports and see how it influences the violence in society, maybe we should try to face the horror and acknowledge that we have those feelings and tendencies within us, and find a safe way, like sports or art, to channel those feelings.