The Toxic Pursuit of Greatness in Chess (w/ Brin-Jonathan Butler) | The Chris Hedges Report

Achieving greatness requires immense sacrifice. Nobody knows this better than perhaps professional athletes or, as author and journalist Brin-Jonathan Butler reveals, chess players. Butler joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his book, The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again and how the history of chess’ greatest players is riddled with psychological dysfunction.

Butler invokes famous chess figures such as Bobby Fischer, Peter Winston and Magnus Carlsen to demonstrate how those who reach the top do so at the expense of their humanity. Referencing Fischer’s famous victory over Boris Spassky in 1972, Butler explains how Fischer was not satisfied because “it’s not enough to murder your opponent, you need to compel their suicide.”

“That was a very common sort of narrative throughout all the top levels of chess, how often the metaphor of blood execution, murder, blood on the board was commonly used,” Butler adds.

The level of obsession that develops within the best chess players transforms into an addiction, similar to one with drugs, alcohol or gambling. Despite it being a fun, challenging game for most, for others who have a propensity to become addicted in such an obsessive way, it must be cautioned with. Butler says, “For that narrow group, which I think comprises the people at the top because you have to be that way, it’s not only sort of recommended that you be this way, there’s no other way to qualify for that top zone unless you happen to be this relentlessly devoted.”