Tiger Worship

Last Saturday, I found myself in the nosebleeds of Tiger Stadium, staring down at 102,000 screaming LSU fans, surrounded by the controlled chaos of college football at its most intense.

Fighter jets ripped overhead, perfectly timed to coincide with the climax of the National Anthem.

Fireworks exploded against the Louisiana sky.

I'm not much of a football fan. Some friends and I were in New Orleans for a birthday and detoured to Baton Rouge for a taste of the local culture. Only when the stands erupted in "Geaux Tigers!" did we grasp the meaning of the stadium's nickname, born of oppressive heat and deafening sound: Death Valley.

But the whole time, I couldn't stop thinking about Mike.

Mike the Tiger (Mike VII, LSU's seventh live mascot) lounged in his sanctuary habitat just outside the stadium, watching the mayhem with predatory calm. Fans pressed against the glass, phones out, desperate for the perfect shot. The marching band blared, the cheerleaders danced, the parade of purple and gold surged around him. Mike sat still, watching.

He looked bored.

Here was an apex predator who, in another life, would be roaming forests in India or Nepal, now spending his days in a $3.7 million enclosure while humans in face paint screamed about "tiger pride."

But Mike's real job has nothing to do with being a tiger. Mike exists to be a vessel for meaning, loyalty, and myth.

Mike generates millions annually for LSU without playing football, teaching classes, or conducting research. He sits in his habitat and occasionally walks around while people take pictures.

The return on investment for that $3.7 million habitat might be the best financial decision LSU ever made.

LSU's athletics program generates over $100 million yearly. Alumni donate another $200+ million. Merchandise licensing deals, broadcast rights, and sponsorship packages worth tens of millions flow from emotional attachment to symbols that Mike anchors.

When Mike VI died in 2017, PETA demanded LSU retire the live mascot tradition. The Chancellor's response was immediate: LSU would absolutely be getting Mike VII. The tiger had become too valuable to abandon.

The uncomfortable reality: while Mike lounges in his $3.7 million habitat, LSU operates with an $818,318 athletic deficit. The university cut faculty pay raises and shrank the academic budget 5% last year.

Mike the 600-pound Bengal-Siberian mix costs a fortune to maintain, but Mike the symbol makes exponentially more.

This reveals something fundamental about how modern economies actually work. We've created systems where representations generate more value than the realities they supposedly represent.

Mike makes otherwise rational people behave completely irrationally. LSU graduates who struggle to pay rent buy $200 bleacher tickets. Alumni donate millions to upgrade Mike's habitat while Louisiana ranks 48th in education funding. Fans drive six hours for a game day experience to feel part of something bigger than themselves.

The most telling detail: LSU invested more in Mike's enclosure than most universities spend on entire academic departments.

Mike represents a trend in the American economy: symbol value has decoupled from underlying reality.

A Starbucks latte might cost thirty cents in ingredients and labor, yet it sells for five dollars. The margin is pure brand power, with the green siren logo carrying signals of cosmopolitan identity and convenience far beyond the product itself.

Hermès charges $15,000-$300,000 for leather containers that cost perhaps $200 in materials and labor. The rest represents pure symbol value, the economic premium of carrying recognizable status markers.

And of course, Disney perfects this at industrial scale. Parents spend $6,000 on family vacations to stand in line for hours, buying $30 t-shirts featuring characters they could purchase for $3 at Target. But they're not buying cotton and polyester, they're buying packaged childhood magic and family bonding narratives.

Once symbols lodge in our neural pathways, they create pricing power that defies rational analysis.

The neuroscience explains why Mike's economics work despite their obvious irrationality. Brain imaging research shows that team symbols activate the same reward centers as addictive substances while bypassing the prefrontal cortex regions responsible for rational decision-making. When fans see purple and gold, their brains literally cannot perform cost-benefit analysis.

Our brains are wired to process visual symbols almost instantaneously, far faster than we can decode text. This speed advantage creates what economists call mental real estate. Once imagery occupies space in unconscious decision-making, it generates value independent of function.

Walk through any LSU tailgate and tiger imagery floods your peripheral vision. Paw prints and tiger heads on cars, faces, clothing, coolers. Purple and gold create visual ownership of entire city blocks. Each exposure reinforces compressed messages about power, tradition, and belonging. By game time, fans have been systematically conditioned to feel tribal allegiance whether they intended to or not.

This is how institutions manufacture belonging.

The most successful companies understand that they're not in the product business, they're in the symbol business. They just happen to require products for distribution.

LSU could relocate tomorrow. The football team could disappear. But as long as Mike the symbol persists, the economic engine continues. The $100 million athletics program, the 102,000 seats, the alumni donations, all of it exists to serve the symbol, not the reverse.

Starbucks brews coffee to reinforce the lifestyle mythology of the green siren. Hermès stitches leather to sustain the aura of exclusivity. Disney creates movies to perpetuate character symbolism.

The real competition isn't between universities, restaurant chains, or entertainment conglomerates. The real competition is between symbols for space in human consciousness.

Companies that master symbol creation capture pricing premiums that purely functional competitors cannot match. They build customer loyalty that survives product failures, quality issues, even ethical scandals.

The symbol becomes more durable than the business itself.

Watching Mike in his habitat, I realized the entire stadium existed to serve him, not the reverse. He'd become the economic anchor for a $100M+ enterprise built around his symbolic meaning.

We've built an economy where symbols don't support businesses. Businesses exist to feed symbols. The most valuable companies aren't those that make the best products, they're those that create the most powerful symbols and defend them most effectively.

The uncomfortable truth: we've become a culture that values the performance of success over its substance.

And Mike, sitting calmly in his glass habitat while thousands of humans perform rituals of devotion to his symbolic meaning, has figured out something most businesses still miss:

The symbol is the product, and everything else is just distribution.

Up and to the right.