5. SIGNIFICANT CULTURAL ANOMALIES

 

                        a. Third world cultures

 

   Poorer countries often inspire stories of striking childlike

light-heartedness in expressions of fun, perhaps due to having less

materials and territory to inspire jealousy and worry, and more opportunity

for emotional maturation due to lack of privacy.

 

 

                        b. Internet

 

   The internet has made possible a very complex world of contact similar

to a society but where personal images can be entirely fictitious and

emotional feedback is near impossible to be accurate about. Many people

have found new wonder in the sea of imagination that has resulted, and have

no more concern about the genuineness involved than they would about a dime

store novel. Refereeing the emotional craziness that sometimes erupts has

proved fairly workable, providing another kind of noble mission for people

who need one.

   The lust to publish and get feedback has proved huge, now that the cost

is trivial. Likewise the offering for sale of oddball items has become so

easy and cheap that the garage sale spirit has taken on full time potential.

Commerce can now be played with at a whole range of skill levels and almost

anything can be called a real offering for sale, making almost anyone able

to find a way in.

   Internet gaming, searchable public journaling and access to forbidden

literature have created new delight as well, allowing experiential and

educational opportunity to broaden the general range of common wisdom.

 

 

                        c. Solitary fun

 

   Having fun alone is perhaps a contradiction but in modern societies it

may be more common than shared fun. While actual psychic solitude results

in the complete disappearance of emotion, a solitary guided or lucid dream

can evoke quite as meaningful and intense emotion as a physically shared

event, with much less limits on the details, and generally lower cost.

Accuracy relative to the shared world may be compromised in unexpected

ways, but for recreational fun that usually matters little.

   The wonder of religious hallucination is only accessible through

watching from the boundary of emotional void that solitary fun facilitates,

so many men are inspired to design intense solitary meditations for

themselves like hang gliding or sitting staring at a wall.

 

 

                        d. Violent social traditions and sports

 

   Many people find emotional fulfillment or delight in a vanquishing of

another aspiring spirit. While logically this seems emotionally impossible,

by establishing an illusory class or group identity that is completely

emotionally disconnected from the opponent, a player can maintain genuine

enthusiasm throughout a competitive encounter.

   Many modern people have no group identification, even to their nation,

and so are unable to have fun in a harsh encounter. Cultures that involve a

lot of this kind of fun inevitably shake down traditions of what is called

fair play related to their styles of combativeness, to prevent the fading of

interest in the sharing or a social evolution into complete heartlessness as

with the Easter Island civilization.

   People without a capacity to group identity are an important nuisance in

most societies, spoiling competitive fun for others merely with their

presence, inspiring development of choreographic separation using buildings

and traditions of formality. Many street people and religious aspirants are

troublesome this way for socially or financially competitive environments,

or family groups that enjoy skirmish of one kind or another.

 

 

                        e. Hunting

 

   Having fun through an attempt to kill is a minority interest, but well

accepted in nearly all societies. Like with competitive fun, hunting

inspires conversation about fair play and acceptable classes to pursue and

kill but few hunters seems very serious about what anyone else actually

does unless another person might accidentally get hit.

   Most hunters seem to suggest in conversation that hunting is, to them, a

basic human skill, essential to civilization and essential to survival in a

sudden food shortage. Most women appear completely unimpressed with the

idea. In most aboriginal cultures virtually every man learns to hunt animals

and many learn to hunt people; and virtually no women even watch or talk

about it and the women obtain most of the calorie base. Some modern women

have shown more interest, particularly in the recent years. Most modern men

have no interest at all and some even oppose the idea.

   To adopt a technically defined group identity as with a nation or a race

has been normal for nearly every conceptual identity for most of recorded

history; though perhaps because history is generally recorded by those

people. Hunting, though, does not appear to depend on group identity.

Apparently many, maybe even most, aboriginal hunters overtly relate to their

prey, whether human or animal, as being psychically linked with them as a

kind of kin but in a hierarchy that includes killing. Many modern men

express a trend towards that as well and undoubtedly someone with a

character based identity could only relate to a hunt that way.

   With the world ecosystem showing signs of disaster and the human

population getting so inclined to trade and travel worldwide, the clearly

understood and shared cold-blooded group identity is getting more and more

unstable among the general run of men, without apparently reducing the

emotional drive to hunt and eat animals, and engage in human predation. The

drive may be genetic and never actually rooted in ideas. That is to say,

ideas may be able to destroy the drive to hunt but may have nothing to do

with creating it.

   Because of this primal aspect the discussion of hunting often involves a

suggestion of basic spiritual exploration, that death compels some kind of

deep integrity with the universe. Some farmers speak of farming the same

way; particularly if they have livestock.

 

 

                        f. Use of machines

 

   The modern cultures have gone machine crazy, as much for fun as profit,

and from the view of those not using a particular kind of machine even the

industrially financed ones are operated for fun, at least at first. The

industrial imagination has created a new kind of tedium, but most people in

monotonous mechanical jobs nevertheless look as though they are in some

kind of divine trance while working, and those few that are articulate

describe their work that way, with apparent sincerity. Mechanical skill

developed over a long period takes on an almost magical quality. Typing 60

words a minute seems not actually possible, and throwing a horseshoe onto

the opposite post thirty times in thirty attempts one would think only

happens in the movies.

   The more recent years have grown somewhat frustrating for machine fun,

due to continual innovation. Someone who was a divine mechanic in their

youth or learned cutting edge computer programming and then did something

else for twenty years is suddenly a complete novice. The term Luddite

refers to someone frustrated this way, their divine skill rendered

worthless by the march of unnecessary innovation.

   Significantly, the repair of machines, that was such a major expression

of machine fun in the past, is becoming relegated to expensive antiques

only. The real world changes machinery so fast that most important

breakdowns occur after the item has been superceded anyway, with the new

improved replacement frequently costing less than the repair would have

cost and quicker to obtain; but requiring a whole new round of learning how

to operate it. Many new machines are not even possible to repair, at any

cost.

   One could very well argue that all innovation is fairly unnecessary and

perhaps tragic. Many older people keep their personal lives linked to the

machines of the past. Many hobbies involve learning old fashioned skills in

textile production or cooking or woodworking.

   But just as many people speak with excitement about the latest new

widget that will level the playing field some more in social and economic

competition, and open new avenues for novelty in whatever aspect of life it

gets used in.

 

 

                        g. Anarchist fun

 

   Political opposition to a faceless authority often evolves into a sport

or playful social expression when adopted by women and children. Many

nursery rhymes originated as politically expressive songs, such as Yankee

Doodle and Ring around the Rosey, with the meaning faded completely away.

   In recent years the internet has facilitated a proliferation of

international association sidestepping government oversight entirely, easing

the creative paralysis that inspires attacks on regular authority.

 

 

                        h. Commercial development

 

   Fun for a fee has spread in cultural scope in the last century, except

in cultural sharing between people who know each other. Wealthier societies

generally embrace the use of commercial fun as a device for pacifying or

emotionally linking members who would otherwise have to be incorporated

through violence.

   Parents who can afford it embrace commercial seduction for control of

children to replace the belligerence and violence that is normally necessary

in ambitious societies. Unfortunately, the use of seduction has not

improved the nihilism and delinquency record of tightly supervised children.

 

 

                         i. Utopian experiments

 

   Due to emotional explosiveness that fun can inspire in bystanders, a

considerable amount of imagination has gone into utopian social experiments

that redirect aspiration to have fun or design new opportunities for fun in

ways prohibited in the originating society.

   New religious movements may have this kind of angst as a major component

of their success.

   The British invasion of America involved many utopian ideas, such as the

predatory "manifest destiny" and the California gold rush, though

significantly with a long term result of general estrangement in American

neighborhoods that have no compensating ethnic dominance.

 

 

                         j. Fun as medicine

 

   Though double-blind research has only established that friendly

association is medicinally helpful, a lot of anecdotal evidence supports

the use of fun as medicine. Some even theorize that fun in some form is

essential to all medical recoveries.

 

 

                         k. Poisoning oneself for fun

 

   Deliberate creation of handicap in oneself is oddly common in nearly all

cultures, inspiring much derisive discussion among non-participatory

observers. Many modern cultures have even used laws against specific forms

of handicap, such as use of religious drugs, to suppress cultural mixing.

   Some cultures require universal handicap of one kind or another, such as

a 40 hour work ethic or marijuana use, as an apparent form of cohesion.

   Tightly supervised children often discover that a temporary handicap

from glue sniffing or falling out of a tree can ease the harshness of the

police effort focused on them. Alcoholism appears to be largely motivated

this way, as an escape from the inner policeman.

 

 

                         l. Other people's children

 

   Though child raising looks quite attractive, from the outside, as a

source of fun, the reality is usually a stiff compromise at best. But other

people's children often prove to be a great opportunity in the right

supportive situation. Though children are generally fairly lame as workers,

they appear to be open to calling any lively focus fun if an associated

adult calls it that. They are far easier to boss around in pageantry than

adults, and are far more tolerant of vicious outbursts or gross stupidity of

any sort. Mistreating children does appear to backfire eventually, but if

the option to abandon them at that point is available then that is not

necessarily a disincentive. Since most parents are quite abusive, an

outsider poisoning their child's equilibrium will likely go unnoticed.

   Genuinely friendly engagement with children generally fails without a

strong trusting familiarity, so grandparents or similarly tribal

associates seem to be the only people able to be kind and happy with

children.