4. HISTORY

 

 

                        a. Fun prior to civilization

 

   The nature of primitive society gets some people quite argumenative,

partly due to complete lack of evidence. One can really only guess about it.

Some basic factors are known though, based on looking at current primitive

societies.

   Memory and physical activity play a bigger part in their fun than for

modern people. Some can remember past details astoundingly well and repeat

with precision after hearing something once. They also engage in carrying

unbelievable loads balanced on their heads, or run 15 miles on a minor

errand.

   Pretty things seem quite appealing to them, inspiring weeks of tedious

hand work with colored dirt and animal parts and other base level

materials. Valuable items all get associated with known people who made

them, generic wealth being generally a foreign idea. Music and personal

expression generally are likewise unprostituted, motivating everyone to

participate and develop some skill.

   Autonomous activity is fairly rare, though it does happen. Most everyone

spends their entire life, including sleeping, in direct association with

several others. Segregation occurs but generally between groups.

   Fun takes the same basic forms as are familiar, with usually the same

basic form of sex identities as modern people. Leadership without personal

involvement, as in a modern institutions, doesn't happen much. Some rare

societies have men wearing makeup or women engaging in violent physical

battle.

   Sexual tradition runs the whole range from complete license to serious

inhibition.

   Spiritual exploration among primitives involves overt relations with

apparently real ancestral spirits and conversational trance with the voice

that appears to speak out of rocks and plants during periods of feral

solitude. The ancestor contact is often facilitated by an intense intellect

compromising drug or a ritual event intended to compromise intellect. The

inanimate voice is apparently a psychic split similar to the sex identity

phenomenon, but involving the physical intellectual part of the hearer's

brain speaking through the actual ear nerve channel without control of

normal consciousness.

   Both forms of experience are primarily autonomous, sometimes with a

little coaching about what signs to look for. For some groups a passage

into adulthood is established through one or both forms. The effect are

quite reliable to reproduce and offer profound and entertaining novelty

that keeps many participants returning for more.

   Genuine government ritual appears to be mostly absent for primitive

groups, though some have traditions of grim meeting rituals that are

similar.

 

 

                        b. Fun prior to overt patriarchy

 

   The first institutional forms were apparently invented and dominated by

women, presumably as an extension of their domestic ideas. There are

stories of religious places that offered deliberate classes in personal

relations, particularly coaching about menstruation, childbirth and

sexuality and encouraging astounding athletic endurance in intercourse.

Athletic sexuality was apparently presented as a spectacle event in Sumer

and India.

   Men invented organized sports apparently involving teams and a ball of

some kind. Gang warfare was common, mainly by men, deliberately mistreating

and robbing nearby communities. Ritual involving bigger and bigger groups

evolved, often in association with celestial events.

   The practice of ritual idolization of individuals began as a result of

groups getting large enough to have unfamiliarity between members. People

would identify a striking or unusual individual and initiate a chanting or

riotous focus on them in an encouraging manner. Most people undoubtedly

were horrified at being an object of that, but some fed the game and took

on choreographic leadership. Significantly, women idolized this way

generally find the effect to be evidence of embarrassing emotional idiocy on

the part of those in the crowd, diffusing the effect considerably.

Idolized men on the other hand often perceive the effect as a call to their

apparent superiority, and revel in the feelings. Thus men rose as

choreographic leaders, in spite of having little real savvy in the role, and

inevitably having to anchor at least one reliable female coach. This pattern

may have been the origination of the concept of marriage, to prevent an

idolized man from making a complete fool of himself.

   Many men got inclined to encourage the development of multilevel

idolization, delighting in the huge wash of emotion that could thus be

created, at least in groups of men.

   Some societies retained the ancestor and "inanimate voice" rites of

passage or exploratory traditions, but most incorporated those forms of

ritual into huge spectacles that made a complete mockery of the original

explorations. Certain legendary ancestors became the object of idolization

and others became marginalized or forgotten. The inanimate voices became

formalized and named Divas or nature spirits. Coaching children about the

phenomena became highly complex and involved chastising those whose

experiences were outside the traditional image.

   Government evolved as a dominant sub-group involving little or no

citizenship or leader accountability in the modern sense. Leaders made

despotic demands for their own fun, generally without feedback. Most

governing leaders made reference in their writings to another sub-group to

which they were subject. While some may have merely been using that image as

a ruse to intimidate, there is considerable consistency in the various

tales, suggesting intelligent alien visitors with some kind of governing or

exploitive intent.

   Leaders discovered fairly quickly that their position could be made much

safer and more fun if they facilitated bickering and battles between rival

groups in their area of dominance, drawing attention away from the offenses

of the leader. A foreign war could serve, but a local one carried no risk of

losing territory. Thus warfare became a huge and continuous focus, nearly

always about very minor political offenses or to demonstrate ability. The

Hindu book called Bagavad Gita exhaustively examines the rhetoric and logic

used by leaders in the clearly senseless and ghastly battles.

   Women apparently became more domestically dreamy and ambitious,

inventing or pressing a husband to invent labor saving and trading methods

for creating wealth of all sorts. Harvesting became deliberate and involved

destroying unwanted plants. Animals to butcher were tamed as pets to make

them easy to kill. Building construction of all kinds became a very

significant hobby. Many societies evolved towards many people being

productively engaged most of day, with any idea of having enough being

completely forgotten. Quite a few societies completely burned out the

carrying capacity of their area having fun this way, with catastrophic

result.

   Traditions of seeking emotional wonder through meanness and arbitrary

heartless dominance became common in all relationships between people and

in relation to natural phenomena, even in childcare and enlisting of work

assistance. People also discovered a huge potential wonder in establishing

a unique group identity through a story that all held in common. This made

possible large groups that were no longer anchored to an area of land to

maintain social cohesion. A group that wore out it's welcome or destroyed

it's resources could relocate.

 

 

                        c. Fun prior to industrial technology

 

   A splinter group in Sumer, led by a fellow named Abraham, originated an

idea that the subgroup that the government leaders claimed ruled them was

actually ruled by the inanimate voice, and that that voice was from a

single entity that had originated all others and all other forms of matter,

and had established a direct verbal link with him. His "creation and

leadership by supreme being" story solidified his group so well that he was

able to propose and carry out a mass relocation towards the west of Sumer,

with an economy based on mobile livestock.

   This charismatic religious story as a basis for group identity proved to

be a huge boon to military effectiveness. The story apparently involves

death being a rejoining with the supreme being, and not something to be

particularly avoided. Thus men could be rallied to fight much more

ruthlessly, and the tradition spread by conquest, splitting into three

highly successful forms that eventually dominated two thirds of the world.

   With the invention of single entity religion in defense of group

illusory identity, women were evicted quite rudely from any part in

spiritual development of anyone. They continued to coach girls privately as

they do today. Warfare escalated to being a continuous focus of leadership

and the gang form of warfare was either forced to join the new government

based form or face being an object of enforcement. Sporting and religious

events became really massive, inspiring construction of gigantic buildings

to allow many to watch at once.

   With the conversion of the Romans to a form of Christianity and later

the middle east and northern Africa to Islam, the role of women in religion

in a huge part of the world was completely restricted to spectator. A

similar change happened in the orient, apparently as a result of

escalation of warfare, to the point where women were shy to engage in any

grossly significant activity.

   In the areas where the leadership by women was explicitly prohibited,

teaching about sexuality became prohibited also. Apparently men were unable

to take on even a minimal educational leadership about orgasm or

childbirth. Menstruation and childbirth became quite painful and dangerous

due to ignorance about them and improper preparation. The masculine

dominance of children whose father was indeterminate was difficult to

establish, so intercourse outside of marriage had to be prohibited, and all

study of sexuality prior to marriage was thus also condemned as criminal.

Menstrual cramps were judged illusory and childbirth pain to be the

unavoidable consequence of an ancient religious violation.

   Sex as a form of seeking fun had to end or go underground, so the

concept of prostitution was invented, in which a condemned but tolerated

subculture of women would continue to study and perfect sexuality,

involving men technically as customers or protection support partners, but

realistically as sexual players.

 

 

                        d. 21st century differences

 

   Industrial society introduced device mania into the pursuit of fun. This

has apparently considerably eased the tragic loss of noble sexuality, though

the pain and danger of childbirth and menstrual ignorance is still a

disaster. Books becoming cheap and plentiful made guided dreaming much more

accessible. Travel became an option for nearly anyone and language

homogenized enough to facilitate cultural melding and eventually a

conversion of literal world warfare into commercial forms. Commerce has

exploded as a source of fun creation with new services as well as new

devices. Orgasm education by women is still generally condemned, but no

longer illegal as long as all participants are adults. Some menstrual and

childbirth education is even mainstream in a sanitized form that forbids

the recognition of orgasm as being essential in preventing pain.

   The autonomy of individual pursuit of fun, made more and more possible

through technical invention, inspires idealistic panic on the part of many

philosophical people, but to no avail. A new form of feral human has

emerged that can participate easily in domestic society without actually

being policed by it to any important degree. Even the heavily socially

controlled Muslim world is breeding the new form.

   The result is what one author, Andrew Keen, has labeled the cult of the

amateur, referring to the proliferation of self taught authorities.

Though he focuses on the internet, where he does business, the phenomenon

took off in the early twentieth century with cheap automobiles and the

telephone. Exploration of wisdom that was once restricted to rich and

highly obsessive people like Thomas Jefferson became cheaper and

politically tolerated. George Gurdjieff managed to maintain his high

profile bizarre school, deliberately helping 20 year old men to dodge the

military, right through World War Two some 30 miles from Paris. That war

also saw the emergence of the conscientious objector, the license to permit

anyone to assess the legitimacy of a war, regardless of how ignorant and

uninformed they are.

   Undoubtedly though, the cult of the amateur has been low profile and

quite huge for all of domesticated history, and simply able to show itself

in the twentieth century. Quite possibly the cults of symbolic idolatry are

coming to a close, and with it the cult of the blinkered formal specialist.

 

 

                        e. Potential directions of development

 

   What becomes of fun creation when the majority is emotionally at a

seven year old level and the babysitting infrastructure that allows that is

gone temporarily? There is currently considerable panic about unruly geology

bringing a brutal end to human fun. The small scale power outages and major

floods have shown a basis for worry that, where the disaster is large enough

that there is no realistic neighbor in better shape to appeal to, fun

utterly changes form into vandalism, tyrannical government and no familiar

recreation.

   The amateur internet demonstrating how easy it is to hoodwink a large

portion of the public about a matter of great significance is undoubtedly

going to make more obvious to everyone how unreliable all sources are,

particularly where a clear motive to lie exists.

   People are likely to evolve into accepting overt discussion of

withholding cures to disease in countries where population control is

failing or the possible benefit of a military conquest of a foreign

government that is thwarting the exploitation of a commercially valuable

part of the earth. With clear evidence of amoral mainstream leadership,

political con games may be become unnecessary for successful heartlessness.

   The prostitution of the arts may also come to an end. Recorded

entertainment has already far surpassed the quality possible from a live

presentation and the internet looks to potentially be an overwhelming

prolific source of free astounding media of all kinds. Selling one's soul

in the normal way and enforcing copyright may become as hopeless as selling

rubber bands on a street corner.

   The rash exploitation of the earth may lose a lot of it's appeal also.

Since a great deal of ambition is boosted by redirected or frustrated

sexual focus, a shift toward sane coaching of children about orgasm and

childbirth may dry up a lot of financial drive. The past obsession with

personal privacy, apparently motivated by economic and sexual shame, and by

fear of insane hysterical reaction to normal secrets, may also fade out as

the internet airs out every conceivable manner of dirty laundry. Inevitably

richer people will discover the immense psychic force made possible by a

dozen people in genuine intimacy and the religious wonder of mixing that

with direct contact with the living realm. People are likely to pine for a

look at the astounding world around them that is only visible clearly at

walking speed, leaving vehicles, even bicycles, mostly idle.