I wrote the following presentation to be a Wikipedia entry. Then I read
the details of Wikipedia policy and found this to be a hopeless violation
of the prohibition against original insights. Unfortunately the topic has
been seriously taboo in the cultures I'm familiar with. I have not found
any overview references and very few references to support subtopics. Though
the subject of fun in human culture may be as complex as the variety of
religious practice and belief, those who have the most intelligence to speak
and write about it are apparently rarely inspired to exposition. Perhaps
this attempt will be a seed for something.
Fun (overview)
Contents
1. Definitions
a. Root concept
b. Feminine model
c. Masculine style
d. Denial mode
e. Legislative concept
f. As a definition of childhood
g. As the defining element of passion
2. Generally recognized forms
a. Recreation
b. Verbal humor
c. Policing of Crowds
d. Control of children
e. Commercial offerings
f. Political seduction
g. Social jousting and friendship expression
h. Devils, witches, villains and predators
i. Con artistry
j. Vandalism
k. Military use
l. Fantasy
3. Moral issues
a. Battle of the sexes
b. Government limiters
c. Conflict with religion
d. Family disintegration
e. Poisoning of friendship
f. Social outcasting and suicide
g. Inspiration to warfare
h. Accidents
4. History
a. Fun prior to civilization
b. Fun prior to overt patriarchy
c. Fun prior to industrial technology
d. 21st century differences
e. Potential directions of development
5. Significant cultural anomolies
a. Third world cultures
b. Internet
c. Solitary fun
d. Violent social traditions and sports
e. Hunting
f. Use of machines
g. Anarchist fun
h. Commercial development
i. Utopian experiments
j. Fun as medicine
6. Figures of speech
a. Having fun
b. Are we having fun yet?
c. Did you enjoy that?
d. Making fun of
e. Funny feeling
f. Poor sport
7. See also
a. Leisure
b. FUN (magazine)
c. F.U.N.
8. References
9. External links
1. DEFINITIONS
a. Root concept
Loosely, fun is any technical pursuit intended to create life affirming
or humorous emotion in oneself and one's social environment, as opposed to
focus to achieve a practical purpose. The emotional effect of a given
pursuit is apparently achieved through mental echoes unique to each
individual and not innate in the pursuit. A pursuit such as group musical
improvisation can be abject misery for one person and heaven for another. A
radical shift of identity can equally radically change what someone feels as
fun and significantly broaden or narrow the term for them.
Most people keep a very narrow idea of the word fun, refering only to
what they pursue or refering only to what they dislike about other people's
life interests. But, taking everyone into account, the actual range is
huge. Nearly every human activity has someone that speaks of it as being
fun, and most have someone else who says that having fun that way is
twisted or evil.
Fun is an antidote to the listless emotional condition common to any
sentient creature in an overtly dependent or imprisoned condition. Many
people consider fun to be morally dubious unless in such a context.
Unchecked listlessness has resulted in the death of captured animals and
babies of all sorts, apparently from a lack of spontaneous breathing. Thus
the deliberate invention and arranging of fun has become essential to any
concept of child raising and dog ownership, and often figures in success
stories of large businesses, zoos and prisoner management.
Grimness or the opposite of fun takes three forms in common
conversational use:
1. any overt actual focus on achieving a technical result
2. creative liberty to a degree that emotional health becomes as
unintentional and unconscious as one's heartbeat
3. any technical focus that consistantly results in the creation of life
denying or grim emotion
Since any socially linked technical pursuit creates emotion to some
degree, and nearly all common technical focus is socially linked, the
establishment of values about fun or grimness, and the management of fun,
appear to preoccupy virtually everyone, even some toddlers. Unfortunately,
direct verbal discussion of the topic is generally far too emotionally
volitile to be reasoned, so those who carefully ponder the nature of fun
nearly always do so privately and rarely produce any obvious verbal result.
b. Feminine model
(Note: What follows is a man's description)
The term fun as expressed in conversation by women appears to always
imply a self-absorbed sensory focus and no awareness of real danger or
accountability to others. Thus fun becomes synonomous with enjoyment, such
as sharing well rehearsed singing or dance, receiving a meal or massage
from a formal stranger, riding a very reliable vehicle without emediate
regard for destination, reading a story alone or not, random encyclopedic
conversation, or watching someone struggle with something unimportant.
Women also appear to refer to actual focus on a particular technical
achievement as being the opposite of fun but a necessary part of life, and
genuine creative liberty as being criminal or self-destructive. They also
appear to assume that no one would ever independently choose to engage a
non-essential technical focus that consistantly created life denying or grim
emotion, or resulted in a complete absence of all emotion.
c. Masculine style
The term fun as expressed by men generally refers to deliberate action
or technical control in a dangerous or unfamiliar context, with other
people overtly involved in a mutually accountable way. Masculine fun always
carries an element of divine awe, related to striving in some way or
discovery of the astounding or unknown, such as driving too fast for
conditions, viewing nude pictures, engaging high speed intellectual
conversation, handling explosives or dangerous equipment, reading about
bizarre inventions or political intrigues, building something never seen
before, grandstanding in some way, looking for lost treasure, listening to
intense entrancing sounds while drugged, speedy release of sensual passion,
computer programming, or vanquishing of a legitimate scapegoat.
Men relate to complete creative liberty as the opposite of fun, focusing
on liberty as harmless but evocative of responsibility in a divine sense.
Men are disheartened and horrorified by people with actual single-minded
focus on a single technical result, as if they have become robots or
insects. Most men in technological societies have some technical focuses
they have independently taken interest in which overtly create life
denying or grim emotion in everyone involved. The focuses are often hobbies
or subjects of intellectual study. Significantly, men in poorer societies
or subcultures tend to avoid focus that makes a grim vibe unless
consistantly coached that way by someone else. Though men will recognize
delight associated with certain activities, no man appears to notice emotion
actually being created or destroyed.
d. Denial mode
Some people believe that life-affirming emotion occurs entirely without
human initiative, and so they don't refer to the creation of it as fun but
instead refer to the feelings as serious, in the same class as defecating.
Some people also relate likewise to humor in non-verbal form, such as
giddiness about a project. Deeply religious people and emotionally immature
people often take this outlook on fun.
Inevitably, uninvolved observers are still inclined to refer to the
activity of those people as fun for them all the same.
e. Legislative concept
Governments tend to consistently outlaw or regulate what men call fun,
tending to intensify the divine awe potential of their fun, and pay for
infrastructure to support what women call fun, making it safer and easier
to achieve. Governments appear open to anyone's use of the term fun as
valid.
f. As a definition of childhood
Many women define the end of childhood as the end of fun, and consider
that children are owed by society a period of unaccountable sensory fun.
Men who give the idea any consideration have an opposite view, that the
best fun begins with independence. Either way, childhood can be defined by
fun.
g. As the defining element of passion
Any person, device, institution or location that appears to overty
facilitate or destroy uncompromised fun for someone, becomes, for them,
associated with life affirmation and light-heartedness, inspiring passionate
devotional relationship or serious loathing.
Facilitating or trashing fun for someone can be an unintended side
effect, as with a kitten appearing cute to an unnoticed observer, or
deliberate as with the United States declaration of independence. For many
people this kind of interactive humorous life affirmation is the defining
element of all love feelings. The article about love expands on this.
Unfortunately, the spontaneous response to feeling passionate often
comes out bizarrely inappropriate. Passion is frequently embarrassing or
confusing for the passionate person, inspiring a brutal reaction to both
delight and loathing. Even when passion feels fun it can inspire a person
to launch a barrage of oppressive demands. Oddly, a lot of harsh responses
to feeling passionate, such as scolding and whining, are traditional in a
particular family or culture, those involved defining the response as
positive interest even though they all feel rotten. Many people speak about
this as a normal cost of having fun and of having relationships with other
people at all, though modern intimacy appears to be tending towards briefer
and politer association, often in hope of finding more friendly passion.
There is no catch-all term in english for negative passion. It is a
subject of exhaustive study even for otherwise mindless people. Loathing,
hatred, anger, vengefulness, disgust, contempt, abhorance, fear,
repugnance, vehemence and antipathy are all words used in conversation to
describe it. Even the word passion generally means the negative. Few people
show success at embracing love without losing kindness. The inspiration to
deliberately help someone else in their pursuit of fun does arise, but quite
often with a backlash of jealosy if the help succedes. To prevent this a
lot of people avoid all deliberateness with other people's fun, prefering
reliance on luck and private prayer to make a world that has love
happening, speaking about it fatalistically if their life has been loveless
for quite a while.
Long term love appears to always be deliberate though. Talking with the
few people who clearly have some measure of old love inevitablely includes
stories of overtly making magic happen for the others.
2. GENERALLY RECOGNIZED FORMS
a. Recreation
Recreation is the use of time in a manner designed for "therapeutic
refreshment" of one's body or mind. Generally the word is only used in
reference to domesticated fun that has no obvious technical usefulness,
such as a game of badminton, and occurs in a choreographed setting that
prohibits obvious creation of root life emotion so that perceptual conflict
can be avoided. It is popular especially for couples, people aspiring to
couple, and as a way to park children, because the emotional result is
rarely challenging. The word has a large separate article here.
b. Verbal humor
The invention of verbal humor appears to be largely a male obsession
driven by a hope of winning admiration and life affirmation from those
listening or reading as well as creating lively emotion for all. Most humor
inventors express idealism of some kind through their presentation, often
with overt intent for political effect or social education. Occasionally
someone will make the mistake of presenting verbal humor without any
idealism and create an embarrassing dud effect. The article about laughter
explores this topic quite a bit.
c. Policing and creation of Crowds
The use of mesmerizing or seductive spectacle, such as stadium events or
parades, to regulate crowds of people is older than recorded history, and
may have preceded organization of towns and cities as a social shakedown
method for creating collective traditions that could minimize cabin fever
in large settlements. With no major media, spectacle would be the only
venue for logical public debate about offenses or political ambitions, as
well as a context for allowing evolving shared symbolism and creating a
sensory basis for being glad to see other people.
Spectacle seems to work especially well to coalesce particularly those
individuals who would otherwise have an interest to create emotion for
themselves using approaches, such as riotous playing or vandalism, that tend
to sabotage commercial effort. In more recent years the television and
computer have served that purpose more efficiently, both for seducing and
for dispersing crowds; the use of physical spectacle going entirely towards
creation of gigantic positive emotion based on tightly choreographed sensory
fun.
Religious, political and commercial use of crowd creation appears to
have gone the same direction as policing effort, in letting the more
striking elements of genuine divine awe become more decentralized, and
embracing sensory fun more overtly. The result in more modern societies has
been a striking abandonment of simple logic in most large scale public
forums, in favor of convulsive sharing.
Churches no longer choreograph spiritually developmental activities in
group services, becoming like a secret society about it with invitation
only very small scale genuine explorations, many explicitly excluding women
and children. Masculine religious fun has become apparently too shameful
for even associates to witness. One odd result has been homosexual
experimentation becoming a focus for some encounters. Nearly all large
scale services have become grossly contradictory displays of overt hedonism
framed in occasional vague references to spiritual accountability, what
would seem more fitting to a musical concert.
Public political spectacle has similiarly released logical exploration
and debate to small private meetings and computerized exchanges. Public
speakers, even in the news media, are under no pressure to be sly about
politically significant matters. Overt public presentations remarking about
the 9/11 event can shamelessly carry as a premise that a jumbo jet crash and
fire can cause a 110 story steel tower to crumble completely to dust and
collapse at free-fall speed suddenly, an hour after impact, with never a
flicker of apology for how preposterous that seems. Public presentations
about AIDS routinely omit any suggestion that the utterly flat level of HIV
infection in the general population and absence of any exponential AIDS
events might point to non-infectious origins.
In the past people would purchase food from specialists. Now they go to
gigantic indoor mechanistic sensory displays or drive up windows with few
genuine human presenters to purchase recreational drugs disguised as food;
resulting in widespread nutritional disaster even in children. In the
vacuum of genuine religious spectacle, some businesses have found a market
by redefining spiritual confusion as social immaturity and sold admission
to conceptual spectacle addressing that; promoting more effective and
active spiritually indifferent business ambition, perhaps successfully.
Sporting and musical spectacles are often hugely successful financially
and appear to be beneficial in their impact, perhaps partly due to their
lack of intellectual pretense.
The use of social spectacle may be evolving more that direction, of less
and less pretense of intelligence, and greater focus on inspiring people to
be glad to see a sea of faces and complex human expressions.
d. Control of children
Controlling children rather than living with them inevitably becomes
necessary in a society that invents more and more activities that their
presense will threaten or embarrass. The invention of humiliating
choreography presented as friendly fun to seduce them has begun to replace
the straight intimidation of the past. Many parents and social theorists
have expressed grave objection to the use of this false fun, but coalescing
spiritually friendly real emotion is difficult even in crowds of adults.
With much smaller vocabulary and fewer recognizable images, children can
only be unified into emotive groups by very skilled people or someone who
personally knows all of them. Many children spend a lot of their day with an
overwhelmed volunteer adult outnumbered by the children, or by a service
worker who knows nothing of their personal life and dreamworld.
False fun has proliferated on television and the new internet
equivalent, giving adults with access to it the easy option of using it
without having to deliver it. As long as the children accept the root
premise of their unworthiness to self direct they will endlessly chase the
promise of life giving meaningful emotion from completely spiritless
vicarious activity.
Inevitably when released as teenagers, some will commit suicide, but
most shake their heads out of the fog of wasted time and begin to explore
actual emotion or settle into a life of endless entertainment.
e. Commercial offerings
Fun for sale is jokingly considered by many to be the oldest profession
and given that most other professions are technological it's probably true.
To obtain actual life affirming emotion or actual laughter through a
commercial sharing is apparently possible for a lot of people.
A salesperson or entertainer who can maintain totally unbroken fidelity
to the dreamworld they weave for the customer can actually carry the event
to a convulsive release that may be a genuine spiritual event for the
customer, even if not relevant to anyone's spiritual maturation. A customer
who leaves the store with a new item, that they truly hold as a symbolic
proof of their own human majesty, will greet their fellows with actual
infectious light-heartedness.
Unfortunatly, success with this has reached the point of completely
trashing the biosphere, so there is considerable current debate about the
moral legitimacy of this way of obtaining money.
Commercial fun involving no product, or other pretense of rational
significance, seems to be drawing less rhetoric of disgust worldwide than
in historical descriptions of the inquisitional past. The spiritual or
religious destitution or compromise that many people associate with paid
emotional leadership is still apparently as big an issue as ever, but not
one addressed as much by recognized governmental authorities, due perhaps
to the powerful multitude of conflicting veiwpoints about it.
f. Political seduction
Success as a leader often hangs on an ability to create fun emotion for
large groups of adults through soul stirring images and calls to validate
competitive comraderie about various forms of government stewardship. A
tiny touch of deliberate verbal humor seems helpful too. There is often
much grim mudslinging in political commentary and advertising though, to
the point that a leader who is merely has a nice voice can elicit a huge
sigh of hopeful relief in a crowd.
g. Social jousting and friendship expression
Playing the field socially, creating emotional fun, is a big part of
cultures that aren't too mingled with potentially confusing other cultures.
Incredible majesty, such as samba music, linux programming and passionate
love affairs, can arise if a social context can maximize exchange while
minimizing unintended hurt feelings. Within the emotional safety of a
stable tradition, the prolific and relentless event invention by groups of
women, with it's attendant unpredictable matters of importance, creates an
emotional sea of familiarity for all manner of shared dreaming to occur in.
Even the clumsiest child can be a genuine participant in fun origination
and expression, as long as tradition is left intact.
In a melting pot cultural scene unintended hurt feelings are relentlessly
destructive of initiative, so the study of interpersonal clumsiness tends
to replace invention of fun. Most people settle in the long run into
conversational and commercial contact only with people who at least appear
culturally similiar and who they can relate to in a context normal to that
culture, so that at least a minimal degree of natural fun can evolve.
The english speaking world is a composite of cultures that strikingly
buck all tradition; minimizing hurt feelings through an adaptation to living
without genuine intimacy; maintaining societal cohesion entirely through
business arrangements and engaging physical sharing solely in tightly
choreographed business environments.
Since the planning and invention of fun only occurs in dreamworlds, and
a solitary dreamworld is far too psychically feeble to originate much of
significance unless channeled through an anonomous mechanism, the english
speaking cultures have evolved a huge and complex business of dreamworld
leadership using highly intense recorded music and extremely high budget
exotic movies. People are encouraged to remain alone, or with friends who
are sharing a current fad dreamworld. Even restaurants have gotten into the
business, offering ready to eat food delivered right to someone's car or
house, with small plastic or paper toys for kids based on current movie
themes.
The internet and the low cost recording and computer equipment made in
poorer countries have facilitated a new non-monetary form of impersonal
sharing using remixed commercial material and ideas like this encyclopedia,
producing totally effective fun between complete strangers who remain
strangers, with no pressure on anyone to emotionally mature. Even children
no longer innately represent a relationship, but are often related to as a
product in a technological nest, to be booted out rudely after 18 years in
a somewhat prisonlike setting. A majority of english speaking people skip
any child involvement at all and their population has stabilized or begun to
decline.
h. Devils, witches, villains and predators
The concept of evil appears to originate entirely from fun origination.
A starving person who steals food doesn't get labeled evil. The term is
reserved for people or creatures that appear to deliberately step entirely
outside of need in the trouble they cause, pursuing fun through causing
trouble.
The common theory appears to be that causing grimness and ill-humor in
others can be emotionally uplifting and humorous. The model of conventional
competitive sports makes that entirely believable, though no record has ever
surfaced of someone who agreed to that assessment of their nature. Men who
appear to find delight that way are labeled devils, villains or predators.
Women who appear likewise are called bitches or sometimes witches.
The idea of the hero appears to be similiarly misconceived, likewise
from competitve sports. An apparent hero in the real world inevitably has
an entirely human self-image when asked directly, and describes their
antagonist in inanimate terms; they're not fighting evil.
Stories often include heros and villians who cheerfully accept their
label, and some people are inclined to use the demonizing or idolizing of
someone or some group as a basis for solidarity with associates. Thus a lot
of fun requires at least temporary belief in heros and villians for
emotional effect. Belief can in some sense create reality. Certainly to
many of the victoms of war or smaller crime, evil intent appears to exist,
and does sabotage fun, and heroes do exist and thwart the apparent evil;
regardless of the outlook of those being labeled.
i. Con artistry
Some people find life meaning in the circus and many do a similiar sort
of society autonomously. Social engineering is a term invented more
recently and used in conversation by con artists to express better their
self-image. In discussion or stories, the con artists all describe the
world around them as made up entirely of con artists and mindless
uncreative sheep, with prolific resources and no fixed or essential purpose
for any of it. That view is not entirely contradicted by evidence. The con
artist sees all of life as an arbitrary competitive game with nothing else
to focus on for fun except short term tiny victories against other players,
as in an endless soccer match.
In the speeches of big scale players like David Rockefeller it sounds to
many listeners like the rationalizing of ghastly unnecessary horror, but he
speaks with a calm and friendly very human voice of one who seeks a world
with more fun for everybody, through encouragement of people riling up the
american public to finance killing 3/4 million middle east people. He
sounds totally sure that the alternative is the lifeless tedium of a bunch
of sheep eating grass all day.
So the con artists are a major force in the world, for fun.
j. Vandalism
Delight in straight distruction or defacing of what someone else cares
about gets rationalized in conversation with the same words as con artistry.
And it's equally compelling. Ownership certainly appears to be quite random
and arbitrarily enforced, with little concern for the influence on societal
fun; so the vandals are taking responsibility in their own minds, for a
world in need of rescue from stagnating tedium. Like the con artists, their
discussion indicates very little direct comprehension of the actual feelings
their actions generate in everybody, as well as actual shattered liveliness
for the owners. Would life be more fun without vandalism? No way to know
.
k. Military use
The tradition of competitive sports is apparently a modern evolution of
what originated as small scale warfare, and still exists that way in some
parts of south america and africa. Even in modern society the fun seeking
armed robber, such as the Sundance Kid or Pirates of the Carribean, makes a
very successful movie and a character style that many boys delight in
portraying, encouraged by their parents. A vigilante policeman enforcing
arbitrary commercial regulations on drugs and weapons, such as Batman, is
also very popular. Many men delight in handling guns and other weaponry, and
many delight in hunting.
Its hard for some people to imagine looking forward to seriously injuring
or killing someone else in an arbitrary game of posturing, but countless men
do, and some women also. Only a minority has trouble finding delight in a
movie depicting it. Some modern sports involve similiarly brutal encounter.
Thus the modern military can appeal to a very real constituency of
participants to play both sides of a senseless and deadly game of arbitrary
posturing about location and ownership of a pipeline or oil field, or
whether a certain kind of commerce should be taxed and by who.
Like the other people who do apparent evil, war veterans speak quite
grimly about the horrible injury their work required, and even more grimly
about injury to their associates. The fun that drove them and kept them
breathing and lively in pursuit of the activity was in spite of all that
tragedy, not assisted by it.
Some people will continue to try to invent more seductive games of all
sorts to try to draw more of those with the tendency to become monsters out
of the killing inclination. Quite possibly the prolific variety of military
like video games will tend towards that result, rather than the escalation
of war as some have suggested. Either way murderous competition will
probably always play a major part in the designing of fun.
l. Fantasy
The one person dreamworld may be the ultimate originator of all other
fun, even in genuinely social societies. Everyone goes there every night
and perhaps a majority during part of the day as well. As an opportunity
for fun it is clearly the best. Many people are able to fly and morph and
experience all six senses while alone in fantasy, and much emotional
maturing results from senarios tried out beforehand in brutal or
embarrassing fantasy, replayed over and over til it comes off sanely. The
renewal of sleep vitally depends on fantasy. Research in experimentally
depriving people of it has been quite conclusive of that.
3. MORAL ISSUES
a. Battle of the sexes
Some masculine traditions, such as the taliban and the American
puritans, have advocated a near elimination of sensuous fun, calling it a
ridiculous offense, and answering the issue of listlessness by offering
artificial anxiety, and horrorifying or highly challenging technical
pursuit; still often referred to as fun. Women in those kind of traditions
apparently engage in secret parallel traditions involving overtly crazy
colorful costumes and ridiculous shared fun.
Many organizations lead by women press for the opposite, a near
elimination of ugly or dangerous fun, calling it entirely unnecessary;
replacing it with relentless mechanistic interaction and activity; and this
likewise inspires secret artificial anxiety or actual combativeness on the
part of males involved.
Oddly, even those men who profess and appear to engage in sensous fun,
and encourage their feminine associates likewise, will still run afoul the
same way; and engage in private ugly activity, courting and often meeting
technical disaster, as with drunks at a bar; and will get into life
changing strife with spouses and feminine neighbors through pressing for
some element of divine awe, greater laxity about traditional security, and
more psychic dependence.
Likewise women who embrace danger and initiate cutting edge discussion
are not seeking divine awe; their emotionally based identity keeps them
bathed continually in the experience the men are seeking; they are acting
out of unusual spiritual faith. The hazards do not exist for them. The
actually seek new sensuous and triumphant possibilities in environments
they were shy of in the past. In the sense that a man would perceive them,
they are heartless and idiotic monsters who may be technically supportive
but are spiritually saboteurs. Thus women volunteering into a male
dominated world fare no better than the men who encourage sensuous focus.
The world of traditional recreation has shown some meager success at
peaceful if formal sharing with both sexes, at a public library, a bird
watching class or sitting on a bus. But the kind of focus that either sex
enthusiastically calls real fun leaves the other sex frowning. Massive
effort to shake this down has proved futile; those who understand the
details of the dilemma brilliantly feel no different.
The problem originates in the identity split that every person must do
in order to be able to function socially. A pure consciousness has no
functional, let alone emotional, separation from it's physical environment.
There is no way to create the illusion of being a separate individual
except through a compartmentalization of awareness into an observer and a
background. Neither a person's emotional awareness nor their technical
awareness is an actual independent observer of the general environment, but
it is functionally possible for one half to observe the other half and
create a pretense of independent observation that way. As long as the person
remains in a social environment validating the illusion, once they get the
appropriate self-image fantasy going, they can sustain it. But three days
without backup and it fades, and must be resurrected in order to re-enter
human relating. The best anyone can do is be aware emotionally as
undifferentiated awareness and aware of technical functionality as a unique
player in spiritual society; or else to track the structure of the
environment without a boundary awareness and engage continuous portrayal of
a ficticious character. There is no way to maintain both illusions at the
same time.
Some people have established a life successfully hopscotching back and
forth between two fully functioning opposite sex identities. Some have got
so skilled at the shift that only a few minutes suffices to complete it. In
the movie called "Brother Sun, Sister Moon", the actor playing Francis of
Assisi successfully portrays this shift.
But even in a world in which everyone could do that, the same conflict
would remain because it is actually a clash of illusions; each sex is
fighting to maintain it's part in holding the social fabric intact, against
the simple intelligence of the other sex. Even a baboon troup has to
maintain this dual illusion at a primitive level in order to stay a
functional group. Dogs and cats have to join it in order to function as
pets.
The best we can do is forgive; to say to oneself, "I am not crazy, I
have decided to be crazy, that's not the same thing(!)".
b. Government limiters
From appearances, governments seem inclined to be responsive solely to
women's views of fun. Undoubtedly that is a result of men tending to ignore
practical communication matters until their temper blows. Women delight in
agitating about possible new venues to promenade or play in, and
undoubtedly that inspires them to send carefully thought out letters or
phone calls to people who influence legislation or administer recreational
offerings. Women's interest in speaking kindly in public and with a pretty
voice probably helps too.
Thus over time the governments volunteer into paying for more education,
entertainment and travel facilities. Programs get more complex or get
morphed into novel possibilities, and hazards shakedown into tighter
oversight. Governments have financial assistance programs too for food,
education, house buying or repair and the like, for people who don't mind
presenting a tame predictable life.
Regulation strangles more cool and exciting possibilities every year, as
they're discovered, and only retracts somewhat on issues that get
self-righteous tempers going for awhile. For someone too proud to take
assistance, too strange to be welcome at public facilities, too creative to
benefit from conventional education, fascinated by unregulated hazards and
dangerous experiments, and inclined towards a bizarre lifestyle, the
governments are an evil enemy to be dodged and thwarted or maybe bullied.
Most men evolve into being covert and small scale with their weirdness,
and many spiritually rot inside from the lack of environmental feedback. An
upheaval like the american revolution radically expands liberty and
masculine hopefulness for awhile but eventually bucking the government
system through heartless trickery becomes the only way for many men to stay
hopeful about life. In the united states now, roughly one man in eighty is
in jail and a whole lot of the others are merely successful at staying
under the radar. The inspiration to entirely abandon morality takes a lot
of men, whether or not they're ever apprehended.
Social arrangements of continuous dependence contribute to fun becoming
amoral or evil by letting people get way out of touch with what kinds of
caring are necessary for maintenance. Civil service institutions and
schools are so prone to this that almost any discussion about them will
include examples of overt indifference to technical tragedy. The term "going
postal" has come to refer to psychotic violence on the part of any angry
person, as if the post office environment creates that as naturally as a
farm grows thistles.
Large scale society has this practical liability. Most national or highly
controversial leaders become amoral in the approach they take towards
emotion creation because they inevitably cannot avoid becoming
virtually imprisoned by handlers, body guards and regular servants, due to
the unavoidable murderous danger they face and the need to present a
sophisticated lifestyle in order to obtain their position. Due to this
intense dependence, many people theorize that political or economic power
innately corrupts a person.
c. Conflict with religion
Fun and religion seem like total opposites in nearly every published
religious writing; but actually a quirk of conceptual language creates that
appearance. Like the opposition of the sex identities, language cannot
convey technical precision and an image of experience at the same time
without seriously compromising genuine communication about either. For
example, the book of Revelation in the christian bible is a major attempt
to convey both, and the main result has been endless speculation about what
the writer is expressing. The Kama Sutra of the hindu tradition at least
manages a presentation of technical perfection without scolding the reader
or implying they were born corrupt or deficient.
The idea of sin, expressed in many religions, seems to suggest that
emotional spontaneity of a natural person is harmful in some sense; and
an event that sabotages someone's illusion of identity, compromising
societal cohesion, could be described that way. Women call it getting one's
feelings hurt and men call it being a victom of indecency or offensiveness
or evil.
In the hindu tradition the dilemma is supposed to be handled through
embracing the shattering of identity and then deliberately re-establishing
one while fully aware. Though the hindu religious practice apparently achors
identity quite as firmly as any other religion, through an enormously
complex and immobilizing tradition, at least the words aren't a source of
grimness.
All the religious traditions address this issue of one person's fun
shattering an unprepared other person's identifying anchors, and
cooperation with that effort is essential to success with having fun in an
area strongly influenced by that religion. The hindu world encourages the
social presense of beggary and unmanaged large animals, so highly complex
capitalizing wonders have to be secret and guarded slyly there. The
christian world encourages competitive solitude involving mockery and
scolding, so sexuality and any attempts at new sensory based skills such as
music must be kept secret and guarded slyly.
Realistically, having a feeble grip on identity and confusion about the
other forms it takes is going to spoil having fun, so allocating a part of
one's life to a thorough study of the matter proves necessary for virtually
everybody sooner or later, often taking an apparently religious form.
d. Family disintegration
In parts of the world that have well established beautiful and friendly
traditions like Indonesia, India and Brazil, family disintegration doesn't
figure as a threat to having fun. In effect, with a whole society playing
together in an easily comprehendable way, it matters little whether or not
a family plays together.
In a society in which the basic framework of expectations keeps changing
every week for one reason or another, a family that has no clear pattern of
cooperative fun will splinter in confusion eventually from random identity
threats. Many societies in which this is common have adapted to it
completely, even requiring by law that everyone between six and twelve
years of age spend a minimum of 30 hours a week in opposition to family
influence, and assuming that every 19 year old person who doesn't splinter
from family intimacy must be seriously infantile.
e. Poisoning of friendship
Fun is nearly always the social dynamic that originates a friendship,
one person's presense becoming a symbol of life affirmation or
light-hearted humor for another. Unfortunately, fun always evolves, and
belief is a conviction built on sand. Novelty is the soul of fun, so unless
a large scale traditional pattern maintains a belief in each others divinity
and humanness, a friend can just as easily become a symbol of evil or a
symbol of emotional vacancy.
There is no clear remedy for this. Even people who make a point of
interlocking all their friendships, with each friend known personally by
several others, a poisoning of belief in someone can still happen, and can
even split an entire network into two.
f. Social outcasting and suicide
The psychology of suicide appears to vary quite a bit, but defining
suicidal interest as a life denying, humorless outlook, one could say that
fun is critical to life, and that convincing someone to forsake pursuit of
fun can be construed as the same as killing them. So from the view of many
people who directly knew a person who killed theirself, or volunteered into
front line combat, the event was murder.
The rhetoric that creates the disaster rarely originates maliciously
though. Words can so easily convey double meanings taken out of context,
and often conversation can mix words about one focus and intense feelings
about something secret and unrelated. The simple question "how are you",
asked as encouragement to converse, can be taken as an implied mockery and
rejection of spiritually exact discussion, without the speaker even
noticing. Several years of experience with similiar encounters can easily
drive a person to suicide with no one at fault and everybody upset.
Social outcasting is thus a very inexact phenomenon. Someone being
rejected as a job applicant could take it as validation of their greater
suitability for another context that is less legitimate but much more fun,
with the employer seeing only a fool.
Logically there is no way to deliberately take the pressure off someone
who has a seriously rejected identity. A stuttering teenager is actually
horrible to a majority of their associates even if most try to keep a good
face on it, particularly if the teenager seeks fun related to conversation.
An ilformed or unadapted identity often must die even if it means the death
of the person. Making a new identity is always theoretically possible but
the people who suggest everyone can do it tend to be like Scatman John, not
mere mortals.
g. Inspiration to warfare
Understanding how life affirmation can result from politically motivated
group violence has baffled a lot of people, but the feeling is undeniably
widespread among men and boys. Many will express overt delight in imagery of
maiming and killing arbitrary political opponents, perhaps seeding the real
thing to some degree. Many people also view beligerent political conflict
like dirty dishes, a civic necessity that only an idiot would see as
optional, a perhaps poorly defined but genuine crisis, something that men
are able to turn into fun in order to make the best of it.
h. Accidents
Whether or not a particular sort of accident is preventable or not can
illicit quite a debate, and people having fun certainly seem more careless
than somber people. People generally focus on fun while within a social
cocoon, contributing to a loss or absence of practical awareness that
results from a long period of being dependent, and a tendency to be
indifferent to some kinds of significant technical tragedy.
Masculine fun is often deliberately courting disaster, even if generally
matched by skill. Some people have remarked that they quit skateboarding not
from social condemnation but from too many bruises. Courting disaster may be
great fun, but meeting it usually isn't.
Drunk drivers appear to be the only class of people who create accidents,
that fair better than their unintended victoms. Accidents appear to be self
correcting unavoidable cost of a social network established by each person
maintaining a form of deliberate insanity. Most accidents are minor and are
an effective warning to all but the most commited.
4. HISTORY
a. Fun prior to civilization
The nature of primitive society gets some people quite argumentitive,
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 similiar 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
similiar.
b. Fun prior to overt patriarchy
The first institutional forms were apparently invented and dominated by
women, presumably as an extention 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, diffusiing 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
choregraphic leaders, in spite of having little real savy 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 exploritory 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 Devas 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 accountablity 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 consistancy 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, spliting 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
similiar 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 mentrual ignorance is still a
disaster. Books becoming cheap and plentiful made guided dreaming much more
accessable. 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 mentrual 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 idolitry 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.
5. SIGNIFICANT CULTURAL ANOMOLIES
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 jealosy 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 similiar
to a society but where personal images can be entirely ficticious 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 accessable 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
enthusiam 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 nusiance in
most societies, spoiling competitive fun for others merely with their
presense, inspiring development of choreographic seperation 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 accidently 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 aborginal 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 heirarchy 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 compells 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 Rosies, 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 passifying 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 beligerence and violence that is normally necessary
in ambitious societies. Unfortunately, the use of seduction has not
improved the nhilism and deliquency 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 medicinially 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 pagentry 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 similiarly tribal
associates seem to be the only people able to be kind and happy with
children.
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6. Figures of speech
a. Having fun
Fun as a possession or commodity is a common archetype in America,
though the experience of fun appears quite relationship dependent
everywhere. The logically implied mockery of a person's emotional
dependency does appear to poison the feelings of fun when the term "having
fun" is used in conversation.
b. Are we having fun yet?
Many, and perhaps even most, kinds of fun have an initiation phase of
some sort that a person must endure before they are able to be
spontaneously graceful enough to focus on feeling. The question though,
"are we having fun yet?", with it's use of "we", is logically a serious
mocking jab, generally said with that intent.
c. Did you enjoy that?
Friends decompressing after an event have a deliberately kind way to
speak of the feelings using the word enjoy. Though the word can be said with
a lewd tone to poison it, that use is uncommon. Though fun feelings are
highly relationship dependent, they are illusion and so are inevitably
unique to each person and each event, and are radically affected by
uninhibited expression at the time. Thus often even an empathic friend
cannot guess at someone's experience of happiness.
d. Making fun of
Creating fun and making fun are oddly opposites. "Making fun of" is a
logical reference to a commodity focus on fun, particularly of using a
person as if they were a device without feelings. Since actual feelings of
fun have no commodity basis, an attempt create feelings of fun using a
"making fun of" approach is logically risky and often fizzles unless the
person evoking it has some sort of institutional support.
e. Funny feeling
Fun and funny are tied by a reference to novelty, a funny feeling being
a feeling that somehow contrasts with normal background. Even if worrisome,
a funny feelings feels good enough to nearly always be a delight.
f. Poor sport
The emotional casualties of fun are not always answered with compassion
or even tolerance. Particularly in competitive fun, those who lose and feel
to rotten to be inspired to further engagement are often derided as being a
"poor sport". For many people a nasty or painful stimulus is much more life
affirming than no stimulus, so they will make an offer of abusive
engagement intending a genuine gift, and can be quite baffled and
disappointed if the result is social disaster.
7. See also
a. Leisure
b. FUN (magazine)
c. F.U.N.
8. References
9. External links
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