FA+
Shop
The Modern World and LARP (Live Action Role Playing)
3 years ago
I’ve recently read about the subject of LARP (Live Action Role Playing), which involves people pretending/playing to be persons from either older period of time (antiquity, medieval period, early modern period etc), fantasy or science fiction worlds. LARPing is seen by many as something extremely childish and is often mocked as a kind of escape from reality and LARPers themselves are often criticized as being “unable to grow up”. I’ve contemplated about this and I came to a different conclusion: what if they are right and most of the modern world is wrong? I used to joke with a friend that we’re just “tribesmen who pretend to be modern humans”, but the more I thought about this I realized that there might be an unspoken truth behind these words. What if we truly are still tribesmen who pretend to be something which they are not? So might say “George, you’re crazy! It’s obvious that we’re more advanced than simple hunter-gatherers! The level of technological advancement is obviously real and we have changed significantly when it comes to societal trends and changes!”
Well, I hear you. I don’t doubt that some societies are technologically more advanced than others (every highly advanced society requires an intelligent elite and a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus to function properly) and I don’t doubt that the current societies have different views when compared with older time periods, but that’s not what I mean. As far as genetics go, we’re not that different from our ancient ancestors, indeed, even biologists openly admit that modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) have changed little in the last 300.000 years. Agriculture is a thing since circa 11500 years ago, writing is even younger, with the oldest known written language being the cuneiform script (invented around 3200 BC in Mesopotamia). So, our current civilization isn’t much older than 5200 years (I’m of course not ignoring the late Bronze Age collapse and the fall of Rome, there’s a case to be made that no civilization is actually an unbroken descendant of an older culture, it’s probably more accurate to say that some civilizations arose, developed impressive features and then declined. Later cultures and civilizations learned from the older ones but changed the old knowledge to fit their own purposes, the Holy Roman Empire was inspired by ancient Rome, but it wasn’t a clone of it, it had its own culture, government and even different ethnic groups, but it did share the same religion and Church with ancient Rome). It’s fair to say that civilization is something very recent (historically speaking). Now, there have of course been microevolutionary adaptions, such as the genetic mutations among Europeans which allows them to drink milk or the existence of blue eyes. But these are tiny little things, macroevolutionary changes didn’t seem to have occurred in a very long time. But still, take a tribesman from the Congo and compare him with me, you’ll find little differences. Yes, I’m healthier and taller (because I had better nutrition and medicine when I was a kid) but we’re not actually genetically different at all.
So, what if he’s actually living “naturally” and I’m role-playing as a modern human? I mean my ancestors have lived for many countless millennia like he does, not like we currently do. This in fact goes for all of us, most of our ancestors were in fact hunter-gatherers until very recently! There’s a reason why people love the image of the loincloth-wearing hero waving around a big sword, this archaic image does indeed represent our ancestors in a distorted way. Our ancestors wore loincloths (loincloths were worn in Europe at least until the 18th century and they are still being worn all over the world, in Japan they are referred to as “fundoshi”, thank you, Sakura and Howard!) and swords were the common weapon for warriors (swords were a part of the fashion of European gentlemen until the 19th century and they are still being worn by police and military officers for ceremonial purposes, the last duels in Europe occurred in the 1960s in France, in the lifetime of my father)! Now, I must stress this: I’m not saying that Conan the Barbarian and Tarzan were our ancestors, I’m saying is that these images do represent aspects of a lifestyle which was common for most of us until a very recent period. Like I said before, loincloths and swords seem so far away and outdated to us, but they were in fact used until very recently (some in the Congo still use both, but it’s no longer “mainstream”). I believe that most of us feel “homesick” for our natural lifestyles. The young boy who gets big eyes when he sees an iron-clad knight in full armor isn’t a foolish escapist, he’s a romantic! He feels deep down that the way how current people behave and react is something modern and unnatural. Something alien. Although he has grown up in such a society, he can’t help himself but feel that all of this is abnormal, it’s not how things are supposed to be. We were never destined to be cultureless cogs in a gigantic machine and we were never meant to worship money as our eternal God, yet this is the culture we currently find ourselves in. The young boy who desires to be like a knight isn’t merely responding to the ideal of idealistic knightly behavior, he’s actually seeking to live more like his ancestors. His ancestors might have not been knights themselves, but they did wear armor and they did carry swords and God was holy to them, not money (“Mammon”). I often talk to friends from all kinds of political factions and one thing which they - ironically enough - seem to share is their hatred and aggressive dislike of modernity. It’s interesting that there are no proponents who seem to like the present, the few people who seem optimistic make clear that they are optimistic for a ”coming future”, but not even they seem to like the present time period (“flying cars and dome cities on Mars” come to mind, a world where everyone wears Star Trek jumpsuits). I therefore predict that we will return to a more traditional lifestyle in the long-term. Societies where we need to drug kids to get them through the day and where half of the population suffers from depression have no realistic future. I don’t predict that we’re going to have a complete collapse and basically return to being hunter-gatherers, because knowledge is now globally available, the collapse of one civilization doesn’t mean that another one will go down as well. I mean if Germany gets destroyed, would that really destroy Japan as well? I highly doubt it. Maybe an asteroid or super virus could destroy humanity, but I doubt that the collapse of an entire continent could destroy humanity’s knowledge in the long-term. No, I foresee that humans will keep their technology but start to incorporate more traditional aspects back into their lives. A person of the future might drive a futuristic car, but he or she will also wear clothes which were inspired by traditional designs and return to old beliefs (the rise of neo-paganism shows this clearly, these are not actually be the same old religions which existed back then, but it’s obvious that the adherents of these new religions seek something similar, a deeply spiritual world, an escape from the constant nihilism which is so prevalent in the West now). Hoodies have become popular, but what might surprise you is that this design is very old, so called “Kapuzenjacken” were worn back in old times in the HRE (Holy Roman Empire). They didn’t have zippers, but the design is the same. A medieval piece of clothing returned to far spread usage in modernity and almost nobody noticed it!
But there are more examples of this: cultural phenomena such as HEMA (historical European martial arts, the reconstruction of medieval and early modern fencing systems), primitivism, primalism and postmodernism (both as a philosophy and art style) quite clearly show that people are sick to death of modernism and its symptoms. You might say “that people enjoy old clothing and architecture does hardly imply that we’ll become less modern” and you might have a point there, but fashion often shows our convictions. I mean when have you ever heard of someone who wore a Schutzstaffel uniform just for fashion purposes? We often show off our needs and wants with our way of behavior and fashion.
So no, I don’t think that we’ll see a “Mad Max” future, but “Star Trek” will most likely also never happen, a sterile future where nobody believes anything anymore and everyone just pesters alien civilizations out of sheer boredom seems highly implausible. I believe that the most realistic prediction is something like “Firefly”. An advanced civilization which is also very traditionalistic and retains ancient customs and even old fashion (I recall that Malcolm even has a rapier duel in one episode. Starships and rapiers co-exist in this future). I believe that the future will be both technologically advanced (technology is very useful and is most likely not abolished) but also traditional (traditional in the original sense). Covid-19 has also indicated that huge societal changes are occurring, people were forced to live in isolation for months and this has led to many returning to their families. To come back to my original point: yes, we’re LARPing, but not as knights of old and/or elves, we’re LARPing as modern humans. Nobody really is a modern human. It’s unnatural and makes us sick in the long term. We’ll eventually return to our native lifestyles and political and societal developments all show that a return to our native lifestyle is inevitable. We’re in reality still tribesmen pretending to be space travelers. Until we have finally accepted who and what we are, we won’t go anywhere. Who knows, maybe Frank Herbert will have the last laugh and the future will be decided by nomadic human tribes in outer space.
Well, I hear you. I don’t doubt that some societies are technologically more advanced than others (every highly advanced society requires an intelligent elite and a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus to function properly) and I don’t doubt that the current societies have different views when compared with older time periods, but that’s not what I mean. As far as genetics go, we’re not that different from our ancient ancestors, indeed, even biologists openly admit that modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) have changed little in the last 300.000 years. Agriculture is a thing since circa 11500 years ago, writing is even younger, with the oldest known written language being the cuneiform script (invented around 3200 BC in Mesopotamia). So, our current civilization isn’t much older than 5200 years (I’m of course not ignoring the late Bronze Age collapse and the fall of Rome, there’s a case to be made that no civilization is actually an unbroken descendant of an older culture, it’s probably more accurate to say that some civilizations arose, developed impressive features and then declined. Later cultures and civilizations learned from the older ones but changed the old knowledge to fit their own purposes, the Holy Roman Empire was inspired by ancient Rome, but it wasn’t a clone of it, it had its own culture, government and even different ethnic groups, but it did share the same religion and Church with ancient Rome). It’s fair to say that civilization is something very recent (historically speaking). Now, there have of course been microevolutionary adaptions, such as the genetic mutations among Europeans which allows them to drink milk or the existence of blue eyes. But these are tiny little things, macroevolutionary changes didn’t seem to have occurred in a very long time. But still, take a tribesman from the Congo and compare him with me, you’ll find little differences. Yes, I’m healthier and taller (because I had better nutrition and medicine when I was a kid) but we’re not actually genetically different at all.
So, what if he’s actually living “naturally” and I’m role-playing as a modern human? I mean my ancestors have lived for many countless millennia like he does, not like we currently do. This in fact goes for all of us, most of our ancestors were in fact hunter-gatherers until very recently! There’s a reason why people love the image of the loincloth-wearing hero waving around a big sword, this archaic image does indeed represent our ancestors in a distorted way. Our ancestors wore loincloths (loincloths were worn in Europe at least until the 18th century and they are still being worn all over the world, in Japan they are referred to as “fundoshi”, thank you, Sakura and Howard!) and swords were the common weapon for warriors (swords were a part of the fashion of European gentlemen until the 19th century and they are still being worn by police and military officers for ceremonial purposes, the last duels in Europe occurred in the 1960s in France, in the lifetime of my father)! Now, I must stress this: I’m not saying that Conan the Barbarian and Tarzan were our ancestors, I’m saying is that these images do represent aspects of a lifestyle which was common for most of us until a very recent period. Like I said before, loincloths and swords seem so far away and outdated to us, but they were in fact used until very recently (some in the Congo still use both, but it’s no longer “mainstream”). I believe that most of us feel “homesick” for our natural lifestyles. The young boy who gets big eyes when he sees an iron-clad knight in full armor isn’t a foolish escapist, he’s a romantic! He feels deep down that the way how current people behave and react is something modern and unnatural. Something alien. Although he has grown up in such a society, he can’t help himself but feel that all of this is abnormal, it’s not how things are supposed to be. We were never destined to be cultureless cogs in a gigantic machine and we were never meant to worship money as our eternal God, yet this is the culture we currently find ourselves in. The young boy who desires to be like a knight isn’t merely responding to the ideal of idealistic knightly behavior, he’s actually seeking to live more like his ancestors. His ancestors might have not been knights themselves, but they did wear armor and they did carry swords and God was holy to them, not money (“Mammon”). I often talk to friends from all kinds of political factions and one thing which they - ironically enough - seem to share is their hatred and aggressive dislike of modernity. It’s interesting that there are no proponents who seem to like the present, the few people who seem optimistic make clear that they are optimistic for a ”coming future”, but not even they seem to like the present time period (“flying cars and dome cities on Mars” come to mind, a world where everyone wears Star Trek jumpsuits). I therefore predict that we will return to a more traditional lifestyle in the long-term. Societies where we need to drug kids to get them through the day and where half of the population suffers from depression have no realistic future. I don’t predict that we’re going to have a complete collapse and basically return to being hunter-gatherers, because knowledge is now globally available, the collapse of one civilization doesn’t mean that another one will go down as well. I mean if Germany gets destroyed, would that really destroy Japan as well? I highly doubt it. Maybe an asteroid or super virus could destroy humanity, but I doubt that the collapse of an entire continent could destroy humanity’s knowledge in the long-term. No, I foresee that humans will keep their technology but start to incorporate more traditional aspects back into their lives. A person of the future might drive a futuristic car, but he or she will also wear clothes which were inspired by traditional designs and return to old beliefs (the rise of neo-paganism shows this clearly, these are not actually be the same old religions which existed back then, but it’s obvious that the adherents of these new religions seek something similar, a deeply spiritual world, an escape from the constant nihilism which is so prevalent in the West now). Hoodies have become popular, but what might surprise you is that this design is very old, so called “Kapuzenjacken” were worn back in old times in the HRE (Holy Roman Empire). They didn’t have zippers, but the design is the same. A medieval piece of clothing returned to far spread usage in modernity and almost nobody noticed it!
But there are more examples of this: cultural phenomena such as HEMA (historical European martial arts, the reconstruction of medieval and early modern fencing systems), primitivism, primalism and postmodernism (both as a philosophy and art style) quite clearly show that people are sick to death of modernism and its symptoms. You might say “that people enjoy old clothing and architecture does hardly imply that we’ll become less modern” and you might have a point there, but fashion often shows our convictions. I mean when have you ever heard of someone who wore a Schutzstaffel uniform just for fashion purposes? We often show off our needs and wants with our way of behavior and fashion.
So no, I don’t think that we’ll see a “Mad Max” future, but “Star Trek” will most likely also never happen, a sterile future where nobody believes anything anymore and everyone just pesters alien civilizations out of sheer boredom seems highly implausible. I believe that the most realistic prediction is something like “Firefly”. An advanced civilization which is also very traditionalistic and retains ancient customs and even old fashion (I recall that Malcolm even has a rapier duel in one episode. Starships and rapiers co-exist in this future). I believe that the future will be both technologically advanced (technology is very useful and is most likely not abolished) but also traditional (traditional in the original sense). Covid-19 has also indicated that huge societal changes are occurring, people were forced to live in isolation for months and this has led to many returning to their families. To come back to my original point: yes, we’re LARPing, but not as knights of old and/or elves, we’re LARPing as modern humans. Nobody really is a modern human. It’s unnatural and makes us sick in the long term. We’ll eventually return to our native lifestyles and political and societal developments all show that a return to our native lifestyle is inevitable. We’re in reality still tribesmen pretending to be space travelers. Until we have finally accepted who and what we are, we won’t go anywhere. Who knows, maybe Frank Herbert will have the last laugh and the future will be decided by nomadic human tribes in outer space.
I will say that an agrarian culture consisting of cities not rising above a certain size 'might' be a model that would preserve mankind. We would desperately need to learn the lesson of the past; and hold on to them.
The dinosaurs were here, and now they're not. The same thing could easily happen to us.
By the by - Kilts and skirts also qualify as a loin cloth.
*smiles...
Vixyy
"The dinosaurs were here, and now they're not", you bring up an excellent point! The biosphere of Earth is not very robust, very little changes could destroy life, same goes for human society. I do believe however that we'll reach a point where we have to live more like our ancestors again. Technology won't go away, but it will be adapted to operate in these new conditions.
Kilts have a long and honorable tradition in Sotland and you're right, they are connected to loincloths! They could in fact be categorized as "waistclothes", the ancient Egyptians wore similar attire! European knights wore waistclothes well into the 16th century!
Vix
If we take our anthropological lenses, what do we see? We actually see a rather ancient image! People who form a quasi-tribe and engage in a form of game while also socializing! I believe that most people fail to recognize how ancient this behavior truly is!
Hewwo George
Do you believe that most modern ideas are mental constructs? Things which were reasoned into existence?
I don’t believe that explicit knowledge is bad, but I believe that it is not superior to implicit knowledge. Certain things developed the way they did because they had an evolutionary or cultural advantage: take for example the mountain dwellers of Switzerland, Austria and Bavaria: their traditional clothes look strange for outsiders but they make technically perfect sense: they use robust leather and protective hoods, hats and caps to protect against the cold wind which is a constant up in the higher mountain regions. Everyone who sees a “Zipfelkappe” finds them curious and endearing, but most observers fail to realize that it’s look and function have developed through century-long trial and error. It protects the neck and the forehead (which is prone to frontal sinusitis when constantly exposed to very cold air), it’s light in weight but is also made from sufficiently thick material to also offer protection against the wetness of rain and the naturally occurring fogs. Again, this cap has developed through centuries of trial and error, it was not developed by a bunch of intellectuals who sat at a table and designed a cap (which is the case today with most products, from cars to movies). I don’t want to imply that intelligent people can’t develop useful things, far from it, but I want to say that the things which have developed through many centuries have served a purpose, things didn’t just “come into existence” out of nowhere, that’s not how humans think and act. Humans traditionally only keep things which have proven their worth over time. I mean who seriously believes that tribesmen in Africa sit around the fire and debate what they should believe in and what new things they should design? They don’t think like this at all and I know what I’m talking about, I’ve spent quite a while around hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers act they way they do because this is how they have evolved over countless millennia. The Zulu and Himba didn’t start to behave the way they do and to wear the things they wear out of a sense for fashion: their cultures, rituals, beliefs and even their clothes came about through many millennia of trial and error. But my view isn’t new, anthropologists know these things since the 19th century. Same goes for religious beliefs in many cases: there are tribesmen in Africa who believe that it is unholy to kill a certain number of animals. This was seen as “primitive” by early anthropologists, but over time they came to understand why the tribesmen have these beliefs and views: if they kill too many animals, they bring about an ecological catastrophe. The explanation of the tribesmen might look weird for the outsider, since they don’t make any modern “rational” arguments. They don’t say “if we do this, then we’re going to have this ecological debacle”, no, they instead say “the gods/spirits will be angry if we do this. We don’t want to make them angry, because we will suffer when they get angry”. What looks like “primitive superstition” is in fact behavior which makes perfectly sense and has developed through countless centuries of implicit learning (this also explains why very different cultures came to similar conclusions, the native American Sioux have never met Ötzi the iceman and his peers, but both of these groups developed similar functioning equipment and clothing).
*looks intimidated
Those who grow up and leave their childish whimsical nature behind are certainly killing a part of themselves.
For a while I was the typical internet atheist, scoffing at notions of sky-god. Lately it's become much more appealing to look at religion as an extended family. 'Communal story time', rather than the typical "live by these rules or we'll kill you" that's been fed to us. Fits into my view of government along the same lines very neatly as well.
Thank you, you are right, everyone seems to hate the current time period, it doesn't matter to who you talk, everyone seems ironically enough to agree that the present time sucks. I mean it's rather amusing that all political factions seem to agree for once about something, haha.
I wouldn't call it whimsical, because we all are basically by nature like this. It's modern man who wages his finger against things like the Bible, folklore and traditional dances and clothes. Modern man is in fact the childish fool, a creature who desperately wants to be something which he isn't. It's like a frog who wants to be an eagle. The frog might be capable of painting himself in the colors of an eagle and might even be able to make a quack which somewhat resembles an eagle’s sound, but it still is a frog pretending to be an eagle at the end of the day. Modern man is a tribesman, a hunter-gatherer pretending to be an enlightened space traveler.
I think that your experience is unfortunately a rather typical one, I for once never understood why people in the West fall so easily for really weird anti-religious propaganda, but this changed when I saw how religion and religious people are constantly and literally every minute demonized in Western media. It’s just ridiculous, as if Baptists and Presbyterians are waiting with guns in their hands to round up everyone who disagrees with them. Are we really supposed to believe that Mormons are planning to take over the world and kill all gays? I’m Catholic but even I have to cringe when I see nonsense like this. It’s like saying that all Sikhs want secretly to behead dogs. Absurd.
My favorite media-made stereotype is that religions promise world peace (or that religions will somehow bring about world peace). No religion which I ever heard of actually claimed to offer world peace. Not even Buddhism (to the best of my knowledge) offers world peace, it only offers enlightenment. I personally blame the media for these nonsensical lies. The media in the West aggressively perpetrate lies about the religions and the religious (and not just with regards to religions, look how weirdly they portray Africa. I can attest that their portrayals of Africa are 100 percent nonsense. We don’t live nakedly in burning cities surrounded by rape and war. There are war-torn places, but most African countries are not at war nor do their cities burn and cannibalism isn’t a far spread phenomenon in Africa. We have the internet, computers, cars, a police force and even militaries. We’re not living in a Mad Max like hellscape, lol. There are problems in Africa, but most of our problems have to do with a lack of good medicine, water and corrupt politicians, not post-apocalyptic nuclear wars).
I believe that you’re a wise man, my friend! I would love to know what you think about religions now. You said that your views changed?
I don't want to turn my thoughts into there being a shadowy uni-party behind the scenes that is steering both viable parties toward authoritarianism, but it is quite the seductive tale.
I really like your comment above about the hard-won generational development of much of our knowledge. It shines through in some examples I'd had in my head a long while. Mostly about religion's rules for clean living and avoiding disease. Proscriptions against eating meat mixed together from multiple animals (such as in sausage), obviously that was about containing the spread of disease, if you got one sick animal you wouldn't poison the whole batch of food. I don't really understand why wearing clothing of mixed fibers is verboten, but that's an easy one to throw out as 'just superstitious junk'. Tea ceremonies being mostly about washing with a little bit of making tea afterwords. Monogamy and a strong family being massively beneficial to all stages of life. I had my doubts about the monogamy bits specifically, but it truly does look to reduce quarrel and strife in the household in many ways. Mormons taking on multiple wives stems from their warring nature, it was a social welfare safety net for the benefit of widows rather than some sort of sex-harem.
Some of that knowledge is certainly lost over time. Even in the very short term, take a look at the generic lifting "sling hook" used on cranes, cables, and chains; it has a vestigial feature that has become aesthetic rather than functional. At the point of the hook you'll see a lot of them curve back out away from the mouth of the hook. This little hooked beak on the end used to be to wrap iron wire around the back of the hook where it narrows, to close the mouth and keep the hook attached to whatever you're lifting. Nowadays it is rare that you'll find one which has the correct angles to this feature for it to be used as originally intended, I see this as a much worse oversight than simply omitting the feature altogether.
Anyways, I just recently came across a bunch of wonderful work by Thomas Sowell, namely about how intellectuals are oftentimes wrong while hard-earned traditional wisdom is proven correct because it has been observed rather than imagined. It kind of plays into that anti-religious propaganda you mention. These intellectuals need to break the grip of traditional wisdom in order to maintain their own self-worth, because they cannot produce anything other than their thoughts and ideas.
To my own world of religion... My parents were both raised strictly regimented Catholics, so with the bitter taste left from that they did not raise their children as such. I was one to scoff at the concept of worshipping 'sky-god' and was fixated on these depictions of religion being a destructive and hateful force of corruption and money-grubbing.
Nowadays, I can see a whole lot more constructive features of organized religions (well, not really islam, that one stands out in being more down the line of excusing ones own failures as 'god's will') and I can look past the negative corruptions that have wormed their way in over the years.
Even a slight/gentle discouragement of homosexuality can easily be seen as shepherding people toward the easiest path that results in the most happiness for the greatest proportion of humans. If I could be normal I certainly would be, tried multiple times. There isn't really anything to be prideful about for other men catching my eye, as the media would have everyone believe, nothing to be ashamed of either, but... To actively encourage such a lifestyle might cause it to be adopted by those who it doesn't come naturally to. It is undeniably a tougher path toward continued happiness, especially later in life when your family comes to an end rather than continuing on through any children you'd have produced.
You’re right! You list some very good examples of implicit learning and knowledge! All of these things might look weird to the outsider, but they have evolved to make perfect sense. We humans actually learn far easier through stories than through sterile information. “Iron man” and “Little Red Riding Hood” appeal more to our tastes than mere data.
Your example with the “sling hooks” is a very good one, it shows that some traditional knowledge which has been gained through trial and error has been lost in less than a generation, which is worrisome. The fetishization of explicit data has become so aggressive that even common-sense logic is often thrown out the window.
Professor Sowell is correct, this actually happens constantly! I had professors at my university who - despite 150 existing fencing manuals from the medieval period – made the stupid claim that fencing during the medieval period was just mindless beating with heavy, almost dull swords. This claim is easily disproven, as we don’t actually have heavy or dull swords from that period and the existing fencing manuals show a highly sophisticated and advanced way of fencing during that time period (it makes sense, why would people who are dependent on blade weapons be incompetent with them?). This might be my African ancestry, but I for one never cared about credentials, I’ve heard some of the highest-ranking historians in Germany making completely absurd statements.
I think I know what you mean. It’s unfortunately true that there is corruption in many religions, however, most human institutions are corruptible, I blame human nature. One of the things which worries me about religious developments in the West is that religion is more and more understood to be a rigorous set of behavioral rules, which seems to contradict the original intention of belief.
The struggle with sexuality is an ancient thing, even the oldest cultures describe such situations and conditions. I’ve read multiple accounts from ancient Greece where men described their love to other men but also the contradictory emotions which they felt. It’s remarkable that homosexuality is constantly a subject in modern conversation, despite the fact that most religions seem to barely care about it. The interesting thing is that the Bible mentions homosexuality only ten times in total, there are vastly more verses about pork and how to dress oneself. Christ himself never even spoke about homosexuality and was completely silent about the topic. Yet it continues to be a highly controversial subject both inside and outside of the Church.
For a while I tried figuring out the lines of division between the two largest factions in the US, the social liberals {D} and classical liberals {R} but after a while I gave up. Both sides hate the rise in authoritarianism when you talk to them individually, they use their own biased language to evoke emotion against the other side, but at the heart of it they're both arguing against the same shit.
Where the modern liberals run into trouble is with how their keynesian economic policy requires much more authoritarian power over the economic markets to be granted to the state when compared to the classical liberals' much more hands-off self regulating approach to the economy. The keynesian economic policy is also very seamlessly integrated into the ideas of social welfare and all these emotionally evocative ideas of social justice and racial equity and just a welfare state in general. Governmental redistribution of wealth is not a natural thing, it requires force and coercion, after all.
It seems that no matter where there is power over others, corruption worms its way in.
Whether it is governmental direct power over people (religion's powers fit in here as well) or instead a softer influence of power such as having an amplified voice from their education... Humanity just seems to default to this egotism.
Some added depth to it, sometimes people go into that so deeply that they come out the other end into a sort of post-scarcity altruistic mindset, like Carnegie and his libraries.
That's the weird thing: both sides of the political spectrum seem to be afraid of political authoritarianism and both sides accuse the other of wanting more power. The truth is that neither side has any real or realistic chances of ever truly getting into power. The Right thinks that they control the military and the Left believes that they rule Academia and the Media (including Hollywood) but both is fantasy. The military, the academia and the media are all controlled by those who control the flow of money. Manuel III of the Kongo famously said “allow your slaves to think that they have some power over their destiny and they will make much better servants. No one who realizes that he’s trapped inside a cage will ever make a good and loyal servant.”
I think that one of the main problems lies in Enlightenment ideals how humans "ought to be" not how they truly are by nature. Humans are both violent and hierarchical by nature, two things which stand in strong contrast to the Enlightenment ideals which postulated that humans are peaceful and equal by nature (equal in rank, not really biologically equal, this concept came later). I mean if you look at WEF you see a bunch of rich and historically illiterate people who just utter nonsense about "humanity". It's hard enough to get Italians and French sit at the same table, let alone to have Nigerians and South Africans agree about anything.
Calls to mind the old adage 'If there were any power in voting, they wouldn't let us do it.'
It is easy to get anyone agreeing with how most of the useful power wielded by the influential is in their control over the flow of information. Link it to money directly and people get really strange, like we're all programmed to disavow any questioning of "the banking elite" hah.
Other parts of your post also call to mind the main workings of any 'fiat currency' system.
Namely allowing the labors of those that hold that currency to be siphoned off at will by whoever controls the printing of it.
All a bunch of junk that a few individuals cannot hope to meaningfully change, so instead we all just plod along living life as well as we can while avoiding the traps set to indenture us little people. Time is the only true currency after all, and it is much too easy to find your time cut short when you dare to rattle the bars.
That's a very accurate adage!
That's the funny thing: the rulers of the Western world had a really easy game with their servant classes: they just produced machines which spied on them and the people even paid for these house spies! It's disturbing when you think about it!
Right, many people fail to understand that currency used to be gold-based. This is however no longer the case. Our current system in the West basically uses fictional capital which has no real equivalent in either gold, silver or jewelry, which is a first in human history.
That's true, time is one of the most valuable things but we have a limited amount of minutes in our lives and we waste large parts of our existence with tiresome and even useless tasks.
Everyone's seen some little kid puffed up and pretending to be 'all grown up and responsible'
I look at whimsy as the antonym to such a dour attitude.
C.S. Lewis wrote the following dedication in his novel, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to his goddaughter, Lucy Barfield: "My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate godfather."