Ran Prieur

October 7.

2016-10-07T19:50:58Z

October 7. Leigh Ann says my last post sounds like an Enneagram 1, and that if I really understood fun, I wouldn't have to argue that it's important, because it's enough that it's fun.

It's true, keeping life fun is not something I do naturally but something I have to work at. This post, The problem with perfection, describes how falling away from fun has happened in classical music:

Imagine a theatre where the author dictates the speed at which the actors should read each sentence, and how loudly each word should be read, the length of each word and the tonal character of the voice of the actor.

On to my usual weekend subject, drugs and music: High Hitler is an article about a new book, Blitzed, and the close relation between Nazi Germany and powerful stimulants. German chemists invented methamphetamine, and soldiers all took it so they could stay awake for three days and nights and invade France. Hitler himself was addicted to cocaine and oxycodone, and Mussolini was getting the same drugs from the same doctor. At the end, on top of losing the war, they were all going through withdrawal.

Anyone on cannabis will enjoy this video, Minecraft Acid Interstate V2. I hate the music, but I love how the video is synchronized to the music, with the stone things passing exactly on the beats. It shouldn't be too hard to make software that can take any music and go farther, with different kinds of trees and buildings matching different instruments and vocals.

And some better music. Diane Coffee is the stage name of Shaun Fleming. He's a good songwriter and performs with an energy that's going to make him much more famous than he is now. I think his strongest song is WWWoman, and here's a live performance (at 14:05) of his prettiest song, Green.

In honor of Hurricane Matthew, here's a video I made in 2014 using footage of Typhoon Haiyan, and a live graphic mapping its location and wind speeds.

October 4.

2016-10-04T16:20:40Z

October 4. When I said that a perfect life is one with no obligations, I was trying to get at something more fundamental, but so obvious it's hardly worth saying: a perfect life is one where every action is intrinsically rewarding. And a perfect society is one where every action by everyone is intrinsically rewarding.

This is not as unrealistic as it sounds. At the beginning of his book In Search of the Primitive, Stanley Diamond argues that many tribal cultures, said by anthropologists to make no distinction between work and play, would be more fairly described as doing no work. Of course they do lots of stuff that might feel like work to us, but they carefully maintain a cultural and psychological context where everything necessary to keep the tribe going feels like what we would call play.

How did we get from there to here, where we spend half our lives doing useful chores, and the other half having useless fun, with almost no overlap? This is how I imagine the Fall of Man: not that we were lured from innocent righteousness by wicked fun, but that we were lured from fun by stodgy pragmatism, when someone said, "I don't care if you don't feel like doing it, you're going to do it anyway." Or maybe it started with prehistoric slavery, and once it became normal to separate useful activity from freely chosen activity, it got locked in, and it spread.

An activity redefined as a chore can be done on a consistent schedule, instead of waiting for people to feel like doing it. This is what we call industry, and it drags related activities into the same mind space -- if horseshoes can't depend on a whim, then nails can't depend on a whim. And if you try to go back, you have to pass through a stage where nobody wants to do any of that shit, and any benefits gained will be lost.

So what can we do about it? On the level of society, there are utopian dreams of re-merging the useful and the fun, but we're actually getting somewhere with another strategy: to shift the whole world of useful chores to machines, and leave humans doing only useless fun. I support this one hundred percent. Of course there will be challenges, described in dystopian fiction from The Machine Stops to WALL-E, but I trust human nature. If we all have the absolute right to do nothing, we will eventually learn to do things that reconnect us in a healthy way to the wider world.

Meanwhile, is there anything we can do on a personal level, maybe change our outlook so that our chores feel more like play? Once I stayed at an intentional community where the idea was that work would feel meaningful if people were doing it for their friends. In practice that didn't happen, and there were firm requirements, enforced by penalties, to do more hours of work per week than a frugal person can get away with in the dominant society. But one guy did figure out a mind hack. He turned washing dishes into a game, where the crew would try to do it as fast as possible, so they would get credit for however long it was supposed to take, while getting off work sooner and having fun.

Another thing is just to notice what makes us feel better or feel worse, and act on it, especially when it goes against what society calls normal. I just rode my bike to the store in the rain, even though we have a car, because I've noticed that driving is stressful and makes me want to curl up under a blanket, while bicycling is fun and I come home energized, even if I'm less comfortable.

October 1.

2016-10-01T13:50:28Z

October 1. Quick topical note. The Clinton campaign has found Trump's weakness: that he will not back down from public feuds even when he seems to be in the wrong. His first collapse in the polls came right after the Democratic convention when he bizarrely attacked the family of a fallen soldier. Now he's doing it again, making hostile tweets at 3AM in a nonsensical grudge against a former beauty queen.

This is especially bad for Trump because it undermines his strength in the world of myth. Trump represents the trickster archetype, and people are hungry for a trickster because the established order is getting more and more lifeless. But now he seems less like a joker and more like an uptight straight man. He needs to be Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack and he's turning out to be more like Ted Knight, or he needs to be Ferris Bueller and he suddenly seems more like the principal.

Trump could still pull it out if Hillary has more health problems. And even if she wins, she's clearly a one-termer, and in 2020 we're likely to get a trickster president if a candidate without Trump's negatives can play that role.