Big Dumb System

Now that I'm in my mid 50s, I am starting to have some brushes with the "end of life racket", which was thankfully out of sight and consequently out of mind for most of my prior life. That racket shows how bleak and regimented the middle class life is.

People march down a toll road over their whole life. They scrimp and save so they can give as much money as possible to hospitals, nursing homes, and finally funeral directors who collect the last fee. A careful person might manage to get a good pile of money to their heirs. A careless person will get worked over by this system entirely and go from a wealthy middle class person to a pauper in a handful of years of decrepitude.

Even body disposal is weirdly expensive. It must be a cartel situation, which is certainly aided by the government and regulation. You could empty out 150 pounds of meat from a freezer, put it in a garbage bag and chuck it in the trash, for example and nobody would bat an eye. Of course there are myriad taboos and legal versions of the same that ensure the funeral racket keeps collecting thousands of dollars per stiff.

I doubt it's legal to build a funeral pyre in most states, for example, but it is legal to incinerate a corpse at a funeral home. A well constructed and fueled wood fire will melt metals. Incinerating a body with a wood fires would be pretty cheap and was fit for kings and warriors for centuries. It's probably also illegal to dig a hole and bury a body like generations of settlers in the US did, although people bury dogs, horses, cows, etc... on their property all the time in rural and even suburban areas.

A few years ago, an unfortunate deer was hit by a car and died on my property. I put her under a large pile of wood chips in the woods, probably double the diameter of her body and three times as deep. I couldn't smell the decomposing body at all, nor did any scavengers disturb the pile. That much carbon rich material basically soaks up any nastiness. I used the wood chips in the garden a couple of years later. Of course there wasn't a trace of flesh left. Eventually even the bones break down.

One of the problems of the "highly organized" economy is the average person becomes a totally unskilled dope whose life is hemmed in by lies spun by douchebags and scammers who want their piece of the money pie. They can't even imagine there's an alternative to the set of cartel offered services and life rituals.

They also are maintained in a sort of fantasy land unreality existence because somebody else "does it" whatever it is. This type of person is the "urban/suburban housecat". They do their job, which is often some abstract nonsense, then pay skilled people to do absolutely everything else in their life. This has apparently led to an overall denial of the realities of life because everything can be managed by "experts" and everything can be "fixed".

Romanization

One of the core elements of the fantasy genre is it is set in the negative space of the current day world which is fully "Romanized" for lack of a better term. Like in the fantasy genre, there's no police officers giving parking tickets to the characters. Instead they are dealing directly with the forces of nature and creatures embodying the same. Also there's no churches and christianity.

Contemplating this topic got me thinking how absolutely weird officialdom is. It's loaded with cosplay and mandatory honorifics and titles and all that kind of nonsense. For example a "judge" wears a robe and people in a courtroom are forced to pay various honors to some rando dude or woman, like "all rise" and such. In England the judges still wear a white wig for some bizarre reason. Lawyers spend their whole professional life in that world of nonsense and procedures. Politicians who are basically the landfill of humanity spend all day citing their titles to each other. "The news" apes that behavior to anybody who cares to listen to their blah blah. Hospitals are another example. The employees wear color coded garments and different outfits that denote their status and rank. The police are a paramilitary organization with ranks and hats. Priests in the Catholic church wear a uniform. When they "perform" a mass they wear a fancy pants version of it. It goes on and on. In fact, almost every aspect of human life is enmeshed in some official structure in the current day world, especially if you live in a city. People believe, for example, professional care is required to die, even.

In the fantasy genre, the characters typically exist in a frontier type world; if officialdom exists in the story, it's typically entirely corrupt. For example, the soldiers guarding some castle or outpost are typically expendable cannon fodder. In movies that's signaled partially by their uniforms which generally contrast with the main character's outfits. The main villain guy might wear some elaborate outfit, sit on a throne, etc...

It's maybe not such a surprise the northern europeans "remember" their heritage via the fantasy genre, especially if it's encoded in their DNA, even after 1000+ years of romanization and absolutism of the catholic church. Romanization basically ends where the pavement does, which is also quite a fascinating pattern to think about.

More of The Fantasy Genre

 

There's a band named Heilung who according to the wikipedia

...describe their music as "amplified history from early medieval northern Europe". Their music is usually about Germanic deities, the Jǫtnar, and valkyries. "Heilung" is a German noun meaning "healing"

Maybe there's a core set of feelings and ideas associated with genetics that the fantasy genre expresses. Perhaps that used to be the religion of the northern europeans.

Metal Popularity and Hunter Gatherer DNA

This is a follow up to the "what is the fantasy genre" post.

It's pretty common for metal bands to borrow or embody tropes from the fantasy genre. The band "Castle Rat" is a case in point.

If you look at a map of "hunter gatherer" DNA in western europe and a map of metal band popularity they seem to overlap well.

Metal Bands per Million People by Country

WHG Admixture Map

The different color schemes in the maps make the correlation hard to see clearly, but it seems pretty good. There are some outliers, like Greece has a really high number of metal bands per capita compared to the WHG admixture, but the overall scheme lines up.

A Problem with a Life Based on Utilitarianism

The thing I really wanted to get to in the previous post is many of the activities people engage in out of apparent "utility" are really cult rituals: high school band or football are two great examples. The average family when I was in school thought those activities were valuable and heavily censured many non-sanctioned activities which were only for weirdos, like a kid who might continue playing dungeons and dragons into their senior year in high school, or who played with matchbox cars or whatever age inappropriate thing would be seen as a total freak or "loser", which was the ultimate bogeyman when I was a kid.

It turned out that "band" was significantly more useful than football in my high school than any of the organized sports. A weirdly high number of kids in my band program went on to be professional musicians in some capacity. Some became successful professional musicians. Others went on to be music educators. AFAIK, none of the people who played football went onto be a professional athlete of any kind and those who went onto earn high incomes in their adult life were in professions that had nothing to do with organized sports and are lawyers or dentists or whatever, which is really the norm for the "successful" band people too. Thankfully, I don't think any of the kids in our school suffered CTE or other chronic injuries from football, but that does happen of course. Some kids did get their knees wrecked and a few were chronic 'roid abusers, but I don't think they continued that after high school, but even a few years of heavy steroid use can cause long term physical damage to key organs and tissue.

I think the typical lesson an adult would draw, in retrospect, from their time in various organized activities like sports or band or school plays would be: "I learned to train and prepare and get better at something." That is, even though what they did was boring, maybe high pressure, or even painful and physically demanding, they were able to plow through and maybe even win, or perform perfectly and get applause or whatever. 

A kid could learn the same lessons, maybe in a significantly better way, from self directed ad hoc activities and games. I can cite several examples of kids, including myself, who became proficient at a hobby well outside the official activities of a school. For example, one of my good friends in high school went onto be a professional race car driver for a few seasons and ended up making car racing his vocation. I raced bicycles through college and into my adult life and always did that in a self-directed trial and error way and managed to at least win some races over my amateur career. I even helped organize a handful of amateur races over the years through the early 2000s. The people I know who do self-directed endurance sports, like running, triathlon, road bike racing, or similar sports are, as adults, even adults in their 70s, significantly healthier than their peers. I know a guy who in his early 70s completed a grueling gravel bike race with several thousand feet of elevation gain for example. 

In retrospect, the claims of utility made by the "organized" sports or activities in high school, that is, it would eventually "pay off" while the self-directed ad hoc activities were seen as second or third tier by comparison were severely overstated, at least for me and the people I grew up with.

Serious LARPs

When I was in middle school and high school my friends and I played lots of different kinds of games. For some years, we played AD&D almost every weekend. We also played different board strategy games like Conquest of the Empire. We also organized paintball tournaments, which got quite popular so there were dozens of kids running around in the woods. All that stuff was very fun but those things also had the tendency to fizzle out for reasons that were mysterious at the time, and even with 40+ years of hindsight, I'm not sure why they fell apart.

By contrast, the "official" activities like organized team sports or various music or performance oriented activities like band or plays, happened year after year and consumed probably hundreds of hours of mine and my friends lives per year. The ad hoc play activities which were generally much more "fun" competed for just a few hours of time per month maybe.

I was in several high school band activities and was good at playing so eventually I had a scholarship in college for it, but I was never that interested in it, and never contemplated it as a vocation. I knew all along I'd stop playing once I was free from school. I sold my sax the same day I graduated from college. I probably played two times in the subsequent decades.

High school band is a weird ritualistic activity. Most kids who are really into music are interested in pop music, rock and roll and other genres which are mainly guitar based and all about getting the attention of the fans. However, when I was in school, there were never guitar parts in band, nor any opportunity to learn or play guitar in school. At least 50%, probably more like 75% of the kids in the band were not even interested in music as a hobby or as an important element of their life. They were in band because their parents thought they should do something like that because colleges wanted kids to be in extra-curricular activities.

In retrospect, it's obvious that organized high school sports were a version of the same thing, but with some game involved. In our school, football was the big sport, and it was even more pointless and ritualistic from the point of view of life prep than even band was. Some of the high school football kids suffered life changing injuries like completely blowing out their knee, or took steroids to be on the team and got nothing out of it beyond high school.

As far as I know, none of the kids in my graduating class went on to play division 1 college football and nobody in the history of my high school ever played professional football. Just a handful of my classmates that played high school football went on to play football in college for small liberal arts schools where the sports programs were de-emphasized to the point it was more of a liability or an opportunity cost to play.

In spite of that, in the years since I graduated high school, the community plowed a huge amount of resources into the high school football team, literally millions of dollars to build a fancy new stadium, but the program continues in the same mode as the late 1980s in terms of not creating NFL players or Division 1 quarterbacks, etc...

Anyway, this is just another investigation into what people consider "serious" versus "play". All the official high school sanctioned activities like football or band were in the "serious" category versus our paintball games, however, as discussed above they're all basically the same kind of thing, basically LARPing.

What is The "Fantasy" Genre?

I recently watched a few videos by the band "Castle Rat".

The lead singer is a pretty woman in her prime, and wears a skimpy outfit, but apart from the side boob and butt cheeks in the videos, the compelling thing about them is nostalgia for 1970s/1980s Sci-Fi and Fantasy media from that era. It really takes me back. It's like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life. I can smell the used book store scent in my mind.

I'm not sure how that aesthetic continued on to the present day so the artistic style of a band made up of people born maybe in the late 1990s or early 2000s would be steeped in it. I stopped paying as much attention to the fantasy genre by the time I was a junior in high school and was learning to drive. 

One of my good school friends and I are still in touch regularly and both were into the sword and sorcery stuff in the middle school years and occasionally reminisce about it. I was really steeped in that realm of concepts for a few years from maybe from around 1982 until 1986 or so. We played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back then, and it was sort of part of the "job" to read and steep in the lore of the overall genre.

The sword and sorcery fantasy realm is another instance of a very detailed "shared hallucination" as is evidenced by the Castle Rat videos which draw on the shared visual vocabulary of that genre. My friends and I sort of lived in that fantasy realm and visited the "real world" of school and the like from the age of about 12-14 maybe 15 at the latest. We also had a "real world" version of the fantasy realm, like exploring caves and cliffs in our neighborhoods in Munson or having a campfire at the end of the day of exploring and hanging out.

All that stuff was pretty fun and interesting. I'd say, in general, "real life" failed to measure up. This is a really common scenario, by the way. Most people I know seem to vastly prefer their LARPs and hobbies to their jobs and the day to day grind of life.

The fantasy genre is really ancient, of course, it goes back to the oldest known recorded story: The Epic of Gilgamesh so it seems likely people had a similar fantasy versus the drudgery of normal life split in their minds. Anyway, it's interesting to ponder what people are "really doing" with such a pastime. The woman in the Castle Rat videos is acting out concepts that people have in their heads for thousands of years, like walking around in the woods with a sword or bow and arrow drawn and ready to fight some mysterious foes.

A lot of hobbies that aren't really obviously related to something like the fantasy genre exist in a similar realm of mind, like Mountain Biking or Road Biking are that for me. An MTB ride is a little adventure excursion and battle against various forces and trying to rack up experience points, basically.