Fascism and GeoCaching

Life is boring.

I have two cats, and, like all animals who don't need to worry about where their next meal is coming from, just sort of sit around all day. Humans, on the other hand, are an odd species out. Rather than simply accepting that there isn't, latently, anything more to it all than just sort of lying around, we demand that life has some sort of ACTUAL meaning to it. We assign meaning to things: we come up with grand ideas, we choose careers, we join causes, etc. in part because without meaning, life to human beings is boring.

But just because humans tend to become depressed when they realize that life has no default meaning or universal overarching point, doesn't mean that it does. As such, in the end, it winds up falling upon us to MAKE that meaning (which we then tend to turn around and believe was there all along). In the end, religion has done an excellent job in giving people meaning along with other ideologies and organizations. We get meaning and purpose, but also identity and understanding, even if we have to make it up ourselves. Life is boring otherwise.

This brings us to fascism. At it's heart, fascism is little more than a rejection of modernity (itself built on a series of systems). The old, medieval systems of giving life meaning and purpose were out, and now, two to three hundred years later, we still haven't figured out how capitalism, industrialization, secularism, liberalism, urbanization etc. is supposed to fill the void. Fascism's answer is to reject modern ideas and return to a life where understanding is governed by an abstract idea of faith, a die-hard sense of community, and purpose in one's occupation. The end result is a quasi-mystical, iron-clad state that is based on a corporatist model.

If I get my sense of identity and propose from my volk, I don't need to frantically scramble for it in a world that is undirected where everybody's way of finding meaning is equal, and thus relative (and thus fundamentally unsatisfying to most people). Of course, this idea of nationalism can quickly lead to an exclusion of non-volkish people. Combined with the power of a state, fascism showed us very well in the 1930's how genocide can be quickly orchestrated based on a warped search for personal meaning.

So herein lies the problem. On the one hand, we have a very old mindset, in one form or another, that assigns people deep personal meaning and understanding, while at the same time causing inquisitions and genocides. On the other, we have a mutual respect for everyone's story, along with the tacit understanding that there is no ONE story, which leads people to vainly attempt to ascertain meaning on their own in an unsupportive, relative, constructivist, post-positivist world. No wonder fascism is making a comeback.

But this brings us to geo-caching. For those who don't know, the basic idea is that someone hid a nalgene bottle really well somewhere and all you get is the GPS coordinates. With some sort of a hand-held GPS reciever, you go tromping through woods and parks and wherever trying to find these sometimes very well hidden, sometimes very difficult to reach containers. When you finally find it, the reward is getting to put your name on a little notebook in the Nalgene along with a note. I got to do this for the first time today, and let me tell you, it was quite an experience.

The thing is, the world is still the same, with the same park benches, and the same bridges, and the same boring everything. Now, with geo caching, there is a quest, a purpose to it all. Now you have something that you need to explore, and something that you need to achieve (and the sense of achievement when you finally find the things is quite satisfying). The plain old boring, has been transformed into the creative and meaningful, while exploring and learning about your community, rather than ritually murdering a particular group out of it.

In the end, fascism and geo-caching have a core problem that they both address. As such, it seems to me like there should be other systems out there like geo caching that can allow us to have meaning in the otherwise mundane, while at the same time actually supporting the search and results thereof, while causing happiness without needless bloodshed.