Send in the Clowns
The Final Frontier

Everyone has lines they don’t dare to cross.  You hear about them all the time from people who tell everyone to just “let go of their inhibitions and try new things”.  How do you know you won’t like eating brussel sprouts unless you’ve tried them?  How do you know you wouldn’t like sky diving unless you’ve tried it?  How do you know that you wouldn’t like getting sh*tfaced drunk unless you’ve tried it?  How do you know you wouldn’t like dropping acid unless you’ve tried it? How do you know you wouldn’t like drinking a quart of bleach unless you’ve tried it?  How do you know you wouldn’t like cutting your leg off with a chainsaw unless you’ve tried it? How do you know you wouldn’t like covering yourself in gasoline and lighting yourself on fire unless you’ve tried it?  And so on... I think all this talk of expanding personal boundaries is really falling short of the mark.  I think the truest, all-inclusive, universal boundary is what I call the line of seriousness.  On this side of the line of seriousness the world makes sense.  On the other side, the world doesn’t make sense.  That line is different for everyone, but everyone has it.
Ultimately, everyone is an uptight conservative, because everyone has something they refuse to let go of.  By hanging onto this thing, whatever it is, they can feel secure that there’s some reason for whatever they’re doing, that it should work, and that other people should take them seriously. Well guess what.  All of civilization is a giant practical joke.  For the first 99.9% of human evolution since our ancestors diverged from the chimpanzees, everyone on Earth lived as stone-age hunter gatherers.  Some people in the world still do, which is why they feel like they’re carrying on such important traditions.  Every infant in the world is born with a stone age brain.  People can learn new things, but the feelings we use to decide how to use what we learn are far, far older than words.  We can build guns, nuclear missiles, and greenhouse gas factories, but we’re still using cave-man instincts to decide how to use them—as you may have noticed.  The whole field of evolutionary psychology is devoted to studying this.

This thing that everyone hangs onto to make their lives make sense is just an illusion, because their lives already don’t make sense.  The people may feel like their lives make sense, and by a very long and complicated chain of logic their lives do make sense, but their lives don’t make sense for the reasons the people think they make sense.  But in order for people to truly find how and why their lives make sense, they have to be willing to cross that line of seriousness, that final frontier, to abandon everything they
thought made sense about the world and trust in their own ability to make sense of the world for themselves.  As always, law and order cannot be forced upon the world by mortal humans, the law and order of the world can only be understood by mortal humans, who can then choose to cooperate with it or to contradict it. Anyone who chooses to contradict the laws of physics
is bound to lose in the end.

So what happens if you’re doing something that doesn’t have anything to do with any laws of physics? Nothing, that’s what.  Since you don’t have any kind of success or failure at stake, it doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it.  So ultimately, what’s the point of hanging onto lines of seriousness that don’t have anything to do with physicsal laws? At the Rocky Horror Picture Show we start out every night with a dance party for about half an hour.  At our last theatre we had a stage with plenty of space on it, but for the longest time, nobody ever wanted to dance.  A few people would sometimes, sometimes nobody would, usually a bunch of people would just get up there and stand around like we were all in f*cking high school of something.  It was getting better after almost two years, but some nights it still took forever for the party to get started.
I figured out the perfect solution to that problem,
though.  For a long time, whenever the dance started,
I would get up there with two other guys and we’d
dance like we were completely f*cking insane.  Why
not?  We had the whole stage to ourselves.  But it
also broke the ice.  First of all, we made the first
move and made it safe for everyone to join in what we
started.   More importantly, we also looked like total
f*cking idiots, but also we obviously had more fun
that anyone else in the theatre.  That way, nobody had
any reason not to come join us, because we pretty well
guaranteed that no matter what anyone else did or how
much fun they had doing it, there was no way they
could look more ridiculous than we did.  Eventually,
my former partners moved on, and so did I, but our
efforts had such a lasting effect on the audience that
they didn’t need any of us to get the party started
anymore.

One of my partners was the late Reverend Jeffery A.
Ralph.  Acting like a complete lunatic to help bring
people together and unleash the full force of their
creative spirits was the very essence of his life.

From that basic principle of creativity bringing
people together, it only stands to reason that what
the world needs is a volunteer guerrilla army of
performance artists spread out all over the world,
loosely organized—if at all—but united by a common
objective:  To have lots of fun entertaining the world
doing simple things that anyone could do, for no
reason.  Fill the world with acrobats, jugglers,
musicians, dancers, amateur performing artists of all
kinds, and the next time you’re stuck standing in line
at the grocery store you’ll never know when the person
in front of you might whip out a harmonica and play a
little tune for everyone, or start reciting a
Shakespearean sonnet.

The point is, these are people who are doing things,
having fun, entertaining people, and not worrying
about what other people might think.

Or to put it another way, this is the complete
opposite of Al-Queda—an army of ordinary-looking
people who just might start entertaining the public at
any time, without warning, thereby making everybody’s
day better, not worse, and making everybody want to go
outside and participate in their communities, not to
stay inside for fear of being killed.

What happens next?  Now you’ve constructed a cultural
background where people are supposed to use the
abilities they have, where they’re supposed to develop
skills for the sake of developing them and use them
for the sake of using them, and they make other
people’s days just a little brighter because of it.
In a culture like that, anything is possible, because
you abolish all social standards of what people are
and aren’t supposed to do.  Some people make good
performing artists, and other people have some
performing arts talents in addition to other talents.

If everyone lives in a culture where some people just
start entertaining other people for fun at any time,
it’s bound to create a carnival atmosphere, where
people are going to enjoy themselves and appreciate
the company of other members of their community, even
total strangers. It’s pretty basic common sense that
people who are in a good mood and who appreciate other
people are going to work together better, get along
with each other better, be less prone to violence and
aggression, and otherwise lead healthier and more
productive lives.  Everyone has some kind of talents
and has to spend their time doing something, so if
using abilities is made socially acceptable, even
people who don’t have any performing arts talents at
all are going to be more inclined to use their
abilities.  Likewise, people will be more inclined to
use their abilities to benefit their communities if
these people are kept in good moods and using
abilities for the benefit of others is made a cultural
value.

Meanwhile, everyone can memorize a poem or a couple
tasteful jokes.  So the next time you’re standing in
line with a bunch of strangers, just start swapping
poems and jokes while you wait instead of everyone
standing there bored or ignoring the people around
them to talk on cell phones to people they already
know.  This would brighten people’s moods and outlooks
on the world, strengthen communities, etc., etc..  It
would also give people insights into the characters
and viewpoints of strangers they meet in a way that
anonymous small talk doesn’t.  Why would people
memorize the poems they do instead of different poems?
 Why do they tell the jokes they do?  How do they tell
their jokes?  What kind of feeling do they put into
their poems?  What kind of a sense of humor do they
have?  What kinds of things interest them the most?

Most importantly, people can’t be snobs about this. If
you and a stranger can both tell jokes or recite
poems, then you both have something in common, no
matter what differences there might be between you.
If someone else puts forth a genuine effort to do
something, it has be a social custom for people to at
least be politely appreciative of the other person’s
effort, if not for the performance itself.  But
neither can people do what they do expecting other
people to react in any particular way, or in any way
at all, because of it.  And it does have to be an
honest effort to entertain others—if you go spewing
profane poetry or just start acting like an obnoxious
idiot in public, don’t expect people to like it.  Or
as I’ve also heard it said, your right to free speech
does not require anyone else to listen to you.  The
point is, people have fun doing things that they think
would be entertaining to the people around them,
without ultimately caring what the other people think.
 At worst you have fun doing something and everyone
ignores you, and at best you entertain people who
weren’t expecting it.

Like it or not, the whole world doesn’t make sense in
the way that it feels like it should.  So at least we
might as well have fun, right?

Why don’t we live in a culture like this already?
It’s as if the world is ruled by passive
mutually-inflicted terrorism.  If people who go out in
public suddenly feel afraid—and are even expected to
feel afraid— to be who they really are because of what
other people will think, what else do you call that?
And what kind of a world do you create that way?

***
Adapted from 42—Evolutionary Science and its uses in
Everyday Life, Civil Rights, and World Peace, by Ezra