Shamans, Poverty, and Kerouac

 There was a time where I thought I was going to write a book with the following thesis: a great deal of mental illnesses are tied to a need that human tribes had for something like 2-4 shamans per 100 people, and that the purpose of a shaman is to break out of traps normies get into since they construct reality on shared opinions and deference to authority. A shaman is off doing their own crazy things and is only listened to during certain rituals, or during a crisis.

But as societies gained mass, fewer and fewer shamans were needed. Monasteries were a place to house the shamanic, but I reckon they tended to be run by normies.

Eventually people had enough mobility (a right very much taken for granted by us moderns) that the shamanic could find nooks and crannies to exist in urban areas. William Blake. The Surrealists. Kerouac and the Beats.

In each of these cases, you have artists living in poverty, paying a real price to be different.

That's what struck me in my reread of "The Dharma Bums": all the poverty. For the most part cheerful, honorable poverty, but still poverty. Hitchhiking, train jumping, sleeping on beaches or even in ditches by the woods, and living in shacks that are behind the main house on a property, with only straw mats as furniture.  

Capitalism has moved on, as have the mediums that are the messages[1]. Now someone shamanic needs to make a product that sells, just like everyone else -- how about in tech? ... If you must make content, then how about a video about after each step of your journey, trying for no later than a week[2] after?  Then your work can "benefit" from all sorts of feedback and analytics. ("Okay, less Buddhism and more on the camping gear... wow, that video were I explained my theory about who really owns the ((media)) really popped, maybe I should just do more vids like that...")

So the shaman becomes a commodity, like everything else. And if it doesn't perform in the market, then it is a failure.

==

[1] I know media is plural, but I think it's time to drop the idea that any part of the public is a pedant, let alone a classics scholar.  

[2] All of the adventures in "The Dharma Bums" occurred before the 1957 publican of "On the Road." It is a little difficult to tell from my cursory research, but I think most, if not all of "Bums" was written before "Road" became a hit.