This is an excerpt from some essay I planned on the permutations of social structures of the past that now are essentially the same, however masked by the complications and layers of linguistic games (plainly, deception) of the modern time. As there is no category for non-fiction here, I'll mark these entries as 'blogs'.


For the purposes of this text 'bards' means not just singer-songwriters (however this group has special significance) but all artists, and maybe even 'non-productive' intellectuals (e.g. philosophers) in general. After all, you must remember that typical roleplaying game or MUD has only few guilds: thieves, fighters, clerics, magicians, bards. I listed them in the order of importance they occupy, in my perception, in the modern world: thieves being those around money, clerics around ideology and magicians around science and technology. I would also add guild of scribes, or monks, for I classify myself to be in scribes guild: those working with manuscripts of any form, computer software included (mathematics as well). Monks are probably between magicians and bards in that order. However, I'm also an engineer, and thus magician. But as a philosopher, I am between monks and bards. Monks generally are busy with reproduction of manuscripts rather than creating new ones, however they participate in processes of classification and generalization of knowledge (as in Umberto Eco's 'Name of the Rose').

Bards: the paradox of this vocation is that majority thinks it is useless, despite at least one immediately visible effect of their work: affecting moods, improving (managing) psychological conditions of the crowds. However, bards probably do the most important in the longest run job. They work with programs constituting our culture, they are software engineers of human civilization. Due to the short-termism caused by inherently limited human nature, we are mostly concentrated on the 'hardware' of civilization: machinery, popular culture (showbiz folks are not bards, they work with hardware: average human soul - as well as shrinks), politics, finances, fashion, mass production, mass education, technology. In short term, bards do not produce anything. That is why we hear so often: this great artist died in poverty and oblivion, and was recognized only 200 years after his death.

Well, the majority regards as useless everything that surpasses narrow boundaries of their imagination. Bards work with archetypes, forging new myths and reiterating old ones. They transmit important messages from the past, from our ancestors, and preserve important knowledge. All we created in 20th century, and before - was once described in fairytales. And those fairytales were composed and transmitted through time by bards.

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