February 2018 – Voice of A HOR

The Perfect Gor

The Gorean Compass is a class given every Thursday by Master Gorm Runo. Classes are held at the Gorean Campus and are given at noon and 6pm SLT. All are encouraged to come and join in the amazing discussions.

This class given on February 15, 2018

Tal and greetings,

In the seminar last week, I was asked the question what was my vision of the perfect Gor, and how would they recognize it, if they happened across it.

And later in the week, after the class, I was asked again the first part of the question. What is your vision for Gor?

The very first reaction was to correct the question. It should be very clear that we are discussing a vision of Second Life Gor.

My second reaction to the question was to encourage the person asking that question to go to the blog and read last years classes.

Right from the beginning of the seminar last year, we advanced this premise:

The culture and society of Earth sucks in many ways because it has become too soft.

and

The culture and society of the fictional planet of Gor introduced in a series of Science Fiction novels sucks in many ways because it is too hard.

The quotation that we used to back up this Counter-Earth way of looking at Gor was in Marauders of Gor, Book 9.

“Many of the competitive moralities of Earth are thus mistaken.

But, what is not mistaken?

The Goreans have very different notions of morality from those of Earth.

Yet, who is to say who is the more correct?

I envy sometimes, the simplicities of those of Earth, and those of Gor, who, creatures of their conditioning are untroubled by such matters, but I would not be as either of them. If either is correct, it would be a lucky coincidence.”

Page 7 Marauders of Gor

“I would not be as either of them”

Tarl lays it out on the next page very clearly. The main difference is in the idea that Earth has become “too soft” and Gor is “too hard”

This is what we spoke of when we talked of that old German philosopher guy who spoke of the Uber Mensch, or Superior Man. It was suggesting a philosophy that embraced a very balanced and positive approach to life.

The model of the Gorean novels is this in a nutshell. A person who was raised and educated on Earth goes to Gor and becomes a superior person.

They become a superior person because they can hold on to the good of Earth and reject the bad, and embrace the good of Gor without succumbing to the bad.

When you look at the history of online Gor, and especially Second Life Gor, you see we seemed to have gotten that completely backwards.

We came here with all the baggage of the soft weak Earth culture, and embraced a lot of what was supposed to be the “bad” side of Gor.

Strangely enough, most of the people doing this called it “BTB”, but it should have been called,
“BTFW” by the fictional world. If it were BTB, it would always be an upward journey toward that more balanced superior model. The books were not rocket science. They were blatant in their laying out of a higher standard, and they were blatant in their examples of what was wrong with Earth and what was wrong with Gor. We were shown both extremes and all the signs were pointing to a balanced middle ground. It was a very simple morality tale.

Everyone always says that there are as many interpretations of Gor as there are people reading the books, and this is true as far as an understanding of the parameters of the middle ground. Exactly, how we attain this balance differs from person to person, but to suggest this is not the goal the books are pointing us to is to totally miss their message.

It is one of those “too soft” things when you suggest there are interpretations of the books that allow you to “do whatever you want to do.” The books are clearly telling us that the danger is at the extremes, and that idea that we are not bound together by codes and rules and standards and limitations or that somehow we are all equal and the same is the soft weak extreme that is beginning to permeate Earth.

When I first read and understood the Gorean novels, I had a vision. How great it would be if there was some way to build that balanced world. What if we could have a place where we could be the narrators of the novels. We could be Tarl, and Jason, or those young girls wisked away to Gor. And we would go there as strong people but with compassion for others, who are going to be asking the question, “why so hard”, at the same time we would be embracing a bit of the toughness and the more natural honest world of Gor. Ah, that was what we called a “pipe dream” , back in the day.

And lo and behold, Linden Labs turned the vision into reality. It wasn’t real, but it wasn’t a game. It wasn’t the planet Gor, but it wasn’t our often mundane RL’s. It was a blank platform hanging somewhere between reality and unreality.

So, I am asked. “What is my vision of a perfect Gor and how would I know it if I happened on it.”

It is a Second Life Gorean community consisting of superior people. They would come into this little section of Second Life into a Brave New World where the standards are very high. . Those virtues that seem to becoming jokes on Earth become the shinning beacons that guide our behavior. Honor, Honesty, Brotherhood, Personal Responsibility, Grace, Beauty, Respect.

People would no longer be “role playing” that they are assholes to cover up the fact that they actually are assholes.

It would be a place where when people logged in, they stopped a moment, took a deep breath, dropped all their baggage, and soared into a World of such incredible excitement and beauty and they had experiences there that made them wiser, stronger, and happier. They were aware that they were superior people, and they would excel. And when they logged back out again, they would be shaking with wonder at the intensity, and would turn and approach that other world, better equipped to deal with it.

The beacon idea, from Hunters of Gor, is the answer to the second part of the question.

Tarl said in that book that he was lighting the beacon to mark the spot he recollected his Honor, and he didn’t really care if anyone saw it or seeing it , if any would understand why it burned, but it was important that it did so.

When you suddenly realize that you are a beacon and the people you are associating with are beacons, then you will know you have found the perfect Gor.

As I said. it has never been rocket science. There are no personal interpretations that justify blaming others for your own failures. Or any that justify whining about things over which you have no control. There is no excuse or defense for weakness. There is such a thing as the Honorable way, and there is morality and there is definitely a right and a wrong.

So, when your online Gorean experience is reflecting those ideas, and the people around you are standing up for them, you will have become part of the perfection of the vision.

As I wrote this talk, I had a vision of Tom Hanks, telling Dottie, in the movie, “League of Their Own” that “It is supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. It is the hard that makes it great.”

That is a part of my vision of the perfect Gor. I want it to be great, and that means I understand it is going to have to be hard, too.

I know many people have a much harder and more demanding real life, and they look for easy and amusing. And many of these people, for one reason or another, have come to Second Life Gor to find it. To me that is like going rock climbing on the weekends, to relax and rest.

I have not preaching from Holy writ here, of course. It is just my opinion based on my experience , but I do not believe anyone is ever even going to have a lot of fun here until they see it more as “rock climbing” than relaxed game playing.

Not too many people get this chance. We have been given a blank slate and we have a playbook to guide us in the creation of a utopian vision that would have satisfied Tarl when he said he didn’t want to be like the people of Earth or the Goreans of Gor.

It is not going to be easy, and that means if we can pull it off, it should be great.

We Are The Priest Kings Here

Class Given February 8, 2018

Tal and greetings,

I would like to start my talk today by telling a story from my days back on Earth.

At the time, I had three children, ranging in age from 8-12 years old, and had decided it would be good for them to learn a bit about camping and roughing it out in nature.

This was before the time every eight year old had a cell phone, and every 12 year old spent half their day playing video games, but already the beginnings of this period of mindless entertainment and distraction were bothering me. A camping trip seemed to be a good way to get back in touch with nature and toughen the kids up as well as offering an alternative to Mario and Final Fantasy.

The first camping trip was an eye opener. I ended up renting a small trailer to carry the vast amount of gear, boxes of food and snacks, radios, small TV’s , electric blankets, toys, and games, and make-up and changes of clothes. (Mom and two of the kids were females, so of course, they needed a lot of clothing options).

It was also necessary to find a campsite situated close to a parking spot, and not too far from the showers and bathrooms, and of course, with an electrical outlet.

Even parked close to the site, I spent most of the camping trip hauling suitcases, coolers, and electronic devices from the trailer to the camp.

But, I was ready for the second trip. I established a rule. When we were ready to leave, I parked the car, with no trailer, out on the street rather than in the driveway, and we piled all our gear on the front porch. And when we were ready, we picked up everything that we could carry, and lugged it across the yard, and that was all we were going to take. One trip, whatever we could carry, was all we were going to have. Everything else went back in the house.

Of course, everyone was bitching and moaning and predicting starvation and doom

The story has a happy ending. The kids learned the lessons I wanted them to learn. Our camping trips become high adventures, and we sought out the roughest and most primitive places, and learned about dehydrated meals and light weight backpacks, and a host of other coping techniques.

This memory was on my mind this week as I prepared this class. The image of my kids trying to experience the rigors of camping surrounded by luxury and electronic devices reminded me of all of us trying to recreate John Norman’s Gor on a computer driven simulation like Second Life.

As we learn when we read the Gorean novels, the world of Gor had severe limitations on technology. They were not limitations caused by a backward people without much science sense. They were imposed on the population by the Priest-Kings, who monitored everyone and everything and dealt harshly with anyone violating the rules.

And since we are all well versed in the “Gorm Runo Fascination for Symbolism”, we see it clearly. The Priest Kings represent rational thought not influenced by the more animal and human emotional side.

And much of our technology on Earth has been driven by forces that are not at all rational.

Take flight for example. It was only a few years after the Wright Brothers pushed their craft off a sand dune at Kitty Hawk, that the Red Baron was shooting down other airplanes, and men were dropping bombs on the trenches from high in the sky.

Warfare and the need to kill more and more people in faster more efficient ways has driven much of our technological advances.

Our weapons are absolutely mind blowing these days, but scientific advances in areas such as the curing of disease and the more efficient production of food, although moving forward, have not kept pace with either weapons, or labor saving devices that have made our lives easier at the cost of weakening us both physically and mentally.

And we have poisoned our air, polluted our water, and reduced much of the beauty of our world to concrete.

So, thanks to the Priest Kings, that weakening did not take place on Gor. The air was cleasn, the water pure, and the people strong and self sufficient. Amazing advances took place in medicine improving both the quality of life, and increasing its length.

So, why is it hard to recreate this world in Second Life? Second Life is a miracle of modern technology and it is geared to the Earth idea that anything that goes faster has to be better.

We can teleport instantly from place to place. We can send messages instantly across great distance and right into the “minds” of the receiver. We can even fly from place to place.

One miracle of Second Life is that it is hard to pollute it and easy to clean it up. That has been a blessing, because if it were not so, I have no doubt that we Earthmen would have brought our baggage with us and Gor would be a dirty, trash cluttered, foul smelling morass of pollution.

The Lindens were not Priest Kings. They didn’t impose rational rules on us and enforce them with the Blue Flame Death. They created a playground and invited the kids to come play.

So, instead of slowly and carefully creating settlements and villages and watching them grow, we built whole cities despite the fact we didn’t have a sufficient population to fill them.

So, instead of slowing things down and learning to savor experiences, we took off with blinding speed always focused on quantity rather than quality.

So, instead of using the platform for self examination and a deeper understanding of our true natures, we created alts, changed our genders willy nilly, and made deception and dishonesty our standards.

So, instead of following John Norman’s advice about how one might forge a more meaningful and deeper and more biologically sound relationship between two people, we created a pick up culture, taking the worse elements of Earth’s “hook up” mentality to create the Gor Hub idea of one night stands and purely hedonistic one sided encounters.

We didn’t have Priest Kings to restrain us.

I am suggesting, however, that we didn’t need them. What the Gorean novels were trying to teach us was that we could rise higher, and that we weren’t little children who needed a “parent” to control us. We could be rational and we could do things right.

All of Second Life could be a children’s playground where instant gratification, selfishness, and “anything” goes is the mantra, but Second Life Gor was never going to work that way.

Just like my children were never going to learn the truth of the camping experience, or gain anything beneficial from it as long as they were sitting on a pile of suitcases in their tent playing Mario Brothers while eating Big Mac’s out of a bag, we weren’t going to be able experience Gor or gain anything beneficial from it doing it the messed up way we have been doing it for the past dozen years.

We have to be the Priest Kings here. We have to be the Priest Kings here. We have to exercise the self discipline to find ways to make our experiences here more challenging and more realistic. We might even have to use our own personal Blue Flames to separate ourselves from those who are really the “Anti-Goreans.”

This is why that story of the camping was on my mind. My kids didn’t understand why I imposed that “what you can carry” rule, and they argued long and hard against it. But, when I enforced it, the result was they become stronger. They became tougher. They became more self sufficient. They learned to seek out and appreciate the beauty that existed all around them. They were better able to cope with not having everything they wanted right when they wanted it. And more importantly, they had fun.

It is way past time, that we become the Priest Kings here. Second Life Gor should be more like that primitive camping site deep in the woods atop a lofty mountain And the more baggage we pack in the trailer before we come to visit it, the less we are going to learn of it and the less we will enjoy it. We have been running around here like spoiled kids for a dozen years now, and maybe it is time to grow up.

The Kaotians

This class was given on February 1, 2018

Tal and Greetings,

In preparing for today’s class I came across a Website called “RationalWiki.” and was very excited. I always get excited these days over the term ‘rational” because it seems so absent in most discussions. There was a short article on “Gorean.”

This is its rational definition of Gorean.

Goreans are, all too often, nutters who have taken the works of a science fiction author way too seriously. The term “Gorean” comes from the Chronicles of Gor series of novels by John Norman, set mostly (where else?) on the planet Gor. The society in the novels is a patriarchy in which women are enslaved and bought and sold as property (there are some male slaves as well, though they’re rare). In fact, on the planet Gor, gravity itself seems to be sexist. Tarl Cabot, the Earth-born hero of the series, is described as having much greater strength on Gor, as his muscles developed to function under Earth’s higher gravity. However, Earth women have no such experience and find themselves physically helpless before Gorean men.

Many Goreans simply use Norman’s setting for the purposes of BDSM role-playing. However, vocal proponents of Gorean “philosophy” actually think the series is a good blueprint for society, which has led to the creation of Gorean sex cults. The Goreans justify the subjugation of women using a mixture of recycled eugenics (or dysgenics, to be more technically accurate) and Social Darwinism. In short, back when men were men and women were women, skull-cracking cavemen roamed the Earth who were better adapted for survival because of their superior combat skills and penchant for kidnapping women. This kept the riff-raff from reproducing until the advent of modernity, industrialization, and feminism.

A splinter group from the Goreans called the Kaotians, founded by Lee Thompson, was raided in May 2006. In 2008, Thompson was sentenced to three years in prison for forcing his girlfriend to have sex with a number of other men
.
The Gorean opinion on how such a society could be brought about on Earth, given the absence of Gor’s insect overlords here, is unknown. And unasked for. ”

—-Rationalwiki article “Gorean” (last updated 1/23/2018)

After reading this and giving it some thought, my first conclusion was that we are in need of a much better Public Relations Department. Or else, I need to rethink my own understanding of the cognitive meaning of the word, rational.

I spent a little bit of time exploring some more of these negative sites, and one thing almost every one of them mentioned was the incident in 2006 involving this Lee Thompson fellow. He has become the critic’s poster child for online Goreans, including Second Life Goreans, despite the fact that his “crimes” took place a dozen years ago, and he was, technically, a Kaotian, and not a Gorean anyway. The idea that we are lumped together with him by the simple expedient of calling Kaotian a splinter group from the Goreans is about as rational as , oh, calling the United States Marine Corps a splinter group from the Goreans because they speak of themselves, at times, as warriors.

It would be easy to laugh off such criticisms as typical internet mis-information, and move on to more important matters. Certainly, we are not surprised, given the insanity going on in the social and political arenas of Western Earth civilization, that many “Social Justice Warriors” of Earth are going to take a dim view of Gor, and question the motives and morality of those who claim to espouse it as more than a titillating sexual role play game.

In the past weeks, however, this very point has been raised in discussions around Second Life Gor. In this seminar, we have been asking the questions: Is online Gor a community? What are the community standards and values we espouse? How can we enforce standards?

Last night, during the weekly discussion I moderated from Glorious AR, the idea of the three levels of Home Stone was mentioned. This is the idea that a Gorean Free would have a personal Home Stone, above the fireplace of his own dwelling, perhaps, and he would also be pledged to the Home Stone of a city or village as well. The third level was planetary. The word Gor itself means “Home Stone”, and thus we could translate “Gorean” to mean; “People of the Home Stone.”

This is not just a bit of interesting trivia either. There is a common thread over the last two or three thousand years, beginning with Aristotle and carrying on through Judeo-Christian philosophy that tells us that we do not exist in a vacuum of self interest and self gratification. It teaches us that we have certain obligations. Obligations to our families, to our communities, and to mankind entire. Obviously, vast differences have existed in the “source” of these obligations. Were they the orders, or suggestions of some superior being, or deity, passed down to us in sacred books, or were they something that emanated from some divine spark inside the soul of the superior human being?
For over a year now, in this very classroom, I have spoke of a higher standard, of codes of behavior; of the path to the superior being.

I can not remember a single session where I suggested the main thrust of our Philosophy was the formation of “sex cults.” Nor do I remember a single time that we extolled the virtues of some randy Englishman who was seducing females under the name “Kaotian” or suggesting he was our role model.

Perhaps, we have no one to blame for this, but ourselves. From the beginning we were the exact opposite of a cult, really. We were more a big fan club, and we had no requirements for membership in the club other than the ability to type out the words, “I am Gorean” on a computer keyboard.

How tolerant and inclusive we are.

And the result of all this, at least as far as Second Life Gor is concerned, is the RationalWiki calls us “nutters.” The thousands of dollars and millions of hours spent here are reduced to a joke and a mockery. The people who have had their lives touched in positive ways by their exposure to Gor are discounted.

Even here, at the Gorean Campus, where this talk is being given, and where recently a fine human being, and honored Gorean, was lost to us after devoting years of time and a lot of money to build something that would make the online world a little better, I have to admit that the person representing us in the internet world is an English pervert who got busted a dozen years ago.

I don’t know, maybe it is just me. I have been doing this too long now, and I have met too many people and had too many insights and too many life changing experiences.

I don’t define Gorean as a bunch of nutters playing a BDSM sex game.

And I think it is about time that we figure out a way to filter out of our community those people who do define it that way.

It is time to create a new definition.

But, what about all those gamers, and players, and predators, and weaklings, and depraved people that slipped in under the poorly defined meaning of “Gorean?”

I know. They can be the Kaotians.

The House of Runo – Slave Dancing

The House of Runo does promote the arts whether it be poetry, singing, music, dancing, painting or any other form of art both visual and performing. As such we will begin to post events related to Gorean forms of artistry on the blog.

A few weeks ago tabi entered a dance competition in the city of Teehra within second life. Slave dancing in second life takes on many elements. First there is the music, then there is the animation and lastly the written word. Many times props are also used. Here is tabi’s dance for the Teehra competition.

Tabi is an experienced Gorean dancer within second life. She has been doing this for many years, but has not dance in quite awhile. Back when tabi was competing regularly she was also a regular winner of competitions and was even featured in an article by the late Samos Madrigal – a huge promoter of Gorean slave dance and also a critic who wrote regular articles critiquing the dancers of Gor. He helped hone tabi’s skills and the skills of many dancers within second life Gor. Keep a look out for more posts about the arts of Gor in Second Life!

There are also more videos available for perusal at the House of Runo youtube channel found here: The House of Runo on Youtube

Gorean Compass – All New Stuff

The Gorean Compass – The Next Generation class offered within Second Life at the Gorean Campus. Come and join in the discussion!

Tal and Greetings

Welcome to The Gorean Compass “The Next Generation.”

I spent the morning in google reading several articles about this world we are presently occupying, and although I have been a participant in Second Life for almost 85% of it existence, it was an eye opening experience for me.

For example, I have been involved in many arguments and discussions over the years about the idea that Second Life is not a “game.” Some years ago, when I was traveling around the country on an extended camping and hiking adventure; an adventure that I called “The Great Gorean Adventure Tour” because one of the goals was to meet as many “real life Goreans” as possible, I spent a couple of weeks with a girl that I had met as a “slave girl” here in Second Life Gor.

She constantly referred to “in game” to describe her time in Second Life. Now, she was just one person using that term, but after getting to know her and spending that time with her, I realized that her saying “in game” made as little sense as if she had called a dip in the swimming pool “drying off” or a meal in a fancy restaurant as “going to starve.

Even the Wikipedia article on Second Life, which is fairly long and detailed, starts off with this paragraph.

“Second Life is an online virtual world, developed and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23, 2003. By 2013, Second Life had approximately 1 million regular users.[1] In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing games; however, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game:[2] “There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective”.[3]
A blogger by the name of Emmanual Maiberg posted this on the Website called “Motherboard” in 2016.
To an outsider, Second Life may look like a crappier version of World of Warcraft. It’s a vast digital space many people can log into with their virtual avatars, only instead of going on wild adventures, slaying dragons and collecting epic swords, it just seems like a bunch of people hanging out in bars, offices, galleries—normal places. That’s a fair assessment of Second Life, but what makes it special and lasting isn’t as apparent.

Yes, Second Life, which first launched in 2003, looks incredibly dated. Thirteen years is an eon in the technology business. There are massively multiplayer games that look prettier, bigger social networks that are better integrated to our daily routines, and video games that are far more fun to play. So why is it still hanging around?

second life 2018 — Second Life 2018 – each dot is a Sim or Region

The short answer is that there’s nothing else quite like it. Second Life was never just one of these things. It was a unique combination of all of the above—plus some weird sex stuff—that no other company has managed to displace. Even Second Life’s developer Linden Lab is hesitant to compete with it. ”

Of course, the idea of a game is not totally foreign to Second Life. There are games played within the game, so to speak. Many people are familiar with “Tiny Empires” or “Madpea.”

And this is usually the refrain of the pro “Second Life Gor as a role play game” argument. Gor is a game within the game in second life. They will concede that Second Life was not originally intended as a game, but as a user created world, where residents were free to create their own content, and so they used that freedom to create a “Gor game.”

That is a good point, too.

I have a analogy that I use often to describe the chaos that has been created by that “good point”, however.

Imagine a big empty field. That is essentially what the Second Life platform was at the beginning. And people were told they could come to this empty field to play a “ball game.”
They were also told that they could pretty much wave their hands and create the needed markers and goals and out of bounds sidelines.

Well, everyone thought this a great idea, and groups of them went out to the field to set up the playing areas. One group set up a bowling alley, and another a basketball court, and a third laid out a baseball diamond, while still another group was setting up soccer nets. Then they all started playing “the ball game”, but of course, they immediately came into conflict. One group was trying to throw the ball through the hoop, while another was trying to hit it with a bat and another were tackling whoever had the ball in their hands.

ball field — What game are they playing?

As hard as this might be to imagine, imagine the chaos. Especially since a couple of things are happening in this analogy.

First, everyone thinks they are playing the same game. It is called a ball game, right? and they are using balls.

Second, they can not understand why the other players are doing bizarre things that aren’t part of their concept of the game. Like for example, throwing the ball through a net on a pole, while everyone knows you are supposed to kick it through the goal on the ground!

This analogy could be the history of Second Life Gor. Everyone thought playing the “Gor” game was going to be a lot of fun, and they rushed into the empty platform created by Linden Labs and started playing their version of it.

And the big problem was that they were not Goreans. They were from Earth where, especially among internet users, the problems we discussed in some of these classes last year were deeply ingrained. We used signal words that had no cognitive meaning, and we tended to lump people into easily labeled groups that likewise had no meaning.

This led people to assume they were playing “the game” right, and everyone else was playing it wrong, if they indeed even bothered to notice that others were playing a different game.

Of course, there were things that bound us together. Mainly, the books, and the trivia of the Gorean World. But, these things existed in the analogy, too. Everyone was using a ball, and keeping score, and measuring the length of the game in quarters, or innings, or frames bowled.
Knowledge of what was in the books and the adaptation of some different cultural norms were the glue binding “Goreans” together, but it was really a weak glue, that would not hold, once we began to move from the very basic trivia into a more philosophical and intellectual examination of what we were doing, and why.

In a class last year, I referred to the whole Second Life Gorean experience as a miracle of tenacity. Despite the chaos of my analogy, we had survived for a decade here, and were even growing and expanding. I have been involved with several schools in the Gorean world over the years, and we dreamed and envisioned a place like “The Gorean Campus.” And now it has become a reality.

Groups, communities, cities, events, radio stations, real life relationships being birthed in SL Gor, and on and on, the list of our victories and successes grows each day.

And sometimes it seems like we have tipped the scale so that the good and positive things that we have accomplished here even begin to outweigh the negative. The deceits, the disappointments, the dishonest and hurtful people that have used this platform to prey on the most vulnerable. The failed sims, wasted money, and disillusioned people that have passed through here are sometimes forgotten as we celebrate our victories and fun times.

Human development and education has always relied on experience and rational understanding of abstract concepts that are passed on from one generation to the next. This is why the mother cat lets her babies go on their own after a few weeks. They are instinct driven animals and do not need to go to “school” to learn how to catch mice. But, we keep our children for years and years to train them for adulthood to insure we have time to pass on the collected knowledge of our species. This process is important as we are rational creatures who struggle to control our “instincts” rather than allowing them to totally control us.

But, Second Life is not something we can really relate to past human experience. It is a sudden change, and not a gradual smooth transition. We can’t go back and study how a global community of people created their other “user created” internet worlds, like we can study human history and the development of human civilization. There is no frame of reference.

Nothing even remotely like this has ever existed before in the entire history of the human race.

Second Life would be as incredible and as hard to accept to our grandfathers and grandmothers, as an airplane would be to a caveman.

I believe if we are ever going to really understand “The philosophy of Second Life Gor” as this course attempts to do, the first step is to accept that premise. As humans, we are used to understanding things based on our past experiences and the accumulated knowledge of those who came before us. But, we can’t do that here. This is all new stuff.

And the younger you are, the harder it is going to be to accept this fact. The younger generation raised with the internet and with cell phones, and with instant communication still seem to act and think as if George Washington’s army spent the winter at Valley Forge logged into SL to pass the cold winter hours.

We try to relate this new experience to things we are familiar with and games like World of Warcraft is an example. It seems a bit like this, so we act as if SL Gor was just a different version of WoW, but with slave girls. We overlook the intention of the creators, and even the reality of what SL actually is, and we make it something we are more comfortable with, like a game.

I assert that Second Life Gor is something unique. It is truly a Brave New World with wonders inside it that no other people have ever had the chance to tap into and it behooves us to, from time to time, take a bit of time out from the fun and adventure of it, to try to understand it.

To understand how we can make it work better. To understand the impact it has on our first life. The dangers it might pose. The things that make it more difficult to be “Goreans” , a civilization that existed with severe technological restrictions, being recreated on one of the most advanced technological platforms ever developed.

This seminar is designed to address some of these issues , and I hope to see you back as we dig into this Brave New World even deeper.