How Drinking Games are Philosophical

Friends are like no other; you can never replicate the dynamic of chillin' in a small group with people that you have developed a deep camaraderie with, and know a detailed history of.

I love hanging out with just the girls, especially the ones that I know, and know me, inside and out. So, last night we were playing Kings, because I am 24 years old and I still enjoy a good drinking game – by the way I am proud of this fact. Anyways, clearly after about 7 years of kings we are forced to become more inventive, including inserting such rules as: The Dictionary Card, where you must pick a word and read three definitions and the other participants must guess the correct meaning (Hanging out with me is a real barrel of monkeys let me tell you)....by the way it is considerably more difficult when you have been drinking excessively. I pulled a card that demanded that I share a fantasy-the stipulation on the card was that it could be any form of fantasy, not necessarily a sexy fantasy.

So, I told the girls about a book I read not long ago about a nomadic group of cave men called "The Clan of the Cave Bear”. In this book the society of “The Clan” was very complicated and developed; they had a hierarchy, defined gender roles, deities, and established traditions that doubled as their means of survival. The Clan was forced to leave their cave when an earthquake ripped open the land. In their search for a new cave they found a girl from another more evolved species, who was victim of the quake, helpless and alone. The Clan decided to rescue her and tried to assimilate her into their culture. Physically she looked different, but more significantly her brain was more advanced and was able to make more connections ...so mentally she was more evolved than them.

She struggled and struggled to fit into their way of life but could not because of an ability to understand concepts on a different level which left rifts between her and the others. Another result of the evolution was the urge for her to do things that were outside her gender role or even outside the confines of the species. These behaviours and thoughts shook the Clan to the core as they were beyond their ability to understand and conceive.

So, my friend Ange asked me what I was really talking about and I my response was that these people, cavemen, neanderthals whatever we want to call them, were so certain in their society. The things were the way they were and had been for as long as they knew. They didn't question the reasoning behind the values but just trusted them blindly. Taking the knowledge that science has bestowed upon our own society we can see where their conventions were false -and these are things that are foundational to them as a people - it would be like us finding out that gravity isn't gravity at all but can be explained by some completely different aspect that was previously outside our conceivability; knowledge that would rock any civilization.

This has caused me to wonder how much of the society we exist within is ideology and how much is actuality – if indeed anything exists in actuality. It wasn’t that many years ago that we believed in bleeding people to rid sickness or that diseases were caused by bad spirits. I am uncertain about what is true and what I perceive to be true because I have been conditioned to do so. I don’t mean to be a spoiler but in the end of the novel the medicine man of the Clan of the Cave Bear comes to understand that this girl is the future and that the ways of the Clan are obsolete and the end of their society is drawing to a close. I truly wonder if and when we will ever reach that tipping point within our own society, after all, compared to the age of the earth us humans do not even register as a blip. How can we live with such an arrogant outlook and reap such domination over the land- confident in the ideology that we are the masters?