Biology is conservative; that is, any biological system will work only as hard as necessary to maintain homeostasis. Freud organized his thinking about the mental apparatus as a system designed to minimize pain (unpleasure) and maximize pleasure.
If you drop an electrode into a rat's Medial Forebrain Bundle it will self stimulate to the exclusion of satisfying hunger, thirst, or any other need until it dies. Other rats will self administer Cocaine to the exclusion of food until they drop. Most people are able to resist such suicidal addiction but some, sadly, are not. Yet even for the vast majority of people, if you make life too easy, they will take the least energy demanding pathway; ie, people tend to be lazy. Winners of life's lotteries often lose their drive and descend into dissolution.
Gerry Rafferty was the lead singer of Stealers Wheel and the author of "Baler Street" a wonderful tune that has the distinction of containing the greatest saxophone solo in Rock and Roll history (with apologies to Clarence Clemons; Jungleland is brilliant but Raphael Ravenscroft is iconic.) Apparently, Gerry Rafferty hated the music business (In [a] 2009 interview, Mr. Rafferty called the music industry “something I loathe and detest”) yet the royalties from "Baker Street" alone earned him $125,000 a year.
Gerry Rafferty died yesterday, at the age of 63; apparently he drank himself to death: [HT: Steve Sailer]
Gerry Rafferty, Songwriter, Dies at 63
Gerry Rafferty, a Scottish singer and songwriter who combined a gift for melody, a distinctive voice and a fatalistic worldview to produce 1970s hits like “Stuck in the Middle With You” and “Baker Street,” died Tuesday in Dorset, England. He was 63.
His death was confirmed by Michael Gray, his former manager, in an obituary he wrote for the London newspaper The Guardian, and later by his agent, Paul Charles, in a report by The Associated Press. Various news reports said Mr. Rafferty had been hospitalized for severe liver and kidney problems.
Mr. Rafferty’s 1978 album, “City to City,” reached No. 1 in the United States. One track, “Baker Street,” made the Top 10 in both Britain and the United States. So did “Stuck in the Middle With You,” a song Mr. Rafferty and Joe Egan recorded with their group Stealers Wheel in 1972. That song reached a new generation of listeners when Quentin Tarantino used it in the notorious ear-slicing scene in his 1992 movie “Reservoir Dogs.”
In all, Mr. Rafferty sold more than 10 million albums over three decades.
But Mr. Gray, writing in The Guardian, said Mr. Rafferty’s success was a shadow of what it might have been. At the peak of his popularity, Mr. Rafferty declined to tour the United States and turned down chances to play with Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney. In his later years his output declined, then stopped altogether as he “spiraled into alcoholism,” Mr. Gray said. Mr. Rafferty himself said in a rare interview in 2009 with The Sunday Express that he suffered from depression.
Baker Street:
We are both much more complex and much simpler organisms than we are comfortable recognizing. At our best we have complex minds with a rich internal life and an appreciation of the beauty and fractal complexity of life; at our simplest, especially once our desires have been reduced to alcohol and/or drugs, we are merely satiety seeking life forms who have replaced all of that wonderful complexity with the most minimal of algorithms, ie to maximize the avoidance of immediate unpleasure.
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