It Takes A Trickster To Beat A Trickster

We're not in Kansas anymore - the final part of Make Cooperation Sexy Again

In part one, we looked at the trickster archetype and how Donald Trump is the political embodiment of it. In part two, I illustrated the trickster in popular culture via the film Joker 2, and considered what made that film a failure on the psychological level.

So I sat down to write part three of 'Make Cooperation Sexy Again' thinking that I just need to work out how to do just that, then put it into words, et voilà, nous avons du sexy cooperation.

But I realised it's maybe not that simple. My friend, and colleague on The Elevator,

Daniel Pinchbeck

, used to be friends with Russell Brand, yes that one. Brand - and in fact this was up until relatively recently - used to call himself an 'anarcho-syndicalist', so he classed himself definitively as a leftist. He was into Daniel's work for its blend of social justice and psychedelic wonder. Those who recently discovered him would have their minds well and truly boggled by watching his work from that time.

(I was just re-reading the late Mark Fisher's classic 2013 Exiting The Vampire Castle essay, and was surprised to be reminded that it mentions Brand in glowing terms as a working class leftist icon, which he was then to many.)

Obviously after The Allegations, cancellation by the left, and a rather fortuitous conversion to Christianity, Russell has now pivoted hard right and his anarchist beliefs have been firmly memory-holed.

Brand is a trickster, and as we explored in the earlier parts of this essay, so is Donald Trump. I believe I made a fairly firm case that Trump's trickster energy was a big part of his appeal, and, as it turned out, his election victory. In particular the sharp contrast with dreary thought-police wokeism that the left has become associated with. You want every word closely monitored for wrong-think, or a guy who just says whatever the fuck comes into his head? Yeah he's a narcissist sex offender and convicted criminal, but that woke stuff, wow, we really hate that.

A bit of a trickster - Mercury/Hermes (Wikimedia Commons)

Tricksters are mercurial, indeed Mercury as the messenger of the gods in Roman mythology gave us that expression: the shifter, the one who moves between the lines. Trump was actually a registered Democrat at one point, so although nowhere near as leftist as Brand was, he's certainly moved across the political map. Tricksters do not have firm beliefs generally; their gift is to slide around, fill in the gaps, make stuff interesting, be hard to pin down. They also disrupt things, which is something tech bros understand and revere, hence the - possibly shaky - alliance between them and DJT.

Firm beliefs, hard work, reliability, and expertise are not going to be priorities in the struggle to firstly limit , then reverse, the damage Trump, and the other wannabe (and actual) dictators are doing and are going to do. It will take a trickster, or tricksters, to defeat a trickster, as is explained in this video

I don't believe that those qualities are unimportant, yet it's the nature of our cultural moment that they must take a temporary back seat. Vibes are way more important, and if you think they're not, you're not in tune with the zeitgeist and maybe find yourself employed as a Democratic strategist.

We're not in Kansas anymore, in case you hadn't realised.

Another factor is explained very well here by

Peter Limberg

, who is very skilled at pointing out things which seem blatantly obvious once one has seen them:

To put this in Jungian terms: the CWL [culture war left] fears the “tyrannical father,” while the CWR [culture war right] fears the “devouring mother.” The former represents masculine authority gone wrong—unforgiving, cruel, and crushing their child’s spirit through control with an iron grip. The latter represents over-nurturing and overprotectiveness, smothering their child’s potential and creating perpetual dependence.

Jungian terms are urgently needed in order to make sense of what's going on now; without them we are looking at something which appears mostly incoherent. Yes, we can point to economic factors, and wokeism for sure, but he's correct that things are converging at a deeper level than those. One is this fear of the negative parental archetype, from both sides of the culture war, and the other is trickster energy.

In order for the left to have a chance of winning again, it needs to shed this 'nanny state', overprotective and smothering image. That means foregrounding policies which are based on, say, decentralisation, like empowering groups to come together semi-autonomously, maybe with the backing of a central authority, but without being micromanaged.

This gets easier now in countries where the left is not in power, because they get to have the sexy rebel cachet, rather than the dreary bureaucratic responsibility function.

So I'm saying we need to Make Cooperation Sexy Again, and trickster energy is key to that. But tricksters and cooperation don't necessarily go together. Social cohesion, coordination, prosocial movement building... that all sounds un-trickstery. Sticking to one thing for ages, gradually convincing people to put aside their selfish desires and come together for the common good, transforming a zero-sum game into a win-win one... none of that is sexy. Or is it?

When I was younger, being left wing was sexy. Everyone cool was left wing, almost without having to ask; they were almost synonymous. Any band which actually rocked was left wing, or at least pretended to be. Any comedian who was funny was left wing. Look at Bill Hicks. He was allowed to be extremely edgy, to a point which would certainly get him cancelled today. In fact, from a cultural rather than personal perspective, maybe it's good that he died in the '90s so we never had to see his inevitable slide over to Trumpism, and an angry podcast on which he sold dietary supplements.

So, the left was the agile side, the one which moved too fast to be caught, which left the squares playing whack-a-mole trying to catch up.

The problem is that ultimately, the left won, then got eaten by its own bureaucracy like the right did before it. It's a lot easier to be against things than to try to build them, as the right is about to find out. They will have fun destroying everything, I'm sure, but will find that by the time they get to the point of having to re-construct things, it will get a whole lot more difficult.

As I'm writing this, I'm realising that long manifestos on What We Need To Do are themselves un-trickstery and not fit for the slippery times we live in. Hints, vibes, bravery, weirdness... clues left along the path for the agile, the connected, the switched-on, might be more salient. So I’ll leave it here, happily inconclusive.

Maybe the Left is dead now, and maybe it needed to die. Maybe that will also kill the Right, because they need each other. Maybe leaving the labels and ideologies behind is the best thing that could happen. Giving up the old maps may leave us disoriented for a while, but it's clear that they are now not serving a purpose other than to confuse us with the illusion that they still point to something meaningful.

But we do need coordination, compassion, and cooperation. And maybe all of that can be juicy, alive and sexy again.