Funny, when you mentioned Mercury I immediately remembered that DT was born under the sign of Gemini, ruled by Mercury, and I had an instant hunch that Russell Brand was probably another Gemini. Sure enough, I looked up RB's birthday and it was June 4 - Gemini. Another Gemini is Bob Dylan, definitely considered sexy, at least in his youth, and then there is Paul McCartney. (To be clear - I have a strong aversion to both Trump and Brand, and have always been an avid fan of both Dylan and McCartney. I am not in any way equating them.) I enjoyed your Jungian take on the strange times we are in, and will have to go back to read the earlier installments.
I loved your conclusion! I think that what we are missing these days is a combination of curiosity, openness to different points of view, and a skilled practice of engaged listening and digging for something entirely new - as a cooperative (collaborative really) venture. We humans are clinging to our tribal identities like flotsam and jetsam after a ship wreck. That obviously isn't working, and as we flail about trying to keep from going under, we actually are sinking ourselves and each other. I used to think of myself as progressive, but I have long since realized that all those labels are terribly passe - meaningless, lifeless, and limiting.
I've been asking a lot of "what if" questions lately. What if we replaced debates with real conversations, where the object was not to win but to uncover a larger truth? What if we took a genuine interest in understanding and learning from our fellow humans, not just the ones we consider "our people"? What if we were to teach deep listening to school children? What if our future depended on these things? (It does.) Lately I've had the opportunity to engage on-line in some real conversations with real (though not physically present) fellow travelers, and the experience has been exhilarating and hopeful. Sexy, even.
It was worth writing the article to get a thoughtful comment like that! Thanks for reading. Interesting point about those people being Geminis too. Miles Davis was as well, in fact he called one of his tracks Gemini/Double Image because of that.
Yes I agree our future does depend on being able to listen and understand, and not just rageclick and doomscroll. And real and intimate conversations are sexy!
The ending surprised me, way to embrace the energy of the piece succinctly! Love that, you said it and you did it, bravo. The words left and right really have almost gone meaningless, especially since I can’t seem to find many that agree with either side wholeheartedly. Throw the whole damn thing out and feel through the dark for a bit, yeah let’s go
Let's make maturity sexy again - not only coordination, compassionate, and cooperation but integrity, courage, and responsibility as well. This is not an individual project alone but a collective one. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Guy.
I agree that part of the appeal of the trickster is doing whatever you want to do, and that we can have that energy on the ‘progressive’ side because we forget that the shadow tricksters don’t actually do whatever they want. They are always guided by the need to be seen by the other in order to be able to know themselves.
Reading your essay made me consolidate a point that lies at the heart of the IFS model. Trusting yourself is the bomb & I might also even say sexy. Because it feels right to break unjust laws and systems. And not on an individual level but that collective level that fought to end slavery. Which is why Tricksters actually create stability. The Trickster keeps a greater balance by bringing the opposite to the prevailing ‘order’.
As you say, the left became moribund in its own stuffy, judging, rule-bound, washed-out middle management righteousness. Which is the entropy of the system, system-ing.
This is why the trickster is fluidity and change and true agility. They know what to break, and why. To stop the constriction, the rigidity, the non-stop meaningless productivity.
I keep returning back to this idea I heard about tricksters - they put the chaos in order and the order in chaos. & what you described in your essay was that the left became too ordered, too bound, too constricted. This is why the trickster is needed, to right the imbalance by knowing where to bring order and where to bring chaos. And of course righting the balance, what an orderly thing to do, even if it is by bringing chaos to (too much) law & order.
I do think that Brand was getting a bit, ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. He was so ‘good’ before he got bad…The married man, raising daughters, doing the happy clappy meditations and no longer being seen as ‘radical’ wot with all the young fire-brands about.
He lost his bad boy cred, but has got it back again by hanging out with Dr. Unhinged (Jordan Peterson) in his ‘groovy’ suits. The visuals of hippie dippy glam Brand & the cartoon villain stylings of Peterson saying the Lord’s Prayer is so weirdly anachronistic.
People are now ‘out to get him’ - just like J.P. The need to evoke such strong reactions in other people & be seen as The Ultimate Victim (because they are soooo special and powerful) seems to be the core underlying & uniting motivation for those two fancy fellows flitting about in their self-constructed fantasies of Great Importance!
Far beyond any fidelity to the artificial categories of left and right. It reminds me when I was traveling through west Africa and someone I met in Mali told me that as Africans, they were always going to first be Africans, and then whatever religion on top of that, and if there was a conflict between the two, the African way would be taken. That ability to resist being overtaken, or ‘colonised’ by the ones suffering the Weitko mind virus, through remaining in touch with oneself first and foremost (cause, ironically, you know you are part of something bigger than yourself - but you the vessel)
& I think that, on some levels, this looks somewhat similar in both narcissistic people (RB & JP) and people who are mentally/spiritually ‘free’.
The narcissist is profoundly loyal to their false self and do whatever it takes to keep that false self happily deluded as to their constant and perniciously paranoid special victims status.
And I think that people who have some level of actual freedom are loyal to themselves, in that know they are both ‘special’ and ‘ordinary’ because they are attached to something bigger. And they allow themselves to feel how that can be brought to light by embracing this mortal coil, our imperfect, bumbling, gravity-bound human selves.
Good ottering in this essay! Playful and with a light touch! I believe you just earned yourself more points for good grapple & fancy thinking!
Excited to write back about my podcast & how weird I want it to be. So scary!
I love what you have written here. "Trusting yourself is the bomb & I might also even say sexy". I was young myself when "Don't trust anyone over 30," was the battle cry of my generation, and while I can't endorse that directive now, I understand that it points to the importance of staying deeply rooted in what is alive and essential and ageless, to ones own depths, to the heart. Depending on outer rules to determine the "correct" response to any situation (which unfortunately the school system inevitably trains children to do from a very early age), causes people to withdraw their creative energy (the best of what they have to give) from society, and leaves us with a shell. This is why I think the most powerful solution to our predicament would be to reinvent education from the ground up. The factory model upon which it was originally based has become more and more devoid of meaning and energy even in my lifetime.
There is no easy solution. In addition to creativity and innovation, we also need rules and structures, but a population of zombies can hardly be expected to create a flexible, playful, spirit-ful and balanced framework. I think it is ironic that people think that somehow AI is going to save us from ourselves. That has to be the ultimate example of not trusting yourself.
Totally agree. And you will have noticed that @GoldenImp is herself the bomb, Lee.
I believe that AI has its uses but saving us from ourselves is not going to be one, because 'AI' is us, it's our past, not our future, and so it cannot bring the breakthroughs we need. It's just a cleverer version of the same regimented mindset which brought us the school system in the first place.
That is a very profound insight Guy. Ai is the past, yes, on so many levels & wow! Of course it is. A childish dream of forever being given the right answer.
Thanks my friend. I got a healing ‘download’ that I could be Muhammed al Lia, and float like a butterfly and sting like a bee when I noticed how becoming the balm for my own inner pain set off the bomb of so many around me who are unwilling to see their own suffering and I mean UNWILLING! I feel like I have to isolate in some ways, because I am sick of setting off everyone’s fire alarms and then getting sprayed in the face with the chemical retardant as they try to put me out, instead of dealing with their own internal raging infernos!
Yes, the balanced trickster is what is needed, we've had so many grifters making us forget that healthy reality-abiding tricketerism can be a thing. I am actually starting to feel physically sick when I think of someone like Brand, he's such a sell-out. He's just chosen his own selfish desires at every turn, only stood for things if he was going to gain from them. Ironically exactly what Christianity says you should never do, and there he is in his underpants in the river, baptising someone after having been a Christian for all of five minutes. And as you say, there on stage with Peterson saying the Lord's Prayer.
Everyone repeat after me: Fuck these fucking grifters! We need balanced tricksters!
So true about tricksters bringing balance, order to chaos and chaos to order, even if it looks like the opposite sometimes.
Also good point about narcissism and inner freedom looking very similar. This is one of the main reasons that people get taken in by cults. The leader has a 'don't care' vibe which looks like freedom, but is actually just a lack of empathy. I mean the sociopath is indeed free from caring about anyone else, a burden which the rest of us do have to carry. But they are also probably hungry for something they can't quite name, connection, love, depth of experience.
The healthy person knows on some level that they are life itself, and therefore incredibly valuable. Yet they also know this life as an individual is fleeting and they are one of billions, which tends to keep you humble if you remember it.
Thanks for the grappling points! My computer is acting the trickster and not letting me write fluidly so I'll leave it there for now.
Really looking forward to your scary plans for the podcast!
"The sociopath is indeed free from caring about anyone else, a burden which the rest of us do have to carry. But they are also probably hungry for something they can't quite name, connection, love, depth of experience.
The healthy person knows on some level that they are life itself, and therefore incredibly valuable. Yet they also know this life as an individual is fleeting and they are one of billions, which tends to keep you humble if you remember it."
You have initiated such a beautiful exchange of potent realizations! It is a real joy to be able to actually participate in a Conversation like this, Conversation with a capital "C" - what the anthroposophist Marjorie Spock called "Goethean Conversation" only in writing instead of in-person speech. It reminds me of a communal garden, where a kind of cross fertilization takes place, and the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but is actually able to give rise to new species of plants. I believe that these kinds of exchanges have a real potential to radically change our world - one conversation at a time. Thank you Guy James and Golden Imp.
Yes, this kind of thing makes me do the happy bee dance - look what richness we have created! I believe Guy was one of the very first people I met on here & how fortuitous it has been! We have been writing ‘letters’ in comments this whole time & I am delighted to meet another player & another person who is fun to think with! Which is my new standard/boundary. Play to Slay!
I snooped into Substack a few months ago, after a few people told me that 'this is the platform for you!'.
I wrote a single article that won me a couple handful of subscribers, and went dormant again for the rest of the year. Tough times that properly shut me up, just coming back from that.
Returning here, I take this article as confirmation that it was the right decision. If this kind of depth, nuance, and archetypal affinity is welcome here, maybe even a cultural staple – that's my place.
We don't know each other, James, and yet did you just give me a little gift.
Funny, when you mentioned Mercury I immediately remembered that DT was born under the sign of Gemini, ruled by Mercury, and I had an instant hunch that Russell Brand was probably another Gemini. Sure enough, I looked up RB's birthday and it was June 4 - Gemini. Another Gemini is Bob Dylan, definitely considered sexy, at least in his youth, and then there is Paul McCartney. (To be clear - I have a strong aversion to both Trump and Brand, and have always been an avid fan of both Dylan and McCartney. I am not in any way equating them.) I enjoyed your Jungian take on the strange times we are in, and will have to go back to read the earlier installments.
I loved your conclusion! I think that what we are missing these days is a combination of curiosity, openness to different points of view, and a skilled practice of engaged listening and digging for something entirely new - as a cooperative (collaborative really) venture. We humans are clinging to our tribal identities like flotsam and jetsam after a ship wreck. That obviously isn't working, and as we flail about trying to keep from going under, we actually are sinking ourselves and each other. I used to think of myself as progressive, but I have long since realized that all those labels are terribly passe - meaningless, lifeless, and limiting.
I've been asking a lot of "what if" questions lately. What if we replaced debates with real conversations, where the object was not to win but to uncover a larger truth? What if we took a genuine interest in understanding and learning from our fellow humans, not just the ones we consider "our people"? What if we were to teach deep listening to school children? What if our future depended on these things? (It does.) Lately I've had the opportunity to engage on-line in some real conversations with real (though not physically present) fellow travelers, and the experience has been exhilarating and hopeful. Sexy, even.
It was worth writing the article to get a thoughtful comment like that! Thanks for reading. Interesting point about those people being Geminis too. Miles Davis was as well, in fact he called one of his tracks Gemini/Double Image because of that.
Yes I agree our future does depend on being able to listen and understand, and not just rageclick and doomscroll. And real and intimate conversations are sexy!
The ending surprised me, way to embrace the energy of the piece succinctly! Love that, you said it and you did it, bravo. The words left and right really have almost gone meaningless, especially since I can’t seem to find many that agree with either side wholeheartedly. Throw the whole damn thing out and feel through the dark for a bit, yeah let’s go
yeah let’s go! and thanks for reading!
Let's make maturity sexy again - not only coordination, compassionate, and cooperation but integrity, courage, and responsibility as well. This is not an individual project alone but a collective one. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Guy.
sexy collectivism, an orgy of courage!
Yes! Good nonsense to clear out the bad nonsense!
I agree that part of the appeal of the trickster is doing whatever you want to do, and that we can have that energy on the ‘progressive’ side because we forget that the shadow tricksters don’t actually do whatever they want. They are always guided by the need to be seen by the other in order to be able to know themselves.
Reading your essay made me consolidate a point that lies at the heart of the IFS model. Trusting yourself is the bomb & I might also even say sexy. Because it feels right to break unjust laws and systems. And not on an individual level but that collective level that fought to end slavery. Which is why Tricksters actually create stability. The Trickster keeps a greater balance by bringing the opposite to the prevailing ‘order’.
As you say, the left became moribund in its own stuffy, judging, rule-bound, washed-out middle management righteousness. Which is the entropy of the system, system-ing.
This is why the trickster is fluidity and change and true agility. They know what to break, and why. To stop the constriction, the rigidity, the non-stop meaningless productivity.
I keep returning back to this idea I heard about tricksters - they put the chaos in order and the order in chaos. & what you described in your essay was that the left became too ordered, too bound, too constricted. This is why the trickster is needed, to right the imbalance by knowing where to bring order and where to bring chaos. And of course righting the balance, what an orderly thing to do, even if it is by bringing chaos to (too much) law & order.
I do think that Brand was getting a bit, ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. He was so ‘good’ before he got bad…The married man, raising daughters, doing the happy clappy meditations and no longer being seen as ‘radical’ wot with all the young fire-brands about.
He lost his bad boy cred, but has got it back again by hanging out with Dr. Unhinged (Jordan Peterson) in his ‘groovy’ suits. The visuals of hippie dippy glam Brand & the cartoon villain stylings of Peterson saying the Lord’s Prayer is so weirdly anachronistic.
People are now ‘out to get him’ - just like J.P. The need to evoke such strong reactions in other people & be seen as The Ultimate Victim (because they are soooo special and powerful) seems to be the core underlying & uniting motivation for those two fancy fellows flitting about in their self-constructed fantasies of Great Importance!
Far beyond any fidelity to the artificial categories of left and right. It reminds me when I was traveling through west Africa and someone I met in Mali told me that as Africans, they were always going to first be Africans, and then whatever religion on top of that, and if there was a conflict between the two, the African way would be taken. That ability to resist being overtaken, or ‘colonised’ by the ones suffering the Weitko mind virus, through remaining in touch with oneself first and foremost (cause, ironically, you know you are part of something bigger than yourself - but you the vessel)
& I think that, on some levels, this looks somewhat similar in both narcissistic people (RB & JP) and people who are mentally/spiritually ‘free’.
The narcissist is profoundly loyal to their false self and do whatever it takes to keep that false self happily deluded as to their constant and perniciously paranoid special victims status.
And I think that people who have some level of actual freedom are loyal to themselves, in that know they are both ‘special’ and ‘ordinary’ because they are attached to something bigger. And they allow themselves to feel how that can be brought to light by embracing this mortal coil, our imperfect, bumbling, gravity-bound human selves.
Good ottering in this essay! Playful and with a light touch! I believe you just earned yourself more points for good grapple & fancy thinking!
Excited to write back about my podcast & how weird I want it to be. So scary!
I love what you have written here. "Trusting yourself is the bomb & I might also even say sexy". I was young myself when "Don't trust anyone over 30," was the battle cry of my generation, and while I can't endorse that directive now, I understand that it points to the importance of staying deeply rooted in what is alive and essential and ageless, to ones own depths, to the heart. Depending on outer rules to determine the "correct" response to any situation (which unfortunately the school system inevitably trains children to do from a very early age), causes people to withdraw their creative energy (the best of what they have to give) from society, and leaves us with a shell. This is why I think the most powerful solution to our predicament would be to reinvent education from the ground up. The factory model upon which it was originally based has become more and more devoid of meaning and energy even in my lifetime.
There is no easy solution. In addition to creativity and innovation, we also need rules and structures, but a population of zombies can hardly be expected to create a flexible, playful, spirit-ful and balanced framework. I think it is ironic that people think that somehow AI is going to save us from ourselves. That has to be the ultimate example of not trusting yourself.
Totally agree. And you will have noticed that @GoldenImp is herself the bomb, Lee.
I believe that AI has its uses but saving us from ourselves is not going to be one, because 'AI' is us, it's our past, not our future, and so it cannot bring the breakthroughs we need. It's just a cleverer version of the same regimented mindset which brought us the school system in the first place.
That is a very profound insight Guy. Ai is the past, yes, on so many levels & wow! Of course it is. A childish dream of forever being given the right answer.
Thanks my friend. I got a healing ‘download’ that I could be Muhammed al Lia, and float like a butterfly and sting like a bee when I noticed how becoming the balm for my own inner pain set off the bomb of so many around me who are unwilling to see their own suffering and I mean UNWILLING! I feel like I have to isolate in some ways, because I am sick of setting off everyone’s fire alarms and then getting sprayed in the face with the chemical retardant as they try to put me out, instead of dealing with their own internal raging infernos!
“Muhammed al Lia” hahaah yeah I love it.
Yeah just get away from people who don’t get you, if you can.
Yes, the balanced trickster is what is needed, we've had so many grifters making us forget that healthy reality-abiding tricketerism can be a thing. I am actually starting to feel physically sick when I think of someone like Brand, he's such a sell-out. He's just chosen his own selfish desires at every turn, only stood for things if he was going to gain from them. Ironically exactly what Christianity says you should never do, and there he is in his underpants in the river, baptising someone after having been a Christian for all of five minutes. And as you say, there on stage with Peterson saying the Lord's Prayer.
Everyone repeat after me: Fuck these fucking grifters! We need balanced tricksters!
So true about tricksters bringing balance, order to chaos and chaos to order, even if it looks like the opposite sometimes.
Also good point about narcissism and inner freedom looking very similar. This is one of the main reasons that people get taken in by cults. The leader has a 'don't care' vibe which looks like freedom, but is actually just a lack of empathy. I mean the sociopath is indeed free from caring about anyone else, a burden which the rest of us do have to carry. But they are also probably hungry for something they can't quite name, connection, love, depth of experience.
The healthy person knows on some level that they are life itself, and therefore incredibly valuable. Yet they also know this life as an individual is fleeting and they are one of billions, which tends to keep you humble if you remember it.
Thanks for the grappling points! My computer is acting the trickster and not letting me write fluidly so I'll leave it there for now.
Really looking forward to your scary plans for the podcast!
"The sociopath is indeed free from caring about anyone else, a burden which the rest of us do have to carry. But they are also probably hungry for something they can't quite name, connection, love, depth of experience.
The healthy person knows on some level that they are life itself, and therefore incredibly valuable. Yet they also know this life as an individual is fleeting and they are one of billions, which tends to keep you humble if you remember it."
You have initiated such a beautiful exchange of potent realizations! It is a real joy to be able to actually participate in a Conversation like this, Conversation with a capital "C" - what the anthroposophist Marjorie Spock called "Goethean Conversation" only in writing instead of in-person speech. It reminds me of a communal garden, where a kind of cross fertilization takes place, and the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but is actually able to give rise to new species of plants. I believe that these kinds of exchanges have a real potential to radically change our world - one conversation at a time. Thank you Guy James and Golden Imp.
Thank **you**. I'm keen to see what kinds of plants will bloom then! 🪴
Yes, this kind of thing makes me do the happy bee dance - look what richness we have created! I believe Guy was one of the very first people I met on here & how fortuitous it has been! We have been writing ‘letters’ in comments this whole time & I am delighted to meet another player & another person who is fun to think with! Which is my new standard/boundary. Play to Slay!
Man, let me share something:
I snooped into Substack a few months ago, after a few people told me that 'this is the platform for you!'.
I wrote a single article that won me a couple handful of subscribers, and went dormant again for the rest of the year. Tough times that properly shut me up, just coming back from that.
Returning here, I take this article as confirmation that it was the right decision. If this kind of depth, nuance, and archetypal affinity is welcome here, maybe even a cultural staple – that's my place.
We don't know each other, James, and yet did you just give me a little gift.
Thanks!
thank you! very glad it resonated and appreciate you telling me. welcome back :)