Make Cooperation Sexy Again, Part One
What has reality got to do with anything nowadays? Re-embracing the Trickster, Hegelians for Trump, Woke or Joke?
I recently came across (via Arielle Friedman who used to be an online friend but is apparently blanking me now) the 'Hegelian E-Girl Council' (now disbanded amid lots of catty controversy, but it doesn't matter for the purposes of this article). This is a cliquey internet phenomenon of hot young women who are fans of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel's book The Phenomenology of Spirit. And also apparently fans of Donald Trump, cocaine, and smoking.
One of them, Nikki The Hegelian, claims on her Twitter account that "Leftists hate to see people have fun!". As a leftist myself, this stings, but I get where she's coming from.
A quote from Ashley Colby from the Doomer Optimism podcast is relevant here:
"The Dems are the party of the man now. As currently constituted the GOP are the underdogs, outsiders"
Leftist politics aligned itself a long time ago with the rational, the scientific, the technological, and above all the materialist; this was taken to its extreme with communism where religion is mostly outlawed. Leftists generally lived in their heads and considered the body to be a necessary evil, the car which carried their brain around.
The magical, the irrational, the emotional, the sacred and the sexy were therefore considered to be consigned to a less enlightened past. Fun was also not something they were particularly concerned with.
Right wing politics to a large extent has historically gone along with a lot of this. Both sides saw nature or the planet as a resource to be extracted, as Daniel Pinchbeck explains here:
In his magnificent essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger saw technology, in its essence, as an “enframing” which conceives of the world as a “standing reserve.” This technological “enframing” reduces the living world to a husk, to be manipulated for reductive, utilitarian aims. He believed that technology was “no mere human doing,” but had an inevitable Telos or direction, which he called, “the destining of revealing.”
Where the two sides mainly differed was in how the extracted resources were to be best allocated. The left favoured wide distribution mostly regardless of contribution to society, whereas the right was more to the side of meritocracy or the victory of the strong over the weak, to say the same thing more pejoratively.
But with the rise of Donald Trump, the right has morphed, while still of course overtly favouring the interests of the powerful, into something else. Something 'trickstery'...
Rise Of The Trickster
From a psychological perspective, the trickster archetype represents the part of our psyche that seeks to challenge authority and norms. The edgy, fun part. The trickster encourages us to question the status quo and think outside the box. However, this archetype can also represent our shadow side - the parts of ourselves that we try to hide or suppress.
If we refuse to acknowledge the Trickster element in life, then we have to go to almost insane, and occasionally pathological, lengths to prop up our Just So Stories where everything happens for a reason.
- Jamie Wheal, ‘Recapture The Rapture’
(BTW this video is well worth a watch for in-depth background on the Trickster.)
Trump is the absolute embodiment of the Trickster. He doesn't tell the truth, as you may have noticed. He has bragged about his abuse of women. He very rarely says anything absolutely definitive, and even if he does, is the master of contradictory statements, clouds of lies and obfuscations, and dog whistles. He is mercurial and hard to pin down. Just when you think you've figured him out, he'll knock you off balance again (as he literally tried to do to other world leaders when shaking their hands).
As such, and because, as Colby points out, the Republicans are now seen as the opposition to 'The Man', he has become the repository of everything the Democrats are perceived as not being: the irrational, the sacred, the embodied, and, most importantly, the FUN.
That's not to say that DT himself is necessarily perceived as being those things himself, in fact he obviously isn't, but in the public mind, he's the trickster in chief and the 'king' of everything the Dems are not. Simply by opposing them he appears as the antidote. In reality, he isn't of course, but what has reality, or facts, got to do with anything nowadays? If you insist they have, you are missing the point.
This is why the Biden administration can announce endless good and rational policies which will mitigate climate change, create jobs, and improve the economy, and yet one crazy mention of Hannibal Lecter or fighting sharks by Trump in a rambling and unhinged diatribe will get more attention.
Also Trump can be seen as 'cool', because he doesn't care. He just rambles on, oblivious to the fact that he's offending millions of people. The media tries to make him care, and he doesn't. Compare that to the micro-targeted, media-trained language of most other political leaders. Of course DT's 'cool' comes from a deep cynicism, an idea that he's been made bulletproof by his lifelong privilege (maybe literally now after the failed assassination attempt). But again, that's irrelevant. He doesn't care, and that means he's seen as cooler than the Dems.
"How many hipsters does it take to screw a light bulb? What, you don't know?" (joke courtesy of Alex Ebert)
This is also why obviously intelligent people (well, she's read Hegel) like Nikki The Hegelian are supporting Trump. To support Trump is to be on the side of the Trickster, the hip, the sexy, the taboo. Just like smoking and taking coke are cool, precisely because your parents (rightly, from a rational point of view) tell you that you shouldn't do them. But if you want to be cool, maybe you should do them, and do them a lot.
Almost nobody young and vital wants to be closely aligned with what Biden represents, even if they might be persuaded to vote for his party. Harris is obviously better, but still there's the deadening taint of the overly rational, the controlling, the parent, the buzz-killer. I’ve seen a lot of people calling leftist parties ‘authoritarian’ recently. Culture war dynamics and Russian-sponsored bots and propaganda are clearly factors in this, but, let’s be honest, isn’t there an element of truth in there which makes the slurs memorable?
And from a young person's perspective: still climate change is upon us, Israel slaughters children on a daily basis, and the incumbents apparently do next to nothing. Why not go for the cool option? Just blow it all up and see what happens? Why not smoke two packs a day, I won't live past forty anyway? We're all fucked, fucked, fucked.
Covid + Social Networks = victory of the irrational over the rational
The left, especially since the coronavirus lockdowns, has become identified with CONTROL above all else. And the Trickster is uncontrollable, for better and for worse.
“There is no way to suppress change . . . not even in heaven,” Lewis Hyde wrote in his book Trickster Makes This World. “Those who panic and bind the Trickster choose the path of control and cataclysm. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop skills (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes that contingency will always engender.”
- From Recapture The Rapture by Jamie Wheal
The left appears to be seeking to bind the trickster, and the end result of that might look like something akin to a China social credit reality where absolutely everything is rigidly controlled. The 'unexpected' cataclysm is then just around the corner, the ‘Black Swan’ event that ‘nobody could have expected’ - nobody, that is, who does not understand the overarching dynamics of the impossibility of trying to exercise that level of control. Especially now that the ability to use technology to control everything seems to be in reach for those who might wish to. And let’s face it, most politicians do wish to.
The threat (rather than the reality, which in most countries was minimal) of vaccine passports has been weaponised to add even more proof that leftism equals authoritarian control.
This, plus the fact that the vaccines didn't actually protect one from getting Covid (I've had it twice since being vaccinated) was another nail in the coffin of control in the guise of 'follow the science'. What good is extreme control if it doesn't live up to its promise of protecting us?
Add the discomfort and outrage of white men who don't like their privilege to be curtailed even a tiny bit for the good of 'society' ('What society?', they ask, 'I'm a sovereign individual'), and you have a recipe for a strange kind of rebellion. A rebellion where an old man who is one of the most privileged people in the country is seen by some as a kind of Che Guevara figure.
Woke Is Not Fun
'Woke', or enforcement of politically correct language, is also an absolute killer to those who want to have fun, laugh, and occasionally colour outside the lines a little bit. 'I should police absolutely every single word I and others utter lest I be irrevocably and mercilessly cancelled forever' does not make for a fun night out.
Wokeism is itself - despite coming from a very well-intentioned place, don't get me wrong - a suppression of the Trickster, the one who doesn't respect norms, who likes to play with boundaries, who needs some looseness in self-expression.
The left's rigid insistence over the past few years on the rules that 'woke' or political correctness has specified has done as much as anything else to create the phenomena of MAGA and the alt-right which are spreading through many countries right now. Because once you're cancelled, where will you go? Into the arms of the right wing of course, because they don't care. And when the rules are that strict, almost everyone is going to end up cancelled eventually, right?
Ask Russell Brand, another example of someone with profound trickster energy, who has gradually skulked over to the right. (As an aside, I just discovered that Brand did a book for kids about a decade ago, literally called Russell Brand's Trickster Tales!)
Brand is a living shadow projection - his brilliance and eloquence on the one hand, and his dark and hidden (alleged) misdeeds on the other. He is the inverse of the 'man in the street'. This everyman doesn't have queues of women waiting to have sex with him (as RB used to), sold out theatres, contracts to make films, millions of followers on social media and so on. The everyman probably is not accused of rape either.
Let me pause for a moment here just to make the following clear: Trump is very bad, Russell Brand is a grifter on the run from serious sexual assault allegations and trying to maintain an audience, Bill Cosby and Andrew Tate are evil, and so was Michael Jackson. I don't want anyone to get the impression that pointing out that someone is a trickster is any kind of excuse for morally reprehensible behaviour. It is not.
There are and have been tricksters who are not 'problematic' in the modern sense; a few who come to mind: George Clinton, Björk, Terence McKenna, George Carlin, Robert Anton Wilson...). Of course if any trickster were entirely 'good' they wouldn't be a trickster but a saint. Tricksters always play with the rules and sometimes break them. However there is a difference between pointing out societal hypocrisy in a 'jester' role, or being a bit 'off the rails', and rape allegations.
I will pause here and continue in part two, which examines the cultural phenomenon of the Trickster via the now apparently much-reviled film Joker: Folie à Deux (and explains why it feels like a disappointment), and I’ll also get to the point of how we can make cooperation sexy again. Yeah!
No society run by behavioral anarchistic leaders have ever survived. Fun to identify them. Foolish to empower them.
Loved this analysis of our moment through the trickster lens. Very revealing!