Kindred (trickster!) Spirits – episode 2 🦊🪽

e8 // Kindred Spirits – e2 🦊🪽

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Dear kindred spirits (that’s a collective noun for you), the latest episode of our little pop-up (video) podcast has just dropped. Once again, your favourite wizard-and-bard duo dance in conversational reverie in service of emergence.

I jokingly suggested that “career limiting is just the beginning” for this little podcast. And of course I do this as a wily trickster—sometimes we achieve more by not making the thing the thing. But I do sometimes wonder—am I being wisely foolish here, or not quite?

Trickster’s accord

Long-time subscribers will know I love the trickster, the jester, and the fool. And my co-host and new BFF John Anthony is right there with me in this. But it takes a sophisticated audience to see what we are doing here. (Yes, that’s me flattering you).

It reminds me of this line from Lewis Hyde’s treatise Trickster Makes This World.

“Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.”

Not that I am worried about being confused for a psychopath, but I do fear that terminally serious listeners might not pick up on what we are exemplifying in these episodes of Kindred Spirits.

Lewis Hyde further observes that:

“Most of the travellers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn’t a run-of-the-mill liar and thief. When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds.”

Again, not to say that we are ever lying—if anything, we are being more truthful here than most would be familiar with. A lot of truth is said in jest. A lot. But there’s something to be said—even of the personalities of the twenty-first century (the one we’re in now)—about the pitch of disruption.

Much of the disruption in our current times is far too base and unsubtle. It’s messaging and content pitched smack-bang within the Overton window, groomed for the algo, the highest TAM, and/or whatever will be popular and viral.

Where does this leave us? Fixated upon the obvious and/or outrageous, and blind to possibilities—both good and ill—beyond the default.

Where are the subversive quickening magics? This is what Trickster (and trickster-spirit) brings.

“I suppose that one of the less obvious signs of civilizational decline is the rise of tricksters.” Bayo Akomalafe writes. “Tricksters are stewards of queer hope, coaxing us away from safe grounds to the monstrous ambiguities of being more fully present. The disturbing mist in the way. The comedic is not merely about laughter, it’s about accounting for the awkward. Acknowledging limitations. Thwarting the tried and true. Perverting the obvious.”

There was a time I once revered Trickster so much that I thought to ‘be a trickster’—and that messed me up. Much as Josh Schrei talks of in Trickster Jumps Sides. What we need, instead, is to remain in right relation to Trickster. To ‘microdose chaos’ (as I discussed with my friend Simon in an earlier episode of my regular podcast)—rather than seek to suppress or deny it.

Honour trickster-spirit (lower-case ‘t’)—but don’t ever claim to be Trickster. Trickster is not loyal to your side. Nor any ‘sides’.*

* But one might consider Trickster to be loyal to Life and the infinite game, for ‘only that which can change can continue’.

The mythologist Martin Shaw, whomst it seems I continue to fanboy, adds further nuance. In the wake of Trump being re-elected last year, Martin wrote:

“Whilst outrageous fibbing, astonishing revivals of fortune and showy displays can be part of the Trickster’s arsenal, what in myth they ultimately serve is something that refreshes the culture. They say in every lie is a little bit of truth, and maybe that tiny bit – the mythic need to shake, rattle and roll the centre – is what some folks sensed was needed. This isn’t an endorsement.

What I do know from folktales is this: never, ever make Trickster the boss. Especially not some feral derivative like this one. In their most esteemed function they are marginal figures, sacred outliers designed to shake things up when needed. The best of them freeze when assembled at the centre of the room. A real Trickster’s power lies in their nose and tail, not anything too centralised. You put a real sacred Trickster in the centre and they implode. They need authority to bounce off, to react to, not to be it.”

It’s a clown world, now. It has been for some time.

And I feel that there’s an important point here: much as we might wax lyrical about trickster-like sensibilities and the role such has in ensuring the conditions for continuation, emergence, and renewal—this is not a centring ploy. I’m not suggesting that leaders ought to “be more trickster,” but rather: to make room for Trickster. To have some accord. And to know that, sometimes, we must ‘run to the safety of trouble’.

Trickster is not the hero; nor the leader. These might be roles that are played, as the situation calls for. But Trickster is much more interested in seeding the conditions that renew what ‘leadership’ might yet become.

Some disambiguation, why not

I’ve thrown a few related-yet-distinct terms around here. Let’s refresh.

Tricksters are boundary-walkers and threshold dwellers. They disrupt fixed orders not for disruption’s sake, but to reveal the constructedness of categories. To loosen ossified patterns, and open novel ,emergent paths. Their transgressions are a sacred play, unsettling the known to make space for what has yet to be imagined.

Jesters operate within the court—they are licensed subversives. Their truth-telling is cloaked in humour and irony, allowing them to voice the unspeakable without direct reprisal.* They trouble power from within, using satire to bend the frame of the dominant narrative.

* Power that integrates the jester becomes more adaptive, more self-aware, and more capable of reflection and course correction. But power that exiles the jester—dismissing critique, banning levity, surrounding itself with sycophants—grows brittle, blind, and dangerously convinced of its own righteousness.

Fools dwell in liminality—between ignorance and insight, awkwardness and awe. Their innocence serves an archetypal function: naïveté allows wisdom to surface obliquely, sidestepping the ego’s defences. The fool invites us into a form of unguarded openness that the rational mind resists.

Clowns are avatars of inversion, often arising during carnivals or moments of social excess. They channel the raw, anarchic forces that simmer beneath the civilised mask; exaggerating affect, grotesquing the familiar, and making the absurd visible. Where tricksters open paths and fools stumble into truth, clowns reveal the hollow theatre of consensus reality by pushing it to farce.

Whilst I respect the role, I’m still not sure how I feel about clowns. Whereas the disruptions of tricksters and jesters are subtle and intentional, the fool and the clown don’t harbour the same level of awareness. But at least with the fool, fewer people get hurt.

What to do in this clown world?

“We would rather be ruined than changed,” writes W.H. Auden in The Age of Anxiety (1947)—a poem whose eclogue form deals with the quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialised world. “We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

Tricksters and jesters* see through the illusions.
Fools don’t know and clowns don’t care.

* And wizards, bards, witches, rogues, and any of us who are paying attention.

Is there wisdom in this? Maybe.

To survive these times we must do at least two things at once.

1. Keep your wits about you. Ha, one day I’ll write a museletter without sharing this line. But it remains as relevant as ever. We are in the liminal, now. The future is not what it used to be, and the recent-past is not a reliable guide. We must have the wit and acuity to see the pattern behind the spells that bind us, so that we might be free to move as needed. Or at least, to have some wiggle.
2. Cultivate ‘islands of coherence’. Thermodynamicist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine coined this term to describe the emergence of order out of chaos in complex systems. Coherence—a state in which things ‘make sense’—can emerge even amidst global instability.

Thus when a family, a company, a country—or any coordination-container—finds itself amidst chaos and collapse, regenerative responses can sprout up in localised, contextual, and relational ways.

You’ll note: neither of these dispositions is about creating order or chaos. We do not impose order from the top down. Rather, we dance with chaos, and cultivate the conditions through which order is more likely to emerge.

Many complexity practitioners are inspired by the work of Ilya Prigogine. “The main character of any living system is openness,” he says.

Part of the sacred work I do in my role as Dr. Fox is to come into seemingly closed systems and open them up. To play my part, in cohort with the client and their crew, to enliven the culture.

In Order Out of Chaos (published in 1984), Prigogine says:

“Entropy is the price of structure.”

We complexity practitioners sometimes like to make a relatively informal distinction between negative entropy and (positive) entropy.

Entropy (or positive entropy) is the tendency of all things to drift toward disorder, dispersal, and dissolution. Left untouched, all structures decay, all patterns blur, and all warmth bleeds into cold.

But life is a sacred defiance. Life is an emergent, organising force. It weaves wholeness from flux, form from flow. Life metabolises chaos, drawing energy from the sun and sustenance from the soil, transmuting lower-order mineral and energetic input into higher orders of complexity, coherence, and renewal.

Negative entropy—or negentropy, if you want to sound fancy—is when something becomes less disordered. It’s not so much the absence of disorder, but rather: the active evocation and instilling of aliveness.*

* I spoke of such in my appearance on At Work with The Ready last year.

In order for something to become less disordered, energy must be used. Thus Life requires energy and sustenance to continue. Just so: egregores (aka organisations) require effort to be invested, in order to grow and be sustained.

Life is not a machine that resists entropy—it is a phenomenon that dances with it. But we often forget this, in our pursuit to optimise and ‘perfect’ the machine. But Trickster will remind you. In a big way, if you haven’t yet come to an accord.

Here’s another quote from Order Out of Chaos.

“One measure of a book is the degree to which it generates good questions.”

Ha! I love this. No surprises here—questions are wondrous. Just as this comic celebrates. Related, Sangeet Paul Choudary asserts: when answers get cheap, good questions are the new scarcity.

But allow me a brief moment to lament: too few clients appreciate the generative power and enlivening affect of good questions. They want the clear, concrete, straightforward, safe, comfortable, familiar answers that are oh-so-easy to implement. They daren’t look beyond the Overton window. And, for a time, this will serve.

That is, of course, until Trickster comes a’knockin’.

I’m very grateful for the many happy clients I have, though. Folks who would rather cultivate a culture of enlivened folk, curious and astute, warm to the ways of complexity. Yes, that was a subtle plug for my Mysterious and Important Work (which mostly pertains to developing the meta-rational capacities and complexity-congruent sensibilities amidst enterprising leadership teams).

Similarly, the spirit John Anthony brings. And most of my friends in this work, each in their own way.

Which reminds me—I have gone way off-track here. This was meant to be a short introduction to episode two of kindred spirits. Ha!

Kindred Spirits, episode two

By the time we are three episodes in, we will have our stride. We were both a bit sleep-frazzled for this episode—JA had literally just welcomed their second daughter into the world (huzzah for Luna Anthony! 🥰). But our semi-lucid alacrity translated to more laughter and fun.

Again, this episode is two trickster-kin talking shop about the same thing I mentioned W.H. Auden was writing of in The Age of Anxiety (1947)—“the quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialised world”. Only here we are talking about substance and identity in a distraction economy replete with optimised influencers, artificial intelligence, and myriad forms of audience and platform capture.

Specifically, we dive into creativity itself. We also sample the Rare Seppeltsfield Tawny Cask from Lark Distillery (the OG Tasmanian distiller). Pour yourself a dram and join us in your own time, if you like.

Maybe I should share the shoggoth summary with you?

Haha, shoggoths do love to “delve.” And they don’t quite know the difference between whiskey and whisky. Oh, and it’s always “engaging”, isn’t it? It is! Wondrously so.

Anyways, enjoy the show! Find John Anthony and meself on the socials and tell us nice things if you enjoyed it—we thrive on your encouragement.

Finally, as a playful experiment: if you have a question you’d like us to explore on the next show, simply email fox@foxwizard.com (and/or jatranscend@gmail.com) with the subject line “A Question from A Kindred Spirit” and we’ll do our best to weave it into the next show. ✨

Thanks for reading, watching, and listening! In my next museletter I will be sharing an offering for fellow infinite players (be ye an internal/embedded/sleeper agent—or an external/rogue consultant agent). Stay tuned—something special this way comes.

Warmth,
—fw