The Utility of the Fool

   

Use The Force, Luke..!!

LET GO, Luke..!!

 

The Utility of the Fool

“It is useful to take your place at the bottom of a hierarchy. It can aid in the development of gratitude and humility. 

Gratitude: There are people whose expertise exceeds your own, and you should be wisely pleased about that. 

There are many valuable niches to fill, given the many complex and serious problems we must solve. 

The fact that there are people who fill those niches with trustworthy skill and experience is something for which to be truly thankful. 

Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness. It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter. 

When you are tightly boxed in or cornered — all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions — all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.

It is necessary and helpful to be, and in some ways to remain, a beginner. 

For this reason, the Tarot deck beloved by intuitives, romantics, fortune-tellers, and scoundrels alike contains within it the Fool as a positive card, an illustrated variant of which opens this chapter. 

The Fool is a young, handsome man, eyes lifted upward, journeying in the mountains, sun shining brightly upon him—about to carelessly step over a cliff (or is he?). 

His strength, however, is precisely his willingness to risk such a drop; to risk being once again at the bottom. 

No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn. 

It was for this reason, among others, that Carl Jung regarded the Fool as the archetypal precursor to the figure of the equally archetypal Redeemer, the perfected individual.

The beginner, the fool, is continually required to be patient and tolerant—with himself and, equally, with others. His displays of ignorance, inexperience, and lack of skill may still sometimes be rightly attributed to irresponsibility and condemned, justly, by others. But the insufficiency of the fool is often better regarded as an inevitable consequence of each individual’s essential vulnerability, rather than as a true moral failing. Much that is great starts small, ignorant, and useless. 

This lesson permeates popular as well as classical or traditional culture. 

Consider, for example, the Disney heroes Pinocchio and Simba, as well as J. K. Rowling’s magical Harry Potter. 

Pinocchio begins as a wooden-headed marionette, the puppet of everyone’s decisions but his own. 

The Lion King has his origin as a naive cub, the unwitting pawn of a treacherous and malevolent uncle. 

The student of wizarding is an unloved orphan, with a dusty cupboard for a bedroom, and Voldemort — who might as well be Satan himself — for his archenemy. 

Great mythologized heroes often come into the world, likewise, in the most meager of circumstances (as the child of an Israelite slave, for example, or newborn in a lowly manger) and in great danger (consider the Pharaoh’s decision to slay all the firstborn male babies of the Israelites, and Herod’s comparable edict, much later). 

But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master. Thus, it is necessary even for the most accomplished (but who wishes to accomplish still more) to retain identification with the as yet unsuccessful; to appreciate the striving toward competence; to carefully and with true humility subordinate him or herself to the current game; and to develop the knowledge, self-control, and discipline necessary to make the next move.

I visited a restaurant in Toronto with my wife, son, and daughter while writing this. As I made my way to my party’s table, a young waiter asked if he might say a few words to me. He told me that he had been watching my videos, listening to my podcasts, and reading my book, and that he had, in consequence, changed his attitude toward his comparatively lower-status (but still useful and necessary) job. He had ceased criticizing what he was doing or himself for doing it, deciding instead to be grateful and seek out whatever opportunities presented themselves right there before him. He made up his mind to become more diligent and reliable and to see what would happen if he worked as hard at it as he could. He told me, with an uncontrived smile, that he had been promoted three times in six months.

The young man had come to realize that every place he might find himself in had more potential than he might first see (particularly when his vision was impaired by the resentment and cynicism he felt from being near the bottom). After all, it is not as if a restaurant is a simple place—and this was part of an extensive national organization, a large, high-quality chain. To do a good job in such a place, servers must get along with the cooks, who are by universal recognition a formidably troublesome and tricky lot. They must also be polite and engaging with customers. They have to pay attention constantly. They must adjust to highly varying workloads—the rushes and dead times that inevitably accompany the life of a server. They have to show up on time, sober and awake. They must treat their superiors with the proper respect and do the same for those—such as the dishwashers—below them in the structure of authority. And if they do all these things, and happen to be working in a functional institution, they will soon render themselves difficult to replace. Customers, colleagues, and superiors alike will begin to react to them in an increasingly positive manner. Doors that would otherwise remain closed to them—even invisible—will be opened. Furthermore, the skills they acquire will prove eminently portable, whether they continue to rise in the hierarchy of restaurateurs, decide instead to further their education, or change their career trajectory completely (in which case they will leave with laudatory praise from their previous employers and vastly increased chances of discovering the next opportunity).

As might be expected, the young man who had something to say to me was thrilled with what had happened to him. His status concerns had been solidly and realistically addressed by his rapid career advance, and the additional money he was making did not hurt, either. He had accepted, and therefore transcended, his role as a beginner. He had ceased being casually cynical about the place he occupied in the world and the people who surrounded him, and accepted the structure and the position he was offered. He started to see possibility and opportunity, where before he was blinded, essentially, by His Pride. 

He stopped denigrating the Social Institution he found himself part of and began to play his part properly. 

And that increment in Humility paid off in spades. "