By Dan Piraro

[This post is from my weekly subscription newsletter The Naked Cartoonist. Subscription info here.]

Audio produced by Temporary Genius Productions

It’s a politically scary time on planet Earth. But it’s important to note that this is neither the first, nor the scariest time our species has experienced, by a long shot.

You could fill a volume the size of the Manhattan phonebook (trust me, they were huge and the type was tiny) with a list of the catastrophes humans have caused and/or endured in our brief time here, but I won’t attempt to cite them. Just know that there have been a lot, drop that knowledge into a box, and leave it on the back porch of your mind for the moment.

Whether you believe in other dimensions or not, it is a fact that the one our entire universe inhabits exists on the “tension of opposites”: light and dark, hot and cold, pleasure and pain, life and death. Our planet orbits around the sun because of the tension between motion and gravity, as all celestial bodies do, etcetera, ad infinitum. Get rid of your least favorite half of any of those opposites listed above—or any others—and you remove the other half, too. Each exists in tension with and as a result of the other.

Put that in a box on the back porch for now, too.

***

Now let’s talk about “bad” people: They lie, they dominate, they cheat, they trick you into believing in them and a host of other falsehoods, then they betray you. We call them “con men”—short for “confidence” men—because they gain our confidence before cheating us. Damn, that hurts. When authority figures who have power over our lives do this, it can be dangerous, damaging, and even deadly. It is understandable if you to want to rid the world of these kinds of people.

Now consider this: People of this sort and the calamities they engender are a major driving force of our evolution. You could even say they are the reason our species has been successful, innovative, and progressive.

I thought that sounded crazy at first too, but give me a couple more paragraphs and you may see the logic.

I recently came across this concept in a book by Lewis Hyde called Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. He uses the history of mythology to make his point, but we’ll skip that and cut to the basic concept, which is simple: Every animal on earth is a predator or prey, and many are both. The game of predator and prey is one of advancing intelligence: Predators must outsmart their prey, prey gets outsmarted and loses some members of its ranks, but it makes them smarter as they learn to avoid the ruse. The predators then must get smarter once again and develop new tricks, and the cycle repeats. It is a function of “survival of the fittest” that doesn’t get mentioned much—not only the fastest and strongest survive, but the smartest.

Leaving wild animals behind for the moment, we see that this pattern is most obvious in human culture because we are so much more intellectually gifted than the average beast of the field; our tricks and deceptions are more complex than those in the wild, and materialize ever more rapidly. And as a result, our responses must be more rapid and complex, too.

Quick aside: This is not a review of that book and is by no means all Hyde has to say on the topic. I only mean to call attention to the fact that this cat-and-mouse game is a major and natural part of how our species drives itself forward. Terrible people and horrible things are not the end of the world, they are a means to a better world.

***

Think about how much you learn when you are comfortable and happy as compared to hungry, victimized, or desperate. There’s no competition. We learn as a result of discomfort, not contentment. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.

Now let’s focus on the United States. Anyone of any political stripe can list things terribly wrong and gloriously right about the U.S. Each side attempts to force its view on the other and fine-tune the government to its preferences. But the other side objects and obstructs, resulting in, at best, a compromise. When compromise stops, so does progress in either direction. The U.S. is currently in this kind of stalemate, but it isn’t the first time.

Here’s where the role of contentment comes in. The Great Depression of the 1930s was horrific, lasted for more than a decade, and only a tiny percentage of Americans who were tremendously rich were content. The rest were living on a knife’s edge. This society-wide discomfort led to great change in the form of a government that stopped doting exclusively on the wealthy and powerful and began to care for a much wider section of the public, which led to the contentment of a much larger percentage of the people. Americans could have made these changes sooner and avoided the Great Depression entirely, but they weren’t uncomfortable enough to demand it. It took a dozen years of a national tragedy to inspire this kind of change. But once it did, it led to more than half a century of prosperity and innovation.

(Going back much further, the U.S. and its radically progressive, liberal philosophy of democracy and equality before the law exists as a result of the abuses of the British monarchy: King George III was the trickster responsible for inspiring our Founding Fathers to birth our nation.)

***

So here we are, about a hundred years after the Great Depression, on the verge of national calamity yet again. We are facing challenges most Americans have not seen in their lifetimes, and most of us are anywhere from anxious to terrified. So how can we see this upheaval not as the end of the world, but as the necessary discomfort of creating a better one?

There is an ancient Asian parable that may help:

A poor farmer’s only financial asset is a horse. One day, it runs away. His neighbor hears the news and offers his condolences. “What bad luck,” he says. The farmer replies, “Is it?”

The next day the horse returns with four other horses. “What great luck!” his neighbor says. “Is it?” the farmer replies.

The next day the farmer’s son is riding one of the horses, falls off and breaks his leg. The neighbor and the farmer repeat the call and response. “Terrible luck!” “Is it?”

The next day the army comes marching through, looking for young men to conscript. They reject the farmer’s son because his leg is broken. Once again, bad luck turns to good.

This pattern can go on indefinitely in a world of opposites in tension, and it has, for as long as we have existed.

When we fear political dark clouds on the horizon, we can take a quick peek at those boxes we put on the back porch of our minds and remind ourselves that whatever challenges arise, our kind has successfully endured worse, and that in a universe fundamentally made up of opposites in tension, we’re going to experience some tension from time to time.

Not knowing what the future will bring can be either unsettling or reason for hope. The choice is ours.

***

Audio produced by Temporary Genius Productions

I didn’t address climate change in this article because I wanted to focus on political upheaval, but I easily could have. We’ve used the earth’s natural resources and the primitive technology of fossil fuels to the point of abuse. Many factions have been warning us of the consequences and trying to change our behavior since the mid-twentieth century, but as I mentioned in the essay above, little gets done in times of comfort. Now we’re roasting, freezing, drowning, and getting blown into the next county, and it is finally waking us up. It takes what it takes.

If this threat leads to new habits and technologies that allow humans to inhabit the Earth without burning it down or turning it into a landfill, it will have been worth the cost of going through it. And if we fail, and the planet succeeds in evicting our kind for good, we won’t be here to give a shit anyway, and the planet’s remaining life forms will benefit immensely. To my mind, that’s something of a win-win.

The book I mentioned above is not only about bad actors and con men; tricksters are defined as any disruptive types who force the rest of us to see things differently. Creative efforts of any kind that push envelopes, challenge tradition, or disrupt the status quo have the potential of getting us to see things from a different perspective, and this is the key to intellectual and philosophical progress.

“Tricksters” are often politicians, but also artists, writers, comedians, satirists, musicians, philosophers, activists, and a host of others. In those roles, we are all challenging perspectives and incrementally dragging (or pushing) our species forward into greater light. Before I read the book, I did not know I was a trickster, but now I’m proud to say that as an artist, cartoonist, and writer I always have been.

In this realm of opposites in tension, it will never be about getting rid of the bad, as we so naturally want to do, it will always be about compensating and balancing, innovating and progressing. Both forces will always exist and neither side will ever completely “win.”

The yin-yang symbol is a perfect and enduring image of the balance of light and dark, while also admitting that nothing is completely one or the other—there are elements of both light and dark in everything. For me, learning to see that small spot of light in the darkness, and admitting that there is a touch of dark in what I see as light, has been an enormous step toward better understanding our world and our existence.