Playing the Fool: Is Role-Playing Inauthentic Behaviour?

I have a foot in both camps. I see Second Life as a remarkable imaginative tool: You can create worlds that don’t (or even couldn’t) exist in reality. You could (theoretically anyway) film a group’s spontaneous experiences in Second Life and edit it into a movie that would be unlike anything you could do in real life. For those who, because of difficult personal circumstances or disabilities, are restricted in their ability to seek or have deep, loving, personal relationships, Second Life is exactly what its name implies, a second chance to live a healthy, normal life.

On the other hand, it can be a place of escapism, aggression and addiction. The degree to which some people obtain gratification from dominating and humiliating another person, and to which others are willing to subjugate themselves just to be “loved”, is very troubling. Many of the places in Second Life are precise and banal imitations of real life, except with vastly more conspicuous consumption and private ownership. The poor play at being rich, with massive private mansions and torture chambers filled with expensive playthings (you need pay nothing to have fun in Second Life, but some people spend enormous sums of real money buying land, clothing and toys for their avatars). In a world that needs no hierarchy, there is a lot of it. In a world where “physical” violence is very difficult to perpetrate, there is a depressing amount of psychological violence.

In today’s complex world we all have (for perfectly practical reasons) multiple identities, and I’ve written before about the challenges of moving between identities (and the media that tend to keep them separate) as relationships evolve and the communities we are each a part of bump together and overlap. My identities as business executive, as family member, as friend, as colleague, as writer, as speaker, as student are each different. They are all authentic, but they emphasize and de-emphasize (or even hide) different aspects of my history and personality, of who I really am.

In addition to identities we also have multiple personas. These are public roles that we assume or display, that we play. Many of these roles are assigned tacitly or explicitly, through a job title, a screenplay, a team roles list, duty roster etc. People who are insecure or unsure who they are will muddle their personas and identities: They will act, for example, how they think a father is supposed to act, in the presence of his children, rather than authentically. In some cases, when they’re really messed up, this can actually be a good thing, but for the most part it’s dangerous and confusing to others. It’s hard to trust someone when you know (and people know when what they are seeing is a persona and not an identity) that it’s only an act, a role-play.

Some personas are authentic, while others are utterly and purposefully false. Some of them are protective colouring that is designed to make it easier to survive in a crowded, judgemental and often intolerant world. Sometimes the gunk of our personas sticks to us so closely that, like some theatre makeup, it is very difficult to take off afterwards. After enough time and practice playing a role we may not even realize that many aspects of our persona are not authentic, not really ourselves at all. We ‘become’ our role, our job, to the point that our true identity is lost.

In many human activities, from the workplace to the theatre, we also recognize archetypes (from the Greek = original model). Archetypes are recognizable symbols or patterns, which may be simplified (stereotypes) or exaggerated (caricatures) to increase their recognizability. Humans are, after all, pattern recognizers, and putting a label on a certain type of character or behaviour enables us to think and communicate with others about it in a meaningful way. If we say Obama acts presidential in the same way that Kennedy did, for example, we are establishing Kennedy as an archetype. The clichÈ about “they broke the mold after they made her” likewise identifies someone as an archetype. All similar people thereafter “in the same mold” are merely copies.

Much use is made of archetypes in the writing and criticism of literature, in art, and in psychology. Many of the gods of different religions are archetypal — intended as models to study or follow. The cards of the Tarot deck, especially the major arcana, are also archetypes, handy in the search for patterns of people and behaviours necessary to tell fortunes.

Three years ago I wrote about one of those Tarot archetypes, The Fool or Jester, and specifically the interpretation of one Australian writer of the card’s meaning:

In the earlier article I wrote about cats as exemplars of Playing the Fool: “I have seen cats of all ages, cats of amazing wisdom and style who otherwise show themselves to be cunning and astonishingly self-sufficient, chase a piece of string dragged by a child around the house for an hour or more, indefatigably and with enormous concentration, creativity and energy. What is the purpose of this unexpected playfulness? Is this the cat’s way of discharging the tension and anxiety that preoccupies her more sombre and sober moments? Is it her way of teaching the child (or the adult, since I get great pleasure from such games, until usually some intrigued child coaxes the string away from me to learn more about this magic trick) important lessons about instinct, about reflexes, about strategy, about the need for play, and a hundred other lessons we are too besotted with WeltSchmertz (sadness over the evils of the world) to appreciate?”

I got to thinking, after reading Chris Corrigan blogging cryptically about learning the value of Playing the Fool at OSonOS, about whether the injection, into an Improv session or an Open Space session, of someone Playing the Fool or some other archetype, as a role, a persona, might be beneficial in getting new perspectives and breakthroughs for the group. The Fool is, after all, the naive seeker of knowledge and self-knowledge. Could someone Playing the Fool ask just the right “stupid questions” to get a group grappling with a complex problem out of their thinking rut? How about someone playing The Magician, the powerful, self-confident master who knows, and shows, that all he and others thought was true is just illusion?

The Magician card reversed is the Juggler, the indigenous Trickster, a conjurer who shows how illusions can wreak real magic (like the colourful butterfly wing that contains no pigment, whose rainbow of hues is the optical deception created by the way the wing’s molecules are layered). What value could be achieved by having someone adept at biomimicry delighting and inspiring the group with nature’s own tricks to overcome adversity, as they struggle with an intractable human problem?

Or how about planting a Hanged Man in their midst, one who is willing to let go of everything he has always been told is true, to look at the world from a fresh and inverted perspective, and trust his instincts and subconscious? Or the Hermit, the one who keeps bringing everything back to reflection, self-organization, self-sufficiency, adaptation, when the group is clamouring for the politicians or management to fix the problem, or calling for a committee, or a revolution?

And of course, we could always plant the Devil. Imagine the creative conflict and friction that might come from having a Devil’s advocate in the room, arguing, just for the sake of challenging all conventional wisdom and the propensity for groupthink.

Dave Snowden has warned me that for such mischievous plantings to work in Open Space and other types of event whose group dynamic is based on trust, the provocateurs would have to be Actors, clearly identified as such, wearing the appropriate ‘mask’ or accoutrements of their persona. To have someone within the group do this surreptitiously, he suggests, would be a betrayal of the group’s trust and throw the authenticity of everything in the event into doubt.

I’m not so sure. I’ve played the Fool and the Devil and other archetypal roles in meetings, not dishonestly but just to stir things up when I felt that stirring up was needed. I’ve seen other people move into these and other roles, and the effect on groups is astonishing, perhaps for the same reason that self-deprecation is so powerful in Improv comedy sessions.

Those of us who are continuously learning have all of these archetypes within us, and for them to emerge as personas is, I think, the most natural thing in the world. Kittens and puppies playing together take turns in the dominant (Magician) and submissive (Fool) role, and this is how they learn about complexity, about how to solve problems, and ultimately, about their own identity.

Perhaps what we need is to give each participant in a problem-solving or brainstorming event a set of cards representing all the common archetypes, and have people self-identify and ‘wear’ the card which represents the persona that has emerged for them, that they are playing, at any point in time during the event. We might learn as much about ourselves as we do about the challenge the event is about. I think de Bono used something like this in his Six Thinking Hats creativity sessions. Some of the more sophisticated emoticons (e.g. the wink) serve a similar purpose, of giving the listener context for “where we’re coming from” in this.

Some of the desktop videoconferencing tools allow participants to put up an emoticon indicating how they feel about what they’re hearing (happy, unhappy, excited, confused) so speakers who can’t ‘see’ the audience can get feedback that way, without interrupting the event.

In Second Life we’ve been using the Talking Stick and a Placeholder to encourage group listening and manage the order of conversations, and to ‘park’ subjects to be discussed once the current one has run its course.

It would be interesting to see whether, in real-time, face-to-face events like Open Space, and in real and virtual conversations and group discussions, we could develop a whole set of “where I’m coming from now” emoticons and archetypal symbols, that we could each display and change on the fly, so that we could accurately ‘read’ all of the other participants as we spoke and listened. A new, unspoken, supplementary language.

I suspect that animals in the wild, wild children, and perhaps some indigenous peoples, have no need for such artifacts — they can sense what is not said much better than we can, and they probably have less ‘gunk’ preventing them from knowing themselves well enough to signal and read accurately “where they’re coming from” without the need for artifacts. But we’ve largely lost that sensing capacity and that deepself-knowledge.

Anyone up for inventing, and learning, a new language?