As Ezra Klein notes (NY Times, 080226) we are living in an age of Tricksters. Media and political figures say one thing and mean or do another. For example, George Orwell’s doublespeak from his novel, 1984, is pervasive (e.g., calling January 6, 2021’s insurrection a “day of love”). Long time moral codes, like Christian empathy, are being trashed by influencers and powerbrokers.
Trickster stories appear across cultures: For example, Hermes in ancient Greek tales; Coyote or Raven in American Indian/Native American tales. The tales often explain why the world is as it is, such as the origin of fire use among humans coming from Prometheus stealing fire from the gods to give to humans.
In a Miwok tale, Coyote creates all the animals and brings them together to discuss creating human beings. Each animal creates a model for a human being in their own image. Coyote mocks them and then destroys all their models. Only his model is left to come to life, with wit and cunning like his.
Tricksters have opposite tendencies, like Coyote being both cunning and stupid. They are often overconfident in their own power and abilities or go too far in their playful explorations, causing harm to self or others.
For example, Coyote sees Eagle swooping down from a cliff, then enjoyably riding the updrafts. Coyote tells himself he can do that too. So he arduously climbs to the top of the cliff and jumps off. He flaps his legs and twirls his tail to no avail, and plummets to his death. His friend, Fox, learned that Coyote’s foolishness has led to his death again. Fox is able to piece him together again with some magic. Coyote sits up and scolds Fox for waking him from a nap.
The Trickster not only shows what can happen with foolhardiness. The Trickster disturbs and reveals, offering an apocalypse—an ‘unveiling’ of what will be or has happened, showing the listener their vulnerability.
In the USA, the Tricksters are revealing the country’s character flaws. Here are three.
Entitled supremacy was initially built into the U.S. Constitution—that some humans are more valuable than others, specifically, white, propertied males. The original document assumed these males deserved to rule over the lesser, even sub-human, non-persons such as women, children, non-whites, especially blacks (most of whom were slaves at the time), and men without property. Although the Constitution has been amended to value these other groups too, some today are seeking to reverse course (see Project 2025). And so we see the Trickster showing us the extremism of this flaw with ICE death camps and murders of citizens and legal residents on the streets and behind closed doors. Today, entitlement is blatant among the ultra-rich who feel no need to pay taxes on their wealth while they play for a living.
A second related flaw is treating money as god. When a culture worships money making, justifying cunning and harm-doing towards that end, most people are crushed as the ‘winners’ trounce all others on the way to the ‘top.’ Predatory capitalism has taken us over. The USA had a reckoning in the 1930s with the Great Depression after Robber Barons and the ultra-rich ‘winners’ brought down the country with their greed recklessness. But here we are again after decades of the wealthy funding the vast infrastructure (e.g., think tanks, media organizations, schools, publishers, etc.) to make ‘feeding the rich’ seem normal and good.
This time, the trickling up of benefits and trickling down of burdens are deeply rewarded or condoned by power players in government (in all branches) and by mega-corporations. The noose tightens around everyone else as freedom from want, fear, and violence, go missing. The wétiko psychic virus predominates—a feverish cannibalism of Life.
Our more intelligent cousins, small-band hunter-gatherers, know that having privilege over another inflates the ego and is dangerous to everyone.
Assumptions of hierarchy are essential to the dominant worldview, which contrasts with humanity’s millions-year-old Kinship Worldview.
It’s true that we have innate domination-submission orientations inherited from our primate roots. These are pre-human instincts that can keep us alive in extremis. Dominance-submission orientations will prevail when nurturing care (especially in early life) is unavailable, or with activated PTSD. Their visibility in a person or culture indicates that something has gone wrong in the person’s development or their cultural milieu. Nurturing early care guides us into our full egalitarian and compassionate human nature.
The third flaw. In the framing of the Constitution, the USA’s founding fathers were inspired by the governance systems of the Haudenosaunee (aka Iroquois). But they left out a key component of the matrilinear Haudenosaunee system, the power of the Clan Mothers to select leaders. When the discussed their plans with the Haudenosaunee, the response was “Where are your women?” Indeed, the focus on nurturing holistic wellbeing, common in matrilineal Native communities across the land, was ignored from the beginning.
These flaws, and others, have led the USA to be about the least nurturing of any society (especially for babies and boys). The culture encourages never-ending competition to be king of the hill. Individuals learn that ‘if you are not one-up, you are one-down’ (and it’s your own fault.)
Sometimes Tricksters move between worlds of the manifest and unmanifest, material and spirit, but get stuck in one or the other. USA Tricksters are stuck in the material world. They scramble for more and more shiny objects, more and more control over others, more and more ruling power. The ‘hungry ghosts’ of those infected with the wétiko virus rage and ravage.
The ‘tech-bros’ are all in on bringing about a techno-feudalist state where they rule through SALAMI (Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences; also known as AI). Like Coyote, the bros have lost their wits and cannibalize us with their tools.
In this Trickster-governed land, there is an absence of Spirit, of heart-centered awareness of Allness, of Oneness. Holistic human nature, reliant on a fully developed and functioning right hemisphere has gone missing (because of undernurture). The narcissistic ego of separation and self-aggrandizement prevails, based in existential fear.
As an interpersonal neurobiology and evolutionary system theorist, I count the undermining of infant, child and adult (evolved) nestedness as the foundational problem, reverberating and snowballing across many generations. The loss of communal evolved nest support has damaged human nature, but because it is so widespread, people believe what we observe is species normal.
Klein notes that our period of Trickster disruption must be healed by integrators, those who put the spirit and material worlds back together.
That’s what my colleagues and I are about. NestedWorld.org and its Nesting Ambassador program aim to do this. With the transdisciplinary insight of the Evolved Nest and Native Science as guides, we offer pathways to restoration and re-nesting. Together we can restore humanity’s cooperative, ecocentric nature.