The one who lived in a barrel in the square, mocking the pretenses of aristocracy. The one who drank with a prince and trained him in the worth of mirth. The one who cleaned up and prayed and kept a parrot. The one who wouldn’t throw stones, and the one who saw through suffering. The one who made soup and shoes for a fellow prisoner. The one atop a column in the desert. The one who would rather not. All those fools living forever and saying whatever they see.
The fool is an old figure, a notion whose shapes predate history. They are outcasts, simpletons; they are poor and blessed truth-tellers. Their speech is not always clear, their intent is not always earthly. But the fool has always had a place at the table.
The fool has a few important qualities. They speak truths. Unsurprisingly, with respect to their own lives, they are relaxed, light on their feet. They are materially scant. They are more like children than adults. A face of perennial philosophies, they may walk in whatever worlds are available to them. The fool is untouchable, aloof, immortal.
And the fool has a simple morality. They usually eschew jargon for plain language. They call things good, and usually these are obvious animal things: food, drink, warmth, touch, a friend. And for the fool the bad things are obvious, too: cruelty, bureaucracy, legalism, pomp and circumstance, pride, power. The fool lives on hard earth, yet is cradled by the dirt. The fool does not run. The fool’s courage is impeccable, even in their fear.
I believe we need, and need today, a fool’s morality.
It is simple to see, feel, understand, and say that exploding someone is bad. It is bad to shoot and stab and hang and gas and cage. It is bad to demand proof of a person’s dignity. And it is easy to know who has power and who doesn’t, and to describe the gap between those groups. It is simple work to know what love is, because love forms the core of our history.
The technological, economic, and political terms which those in power deem mandatory simply obscure our senses and cleave our simple animal selves from the earth that supports us. We think so many fake things are real: nations, borders, laws, status, authority, victory, permanence. But morality is a function of simple principles, not complex frameworks. It is good to love and care for others, it is good to listen, it is good to wait to judge or not at all.
The fool evinces these simple principles. The fool is the archetype of living peace. Peace is made from commitments to dialogue, exchange, and pleasure—not détente, competition, and threats. Again: this is obvious. Screamingly so. Yet we have tried to ignore the fool for so long.
When one sees as the fool does, one travels easily through the flames of ambition, patronage, and conflict. For instance, the fool would demonstrate that when one group has more power than others, and uses that power to kill people trying hard each day to simply live, then that group is bad. Yet the fool is not trapped in binary and mechanistic thinking: in the fool’s ethics, good and bad are not all-encompassing and linked; there is good, and there only needs to be good, while bad is just a mistake along the path. In their simplicity, the fool knows reality more intimately than every single professional. Keeping an honest relation to the Janus-faced fact of circumstance and possibility is one of the fool’s many moves.
What I am saying is that the fool is humble. A humble and simple morality does not lapse into folk truisms and the worn hypnosis of tradition; the fool is usually aberrant to the norms of their time, almost as if by transcendent design. Yet the fool is no edgelord fantasizing about power; in most cases, the fool would rather walk away than cause a stir. The fool tightrope walks upon a kind of middle, but the fool is no centrist muppet, because the fool has a moral center of gravity. The fool takes each situation as they meet it, not contemplating and theorizing beforehand, but allowing their whole body to meet the needs of the moment. If the fool were an organ, they would be the gut. Though they strive for peace more than others, the fool and a judicious anger are not mutually exclusive.
We may look at ourselves addicted to screens, imaginations hobbled, victims of tools and terminology, herded and caricatured, bought and sold, our hearts a shroud of numbness, politically powerless, socially desperate, ready to fight, ready to kill, willing to exit, instrumentalized.
But then the fool looks at us. And the fool says what they see.
If we are wise or lucky, we hear.
Then, as though a dream, we know the simple sign of love.