- amused by abuse of trust
- amused by subversion
you may have what might be called "subversion complex" (SC). Other evidence of this may be:
- hacking
- pedophilia
- enjoyment of sick jokes
- trust issues
Social role of the trickster
I conjecture that the evolved role of SC (tricksterism) is to harden a population against natural disasters such as famine and pestilence. In this regard, persons with SC are analogous to white-hat hackers, or penetration testers, that the military or a large corporation may keep on staff to harden their systems against hacking for real by outsiders. Spontaneously formed, cooperating groups of persons with SC would be analogous to corporate "red teams" or "tiger teams."
Tricksterism as a subroutine of the human swarm intelligence
SC is probably transmitted intergenerationally by child abuse. The prevalence of SC in a population may rise with increasing population density because of adult carriers encountering and victimizing solitary children more frequently. If the SC prevalence rises high enough, carriers encounter each other often enough to form social groups ("red teams") that cooperate in subversion to amplify their social effect. This is adaptive, because the risk of famine and pestilence to a population increases with population density. <06-19-2020: this can be called a "macro-homeostatic effect," or maybe a "population homeostatic effect," but is usually called "the hand of God.">
There may also be a complimentary subversion-victim complex (SVC), also induced by childhood abuse, but involving a milder disturbance that spares the victim's ability to influence and harden a network of friends against adversity. <03-27-2020: This may be where priests come from.>
An SC carrier or red team of same will appear to the victim to:
- accurately imitate the essential features of microbial pathogens
- accurately imitate the essential features of a famine
- "not be doing a very good job" of killing the victim, because their evolved role is essentially instructional.
Of value would be a psychometric test to detect SC and SVC, but the test authors will need to do much field testing to bullet proof the SC test against cheating.
Schizophrenia may be a disease of persons with SVC who fail to learn fast enough to defeat the threats posed by their local "red team."
The evolved emotional reactivities underlying tricksterism
05-14-2020: The toxic factor that induces the SC/SVC may be unavoidable stress experienced in childhood. This factor is also linked to depression. In adulthood, the dynamic would be between the Till Eulenspiegels (SC) and the control freaks (SVC). The angrier the control freaks get because of the tricks of the Tills, the more fearful the Tills get because the control freaks signal their desire for disproportionate retribution. However, the Tills have learned that by cleverly subverting the control freaks, thus making them look feckless and by implication, no real threat, they can reduce their own anxiety levels, resulting in negative reinforcement of the subversion behavior (and a vicious interpersonal cycle). <05-17-2020: These emotional reactivities underlying full-blown SC may also underlie the cultural phenomenon of humor.>
06-09-2020: The victims of Till Eulenspiegel's tricks were often craftspersons, which supports the present theory because such people are in the best position to devise technological solutions to external threats to society, which are one possible output of the SC/SVC adaptation that led to its selection in evolution. Recall that both Jesus of Nazareth and Paul the Apostle were craftspeople (carpenter and tent maker, respectively). However, the worst mass murderer in Canadian history to date was also a craftsperson (denturist). Keep calm and make something.
12-24-2020: Evolution has raised up a number of supporting roles for the builder-trickster interaction: the humorist, the madman, and the suicide. The humorist makes the trickster role appealing to young people and serves as recruiter. The madman runs to the police with tales of nonexistent persecution, thereby obfuscating attempts by the tormented builder to explain his problem and be believed, and get help, due to a poor signal-to noise ratio, thereby allowing the tricksters to do their work unimpeded by social controls. The suicide obfuscates the question of whether someone has been murdered. If the tricksters decide that some builder must be murdered to keep the party going, they just have to pin a suicide note on the body to get away scot-free.
12-25-2020: The final stage in the builder-trickster program is making public the findings of the builder, for which an attention-getting emotional explosion will be needed, e.g., the crucifiction of Jesus, or the Gabriel Wortman massacre. However, this is probably simplistic. <01-26-2022: Other mechanisms for propagating design improvements can be imagined, such as the emulation of high-status individuals.>
A biological precedent for penetration testing?
Evidence for a biological precedent may be the many retroviruses integrated into the human genome. Presumably, one of these becomes active now and then at random and kills the host cell if the anti-viral defenses of the latter have become weak due to some somatic mutation. The red team-blue team strategy seems to be too good a trick for nature to miss (TGTNM).
A field observation
06-18-2020: Don't assume that all persons with SC are necessarily grinning and leering all the time. I strongly suspect that the ones who have done time are unsmiling, taciturn, and given to complaint--and still up to their tricks.
Evolution of the trickster
09-27-2020: Modern human populations may have two (independent?) axes of political polarization: oppressor-oppressed and trickster-control freak. The first may sub serve dispersal by generating refugee groups and the second may sub serve building. Any built thing must serve in a complex world in which many constraints must be simultaneously observed. Thus, after the initial build, a long period of tweaking must typically follow. The role of the tricksters is to powerfully motivate this tweaking before the complacency of the control-freak builders leads to disaster. <03-12-2021: This may have been how engineering was done by an archaic version of Homo sapiens.><12-02-2022: The tricksters can also make mistakes, causing damage that cannot have a silver lining in any possible world, and moving to correct this is a natural role of the builders. If you are a builder, ask this: “What is the best use of my indignation?” It is to keep to a strict harm-reduction approach.>
A tangent about our evolutionary context
Our evolutionary forebears may have been champion dispersers for a long time <12-21-2020: i.e., Homo erectus*> before the ice age** forced some of them to become champion builders (initially, of shelters and warm clothing). <12-31-2020: "champion environment modifiers" may be closer to the mark than "champion builders"> It is an interesting fact that physically, humans exceed all other animals only in long-distance running, which can be read as dispersal ability. Our carelessness with preserving the local environments and our propensity for overpopulation can be read as typical r-selected disperser behavior. <12-21-2020: The r-selecting niche was probably big game hunting. H. erectus sites indicate consumption of medium and large meat animals. Overhunting would have occurred routinely, due to the slow reproduction rates of large animals and the high hunting efficiency of H. erectus due to tool use, so that dispersal of the hunters to new habitats would likewise have been routine.>
* H. erectus: lived 2 million years ago to 100,000 years ago. H. sapiens: earliest fossils, 300,000 years old. Evidence of behavioral modernity: 100,000–70,000 y ago.
** that is, the Pleistocene ice age, itself a sequence of 5 successive continental glaciations (by oxygen isotope evidence) separated by temperate periods, starting 2.6 million years ago and thought to be not over yet. Over the past 800,000 y, continental glaciation has happened rhythmically on a 100,000-y cycle due to astronomical factors (Milankovitch cycle). Selection for building skill may therefore have occurred in multiple successive episodes over the course of the Pleistocene.
