Yup. We are gonna do another TED talk based blog entry.

What can I say? TED talks are one of the best things in the world right now, in my opinion. Smart people with great ideas giving fascinating, moving talks about really important topics.

To me, that is intellectual ambrosia, which is of course my favorite kind. And when something fills my mind with inspiration and ideas like a TED talk does, I just have to pass the overflow on to you.

I’m an intellectual, and that’s the sort of thing we do.

On with the show. Ladies and gents, one of the funniest and most adorable intellectuals I have ever heard, Emily Levine, talks comedy, life, and the trickster spirit.

She is my kind of person. Funny, questioning, always seeking perspective, wanting to see things from all the different points of view before she makes up her mind about something.

She seems like someone it would be a hoot to hang out with and talk about everything under the sun and have wonderfully wacky adventures with going where we aren’t supposed to go so we can see what we are not supposed to see.

And I love how she is clearly a person who loves on making connections between things and finding the delightful and often quite illuminating and humbling ironies of life that most people never see because they are too busy dealing with the objects of life to wonder about the spaces in between them.

I don’t like how she using the phrase ‘Newtonian science’ though. I know that feminist philosophy uses that phrase as a shorthand for all that is rational, mechanistic, logical, and well, male.

(And don’t get me started on that!)

But when I hear “Newtonian science” I want the person to be talking about the actual science Newton did. Perhaps that is excessively literal of me, I don’t know. But it’s pretty hard to argue with Newton’s science when we have already used it to put people on the Moon.

I mean, it’s not like Newton’s laws of motion and light are difficult to test.

And I completely do not get what she is talking about when she says objectivity has something to do with the object dominating the subject. That sounds like more hairy-brained feminist fuzzy philosophy to me.

All objectivity means is that you remain focused on the search for the truth, and that you are able to remove yourself from the equation in order to get at it. I would agree that some people use objectivity to deny their own subjectivity, and we can quibble about whether total objectivity is possible for any human being, but striving for objectivity is still a worthy pursuit.

I get the feeling that she and I could have some really interesting arguments. I’m sorry… discussions. She doesn’t do serious arguments.

I can respect that point of view, and even partially endorse it. Certainly arguments (outside of politics) are never more important than the relationships in our lives. The feminists and I agree on that. And an argument is, after all, just a game between two people, most of the time.

And a game is only a game if both people are still having fun, right?

But me, I was born to argue and I doubt I will ever change on that subject. The world of ideas and ethics are very real to me, and so what happens there is of extreme importance to me.

So I will always love a good argument, as long as everybody can stay calm and not make it personal. It might be nothing more than an intellectual arm-wrestling match, but I like it.

And when the other person says they don’t want to talk about it any more, you drop the matter instantly, even if you think they are only saying that because they are losing.

If you pursue it after that, you are the asshole. You’re the one who is forcing the other person to submit to your desire for blood and dominance.

Nobody has a moral obligation to let you “get” them. Back the hell off.

But what I really want to discuss is the whole notion of “the trickster” that she addresses in the second half of her talk. I recognize a lot of the trickster nature in myself, but that has always troubled me because the trickster is a confusing and confounding figure for someone who cares as much about ethics as I do.

Basically, the trickster always seems callous or cruel to me, and that is simply something I cannot accept. Kindness, benevolence, consideration, sensitivity, and understanding are all crucially important to me and form the core of my ethical being, and this creates a conflict between my ethics and my being able to accept the trickster spirit in myself.

So I suppose I would have to call myself a trickster who strives to only uses his powers for good. I have a chaotic streak underneath my desire for order and efficiency, and I am perfectly capable of playing tricks and laying traps and using my imagination to create illusions if it suits my purposes.

I believe there can definitely be such a thing as constructive chaos. Sometimes, you just have to shake things up to wake people up and make them see what is really going on. It’s why I loved carefully violating unspoken rules and undeclared assumptions.

What better way than that to make people aware of them? They know something is wrong, but they don’t know what, exactly. And out of that creative confusion comes enlightenment.

But unlike the followers of Eris, I cannot just sow the chaos for it’s own sake. I am too responsible for that. The trickster spirit often does not seem to know why it does what it does, but I must know, and understand, so I can maintain my ethical standards and preserve my ethical being.

Hence, when I used to play D&D, my characters were always Neutral Good.

Both chaos and order have their uses. I just want to make things better, whatever it takes.

I will not victimize people purely for my own amusement, which is definitely part of the dark side of the trickster spirit from what I can tell. That, and a dark rage at people for being stupid and not thinking that can lead to cynicism and even nihilism.

But I will use making them laugh as a way to make them think.

That’s still okay, right?