Dear Jesters,
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the way criticism of Islam is treated in contemporary political discourse, as though it’s such a deranged act to even consider asking questions about a religion, its doctrines, or its political influence. And frankly, some of what I’ve been noticing is making me sick. I’m not Islamophobic. I’m a Realist. In fact, I question the legitimacy of the term itself, particularly when criticism of a religion is treated as though it were inherently an expression of prejudice toward its followers. I’m well aware that people can hate Muslims, persecute them, and subject them to genuine discrimination, and I have no interest whatsoever in defending that behaviour. But surely you can recognise the difference between questioning the principles of an institution and hating the people who find themselves living within its influence? Unless of course the context is Christianity, which is apparently free real estate when it comes to criticism, questioning, ridicule, and accusations of bigotry. And to be clear, Christianity ought to withstand the very same scrutiny. I wouldn’t have much faith in something whose legitimacy depended upon my unwillingness to question it. Although I suppose that’s precisely what has been bothering me, that increasingly, it appears as though the legitimacy of certain ideas has become dependent upon the social consequences associated with questioning them.
And what I find particularly disturbing is the extent to which this kind of linguistic programming has seemingly taken hold within contemporary political discourse, particularly among certain leftist circles, where the accusation itself becomes sufficient evidence of guilt, and the accused is expected to defend their character before their argument is even considered. There’s something deeply manipulative about that reversal, something resembling a socially reinforced DARVO tactic, which people consume with all the drunken pride of sailors convinced of their own sobriety. I say resembling because I’m not convinced that everyone participating in this behaviour is consciously manipulating anyone. And that’s actually part of what makes the whole thing considerably more interesting, and frankly more concerning. Because what happens when a mechanism of manipulation becomes so thoroughly normalised that those participating in it no longer recognise themselves as either the manipulated or the manipulator? What happens when the language itself becomes the authority through which the individual is permitted to understand an argument, and therefore the very instrument through which that individual determines whether an argument is even morally permissible to entertain?
I think there’s something to be said here about the nature of our learned associations, and how easily we mistake the emotional impressions accompanying a particular Word for the actual substance of what that Word represents. We hear something enough times, under enough similar conditions, and eventually its meaning becomes almost inseparable from the emotional posture we’ve been conditioned to assume upon encountering it. Prejudice, hatred, extremism, oppression, liberation. All of these words have meaning, of course they do, but meaning is not something that ought to be exhausted by the emotional reaction a word has been engineered, or socially conditioned, to produce. I can accuse you of prejudice, and perhaps I may even be correct in doing so, but the accusation itself has done nothing to establish whether I am. Yet we’re apparently becoming increasingly comfortable allowing the accusation to perform the function of the argument it was supposed to initiate.
And this is where my thoughts have been wandering toward something much larger than religion or even politics, because I don’t think the problem is exclusive to either the Left or the Right. In some ways both parties are so instinctively engaged in developing the identity of something for others to wear like armour, furnishing their respective ideological infantry with a vocabulary of convictions through which they can project the influence of their own systems. Appealing to authority, convinced that in doing so we somehow become relinquished of our individual burdens and liberated as a collective Peoples. There’s an extraordinary amount of submission involved in that process, and I don’t think we adequately recognise it because we’ve learned to associate submission almost exclusively with oppression, especially when it concerns religious authority. Yet there are plenty of people who would consider the very suggestion of submitting oneself to God an intellectual humiliation, while demonstrating an almost instinctive willingness to submit themselves to the moral authority of whatever political identity they happen to have inherited.
And for all the pagans who are indifferent to tradition, and are so complexed by the indifferences of their own afflictions that they become vivified through the repeated consumption of assumptions they barely recognise as assumptions, I wonder whether what we’re witnessing is something that could reasonably be described as a form of modern subconscious paganism. I’m using the term carefully here, because I’m not particularly interested in confusing historical pagan religions with what I’m trying to describe. I’m referring to the manner through which people begin investing finite, humanly constructed systems with the kind of authority traditionally reserved for something higher than themselves. An ideology, a political movement, a cultural identity, an economic arrangement, sometimes even the image of the Self becomes an object of reverence. And the strange thing is that these arrangements can continue functioning religiously even among people who adamantly insist they are entirely liberated from religion.
I mean, think about it for a moment. If a society gradually abandons its conception of God as the highest Agency of Order, does it actually abandon the psychological and social functions through which that conception once organised its relationship with reality? Or does it simply redistribute those functions among the people and institutions that remain?
Because I don’t see how you could altogether eliminate the human necessity of establishing relationships between higher and lower Orders of influence. We are dependent creatures, regardless of how sophisticated our technology becomes or how extensively we attempt to liberate ourselves from the limitations of our Nature. We need to determine what is good, what is worth preserving, what is dangerous, what is permissible to create, and what sort of authority possesses the legitimacy to govern the consequences of our actions. And historically, God has furnished an answer to the question of where that authority ultimately resides. Now remove God from that arrangement, or rather remove the willingness of the People to acknowledge an Agency beyond themselves, and suddenly the responsibility of establishing Order becomes increasingly concentrated within the human systems through which collective life is organised.
But here’s what I think is particularly interesting. That redistribution requires an extraordinary amount of collective submission, because the individual does not suddenly become capable of exercising universal moral authority merely because he has ceased to recognise the existence of God. He remains finite. His Knowledge remains incomplete. His experiences are local, his interpretations conditioned by the particularities of his existence, and his capacity to understand the consequences of his actions remains limited by circumstances he cannot possibly comprehend in their entirety. Yet somehow, through the apparent accumulation of Knowledge, through political consensus, institutional authority, technological prediction and socially reinforced conviction, we begin behaving as though the collective arrangement of our partial understandings has furnished us with an Agency capable of determining what ought to constitute universal Order.
And eventually we become convinced that our Knowledge itself possesses that Authority.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly unreasonable about wanting a society organised through human reasoning. Of course we should reason, investigate, discover, and develop systems capable of improving the conditions of our collective existence. But I question what happens when our confidence in those systems begins exceeding our willingness to recognise their limitations. When we become so enamoured with our capacity to explain something that we begin confusing explanation with moral possession. As though understanding the mechanisms through which something occurs somehow furnishes us with the rightful authority to determine the purpose for which it ought to occur.
And perhaps this is where the hubris begins.
Because we’re naturally creative beings. Inarguably, one of the most extraordinary things about humanity is our capacity to Create, and I don’t mean merely inventing machines, constructing buildings, composing music, or producing objects through the manipulation of our environment. I’m talking about the fundamental capacity to recognise existing arrangements of Reality and introduce into them something that did not previously possess Form. And in order to create anything, one inherently must become capable of influencing the Agencies of other systems. There is no creation without some manner of intervention. Even the simplest act of communication requires me to influence another person’s field of understanding. I’m attempting that very thing as I write this, arranging the substance of my own thoughts into language and introducing them into a space where another consciousness might receive them, reinterpret them, reject them, or incorporate them into whatever it is that consciousness is already becoming.
And therein lies a responsibility I don’t think we can escape.
Because the capacity to influence something does not necessarily establish the legitimacy of exercising that influence however we please. There must be some distinction between participating in the creative development of another system and attempting to subordinate that system entirely to our own intentions. Otherwise, what prevents us from confusing the ability to produce an outcome with the moral authority to produce it?
I wonder how frequently that confusion finds itself represented within our political and economic institutions.
Consider the lobbying industry, for instance. We have constructed an arrangement in which political influence can be professionally organised, purchased, negotiated, and maintained through enormous concentrations of economic resources. And I’m not suggesting that lobbying itself is inherently illegitimate, because representation is an unavoidable feature of any sufficiently complex political system. But surely there’s something worth questioning about an arrangement where the capacity to influence the conditions of collective life becomes so disproportionately available to those possessing the financial means to sustain that influence. We are constantly being furnished with language about democracy, representation, equality, public welfare, and collective liberation, while enormous industries operate through the professional management of the very authorities responsible for determining what those principles are supposed to mean in practice.
And then there’s the economic relationship between political instability and profitability, which is something I’ve become increasingly interested in because I suspect we underestimate how frequently the continued existence of a problem becomes economically beneficial to those professionally engaged in managing it.
Think about the industries that emerge around social estrangement. The political consultants, media institutions, lobbying organisations, fundraising operations, advertising networks, and increasingly sophisticated technological systems through which public attention is captured, classified, distributed, and monetised. There are legitimate functions within these industries, certainly, and I wouldn’t want to pretend otherwise. But there are also conditions under which resolving the problem would diminish the economic activity that has developed around its continued existence. If my livelihood depends upon convincing people that their identity is under perpetual threat, what incentive do I have to encourage them to become less threatened by their neighbours? And if a political movement derives its influence from maintaining a population in a condition of permanent moral emergency, then what happens when someone within that population begins questioning whether the emergency has been accurately represented in the first place?
I keep thinking about the Jester.
While Role burns, the Jesters dance, and we are the Jesters who must keep dancing. And to stop is to die, although I don’t necessarily mean physical death. I mean the death of the Role through which the individual has become capable of recognising himself within the larger arrangement. The Jester is furnished with a costume, a function, a particular manner of speaking, and an audience whose recognition sustains his participation. The performance gradually becomes indistinguishable from his identity. And perhaps he even knows that something is burning around him, but the music continues, and the other Jesters continue dancing, and the whole arrangement has become so familiar that he no longer knows what it would mean to exist outside the performance.
And then another Jester suggests stopping.
Now suddenly something rather extraordinary happens, because the suggestion itself becomes a Threat. Not necessarily because the person suggesting it has done anything threatening, but because the possibility of stopping introduces a contradiction into the system through which the others have justified their continued participation. If stopping is possible, then perhaps the dance was never compulsory. And if the dance was never compulsory, then all the sacrifices made in its preservation, all the convictions adopted, all the identities defended, and all the people condemned for refusing to participate must suddenly become available for reconsideration.
I imagine that would be an extraordinarily uncomfortable thing to confront.
So naturally, the suggestion must be reinterpreted. The Jester who wishes to stop must be selfish, ignorant, dangerous, prejudiced, disloyal, or otherwise morally deficient. Something must be wrong with him, because if nothing is wrong with him, then perhaps something is wrong with the Dance.
And the Profiteering-Class continues collecting its dues.
I use that expression with some hesitation, because I don’t want to imply that there is necessarily some singular, consciously coordinated class of individuals sitting above society orchestrating every contradiction for personal gain. That would be far too convenient an explanation, and ironically would commit precisely the kind of reductionism I’m attempting to criticise. I’m considerably more interested in the possibility that these arrangements are sustained through the convergence of different interests that need not even recognise one another in order to produce mutually beneficial outcomes. Political instability generates attention. Attention creates opportunities for influence. Influence attracts resources. Resources can then be invested in the preservation or expansion of the systems through which that influence was obtained. None of this requires every participant to possess the same intentions, and some may even believe themselves to be acting entirely in the public interest.
Which is perhaps a more disturbing possibility than the existence of some hidden conspiracy, because it means the resulting system can continue reproducing itself without anyone necessarily intending the totality of what it has become.
And then consider prediction markets.
There’s something almost absurdly revealing about our willingness to organise financial speculation around the anticipated outcomes of political events, as though the great uncertainties of collective human existence can be translated into probabilities and subsequently assigned exchangeable value. I can recognise the practical utility of forecasting, and I can even recognise that market participation may reveal information otherwise difficult to aggregate. But the underlying arrangement becomes morally peculiar when we begin approaching human catastrophe through the same imaginative instruments we use to anticipate financial returns. A political assassination, an attempted assassination, the death of a public figure, the collapse of a government, the outbreak of violence. These are events that fundamentally alter the lives of actual human beings, and yet the systems surrounding them increasingly invite us to interpret their occurrence through the language of attention, probability, institutional advantage, and economic consequence.
Now I want to distinguish something here, because recognising that people can profit from the consequences of violence is not evidence that those people caused the violence. Those are entirely different claims, and confusing them would only reproduce the very intellectual dishonesty I’m concerned with. But I do wonder what happens to a society’s moral imagination when even the possibility of another human being’s death becomes something we are capable of incorporating into a calculation of prospective value.
We’ve witnessed assassinations and attempted assassinations of public figures, violence against political representatives, and a public atmosphere in which the suffering of one individual is almost immediately absorbed into the interpretive machinery of competing ideological factions. Sometimes before the immediate circumstances are even understood, people are already determining what the event is supposed to prove about their enemies. A person has been injured or killed, a family has been transformed by an event from which it may never recover, and elsewhere the Jesters are already dancing around the symbolic remains, determining whose convictions have been vindicated and whose political identity must now be held responsible.
I find that absolutely fucking grotesque.
And what troubles me is the possibility that even our condemnation of violence is becoming subordinate to the identities through which we interpret it. We condemn an assassination when its victim represents something we recognise as belonging to Us. We become suspiciously qualified in our condemnation when the victim represents something we associate with Them. And while I don’t believe this describes everyone, I think it’s sufficiently prevalent that we ought to recognise the danger of it. Because the moment we begin treating the moral legitimacy of violence as dependent upon the ideological identity of its victim, we’ve already permitted the political arrangement to exercise authority over the value of human life.
What an extraordinary thing to surrender.
And I suspect that this relationship between collective identity, moral authority, and the creation of human life becomes particularly difficult to confront when we begin examining abortion.
Because abortion exposes something I think our political language is profoundly inadequate to contain. We are dealing with the relationship between an existing human being whose body and life are directly implicated in the circumstances of pregnancy, and another developing human life whose moral status, dependence, and relationship to that body remain subjects of enormous philosophical and ethical disagreement. The consequences of our judgments are actual. They enter Flesh. They alter the conditions under which people live, suffer, become parents, or are prevented from becoming parents. And yet the entire discussion is so frequently reduced to ideological shorthand that we scarcely seem interested in understanding what the opposing argument is actually attempting to preserve.
I find myself questioning how a society that places such extraordinary emphasis upon the autonomy of the individual determines the point at which one developing human life becomes entitled to moral consideration independent of another. And I question, equally, what happens when the recognition of that developing life is used to dismiss the physical risks, obligations, and legitimate Agency of the woman carrying it. I don’t think either consideration disappears simply because one of them has become inconvenient to the political position we happen to occupy.
But something deeper concerns me.
If the value of human life is established entirely through the collective authority of human reasoning, what ultimately prevents that value from being revised according to the changing convictions of the collective? I’m not suggesting that secular people cannot recognise human dignity, or that religious people have somehow demonstrated an uninterrupted historical capacity to preserve it. God knows how extensively religious institutions themselves have participated in the degradation of human beings. But I am questioning where our understanding of inviolable human worth ultimately derives its authority, and whether we have adequately considered the consequences of placing that authority entirely within systems whose legitimacy depends upon our own continuing agreement.
And if I believe that human beings are Created, that our existence emerges through a relationship with an Agency greater than ourselves, then I cannot simply dismiss the possibility that the value of a human life precedes my ability to recognise, understand, or assign a practical function to it.
Yet even that conviction imposes a responsibility upon me. If I insist that life is sacred, then surely the lives of women, children, the impoverished, the dependent, and those whose circumstances I have never personally endured must also be recognised through that same reverence. Otherwise, what have I actually defended besides the portion of my own doctrine I found most convenient to articulate?
This is why I cannot bring myself to trust political movements that appear incapable of recognising the moral costs associated with their own convictions. We have become extraordinarily proficient at identifying the contradictions of our opponents while remaining almost comically indifferent to the contradictions through which our own ideological arrangements are sustained.
And I wonder whether modern subconscious paganism finds its most recognisable expression within this very tendency, the manner through which we elevate some chosen aspect of human existence into an apparently self-justifying authority. Individual autonomy becomes absolute. Or collective identity becomes absolute. Or political sovereignty, economic prosperity, historical grievance, scientific expertise, religious tradition. Each can be granted a form of authority so extensive that we gradually lose the capacity to recognise the conditions under which its exercise becomes destructive.
And before anyone mistakes what I’m saying, I don’t think Knowledge is the enemy here. Quite the opposite. Knowledge is among the most extraordinary instruments through which human beings become capable of participating consciously in Creation. But to know something is not necessarily to understand what ought to be done with it, and to understand what ought to be done with something does not necessarily furnish us with the character required to act accordingly.
This is a distinction I think becomes increasingly important when we consider the relationship between God and human Agency.
Because a society without God does not necessarily become a society without worship. It may simply become a society in which the responsibility traditionally deferred to God is gradually redistributed among its people. And without God being recognised as the necessary point through which our separate Agencies converge toward some higher Order, people may begin convincing themselves that the responsibility of establishing that Order resides entirely within their own collective Knowledge.
But the collective is not some independently existing consciousness capable of absolving its constituent members of responsibility. It is constituted through us, through the accumulated actions, convictions, and relationships of individuals whose understanding remains perpetually incomplete. And this means that whenever we invest the collective with an authority we would otherwise hesitate to grant any one person, we may inadvertently construct a system through which the limitations of individual human reasoning become concealed beneath the apparent legitimacy of collective agreement.
An amassed submission.
And the extraordinary irony is that we may experience this submission as liberation, because the burden of determining what is Right has seemingly been transferred away from the individual and into the institutions, identities, and moral vocabularies through which collective agreement is maintained. We no longer have to confront the full implications of our uncertainty because uncertainty itself can be interpreted as a failure to recognise what the collective has already established.
And suddenly Reason, which ought to furnish us with the means of questioning our assumptions, becomes increasingly occupied with defending the assumptions through which our identities have been constructed.
There is something profoundly dangerous about that.
I think back to Augustine, and particularly the manner through which the act of Confession becomes an instrument of interior transformation. Because there is an extraordinary difference between acknowledging the limitations of one’s own Agency before God and attempting to preserve the appearance of moral legitimacy before other human beings. In the former, the individual must become capable of recognising himself as something incomplete, something whose capacity for understanding and acting rightly remains dependent upon a relationship with an Order he cannot claim to have authored. In the latter, he may become principally concerned with maintaining the conditions through which other people continue recognising him as morally legitimate.
And perhaps this helps explain the extraordinary hostility with which people sometimes respond to questions that threaten the ideological structures they’ve adopted.
Because the question threatens more than the argument. It threatens the arrangement through which the individual has learned to experience himself as Good.
And that brings me back to the Jester.
The Jester doesn’t necessarily love the Dance. He might even despise it. Perhaps he’s exhausted, perhaps he has recognised that the music is becoming increasingly intolerable, or that the audience has long since ceased to understand what the performance was originally intended to accomplish. But the Dance provides him with a Role, and the Role provides him with a recognisable identity, and that identity has become so intimately associated with his experience of belonging that abandoning it begins resembling an act of self-destruction.
So when another Jester suggests stopping, the suggestion is received as an accusation.
Because if I am permitted to stop, then perhaps you are permitted to stop as well, and the recognition of that possibility exposes something about the nature of our continued participation. We must suddenly confront the extent to which our sacrifices were voluntary, the extent to which our convictions were inherited, and the possibility that what we have been defending all along was less an independently recognised Truth than a system of relationships whose continued existence had become necessary for the preservation of our own identity.
I don’t think cognitive dissonance alone adequately explains all of this, although it certainly helps me understand why the introduction of contradictory information can produce such extraordinary emotional resistance. There’s also the social reality of what happens when someone refuses to participate in the mechanisms through which belonging is distributed. People have families, careers, friendships, communities, reputations, and relationships whose continued stability may depend upon their willingness to behave according to expectations they did not necessarily author. The threat of exclusion can become extraordinarily persuasive, especially when the individual has few meaningful relationships beyond the system whose authority he is being asked to question.
And I wonder how frequently our moral convictions are being preserved through those conditions, rather than through our independent recognition of their legitimacy.
Of course, I cannot exempt religious communities from this criticism. Some have constructed equally coercive arrangements through which doubt is treated as betrayal, questioning as disobedience, and submission to human authority as though it were indistinguishable from submission to God. And perhaps that is one of the most significant contradictions I have to contend with in my own argument, because I cannot reasonably condemn the deification of political institutions while ignoring the possibility that religious institutions may participate in precisely the same behaviour.
If God is to mean anything within this conception of higher Order, then surely He cannot simply become the name through which I authorise my own convictions and demand their acceptance by others. Otherwise I’ve done little more than furnish my existing authority with a divine costume.
And I’m beginning to think that the distinction between Creation and Domination might offer something useful here.
We as humans are required to Create. That is which inarguably defines Us, or at least furnishes one of the most extraordinary expressions of what we are capable of becoming. We participate in Reality through the manipulation, cultivation, and transformation of existing arrangements, and there is no conceivable manner through which we could meaningfully exercise Agency without influencing the Agencies of other systems. We cannot even Love without influencing another. To teach someone is to enter the conditions through which their understanding develops. To raise a child is to participate in the formation of another consciousness. To establish a society is to construct an arrangement of relationships through which innumerable individual Agencies become capable of coordinating their activities toward purposes none could accomplish alone.
But the very capacity that permits Creation also permits Domination.
I can influence another person’s understanding in order to furnish them with greater freedom, or I can influence them in order to make their understanding increasingly dependent upon my continued authority. I can construct an institution through which people become capable of exercising their own Agency more effectively, or I can construct one through which their Agency becomes progressively subordinated to the preservation of the institution itself. And the difficult thing is that these distinctions cannot always be determined by examining the intentions of the person responsible for creating the arrangement, because good intentions do not guarantee that the systems emerging from them will continue serving the purposes for which they were originally established.
Which makes the responsibility of Creation considerably more demanding than simply possessing the capacity to Create.
And perhaps this is where worship, properly understood, becomes something more significant than the recitation of doctrines or the public performance of religious identity. Perhaps worship is concerned with the orientation of Agency, with the recognition that our capacity to influence Reality does not establish our right to possess it, and that the Knowledge through which we become capable of exercising influence must remain answerable to something beyond our immediate desires.
I suppose that’s part of what I find so beautiful about the Christian conception of God, although I recognise that my understanding of it remains incomplete. The highest conceivable Agency does not become meaningful merely through its capacity to exercise unlimited influence over lower Forms. Its relationship with Creation is also represented through an extraordinary willingness to enter the conditions of the very world it has brought forth. And in that relationship there exists something I find difficult to reconcile with the contemporary obsession with power, particularly the assumption that the possession of greater authority ought to furnish us with greater freedom from responsibility toward those beneath it.
Because if I possess the capacity to influence another system, then surely the conditions of that system must become relevant to the manner through which my influence is exercised.
And if the preservation of my own authority requires the progressive destruction of the independence of everything beneath it, what exactly have I created?
A Kingdom? An Institution? A Collective? Or merely an elaborate arrangement through which my own limitations have been furnished with the appearance of something greater than themselves?
I don’t know. I really don’t. And I don’t mean that as some convenient means of avoiding the responsibility of drawing conclusions, because there are things here about which I have fairly strong convictions. I believe we’re witnessing an increasingly dangerous relationship between ideological identity and moral authority. I believe certain political and economic arrangements benefit from the continuation of social estrangement, and that we ought to become considerably more suspicious of institutions whose influence depends upon maintaining the problems they claim to exist in order to resolve. I believe human life possesses a dignity that cannot simply be reduced to its immediate utility, and that our capacity for understanding Reality does not automatically grant us the authority to determine every aspect of what Reality ought to become.
But I also recognise that these convictions must remain available for scrutiny, especially when I find myself becoming emotionally invested in their preservation.
And that’s the part I think I have to be particularly careful about, because I can feel the disdain moving through my own reasoning as I write this. I can feel how easily my frustration with ideological conformity might become an identity of its own, something through which I begin evaluating the people around me according to their willingness to recognise what I believe I’ve discovered. And wouldn’t that be fucking ridiculous? To spend all this time condemning the Jesters for their unwillingness to stop dancing, only to construct for myself an entirely different performance through which I can feel superior to them.
I don’t want that. I want to understand what it is we’re doing, and why so many of us appear to be participating in arrangements whose consequences we scarcely understand, all the while becoming increasingly convinced that our participation demonstrates some extraordinary degree of moral or intellectual independence.
Because I suspect that some of the most consequential forms of submission are those we have learned to experience as freedom.
And if I’m going to speak about God, about the preservation of human dignity, about the responsibilities of Creation and the dangers of worshipping our own Knowledge, then I have to be willing to recognise the possibility that my own convictions are being influenced by Agencies I have not yet adequately identified. My emotional attachments, my experiences, my language, my relationship with the people whose recognition I value, and the very conditions through which I have become capable of articulating what I presently believe.
I cannot claim to have escaped the Dance simply because I have become conscious of the music.
And perhaps that’s what I need to sit with for awhile longer, because the question is becoming considerably more difficult than determining which political ideology has become the most thoroughly corrupted, or which religious institution has demonstrated the greatest hypocrisy. I’m wondering how an individual becomes capable of recognising the systems through which his own Agency is being organised, and what it would actually require of him to begin acting independently of those systems without immediately constructing another arrangement through which his independence becomes merely another Role.
And what happens to the other Jesters when he does?
Because I wonder whether the first one to stop dancing would even know what to do with his feet.