Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love

An activist reveals how the mischievous personality of the universal archetype can be applied in modern society to inspire a better world.

A Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award–Winner

Comedian Richard Pryor narrated the George Floyd murder in 1979, forty years before it occurred. A murder no one is laughing about. Yet when Pryor tells the story in very raw terms, and with his comic talent, the audience laughs. As a time-traveling trickster, Pryor is preparing the audience, lubricating their psychic joints—spiritually, psychologically, politically—in a foreshadowing of today’s reckoning. It can be checked out on Richard Pryor: Live in Concert.

People and cultures draw on a mix of archetypes, the attributes of personality that make them who they are—Warrior, Caretaker, Magician, Fool, Hero, Sage—and Trickster. Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love is about how grownups who have retained the ability to be as playful as they were when a child view and behave in the world. Such a grownup will consciously or unconsciously engage with the Trickster, and Shepherd Siegel's book reveals what could happen if society made more of that animating force.

Today, an infantilized infatuation with the Warrior archetype tears society apart. The best response comes out of a more peaceful and playful approach. In a time of great political frustration and culture wars, Tricking Power into Performing Actsof Love casts a clear eye on the dilemmas and proposes the pursuit of fun and the refusal to take power seriously as a timeless and potent political strategy.