Every culture has a story, or something similar. A boy watches over sheep on a hillside above a village. Bored, he shouts ‘wolf.’ The villagers abandon their work and rush over only to find nothing. He repeats the trick. The villagers return, dissatisfied. Eventually, the wolf appears, and the boy screams, but no one responds. The sheep are killed. In different versions, the boy may also die.
As I write this essay, news outlets are filled with stories about the US President claiming he’s in talks with Iran to end the war he started. Meanwhile, Iran and other countries insist that no negotiations are taking place. The consensus among financial media is that the president’s recent statements aim to stabilize oil and stock markets. It seems everyone, on all sides, loves fake news and accusing others of spreading it. Is all this fakery wearing you out? I think a new diagnosis is needed for our time. TFS – Trump Fatigue Syndrome.
Aesop’s fable is often seen as a lesson about lying. However, there’s a deeper interpretation more relevant today. The boy who cried wolf isn’t just a liar; he’s an archetype who uses disruption to provoke reactions, knowing that overturning expectations triggers responses, and he can’t resist repeating it. In mythology, he’s a trickster. The story isn’t only about lying; it shows what happens when the trickster’s impulse becomes compulsive, and the community’s capacity to respond wears thin.
The trickster is among the oldest and most universally recognized figures across cultures. He appears as Coyote in Native American oral stories, Loki in Norse mythology, Hermes in Greek myths, and Br’er Rabbit in the American South. Even the satan figure in the biblical tradition can be viewed as a trickster. These figures are not exclusively villains. They challenge authority, see through existing structures, and enjoy revealing what others prefer to hide. He often works through indirect actions, misdirection, and sudden truths. When at his best, he acts as an undercover truth-teller.
Coyotes are often depicted in stories not just as mischievous figures but also as a source of fire for humans. He embodies the trickster as a culture hero, with chaos fueling gifts. Hermes, the messenger of the gods, also served as the patron of thieves and the guide to the underworld, a figure whose power depended on his ability to traverse the borders between realms that are usually kept separate. Loki spent centuries within the Norse cosmos, daring to do what others wouldn’t. He reveals the gods’ vanity, solves problems with innovative ideas, and disrupts rigid hierarchies. For a long period, his tricks were effective. The gods relied on him, even amid their anger, because he was indispensable precisely because he defied the rules.
But the trickster’s effectiveness relies on a key condition: the tricks must, in some way, stay connected to reality. Coyote’s chaos creates something. Hermes’ thefts serve a purpose. Trickster’s cleverness, even if maddening to those he outsmarts, ultimately brings wisdom to the community. The trickster earns his license to disrupt by being correct about something. He sees what the respectable cannot afford to see, and he states it.
Loki’s story ends in disaster, not because he was always a villain, but because his tricks lost their connection to any meaningful truth. The mischief that once fixed problems started creating them. The gods’ patience, which had worn thin, finally broke. He had worn out his welcome in the cosmos itself.
The biblical tradition has its own version of this story. The figure known in Hebrew as ha-satan , which is better understood as the adversary or the accuser, not the devil in a red suit. We see this adversary at work in the book of Job, not as the devil of later Christian imagination but as a member of the divine court, a heavenly prosecutor whose role is to challenge and test. Ha-satan’s first trick succeeds: he persuades God to allow Job’s suffering as a test. His second trick is also permitted. However, the book does not give him a third. There is a point at which even a legitimate challenge to the status quo becomes mere suffering, and the challenger loses his authority.
These stories follow a similar pattern. The trickster starts with a real insight. He or she recognizes that something is wrong, that it needs to be broken apart, and that comfort must be disturbed. The disruption is genuine and sometimes essential. But without wisdom to guide it and the ability to shift from exposing issues to healing, the trickster becomes something else: not a healer but a pathogen.
This is the framework that David Brooks accurately identified during a recent appearance on PBS’s Amanpour and Company. Reflecting on the Trump era, Brooks shared an analogy that resonated with me. He compared Trump to a doctor who, when faced with a simple acne problem, suggests decapitation as a cure, saying, “You know what will cure acne? Decapitation. We’re going to chop your head off, and that’ll cure your acne.” Trump, in this analogy, is destructive by nature. While the diagnosis might correctly point to societal issues such as the failure of the establishment, the ideological insularity of universities, and the lack of accountability within the administrative state, simply recognizing these wounds isn’t enough. The trickster identifies the wound but often prescribes harmful solutions, like decapitation, which can be worse than the original problem.
What Brooks refers to is not just a disagreement over policy. It is more like what mythographers see as the trickster’s fatal mistake. They reach a moment when chaos, lacking wisdom, turns into destruction. The boy on the hillside is correct in thinking a wolf might come. He is wrong in that his cry, disconnected from reality, is worth making. He is also wrong to believe that the village’s nervous system can be continually used as a tool of his boredom. Eventually, the community stops reacting not because the threat is fake, but because the trust that makes a response possible has run out.
We are living in this moment. It’s not just a political crisis; it’s a crisis of cultural attention. When everything becomes an emergency, nothing truly is. When every rule-breaking act is presented as courageous truth-telling, the framework collapses. The trickster’s power relies on surprise, on the audience’s capacity for shock, and on the existence of a stable order that makes disruption seem meaningful. Tear down that order, and the trickster has nothing left to oppose. He’s left shouting into the ruins.
The ancient stories suggest there’s no clear ending to this kind of moment. Loki does not repent; he waits beneath the earth for the world to end. The boy on the hillside does not survive to learn his lesson. What comes after is not the trickster’s doing. It is the community’s action. The people who kept their tools, trust, and willingness to believe, eventually, respond and rebuild.
The sheep in Aesop’s story are already gone. The real question is what the village will do in the morning.
The Notebooks of James Hazelwood
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
