3 September 2026
I wish to highlight David Pinder’s recent essay, “Bring on the (Wise) Fool”. Pinder’s essays are available at https://davidpinder.substack.com/
To promote his work, I reproduce the essay below. I am most willing to amplify the wonderful intelligence of my friends. I appreciate the way Pinder has cleverly woven the insights together, and his humbling kindness in including me.
While watching the Netflix series, “The Tudors,” I was reminded of the scene depicting Henry VIII seeking solace from his fool while grieving Jane Seymour’s death. Personally, I think Henry VIII gets off too easily in his grief. His fool’s comments are biting, but as a fool of power, Henry VIII excuses himself too easily in the end. These days those in power will find it hard to excuse themselves so easily to the public. As with the 16th Century Reformation—whether for Aristotelian or godly flourishing or evil—this 21st century Revolution of populism and intellectual endeavours exposes the problems and, consequently, the host of imperfect solutions. The turn in the spiral historiography.
Bring on the (Wise) Fool
Part 1 of a new series that tries to do the impossible: work out what the future of Business might look like
David Pinder
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Bring on the (Wise) Fool
Part 1 of a new series that tries to to do the impossible: work out what the future of Business might look like!
David Pinder
Right now, in the second decade of the 21st century, what Lionel Trilling referred to as “something like a mutation in human nature” is taking place. Now, after half a millennium of a broadly understood way of being in the world, we are having to deal with the fact, not just that some things are different but that, potentially, everything is different: the landscape and the disposition of everything within it is unfamiliar; the maps that up until recently helped us navigate our way around are out of date, useless.
Whatever happened?
Put simply, digital technology happened. Slowly at first, then in a blinding rush. Everything was okay, in the sense that it was comprehensible (which is not to say that things always ran smoothly – of course they didn’t) until the full impact of the digital revolution hit society. Then all bets were off.
One evidence of the lightning progress of digital tech is the image at the top. It’s an AI generated response to a brief description that I wrote about what I wanted to achieve. Ten seconds later … bingo! The copyright goes to Shutterstock. Is the image good? You’ll have your own opinion about that but one thing’s for sure, it is an impressive facility. But how does this resource impact the potential future for human photographers? Does the image itself represent a challenge to the very point I’m exploring?
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Whoa! Hold on! I’ve dived in, haven’t I, without first explaining what I’m trying to do. My apologies. Let me first set the scene.
We’d probably all agree that the world is constantly changing. In all sorts of ways. And being an integral part of the whole scheme of things, we – homo sapiens, that is – are directly impacted by those changes and, indeed, are part of the change. That, in and of itself, is a key part of the complexity: it is particularly difficult for something to analyze a system when it is itself part of that system … and we sure are an integral part of the dynamic system I’m referring to. In fact, we undoubtedly do more than our own fair share of instigating change. After all, we’re a jolly creative bunch. You don’t, for example, get rabbits building airliners. But, arguably, we are sometimes too clever for our own good, and it’s technological developments, especially those that bear on the ways we communicate with one another, that seem to have a particular capacity to mess with our tiny minds.
There, that’s the topic I want to investigate – call it The Techno-Human Interface (THI for short).
On Trilling
Now let’s go back to where I started: what’s all this about Lionel Trilling and events half a millennium ago? Trilling was an American literary critic who, in 1970, delivered a series of lectures at Harvard University. Here’s how he launched into his topic:
Now and then it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself, perhaps by reducing the emphasis it formerly placed upon one or another of its elements, perhaps by inventing and adding to itself a new element, some mode of conduct or of feeling which hitherto it had not regarded as essential to virtue. ¹
A little later, he made reference to a historical hinge point:
Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement that, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, something like a mutation in human nature took place. ²
That’s the half-millennium-ago that I refer to. A key point is that it was associated with a specific technological development that happened just a little earlier – Gutenberg’s printing press with movable type. That was around 1440, but things really hotted up when, in 1455, the Gutenberg Bible appeared.
Picture the horrified alarm from those in power: “Hell’s bells! How can we maintain control if every Hinz und Kunz, every Tom, Dick and Harry, has access to the biblical message in their own language?”
It’s all, always, about Power and Control.
On McGilchrist …
We’ll come back to the technology factor but, before that, I’m going to ask you briefly to turn your attention to a really basic rule that helps govern how life develops. Yes, really! I have one particular rule in mind. It is, eat or be eaten. Let’s put that into context.
In 2010, British psychiatrist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, put forward the argument that left-brain thinking (which favours a focus on logic and detail and facts, and order and pattern, all in a rather two-dimensional way) has usurped its place as emissary to right-brain thinking (which favours a ‘big picture’, more complete and nuanced, multi-dimensional view of the world).
“So what?”, you may say.
Well, how about it being, arguably, a fundamental factor in the overall evolution of human society. I say that with reference to a founding challenge that McGilchrist states in his magnum opus, The Matter With Things (2021). It’s this: to survive and thrive, any and all living creatures need to eat while themselves avoiding being eaten. Getting food requires highly focused attention – think of a bird seeking out seeds on the ground – but, while that close attention mode is being deployed, there is the need somehow to also maintain a broader view of the surroundings lest a predator is stealthily closing in, intent upon turning the food-seeker itself into a tasty snack.
Thus, in order to gain a complete view of anything, there is the requirement to adopt two ways of seeing:
These two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival. We need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to deal with the necessities of life, and to build the foundations of a civilisation. But to live in it, we also need to belong to the world and to understand the complexity of what it is we are dealing with. This division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. However, it is a handicap – in fact, it is a catastrophe – when we use only one. ³
The question then, of course, is how best to achieve this objective in everyday life? Particularly at a time, as now, when developments in digital technology are enabling what French philosopher Bernard Stiegler termed denoetization (about which a little more later) to dominate as never before.
Anyway, you get the point: digital technology is absolutely amazing, it is providing the answers to some hitherto intractable challenges, and will continue so to do … BUT, are we – homo sapiens, that is – going to have better, happier, more fulfilling lives as a result? Which leads to the question, What’s the best outcome at the Techno-Human Interface?
Whatever the solution at the THI, one thing is surely certain, it really must take account of the human condition – our strengths and, crucially, our frailties – if we are to retain our sanity.
To investigate this context, it is useful briefly to revisit the McGilchrist challenge mentioned earlier. Is the ‘eat or be eaten’ challenge the fundamental challenge – or, at a minimum, a fundamental challenge – of continuing existence for life on Earth? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to suggest that the answer to that is YES!
Imagine that you are the intelligence (however you envisage it) behind whatever set up the experiment to test the resilience of life in a universe of the kind we inhabit. Surely, a startlingly simple yet reliable way to keep things, not only, moving forward, but rather to keep things moving forward in an ever-improving fashion, would be to implant the ‘eat or be eaten’ imperative as a basic tenet of evolution? As an ontological fundamental it is surely one of the simplest and yet most effective ways to ensure progressively ‘better’ outcomes, however ‘better’ might be assessed?
It does, of course, bring with it a corollary: the “eat or be eaten” law must inevitably mean that life will be a never-ending battle and, quite possibly, therefore, an extremely risky and dangerous one, BUT, over the long term, it must surely be the most certain way to encourage the fulfillment of the concept that Herbert Spencer described as “Survival of the fittest”.
And, for humans, there is an astonishingly simple way to test the sense of progress or otherwise in this struggle. I slipped it in just a few paragraphs ago: simply ask, “Are we moving forward? Do you think we are we moving forward?”
For those of us with language, this non-specific, generalized enquiry is one of the most basic tests of life, the universe and everything. There is no need to ask what the question means. What it seeks to establish is a felt sense – something that may arise and be based upon any number of conscious and subconscious triggers. What it will always do is help bring to the surface any concerns that people have regarding progress or regression in any part of their lives.
And it’s particularly important now, precisely because of the challenge with which I started. A big change is underway at the Techno-Human Interface and it’s not just about who holds the loudest microphone, but also about the nature of the medium carrying the message.
… on Stiegler and Buch …
Earlier, I also mentioned Bernard Stiegler and his concept of denoetization which refers to the fact that we humans have, and always have had, a very close relationship with, and reliance upon, technology – a category that includes any and all of the things we make and use because, in Stiegler’s terms, anything from a toothpick, to a cup, to a book, to an axe, to a power station, to a computer … they’re all technology. All of the things we make and use are, so to speak, prostheses. But, the more technology we create, the more reliant upon it we become, and the more potentially dehumanised we become in the process. That’s denoetization.
Dr Neville Buch writes extensively on this topic and one of the points he makes is that social media platforms carry Stiegler’s denoetization further than any medium before them: complex problems collapse into soundbite and binary opposition, and argument gives way to what he calls ‘transactional truth’ — where whether a claim is actually true matters less than whether it wins, in the moment, for whoever is making it. A public square built to reward persuasion over understanding will, over time, select for exactly the people and claims most willing to treat truth as disposable.
All of which is to say, we have a problem, and, if we do not raise our awareness and take steps, I think it reasonable to say that we can expect said problem to become ever more deeply embedded. Which takes us briefly into the world of function systems.
… plus Luhmann …
The problem with the left-brain, close-up, ‘simplified’ view of everything is that, before you know it, it has commandeered all of the attention. Which means that, inter alia, the larger setting, the bigger picture, the context, is sidelined, or just plain ignored or forgotten.
There has always been some risk of this, but its likelihood has increased dramatically in the digital era — courtesy, in part, of a second, deeper current running underneath Buch’s point, one that isn’t really about bad actors at all. The German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann argued that modern society can no longer be usefully understood as people talking to each other. It has to be understood as a set of self-running function systems — the economy, the media, the law and so on — each processing its own kind of communication according to its own logic, largely indifferent to the humans who are involved.
So, buying a chocolate bar, watching a soap opera, casting a vote: as Luhmann sees it, each of these instances is better described as an event within a system rather than as an act of connection between two people. Buying a chocolate bar? That occurs in the economic function system. Watching a soap opera? The mass media function system. Casting a vote? The political function system. And in every instance, as Hans-Georg Moeller details it ⁴ (in Luhmann Explained, 2006), human beings do not do the actual communication – only communication communicates.
Put these realities together and something clarifies. Buch shows what one particular system has learned to reward. Luhmann explains why nobody — including the people nominally running that system — is fully able to correct it: the system has its own momentum, its own criteria for a successful communication, and human intention only ever enters it indirectly. These factors describe an environment that doesn’t merely tolerate distortion. It, itself, initiates the distortion by, so to say, regarding each system as closed and at liberty to evolve itself without reference to any human preferences – a process that, borrowing from biology, Luhmann named autopoiesis.
It’s all, always, about Power and Control
All of the above is in addition to a dynamic that has operated since time immemorial: communication and its influence can be manipulated by those who have power by virtue of their positions in society. We have always understood this point: it has always been recognized that power begets power and is susceptible to misapplication.
So much so, in fact, that, throughout history, societies have recognized the benefit – need, even – to contrive means to somehow exercise at least some control over the powerful. It’s why numerous cultures have sanctioned the appointment of those who can say things to authority that would get regular members of that society into a great deal of trouble.
The court jester is the best-known version, but the type is older and wider than any one court — it runs through Carnival, through the morality play, through the feast of fools, through every custom that set aside a bounded time or a bounded body through which the humble could address the grandees without being destroyed for it.
Writing about Shakespeare’s King Lear, the critic Frank Kermode stated the mechanism plainly: the Fool carries
the commentary on grandees allowed by custom to the humble. ⁵
Allowed. It isn’t that the Fool happens to be witty, or that Lear happens to tolerate him. It’s that a license exists permitting a specific kind of truth-telling that might well be considered treasonous from anyone else. The Fool doesn’t threaten the throne. He simply tells the truth inside a space custom has agreed to protect.
What’s easy to miss, if you think of the Fool only as comic relief, is how much that license costs him to hold, and how little comic distance he actually gets. The scholar A.C. Bradley made this the centre of his reading of King Lear: he imagined Shakespeare setting out to prove that a fool was about much more than lightening a tragedy — that he would and should stand inside it, “in the very tempest and whirlwind” of Lear’s own suffering, rather than commenting on it from the wings. The Fool isn’t safe. He’s exposed to the storm that his master is exposed to, and his wisdom is earned, in part, by that shared exposure. He isn’t being clever about Lear’s pain. He is in it.
That distinction — license without cost versus license earned by proximity to the cost — is relevant.
Where did the (Wise) Fool go?
The fool’s licence has been handed to different parties at different times throughout history. In the middle of the first century BCE in Greece, for example, in around forty plays, the dramatist Aristophanes proved to be a master Wise Fool: “Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right. I shall not please, but I shall say what is true.”
And, for the most obvious examples of jesters, the English medieval world is usually considered the archetype. But, long since, the formal role of the jester evaporated.
It is, arguably, one of the favourable outcomes of the trend in the West towards democracy. Once everyone in society had equal rights and responsibilities then the role of the wise fool was available to anyone who chose to take it on. It emerged and was exercised in a variety of ways, in all manner of environments. And a truly interesting point about this phenomenon is that it happened spontaneously and informally, below the threshold of any conscious decision. However, the more digital tech became a part of our world, the more the informal machinery that used to carry this function has been dismantled.
The pub conversation, the corridor aside, the letter to the editor written under a joking pseudonym, the member of the awkward squad in the workplace who declares “this plan’s mad” — all of these depended on a kind of protected marginality, a person or a place understood by common consent to be safe to be honest in. Much of that has thinned, digitized, or been optimized away.
What replaced it — social media chief among the candidates — promised something similar but delivered something closer to its opposite: not protected honesty, but unprotected exposure, where saying the true thing carries more risk, not less, than saying nothing at all.
So we have, in a fairly literal sense, a Fool-shaped hole. And it’s a space we need to reclaim.
You are cordially invited to play the (Wise) Fool
So, if the “eat or be eaten” imperative is at our very core … and if the adoption of, and addiction to, technics is in our blood … and if function systems have a mind of their own, it’s surely pretty damn obvious that we really do need to take care of our humanity if we are to survive. Any fool can see that.
Earlier I referenced A,C. Bradley. That’s Andrew Cecil Bradley, since you ask, born 1851, died 1935. He was a literary scholar, now most remembered for his volume Shakespearean Tragedy featuring lectures that he delivered on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. And if this all sounds like a rather abstruse detour, let me explain the connection.
As already mentioned, the Fool was licensed to speak to power in ways that might well have brought deeply unpleasant consequences down on the head of anyone who was not thus authorized. But that’s only part of the Power-Fool confrontation. And it’s where Bradley comes to our aid. Introducing the Fool in King Lear, he imagines Shakespeare’s reaction to a conversation in which, perhaps, Ben Jonson has deprecated the concept of the fool as a dramatic character. Walking home afterwards, Shakespeare thinks to himself:
Come, my friends, I will show you once and for all that the mischief is in you, and not in the fool or your audience…. He shall keep from first to last the company in which you most object to seeing him, the company of a king. Instead of amusing the king’s idle hours, he shall stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion.” (My emphases) ⁶
Lear’s Fool does not get his wisdom from having nothing to lose. He gets it from having chosen to stay — to walk out onto the heath with his master rather than seek the safety of somewhere warm. And he stays and talks when leaving would have cost him nothing at all. Presence and loyalty are what give him his moral authority. He is present and loyal by choice.
This is why we need fools. And everyone, every single one of us, is welcome to participate, to act the fool. All we need is a mechanism so to do – a mechanism that overrides or outwits the powerful autopoiesis that is a feature of techne-generated function systems.
We’ll expand on this in future posts but, for now, the good news is that, I do know, efforts to liberate and energize the Wise Fool, reformatting the Human-Technology Interface in the process, are underway. In fact, this series intends to explore five of them, listed at the conclusion of this article.
I should declare at the outset that I have a particular connection with one of the five: the Mass Relational MetaCognition (MRMC) concept which is the brainchild of Dr Olaf Hermans. But I think the five topics we’ll review provide a fascinating panoply of potentially complementary approaches to the challenges of the future.
Keep in mind … it’s all, always, about Power and Control
Part way through King Lear the Fool disappears from the action and things go from bad to worse. Chaos ensues. Then, at the very end of the play, there’s this deeply ambivalent speech from Lear himself, holding the dead body of his faithful daughter, Cordelia, just before he himself dies (King Lear Act V Scene 3):
And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? ⁷
If we are to reshape the Techno-Human Interface to reinvigorate the flow of loyal wisdom that is vested in the mass, rather than re-engineering the mass into a confrontational duopoly, or just caving in to an increasingly concealed but ever more powerful Power, we need to resurrect the character who can help assure delivery. So, come on, it’s time to act the Wise Fool.
To begin at the end
At the outset, I described this as “Part 1 of a new series that tries to to do the impossible – work out what the future of Business might look like!”
So, what has this installment had to do with that objective? Well, it’s my attempt at a kind of universal intro to try to communicate the scale of the challenge. Congratulations if you have got this far. But where does it go from here?
Well, there are, no doubt, thousands of attempts, large and small, to fathom various aspects of the future of Business. As mentioned earlier, I’ve lighted upon just five. Five approaches that seek, in different ways, to try to get some traction on a pathway to future success. What appeals to me is that although they differ enormously in their intents and practices, they all recognize the vital requirement to harness the energy, the imagination, and the loyalty of humans. Never before have Wise Fools been so necessary. As you’ll appreciate, Wise Fool is by no means a pejorative term.
Here are the five:
Enlightened Enterprise Academy – Paul Barnett
Mass Relational MetaCognition – Dr Olaf Hermans
MICE: Management Institute for Contributory Economy – Dr Neville Buch
Sapiopoiesis – Dr Leon Tsvasman
Venture Mode – Hunter Hastings
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1. Lionel Trilling. Sincerity and Authenticity (1971, 1972)
2. Lionel Trilling. Ibid.
3. Iain McGilchrist. The Matter With Things – Volume 1 (2021)
4. Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (2006)
5. Frank Kermode. Shakespeare’s Language (2000)
6. A.C. Bradley. Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)
7. William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of King Lear (1605)
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Featured Image:
Neville Buch
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