Quick Overview: The Joker represents a kind of harm that can't be bought, bullied, or bargained with — chaos for its own sake. Useful for discussing clients or situations that don't respond to typical motivational approaches.

Bruce Wayne’s Butler in The Dark Knight, describing the Joker’s motivation to Mr. Wayne:

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

The Joker as portrayed by Heath Ledger is an example of what I have coined as “gloriously fk’d up.” This is not like the past when I was a kid and had to come to Minneapolis to see my asthma specialist 3 or 4 times a year. We would stay at Aunt Ragna’s house, then drive downtown to Dr. Stoesser’s office, part of the route along Franklin Avenue, where a bevy of Native American men lay propped against the buildings along the way, already drunk out of their minds, numb as they could possibly get. at 9 in the morning. They surrendered to the forces that stripped their lives of meaning - they were overpowered - and now they were simply scorned. Being seriously drunk seemed to protect them from the humiliation and shame the world around them was willing to shovel into them.

When I worked at Stillwater Prison I believe I saw a new generation of men emerging: Native-American, African-American, even some of the white guys, who were GFUs - gloriously fk’d up! Nothing could hurt them. They weren’t afraid of death or beatings or someone putting them down. If they were going out, going down, they wouldn’t go with a whimper, but with a bang, a celebration, an explosion, with other bodies in their wake. It was a bold bravado and would never honor the moral code of the older prisoners. The GFU’s had their own ways.

Ledger’s Joker is the embodiment of this new breed of men and women. The movie has a harbinger. Many of us watching it could hardly realize it was the wave of the future. A seriously abused man took control of his life and terrorized those around him. And even the criminals were intimidated because they watched the Joker burn a huge pile of money: the Joker wasn’t motivated by money, to their shock and dismay. How many of these now walk amongst us? How does one stand up to this?

“You have all these rules, and you think they’ll save you………..The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules…..You have nothing…..nothing to threaten me with.” The Joker - The Dark Knight

One could also argue that this is the antithesis of spirituality - the anti-Christ spirit that has no rules, has no loyalties, only wants to destroy things, perhaps with the belief that the end is coming and it will simply help it along. The emergence of this character cinematically is no accident - it is a harbinger of changes in the world scene - the rise of amoral dictators who want to live in splendor and could care less about the world as a whole, their constituencies. It reminds me of the scene towards the end of Fellini’s film SATYRICON, where the rich men who want to inherit of the rich oligarch who has just died, must eat his entire body as part of the terms of receiving his wealth, and they are doing just that, one morbid chewy bite at a time.

And one could say the Anti-Christ is a spirit: it inhabits people, takes over their ambitions and finds willing partners who may even believe they are doing good. One could call that spirit a morphogenetic field: an archetype of sorts that substitutes its governing system for that of its host! (See writings or interviews by Rupert Sheldrake.) The Anti-Christ is able to harness the anger and hatred in people, what they are unconscious of, and use it to further its cause, to aid the destruction, to legitimize hatred and bigotry. Hiding in plain sight, one might say!!

Overall, the Joker represents a sea change in national and international politics. For the joker, conventional senses of justice, decency, lawfulness and decorum are irrelevant. Psychologically speaking, an abusive father and untended and festering emotional wounds linger in the background, increasing the need for mirroring in the form of domination, dominion, tons of admiration, obedience and even worship. There are typically no shortage of minions to serve these individuals and carry out their wishes, as there are no shortage of people who underestimate their own psychological damage and how it controls and steers them on a subconscious level, making them susceptible to those who know how to pull the strings and evoke the need for strong fathers that at least appear to be benevolent at times.