I want to talk to you tonight: not as your affable host here at the Bistro, nor as your gregarious philosopher, but as a social theorist.
It is Halloween, and I want to talk to you about transgression.

When we visited Germany this summer, on our wandering extended exploration. Germany is a very ordered society, full of rules. There are signs everywhere telling you what is forbidden. We saw a sign forbidding us from blocking a driveway, that said: “Exit must be kept free.” Underneath it, somebody had scrawled in Sharpie: “Freedom For All Exits!”
This is how cultures work. Society sets boundries and norms, expectations and rules for us, and, for the most part, this is a good thing, and it keeps us all from killing each other on a daily basis. But to keep the all these norms from crushing us, we also need some rupture, a way of transgressing these norms and boundaries, and of letting off steam. There are rules, but then there is an undercurrent of freedom, where we express ourselves. In a healthy society, this can be done with humor, or with strange rituals.
Most societies have them: Ancient Greece had the Dionysian Rites, Ancient Rome had Saturnalia, where all the conventions were turned on their heads and the masters served the slaves. Evolving from this, the Roman Colonies in Britain retained the Twelfth Night Celebration, including Twelfth Night Follies where the men would dress like women and the women like men, and everybody would laugh and be silly (and sometimes learn something or be made uncomfortable by the gender roles they saw from a different side). Germany, where I grew up, celebrated the madness of Fasching before heading into Lent, as many cultures celebrate Mardi Gras.

The last remnant of this we have in the United States is Halloween, and even it is co-opted by fear of strangers and commercial interests and the consumerist desire to fill ourselves with candy or booze.

In a class I once taught, a student, a young romantic, suggested that all of us should go completely mad every once in a while. At the time, I was a bit put out by this, since I had an inkling of the pain mental illness can bring. Now, I understood madness better, having experienced a bit of it firsthand, and it can be terrifying.
However, I am convinced we do need a bit of safe madness, we do need to break free, to dress up and be someone else, to howl at the moon, to be a zombie and chase humans around, to pull pranks or jump out at people.

So celebrate this Halloween, but also keep it in your heart the rest of the year, and find little forms of transgression and rebelling that won’t hurt you or others.
Find some madness and ride it like a wild horse.
Take the time to dance the night away with abandon.
Sing out loud.
Pull a prank. Or two.
Make an inappropriate joke and shock someone.
Read Poetry out loud.
Howl at the moon.
We are all mad here.
Take a walk on the wild side.

Happy Halloween!
Enjoy your madness, but be kind to each other.