The danger of primary processes and their capacity for destruction

Why is it so difficult for most people to accept a woman's authority? They do in the gym, where formal standards of rank are recognised, but not in schools, and hardly in the workplace, unless there are also formal standards introduced and maintained in the workplaces.

What we have is a descent into Nature in a very unconscious (hence non-shamanistic) way. We are all "natural" and so formal standards are not allowed to intervene sufficiently to moderate attitudes and behaviour. Women per se are thus treated on the basis of primary processes of thought, as Mothers. And when they refuse to be Mothers, they are perceived as impossible to understand and unconscionably evil.

And fathers, I guess, on the basis of these primary processes, are the unquestionable authorities. It's not the content of their ideas, but their state of being that gives them this authority. Again, its a product of primary process operations.

Zimbabwean culture hasn't fallen to quite this level yet.

It is also, of course, very UN-SHAMANIC, this kind of "naturalness" -- a human devolution. Shamanism goes BEYOND the subject as he or she is conventionally and culturally constructed, in order to play with future possibilities, on the basis of its knowledge of primary processes. It's use of this knowledge always sublates (in the Hegelian sense) the existing subject, in a forward movement toward the future. Nietzsche's trope of the child captures the essence of this shamanistic engagement:
But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?

Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self- rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.

Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto life: ITS OWN will, willeth now the spirit; HIS OWN world winneth the world's outcast.

But this is the kind of "naturalness" that has been finally obtained through first undergoing a huge amount of painful transformations (first the camel, then the lion, and only finally, "the child".) So the shaman can enjoy flights of fancy and other primary processes, but that is because they are so well integrated with secondary processes, that they represent an opportunity to play enjoyable games (as Marechera does with us in his story telling).

But there is another kind of naturalness that is so undeveloped, that it would prevent any potential shaman from coming into being. It is the naturalness of a culture that is descending towards accepting the predominance of primary processes in the general spheres of work and education.