So long Sukerz: Byebye to 2010!

This year has a new beginning. I've been working towards this all my life -- the point of breaking free from metaphysics.

Being free from metaphysics means that logical and empirical thinking hold my attention. I used to pay far too much regard to those who would try to make me doubt myself in order to receive my attention. My hunger for knowledge made every single human interaction an opportunity to gain ground in knowledge. I sought after knowledge like nothing else. If somebody had a different perspective from me, I wanted to know it. Particularly, I had to know how that perspective related to mine. I wanted to use others' perspectives to expand my own, in order to oversee the whole panorama of humanly constructed meaning. Nothing was more important than this. I wanted this with all of my erotic drive.

And finally the penultimate vision was mine. My thirst for knowledge was assuaged. I looked; I took it all in -- and having drunk more deeply than I'd even thought, I no longer had the need anymore for crude metaphysics.

Truth is not what it had seemed to be. I'd thought it to be present in the condensation of meaning into metaphysical principles: actually, truth is the reverse of this. It is phenomena set free from the limits of perception enforced by metaphysical principles. Metaphysical principles have turned out to be actually the bondage of truth -- and not truth's means for manifesting.

To put truth into words is to bind and limit it. Various bindings create the basis for different kinds of politics. We are all bound, to one degree or another, when we communicate. Right wing politics likes our perceptions bound in a certain way, whereas left wing politics would bind us up in another way. The politics of liberation is that which allows us the broadest vision.

Many of our perceptions are bound in one culture, but then released in another culture and vice versa. This accounts for cultural differences and the difficulty of conveying insights across cultural barriers. The main barriers to trans-cultural communication are not linguistic barriers, but perspectival barriers.

To realise this is to absolve humanity of many of its errors. For, humanity is stuck within the following state: the more we try to articulate our perceptions, the more we bind ourselves into narrow postures and states of physiological contortion. Language makes us seem to wear hard, outer shells, as the words we've spoken turn into containers of reality; publicly delineating and defining who we are. Internally, we ought to be less sure that words are able to convey as much as is assumed from them. Humans ought to be hermit crabs at most, moving from one container to another, as we grow. Humans are not the kind of organisms that do well with a permanent, hard shell.

"Truths" -- which are a subsection of the class of dogmas -- have all sorts of import for those whose inner growth has become stunted. When someone proclaims their views with a resounding certainty, observe the qualities of their behaviour. Are they shallow and pompous and determined to make you suffer? Even factual assertions can be used to take away your freedom, if they're used by someone whose whole inner being has been stunted.

One would do well to pay far more attention to the state of someone's mentality, than to the "facts". A decrepit state of inner being leads to a corruption of inner motive and design, even when the truths being presented are at their utmost objective. Even facts and truths, used wrongly, will lead directly to curtailed freedom.

Metaphysics, which is our tendency to revere "truth", must therefore take a back seat to a consideration of the whole panorama of reality -- one that encompasses our sense of how "truths" are being used politically.

Nietzsche, Bataille, Wolin

Re:  The Seduction of Unreason The Intellectual Romance With Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism by Richard Wolin

Jennifer Armstrong:
It's really not an "intellectual romance with fascism" that either Nietzsche or Bataille had. There are fundamental aspects to both of their philosophical approaches that are in profound opposition to the ideology and practice of fascism. Most significantly, Nietzsche and Bataille are anti-authoritarian. They are trying to develop the individual, through encouraging exploration, self-invention and confrontation with challenges. This aspect of their philosophical approaches is about as anti-fascist as you can get. After all, a fascist is someone who has a fundamental desire for authority and want to find his or her particular place within a hierarchy of power.

WOLIN:

"One of the crucial elements underlying this problematic rightleft synthesis is a strange chapter in the history of ideas whereby latter-day anti-philosophes such as Nietzsche and Heidegger became the intellectual idols of post–World War II France—above all, for poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles
Deleuze. Paradoxically, a thoroughgoing cynicism about reason and democracy, once the hallmark of reactionary thought, became the stock-in-trade of the postmodern left.7 As observers of the French intellectual scene have frequently noted, although Germany lost on the battlefield, it triumphed in the seminar rooms, bookstores, and
cafés of the Latin Quarter. During the 1960s Spenglerian indictments of “Western civilization,” once cultivated by leading representatives of the German intellectual right, migrated across the Rhine where they gained a new currency. Ironically, Counter-Enlightenment doctrines that had been taboo in Germany because of their unambiguous association with fascism—after all, Nietzsche had been canonized as the Nazi regime’s official philosopher, and for
a time Heidegger was its most outspoken philosophical advocate— seemed to best capture the mood of Kulturpessimismus that predominated among French intellectuals during the postwar period. Adding insult to injury, the new assault against philosophie came from the homeland of the Enlightenment itself.

One of the linchpins of the Counter-Enlightenment program
was an attack against the presuppositions of humanism. By challenging the divine basis of absolute monarchy, the unbelieving philosophes had tampered with the Great Chain of Being, thereby undermining morality and inviting social chaos. For the anti-philosophes, there existed a line of continuity between Renaissancehumanism, Protestant heresy, and Enlightenment atheism. In Considerations
on France (1797) Maistre sought to defend the particularity
of historical traditions against the universalizing claims of
Enlightenment humanism, which had culminated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of August 20, 1789. In a spirit of radical nominalism, the French royalist observed that he had encountered Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and even Persians (if only in the writings of Montesquieu). But “humanity” or “man in general,” he claimed, was a figment of a feverish and overheated
philosophe imagination. “Man” as such did not exist.8

An assault on humanism was also one of French structuralism’s hallmarks, an orientation that in many respects set the tone for the more radical, poststructuralist doctrines that followed. As one critic
has aptly remarked, “Structuralism was . . . a movement that in large measure reversed the eighteenth-century celebration of Reason, the credo of the Lumières.”9 In this spirit, one of the movement’s founders, Claude Lévi-Strauss, sought to make anthropology useful for the ends of cultural criticism. Lévi-Strauss famously laid responsibility for the twentieth century’s horrors—total war, genocide, colonialism, threat of nuclear annihilation—at the doorstep of Western humanism. As he remarked in a 1979 interview, “All the tragedies we have lived through, first with colonialism, then with fascism, finally the concentration camps, all this has taken shape not in opposition to or in contradiction with so-called humanism . . .but I would say almost as its natural continuation.”10 Anticipating the poststructuralist credo, Lévi-Strauss went on to proclaim that the goal of the human sciences “was not to constitute, but to dissolve
man.”11 From here it is but a short step to Foucault’s celebrated, neo-Nietzschean adage concerning the “death of man” in The Order of Things.12"

The supposed opposition between "humanism" and Bataille/Nietzsche/Foucault/Deleuze type "irrationalism" is conceptually mistaken. Of course, this is how it has played out in history -- as two distinct streams of thought, whereby one has effectively cannibalized the other, or at least it seems that way. As an aside, I went back to Zimbabwe recently and revelled in the humanistic mindset of most people there. Post-modernist post-humanism has not caught up with them, although they are very much enmired in Christianity, also. In general, it is a situational time warp that reminds one of the value of one's fellow human being. One can love humans, again, within that context, where humanism largely prevails.

In the deeper sense of Bataille, Nietzsche and Deleuze, they are implicitly interested in undergoing a stage of madness, in order to come out the other end in a better and stronger condition. The implicit goal is to get rid of blind authoritarianism (although not necessarily recognition of authority), especially that which is linked to an idea of a god above, which maintains order. In terms of this, the means to the end is "madness", but the goal is a superior kind of sanity to what we experience as normal and necessary, today. The whole emphasis of all three of these writers is a circular movement from everyday normality (a form of insanity in many respects), into true insanity, into a state of superior sanity. It's a large scale historical programme which is supposed to bring "the individual" into being in a true sense, for the first time in history. The irrationality that these writers seek to expand upon is not the end goal for humanity, but merely a stage in the process of humanity's self-transformation.

What we have today, under the rule of capitalism, is quite substantially already the "death of man". The individual doesn't matter. What she produces and the length of time in which she produces it (and then, ultimately, its value on the market), is all that retains meaning in this day and age.

In all, it seems to me that Bataille, Nietzsche and Deleuze were largely just messengers foretelling this 'death of man' and warning against the error of losing reverence for ourselves in a post-Christian era, rather than those who brought this situation into existence. That is to say, Wolin is keen on shooting the messenger.

dreadful disease

Males in Western culture tend to project their emotions outside of themselves. They don't integrate them as part of their personalities. This approach to life actually tends to make them feel more vulnerable, less whole, than if they were actually to become more emotional beings. They often do not know what their reactions to something are. Can you imagine how alienating this must be, to feel this way? Japanese men, by contrast, are generally quite aware of what their reactions are, to any particular circumstance. They often find something mirthful or ironic about various situations. The irony is not that, which is particularly Western -- the irony of emotional detachment. Rather, they are quite aware that they are required to do things that they don't especially want to do. They are quite natural in the ways that they acknowledge this.

What I have concluded is that the problem of detachment is not one that relates to males as such, but to the peculiar cultural disposition of Western males.

The not listening mode, the not paying attention, if taken too far, can put these men into real danger as they become further and further alienated (not just from others, but) from themselves. I really learned a lot from Ashis Nandy's work:

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Sociology/IndividualinSociety/?view=usa&ci=9780195622379

Although it is about the relationship between the colonised and the colonisers, the psychological dynamics of this relationship can be applied to gender.

What Nandy says is that those who refuse to affirm the dignity of the gentler, childlike aspects in others (the colonised are viewed as inferior and in some ways as children) also cannot affirm it within themselves. 

Some fundamental points of intellectual shamanism

1. Heraclitus is actually the early modern prototype for intellectual shamanism.

2. Intellectual shamanism considers that social stability and indeed power relationships themselves are maintained by means of psychological projection. This is in direct opposition to the ideology of meritocracy, which holds that those who are in power are there because they deserve to be there. Rather, intellectual shamanism suggests that those who are in power remain there because they are the most capable people in terms of projecting their worst qualities onto anybody who is not in power. Thus do they get rid of their worst qualities and appear to be morally pure without effort, whereas those in the lower echelons of society appear to need to purify themselves again and again.

3. Intellectual shamanism maintains that social reality -- although not material reality, which functions differently -- is a product of both negative and positive psychological projections. Thus, women will generally project their positive qualities out of themselves and into the world, whereas men will project their negative or frivolous emotional qualities in a way that they perceive to be "downwards". At any rate, they will project them into women.

4. Initiates of intellectual shamanism do not need to bother to analyse every individual action of the ruling powers in order to understand their meanings in their generality. Individuals or actions that threaten the stability of the social order will be targeted with mind-bending projections. Thus, those who threaten the system as it is will be destroyed by means of invisible attacks which cause their peers to look upon them negatively.

5. Intellectual shamanists believe in the law of reciprocity and test the authenticity of their relationships this way. The difference between an innocent action and a power hungry (projective) action is established on the basis of this law of reciprocity. If a woman is referred to using the diminutive version of her name, she can easily test the character of the one who does this by referring to him, publicly,in the same way. If he recoils from this, he was obviously engaged in a power play of projection. If he does not mind the reciprocation, she can assume that the way of speaking was naive and was not intended offensively.

6. Intellectual shamanists "journey" by using abstract ideas as containers for new experiences. They don't believe in fixed states of being, but rather that they can metamorphise from one state of being into another whilst exploring the interior meanings of complex abstract ideas.

Gender and the limits of empiricism

There is a tendency in Western culture (and it seems to be no different within "scientific" circles) to bring to bear implicit metaphysical principles. This is particularly the case with regard to gender. I had a discussion with someone recently, who stated that if we got the average man to compete against the average women in sports, we would be able to determine, from the outcome of their competition, something about their intrinsic natures. This is the kind of thinking that reaches for a metaphysical interpretation of gender, whilst to some degree already having assumed one.


What is it about "averageness" that somehow denotes truth to us? The average (median? or mean? or modal?) woman may not necessarily contain any more of a specific "feminine" essence than the women at the more extreme ends of the scale. At the same time, since "essence" is a social construct and therefore illusionary, extremes may only yield us empirical data about extremes. They do not necessarily furnish us with instrinsic meaning about the fundamental characteristics of identity.


In any case, what generally happens is that "essences" are postulated on the basis of some anticipatory projection. Next, they are looked for in the concrete realm of things and somehow the lens that focuses on "essences" is sharpened by each and every "new" empirical discovery of what had already been assumed. Notions of fundamentally different male and female essences thus become more and more fixed. Identity itself becomes a product of reified ideas, as we modify our own behaviour in order to fit more perfectly in line with our attributed "essence". Thus, essentialised thinking and behaviour are both socially constructed with a putatively empirical pretext.


It would seem that metaphysics is responsible, since it invades our thoughts even when we try to be objective. Indeed, if we were to be truly objective, we would see the world as being hard to compute and in a state of flux. So, we are inclined to use metaphysics as a way to stabilise our perceptions and to develop a comforting sense of order even in the face of its absence. At the same time, our desire to see order and our anticipating of it ultimately creates different kinds of concrete order where none had previously existed.

Addendum to the note below

My views are simply dialectical. I don't think that having a category of identity gives anybody a particular moral status or supplies a justifying cover for their actions. I don't know what it means for someone to "understand" Australian culture in the sense of acqueiscing to it or paying it lip service. One can understand something and still be opposed to it. Perhaps developing understanding is a necessary element for becoming opposed. Somebody can be innocent, for all sorts of reasons, cultural background included. I imagine that MRAs are extremely innocent in terms of understanding the harm they do to women.

My point about understanding the psychology of innocence is that it is helpful to factor it in as something the escalates the psychological violence that those who remain "innocent" do to each other. I wasn't suggesting, for a moment, that those who proclaim their innocence should be let off any hook.

Assange's rape charges: Them's the breaks

I do think Assange is expressing a legitimate grievance about feeling "trapped",as it were, by his rape charges. He feels caught out by a situation that he had not anticipated. His own culture and the rules prevailing in Australian society are rather different from Sweden. My feeling about this is "them's the breaks". Women express legitimate grievances all the time and they are generally based on much more extreme devaluations of their beings and ideals than Julian has experienced. We women are also very often taken by suprise when our ordinary assertiveness and hopefulness that we can get along in the world are treated with crude contempt and labeled as something else. I think that treating innocence as if it must be the mask for something inherently malicious is one of the worst violations of human integrity possible. If I were to put it into religious terms, it is the one "sin" against the human spirit that cannot be forgiven.

Because I consider Assange to have been basically innocent in his intent,(although no doubt presumptuous in relation to women and to some degree chauvinistic), I am not inclined to condemn him overly. I don't want to treat his innocence of how to behave properly in the company of women as if it were a crime. I think he needs to be educated.

Men's Rights Advocates' style of rhetoric against "feminism" is the product of men making a mistake with regard to individual women -- and then, instead of learning from their mistake, compounding it in every way possible due to their sense of hurt. The men who do this are very immature and they end up kicking and fighting against the opportunities life gives them to become more mature. They become extremely dangerous, especially to women.

When women try to highlight the fact of female oppression, they are treated, conventionally, as if they were merely engaged in some emotional blathering. It is the failure to observe this red light that causes many men to end up in some kind of "accident", like that Assange has ended up in.

His "innocence" is not entirely excusable, then. However, it is very hard for many men to see what they have been trained from an early age to avoid seeing, namely that women are more oppressed, simply as "women", than men can ever dream of. It's like a kitten that is not exposed to verticle lines at an early age cannot see them for the duration of its lifetime. Likewise, many males cannot "see" female oppression,no matter how much it is pointed out to them. This is why Assange can make the crude and unrealistic assessment that Sweden is the Saudia Arabia of feminism.

There is a kind of denseness there, a quality of being mentally challenged. It's difficult to know what to do about it.

PRIESTLY LOGIC

In all fields of human activity, we fall victim to a historically imposed mode of reasoning -- the 'logic' of priests. This ideological core is very hard to resist because of the way it is structured. It has an inconsistent logic that is nonetheless very consistent to the ideology of patriarchy. For males to be harsh and dominant is seen to be 'good' because this represents (according to the priests) the necessity for 'civilisation' to thrive. For women to question patriarchal ideology is seen to be inherently malicious and destructive because (according to the priests) women = anti-civilisation.

It's the same patriarchal 'logic' that allows pompous men to feel very self-assured and morally righteous even (and especially) in the act of being very grandiose and socially offensive. They have been encouraged to believe they are actively holding together the "fabric of society" with their vain posturing.

By contrast, women who are assertive are seen to be behaving as the patriarchal men in fact are (that is, they carry the sins of the pompous and arrogant male, who does not carry them himself). Their sin of assertiveness is punished because their female essence, unless repressed, is deemed to have the inherent action of tearing apart society's fabric.

On liberation

Tobias asks:

Here's the scenario: last week, another FB friend posted up about the salary disparity between men and women here in the US and in canada.. being a job search coach, and recruiter, I typed out some salary negotiation tips that women could use so they wouldn't be taken advantage of when it was job offer time.. now, I agree that wage disparity is real, and it's a bad thing, and I also understand that not everyone can negotiate a salary..sometimes an hourly wage is all you get and it's a take it or leave it proposition.. anyway, I got yelled at for being an individualist..that being an individualist didn't help the class of lesser paid women as an aggregate.. my view was that if one has the means to not be a victim they should take it, and not wait for an outside entity to change things, but this was what I wanted to ask you: is it better to teach individuals to not be victims one at a time, or is it better to advocate for a wholesale change to a fairer system for all, even if done by force or if the aftermath results in the hampering of someone elses ability to get ahead? In trying to break people out of a box, aren't we then creating boxes for others, and do we have that right?

I'm really interested in your view because the FB friend who yelled at me is a personal fitness trainer...I thought it odd that someone who teaches empowerment to women who need a problem solved would yell at someone ( me) who spends a lot of time teaching women how to be empowered in terms of their career. I figured that since you teach womens sellf defense, AND you speak in terms of class and systems, you would be the person to ask.


Answer:
The thing is, Tobias, that what can look like an extremely easy problem to "fix" from the outside is often fraught with a lot of complications. The complications I am talking about are not the result of any particular individual's actions or willingness to accept a "victim" status. Rather, they are due to broad-based dispositions to treat men and women differently, within the system. This brings me to my next point: the solutions that work for you, or indeed, for men generally, within the system, will not necessarily 'work' for women.

Look at it this way: If a woman behaves as if her gender didn't matter, she is viewed as stepping out of line, exhibiting signs of poor socialisation and (to the degree that she does not defer to the males as men), her behaviour can often be written off as "pathological".

A man who behaves assertively in order to get a raise can be considered to be behaving appropriately and according to the implicit social rules governing "masculine" behaviour. A woman who behaves in exactly the same assertive way may be considered to have stuck her neck out so far that she may actually risk losing her job.

If you are going to set out to educate women about how to claim their rights, you need to be aware that women's experiences and yours are not going to be of the same order.

The most obvious way to 'lose one's mind'

It seems to me that if one represses one's emotions -- that is, one represses one's natural and immediate reactions to one's set of circumstances -- one also ends up closing one's mind to other realms of possibility. One thereby becomes more stupid.

Despite this, the patriarchal agenda for men is to shut off their emotions and the patriarchal agenda for women is to try to appear more stupid than men.

There are a lot of emotional blackmail mechanisms and other forms of coercion in place to discourage women from showing their intelligence. Generally, if you question patriarchal mores, you will find a lot of people ready to jump on the bandwagon to pathologise you. They feel threatened by your questioning of the status quo. They fall back upon ancient patriarchal texts in order to vindicate themselves. They insulate themselves from feeling any discomfort.

Women say what they mean

Many males are under illusions about how the world works. They've never been on the other side of the gender divide, so they think that when women are complaining about something, they are overreacting, making things up, or what have you. After all, the world has always treated them (the males) fairly enough. They don't understand what it feels like to be disempowered and to have one's perceptions and experiences devalued.

With the males I told you I had encountered, they thought it was a game I was playing. I would say it is hurtful to be disempowered and they they thought I was just being ideological, having some fun with abstract ideas.

Unless males can experience for themselves what women are talking about, it is often very difficult for them to understand that this is not a game. When we say that as women we have been profoundly disadvantaged, this is what we have actually experienced. We are not just saying it as a form of power play.

Things actually are as they seem to be

If we can extrapolate just a little from Horkheimer and Adorno, we can say that in Western culture, people assume that nothing is as it seems to be. What I am suggesting here is a cultural appropriation of this principle of "Enlightenment", which has a very mystifying (rather than enlightening) effect on people.

Because people have become culturally accustomed to doubting their own perceptions, it is easy for suave manipulators to make good seem like evil and vice versa, so that the populace regularly votes against its own interests (and shoots itself in the foot). It seems people are just too "clever" for their own goods, always doubting what is in front of them and seems to be most apparent. The cultural logic that says nothing is ever what it actually seems to be makes it easy for things to be represented as their opposites. For, after all, if something appears good, what could be more opposite -- and hence "enlightened' -- than to expose some ostensibly "evil" underlying motivation in it? Likewise, if something actually APPEARS harmful, a feeling of suave sophistication in relation to this harmful thing might readily be obtained by seeing "good" in it.

In all, it seems that many people are addicted to this feeling of sophistication, which comes from the capacity to "see" some of the opposite characteristics in whatever comes into their view. Anything that stands out very much from the norm is likely to receive this sort of treatment. The practical results of reinterpreting various situations and events as their opposite seems to have little cultural importance in comparison to this feeling of sophistication obtained in being able to read opposite values into things. It is an addiction, an intoxication, which gives a sense of immediate transcendence of everyday reality.

Fighting fodder

Many people have smaller and smaller attention spans, these days. It is very difficult to educate people on anything, because unless the lesson you want to impart has a strong emotional impact, people are unlikely to keep it in mind. The more stressed people are, the more the attention span narrows. Feminist efforts to educate the populace about gender roles are noble, but end up preaching to the choir. The prevalence of various popularisations of Darwinism means that those who feel stressed by their situations, but do not wish to do anything about the deeper reasons for their stress, (perhaps believing, wrongly, that there is not such thing as a “deeper reason"), tend to revert to the rhetoric: “Well, I’m just an animal, an ape. What did you expect?”

In such a situation as I have described, I don’t think feminism has much to lose by letting go of the motherly, educative role, at least in terms of trying to change the world. Such a task as educating others should be used only in support of those who are already aware that feminism is necessary, but do not understand the ins and outs of patriarchal oppression in enough detail to fight it back.

In relation to those others—the majority of people—who show resistance to understanding feminism, I think that little energy should be expended in trying to teach them right from wrong. Many people are willing to lap up feminist criticism, even if it is harsh, because they feel starved of attention. They will try to provoke it as a perverse way of feeling nourished. Due to this way of fulfilling a need, feminists can end up in a maternal role, which is just what isn’t useful.

I think that the strategy of feminism should be to veer away from identity politics, so that it becomes difficult to target women as a particular identity. This is where the backlash has succeeded and is still succeeding. Instead, feminism should employ an emotional detached logic, to show that the way in which anti-feminists are thinking is profoundly illogical and self defeating.

For instance, yesterday a man told me that he didn’t look deeply into the reasons for things, because he was “a man” and “men are simple”, he told me, like apes. So, I asked him whether it was impossible for “a man” to be an intellectual. Notably, what I said didn’t sink in, which is to be expected due to the complacency that anti-feminists develop within the popular cultural milieu.

Patriarchal projections

Patriarchal projections might not appear obviously what they are -- which is to say, projections -- just because they often rely upon a framing device to change the meaning of an event, depending upon whether the subject is male or female.  What is projected it the idea of female inferiority, which seems to be confirmed by any unusual event in the life of any woman. 


The way I have found this to work: if a woman struggles against something, the fact of a struggle one is seen as a mark of her failure. (If a man similarly struggles against incredible odds, then that is often seen as a mark of his will to overcome those odds.)


What this patriarchal logic adds up to is a general social perspective that a woman who struggles against the odds is a failure. She struggles because life appears to overwhelm her.   (Actually, patriarchal hegemony can often be overwhelming, depending on one's particular circumstances.)  For one who has more patriarchy to deal with than maybe others do, failing to struggle would not lead to any kind of a success, either -- and necessarily so, since those who do not struggle against powerful enemies do not end up making anything of their lives.


All the same, patriarchy is not an ideology that distinguishes between just and unjust situations.  For women who suffer under a great deal of patriarchal control, the fatigue after having exerted oneself in an extraordinary manner is viewed as signifying the failure of one's whole enterprise, which is to survive as a whole human being.   Patriarchal ideology assures that one loses, either way (by struggling against it or by not struggling).  It thus enforces standards of mediocrity for women.


As we can see, then, a mediocre woman is the only kind of woman logically acceptable under the patriarchal system. Yet, even this ostensibly "acceptable" woman -- this patriarchal, mediocre woman -- will ultimately be rejected by the patriarchal system, for it's clear that acquiescence to a system that defines your character as mediocre makes one, if anything, superlatively mediocre. This is a fact sensed by the brighter of the patriarchal types themselves, who intuit that any woman accommodating herself to their wishes cannot have much character or substance.


From a patriarchal perspective no woman is anything but mediocre. That view is behind the self-justification of patriarchal value systems:  we dominate you because you are inferior and we are superior to you.

Conventional views of gender: Why they are wrong

(This relates to my previous post on infantile projection.)

Samantha Meki: I think men have acquired this noble state in the hierachy coz they're physically stronger than women, emotionally repressive than women who show their weaker side and therefore need all the men's stronger qualities to suppliment hers so as to feel secure;hence women play a part as well in pushing the Man up the hierachy making him noble coz they need some of the men's qualities which r totally opposite to theirs.

Jennifer F Armstrong: Yes, that is the conventional view, Samantha. My view is that whilst many men and women have become accustomed to viewing gender relations in that way, it is likely that they have things exactly back to front.

We need to examine our assumptions to understand how this could be.

1. Why is emotional repression considered to be strength in this absolute sense required by patriarchy? Quite clearly all humans are equipped with the capacity to express emotion, so a human that does not express emotion is not necessarily a stronger one, but rather one who is a bit mutilated.

2. Why is the expression of emotion considered to be the expression of "a weaker side"? All humans have the capacity --and need -- to express emotion.

3. Why do women buy into the logic that it is their responsibility to support and affirm men because men repress their emotions more than women do?

4. Hasn't the way women express emotions become poisoned and unnatural, due to their relationship with men within the gender hierarchy? Perhaps this is why female emotions seem "weak", like unwanted and unreliable residues of a more glorious human condition?

5. How did women end up having to try to attain necessary human qualities that are nonetheless deemed to be "the opposite to hers" by sweating for them? In the end, she elevates the male, but does not actually manage to obtain the reward she has been offered. That is, nobility remains always beyond her reach, despite her reaching for it by pushing up the male. Hasn't she been deceived in all sorts of ways?

Icarus and patriarchy

Patriarchal psycho-dynamics divide the human psyche into half so that all its godly attributes seem to belong to men and all of its contemptible attributes seem to belong to women. Although males hope to win by this sleight of hand, they actual lose, for they become divided in half. There are still some areas in battle, where women are sometimes viewed as having mystical, sacred powers due to their sexuality, but generally intellect, knowledge, will and courage are deemed to be "male". Women are deemed to have precisely the opposite qualities.

When anyone is in the grip of patriarchal ideology, they feel like it's the boost they need to reach the sun, if not the stars. You simply cannot tell a person, who is intoxicated in this way, that the result will be that they are shattered. For, nobody can efficiently go through life and face unpredictable challenges whilst they remain committed to being, effectively, only half a person.

Patriarchy makes society undeveloped

Patriarchy perpetuates itself by undermining the logic of those who are oppressed -- women. It says, "Surely you are imagining it that men are actually oppressing you? You must be insane! We care for you, deeply."

The result of this kind of brainwashing is that women underestimate the accuracy of their own perceptions and start to believe that they are incapable of logic.

It is easy to see why patriarchal societies are less developed, because the ideology of patriarchy is based on infantile projection. That is, if I am male and I do not like anything about myself, I can feel justified and encouraged by the system as it is to project these nefarious aspects onto women close by. Patriarchal societies keep their members in a state of infancy by encouraging this sort of behaviour as a way to excuse oneself. Rather than embracing patriarchy, people should be taught to observe their actions and introspect and analyse why they do the things they do. That would allow them to behave in a more mature fashion.

I perceive that infantile projection is absolutely essential for giving the impression that there are "natural" hierarchies, whereby men dominate women because men are intrinsically more noble than women happen to be. Louis Althusser recognises a difference between forms of repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatus.In terms of sheer power, we could recognise that men dominate in various institutions of power. Why they dominate and how they manage to get into a position of domination are other questions.

We have the media, the church and to some degree various educational institutions perpetuating the idea that there is something noble, logical and "transcendent of emotional states" in the quality of being male. Men learn through social conditioning that they can easily project their unwanted emotional states onto women so as to conform to the masculine ideal.

identity categories

People expect you to play a role that is defined how they see your identity to be. So, for instance, when I migrated from Zimbabwe to Australia, I was expected to self-consciously "distance" myself from white, colonial racism. I didn't do that, because I didn't know that this was how "the game" had to be played. I genuinely had no idea about the necessity to play any game.

Similarly, one is expected to maintain an internal consistency of behaviour in relation to how others happen to judge you (i.e. what category they have subconsciously put you into). If you appear to be a particular category of person, but then do not act according to the principles that would define that category of existence, many people become upset. They believe you have "deceived" them -- when really they have simply made a mistake about who you are, and then changed their minds, and then blamed you for the discrepancy between their two perceptions.

Obama, identity politics and why that didn't work out

Identity politics goes well with a consumerist approach to life, since one can rather passively "choose" one's product (often in a way that is seen to enhance one's self-image or 'lifestyle choices). Then one sits back and expects the 'product' to perform. It's all quite superficial. The idea that Obama must necessarily perform acts in solidarity with oppressed people because of his skin color is false. People need to get over the idea that 'identity' is a transparent and obvious signal of motivation. It isn't.

This discomfort one experiences must be substantial, otherwise humans have a tendency to be conservative and to try to "adapt" to the circumstances they are in, rather than try to change them. This approach seems to be ingrained in us at something like a biological level. Part of the problem seems to be in the way our biological hardware enables us to adapt to our cultural and environmental circumstances at an early age. So, if we grow up in a system of capitalism, we will find that capitalism also comes to define our emotional determinants. We learn a capitalist subjectivity, which can be so hard to change that it seems to us like "human nature".

It may have something to do with this neurological mechanism:

I will suggest that in addition to being a neural repository for innate forms of behavior, the striatal complex constitutes part of a storage mechanism for parroting learned forms of emotional and intellective behavior acquired through the participation of limbic and neocortical systems."
CEREBRAL EVOLUTION AND EMOTIONAL PROCESSES:NEW FINDINGS ON THE STRIATAL COMPLEXPaul D. MacLeanLaboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior

Clearly people have been on the wrong path with their forms of moral leftisms and identity politics. Identity politics dominates the left when what is needed is a more considered and critical approach.

The need for a more substantial basis for action other than identity is made palpable by the fact that identity has become a repository for ideas of moral goodness and evil. Because of this, we do not see the human being and his or her capacity for thought and for action. Instead, we see an "identity" with a powerful code attached suggesting either "good" or "evil".

Although there is a historical basis for seeing certain groups of people as oppressed or as oppressors, contemporary ways of treating identity go way beyond this recognition to the point that psychological forces within society as a whole are directed towards assuring that identities remain fixed on the basis of our inner needs to have a sense of moral certainty about our worlds. We learn to project our sense of "good" into certain types of identity, and the parts of ourselves that we would disown as "evil" into other identities. This seems to be the case with both the left and the right.

Thus, "identities", although originally historically created and developed, become psychological fictions to amuse ourselves by. These have next to nothing to do with serious politics, but disguise actual political processes.

"Projecting" -- and how this applies to gender

It strikes me that many people do not know what "projection" is, or how that psychological dynamic is used in the construction of gender. Generally, "projection" is viewed as something anomalous, eccentric, and the product of rare individuals who express themselves in pathological ways.

In actual fact, projection is the means by which societies maintain inequalities between people. It is indispensable for creating hierarchies of class and gender. Without projection, we would not be persuaded to the belief that people have certain unchanging and essential qualities that mark them, independently from the social context, as being either "inferior" or "superior".

Projection, however, facilitates this sense we often have that society is structured by people expressing their "essential natures" as it were. If more women than men find themselves at the bottom of their societies, with few economic resources, this is because of their essential natures. Likewise, a male has power because he is essentially powerful. A change of social context, therefore, ought not to change the degree of power he has over others. He retains that power, independent of his context, just because he is "a man".

Clearly, this way of reasoning is fallacious -- a fact that men's rights groups expose whenever they point out that "men, too, are discriminated against." Suddenly, a social basis for organisation comes to light when men feel that they are being made into victims. Otherwise, such organisation remains deliberately obscured and unnoticed. Such is the ubiquitous and self-serving view that society is generally just made up of individuals (except when women are behaving nefariously and in a "socialistic" fashion, by making males feel that "social forces" actually exist).

Projection, however, continues to reinforce social hierarchies, whilst rendering them invisible. The way in which projection "works" is through the culturally engendered trope of "reading between the lines". This way of handling others from a different class or different gender from one's own places an impermeable membrane between you to prevent communication.

How much do you "read between the lines"? (The answer to this question may answer : 'How much do you "project"?')

If I tell you that society has been harmful to me because of patriarchal practices, do you read me as saying something completely different; something I hadn't thought to say, at all?

Perhaps, (you think), what I am really saying is that I feel I am one of the weaker members of society. Perhaps you think I out to conquer the world by "making excuses" for all sorts of things. (With what motivation? To what end? Why now?)

It has never ceased to astonish me how mentally secure most patriarchal men become, as they set to work to undermine my speech with all sorts of bizarre interpretations of their own. They become busy securing their positions in society as superior to me, but their projections are outlandish; their ears tone deaf. They have absolutely no idea what I am actually saying.

I see this, don't you?

What I see is that any form of contemporary capitalism can appear to be largely justified by means of deflection of guilt away from present day capitalists to the 'colonials' of yore. It is THEY who are deemed to be truly evil, with values and motivations that are 300 percent reprehensible. By contrast, capitalism markets itself as belonging to a 'West' whose values have been completely regenerated, though condemning and distancing itself from 'colonialism'. Capitalist raping and plundering is now morally pure, according to this understanding. That is because all of the evil belongs to the past, when people didn't know any better and were 'colonials'.

individualism

WHAT WOMEN WANT

It has become clear to me,through my philosophical research, that the reason why males simply cannot know what women want is because "masculinity" involves transcendence of what it generally understood to be "femininity". That is, a male become a man by negating the aspects within him that relate to empathy, reflectiveness, and intellectual flexibility. These aspects become relegated to the realm of the "feminine" in the man who has successfully transcended them, in order to become "masculine".

Henceforth, when a woman speaks, a "masculine" man is unable to process what she is saying. He has, to all effects and purposes, "transcended" her language and its meanings, and now what a woman says has no meaning for him.

Despite the fact that women are fully capable of communicating what "they want", the man is no longer in a position to hear them, insofar as he is "a man". So, "what women want" is necessarily mysterious to him.

I think that there are certain sociocultural pressures (by which, I generally mean, broadly "economic pressures") that prevent people from taking what ought to be a simple step, and affirming the humanity of others. Industrialism, for instance, gives us categorically different identities, which allows us to be readily utilised in different ways as part of the division of labour. It sets us against each other, since we come to see ourselves as beings with ontological distinct characteristics, such as gender or "race". The sense that we are actually all human beings become de-emphasised by means of these economic processes.

In my view, postmodernisms are often struggling with the way in which we have accepted identification with these historically bestowed economic roles. We end up thinking within these terms, on the basis of the categories that have been bestowed on us. We feel stuck, because we cannot resist history and the work that it has done on our minds.

Objectivity and subjectivity, perception and politics

When I speak about "objectivity" and "subjectivity" I am really speaking about human attitudes. "Objectivity" is the state of mind that removes emotion as far as possible from the equation. So, the lens of "objectivity" is fairly unemotional, but still not METAPHYSICALLY (that is, in terms of last truths) objective. A surgeon or airline pilot needs to be "objective" in this sense.

By contrast: "subjectivity" allows emotions to become part of the lens by which reality is observed. This is, I think describes natural human tendencies, in relation to the central core of human emotionality.

What is artificial is repressing subjectivity to get objectivity -- that is to say, the patriarchal formula for making headway. Repression cannot lead to a viewpoint devoid of emotion, but rather to a state where emotions are no longer integrated with the important human search for meaning.   Additionally, this lack of integration of the emotions with the rest of the psyche leads to emotional distortions of reality. Paradoxically, one must have a certain amount of emotional integration to be able to stand apart from the emotions, with emotional equilibrium.  For this purpose, a strong ego can help objective detachment better than a weak ego, but the strong ego has to be self-assured enough not to fend off reality, but to dissolve itself into reality at times, without losing its potential to regain its strength.

As for subjective states, they can be useful in many ways, especially in determining unconscious boundaries of identity, whether these happen to be related to nation, religion or gender.  We can be very scientific and critique our own subjectitivies with the aid of other subjectivities. That is when the fun begins but also when we start to develop our capacity and knowledge for political affairs.   At the its most active end knowledge and self-mastery, the capacity for politics is the self-conscious commitment to develop lenses through which others come to see the world. 

Entertainment between cultures

I don't find African culture to be less intelligent than Western culture. Comparing both, at the level of popular culture, we find that they are just on about something different.

In the case of Western culture, tragedy in soap operas serves the purpose of getting the viewer to respond by feeling anything at all. In the popular Australian soapie, Neighbours, one tragedy strikes after another, all in the effort to get the viewers to feel something.

In the case of the Nigerian soap operas I've watched, the tragic events that happen are obviously staged. Their purpose is to get the audience to laugh about the trials and tribulations of life.

I think that the differences in philosophies behind these two approaches reveals something significant. Human nature is not the same everywhere you go.

Rationality as ideology: the gender bind

Jennifer Armstrong: Self defence teaching

Go to YouTube.

Colonialism

The games people play against "The colonial"

The kinds of games people play against "The colonial" (an archetype in their minds):

"Ah, you WANT to be mysterious... you fail to communicate your problems. Please, tell me again, what were they?? Oh! I see, rather petty compared to the natives that suffered under you, old chap, haw, haw, dontcha think?? And if you really expect us to "understand" you, as you keep begging us to do, well wouldn't a little effort on your part be worth the cost, you little high and mighty Lady of the Manor, haw, haw, haw."

"The colonial" has to do penance to prove his or her humanity, otherwise it is presumed not to exist. Asking me to work overtime to communicate beyond what I have done for twenty years to explain why it is wrong to treat others as less-than-human is part of this. "Your humanity hasn't quite come across to us over here. Keep trying."  Twenty years on.

Human consciousness

There are some feelings that are politic to have and some that are not so. One of the strongest political feelings emanating from the newborn to the former colonialising countries is that people who are evil (i.e. whites who lived in the actual colonies) do not suffer, or if they do, one ought not to acknowledge this, for this would undermine the value of the suffering of those who were "genuine" victims of the colonial regime.

I know I am not deluding myself as regards the moral reasoning stated above. This is profoundly ubiquitous, pervasive, and has seeped into most people's unconscious to become a form of "common sense". So, if you do not have any element of that reasoning in your consciousness, well done. You are exemplary, have passed the test of being a decent human being with flying colours, and you are out of this world. But, in any case, and if you haven't manage to escape the plague of contemporary reason, then this is just what I had expected, and it is normal, and too bad.

Politics and how we feel

In general, an education in the humanities can be most useful in enabling one to move away from a paradigm in terms of which one interprets differences in others on the basis of morality and one's own emotions towards a paradigm that views differences as being necessary, irreducible, and fundamentally political.

The direction of this movement is away from positing an ideal state of unity connecting the whole of humankind, which is to be facilitated by "moral understanding", and towards an expectation that even the best friendships and relationships will have elements made up of irreducible political differences. Such differences must be understood to be as fundamental to the other's constitution as their biology in fact is.

Whereas one's morality may be based on principles of ethics, one's politics are almost always based on implicit senses of belonging or not. This means that the two facets of one's thinking are rarely ever in direct synchronisation. One can sometimes feel the effect of the two principles working at odds when a relationship with a foreigner is suddenly disrupted by a sudden certainty that each of you has a different sense of allegiance to different peoples or places.

The temptation, when this sense of differences suddenly becomes clear, is to try to solve "the problem" moralistically -- that is, by attributing the cause of the sense of disagreement to "misunderstandings" or undesirable emotional states. Often, however, no "misunderstanding" has actually taken place. Rather, the political boundaries that circumscribe the other's identity have suddenly become much more apparent. In fact, rather than considering a "misunderstanding" to have occurred, one should consider that what has occurred in such cases is "clarification".

This clarification involves understanding the 'soul' of our political nature or what Nietzsche called an element of what is "unteachable" in us.

Psychological normality is generally ill-conceived

Psychological normality might be conventionally defined in terms of one's capacity to act as if one's social and political environment were entirely neutral. That is, one is psychologically normal if one does not react defensively in relation to one's environment. If one does, however, have defensive reactions, then this is taken as a sign of abnormality in an individual.

Yet, it is neither philosophically necessary nor justified that one must see normality in these terms. Rarely are experiments performed to determine whether the status quo is in fact rational, rather than being insane. The status quo is indeed, normative -- but only in the tautological sense that it is the status quo. This by no means indicates that it is healthy, or even reasonable, to embrace the status quo.

When discussing the need for feminism with men, I generally find that most men see no need for it. Their own experiences tell them that their social environments are generally impartial (to them, as men). They do not feel the discriminatory practices that are leveled against women. Therefore, they can't imagine that these practices are taking place.

Men who are skeptical about the existence of gender bias in the general social environment assume that men and women inhabit the same social realm, where attitudes are gender neutral. But this is only because men experience social attitudes towards them -- as men -- to be gender neutral. In reality, men and women do not actually experience the same social realm, even though it may seem the same in all sorts of concrete and tangible respects, for what seems to be the "same" social environment is one that simultaneously treats men in a gender-neutral fashion whilst treating women in a gender-biased fashion.

A psychologically "normal" man would be one who views his environment as being neutral toward him. A "normal" woman would be, in the tautological sense, one who sees her environment as being neutral toward her. Herein lies the problem because a woman who experiences a gender-biased environment as being neutral is not, in fact, normal in the sense of being psychologically healthy.  Rather she is  in extreme denial about the nature of a patriarchal society.

ironic acid

When speaking to right wingers you do need to realise that you are both speaking different languages. The most common cause of confusion when speaking across the chasm of the political divide is that the right winger will hear your ironic musings as if they were suggesting serious causal relationships between things.

The right winger is always on the look out for causes. In particular, he considers the issue of moral corruption as having a cause, or causes, that can be very easily traced and understood, through simple logical equations.

The use of irony implies recognition that aspects of life do not follow a logical course. The right wing ideologue sees such a suggestions and nonsensical, or "silly", because he believes that life has to follow a narrowly logical pattern and that people always get their "just desserts". Except -- if it is he who isn't getting his.  Then, he is the one who is being victimised by life.

That's why, in some other instances,  one's use of irony is taken to imply that one is mocking one's own causes.

The bully and his unconscious mind

I'm far from being someone who theorises that the unconscious mind is largely a negative force, which mitigates against civilising processes. I'm not a Freudian. Rather, I see that in many cases, the unconscious minds of others are on my side. They are capable of telling me something about the others' experiences that they would never feel free to tell me themselves.

It seems strange to say, but bullies, when they have appeared in my life, have always taught me something about the world in general, through sharing with me their world views. This is not, as I have suggested, an intentional sharing, but rather, one that always tends to happen inadvertently, and despite the self-image that the bully is trying to create.

So, in one instance, I learned from a particular bully that he had been unsatisfied in his work for 40 years. His expressed ideology might have been: "So, suffering is normal. Suck it in. We've all had to endure it." Yet, the situation we were enduring was clearly contrived to make us suffer. This particular boss could have alleviated our suffering, but he chose not to.

The contradiction of imposing suffering whilst acting as if this suffering was inevitable is expressed in the idea: "I had to suffer, so you will have to suffer as well."

This is the unconscious mind of the bully speaking, and it is on my side. It warns: "If you follow the path in life that I have followed, you will be miserable. Don't follow it by any means! Look -- I am increasing your suffering as a disincentive for you to even stick around in this workplace. Trouble resides here."

A bully, in general, makes not conforming a lot easier than conforming to the status quo. A bully is one who is exceedingly troubled by the costs that conforming to others' expectations have imposed on him. Had he had his life to live over again, he feels he ought not to have made the choices that denied him freedom. He nonetheless suspects that his character is just not strong enough to have made choices in favour of his own dignity and freedom. His suspicions about his own lack of integrity lead him to bully others. "At least, if I am not happy in myself, I have this compensation of extracting pleasure by watching others suffer," he says.

As for me, I have always learned from the bully, by what is spoken to me by his unconscious mind. That, alone, is his "true self", as Bataille has suggested. That is the goodness that remains in the bully, despite himself; the part that yearns to communicate truthfully.

"The costs I am imposing upon you now should make you think again about the path that you have chosen!" the bully says. "I care about you, as I care about the self that I ought to have fought for, but have lost. Accept this disincentive I am offering you now, which is all that remains of my capacity to speak honestly. Turn away, please. For the sake of humanity, turn away."

On identification with ego

Naturally, one become obsessed with identity in instances where one is devalued. But I also think that one identifies with one's own interests as a matter of course, too. What I am considering is that Buddhist "detachment" and the shamanistic dissociation away from morally identifying with one's egoistic interests have something in common --- although shamanism is ultimately less consistent in this, as compared to the Buddhism, because the shaman only wishes to dissociate from ego in order to make himself freer, and not in order to "transcend" or birth a moral system through his dissociation. So, a shaman may even choose to take a more egoistic approach at times, if that seems to suit the situation. The difference between shamanism and Buddhism -- although both practice detachment -- is that shamanism is a perspective that concerns itself with life in in a structural sense, whereas Buddhist training is more oriented towards a moral outcome.

In Zimbabwe

language and experience

Entering a realm where experience is less mediated by language or culture can be quite scary. Language is kind of like a barrier against falling off your "cliff edge". So long as you can pin the other person to language, and what they are deemed to have said, you do not feel existentially threatened, but rather as if everything in life were firm, and always had been.

The opposite to this is to remove the barrier of language, not in terms of denying that there is, or can be, or ought to be such a barrier, but in the sense of not relying on it so much. That it is quite possible to do so is shown by sparring, wherein social conventions do not matter, but only the movement of the body and its apparent intentions are considered.

They are definitely two very different levels of relating to the world. I would not have been able to go to Zimbabwe and achieve anything like I did, had I been concerned to lock meanings into place in any kind of rigid fashion. I think "identity politics" is precisely concerned with locking into place these kinds of meanings, so that others can seem more solidified than they are. However, you can't go under, over and around identity, if you are thinking in that way. I would have had to stay in the white suburbs for the duration of my stay, instead of passing freely between different realms.

Shamanic regression has nothing to do with morality, in either a positive or negative sense. Shamanic observations about how societies are structured are in terms of amorality. One is not "better" for being at the top of society, for instance -- one just appears that way due to being able to pass off one's failings and guilt as belonging to somebody lower down in the social hierarchy. This is a fundamental shamanistic insight.

In fact this is the the core insight of shamanism -- that the realm of society is not structured on the basis of morality, and nor can it be. This point is related to another point, concerning how  shamanistic practice can be misunderstood. If it is associated with a system of morality, or a way to become morally pure, or a way to prove others to be morally in the wrong,  this is about as extreme a misunderstanding as is possible.

The instability of matter

The paradox of all things Colonial is that they involve movement, change, conquest, and ultimately, revolution. Conversely, the lack of change, such as the acquisition of land through inheritance, is considered to embody the ideal of "the good" in non-Colonial societies. Change is evil: Satanic. This is something that shamans who resisted colonization were able to sense, for they were already in the realm of change, and just had to take it some steps further; to push the process beyond the comfort levels of their masters.

Shamanism is the opposite to Kantianism. Instead of the the rule of morality being based on abstraction, the drive towards freedom is based on spontaneity/impulse.

The power invoked here is in the instability of matter, or in terms of Bataille, "Base Materialism".

Cultural misunderstandings

An outsider will need to read between the lines, very often, to work out what cultural misunderstanding are taking place, as they are rarely stated directly, but instead operate as false premises. One has to work backwards from the stated conclusions in order to conjecture how false premises might have been introduced. The cultural logic of one particular group, brought up in entirely different historical circumstances, is not the cultural logical of another. The "in-group" is not disadvantaged by a system of cultural logic that relates to their own historical circumstances, but the "out-group" member is very much disadvantaged by an approach that disregards their own particular set of historical circumstances.

So it was that I have had to find out what Westerners think of me by indirect means, through never knowing for sure which essential bit of historical information they have left out. "Their calculations seem to be wrong. But, how precisely have they gone so wrong?" This is the fundamental question of my life; the one I've learned to live with.

I learned indirectly, for instance, that it was considered by one Westerner that I could not keep friends. How was it he came to that conclusion?

Reflecting on our different historical circumstances, I came to understand that the false premises introduced on this occasion were: "Societies are basically stable. People are not profoundly uprooted. Cultures stay the same; friends remain in touch. Only those individuals who are themselves unstable do not experience life this way."

Trying to make sense of his perspective, I realised that my memoir depicts a kind of loneliness. Somehow, because I have never had a yardstick of social normality to define my life, I had neglected to mention that I lived through a period of extreme historical disruption of my culture. I had not noted down that my colonial culture had been judged to be an invalid one, such that people I had known and grown up with had fled the country, within two or three years, to all parts of the Earth.

And, somehow we had not kept in touch. Perhaps the traumatic circumstances of the leaving of one's place of birth had led to this?

More likely, it was down to youth, and the happy-go-lucky attitudes we had developed at that time, which embraced a sense of fatalism. "Everything would surely be okay. Our fates were in God's hands."

It seems my lack of connection with the culture I'd grown up in became a mark of Cain on me; a sign that I had done some wrong. But, I was not to realise I had been marked in this way, apart from indirect comments that let me know that this was so.

After all, I did not have access to Western cultural logic, and so I did not know, from personal experience, what premises were likely to be applied regarding me. They made no sense immediately, but I could maybe gauge what these might be through working backwards through the insinuations to try to find any logic.

The ideology of fixed identities

The idea of fixed identities is a plague upon contemporary societies. I see how this ideology can make things seem simpler, more predictable, in societies that are relatively static. However, if one's society, or the people in it, have experienced a lot of change, the ideology that identities are basically fixed and remain relatively unalterable throughout one's lifetime, seems plainly wrongheaded.

Much of my contention with these ideologies, that hold that our identities remain fixed, stems from personal experience with them. As an ideological force, they seem to exert a very reactionary effect on social relations.

In my life, I have been categorised in various very unhelpful ways. It has seemed to me that categorising me according to a "type" has inevitably hindered communication, and has sometimes been used with exactly this intention by those who have a political agenda.

Categorising me in a particular way prevents me from communicating things that do not come from the perspective of one who sees the world according to the category. It's Procrustean. Anything that goes outside the lines of the ideologically determined cookie-cutter persona is deemed to be irrelevant, unintelligible, or just plain crazy.

I'm had legitimate concerns for my well-being dismissed because I speak as "a female" -- only not nearly enough, apparently, since women are considered to be most quintessentially themselves when they do not speak at all. (Having said that, a woman who speaks much, but without much consideration to the content, is considered, in Zimbabwe, to be expressing her normality. Go quiet in that country, and as a female, you will be considered to have become "depressed".)

I've not been able to express my sense of loss of my culture, identity, and country, because a white African's perspective has long been deemed socially illegitimate. It's supposed to be transcended by a righteous black's perspective.

I've been told that if I want to communicate at all, I must represent myself as a "white woman", when the Western cultural history that has produced this category of "white woman" is not my own cultural history at all. Even this brief post should be enough to indicate that I have not had the same, or similar privileges, as the U.S., British, or Australian, middle class female, who happens to be Anglo-Saxon. I think differently, because I am already different. I cannot choose this historically engendered category of identity because it has no predictive power over my behaviour, and as an epistemological category, makes little sense when applied to me.

And then there is the idea that the leopard does not change its spots. This is a particularly noxious ideology, since it is based wholly on an oversimplified idea of historical determinism. The assumption here is that experiences do not, or ought not to change one's nature. One is destined always to remain the same, just as one's parents had determined one to be. There's no thinking; there's no responsiveness; there's no will power. One is like a billiard ball to be directed by another, or an historically produced blob.

BREAK FREE

An extremely revolutionary principle: Trust must be earned

For those who do not believe that there are mechanisms of oppression, or that these are not "objective", I have a simple way for you to measure whether or not you are living under domination. All it requires is for you simply to express a certain degree of caution, verging on distrust, in relation to your authorities.

This attitude attracts punishment like an open bottle of Fanta attracts bees in a Harare park.

On a feminist blog, any expression of cautious distrust, which nonetheless hasn't grown yet to become a fully intellectual state of knowledge, is a lure for patriarchal trolls of every shape and size. One must not express distrust with the system as it is. One must embrace it. This is the distilled message of trolls, and those who take their side.

Express cautious concern that patriarchy is not the best way to go for women. Express cautious concern that one's government or local authorities do not have one's best interests at heart. Reveal evidence that one is grappling to discover an intellectual position, but hasn't quite obtained one yet.

Enter the trolls, who will always tell you their truths. A troll's belief in authority is always absolute.

Program for the future

If postmodernism is not a program for the future then those who teach its ideas ought to be aware of its self-imposed limitations, as the future ought not to be left in the hands of those with the determination to seize power

What is good about Nietzsche is his injunction to "live dangerously". Bataille, who in turn proclaims "I am Nietzsche" suggests that we depart from what we know into a realm of experience where nothing is decided. Bataille's injunction, although mystical sounding, was for people to break out of the impasse made up of ideology and convention.

Postmodernism, although having links with Nietzschean "perspectivism" is devoid of the logic of the overall Nietzschean project, which was to create a different kind of human being for the future. It kids itself that it is revolutionary, whilst remaining in a Prufrockian bubble, separated from the realm of experience:

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?"

By contrast, shamanism has the nerve to want to experience the "thing in itself". This is impossible, according to Kant. But it is this very impossibility that is attractive and which somehow gives shamanistic practitioners their sense of meaning. There is a wish to explore "the abyss" and if necessary become wrecked within this void.  As Byron Siedrmann explains:

The Germanic shaman may go into a trance to have visions or receive a specific message from the gods , but he/she seldom has some therapeutic motive. In the big picture the whole thing does benefit the individual human shaman, but it might not be in an expected or pleasant way. The shaman might be driven "mad" or might be physically wounded while in the shamanic state. This is irrelevant. Whether the shamanic is helped or harmed by the experience is ultimately irrelevant. As long as some goal is achieved and the gods are pleased that's all that matters.

The spirit of shamanism and the spirit of postmodernism are opposite. The first is incautious, audacious and foolhardy. The second is accepting of convention, timid, and moralizing.

Against postmodernism

Letwin Gurupira's patriarchy and Chipo's patriarchy are very similar to my patriarchy. The difference is that there is another level of oppression they have to face due to their skin colour. Terms like capitalism and patriarchy point to the way that power is structured in society. Certainly, we will experience the impact of this power in different ways, but not so differently that it warrants having a different category for "a white woman's experience of patriarchy" and "a black woman's experience of patriarchy". I believe that there is a real danger in overemphasizing perception and the perceiver to the point that the power structures that oppress seem to disappear, or seem to be totally different depending on whether you are "black" or "white".

There is a background to my opposition to postmodernist theory. I swallowed postmodernism whole as an undergraduate, back in the eighties. I left University and went on to be bullied in the workplace. I said to the bosses there, "I seem to have the perception that I am being bullied, but please correct me if I am wrong. Perhaps it is not your intention? After all, this is merely my perception and may have nothing to do with reality, at all, since reality is something we cannot know."

The bullying did not stop but simply intensified at that point.

I learned the hard way that sometimes it is better to address reality as if it actually existed, otherwise there is no way of combating its particularly negative manifestations. If you try to address the issue as if it could be merely something happening in your own mind, you are ideal fodder. They have you where they want you, with your belief that the bullying is simply a product of your way of thinking.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a conservative

One of the stranger aspects of my life has been dealing with groups of people, and occasionally individuals, who have presumed that I must be a conservative because of where as I born and the colour of my skin. That I have often been mistaken for a conservative, and that I have generally not realised what was happening until much too late, highlights something about my character and situation.

In retrospect, I see that there is a certain logic in treating whites who must have been born into a colonial country during the colonial era as if they must be conservatives. Although it is an oversimplification, the assumption that a white Zimbabwean must be a conservative is perhaps generally true enough to make it a predictive principle.

Yet, I am not, nor have ever been, a political conservative. I am even less of a cultural conservative than a political one. My cultural training was in line with principles of stoicism and irreverence, in about equal proportions. Although the stoicism might seem to imply a right-wing state of mind, it has no such political homeland. It can just as easily be lobbied against the establishment as for it, or on its behalf. There is no telling, from my character structure, what politics I happen to embrace.

Throughout the years, however, people have assumed that I must be a conservative, and have treated me accordingly. This leads directly to misunderstandings, particularly if I should happen to express any of my intrinsic irreverence for power structures or ways of thinking that do not develop and thus self-transform. I am impatient with everything that stays in the same position. Character-wise, I am no conservative.

To the degree that I have remained lacking in knowledge about politics, and indeed about my own identity as others see it, I have left myself open to being misunderstood in ways that seem to have been quite extreme.

I have not expressly denied that I am a conservative, because I have not understood that this is what was being assumed. For much of my life, I would not have had the terminology, even, to name the error.

My path to understanding conservatism, as well as to understanding many other political movements, has been on the basis of errors that others make about me. My principle of epistemology is as follows: "If you want to know what others are really thinking about you, observe their errors."

There are always going to be those who will blame me for their perspectives. This has happened many times. They will say, "We assumed you to be a conservative and now you have turned out to be something other than that!" They will say that I have tricked them into believing one thing about me, when I was acting according to a different sort of logic altogether.

In reality, when this happens, I have never had any notion of the direction of their thoughts until they proclaim that they have been deceived. I can't be held responsible for what they had been presuming.

Hidden assumptions reveal all

A recent British pop survey had parents conveying what adjectives they thought described boy children and girl children in general. Whilst boys were considered to be playful and enterprising, girl were considered to be "serious" as well as "stroppy" and "argumentative".

Let us think about the contexts in which people are "stroppy" and "argumentative". These responses normally come about when one is denied the right to have one's own views or to follow through on one's own course of action. It is apparent that an estimation of the impact of existing patriarchal social systems on the personality of women is expressed in the adjectives that are applied to girl children in general (rather than to any girl child in particular). This systematisation of thinking about gender in terms of gender stereotyping replicates the systematised nature of material patriarchal systems. (Observe, in terms of gender, the typical structure of a corporation, for instance.)

Is the acquisition of this negative character-set the anticipated destiny of the girl child, in the subconscious minds of British parents? If so, it would seem that these parent's anticipating an inevitable outcome of internal maladjustment in relation to an artificial and externally imposed role of subordination to males.

Since parents were asked to apply these adjectives to boy children and girl children in general, the characteristics of any particular individual were conceptually subordinated to overarching notions about gender. What would be the ramifications for the individual child's development, if the parents really did subscribe to such gender stereotyping?

Inside and outside of the prevalent cultural matrix

Further to this, my earlier post concerning ways of thinking influenced by a capitalist-patriarchal ideological matrix, I wish to add something that is perhaps, at least on the surface of it, on a more personal note.

The point I wish to take up is what I have sensed to be true in terms of the ways of thinking produced by this matrix -- that is, that one has an identity on the basis of self-assertion. A slight variation on this idea is that one has an identity on the basis of asserting one. The first principle implies that one is charged with expressing one's power, and by this means, one obtains others' recognition about who one is. The second principle suggests that there is logically an element of fabrication to the aspect of having an identity within this ideological matrix; that the identity that one expresses may not have existed prior to the act of self-assertion. Rather, it is the act of self-assertion that brings it into being.

These are ways of thinking that I take to be pervasive in terms of how people come to think about the nature of identity within the patriarchal-capitalist matrix. To dissect the logic of this approach even further, it is as if the holder of these ideas about identity desires to leave a visceral impact upon the psyches of other people, which will consolidate and reinforce his sense of being a person of importance. (To be "important", at least to oneself, can be understood as a basic human need. If one is not at least a little bit "important" then one's life is meaningless.)

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For some reason, perhaps linked to my different mode of upbringing, I have never been convinced by attempts to establish self-identity on the basis of self-assertion. The expectation that one can obtain recognition of one's value, in this way, seems to be based largely on the assumption that human beings respond viscerally to threats, without undertaking to analyse or understand them. This is true only in situations where the one making such a threat has a captive audience -- such as, for instance, in the hierarchy of a corporation, where the one asserting himself is a manager. Within the military, as well, one is trained to respond viscerally to the barking of an order. Yet, to mistake for "human nature" as such the kind of visceral response of those whose training socialised them to accept hierarchy, is an error.

Outside of the context of hierarchal power relationships, (which is to say, in contexts where one has no need to accept them due to contracts and issues of survival), attempts to assert identity on through visceral impact have no place. The logic of power relations that circumscribes "human nature" in one context does not reach into another situation, where such power relationships have been transcended, or were never in place.

In such situations as these in the second instance, where dominance has not been established on the basis of contractural or financial coercion, responses to attempts to obtain recognition via self-assertion will be more more variable. The material conditions that guaranteed a predictable response in the former situation do not pertain to the latter. Rather, argument by assertion makes the patriarch seem ungrounded and unguarded. Should he persist to assert himself in this way nonetheless, he seems to be spinning out of control, into narrower and more intense whirlpools of madness.

In the final analysis, it is the patriarch's crude disregard for the intellect of others than will undo him.

The exaggerated emphasis on ego

Professor Z and I are discussing the kind of cultural matrix wherein the only attitudes that are considered possible are those produced by either ego-inflation or ego-deflation. These states seem to correspond to particular moral positions. The desire to represent leadership might be expressed as ego-inflated posturing, whereas the desire to represent willing servitude or to embrace "reality" might be expressed though ego-deflation. In the first case, one proclaims that one knows exactly who one is, and that this is self-evidently and clearly defined. One expects that others will have no choice but to recognise it, too. In the second case, one does not know who one is, or what one is. One knows that one has certain feelings, but one waits for orders.

Organising or interpreting those feelings, or allowing them to press one towards any goal of one's own is certainly beyond one's capabilities. Whether one accepts the former or the latter attitude is related to "creating a balance" between oneself and one's world. Presumably, one senses the presence of other egos as "forces", and one makes corresponding compromises with oneself, one the basis of one's overall feelings.

Professor Z tells me that this exaggerated ego-emphasised approach to life may not be so quintessentially "Western", as I had suspected, but may perhaps be better understood as the product of a confluence of patriarchal and capitalist forces. Quite probably, one adapts best to late capitalism by assimilating oneself to this ego-oriented way of experiencing the world. At the same time, there may be a more meaningful layer of culture hidden underneath all of this, which the ego-emphasised attitudes tend to obscure somewhat. A genuine "America" and a genuine "Australia" may yet exist, if capitalist and patriarchal attitudes are put aside.

If one considers an ego-emphasized approach to life as a kind of yeasty growth on the surface of more authentic layers of culture, then it becomes clear that the issue at hand is not to be understood so much in appraising the peculiar qualities of any particular culture, but rather in terms of measuring the quantity of this pathological growth that is afflicting it.

What suffers most, within a cultural matrix where an ego-based approach is emphasised, is genuine epistemological enquiry. It is logical and automatic that this should be so, since a limitedly ego-based approach to life does not consider the individual and her needs apart from narrowly, in terms of ego.

A human being intrinsically craves knowledge of his environment, and a sense of identity that is based on something more profound than one's own self-assertion. Yet, even the possibility of having such a need is denied by the overemphasised ego-based philosophy. Rather, undisguised cynicism comes into play: "You just want 'knowledge' so you can have power over others!"

Under such a system of anti-intellectual tyranny, the worst statement you can possibly make is to imply you feel that you are "different" in some way, from those around you. In fact, there is no room for any genuine cultural, intellectual, or experiential differences within the closed system of ego-based philosophising. So such a statement concerning "difference" throws the computer-mind of ego-based assumptions into a state of panic. The potential complexities implied in the use of the term "difference" must immediately be reduced to the product of binary thinking: An assertion of "difference" must be interpreted to imply an assertion that one is either "better" or "worse" than everybody else.

An assertion of "difference" thereby automatically becomes a minor league crime, something that suggests either overweening arrogance, or alternatively, acknowledgement of a failure to match up to others' expectations. To be innocently "different" is viewed as being a road to nowhere, when in fact it could just as easily be a road to somewhere useful -- to discovering the innocent differences that reside in all of us, perhaps.

The narrowly ego-based approach to life is fundamentally and militantly anti-epistemological, however. It doesn't trust individuals to search for, and find, their own answers and meanings. It acts as if such searching is, at best, useless activity. At worst, it is some kind of evil; some expression of a will to sin.

This way in which sin and a search for knowledge are made equivalent, suggests that there is also something deeply Christian about it. After all, Christianity associates the possession of knowledge with the eating of forbidden fruit.

Analysing ego in terms of culture

All in all, it seems that the cultural and philosophical paradigm by virtue of which I am most misunderstood is ego-oriented psychology. The misunderstanding occurs in the sense that I am presumed to do things, say things and behave in the way I do, in order to get other people to accept me. In terms of this same logic, I am also supposed to say things, do things and behave in certain manners in order to compete with others on a moral level. Therefore, in every sense the meaning of my behavior and actions is presumed to reside in self-advancement.

I shall take care to clarify at this point, less I be misunderstood in an even more drastic way than the initial misunderstandings, that I do not, by any means, eschew self-advancement. I do set out to achieve it, but it is one of my values among many others. It should not be concluded, by any means, that because I eschew ego psychology, I eschew self-advancement. I reject only that ego should be the vehicle in which one advances. I reject this as a particular cultural orientation. As a practical orientation, enabling one to compete on the economic market, I give in only half marks. One can certainly, as it has been proven, compete on the market without the force of ego motivating you. The Japanese economy is evidence enough for this.

Overall, my whole orientation towards the world has been in terms of epistemological enquiry. I will do almost anything to enhance my knowledge, wherever I sense that it is lacking. I will even go so far as to look stupid, to look naïve, to present an image of failure. None of this matters very much to me, so long at the outcome is epistemological gain.

When I first encountered ego-oriented culture, at the age of fifteen, it was so very alien to me that I could make no sense of it at all. I vaguely perceived that there were popularity contests and that these were oriented around fashion sense. I felt nothing positive nor negative about this orientation towards competition through fashion. I only had an extreme feeling that the vitality had gone out of life, that there was no longer anything out there that was particularly challenging or inviting to my own style of character. I had moved from a culture that had made sense to me emotionally, to one that no longer did. To seek to make those whom I couldn't understand like me and approve of me would not have made any sense, either. It wasn't a matter of choice, or of conscious decision not to "play along". It wasn't in me to be able to relate to games that were so purely oriented around ego.

My inability to relate to this game of ego has, more than anything else in life, fueled my epistemological drive up until recently. At times, this drive to know and understand my world has been extremely intense. I've had to try to understand more for my own survival -- because, if I do not understand the "game" and whether it has a justifiable command over me -- then how am I able to survive? At other times, my epistemological quest has been driven by playfulness and stems from relative idleness.

During the happy episodes of my research, I have even forgotten that the dominant culture is so ego-oriented. Then, all of sudden, this will become clear again. Somebody will have totally misread my motivations, and I will have to wash my hands of them. Sometimes it is the abruptness in manner that will tell me I have been misread once again. At other times, it is necessary to wait longer, to hear through the grapevine about misreadings. Should these occur at too frequently or with too much intensity, it becomes necessary to move away from whatever cultural milieu one may have inadvertently entered, and back into a more intellectually driven environment. There, one can always find companionship, even across cultures.

My approach to life is rather Nietzschean. I take the good with the bad that life dishes out to me, so long as I am not forced to conform to that which is both alien and incomprehensible. I prefer to be alone rather than mingle with the herd, to obtain its approval. When I am misunderstood for this strategy, I take it as inevitable. As much as possible, though, I try to avoid life-disrupting misunderstandings.

Overall, I prefer to be alone. I like companionship with those who have similar inquisitive attitudes to life as mine. Mike is one of those types. I also like the kinds of cultural experience where ego psychology is not the norm. I can harmonise with a typical Japanese personality remarkably easily. The Zimbabwean character structure and the Japanese one are not too far apart.