My war of liberation

To achieve my liberation,  I had to deal with the habits of right wing thinking -- not mine, but those of my parents, particularly of my father.

The dynamics of this are extremely hard to understand.  This accounts for the fact that I didn't understand them for many years.  I always have the feeling that I've only just reached the precipice of understanding and that I've arrived breathlessly.

In short, it has to do with projective identification.   I come from a non-individualistic, layered society, where everybody had their place in the hierarchy.   What I couldn't have fathomed in my wildest dreams was that a lot of the solid feel of this society had to do with the capacity of those who wished to maintain a sense of a uniformity of characteristics to project their unwanted characteristics onto others.  A direct analogy is when somebody farts and blames it on the dog.   That was how my father's mind worked, anyway.   I'm not sure how far the phenomenon extended into the rest of society.

This was a country at civil war, where those who had black skin were given second class status.   The denial of their full humanity wasn't just formal, but had a psychological dimension.   There was a sado-masochistic dynamic, whereby the incapacity to demonstrate qualities of "civilization" was held over these black people as a reason to deny them liberation from inequality.   For instance, the authorities would act triumphantly if a word was used incorrectly because English was a second language.   This meant that a civilized mentality hadn't been attained yet and that a second class status was still necessary.

This describes the background to my own struggle -- for when we transferred to Australia from Zimbabwe, my father's mentality remained hierarchical and he looked around for a dog to blame his farts on.   He concluded that this person ought to be me -- and so began my battle for liberation where I demanded my full human status and he fought me all the way.

The aspects of his character that he tried to pass off onto me were defined in his mind as "feminine" characteristics.   He particularly tried to relate to his own emotions through me, by claiming I was experiencing very negative emotions and that I should speak to him about them.   By externalizing his confusion and distress and attributing them to another, he expected to be able to come to terms with them.

He used a lot of patriarchal reasoning to justify to himself and others why it was I who was experiencing these emotions and not he.  Many fell for his lies.  Even I wasn't sure, half the time, which of my problems were legitimately my own and which were his. Thus, my liberation as a human being has involved liberating myself from my father.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Zimbabwean women's boxing

Zimbabwean women's boxing

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My feminist fight

My engagement with feminism was based on very personal necessity — to bring myself out of a traditional mindset and into the 20th Century. My culture had a very limited pool of knowledge about sexuality and gender relations. We hadn’t even entered the arena of any sort of gender politics. That is to say modernity had not yet arrived in my culture.

This led to a state of affairs where I didn’t understand the sub-texts of any of the social situations I was in. In retrospect, I see a lot was implied about identity, including gender but I didn’t really catch on at the time.

My inability to respond appropriately and to defend what others perceived as my “identity” made me extremely vulnerable to such onslaughts as workplace bullying. I really had no idea what people wanted from me or how to behave normally. To make matters worse, I had internalized attitudes that were socially quite passive. A female in an extremely right-wing, militaristic culture has no need to assert herself. Men are expected to do that for her.

For me, feminism was a way of solving this set of problems, in order to bring myself into modernity.

Feminism gave me the philosophical justification for what I needed to do, which was to engage in a prolonged and difficult battle with my original character structure in order to transform it into something more effective for the modern world.

What surprised me was how few people were able to understand this need and how many — good liberals included — worked actively to sabotage my project. Since I wasn’t able to articulate the nature of my project at the time, the lack of active support can be explained away. The attempts to sabotage my freedom by affirming my father’s perspectives over and against mine really needs a lot more explanation, though.  It wasn't just my inability to articulate the deeper nature of the problem at the time I was experiencing it. Rather, it seems that even those who are otherwise impartial in their dealings with others do in fact have a deep emotional attachment to the concept or sensation of patriarchal authority.

So it was that I finally won my battle,  but  all my own effort, and against the forces of all sorts of attempts to make me feel guilty and repent of my fight for freedom.

Like most aspects of life, unless you’ve been through the experience — in my case, the experience of giving birth to oneself — you have little idea of what it means. You will misconstrue everything.

MORE SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ZIMBABWE: refereeing and stick fighting

MORE SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ZIMBABWE (3)

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

MORE SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ZIMBABWE: Orphans and refereeing

MORE SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ZIMBABWE: Orphans and refereeing kickboxing (2)

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

MY MIGHTY STEED!

MY MIGHTY STEED! 

I was extremely impressed by my horse on safari.  She turned out to be both sure of foot and mild of temperament -- not features I would normally have considered selecting for, but exactly what was required for the type of terrain we covered for eight days.  The ground was incredibly rocky, unpredictable and uneven, but she never put a foot wrong.

She was, however, a follower and not a leader.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

IMAGES FROM MY TRIP TO THE NORTH-EAST WILDERNESS AREA OF ZIMBABWE, JUNE 2010

IMAGES FROM MY TRIP TO THE NORTH-EAST WILDERNESS AREA OF ZIMBABWE, JUNE 2010

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

IMAGES FROM MY TRIP TO ZIMBABWE, JUNE-JULY 2010, TO TEACH SELF DEFENCE TO WOMEN!

IMAGES FROM MY TRIP TO ZIMBABWE, JUNE-JULY 2010, TO TEACH SELF DEFENCE TO WOMEN!  (1)

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

National boundaries and whether they define us: Zimbabwe

On the issue of whether "Zimbabwe" is a made up community: It is and it isn't. Right now, we have a movement whereby one of the traditional ethnic groups wishes to secede:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mthwakazi-Nation/162801343740250

Originally, colonial politics defined the boundaries of Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). The group that now wishes to secede was violently subdued after the anti-colonial war. It is said that 20, 000 were killed in what might be described as a genocidal act on the part of the guerrilla faction that came to power.

Even though the nature of identity is being disputed within Zimbabwe itself, it is undeniable that there is a common history shared by the peoples of Zimbabwe, based on the historical fact that boundaries were defined. Whatever people in Zimbabwe have experienced -- and whatever they now think and feel, based on what they have experienced -- is different from what those in the Republic of South Africa will think and feel. National boundaries have a psychological meaning simply because they are a historical fact.

Some of the ways that national boundaries define and help to shape and form community is in terms of what kinds of media are permitted within those boundaries. During the years of Rhodesian rule, those within the national boundaries were time-locked, in that ideologies that were not right wing and Christian were not permitted to permeate the borders. There was strong media censorship and this affected the cultures developing within the national boundaries. I would say, in general, Rhodesians were stuck in the time of about 1949*. Then suddenly the national boundaries were open to the media and other influences. "Modern" ideas began permeating. Many white Rhodesians panicked and became converts to extreme forms of evangelical Christianity, as the American missionaries began filtering in, past the old boundaries. When I left Zimbabwe in 1894, I would have to say I could not have been less prepared for the 1980s. Our media censorship had made us unaware of how much the rest of the world had moved on.
---
* When I went back to Zimbabwe last year, I found elements of the society still hadn't moved on from 1949. For example, a pantomime I attended had as one of its jokes that Germans were very funny because they did the Hitler salute.

Western identity politics is self-serving nonsense, most of the time

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Lies that serve a psychological purpose

Lack of knowledge about other countries is very common in the West. Distorted perspectives often serve domestic political purposes — also psychological purposes. The portrayal of white Zimbabweans as self-indulgent racists who lived high on the hog has a powerful psychological benefit for most Westerners, in that it makes them, as other beneficiaries of Western imperialism, seem more tolerant and less racist in their own eyes. After all, they never left the shores of Western countries to exploit any blacks. The lie entailed in this sentence should already be evident. However, projective identification is an extremely intense psychological mechanism that overrides empirical fact and reason. If one has the need to believe that others are more evil than you are, so you can diffuse your guilt, you will believe this no matter what.

Evidence is not so important. The need to get rid of an intolerable psychological burden is what counts. Hence, most Westerners have illusions about their identities — and about their morality.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Sparring with Mike Elliot a long time ago

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Looking back, with gratitude

It's time to celebrate the past, to look back on it with gratitude, a sense of transcendence and relief.

I'm very, deliriously happy. All my life I'd been seeking a level of self-understanding that I finally have. I realized how definitively I'd achieved it yesterday, as I moved among my relatives and family with their newly sprouted children. I could relate to nothing that was happening and yet I didn't feel like going mad.

Now I have achieved the monumental task of self-understanding. I realize how from an extremely early age -- around the age of three -- I had developed the ability both to wholly embrace aspects of reality and to shut aspects of it out that would have hindered my development. For instance, I erased from the realm of meaningfulness my father's wartime temperament. I shut out emotional complexity in relationships, demanding that all relationships should be simple. My relationship with my father was very distant.

This strategy gave me an excellent childhood: I was one with nature.

This continued.  As a teen, I went to all all girls' school. At this stage, life was also relatively tranquil and unhindered by any sort of incident apart from my mother increasingly worrying that I was isolating myself by spending too much time with horses. I suspect her fears had more to do with sexuality than sociability. She did not explain them to me at all.

I didn't lack for anything, as a young adult in Zimbabwe. Even when my father became increasingly hostile to me as a developing young woman, this didn't phase me as deeply at it might have -- rather, it heavily underlined the distant nature of our relationship. It felt like grave injustice to be treated in a harsh and arbitrary fashion. I can't say I was personally hurt by his erratic and alarming attitudes.

This all changed when my family migrated to Australia at the age of fifteen. After this, there was less scope to roam and more uncertainty. I became much more dependent on my father and his car, to get me to those kinds of places that potentially held interest to me -- the rural areas, where horses and the space to roam were. I eventually got a bike and road the two and a half hours out to see the horses. These trips helped me to reduce my level of distress in a setting where very little of either the Australian culture, environment or people made any sense.

The suburban setting was truly hideous. It didn't appeal to my sense of aesthetics, which were adjusted to appreciation of the African bush. I found the fashion to be garish, like a clown and counter to my appreciation for a cool, military aesthetic.  I began to idealize what I'd lost. Mostly it was in terms of the aesthetic, but also I had the feeling that life as a whole had been on a firmer foundation before. Now, it was far more fragile, frivolous and cheap. (This was the mid-eighties, so commercial values ruled the 'culture'.) I did what I had always done -- I attempted to weather the storm, whilst waiting for change.

Change of the sort I felt I needed simply didn't arrive and I began to feel alienated. I had internalized just enough of this culture of individualism to reach for such a term. I couldn't understand it. I tried Christianity and reading the Bible -- but that only made everything so much worse. The more it didn't resolve my problems, the worse I felt. After three or four years of Christianity not working, I gave it up.

I couldn't fit into the culture, but I didn't feel any pain in this. The distress I felt was in not being able to roam freely through the environment, perhaps on a horse.

It gradually dawned on me that I lacked all sorts of normal competencies in terms of Australian society. I conceived that I had to develop my knowledge-base, or I would never be able to resolve my sense of being lost.

Once the pursuit of knowledge became my project, I worked on it tirelessly. Everything I did or experienced had to serve the purpose of enhancing my knowledge. I simply had to know what had been denied to me. Gaining knowledge was the project of my salvation and in its service, just about anything would be justified.

Conservative norms were as far as could be from me, in my hot pursuit of knowledge. I didn't find much companionship among liberals or leftists, however, since they had been trained to view me with a cynical eye, as I was a colonial type, who was deemed to have "fled" Africa. They occasionally upbraided me for what they considered my "expectations" that I should be given any understanding or respect, after having escaped the punishment that was awaiting me "back home".

It was leftists and liberals, above all, who made it impossible to culturally adjust.

My father's attitude didn't help either. My mother and father were always on the lookout for sexual impropriety -- which I was not capable of, because nothing in my environment really turned me on.

I lived many years in extreme "alienation".

I'm very happy now, all the same. I've managed to achieve a few "rites of passage",  I know who I am and I approve.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

More on what is wrong with contemporary identity politics

In order to fit in with postmodernist politics, we all have to subdue ourselves by adopting a masochistic mode, in order to hear the views of “the Other”. If we do not adequately subdue ourselves, we will not hear the message that this “Other” wishes to impart, and thus we will remain within the realm of moral un-edification, having only ourselves to blame for not being more spiritual.
The blindspot of postmodernist theorising is that it doesn’t allow for the fundamental aspect of the nature of power, which is that power does not wait for permission, or understanding, in order to come into being -- and once power relationships have come into being, stopping to police them is already too late. At best, identity politics acts as a palliative for those who are suffering from a particular identity. Its analysis is not deep enough, not historically founded enough, to take into account how reality might actually be altered.
In practical terms, postmodernist theorising is the idea that time should be frozen and that we should all stop and wait, before being given permission to express the kinds of identity that would be morally elevating to all concerned. (This is, for instance, the kind of identity Hugo Schwyzer has decided feminism is.)
Yet, there is no need for feminism to embroil itself in any kind of morality play. It shouldn't have to argue that it is beneficial for others -- such as men. My identity has become feminist because I have thrown off belief in patriarchal postures. Whether this is later analysed as a good thing, or viewed as being helpful to others, is a secondary issue at best.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

From last year's horse safari

(select image for larger display)

I'm in the middle. This eight day safari is known as the "explorer" safari, which involves nights out in the open and long and daily rides of 6 hours or more past thorn trees, over rubble and up and down river banks. Prior to this safari, I hadn't ridden much since I had had left Zimbabwe in the mid-eighties, aged 15.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Gender politics and gender identities

Danny:
I don’t think [contemporary identity politics is] a matter of freezing time but rather having only their own life time to measure what they call a “hard life”, “easy life”, etc… And (if I understand you) making history over won’t do good because that would only bring back the those things from the past that would actually make life harder.

JA–Well do they want a hard life or an easy life? I think that is much of the problem. They don’t know. It’s important to figure that out in one’s mind, otherwise one won’t be able to obtain what one wants. In my case, I’ve always wanted a rite of passage. I couldn’t quite formulate what I wanted for many years, but I finally obtained what I wanted through a process of experimentation and elimination. Now, I’ve effected that transition to the other state of being. I’ve been feeling wonderful for months. It took me many years, but I've achieved it.

Danny:
True. Things have gotten better in comparison to how people were as relatively little as 60-70 years ago. And of course that’s a good thing. The problem is those “old ways” are still in effect, namely the damaging ones. If I were to have a son and daughter 10 years from now sure those two would have a much greater chance at being able to exist outside the boy/girl gender binary that my grandparents were stuck under. At the same time there is still a chance that they will still have those expectations floating over their heads.

JA—In some ways, things have become worse. I grew up with a tremendous amount of freedom and very little policing. I used to get around on horseback. I fell off numerous times, got lost quite far from my home, and once my horse fell on me.

Danny:
True this does happen but what I’m thinking is more like, “I’m a masculine entity. But don’t presume that there is a standard definition of ‘masculine entity’”. Which brings us to…

JA—Well then you need to make sure to communicate to whomever you are with what you understand by your own identity. Make it plain. Don’t expect people to mind read.

Danny:
For me I’ll admit that masculine is pretty loosely defined for me and is mostly tied to the male body I have. Now as for why that necessitates respect I say it does in the sense that I have my own masculine way and (as per not identifying me solely in terms of identity) the fact that my way may not match your way is not reason enough to disrespect me. (Mind you if I were doing something damaging…)

JA—but that is all too much in categorical terms to be much use for any kind of human relationship – which was my original point. To illustrate it a bit more, I have a lot of strangers coming up to me on Facebook and addressing me in a way that implies we are already on very familiar terms. These people are relying very heavily on traditional constructs of masculinity and femininity, whereby I’m expected to respond in a generic way, that is “as a female” per se, and not as my self. Obviously, I have no use for these kinds of conversations or relationships. If these same people had tried an approach that took into account my individuality, we might have got somewhere. So — I see very little point in being reliant upon categorical identities. You are biologically male and that is irreducible. Work with it. Don’t try to set a category around it for stabilization. That will fail – mainly because it is impersonal and dehumanizing.

Danny:
Yes individualism is going to play a role in parsing all this stuff. I agree that life will not be as hard as in the past when the gender roles were more rigid. But obviously that doesn’t mean we should just not bother trying to loosen them up right?

JA—”Individualism” isn’t an entity. Humans are individual entities. There’s a world of difference here.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

On gender roles and the past

1. Danny :
   What do males want?
   As for me I want the freedom to express masculinity in any (reasonable) way I wish free of people constantly trying to police me.

   Well that’s the thing — and this is emblematic of identity politics as such — people want to stop time and kind of make history over, so that everybody has an ideal set of relationships. That’s never going to work. Sure, life was more predictable in some ways, in the past.  Rigidly defined gender roles made some aspects of life easier, although life as a whole wasn’t easier in the past. 

   We all want to express ourselves without others policing us. We have a society more like that today than the one in the past. Believe me, I COME from the past, so I should know. In the past, everybody had their allocated place in society, and this couldn’t change. Everybody knew how to talk to you, because they were addressing the position, not the person.

   Identity politics seems to be appealing to this olden days state of affairs when it demands of others: “You need to address me as a ‘masculine’ entity. Okay, now! Go ahead and do it!”

   Well, we are on modern terms these days, and there is no way I can address you solely in terms of an identity. I’d need to learn more about you, first. What makes you tick? What is it about you that is particularly ‘masculine’ — and in what ways does this necessitate that I respect you?”

   All the questions become a little more nuanced, under the force of individualist psychology. Perhaps this makes relationships harder, for some people. In general, though, life will never be as hard as it used to be when rigid gender roles were enforced. (You only have to look at some of the war movies I’m fond of viewing, to see that ‘masculinity’ was largely impersonal and self-sacrificial, in the past, for the majority of men.)
2. 
   

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

On self esteem

The truth cannot be set in stone. Much of what may seem to be a lack of self esteem on the surface of it can be an indication of its presence. There are many situations and relationships I avoid because I have self esteem. Yet, on the surface, this can look like avoidant behavior.

How one looks can serve as a form of self defence. My face has a totally different structure to it, these days, than it did in my youth. In some ways, the layer of facial musculature is a mask. It freezes and solidifies my general disposition. It doesn’t reveal subtle shifts so much, anymore. , I wear my authenticity on my face much more clearly these days, than twenty years ago. Authenticity and the mask are one.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My martial arts goals

My physical conditioning -- it's all come along, as you might be able to gauge from the couple of photos below (taken from today's fitness session). This improvement is only to be expected: I've been improving all year, although in 2011, I haven't regularly pushed myself beyond a certain comfort zone. This leisurely pace of my development has been by design, as 2011 was nominated as the year where I would tie up many of the loose ends of some very complicated mental process which produced my intellectual wealth.

Back to matters of training: It's a sure sign of success that I no longer feel the kind of acid burn I used to. When I was about half my age, I used to get a lactic acid burn after punching the bags for several minutes. Now, I can go for 45 solid minutes at a very strenuous level. More than that -- I feel I could keep on punching the bags indefinitely.

My health is fine, apart from errant hormones. My blood pressure reading was 104 / 64, after training and a glass of white wine today, for instance.

I now plan to do a martial arts exam -- termed "grading" -- around March, so I need to undergo mental (rather than purely physical) preparation. Physical preparation for a grading is nothing compared to developing mental endurance, which can only be achieved through doing many rounds of sparring in one session.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Boxing for fitness class 21 DECEMBER 2011

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The impersonal bedrock of shamanism

I've mentioned this before: there are many aspects of Western culture that on the basis of my personal experiences, I simply don't "get". A significant one of these is that personality is something akin to a delicate flower, and that one therefore ought to have great tentativeness when approaching the personalities of others, along with due concern for the fragile manner in which these manage to develop.

Don't get me wrong: this is not meant as heavy-handed right wing railing against delicacy or personality as such -- I'm not even of that political persuasion and I don't have a moral judgement to make about how others view themselves. Pressed for a view, I can only offer that a very refined personality is marvelous in some cases, but less so in others. In all, difference of this sort does not have to have a moral flavor. It's better to simply recognize that there is a difference here. On the one side are those who, having been brought up in a highly individualistic culture, have very complicated layers to their personalities. On the other side are those like I -- who, having been brought up in an impersonal culture -- have a very solid and simple bedrock as the base of my personality.

I've no doubt as to who I am. This may seem as paradoxical as it is true: having been accepted wholly, and unreservedly by others, who grew up alongside me in my impersonal culture, I'm secure in a base level state of impersonal feeling and sensation. Indeed I'm overjoyed if all that I experience is my existence. Brer Rabbit's famous briar patch is greatly to my liking. Moreover, I rarely if ever feel like I'm losing something of myself if I return to the consciousness I associate with impersonal camaraderie, or with closeness to nature.

I'm sure this condition of the mind is qualitatively different from that most commonly experienced by many -- Many, certainly, but not all. For, Mike and I, who were both brought up wild in rural settings, are of the same type. City dwellers, who are often less disposed to shamanistic experimentation, marvel at the fact that we met online, moved in together the same day that he arrived from overseas and now have been together for ten years. No question at all: our arrangement would have been impossible had either of us lacked substantial measures of either self-awareness or maturity.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Some counter-intuitive features of human psychology

Human psychology is strange, indeed the more I learn about it. Repression, for instance, is a very strange mechanism. I had previously supposed that one would be able to somehow mentally sense when one was repressing something. I know I can sense it physically in some ways, because I start to feel bottled up and my body erupts with various minor symptoms, indicating that not everything is in its proper order. I had thought that mental repression must feel the same way, which would be more in line with physics. One would have to press something down mentally, to effectively repress.

That turns out not to be true at all. Repression doesn’t feel that way. One can empty one’s head of very much that would cause concern and have ideas that are generally nondescript. My blood pressure gauge registers this mode of behaviour as severely stressful. By contrast, I would have assumed that to think about stressful ideas is likely to raise the blood pressure. However, my blood pressure gauge registers focusing on what is bothering me as the lowest stress activity of any. From these home experiments, I now understand that trying to distract oneself from whatever produces anxiety may not feel stressful, but causes a huge amount of stress. It’s better simply to register that one is stressed.

Likewise, humans have another weird faculty, for projective identification. Anyone who projects a negative identity into somebody else will not feel stressed by this action. They’re losing a burden on their psyche. Meanwhile, the person whom they’ve projected the nefarious identity into will feel tremendous confusion and anxiety. Western liberal ideology (a form of theology), alleviates the stress of Western liberals, but has caused me enormous stress throughout my adult, migrant life. It seems that much of what they've disliked about themselves as Western imperialists they've seen fit to project onto me.

Identity and choice are ideologies.

My upbringing until my mid teens was training for a severe form of impersonal conduct. Although originally British, my culture had merged ideas with those of traditional, African culture. To this extent, what stood out in life, in terms of overall meaning, was "the tribe", whether white or black, and not by any means the ideas, goals or aspirations of individuals.

I did not by any means consider myself an individual, but I experienced the inexpressible fact that I was part of a historical movement of people defined by a time and place. As such, "choice" was --and remains-- an alien idea to me, to the extent that I think someone must have something tricky up their sleeve if they are framing anything in that way. My practical options were limited. They came down to how I would spend my 20 cents in the supermarket. Everything else was a product of necessity and tradition. No opportunities emerged to make choices on a larger scale.

The most alien component of Western culture is the idea that my identity is a feature of my capacity to make choices. I don't hinge that much moral importance on the ideology of choice. I express my "choice" in two ways, fundamentally. Either I engage with you, or I withdraw into my default mode of impersonal relations. I'm much more comfortable not to engage too much with others on a personal level. I have found it very difficult to translate an often impersonal standpoint into terms that express "personal choices". There exist many fanatical ideologues who express the attitude that one ought to always be in the mode of making and defending choices, in order to fulfill ones moral obligations in the world. I find that very exhausting -- not least because it involves translating an impersonal stance into one that seems more personal and "chosen".

Having relinquished this project of trying to adapt myself to Western culture I feel much better.

I do make choices, but they are much deeper than those to which the ideology of Western individualism would lend its credence. I decide not to participate in any abusive relationships, no matter what the cost is to my finances or to my credibility. I decide not to participate in an ideology that has no intrinsic meaning to me -- that of individual "choices" and how they are supposed to form one's identity. I can't become a Western educator, because I disagree with this fundamental tenet of Western culture. It has a false feel: I cannot represent it.

My capacity to be impersonal is linked to an inherent stoicism. I have the innate capacity to switch off energy that would otherwise flow to personal concerns. I enter a state where neither wakefulness nor sleep preside: I enter this state of psychological hypothermia, whenever this world becomes too stressful. When this happens, I can immediate focus much more clearly on practical concerns using abstract thinking very efficiently.

A highly impersonal state of mind is my primeval lair: useful to recover from what afflicts me.

My upbringing may have been different from yours

I'm learning a great deal from Clarissa's blog about aspects of behaviour that one can consider socially normal.  Even though Clarissa is from the Ukraine, quite a large part of her ideas about social normality have more in common with people from U.S. culture than mine.

Many people assume that my upbringing must have been generally "Western", because English is my first language and because I am white.   Surface appearance belies the significant underlying differences, however, which permeate my psychology.

To aid others to understand these differences, let me outline a few of them that may differ from contemporary Western values and ideas.

1.    I was not brought up to think of myself as having a discrete identity and personality that had to be recognized in its own right.  It's not that anyone would have denied that I had a personality of my own.   It just wasn't accorded any value as such.   My personal characteristics were not viewed as a sign of future success or failure in life.  Rather, physical characteristics (and to a lesser extent, academic aptitude) were considered markers for this.   Overall, very little attention, if any, was given to the consideration of my -- or anybody else's -- future prospects.   

2.   Sturdiness -- particularly as represented in the character of the soldierly white male -- was very much lauded in my original culture.   If someone fell sick in any way, they were hurriedly ushered as far as possible from center stage.    It was a huge social shame to have anyone who didn't conform to this ideal of sturdiness in one's family.   Also, sexual transgressions led to this enactment of defense against the exposure of the family to social shame.

3.  Christianity was synonymous with moral decency.  Everybody was nominally a Christian, unless they were morally indecent.  Islam was considered a morally indecent religion.

4.  I had no sex education in school and I didn't understand the fundamental mechanisms of sex until way into my late teens (and even then, it was rather hazy and didn't bear thinking about).

5.  As a female, I had to suppress my anger as female anger would worry and unhinge my father.  Male anger was okay.  My father's lid would burst every so often and he would express very high levels of rage -- but never in a way that we found coherent.

6.   I never had any trouble with socialization in any of my Rhodesian (later "Zimbabwean") schools.   That is because socialization itself wasn't really an issue.   The thing was to mingle and to go along with others.   This was more in the mode of external action, rather than in terms of understanding others' viewpoints.   In fact it was assumed that everybody thought the same, so there really wasn't anything to discuss.   

7.   Everyone felt that "fate" was something you had no control over.   Events just happened to you and one situation moved into another.   There was nothing you could do about that and nor should you bother to try.  Everything that happened to you in life was simply inevitable.

8.   The survival or death of anyone around us was part of life's inevitability, which didn't bear thinking about too deeply.

9.   Women were considered incapable of doing sports as vigorously as men -- although Zimbabwean sportswomen competed very effectively at an international level.  At levels lower than international competition, women were considered to be a little anemic -- sometimes incapable of exerting themselves too much.

10.  All people were very formal and polite.   Foreigners were labeled as outsiders by means of jest and sometimes even treated with  censure if they were deemed to be lacking in "class".   One had to show good manners in order to be accepted within the society.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

on the meaning of sickness in my former culture/s

In my original culture, being sick was hardly rewarded. Rather the opposite was the case. My culture was very right wing and only valued anything that was sturdy. Even right down to the underlay of the (black) African culture, being sick was more a sign that one had been dabbling in witchcraft than anything that deserved pity. The most common response directed at someone who had become sick was anger that they had betrayed Christian decency. That is why it is hard for me to imagine any trade offs existing for illness.

The logic of shamanistic healing

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 18, 2011 at 7:42 pm | #21

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bloggerclarissa :
“Except that maybe the person hasn’t considered that there is any other way to be [and therefore remains sick].”
- Of course. But this all hinges on one’s desire to change things.

It does. But in a sense one just has to move ahead blindly, because the new way of being hasn’t been mapped by the current neurological structures. I mean, one is locked into the old way of being by force of habit and by the innate conservatism that we all possess to some degree. We choose “the devil we know” rather than the one we don’t. That’s an evolutionary adaptation.

Shamanism proposes that you need the courage to move ahead out of this existing structure of mind. It also recognizes there is a sense of blindness to all this moving and fumbling one’s way out of the morass.

STAY SANE AND 

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 18, 2011 at 8:14 pm | #23

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bloggerclarissa :

-Embracing the blindness is scary but also liberating, once you dare to do it.

It’s what shamanism has over other methods of therapy: you leap in at the deep end and heal yourself. Authoritative interventions can often confuse and mislead as much as they are capable of assisting.

SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Chronic fatigue and women's rage

1.  This post is a response to http://clarissasblog.com/2011/12/17/how-pill-guzzlers-theorize-their-identity/

I had the same condition during my twenties. My solution was to realize how much aggression I had turned inwards. Women — especially in right wing or religiously informed cultures — tend to unconsciously model themselves on the ideal of passive suffering as a form of sainthood. It’s not thought through or deliberate but an unconscious tendency. The body gets overheated and run down because all the energy that should be directed at the world is locked inside the body with nowhere to go. One should be sublimating this aggression by establishing one’s identity in the world, but the unconscious mind is determined to lock one into passive sainthood.

That was certainly my condition and there is no doubt in my mind that the illness was physiological. There is a certain point where you can’t simply “snap out of it”, because you’ve ruined your physiological health with this ongoing misdirected (and entirely unconscious) aggression.

The solution is to bring the aggression out of you in some way, very gradually, whilst working to develop a healthier self image at the unconscious level. The difficulty is that many would resist the idea that they harbored unconscious aggression. I had no trouble facing this insight as I have a very innovative mindset (which I had also been repressing).

May 2012 ADDENDUM: Many women try to solve the problem of macro- or micro-aggressions against them (designed to teach them the secondary nature of their place) by conforming to patriarchal mores and accepting traditional gender roles. They end up giving in to those who would have society return to a very traditional state. I resolved not to be one of those women. A person with situationally-engendered chronic fatigue needs to face their anger and aggression about the behaviour of significant people in their lives, as well as their anger about significant life events.Then they must gradually develop ways to use anger more productively, to release that pressure that has already built up. This has to be a long term goal, as one's body needs to recover from all the abuse accepted into it over the long term, as a result of staying passive and submissive to events that had filled you with still unrecognized rage.

2.

with an angular knife:

http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/03/want-to-feel-younger-more-open-magic-mushrooms-trigger-lasting-personality-change/


Above is an article depicting much of what I have also found as a result of my intellectual research on the intersection between literature and shamanism.  This kind of impersonal ego, or indeed "egoless" experience (as per the article), was a fundamental part of my experience until about the age of 15, when I emigrated from Africa to Australia.

The impersonal, mystical or detached aspect of experience is the core part of my identity.  As such, I revert to it when under stress.   The more stress I'm under, the more detached I become.   Ego matters less and less at that point -- and, thus, I see the world more pragmatically, in terms of its whittled down structures.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The post with no point

I’m starting to reflect on how unreservedly wonderful my childhood was. I was never bullied. By Western standards, occasionally the teachers were too harsh, but I didn’t feel it. Unlike people here who have trouble sleeping, I’ve never had trouble switching off from the kinds of problems that do not need my active mental engagement. My default reaction is set to switching off and going to sleep. When I’m fast asleep, no kind of noise awakes me. This kind of switching off sometimes means I don’t engage emotionally. When I emigrated to Australia, at 15 I decided the society and culture were fully meaningless and so I didn’t engage with these for many years. I also had no existing experiential or intellectual inroads into it. Anyway, after ten years or so, I began to work to enhance my emotional sensitivity, since being switched off was the opposite of nourishing. In many ways, I’m coming at reality from the opposite direction to most people — from a state of insensitivity to one of greater alertness.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

What is "Intellectual shamanism"?

Without the artifice of the form of logic we often mistake for "common sense", much of human experience would appear in a state of flux. We overestimate humanly constructed realities, often largely as a result of individual and group psychological projections, which serve to solidify flux into seemingly reliable, moral facts.

Group psychological projections can do both good and harm, since we ascribe positive or negative meanings to otherwise ambiguous actions depending on our prior dispositions which are historically generated and therefore more arbitrary than human neurology finds it comfortable to accept.

Shamanism is a means to get below normal neurological patterns of thought, which is why those whose normal human consciousness has been "wrecked", either by traumatic experience or shamanistic drugs, can often resurface from their descent into the underworld of the mind with remarkable insights into humanity.
STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Nietzsche and "moral responsibility"

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 15, 2011 at 5:31 pm | #44

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Patrick :
In his defense, if it hadn’t been for the crisis, Person A’ not being a star likely wouldn’t matter – so, in that respect, he is a victim of circumstance. What separates him from the rest is that he didn’t use it as a crutch. And he took concrete actions to improve and prevent.

Having totally moved out of any kind of moralistic mode of analysing the world, as a process of doing my PhD, I can no longer relate to the conceptualizing of any part of reality as “a crutch”. It seems to me that one only needs an excuse in the face of a hostile parent figure who demands that one account for oneself. In the absence of such a figure, the concept of a crutch has no meaning at all. The concept of “whining” about anything also has no meaning. For instance, who would one’s whining be heard by, should one engage in this activity? Unless it is heard by some omnipotent being, it would serve no purpose at all.

Even if we remove the conceptual mode one step away from this quasi-religious perspective, the metaphysical attitude of making oneself a “victim of circumstance” still makes no sense. Nietzsche’s view is to get under the way that grammar shapes our consciousness, so that we see that there is no moral universe — even though language itself would tend to bind us to a moral perspective.

The way reality works, according to Nietzsche, is actually different from the way language lures us into thinking. “Free will” is a phantom of language. In Nietzsche’s view, there is neither ‘free’ nor ‘unfree’ will. There is only the measure of energy and power stored in you as an individual, which has the apparent expression of “will”.

Taking it down to a more concrete level, Person A obviously had a lot of this force stored up within him, so he pressed through and came out on top. This sounds a little like I’m choosing deliberately unfamiliar language in order to make the same point that language compels us into making — that is, that Person A had more “free will” than others. I don’t mean to say that at all. Rather, the accumulation of historical energies of different sorts — and not just Person A’s individual excellence — all led to this positive outcome. To make it even clearer: that is to say that the leftist point of view, that historical forces can either hold us back or propel us forward, is also relevant.

The point where Nietzsche’s point of view differs from that of a typical liberal is in the sense that it acknowledges that even if history has “held you back”, the universe does not care one iota. It doesn’t owe you anything. Also there is nobody to complain to about that. The very perspective that “whining” or “having a crutch” are morally meaningful is undermined.

SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism