Many are the benefits of maturity. One is in realizing what one had failed to recognize before -- that people often have readily identifiable propensities that having no relationship to what it means to be an individual.
Social psychology is more important to know that individualistic psychology, if you want to make your way through everyday life. In the past I was under the mistaken impression that everybody around me was an intellectual who thought very deeply about every sort of issue. Many people represented themselves that way to me. I later learned that intellectuals are not that great in number. They are those who can generate an original thought, rather than reacting to the world and repeating what they've heard. To be assertive is not the same as generating original thought. One really has to have thought it through.
Other myths I've managed to shrink over time include the idea that one necessarily stands out as being more intelligent if one's life follows a smooth and easily managed path. There's no logic behind this supposition. One cannot account for all the variables influencing our existences with such a trite formulation.
I've also developed a much better understanding of the two enemies of shamanistic thinking:
1. Identity politics, which has an agenda to morally reform the world. Moral reforms are hopeless. Genuine change has to be willed and has to come from within.
2. Biologism. There are many forms of biologism on the left and the right. Essentialist feminism and biological determinism both are detrimental to intellectual development. You cannot be open about the future if you are working within deterministic systems or within categories of pre-defined identity.
Far beyond and above this, the most important insight I've had in my life to date is that most people, when they seem to be addressing you, are really addressing an idea of you based on narrow, categorical assumptions. That is, most people don't rely upon direct perception.
That makes sense when you later understanding how many social constraints act to condition us against direct perception. One sees people in terms of categories, as one is trained to. One doesn't see the behavior, the tendencies, the nuances. It is particularly Americans not to take the time to see these, for Americans are the ultimate sales people, and one doesn't make a sale unless one seizes up the prospective buyer in the first few seconds of interaction.
To have an accurate perception is difficult, since one must constantly clean the windows of the psyche to reduce effects of cognitive distortions and mental projections. Otherwise, one sees the world precisely as it isn't. Most people don't have the basic strategies in place to achieve visual hygiene. They can be great people, but don't expect them to perceive anything accurately. This they cannot do. It's not because they're bad, or mean or wrong. They just don't have the necessary training and awareness.
MARECHERA'S VIEWS ON THINKING/MATURITY
Marechera talks about trying to find his way out of Harare's Maze, but the "maze" is also -- which we know from previous metaphors and allegories in his work -- his mind.
MINDBLAST, OR THE DEFINITIVE BUDDY.
This "definitive buddy", or one true friend seems to represent the doppelgänger of the civilized and culturally conformist Zimbabwean -- the one who is living the authentic life on the streets, in touch with his true self, yet languishing because of it. (Well that is a symbolic reversal of the Kleinian position, it seems, which is typical for Marechera, who called himself an insider, when ironically, he meant "outsider" -- "Inside-out is outside-in, insider!"). But the psychological struggle at the pre-Oedipal level, and the threat of the intrusion of Minotaur of paranoia (due to the psychological harshness of living life on the streets) is Marecherean and somewhat Kleinian (p 596 of the article). Anyway, every person that Marechera meets in his journal is "maze unto himself".
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There are a lot of guys right here who've got the maddest notions in the world and each day all they are waiting for is to act out their weird descriptions. Just like I am doing. You look them in the eye and that's that. You've had it. It's like looking the Ancient Mariner in the eye. Afore ya know the yarn you already It. No escape from their mazes. No exit from Brooklyn. [a reference to Sartre's "No Exit"?] Only the Sartre nausea. Only the mesmerizing outsideness with Albert Camus shouting: "Seconds out. Round twenty-first century!" and you know you gotta fight and fight till you're down and the chips and the odds and the neuroses are hanging out like your intestines after the knife fight. There they are hanging out like nothing in the bloody world. [...]How enticing, the notion of uniqueness -- suddenly dispelled by the raucous voice, the shrieked insult, the horrible truth under the fine skin of humanity. Were I a pathologist, a forensic scientist in the police murder laboratory ... What the means? Why the irrevocable? How the exit of these Hararean mazes?"
NOT IDEALISM
Let us start with Freudian idealism: It seems to me that when the "aggression of the self it mislocated [into a hostile other]" (p 597), that repeats a tendentious error, based on a right-wing moral tradition, to make it out that all forces are by their nature psychical and immaterial. Rather, for Freudian logic to be more consistent with itself, it is necessary to consider that the forces that impose a response of psychological retreat (and concomitant feeling of anxiety) are themselves MATERIAL forces that have real material power, and not forces of the imagination that have only imaginary power.
Let us view things from the perspective of a more humane philosophy. We can then assume that the active force of one's imagination comes to terms with the material nature of the power of unconscious interpsychological forces, and it does so in terms of rearranging its mental structures to accommodate its maturing understanding that political force is in fact real force. Whether this knowledge is later repressed (or not) will determine the degree to which one conforms to society’s requirements for conventionally “civilised” behaviour (the specific nature of which will vary from culture to culture). Trauma (and shamanic wounding) tends to open a window of the mind. If one's mind is strong enough to observe it both from near and from afar, it enables one to reconsider the nature of power, as well as its effects upon the arrangement of one’s psyche.
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