How are evil and knowledge combined in a powerful way? In the case of the shamanic initiate, initially the source is great hardship or great calamity. A person who has had harsh experiences has knowledge. This knowledge is accompanied by distress. Such a violated one has seen things one is not supposed to see, if one is to remain within the bounds of sanity. Moreover he is in an unwanted and uninvited transgressive state, questioning everything one ever thought one knew about society. Authorities are no longer the benign enforces of order they had once seemed to be. Those who had once seemed worthy of one's trust without a thought now have to earn it. Friend becomes foe and former foe becomes friend. This is a state of madness, albeit it often temporary.
On the side of society: It has powerful mechanisms for dealing with transgressive states. These are priests, prisons and psychiatric institutions.
One naturally recoils from anybody in a state of temporary madness. Yet one step divided the mental patient from the inspired madman, and that is if he can recover most or many of his sensibilities and make advances in his knowledge. In the mean time, the subject's questioning mode, accompanied by mental and emotional disturbances, seems maddening, all the more so since our poor victim seems to be under strain. He's not at rest anymore. His nerves are under strain. He insists there must be other ways of seeing things and doing things and yet he speaks not from a position of socially bestowed authority. He stands below us and makes transparent his socially orchestrated debasement, thus we are driven to revile him and despise him.
To combine knowledge and evil it to cross the bridge with tenuous and faltering steps. The one who can achieve such a feat, under strain, is one whose knowledge has transformed him. He may wish for no more than just the incorporation of what he knows, to become fully a part of who he now has to to be. Then again, the evil he's incorporated may be longer lasting, who have learned how to use guerrilla tactics to manipulate reality along the fault-lines of identity politics. These were forged during the evil of the anti-colonial war.
Asserting that the war against colonialism was necessary or inevitable does not change that. The underlying character structure of one who survives evil is altered. He has crossed the bridge from one way of seeing to the other side and this process of incorporating knowledge has given him power. Only a greater power can defeat him. A greater power is one that has combined, through personal experience, evil and knowledge to greater extent than the other.
To sit on the sidelines and blandly proclaim that an anti-colonial war is simply good is to be in a position to be manipulated along identity politics lines. To take the opposite line and say that anyone who participates in evil is to be hated and avoided it to condemn humanity to forever dwell in shallow waters, make pale and feeble proclamations about right and wrong. This is the situation for the majority of humanity, and they hardly know what's good or bad, so careful are they to avoid any experience of evil, which they feel to be morally tainting.
The more moral the majority aim to become, the more they are susceptible to being manipulated. The more they hide away from evil, even by labeling it as morally necessary (and therefore, by a twist, as good) the less equipped they will be to effectively combat the forms of evil that manipulate them every hour.
The fear of evil has an obvious source. It can become a contaminant. Society becomes too refined in plucking out any signs of madness at the first instance these begin to sprout. It keeps its gardens clipped and smooth. But always there will be the ones who have experienced much evil and have managed to turn it into knowledge.
Mugabe is a fine tactician in the shamanic tradition. But there will be others -- those whose experiences have taken them more deeply into evil; who have transformed themselves to overtake us in our garden variety form of knowledge. Stronger forces, more deeply initiated in shamanic knowledge, are needed to combat them.
On the side of society: It has powerful mechanisms for dealing with transgressive states. These are priests, prisons and psychiatric institutions.
One naturally recoils from anybody in a state of temporary madness. Yet one step divided the mental patient from the inspired madman, and that is if he can recover most or many of his sensibilities and make advances in his knowledge. In the mean time, the subject's questioning mode, accompanied by mental and emotional disturbances, seems maddening, all the more so since our poor victim seems to be under strain. He's not at rest anymore. His nerves are under strain. He insists there must be other ways of seeing things and doing things and yet he speaks not from a position of socially bestowed authority. He stands below us and makes transparent his socially orchestrated debasement, thus we are driven to revile him and despise him.
To combine knowledge and evil it to cross the bridge with tenuous and faltering steps. The one who can achieve such a feat, under strain, is one whose knowledge has transformed him. He may wish for no more than just the incorporation of what he knows, to become fully a part of who he now has to to be. Then again, the evil he's incorporated may be longer lasting, who have learned how to use guerrilla tactics to manipulate reality along the fault-lines of identity politics. These were forged during the evil of the anti-colonial war.
Asserting that the war against colonialism was necessary or inevitable does not change that. The underlying character structure of one who survives evil is altered. He has crossed the bridge from one way of seeing to the other side and this process of incorporating knowledge has given him power. Only a greater power can defeat him. A greater power is one that has combined, through personal experience, evil and knowledge to greater extent than the other.
To sit on the sidelines and blandly proclaim that an anti-colonial war is simply good is to be in a position to be manipulated along identity politics lines. To take the opposite line and say that anyone who participates in evil is to be hated and avoided it to condemn humanity to forever dwell in shallow waters, make pale and feeble proclamations about right and wrong. This is the situation for the majority of humanity, and they hardly know what's good or bad, so careful are they to avoid any experience of evil, which they feel to be morally tainting.
The more moral the majority aim to become, the more they are susceptible to being manipulated. The more they hide away from evil, even by labeling it as morally necessary (and therefore, by a twist, as good) the less equipped they will be to effectively combat the forms of evil that manipulate them every hour.
The fear of evil has an obvious source. It can become a contaminant. Society becomes too refined in plucking out any signs of madness at the first instance these begin to sprout. It keeps its gardens clipped and smooth. But always there will be the ones who have experienced much evil and have managed to turn it into knowledge.
Mugabe is a fine tactician in the shamanic tradition. But there will be others -- those whose experiences have taken them more deeply into evil; who have transformed themselves to overtake us in our garden variety form of knowledge. Stronger forces, more deeply initiated in shamanic knowledge, are needed to combat them.
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