The Hilarious G20 | Clarissa's Blog: As I’ve said before the contemporary West will not regain its wholeness — meaning its capacity to theorize and act coherently — until it comes to terms with its colonial past. I know it already thinks it has done so, but feeling guilty and ashamed only leads to the splitting of the psyche and moments of shooting into heaven followed by plummeting into hell. It is not a stabilized state. All countries, all cultures, all societies, have had a history. History seems terrible to us, since it is a concrete encasement of solid facts we cannot change. Therefore the mind encodes history as “evil”. However, as Nietzsche saw, “evil is man’s best strength”. So long as you are denying your evil, you are not strong and you cannot act concertedly or with any clarity of thought. You can turn soviet actors into caricatures but you cannot think coherently about them. Everything becomes a cartoon.
The reason why I insist that the major complex disrupting Western society today (and not just on a political level) is its inability to come to terms with colonialism, is because that is what individual Westerners keep impressing on me is their main source of paranoia, fear and the origin of their failure to communicate effectively. I have been writing on this topic for almost two decades, but I have not yet found a Westerner who will speak to me on the same level that I am talking, without resorting to running away or childish retorts. I did some particularly vicious retorts for a while, when all I was doing was talking.
As I say, and I re-emphasize, to feel childish guilt and shame is very different from coming to terms with actual historical fact. In the second case, one integrates the knowledge back into one’s identity and becomes stronger as a result. I have just completed such a shamanic re-integration and now I sleep very peacefully at night and I feel very much stronger and more solid in myself.
My writing (newly re-issued) addresses precisely this matter, but I think it will take three centuries before the maturity develops where it can get a decent review.
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