Extreme Douchebaggery | Clarissa's Blog

Extreme Douchebaggery | Clarissa's Blog: "There ARE all sorts of potential correctives when people act in harshly prejudicial ways, but you have to be of the shamanic type to make them happen. One of the most basic shamanic principles is “not doing”. That is to say, if someone performs an act of violence against you, you don’t try to fix things up, mend the relationship or close the gap. It’s not that you don’t care about fixing things up, but you have to understand that the nature of the violence is deeper than that which you can fix. If you keep fixing it, you will actually keep re-creating the circumstances for the same kinds of events to keep occurring. It’s not for you to palliate, therefore, but you can do a lot by allowing the imbalance that has been created by the violence to remain what it is — an uncomfortable imbalance. And all imbalances are uncomfortable.

Shamans see that there are the seeds of a solution in every violent act. For instance it used to be de rigueur to opine that women cannot be understood by anyone. Looking at that paradigm as an engineer would — which is to say dispassionately — one can see immediately how that creates a structural imbalance, whereby communication can only occur in one direction. A shaman does not try to fix this imbalance by taking great strides to ensure that communication occurs nonetheless, despite all the imposed difficulties. Rather, the shaman accepts and even perpetuates the imbalance by means of non-action. From now on communication only occurs in one direction. The shaman, if female, will not be required to communicate…will not require herself to do so.

But this produces great paranoia in the one who has set up the structural imbalance, because it is unnatural not to know what someone else is thinking. But they have made the pronouncement: “Women cannot be understood”. Now they must live with it.

This involves the use of engineering principles to facilitate the betterment of the world. It is not passive -aggression, since emotions would be involved in the latter. The shamanic approach makes use of an understanding of principles of physics as they relate to human pscychology.

Also it requires a lof of self-development, compassion and capacity for self-discipline to make the principle of “not doing” work for you. Most people are lacking in these. Above all, they do not have all these qualities combined.