Monday 30 March 2015

Communication, historical trauma and how they are linked





Language comprises a power house to which only certain people are allowed full entrance.
Please also consider that 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 illusionary transcendence with a sensation of shooting into heaven, followed by plummeting into emotional hell. It is not a stabilized state. All countries, all cultures, all societies, have had a history. History itself seems terrible to us above all because it is a concrete encasement and fixedness of solid facts we cannot hope to change. Therefore the untrained mind encodes history as “evil”. However, as Nietzsche saw, “evil is man’s best strength”. And even if we didn't want that strength, we can't actually negate it because when we look back upon our lives, however well-intentioned we have been and however determined to transcend our concrete realities, we will still have created history. That is to say, there will be concrete and fixed facts, which now strike us as evil. Only we will not have created our lives with any will, or reason or determination.
Therefore, 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 political actors into caricatures but you cannot think coherently about them. Everything becomes a cartoon.
Individual Westerners keep impressing on me that their distrust of themselves lies in the fear that they may be in some way evil or 'fascist'. This is the main cause for their paranoia and fear, but also their inability to communicate effectively. I have not yet found a Westerner who will speak to me on the same level that I am talking about history, without running away with childish retorts.
I keep on saying (and I re-emphasize my view) that to feel childish guilt and shame is very different from coming to terms with actual historical fact. In the case where one ascends to intellectual adulthood, one integrates the knowledge of historical fact back into one’s identity, and this makes one psychologically better balanced. I have just completed such a shamanic re-integration with historical fact and now I sleep very peacefully and I feel very much stronger and more solid in myself.
My writing (newly re-issued) addresses precisely this matter, but I honestly think it will take about a century before the Western cultural maturity develops so that history and psychology can be viewed as one.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity