Repost: The Western postcolonial cringe

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.

2.

"The common accusatory stance towards perpetrators and victims reinforces such a constricted state of mind and narrows the range of opportunities for traumatized individuals to reenter the libinized social matrix." ---49. 

Emery, Paul F. & Emery, Olga B. "Psychoanalytic Considerations on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 19.1 (1989): 39-53.

Shamanism, however, enables a re-entry in the libidinised matrix, by compelling you to encounter psychical forces as they are, that is as contingent forces (and to view yourself as a contingent being.)

This is in contrast to the traumatised mind's tendency to understand psychical forces as traumatic absolutes, which were directed at you personally.

Such a traumatised perspective wastes much of ego's energy because of an investment in the idea of absolute forces – ie. the idea that there are absolute victims or absolute perpetrators – which, in turn, leads to a "repetition compulsion" .

And the "repetition compulsion" involves constantly trying to itch a wound, as if to grasp some non-existent revelatory meaning, assumed to lurk behind the original experience of the trauma.

By contrast, shamanistic experience reveals that life is contingency, and that such an absolute meaning does not exist to be found, but that life has much to offer if we recognize its contingency.  By means of this very different experience of coming to terms with history, shamanism cures.