The old and new traditions of shamanism are linked by their idea of the psyche as being made of disparate elements that require integration if one is to function as a human being, without an integral loss of being or distortion of it.   Nietzsche depicts Zarathustra as being concerned with the selfsame issues:

When Zarathustra went one day over the great bridge, then did the cripples and beggars surround him, and a hunchback spake thus unto him:
"Behold, Zarathustra! Even the people learn from thee, and acquire faith in thy teaching: but for them to believe fully in thee, one thing is still needful--thou must first of all convince us cripples! Here hast thou now a fine selection, and verily, an opportunity with more than one forelock! The blind canst thou heal, and make the lame run; and from him who hath too much behind, couldst thou well, also, take away a little;--that, I think, would be the right method to make the cripples believe in Zarathustra!"
Zarathustra, however, answered thus unto him who so spake: When one taketh his hump from the hunchback, then doth one take from him his spirit--so do the people teach. And when one giveth the blind man eyes, then doth he see too many bad things on the earth: so that he curseth him who healed him. He, however, who maketh the lame man run, inflicteth upon him the greatest injury; for hardly can he run, when his vices run away with him--so do the people teach concerning cripples. And why should not Zarathustra also learn from the people, when the people learn from Zarathustra?
It is, however, the smallest thing unto me since I have been amongst men, to see one person lacking an eye, another an ear, and a third a leg, and that others have lost the tongue, or the nose, or the head.
I see and have seen worse things, and divers things so hideous, that I should neither like to speak of all matters, nor even keep silent about some of them: namely, men who lack everything, except that they have too much of one thing--men who are nothing more than a big eye, or a big mouth, or a big belly, or something else big,--reversed cripples, I call such men.
And when I came out of my solitude, and for the first time passed over this bridge, then I could not trust mine eyes, but looked again and again, and said at last: "That is an ear! An ear as big as a man!" I looked still more attentively--and actually there did move under the ear something that was pitiably small and poor and slim. And in truth this immense ear was perched on a small thin stalk--the stalk, however, was a man! A person putting a glass to his eyes, could even recognise further a small envious countenance, and also that a bloated soullet dangled at the stalk. The people told me, however, that the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believed in the people when they spake of great men--and I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing.
When Zarathustra had spoken thus unto the hunchback, and unto those of whom the hunchback was the mouthpiece and advocate, then did he turn to his disciples in profound dejection, and said:
Verily, my friends, I walk amongst men as amongst the fragments and limbs of human beings!
This is the terrible thing to mine eye, that I find man broken up, and scattered about, as on a battle- and butcher-ground.
And when mine eye fleeth from the present to the bygone, it findeth ever the same: fragments and limbs and fearful chances--but no men!  [emphasis mine]

Attaining wholeness -- this was the project that Bataille read into Nietzsche in his introduction to his book, On Nietzsche.   Bataille thought the majority of his time was prevented from being whole due to the enslaving nature of work.  In other words, history has a structure that creates deformities in its subjects. One need not take up Bataille's Marxist view explicitly to understand that history -- and our responses to it -- lead to the fracturing of identity.

Identity is, after all, not a tangible possession, but is an emotional relationship to one's inwardness.   One is whole so long as one's inwardness is integral, But force of circumstance may cause one to lose that relationship with one's integral self.  In that case, one loses wholeness and becomes deficient as a human being.

The resulting deficiency is not precisely personal, but can be viewed in terms of one's relationship to one's environment, which will differ from individual to individual, whilst often also having some aspects that are held in common (depending on the nature of the historical dynamite that would be capable of separating limb from limb).

It's easiest to give an example on the basis of one's own experiences, since one can claim to know oneself the best.   In my case, I experienced a degree of emotional numbing after emigrated from Africa to Australia in 1984.   In shamanistic terms, this meant my inner sense of identity had become scattered and was less than integral.   Emotional scattering is also cognitive scattering, as Antonio Damasio suggests. It can lead to being unable to make the best decisions.  Due to my having become scattered, I became susceptible to many viruses, as well as to others' misinterpretations of my identity.   I needed to restore the parts of myself that had become historically scattered, in order to restore my sense of wholeness.

My idea is that the fundamental goal of shamanisms, past and present, is to restore the individual's human wholeness, by recovering the parts of the self that has been lost due to historical change.

Since shamanism deals with history and with political forces, it differs from psychoanalysis, which restricts itself to pathologies arising from family structures.

Intellectual shamanism today is concerned with strategies to restore an individual's wholeness, through emotional integration of parts that were at times lost, due to the suddenness or violence of historical shifts.

It's difficult indeed to develop the mental strength necessary to oppose a system of oppressive values that has already been internalized. The oppressive morality -- for morality is a set of principles governing behavior -- has become part of you. That is why your arguments seems to defeat themselves. This is also why Bataille says, you need to change your consciousness and simply start thinking differently about the world, if you want to be free. Don't succumb to the tyranny of forms:  that which cannot be defined is totally free.

Presuming nefarious motives is the mark of othering. One is free to ignore annoying people, but one shouldn’t presume to know them, unless one truly does.

In my experience, people have often attributed to me motives which I might reasonably have been thought to have had, had I been brought up in the same environments as they. I hadn’t though, so my drives, meanings and ambitions were misaligned with the expected norm.

In my experience, most people in the contemporary First World can’t imagine what it is like to fight for values when it seems like a matter of life and death. They assume that one who feels this way must necessarily be being silly. I can tell you that I’m not a ridiculous or silly person, and yet I did feel this way.

To make sense of why I felt so, one must go back into history. In fact, my father’s history holds the key. He’d fought a war for particular values, which were based squarely on valuing whiteness, patriarchy and Christianity. When he lost the war in historical, tangible form, he had to win it in other ways. That is, he was driven to win it symbolically, by enforcing these values as the patriarchal breadwinner. I was to have no choice in the matter because, you know, people had died for this ideal. We had lost close family members, killed in action.

In order to be free, I had to do battle with the patriarchy in a most extreme and fundamental way, which had to do with my cultural history and familial relationships.

Whilst the degree of anxiety I experienced in this might have seemed silly or disproportionate to an outsider, the outsider didn’t have to fight my battles. In fact, no outsider could really understand what this battle was about. You would have to read a bit of Freud, to understand how patriarchal values are internalized. You’d have to know a lot about the ideology of the Rhodesian cultural system and the isolationist politics the society adopted. You’d also have to have had similar experiences, or at least be able to imagine what it means when people literally sacrifice their lives for an ideology and then expect it to be upheld, above all by closest family members.

Understanding all of these points would enable an outsider to begin to grasp the degree of my anxiety. Not understanding any of them, an outsider would presume that I was a delicate little flower, overreacting to normal, First World gender relations. But my reaction to everything was influenced by this structure of anxiety.

My initial feminism was therefore very fraught and uncertain. It involved a sense of freedom at the expense of partial self-annihilation. I had to sacrifice the past and its value in order to obtain my freedom.

I wasn’t an overreacting feminist — but that didn't stop people from seeing me that way.

Translation: More Gems From Suzanne Venker | Clarissa's Blog



I think this is a good and accurate translation of a misanthropist's rants.  Hatred between men and women is born out of traditional gender relations, where both men and women would trap each other in some way, in order to co-opt them into the family system.  Men would be deceived through the promise of sex, to become providers, no matter how they were feeling.  Women would be compelled to play their role as housewives and mothers, through economic default.   There were few ways for women to make a living on their own, in the past.

Now, everything is changing and this is obvious from each new generation.  The up and coming one has very little sexism in it, even compared to my generation.

There is much less reason for anyone to be angry than before.  Only the sexists, who want to hold back progress, are still enraged.

Is Feminism a Tough Badge to Wear? | Clarissa's Blog


A word of caution — one should never automatically assume that complaining about gender is just a form of subconscious revenge — i.e. ressentiment. I know that my complaints about gender, when I made them some years ago (and repetitively), were completely legitimate.

I was trying to communicate about some important imbalances I had observed in my environment, and everybody at the time seemed to be saying, ‘It’s just emotion. It’s perception. You are overreacting about something that is necessarily totally normal and acceptable, just like everything in life is.”

The gender stereotype, that women are incapable of referring to the objective environment because they are stuck at the level of only being able to relate to personal issues, made my life miserable. I really did need just to be able to communicate, but nobody seemed open to that.

If you thwart communication, you make life very difficult indeed — and you certainly do nothing to combat social ills. You only exacerbate them.

Is Feminism a Tough Badge to Wear? | Clarissa's Blog

musteryou:
I think the ressentiment that some people have in the realm of identity politics has to do with not being able to handle their revelations about systemic injustice. 

Danny: I wonder just what revelations could generate such responses (by responses I mean the resentment that you mention).

—-There’s a woman of my age, whom I met on Facebook. An American. Described herself as a working class feminist — i.e. using the sociological terminology that categorizes her as poor. She suddenly flipped out and became rad-fem — but that’s another story. Before that change, she seemed very logical in documenting various sorts of legislative oppression. But suddenly, she expressed herself in only an emotional mode and used some very boring rhetorical tactics against me. I think she’d got to the point where she had become emotionally overloaded. She no longer wanted to relate her observations in terms of the facts. Instead, she wanted to make out that somehow I had more “privilege” than she. I was supposedly looking down on her because of my education. Well, she was also educated to a very high degree. She had a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and she was clearly self-educated beyond that in a way I found to be particularly impressive. I had previously told her so. But, somehow she had suffered from a sudden lack of confidence. She began to project quite strongly in my direction. Let me say, I know when someone is projecting cultural baggage and concepts that do not belong to me, because they accuse me of having an ego. Supposedly, I am egoistic in the bourgeois, individualistic sense. In this case, I’m to be viewed as uppity because I have an education and caution against falling into the identity politics trap of letting of steam by attacking other “identities”. Thing is, I’ve never really mastered Western individualism, much as I tried, so the assumption that I’m competing individualistically is very bizarre. That’s not how my character is constructed — I only have a superficial understanding of Western egoism as an expression of economic force or intent. So, all I know is she freaked out about something — probably a relationship with a man — and then blamed me for what she was feeling.

my:…but there is a point when you have to get beyond the obsession with primeval issues of belonging and try to attack the system that produces inequality. 

Danny:I think a part of the problem is that people are still getting some sort of benefits based around those group identifications.

—I’m sure you’re right.

my: Yeah, you bring to light another point, which is that people try to develop group identity not only on the basis of a shared ideology, but on the basis of re-instating the ideologies of the oppressors. 

Danny: Perhaps for the sake of protecting their own? And then justified with some thought along the lines of, “It’s oppressive when you do it but it’s not oppressive when we do it.”?

—Yeah, the status of victim can and does offer some protection in many instances, primarily when it is taken on by a group.

Culture is also a language, because every individual culture has a different relationship to sub-text.   Also, as Nietzsche has pointed out, the hardest differences to bridge are those where two elements seem most similar -- most probably because we mistake similarity for sameness.   This, of course, relates  to my personal experience as an English-speaker, with a different historical background from other English speakers.

That which suffers the most from differences in sub-text is irony.  I'm sure if we could remove irony from communication, we would have a very mechanical, useful language, but much of the substance of communication would then go missing.

Irony is produced when there is a recognized difference between cultural and social expectations and what is said.  Irony is therefore fundamentally social and is based on shared cultural understandings.   It's never about the individual alone, or just about his or her desires or perceptions of the world.

Children Are People | Clarissa's Blog

I totally agree that constantly supplying an exterior source of motivation is counterproductive, no matter what a person's age. It is particularly inappropriate to try to use exterior forces to motivate an adult.

When I was a kid, I went through school and did everything I had to without constant parental agitation. That was easy. Actually, I'd internalized a lot of authoritarianism, so it was double easy. Then people started getting on my case because, "this is the way we do it." After that, I had all number of problems with concentration, with motivation, with the ability to feel respect....

I think people feel that in the absence of a scary deity, “human nature” is incapable of standing alone and must be constantly cajoled into action.

It just so happens that only yesterday I was relating to Mike how, during the time I was a tutor for school-aged children, the only two students who were inner-motivated came from extremely religious families. One was a Coptic Christian, the other Catholic. In all of the other cases, numbering about 150, the parents expected the tutor to be a God stand-in, and impart knowledge magically to their child’s brain.