STAY SANE AND SAVAGE

Draft Chapter 3--my father's memoir

2012-01-28T15:17:00.003+08:00

Whilst in kindergarten some bulldozersarrived and started to flatten a hill on the other side of the playingfields. We were told this was for a new hostel. One day, my mothersaid to me would you like to go to boarding school. My dad thought itwould be very good for me. I had now reached a stage in life where didn'twant to avoid challenges. If everyone was saying to me this is goodfor you, I realised they wanted me to do it. I was six at thetime. In due course, the bulldozers left and this square block ofbuilding started to rise. In due course, mother took me to the shops toget kitted out with a uniform, which was khaki shirt and shorts, grey sockswith a red strip, red belt, grey tie, with diagonal red stripe, grey felthat.

Everything was put into a metal trunk withmy name on the outside and I was bundled off to boarding school. I'dnever been to boarding school, had no idea what to expect. I found myselfin a long dormitory with eighteen or twenty beds, covered in yellow quilts withlockers next to each bed. A mosquito net hung over each bed. Theywere white. Matron came in and allocated each of us a bed. She did her job and that was it. So then, matron came and collectedany tuck we had, such as biscuits, sweet bars. Every mother,knowing their kids were going to be away for some weeks would give them enoughsweeties to last three months. Medications were collected at thesame time. We all got into pyjamas and into bed. We had earlierbeen taken into the shower room, a longish room with twelve shower heads.

We were told to take our clothes off,whereupon some of the boys started to twist their towels up and flick eachother with the towel. Matron would stroll along and check we were allusing soap. Then we'd all brush out teeth. I remember the ablutionblock for the smell of toothpaste. So then, we all went downstairs to thedining room and we were allocated a table. Ten boys to a table, five downeach of the sides, sitting on benches. Then somebody at the head ofthe table would start to serve up food on each of the plates and you were toldto eat it. Then suddenly everyone stood up and a teacher said, for whatwe are about to receive, may the lord make us truly grateful.

Everyone then sat down with a big clatterof plates and started to eat. Then the person invested with theauthority to serve, either a teacher or a prefect, served up the dessert. Eventually I began to vomit a lot and decided I would have to take steps to dosomething about this, so I stopped eating. One day I went into lunch andthe sweets was as an orange fruit salad. I might have guessed it wrong asI was only six, but I think I worked out I didn't eat for six weeks. Atthe end of the meal, we all stood up and the teacher said, for what we havejust received, may the lord make us truly grateful.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

TOP 30 REASONS WHY WOMEN DON'T RECEIVE PAY RISES

2012-01-27T17:11:00.003+08:00

TOP 30 REASONS WHY WOMEN DON'T RECEIVE PAY RISES

1.You have secret sin – Lam 3:44; Psalm 66:18, 90:8; 1Peter 3:12
2.You are not tithing – Malachi 3:10
3.You are not fasting – Mark 9:29
4.You are not asking in faith, believing – James 1:6; Mark 11:24
5.You are not reading the Bible regularly – Romans 10:17
6.You are not in fellowship with God – John 15:7
7.You pray after your own lust – James 4:3
8.You do not pray with spiritual authority in Jesus’ name – John 14:13-14
9.You are not praying loud enough: don’t whisper, speak audibly – Matthew 16:19
10.You are too greedy: be more thankful – Philippians 4:6
11.You don’t ask – James 4:2
12.Your prayers are not big enough, don’t be petty – Mark 11:23
13.Your prayers are too vague, be specific – Matthew 7:9-10, 21:22
14.You presume God will answer your prayer your way – Isaiah 55:8
15.You are not praying in accordance with God’s will – 1John 5:14
16.You are impatient: it will be answered in God’s time – Matthew 6:7-8
17.You are not persistent, pray until it is answered – 1Thessalonians 5:17
18.Your prayer is already answered, you just don’t know it yet – Daniel 10:12-13
19.Your prayers are too long – Matthew 23:14
20.You don’t spend enough time in prayer – Luke 6:12
21.You doubt and harbor unbelief – Mark 9:23; 1 Timothy 2:8
22.You are not helping God answer the prayer – 2Thessalonians 3:10
23.You are not praying the right way (prayer formula) – Luke 11:1
24.You are holding a grudge with someone else: forgive – Matthew 5:23-24
25.You do not have the proper environment to focus – Matthew 14:23; Mark 1:35
26.You’ve rejected God’s counsel -1John 3:22
27.You are not praying in the Spirit – 1Corinthians 14:15; Jude 1:20
28.You need to pray in agreement with another – Matthew 18:19-20
29.Your prayers are too public; pray in secret – Matthew 6:6
30.God did answer; his answer was ‘No’. – 2Corinthians 12:9

Now replace "prayer" for "petition" and "God" for "Boss".

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Three Battles with Sensei Craig Monie

2012-01-26T14:35:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The parable of the colours

2012-01-26T09:06:00.001+08:00

Once upon a time, there was a male. This was no ordinary guy, however, but one who heard messages from on high. The messages pained him and brought him shivers of ecstatic pleasure.

There was a voice carried in the midst of a storm to elevate his heart. It came as if from behind a rainbow -- a stream of fractured white light. The sound of his deity carried all away along the rainbow until it reached him. In dulcet tones, it made itself known: "See those colors, red and blue? How free and separate they are! Their bondage chains are broken and now radiate they most vividly into thine eye! Behold the separate colors 'blue' and 'red'!"

The deeper-than-usual-man went apart from his fellow male to meditate awhile. He has discovered 'red' and 'blue' as separate identities.

This holiest-of-men drew himself even further apart from his fellow man. He began to write the tablet of the law that only vain and foolish idol worshipers would ever question:

-1. Blue and red are fundamentally separate colors, a fact uncontested by all pious men .

-2 Blue must be made to stay on its side of the spectrum and red must be made to stay on its opposite side. For them ever to shift or merge is both malicious and impious and those who perform this technique of mixing will be punished .

-3. The nature of blue shall be to depict coolness and tranquility. The nature of red shall be to depict urgency and enthusiasm. Blue is not permitted under any circumstances to depict enthusiasm: It is 'blue'.

-4. The two colors ought to radiate and shine in splendor for the glory of the universe.

-5. These laws inscribed above depict the status of all things in the realm of nature itself. It is evil and sinister to go against fundamental laws of nature.

----

AND NATURE LAUGHED!

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Intergeneration conflict / suicide | STAY SANE AND SAVAGE

2012-01-25T19:18:00.000+08:00

Intergeneration conflict / suicide | STAY SANE AND SAVAGE

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

HITTIN.

2012-01-25T12:31:00.002+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

me hitting very hard on a hot day

2012-01-25T12:09:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Nietzsche

2012-01-24T10:11:00.001+08:00

In the Preface of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche outlines the project that was also to be mapped out and re-formulated in more detail by Bataille. In more well-known Freudian terms, to get control over one's Superego and to master it, rather than to have it controlling one from above.

More to come later, but the three stages of becoming healthier he describes are:

1. Starting from being the unquestioning servant of one's Superego.
2. Losing a sense of ego in the sense of no longer taking anything personally, but transcending "for and against" (thinking about right and wrong).
3. Adopting a perspective based on these earlier stages of experience, whereby one understands that "injustice" is written into the framework of all things. This insight accompanies a state of being whereby one comes to master Superego and thereby to gain mastery of one's "for and against". One might put this in a different way by saying one's "for and against" become relativised on the basis of having seen oneself transcendentally -- from a distance. They are now no longer absolute and rigid and one is no longer unquestioningly subservient to them. Thus, one is healthier than previously.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

updated:

It may never gets so far that someone has a desperate need to be an identity that isn't the consumer unit -- most people have a desperate desire to be one that IS the consumer unit. That's because Superego (the device that makes us conform from within) is going to make us conform to the prevailing paradigm/s. This is why intellectual shamanism counsels that one should depart from everything one thinks one "knows" or feels to be true about oneself and one's world.
By sacrificing one's "self"as one mistakenly understands it to be, one has a much greater chance of finding one's true nature. (This principle is in some ways more Bataille's than Nietzsche's.)

Why I write

2012-01-24T08:19:00.001+08:00

I began writing as a form of self-discipline. My feelings, my emotions, like sheep, had gone astray and I had no idea where they were or what they were up to. I was in my late twenties at this time and I knew something was wrong. My life was dominated by attitudes of duty and hope for a better life if I pleased the correct authorities. And I had every intention of pleasing them with all my might - so much so, I was coming apart at the seams. I had no concept of pleasing myself. How would I get a better life that way? I had to conform to others' expectations and take pleasure in bringing myself in line with them. That was the only way I could get out of the bog of meaninglessness and resignation that defined, at any rate, my working life.

I realize that many people would consider the attitudes I describe above to be ideal ones for a young female. This was far from true. My health was suffering and I would catch viruses much of the time -- signs indicating that I'd become a spiritual anorexic.

So, I began writing as a means to feast on my own lamb stew -- or as Jung's less malicious prose would have it, "to water one's own garden".

All of my writing has been an attempt to track down and reintegrate my emotions.

This is why there are certain modes of critiquing any of my work that are wholly wrong. My writing is not, for instance, inherently emotional. I worked hard to obtain this effect. Also, I don't need to be told to take a good, hard look at myself in order to figure out what, from a right wing perspective, I need to change. After all, I began writing in order to examine myself carefully whilst attempting to bring about the necessary changes -- the foremost of which is to acknowledge how I'm feeling about various experiences I've either had or wish to have.

It should already be obvious, not least on the basis of good manners -- I really don't need to be told to go ahead and do what I've already been doing over all these years, to find what needs to change. That attitude to my work is, not too put too fine a point on it, insulting. I'm also not a female stereotype, replete with emotions that just want to come pouring out at the slightest touch. If that had been so, I would never have chosen the self-discipline of learning to write.

A friend recently told my of her disappointment in viewing a movie, Diary of a Geisha. She observed that the book had been very poorly rendered into film because the character seemed like a "Western girl", very emotional. "At that age, she would not have known what she was feeling," my friend pronounced.

The structure of shamanistic observation

2012-01-22T19:41:00.000+08:00

From Nietzsche: But someday, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, He must yet come to us, the redeeming man, of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, He may bring home the redemption of this reality; it's redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. The man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; This this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the Earth and his hope to Man; this Antichrist and Antinihilist this victor over God and nothingness-He must come one day.
[My bolds.]
------------------

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Power itself is the medium we all move in. We can't renounce relating to others in terms of power even if we want to, but we can observe how power functions and step back from that. That is like stepping out of time and out of reality temporarily. One observes reality better from this position of detachment and it buys one time to think before acting.
Shamanism is not asceticism in any way. It renounces nothing. In this it differs very much from Christianity, which would posture as if to forsake an interest in power in order to appear more "spiritual".

Psychiatry: An Industry Of Death 10/10

2012-01-22T13:16:00.000+08:00

Leans too much towards right wing conspiracy ideas, but hey, what's not to like?

I agree with the guy who says, "psychiatry IS politics". The tone is a bit alarmist, though.

Try shamanism. Aim for a baseline experience of nature, not moderated by social notions or ideas. You will find out what is missing in your life and restore it.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Human Nature, ready to rule the roost

2012-01-22T12:14:00.003+08:00

In many quarters of society, it's considered quite urbane and natural to refer to human nature in terms of the conditions of domesticated and wild animals.

Workplace harassment is dismissed as a natural expression of "the pecking order". We often hear reference made to "alpha males" and humans willingly acquiesce to the idea that what works best to keep others in line is both "the carrot" and "the stick".

Given the near universal acceptance of barnyard metaphors and appeals to certain idealized versions of "the wild", I find it astonishing that whenever I choose to casually refer to people in these terms, umbrage is taken.

For instance, someone might greet me casually, according to the dictates of the wild and the pecking order with "hey gal!"

To this, I respond, "hey ape!"

My response is always reasonable and wholly consistent in accepting the predominant world view that humans haven't quite made it to human status yet. In other words, we only recognize each other hazily and in accordance with sado-masochistic notions of gender and racial hierarchy.

We might try harder, but we cannot seem to budge: perhaps more carrot and more stick is necessary?

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

What is metaphysics?

2012-01-21T18:44:00.003+08:00

Metaphysics is: "The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

For instance, if one believes that different people are constrained by inner essences to behave according to their "genders", often this is metaphysics.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

enjoy life to the full

2012-01-20T17:06:00.004+08:00

I give you my recipe for health: enjoy life to the full.

the doubling of mind

2012-01-20T10:03:00.000+08:00

The following section from Foucault is very interesting, because it recognises what I have also discovered, which is that you need a kind of “doubling” (in my terms) or in this case, “a mind folded back” in order to have any kind of profundity in thinking.

[Y]ou find this idea of a mind in profundity; of a mind folded back in the intimacy of itself which is touched by a sort of unconsciousness, and which can develop its potentialities by the deepening of the self. And that is why the grammar of Port Royal, to which you refer, is, I think, much more Augustinian than Cartesian.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Minefields of language and culture

2012-01-18T13:53:00.005+08:00

Over the years -- over very many years -- I've realized that the way I communicate is different from many people, perhaps even the majority. I've realized I have an inside-out soul. Also an upside-down soul. I'm not entirely alone in this. Mike has one too. "When my father died and I was still six, I shut out all emotion in order to cope." That is how he describes his progeneration of an upside-down soul.

Perhaps most people experience their reactions to the world on the basis of emotion. They then become aware of the emotion and try to tame it and control it. This capacity to tame the emotions defines the progress one typically makes from childhood to adulthood. In my case and in Mike's, out natural progress has to be in the opposite direction -- from stoicism to greater feeling-integration.

Language itself becomes contorted when an innate propensity for emotionalism rather than stoicism is assumed. Even empathy may be a contributing factor to meaning going off course. For instance, in not understanding something I do, another may exhort me to "act with more self control", when in fact my level of self-control is extremely high. It would facilitate communication better if I understood why something had to be a certain way and not another, rather than pushing me to act in a manner of even colder, rarefied detachment. The assumption that bringing my emotions to heel would enable me to see anything more clearly is wrong. The would only lead to socially defined meanings becoming much more opaque than ever.

These mechanics of distancing become even more relevant with regard to my writing, where I tend often to use terms outside of their regular social meaning. I'm never concerned with social meanings in any of my writing, only with the structure of meaning and how people read -- or misread -- underlying structures.

Underlying structures are those that enable (or obstruct, in some cases) communication. An example of obstruction is given above. Someone who is moving away from an emotional way of responding to the world will probably misread the actions and ideas of someone who is the process of moving towards a more emotionally integrated view of the world. They will see moments of release from the necessity of stoicism, for instance, as a shameful loss of self-control. However, if one has self-control almost inevitably and necessarily, one may not be so alarmed at losing it through episodes of humor, even when this involves a risk of being profoundly and irrevocably misunderstood -- indeed "read backwards".

I enjoy cultures where having stoicism at the base-line of one's character is considered normal and I find it akin to walking in a minefield whenever I engage with cultures which have the opposite assumption at work.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Boxing for fitness class 18 JAN 2012

2012-01-18T12:30:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Power/identity through perversion

2012-01-17T14:00:00.002+08:00

Jennifer Frances Armstrong The system exerts a tremendous amount of force to push us into certain roles and into adopting certain "perceptions".
2 minutes ago · · 1
Karen Lea As opposed to a powerful and intrinsic knowledge of one's own gender/race equality and right.
Oh yes...prescribed or recreational drugs are certainly a big keeps of the status quo.
about a minute ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong Well the "intrinsic" knowledge can also be wrong and limiting. That's why I propose the shamanistic thing of self-knowledge through perverting the dominant paradigm. i.e. create various perversions of it and find out if any of those are suitable for you.

Note: The term, "perversity", offers an ironic take on this matter above, since those who defend the dominant paradigm will always view any kind of creativity in dissent as "perverse".

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Minus the Morning

2012-01-16T10:39:00.002+08:00

[O]ver time I’ve come to think that the victim is a far more fundamental, and sincere, figure in the conservative canon. Because not only does he appeal to us as a figure of compassion or pity, but he’s also someone who has a very particular claim on us: he demands to be made whole. In other words, he’s a rallying figure, someone whose losses – a country house, a plantation, a factory, a white skin – ought to be recompensed.

And THIS is why I destroy my former identity and its appeals in the last pages of my memoir.

I'm explicitly renouncing any such conservative claim.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

ego reification

2012-01-16T09:55:00.002+08:00

The corrective to Nietzsche is of course Georges Bataille, who also has a few problems, but at least is clearly of the left. I think you sum it up there very well in stating that the problem of bourgeois society IS the reification of the ego. I think that liberals in general cannot understand a critique from someone of my bent, who takes up the Nietzschean tradition. They imagine that it would be impossible not to reify the ego or to avoid doing so would mean to denigrate the ego. This is typical bourgeois black or white thinking. One cannot gain real subjectivity unless one sacrifices the bourgeois ego. That is a fact. Yet the sacrifice does not lead to nothing or negation. It leads to wholeness and a fulfilled life.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Gender versus maturity

2012-01-15T15:21:00.000+08:00

My experience with Western society is that gender roles are conventionally a division of labour, whereby males are expected to do all the hard lifting in terms of solving life’s problems and women are expected to reciprocate by processing their (male) emotions for them.

This keeps everyone at a very infantile level, because the system of assigning genders to do certain roles can only work by means of projective identification. How can a woman process the various emotions a male might be feeling unless he projects them into her, to begin with? She accepts them as “the emotional one” and performs a hygienic role of allowing him to be unimpeded by emotions in his work.

Certainly I think this is what many men and women are reacting to. It’s where gender politics can go wrong, because often people are reacting to the dismantling of this practice and the way it leaves them out in the cold. It’s absolutely necessary for this system to be dismantled, but it means each person has to be an individual in their own right, not a function of part of one. Many “men’s rights” guys freak out because women are no longer playing their expected role. They are reacting to the betrayal of expectations concerning this role. Women, too, dig their heels in and refuse to budge when they create systems of female solidarity that reinforce the view that women are fundamentally emotional and sensitive creatures. We are not.

The feminist project is for both men and women to be stand-alone adults. This is a process of evolution and many people are getting hurt along the way. I’ve often feel hurt myself having to say, “I know you need me to play this role of processing your emotions for you, but I’m not available for that.”

Fortunately, my husband does not require that kind of service to feel whole. He’s done all the emotional work necessary to get himself to level of being where he is a really attractive man.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Ideological sensitivity

2012-01-15T09:39:00.001+08:00

A misleading idea is that feminism is about sensitivity, a variation of "sisterhood". This may be related to the idea that one achieves a sense of belonging by embracing an identity. I do not attach an identity to my actions, so my actions are not immediately understood. Those who uphold the ideology of identities can easily point out "inconsistencies" in my attitudes, just because being human is an inconsistent act. To "belong" one has to submit to correction by others, who believe they are called upon to make you consistent. Inconsistency is held to be the worse possible condition for anyone, that has to be stopped at all costs.

Humanity, spontaneity and pleasure, therefore have to be stopped at all costs. All ideologies command this.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Newsflash: war is worse than anarchism!

2012-01-14T12:22:00.000+08:00

DID YOU ASK WHAT'S WRONG WITH WAR --DAMBUDZO MARECHERA

There are no wrong words, right?
There are no wrong trees, right?
There is no wrong sand, right?
I’ve slept the world in frilly
underwear
Dreamed I buggered all the little boys
who are future leaders
Fucked all the funny little girls made of
thatch and ghandy
My anarchist arse has shat on society
And LOOK millions of open flies
are homing in on your wide-open lips.

Nietzsche, Bataille and "facing death"

2012-01-14T08:58:00.002+08:00

I have a huge amount of knowledge about Continental Philosophy. Absolutely huge. I’m not always keen to communicate it as the structure of these ideas are not linear or rational. Nietzsche, for instance, wrote in an aphoristic style and suggested that he could only be understood by those with “long legs”, who could step from one peak of a mountain to another. I’ve managed to achieve this feat of fully understanding Nietzsche, after many years. I still can’t convey what I’ve understood, at least not effectively. I’m not sure it’s even advisable to try. People ought to read Nietzsche directly and then read Bataille’s take on him. It’s all about letting go of safety and servility — an action that can feel to some people like “facing death”.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

apes in capes: the human condition

2012-01-14T08:31:00.000+08:00

I’m not an introvert. I’m slightly to the side of extroversion. All the same, I've adapted to a rather introverted lifestyle because I find too many conventional social assumptions to be alarming. The pop psychology embraced by all too many, including university professors, makes my head spin with its degree of wrongness. For instance, there is the idea that what others believe they observe about you must necessarily be more objective than what one observes about oneself. The illogical and obscene nature of this assumption is something I have no will to deal with. It’s just crazy.

Mirror, mirror on the wall: the shamanistic disposition

2012-01-13T18:06:00.002+08:00

It's my sister's birthday, today.

When I was five, I wrote a card for her that began with the letter A underlined. It said: "shy is 4 yis old." After that, I began writing backwards because I was looking into a mirror to correct my handwriting as I wrote.

At that tender age, I had been misled by authoritarian advice, which held that if you want to check your speech, check it in the mirror. If you want to check your handwriting, ditto. The assumption is that if you were looking at either directly, you would be too subjective in your analysis.

Of course, this advice later became the foundation for my idea of shamanistic doubling: you can obtain a kind of difference of perspective by distancing or dissociation. This will produce unpredictable and novel results, which enhance experience and creativity, whilst at the same time producing a form of objectivity that runs counter to authoritarian mores.

UPDATED:
Q. But is shamanism really a form of intentional dissociation or is it the ability to access an expanded and perhaps more true version of reality?

A. One loses one's sense of attachment to mundane and conventional forms of behavior, when one dissociates. These no longer seem as necessary or as inevitable as before. Consequently one sees the truth, that one's capacities for LIVING are much broader than one had assumed.

The cult of the individual

2012-01-11T10:00:00.002+08:00

In all sincerity, I’ve had “the individual” up to here [Points to above the head or so]. The ideology of the individual has been taken to such extremes nowadays that it is become actually impossible to communicate anything of importance. People just assume you’re on the game of trying to make yourself sound special, making them free to dismiss anything that doesn’t automatically flatter their views of themselves. This ideology of the individual is thus killing the life of the mind. Everything is going down the plughole in honour of this cult of the individual.By contrast, I'm all for actual individualism.

Stalking one's emotions

2012-01-09T10:33:00.004+08:00

Emotional literacy: It's something I have struggled with until about five years ago. This relates back in part to not being from a very individualistic society. It also pertains to the reality of the war, with which I grew up. It used up all of our emotions, so we didn't filter much feeling into private concerns. By about the age of 26 (I had migrated to the First World ten years before), I realized that I was thinking and reacting very differently from how many had expected me to respond. I learned a little bit about my personality -- that I was most inclined to make intuitive leaps in logic, based on pattern awareness, but that my processes were not very linear. I also realized that I had little idea what my emotions were at any particular point in time. I was out of synch with them.

That's why I began writing -- to try to stalk down my emotions. It wasn't easy; they were very evasive due to years of repression. Also, the change in cultural scenery didn't help, as my original character had been formed in an entirely different environment, so common explanations, which pertained to the way reality was organised as per Modernity, did not have any meaning for me. Worse than this, they distorted my understanding of myself for a long period. More often than not, other people's "help" was in the form of a paternalist projection. These projections had much to do with how people perceived my gender and my historical background, which were in terms of inappropriately applied Modernist categories. Also, there was a lot of negativity about "colonialism", which made it even harder for me to understand myself.

In the end, I was able to achieve a very high level of emotional literacy only by giving up the project of adapting to Western culture or trying to understand my emotions in its terms.

Talking to Asian people finally enabled this development, as they are unaffected by Western history and so do not have a negative reflex reaction to my identity as a "colonial".

doppelgänger

2012-01-09T08:00:00.000+08:00

This interesting article came from Clarissa's blog.It's particularly appealing for me since, the doppelgänger concept was part of my theoretical platform for my thesis. I said that shamanism functions by means of creating doppelgängers in a state of dissociation. The difference between shamanism and pathology would be that the dissociation is intentional and is carefully observed and studied by the other half of the self. It’s a means of acquiring knowledge, but not in the normal sense of western epistemology, where knowledge is supposed to be divorced from experience and emotion. As Nietzsche points out, that kind of objectivity would be useless in terms of enhancing the human experience of life, and is part of the ascetic ideal — which he was trying to conquer in order to make human life meaningful. Thus Bataille (Nietzsche’s 20th Century student) avoids the trap of the wrong kind of knowledge-seeking by referring to mystical experience as ‘non-knowledge’.

My feminist conversion

2012-01-08T13:44:00.002+08:00

Because I hailed from a very right wing society where it seemed men were elusively noble -- (that is, not quite in the sense of being so, but rather as shadows of nobility inspirited on warlike grey horses) -- my conversion to feminism was via a rough and lonely road.

My conversion was achieved through Western gender dynamics, but would not have been the same without the contributing factor of my incredible naivety.

The structure of relationships in a contemporary Western context mostly, if not always, go like this. The Western men will adopt the attitude that they are free agents and free spirits, worthy of engaging with and relying upon. They should be trusted implicitly. Time reveals that these wonderful men are incapable of achieving anything out of the ordinary. After some time, it becomes evident that they believe nefarious forces are holding them back. At the point of this proclamation, just when one is wondering what or whom these nefarious agents of disaster might be, the tide of reasoning points to YOU.

You, as a woman, are the inherent cause of all the deep unhappiness that besets every male: each of them is deeply unhappy -- and it is ALL YOUR FAULT.

In particular, you, yourself took the faulty step of thinking you could rely on males to be whom they said they were. This shows a typical case of feminine "over-sensitivity" that in turn means that women have nobody to blame for being deceived by male proclamations, but themselves.

So, it was that after a period of ten years or so, the Western male himself convinced me that I had to embrace feminism for the sake of logical consistency -- or risk losing (more of) my sanity.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

All forms of discourse are not the same

2012-01-07T12:02:00.001+08:00

Not all forms of discourse are the same. They vary according to intent. Some are designed to assert power and some are designed to raise and examine questions.

Consider the extreme difference of outcome if "I don't know what my identity is" is taken to represent a state of emotional confusion as opposed to being an intellectual question.

In the second instance, a high level of curiosity is combined with a personal psychology that is capable of detaching self-esteem from the issue of identity. When read as an emotional statement, devoid of intellectual content, the question seems to imply emotional defeat. The outcome of interpretation could not be more different.

I relate this back to my own experience, over the past ten years. Since I am an intellectual who also happens to be female, a regular occurrence for me has been having statements or questions I've made in the second category misappropriated to the first. No doubt, intellectual questions and attitudes must be extremely rare in the general population to warrant the consistency of pushing this wrong angle. Also, according to traditional metaphysics, women are "emotional" not "rational", so the category my statements are too often placed in, where they become distorted, has an external and historical origin. These meanings appended to my statements or my questions then have no relationship to my personal psychology.

I would be happy to relate more intellectually to most of my correspondents, but many of them seem stuck at a metaphysical-emotional level of processing ideas. Sadly, this means they will also be inclined to impute their particular worldview and perspectives to me.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

More on what shamanism isn't

2012-01-05T14:17:00.001+08:00

An understatement: shamanism is not an approach designed for self esteem building. Nor is it a means for moral edification. Whilst building self-esteem through worthwhile activities or edifying oneself morally are necessary and valuable, shamanism is still not the means for this.

A good analogy: the paintwork in one's house has become worn and shoddy. There are already too many layers of paint to warrant a simple repaint, so a paint stripper is advised. Shamanism is the chemical reagent that will remove the glossy sheen from inside your house.

Shamanism is inimical to the project of building an identity, since it eschews self-deception and social identities are useful fictions at best. Shamanism holds that one does not earn an identity or develop self-esteem from others. To attempt this approach would make one a victim of sado-masochistic relationships, since others can freely deny you your very identity So long as one wishes to "command respect" from others, others can control you.

Shamanism is the paint stripper that breaks down the illusions -- it removes the gloss of your psychological illusions that would keep you in a mode of sado-masochistic attitudes. It removes the illusions that you and others, through social collusion, have long painted over reality.

It strips off the illusions to reveal what's underneath, which may not always be to our liking. In time, the reality underneath can be polished and made to emit radiance.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra advised his readers that some people ought not to lose their illusions as they are better off with them.

To be free from illusions could lead some people to commit suicide. One's self esteem needs to be already high, in order to manage life without the self-deception that leads to believing that embracing a moral system will redeem one. Nietzsche thought the majority were not free enough for this freedom; that they needed to limit their capacity to be honest with themselves in order to relatively thrive.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

What intellectual shamanism isn't

2012-01-04T22:39:00.002+08:00

Intellectual shamanism is about destruction of identity, not the formulation of identity in order to build self-esteem. That is a recipe for servitude.

Garreth Gothaven is not shamanism the rule you use to lead one to uncovering their potential.?
14 minutes ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong no --it's not a human potential movement.
13 minutes ago ·
Garreth Gothaven correction not lost but thats where the pendelums swing is currently, in any case for thngs to be the way they are was a product of human effort... Nw it is also pan africanist human effort that works to seduce man to an alternative state
9 minutes ago ·
Garreth Gothaven if not a potential movement what is it then?
8 minutes ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong Just leads to more self deception -- trying to correct others in order to gain power over them. Very slimy.
4 minutes ago ·
Garreth Gothaven i am not enforcing an identity politics per se but rather a cosmopolitanism in its strictest sense where equality and self esteem is not obtained by paddling another groups illusion of civility
2 minutes ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong Few people are actually capable of being themselves because they prefer lies and self deception. Shamanism is the capacity to be oneself. You can' t be that whilst you're trying to get power over others or build an identity to deceive them
2 minutes ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong If people want no longer to be deceived, they ought to stop deceiving themselves -- stop trying to construct an identity
about a minute ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong Others can only deceive you because you are so willing to deceive yourself. You think that creating an identity will "command respect" from them. That is a basic level of self deception about the world and how it functions
A few seconds ago ·

Jennifer Frances Armstrong You can't reduce masochism by creating an identity with the intention of "commanding respect"
4 minutes ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong That is actually a recipe for masochism.
3 minutes ago ·
Garreth Gothaven so in a shamanistic aproach how would you reveal to a 5 year old black girl that the blond barbie doll is not better than a black doll at the same shop (not even a barbie too) is the 5 year old girl simply suffering from her inner desire for self deception
about a minute ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong Why do you think a shamanistic approach would be suitable for the moral edification of such a child?
A few seconds ago ·
Jennifer Frances Armstrong Most people deceive themselves, because of power relations and their natural way of handling them.
2 seconds ago ·

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Swimming in the river at Dwellingup

2012-01-04T12:16:00.000+08:00

My war of liberation

2012-01-01T09:07:00.002+08:00

To achieve my liberation, I had to deal with the habits of right wing thinking -- not mine, but those of my parents, particularly of my father.

The dynamics of this are extremely hard to understand. This accounts for the fact that I didn't understand them for many years. I always have the feeling that I've only just reached the precipice of understanding and that I've arrived breathlessly.

In short, it has to do with projective identification. I come from a non-individualistic, layered society, where everybody had their place in the hierarchy. What I couldn't have fathomed in my wildest dreams was that a lot of the solid feel of this society had to do with the capacity of those who wished to maintain a sense of a uniformity of characteristics to project their unwanted characteristics onto others. A direct analogy is when somebody farts and blames it on the dog. That was how my father's mind worked, anyway. I'm not sure how far the phenomenon extended into the rest of society.

This was a country at civil war, where those who had black skin were given second class status. The denial of their full humanity wasn't just formal, but had a psychological dimension. There was a sado-masochistic dynamic, whereby the incapacity to demonstrate qualities of "civilization" was held over these black people as a reason to deny them liberation from inequality. For instance, the authorities would act triumphantly if a word was used incorrectly because English was a second language. This meant that a civilized mentality hadn't been attained yet and that a second class status was still necessary.

This describes the background to my own struggle -- for when we transferred to Australia from Zimbabwe, my father's mentality remained hierarchical and he looked around for a dog to blame his farts on. He concluded that this person ought to be me -- and so began my battle for liberation where I demanded my full human status and he fought me all the way.

The aspects of his character that he tried to pass off onto me were defined in his mind as "feminine" characteristics. He particularly tried to relate to his own emotions through me, by claiming I was experiencing very negative emotions and that I should speak to him about them. By externalizing his confusion and distress and attributing them to another, he expected to be able to come to terms with them.

He used a lot of patriarchal reasoning to justify to himself and others why it was I who was experiencing these emotions and not he. Many fell for his lies. Even I wasn't sure, half the time, which of my problems were legitimately my own and which were his.

Thus, my liberation as a human being has involved liberating myself from my father.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Zimbabwean women's boxing

2011-12-30T13:30:00.002+08:00

Zimbabwean women's boxing

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My feminist fight

2011-12-30T10:18:00.002+08:00

My engagement with feminism was based on very personal necessity — to bring myself out of a traditional mindset and into the 20th Century. My culture had a very limited pool of knowledge about sexuality and gender relations. We hadn’t even entered the arena of any sort of gender politics. That is to say modernity had not yet arrived in my culture.

This led to a state of affairs where I didn’t understand the sub-texts of any of the social situations I was in. In retrospect, I see a lot was implied about identity, including gender, but I didn’t really catch it at the time.

My inability to respond appropriately and to defend what others perceived as my “identity” made me extremely vulnerable to such onslaughts as workplace bullying. I really had no idea what people wanted from me or how to behave normally. To make matters worse, I had internalized attitudes that were socially quite passive. A female in an extremely right wing, militaristic culture has no need to assert herself. Men are expected to do that for her.

For me, feminism was a way of solving this set of problems, in order to bring myself into modernity.

Feminism gave me the philosophical justification for what I needed to do, which was to engage in a prolonged and difficult battle with my original character structure in order to transform it into something more effective for the modern world.

What surprised me was how few people were able to understand this need and how many — good liberals included — worked actively to sabotage my project. Since I wasn’t able to articulate the nature of my project at the time, the lack of active support can be explained away. The attempts to sabotage my freedom by affirming my father’s perspectives over and against mine really needs a lot more explanation. It seems that even those who are otherwise impartial in their dealings with others do believe in patriarchal authority.

The problem was, many people were pushing me back into the range of control of someone who was not only mentally unwell, but who wanted me to become a Christian fundamentalist and conservative. Once again (it bears repeating) good liberals were doing this. Many of them turned out to be very much in thrall of ideologies concerning patriarchal authority and its rights. People seem to get pleasure from reinforcing a familiar ideology.

I finally won my battle, needless to say, but it was all my own effort.
The broad meaning of feminism today is different from the meaning of my feminism. Like most aspects of life, unless you’ve been through the experience — in my case, the experience of giving birth to oneself — you have little idea of what it means. You will be likely to misconstrue its meaning.

This is why not just feminists have a hard time understanding where I am coming from.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

MORE SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ZIMBABWE: refereeing and stick fighting

2011-12-29T09:44:00.000+08:00

MORE SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ZIMBABWE (3)

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

MORE SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ZIMBABWE: Orphans and refereeing

2011-12-28T20:15:00.000+08:00

MORE SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ZIMBABWE: Orphans and refereeing kickboxing (2)

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

MY MIGHTY STEED!

2011-12-28T16:06:00.002+08:00

MY MIGHTY STEED!

I was extremely impressed by my horse on safari. She turned out to be both sure of foot and mild of temperament -- not features I would normally have considered selecting for, but exactly what was required for the type of terrain we covered for eight days. The ground was incredibly rocky, unpredictable and uneven, but she never put a foot wrong.

She was, however, a follower and not a leader.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

IMAGES FROM MY TRIP TO THE NORTH-EAST WILDERNESS AREA OF ZIMBABWE, JUNE 2010

2011-12-28T16:05:00.002+08:00

IMAGES FROM MY TRIP TO THE NORTH-EAST WILDERNESS AREA OF ZIMBABWE, JUNE 2010

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

IMAGES FROM MY TRIP TO ZIMBABWE, JUNE-JULY 2010, TO TEACH SELF DEFENCE TO WOMEN!

2011-12-28T08:02:00.002+08:00

IMAGES FROM MY TRIP TO ZIMBABWE, JUNE-JULY 2010, TO TEACH SELF DEFENCE TO WOMEN! (1)

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

National boundaries and whether they define us: Zimbabwe

2011-12-27T11:09:00.003+08:00

On the issue of whether "Zimbabwe" is a made up community: It is and it isn't. Right now, we have a movement whereby one of the traditional ethnic groups wishes to secede:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mthwakazi-Nation/162801343740250

Originally, colonial politics defined the boundaries of Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). The group that now wishes to secede was violently subdued after the anti-colonial war. It is said that 20, 000 were killed in what might be described as a genocidal act on the part of the guerrilla faction that came to power.

Even though the nature of identity is being disputed within Zimbabwe itself, it is undeniable that there is a common history shared by the peoples of Zimbabwe, based on the historical fact that boundaries were defined. Whatever people in Zimbabwe have experienced -- and whatever they now think and feel, based on what they have experienced -- is different from what those in the Republic of South Africa will think and feel. National boundaries have a psychological meaning simply because they are a historical fact.

Some of the ways that national boundaries define and help to shape and form community is in terms of what kinds of media are permitted within those boundaries. During the years of Rhodesian rule, those within the national boundaries were time-locked, in that ideologies that were not right wing and Christian were not permitted to permeate the borders. There was strong media censorship and this affected the cultures developing within the national boundaries. I would say, in general, Rhodesians were stuck in the time of about 1949*. Then suddenly the national boundaries were open to the media and other influences. "Modern" ideas began permeating in, albeit at a snail's pace. Many white Rhodesians panicked and became converts to extreme forms of evangelical Christianity, as the American missionaries began filtering in, past the old boundaries. When I left Zimbabwe in 1894, I would have to say I could not have been less prepared for the 1980s. Our media censorship had made us unaware of how much the rest of the world had moved on.
---
* When I went back to Zimbabwe last year, I found elements of the society still hadn't moved on from 1949. For example, a pantomime I attended had as one of its jokes that Germans were very funny because they did the Hitler salute.

Western identity politics is self-serving nonsense, most of the time

2011-12-27T09:42:00.001+08:00

Jennifer Frances Armstrong
December 26, 2011 at 7:28 pm | #33
Reply | Quote
bloggerclarissa :
[F]eeling special through cultivating your individuality and achieving something to distinguish yourself is a lot of hard work. Why not create an identity around the fact that you were born with two moles on your left forearm?
It relates to the false religion of postmodernism, whereby we can all achieve inner sanctity by embracing ‘the Other” in all of his petty differences. Of course, we still get to project our horribleness onto those who are genuinely other — like the white Africans. That is the benefit of belonging to this religion.

bloggerclarissa
December 26, 2011 at 7:33 pm | #34
Reply | Quote
“Of course, we still get to project our horribleness onto those who are genuinely other — like the white Africans. That is the benefit of belonging to this religion.”
-Exactly. And that’s extremely convenient, isn’t it? The Other becomes nothing but a space where one can enact one’s own dramas and conflicts. And when that Other fails to comply, the sense of outrage is huge.

Jennifer Frances Armstrong
December 26, 2011 at 7:40 pm | #35
Quote
bloggerclarissa :
“Of course, we still get to project our horribleness onto those who are genuinely other — like the white Africans. That is the benefit of belonging to this religion.”
-Exactly. And that’s extremely convenient, isn’t it? The Other becomes nothing but a space where one can enact one’s own dramas and conflicts. And when that Other fails to comply, the sense of outrage is huge.
Yes-and unsurprisingly, it is a form of imperialism –only now enacted on a psychological level, rather than in broader physical terms.
It’s interesting that the black Zimbabweans, whom white (but not black) Westerners require to hate me, rarely do anything of the sort. Most of the time, we are quite chummy. This shows they are not fulfilling the postmodernist, Western agenda for me.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Lies that serve a psychological purpose

2011-12-27T09:14:00.003+08:00

Lack of knowledge about other countries is very common in the West. Distorted perspectives often serve domestic political purposes — also psychological purposes. The portrayal of white Zimbabweans as self-indulgent racists who lived high on the hog has a powerful psychological benefit for most Westerners, in that it makes them, as other beneficiaries of Western imperialism, seem more tolerant and less racist in their own eyes. After all, they never left the shores of Western countries to exploit any blacks. The lie entailed in this sentence should already be evident. However, projective identification is an extremely intense psychological mechanism that overrides empirical fact and reason. If one has the need to believe that others are more evil than you are, so you can diffuse your guilt, you will believe this no matter what.

Evidence is not so important. The need to get rid of an intolerable psychological burden is what counts. Hence, most Westerners have illusions about their identities — and about their morality.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Sparring with Mike Elliot a long time ago

2011-12-26T18:14:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Looking back, with gratitude

2011-12-25T18:03:00.007+08:00

It's time to celebrate the past, to look back on it with gratitude, a sense of transcendence and relief.

I'm very, deliriously happy. All my life I'd been seeking a level of self-understanding that I finally have. I realized how definitively I'd achieved it yesterday, as I moved among my relatives and family with their newly sprouted children. I could relate to nothing that was happening and yet I didn't feel like going mad.

Now I have achieved the monumental task of self-understanding. I realize how from an extremely early age -- around the age of three -- I had developed the ability both to wholly embrace aspects of reality and to shut aspects of it out that would have hindered my development. For instance, I erased from the realm of meaningfulness my father's wartime temperament. I shut out emotional complexity in relationships, demanding that all relationships should be simple. My relationship with my father was very distant.

This strategy gave me an excellent childhood: I was one with nature.

This continued. As a teen, I went to all all girls' school. At this stage, life was also relatively tranquil and unhindered by any sort of incident apart from my mother increasingly worrying that I was isolating myself by spending too much time with horses. I suspect her fears had more to do with sexuality than sociability. She did not explain them to me at all.

I didn't lack for anything, as a young adult in Zimbabwe. Even when my father became increasingly hostile to me as a developing young woman, this didn't phase me as deeply at it might have -- rather, it heavily underlined the distant nature of our relationship. It felt like grave injustice to be treated in a harsh and arbitrary fashion. I can't say I was personally hurt by his erratic and alarming attitudes.

This all changed when my family migrated to Australia at the age of fifteen. After this, there was less scope to roam and more uncertainty. I became much more dependent on my father and his car, to get me to those kinds of places that potentially held interest to me -- the rural areas, where horses and the space to roam were. I eventually got a bike and road the two and a half hours out to see the horses. These trips helped me to reduce my level of distress in a setting where very little of either the Australian culture, environment or people made any sense.

The suburban setting was truly hideous. It didn't appeal to my sense of aesthetics, which were adjusted to appreciation of the African bush. I found the fashion to be garish, like a clown and counter to my appreciation for a cool, military aesthetic. I began to idealize what I'd lost. Mostly it was in terms of the aesthetic, but also I had the feeling that life as a whole had been on a firmer foundation before. Now, it was far more fragile, frivolous and cheap. (This was the mid-eighties, so commercial values ruled the 'culture'.) I did what I had always done -- I attempted to weather the storm, whilst waiting for change.

Change of the sort I felt I needed simply didn't arrive and I began to feel alienated. I had internalized just enough of this culture of individualism to reach for such a term. I couldn't understand it. I tried Christianity and reading the Bible -- but that only made everything so much worse. The more it didn't resolve my problems, the worse I felt. After three or four years of Christianity not working, I gave it up.

I couldn't fit into the culture, but I didn't feel any pain in this. The distress I felt was in not being able to roam freely through the environment, perhaps on a horse.

It gradually dawned on me that I lacked all sorts of normal competencies in terms of Australian society. I conceived that I had to develop my knowledge-base, or I would never be able to resolve my sense of being lost.

Once the pursuit of knowledge became my project, I worked on it tirelessly. Everything I did or experienced had to serve the purpose of enhancing my knowledge. I simply had to know what had been denied to me. Gaining knowledge was the project of my salvation and in its service, just about anything would be justified.

Conservative norms were as far as could be from me, in my hot pursuit of knowledge. I didn't find much companionship among liberals or leftists, however, since they had been trained to view me with a cynical eye, as I was a colonial type, who was deemed to have "fled" Africa. They occasionally upbraided me for what they considered my "expectations" that I should be given any understanding or respect, after having escaped the punishment that was awaiting me "back home".

It was leftists and liberals, above all, who made it impossible to culturally adjust.

My father's attitude didn't help either. My mother and father were always on the lookout for sexual impropriety -- which I was not capable of, because nothing in my environment really turned me on.

I lived many years in extreme "alienation".

I'm very happy now, all the same. I've managed to achieve a few "rites of passage", I know who I am and I approve.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

More on what is wrong with contemporary identity politics

2011-12-25T11:27:00.008+08:00

In order to fit in with postmodernist politics, we all have to subdue ourselves by adopting a masochistic mode, in order to hear the views of “the Other”. If we do not adequately subdue ourselves, we will not hear the message that this “Other” wishes to impart, and thus we will remain within the realm of moral un-edification, having only ourselves to blame for not being more spiritual.
The blindspot of postmodernist theorising is that it doesn’t allow for the fundamental aspect of the nature of power, which is that power does not wait for permission, or understanding, in order to come into being -- and once power relationships have come into being, stopping to police them is already too late. At best, identity politics acts as a palliative for those who are suffering from a particular identity. Its analysis is not deep enough, not historically founded enough, to take into account how reality might actually be altered.
In practical terms, postmodernist theorising is the idea that time should be frozen and that we should all stop and wait, before being given permission to express the kinds of identity that would be morally elevating to all concerned. (This is, for instance, the kind of identity Hugo Schwyzer has decided feminism is.)
Yet, there is no need for feminism to embroil itself in any kind of morality play. It shouldn't have to argue that it is beneficial for others -- such as men. My identity has become feminist because I have thrown off belief in patriarchal postures. Whether this is later analysed as a good thing, or viewed as being helpful to others, is a secondary issue at best.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

From last year's horse safari

2011-12-23T17:17:00.006+08:00

(select image for larger display)

I'm in the middle. This eight day safari is known as the "explorer" safari, which involves nights out in the open and long and daily rides of 6 hours or more past thorn trees, over rubble and up and down river banks. Prior to this safari, I hadn't ridden much since I had had left Zimbabwe in the mid-eighties, aged 15.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Gender politics and gender identities

2011-12-22T15:40:00.001+08:00

Danny:
I don’t think [contemporary identity politics is] a matter of freezing time but rather having only their own life time to measure what they call a “hard life”, “easy life”, etc… And (if I understand you) making history over won’t do good because that would only bring back the those things from the past that would actually make life harder.

JA–Well do they want a hard life or an easy life? I think that is much of the problem. They don’t know. It’s important to figure that out in one’s mind, otherwise one won’t be able to obtain what one wants. In my case, I’ve always wanted a rite of passage. I couldn’t quite formulate what I wanted for many years, but I finally obtained what I wanted through a process of experimentation and elimination. Now, I’ve effected that transition to the other state of being. I’ve been feeling wonderful for months. It took me many years, but I've achieved it.

Danny:
True. Things have gotten better in comparison to how people were as relatively little as 60-70 years ago. And of course that’s a good thing. The problem is those “old ways” are still in effect, namely the damaging ones. If I were to have a son and daughter 10 years from now sure those two would have a much greater chance at being able to exist outside the boy/girl gender binary that my grandparents were stuck under. At the same time there is still a chance that they will still have those expectations floating over their heads.

JA—In some ways, things have become worse. I grew up with a tremendous amount of freedom and very little policing. I used to get around on horseback. I fell off numerous times, got lost quite far from my home, and once my horse fell on me.

Danny:
True this does happen but what I’m thinking is more like, “I’m a masculine entity. But don’t presume that there is a standard definition of ‘masculine entity’”. Which brings us to…

JA—Well then you need to make sure to communicate to whomever you are with what you understand by your own identity. Make it plain. Don’t expect people to mind read.

Danny:
For me I’ll admit that masculine is pretty loosely defined for me and is mostly tied to the male body I have. Now as for why that necessitates respect I say it does in the sense that I have my own masculine way and (as per not identifying me solely in terms of identity) the fact that my way may not match your way is not reason enough to disrespect me. (Mind you if I were doing something damaging…)

JA—but that is all too much in categorical terms to be much use for any kind of human relationship – which was my original point. To illustrate it a bit more, I have a lot of strangers coming up to me on Facebook and addressing me in a way that implies we are already on very familiar terms. These people are relying very heavily on traditional constructs of masculinity and femininity, whereby I’m expected to respond in a generic way, that is “as a female” per se, and not as my self. Obviously, I have no use for these kinds of conversations or relationships. If these same people had tried an approach that took into account my individuality, we might have got somewhere. So — I see very little point in being reliant upon categorical identities. You are biologically male and that is irreducible. Work with it. Don’t try to set a category around it for stabilization. That will fail – mainly because it is impersonal and dehumanizing.

Danny:
Yes individualism is going to play a role in parsing all this stuff. I agree that life will not be as hard as in the past when the gender roles were more rigid. But obviously that doesn’t mean we should just not bother trying to loosen them up right?

JA—”Individualism” isn’t an entity. Humans are individual entities. There’s a world of difference here.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

On gender roles and the past

2011-12-22T13:39:00.005+08:00

Danny :
What do males want?
As for me I want the freedom to express masculinity in any (reasonable) way I wish free of people constantly trying to police me.
Well that’s the thing — and this is emblematic of identity politics as such — people want to stop time and kind of make history over, so that everybody has an ideal set of relationships. That’s never going to work. Sure, life was more predictable in some ways, in the past. Rigidly defined gender roles made some aspects of life easier, although life as a whole wasn’t easier in the past.
We all want to express ourselves without others policing us. We have a society more like that today than the one in the past. Believe me, I COME from the past, so I should know. In the past, everybody had their allocated place in society, and this couldn’t change. Everybody knew how to talk to you, because they were addressing the position, not the person.
Identity politics seems to be appealing to this olden days state of affairs when it demands of others: “You need to address me as a ‘masculine’ entity. Okay, now! Go ahead and do it!”
Well, we are on modern terms these days, and there is no way I can address you solely in terms of an identity. I’d need to learn more about you, first. What makes you tick? What is it about you that is particularly ‘masculine’ — and in what ways does this necessitate that I respect you?”
All the questions become a little more nuanced, under the force of individualist psychology. Perhaps this makes relationships harder, for some people. In general, though, life will never be as hard as it used to be when rigid gender roles were enforced. (You only have to look at some of the war movies I’m fond of viewing, to see that ‘masculinity’ was largely impersonal and self-sacrificial, in the past, for the majority of men.)

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

On meaningless concepts

2011-12-22T10:31:00.002+08:00

December 21, 2011 at 8:08 pm | #28
Reply | Quote
bloggerclarissa :
I think that “authenticity” is a completely meaningless concept.
Jennifer Frances Armstrong
December 21, 2011 at 8:30 pm | #29
Reply | Quote
I have a tendency not to read philosophical positions very literally. I now discover that they can be read very literally and that perhaps this is the way most people read them. For instance, I bought a book on new age shamanism when I was writing my thesis. I’ve never considered this to be a particularly good book by any means. I was interested in the way it contextualized certain shamanistic motifs. I did not read the book as a whole, but to pluck these motifs out of their nesting place and refurnish them into my own world view.
Nowadays, presumably because my social sophistication has increased (this is something quite apart from my intellectual sophistication), I realize that most people do not read books this way. A book like the one I’m referring to would more likely be read as giving very definitive solutions to the world’s problems. It would probably be seen, by most of its readers, as authoritative and proposing a well-defined system of action.
This goes to show that I don’t read books in a very normal way. I pluck things apart so that the original meaning (in the book) because something else, perhaps more useful, within my head.
Likewise, concerning the word, “authenticity”. My understanding of this term derives from objective sources, such as Sartre and other fine fellows. But, it doesn’t have their meaning. It has my own. I could explain that meaning. That would mean to explain my philosophy. Or, I could not explain it.
I think if a concept has become meaningless, then words have also become meaningless.
It may be meaningful or not to make them meaningless.
One would have to know what you mean?

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

On self esteem

2011-12-22T09:56:00.003+08:00

The truth cannot be set in stone. Much of what may seem to be a lack of self esteem on the surface of it can be an indication of its presence. There are many situations and relationships I avoid because I have self esteem. Yet, on the surface, this can look like avoidant behavior.

How one looks can serve as a form of self defence. My face has a totally different structure to it, these days, than it did in my youth. In some ways, the layer of facial musculature is a mask. It freezes and solidifies my general disposition. It doesn’t reveal subtle shifts so much, anymore. In another way, I wear my authenticity on my face much more clearly these days, than twenty years ago. Authenticity and the mask are one.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My martial arts goals

2011-12-21T13:56:00.009+08:00

My physical conditioning -- it's all come along, as you might be able to gauge from the couple of photos below (taken from today's fitness session). This improvement is only to be expected: I've been improving all year, although in 2011, I haven't regularly pushed myself beyond a certain comfort zone. This leisurely pace of my development has been by design, as 2011 was nominated as the year where I would tie up many of the loose ends of some very complicated mental process which produced my intellectual wealth.

Back to matters of training: It's a sure sign of success that I no longer feel the kind of acid burn I used to. When I was about half my age, I used to get a lactic acid burn after punching the bags for several minutes. Now, I can go for 45 solid minutes at a very strenuous level. More than that -- I feel I could keep on punching the bags indefinitely.

My health is fine, apart from errant hormones. My blood pressure reading was 104 / 64, after training and a glass of white wine today, for instance.

I now plan to do a martial arts exam -- termed "grading" -- around March, so I need to undergo mental (rather than purely physical) preparation. Physical preparation for a grading is nothing compared to developing mental endurance, which can only be achieved through doing many rounds of sparring in one session.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Boxing for fitness class 21 DECEMBER 2011

2011-12-21T11:41:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The impersonal bedrock of shamanism

2011-12-20T15:52:00.003+08:00

I've mentioned this before: there are many aspects of Western culture that on the basis of my personal experiences, I simply don't "get". A significant one of these is that personality is something akin to a delicate flower, and that one therefore ought to have great tentativeness when approaching the personalities of others, along with due concern for the fragile manner in which these manage to develop.

Don't get me wrong: this is not meant as heavy-handed right wing railing against delicacy or personality as such -- I'm not even of that political persuasion and I don't have a moral judgement to make about how others view themselves. Pressed for a view, I can only offer that a very refined personality is marvelous in some cases, but less so in others. In all, difference of this sort does not have to have a moral flavor. It's better to simply recognize that there is a difference here. On the one side are those who, having been brought up in a highly individualistic culture, have very complicated layers to their personalities. On the other side are those like I -- who, having been brought up in an impersonal culture -- have a very solid and simple bedrock as the base of my personality.

I've no doubt as to who I am. This may seem as paradoxical as it is true: having been accepted wholly, and unreservedly by others, who grew up alongside me in my impersonal culture, I'm secure in a base level state of impersonal feeling and sensation. Indeed I'm overjoyed if all that I experience is my existence. Brer Rabbit's famous briar patch is greatly to my liking. Moreover, I rarely if ever feel like I'm losing something of myself if I return to the consciousness I associate with impersonal camaraderie, or with closeness to nature.

I'm sure this condition of the mind is qualitatively different from that most commonly experienced by many -- Many, certainly, but not all. For, Mike and I, who were both brought up wild in rural settings, are of the same type. City dwellers, who are often less disposed to shamanistic experimentation, marvel at the fact that we met online, moved in together the same day that he arrived from overseas and now have been together for ten years. No question at all: our arrangement would have been impossible had either of us lacked substantial measures of either self-awareness or maturity.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Some counter-intuitive features of human psychology

2011-12-20T12:34:00.003+08:00

Human psychology is very strange, indeed the more I learn about it. Repression, for instance, is a very strange mechanism. I had previously supposed that one would be able to somehow mentally sense when one was repressing something. I know I can sense it physically in some ways, because I start to feel bottled up and my body erupts with various minor symptoms, indicating that not everything is in its proper order. I had thought that mental repression must feel the same way, which would be more in line with physics. One would have to have the sensation of pressing something down mentally, in order to effectively repress.

That turns out not to be true at all. Repression doesn’t feel that way. One can empty one’s head of very much that would cause concern and have ideas that are generally nondescript. My blood pressure gauge registers this mode of behaviour as severely stressful. By contrast, I would have assumed that to think about stressful ideas is likely to raise the blood pressure. However, my blood pressure gauge registers focusing on what is bothering me as the lowest stress activity of any. From these home experiments, I now understand that trying to distract oneself from whatever produces anxiety may not feel stressful, but causes a huge amount of stress. It’s better simply to register that one is stressed.

Likewise, humans have another weird faculty for projective identification. Anyone who projects a negative identity into somebody else will not feel stressed by this action. They’re losing a burden on their psyche. Meanwhile, the person whom they’ve projected the nefarious identity into will feel tremendous confusion and anxiety. Western liberal ideology, although alleviating of stress to Western liberals, has caused me enormous stress throughout my life. So much that they've disliked about themselves as Western imperialists, they've seen fit to project onto me.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Identity and choice are ideologies.

2011-12-20T09:27:00.003+08:00

As per the post below, my upbringing until my mid teens was training for a severe form of impersonal conduct. Although originally British, my culture had merged ideas with those of traditional, African culture. To this extent, what stood out in life, in terms of overall meaning, was "the tribe", whether white or black, and not by any means the ideas, goals or aspirations of individuals.

I did not by any means consider myself an individual. Rather, I experienced the inexpressible fact that I was part of a historical movement of people defined by a time and place. As such, "choice" was --and remains-- an alien idea to me, to the extent that I think someone must have something tricky up their sleeve if they are framing anything in that way. My practical options were limited. They came down to how I would spend my 20 cents in the supermarket. Everything else was a product of necessity and tradition. No opportunities emerged to make choices on a larger scale.

For me, the most alien component of Western culture is the idea that my identity is a feature of my capacity to make choices. I don't hinge that much moral importance on the ideology of choice. I express my "choice" in two ways, fundamentally. Either I engage with you, or I withdraw into my default mode of impersonal relations. I'm much more comfortable not to engage too much with others on a personal level. I have found it very difficult to translate an often impersonal standpoint into terms that express "personal choices". There exist many fanatical ideologues who express the attitude that one ought to always be in the mode of making and defending choices, in order to fulfill ones moral obligations in the world. I find that very exhausting -- not least because it involves translating an impersonal stance into one that seems more personal and "chosen".

Having relinquished this project of trying to adapt myself to Western culture, I feel much the better for it.

I do make choices, but they are much deeper than those to which the ideology of Western individualism would lend its credence. I decide not to participate in any abusive relationships, no matter what the cost is to my finances or to my credibility. I decide not to participate in an ideology that has no intrinsic meaning to me -- that of individual "choices" and how they are supposed to form one's identity. I can't become a Western educator, because I disagree with this fundamental tenet of Western culture. It has a false feel: I cannot represent it.

My capacity to be impersonal is very high, on the other hand. It's linked to stoicism. I have the innate capacity to switch off energy that would otherwise flow to personal concerns. I enter a state where neither wakefulness nor sleep preside: I enter this state of psychological hypothermia, whenever this world becomes too stressful. When this happens, I can immediate focus much more clearly on practical concerns using abstract thinking very efficiently.

A highly impersonal state of mind is my primeval lair: I withdraw into it in order to recover from whatever afflicts me. It's a natural mode of being into which my mind regresses when I've had enough.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My upbringing may have been different from yours

2011-12-20T07:36:00.007+08:00

I'm learning a great deal from Clarissa's blog about aspects of behaviour that one can consider socially normal. Even though Clarissa is from the Ukraine, quite a large part of her ideas about social normality have more in common with people from U.S. culture than mine.

Many people assume that my upbringing must have been generally "Western", because English is my first language and because I am white. Surface appearance belies the significant underlying differences, however, which permeate my psychology.

To aid others to understand these differences, let me outline a few of them that may differ from contemporary Western values and ideas.

1. I was not brought up to think of myself as having a discrete identity and personality that had to be recognized in its own right. It's not that anyone would have denied that I had a personality of my own. It just wasn't accorded any value as such. My personal characteristics were not viewed as a sign of future success or failure in life. Rather, physical characteristics (and to a lesser extent, academic aptitude) were considered markers for this. Overall, very little attention, if any, was given to the consideration of my -- or anybody else's -- future prospects.

2. Sturdiness -- particularly as represented in the character of the soldierly white male -- was very much lauded in my original culture. If someone fell sick in any way, they were hurriedly ushered as far as possible from center stage. It was a huge social shame to have anyone who didn't conform to this ideal of sturdiness in one's family. Also, sexual transgressions led to this enactment of defense against the exposure of the family to social shame.

3. Christianity was synonymous with moral decency. Everybody was nominally a Christian, unless they were morally indecent. Islam was considered a morally indecent religion.

4. I had no sex education in school and I didn't understand the fundamental mechanisms of sex until way into my late teens (and even then, it was rather hazy and didn't bear thinking about).

5. As a female, I had to suppress my anger as female anger would worry and unhinge my father. Male anger was okay. My father's lid would burst every so often and he would express very high levels of rage -- but never in a way that we found coherent.

6. I never had any trouble with socialization in any of my Rhodesian (later "Zimbabwean") schools. That is because socialization itself wasn't really an issue. The thing was to mingle and to go along with others. This was more in the mode of external action, rather than in terms of understanding others' viewpoints. In fact it was assumed that everybody thought the same, so there really wasn't anything to discuss.

7. Everyone felt that "fate" was something you had no control over. Events just happened to you and one situation moved into another. There was nothing you could do about that and nor should you bother to try. Everything that happened to you in life was simply inevitable.

8. The survival or death of anyone around us was part of life's inevitability, which didn't bear thinking about too deeply.

9. Women were considered incapable of doing sports as vigorously as men -- although Zimbabwean sportswomen competed very effectively at an international level. At levels lower than international competition, women were considered to be a little anemic -- sometimes incapable of exerting themselves too much.

10. All people were very formal and polite. Foreigners were labeled as outsiders by means of jest and sometimes even treated with censure if they were deemed to be lacking in "class". One had to show good manners in order to be accepted within the society.

It would be hard to overestimate the levels of repression that my right wing culture imposed, along with the degree of being impersonal.
It’s why when anybody says, “You’re trying to draw attention to yourself by doing X or Y,” I see they really don’t understand my original culture. They think it’s all about walking around like a Nazi and bloating one’s ego and being all racially superior. But we had no concept of individualism at all, and only a formal (not all that subjectively felt) concept of racial superiority.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around, because that is not the Western depiction of the Rhodesian culture.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

on the meaning of sickness in my former culture/s

2011-12-20T06:40:00.001+08:00

In my original culture, being sick was hardly rewarded. Rather the opposite was the case. My culture was very right wing and only valued anything that was sturdy. Even right down to the underlay of the (black) African culture, being sick was more a sign that one had been dabbling in witchcraft than anything that deserved pity. The most common response directed at someone who had become sick was anger that they had betrayed Christian decency. That is why it is hard for me to imagine any trade offs for illness.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The logic of shamanistic healing

2011-12-19T09:44:00.003+08:00

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 18, 2011 at 7:42 pm | #21

Reply | Quote

bloggerclarissa :
“Except that maybe the person hasn’t considered that there is any other way to be [and therefore remains sick].”
- Of course. But this all hinges on one’s desire to change things.

It does. But in a sense one just has to move ahead blindly, because the new way of being hasn’t been mapped by the current neurological structures. I mean, one is locked into the old way of being by force of habit and by the innate conservatism that we all possess to some degree. We choose “the devil we know” rather than the one we don’t. That’s an evolutionary adaptation.

Shamanism proposes that you need the courage to move ahead out of this existing structure of mind. It also recognizes there is a sense of blindness to all this moving and fumbling one’s way out of the morass.

STAY SANE AND

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 18, 2011 at 8:14 pm | #23

Reply | Quote

bloggerclarissa :
-Embracing the blindness is scary but also liberating, once you dare to do it.

It’s what shamanism has over other methods of therapy: you leap in at the deep end and heal yourself. Authoritative interventions can often confuse and mislead as much as they are capable of assisting.

SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Chronic fatigue and women's rage

2011-12-18T17:37:00.005+08:00

1. This post is a response to http://clarissasblog.com/2011/12/17/how-pill-guzzlers-theorize-their-identity/

I had the same condition during my twenties. My solution was to realize how much aggression I had turned inwards. Women — especially in right wing or religiously informed cultures — tend to unconsciously model themselves on the ideal of passive suffering as a form of sainthood. It’s an unconscious tendency. You don’t know you’re doing it. The body gets overheated and run down because all the energy that should be directed at the world is locked inside the body with nowhere to go. One should be sublimating this aggression by establishing one’s identity in the world, but the unconscious mind is determined to lock one into passive sainthood.

That was certainly my condition and there is no doubt in my mind that the illness was physiological. There is a certain point where you can’t simply “snap out of it”, because you’ve ruined your physiological health with this ongoing misdirected (and entirely unconscious) aggression.

The solution is to bring the aggression out of you in some way, very gradually, whilst working to develop a healthier self image at the unconscious level. The difficulty is that many would resist the idea that they harbored unconscious aggression. I had no trouble facing this insight as I have a very innovative mindset (which I had also been repressing).

A person with chronic fatigue needs to face their anger and aggression about the behaviour of significant people in their lives, as well as their anger about significant life events. They need to gradually develop ways to use anger more productively, to release that pressure that has already built up in their bodies. This has to be a long term goal, as the body literally needs to recover from all the abuse you’ve imposed on it in the long term, when you remained passive and submissive to events that had filled you with rage.

2.

Somebody asked how one gets rid of any internal build up of aggression. I learned a lot about human character structure from Nietzsche. That’s how I understand that, unbeknownst to myself, my character structure had become masochistic. I accepted everything without getting angry. I was very angry about having to emigrate from Zimbabwe, but I had no idea. I never expressed any negative emotion about anything. I was perfectly controlled. Nietzsche uses such terms as “physiologically inhibited” and mocks those who do not understand that life is not lived on the basis of unconditional compliance to social norms. Rather, “Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.” Anyway, this extreme level of self control seems almost the opposite to what most people are struggling with today, so it makes it very difficult to offer any advice. I do advise reading Nietzsche, though, if you want to try to figure out psychology.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

with an angular knife:

2011-12-18T13:03:00.002+08:00

http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/03/want-to-feel-younger-more-open-magic-mushrooms-trigger-lasting-personality-change/

Above is an article depicting much of what I have also found as a result of my intellectual research on the intersection between literature and shamanism. This kind of impersonal ego, or indeed "egoless" experience (as per the article), was a fundamental part of my experience until about the age of 15, when I emigrated from Africa to Australia.

The impersonal, mystical or detached aspect of experience is the core part of my identity. As such, I revert to it when under stress. The more stress I'm under, the more detached I become. Ego matters less and less at that point -- and, thus, I see the world more pragmatically, in terms of its whittled down structures.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Wilfred Bion versus Jacques Lacan | STAY SANE AND SAVAGE

2011-12-18T12:14:00.000+08:00

Wilfred Bion versus Jacques Lacan | STAY SANE AND SAVAGE

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The post with no point

2011-12-17T12:01:00.003+08:00

I’m starting to reflect on how unreservedly wonderful my childhood was. I was never bullied. By Western standards, occasionally the teachers were too harsh, but I didn’t feel it. Unlike people here who have trouble sleeping, I’ve never had trouble switching off from the kinds of problems that do not need my active mental engagement. My default reaction is set to switching off and going to sleep. When I’m fast asleep, no kind of noise awakes me. This kind of switching off sometimes means I don’t engage emotionally. When I emigrated to Australia, at 15 I decided the society and culture were fully meaningless and so I didn’t engage with these for many years. I also had no existing experiential or intellectual inroads into it. Anyway, after ten years or so, I began to work to enhance my emotional sensitivity, since being switched off was the opposite of nourishing. In many ways, I’m coming at reality from the opposite direction to most people — from a state of insensitivity to one of greater alertness.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

What is "Intellectual shamanism"?

2011-12-16T13:25:00.006+08:00

Without the artifice of the form of logic we often mistake for "common sense", much of human experience would appear in a state of flux. We overestimate humanly constructed realities, often largely as a result of individual and group psychological projections, which serve to solidify flux into seemingly reliable, moral facts.

Group psychological projections can do both good and harm, since we ascribe positive or negative meanings to otherwise ambiguous actions depending on our prior dispositions which are historically generated and therefore more arbitrary than human neurology finds it comfortable to accept.

Shamanism is a means to get below normal neurological patterns of thought, which is why those whose normal human consciousness has been "wrecked", either by traumatic experience or shamanistic drugs, can often resurface from their descent into the underworld of the mind with remarkable insights into humanity.
STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Nietzsche and "moral responsibility"

2011-12-16T07:34:00.004+08:00

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 15, 2011 at 5:31 pm | #44

Reply | Quote

Patrick :
In his defense, if it hadn’t been for the crisis, Person A’ not being a star likely wouldn’t matter – so, in that respect, he is a victim of circumstance. What separates him from the rest is that he didn’t use it as a crutch. And he took concrete actions to improve and prevent.

Having totally moved out of any kind of moralistic mode of analysing the world, as a process of doing my PhD, I can no longer relate to the conceptualizing of any part of reality as “a crutch”. It seems to me that one only needs an excuse in the face of a hostile parent figure who demands that one account for oneself. In the absence of such a figure, the concept of a crutch has no meaning at all. The concept of “whining” about anything also has no meaning. For instance, who would one’s whining be heard by, should one engage in this activity? Unless it is heard by some omnipotent being, it would serve no purpose at all.

Even if we remove the conceptual mode one step away from this quasi-religious perspective, the metaphysical attitude of making oneself a “victim of circumstance” still makes no sense. Nietzsche’s view is to get under the way that grammar shapes our consciousness, so that we see that there is no moral universe — even though language itself would tend to bind us to a moral perspective.

The way reality works, according to Nietzsche, is actually different from the way language lures us into thinking. “Free will” is a phantom of language. In Nietzsche’s view, there is neither ‘free’ nor ‘unfree’ will. There is only the measure of energy and power stored in you as an individual, which has the apparent expression of “will”.

Taking it down to a more concrete level, Person A obviously had a lot of this force stored up within him, so he pressed through and came out on top. This sounds a little like I’m choosing deliberately unfamiliar language in order to make the same point that language compels us into making — that is, that Person A had more “free will” than others. I don’t mean to say that at all. Rather, the accumulation of historical energies of different sorts — and not just Person A’s individual excellence — all led to this positive outcome. To make it even clearer: that is to say that the leftist point of view, that historical forces can either hold us back or propel us forward, is also relevant.

The point where Nietzsche’s point of view differs from that of a typical liberal is in the sense that it acknowledges that even if history has “held you back”, the universe does not care one iota. It doesn’t owe you anything. Also there is nobody to complain to about that. The very perspective that “whining” or “having a crutch” are morally meaningful is undermined.

STAY SANE AND

Also, Nietzsche is much more beloved of the right than of the left, because his philosophy naturally lends itself validating those who want to trumpet their successes. It doesn’t see failure as an “excuse” or even particularly meaningful. On the other hand, one can also draw some leftist principles from Nietzsche’s views as I have done.

SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

stuffs.wmv

2011-12-15T15:27:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Do we "consent" to being oppressed?

2011-12-15T08:01:00.001+08:00

Accepting psychological oppression is often a compromise made by the ego to avoid a sense of being completely annihilated. Sure, such a compromise position is a weak one and as such it is undesirable. I will give you an example. My father grows up to understand, believe or sense that his adopter father abhors him. This realization is so terrifying that my father develops an alternative explanation: his adopter father actually loves him very much, but is treating him in a harsh and rejecting manner “for his own good”. In that case, the harshness and rejection is just an expression of supreme love, which has a different surface appearance from what one might have anticipated. Consequently an expression of hatred is actually an expression of love.
This is an obvious lie when stated in this way, but my father told it to save his ego from shattering. The “reward” for accepting this oppression of fatherly hatred was the salvation of the ego in a more general sense.
This is just one level of oppression — a psychological one — where “consent” isn’t really a question of choice but of survival.

On a material and more practical level, there are many cases like this one.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Towards a human ideology

2011-12-15T06:44:00.000+08:00

Both left and right embrace identity politics, which means they overlook the human in the human. As for education, I would be considered on the right, although this makes no sense these days, considering what both left and right have become. I believe in better communication about what the standards are one needs to aim for. Describing standards more carefully and reinforcing them does not hurt my feelings. I’m also prepared to do that for others.
As for “taking responsibility”, I think everybody on the spectrum of politics is confused about what this means. The right reinforces harsh sounding words, terms and conditions, without having any idea of what their application would look like. This fetishises harshness, but with no meaning. The left avoids harsh sounding words on principle — once again with a blithe disregard for practical results — which is to say, meaning and content.

bloggerclarissa
December 14, 2011 at 4:38 pm | #25
Reply | Quote
“This fetishises harshness, but with no meaning. The left avoids harsh sounding words on principle — once again with a blithe disregard for practical results — which is to say, meaning and content.”
-Exactly! I couldn’t agree more.

Jennifer Frances Armstrong
December 14, 2011 at 4:41 pm | #26
Reply | Quote
Also, it should be mentioned that the society I come from was conservative through and through. People were thoroughly blamed for a lot of things — not so long as the economy prospered, but when things went wrong within the system overall and individuals left the country in droves. After that, individuals of all sorts were blamed for anything at all. The overturning of the far right government by a communist regime meant that the right wingers began to seek for an enemy “within”. Women and children, who were by definition “weak” seemed to fit that description well enough to serve the purpose of bearing the brunt for what had gone wrong.
The right wing view about personal responsibility is as mystical as any left wing view that everyone is innately good.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Trust YOU. (I may not like you or have much to say to help you!)

2011-12-14T14:17:00.006+08:00

I'm certain that a fundamental reason why my view on shamanism is not viewed more seriously is the old patriarchal evaluation: "Women who write philosophy are not to be trusted."

Certainly my views could be a result of my womb wandering and leading me to be being deceived (The traditional view of male philosophers). It could be that Satan has tempted me away from the true path of Judeo-Christian ideology.(The traditional view of male theologians).

All the same: I'm not asking you to trust ME.

Shamanism is about learning to trust yourself.

Not external authorities, who think they know what's best.

Just you, all by yourself.

Do you have what it takes to embrace your own self-understanding?

Can you come out on top?

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

and, yet another thing: shamanism

2011-12-14T08:35:00.007+08:00

Social and economic systems determine our norms, as Deleuze and Guattari point out. Under Capitalism, it is normative to direct much of one's libidinal energy towards trying to appear in the others of the others as having "interesting" qualities, that make one stand out from the crowd.

My philosophy of life points in the opposite direction.

What I still find startling and original are not those who are Baroque. Perhaps one would have to do as I have done and experience shamanistic regression through all sorts of animal and primeval stages, to discover that the everyday human being is the most extraordinarily interesting thing. We should regain our capacity to marvel at this strange fact of being human.

This is my attitude to life: It's the basic assumption I bring to my memoir: How would an average person respond to the kinds of events I depict, in order to survive?

Being able to embody a human shape -- that is being physiologically normal, is a miracle.

This is not to discount the possibility of being more (or, indeed, less "interesting") in other people's eyes. Yet to try to become more "interesting" in one's own eyes leads to losing one's grounding in this basic human state of being. This is because "interesting" has no essential or unchanging value, but rather shifts and changes according to others' libidinal desires. More profoundly, I have always found it much more interesting to fully embody one's reality, than to search in an outward direction for a sense of approval.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Deleuze, Guattari et moi

2011-12-14T07:50:00.003+08:00

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

I do agree entirely with this from Deleuze and Guattari. " Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field."

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

On environment and character development

2011-12-12T11:54:00.002+08:00

As an adult, I developed a great hunger to know and experience more than I had known. Be that as it may, trying to learn from people who had not had my much earlier range of experiences proved to be very bad indeed. I finally concluded that we were not even speaking the same language-that our notions of reality were very different on the basis of our very different childhoods. For instance, for me childhood was a revert impersonal time, where my most direct relationship had been with the natural environment. For most others, it seems their childhoods were times of dependency. If I assert that this impersonal state of mind is at the root of my being, people who have been brought up to experience the world purely in personal terms think that I’m trying to make myself over all “special” (and in a deeply personal way), whereas nothing could be further from the truth. I’m simply recognising that it is fairly easy for me to divorce myself from public opinion. But I can’t even express something as basic as this without people presuming that I’m trying to court public opinion by making myself seem different from others.
STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Freud and Jung

2011-12-12T11:01:00.002+08:00

Jung’s emphasis on archetypes represents his most radical departure from Freud. Jung has the idea that there is another force, perhaps a third force, apart from parental authority, that can shape a child’s development. In a way he reifies the childish imagination and refers to the dialectical process between imagination and concrete being in terms of archetypes. This makes Jung’s approach much closer to shamanism than Freud’s approach is. Whereas Jung has at least three dimensions to his thinking, Freud’s seems to have only two. Whereas Jung sees the third force in terms of mystical experience, Freud’s theoretical position would seem to default to pathology.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My philosophy of life

2011-12-12T08:37:00.005+08:00

My philosophy on life was largely formulated during my childhood upbringing during a time of war. It has been confirmed and consolidated in adulthood, despite the different paths and approaches I have attempted.

1. I have low expectations regarding rationality. I was not brought up to anticipate it or work within a rational system during childhood. During adulthood I have noticed that what seems to be rational behaviour on the surface is really just an arbitrary imposition of social order, without any deeper meaning than that.

2. I find verbalisation of positions and attitudes to be ultimately tiring. I became very tired of it towards the end of my PhD and found reprieve at last only in the realm of the non-verbal. To me, being out in the bush or practicing martial arts is non-verbal activity.

3. I don't see the task of humans as being anything related to reproduction. I actually can't relate to this by any means, which is why school teaching (bringing up the next generation) is out of the question for me. My deeper feelings are that there should not be a "next generation" and that humanity should end here.

4. I have an aesthetic attraction to certain severe regimes or training systems. Living in a place like Sparta would not be inimical to me. My happiest dreams are to be in the company of like-minded Spartans.

5. Happy and fortuitous dreams are when I go down to the beach to face enormous tidal waves. They crash over my head and leave me in one piece: I am always fine.

6. I don't find harsh experiences to be all that bad, but rather "interesting". When I mention difficult experiences, very modern people wrongly assume that I must be complaining. This makes for a grave misunderstanding. What I'm more likely to be saying is that life has much texture for me and is very interesting.

7. I can't even begin to understand those who go through the various stages in life and allow each stage to "happen" to them. I can't understand people who suddenly find they need to get married or are with child. These events befall them at a certain age and they don't question them. These milestone issues I have questioned through and through.

8. I have the idea that if others believe they know what is good for me and how I should be treated -- for instance if they feel I ought to be converted to religion for my "own good" -- then I also have the right to treat them randomly and capriciously, according to whatever I might be feeling on the day.

9. I devalue verbal meanings and communication, whilst observing underlying attitudes and behaviour.

10. Deep down where it hurts, I think identity politics are systems of manipulation and self-deception: nothing more, nothing less. I distrust those whose first method of communication is to try to relate to me on the basis of their views of my identity.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The physicality of feminism

2011-12-11T08:53:00.003+08:00

I value non-verbal methods of teaching and relating over verbal means, especially these days. I suspect a lot of people don’t know what “the next step is” because of the ways in which they inhabit their bodies, which is in a mode of withdrawn paralysis. Martha McCaughey’s Physical Feminism seems to go part of the way to alleviate this mindset. It’s still not enough, because people turn the full contact self defence itself into a ritual and a fetish. This implies that they still expect their transformation to be done to them as relatively passive objects. The point is to break down this inner need for approval and carry the acquired momentum through into all aspects of one’s life.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Mister No and "passive voice feminism"

2011-12-11T07:22:00.006+08:00

The active voice often works better for rhetorical purposes, however I don’t think the use of the passive voice necessarily indicates that one is trying to hide something. Freud has been very instructive in this. Consider Dora, who was held to be projecting out her sexual fantasies into the world, no matter what she claimed about the disturbing events that were literally taking place around her. For Freud, she was masochistically fantasizing because she wanted to “get some”. For reasons such as this, I’m convinced that the active or passive construction of a sentence doesn’t make any difference very often, in terms of convincing those who have set up barriers against understanding (of feminist issues, for instance).

Our prime minister, Julia Gillard, is absolutely brilliant at framing things in a concrete way and going for the jugular, rather than casting vague aspersions. Instead of saying the leader of the opposition has a slimy, patriarchal attitude and is only motivated enough to take a negative stance to anything the government proposes, she refers to the leader as Mr No, or somebody who writes the book of No.

This reference is much more memorable and gets the point across, without expecting the observers to understand the misogynistic dynamics at a deeper level. It also puts the opposition on the defence, which is always far better than trying to justify oneself to an incredulous audience.

QUOTE:”Being tagged as Mr No in charge of the ”Noalition” has scratched Abbott, probably one reason his personal ratings are poor. Still, negativity has served him pretty well. As time goes on, however, the trick is to stay tough without sounding narky.” http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/mr-no-puts-a-positive-spin-on-a-year-of-negativity-20111210-1ooj4.html#ixzz1gB1VAeGn

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My philosophy on writing (and what a good reviewer should know)

2011-12-10T12:31:00.003+08:00

My sense of ethics leads me to a different approach to knowledge than that which is typically Western, which is why I am such a good teacher of non-Westerners. (The same attribute probably makes me poor at communicating with those who have developed a very strong Western line to their thinking.) I am averse to telling people what they ought to think or what attitudes they ought to have in interpretation. When I write anything, I desire that people should draw their own interpretations rather than looking to me for “the right one”. (Part of me even believes that producing a thesis statement defeats the purpose of writing, which should be to carry the reader along with you to the point that they draw their own conclusions in a way that is meaningful in relation to both affects and logic.) If they try to alight upon “the right” answer — usually an interpretation based on input from a received authority — this inevitably produces a wrong or offensive-sounding interpretation. Readers shouldn’t be fighting the writer to understand or oppose their world view. They should develop ways to go with the flow so that they fill the shape that is the writer’s mind.

I could teach people to write good essays, but I don’t feel that a conventionally good essay is all that good — at least to the point of being something I would like to teach. Rather, writing a good computer programme serves this logic of essay writing better than writing essays in English. I’m either for or against positivism — but not much for this mid-way land which requires a being for and against discrete propositions. The Eastern way is more for an epistemological holism that doesn’t separate emotion from logic, but relies upon phenomenology.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Training

2011-12-10T11:07:00.003+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Projections and comparisons

2011-12-10T08:26:00.002+08:00

One of the things about those brought up under colonialism during my time was that we had an extremely high level of education, but we generally underestimated it and assumed that people in the more industrialized countries must be more up to date and in the know. In some ways this was true. Our educational system was strictly disciplinarian and old-fashioned. We also had the idea that knowledge was objective — including that is was capable of being objectively measured and ascertained.

The writer I studied for my PhD generally aimed his books way over his readers’ heads and seemed unable to do otherwise. My memoir, similarly, makes the same mistake.

I have to tell you, it was a weird realization that I was projecting my intelligence into the kind of people who are brought up write poor essays. We don’t normally entertain the view that there are broad social and cultural blocs of consciousness that form “identities” in relation to other broad blocs — but now I am sure this is true.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Jennifer F Armstrong

2011-12-09T16:05:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My father's memoir: Chapter 2

2011-12-08T18:19:00.002+08:00

That beetle and I had lots of adventures. I've a movie of it with just married scrawled across it in lipstick.   A 'present' from my best man, Jeremy brooks.   Jeremy and I go back to kindergarten. We both started on the same day, a rainy day as I remember it. We were queuing up to get our government issue gill of milk.   It used to come every day and it used to go off. By the time we got it, it was usually sour.   Some young tough started to push me around, a problem I had to the end of my school days.   I had no idea how to deal with it, but Jeremy just flew into him with arms swinging like a windmill, then finally wrestled him to the ground. After that, he went away. Jeremy was at my side for many more adventures.

One day, my father said to me, I have to take you to the dentist.   I as six years old.   Dad used to go to work on a bicycle. He went up the road on a bicycle and parked his bike and got a bus.   My dad was one of those Victorians who believed that hardship was good for the soul and I had to sit on his cross bar while he pedalled up the road.   There was a vacant block of land behind our house, that had a kaffir path winding its way though it.   There we are. It had just stopped raining, me sitting fearfully on the crossbar, trying to avoid my dads knees, which were pumping up and down on the pedals as we sped along with the winding path.   Dad made an error of judgement somewhere and both of us and the bicycle ended up in the mud. It had just finished raining.   So we walked back home and dad decided we would get a lift with athol tiffen, who agreed to take us to the bus stop.   We got off the bus at the appropriate place and I found myself in Salisbury general hospital.   Somebody in a white coat pushed me towards an open door and I'd had a few experiences with people in white coats before and I decided I wasnt going through that door, so I clung to the door frame.   My previous experiences were usually injections.   Every holiday we all had to be inoculated against the parasites of Africa, to a formula approved of by the British empire-without which you couldn't cross the border or get into school. The yellow Fever injection was put into you with a huge needle like a knitting needle.   Eventually they overpowered me by brute force and I was dragged onto a couch, where a voice told me that what was about to happen was painless and just like going to sleep.   Then something was out over my nose that smelled very bad. Everything I could see was swirling around in circles.   When I came round, everyone was saying comforting things like, everything's alright, and my mouth was very painful.   They used a mirror to show me big gaps where my teeth used to be and a lot of blood. I think in those days they used to grab you, get a pair of pliers, hold your tooth and just twist it.   What i left out is I had an inspection by the school dentist a few weeks earlier, and everyone was responding to this report.

Life was like that. Then athol came and took me home.   I can remember sitting in the car, feeling that I'd been violated.   But from then onwards going to school was all much of the same.   There were always things going on.   I used to go to school on my fathers bicycle as well.   I did eventually they my own bike, but I had been considered a unsafe bet for riding a bike.   This was because when Charles needed to sell his bike, he brought it around and I was put on it and told to pedal- which felt very unsafe to me as I knew nothing about balance and steering and landed up face down in a patch of Christ thorn. Charles decided that the problem was my feet wouldn't reach the pedals, so wooden blocks were fixed to the pedals.   It was many years before I finally taught myself to ride, practicing mounting within my mothers reach.   I put my foot of the pedal and I pushed the bike along to achieve some momentum, then swing my leg over the saddle to get on.   But once I learned how to do it, I would ride round and round our garden until boredom got the better of me, but we had a big garden of five acres, so I didn't really get bored.   Still,nobody was game to let me cycle to school, in case one of my swerves caused me to end up under the wheels of a bus.   This doomed me to dad's cross bar and the bus. We used to ride to somebody's house and leave the bike in their front garden and catch the bus to school.

My father was all for pushing you into doing things as was was my mother to tell you the truth.   Mum was old school and robust.   She could endure a great deal and was always lecturing me not to let things get me down.   But this also led me to distrust her. If I asked her to teach me to drive, she would put me in a car and tell me what to do without understanding how much I really understood.   For example, she would put my feet on the pedals and tell me one was the accelerator and the other was a brake.   But I didn't really understand the meaning of the word accelerator - or brake.   When we finally got trundling down the road, she would start yelling "brake"- but I didn't really know what she was saying, which would lead to our raised voices and frustrations.

To this day, I am horrified of being put in charge of something where I don't really understand the controls, such as the time my uncle started a lawn mower, a self propelled lawn mower, and told me to push it order the grass.   After the mower had been through his prized flower bed and the mower was taken away from me, all these incidences culminated in my mother's mind to convince her that I wasn't mechanically minded. This heavily influenced what job I could take. I wanted to be a farmer but this was cancelled before I got off the ground because I wasn't "mechanically minded".   I'm much more mechanically minded now.

Mother was very conscious of practicalities. After a happy holiday, where I'd spent months fishing and I suddenly decided I was going to be fisherman, she hurriedly dissuaded me from this.   Whether I'd have been able to earn my living, I have no idea, but I know that was the only time I really looked forward to doing something with my life.

My dad decided he wasn't an authority about my future and that he'd better get one in, so he had in his office a highly qualified education specialist. His name was Brady. Dad handed me over to his tender care. My Brady talked to me for about an hour and a half and decided that I needed to be an architect.   So when this was put to my dad, I remember him sitting behind his desk and telling someone in his office what the finding had been and remember telling this other chap that this was expensive and he would only be able to do it once and he really wanted to send his own sons.   To say i was hurt was an understatement. This all needs some explaining.   We need to go back really early.

Around about 1940, all the men were enrolling in the forces and rushing off to war.   My father decided that Hitler was a bad guy that had to be stopped. He became a navigator on a Catalina aircraft and was killed soon after. The first my mother knew was when an RAF lieutenant presented himself at the door and told my mother.   She just couldn't soak up the information. I would have been about six months old. Various relatives also didn't believe it. One was Harold, who said he was still alive somewhere out there somewhere, which left my mother in no mans land. She wrote to the airforce asking for his things, which did eventually rock up because I saw them. They were his uniform, medals, his razor. I've seen these, so I know they must have come, but it didn't soften the blow.   People had been collecting the national war fund for some years and this money had been added to by a grant from the state lotteries.   But because of the uncertainty about my father, my mother became very pale and anaemic. This went on for many years. I don't know how many as I was a baby.   She became very ill from stress.   The doctor put her on a tiny dose of strychnine.   It pulled her out. She gained weight. My mother was always lecturing to me that what doesn't kill fattens.   This period of time really toughened her up.

My real father owned a studebaker, a royal blue one.   My mother used to put me in the back of this thing and we'd go. I can see myself leaning out of the window and putting greasy fingers on the paintwork.   She also used to take me out in it when I couldn't sleep.   At this time, we were living in forts flats with my grandmother and my aunts, yvonne and olga.

Around this time, all the daughters and my mother decided to get married.   My mother married jack Armstrong and I became an "adopted" child.   My new father reminded me of this on frequent occasions, which didn't make for security.   An early experience brought this home.   Soon after we moved into his house in greendale, which he had built himself, which in those days in Africa meant employing Africans who thought they knew how to build. The house had a steep pitched thatched roof and numerous extensions.   It was cold and drafts and insects came in, while lizards used to run along the walls.

One morning, I told my mother I needed to do a wee-wee. She told me to go through a particular door. This turned out to be the toilet door. I had only just started living there. My father happened to be in the toilet doing his own wee-wee. He slammed the door on me. The last image I have is of this tall, shadowy man with a big penis, squirting into the toilet bowel as the door slammed -- and a feeling of rejection.

I complained to my mother but she simply said that's alright, wait until he's finished.    My mothers misjudgement on the painful experience meant that i didn't trust her judgement.   Nothing really came out of that, just a sense of distrust.   I learned not to trust anything in life but to analyse every situation down to rock bottom. It basically means you're learning to fight for yourself and you've got to learn to fight for yourself.   Me against the world. That continued for many years.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The more they ape, the more I stay the same.

2011-12-08T09:05:00.002+08:00

Upon reflection, it is probably the permissive nature of society, reflected in the self esteem movement in counselling, that is responsible for giving rise to the “solution” of the harsh use of censure in “therapy”. In other words, I am suggesting that maybe the “therapist” is trying to medicate himself by means of such “therapy”.

I read in the book by Otto Fenichel that people sometimes find a permissive society very oppressive because it makes their morality more and more refined and hair splitting. So the imposition of an external imperative can come as a relief.

This may well be the case with many people today. Their neuroses are caused by a lack of moral standards, rather than having too much of one.

My case is, of course, the opposite — or has been until very recently — since the society I was brought up in was extremely authoritarian. Consequently, I don’t need anyone to act the big moral arbiter in my face. I don’t find that kind of pose radical or refreshing – not as someone might who has experienced a permissive society all their life might find it.

Rather, such an attitudinal posture returns me to much older coping methods. I can revert to these in a flash because, after all, I had achieved a very effective level of adaptation to my old, authoritarian culture. One puts up an emotional shield and says less. One saves one’s energies for any ultimate confrontation or show down. It is better not to speak too soon or show one’s hand.

I am extraordinarily well adapted to that method of behaviour, since it was ingrained in me since childhood.

Also, punishments that involve ostracism or having my nonconformity “noticed” don’t seem to bother me, since I have always cultivated an extremely high level of independence.

In short, and what I have taken the long road to saying, is that therapeutic techniques that might have been designed to give an overly sensitive/effete contemporary person a helpful kick of the buttocks do nothing like that for me. This is mostly because I anticipate the behaviour. I find it stereotypical of authorities — but apart from that, it doesn’t communicate much.

2.

So it is clear now that my issues had always been my repression of my rage, due to my extremely authoritarian upbringing and that trying to treat this kind of condition in a liberal democratic culture is near impossible, even if the background to it is thoroughly explained. People lack both the imagination and the cultural bridge to make any recognition of the actual issues possible. Part of the problem is that words have a different meaning in a different culture. For example, when I have used the word, “emotional”, I have often meant it in terms of something I had wanted to attain in order to overcome my previous repression. Yet in this culture “emotional” has the connotation of being emotionally labile, infantile and out of control. The very meanings of the words are almost the opposite to what I have wanted to convey. You would think that a sophisticated society could understand the need to transcend differences in cultural meaning, but apparently not.

3

Nobody ever “needs” more superego, because superego is a function of basic homeostasis (the ability to maintain psychological equilibrium and internal tension relative to the environment). The only people in the world who lack it are sociopaths and psychopaths.

Whenever people have assumed that this is what I’ve needed, I’ve always recognized: “I have enough self control to be able to kill you, if I have to — therefore I disdain to kill you.”

In other words, they confirm that my superego suffices me as a basic protective and self-defensive measure. I’m not falling apart.

However, someone who tries to make me feel more guilty than I need to feel is my enemy.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Victimising

2011-12-08T07:50:00.003+08:00

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 7, 2011 at 5:48 pm | #50

Reply | Quote

Z :
“Originally I had thought psychotherapy would help untie the knot of guilt and rage I had. What it wanted to do, though, was (1) emphasize these, redefine them as essential character traits, and (2) then, teach me to repress them. ”

Upon deep reflection, all my experiences have been the same. The ultimate lesson I have learned from all this: never attempt to communicate anything complex, because it can and will be used against you in the most astonishing of ways.

Most people’s response to complexity is to reflexive fear and looking for a way to cast blame on the messenger. Even professionals are capable of this to a remarkable extent. People have generally lost the skill to take a more detached stance and slowly analyse the components of a difficult situation gradually, without leaping to conclusions, quick fixes or casting of blame.

One should not communicate, then, unless one has something conventional to say.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Boxing for fitness class 7 DECEMBER 2011

2011-12-07T12:31:00.000+08:00

aggression turned inwards: a culturally conditioned state of mind

2011-12-05T09:44:00.002+08:00

Chronic fatigue syndrome seems to be linked to aggression turned inwards, especially in women. My understanding is purely anecdotal, but this seems reasonable for me to presume, especially based on my own long-term introspection (I was extremely miserable and tired in my early twenties). I know one woman from Zimbabwe who had it. I remember her build up of tension when she complained about how stressful she considered children to be. She had very Victorian sensibilities about femininity on the one hand. On the other, it was the height of the war, around 1976, when there was an influx of insurgents. She later developed extreme CFS — but this was much later, about 30 years after migrating to Australia. Her attitudes were still repressed — not expressing anger or sexuality, but keeping them bottled up under a lid of Christian repression.

Another woman who says she had this condition was one of the most formidable people I know in my martial arts gym. She is the epitome of psychological health — very aggressive and forthright. Apparently she had the condition in her early twenties, and I presume this must have been related to trying to adjust to a narrowly feminine gender role. (I’m not sure she was during any sports at that time.)

As I said, I also had the same thing and I found a way to combat it by directing my aggressive energies outward instead of inward. I had very much to be angry about. In fact I was absolutely furious about almost everything in my life, but I didn’t know it. Thus, I became sick.

Even today, my blood pressure gauge, newly purchased, acts as a lie detector test. If I say, “I am calm and will get a good reading” it always gives me an impossibly high reading. Then I recoil and state, “Okay, you got me there. I’m still very angry about a lot of things and I will list them off.” This brings my blood pressure down about 50 points, even as I am feeling angry and making my lists.
I do rather heavy martial arts training and nowadays barely raise a sweat. The fundamental difference is that I've learned to turn my aggression outwards, rather than directing in inwards, toward myself.
I have no doubt whatsoever that aggression turned inwards registers in biological terms, for instance as a suppressed immune system and having trouble sleeping. I don’t consider those findings to be controversial. They’re just what one would expect to find.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

On withholding pity

2011-12-05T08:24:00.002+08:00

My situation as an immigrant was different, due to what I symbolize. However, one of most incredible absurdities I’ve run into is also a strong feature of those who interpret identity symbolically. They have weird notions about the distribution of “pity” and about whom it is morally right or wrong to distribute their pity towards.

So, if you confront them with something rather devastating — let us say you announce, “My leg was torn off my a dragon and I’m now bleeding to death!” — they will weigh up whether this is a genuine case demanding a demonstration of their pity or whether it is otherwise.

If it is otherwise, then they will show extreme disdain, insinuating that your fate of having your leg demolished by a dragon was an absolutely necessary state of affairs, given your identity.

All pity for people being eaten by dragons with be withheld. Such pity is to be reserved for people being eaten by pterodactyls only. Also, the people who are getting eaten by pterodactyls have to be well-meaning and emaciated to deserve any kind of respect — otherwise, they too deserve what was coming to them.

This kind of an audience considers it very important that nobody should wring “pity” out of them as an expression of automatic human solidarity. That would make them less important in their own eyes as well as making meaningless their capacity to withhold their pity.

They also mistakenly believe that people being eaten alive by dragons crave their pity more than anything else in this world.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Western moral reasoning and phony toughness

2011-12-03T06:15:00.003+08:00

The problem with those who avoid facing their frustrations is their back to front reasoning and the fact that a phony toughness has gained rhetorical power in Western communities.

Many people start with the estimation, “I’m a decent person, with high self esteem. Therefore, things ought to be easy for me. But if they’re not easy, it’s because someone is making things unnecessarily complex and they have no right to do that. I will teach them a lesson.”

I think if one starts from a position of how things ought to be, rather than setting out to find out how things are, one cannot learn anything new — that is, apart from what one THINKS one already knows. The idea that the “strong” identity is fixed and never alters is part of the attitude of this fake toughness. People like this don’t tolerate complexity, because they choose to believe that anything hard to understand is the result of others “making excuses”.

It’s all very strange, but it’s philosophical idealism at work, once again — the idea that because I think I have high self esteem, the world owes me deference and should present me with no difficulties.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Postmodernism is a belief in nothing

2011-12-02T10:14:00.004+08:00

If I try to think back to my own situation of needing others' help, which was a very long time ago, the one element I was always craving — but never actually got — was simple moral support. The one form of academic training that just about undid me in terms of effectively combating any form of abuse was philosophical idealism, which was taught very strongly as a form of moral solipsism that we were all obliged to embrace in order to be properly intellectually trained and psychologically well-adjusted. The academically espoused form of moral solipsism, taught as postmodernism, really confused me more than anything else could have done. It made out that everything came down to various differentials in terms of “perceptions”, such that a negative situation ought to be resolved either by adjusting one’s own perceptions or by persuading the offending party to adjust theirs. Nothing has viciously assaulted my psyche more than this ideology of postmodernism, which is constantly reinforced by academics not matter how hard you fight against it.

Indeed, the more you fight it on intellectual and ideological terms, the more the postmodernist ideologues will tend to dissolve your arguments so that they appear to be mere psychology postures, with no ability to point beyond themselves to any actually existing reality. I can’t emphasize enough how hostile I am to this form of reasoning, with its default position that we are all absolutely free and therefore any unwanted behaviour is either subconsciously desired or a product of fantasy and “all in the mind”.

My contempt for this vapid psychologising knows no bounds.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

6 People Who Gained Amazing Skills from Brain Injuries | Cracked.com

2011-12-02T08:48:00.001+08:00

6 People Who Gained Amazing Skills from Brain Injuries | Cracked.com

QUOTE:"The floodgates opened from there. Walters would wake up every night in the wee hours of the morning with visions of art in his head, and he would draw until the sun came up. He had hated art in school, and was never any good at it, so he thought of it as a symptom. He asked his doctor what the heck was happening to him and, controlling his urge to tell Walters that he was possessed by Casper the Friendly Drawer, the doctor instead told him that after a stroke, the brain can rewire itself to avoid damaged areas. Usually, this rewiring causes things like personality changes, but in Walters' case, it gave him the insatiable urge -- and the ability -- to draw. The doc told him not to worry, that this was likely just temporary. Boy, was he wrong."

learning self defence, mma, leg locks

2011-12-01T17:15:00.001+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Fun self defence: kicking from the ground

2011-12-01T14:46:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

demo_leglocks.wmv

2011-12-01T14:17:00.000+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

turtle.wmv

2011-12-01T14:16:00.001+08:00

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism