Recently a student asked a good question: if I seem to prioritize autonomy and freethinking, how do we reconcile this with our admiration and study of traditional culture?
Firstly, we'll never represent anything but permanent convalescents: we're not a candidate for traditional life. Secondly, there are advantages to dwelling in this wasteland, despite the immense risk of psychosomatic collapse.
To be a medicine man is embrace isolation, to lean into an idiosyncratic relationship to oneself and the environment. The traditional initiation rituals make it abundantly clear: you must exit the boundaries of tribe and taboo in order to acquire shamanic power. The medicine man is supposed to be the only realized individual among many relatively unconscious unbothered people, who have no need of the anxiety of individuality. The medicine man undergoes the extreme duress of wandering outside the protection of the psychic circle, letting the neurosis come crashing down, letting it peak into a psychotic moment - as they say, to reach into the spirit world and get medicine for the people.
In modernity, it's confusing: no one is fully on the inside of any circle, there is no tribe, and as a result everyone's in the middle of a botched shamanic initiation. How far they've made it along that path, depends on their resilience and the degree of isolation experienced early on - such that most of the people you meet have adapted themselves around the necessity of precluding and aborting this initiation on a permanent basis. The more potent is this deferred initiation, the more obvious and precarious the prevention: the most prone to psychosomatic disease make the strongest medicine.
This goes a long way to explain why we feel there's so much bad faith sorcery everywhere - that modernity is riddled with petty black magic, with half-completed spells and fragmentary rituals of exclusion, no ceremony completed nor broken: that everyone feels half-in-half-out, between nightmare and birthday party - tense, paranoid, and fine.
We look back on our nomadic tribal heritage primarily to understand where and why modernity has failed - not to imitate it. Any renewal must come naturally, entirely unforced, unplanned. And it will not be us: we're only allowed faint aftertastes of that freedom from anxiety, that balls-to-bones belonging of the tribal creature. We're here to survey the damage, clear a few roads, and hum a few bars of the old songs we'll never hear.
