Shamanism has been lurking in the background of our discussions since day one, and our “jingle” is just one of us playing a shaman drum. It was high time we had an episode on it.
What is a shaman? We follow Manvir Singh in boiling it down to people who 1) enter non-ordinary states and then 2) engage with unseen realities to 3) provide a service to their community. They have long served an important role in community helping their fellow humans deal with uncertainty, and as a result crop up in pretty much every human society at some point. They tend to lead very different lifestyles to the rest of their community, othering themselves.
Is it a LARP, or do the shamans actually believe what they’re doing? It’s hard to tell, probably a bit of both. They know they’re performing a role, and the better their performance, the more they consciously fulfil the role of shaman, the more effective they are. The service they offer is not a million miles from a placebo, giving their clients the belief that they are going to get better, and like placebos the cures of the shaman are often effective. And the idea that actions, as opposed to words, can be a lie is quite a modern one. In fact putting on a performance can be self-fulfilling, since the performance helps you get into a non-ordinary state of consciousness so could just be a legitimate part of the process.
And we can see the same mechanisms at play in the modern world. There’s a lot of theatre in medicine, for example, and in hedge fund management. The best UFC fighters clearly have access to a specific state of consciousness when they step into the octagon. Catholic priests are celibate, which marks them out as different to their flocks in the same way that shamans tend to lead very different lifestyles to the rest of their community to other themselves. The big name startup founders also live bizarre lifestyles, bare feet in the office, unkempt hair, drugs, aura, and these things all inspire belief and weirdly often actually deliver results.
And this leads us to some actionable insights that will inform how we approach our jobs from this day hence.
