Why Our Politicians Are Witch Doctors
Comanches, Coriolanus, and hard times
Blinded by ease—We are told that progress, science, enlightenment, and justice define our age, and that we must fight to keep them. The problem, we are told, is that we do not have the right leaders to accomplish this mission.
But my hunch is it may be impossible to find the right leaders because of these virtues. It is a striking paradox: most of our politicians can be tribalistic voodoo artists immune to suffering the consequences of their decisions because we live in the age of progress, science, enlightenment, and justice.
I study pre-state peoples not because I think we ought to live in mud huts and become polygamous. I do so because comparing their modes of life to our own is remarkably useful in diagnosing our times.
We have much to learn from their leaders in particular.
The Warriors, the Wise, and the Witch Doctors—The warrior held a place of esteem in every culture across the globe. They had a reputation for the large number of enemies they killed and their mastery in building coalitions for war parties. We might say about a warrior, “I would follow him in hard times.” What is said of the Dani of New Guinea applies to nearly all pre-state peoples: “No man becomes a leader who has not proven himself in war: on the front lines, facing the spears and arrows of the enemy; or on the flanks where the dirty war is fought around bushes; or in raids.”1 Warriors were (and are) necessary but insufficient: if they were the only leaders we had, our species would have ended in a sweaty skirmish in the savannah.
It is significant the warrior was usually offset by one of the wise. They formed an elegant balance: aggression and restraint, killing and healing. The wise old man or woman was not listened to simply because of their age, but because of their boots on the ground life experience and the transferable lessons they carefully culled from it. The Kayapo of Brazil had a “haranguer,” a sort of pre-state Socrates: “Almost every night about 9:00, or just before dawn, an older man saunters about the central plaza… preaching to the people. Wandering from one subject to the next, he recounts myths, tells stories of the ancestors, acts out past war episodes, harangues the people about their misbehavior, and occasionally gives advice or asks for opinions from his audience (both male and female). Only certain… elders may preach in this manner.”2
But this ancient balance always included a third type of leader—a parasite.
The witch doctor preys on the meaning seeking capacity of the human mind. They offer unverifiable and yet seemingly unlimited benefits in return for perfectly quantifiable material goods or status. If you give them your favorite hunting bow, they will tell you how to cure that little cough of yours. If you sleep with them, they will ask the spirits where the best patch of cassava is hidden.
There was a witch doctor among the Comanche Indians named Isa-tai. He said he could make medicine that would render his warriors immune to bullets, even if they stood right in front of the white man’s rifles. So they went on a raid to a trading camp. Quanah Parker led the raid as the warrior and Isa-tai as the witch doctor. Sure enough, over fifteen Comanche warriors were shot dead and many more wounded in what became known as the Second Battle of Adobe Walls. When the warriors regrouped for a breather, the father of a young warrior killed in the battle asked Isa-tai why he did not walk into the firefight and save his sons corpse since he could not be killed. Isa-tai’s horse was then shot out from underneath him.
Unlike Isa-tai, Quanah actually fought—and was shot.
The modern witch doctors—They are now a class unto themselves. We find few warriors, few Quanah’s, in the political arena, and we find all too many Isa-tais. The modern warrior, if lucky enough not to be mauled in mind and body by VA hospitals handing out pills like skittles, might be allowed into the halls of power so long as they play the game right. And we find few of the wise who break into cold sweats and develop strange flu-like symptoms at the thought of running for office.
But the witch doctors are here for it. Ours is the Age of the Witch Doctor. Take Bill Clinton: I will not raise taxes on the middle class. And George W Bush: We do not nation-build. And Barrak Obama: We will close Guantanamo Bay. And Donald Trump: We will build a great wall along the southern border and Mexico will pay for it. And Joe Biden: You will not see people lifted off the roof of the United States embassy in Afghanistan, it is not at all like Saigon. It is telling that Clinton, Trump, and Biden each had more than one draft deferment to get out of fighting in Vietnam. Trump and Biden each had five.
They never knew war, and yet they could send the greatest war fighting force the world has ever seen into combat. They had no flesh and blood experience, and yet they could forever alter the lives of millions of the born and billions of the unborn with the flourish of a pen. They will never suffer the consequences of their actions, and yet they could… the list is too long to go on.
And so the least worthy are given the greatest power.
Easy times and the witching hours—So why are there so many witch doctors at present? Maybe the better question is why would there not be? We no longer live in mortal environments that weed out the witch doctor. Our leaders have nothing to prove physically, for muscle, skill, and courage are irrelevant in the industrial age and mocked in the digital age. They can also be narcissists; in fact, they must be, for no one else can handle being called Hitler or Mao or some other mass-murderer with a shrug and a wink as if it were all a good old fashioned game.
From another angle, our day to day life is now so abstract that we can no longer know everything that happens like the Dani or Comanche did. It is therefore harder to call bullshit when bullets can, in fact, break the skin. Many people are numbed by entertainment, technology, and drugs. They can only be reached with fantastic promises of free things given by flamboyant personalities. Not the flamboyancy of an Agamemnon who actually fought in his own wars, but of a Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, or Trump who—like the medicine man Isa-tai—would never.
When we ended hard times, we ended the conditions that forged the strong and the wise. And so progress, science, enlightenment, and justice gave birth to the supremacy of the witch doctor.
The witch doctor is the captain now—That the witch doctor exists is irrelevant; that there are always those who will follow them is significant. For how many people just want to be left alone? How many want to discover their physical, emotional, and intellectual limits, and savor every single second of their lives on this beautiful blue orb to the maximum?
It is hard to tell, but it may not be that many. It is no wonder he who promises the world is believed with blind faith. The witch doctor obeys the laws of supply and demand like everything else. My point is they only exist because enough people want them to exist.
What then are we to do? Are we condemned to wait for a World War or a Civil War to weed out the mystics and make way for war leaders? Are we fated to watch opposing political parties demonize each other until our countries burn to the ground, and out of the ashes come wise Socratic matriarchs?
We may be.
To bring this hammer of nonpartisan sacrilege fully home, my sense is the greatest danger is not merely a blind faith in a political tribe. It is a blind faith in any government whatsoever. A different path may be walked. One that transcends the leadership of the warriors, the wise, and the witch doctors altogether.
Coriolanus points out a path—
‘To brag unto them “Thus I did, and thus!”
Show them th’ unaching scars, which I should hide,
As if I had received them for the hire
Of their breath only!’
I have admired Coriolanus, flaws and all, since I first read Shakespeare’s tragedy in a one-man tent during a winter warfare training trip in Alaska. I had a beaten paperback and I read it by the light of my headlamp. I committed violence to it with ink and dog-eared pages. Plutarch’s biography which Shakespeare based his play on is even better.
In war, Coriolanus was unbreakable—not by the sweet smell of days old sweat under armor, the fire-lit faces of his enemy with their backs against the wall, the ego boost of awards and victories, the strangely satisfying feeling when societal norms are thrown out of the window, the scars of swords and spears, and the never to be forgotten sight of human eyes transitioning from life to death.
In politics, he was just as unbreakable. Unwilling to say whatever it took to gain power, and unwilling to kneel, bow, or bend to those who were. He held his leaders to task as aggressively as he held himself to task. He was a Roman who fought the enemy Volscians with blood-visioned boldness, and when Rome was no longer what he fought for, he fought the Romans with the same ruthlessness.
He rejected the terms of both. We all obey a law, whether cosmic or terrestrial. When the only law left was that of witch doctors, Coriolanus made his own law. He was sovereign. (Except, apparently, when it came to his mother, but that is a different matter that adds credibility to my point rather than negating it.)
What, then, is the revolutionary act in our Age of the Witch Doctor? I believe it is to walk our own path—to become a law unto ourselves. For if we do not govern our own souls, the witch doctors are tripping over themselves to govern them for us.
We can ask: “What would Coriolanus do?” Would he live by his law whether crucified or deified? Would he learn to live among the witch doctors without falling under their spell? Would he script his own code within the walls of his skull no matter the apocalyptic insanity taking place around him? Would he dance between the spectacle of this outer madness and his inner solitude and fight with passion and joy all the same?
Thank you for reading. If you believe more people would find value in these ideas, please leave your thoughts below and share this essay far and wide.
Heider, Karl G. The Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West New Guinea. Aldine Publishing Company, 1970.
Werner, Dennis Wayne. The Making of a Mekranoti Chief: The Psychological and Social Determinants of Leadership in a Native South American Society. 1980. PhD dissertation, City University of New York.
This appeals to one of the main questions in life, what is our purpose? We ought to follow our north star, our values and morals, and follow them without straying. Or summarily, we ought to develop self-trust, in that we will walk our own way virtuously and resiliently!
I like this Sam, but I’m thinking there’s a broader scope to the witch doctor role — that of a shaman and intermediary to the spiritual realm — that is important and sorely lacking in our society. As you describe them, our politicians certainly don’t fill it, that’s for sure at least. Need to noodle on it.