Costner Complex
White Messiah Fantasies Go Native, Dances-With-Wolves Style
Outsiders entering Indigenous communities may harbour ego needs and secret fantasies of a Dances With Wolves nature. A harmless delusion, or destructive psychosis?
Messianic Fetish
A lot of foreign workers entering Indigenous communities think they're going to be like Peekay in Bryce Courtenay's "Power Of One". They secretly fantasise about being a chosen one, a white messiah, a Dances With Wolves hero come to save the natives. I call this the Costner Complex.
Disillusionment
The problem is that they usually don't have the time or capacity to create any real change. They also find out that Aboriginal people are human, with human weaknesses, rather than the noble and spiritual beings they have been fantasising about. Bitterness and disillusion follow, and this of course affects their capacity to deliver any kind of effective service in health, education, etc.
This is when deep subjectivities begin to emerge. Within weeks a person can transform from a woolly-headed liberal to a mean-spirited bigot. But paradoxically, the Costner Complex remains. They blame their inability to morph into messiahood on others, and begin spending most of their time playing political games to undermine other workers.
Impact On The Community
Their energies are usually directed towards people who actually do have the capacity to affect real change. This is because if somebody else comes along and succeeds where they have failed, it means that their own inadequacy was the cause, rather than the dysfunctional community or the "system". So it is suddenly very important to Costner Complex sufferers to sabotage and attack any person who is enjoying success.
I've seen so many good people (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) demoralised and forced out of Aboriginal communities, their great programs destroyed, because of systematic bullying and abuse from groups of Costner Complex sufferers.
It is for this reason that I firmly believe the condition to be a principal factor in Indigenous community dysfunction and the failure of foreign organisations to deliver any kind of improvement to address the horrific human rights violations that continue to plague our people.
