Page 379 of
Print Edition ’Homes’ at different distances from the incinerating bonfire of truth

Until now it has not been possible to openly acknowledge the immense differences in alienation amongst humans. Everyone has been living ‘behind closed doors’ in ‘homes’ at different distances from the incinerating bonfire of truth.

According to how much their instinctive expectations of being loved and reinforced had been met during their infancy and early childhood adults have varied in their degree of insecurity in the presence of the cooperative ideals and related truths. Their degree of insecurity was what governed the extent to which they had to live in denial of the issue of the human condition.

Individual humans each established an evasive way of living that suited their particular degree of insecurity. The more insecure an individual was, the more escapist, self-distracting, superficial and artificial their lifestyle had to be. (The stages that occurred in the development of self-corruption or psychological ‘upset’ under the duress of the human condition are described, and illustrated with cartoons, in Beyond.)

There were a number of factors, in addition to nurturing, that contributed to a person’s level of corruption and therefore insecurity and therefore alienation. One of these was a person’s age. While most corruption occurred during the sensitive, formative, impressionable years of infancy and early childhood, a certain amount of corruption occurred as life went on. Corruption has been a cumulative process, both in the individual and in our species (as was explained in the Introduction, under the heading ‘The “deaf effect”: the difficulty of reading about the human condition’). The older the person, the longer they had been living with and adapting to the heroic but corrupting battle to champion understanding over ignorance. Closely associated with age as a factor was the intensity and amount of corruption encountered throughout life. A person’s level of IQ also contributed to corruption of the instinctive self or soul, for the more intelligent the person, the more likely they were to challenge their instinctive orientation to life and the faster they realised the need to adopt evasive denials to avoid depressing, unjust criticism.

A fourth factor that influenced the degree of corruption in a Page 380 of
Print Edition person’s life—and as a result the degree of falseness and artificiality that until now they needed to employ to cope—was how genetically adapted their ancestors had become to living under the duress of the human condition. Because denial has been humans’ only way of coping since the human condition emerged, alienation—with all its evasive, artificial, superficial, false, blind and cynical ways of thinking and living—has naturally become partially instinctive; there has been some selection for the ability to cope with the human condition. Those races that have been more exposed to the corrupting battle to champion the intellect over instinct have naturally become more adapted to cope with it. While it was not possible to explain the corrupt state of humanity, acknowledging differences in alienation between races and cultures—and indeed between sexes, ages and individuals—only led to unjust condemnation of the more corrupted; it led to false—so-called ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ and ‘ageist’—inferences of superiority and inferiority.

As was explained in the previous essay, corruption or upset has been replacing innocence for some 2 million years, at times through the more corrupt feeling unjustly condemned by the more innocent and attacking them in retaliation for that unjust condemnation, but mostly by the more innocent finding themselves unable to accept and cope with the new more corrupt reality, the new level of compromise of the ideals. The biblical story of Cain and Abel acknowledges this toughening process, this genetic adaptation to the compromise and corruption of the ideals that resulted from the battle to champion the intellect: ‘Abel kept flocks, [stayed close to nature and innocence] and Cain worked the soil [became settled and began the discipline and drudge of the corrupting search for and accumulation of knowledge]…Cain was [became] very angry, and his face was downcast [depressed]…[and] Cain attacked his [relatively innocent and thus condemning] brother Abel and killed him’ (Genesis 4:2,5,8).

Imagine the issue of the human condition and the related truth of the cooperative ideals of life as a bonfire, with each person, and indeed each race, constructing their ‘homes’ at various distances from that fire, wherever they found the heat bearable. A rare few could tolerate the full searing heat of the truth, metaphorically building right beside the bonfire, but most of humanity were much less able to cope with the truth and ranged themselves out from the hot flames of the bonfire accordingly. Each distance, each ‘lifestyle’, each person’s ‘home’ had its own particular way of minimising the agony Page 381 of
Print Edition of life associated with its particular degree of insecurity. Each ‘lifestyle’ also had its own particular way of trying to contribute to the human journey as much as possible from that particular compromised, corrupted position. Life for almost all humans has been an extremely difficult juggling act of having to be evasive or false to some degree but also of endeavouring as much as possible to minimise and contain that level of false, escapist behaviour.

The different states of alienation or evasion or denial meant humans have had different needs, as these sayings attest, ‘each to his own’, ‘one man’s poison was another man’s elixir’ and ‘what was true for one person wasn’t true for another’. Further, humans could not admit, be honest about or even talk about what was really going on in their own and other people’s lives. This disguise and denial is symbolised in the sketch below with each position represented by groups of houses rather than by groups of people. The deeper truth about the different states of alienation amongst humans has been hidden behind the ‘closed doors’ of their ‘homes’. Humans have not been able to differentiate between these positions ‘out from the bonfire’, have not been able to admit what was really going on in those undifferentiated ‘homes’, not even to themselves, let alone others. What has been said here makes it possible to understand ‘the Freudian notion that much of our inner life and motivation are unknown to us and that our desires, thoughts and actions are unconsciously motivated’ (Jason Cowley, Australian Financial Review, 31 Dec. 1998).

The cooperative ideal-fearing—‘God-fearing’—denial-complying, evasive state that humans have had to live in is well described in the Bible, and similarly uses the analogy of fire, where it says, ‘Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire any more, or we will die’ (Deut. 18:16). Plato also uses the powerful metaphor of fire in Page 382 of
Print Edition his cave allegory (refer to the Plato essay). So practiced did most humans become at evading the core question in human life of the human condition that today they allow virtually no confronting truth, no glaring light, to penetrate the safety of the darkness of their cave state of denial.

Resigned adults have had to employ various ways to cope with their particular encounter with the battle of the human condition. The immense tragedy of this situation was that without the ability to explain the human condition, it was not possible to explain and thus honestly defend the more evasive, dishonest ways or states of living against the criticism, express or implied, from the more innocent, less evasive and less dishonest states. That being the case, humanity was left with no choice but to accept the need to evade and deny the existence of different degrees of falseness or alienation in the world. Humans have even had difficulty acknowledging the existence of alienation—‘the dreaded A word’ as I once heard it referred to on television—let alone acknowledge that it differed immensely from person to person. A great silence, effectively denial, developed about the immense variations in the levels of alienation between people—and indeed about the extremely false state the whole human race was living in.

Now that we can explain, understand and honestly defend humanity’s corrupted state, our alienation will subside and this historic denial of who is and isn’t alienated can end. It is finally safe to confront the extent of humans’ alienated condition and the immense differences in alienation between people. In fact now that we can acknowledge the truth it is critically important that we do so; the future of the human race depends on this honesty.

The real difference between humans has been the degree to which they were alienated. What has been termed ‘personality’ has, largely, been the expression of a person’s particular state of alienation. This means that in the future when the human condition subsides and alienation doesn’t occur, people will be very similar. While our world will lose some of its variety or ‘colour’ with this loss of different personalities, the incredible sensitivity and happiness that will come with being able to access the world of our soul again will lend our lives a depth of real beauty and a dimension that we have hardly dared to dream of. Even though people have not been able to acknowledge the issue of the human condition, they nevertheless occasionally do allow themselves to recognise its existence and at that moment to Page 383 of
Print Edition contemplate a world free of the human condition. I have encountered many comments to the effect that ‘the future will be boring’ that have clearly been made in such moments. These comments are an understandable defensive reaction that people have in order to make themselves feel better about their agonising reality, yet to advocate staying in alienation, effectively remaining as dead people—with all the immense suffering that went with our estrangement from our true world and self—in order to preserve this ‘colour’ is absurd and a betrayal of all the human race has worked for. Once people understand what it will be like to be free of the human condition they will not seek to hold on to this paltry aspect of it.