Humour, swearing and sex demystified

So complete has their denial been that resigned humans don’t have an everyday word for the denial or evasion that they practice day in and day out—apart from the swear word, ‘bullshit’.

Page 450 of
Print Edition Resigned adults are always talking about training people to think when the truth is that resigned adult minds are primarily concerned with training their minds to avoid deep, meaningful thought. They are full of denial, ‘full of bullshit’.

Swearing is a powerful tool in that it tears through all the ‘bullshit’ or ‘crap’ that resigned adult life is full of. The truth is resigned adults are ‘up to here in it’. They are so ‘full of it’, it is a ‘fucking joke’.

The origins of humour have never been able to be properly explained, but once it is understood how false humans are, the source of humour becomes overtly apparent. For the most part, adult humans maintain a carefully constructed facade of denial but every now and again they make a mistake, ‘slip-up’, and the truth of their real situation is revealed, providing the basis for humour. When someone falls over, for instance, it’s humorous because suddenly their carefully constructed image of togetherness disintegrates.

From time to time situations occur where the extreme denial, self-deception, delusion, artificiality, alienation becomes apparent and transparent, and in these moments the truth of the extreme falseness is revealed and seen for what it really is; so farcical it is funny, in fact a joke. On a more serious scale, when the extreme hypocrisy of human life is revealed, it is a ‘fucking joke’, ludicrous and appalling. The words of Tracy Chapman’s 1986 song Why? acknowledges the extent of the hypocrisy in human life: ‘Why do the babies starve / When there’s enough food to feed the world / Why when there’re so many of us / Are there people still alone / Why are the missiles called peace keepers / When they’re aimed to kill / Why is a woman still not safe / When she’s in her home / Love is hate, War is peace / No is yes, And we’re all free / But somebody’s gonna have to answer / The time is coming soon / Amidst all these questions and contradictions / There’re some who seek the truth / But somebody’s gonna have to answer / The time is coming soon / When the blind remove their blinders / And the speechless speak the truth.’

To understand why ‘fuck’ is such a powerful swear word we only have to acknowledge the truth of what sex really is. As has been explained in the first section of the previous essay, ‘Bringing peace to the war between the sexes’, while sex at its noblest level was something that marvellously complemented the human journey, and as such has truly been an act of love, it has nevertheless, at base, been about attacking innocence (which women represent) for innocence’s unjust condemnation of humans’ (especially men’s) lack of innocence. ‘Fuck’ means destroy or ruin, and what is being destroyed or Page 451 of
Print Edition ruined or sullied is innocence or purity. Such was the horror of the human condition; while humans were unable to explain their lack of innocence they had no choice but to use denial, retaliation and oppression to hold at bay the unjust criticism they were having to endure because of their divisive state. Sex has been such a preoccupation of humans and yet everyone lives in denial of the truth that it is at base an attack on innocence. This makes sex one of the biggest lies and thus jokes of all, which is why using the word ‘fuck’ is such a powerful attack on the world of lies, and thus such a powerful swear word. Swearing is one way to be honest, one way to tear through all the denial, a way of admitting humans are living in an ocean of dishonesty.

In one sense the civilised state, which requires that humans avoid swearing, was marvellous because it made life bearable by concealing the ugliness of humans’ extremely false condition, but in another sense it made life unbearable because it hid the truth of humanity’s extremely false condition. The importance of civility depends on your position; do you want to contribute to the maintenance of the lie or do you want to relieve the world of its lying?

The following comment about George Gurdjieff, a Russian philosopher who took on the world of denial, supports the civilised position: ‘In his writings he used both humour and vulgarity to stimulate man’s awareness of his own unworthiness and these “weapons” often detract from Gurdjieff’s reputation as a serious philosopher’ (Gurdjieff: An Approach to His Ideas, Michel Waldberg, 1989).

Prophets adopt the position of relieving the world of its lying, and in doing so they are typically raw, defiant and irreverent—uncivilised. As it says about the defiant personality of prophets in the Bible, ‘zeal for your [denial-free] house consumes me’ (Psalm 69:9 & John 2:17). As was mentioned earlier, prophets were ‘warlike’ rather than saintly, capable of being both sensitive and tough. They have to be sensitive enough to access the true world of the soul and tough enough to defy the all-dominating world of denial. Kahlil Gibran was quoted earlier as saying, ‘Jesus was not a bird with broken wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked wings. He feared not His persecutors nor His enemies. He suffered not before His killers. Free and brave and daring He was. He defied all despots and oppressors. He saw the contagious pustules and amputated them…He muted evil and He crushed Falsehood and He choked Treachery.’ In a tirade against the intellectuals of his day, Christ said, ‘You snakes! You brood of vipers!’, repeatedly Page 452 of
Print Edition adding, ‘Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites…you, blind guides!…You blind fools!’ (see Matt. 23).

In the Resignation essay it was mentioned that I and the World Transformation Movement have been persecuted because we have dared to confront the issue of the human condition and in the process demystify religion. We intend to document this persecution at the conclusion of the legal actions we have taken against it in a book provisionally titled The Attempted Assassination of the WTM: The Denial Tries to Reimpose Itself. The main persecution involved an Australian current affairs television program, broadcast in 1995, that included private WTM video footage, used without permission, that showed me swearing liberally. I am not defending the public broadcast of such swearing because I view it as unnecessarily offensive to people not familiar with my unevasive paradigm, and in a radio interview the day after the program was aired, I publicly apologised. However within the WTM, where people understand what I have explained here about the honesty of swearing, it is justified and in fact a necessary tool for introducing an honest world. There are so few honest aspects of our evasive world, that I make use of any that are available.

For me, swearing signals to those listening that I am not party to the hypocritical world of denial. Many young adults in their late teens and early 20s find relief from having the false world torn apart, for having just left the pre-resigned state where they could see the world was utterly false, they are still resistant to adopting the artificial, monstrously egocentric resigned adult world of lies. In opening up the issue of the human condition my fundamental task is to defy and expose the world of denial. I have to shatter the delusions and artificialities of that world.

R.D. Laing was a prophet who regularly used swearing to ‘shock…the established order, the fool living in ignorance of his own ignorance’ (R.D. Laing A Biography, Adrian Laing, 1994, p.133 of 248). The following is one sample of Laing’s use of swearing, and he is using it to emphasise just how corrupted, and dishonest about being corrupted, humanity has become: ‘How do you plug a void plugging a void? How to inject nothing into fuck-all? How to come into a gone world? No piss, shit, smegma, come…[etc], will plug up the Hole. It’s gone past all that, that, all that last desperate clutch. Come into gone. I do assure you. The dreadful has already happened’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.153 of 156).

Carl Jung was another prophet whose ‘language, which could be just as earthy as it was poetic, when he was roused in this profound regard was Page 453 of
Print Edition worthy of an inspired peasant, and words like “shitbags” and “pisspots” would roll from his lips in sentences of crushing correction’ (Sir Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.220 of 275).

Even the great Australian educator and prophet Sir James Darling was not averse to using strong language as this quote from a journalist who interviewed him records: ‘Indeed; Darling’s lengthy conversations during my visit revolved from intense thoughts on God, Socrates, Jung and the unconscious, to a joke with the copulating adjective rousingly pronounced’ (Janet Hawley, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend mag. 19 Nov. 1988).