Intelligence and success also increase the ‘deaf effect’

One of the obstacles this material faces is the arrogance of the human mind or, more precisely, the extent of its delusion that it is not alienated. People naturally feel it is an insult to their intelligence to Page 59 of
Print Edition be told their mind is incapable of comprehending something. People simply do not believe their mind could be as deaf as a post to well reasoned and explained analysis of a subject, but that is exactly what the human mind has been to the subject of the human condition. The letter from the 16-year-old girl Lisa Tassone described how she read and digested Free in one sitting in one night. To most people who have had to struggle mightily to read my books this is astonishing but in fact it is merely a measure of their alienation, a measure of how deeply they have blocked out the subject of the human condition. Christ described the alienated situation of adults perfectly when he said ‘you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children’ (Matt. 11:25). As was mentioned, the Resignation essay explains why young people haven’t yet adopted a strategy of denial of the issue of the human condition.

Very intelligent and successful people are often the most deaf to discussion of the human condition. After reading material about the human condition they frequently do not recognise that they cannot understand it and yet I know they have not understood it because if they had they would be moved by the accountability of the explanations, or at least unnerved by its penetrating truthfulness. Time and again I have seen people with obviously high IQs and backgrounds of exceptional academic and public achievement try and scan-read material about the human condition, certain that they can ascertain what is being said and take in anything of value, but basically they absorb nothing and do not begin to know what has been said. Life in Plato’s cave became a life unto itself. Its residents lived in almost total darkness, and yet they were oblivious of their extremely limited view and behaved as if it were boundless, the only view. They acted with sublime confidence, incredible arrogance, in fact, extreme delusion. Christ highlighted the arrogant delusion that people living in denial have been capable of when he said, ‘They like to walk round in flowing robes and love to be greeted in the market-place and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honour at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely’ (Luke 20:46). Delusion/ alienation/ denial will not be ‘punished’ with the arrival of the understanding of the human condition, but it will be made visible and will thankfully become unnecessary in human life.

Adult humans are so deluded, so unaware of being alienated, that while reading about the deaf effect they very often think that, while Page 60 of
Print Edition it may be true of some people, it does not apply to them and that they are quite capable of taking in any analysis or argument. In general, the more successful and intelligent the reader, the more confident they are that they do not suffer from the deaf effect. The truth is that when it comes to denial-free, human-condition-confronting information, the more intelligent and successful are often the people who have been most able to master and refine the art of living in denial—hence their comfort and competence in the corrupt world of denial—and are thus the people most ‘deaf’ to the truth. Once again the Bible provides the most succinct description of the limitations of the sophisticated, clever, alienated mind in accessing presentation and analysis of the human condition: ‘Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a “fool” so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness”; and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile”’ (I Cor. 3:18–20 & Psalm 94:11).

In her introduction to the 1986 book, Simone Weil, An Anthology, Siân Miles recorded Simone Weil’s account of the limitation of high intelligence: ‘Simone Weil completed her last work in 1943 when at the age of thirty-four she died in an English sanatorium. Two weeks earlier she had written to her parents: “When I saw [Shakespeare’s] Lear here, I asked myself how it was possible that the unbearably tragic character of these fools had not been obvious long ago to everyone, including myself. The tragedy is not the sentimental one it is sometimes thought to be; it is this: There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion, of the specific human dignity, reason itself—and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All the others lie. In Lear it is striking. Even Kent and Cordelia attenuate, mitigate, soften, and veil the truth; and unless they are forced to choose between telling it and telling a downright lie, they manoeuvre to evade it…Darling M., do you feel the affinity, the essential analogy between these fools and me—in spite of the Ecole and the examination successes and the eulogies of my ‘intelligence’…[which] are positively intended to evade the question: ‘Is what she says true?’ And my reputation for ‘intelligence’ is practically equivalent to the label of ‘fool’ for those fools. How much I would prefer their label.” Since then she [Simone Weil] has become known as one of the foremost thinkers of modern times, a writer of extraordinary lucidity and a woman of outstanding Page 61 of
Print Edition moral courage’ (pp.1,2 of 310).

What Simone Weil has said here is reminiscent of Christ’s description of the intellectual ‘teachers’ of his day as ‘blind fools’ (see Matt. 23:17). It has to be remembered that to live in denial of the issue of the human condition was not itself foolish because to confront the human condition, and the many truths that brought the human condition into focus, could lead to madness, even suicidal depression.

Clever people find it most difficult to make any headway with the truth, their intelligence having allowed them to hide themselves from it most effectively. Intellectualism is the opposite of instinctualism in that the former has been concerned with the art of denial while the latter is concerned with God or cooperative meaning-confronting, soulful truth. To date human intelligence has largely been concerned with the art of denial, not with truthful thinking. Artful, sophisticated, evasive, esoteric, cryptic, intellectual cleverness was needed to establish, defend and maintain the safe, non-confronting, escapist, alienated state. Universities selected for cleverness—you have not been able to attend a university unless you pass exams that test for mental aptitude—not because cleverness was best at thinking and learning, as those living in denial have evasively maintained, but because ‘dumbness’ or lack of intelligence could not be trusted to maintain the denial. The truth is the average IQ or intelligent quotient of humans is quite adequate for understanding. Why a high IQ or ‘cleverness’ was needed was to deny and evade the truth. That was the real art. Universities have high IQ entrance requirements because they have been the custodians of denial, keepers of ‘the great lie’. A student had to be able to investigate the truth and talk about the truth without confronting it or admitting it, which is a very difficult, IQ-demanding undertaking. In her 1980 book, War Within and Without, Anne Lindbergh, wife of the renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh, recalled a conversation with the author, philosopher and denial-free thinker or prophet, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘The three greatest human beings he has met in his life are three illiterates, he says, two Brittany fishermen and a farmer in Savoy. “Yes”, I say, “it has nothing to do with speech—quick brilliant speech—though one thinks it has when one is young.” “Oh, yes,” he says, “mistrust always the quick and brilliant mind”’ (p.30 of 471). In his 1976 book, Jung and the Story of Our Time, Sir Laurens van der Post records that: ‘Once asked then which people he [the psychoanalyst Carl Jung] had found most difficult to heal, he had answered instantly, “Habitual liars and intellectuals”…Jung maintained that Page 62 of
Print Edition the intellectualist was also, by constant deeds of omission, a kind of habitual liar’ (p.133 of 275).

Now that the human condition is thankfully resolved, human intelligence can end its life of deluded denial, its lying arrogance, and take up a truthful, humble existence. As the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah said about the arrival of the human-condition-ameliorated new world: ‘I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty’, and ‘all your pomp has been brought down’ (Isa. 13:11 & 14:11).

Age and alienation are important factors in determining how much someone will suffer from the deaf effect. To those factors should now be added the factors of IQ and the often-associated success in managing life in the corrupt world.

What has been said about success in the world of denial makes clear Christ’s comment that ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ (Matt. 19:24, Mark 10:25).

To illustrate how those who have been successful in the world of denial are especially prone to the deaf effect we can look at the situation of someone who finds themselves experiencing the opposite of success, someone whose life is in crisis. Such people can find they are able to hear human-condition-confronting information because what occurs is that a crisis can leave a person so emotionally bereft that they abandon any pretence of denial and at that point they become open to the truth again. As Sir Laurens van der Post wrote, ‘Until war or sudden social and individual disaster penetrate our conscious defences we see only the glittering civilised and defended scene lying below and before us’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955, p.99 of 159). A reviewer of my first book, Free, obviously had no trouble accessing the book’s content when she wrote: ‘Was Jeremy Griffith struck by lightning on the road to Damascus…Such was my cynicism reading the summary…Then whack! Wham! Reading on I was increasingly impressed and then converted by his erudite explanation for society’s competitive and self-destructive behaviour. His is not a band-aid cure for mankind’s sickness but a profound thinking through to the biological cause of the illness’ (Executive Woman’s Report, 12 May 1988). When I wrote to the reviewer commenting on her ability to comprehend my book this was her response: ‘Our 12 year old son was killed in a bicycle accident eight years ago and God literally hammered on my soul and senses. Miracles, signs, phenomena were granted me because I kept open the communication lines and begged God to help me.’

Despair can shatter the carefully constructed facade of denial and Page 63 of
Print Edition make it seem pointless and immaterial. In Olive Schreiner’s extraordinarily honest 1883 book, The Story of an African Farm, there is a marvellous description of how despair can lead to the abandonment of the facades of life and, when that happens, how all the beauty—and truth—of life is suddenly accessible: ‘There are only rare times when a man’s soul can see Nature. So long as any passion holds its revel there, the eyes are holden that they should not see her…For Nature, ever, like the old Hebrew God, cries out, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Only then when there comes a pause, a blank in your life, when the old idol is broken, when the old hope is dead, when the old desire is crushed, then the Divine compensation of Nature is made manifest. She shows herself to you. So near she draws you, that the blood seems to flow from her to you, through a still uncut cord: you feel the throb of her life. When that day comes, that you sit down broken, without one human creature to whom you cling, with your loves the dead and the living-dead; when the very thirst for knowledge through long-continued thwarting has grown dull; when in the present there is no craving and in the future no hope, then, oh, with a beneficent tenderness, Nature enfolds you…And yellow-legged bees as they hum make a dreamy lyric; and the light on the brown stone wall is a great work of art; and the glitter through the leaves makes the pulses beat’ (p.298 of 300).

When the Australian bushranger and folk hero, Ned Kelly, was taken from his jail cell to the gallows and all hope was gone, he was suddenly able to see beauty, for ‘he remarked how lovely were the flowers’ that he passed in the courtyard (Ned Kelly: Australian Son, Max Brown, 1948, p.223 of 262).

The obvious fact is that the more secure a person is in their state of denial, the more difficult it is for them to ‘hear’ denial-free information.