Unaware of the ‘deaf effect’ readers blame the presentation

The major problem has been that people who have difficulty reading about the human condition—virtually all adults—cannot know that this deaf effect is occurring. If people knew they were alienated they would not be alienated; if we can recognise that we have blocked something out then necessarily we have not blocked it out. People living in denial are not aware that they are. The human mind, finding itself unable to absorb or ‘hear’ what is being said, and not knowing that the problem is the ‘deaf effect’, has to find some justification for the difficulty it is having. It usually decides the book must be badly written. It blames the presentation. It finds reading the material ‘extremely heavy going’ and decides the concepts must be ‘poorly expressed’, or even that the text is ‘too dense’ and the concepts ‘too intellectual’ to understand. To the denial-maintaining, evasive, alienated brain the information appears ‘obscure’ and ‘impenetrable’. These terms are comments that have been made by people who have attempted to read my earlier books.

Since I am dealing with the human condition, rather than living in denial of it, I do not have to merely allude to the truth, or find clever, coded, evasive, intellectual, sophisticated, esoteric ways to talk about it, as people living in denial have to. My writing only needs to be simple, plain and direct, but that is the problem, people who are living in denial do not want the simple truth, they can only tolerate the truth being cleverly alluded to. A mind that is living in denial does not allow itself, and cannot hear, the simple truth. What appears dense and impenetrable to the mind that is living in denial is simple and clear to a mind that is not in denial.

In the Resignation essay it will be explained that people are not born mentally in a state of denial of the human condition, rather it Page 53 of
Print Edition is a psychological adjustment they make during their adolescence. In that essay it will be explained that at about 12 years of age humans begin to attempt to understand the dilemma of the human condition; however with humanity unable—until now—to explain this deepest of issues, adolescents eventually, at about the age of 15, learnt they had no choice but to resign themselves to a life of denial of the extremely depressing subject. Each generation of humans has adopted the historic state of denial in their mid adolescence. The following unsolicited letter to the WTM from a 16-year-old student, Lisa Tassone, illustrates how young adolescents who have not yet adopted an attitude of denial of the issue of the human condition have been able to read and digest my books with the greatest of ease: ‘Before stumbling upon Free: The End Of The Human Condition that was discreetly shoved in the back of the philosophy section, I was at the end of my road. I had experienced a year of complete and utter pain, confusion, anger and frustration. When I finally took the plunge to seek medical help (as I was suicidal), I was diagnosed with severe depression and put on medication. After reading your book (which I stayed up till 2am reading, I just couldn’t put it down), I have been one of the fastest recovering depressants around. No wonder why. If everyone knew your insights, so much would be resolved. The purpose of this letter is to thank you for your courage in publishing your sure-to-be controversial work, and for basically recovering and saving this 16 year old. Not only is your work the absolute truth and has restored my faith in humanity, it has given me inspiration to help others. I may seem young to know what I’m talking about but, well, I do. I have tested all your work and others and yours always held up’ (Brisbane, 4 Oct. 1999).

The difficulty older people have reading about the human condition is not due to poor presentation of the explanations, it is because they are living in denial. The problem is alienation.

Sir Laurens van der Post’s writings have been of the greatest influence in my own thinking. Beyond is dedicated to him and the reader will already have seen how much value is placed on his writings to support or illustrate the points being made in my books. Sir Laurens’ writings are as ‘terrifyingly honest’ as those of William Blake. He was an exceptionally unevasive, honest thinker, and, as a result, many people have found his writings to be obscure. For example, in the obituary where he was described as ‘a prophet’, Sir Laurens’ writings were variously described as ‘not always clear’, as ‘imprecise’ and ‘elusive’. The fact is that Sir Laurens van der Post’s writing is some of the Page 54 of
Print Edition clearest in recorded history, as his many quotes in this book attest. What is not clear are the minds of humans blocked with the historic denial of the human condition.

A publisher once said to me after reading Beyond, ‘I find the concepts fascinating, but I also find the arguments elusively receding from my mind as soon as I stop reading them’ (WTM records, 3 June 1993). This comment raises another point that even when people begin to comprehend these understandings of the human condition it is hard for their mind to retain those understandings. So practiced at denying the issue of the human condition has the human mind become that it even has difficulty retaining argument about the subject when it has grasped it.

While people regularly say they find my writing obscure and impenetrable it is usually not difficult to demonstrate to someone that the text is not too obscure, dense or intellectual to understand. If a reader is taken carefully through the text, paragraph by paragraph, they usually cannot identify any step in the logic that is not clear. The problem is not the presentation, it is the implication of what is being said coming through in their mind subliminally that triggers their evasive defences and leads readers to decide they do not want to hear what is being said.

The deaf effect also causes readers to believe ‘the text is too repetitive’. In order to explain this response it first needs to be appreciated that, at best, the mind of nearly all humans can only tolerate the subject of the human condition being alluded to remotely and briefly. Acceptable glancing references to the human condition include: ‘the meaning of humans and their place in the world’, ‘our human predicament or situation’, ‘our troubled human state and nature’, ‘what it is to be human’, ‘the dark side of our nature’, ‘the riddle of life’, ‘why are we the way we are’ and ‘the root of human conflict’.

The biologist, Edward O. Wilson, uses the term ‘human condition’ more frequently than any other writer I have encountered—Wilson has even acknowledged the importance of studying the human condition, stating that ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’ (Consilience, 1998, p.298 of 374). Although Wilson frequently uses the term ‘human condition’ I have only been able to find two descriptions of what he means by the term. Firstly, there is a reference he made to ‘the persisting enigmas of the human condition—What are we? Where did we come from? What do we wish to become?’ (Wilson’s 1998 Phi Beta Kappa Oration, pub. in Harvard Magazine, 1998 addresses). The meanings Page 55 of
Print Edition of these terms, ‘what are we?’, ‘where did we come from?’ and ‘what do we wish to become?’ are elusive. However, if you think honestly about the question ‘what are we?’, the essential truth has to be that while we humans do have a potential for generosity and kindness on one hand we nevertheless have a capacity to be extraordinarily aggressive and selfish on the other. Similarly, if you think deeply about the question ‘where did we come from?’, the real questions that are being raised are, ‘where did the dark side of our nature come from?’, and ‘have we always been so aggressive and selfish?’ Also, if you think deeply about the question ‘what do we wish to become?’, the real question involved is ‘how are we to free ourselves from our corrupted, “fallen” state?’ Wilson is only daring to allude to the all-important question of humans’ corrupted condition. The second reference breaks the convention of evasion and clearly defines the human condition, but notice it takes a direct question to Wilson to bring about the precise admission of what the issue of the human condition is. When an interviewer asked, ‘How is it that ethics can coexist in the same species, in fact in the same human being, with hatred and aggression?’, Wilson responded, ‘That is the human condition’, and added, ‘That was our biological fate. And there is no way of reconciling these things except by law and treaty’ (Futurology, Talking About Tomorrow, The Wall Street Journal interviewing E.O. Wilson, 2000). Saying there is no way of reconciling good and evil is, I suggest, an allusion to the fact that it has been virtually impossible for humans to confront the issue of the human condition. I should mention that, even though Wilson has said here that there is no way of reconciling good and evil, he has said elsewhere that ‘Biology is the key to human nature’ (On Human Nature, ch.1, 1978). This is a more accurate response because biology could one day make sense of human nature, it could explain the human condition, as I am suggesting it now has.

The point is, most humans can only talk about the human condition in code, in ways that only the initiated can understand. They limit themselves to esoteric inference and innuendo. They appeal to the shared intuitive awareness in humans of the need to evade the deeper confronting truths about human life. They talk of certain things being ‘self-evident’. They intellectualise the truth, learn to live with it at arm’s length; at base they find a way to safely live in denial of the truth. In Plato’s imagery, they prefer the darkness of a cave existence.

Continued direct and open description and analysis of the human Page 56 of
Print Edition condition greatly affronts the mind of most humans. Their mind does not want to keep hearing description of the subject but it cannot admit this to itself without admitting it is practicing denial, without admitting and confronting its alienation, which, as has been pointed out, it cannot do. Something is occurring repeatedly but it is not repetition of the same particular concept or material, it is repeated raising of a subject the human mind has become deeply committed to blocking out, a continual elaboration and analysis of a long-forbidden, exiled subject.