The Apocalypse and the Battle of Armageddon explained

With the dignifying understanding of the human condition available humans can now end their alienation and stop lying. In fact now that their corrupted condition is explained it is at last both safe and necessary for humans to be honest and acknowledge their alienation. It is also safe and necessary to acknowledge that levels of alienation vary immensely from person to person and race to race. Understandably it is an immense shock for people to suddenly confront the existence of their alienation, having lived virtually in total denial of it, and initially they will be inclined to resist acknowledging it. When a deep denial is challenged the immediate psychological response is to vigorously and urgently try to maintain it.

Since suicidal depression has historically been associated with trying to confront the previously inexplicable human condition, humans have come to fear the issue and the truth of their alienated state to an almost paralysing degree. This historic fear has to somehow be overcome, because it threatens to oppose and deny the arrival of the all-important, 2-million-years-searched-for, liberating truth about ourselves.

Alvin Toffler coined the term ‘future shock’, defining it as ‘the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time’ (Future Shock, 1970, p.4). The arrival of understanding of the human condition brings the real ‘future shock’, ‘culture shock’, ‘paradigm shift’, ‘sea change’ and ‘brave new world’ humans have long anticipated. For 2 million years humans have lived in deep denial of the truth about their corrupted condition; suddenly, they are now face-to-face with truth day, honesty day, exposure day, self-confrontation day, ‘judgment day’, ‘revelation day’, ‘the day of reckoning’, when all their denials or alienations are exposed. Humans cannot help feeling that the ‘foundations’ of their existence are being destroyed, despite the fact that these foundations—their old artificial defences—are actually being superseded by the real support structure, namely the actual understanding Page 399 of
Print Edition of their divisive state that they have always needed and sought. An anonymous Turkish poet spoke truthfully when he said that judgment day is ‘Not the day of judgment but the day of understanding’ (National Geographic, Nov. 1987).

In using the biological understanding of the human condition, it is possible to decipher all our mythologies and clearly understand their meanings at last. Christian mythology anticipates the arrival of the liberating but all-exposing truth about ourselves as being like the arrival of a terrifying storm of thunder, lightning and hailstones. In Luke for example, it says the all-exposing truth will be ‘like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other’, and like a time when ‘fire and sulphur rained down from heaven’ (Luke 17:24, 29; see also Matt. 24, Mark 13, Rev. 16).

While all the historic denials, disguises and evasions that humans have justifiably employed to cope are made obsolete when understanding of the human condition arrives, they are also suddenly exposed, made transparent. The truth destroys the lie. This exposure or, more to the point, the resistance to this exposure, signifies a very serious impasse to accepting the arrival of the liberating understanding of human nature.

It makes sense that the people who will especially fear the arrival of the truth about humans’ alienated state and who will most resist exposure of their condition will be those who are most alienated. While the greater truth is that we can all welcome with relief the arrival of understanding of the human condition, those who suffered most from the effects of the human condition, those who were most hurt in childhood and as a result are the most insecure and alienated, will initially be the most fearful of this liberating but all-exposing understanding.

It is the arrival of this liberating but naked truth about humans, a truth that destroys the historic denial that resigned humans have hidden behind and which humans are variously in fear of, that is anticipated in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. The Book of Revelation is sometimes called the Apocalypse, with both titles derivative of the Greek word apokalypsis which means revelation. What is being uncovered or unveiled or revealed is the denied truth about humans.

Until understanding of the human condition arrived, humanity had to deny the immense differences in alienation between people. This was because without the explanation for humans’ corrupted, Page 400 of
Print Edition alienated state, acknowledging any differences in that state (acknowledging who was more and who was less soul-destroyed during childhood) would have led to unjust condemnation of the more corrupted. It would have led to unjust, prejudiced, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, and ‘ageist’ assertions of inferiority and superiority. To avoid unjust and condemning differentiation, no acknowledgment of differentiation was allowed; a great lie denying the existence of alienation had to be maintained. Everyone lived concealed from exposure ‘behind closed doors’, inside their ‘homes’. The end result of this practice of denial of the existence and extent of alienation was that no one knew who was and was not alienated.

Now that the liberating, Earth-saving, but at the same time extremely exposing truth about humans has arrived, this ‘concealment’ is suddenly ineffective; the age-old denial of humans’ state of alienation is exposed, the truth is revealed, the difference in alienation between people is suddenly apparent: ‘On the day the Lord gives you relief from suffering and turmoil and cruel bondage…The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom… “…your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped…Your nakedness will be exposed’ (Isa. 14:3; 35:1,4,5; 47:3).

With the arrival of the understanding of the human condition everyone who is resigned and living in denial will have their denial exposed and they will find it difficult to cope with that sudden exposure. The first reaction will be to try to maintain their denial by opposing this all-important, humanity-liberating breakthrough. However, those who are relatively secure, less alienated, with less to be exposed, will have enough strength to overcome this inclination. Those who are less secure, more alienated, with more to be exposed, will find it more difficult. Indeed many will be so afraid of the emergence of the truth about the human condition that they will feel they cannot contain their inclination to oppose it and will vigorously try to maintain the denial. A battle will break out between those who feel they cannot cope with the truth and want to stay in denial and those who can cope with the truth and want to end the denial. In fact the last great battle to be fought, described in the Book of Revelation as the ‘Battle of Armageddon’, is this battle, which has already commenced, between the more insecure and thus afraid and those who are relatively secure and relatively unafraid of the truth about humans.

The immense differences in alienation in the world that, until Page 401 of
Print Edition now, people have hidden from one another—even those they supposedly know intimately—will suddenly become apparent, with the less alienated being able to support and welcome the truth and the more alienated resisting it. This situation is perfectly described in the Bible where it says—immediately after describing the arrival of the truth as being ‘like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other’ (Luke 17:24)—that ‘two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding corn together; one will be taken and the other left’ (Luke 17:34,35; see also Matt. 24:40). With the arrival of understanding of the human condition some will immediately take up the truth and become part of the new world and others will initially feel they have to oppose the truth.

The word ‘initially’ needs to be emphasised because the greater truth is that confronting the human condition and ending our species’ historic state of denial is manageable and can be negotiated by all humans. While some will initially resist the arrival of the truth and as a result will be temporarily left behind, it will not be long before everybody takes up support of the 2-million-year-searched-for liberating truth. The final ‘Battle of Armageddon’, between those who initially find it overwhelmingly difficult to cope with the truth about humans and those that don’t, will be short.

As was explained in the Resignation essay in the section ‘Renegotiating resignation’, the reason why the understanding of the human condition can be coped with is that it is possible to support the understandings involved without overly confronting them. By doing so you avoid standing in the way of freeing humanity from the human condition. In fact the relief and enthusiasm derived from being able to adopt such an all-truthful, all-meaningful and all-liberating way of living will swiftly carry all before it. The entrenched denial will be swept away and the battle will conclude shortly after. A song by the band Hunters and Collectors, included in the Introduction, contains a description of the emergence of an immense army sweeping all before it in support of these liberating understandings of the human condition. Here are the relevant lyrics: ‘Woke up this morning from the strangest dream / I was in the biggest army the world had ever seen / We were marching as one on the road to the Holy Grail // Started out seeking fortune and glory / It’s a short song but it’s a hell of a story…Well have you heard about the Great Crusade? / We ran into millions but nobody got paid / Yeah we razed four corners of the globe for the Holy Grail // All the locals scattered…they were hiding in the snow’. In the Bible the prophets Joel Page 402 of
Print Edition and Isaiah described the same event using similar imagery. Joel said: ‘Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy hill. Let all who live in the land tremble, for the day of the Lord [the denial-free understanding of the human condition] is coming…Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come. Before them fire devours, behind them a flame blazes. Before them the land is like the garden of Eden, behind them, a desert waste—nothing escapes them. They have the appearance of horses; they gallop along like cavalry. With a noise like that of chariots…like a mighty army drawn up for battle. At the sight of them, nations are in anguish; every face turns pale. They charge like warriors; they scale walls like soldiers. They all march in line, not swerving from their course. They do not jostle each other…For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. The sun and moon will be darkened, and the stars no longer shine. The Lord will roar from Zion and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the sky will tremble…“In that day the mountains will drip new wine, and the hills will flow with milk; all the ravines of Judah will run with water…Their bloodguilt, which I have not pardoned, I will pardon [dignifying understanding of humans’ corrupted state is finally found]”’ (Joel 2,3). Isaiah similarly said: ‘He lifts up a banner for the distant nations, he whistles for those at the ends of the earth. Here they come, swiftly and speedily! Not one of them grows tired or stumbles, not one slumbers or sleeps; not a belt is loosened at the waist, not a sandal thong is broken. Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung; their horses’ hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels like a whirlwind. Their roar is like that of the lion, they roar like young lions; they growl as they seize their prey and carry it off with no-one to rescue. In that day they will roar over it like the roaring of the sea. And if one looks at the land, he will see darkness and distress; even the light will be darkened by the clouds’ (Isa. 5:26–30).

As was emphasised in the conclusion of the Plato essay, the most exciting and challenging adjustment humanity has ever had to make lies directly ahead. As difficult as it will be, adjusting to the truth about ourselves can be managed. Humans would never have had the strength to pursue the immense 2-million-year-long journey to find knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, if they had not always believed that when they finally found the truth about themselves they would be able to adjust to it.

The most difficult aspect of this journey to understanding is its beginning, when there exists only a small group of people supporting these unevasive, immensely confronting understandings. It is in Page 403 of
Print Edition this early stage, where the public at large has still to appreciate the new way of living that the arrival of self-understanding makes possible, that the battle is at its most ferocious. It is this foundation stage of humanity’s homeward journey that we at the World Transformation Movement are negotiating and pioneering. This is the time when immense, unwavering courage is required. So deeply entrenched has our species’ denial been that the task of reversing the practice is analogous to turning the Amazon River around in its bed. Humanity has been living in a state of denial for so long it is almost as if it cannot change its ways, but it can.

With regard to the fear of being ‘not chosen’ on ‘judgment day’, it might be mentioned that with alienation in the world escalating to terminally dangerous levels in the wealthier parts of the world (manifesting in cynical opportunism breaking out in the boardrooms of the world’s biggest companies), and with the gulf between the rich and poor becoming so deep that it is as if there are two unconnected continents on Earth (manifesting in the 2001 September 11th terrorist attack in New York), there has been an upsurge in apocalyptic sentiment. A series of books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins containing fictional apocalyptic stories selectively based on the scriptures, especially Revelation, have sold an astonishing 50 million copies (Time mag. 1 June 2002). The biggest seller of these books was Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (1995), the first of the ‘Left Behind’ series. This focus on those ‘left behind’ plays on the anxiety that people intuitively feel of being unable to cope with the truth about the human condition when it arrives, of being left behind, unable to face the truth. The parable of two in the bed and only one being chosen taps into people’s intuitive fear of knowing themselves to be extremely alienated and thus at risk of not being ‘chosen’. It has to be emphasised that it is not an individual that does the ‘choosing’, it is the confronting truth that separates those who can accept the truth and those who find they cannot. Again it has to be emphasised that while some will be slow to adjust to the new way of living in support of these compassionate understandings, no one will be permanently ‘left behind’.

Humans’ different degrees of alienation first becomes starkly apparent when people are faced with having either to support or oppose the truth about the human condition. Those who are most alienated will suddenly reveal themselves in their inability to support the truth. Two literary editors will have totally different responses to this book when it is sent to them to consider for publication. One will loathe the book and another will love it. In fact given the level of exhaustion and alienation in the world now it will be difficult to find a publisher for this book, and if one editor can cope with and appreciate it they will, in the process of obtaining approval to publish it, inevitably encounter many others who loathe it and will find every reason not to publish it. This is in fact exactly what has happened. The World Transformation Movement’s publicist sent some 70 copies of the manuscript of this book to the leading literary agents in the world, and another 70 copies to the major international publishers. No literary agent or publisher would take on the book, and the extraordinary range of contradictory comments strongly suggests that it was not the merit of the book that was the problem but that they were variously confronted by the content. The following is a sample of the range of comments the manuscript received:

‘Mr Griffith presents a formidable work synthesizing philosophical, historical, religious, scientific and cultural currents’ (Anne Jump, Andrew Wylie Literary Agency, UK, 26 Mar 2002) email.

‘found Mr Griffith’s premise bold and far-reaching’ (Jane von Mehren, Viking Penguin, 11 Jun 2002) letter.

‘It’s extraordinarily rich and well researched’ (Roland Philipps, Publishing Director, Hodder & Stoughton, UK 1 Jun 2002) fax.

‘this is an original and carefully conceived idea and the writing is clear and accomplished’ (Sebastian Godwin, David Godwin Associates, UK, 15 Apr 2002) email.

‘Griffith’s thoughts on the human condition are intriguing’ (Liz Nagle, Little, Brown and Company, USA, 13 Jun 2002) letter.

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‘just don’t think this is a very persuasive or well-written polemic’ (Toby Mundy, Publisher, Atlantic Books, UK, 7 Jun 2002) faxed letter.

‘far too dense and in parts incomprehensible’ (Gail Winston, Executive Editor, HarperCollins, USA, 12 Jun 2002) email.

‘not convinced that there is a cohesive argument there’ (Tim Whiting, Commissioning Editor, Time Warner Books, UK, 25 Jun 2002) email.

‘unpersuaded by his thesis and its presentation’ (Mary Cunnane, Australia, 12 Mar 2002) email.

‘We have no intention of publishing this book’ (Dr Trevor Lipscombe, Editor in Chief, the John Hopkins University Press, USA 20 Jun 2002) email.

Obviously, if the truth about humans is to emerge, the extremely entrenched denial of the issue of the human condition in the world today must be defied—at least until wider support emerges—by the few who are both young enough to take up the new ideas and secure enough to cope with the confronting nature of the ideas.

Page 404 of
Print Edition One of the problems to be overcome in introducing these denial-free understandings is that there have been so many ‘false prophets’ promoting artificial, pseudo forms of ideality that the whole business of bringing ideality to the world has been extremely discredited. These false forms of ideality, such as the New Age Movement, Environmentalism, Feminism, the Politically Correct Deconstructionist Movement, the Peace Movement, are such superficially satisfying forms of idealism to live through that when the real ideality arrives, namely the reconciling understanding of the human condition, people actually prefer the non-confronting, false forms of ideality. Most disconcerting of all is that those who have seen through, and been offended by, these false forms of ideality sceptically assume the real ideality is merely another of the false forms of ideality. Real ideality is discredited by the false forms of ideality that have failed before it.

These false or pseudo forms of ideality are extremely seductive because they give people relief from the horror of their corrupted state by allowing them to feel good about themselves without having to confront their corrupted state. In a world where people are rapidly becoming more corrupted and in need of relief from their condition, pseudo-idealism has become a plague. In fact it has gained such a foothold that it now threatens to control the world and lead it to a totally non-confronting, truthless state of oblivion. Pseudo-idealism is the ‘Antichrist’ because it is at base anti-truth, opposed to the truth which Christ so wholly represented. The following is a brief explanation of the extreme danger of pseudo-idealism.

Three of the Christian gospels (see particularly Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 17) accurately predict that before the frightening storm of the truth about humans arrives the human journey would come under very real threat of being stopped dead by the emergence of what is described as the ‘abomination that causes desolation’. This ‘abomination’ that halts progress and leads nowhere is the great lie that asserts there is no difference in alienation between humans. The gospels predict the emergence of the artificially achieved undifferentiated, criticism-free world; a world where no fundamental difference between the ‘two people…in one bed’ is acknowledged. The emergence of ‘abomination that causes desolation’ is described as the ‘sign…of the end of the age’ (Matt. 24:3). It is a dangerous time that we now live in, where the more insecure have established a dishonest, pseudo-idealistic, ‘politically correct’, ‘postmodern’, artificially ‘deconstructed’, artificially Page 405 of
Print Edition undifferentiated, artificially criticism-free world. Our task as humans has been to understand the dilemma of our condition and in so doing render it obsolete and allow it to subside, not to abandon this search by transcending the whole issue and attempting to artificially impose an ideal state. That was a false way of living, promoted by false prophets; it halted progress towards self-knowledge and could only end in untenable levels of alienation, total, eternal ‘darkness’.

False prophets claimed that the way to achieve a reconciled, ‘new age’ for humans was for everyone to simply dogmatically adopt ideality, transcend their reality, deny their own and others’ alienation, ‘think positively’, ‘embrace their human potential and be at one with the cosmos’, and so on, when the real path to a reconciled new world for humans depended on going in the opposite direction, confronting the reality of humans’ corrupted state, penetrating the almost universal denial and solving the underlying issue of the human condition. True prophets attacked the denial while false prophets sought ways to embellish it.

(The immense danger of pseudo-idealism is explained in chapters 8:15-8:16 of my 2016 book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition at <www.humancondition.com/freedom>. Also my 2021 book Death by Dogma provides a powerful exposé of the pseudo-idealistic, left-wing culture at <www.humancondition.com/death-by-dogma>. Also see Freedom Essays 14, 34, 35 & 36 at <www.humancondition.com/freedom-essays>.)

This time when pseudo-idealistic dogma would try to control the world was also anticipated by the prophet Daniel who, after warning of the ‘abominations’ that lead to ‘desolations’, accurately concluded, ‘but the people who know their God [those who are less alienated] will [must] firmly resist [the abomination of the dishonest world of pseudo-idealism]’ (Dan. 11:32).

The rise to dominance of pseudo-idealism in wealthier parts of the world and its counterpart of fundamentalism in the poorer parts of the world is the outward ‘sign of the end of the age’. With alienation at last able to be acknowledged and its extent revealed, it can be understood that the ‘four horsemen’—‘war, death, famine and pestilence’—that herald the apocalypse, as described in Revelation 6 in the Bible, is the best description of a terminally alienated world that was possible before we were able to explain the human condition.