The denial-free history of the human race

With understanding of the human condition it is possible not only to talk honestly about the different roles that men and women played in the human journey to enlightenment, but to explain the roles different races have played in the journey.

As emphasised at the beginning of this essay, without explanation of humans’ corrupted state it hasn’t been safe to acknowledge different levels of corruption between individual humans or between races of humans. Acknowledgment of such differences only led to false, ‘racist’ notions of some races being inferior or superior to others. Understanding of the human condition enables us to know that all humans are equally good despite their various states of corruption. Page 350 of
Print Edition In fact corruption is a heroic state, for it is a result of fighting the all-important battle against ignorance. Now that humans’ corrupted state can be understood as a heroic rather than a ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ or ‘guilty’ state, the differences in corruption between individuals and races can be safely acknowledged. Such honesty is vital for the rehabilitation of the human race.

With the arrival of the understanding of the human condition, criticism of humans is rendered obsolete. Humanity moves beyond the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to a denial-free world of honesty and with it, psychological healing. As the commonly used phrase asserts, ‘honesty is therapy’, or as Christ said, ‘the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32). Honesty is therapy, as Sir Laurens van der Post noted: ‘Truth, however terrible, carried within itself its own strange comfort for the misery it is so often compelled to inflict on behalf of life. Sooner or later it is not pretence but the truth which gives back with both hands what it has taken away with one. Indeed, unaided and alone it will pick up the fragments of the reality it has shattered and piece them together again in the shape of more immediate meaning’ (A Story Like the Wind, 1972, p.174 of 473).

Because of the danger of racist, sexist and ageist prejudice, human history has been taught in an almost totally dishonest, evasive and superficial way. At school we are currently taught, and required to recall for exams, such facts as ‘King Oscar the 30th married Queen Isabelle the 14th in 1252 and they fought the War of the Marshes in 1270’, but the real questions are not addressed. Why were there kings and queens and peasants? Why did people get married? Why did people go to war? Why did one group of people dominate another group of people, and what were the effects of such dominations over time? What was the overall meaning of these events?

It was mentioned in the previous section that the Cimbrians’ exceptional vitality, valour and ability to be content in a monogamous relationship was a reflection of the relative innocence of their race. It was explained that they migrated from Denmark, an exceptionally sheltered corner of the inhabited world, and that their innocence was a product of this isolation. As was pointed out, innocence doesn’t survive long in New York’s Times Square.

A deeper analysis of the history of the Cimbrians and related tribes provides insight into what has actually been occurring throughout human history.

The Goths, who wandered freely and adventurously all over Europe around 400 AD, and eventually succeeded in sacking Rome, originally Page 351 of
Print Edition came from Sweden, one of the most isolated and thus sheltered corners of Europe. The energetic Angles, Saxons and Juts who settled England, (the word ‘England’ means ‘land of the Angles’), in the 5th and 6th century came from the same Danish peninsular as did the Cimbrians some 600 years earlier. Later, around 800 AD, the extremely adventurous and fearless Vikings traversed as far as the Caspian and Black Seas, the Mediterranean, England, Ireland, Iceland and even America. They too came from the sheltered corner of Scandinavia—Norway, Sweden and Denmark, while William the Conqueror, who conquered England in 1066, was a Norseman from coastal France. These robust Norsemen originally came from Norway and Sweden; the word ‘Norsemen’ is derived from ‘Northmen’ in reference to these northern origins.

The British Isles, due to their isolation, became a shelter for relative innocence. Even before the relatively innocent Scandinavian Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Norsemen came to the British Isles, original relatively innocent stock from a race called the Celts sheltered and thus survived there, especially in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. A 2001 Scottish Television documentary (and book) about the Celtic people of the British Isles, titled The Sea Kingdoms, said that ‘more than 40 percent of all Britons claim an Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Manx, Cornish or Cumbrian [ie Celtic] heritage’.

The story of the Celts of the British Isles is very similar to the story of the Scandinavians. As will be explained shortly, the Scandinavian races and the Celts were both descendants of the Aryan race who originally came from the Caucasian Steppes, in what is now southern Russia. The original Celts were Aryans who settled in Central Europe where they were given the name Celtoids. As their culture expanded they became known as the Gauls or Gaels. They spread to Portugal, to Gaul (now called France), to Galicia in southern Poland, to Pays Les Galles (the French name for Wales), and even to Galatia in central Turkey (as referred to in the Bible as the Galatians). The Celtic languages were once widely spoken in Britain, France, Spain, The Alps, northern Italy, parts of Yugoslavia and central Turkey. In 390 BC the Gauls even managed to briefly capture Rome. The Celts dominated much of Europe from 650 BC to about 200 BC, when they were progressively conquered by the irresistible might of Rome’s legions. While the Celts were once widespread their last stronghold was the British Isles, just as Scandinavia was the last stronghold of other early Aryans. As The Sea Kingdoms documentary recognised, it Page 352 of
Print Edition was the ‘remoteness’ of the British Isles that preserved the Celts.

The language and culture of the Celts or Gauls arrived in Britain and Ireland in around 500 BC and within a short period of time their political structure and military methods became widely established. By the time the Romans arrived in 43 AD these horse-riding warriors and their kings controlled the whole of the British Isles. When the Romans left in 410 AD the Celts were still living relatively undisturbed in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In fact The Sea Kingdoms documentary stated that ‘there are still nearly three-quarters of a million people living on these islands [off the west coast of Britain] who speak a language which would have been understood, admittedly with some difficulty, by people here 2,500 years ago’. After the Romans withdrew, the native Celts were invaded and defeated by the Germanic Angles and Saxons, but they and their culture survived in the western parts of the British Isles.

Like the Scandinavians, the Celts of the British Isles were renowned for their ‘physical courage’, ‘a certain arrogance’, and ‘tenacity’. However, while the Anglo-Saxons were ‘cool and practical’, the Celts were ‘fiery and passionate’ (ibid). This difference in personality and attitude to life is still strongly manifest in the personality differences between the predominantly Celtic Irish and the predominantly Anglo-Saxon English.

It can be seen that the British Isles have been an extraordinary refuge for relative innocence with all its qualities of courage, energy, enthusiasm and relative lack of cynicism and selfishness—that is, relative lack of the anger, egocentricity and alienation that resulted from life under the duress of the human condition.

In the case of England, the author of a 1918 book that I found about Romania said she knew of far away England as ‘The land of the free’ (Roumania Yesterday and Today, Mrs Will Gordon, p.55 of 270). For a country small in size and with limited natural resources, England has made an extraordinary contribution to the human journey to enlightenment. In an essay titled The English Record, my headmaster at Geelong Grammar School, the incomparable Australian educator and denial-free thinker or prophet Sir James Darling, wrote: ‘The truth seems to be this, that there is a genius of the English character which shows itself in its institutions, in its practical inventiveness, and under stimulus in its fighting quality. There is a stubborn determination to live its own life, and to brook no interference from a foreign power, which has put England five times in history into the position of protagonist against a European power which Page 353 of
Print Edition threatened to dominate the world; but this same determination has been coupled with a recognition that others also have a right to self-government and that the function of Empire is to educate rather than to oppress.’ Sir James even went on to say that England has ‘an unbeaten record in the history of civilization’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, 1962, pp.134,136 of 223). An article in Time magazine recorded that ‘A quarter of the world’s population speak English…English is increasingly becoming entrenched as the language of choice for business, science and popular culture. Three-quarters of the world’s mail, for example, is currently written in English’ (7 July 1997).

For their part the Irish, Welsh and Scottish have contributed a ‘non-conformist’, ‘joyful and productive’ (The Sea Kingdoms) freshness to the world, qualities that have greatly complemented and assisted the endeavours of the English. There is an integrity about the Irish in particular that is admired throughout the world, to the extent that Ireland, or ‘I-love-you-land’ as I saw a Chinese woman refer to it on television, has become a place of pilgrimage for people from all over the world irrespective of their racial origins. In the upcoming essay, The Demystification Of Religion, the section ‘Australia’s role in the world’ emphasises the special contribution the Irish people have made to the world with their refusal to conform to the artificial, sophisticated and dishonest way of living. In terms of what was explained in the Resignation essay, it is almost as if the Irish as a nation refused to accept resignation, preferring to remain a somewhat mad ‘ship at sea’. In comparison, the English applied their ‘cool and practical’ temperament to humanity’s fundamental task of accumulating knowledge using the relatively safe guise of eccentricity and ridiculous degrees of sophistication to valve-off the resultant corruption and angst. In their preference to stay ignorant and honest rather than become sophisticated and false, the Irish served to keep the English honest, preventing them from becoming too alienated from the soul’s true world. Once when unloading my suitcase from a cab in an up-market part of London I was approached by a short man who smelt of alcohol. In a strong Irish accent he offered to carry my suitcase. When I said that I was happy to carry it myself he said, ‘That’s OK, you carry it but I’ll come along and you can still give me the tip.’ The logic was confusing but it was very amusing and I found his off-centred way of thinking and his unconcerned, even disrespectful, attitude to all the sophistication around him immensely refreshing and relieving. We ended up sitting on the suitcase on the edge of the footpath talking about Ireland. Such is the effect the Irish have on people.

Page 354 of
Print Edition The British Isles certainly were an extraordinary refuge for relative innocence in the world. As will be explained in ‘Australia’s role in the world’, the island continent of Australia has become the latest and undoubtedly last shelter for relative innocence in the world. ‘Undoubtedly last’ because there are no other large hide-outs left for innocence on Earth, and with communication and travel technology as sophisticated as it is, even its island isolation can no longer shield Australia from the march of upset and alienation.

The point is, when the history of the human race is taught in the future, it will be taught honestly, it will acknowledge the varying degrees of upset inherent within different races. As emphasised, with understanding of the human condition—understanding the reason why humans unavoidably and necessarily became corrupted—it at last becomes both safe and necessary to acknowledge the various states of upset/​corruption/​alienation.

Teachers will explain how ‘This was a shy, naive, undisciplined, procrastinating teenager-equivalent race of people; while this race was a bold, adventurous, take on the world 20-year-old-equivalent race; this other race was an angry, embattled, but focused and disciplined 30-year-old-equivalent race; while this race was an overly embattled, defeated 40-year-old-equivalent race; and this race was a spent, bitter 50-year-old-equivalent race.’

Using this honest presentation, it will be explained that the relatively innocent northern Germanic races, who stayed isolated in the outreaches of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, along with the relatively innocent Celts who survived in the isolated British Isles, originally came from the Caucasian Steppes, what is now the Georgian region of southern Russia. The original stock were nomadic herders who had domesticated cattle and horses on the grasslands of the Steppes. Unlike hunter-gatherers, the herding lifestyle meant humans lived in permanently close quarters. This greater interaction with other humans living under the duress of the human condition meant that over time the herders progressed from the ‘teenage-equivalent’ psychological stage to the adventurous ‘20-year-old-equivalent’ stage. It was these adventurous 20-year-old equivalents who left the Steppes and colonised neighbouring territories, eventually reaching Scandinavia and the British Isles.

Before elaborating on this migration from the Steppes, it needs to be more fully explained how the greater interaction with other humans led to the transition from the ‘teenage-equivalent’ stage to Page 355 of
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In general, living with the human condition and the resulting upset and corruption was a toughening process; innocence was lost and people became adapted to a more angry, egocentric and alienated existence. The greater the exposure to upset and the unavoidable corruption of humans’ instinctive self or soul, the greater the selection for ‘tougher’, more corruption-adapted people and the ‘tougher’ races became.

To examine the particular stage of advancing from the ‘teenage-equivalent’ stage to the ‘20-equivalent’ stage, it is useful to take an example from society to illustrate this transition. It is a long-held tradition in western societies to hold a ‘coming of age’ party for offspring when they turn 21. The 21 year old is traditionally given a key symbolising that they are at last ready to leave home and face the world. While adolescents resigned to living a life of denial at around 15, it normally took them another six years of procrastination before they had made sufficient mental adjustments to embrace the extremely dishonest resigned way of living. It was not until they reached 21 that they finally managed to make the necessary mental adjustments. There were two main adjustments they had to make. Firstly they had to block out the negative that living so falsely had eventually to end in the disaster of becoming utterly corrupted. Secondly, they had to train their mind to focus on the one positive there was in the resigned life, which was that at least there was the adventure to look forward to of trying to avoid that disaster as much, and for as long as possible. They may be going to ‘go under’—become defeated and corrupted—but at least they could hope to make a good fight of it. In fact, by the age of 21, young adult men could have so put out of their mind the fact they had resigned and its corrupting consequences that they could delude themselves that they might even be able to win the egocentric struggle to prove their worth. As was explained in the Resignation essay in the section ‘The moment of resignation’, the ‘struggle to prove their worth’ through winning power, fame, fortune and glory in a claimed battle of the survival-of-the-fittest, was the resigned mind’s distorted form of participation in humanity’s great fight against ignorance.

While humans have largely lived in denial of the various stages of self-corruption, a Japanese proverb does acknowledge this pattern: ‘At 10 man is an animal, at 20 a lunatic, at 30 a failure, at 40 a fraud and at 50 a criminal.’ With understanding of the human condition it is possible Page 356 of
Print Edition to explain the meaning of these stages all humans go through as they age. Ten-year-olds were ‘animals’ in the sense that their instinctive selves were unrepressed. Twenty-year-old young men were ‘lunatics’ in the sense that they were swashbuckling cavaliers who believed they could ‘take on the world’. They deluded themselves that they could actually defeat the oppressive foe of ignorance (or, from the resigned mind’s point of view, that they could actually achieve satisfaction through winning power, fame, fortune and glory). Thirty-year-old men were ‘failures’ in the sense that, even though they were still determinedly trying to defy the inevitable, they were being forced to accept that the task of defeating ignorance was going to be beyond them (from the resigned mind’s point of view, they were being forced to accept that the corrupting life of seeking power, fame, fortune and glory was not going to be a genuinely meaningful and thus satisfying way of living). Forty-year-old men were ‘frauds’ in the sense that they had become so corrupted and disenchanted with their efforts to ‘conquer the world’ that they suffered a ‘mid-life crisis’; a crisis of confidence in what they had been doing in life that precipitated a decision to take up support of some form of ‘idealism’ in order to make themselves feel better about their corrupted state. Having had enough of the critically important, yet horribly corrupting battle to champion the ego over soul, they changed sides and became ‘born-again’ supporters of the soul’s ‘idealistic’ world. Their fraudulence was that they were deluding themselves that they were at last on the side of good when in truth they were working against good in the sense that good depended on defying and defeating—not supporting—the ignorant ‘idealistic’ world of the soul. (This dishonest, fraudulent, ‘pseudo-idealistic’ way of living is explained more fully in chapters 8:15-8:16 of FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition which is freely available at <www.humancondition.com/freedom>.) Fifty-year-old men were ‘criminals’ in the sense that they were beaten on every front and had become bitter and vengeful; their attempts to win power, fame, fortune and glory had not proved satisfying, nor had the fraudulent, immensely deluded life of being born-again to the soul’s world of ‘ideality’.

It needs to be understood that the maturation process of each race, and indeed of the human race as a whole, mirrors that of an individual’s journey. Given the human race is composed of individual humans, it too, on a greater level, must reflect the stage of development that the individuals within it are in. Further, since the psychological Page 357 of
Print Edition stage of one individual affects the psychological stage of his or her neighbours, everyone within a group of humans gradually comes to share a common stage. While the psychological stages humans pass through have long been acknowledged as ‘infancy’, ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’, ‘adulthood’ and ‘maturity’, the stages have never been properly explained because humans have largely been unable to deal with the psychology of their circumstances. With understanding of the human condition, which means understanding of human psychosis, we can now explain that ‘Infancy’ is when consciousness first appears and the individual becomes self-aware, able to recognise that they exist, that they are at the centre of the changing events around them. ‘Childhood’ is when humans become sufficiently intelligent to experiment or ‘play’ with the power of conscious free will. ‘Adolescence’ is when humans become sufficiently developed in their intelligence to seek to understand themselves, in particular to understand why they have not been ideally behaved—understand the by then well developed issue of the human condition. It is the time when they are insecure about who they are, the time when they search for their identity. ‘Adulthood’ is when humans have learnt who they are, in particular, have understood the dilemma of the human condition, and are applying themselves in a secure way to the task of complying with the meaning of existence which is to develop the order of matter on Earth. ‘Maturity’ is when they have completed the adulthood stage of securely applying themselves to the task of ordering their life and world. In summary, infancy is ‘I am’, childhood is ‘I can’, adolescence is ‘but who am I?’, adulthood is ‘I know who I am’, and maturity is ‘I have fulfilled who I am’.

As emphasised, these psychological stages apply to both the maturation of humanity and each individual human. In Beyond I described our ape ancestor as ‘Infantman’. It was with this ancestor that the nurturing, love-indoctrination process took place. In time Infantman gave rise to ‘Childman’. In the fossil record Childman is the Australopithecines. I have described the earliest Childman, Australopithecus afarensis, as ‘Early Prime of Innocence Childman’. Afarensis lived from 4 to 2.8 million years ago. As our Australopithecine ancestors’ intelligence developed they matured psychologically to become Australopithecus africanus, ‘Middle Demonstrative Childman’. They were ‘demonstrative’ in the sense that they began to demonstrate and even taunt the world around them with their power of free will. Africanus lived from 3 to 1.8 million years ago. Africanus developed Page 358 of
Print Edition to become Australopithecus boisei, who I have described as ‘Late Naughty Childman’, for the troubled, ‘naughty’ behaviour that arose from having encountered the frustration of the emerging dilemma of the human condition. Boisei lived from 2.2 to 1.3 million years ago. (Since Beyond was published in 1991 more varieties of the Australopithecines have been discovered but they still fall into these broad categories of Early, Middle and Late Childman.)

Some 2 million years ago our ancestors’ intelligence had developed to such an extent that it began to challenge the instinctive self for management of our ancestors’ lives. The resulting conflict between instinct and intellect gave rise to the dilemma of the human condition. With the human condition fully emerged humanity entered the stage of insecure adolescence, the stage where humans search for their identity, for understanding of why they became divisively behaved. Insecure ‘Adolescentman’ has progressed from the early sobered teenage stage during which the issue of the human condition is wrestled with, through the 15-year-old resignation stage, the procrastinating late teenage stage, the 20s ‘adventurous’ stage, the ‘embattled’ 30s stage, the ‘born-again’ 40s stage, to where humanity is now, entering the burnt-out, end-play, 50s ‘criminal’ stage. The only solution powerful enough to prevent self-destruction from over corruption—the potential end of this stage—was to find the dignifying understanding of the human condition, which has now been achieved. Only by bringing understanding to the human condition could humanity avoid eventual self-destruction and move from the insecure state of adolescence and enter the secure state of adulthood.

As is explained in Beyond, Homo habilis was ‘Sobered, Resigning, Procrastinating Adolescentman’, the variety of early human who became sobered from trying to confront and think about the human condition, only to resign to a state of procrastination about having to adopt a resigned lifestyle. Homo habilis lived from 2 to 1.3 million years ago before maturing into ‘Adventurous Adolescentman’—Homo erectus—the variety of early humans who migrated all over the world from our species’ ancestral home in Africa. They lived from 1.5 to 0.4 million years ago before maturing into ‘Embattled, Angry, Disciplined Adolescentman’, Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens lived from 0.5 million years ago to 50,000 years ago before maturing into ‘Born-Again, Sophisticated Adolescentman’—Homo sapiens sapiens—who has lived from 60,000 years ago to the present. This ‘born-again’ 40-Page 359 of
Print Edition year-old stage is where humanity is currently progressing toward the burnt-out criminal stage. The born-again 40-year-old-equivalent stage could also be termed the ‘Civilisedman’ stage. A civilised person is an overly corrupt person who, instead of living out their extreme anger and frustration, has learnt to restrain and conceal them. A civilised person is someone who, despite their corrupt, alienated, non-‘ideal’ reality, has decided to take up a ‘born-again’ attitude of behaving in a ‘good’, ‘ideal’ way. Emphasis is placed on the word ‘behaving’ because they were only pretending to be good or ideal; their real state of upset is concealed. Civility was humans’ earliest way of being ‘born-again’ to ‘ideality’. Today, all humans are adapted to behaving in a civilised way. For the most part we are instinctively restrained from living out and revealing our real angers and frustrations. We restrain and hide our true feelings. This ‘dark side’ of the human make-up that is rarely confronted and acknowledged is what those literary figures quoted in the Introduction did bravely acknowledge. Author Morris West confessed that with enough ‘provocation I could commit any crime in the calendar’ (A View from the Ridge, 1996, p.78 of 143).

The question arises, if all humans who have lived since 60,000 years ago belong to the 40-year-old-equivalent, Born-Again, Civilised, Sophisticated Adolescentman stage, why were the hunter-gatherers of recent times described earlier as being in the procrastinating teenage-equivalent stage, and the herding Caucasians described as having entered the adventurous 20-year-old-equivalent stage? What is being described is another level of refinement of the already established stages. The first T-model Ford car had all the basic elements of a car in place but that did not mean the elements could not become much more refined. The relatively innocent hunter-gatherer Bushmen people of the Kalahari Desert have all the basic adjustments in place for managing extreme upset. They are civilised, instinctively restrained from living out all their upsets; they don’t generally attack when they feel frustrated and angry. They have a form of marriage to artificially contain sexual adventurousness. They clothe their genitals to dampen lust. The women love to wear adornments such as jewellery; they are adapted to being sex objects. The men love hunting animals; they find relief from attacking innocence. Men and women don’t relate to each other as well as their own gender; there is a lack of understanding between the sexes. They make jokes about their fraudulent state; they employ a sense of humour to lighten the load of the agony of being so corrupted and fraudulent. Page 360 of
Print Edition They employ fatigue-inducing dance to access their repressed soul. In short they are members of ‘Born-Again, Sophisticated Adolescentman’. While they have these basic adjustments for managing extreme upset well in place, they are still a relatively innocent race compared to the adventurous, high-spirited Vikings, or the embattled, angry Mongols who raided Europe.

As explained, the maturation of an individual human through the stages of ever-increasing corruption follows the same pattern as the maturation of a race of people, and just as one human could be forced to adapt to new levels of corruption through greater exposure to corruption than another human, some races could be forced to adapt to new levels of corruption through greater exposure to corruption. As each new stage of corruption began to emerge in a society of people, those individuals who happened to have a genetic make-up that enabled them to tolerate and cope with that new level of corruption survived better and thus, over time, that race became genetically adapted to the new, more corrupt reality.

To clarify what is meant by the terms ‘tolerating’ and ‘coping with’ corruption, it is necessary to explain the two ways in which corruption destroyed innocence. The first was by the more corrupt deliberately oppressing and even killing innocence because of its implied criticism; the second by the more innocent finding themselves unable to tolerate and cope with corruption. Both methods will be elaborated upon in the following passages.

Throughout the 2 million years humans lived unable to explain and defend their corrupted state, innocence has unwittingly confronted, exposed and condemned the more corrupted. Innocence has been oblivious to its impact upon those more corrupted, as the following quote demonstrates: ‘In the small fenced-in waiting area outside the departure hall an African woman sits with her wares spread out upon the grass. On the way to the plane I notice a framed piece of needle point she has hung on the fence that reads: “I love those who hate me for nothing”’ (River of Second Chances by Eric Ransdell, Outside mag. Dec. 1990). This reaction was evident also in the words of Christ when he quoted Psalm 35:19 and 69:4: ‘They hated me without reason’ (John 15:25). We can explain now that Christ was crucified because the upset world hated his exceptional innocence and the exposing and confronting honesty of what he had to say. Tragically it has been the lot of innocence, be it innocent humans or nature, to suffer for its unjust condemnation of the upset, corrupted world. The biblical story of Cain and Page 361 of
Print Edition Abel encapsulates the innocence-destroying, toughening process that has been occurring: ‘Abel kept flocks, [he lived the life of a shepherd, staying close to nature and innocence] and Cain worked the soil [he became settled and through greater interaction with other humans became corrupted]…Cain was [became] very angry, and his face was downcast [he became depressed about his corrupted state]…[and] Cain attacked his [relatively innocent and thus condemning] brother Abel and killed him’ (Genesis 4:2,5,8).

While this replacement of the more innocent through oppression and even murder commonly occurred, the more corrupt have most often replaced the more innocent through the latter finding themselves unable to accept and cope with each new level of corruption, each new level of compromise of the soul’s ideal world. Sir Laurens van der Post recognised the difficulty innocence has had coping with the more advanced levels of compromise of the cooperative, selfless, loving world that humans’ original instinctive self or soul expects, when he wrote: ‘Nor should we forget that there were races in the world which vanished not because of the wars we waged against them but simply because contact with us was more than their simple natural spirit could endure’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955, p.101 of 159). In The Lost World of the Kalahari Sir Laurens related the story of how a member of the relatively innocent Bushmen race could not cope with having his natural spirit compromised: ‘You know I once saw a little Bushman imprisoned in one of our gaols because he killed a giant bustard which according to the police, was a crime, since the bird was royal game and protected. He was dying because he couldn’t bear being shut up and having his freedom of movement stopped. When asked why he was ill he could only say that he missed seeing the sun set over the Kalahari. Physically the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him but he died none the less!’ (1958, p.236 of 253). Sir Laurens was more specific when he wrote about the Bushmen, that ‘mere contact with twentieth-century life seemed lethal to the Bushman. He was essentially so innocent and natural a person that he had only to come near us for a sort of radioactive fall-out from our unnatural world to produce a fatal leukaemia in his spirit’ (The Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.111 of 233). Sir Laurens recognised that innocence has been cruelly denied and neglected when he wrote, ‘There was indeed a cruelly denied and neglected first child of life, a Bushman in each of us’ (ibid. p.126). The following extract from a poem by D.H. Lawrence also acknowledges how hardened the human race has become: ‘In the dust, where we have buried / The silent races and their abominations [their condemning and thus detestable Page 362 of
Print Edition innocence] / We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life’ (Son of Woman: The Story of D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, 1931, p.227 of 402).

Through the selection of those individuals genetically better suited to a corrupt world, all humans are now variously genetically adapted to this corruption and to life under the duress of the human condition. (Incidentally this means there is a great deal of genetic pre-conditioning in the make-up of a human. It is not simply a case of ‘nature’ [genes] or ‘nurture’ [environment] alone impacting upon our lives, but a case of both exerting their influence.) Humans and humanity’s journey under the duress of the human condition has been a toughening process, a process where innocence was lost and corrupt reality adapted to. For a race of teenage-equivalents, such as the original Caucasians, to mature to 20-year-old-equivalents, selection pressure had to occur for individuals who could block out the negatives of the dishonest, resigned lifestyle and focus on the adventure of trying to champion the ego. In the case of Caucasians, that selection pressure would have been produced by their herding lifestyle that forced greater interaction between people.

The change in the ‘Caucasians’ to the adventurous 20-year-old stage occurred around 2000 BC, a time when they were able to colonise almost all the neighbouring regions before any other race emerged as 20-year-old equivalent adventurers. The only other race to reach this threshold in time to compete with the Caucasians were Semitic herders who colonised parts of the Middle East from their homeland somewhere on the Arabian Peninsular or North Africa. The descendants of the Semitic herders included the Phoenicians, Chaldeans, Aramaeans, Arabs and Hebrews. The original Caucasian herders called themselves Aryas, which meant ‘noble of birth and race’. These strongly patriarchal, proud, tall, fair-skinned people, with their great herds of cattle and chestnut horses, their flocks of sheep and goats and packs of dogs migrated from their ancestral homeland on the Caucasian Steppes to colonise India, Europe and most of the Middle East. The Romans, Greeks, Slavs, Celts and the Germanic races all descend from this Aryan stock: ‘Since c. 2000 waves of Aryan warriors have gushed from the Caucasian steppes. They have conquered the Indus Valley and set up the kingdoms of the Hittites and of Mitanni [in the Middle East]; by 1000 BC they will found five more kingdoms in the Middle East. Greek-speakers have built Mycenaean civilization. Descendant of other Aryans, the Hyksos [the “Shepherd Kings”], have ruled Egypt’ (The Last Two Million Years, 1974 edn, p.269 of 488). As evidence of Page 363 of
Print Edition their common ancestry, all races of Aryan stock share a similar ‘Indo-European’ language. For example, the English word ‘mother’ is ‘mutter’ in German, ‘máthair’ in Gaelic, ‘mater’ in Latin, ‘meter’ in Greek, ‘mati’ in Old Church Slavonic, ‘matr’ in Sanskrit and ‘mater’ in Indo-European. It is a measure of how assertive and pervasive the Aryans have been that these Indo-European tongues have been adopted by half the world. Aryans have in general been extremely influential in the world, but it is those relatively isolated Aryans from Scandinavia and the British Isles who have exerted the most influence in recent centuries.

Over time the original 20-year-old-equivalent Aryan stock from the Caucasian Steppes was bled dry of its relative innocence in endless wars in their new homelands. Because of their moral strength, the innocent are the first to stand against oppression and thus the first to be eliminated by an oppressor. The expression, ‘the good die young’, is an acknowledgment of this reality. As explained, it was a toughening process—an adaption—to the new level of corruption which the more innocent found most difficult to accept and adjust to. The result of this loss of innocence was that the original 20-year-old-equivalent Aryan stock advanced to more embattled and upset 30, 40 and 50-year-old-equivalents. Even the original 20-year-old-equivalent stock who remained on the Caucasian Steppes were eventually overrun by their even more upset-advanced neighbours, the extremely angry, utterly ruthless 35-year-old-equivalent Huns from Mongolia, who swept across Europe around 400 AD. Some idea of the amount of blood-letting that took place in Europe and the Middle East over the last four millennia can be gauged from this account of the outcome of just one war in central Europe: ‘The flowing blood of these murdered men, ten million gallons steaming human blood could substitute for a whole day the gigantic water masses of the Niagara…Make a chain of these ten million murdered murderers, placing them head to head and foot to foot, and you will have an uninterrupted line measuring ten thousand miles, a grave ten thousand miles long’ (Roumania Yesterday and Today, Mrs Will Gordon, 1918, p.251 of 270). The loss of innocence has been immense. Races and their empires that were once great are now just shells of their former glory; an article in Time magazine described Italians now as, ‘Creative and hardworking yet corrupt and ruthless’ (3 Aug. 1992). It can now be explained psychologically what was actually happening when history books talked of civilisations having ‘peaked’ and become ‘decadent’, such as Olive Schreiner described as having occurred in Rome.

Page 364 of
Print Edition It has to be emphasised that under the duress of the human condition all races eventually became overly corrupted, corruption of soul being the price of humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. In this journey from innocence to exhaustion of soul the most creative period was the toughened and disciplined, but not yet overly corrupted, 30-year-old equivalent stage. As each race and its associated civilisation passed through this stage it made its particularly creative contribution to the human journey. This was when civilisations were at their ‘peak’, however, inevitably, they entered a more corrupted ‘decadent’ stage. The Mediterranean, Middle East and Indian civilisations all made extensive contributions to the human journey during their energetic and creative 30-year-old equivalent stage. The Egyptians and peoples from the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates delta in the Middle East began the civilisation of the ‘known world’, for example they invented the wheel, mathematics and writing. Greeks and Romans laid the foundations for ‘western civilisation’ during this most creative stage of their journey through ever-increasing levels of upset. The great religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were developed in India and the Middle East when there was still enough soundness left in their populations to produce exceptionally sound, denial-free thinkers or prophets.

With understanding of the human condition the various stages of soul corruption can be compassionately understood. To become corrupted was an unavoidable consequence of having to participate in humanity’s heroic journey to defy ignorance and find understanding, ultimately self-understanding. To illustrate how races progress from innocence to corruption of soul I have used the history of the Aryan Anglo-Saxons and Celts. I have done this because they are currently in their ‘peak’ state of contributing to the human journey to enlightenment, and because that journey is in its crucial final stage where a great deal of honest explanation of the events that are taking place is needed. However, I could have chosen the history of the Aryan Greeks and Romans, the Aryan Indians, the Middle Eastern Semites, the Chinese (who during their most creative stage contributed to the human journey such wonderful inventions as paper, moveable type, the compass and gunpowder) and other races of Asia, or the Aztecs and Incas of Central and South America to illustrate the same journey. Each of their rich histories would have shown the same pattern of progressing from a state of innocence through an operational, exceptionally creative 30-year-old equivalent stage and on to a more corrupted, soul-burnt-out, selfish, cynical, ‘decadent’ state.

Every civilisation has contributed to the advance of knowledge. Just where the leading edge in the advancement of knowledge was occurring at any one time depended on what stage in the human journey from innocence to exhaustion or decadence the various civilisations were at, so it is in truth meaningless passing out accolades to any particular individual, race or civilisation. For example, I have employed the commonly used terms of ‘East’ and ‘West’ descriptions for the world’s different civilisations but that Europe-centric view is in truth unjustly prejudiced.

It also should be emphasised that even races at the more corrupted end of the alienation spectrum still contribute to the human journey. Page 365 of
Print Edition Every individual and every race always sought to contain and minimise the negative aspects of their particular condition and develop and maximise the positive aspects of that condition. The 40-year-old, or thereabouts, Italians for example, despite having progressed past their ‘peak’, still contribute to the human journey on many fronts. For example, their mature sophistication has made them masters in the ‘creative’ world of design.

In the story of the Aryan Anglo-Saxons and Celts, evidence suggests that only in the northern and western hideaways of Scandinavia and the British Isles did the original Aryans remain in a state of relative innocence. Even amongst the relatively innocent Anglo-Saxons and Celts of the British Isles, the disciplined ‘coolness’ and focused ‘practicalness’ of the Anglo-Saxons indicates they progressed further in their loss of innocence than the still fiery, passionate early 20s equivalent, or thereabouts, Celts.

(Post-publication addition: I should mention that there is now (2011) some dispute about whether the people in Ireland, Wales and Scotland who describe themselves as Celts are actually Celts, actually descendants of the Central European Celts who originally migrated from the Caucasian steppes. Despite the supposed Celts of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Mann having the highly distinctive Celtic culture such as hill forts, and the highly distinctive Celtic art forms, and highly distinctive Celtic language roots, it is now being claimed that genetic studies show that the people of Ireland, Wales and Scotland are not related to the Celts of Central Europe. The suggestion is that they adopted the Celtic culture but weren’t themselves Celts, which is all extremely perplexing—usually if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is a duck!

I think the issue all boils down to what happens when people at one stage in the development of upset encounter people at another stage. The essence of the Celts is that they had entered the early 20s equivalent, or thereabouts, stage of still being full of the energy of our original instinctive all-loving soul, but had become sufficiently instinctively adapted to the reality of the toughness of life under the duress of the human condition to be extremely energetic, courageous, adventurous and determined to validate themselves—absolutely full of power and vigour, not yet burnt out from being overly exposed to the horror of life under the duress of the human condition. The question is, if such people enter a more innocent population, people not yet as adapted to life under the duress of the human condition (say, 19-year-old equivalent or thereabouts people), such as probably were the people living in the British Isles before the Celts arrived, what would happen? We can expect that the energy and power of the Celts would be extremely influential in such a population. Even if they were few in number they would cause and even inspire the existing population to rise to that same bold, determined stage. The effect would be to drag the existing population up to that new level of adaption to upset. The result would be that the existing population would, before too many generations had passed, become the equivalent of Celts. The more true Celts that arrived the faster the transition. If not many Celts arrived, this could explain why those in the British Isles became Celt-like but not Celts. When the energetic, powerful and functional (say late 20s equivalent or thereabouts) Normans (who had come from Scandinavia via Normandy in France) took over eastern England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, they ruthlessly imposed their culture and genes on the existing population, but because the existing people were many in number their genetic footprint would still be apparent in those living in eastern England. When a handful of exceptionally energetic and inspired Normans from Normandy—especially those from the Hauteville family—conquered southern Italy and Sicily around 1100AD their courageous and bold culture quickly came to dominate those regions, however, in that situation, the Normans involved were so few in number that there would likely not be any of their genetic footprint left in those regions. In the case of the southern Italian and Sicilian population at the time, they weren’t less innocent than the Normans, but more human-condition-adapted, in fact, already overly upset, cynical, and basically burnt out in soul-strength—their Norman-equivalent energetic time had occurred when Rome conquered the known world more than a thousand years earlier—which means instead of being dragged up from innocence they would have been to some degree dragged back by the Normans from being overly upset. With regard to the ‘Celts’ of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Mann, I should say that, given how pseudo idealism has become such a strong force, I am not altogether convinced that the genetic studies were not in some way distorted or misrepresented or misinterpreted. There is such a strong desire amongst many people now to artificially create equality amongst races by eliminating, by any means, the possibility of differences between races, especially differences to do with exceptional ability.

The point is that the Celts had reached the stage in the journey from innocence to upset where they had developed, and possibly even deliberately selected for, courage, boldness and adventurousness, and so the possibility is that when some of them arrived in the British Isles they, as it were, dragged the existing population up to that stage also, with the result that, in the case of the western part of the British Isles, the existing population became, and still is, either the equivalent of or genetically, or both, the bold, relatively soul-strong Celts. Whatever the final truth is, the people living in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Mann have, to a significant degree, been sheltered, if not from trading with mainland Europe, from all the innocence-destroying wars and bloodshed on that mainland. While Brittany is part of mainland Europe it’s on a north-western peninsula, at the very edge of it.)

(Post-post-publication addition: Since writing the above in 2011, in 2018 I saw a documentary about the origins of the Irish and read a science report about the ancient Britons being overrun by people from the steppes, which I think confirms my thinking in the above addition.

Firstly, in 2018 I watched for the first time a 2008 RTÉ documentary titled The Origins of the Irish, which was narrated by Diarmuid Gavin, that describes just how sheltered and relatively ancient and thus innocent the basic Irish stock is. To quote from it, Gavin says ‘People first came to Ireland about 10,000 years ago…As we’ll find out, many of us are directly descended from the first wave of settlers who made Ireland home… [Professor Daniel Bradley:] As to where we [the Irish] originally come from, there’s an idea and it’s a good idea, that during the last glacial period a group that survived in southern Europe in the west after the ice moved up, they would have moved up and peopled in a band the western part of Europe. [Gavin:] The stone age people carried a distinctive genetic marker which can still be detected in Europe today. But when the frequency of this marker is mapped, a striking pattern emerges. It’s found in just 2% of Turkish men, but moving west the marker increases in frequency, rising to 50% in central Europe and to even higher levels as you get closer to the Atlantic coast. And the highest occurrence anywhere is in Ireland. On average, almost 80% of our population have the marker and in Connacht [western province of Ireland] it’s found in a remarkable 98% of men. The only place to come anywhere close to those levels is in the Basque region of northern Spain.’

With regard to the science report about Britons being overrun by people from the Eurasian steppes, the following is a report by Oliver Moody in The Times on 22 Feb. 2018 titled ‘Ancient Britons overrun by folk from the Steppes’: ‘Within a few hundred years of the last stone [of Stonehenge] being winched into place, the native Britons who built the monument had been almost entirely replaced by lighter-skinned, bluer-eyed migrants originating in the windswept steppes of Ukraine and Russia. The results of one of the largest ancient DNA studies yet conducted, published in the journal Nature [‘The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe, Nature, Vol. 555, 8 Mar. 2018] show that more than 90 per cent of the genetic make-up of the British Isles was “swamped” by the new arrivals from the Continent. Exactly how this happened remains a mystery. What is clear, though, is that the shift was permanent as it was abrupt, stretching from Dorset to Orkney. These invaders were our forebears. “Anyone who’s got British ancestry going back a couple of hundred years will have a predominance of steppe ancestry,” said Ian Armit, professor of archaeology at the University of Bradford. “Once it’s here, that’s essentially the ancestry of the historic British population.” Until about 4,500 years ago, Britain was inhabited by neolithic farmers who had spread up the Atlantic coast of Europe by way of Spain and Brittany. They grew cereals, herded sheep, goats and cattle, and built vast monuments such as Stonehenge, the ceremonial landscape on Salisbury Plain. Then, suddenly, everything changed. People started forging tools and weapons from copper, then bronze. They buried their dead in new kinds of tombs. They began making bell-shaped clay beakers like those found at archaeological sites all over Europe. The old question is: were these metal-working Britons the same people who raised the bluestones at Stonehenge? The genetic analysis shows emphatically that they were not. An international group of more than 100 scientists led by Inigo Olalde and David Reich from Harvard Medical School examined the wisps of surviving DNA from 400 Europeans who died between 4700BC and 800BC. They were trying to work out whether the “Beaker folk” culture that began to appear all over the continent from 2750BC represented a massive migration from the east or simply new ideas and technologies that had spread through trade between tribes. Almost everywhere except Britain, the picture was a complicated patchwork of the two. In this country it seems that from 2450BC to 2000BC the native population buckled before a tide of people flowing across from the continent in what the authors call a “demographic transformation”. One of the clearest examples is a man known as the Amesbury archer, an apparently wealthy and powerful member of the Beaker folk who was buried near Stonehenge a few decades after the stone circles were completed. The chemistry of his teeth shows that he grew up in the Alps. Professor Armit said he was possibly a pioneer in the first influx of people who would become the modern Britons. Since the 19th century historians have speculated that the sudden cultural leap forward was the result of an invasion. There is, however, precious little archaeological evidence to support this. Instead, studies have shown that the forests were beginning to grow back and the construction of new monuments was tailing off several hundred years before the Beaker folk turned up. Professor Armit said the new evidence raised questions about whether the land was already underpopulated. “Most archaeologists would be sceptical that we’re looking at a violent invasion.”’)

The southern edge of the Aryans’ original range, the north African desert, offered no refuge nor did the eastern edge offer a hide-out from all the wars that raged during the last 4,000 years. It was only in the north and the western edge of the range that there was any refuge from the march of corruption, and what is so remarkable is that this western region of England received a double-dose of the relative innocence, absorbing those from the northern edge of the original range.

The point is that a denial-free history of the human race will acknowledge not only the different levels of innocence amongst races, but how those levels have affected the human journey. The only difference of significance between individuals and races is their different degrees of corruption, their alienation, yet alienation is never acknowledged. This raises a whole debate that has never been allowed to take place; what happens when races at different levels of corruption attempt to coexist, and what ultimately is the solution to the problems that arise?

Much of the earlier part of this book has demonstrated the benefits of being able to be honest about the different states of corruption amongst individual humans. At last so much about humans can be compassionately explained, thereby subsiding the upset of soul, the psychosis in humans. Similar benefits can be derived from being honest about the different levels of corruption in races of humans and how these varying levels have impacted upon society.

In the late 1800s British colonists brought Indians to Fiji as indentured Page 366 of
Print Edition labour for farming sugar cane, and by the mid-1960s half the Fijian population was Indian. As a result a serious conflict has arisen between the Indian and native Fijians. The issue is the Indian Fijians have been so industrious and materially successful that they now monopolise Fijian business to the extent that the native Fijians feel their country is being taken over by the Indian Fijians; for their part the Indian Fijians feel that they are being discriminated against. Indian sugar growers in particular feel this inequity for while they are only allowed to lease land from native Fijians (who control 90 percent of the land) they produce 90 percent of the country’s sugar. Furthermore, since independence in 1970, native Fijians have ensured their domination of the political process.

The Indian Fijians come from a very ancient civilisation in India, one where innocence has long ago given way to more corruption-adapted humans. In comparison, native Fijians are still relatively innocent, yet to become embattled, hardened and upset-adapted. They aren’t manically driven, preferring to spend their day tranquilly occupied by such activities as playing music, drinking sedating kava and eating taro roots from their gardens. It is a case of a teenage-equivalent race having to coexist and compete with a toughened, cynical, driven opportunistic 40-year-old equivalent race.

An 18-year-old won’t wash the car—they do not yet know of the extent of the hardships that arise in a human-condition-afflicted world and thus they do not yet accept the responsibilities that arise in that world. A 40-year-old on the other hand has had sufficient innocence knocked out of him and has encountered a sufficiently uncertain world to be able to apply himself with immense discipline. He readily washes the car, sweeps the drive and works diligently, for instance, to pay the mortgage on his home. The truth is 40-year-olds are so aware of the reality of their human-condition-afflicted world where employment and income is never certain that in private moments they shake with fear, hardly able to believe they are fortunate enough to own a car and a home.

The frightening reality of the world of a 40-year-old arises from the fact that the more humans became corrupted and thus selfish, the more everyone else had to become selfish to successfully compete with them. Loss of innocence caused further loss of innocence; corruption was a self-fuelling process. At a certain point in this escalation of corruption life was no longer functional because everyone was too cynical and thus selfish for there to be any effective cooperative effort. That level of dysfunctionality, where everyone was only concerned for themselves equates to the level of corruption in the world of 40-year-olds.

Page 367 of
Print Edition Native Fijians are still sufficiently free of corruption, still sufficiently innocent and naive about the potential reality of life under the duress of the human condition to dislike applying themselves. Indians on the other hand had that naivety eliminated from their make-up long ago and are born to be cynical and realistic.

Native Fijians are renown for being a happy, smiling, generous race who like to sit around talking, playing music and singing. To them materialism is not so important. Native Africans share these same characteristics. Cecil Rhodes, the English pioneer developer of South Africa once famously complained, ‘we have to teach the natives to want’. To build the railway from Mombasa to Nairobi in Kenya, Indians had to be hired from India because the native Africans would not ‘work’. In earlier times when the act of enslaving was tolerated, the native Africans were highly sought for their relative innocence and naivety because it meant they were generous and pliable rather than cynical and obstinate like people from more upset-adapted races. I have read that there are now economic maps of the world that do not have Africa on them. From a business perspective, Africa is apparently not considered to be an economically operational place. South Africa, with its high proportion of Europeans, is the only exception; as an illustration of this comparison, on a map of Africa, South Africa is distinguished by its crisscross patterns of roads and railways.

While it was not safe to acknowledge different levels of innocence, excuses had to be contrived for racial differences. For example I have often heard it said that, ‘If Africa is dysfunctional it is because the white missionaries and then the white colonialists so disrespected native culture and so ill-treated the native people that the native people were left economically and spiritually crippled by the experience.’ It is true that innocence can be psychologically devastated by encounters with more corruption-adapted people, but that is not what is being argued. What is being asserted is that native Africans could compete if their culture had been respected and they had not been treated in a patronising way, and that is not true. What is true is that there are relatively innocent races who are naive about life under the duress of the human condition; and there are races who are relatively operational under the duress of the human condition; and there are races who are dysfunctional because they are overly corrupted, cynical and selfish—just as there are individual humans in these various stages of corruption.

Page 368 of
Print Edition Yet again it has to be emphasised that these stages of corruption are a result of humanity’s necessary battle to solve the human condition and while some races are more innocent than others, racist notions of some races being superior or inferior—such as Hitler’s view of the superiority of the Aryan race, especially that of the Nordic branch—have no credibility. Equally lacking in credibility are those assertions that humans and races do not become more corrupt as they age. As stressed, without the reconciling understanding of the human condition everyone who was innocent eventually became corrupted. Would a person’s 18-year-old self disown their 30-year-old self and would their 30-year-old self disown their 40-year-old self? Of course not. No one is better or worse than anyone else, merely differently corrupted as a result of the necessary battle to champion our intellect over the ignorance of our instinctive self or soul. What is being said in this essay explains everyone yet criticises no one.

The ability to be honest about the different levels of exhaustion or corruption of soul in different races, enables them to finally coexist and complement each other according to their different attributes. My second book Beyond is dedicated to the relatively innocent native Bushmen of the Kalahari because their innocence verified and sustained my innocence, allowing me to confront the issue of the human condition without being intimidated by the world of denial. As Sir Laurens van der Post hoped, the Bushmen’s ‘inner life might reveal a pattern which reconciled the spiritual opposites in the human being and made him whole…it might start the first movement towards a reconciliation’ (The Heart of the Hunter, 1961, pp.135–136 of 233). The more innocent have soundness to contribute while the more corrupt contribute necessary self-discipline and tough perseverance. Sir Laurens described the role of the more innocent when he wrote: ‘We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water…I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.151 of 253).

In his 1955 book The Dark Eye in Africa, an examination of the problem of blacks and whites in Africa, Sir Laurens used the word ‘primitive’ where I use the term ‘teenage-equivalent race’, and ‘civilised’ where I use the terms ‘disciplined 30-year-old equivalent race’ and ‘born-again 40-year-old equivalent race’. With his terms, Sir Laurens made the same point that I have just made when he Page 369 of
Print Edition wrote: ‘To my black and coloured countrymen who may read this book I would like to explain my use of the words “primitive” and “civilised” man. I use these words only because I know no others to denote the general difference of being which undeniably exists between indigenous and European man in Africa. I am, however, fully conscious of their limitations and relativity. I do not think of the European as a being superior to the black one. I think of both as being different and of the differences as honourable differences equal before God. The more I know of primitive man in Africa the more I respect him and the more I realise how much and how profoundly we must learn from him. I believe our need of him is as great as his is of us. I see us as two halves designed by life to make a whole. In fact, as I watch the darkening scene I see this need of the one for the other to be so great as to create fresh hope that this may yet save Africa from disaster’ (pp.19–20 of 159).

Relatively innocent, naive native races and over-exhausted, more cynical races, such as those in the Middle East, have both found it difficult competing with races from the middle of the spectrum, those that are toughened but not yet overly corrupted and can still effectively cooperate and function. What is occurring in the world today, in 2003, is that an operational 30-year-old equivalent race, namely the Anglo-Saxons, are proving so successful—for example they are most responsible for the so-called ‘economic globalisation’ of the world—that the relatively innocent teenage-equivalent races and the overly corrupted 40-year-old equivalent races are finding they are unable to compete and as a result their populace is being left impoverished. This ever-widening rift between the haves and have-nots is fuelling immense frustration amongst the have-nots. The break-out of terrorism in the world and the wars in the Middle East are the result of this frustration.

Obviously what is needed is a more equitable world where wealth is more evenly distributed. The denial-free interpretation of this is that the more operational races need to be prepared to share their good fortune with the less operational races. The fortunate have a responsibility to be merciful to those less fortunate.

The problem is that without understanding of the human condition no differentiation could be made between races according to how innocent or corrupt and thus how operational or non-operational they were. In order to avoid prejudice, everyone had to be allowed equal opportunity, yet obviously the more operational were always going to be ultimately more materially successful. Page 370 of
Print Edition Inequality was an unavoidable price of living in denial.

The result of this free enterprise system of equal opportunity for everyone is a world that has divided into an impoverished majority and an obscenely wealthy minority. On the face of it nothing could appear more unjust and dangerous than that situation. There is however an accompanying development to this unfair pattern that—and this will come as a surprise to a world that has been living in denial—is even more dangerous.

The more the world became unjustly unequal the more people tried to counter this with the only means at their disposal—the imposition of freedom-denying dogmatic forms of restraint. What is so dangerous is that this development has the potential to shut down the freedom of expression needed to allow the reconciling, dignifying, peace-bringing, humanity-liberating understanding of the human condition to emerge.

In the situation where inequality was to a significant degree unavoidable the real danger was not of inequality eventually destroying the world, but of dogmatic forms of restraint eventually denying the freedom needed to search for understanding, ultimately self-understanding. In a world dependent on denial, the dangers associated with both the political left and the political right escalated as time went on. However the political view that has the potential to destroy the world is that of the freedom-restraining political left, not the free enterprise political right. An article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Australian Financial Review recognised that ‘the great twin political problems of the age are the brutality of the right, and the dishonesty of the left’ (29 Jan. 1999). The scientist philosopher Carl von Weizsäcker similarly stated that, ‘The sin of modern capitalism is cynicism (about human nature), and the sin of socialism is lying’ (mentioned in a speech by Prof. Charles Birch that is reproduced in the Geelong Grammar School mag. The Corian, Sept-Oct. 1980). The dishonest pseudo-idealism of the left is by far more dangerous to humanity than the cynicism and brutality of the right.

Nietzsche was emphasising this surprising situation where fighting for freedom becomes more critical than the critical problem of inequality and its poverty when he said, ‘You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you…But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope!…War and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your pity but your bravery has saved the unfortunate’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, 1892; tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1961, pp.70,71,74 of 342).

Sir Laurens van der Post spoke equally strongly against pseudo-Page 371 of
Print Edition idealism: ‘the so-called liberal socialist elements in modern society are profoundly decadent today because they are not honest with themselves…They give people an ideological and not a real idea of what life should be about, and this is immoral…They feel good by being highly moral about other people’s lives, and this is immoral…They have parted company with reality in the name of idealism…there is this enormous trend which accompanies industrialized societies, which is to produce a kind of collective man who becomes indifferent to the individual values: real societies depend for their renewal and creation on individuals…There is, in fact, a very disturbing, pathological element—something totally non-rational—in the criticism of the Prime Minister [Margaret Thatcher]. It amazes me how no one recognizes how shrill, hysterical and out of control a phenomenon it is…I think socialism, which has a nineteenth-century inspiration and was valid really only in a nineteenth-century context when the working classes had no vote, has long since been out of date and been like a rotting corpse whose smell in our midst has tainted the political atmosphere far too long.’ (A Walk with a White Bushman, 1986, pp.90–93 of 326.)

The point is that without the freedom for individuals to question and to search for (and ultimately to deliver) understanding of the human condition, eventually alienation and its effects will destroy the human race, it will bring it into a state of abject physical and psychological poverty. Terminal poverty, the death of the human race, is what occurs if freedom is extinguished.

The following extract from my 2006 book The Great Exodus: From the horror and darkness of the human condition explains the extreme danger posed by the left wing, pseudo-idealistic, freedom-denying, ideal-world-imposing dogma of the so-called ‘politically correct’ culture.

‘We have reached the point in the human journey where the rapidly rising tide of the politically correct culture of deconstructionism, or post-modernism in affluent parts of the world, and its fundamentalist religious counterpart in poorer parts of the world, are threatening to stifle the freedom of expression upon which liberating enlightenment of the human condition depends.

In more affluent parts of the world the need to escape the escalating dilemmas and psychoses of life is becoming desperate and as a result the relief offered by idealistic, self-affirming, emotional causes is becoming increasingly irresistible. In poorer parts of the world there is an ever-growing need to counter the ravages of disorder and wretchedness through strict obedience to ideal principles. But the great danger is that if the strategy of imposing idealism or “correctness” becomes universal then the freedom to differ will be denied and the responsibility to address and resolve (rather than to escape and repress) the dilemmas of life will be abandoned—and real progress will be halted.

A crisis emerges for humanity when the seductive qualities of delusion Page 372 of
Print Edition become irresistible and/or the need for ultra-restraint becomes a necessity for the bulk of humanity. In the on-rush of the psychosis-escalating struggle of the human journey it was inevitable that a point would eventually be reached where the need for relief and restraint would become so great that the delusion of dogma—the artificiality of imposing ideality to solve reality—would become invisible to its practitioners. We are now in that situation where the advocates of dogma have become blind to its short-comings and consequently are now on an all-out mission to seduce and intimidate everyone with their culture.

It has been said that “postmodernism has peaked, and will die with the century” (A Strange Outbreak of Rocks in the Head by Damian Grace, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Jan. 1998), but this is a psychosis-driven situation where increasingly people have to variously live in adherence to pseudo forms of idealism to cope with their circumstances. Therefore, if you live in an affluent part of the world, no amount of opposition will halt the rise of politically correct culture, or, if you live in an impoverished part of the world, no amount of opposition to fundamentalist expressions of religion will halt its growth.

Throughout history there have been warnings of this great danger of pseudo-idealism seducing the world. George Orwell’s famous prediction in his 1949 book Nineteen Eighty-Four that “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face [freedom] forever” is relatively recent; the Bible presents powerful warnings in both the Old and New Testaments.

In the Old Testament the Book of Daniel focuses upon the eventual rise of pseudo-idealism in the world, describing the end result where the two ultimate forms of pseudo-idealism, namely politically correct deconstructionism in wealthier, more educated parts of the world, and fundamentalist expressions of religions in more impoverished parts of the world, take over: “two kings, with their hearts bent on evil, will sit at the same table and lie to each other” (11:27). Daniel concludes with this summary: “He [delusion] will invade the kingdom [of honesty] when its people feel secure [when delusion becomes a sufficiently universal culture], and he will seize it [seize the kingdom of honesty] through intrigue [through the seduction of pseudo-idealism’s imitation of idealism]…Then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation [pseudo-idealists will establish their culture of delusion that leads to oblivion]. With flattery [the do-good, feel-good self-affirmation that pseudo-idealism feeds off] he will corrupt those who have violated the covenant [pseudo-idealism will seduce the more upset away from true Page 373 of
Print Edition religion’s infinitely more honest way of coping with the human condition], but the people who know their God will firmly resist him [the more secure, less evasive will not be deceived and must strongly resist the seductive tide]” (11:21,31,32).

In the New Testament Christ reiterated Daniel’s stance, advising people to head for the hills when pseudo-idealism threatens to take over: “So when you see the ‘abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong [claiming to be presenting the way to the human-condition-free, good-versus-evil-deconstructed, post-human condition, new age]—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no-one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no-one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter because those will be days of great distress [mindless dogma and its consequences] unequalled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short [by the arrival of the truth about the human condition], no-one would survive” (from Matt. 24 & Mark 13).

The situation where extreme delusion threatens to seduce the world has now arrived. Its influence and hold has become so great that political opposition will soon no longer stop it. As the prophets above anticipated, humanity has finally reached the end-play situation where only the truth about the human condition can save the situation.’

That completes the extract from The Great Exodus: From the horror and darkness of the human condition. For great prophets throughout history, from Daniel to Christ to Nietzsche to van der Post, to make such powerful no-holds-barred warnings about the dangers of pseudo-idealism, emphasises just how serious a threat pseudo-idealism is. The level of intimidation that pseudo-idealists recently inflicted on the handful of countries willing to stand against the dangerous dictator and tyrant, Saddam Hussein, was of such intensity that they almost succeeded in preventing the stand altogether. If those who are so frustrated by the inequality in the world that they resort to reckless retaliation—such as President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan—are not strongly countered then the all-important culture of freedom in the world would have failed a crucial test, and as a result be on the way out forever. In the recent case of Saddam Hussein there were so few willing to defend freedom that it seems likely that it will not be long before freedom will succumb to the global assault of pseudo-idealism. George Orwell’s prediction that Page 374 of
Print Edition by 1984 the ‘boot [of pseudo-idealism would be] stamping on a human face [freedom] forever’ is apparently not many years off the mark.

An article written by Ramesh Ponnuru titled ‘Empire of Freedom’, published in the United States magazine National Review (24 Mar. 2003), was truthful when it talked of ‘The Three Anglos’, the United States President George W. Bush, England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard leading ‘The English-speaking alliance to save the world’ in the war against Saddam Hussein. The article reinforces many of the points I have made. It says that a US internet entrepreneur, James Bennett, uses the term ‘Anglosphere’ to describe a coalition of English-speaking countries, the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa that are ‘characterised by a high degree of individualism and dynamism, and by a talent for assimilation.’ Bennett says it is ‘no accident that it was in the Anglosphere that the industrial revolution and parliamentary democracy first emerged…Nor is it an accident that when French intellectuals and Malaysian prime ministers wish to denounce free markets, the phrase they use is “Anglo-Saxon capitalism”.’

What is happening in this situation where freedom is being almost annihilated and the inequality in the world is unbearably obscene is that humanity is entering end-play or end-game. If the reconciling understanding of the human condition had not been arrived at, the chasm between the rich and the poor and the resulting levels of frustration would only escalate, as would the difficulty of maintaining freedom in the world. The reconciling dignifying understanding of the human condition has arrived only just in time. As Christ said, ‘If those days [when the abomination of pseudo-idealism that causes desolation] had not been cut short [by the arrival of the truth about the human condition], no-one would survive’. The situation faced by the human race was that dangerous.

With the last minute arrival of understanding of the human condition, the innocent and upset states of the human condition can be finally reconciled and real and lasting peace can at last come to the human race. The battle to champion the human intellect over the ignorance of the instinctive self or soul of humans is finally resolved. The warrior’s sword can be laid to rest and everyone can work side by side for the new world.

How the transition to the human-condition-ameliorated, peaceful new world actually takes place was explained in detail in the Resignation essay in the section ‘Renegotiating resignation’.