The ‘deaf effect’: the difficulty of reading about the human condition

Given humans’ justified extreme fear of the subject of the human condition, a very important question arises: How are humans going to be able to consider presentation and analysis of the human condition now? Won’t their historic fear be triggered? Won’t their habituated practice of denial come into play? Won’t their mind start blocking out what is being said, effectively unable to absorb the information?

The answer to these questions is a resounding ‘yes’, humans are effectively ‘deaf’ to discussion of the issue of the human condition. Humans’ historic denial prevents description and analysis of the human condition coming through into their conscious awareness. Such is the nature and purpose of a denial.

Page 43 of
Print Edition The following extract from a newspaper article is an illustration of the power of the human mind to block out or alienate itself from or deny what it does not want to hear. The article, headed ‘Patients can’t comprehend doctors’ bad news’, said that a study of cancer patients ‘showed that many patients use denial as a way of coping…Professor Stewart Dunn, director of the medical psychology unit at the University of Sydney and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, said the new findings suggested many patients did not want to hear their doctor because they were in “denial mode”. “We found that denial is a way of dealing with severe distress…In a typical 28-minute consultation, a cancer patient received one new piece of information a minute—too much for traumatised people to absorb,” he said…Ms Kay Roy, 50, who was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, recalls that she remembered nothing from what the doctor said in the initial consultation, other than “you can expect a normal lifespan”. “So, I obviously picked up the words I wanted to,” she said. “I think there is a general discrepancy between what the doctor says and the patient hears. I thought I was cool, calm and collected but I must have been in a state of shock. The words just seemed to flood over me.” Ms Roy, of Wahroonga, said it took another two weeks before reality began sinking in’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Aug. 1995).

It is true that as soon as discussion of the human condition begins, the human mind’s highly practiced, virtually automatic denial asserts itself to protect it from the implicitly condemning criticism that it has come to expect will follow. In the full text of his cave allegory in The Republic, Plato described the situation perfectly when he wrote: ‘if he [a prisoner in the cave] were made to look directly at the light of the fire [as explained, the sun and its Earthly representation fire represent the cooperative ideals and the associated issue of the human condition], it would hurt his eyes and he would turn back and take refuge in the things which he could see, which he would think really far clearer than the things being shown him. And if he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rocky ascent [out of the cave of denial] and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight, the process would be a painful one, to which he would much object, and when he emerged into the light his eyes would be so overwhelmed by the brightness of it that he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real’ (Plato The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.280 of 405).

Plato says that when the cave dweller ‘emerged into the light his eyes would be so overwhelmed by the brightness of it that he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.’ Humans have Page 44 of
Print Edition had to live in such deep denial of the issue of the human condition that when they are confronted with the issue they, as Plato says, are not ‘able to see a single one of the things’ they are being told. Not being able to take in ‘a single thing’ when reading logical and simple to follow explanation is so against the normal person’s experience that the reader is entitled to be extremely disbelieving at being told that this will occur with analysis of the human condition. However, despite the readers’ expected initial extreme disbelief, Plato is right, the reader will be ‘blind’ or, depending on which metaphor you use, ‘deaf’ to discussion of the issue of the human condition. I hope the reader will not be offended by this assertion. The intention of this book is that the further someone reads into the book, the more aware they will become of just how frightening the issue of the human condition has been for humans, and thus how deeply humans have been living in denial of the subject. There truly has been an elephant in everyone’s living room that virtually everyone has very deliberately not been able to see. The aim of this book is to bring the reader, step by step, into contact with the extent of the problem of humans’ fear and thus denial of the issue of the human condition because it is only then that they will be in a position to appreciate the reconciling, dignifying, ameliorating and liberating explanation of the human condition. To be in a position to rid themselves of the ‘elephant’, humans had to first rediscover its existence.

Plato elaborated on the difficulty of trying to get people to confront the issue of the human condition, actually describing it as being like trying to ‘put sight into blind eyes’ (ibid. p.283). As the Plato essay will explain in detail, people who have historically been referred to as prophets are individuals who had the rare good fortune to receive a sufficiently nurtured upbringing to remain uncorrupted enough in self to be able to confront the Godly, meaningful, cooperative, loving ideals of life and the associated issue of the human condition without experiencing condemnation and depression. They are individuals who have a clear conscience. As Berdyaev said in the aforementioned quote from his 1931 book The Destiny of Man, ‘Moral knowledge is the most bitter and [requires] the most fearless of all for in it sin and evil are revealed to us…There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless…[for this reason the study of] ethics is bound to contain a prophetic element. It must be a revelation of a clear conscience, unclouded by social conventions; it must be a critique of pure conscience.’ The biblical prophets Isaiah and Christ Page 45 of
Print Edition were two such fortunate people and both encountered the ‘deaf effect’ response to their unevasive, denial-free, human-condition-confronting, truthful words. Using the same sensory metaphor as Plato, Isaiah said, ‘“You will be ever hearing, but never understanding; you will be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” This people’s heart has become calloused [alienated]; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes’ (Bible, New International Version, 1978, Isaiah 6:9,10, footnote). Christ similarly said, ‘why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say…The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God [you live in denial of the Godly, meaningful, cooperative ideals of life and the associated issue of the human condition]’ (John 8:43–47).

T.S. Eliot once wrote of the ‘terrifying honesty’ of the denial-free, unevasive, sun-confronting writings of William Blake (William Blake Selected Poems, ed. P.H. Butter, 1982, pxiii of 267). As we have seen, Blake dared to plumb the depths of the human condition.

The truth is that almost all humans have had to employ immense mental block-out from, and thus separation or split-off or alienation from, the truth of their corrupted state. The human condition is, to re-quote Kierkegaard, ‘something’ a human ‘doesn’t even dare strike up acquaintance with’. This deepest of issues of the human condition has been an anathema to most people. They have had the attitude of Albert the alligator in the old Pogo comic strip: ‘The inner me? Naw, got no time fer him. Ah got trouble enough with the me whut’s out cheer whar Ah kin get mah hands on ’im. Ez fer the inner me, he goes his way, Ah go mine’ (mentioned in Charlton Heston’s autobiography, In The Arena, 1995).

Significantly, the longer the human journey had to continue without the reconciling understanding of the human condition, the more psychologically embattled and insecure, and thus the more in denial and alienated each generation of humans became. Once adults were corrupted and alienated, their children’s pure, original, instinctive self or soul was going to be compromised, hurt, damaged and corrupted by the unsound, dishonest environment they were having to grow up in. ‘Hurt’ has unavoidably been causing hurt since the human condition emerged. As it is described metaphysically in the Bible, ‘I…am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me’ (Ten Commandments, Exod. 20:5, Deut. 5:9). Also, the level or amount of corruption has compounded as each generation contributed to the existing corruption with the corruption it incurred from its own conscious search for Page 46 of
Print Edition knowledge. (How the conscious search for knowledge created humans’ corrupted angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour is the central explanation presented in Beyond.) While self-restraint could, to a degree, contain the corruption and its propagation, ultimately only reconciling, dignifying and ameliorating understanding of the reason for this corrupt behaviour could end the cumulative process.

Alienation has been exponentially accumulating. In fact a graph charting the extent of alienation over time would show its curve beginning to climb vertically in recent years, the rate of increase having become so rapid. The levels of alienation in the human race now are so extreme that we are fast approaching an end-point where the human body cannot endure any more suffering from depression and loneliness, and the human mind cannot become any more alienated without going completely mad.

Part of humans’ strategy for avoiding the issue of the human condition has been to avoid the true extent of their devastation of the world around them and within them. Humans have had to, as is said, ‘put on a brave face’, ‘stay positive’, ‘keep our chin up’—as the actor David Niven once commented, humans ‘had a duty to be cheerful’. The only way humans could do that in the face of their awful reality was to not allow themselves to see this reality. News bulletins report when someone is run over by a bus or is murdered but they never report the deaths that are occurring daily of the souls of humans, deaths that are just as real as physical deaths. Alienation is not a subject people want to know about. The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote that ‘the only real death we recognize is biological death’ (The Divided Self, 1960, p.38 of 218), while Kierkegaard, in his book The Sickness Unto Death, noted that ‘The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is bound to be noticed’ (p.62 of 179). (Kierkegaard was certainly one of the rare people capable of, as the dustjacket of the 1989 Penguin edition of his book says, ‘digging deep in the graveyard of denial, refusal and despair’ of the human situation.) As mentioned earlier, this practice of positive stoicism was the essence of our species’ bravery, but the point here is that it has masked the true extent of alienation in humans from themselves.

The following quote from a review of Stanley Cohen’s 2001 book, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, describes humans’ inability to face the extent of the devastation of the world around them. It also provides another illustration of humans’ capacity Page 47 of
Print Edition for denial of unconfrontable realities, acknowledging that ‘denial has become the condition of our times’ and alienation is a ‘wholesale pathology’ in our society.

The reviewer, Anthony Elliott, writes: ‘Few topics can be as disquieting as the strategies we use to shield ourselves from administered atrocities—torture, political massacres, genocides. From the shadows cast by Auschwitz to recent terrors in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya and Kosovo, the apparent indifference of Western publics to mass suffering is shocking, disturbing, haunting. With media images of violence relayed instantly across the globe, knowledge of organised cruelty seems increasingly threatening—such knowledge incapacitates us intellectually, drains us emotionally. Blocking out, shutting off, not wanting to know: denial has become the condition of our times…Cohen’s States of Denial is out to show that the personal and political ways in which we avoid uncomfortable realities are deeply layered at the level of both personality and contemporary culture. When we deny painful knowledge, says Cohen, we use unconscious defence mechanisms to protect ourselves. Cohen finds the subterranean, ambivalent waters of the Freudian unconscious a useful explanatory tool for making sense of subtle variations in professed denials of fact or knowledge. In both the private realm and the public sphere, Cohen traces mechanisms of denial from “splitting” (where a person psychically detaches from painful knowledge) to “inner emigration” (a retreat inwards to shut out an unbearable outer reality). Intriguingly, Cohen nicely captures one of the most common modes of avoidance with the term “pseudo-stupidity”. This is a way of both knowing and not-knowing, of suspecting but not seeking to check one’s suspicions. While noting that some “switching off” is necessary in order to retain our sanity, Cohen argues that our rising inability to “face” or “live with” unpleasant truths is producing wholesale pathology in the form of alienated individuals and remote communities. In an exceptionally wide-ranging treatment of the topic, Cohen’s timely book traces multiple forms of the denial of distant suffering. He analyses denial through the rich literature of its expression, including cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis, social and political sources, the reports of witnesses and bystanders, legal theory and literary texts’ (The Australian, 4 Apr. 2001).

The denial that humans are currently practicing towards the atrocities of our time is undoubtedly extreme, nevertheless it is but a tiny drop in the 2-million-years-deep ocean of denial and resulting alienation humans have developed to protect themselves from the trauma of the human condition. Friedrich Nietzsche recognised the phenomenal role lying has played in human life when he wrote, ‘That Page 48 of
Print Edition lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence’ (The Will To Power, 1901; tr. A.M. Ludovici, 1909). In his major work Faust (1808), Goethe argued that lying is part of human nature while truth is not.

What is so significant about the 2-million-years-reinforced alienation humans now have from the issue of the human condition is that it means that the ‘deaf effect’, the amount of block-out or denial that humans are employing to protect themselves from confrontation with the issue, is now almost complete. In 1967 R.D. Laing described the situation when he wrote, ‘There is a prophecy in Amos that there will be a time when there will be a famine in the land, “not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.” That time has now come to pass. It is the present age’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.118 of 156). The ‘famine’ that is now upon humans is their near total inability to access and acknowledge the issue of the human condition. As mentioned, ‘the Lord’ or ‘God’ are the metaphysical terms we have used for the profoundly meaningful cooperative, loving, selfless ideals of life, a meaningfulness that humans have not been able to confront while they could not explain their competitive, aggressive and selfish nature. While humans have been unable to confront the truth of such meaningfulness, and have thus had to live in denial of it, there are many other important truths that bring into focus humans’ apparent lack of compliance with the Godly ideals of life, and of which humans have therefore also had to live in denial. For example, humans have had to live in denial of the truth that our species lived in an instinctive innocent, all-sensitive, utterly cooperative, soulful state before consciousness emerged, the fabled Golden Age or Garden of Eden. Also, as just described, they have had to live in denial of the truth of the epidemic, the ‘wholesale pathology’, of human alienation. These denials, and many, many others that will be described in this book, are enormous lies. Humans have blocked out so much that is real and true. In this sense there is now, as Amos prophesied and Laing recognised, a ‘famine of hearing’ anything that brings into focus humans’ apparent lack of compliance with ‘the Lord’, which is the cooperative state.

In Homer’s Greek legend, The Odyssey (composed sometime in the 9th century BC), the prophet Teiresias predicted that Odysseus (or ‘Ulysses’ in the later Roman version), on his return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, would have to undertake one final journey into Page 49 of
Print Edition a desperately barren land. Odysseus told his wife Penelope, ‘Teiresias bade me travel far and wide, carrying an oar, till I came to a country where the people have never heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food.’ The sea is a metaphor for humans’ original innocent instinctive self or soul that, as is explained in Beyond and referred to in essays in this book, became repressed with the emergence of our conscious self. This instinctive self or soul, which psychoanalyst Carl Jung referred to as our species’ ‘collective unconscious’ and for which the sea is such a good symbol, now resides deep in humans’ subconscious. From there it bubbles up in dreams and on other occasions when the conscious self is subdued. As Jung wrote, ‘The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche [soul], opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness’ (Civilization in Transition, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol.10, 1945). Our psyche or soul (‘psyche’ in the dictionary means ‘soul’) has immense sensitivity, it has access to all the beauty and magic of life, the ‘salt’ or full flavour of existence—unlike the numb, seared, flavourless, ‘saltless’, alienated state. It follows that this ‘country where the people have never heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food’ is the soul-destroyed, alienated world that R.D. Laing described as, ‘the present age.’ The ‘oar’, Teiresias explained to Odysseus, is actually a ‘winnowing shovel’. This other journey, that Teiresias was predicting would eventually have to be undertaken, was into the centre of this alienated world we now live in, in order to winnow from its denial-compliant, evasively presented scientific discoveries the truth about the human condition. It is that other journey that has at last been completed.

It should be mentioned that Sir Laurens van der Post has written an essay, titled The Other Journey, that explains ‘the other journey’ component of the Teiresian prophecy in greater detail than I have here. It can be found in Sir Laurens’ 1993 book, The Voice of the Thunder. I should point out that Sir Laurens titled that book ‘The Voice of the Thunder’ in anticipation of the arrival of the deafening truth about the human condition. For Sir Laurens van der Post to have been able to make such penetrating insights into mythology and the human situation he must clearly have been one of those rare individuals who was sufficiently sound to confront and think freely about the human condition, someone living outside Plato’s ‘cave’ of denial in the truthful world of the illuminating ‘sun’, one of those people traditionally termed a prophet. Indeed in his full-page obituary in Page 50 of
Print Edition the London Times he was recognised as ‘a prophet’ (20 Dec. 1996). Sir Laurens van der Post’s extraordinary ability to reveal the confronting truth about humans has led some people to seek to destroy his credibility. More is said about the posthumous persecution of Sir Laurens in the Plato essay.

The point being made is that the extreme levels of alienation in humans now means that their ‘deafness’ to any discussion of the human condition could hardly be greater. In Plato’s imagery, humans have retreated to the deepest, darkest corners of their ‘cave’ world of denial, to a life that finds any light at all ‘painful’ and ‘hurtful’.

The two most dreaded terms in the English language are ‘human condition’ and ‘alienation’, and yet they are the most-used terms in this book. This gives an immediate measure for the reader of how difficult it will be for their mind not to be, in the words of the cancer sufferer quoted earlier, ‘in a state of shock’, where the words will just seem ‘to flood over’ them, and they will not ‘hear’ what is said and will ‘remember nothing from what [is] said in the initial consultation [the first reading]’.

This book, A Species In Denial, published in 2003, is the third book I have written. The first, Free, was published in 1988 and Beyond was published in 1991. These two earlier books were written as concise and thus, it was hoped, easily accessed and understood presentations of the explanation of the human condition. However, far from being easily accessed and understood, the overwhelming reaction has been that people found they could not ‘hear’ what was being said in these books.

With only this reaction to judge by, people would be entitled to be sceptical and think that the lack of response was because the books were badly written, or the ideas lacked veracity, but consider the following responses to Free and Beyond: ‘The words in your books have in my experience brought up emotional reactions in people and they reject the information, not able to get behind them and experience the profundity of where you are coming from…Your insights are so head on as to cripple some people’ (WTM Supporter G. Clark, letter to author, Jan. 1993). Similarly, ‘From the reactions of people who have borrowed my copies of Free and Beyond I have started to wonder if the complete holistic picture presented may be too much to accept and absorb in one hit’ (New Zealand WTM Supporter P. Sadler, letter to author, 8 Nov. 1995). Years after he had finally overcome his mental state of denial of the books’ subject matter one reader confided, ‘When I first read your books all I saw were a lot of black Page 51 of
Print Edition marks on white paper’ (comment by WTM Supporter G. Plecko, Mar. 2000).

In those first two books, the logic that led me to the strategy of presenting the direct explanation of the human condition, the concise account of the biological reason for why humans have been divisively behaved, was that since humans’ denial of the issue of the human condition occurred because they were not able to understand why they have not been able to be ideally behaved, the key to getting them over their denial would be to give them the explanation of the human condition. What I had not sufficiently appreciated and factored in was the extent of the deaf effect. I was solving the problem of the human condition but the reader was in denial of the existence of the problem. The strategy with this book has been to reconnect the reader with the problem of the human condition because only when this is done can they appreciate and begin to take in the explanation. The deaf effect has been the stumbling block.

It can be seen from the comments in the preceding paragraph that Plato was right when he said that when the cave dweller ‘emerged into the light his eyes would be so overwhelmed by the brightness of it that he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.’ Isaiah was also right when he said this about human-condition-confronting information: ‘“You will be ever hearing, but never understanding; you will be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” This people’s heart has become calloused [alienated]; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes’.

When people begin reading direct description and analysis of the human condition the reality is that they ‘hear’ very little. The mind is literally in shock at hearing the subject even admitted, let alone talked about and talked about so openly and freely. The mind quickly brings up the blocks it has needed to protect itself from the condemning and thus depressing implications that thinking about the human condition has led to in the past. It may seem amazing, but people can read a page of those earlier two books over and over again and still not comprehend what is written there. In a typical description of this phenomenon, a married couple said: ‘We have tried very hard to read Beyond; in fact my wife and I would sit in bed and read a page together, and then re-read it a number of times, but still we couldn’t understand what was written there’ (WTM Supporter H. Saunders reporting a friend’s comment, Oct. 1998).

It should be pointed out that the almost instantaneous triggering of the deaf effect is witness to the fact that a person’s mind only has Page 52 of
Print Edition to become aware of the smallest amount of information relating to the human condition to know where the discussion is heading. It is an indication of just how intuitively aware humans are of the truths they are blocking out. The deaf effect response to this information is a measure of just how penetrating it is; in fact it authenticates the integrity of the material being presented.