Part 7. The crescendo of upset that has developed in the last 50 years

At this point the march of ever increasing upset was knocking on the door of terminal alienation, which the following graph that I presented in TI illustrates.

The race between self-destruction and self-understanding

I should emphasise that this progression was unavoidable while we still had to find the redeeming understanding of our corrupted condition. It really has been a race between self-destruction and self-understanding. Plato recognised this progression when he described humans becoming conscious and able ‘to order their course of life for themselves’ and as a result ‘the separation [from our soul occurred], when the world was let go [when the corrupt angry, egocentric and alienated state of the human condition emerged]’, after which ‘at first all proceeded well enough [our intellect mostly deferred to our instincts], but, as time went on, there was more and more forgetting [more and more dishonest denial with its psychosis-increasing alienated separation from our instinctive self or soul because it was criticising us more and more]…​and at last small was the good, and great was the admixture of evil, and there was a danger of universal ruin to the world’ (The Statesman, c.350 BC; tr. B. Jowett, 1871, 273). And some 400 years before Plato, his Greek compatriot Hesiod also recognised humanity’s deterioration from, as he described it, a ‘Golden Age’ of original innocence, to a ‘Silver Age’ when there was still some innocence, to a ‘Bronze Age’ when men were war-like, to a ‘Heroic Age’ when upset was civilised, and then finally to the completely corrupt ‘Iron Age’, which has now arrived, where ‘Corrupt the race, with toils and grief opprest / Nor day nor night can yield a pause of rest / …Speeds the swift ruin which but slow began’ (The Remains of Hesiod the Ascræan, tr. C.A. Elton, pp.23-24). Yes, this time of the ‘universal ruin to the world’, this time when ‘Speeds the swift ruin which but slow began’, this time of terminal alienation, is the time we humans are now living in!

Yes, the human race’s immensely heroic but immensely corrupting search for knowledge, ultimately for self-knowledge, the redeeming understanding of our corrupted human condition, has finally arrived at the end play, ‘universal ruin to the world’ stage where the line tracking the increase in upset on the above graph has become vertical with the amount of upset virtually doubling now in each new generation.

There has been a colossal change from the happiness and optimism of the 1950s and ’60s (as evidenced by the excitement of the music of those eras—‘the golden age of pop’ as the rock band U2 described it in God Part II), to the 1980s and ’90s when technology shrunk the world so that all the angst of the rapidly escalating alienation in people and all the resulting upset horror in the world massively spread and traumatised and virtually destroyed all the innocence of children from then on (as evidenced by the music of these subsequent generations, which changed from the 1950s and ’60s excitement to frightening head-banging angst, and now completely burnt out, muted music—as London’s The Times reported in 2024, ‘Lyrics of the most popular songs have become gloomier and angrier over the past five decades, a [University of Innsbruck] study has found, and there has been an increase in “negative sentiments” and a decrease in “positive emotions”’ (29 Mar. 2024)).

And once levels of alienation reach an extreme point, epidemic levels of family dysfunction and breakdown occur which further greatly exacerbates the increase in alienation—and that is the reality now; people are so alienated, so estranged from their true all-loving, all-sensitive and all-trusting instinctive self or soul that they can barely live with themselves, let alone effectively relate to and emotionally support, reinforce and nurture anyone else. In 1993 it was reported that ‘96 percent of American families are now dysfunctional’ (leading US counsellor John Bradshaw quoted in The Australian, 8 May 1993), and that was 28 years ago (from 2021 when this book was first published). And a major 2011 study in Australia—and Australia has until recent times been one of the most isolated and sheltered countries from all the upset in the world—found that ‘The well-being of Australia’s children and young people has declined alarmingly in the past decade—and plunging marriage rates are partly to blame, a major study has found. Growing rates of child abuse and neglect, of children being placed in foster care, and of teenage mental health problems, including a rise in hospital admissions for self-harm, are rooted in the rise of one-parent families and de facto couples, violent and unstable relationships, and divorce, the report says’ (‘Decline in marriage blamed for neglect’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 Sep. 2011).

George Orwell certainly wasn’t far off the mark when he titled his 1949 book about the arrival of terminal alienation Nineteen Eighty-Four!

Insightful, terminal-alienation-revealing artwork for a recent stage production of 1984

Not only has music reflected the state of upset of current generations, so has clothing, with recent generations wearing only muted dark and dull colours on often torn and worn out looking fabrics, with minimalist t-shirts obligatory. Few people now wear decorative clothing or bright colours. It’s like everyone is trying to out-do each other in how drab and understated they can dress. In truth they are making an honest statement about how psychologically exhausted and alienated they actually are. Yes, our streets really are drudging dirges of psychologically dead cadavers—which participants in zombie street parades only somewhat exaggerate for cathartic purposes! A 2013 article titled ‘Vacant stares become all the rage’ contained a photograph—very similar to the ones shown below on the left and right of participants in a zombie parade—with the caption, ‘An enthusiast takes part in the Zombie Walk festival in Prague on the weekend. Zombie walks, in which horror fans dress as zombies and parade through city streets, have grown in popularity in recent years’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 Jun. 2013). The picture in the middle below is a detail from another painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat (one was included earlier in par. 5) which sold in 2013 for a whopping $US48.8 million (The Australian, 17 May 2013)—a price no doubt indicative not only of its artistic merit but how much it resonates as an image of our time.

Mag Boiss; Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat; Devon Christopher Adams

Depictions of the terminally alienated, zombie state that humanity has arrived at.

Yes, while we humans haven’t been able to face the truth of our corrupted condition while we couldn’t explain it, and have had no choice but to bravely cope by adding more layers of denial of the extent of our corrupted condition, and ever more pretence that everything is okay, that façade is becoming impossible to maintain and the truth that we are reaching the end play, ‘universal ruin to the world’ stage is breaking out everywhere. Subconsciously aware of the trajectory of increasing corruption that the human race has been on, there have always been ‘The end of the world is nigh’ doomsayers, but that state is now upon us! In 2013 I compiled this collection of expressions in television and film of anxiety about our situation (for my book FREEDOM), and this anxiety has only increased since then. So, in 2013 a plethora of end-of-the-world, post-apocalyptic programs were appearing on television, such as ‘Life After People’, ‘Evacuate Earth’, ‘Doomsday Preppers’, ‘Survivors Guide to the Mayan Apocalypse [the prediction in the Mayan calendar that the world would end in 2012]’, ‘Apocalypse 2012 Revelation’, ‘Armageddon Outfitters’, ‘End Day’, ‘Omens of the Apocalypse: The End is Near’, ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Zombie Apocalypse’. And in cinemas, there were films titled: ‘Oblivion’, ‘Scary Movie 5’, ‘Warm Bodies [about zombies]’, ‘Escape from Planet Earth’, ‘Trance’, ‘The Host [about the human race being infected by psychic parasites]’, ‘A Good Day to Die Hard’, ‘This Is The End’, and the actor Brad Pitt’s film ‘World War Z’, which was described as ‘the latest in a trend of apocalyptic thrillers…​from a Hollywood convinced that the end is nigh’ (The Australian, 10 Jun. 2013), and as being about ‘a viral zombie disease that threatens world domination’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 Jun. 2013). Yes, the ‘zombie disease’ of psychological exhaustion and alienation is threatening to take over the world, and ‘the end of the world is nigh’!

In terms of new generations coming into such an exhausted world, the situation is so dire that our youth are now so psychologically upset, soul-damaged, spiritually hurt and needing to block out any confrontation with the truth of their and the human race’s now hyper corrupted condition that any deeper thinking at all has become impossible—which is why universities provide ‘trigger warnings’ on any confronting subject matter, ‘safe spaces’ for students to escape such confrontations, and protection from ‘microaggressions’ that encounters with any truth about the extent of the upset in themselves or in the whole human race represent to them. A 2017 article in The Australian newspaper evidenced this trend, with journalist Jennifer Oriel reporting that ‘half of undergraduate students [now] think it is acceptable to silence speech they feel is upsetting’ (25 Sep. 2017). In fact, Millennials (also known as the ‘Y-generation’, those born between 1982 and 1998) and subsequent ‘Z’ and ‘Alpha’ generations are described as ‘snowflakes’ because they melt if placed under any pressure. It certainly is endgame for the human race when humans completely give up on thinking, which is what has happened in academia. Universities have been places of learning, but how can you learn and seek truth if you aren’t prepared, expected or even challenged to think anymore?

2017 cover picture to article titled ‘Professor Encourages Students To Choose Their Own
Grades To “Reduce Stress’” (Joshua Caplan, The Gateway Pundit political website, 7 Aug. 2017)

Unaware of the instinct vs intellect explanation of the human condition and the ever-increasing levels of anger, egocentricity and alienation that the struggle to find that explanation has unavoidably caused, researchers have sought to blame the on-rush of alienation/​block-out/​denial/​soul-estrangement/​psychosis/​‘universal ruin’ in emerging generations on such superficial causes as the overuse of communication technology, such as the internet, social media, smartphones and computer games. While this technology has very greatly increased and spread alienation by exposing children to all the now overwhelming levels of upset in the world, which destroys their innocent, happy, trusting and loving instinctive self or soul, its overuse, even addiction, is the result of an immense need for distraction from overwhelming internal psychological pain from all their encounters with the human condition, especially during their infancy and childhood.

As the psychologist Arthur Janov pointed out: ‘The brain [of young people today] is busy, busy, dealing with the pain’; with the result that ‘when there is stimulation from the outside…​it meets with a very active brain which says “Whoa there. Stop the input. I have too much going on inside to listen to what you ask for”…Of course, the kid is agitated out of his mind, driven by agony inside. We want her to focus on 18th century art and she is drowning in misery’ (‘Once More on Attention Deficit Disorder’, 4 Apr. 2013).

Indeed, 8 years ago now in 2013 an art teacher at one of Sydney’s leading private schools told me that ‘while only two years ago students were able to sit through a half hour art documentary, I now know I lose them after only eight minutes; today’s students’ attention span is that brief!’ This comment mirrors an observation made by the political scientist David Runciman in a 2010 BBC documentary series about the internet: ‘What I notice about students from the first day I see them when they arrive at university is that they ask nervously “What do we have to read?” And when they are told the first thing they have to read is a book they all now groan, which they didn’t use to do five or ten years ago, and you say, “Why are you groaning?”, and they say “It’s a book, how long is it?”’ (Virtual Revolution, episode ‘Homo Interneticus’). The same documentary also included the following insightful statement from Nick Carr, the author of Is Google Making Us Stupid?: ‘I think science shows us that our brain wants to be distracted and what the web does by bombarding us with stimuli and information it really plays to that aspect of our brain, it keeps our brain hopping and jumping and unable to concentrate.’

In the case of social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/​X and TikTok, it allows people to be preoccupied/​distracted (from the truth of the until now unexplained corrupted state of the human condition) all day long with inane, frivolous, narcissistic, superficial self-promotion and gossip. The result of this extreme distraction from the ‘agony inside’ is that ‘The youth of today are living their lives one mile wide and one inch deep’ (Kelsey Munro, ‘Youth skim surface of life with constant use of social media’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 Apr. 2013). Yes, ‘the net delivers this shallow, scattered mindset with a vengeance’ (‘The effects of the internet: Fast forward’, The Economist, 24 Jun. 2010). As one member of the Millennial generation self-analysed, ‘Alone and adrift in what [Professor] de Zengotita calls our “psychic saunas” of superficial sensory stimulation, members of my generation lock and load our custom iTunes playlists, craft our Facebook profiles to self-satisfied perfection, and, armed with our gleefully ironic irreverence, bravely venture forth into life within glossy, opaque bubbles that reflect ourselves back to ourselves and safely protect us from jarring intrusions from the greater world beyond’ (Tom Huston, ‘The Dumbest Generation? Grappling with Gen Y’s peculiar blend of narcissism and idealism’, EnlightenNext, Dec. 2008-Feb 2009).

What all this exhaustion of soul has finally led to in the last few years is that young people are starting to give up on having anything to do with anything. A 2018 study by ‘social scientists seek[ing] explanations for millennials’ moderate ways’ said that ‘something is up’, ‘teenagers seem lonelier than in the past’, and talked of ‘young people becom[ing] virtual hermits’, and of ‘taking it slow. They are slow to drink, have sex and earn money.’ It said that ‘teenagers are getting drunk [on mind-numbing alcohol] less often’ and ‘other [escapist] drugs are also falling in favour’, and ‘young people [are] harming each other much less than they used to. Fighting among 13 and 15-year-olds is down across Europe’, and ‘teenagers are also having less sex’. It said that ‘In short, young people are less hedonistic and break fewer rules than in the past. They are “kind of boring”’ (‘Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic nowadays but they are also lonelier and more isolated’, The Economist, 10 Jan. 2018). With regard to the ‘moderate ways’ of younger generations and the inclination to be ‘virtual hermits’, a 2022 article in France reported on ‘a study claiming that the country is now mired in a “laziness epidemic” after swathes of the population said they had lost the will to work hard…​This unwillingness to work at all costs has led to a huge shortage of labour’ (‘Weary French mired in “exhaustion epidemic”’, The Telegraph, 16 Nov. 2022). Similarly in Spain, in 2022 it was reported that ‘One in 10 young Spaniards has dropped out of education and work altogether, with no plans to resume studying or look for a job’ (‘Spanish shun work and study’, The Australian, 19 Oct. 2022). A 2021 report about China says, ‘In China today, especially among urban millennials and members of Generation Z, unease is growing over the intense stress and extreme competition of daily life. They call this “involution”, which literally means to coil tightly inward, like the whorls on a shell…​[There are] online calls for people to “lie flat” or tangping and do the minimum…​“People know this is not what life is about…​and yet they cannot find a way out”…​with a quarter of Chinese adolescents experiencing depression’ (‘All work, no play? Chinese millennials opt to “lie flat” instead’, Christian Science Monitor, 15 Nov. 2021). In 2019 Japan’s epidemic of ‘shut-ins’ or ‘hikikomori, the phenomenon of withdrawal from society’ was predicted to ‘eventually rise above 10 million’ (‘Japan’s “Hikikomori” Population Could Top 10 Million’, Nippon.com, 17 Sep. 2019). In Australia in 2023 it was reported that there is ‘a silent legion of kids across our nation’ suffering from this psychological paralysis, where, ‘As the organisation School Refusal Australia explained in a submission to Victoria’s royal commission into mental health, “The kids are isolated, often live in their bedrooms 24/7 and are unable to leave their home. They barely function. They feel guilty and ashamed. They’ve given up”’ (‘The Absent Generation’, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 13 May 2023). A 2017 article reported that Australia’s ‘Five Year Mental Health Youth Report…​found the proportion of young people likely to have serious mental illness rose from 18.7 per cent in 2012 to 22.8 per cent in 2016’, and went on to say that ‘There is a tidal wave of mental health issues in the schools’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Apr. 2017). A 2023 report about the effects of the psychological distress in young Australians stated that ‘One in five teens struggles to read’ (The Australian, 15 May 2023). And a 2022 report said that ‘Suicide is the leading cause of death among Australians aged 15-24…​a 47 per cent increase over 2019’ (Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph, 4 Sep. 2022). Another 2022 report about the effects of the crippling levels of psychological upset in society said that ‘Australia is in a baby drought, with a record low birth rate’, and referred to ‘The rise of suburbs that are empty of children’ (Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph, 9 Oct. 2022). With regard to the effects on business of the psychological exhaustion of younger generations in Australia, 2022 reports said ‘we’ve now got a population that doesn’t want to work’ (Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph,  2 Jul. 2022) and that ‘there are thousands of businesses…​that just can’t get staff, let alone good employees’ (Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph, 4 Sep. 2022). In 2020 the then chair of Australia’s national broadcaster, Ita Buttrose, complained that ‘Millennials so lack resilience they need hugging’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Jul. 2020). Yes, the psychological exhaustion of younger generations in most parts of the world now is such that they are preferring to work from home, want to take their dog to work, ban phone calls from management because they find them too confrontational, want the business to have a climate agenda and be ‘politically correct’/​‘woke’ so they can gain some feel-good relief from their depressed condition, and even want a four-day working week. In the United States in 2022, Elon Musk was so frustrated with the paralysis of many in the younger generations at his Tesla car company that he famously suggested they should go and ‘pretend to work somewhere else’! And a survey in 2023 in the US found that ‘a staggering 79 per cent’ of business owners and managers ‘find Gen Z the most difficult generation to have in the workplace’ citing ‘entitlement, a lack of effort, motivation and productivity’, some saying interacting with them ‘can be exhausting because they lack discipline’ and ‘are too easily offended’ (‘Bosses lash out at Gen Z’, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, 24 Apr. 2023). This inability to work has led to countries’ welfare and disability funds being drained. For example, in 2022 in Australia it was reported that there was a shocking ‘Double-digit annual growth in the cost of the NDIS [National Disability Insurance Scheme]’ (The Australian, 7 Oct. 2022), largely driven by ‘spiralling numbers of children with developmental delay…​One in 11 boys aged five to seven in Australia is now on the NDIS…​With the numbers of young people with autism and psychological conditions driving the faster-than-anticipated growth in NDIS numbers’ (The Australian, 3 Nov. 2022); where ‘about one in three people currently on the scheme has autism, and more than 40 per cent of all participants are aged 14 and under’ (The Weekend Australian, 12 Nov. 2022). Also in 2022 in Australia it was reported that ‘Workers’ compensation claims for psychological injuries are doubling every four years’ (Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, 27 Jun. 2022), and that ‘Australians calling in sick to work could cost the national economy as much as $24 billion by the end of the year, new research shows…​Gen Z were nearly twice as likely than Baby Boomers to call in sick’ (Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, 12 Nov. 2022).

The following stories in the media provide a powerful snapshot of the rapidly increasing levels of alienation in the United States—indeed in the whole world—over the last 20 years.

2003 TIME cover story about ‘A medicated generation’ of children ‘suffering from’ ‘exploding rates’ of
‘the alternatively depressive and manic mood swings of bipolar disorder (BPD)’ and ‘attention-deficit/
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)’, with experts admitting ‘we don’t know exactly why the incidence of
psychopathology is increasing in children and adolescents’ (8 Dec. 2003). Yes, living in denial of the human
condition meant we were in no position to understand the effects of the human condition.

The truth is that the last refuge for those suffering from unbearable upset is dissociation from the world.
In fact, the epidemic numbers of children now suffering from the extremely agitated mental condition
of ADHD, and the completely-dissociated-from-the-world state of autism, shows how rapidly Plato’s predicted ‘universal ruin’ stage has in recent times been developing.

2013 TIME magazine cover story about the ‘narcissism epidemic’ of the ‘80 million strong…​biggest
age group in American history’ ‘Me Me Me Generation’ of ‘Millennials’. The article said that this
‘narcissism’, which is a ‘personality disorder’ where ‘people try to boost [low] self-esteem’, may
mean that the Millennials’ ‘self-centredness could bring about the end of civilization as we know it’.
Saying that ‘Millennials’ will ‘save us all’ was a reverse-of-the-truth lie designed to put a positive
spin on this real sign of ‘the end of civilization’ (20 May 2013).

This 2016 TIME magazine cover story, headed ‘The Kids Are Not All Right: American teens are anxious,
depressed and overwhelmed. Experts are struggling over how to help them’. Describing a ‘spectrum of
angst that plagues 21st-century teens’, like ‘anxiety’, ‘depression’, ‘self-loathing’, ‘fragility’, ‘sadness’ and
‘hopelessness’, the article begins and ends with harrowing descriptions of teens ‘cutting’ and ‘hurting
themselves’ because ‘physical pain may relieve the psychological pain’. ‘Self-harm’, it says, ‘does appear
to be the signature symptom of this generation’s mental health difficulties’ (7 Nov. 2016).

A 2017 article in The Economist reported that ‘the suicide rate for [American] 15 to 19-year-olds shot up
between 2007 and 2015, increasing by 31 per cent for boys, and more than doubling for girls’ (23 Nov. 2017).

(The American country singer Johnny Cash’s 2002 cover of Trent Reznor’s song Hurt so captures the pain
of many people today that the video of it ‘is considered one of the greatest of all time’ by many publications.
It includes Reznor’s horrific lyrics: ‘I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel / I focus on the pain /
The only thing that’s real // The [heroin] needle tears a hole / The old familiar sting / Try to kill
it away / But I remember everything // What have I become? … // I wear this crown of thorns /
Upon my liar’s chair / Full of broken thoughts / I cannot repair’.)

The fact is the paralysed, can’t-cope-with-anything, aptly titled ‘snowflake’ millennials are now describing themselves as ‘The Burnout Generation’—although, unable, until now, to acknowledge their extreme psychosis/​soul-death/​alienation from the end play state of humanity’s heroic search for the explanation of why we corrupted our cooperative and loving instinctive self or soul as being the real reason for their burn-out, they are blaming it on such superficial causes as stress from the overuse of ‘smartphones’ and from ‘the 2008 financial crisis’; to being ‘scared’ of the world due to ‘intensive’ ‘helicopter parents’; and in general to the ‘mental load’ produced by the ‘systems of capitalism and patriarchy’! (Anne Helen Petersen, ‘How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation’, BuzzFeednews.com, 5 Jan. 2019.) As is explained later in paragraphs 129 and 143 respectively, materialistic ‘capitalism’ and the ‘patriarch[al]’ work of solving the human condition are what has saved the human race from extinction, but such is the despair and madness of thinking in the human mind now that our saviours are portrayed as the villains. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who President Donald Trump is going to make his health czar, tweeted in 2024 that ‘I prayed to God every day for 19 years to put me in a position where I could end the chronic disease epidemic and bring health back to our children…​We have the sickest children in the world right now…​The autism rate is now 1 in every 22 boys…​And 50 percent of our children are obese…​We’re going to identify the root cause and eliminate these exposures to toxic additives and pesticide residue in our food.’ Again, the ‘root cause’ for the unhealthy mental and physical state of young people is not a superficial issue such as exposure to chemicals and vaccines but to the unbearable agony of the human condition that young people are now enduring. Someone please tell RFK Jr and Donald Trump to please assist our work that answers everyone’s prayers by solving the real ‘root cause’ of the human condition!

In terms of understanding the non-superficial, real reason for the increase in upset from one generation to the next (as Hesiod so accurately described it, ‘Nor day nor night can yield a pause of rest…​Speeds the swift ruin which but slow began’ for the human race), which was the upsetting effects of humanity’s heroic search for knowledge, there were two components. Firstly, there was the upset each person developed from their own experiments in self-management when there was no understanding of how such experiments could lead to outcomes that weren’t consistent with what our cooperative and loving instinctive self or soul expected—which, without that understanding, were coped with by defensively attacking, denying and trying to prove wrong those implied criticisms of our experiments; which, again, is the upset that self-management caused while we didn’t understand that we weren’t bad to search for knowledge and make mistakes. The second, and by far the greatest reason for the increase in upset that has occurred from generation to generation is the soul-destroying influence of the existing levels of upset in your society from all the upsetting searching for knowledge that has taken place before you arrived in the world. Each generation is born expecting to encounter the all-loving and all-sensitive world we humans originally lived in, and the more upset/​soul-corrupted the world we actually encounter is, the more bewildered, hurt and damaged our soul became by that encounter. When the great psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote that ‘To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.118 of 156) he was recognising how sensitive our soul is and how much it dies when it doesn’t encounter the love and happiness it expects. Admitting the loving sensitive nature of our instinctive self or soul is what allows us to understand what is crippling younger generations. As I have said, what the internet does then that is so destructive of young people is expose them to no end of soul-terrifying-and-deadening trauma. Playwright Samuel Beckett was only slightly exaggerating the brevity today of a truly loved, soulful, happy, innocent, secure, nurtured-with-unconditional-love-from-mothers-and-reinforced-with-unconditional-kindness-from-fathers, sane, trauma-free life when he wrote, ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’! (Waiting for Godot, 1955.)

Grotesque as it is, this detail from Goya’s 1819 painting of Cronus devouring his
child is a fair representation of how destructive our upset is of children’s innocence.

And the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 has so magnified the already unbearable levels of upset in younger generations that our youth are now living in a completely overwhelmed and traumatised state. If, since 2 million years ago, human life had not been based on living in denial of the truth of our corrupted condition while we couldn’t explain it, and we could see how terminally psychologically upset and soul-corrupted we humans have become, every publication in the world would carry the headline ‘We have to solve the human condition right now or all is lost!’ Yes, as the biggest worldwide study into youth mental health found, ‘Young people are showing the most serious warning signs and symptoms of a society and a world that is in serious trouble’ (McGorry, Patrick D. et al, ‘The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on youth mental health’, The Lancet Psychiatry, Sep. 2024, Vol. 11, Issue 9, 731–774). The following famous painting by Théodore Géricault captures the true extent of the exhaustion of the human race and the now absolutely desperate need to find the relieving explanation and understanding of our 2-million-year soul-corrupted human condition!

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, 1818-19

Unfortunately, because we are living in alienated denial of the truth of our soul-corrupted condition, apart from some superficial recognition of our psychologically distressed state, such as the TIME magazine cover stories, there is not even any mention of the linchpin issue of the human condition in the media! Truly, as that breathtakingly honest psychiatrist R.D. Laing also wrote, ‘Our alienation goes to the roots [p.12 of 156] …​the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be…​we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …​The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] …​between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete [p.118] …​The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness [p.116] (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). ‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake…​We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness]’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192). ‘We are so out of touch with this realm [so in denial of the issue of the corrupted state of the human condition] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, p.105).

This painting by the Irish artist Francis Bacon captures the ‘fifty feet of solid concrete’ ‘condition of alienation’ that Laing just described, with its death-mask-like, twisted, smudged, distorted, trodden-on—alienated—face, and tortured, contorted, stomach-knotted, arms-pinned, psychologically strangled and imprisoned body. As with the paintings of Basquiat, it is some recognition of the extraordinarily purging honesty of Bacon’s work that in 2013 one of his triptychs sold for $US142.4 million, becoming, at the time, ‘the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, breaking the previous record, set in May 2012, when a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream [another exceptionally honest, human-condition-revealing painting that I include at the end of the next paragraph] sold for $119.9 million’ (TIME, 25 Nov. 2013).

Detail from Francis Bacon’s Study for self-portrait, 1976

Yes, the level of soul-destroyed, alienated madness, and conversely the level of bravery of the human race, is astronomical! Even though not many are aware of it yet, MERCIFULLY THE HUMAN CONDITION HAS BEEN SOLVED—THE INSTINCT VS INTELLECT, RECONCILING, REDEEMING AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY REHABILITATING BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION FOR WHY WE CORRUPTED OUR SPECIES’ ALL-LOVING AND ALL-SENSITIVE BUT NON-CONSCIOUS ORIGINAL INSTINCTIVE SELF OR SOUL HAS BEEN FOUND AND PRESENTED IN ALL MY PUBLICATIONS! These clearly unresigned, denial-free, honest lyrics from the 2010 Grievances album of the young American heavy metal band With Life In Mind also powerfully reinforce how ‘desperate for the answers’ about the human condition we have been, and also how ‘Fear is driven into our [young people’s] minds everywhere we [they] look’, and how ‘scared to use our minds’ the human race has been: ‘It scares me to death to think of what I have become…​I feel so lost in this world’, ‘Our innocence is lost’, ‘I scream to the sky but my words get lost along the way. I can’t express all the hate that’s led me here and all the filth that swallows us whole. I don’t want to be part of all this insanity. Famine and death. Pestilence and war. [Famine, death, pestilence and war are traditional interpretations of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ described in Revelation 6 in the Bible. Christ referred to similar ‘Signs of the End of the Age’ (Matt. 24:6-8 and Luke 21:10-11).] A world shrouded in darkness…​Fear is driven into our minds everywhere we look’, ‘Trying so hard for a life with such little purpose…​Lost in oblivion’, ‘Everything you’ve been told has been a lie…We’ve all been asleep since the beginning of time. Why are we so scared to use our minds?’, ‘Keep pretending; soon enough things will crumble to the ground…​If they could only see the truth they would coil in disgust’, ‘How do we save ourselves from this misery…​So desperate for the answers…​We’re straining on the last bit of hope we have left. No one hears our cries. And no one sees us screaming’, ‘This is the end.’

Painted in 1895, not long before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914,
Edvard Munch’s iconic image The Scream captures all the denied pent-up pain
and horror of the human condition acknowledged in With Life In Mind’s lyrics,
‘I scream to the sky but my words get lost along the way’, ‘no one sees us screaming’.

The completely exhausted inclination in emerging generations to give up on life is going to have, indeed is already having, very serious political and thus social consequences. As will be described more fully in the next Part 8 of this book, in the case of politics, in the situation that has existed up until now where we haven’t understood that we had no choice but to defy our moral instincts and participate in humanity’s heroic corrupting search for knowledge, ultimately for self-knowledge, the all-important, psychologically relieving understanding of our corrupted human condition, for the psychologically exhausted, burnt out younger generations the attraction of the Left’s pseudo idealistic, ‘let’s-all-just-hug-each-other’, ‘do-good-to-make-yourself-look-and-feel-good’, ‘politically correct’, ‘woke’ culture is proving irresistible. Exhausted by the battle, they are throwing their hands up and saying ‘Let’s quit the battle, throw in the towel, give up on finding knowledge, just stop this struggle and be good to each other’. A 2023 article about the voting habits of young Australians said that ‘Millennials and Gen Z voters are bucking the time-honoured trend of becoming more conservative as they get older…​Indeed, Gen Z…​is the first cohort to become less conservative with age’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Jun. 2023). What happened after the 2022 federal election in Australia, is that ‘the Australian National University 2022 Australian Election Study’ found that ‘only one in four voters under the age of 40 voted for the [right-wing] Coalition and only one in five voters among Generation Z voted for the Coalition’ (The Australian, 7 Dec. 2022). In Britain, ‘A poll last year [2023] found that only 1 per cent of Britons between 18 and 24 plan to vote [right-wing] Conservative at the next election’ (The Australian, 27 Jan. 2024). In the case of the US, a 2016 article in The Atlantic said, ‘if there’s one thing people are learning about this young generation, it’s that they are liberal. Even leftist. Flirting with socialist. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, more than 80 percent of voters under 30 years old voted for Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist so outside the mainstream of his party [so extremely left-wing] that he’s not even a member’ (Derek Thompson, ‘The Liberal Millennial Revolution’, 1 Mar. 2016). In fact, there are many predictions being made in democratic countries that before long the right-wing may never be able to win power again. A May 2019 article in The Atlantic that has the meta title ‘Young Democrats May Control the Political Future’ said that in the US ‘the [right-wing] GOP seems to be playing a losing hand’ (Niall Ferguson & Eyck Freymann, ‘The Coming Generation War’). And in Australia it’s been suggested that ‘Eventually there will be almost no realistic path back to power for the [right-wing] Coalition without a [seemingly unlikely] dramatic increase in support among voters born after 1980’ (The Australian, 29 Jun. 2023). In fact, soon the only way the right-wing may be able to win power will be by the left-wing’s addictive culture of relieving yourself of your corrupted condition by finding pseudo idealistic causes to support becoming so extremely destructive of humanity’s all-important, heroic search for knowledge that a great revulsion of the dishonest, utter trashiness of the Left develops and there is a desperate return to supporting the Right (such as happened with the re-election of Donald Trump in American politics in 2024). Extreme polarisation of politics, such as we are seeing in the 2024 left-wing Kamala Harris versus right-wing Donald Trump US election, will be (and was) the result—‘Finding relief from my corrupted condition through supporting pseudo idealistic causes is so important to me that I don’t care about the human race’s survival’, versus, ‘We desperately have to maintain the freedom from the oppression of pseudo idealistic dogma in order to continue our species’ corrupting search for knowledge, ultimately for self-knowledge, the redeeming understanding of our corrupted condition’—which thank goodness has finally been found! As will be explained much more fully in what follows in this book (see particularly paragraphs 109-114), the problem of course for the Right while this understanding of humanity’s heroic task of having to find understanding of our species’ corrupted condition isn’t widely known, is that it has been almost impossible for the right-wing to argue that there’s been anything fundamentally wrong with the seemingly ideal, cooperative, selfless and loving behaviour-demanding culture of the Left.

As will be described shortly when the development of Postmodernism and then Critical Theory is explained, this abandonment of the immensely upsetting, heroic battle the human race has been involved in to find understanding of the human condition has developed into not just a totally dishonest attitude, but into totally dishonest philosophical theories about the very nature and purpose of human existence!

Yes, it certainly is endgame for the human race when humans completely give up on thinking, which is what the Millennial, Z and Alpha generations, which are those born since 1982 (those under the age of 39 in 2021), essentially want to do with their ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’, ‘microaggression-avoiding’, ‘snowflake-lack-of-resilience’, ‘struggles to read’ anything profound, ‘scared to use our minds’ mentality. Indeed, a further indication of how terminally alienated the human race has become is that we in the WTM get virtually no response to our online advertisements that promote understanding of the human condition from those now under the age of 39 (in 2021)—you can view a sample of our online advertisements at www.humancondition.com/online-ads. The all-important issue of our species’ troubled human condition has become just too unbearable to even begin to think about for all but a rare few who are younger than that. Some of us from the Sydney WTM who attended a seminar on online marketing in 2017 were actually told that ‘conventional advertising doesn’t work with anyone under the specific age of 35’, and that they require ‘much more backed-off, minimalist, even oblique messaging’ (Salesforce World Tour). In fact, we have learnt that advertising to under 39s (in 2021) is so futile that we have no choice but to avoid it—which means that the initial appreciation and support of the human-race-saving understanding of the human condition is going to have to come from people over 39, which is a stark measure of the extremely serious, fast-running-out-of-time situation the human race is in. Yes, when that musical genius and prophet of our times and Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan wrote and sang in 1968, ‘There must be some way out of here…​There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief…​So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late’ (All Along the Watchtower), he could not have known how ‘late’ it was going to get to ‘not talk falsely now’ about the ‘confusion’ of our horrifically corrupted human condition and by such truthfulness find the ‘relief’ of the understanding of that diabolical condition, which is our only ‘way out of’ it.

It should be emphasised that what is said about Millennials and subsequent generations is not an attack on them. As is explained here and in TI, the unavoidable, heroic price the human race had to be prepared to pay for searching for knowledge was ever increasing levels of upset anger, egocentricity and alienation, which has led to the extremely upset Millennial and subsequent generations. So a generation’s particular level of upset is not their fault, rather it is a consequence of where it happens to fall in humanity’s progression of upset. You can read more about Millennials and subsequent generations in Our Meaning; and you can read more about the march of upset to terminal levels and the ‘universal ruin to the world’ in F. Essay 55, and chapters 8:16A-Q of FREEDOM.