42. The final 200 years when increasingly dishonest forms of Pseudo Idealism were developed

At this point we need to consider the situation faced by humanity in the final 200 years of its now plummeting path to self-destruction through excessive upset, because it was during this final stage in the march of upset that the honesty of religion became too confronting and other extremely dangerous forms of pseudo idealism were adopted.

Eventually, as the graph of the exponential growth in upset in the world entered the stage where it dropped almost vertically, compounding at an extremely rapid rate, a crisis stage in the human journey occurred. This crisis stage is where the upset in humans becomes so great that the need to find relief from the associated guilt and escape the dangerous depression it causes becomes so intense that the extreme danger for humanity of abandoning the corrupting search for knowledge through excessive emphasis on oppressive idealism becomes irrelevant; it is ignored. It is this endplay crisis stage that is occurring at this very moment in humanity’s 2 million year long journey through adolescence. We have arrived at the situation where the need to feel good about ourselves has almost taken over and the greater responsibility to carry on humanity’s heroic but corrupting search for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, is on the very threshold of being abandoned.

What happened around 200 years ago to dramatically increase the levels of upset in society was another serious amplification of the factors that caused a sudden increase in upset 11,000 years ago. Eleven thousand years ago it was that the domestication of crops and animals that led to greater numbers of humans living in closer proximity, resulting in each person’s upset having a much greater effect on others. It was also mentioned that the amplification of the degree of interaction of people and thus the further spread and growth of upset occurred again around 4,000 years ago with the development of villages, the specialisation by people into different occupations and the beginnings of trade and industry. What occurred at around 200 years ago to drastically amplify the degree of interaction of people yet again was that the world’s population had so increased that people were living virtually on top of each other in many parts of the world, with villages having become cities and even mega-city metropolises. In cities people were not only living shoulder to shoulder, many grew up never even encountering the natural world of nature that our species’ instinctive self or soul expected to be immersed in. Above all, by 200 years ago the isolation from the horror of the human condition that was needed Page 195 of
PDF Version to preserve innocence had disappeared for the great majority of humanity. In truth the importance of cities was not that they were functional centres for operation as is evasively claimed, but rather hide-outs for alienation, places where upset humans could live relatively unconfronted by the exposing innocence of nature and where they could distract themselves from their upset condition with all manner of escapist preoccupations, but in being so they were places that both spread and perpetuated alienation. While cities were kind to upset adults they were particularly murderous of the innocence of children growing up in them, but again, as humans became more upset their need for relief became such that they couldn’t afford to worry about the next generation. Cities represent the most extreme congestion of people and life there was particularly destructive of innocence; as Australian historian Manning Clark said, ‘The bush [wilderness] is our source of innocence; the town is where the devil prowls around’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Feb. 1985). In the new human-condition-reconciled world that can now emerge cities will be seen as dangerously corrupting of our innocent souls. Christ anticipated this future when he said, ‘Do you see all these great buildings?…Not one stone here will be left on another; everyone will be thrown down’ (Matt. 24:2; Mark 13:2; Luke 19:44,21:6). The human race will go back to nature to rehabilitate its soul and become sound again. However, we shouldn’t ‘throw out the baby with the bath water’ and lose all the knowledge, albeit denial-complying knowledge, that we gained, such as in technology. While our energies were often horribly misdirected and our creations often as horribly distorted as we were, we did nevertheless, in our mad and driven state, cover a lot of valuable ground in inquiry that will be needed when we set about repairing and integrating our world.

The overall effect of the extremely congested living, especially in cities, was that it led to upset rising to a crescendo within the human population, the end result of which was two massive world wars and the invention of weapons of such ferocity that they could wipe out entire cities, namely the atomic bomb.

Another influence that amplified the spread and growth of upset and thus alienation in the world as a result of greater human interaction was the advent of communication technology of such sophistication that, in terms of one human’s access to another, it basically shrunk the world down to one giant city—worse, down to one immense household. First there was the delivery of letters through a sophisticated postal system, then mass printing of documents and newspapers, and then typewriters, and then the telephone, and then television, and then credit cards, and then computers and faxes, and then emails and mobile phones, and then the world wide web. The shepherd’s innocent gentle life surrounded by our soul’s friends the animals and the trees and the wind and the rain and the sunshine had all but disappeared from human life. From the moment of birth we were immersed in a sea of alienation and overwhelmed by anxiety and stress.

There is one more phenomenon that should be mentioned and that is what I call ‘the Baywatch effect’. During the so-called colonisation period of the world where the more materially developed countries established colonies in materially undeveloped countries, the indigenous populations of those nations had little awareness of just how materially successful people in the ‘developed world’ were, but this changed dramatically with the advent of sophisticated communication technology. The reason why some races have been more materially successful than others is explained in A Species In Denial in the chapter ‘The Denial-Free History of the Human Race’. Basically, having had to live in denial of any difference in alienation between individuals and races, because any recognition of those differences would have led to unjust criticism of those who were more upset, meant that there has been no acknowledgment of such differences. The truth of course is that there are immense differences between individuals and races which can, now that it can Page 196 of
PDF Version be understood that all humans are equally good though variously upset, be at last safely admitted. The result of these differences in upset between races is that there are races of people who are relatively naive about the difficulties of living with the human condition, and other races who are more instinctively adapted to upset and can thus cope better with it, and still other races who are so instinctively adapted to upset that they are too aware of the reality of life under duress under the human condition and thus overly cynical about being ideally behaved and thus overly selfish and opportunistic and thus socially uncooperative. The result of all this is that some races have been extremely effective in living with the human condition while others have been either too innocent and naive or too burnt out and cynical. The end result is those races who have been most operational under the duress of the human condition and thus most materially successful, and these were the ones that colonised the world, brought with them such a materially successful existence that the less operational races found themselves unable to compete. Because communication technology was still undeveloped during the colonisation period the indigenous populations that were being colonised had, as emphasised, little awareness of just how materially successful the colonisers were. With the advent of the likes of television suddenly these colonised people could see what they were missing out on materially and when they found themselves unable to compete with these ‘successful’ colonisers it naturally made them insanely envious. People in the slums and impoverished parts of the world were watching programs like Baywatch (TV-series 1989—2001) where gorgeously groomed people in stunningly enticing swimsuits played in a fabulously wealthy world and naturally they were overcome with distress about what they were missing out on. The psychiatrist Professor Clancy McKenzie gave this stark description of ‘the Baywatch effect’ in action: ‘While visiting Machu Picchu in Peru in 1979 I noted very poor persons, living in the mountains, who had only the clothes they wore and perhaps a lama or two, but had beautiful, warm smiles and seemed content and happy. Days later I was in Bogota in Colombia. It was a very hot day and we asked the driver to stop at an outdoor tavern to buy cold beer. The people were very impoverished, but there was a TV playing and they were able to view the “outside world” where everyone seemed to have more, and luxury was abundant. I offered to go in with the driver and he urged me to wait in the car. I soon learned why. The absolute hatred was so intense that it was palpable. These people did not have less than those in Machu Picchu but they saw others who had more, and their needs were intensified’ (The Human Condition Documentary correspondence, 27 Mar. 2006). This distress from jealousy was a form of extreme upset and, as will be described later when the development of fundamentalist forms of religion is explained, it led to the adoption of extremely strident expressions of fundamentalist religion to manage the unbearable situation.

For all these reasons, it is during the last 200 years that the growth of the levels of upset in the world have entered the vertical descent part of the graph of exponential growth in upset where the levels of alienation in society, both in impoverished societies and in wealthy societies, are now doubling virtually every generation. This is now, and very quickly, taking humanity to a state where levels of alienation within humans everywhere are at terminal heights, so much so that it is testing not only our ability to live with each other but even to live with ourselves. Being relatively innocent the hunter-gatherers lived in extended family groups but in the final stages of the development of upset that became impossible with almost every family having to secede to a little fenced off house-block separate from their neighbours to keep upset under control. We had to develop a social structure that accommodated our alienation, that allowed us to be alienated or estranged. Our world tended to become as alienated as we were so that we could live in it the way we were. Finally, when upset reached a crescendo, even family life Page 197 of
PDF Version became impossible with the number of divorces and single-parent families sky-rocketing. By this stage even living with ourselves was becoming almost impossible and escape from neurosis (fear of thinking) and psychosis (denial of soul) through drugs became the only bearable option for many.

The overall principle is that the more alienated the human race became as a whole, the more difficult it was for humans to coexist. Alienation tested all interactions between humans so with levels of alienation throughout society rapidly increasing it is no wonder that even the basic human relationship, that of the family unit, has become strained to and beyond breaking point, with all the upsetting consequences the so-called ‘broken’ family has on all members of that historic, fundamental unit, especially innocent children.

Again it has to be emphasised that while we couldn’t explain the human condition we couldn’t acknowledge our alienation or the extent of it in society. Denial, which is what alienation is, was our only means of coping with the truth of our upset, corrupted condition and its effects on the world. Now that we can explain the human condition we can understand that alienation was not an evil, bad, shameful state but rather an unavoidable product of humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. It is this dignifying, fully compassionate understanding of our condition that makes it at last safe to acknowledge, discuss and accept the effects of alienation.

With this compassionate awareness in mind, the following are revealing but honest indications of the arrival of the terminal levels of alienation in society that characterise the crisis, endplay stage of humanity’s adolescence: ‘today’s children are probably the least loved generation of all’ (Robert de Grauw, Letter to the Editor, Time mag. 3 Apr. 2006), that ‘96 percent of American families are now dysfunctional’ (popular US therapist and author John Bradshaw quoting recovery movement statistics on dysfunctional families in America, in The Australian, 8 May 1993), that ‘The 1990 US Census stated there will be more stepfamilies than original families by the year 2000, and that 66 percent of those stepfamilies break up when children are involved’ (Stepfamily Foundation, www.stepfamily.org/statistics), that ‘one in two US children will live in a single-parent family at some point in childhood’ (US Census Bureau of Household and Family Statistics, 2000), that ‘63 percent of the 18.5 million US children under 5 years of age were in some type of regular child care arrangement’ (US Census Bureau, 2005), that ‘the electronic age has ushered in electronic parenting. Kids spend far more time sitting passively before a device such as a computer or television than they do playing or speaking with their families’ (The Commercial Appeal, 26 Aug. 2001), that ‘the sexualisation of Western culture [has meant] that sex has been robbed of its emotional depth…For young men and women, it’s increasingly a physical activity, with no real pleasure and no meaning at all…one hears of lipstick parties, where teenage girls wearing different coloured lipstick line up to give oral sex to boys with the aim of giving them a candy-striped penis’ (Clive Hamilton, co-author of the report ‘Youth and Pornography in Australia’, The Australian, 24 June 2006), that ‘someone born since 1945 is likely to be up to 3 times more depressed than their parents and 10 times more than their grandparents’ (psychologist Michael Yapko in his 1999 book Hand-Me-Down Blues), that ‘Depression is now the leading cause of disability in the US’ (Andrew Solomon in his 2001 book The Noonday Demon), that ‘Truly alarming evidence from pharmaceutical prescriptions for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) drugs shows that in 2005 one in 25 children in many poorer areas of Australia suffer from ADHD’ (The Daily Telegraph, 13 June 2006), and that ‘According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 1 in 166 American children born today will fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum. That’s double the rate of 10 years ago and 10 times the estimated incidence a generation ago’ (Time mag. 15 May 2006).

To context some of these reports we first have to re-emphasise that while we lacked understanding of the human condition denial was the only means of coping with it, but now that the human condition has been explained compassionate honesty is both possible and necessary. In particular, as was explained earlier in Section 23, instead of blaming Page 198 of
PDF Version genes for the effects of our upset state upon our offspring we can acknowledge the real problem of the universal upset state of the human condition that we unavoidably suffer from. In the case of depression, ADHD and autism, an Australian newspaper article titled ‘Epidemic of autism mystifies experts’, referred to a study which showed that in California the incidence of autism had ‘more than tripled from 1987 to 1998’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Oct. 2002). As is commonly recognised now, California represents the leading edge of trends in the developed world so what is happening there is a good indication of what is going to happen before too long everywhere else in the developed world. Significantly this article, which was first published in the New York Times, made the point that ‘You can’t explain an increase of this magnitude on genetics. Something else is happening.’ That ‘[s]omething else’ is the rapidly escalating levels of alienation in society. Recent generations have been revealingly labelled the ‘X generation’, the ‘XX generation’, the ‘Y generation’, and more recently the ‘ACES generation’—the ‘alienated, cynical, experimental and savvy’ generation (Sydney Morning Herald, 8 Aug. 1996). The Canadian writer Douglas Coupland defined a Generation X-er as one who ‘lives an X sort of life—cerebral, alienated, seriously concerned with cool’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 22 Aug. 1994). All of these qualities attributed to X and ACES generations are qualities associated with having had to adjust to an extremely corrupt world. As was emphasised in Section 23, children exposed to the current world of extreme alienation simply cannot cope with it, hence the occurrence of childhood madness, which is really what ADHD, autism and schizophrenia are. Regarding the reference to the trivialisation of sex in Western society, it was explained in Section 22 that at base sex, as humans practice it, is concerned with attacking the innocence of, in particular, women, so while it has also become an act of love it must be managed with care because of its destructive impact on innocence. That that care has been abandoned is therefore another indicator of extreme levels of alienation having emerged in society.

As stated, the consequence of the arrival of terminal levels of alienation in society is that a crisis occurs in humanity’s overall journey to enlightenment where there is an extreme danger of the all-important search for knowledge being brought to an end. The following section of this book charts the different ways of coping humans have had to adopt during this final stage in the march of upset—when the graph of upset plummets vertically—and which have now culminated in this crisis situation.

As mentioned, with the emergence of such extreme levels of upset the honesty of religion, which was its great benefit to the human race, became too confronting and much less guilt-confronting forms of pseudo idealism had to be found. Again, as Mary McCarthy wrote about religion, ‘Only people who are very good can afford to become religious; with all the others it makes them worse’. However the price of adopting such dishonest, superficial ways of living was the danger of terminating humanity’s journey to enlightenment before its completion.

Fundamentalist Expressions of Religion

Before describing the various less guilt-confronting forms of idealism that were developed to replace religion it needs to be explained that before religions were completely abandoned attempts were made to modify them so they weren’t as confronting. The emphasis in religion could be shifted from any self-confronting honesty and interpretation of the deeper truths contained in the religion’s scriptures to simply worshipping the prophet as a more indirect way of glorifying and supporting the truth he stood for, and to simple, literal, non-interpretative propagation of the religion’s scripture. And, overall, to counter the increasing waywardness of the greater levels of upset, to even more strict obedience to the cooperative ideals and principles espoused by the religion. Page 199 of
PDF Version The popularity of literal, fundamentalist expressions of religion, especially simplistic, emotional, ‘evangelical’, ‘charismatic’ forms of Christianity and Muslim fundamentalism have increased so much in recent times that they are now the fastest growing forms of religion in the world.

The more upset and thus insecure and guilt-feeling we became the more fundamentalist or literalist we needed to be. Mindlessness saved us from hurtful mindfulness. In his book Jung and The Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post railed against this increasing, but, as we can now understand, necessary mindlessness in the Christian religion: ‘Yet the churches continue to exhort man without any knowledge of what is the soul of modern man and how starved and empty it has become…They behave as if a repetition of the message of the Cross and a reiteration of the miracles and parables of Christ is enough. Yet, if they took Christ’s message seriously, they would not ignore the empiric material and testimony of the nature of the soul and its experience of God that [Carl] Jung has presented to the world. He did his utmost to make us understand the reality of man’s psyche and its relationship to God. But they ignore the call’ (1976, p.232 of 275).

The Gnostics were an early Christian sect who encouraged the kind of self-confronting introspection and analysis and interpretation of the Gospels that van der Post advocated. Gnosticism stressed self-knowledge and the need, as they said, to ‘find the Christ in yourself’. The word ‘knowledge’, which means ‘to know’, has in fact the same roots as the word ‘gnosis’. The Gnostics also practiced living a frugal, ascetic, ‘pure’ life. Since the majority of people found such dedicated introspection and interpretation of the Gospels far too confronting and a life of frugal purity unbearably devoid of much needed self-distraction and escape from reality, Gnosticism eventually died out. In fact around 1230AD a branch of Gnostics in France called the Cathars were viciously persecuted and eventually destroyed by emissaries from the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic branch of Christianity especially caters for the more upset by emphasising worship and a more literal interpretation of the Gospels. Rather than austerity and self-confrontation Catholicism also emphasises self-distracting pomp, ceremony and ritual. As a result they viewed the Cathars as heretics and burnt many of them at the stake. The tenets of Catholicism are unity, visibility, indefectibility, apostolic succession and sanctity. Notice there is no mention of need for any form of self-confrontation. Other branches of Christianity, such as the Anglicans, aren’t so upset-adapted and thus escapist and fundamentalist in their orientation.

The more upset and thus insecure we became the more literal and non-interpretative of scripture we needed to be, and the more we needed to emphasise deferment of self to the prophet through worship as opposed to emphasising confronting self-analysis. Also the more we needed to express our faith through the adornment of our churches and through elaborate ceremony, as opposed to expressing our commitment to the prophet’s embodiment of the cooperative ideals of life through living humbly without extravagant adornments and ceremony. Van der Post observed how humans’ religious images reflected their degree of alienation when he wrote: ‘It seemed a self-evident truth that somehow the sheer geographical distance between a man and his “religious” images reflected the extent of his own inner nearness or separation from his sense of his own greatest meaning. If so this made the conventional Christian location of God in a remote blue Heaven just as alarming as, conversely, the descent of his Son to earth was reassuring’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.31 of 275). While the increase in artificiality of life that accompanied increased upset was ‘alarming’ there was no other alternative because trying to be any less artificial was too confronting, guilt-inducing and depressing. With the finding of the dignifying understanding of the human condition the need for denial is obsoleted and all our alienation can be dismantled. In the case of Page 200 of
PDF Version religious truths, instead of making them more and more abstract so they are less and less confronting, we can at last afford to explain and demystify them. For example, it was explained in Section 12 that we can now understand that ‘God’ is the personification of integrative meaning which virtually all humans have so departed from that they have lived in mortal fear of ‘him’; to such an extent they could only cope by creating a ‘distance’ and ‘separation’ from ‘him’, abstracting ‘him’ from reality, making ‘him’ a supernatural being seated upon a throne ‘in a remote blue Heaven’ surrounded by people with wings. By deifying and worshipping prophets we similarly distanced ourselves from them, made them appear to be different beings to us so that we no longer had to compare ourselves with them, but, as has been explained, the truth is they were simply individuals who had been exceptionally nurtured and sheltered from exposure to upset and were thus relatively free of alienation from the cooperative ideal Godly state that our original instinctive self or soul was orientated to—Christ therefore was in effect the ‘Son’ of God, the uncorrupted expression of God. We can also understand that the so-called ‘virgin mother’ of Christ was simply a metaphor for the exceptionally innocent mother needed to nurture an exceptionally innocent child who would be capable of becoming a denial-free thinking prophet. We can also understand that the ‘resurrection’ of Christ after his martyrdom was emblematic of the opportunity he gave upset humans to be ‘born again’ or raised up or resurrected from their corrupted, dead state. We can also understand that the trinity of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost or Spirit is a perfect pre-scientific representation of the three fundamental aspects of existence on Earth. God the Father is integrative meaning; God the Son is the first great tool for integrating matter, namely the gene-based learning system that gave rise to our integratively orientated instinctive self that Christ for example was an uncorrupted expression of; and God the Holy Ghost or Spirit is the second great tool for integrating matter, namely the nerve-based learning system that gave rise to our conscious self which is our thinking ability or spirit. This demystification of religious concepts, like all the insights that suddenly become accessible with the arrival of understanding of the human condition, is a lot to adjust to and takes time—it is the ultimate ‘future shock’ as Alvin Toffler said. Physicist Paul Davies summarised the problem when he said, ‘A lot of people are hostile to science because it demystifies nature. They prefer the mystery. They would rather live in ignorance of the way the world works and our place in it…many religious people still cling to an image of a God-of-the-gaps, a cosmic magician’ (from Davies’ 1995 Templeton Prize acceptance speech). (Note, a detailed presentation of the demystification of all the main religious concepts can be read in A Species In Denial in the chapter ‘The Demystification of Religion’.)

Less Guilt-Emphasising Religions, Atheism and Secularism

Of course adapting religion to be less confronting had its limits and in time, as upset increased, some people began to change their religion to less guilt-emphasising varieties of religion. Since God is representative of the cooperative ideals and ‘his’ presence in effect stands in judgement of our non-ideal state, religions that didn’t emphasise God, sin and guilt, such as Buddhism, became increasingly popular in the latter stages of the last 200 years when upset has become extreme. For some people, complete denial of God became the only acceptable option. Atheism, disbelief in God, and secularism, the rejection of all forms of religious faith and worship, gained popularity. Indeed in recent years the resentment and anger towards God for ‘condemning people’ (What the Bleep do We Know!?, 2004), and towards religion for being ‘the church of perpetual misery’ (from a 2005 animated TV cartoon), has grown so much that secularism is on the rise everywhere. This now extreme resentment and anger is palpable in Oxford University’s Professor of Public Understanding of Page 201 of
PDF Version Science, Richard Dawkins’, statement that ‘“faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus, but harder to eradicate. The whole subject of God is a bore”…those who teach religion to small children are guilty of “child abuse”’ (quoted by Garth Wood, The Spectator, 20 Feb. 1999). While all forms of religion were losing favour in more affluent parts of the world, religion, especially the more fundamental and charismatic expressions of religion, continued to grow in popularity and influence wherever the increasing levels of upset was also accompanied by impoverishment and/or lack of education. It requires a degree of material comfort and education to be able to engage the subtleties of life under the duress of the human condition, in particular the issue of how to manage the guilt associated with being an upset, non-ideal person. When mere survival is a struggle, especially if you are starving, thinking about your psychological state is a luxury. Also, without some education you lack the base of knowledge with which to think intellectually and sophisticatedly about the dilemma of being an upset human. As will shortly be described, while entirely new forms of pseudo idealism that were much more sophisticated than religion in avoiding guilt were developed in wealthier parts of the world, for the upset who were impoverished and/or uneducated, religious faith remained the main way of countering upset. In fact, with ever greater numbers of people in the world and an ever greater frustration and resentment of the widening gap between the materially fortunate and the materially impoverished, the attraction and influence of religious faith, especially the simple fundamentalist expressions of religion, only increased amongst the materially less fortunate. In time, with greater levels of upset developing everywhere, coupled with resentment by the less fortunate of the gap between the ‘rich and poor’, extremely strident, even militarist and terrorist expressions of fundamentalism began to be adopted by the less fortunate. Since religion was essentially about indirectly maintaining the search for knowledge this strident form of fundamentalism would amount to a dangerous form of anti-religion. It could threaten the need for there to be sufficient freedom to continue the search for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, liberating understanding of the human condition. This subject of the threat to freedom from the rise of fundamentalist expressions of religion amongst the less materially fortunate will be returned to later in this book. What will be looked at now is how the adoption of more guilt-free forms of pseudo idealism in the wealthier parts of the world also came to seriously threaten the all-important human journey to enlightenment.

As another reflection of the compounding rate of increase of upset in humans, the time interval between the development of one form of pseudo idealism to the next more evasive form in this chronology became shorter and shorter, shrinking from centuries to decades to years. Communism was a long time coming after the development of religion whereas the forms of pseudo idealism that followed communism appeared, or if they had been germinating for some time then became prominent, one after the other in rapidly shrinking time intervals.

Socialism or Communism

In wealthier parts of the world, with religion becoming more artificial and fundamentalist and even unpopular there, the need for a more guilt-free form of idealism to live through that didn’t involve the religious presence of a perfecting, condemning God and faith in a prophet eventually gave rise to Socialism or Communism. These movements denied the notion of a perfecting God and avoided the depressing recognition of a prophet’s world of soundness. Instead they simply, dogmatically demanded an idealistic social or communal world and, in doing so, denied and oppressed the whole reality of the knowledge-finding, creative, egocentric, corrupting, unavoidably-variously-upset, individualistic, competitive, combative, materialism-compensation-needing, Page 202 of
PDF Version self-distraction-hungry, human-condition-afflicted world. Karl Marx, whose mid 19th century theories gave rise to socialism and communism, said, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is [not to understand the world but] to change it’ (Theses on Feuerbach, written in German in 1845). By ‘change it’ he meant just make it cooperative or social or communal. Marx was wrong—the whole ‘point’ and responsibility of being a conscious being is to understand our world and place in it. The attraction—and inherent lie—of socialism or communism was that you could support and have the ideals without acknowledging the reality of the human condition and its struggle. It can be seen from this that these movements were far more sophisticated than religion in their degree of evasion, superficiality and dishonesty.

The New Age Movement

The limitation of socialism or communism was that while there was no confronting prophet present, there was an obvious acknowledgment of the condemning cooperative, social ideals. In time, as levels of upset and thus insecurity rose, the need again arose for the development of an even more guilt-free form of idealism to live through. This was supplied by the New Age Movement (the forerunners of which were the Age of Aquarius and Peace Movements). In this movement all the realities and negatives of our corrupted condition were transcended in favour of taking up a completely escapist, think-positive, human-potential-stressing, self-affirming, motivational, feel-good approach. The truth is the new age movement was not leading humanity to an aquarian new age of peaceful freedom from upset, but to an even more heightened state of deluded, dishonest alienation than that espoused by socialism. Talking about how he became ‘a personal growth junkie’ the Australian comedian Anthony Ackroyd summed up the extremely deluded artificiality of the new age movement when he said: ‘What are millions of us around the globe searching for in books, tapes, seminars, workshops and speaking events? Information to enhance our lifestyles and enrich our experience on this planet? Certainly…But I smell something else in the ether. Something more desperate and deluded. A worrying snake-oil factor that is spinning out of control. It’s the promise of salvation. Salvation from the basic rules of human life. This is the neurotic aspect of the human potential movement. This hunger for a get-out-of-the-human-condition-free card’ (Good Weekend mag., Sydney Morning Herald, 13 Sept. 1997). Yes, to ‘get out of the human condition’ we had to confront and solve it, not deny and escape it; ultimately trying to escape it only made it worse. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel recognised, ‘The capacity for transcendence brings with it a liability to alienation, and the wish to escape this condition…can lead to even greater absurdity’ (The View From Nowhere, 1986).

The Feminist Movement

The limitation of the new age movement was that while it did not remind humans of the cooperative ideals, its agenda still involved the issue of humans’ variously upset, troubled, estranged, alienated state—a problem the next level of delusion dispensed with by simply denying its existence. The Feminist Movement maintained that there is no difference between people, especially not between men and women. In particular it denied the legitimacy of the exceptionally egocentric, combative male dimension to life that we can now understand was taking on the heroic front role in fighting the ignorance of our instinctive self. Women’s lack of awareness of the all-important role that men have been playing is evident in this comment from Germaine Greer, an icon of modern feminism: ‘As far as I’m concerned, men are the product of a damaged gene. They pretend to be normal but what they’re doing sitting there with benign smiles on their faces is they’re manufacturing sperm’ Page 203 of
PDF Version (Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Nov. 1991). Beyond their necessary role in reproduction men have been viewed as meaningless—leading feminist Gloria Steinem famously said, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’—but the truth is now able to be revealed that men were carrying out the most important and difficult task being undertaken on the planet. With the arrival of understanding of the human condition light can finally be shed on so many situations and in many cases the truth was not at all as it appeared. Based on extreme dogma, the feminist movement could not and has not produced any real reconciliation between men and women, rather, as this quote points out, ‘What happened was that the so-called Battle of the Sexes became a contest in which only one side turned up. Men listened, in many cases sympathetically but, by the millions, were turned off’ (Don Peterson, Courier Mail, June 1994). Only by winning the battle to champion the ego—that is, explain the human condition and establish that our egocentric conscious thinking self is good and not bad—could the polarities of life of so-called ‘good’ and ‘evil’, that women and men are in truth an expression of, be reconciled.

The Environment or Green Movement

Where feminism falls down is that while it superficially dispensed with the problem of humans’ divisive reality, we still remain the focus of attention and that is confronting. The solution that emerged to counter this limitation was the Environmental or Green Movement which removed all need to confront and think about the human state since in this movement all focus is diverted from self onto the environment—as this quote acknowledges, ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue’ (Time mag. 31 Dec. 1990). Of course the truth is that by not addressing the cause of the destruction of the natural world, namely the issue of our human condition’s massively upset angry, egocentric and alienated state, there has been no real let up in the pace of our world’s devastation. As these quotes emphasise, ‘The trees aren’t the problem. The problem is us’ (Simply Living mag. Sept. 1989), and, ‘We need to do something about the environmental damage in our heads’ (Time mag. 24 May 1993).

The Politically Correct Movement

For all its guilt-relieving benefits there is still a condemning moral component to the environmental movement. If we are not responsible with the environment, good, we are behaving immorally, bad. Moreover, the purity of nature exists in stark contrast to humans’ corrupted condition. At this stage in the march of upset a form of pure pseudo idealism had to be manufactured whereby confrontation with the by now extremely confronting and depressing truth of the dilemma of the human condition was totally sidestepped. What was required was a completely guilt-stripped dogma that was devoid of any need to confront and wrestle with the issue of soundness and Godliness, with whether you are a cooperative, social person, with the issue of your troubled self, with the morality issue of men and women’s treatment of each other, and with the issue of whether or not you are being good to the environment. Upset had become so great the need was to just be ideal without question. This need for a totally non-confronting form of relief from feeling ‘bad’ resulted in the establishment of the Politically Correct Movement which has no other focus or requirement beyond simply choosing, from the two simplistic, fundamental, ‘political’ options in life, of being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, to be ‘good’. There is no other reference point or consideration or concern in the politically correct agenda other than to being ‘good’, in truth escaping from feeling ‘bad’. (Note, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are in inverted commas to indicate that they relate to behaviour that is consistent Page 204 of
PDF Version with conventional, cooperative, loving pseudo idealism, rather than with behaviour that is consistent with participating in humanity’s heroic but upsetting conscious thinking self or ego’s knowledge-finding battle with our ignorant instinctive self or soul.)

Within the politically correct culture the need for relief from guilt was all-pervasive, with the mind constantly on the hunt for opportunities to be ‘idealistic’ and achieve that rush of psychological relief from feeling you are a ‘good’ rather than a ‘bad’ person at last. Wherever there was a victim of the battle, there was an opportunity to take up their cause and access that all-important relief. With humanity now reaching the critical limit in the amount of upset we humans can cope with, relief-hunting has become a huge industry, to the extent that we have in fact become, as sociologist Frank Furedi recognised, ‘a society that celebrates victimhood rather than heroism’ (The Culture of Fear, 1997). The truth is that while extreme upset is universal many of us are now so utterly exhausted with upset that the need for relief from guilt has become so great we are way beyond caring about being deluded and dishonest. All humans’ intuitive awareness of the responsibility to keep on fighting humanity’s heroic but upsetting battle against ignorance and searching for liberating understanding is being easily ignored in favour of escaping the battle outright and desperately taking up some form of pseudo idealism to relieve the overwhelmingly depressing guilt of our spent condition. For many of us it has literally become a case of relief at all costs.

The rise of this extreme state of being concerned only with finding relief from guilt through taking up pseudo idealistic causes is extremely dangerous because, as has been explained, it involves abandoning the battle to find the all-important liberating understanding of ourselves. This is not to say that in a critical battle, such as the one humanity is involved in, showing care and consideration towards those who are struggling and suffering from the effects of the battle is not important. It is in fact very important because even though we are involved in an upsetting battle, selflessness is still, as was explained in Section 12, what binds wholes together; it is the glue within humanity’s army. However while caring for those struggling to keep up is important, it is obviously more so to maintain support for those on the frontline who are still carrying on the battle otherwise the battle will surely be lost. In this light it can be seen how very dangerous and irresponsible the politically correct movement’s focus only on caring for victims of the battle is. In a world where we couldn’t explain the reality of the upsetting battle humanity has been involved in, and where, in that vacuum, pseudo idealism has had a field day mocking realism as evil, the following quote from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche provides a rare acknowledgment of the truth about the all-important need to carry on the heroic but upsetting search for knowledge, ultimately liberating self-knowledge, and of the extreme anger-from-feeling-so-condemned-based delusion and dishonesty of those ignoring the reality of this search: ‘There have always been many sickly people among those who invent fables and long for God [ideality]: they have a raging hate for the enlightened man and for that youngest of virtues which is called honesty…Purer and more honest of speech is the healthy body, perfect and square-built: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth [to face truth and one day find understanding of the human condition] [p.61 of 342] …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! [pp.70—71] …War and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your pity but your bravery has saved the unfortunate up to now…What warrior wants to be spared? I do not spare you, I love you from the very heart, my brothers in war! [pp.74—75]’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, 1892; tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1961). (Note, the profundity of Nietzsche’s thinking led to much misunderstanding and misrepresentation of his work, most notably his concept of ‘the will to power’ which was misused to justify Page 205 of
PDF Version Nazi doctrines of racial superiority. We can now understand that ‘will to power’ means humans’ will to defeat and thus achieve power over the ignorance of our instinctive self as to the fact of our goodness; to win the ‘war’ between our knowledge-finding conscious self and our ignorant instinctive self.)

The Postmodern Deconstructionist Movement

While being interested only in those who are suffering has been so extremely dishonest and dangerous, from the perspective of the politically correct supporter, relief from guilt/ self-confrontation/ depression/ the human condition was all that mattered; when truth is killing you there are no qualms about escaping it. To help ensure no subversive questioning could creep in, a philosophical justification for truthlessness was added to the political correct culture. This was Postmodern Deconstructionism, ‘a bewilderingly complex school of continental philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy’ of ‘intellectual assumptions—truth is a matter of opinion, there is no real world outside of language and hence no facts independent of our descriptions of them’ (Luke Slattery, The Australian, 23 July 2005). While language is artificial it nevertheless models a real world, so to say that just because language is artificial there can be no universal truths is ridiculous, but of course such logic doesn’t matter because all that was required was for some philosophy, no matter how patently false, to be invented—just baffle the world, and yourself, with intellectual baloney; just do whatever it takes to free yourself from unbearably depressing condemnation.

The point is exhaustion levels in society had become so great that for ever increasing numbers of people relief-hunting had become an all-consuming exercise with the mind constantly searching for opportunities to be ‘idealistic’. The American columnist Ann Coulter understood and spelt out the magnitude of the problem when she said, ‘Whenever the nation [the USA] is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence’ (Time mag. 27 Sept. 2004). This report in the Sydney Morning Herald presents a similar observation: ‘[US] presidential adviser, Karl Rove…comments that left-wingers wanted to respond to the savagery of the September 11 attacks with “therapy and understanding for our attackers” rather than preparing for war’ (26 June 2005). Often accurately described as ‘compassion junkies’, relief-hunters have become a very powerful force; drawn together by their very particular need of finding causes through which to feel ‘good’ they have captured such major institutions as the national broadcasters in the USA, the UK and Australia. As former British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) correspondent Robin Aitken said, he ‘could not raise a cricket team of Tories among BBC staff’ (The Australian, 10 Oct. 2005). British journalist Melanie Phillips similarly observed that ‘With a few honourable exceptions, the BBC views every issue through the prism of left-wing, secular, anti-Western thinking’ (Daily Mail, 16 May 2005). Almost every program on Australia’s national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), is now either outrightly dedicated to, or at least heavily skewed in its presentation towards servicing the needs of relief-hunters. These national broadcasters serve no purpose now other than as safe havens for extreme upset and its alienation. Alienation is the common factor, which those involved are totally preoccupied with avoiding admitting. Neither the national interest nor humanity’s are of any concern, even though the illusion is that these are their only interests. Much of academia, our supposed environment of higher learning, has similarly been hijacked by truth-hating relief-hunters, as was illustrated by the earlier quote from Richard Dawkins, Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Europe’s second oldest university, that ‘those who teach religion to small children are guilty of “child abuse”’. Literary scholar Harold Bloom’s 1994 book, The Western Canon, was an exposé on how Page 206 of
PDF Version a ‘rebellion in U.S. schools against Dead White European Male authors’ (or ‘D.W.E.M’s’) will lead to ‘the end of civilization’ through a ‘triumph of the forces of darkness’ (Time mag. 10 Oct. 1994). ‘Batman comics’, Bloom said, ‘will replace Chaucer, Milton and Wordsworth’ (The Courier Mail, 15 Oct. 1994). An article in The Australian newspaper reported that Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard (who incidentally will undoubtedly be recognised in the clarity of the post-human-condition-understood world as one of the greatest leaders of a country the world has seen) ‘believes the postmodern literature being taught in schools is “rubbish”…accusing state education authorities of “dumbing down” the English syllabus and succumbing to political correctness. [He said] “I feel very, very strongly about [this situation where]…traditional texts, are treated no differently from pop cultural commentary”’. He also referred to postmodern discourse as meaningless ‘gobbledegook’. The article said Howard’s comments were in response to great literature now basically being dismissed as elitist, sexist and racist with a leading Sydney private school having ‘asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives’ (21 Apr. 2006). The real subject students should be asked to ‘interpret’ is how artificial and dishonest pseudo idealism is and how it is threatening to condemn humanity to extinction. In his insightfully titled 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, political scientist Allan Bloom also wrote about the devastating effects of deconstructionist teaching in American universities, contending that, ‘we are producing a race of moral illiterates, who have never asked the great questions of good and evil, or truth and beauty, who have indeed no idea that such questions even could be asked…deprived of literary guidance they [students] no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing…If the classics are studied at all in the universities they are studied as curiosities in the humanities departments, not as vital centres of the liberal tradition, and not as texts offering profound insight into the human condition’ (The Australian, 25 July 1987). Of course the whole point of the politically correct movement was to avoid ‘the great questions’ about our ‘soul’ and what has happened to it, namely the question of our self-corruption and alienation, the issue of ‘good and evil’, ‘the human condition’, ‘truth’. The object was to stop thinking, stop the pain of guilt, bring about a ‘closing of the…mind’, ‘dumb’ the mind ‘down’. The deeper, fundamental and true objective of education is to enlighten us about the underlying issue in all of human life of the human condition, and that is precisely what literature that has historically been considered great has managed to do. While not overly confronting us with our upset, corrupted, fallen condition it has, through great literary skill and device, managed to throw light on it. But it is precisely that great gift that postmodernism found a way to destroy. The character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s great/ classic novel ‘Heart of Darkness [of our condition]’ acknowledged ‘The horror! The horror! [of our condition]’, but of course for the politically correct postmodernist this is a despicable ‘D.W.E.M.’-written piece that propagates male chauvinism, elitism, racism and aggression. Not long ago, Prince Charles, the future King of England, wrote a letter of deep concern to the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, questioning the extreme bias now apparent in legal thinking, stating, ‘The Human Rights Act is only about the rights of individuals. I am unable to find a list of social responsibilities attached to it and this betrays a fundamental distortion in social and legal thinking’ (The Australian, 27 Sept. 2002). The media, our centres of education and learning, the judiciary—these are all pillars of society that are crumbling. The world is in danger of being hijacked by those who are no longer concerned with humanity’s heroic journey to enlightenment and who only want to escape depression from the effects of their own human condition. Total self-preoccupation, selfishness disguised as selflessness had arrived.

With its supposedly underpinning postmodern deconstructionist philosophy, the politically correct movement was a pure form of freedom-denying dogma that fabricated, Page 207 of
PDF Version demanded and imposed ideality or ‘correctness’, specifically that of an undifferentiated world, in complete denial of the reality of the underlying issue of the existence of and reasons for humans’ variously embattled and upset states, and beyond that of the deeper question raised by those ‘non-ideal’ states of the issue of the human condition. The politically correct movement now teaches that the children’s nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep is racist and must instead be recited as ‘Baa baa rainbow sheep’ (London Daily Telegraph, 18 Feb. 1997). The 1994 postmodernist teaching guide, From Picture Book To Literary Theory, similarly argues that school children shouldn’t be read stories about witches on broomsticks because they are sexist for ‘narrowly defining women’s roles’, or the Three Little Pigs fairytale because of its elitist promotion of ‘the virtues of property ownership and the safety of the private domain which are key elements of capitalist ideology’. In his 2001 book The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood, Jeremy Campbell described ‘postmodern theory’ as having elevated ‘lying to the status of an art and neutralised untruth’. It has ‘neutralised untruth’ because by denying the existence of the whole issue of humans’ variously embattled and upset states it has made any discussion of such differences—any pursuit of insight into the human condition—impossible. Liberation from the human condition was being denied because now that we can at last understand the human condition we can understand—and, as mentioned earlier, this is more fully explained in ‘The Denial-Free History of the Human Race’ chapter in A Species In Denial—that in humanity’s long, heroic struggle some races, like some individuals, have happened to have been less exposed to the battle and are thus more innocent than others, while other races, like other individuals, have ended up more upset and upset-adapted, but that the more upset are now able to be understood as not at all bad or evil, just more heroic from having fought for humanity longer and/or more intensely. We are all variously embattled, but we are all equally good. Human upset is a result of humans’ unavoidable and necessary heroic struggle against ignorance. Understanding the cause of the upset state of the human condition eliminates the possibility of the prejudicial views of some people being good and therefore superior and others evil, bad, unGodly and therefore inferior, but this real liberation from prejudice was being denied by the politically correct deconstructionist movement. Thankfully the whole issue of differences between individuals, sexes, ages, generations, races and cultures is rendered meaningless with, as will shortly be explained, everyone, irrespective of their backgrounds, now able to go wholeheartedly to work for the greater good of humanity.

The truth is the politically correct deconstructionist, postmodernist movement was entirely about pretence and delusion. It was concerned with pretending to behave ideally and by so doing deluding yourself that you were an ideal, ‘good’ person. The delusion involved was in fact so great the movement boldly labelled itself the ‘politically correct’ movement and brazenly claimed to be taking humanity beyond or ‘post’ the existing upset, embattled ‘modern’ state to a good versus evil ‘deconstructed’, ‘correct’ world when in truth it was behaving non-ideally and working against the search for the liberating understanding that would take humanity beyond the upset state to a human-condition-ameliorated, good-versus-evil-reconciled and thus truly deconstructed, genuinely correct world. The gloves were off now, the confidence of—and sheer anger and aggression underlying—the industry of denial and delusion was such that it was now prepared to go the whole hog and outrageously mimic the arrival of the true world at the actual expense of any chance it had of arriving. The fact is the postmodernist politically correct movement represented the very height of dishonesty, the most sophisticated expression of denial and delusion to have developed on Earth. The ‘forces of darkness’ articulated Page 208 of
PDF Version by Harold Bloom were certainly in ascendance. Terminal alienation was upon us and humanity was entering endplay, a death by dogma.

It should be emphasised that the politically correct movement was only the peak expression of the extreme danger of pseudo idealism derailing the human journey to enlightenment. Many people now deride the excesses of the politically correct/ postmodern movement and dissociate themselves from it while ignoring the freedom-oppressing, human-condition-avoiding-at-all-costs, feel-good, pseudo idealistic, battle-ignoring, relief-hunting focus of their environmentalist, animal liberationist, feminist, secular (or at least supporters of a faith that doesn’t emphasise God and guilt), multi-culturalist, disenfranchised-people and anti-globalisationist, human-potential-new-age-for-humans-deluded, everyone-hug-each-other-and-there-will-be-peace, joy-to-the-world-moral-high-ground-self-satisfied lives. A non-confronting, massively deluded pseudo idealistic world that has been made safe from any condemning guilt is all very well but it is a world stripped of any honesty and thus truth, which means that in terms of the quest for knowledge it is a world that has become completely meaningless, effectively dead. It is happiness at the expense of any future for the human race. It is total, bloody-minded self-preoccupied selfishness.

Describing such behaviour as ‘bloody-minded’ is not as compassionately contexted as the description given six paragraphs back where it was explained why ‘many of us are now so utterly exhausted with upset that…we are [unavoidably] way beyond even caring about being deluded and dishonest’—in other words it was a case of having no choice other than to be so self-preoccupied with delusion because the alternative was suicidal depression—however saying it was bloody-minded does spell out the truth of the situation from humanity’s perspective because such behaviour was going to destroy humanity. Humans’ state of alienation is now able to be understood and explained but there is a lot of truth to have to face, which only gives insight into Isaiah’s and Mohammed’s warning in Section 28 that the arrival of the liberating truth about the human condition can make people feel that their ‘nakedness’ is so ‘exposed’ that it is as though they are being ‘crushed’ with ‘terror’ and ‘retribution’. Honesty is ultimately the only therapy but with the matter of our human condition there is so much denial in place that the arrival of honesty about it was always going to be difficult to face. How we can cope—and cope very happily—with the liberating but confronting honesty about our immensely upset and deluded condition will be explained in the latter part of this book.

The science historian Jacob Bronowski summed up the dangerous situation the march of pseudo idealism posed to humanity when he said: ‘I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into—into what? Into…falsely profound questions about, are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex [instinct]. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us’ (The Ascent of Man, 1973, p.437 of 448).

As emphasised, we can now understand that the decision by many to quit the battle to find knowledge was not a cowardly ‘loss of nerve’ from their perspective but a necessary decision to avoid suicidally dangerous depression. As upset increased, ever more deluded and artificial guilt-relieving ways of living simply had to be adopted. Of course, as has been mentioned, this guilt-relieving aspect could not be admitted because without the explanation for why we were upset we had to cope by denying we had anything to be guilty about. To avoid admitting that these new directions in ways of living were driven by Page 209 of
PDF Version guilt we justified them by saying they were necessary means of countering the devastating levels of upset in the world. However the truth is the procession of movements, from religion onwards, was entirely self-preoccupation or selfishly based upon finding more sophisticated ways to avoid guilt. It can be seen here how, from the perspective of humanity’s journey to enlightenment, religions offered an infinitely better way to support idealism and counter upset both in ourselves and in the world than these new forms of pseudo idealism. Religions have been the only truly effective so-called ‘alternative lifestyle’ to the battle-engaged, egocentric one.

To explain another aspect of the self-preoccupation/ selfishness that drove the procession of movements that followed religion; the reality is that when we became so upset that we had to take up support of such movements we had less natural and real concern and empathy for others than any other people—indeed that is the core truth we were trying to conceal from ourselves and the world. People who are not overly upset, not overly soul-corrupted, are naturally concerned for other individuals, genders, races, cultures, the environment, etc, while those who are overly upset are merely pretending to be concerned for anyone and anything other than themselves to relieve themselves of their guilt. Upset does basically mean self-preoccupation: you are preoccupied with expressing your anger, with satisfying your egocentricity and with maintaining your alienation. In a quote shortly to be included Christ speaks of the great danger posed by religion-hating pseudo idealists, insightfully and truthfully describing them as having had their ‘love’ ‘grow cold’.

Of course the overly upset were not only to be found on the side of left wing pseudo idealism. Some people who were overly upset resisted taking up support of left wing pseudo idealism because they didn’t want to be perceived as, or consider themselves to be, weak and cowardly for having abandoned the battle, and/or because they were intuitively aware that too many had already adopted pseudo idealism resulting in the now extremely high levels of delusion and dishonesty in the world and they didn’t want to contribute any further to that state. As the search for knowledge continued and upset grew so too did the dilemma of life for humans. The more angry, egocentric and alienated humans became, the more there was a need to abandon such socially brutal and unbearably guilt-producing behaviour and adopt some form of pseudo idealism; but, on the other hand, the more people abandon humanity’s all-important, heroic but upsetting battle against the ignorance of our idealistic instinctive self and take up ever more dishonest and deluded forms of pseudo idealism, the greater the danger was and is of the all-important battle being lost. The problem with not abandoning an overly upset state and continuing to participate in humanity’s heroic but upsetting battle was that while you were not contributing to the dishonesty and delusion in the world you were contributing to the levels of brutal selfish, aggressive and egocentric upset. As has been mentioned, the criticism, and ultimate tragedy, of someone obviously overly upset like Adolf Hitler was that he, like Genghis Khan, continued to live out his upset rather than becoming ‘born again’ through a religious faith or, alternatively, taking up support of some form of left wing pseudo idealism. It must be remembered however that the options on the left were also becoming extremely socially dangerous and personally distressful. Pseudo idealism was becoming dangerously oppressive of humanity’s need to search for knowledge and, on a personal level, unbearably fraudulent. In the end the dilemma of the whole political situation was bound to escalate with both the left wing and right wing options in life destined to become virtually untenable.

What is so important about what has been explained about pseudo idealism in this book is that it is not real idealism—because real idealism has never been able to be Page 210 of
PDF Version explained before. The criticism of the anger, egocentricity and alienation of the upset embattled state of humans has been clear since the battle of the human condition emerged but it is only now with the ability to explain the battle that produced the human condition that the great danger of abandoning the battle can also be explained. What is revealed, and this will come as a shock to a world that has been living in denial of the human condition, is that of the two political attitudes in human life the attitude that is the real threat to humanity and the real problem in the world is not the individualistic, free enterprise, corrupting political right as so many people believe, but the freedom-oppressing, relief-hunting political left. Extreme levels of aggressive and selfish upset behaviour have certainly caused terrible human inequality, suffering and environmental devastation, however what is now able to be revealed is that the real danger to humanity comes from freedom-oppressing pseudo idealism. Humanity has certainly entered end game or endplay from both excessive upset behaviour and from the excessive oppression of freedom to search for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, the understanding of our human condition, but if we succumb to the latter and fail to pursue the search for that knowledge, that understanding—and, since science has now made that understanding available, fail to support it because it is too confronting—then all is certainly lost. The real assessment and appreciation of the danger humanity is in is, at last, now finally able to be clearly made and seen. Thankfully, as will be explained shortly, there is an easy way to solve the problem of the arrival of the unbearably exposing and thus confronting truth about our corrupted condition.

In this endplay situation, where the effects of freedom-dependent, knowledge-finding upset in the world has become so extreme, it is rapidly becoming virtually impossible to find sufficient soundness (from having a relatively nurtured, loving, secure upbringing and thus not too much upset) coupled with strength of character (from having some, but not too much, genetically adapted toughness to life under the duress of the human condition—see the ‘Denial-Free History of the Human Race’ chapter in A Species In Denial) to stand against the tide of pseudo idealism and continue the freedom-dependent search for the liberating understanding of the human condition. Resolve and solidarity for our species’ all-important, freedom-dependent journey to enlightenment is fast disappearing, and it is the lack of solidarity, the failure to present a strong, united front, that is especially encouraging and empowering of the radical opponents of freedom such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. In fact it is the first sign of the collapse of the will needed to complete our species’ journey to enlightenment.

The truth is relief-hunters have been inflicting a terrible distortion upon the democratic process, akin to having a mad person participate in what should be a rational debate. Their interest only in relief from the guilt of the human condition, at any cost, was without balance: it was skewed, irrational, and worse—their desperate need to convince themselves they weren’t deluded tended to make their advocacy hysterical. Further, such extreme delusion and dishonesty was so offensive it was fuelling upset everywhere, making many, many people very angry—and the practitioners of this relief-hunting pseudo idealism were fast becoming a majority! This is the scenario of a world undergoing death by dogma. Such is life when terminal levels of alienation arrive at the very bottom of the departure from integration curve.

To attempt to describe how serious the situation is, freedom (which we can now clearly understand means freedom from oppressive levels of denial of truths and issues related to the human condition, or simply freedom to be honest, or, even more simply, just honesty) is as under threat from pseudo idealism (pseudo idealism being the most Page 211 of
PDF Version sinister and dangerous form of dishonesty because it masquerades as truth, idealism and honesty when it is the complete opposite) as a country or community or individual or the defender of a new concept would be if it was surrounded by intensely hostile countries or communities or individuals or opponents of the new concept respectively and had given up, or was about to give up, defending itself.

One reason pseudo idealism is so dangerous is because the deficiencies of it have become so invisible, especially to its practitioners. They see nothing wrong with their behaviour, after all they say ‘what could possibly be wrong with being concerned for those who are disadvantaged, suffering and oppressed, or with loving the environment, or with wanting peace?’

As explained, the problem was that the dishonesty of pseudo idealistic relief-hunting could not be exposed until explanation of the human condition was found. As will be described shortly, now that, at the very death-knell for humanity, understanding of the human condition has finally emerged, not only is the extreme danger of relief-hunting finally exposed, the whole political process of the left and right wing is thankfully obsoleted. Indeed it will shortly be explained that when the truth about the human condition arrives the whole intellectual and psychological world that humans’ have been living in—our whole culture—is suddenly obsoleted and ended and a new human culture and civilisation emerges. I think everybody would agree that such a change is not before time.

The danger for humanity’s journey to enlightenment came from the increased levels of delusion and denial that we humans were having to employ in order to cope. To be truly free we had to confront and understand our condition, not escape it by adding more and more layers of denial. Denial blocked access to the truth, that being its purpose, but ultimately we had to find the truth. The purpose of a conscious mind is to understand; ultimately to understand ourselves—as Socrates said, ‘the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance’, and ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’—but in the end a preference for ignorance and the associated need to oppress any examination of our lives, oppress any freedom to think, question and pursue knowledge, threatened to become the dominant attitude in the world. As George Orwell famously predicted, ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face [freedom] forever’ (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949). While journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft recognised that ‘the great twin political problems of the age are the brutality of the right, and the dishonesty of the left’ (Australian Financial Review, 29 Jan. 1999), and 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 was reproduced in the Geelong Grammar School mag. The Corian, Sept-Oct. 1980), it was the dishonesty of the left which had the potential to, and which was poised to destroy the world.

Having been unable to explain the human condition and, as a result, see through all our denials and delusions, it can, as mentioned, come as a shock to discover just how dangerous pseudo idealism has been. Now that we are able to explain the human condition we can at last understand that real idealism involved being prepared to ‘fly off course’ in search of knowledge and that these movements that lacked religion’s central element of honesty and truth were dangerously pseudo idealistic. They were deluding their adherents that they were capable of bringing about real change in the world when the truth is they were leading humanity away from any such meaningful change. Ever since its inception pseudo idealism has been the art of creating the cooperative ideal state by denying the reality of the upsetting battle involved in achieving it. The litany of pseudo idealistic Page 212 of
PDF Version causes served to relieve humanity of excessive guilt but, as Bronowski said, ‘They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself’.

In truth, all the movements that have emerged since the advent of religion have represented false starts to the human-condition-free new world and have been led by false prophets, merchants of denial and delusion, advocates of means to escape rather than pursue understanding of our condition.

Strident forms of Religious Fundamentalism

We now need to return to looking at what was happening with the development of fundamentalist forms of religion that were continuing to be adopted to cope with the emergence of excessive upset in poorer, more impoverished regions of the world. As was pointed out, when religions became too condemning we could either find a more evasive form of pseudo idealism to support or modify the religion to make it less confronting. The emphasis in religion could be shifted from self-confronting honesty, introspection and interpretation to simple literal (non-interpretative) propagation of the religion’s scripture, to strict obedience to the cooperative ideals imbued in the religion and to worship. Since the sophisticated reasoning required for the more evasive forms of pseudo idealism was a luxury that people struggling simply to survive could not afford their only option as upset developed in their world was to adopt even more strident and fundamentalist expressions of religion. In fact as the politically correct, deconstructionist movement began to spread in the ‘developed’ and more affluent part of the world its growing influence was matched in the ‘undeveloped’ and more impoverished parts of the world by increasingly strident and fundamentalist expressions of religion, especially Muslim fundamentalism and simplistic, emotional, ‘evangelical’, ‘charismatic’ forms of Christianity. These strident forms of religious fundamentalism were as stripped of honesty and thus as dangerous as the extreme forms of pseudo idealism such as politically correct deconstructionism. Thus, the human journey to enlightenment is under serious attack from two quarters, from extreme forms of pseudo idealism and from fundamentalist expressions of religion.

Endplay

We have reached the point in the human journey where the rapidly rising tide of the politically correct, deconstructionist postmodernist culture 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 stopped.

A crisis has emerged for humanity where the seductive qualities of delusion have become irresistible and/or the need for ultra-restraint has become 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 Page 213 of
PDF Version 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 the rise of extreme forms of pseudo idealism and fundamentalist expressions of religion. George Orwell’s prediction 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 extremely powerful warnings in both the Old and New Testaments.

In the Old Testament the Book of Daniel focuses specifically on the emergence of the various ways of coping with the human condition that arise in the final stages of the development of upset where the graph charting its increase begins to plummet. While his account obviously couldn’t be given in the first principle based biological terms that are possible today, using powerful analogies Daniel was nevertheless able to describe exactly what has been described in this and previous sections of this book about the stages that occur in the final passage of upset’s development. He said, ‘I have come to explain to you what will happen to you people in the future’ (10:14), ‘I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth’ (10:21). Daniel used a number of different analogies to present his insight into the future. In one he describes different kings competing for power and involved in endless rounds of payback warfare. He then describes the emergence of an all-dominating king which we can now understand is the kingdom based on the very effective form of management of upset of religion involving the imposed discipline of, for example, the Ten Commandments. After describing the time of many competing kings Daniel said, ‘Then a mighty king will appear, who will rule with great power’ (11:3). He then described how in time this highly effective and thus all-powerful system will disintegrate into two competing world views, which we can now understand is the emergence of extremely artificial forms of pseudo idealism and with them the need to oppose such dogma and thus the emergence of the left wing and right wing political positions. Daniel said, ‘After he [the mighty king] has appeared, his empire will be broken up…his empire will be uprooted…[and] The king of the South [the resigned right wing emphasis on freedom, power, fame, fortune and glory] will become strong, but one of his commanders will become even stronger than he and will rule his own kingdom [to the north] with great power [this represents the rise of the left wing emphasis on pseudo idealism]. After some years, they will become allies [the left and the right harmonise through the practice of politics]. The daughter of the king of the South will go to the king of the North to make an alliance, but she will not retain her power, and he and his power will not last…one of her family line will rise to take her place. He will attack the forces of the king of the North…then the king of the North will invade the king of the South…then the king of the South will march out in rage and fight against the king of the North…the king of the North will muster another army larger than the first…The forces of the South will be powerless to resist; even their best troops will not have the strength to stand [pseudo idealism becomes increasingly seductive and powerful]. The invader will do as he pleases; no-one will be able to stand against him…[but eventually he] will make an alliance with the king Page 214 of
PDF Version of the South…[and eventually] will stumble and fall…[however in time] He will be succeeded by a contemptible person [even more dishonest forms of pseudo idealism emerge] who will not be given the honour of royalty [they will lack religion’s honesty]. He will invade the kingdom [the religious kingdom of honesty]…and he will seize it through intrigue [dishonesty masquerading as honesty]. Then an overwhelming army will be swept away before him; both it and a prince of the covenant [religion] will be destroyed…when the richest provinces feel secure, he will invade them and will achieve what neither his father nor his forefathers did [no force has been able to overthrow religion before]…The king of the South will wage war with a large and very powerful army, but he will not be able to stand…[yet again the right wing attempts to fight back and in time] The two kings with their hearts bent on evil [the dishonesty of the resigned right wing strategy and the even more dishonest left wing pseudo idealistic strategy], will sit at the same table and lie to each other, but to no avail…the king of the North will return to his own country with great wealth, but his heart will be set against the holy covenant [set on completely destroying and/or corrupting religion for being too confronting and condemning]…At the appointed time he will invade the South again, but this time the outcome will be different from what it was before [this time the right wing will not be able to stand against the seductive tide of extreme forms of pseudo idealism, particularly politically correct deconstructionism]…he will return to show favour to those who forsake the holy covenant [forsake religion]. His armed forces will rise up to desecrate the temple fortress and will abolish the daily sacrifice. Then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation [pseudo idealism and fundamentalist forms of religion will take over the world and lead humanity to a death by dogma]. With flattery [the truth-and-guilt-avoiding, 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 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]…The [pseudo idealistic] king will do as he pleases. He will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will say unheard-of-things against the God of gods [such as Richard Dawkins’ statement about religion]. He will be successful until the time of wrath [until the all-exposing truth of understanding of the human condition arrives to save the world]…He will invade many countries and sweep through them like a flood…he will set out in a great rage [the strident anger of fundamentalist forms of religion; actually not forms of religion but forms of anti-religion] to destroy and annihilate many…Yet he will come to his end, and no-one will help him…[however while he reigns] There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then…From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be [many days]’ (from Dan. chpts 11&12).

In another analogy of the same progression, which in some ways is even more revealing, mentioning as it does how ‘truth was thrown to the ground’, Daniel used the symbol of a ram for the right wing and a goat for the left wing. He said that to begin with ‘No animal could stand against him [the ram], and none could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great…[greed and indifference to others was so great that children were used in coalmines to mine coal but then the] goat…charged at him in great rage…[the left wing emerges and] The ram was powerless to stand against him; the goat knocked him to the ground and trampled on him, and none could rescue the ram from his power. The goat became very great…It set itself up to be as great as the Prince of the host [it set itself up to be more important than religion]; it took away the daily sacrifice from him, and the place of his sanctuary was brought low…It prospered in everything it did, and truth was thrown to the ground…“How long will it take for the vision to be fulfilled—the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, the rebellion that causes desolation, and the surrender of the sanctuary [the abandonment of religion] and of the host that will be trampled underfoot [the seduction of the human race]…It will take [many days]…understand that the vision concerns the time of the end.”…[when humans] have become completely wicked [and], a stern-Page 215 of
PDF Version faced king [the deeply upset and angry], a master of intrigue, will arise [the pseudo idealistic, false prophet merchants of denial and delusion will arise]…He will cause astounding devastation and will succeed in whatever he does. He will destroy the mighty men and the holy people [even the strong will begin to cave in to the intimidating tide of pseudo idealism, such as we have recently seen where many in the supposed free world refused to stand against the tyrant Saddam Hussein]. He will cause deceit to prosper, and he will consider himself superior…“The vision…concerns the distant future [that has now arrived]”’ (Dan. ch.8).

In the New Testament Christ gave exactly the same warning as Daniel, even referring to Daniel’s description of pseudo idealism as the ‘abomination that causes desolation’, but going further than Daniel by advising people to head for the hills when pseudo idealism and strident fundamentalist anti-religion threatens to destroy humanity. Referring to ‘the sign…of the end of the age’, Christ said that ‘At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other [a great deal of upset will develop], and many false prophets [pseudo idealists claiming to be leading the way to peace and a new age for humans] will appear and deceive many people…even the elect [the strong]—if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time…Wherever there is a carcass [the overly upset and exhausted], there the vultures [false prophets] will gather. Because of the increase of wickedness [upset], the love of most will grow cold. So when you see the “abomination that causes desolation,” spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong [throwing out religion and 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 understanding of the human condition], no-one would survive’ (extracts from Matt. 24 & Mark 13 combined).

(Note, it might be asked how, in such ancient times, could the threat pseudo idealism and strident forms of fundamentalist anti-religion posed to the human journey have been so accurately anticipated by Christ and Daniel. The truth is all the nuances of the human condition can be seen in any sample of human behaviour for those sufficiently psychologically open to seeing it. In the case of pseudo idealism you only have to be caught in heavy traffic and observe how instead of holding their place against aggressive lane swappers some drivers are clearly deriving a feel good rush from letting such drivers push in front of them, even slowing down to encourage them. With a little more observation you can extrapolate what is eventually going to happen in the world, especially if you are sufficiently free from needing to live in denial of the issue of the human condition—in particular free from having to live in denial of integrative meaning or God—to be able to, and want to, think deeply about such matters. Daniel for example, in explaining why he said ‘I have greater wisdom than other living men’ [Dan. 2:30] and why he was able to have his mind ‘turned to things to come’ [Dan. 2:29], ‘praised the God of heaven [he embraced the truth of integrative meaning and is unafraid of the issue of the human condition]…[who] gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning [not denying integrative meaning enables him to think truthfully and thus effectively]. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him. I thank and praise you, O God of my father: You have given me wisdom and power’ [Dan. 2:19,21,22,23].)

Like Daniel and Christ, there have been other exceptionally unevasive, human-condition-confronting, denial-free, sound, relatively upset-free, honest, penetrating, deep thinking true prophets in history who have been strong enough to stand against the tide Page 216 of
PDF Version of pseudo idealism and warn of its great danger. As with Daniel and Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche didn’t mince his words when he said, as mentioned earlier—and it’s a statement worth repeating—that ‘There have always been many sickly people among those who invent fables and long for God [ideality]: they have a raging hate for the enlightened man and for that youngest of virtues which is called honesty…Purer and more honest of speech is the healthy body, perfect and square-built: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth [to face truth and one day find understanding of the human condition]…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 up to now…What warrior wants to be spared? I do not spare you, I love you from the very heart, my brothers in war!’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, 1892; tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1961). (Note, some may argue that Nietzsche can’t have been ‘sound’ and ‘relatively upset-free’ because he went mad at the age of 44. However it is explained in the ‘Resignation’ chapter in A Species In Denial that while some human-condition-confronting true prophets did go mad from confronting the subject, the fact that they were able to confront it at all means that by comparison with virtually all other humans who couldn’t go even near the normally terrifyingly depressing subject they had to have been sound and relatively upset-free.)

Laurens van der Post, the most exceptional denial-free thinker of last century, was another who was ‘square-built’ enough to speak out strongly against the ‘abomination’ of pseudo idealism that causes ‘astounding devastation’, saying: ‘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 [UK] 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).

(Note, again it does need emphasising that upset is a heroic state, with the most upset being the most heroic individuals of all because they have necessarily been involved in the battle that humanity has been waging longer and/or more intensely than any others. While the above descriptions of the extremely upset being ‘wicked’, ‘stern-faced’, ‘cold’, ‘sickly’ ‘carcasses’ and ‘vultures’ involved in creating a ‘rotting corpse’ were necessary to match the no holds barred, absolutely brutal, assault on the truth that was being left ‘trampled underfoot’ by pseudo idealists, in the human-condition-understanding new world such rhetoric is entirely wrong and redundant.)

It is a measure of how extremely dangerous the threat of pseudo idealism and fundamentalist forms of anti-religion are to humanity’s journey to enlightenment that four of the most exceptional denial-free and thus soundest thinkers in recorded history have given such dire warnings about it. Pseudo idealism especially is the art of lying to the maximum, which means it takes humanity the furthest away from the truth, and thus its freedom, that is possible. That is why it is the ‘abomination that causes desolation’—it leads to humanity’s death by dogma. What was foreseen has eventuated with the extreme Page 217 of
PDF Version artificiality and its dishonesty of the delusion and denial of pseudo idealism, along with fundamentalist forms of anti-religion now set to dominate the world. In the race between self-discovery and self-destruction from terminal alienation, it appeared the latter had won. Again, R.D. Laing got the truth up about just how sick with alienation the human race has become when he wrote: ‘We are born into a world where alienation awaits us [p.12] …the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] … The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [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 dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. 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). In his 2005 inaugural mass, Pope Benedict XVI similarly acknowledged that, ‘We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light.’

The situation where extreme delusion threatens to destroy humanity 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 game situation where only the arrival of understanding of the human condition can save the situation. With the arrival of that all-important liberating understanding the dire situation humanity has been in suddenly changes to one of extraordinary excitement where everything we have ever dreamed of in terms of human happiness and freedom from suffering is within reach. While it is within reach there remains one last impasse to be overcome.