4. Humans’ historic denial of the issue of the human condition

As Søren Kierkegaard, Nikolai Berdyaev, Laurens van der Post, R.D. Laing, Alan Paton, William Blake, Alexander Pope, Patrick White, William Wordsworth, Morris West, Henry Lawson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Albert Camus in a quote that will be included shortly, bravely express, it took virtually all humans’ courage merely to exist under the duress of the human condition. Having no answer to the core question in human life of our meaningfulness or otherwise meant that trying to think about the problem led only to deep depression. Despite being the only fully conscious, thinking-based beings on Earth, the truth of the matter is thinking has been a nightmarish activity for humans. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins when he talked of the ‘cliffs of fall’ that lay in wait for any who tried to think deeply, the Australian comedian Rod Quantock has similarly acknowledged that ‘Thinking can get you into terrible downwards spirals of doubt’ (Sayings of the Week, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1986). Nor was the philosopher Bertrand Russell exaggerating when he said ‘Many people would sooner die than think’ (quoted in Antony Flew’s Thinking About Thinking, 1975). The fact of the matter is only an existence absolutely dedicated to escapism and superficiality has been at all bearable for humans.

Tragically, until the clarifying explanation for our contradictory nature was found, humans had no choice other than to live in denial of the issue. While we lacked understanding of our condition, denying it—extremely dishonest, false and limiting a response as that was—has been our only sensible means of coping with it. The truly extraordinary aspect of humans, and measure of our immense bravery, is that we have managed to keep the semblance of a bright and optimistic countenance despite the awful realities of our circumstances. The courage to live in denial, despite the dishonesty of this behaviour and the extremely artificial and superficial existence it left humans with, has been the very essence of our species’ immense bravery.

Page 22 of
PDF Version As will shortly be explained, humanity’s historic denial of the issue of the human condition began when consciousness first emerged from the instinct-dominated state some 2 million years ago when the large thinking ‘association cortexed’ brain first appears in the fossil record, and has been reinforced ever since. As a result of having practiced this denial for so long, humans are now at a conscious level almost completely unaware of the existence of the issue of the human condition. The issue is now deeply buried, a part of our species’ subconscious awareness. A characteristic of the human race now is that at a subliminal, subconscious level there is an immense insecurity, a deep sense of guilt about being divisively behaved.

The issue of the human condition is so much the dominant issue in all human life yet so deeply denied by us now that it is as if we are living with an unacknowledged elephant in our living rooms. In fact so dominating has this practice of denial been in human life that if there were any enlightened intelligence in outer space it would likely regard us as ‘that species that is living in denial’. Indeed humans live in such complete denial and, as a result, are so deeply separated, split-off or alienated from our true situation and true selves that we could also be known throughout the universe as ‘the estranged or alienated ones’. Having said this it also needs to be emphasised again that while humans may be the most alienated species in the universe we must also be among the bravest.

The real problem we humans are faced with on Earth is our predicament or condition of being insecure, unable to confront, make sense of and deal with the dark side of our nature. The real struggle for humans has been a psychological one. In truth, human self-esteem, which at base is the ability to defy the implication that we are not worthwhile beings, is so fragile that if a man loses his fortune in a stock market crash, or his reputation from some mistake he has made in the management of his life, he all-to-frequently will suicide or if not suicide then completely crumple as a person, lose the will to actively participate in life. The fact of the matter is that the framework within which humans feel secure and can operate is extremely narrow. Humans’ insecurity from the dilemma of the human condition has been such that the comfort zone within which we live is only a fraction of the vast, true world that we have the potential to live in.

As the full extent of humans’ insecurity under the duress of the human condition becomes clear in the pages ahead we will see that the world humans have lived in has been a miserable, tiny, dark fortress corner of what the world really has to offer. It is as if we have been living hiding in a hole in the ground, a dark cave where no light could reach us to expose and confront us with our condition. This cave-like existence protected us from suicidal depression but at the same time it denied us any real ability to participate in and enjoy our world. Thankfully, with the human condition now solved—the poles of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the human make-up now reconciled—this great potential to live will at last be able to be accessed. Although she was fully in denial of the issue of the human condition as being the cause of our species’ neurosis and the issue that had to be confronted and solved for a ‘new age’ for humans to come about, Marilyn Ferguson—one of the gurus of the extremely dishonest, deluded and dogmatic 1980s New Age Movement—was actually anticipating this time of liberation from the human condition when she wrote: ‘Maybe [the Jesuit scientist] Teilhard de Chardin was right; maybe we are moving toward an omega point [final unification of our split selves]—Maybe we can finally resolve the planet’s inner conflict between its neurotic self (which we’ve created and which is unreal) and its real self. Our real self knows how to commune, how to create…From everything I’ve seen people really urgently want the kind of new beginning…[that I am] talking about [where humans will live in] cooperation instead of competition’ (New Age mag. Aug. 1982). As will be explained much more fully later, the delusions that the ideal-world-demanding-but-issue-of-the-human-condition-avoiding New Age Movement Page 23 of
PDF Version was based on meant that that movement was actually leading humans to greater alienation and thus away from, not ‘towards’ a ‘new age’ of unification; however, as was pointed out, the thrust of what Ferguson said about the need to end our estrangement from our true selves is true.