3. The suicidal depression that confronting the human condition has caused

Good or bad, loving or hateful, angels or devils, constructive or destructive, sensitive or insensitive: what are we? Throughout our history we’ve struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of the human condition. Neither philosophy nor science has, until now, been able to give a clarifying explanation. For their part, religious assurances such as Page 15 of
PDF Version ‘God loves you’ may provide temporary comfort but fail to explain WHY we are lovable. Indeed, if we refer to the embodiment of the ideals that govern our society as ‘God’, then humans have been a ‘God-fearing’ species—a people living in fear and insecurity, made to feel guilty as a result of our inconsistency with the cooperative, loving, selfless ideals. The human predicament, or condition, is that humans have had to live with a sense of guilt—albeit an undeserved sense of guilt, as will shortly be explained. Whenever we attempted to understand why there was such divisiveness and, in the extreme, ‘evil’ in the world, and indeed in ourselves, we couldn’t find an answer and, not finding one, were left feeling insecure, uncertain about our goodness and worth. In fact, so deeply depressing has the underlying issue of our human condition been that we learnt that the only practical way to cope with it was to avoid thinking about it.

While the human condition is the underlying real issue in all of human life, it has been such a troubling and ultimately depressing subject that we humans learnt, from a very young age, that we had no choice but to stop thinking about it, avoid even acknowledging its existence, force the whole issue from our minds. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point about our inability to even acknowledge the issue of the human condition in his now-famous line, ‘About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent’ (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ch.7, 1921), while T.S. Eliot recognised our species’ particular frailty of having to live psychologically in denial of the most significant and real issue in our lives of the dilemma of our condition when he wrote that ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’ (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, 1936).

So daunting has this subject of the human condition been that we rarely referred to it. For example, while ‘human nature’ appears in dictionaries, ‘human condition’ never does. Only in moments of extreme profundity did we even mention the topic, and even then it was only ever a glancing reference. For example, the mission statement of the Fetzer Institute, an American philanthropic organisation, contains lofty words about the foundation’s dedication to research, education and service, and spliced in amongst them are the words: ‘as we press toward unique frontiers at the edge of revolutionary breakthroughs in the human condition’. Humans have lived in such deep denial of the issue of the human condition that when they encounter the term ‘human condition’ many think it refers to the state of poverty or disease that afflicts much of humanity. If you search ‘human condition’ on the Internet most references interpret it as being to do with humans’ physical state rather than with humans’ psychological predicament, which, as will become clear, is its real meaning.

Testament to how virtually impossible it has been for humans to confront the issue of the human condition is that while there has been an infinite amount written on the subject of humans’ capacity for good and evil, only a very rare few individuals in recorded history have been able to engage the core issue and fear in being human of whether or not we are at base evil, meaningless, worthless beings—even, for the believing, sinful, defiling and not part of God’s intended world. The following few examples constitute almost the entire collection of descriptions of the agony of the human condition that I have found in the 31 years since 1975 when I first started to actively write about the subject. You will notice that even these rare examples required the capabilities of some of the world’s most gifted writers to manage even to allude to the issue.

The 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was one who was brave enough to write about the human condition, describing the horrific depression that came from trying to confront the ‘tormenting contradiction’ as being so great that it is equivalent to a living death. In fact, in his 1849 book that he so aptly titled The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard wrote that the subject of our contradictory nature is so fearfully depressing Page 16 of
PDF Version that a human ‘doesn’t even dare strike up acquaintance with’ it, adding that this denial becomes so important and practiced that we can only occasionally glimpse the presence of the issue, and that even those ‘glimpses’ cause us ‘inexplicable anxiety’. Kierkegaard wrote (all underlinings in quotes and text are the author’s emphasis): ‘the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die…that despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction, this sickness in the self; eternally to die, to die and yet not to die [p.48 of 179] …there is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something, or a something he doesn’t even dare strike up acquaintance with…he goes about with a sickness, goes about weighed down with a sickness of the spirit, which only now and then reveals its presence within, in glimpses, and with what is for him an inexplicable anxiety [p.52]’ (tr. A. Hannay, 1989).

In this next quote from his 1931 book The Destiny of Man, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev also bravely acknowledged the existence of the horror of the human condition. Referring to and possibly even inspired by the courage of Kierkegaard’s writing, Berdyaev acknowledged an ‘ancient, primeval terror’ of ‘the fallen state of the world’; of the ‘deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless’, describing the distinction between good and evil as ‘the bitterest thing in the world’. He wrote: ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror. Fear makes the search for truth and the knowledge of it impossible. Knowledge implies fearlessness…Conquest of fear is a spiritual cognitive act. This does not imply, of course, that the experience of fear is not lived through; on the contrary, it may be deeply felt, as was the case with Kierkegaard, for instance…it must also be said of knowledge that it is bitter, and there is no escaping that bitterness …Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world, and in no way undermines the value of knowledge…it must be said that the very distinction between good and evil is a bitter distinction, the bitterest thing in the world …Moral knowledge is the most bitter and the most fearless of all for in it sin and evil are revealed to us along with the meaning and value of life. There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless. We cannot rest in the thought that that distinction is ultimate. The longing for God in the human heart springs from the fact that we cannot bear to be faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil and the bitterness of choice…Ethics must be both theoretical and practical, i.e. it must call for the moral reformation of life and a revaluation of values as well as for their acceptance. And this implies that ethics is bound to contain a prophetic element. It must be a revelation of a clear conscience, unclouded by social conventions; it must be a critique of pure conscience’ (tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.14—16 of 310).

Berdyaev points out here that ‘we cannot bear to be faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil’, ‘we cannot rest in the thought that that distinction is ultimate’. As a species we couldn’t endure having to live with the crippling depression of the human condition forever. One day humanity had to find the reconciling, ameliorating understanding of the dilemma of our split nature. In fact, as humanity’s vehicle for inquiry into the nature of our world and place in it, science’s fundamental task was to find this all-important liberating understanding of the human condition. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was recognising this all-important task of science when he said, ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’ (Consilience, 1998, p.298 of 374). The problem for science is that it, like the rest of humanity, was having to practice denial of the issue of the human condition—and not just of the human condition but of any truths that brought the issue into focus, which, as we will later see, were many—and this denial made any effective inquiry into the human condition virtually impossible. Denial is a form of lying and you can’t build the truth from lies. Later it will be described in some detail how this necessary practice of denial or lying in science had completely stalled any real progress Page 17 of
PDF Version being made in science, namely progress in fulfilling its fundamental responsibility of delivering liberating understanding of the human condition. While science found a great deal of valuable knowledge about the mechanisms of the workings of our world, in fact sufficient knowledge to make explanation of the human condition possible, its practice of denial became so over-developed it almost prevented any possibility of this knowledge being effectively applied to explain the human condition. Denial in science had become so sophisticated that progress was only being made in matters unrelated to the human condition. The American General Omar Bradley, who rose to eminence during World War II, highlighted this deficiency in science when he said, ‘The world has achieved brilliance…without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants’ (Armistice Day Address, 10 Nov. 1948, Collected Writings of General Omar N. Bradley, Vol.1). A caller I once heard on a talk-back radio program made the same point when she said ‘we can get a man on the moon but a woman is still not safe walking down the street at night on her own’. The truth is the real frontier and challenge for science was not outer space but inner space, solving the human condition no less. The significance of Berdyaev’s quote is that he not only bravely acknowledges the depressing horror of the human condition, he also addresses this problem of the deficiency of science by emphasising what is required to overcome it. He says that to achieve ‘victory over [the] ancient, primeval terror’ of our condition so that we are not ‘faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil’ requires the ‘conquest of fear’ of that condition. He says ‘moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil’ ‘requires great daring’, a ‘fearlessness’, and that such fearlessness can only come from ‘a clear conscience, unclouded by social conventions; it must be a critique of pure conscience’. He emphasises that only a ‘prophetic’ approach, one that fearlessly defies all the lying of denial can succeed to penetrate and thus see into the issue of the human condition, and that ‘we cannot rest’ until such an approach does succeed. Indeed the words of all the authors quoted in this collection are ‘prophetic’ in their exceptional denial-free honesty. One of the greatest prophets of our time—in fact in his London Times obituary he was described as ‘a prophet out of Africa’ (20 Dec. 1996)—Sir Laurens van der Post reinforced Berdyaev’s earlier assertion about the need for a new ‘fearless’ approach in science, one ‘unclouded by social conventions’ of denial of the issue of the human condition, when he wrote, ‘we need a new kind of explorer, a new kind of pathfinder, human beings who, now that the physical world is spread out before us like an open book…are ready to turn and explore in a new dimension’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955, p.133).

In this next quote the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing didn’t talk about the depression that confronting the human condition caused however he did describe the effect of the denial of the issue, which is our separation or alienation from our true situation and true selves. He described the alienating block out as being so great that it is ‘like fifty feet of solid concrete’. Like Kierkegaard, Laing also observed that we have so psychologically denied the issue of the human condition we hardly know it exists, saying, ‘We are so out of touch with this realm [where the issue of the human condition resides] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist’, further acknowledging that ‘it is perilous indeed to explore such a lost realm’. Laing, like Berdyaev and van der Post before him, also emphasised that ‘the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life’ demands that the human condition be confronted rather than denied, describing the undertaking as this ‘desperately urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness’. In his 1967 book The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, Laing wrote: ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life [p.12 of 156] …The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] …between us and It [the Godly, ideal state and the issue it raises of our inconsistency with it] Page 18 of
PDF Version there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded [p.118] …We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the space man. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project—indeed, as a desperately urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness. Perhaps this is one of the few things that still make sense in our historical context. We are so out of touch with this realm [so in denial of the issue of the human condition] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist. It is very small wonder that it is perilous indeed to explore such a lost realm [p.105]’.

We can appreciate how ‘perilous’ it has been and thus how important the ‘fifty feet of solid concrete’ block out has been when we consider that if those needing to employ such block out, which is virtually all humans, were to suddenly remove the block and fully engage the issue of the human condition they would, at that moment, die from suicidal depression—or at the very least go mad. The following quotes provide more evidence of just how dangerously confronting the issue of the human condition has been.

When Time magazine invited Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, to write an essay on apartheid in South Africa they received in its place a deeply reflective article on his favourite pieces of literature. In what proved to be the great writer’s last written work, Paton revealed: ‘I would like to have written one of the greatest poems in the English language—William Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright”, with that verse that asks in the simplest words the question which has troubled the mind of man—both believing and non believing man—for centuries: “When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the lamb make thee?”’ (25 Apr. 1988). The opening lines of the poem, ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night’, refer to humans’ denial of the issue of our divisive, ‘fallen’, apparently worthless condition. It is a subject humans consciously repress and yet it is one that ‘burns bright’ in the ‘forests of the night’ of our deepest thoughts. The very heart of this issue lies in the line, ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’—a rhetorical question disturbing in its insinuation that we are wholly unrelated to ‘the lamb’, to the world of innocence. The poem raises the age-old riddle and fundamental question involved in being human: how could the mean, cruel, indifferent, selfish and aggressive ‘dark side’ of human nature—represented by the ‘Tiger’—be both reconcilable with and derivative of the same force that created ‘the lamb’ in all its innocence? As Paton pointed out, despite humans’ denial of it, the great, fundamental, underlying question has always been, are humans part of God’s ‘work’, part of ‘his’ purpose and design, or aren’t we? With these final words, in what was the culmination of a lifetime of thoughtful expression, Paton transports the reader into the realm where the deep fear about what it really is to be human resides; he raises the core question—that one day had to be addressed and solved—of whether or not humans are evil, defiling, worthless, meaningless beings?

In this next quote, English poet Alexander Pope considers wisdom to be the ultimate ‘system’ because it can make all things understandable or ‘coherent’. As with all the authors of this collection of quotes, Pope believed that ‘in the scale of the reasoning’ involved in becoming wise, the ultimate ‘question’ to be answered—the one the human mind has ‘wrangled’ or struggled with for ‘so long’—is this question of whether or not humans are a mistake. In his renowned 1733 work Essay on Man, Pope wrote: ‘Of systems possible, if ‘tis confess’d / That Wisdom infinite must form the best / Where all must fall, or not coherent be / And all that rises, rise in due degree / Then in the scale of reas’ning life, ‘tis plain / There must be, somewhere, such a rank as man: / And all the question (wrangle e’er so long) / Is only this, if God has placed him wrong?’

In this key passage from his 1981 autobiography Flaws in the Glass, Patrick White, Australia’s only literary Nobel laureate, offers another rare, honest description of the core agony of having to live with this unresolved question that Pope referred to of whether we Page 19 of
PDF Version are worthy or not: ‘What do I believe? I’m accused of not making it explicit. How to be explicit about a grandeur too overwhelming to express, a daily wrestling match with an opponent whose limbs never become material, a struggle from which the sweat and blood are scattered on the pages of anything the serious writer writes? A belief contained less in what is said than in the silences. In patterns on water. A gust of wind. A flower opening. I hesitate to add a child, because a child can grow into a monster, a destroyer. Am I a destroyer? This face in the glass which has spent a lifetime searching for what it believes, but can never prove to be, the truth. A face consumed by wondering whether truth can be the worst destroyer of all’ (p.70 of 260). In this distillation of a lifetime spent mentally grappling with what it is to be human, White bravely managed to articulate the core fear shared by virtually all humans. If you allow yourself to think deeply about what it is that White is daring to face down you will see it is a terrifying issue—‘this tormenting contradiction, this sickness in the self’ that ‘not a single human’ does not suffer from, as Kierkegaard acknowledged. The truth is this issue of the human condition is such an incredibly difficult subject for humans to acknowledge that to do so virtually requires that we betray and undermine ourselves. To admit its existence destroys our capacity to cope with it, which has been to live in denial of the whole subject.

Sharing the same sentiments and even using similar imagery to Patrick White of the beauty and purity of a flower was English poet laureate William Wordsworth, who wrote too of the agony of the dilemma of the human condition in his celebrated poem of 1807, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. In this extraordinarily honest and thus penetrating poem (which will be referred to again in more detail later), Wordsworth begins by recalling all the beauty in the world that humans were able to access before ‘the fall’, before the human species departed from the fabled state of harmony and enthralment it lived in prior to the emergence of the alienating, ‘good’ and ‘evil’-afflicted state of the human condition. (The reference here to a time when our distant ancestors lived in a pre-conscious, innocent, human-condition-free state is a subject that will be addressed shortly.) Wordsworth then concludes the poem by alluding to the reason for humans’ loss of innocence and sensitivity of a clash between our instinct and intellect (another subject to be addressed shortly), and then he gives this honest description of the agony of the human condition: ‘The Clouds that gather round the setting sun / Do take a sober colouring from an eye / That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality / …To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ Thus the emergence of the human condition made humans red-eyed from being worried about their life’s value, meaning and worth. Wordsworth is saying that worrying about our mortality is ultimately due to being insecure about our life’s value and worth—hence the reference in the poem’s title to the ‘intimations of immortality’ humans had during our species’ pre-‘fallen’, pristine, innocent, uncorrupted ‘early childhood’. The thoughts that are now buried so deep that they are beyond the reach of humans’ everyday emotional selves—they are ‘too deep for tears’—are the thoughts about humans’ present corrupted state that the beauty of even the plainest flower has the ability to remind us of, if we let it—if we have not practiced burying the issue deeply enough.

Morris West is another distinguished Australian writer. The author of 26 novels, including The Shoes of the Fisherman, West has been described as one of the 20th century’s most popular novelists. Many times he was asked to write the story of his life and many times he declined, until 1996 when, at the age of 80, he chronicled his life and beliefs in A View from the Ridge—the testimony of a pilgrim. In possibly the book’s central passage West confided: ‘Evil, you see, is not explainable. It is not even understandable. It is what the writers of the Dutch Catechism called “the great absurdity, the great irrelevancy”…brutalise a child and you create a casualty or a criminal. Bribe a servant of the state and you will soon hear the deathwatch beetles chewing away at the rooftrees of society. The disease of evil is pandemic; it spares Page 20 of
PDF Version no individual, no society, because all are predisposed to it. It is this predisposition which is the root of the mystery. I cannot blame a Satan, a Lucifer, a Mephistopheles, for the evils I have committed, the consequences of which have infected other people’s lives. I know, as certainly as I know anything, that the roots are in myself, buried deeper than I care to delve, in caverns so dark that I fear to explore them. I know that, given the circumstances and the provocation, I could commit any crime in the calendar’ (p.78 of 143). It is the ‘caverns so dark’ that exist in ‘all’ humans to varying degrees that will be explored in this book, and, despite what West has said, evil too will be explained, made ‘understandable’. Laurens van der Post once wrote that it was ‘Only by understanding how we were all a part of the same contemporary pattern [of selfishness, greed, anger, hatred, brutality and indifference] could we defeat those dark forces with a true understanding of their nature and origin’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976. p.24 of 275) and, anticipating the arrival of that reconciling insight, added, ‘Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future’ (ibid, p.29).

The renowned Australian literary figure, Henry Lawson—whom Ernest Hemingway greatly admired, and whose work he referred to in his 1970 book Islands in the Stream—wrote extraordinarily forthrightly about the dangerous depression that awaits those who attempt to confront the issue of the human condition. In his 1897 poem The Voice from Over Yonder, Lawson wrote: ‘“Say it! Think it, if you dare! / Have you ever thought or wondered / Why the Man and God were sundered? / Do you think the Maker blundered?” / And the voice in mocking accents, answered only: “I’ve been there.”’ Implicit in the final phrase, ‘I’ve been there’, are the unsaid words, ‘and I’m not going there again’. The ‘there’ and the ‘over yonder’ of the title refer to the state of depression that resulted from trying to confront the issue of the human condition—trying to understand ‘why the Man and God were sundered’ or torn apart, why humans lost their innocence, ‘fell from grace’, became corrupted, ‘evil’, ‘sinful’. To avoid depression humans had no choice but to repress the issue of the human condition, block it from our conscious awareness, cease trying to decide whether ‘the Maker blundered’.

In his 1885 sonnet No Worst, There is None (like Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, another apt title), poet Gerard Manley Hopkins summarised the suicidally deep depression that faced virtually anyone who was crazy enough to dare attempt to plumb the terrifying depths of the issue of our less-than-ideal, apparently worthless condition. The poem was written in what is now archaic English, but there is no doubting what Hopkins is talking about: ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief / More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring / Comforter, where, where is your comforting? / Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? / My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief / Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing— / Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked “No ling- / ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief” / O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May [any] who ne’er [have never] hung there. Nor does long our small / Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep / Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.’ ‘Hung’ is the perfect word for depression, for the state that there is ‘no worse’ than. Hopkins says that the only people who ‘hold’ the ‘frightful’ ‘mountains’ of ‘the mind’ where the issue of the human condition resides ‘cheap’ are those who have never ‘hung there’, which, as Berdyaev said are only those with ‘a clear conscience’, namely the exceptionally innocent. For everyone else, trying to confront the issue of the human condition without the ability to understand it meant that it was an impossible task.

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PDF Version (Note, consistent with what Kierkegaard and Laing have said about being ‘so out of touch with this realm [where the issue of the human condition resides] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist’, many readers may find the existence of a complete block-out or denial in the human mind of a terrifyingly depressing yet all-important subject difficult to accept. On the face of it, to be told there is a crux, fundamental, all-important issue facing humans that they are currently not consciously aware of must seem absurd. It is not easy to accept that there is a subject that looms so large in its significance in our lives that it is like an elephant that resides in our living room and yet we are in such denial of it that we can’t see the ‘elephant’. While this situation may sound unbelievable at first, the mental process involved is no different to that which takes place in the minds of, for example, incest victims who, after finding they cannot comprehend such violation, realise that their only means of coping is to block out any memory of it. ‘Repressed memory’, living in denial of an issue, is a common occurrence. In fact blocking thoughts from our mind has been one of humans’ most powerful coping devices. For those who aren’t persuaded by the quotes presented here and by the discourse in the pages ahead of the presence of this deep psychosis in humans I recommend reading the ‘Resignation’ chapter in my book A Species In Denial, because I believe you will find there all the evidence you need of it. How we are to cope with fully confronting and finally overcoming the terrifying fear and deep psychosis associated with the issue of the human condition once we are reconnected with it is the main subject of this book.)