Section 1:14 Since the human condition is an unbearable subject to think about how did you manage to find understanding of it?

QUESTION: Professor Prosen has asked me to say something about how I managed to find these understandings of the human condition when the whole issue has been such an unbearable subject to look at.

ANSWER: It is true that the issue of the human condition has been all but unapproachable. To illustrate this, the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia says that ‘philosophers and psychologists’ regard the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s 1849 book The Sickness Unto Death as ‘one of the best accounts on the subject [of]…the nature of despair’ (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/​Søren_Kierkegaard>, accessed 11 Sept. 2010). As the title of the book, The Sickness Unto Death, indicates, the ‘despair’ that the ‘philosophers and psychologists’ are referring to that Kierkegaard gave such a deadly accurate ‘best account’ of, is the suicidally ‘sick[ening]’, worse-than-‘death’ depression that the ‘tormenting’ good and evil ‘contradiction’ of the human condition has caused humans whenever they allowed their minds to even momentarily ‘glimpse’ its existence. The following quote forms part of that deadly accurate description that Kierkegaard gave of that worse-than-‘death’ depression that the issue of the human condition has caused: ‘the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die [and end the torture of our unexplained human condition]…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 doesn’t 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).

Yes, we humans have learnt to live in such complete denial of the unbearable issue of the human condition that whenever the ‘anxiety’ from it momentarily appears we are so unaware of where that ‘anxiety’ is coming from that its source does seem ‘inexplicable’.

The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev similarly wrote extraordinarily honestly about the pure ‘terror’ the issue of the human condition has caused humans in his 1931 book The Destiny of Man, when he referred to the ‘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’.

So yes, the human condition has seemed to be a universally unapproachable subject—but not entirely so, because in The Destiny of Man, in the passage where the quote I just referred to came from, Berdyaev also gave this very clear description of a way, in fact the only way, understanding of the human condition could be found. Referring to and possibly even inspired by the courage of Kierkegaard’s writings about the human condition, Berdyaev wrote that ‘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 [which is the issue of the human condition]. 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…we cannot bear to be faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil…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 [most particularly unpolluted by the all-pervading social convention of denial of the issue of the human condition]; it must be a critique of pure conscience’ (tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.14-16 of 310).

As Berdyaev said, ‘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 forever with the crippling depression of the human condition, and with all the deadening effects of alienation from having to live in denial of the issue of the human condition, and of any truths that bring that issue into focus—which, as we are going to see, were many, many truths.

Understanding of the human condition certainly had to be found, and, as Berdyaev said, finding it was going to require ‘fearlessness’ of the subject of the human condition. He said that ‘the distinction between good and evil’, which is the study of the issue of the human condition, is ‘the bitterest thing in the world’, the hardest subject to confront, so much so he said that only ‘fearlessness’ of it could conquer it. Explaining from where this ‘fearlessness’ would come, Berdyaev said that the study of ‘moral knowledge’, of ‘ethics’, of the issue ‘of good and evil’ in the human make-up, that leads to ‘the moral reformation of life and a revaluation of values as well as for their acceptance’—in other words, that leads to the TRANSFORMATION of the human race from a self-preoccupied, selfish existence to a selfless existence—would require ‘a revelation’ based on ‘a clear conscience, unclouded by social conventions’, namely the social convention of denial of the issue of the human condition; it would require ‘a prophetic element’, ‘a critique of pure conscience’. So, solving the human condition required ‘a clear’, ‘pure conscience’, a ‘conscience’ ‘unclouded by [the] social conventions’ of denial of the whole depressing subject of the human condition. Only those who aren’t made to feel, as Berdyaev said, ‘worthless’ when thinking about the human condition—that is, only those who haven’t been exposed to upset in their infancy and childhood and who are thus relatively free or innocent of upset, only those with a ‘pure conscience’—could hope to ‘fearless[ly]’ face and investigate the issue of the human condition. Everyone else will suffer ‘fear[ful]’ depression if they tried to confront and think about the issue of the human condition—in fact, everyone else will be resigned to living in denial of the issue of the human condition. Obviously only those innocent enough of upset to not have become resigned to avoiding the subject of the human condition could hope to solve the human condition. If you can’t think about it you can’t possibly solve it.

As the story of Adam Stork describes, when human consciousness fully developed some two million years ago our search for knowledge unavoidably involved becoming upset—that is, angry, egocentric and alienated. The upset state of the human condition emerged. So obviously by the end of that heroic two million year search for knowledge there was not only going to be a great deal of knowledge ‘in our kit bag’, but also a great deal of upset. Through the course of this heroic search, science, the formalisation of the pursuit of knowledge, developed—and through that development nerves and genes and how they differ in the way they process information was discovered—namely, how one is insightful while the other isn’t. Science found the clues that made explanation of the human condition possible—but it was being practiced by humans who were resigned to living in denial of the issue of the human condition, and who, as a result, couldn’t possibly put the clues together and explain the human condition. To do so required a human-condition-confronting-rather-than-human-condition-avoiding, unresigned, denial-free approach—‘a critique of pure conscience’, as Berdyaev said; basically a mind free of the upset state of the human condition.

So, science and humanity as a whole had to wait for someone who had been exceptionally sheltered from all the overwhelming upset in the world and who could thus ‘fearless[ly]’ assemble all the clues and deliver the explanation of the human condition—and that is what happened, that is how I found understanding of the human condition. I grew up in the quiet, natural, soulful countryside of Australia, which is, or was, one of the most sheltered, upset-free, innocent countries left in the world, and only such an innocent place could hope to deliver insight into the human condition. Interestingly, in an interview with the Australian television presenter Andrew Denton, Bono, the aforementioned prophetic lead singer of the rock band U2, said, ‘You do get the feeling in Australia that there’s…something going on down here, a new society being dreamt up…[that in Australia there is] the opportunity to lead the world…to actually just take some moral high ground’, to which Denton joked, ‘You say this to every country you visit.’ Bono responded, ‘The only other country I think has the chance in leadership in terms of creating a new model as Australia would be Canada’ (Enough Rope, ABC-TV, episode 97, 13 Mar. 2006). Australia has been an exceptionally sheltered country and only such shelteredness could produce the innocence that Berdyaev recognised would be needed to unravel the human condition and enable the ‘moral reformation’, the TRANSFORMATION of the world. As well as the benefit of having grown up in Australia, I had to be, and was, exceptionally securely loved, nurtured and sheltered in my upbringing, and also educated in two of the most wholesome schools in Australia. I also grew up in the euphoric ‘flower power’, ‘Age of Aquarius’ 1960s post-war flush of innocence, freedom and idealism that always follows such a terrible exorcism of upset as occurred in the Second World War.

I’m not at all special, not in the slightest, just someone who had the good fortune to largely escape encounter with the immensely heroic but also immensely upset state of the human condition during my upbringing, and as a result found I could think about a subject that was an anathema for most people, indeed virtually all people.

Importantly, the real hero and liberator of humanity is science—and backing up science has been the efforts of all the humans who have ever lived. Humanity as a whole, but in particular science, did all the hard work of finding the clues that, as I explained, have made the explanation of the human condition possible. It is like in a game of gridiron football where the team as a whole, with one exception, does all the hard work, gaining yardage down the field. Finally, when the side gets within kicking distance of the goal posts, a specialist kicker, who until then has played no part, is brought onto the field. While he—in his unsoiled attire—kicks the winning goal, the win clearly belongs to the team of exhausted players who did all the hard work. Now that we can understand the great battle that the human race has been waging we can understand that the least heroic and thus least special are those who haven’t been in the battle, which puts me somewhere near the end of the queue in terms of deserving any accolade or special regard from anyone. That is the truth, a fact—in terms of who is deserving, I come last. If I had a second life, or even were to have the chance of a second career to the one I now have of bringing understanding to the human condition, I would immediately take the most difficult serving job I could find, maybe taking care of autistic children, or helping those with AIDS, or helping any one of the oppressed or persecuted races, or helping all the starving millions. Do you know that it won’t be long before the number of people suffering is outstripped by all those who want to help—and this help will not be driven by the pseudo idealistic, selfish ‘love’ we have been seeing, where people help others in order to make themselves feel better about themselves (as described earlier in Section 1:6), but true love that comes from a desire for the world to be as it really can be.

I should say that the notion of who has had to endure the most upset in humanity’s great battle—in other words, who has been the most heroic, the most special—is redundant now anyway because it is replaced by the equality of everyone’s goodness and specialness. In the spectrum of alienation that necessarily exists on Earth there have always been a few people who existed at the innocent, least embattled, least heroic end, which is where I came from and, as Berdyaev pointed out, had to have come from to be able to look into the human condition, but, as the story of Adam Stork at last makes clear, while all humans are variously upset, all humans are equally good because upset was a result of an unavoidable and necessary battle. Some people are taller or shorter than others, but they are all equally good. In exactly the same way, some people have been more or less involved in humanity’s heroic battle than others and are thus more or less embattled/​upset, but they are all equally good. The equality of goodness and worthiness of all people is a first-principle-established, fundamental and universal truth now.

The fearful, worse-than-death depression that was caused by the good-and-evil—‘the valuable and the worthless’—distinction that Kierkegaard and Berdyaev talked about, no longer exists. It has been eliminated forever—and not by blocking out, denying the whole subject, stopping our brain thinking, or by using terrible lies such as saying there is no such thing as truth because that was nothing more than a construct of language, as postmodernism tried to maintain—you can’t eliminate or ‘deconstruct’ the dilemma of good and evil using lies. That could only be achieved, and now is achieved, by rational, understandable, testable, verifiable, first-principle-based biological explanation of the human condition. Knowledge has eliminated the terrifying, sickening distinction between good and evil forever. That distinction can no longer depress us because it no longer exists. With enough digestion time of the understanding that is now available, and that will take a generation or two, we humans can think freely about any subject now without fear of depression. Berdyaev said ‘we cannot bear to be faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil’, and we no longer are. Remember that we humans are now able to understand that everyone of us is not just good but the absolute heroes of the story of life on Earth. The unbearable terror of the issue of whether we are good and worthy or not has gone from Earth forever. We are free now. It’s all over. WE ARE FREE.

Humanity no longer has to rely on dogmatic assertions that ‘all men are created equal’ purely on the basis that it is a ‘self-evident’ truth, as the United States’ Declaration of Independence asserts, because we can now explain, understand and know that our equality is a fundamental truth. And—best of all—this dignifying, reconciling, redeeming and healing understanding now allows you and every other human in the world to leave your upset state behind as dealt with and be immediately TRANSFORMED to an effectively human-condition-free state.

So we can now understand and thus know that everyone is equally good, and also everyone is now immediately effectively free of the upset state of the human condition. That is an utterly fabulous, sublimely wonderful situation that the whole human race has dreamt of achieving, and through all the efforts of all the humans who have ever lived, it has now, finally, at last been achieved. We humans have won our FREEDOM. The TRANSFORMATION of the human race is on, we’re all out of here, leaving the old exhausted, variously embattled, good-and-evil-differentiated, upset, messed up world behind forever! As Bono sang, ‘When love [truth] comes to town I’m gonna jump that train’. Yes, ‘Joy’, ‘Joyful, as a hero to victory!’, ‘Join in our jubilation!’, ‘We enter, drunk with fire, into your sanctuary…Your magic reunites…All men become brothers…All good, all bad…Be embraced, millions! This kiss for the whole world!’