Chapter 8:16E The differences in alienation between ‘races’ (ethnic groups) of humans

Having now described the emergence of terminal levels of alienation in the more materially ‘developed’ parts of the world (remembering that alienation from nurturing instincts in mothers and extreme egocentricity in fathers is having a devastating impact on the souls of all children everywhere), what now needs to be explained is the role greatly improved communication technology has played in the emergence of ‘materialism envy’ and the resulting unbridled greed, dysfunction and destitution in the materially poorer, so-called ‘developing’ world. But before presenting that explanation (which will be given next in ch. 8:16F), it is first necessary to explain what is really meant by the terms ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds because, as will now be made clear, the explanation of what we really mean by these terms depends on recognising the truth of the existence of different degrees of alienation between ‘races’ of people. (As explained earlier, since ‘race’ is a very imprecise term, what is meant by it in this book is a group of people whose members have mostly been together a long time and are thus relatively closely related genetically—basically people who have a shared history—so a more accurate term would be ‘ethnic group’; however, race is what we use in our everyday language, so to indicate the interpretation of it here, I’ve placed inverted commas around it.)

The different states of material success in the world were once described in terms of the ‘rich and the poor parts of the world’, or the ‘haves and have nots’, then as the ‘first, second and third worlds’, then the ‘developed and undeveloped worlds’, before now being referred to as the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds. In the context of avoiding the unbearable issue of the human condition, the benefit of the terms ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds is that they implied that any country could achieve material success—all that was needed was the time to develop it. The truth that will now be explained is that it wasn’t possible to develop a functional society with ordered and well-run services where the majority of the population lived with a high standard of material comfort if the people in that society were either too innocent or too upset—once again, ‘innocence’ being lack of exposure to and familiarity with the angry, egocentric and alienated upset state of the human condition.

It has to be stressed that while we couldn’t explain and thus defend the upset state of the human condition we couldn’t afford to differentiate individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures according to how innocent or upset they were because it would have left the more upset condemned as bad, unworthy and inferior. It would have led to unfair, destructive and dangerous racist, ageist and sexist prejudice and discrimination against the more upset—and so a dishonest attitude of not allowing differentiation was silently enforced. But as was stated in par. 861, the truth is the only significant difference between humans—the acknowledgment of which makes it possible to truthfully explain and understand much of human behaviour—is the difference in upset anger, egocentricity and alienation between individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures, but until the human condition was explained and upset defended as a good, heroic state we couldn’t admit and talk about that all-important, clarifying difference. So yes, there are immense differences in upset between ‘races’ of humans which can—now that it can be understood that all humans are equally good though variously upset—at last be safely admitted. And the result of the differences in upset that exists between ‘races’ of people is that there are, in fact, more innocent ‘races’ 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 others still who are so instinctively adapted to upset that they are too aware of the reality of life under the duress of 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 variation in upset is that some ‘races’ have been effective in living with the human condition while others have been either too innocent and naive, or too upset, soul-exhausted and cynical.

Although we have had to avoid it, it is an obvious truth that humans became increasingly adapted to life under the duress of the human condition, with some ‘races’ becoming more adept at that adaptation than others. Just as individual humans vary in their degree of alienation from our species’ original instinctive, all-loving, selfless and trusting soulful true self, so ‘races’ of humans naturally vary in their degree of alienation. The longer an individual or a ‘race’ of people were subjected to life under the duress of the human condition, the more they naturally became adapted to that corrupt existence. While a relatively innocent person or relatively innocent ‘race’ still behaved relatively ideally themselves and expected others to do the same, other individuals and ‘races’ became so adapted to the upset/​corrupt world that they no longer behaved ideally themselves and no longer expected others to behave ideally either. The longer humans were exposed to the human-condition-afflicted state the more cynical they became about human existence—a ‘cynic’ being ‘one who doubts or denies the goodness of human motives’ (Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edn, 1998). As mentioned in par. 761, when describing the Distressed Adolescentman stage, the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich wrote honestly about the effects of the different levels of upset in the human race when he described how ‘The living [those relatively free of exposure to upset]…​is naively kindly…​It assumes that the fellow human also follows the laws of the living and is kindly, helpful and giving. As long as there is the emotional plague [the flood of upset in the world], this natural basic attitude, that of the healthy child or the primitive [innocent race]…​[is subject to] the greatest danger…​For the plague individual also ascribes to his fellow beings the characteristics of his own thinking and acting. The kindly individual believes that all people are kindly and act accordingly. The plague individual believes that all people lie, swindle, steal and crave power. Clearly, then, the living is at a disadvantage and in danger.’

The consequences for a society of its people becoming overly cynical was that it meant that there would be too little soulful, selfless idealism and too much upset-adapted cynicism-derived selfishness for the society to function effectively. In the situation where it wasn’t possible to explain and thus defend the upset state of the human condition, the closest people could come to admitting and talking about this fact that people became adapted to the human condition was to describe individuals or families or ‘races’ or countries or civilisations as having become ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘decadent’, and—especially in the case of civilisations—as having ‘passed their prime’ or ‘peaked’ in terms of their creative powers.

Conversely, some ‘races’, like some individual humans, have, in fact, been too innocent to function effectively in the extremely upset-adapted, human-condition-afflicted, soul-corrupted world. As mentioned in par. 848, Sir Laurens van der Post described how a member of the relatively innocent Bushmen people found it impossible to cope with having his innocent, natural spirit compromised: ‘You know I once saw a little Bushman imprisoned in one of our gaols because he killed a giant bustard which according to the police, was a crime, since the bird was royal game and protected. He was dying because he couldn’t bear being shut up and having his freedom of movement stopped. When asked why he was ill he could only say that he missed seeing the sun set over the Kalahari. Physically the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him but he died none the less!’ And Sir Laurens was even more specific when he stated that ‘mere contact with twentieth-century life seemed lethal to the Bushman. He was essentially so innocent and natural a person that he had only to come near us for a sort of radioactive fall-out from our unnatural world to produce a fatal leukaemia in his spirit.’ The honey-coloured Bushmen are probably the most instinctively/​genetically innocent group of people living today. They are more innocent, less soul-corrupted, less human-condition-adapted, less adapted to upset, less toughened, than dark-skinned Bantu Africans, but in turn Bantus are not as toughened and thus as operational and successful in the human-condition-afflicted corrupted world as Caucasians from Europe. For example, I once saw a documentary in which a Bantu African said something to the effect that ‘My people can’t compete with white people, you go to sleep at night only to wake up in the morning to find white people own everything.’ In turn, European Caucasians aren’t as cynical, toughened and opportunistic—selfish—as people from even more ancient civilisations, like the Chinese from the ancient Yellow and Yangtze River valley civilisations, the Indians and Pakistanis from the ancient Indus and Ganges River valley civilisations, and the Arabs and Jews from the ancient Tigress, Euphrates and Nile River valley civilisations.

In another documentary I once saw, this time about a huge barge that travelled up and down the Congo River from Kinshasa to Kisangani, I could see the whole innocence-destroying, toughening process going on before my eyes. While most of the Africans on the barge were happy to pass the day innocently laughing and singing together, there were a few on-board who were buying produce from each port along the way and then selling it to their fellow passengers for a profit. In my mind it wasn’t hard to extrapolate the situation and see that after only a few generations of this occurring that those who were innocently playing and enjoying life weren’t going to survive as well as those who were less soulful and focused on ‘making a living’, which is code for ‘achieving material success’—winning power, fame, fortune and glory; finding relief for their insecure human-condition-afflicted existence. Further, since their preoccupation with seeking that material relief will inevitably mean that their offspring will not receive the degree of nurturing and reinforcement they expect and require, that next generation will be even more insecure and thus even hungrier for the relief of power, fame, fortune and glory. And so it will go on, generation after generation of ever-increasing soul-less selfishness and psychological upset until there is either terminal alienation or reconciling understanding of our species’ insecure condition.

The situation in Fiji provides a good case-study of what invariably took place when ethnic groups of varying degrees of upset cohabitated. In the late 1800s British colonists brought Indians to Fiji as indentured labour to farm sugar cane, and by the mid-1960s half the Fijian population was Indian. As a result, a serious conflict arose between the Indian and native Fijians, which we can now understand. The Indian Fijians, coming from an older and thus naturally more cynical, human-condition-toughened, human-condition-realistic and thus opportunistic civilisation, have been so industrious and materially successful that they now monopolise the small business sector in Fiji to the extent that the native Fijians feel their country has been taken over by the Indian Fijians; for their part, however, the Indian Fijians also feel discriminated against. Indian Fijian sugar growers in particular feel this inequity, for while they produce 90 percent of the country’s sugar, they are only allowed to lease land from the native Fijians (who own 90 percent of the land). Furthermore, since gaining independence in 1970 the native Fijians have ensured their domination of the political process—a state of affairs that was reinforced in 1990 when the Fijian constitution restricted the Indians to a maximum of 27 seats in the country’s 71-seat Parliament. When this provision was amended in 1997 the Indians came to dominate the political scene, successfully electing an Indian Prime Minister in 1999. This situation, however, was overthrown in 2000 when the native Fijians led a coup—and they have remained in power ever since. As mentioned, the Indian Fijians come from a very ancient civilisation in India, one where innocence has long given way to more upset-adapted humans. In comparison, the native Fijians are still relatively innocent, yet to become embattled, hardened and upset-adapted. They aren’t manically driven to win power and glory like more embattled, upset-adapted ‘races’, preferring to spend their day tranquilly occupied by such soulful activities as playing music, drinking the sedating kava and eating taro roots from their gardens—and trusting in soulful selflessness to care for each other. It is a situation where a 20-year-old, or thereabouts, equivalent ‘race’ is having to co-exist and compete with a toughened, cynical, more-upset-and-thus-more-insecure-about-their-goodness-and-thus-more-egocentrically-driven-to-try-to-prove-they-are-good-and-not-bad, competitive, selfish, opportunistic 50-year-old, or thereabouts, equivalent ‘race’. (Note, it was explained in the Angry Adolescentman stage (in par. 860) how 15, 20 and 30-year-old equivalent stages could be said to exist during the last 2,000 years when that period is being described as the born-again Pseudo Idealistic 40-to-50-year-old ‘fraud’ stage and the horrifically angry, punch-drunk, bitter and vengeful Hollow Adolescentman 50-plus-year-old ‘criminal’ stage of humanity’s maturation.)

While holidaying with Annie in Fiji in 1997 a local gave us this description of the structure of Fijian society: ‘The Chinese [who he said were ‘the Jews of the East’] own all the big tourist resorts where the big money in Fiji is made, the Indians run all the shops and smaller businesses and produce all the sugar cane, and the Caucasians run the country in that they occupy so many of the important administrative positions, providing the good structure and order required for the whole society to function.’ ‘Fiji’, he added, ‘is one of the few countries in the world where the indigenous people still control the country even though they are the least materially productive and successful.’ When I asked other residents, including an Indian Fijian and a native Fijian, if they thought this was an accurate description they agreed it was but said that they would never say so publicly for fear of being labelled a racist. The human-condition-understanding-reconciled interpretation of this description is that as soon as you have an unavoidable and necessary battle such as the one that the human race has been involved in, it is inevitable that all those involved are going to become variously adapted to that battle depending on how long they have been exposed to it—with the result that the Chinese and Indians are the cynical 50-year-old equivalent ‘races’, the European Caucasians are the toughened, but not too toughened, too insensitive or too selfish, more operational 30-and-40-year-old equivalent ‘race’, while the native Fijians are the 20-year-old equivalent, overly innocent ‘race’. I might mention that a book about the origins of Blues music gave this similar description of the activities of the different ‘races’ in Memphis, USA, during the 1930s to the one given for Fiji: ‘Beale Street [Memphis], owned largely by Jews, policed by the whites, and enjoyed by the Negroes’ (George W. Lee, Beale Street: Where the Blues Began, 1934, p.13 of 296). Such differences are simply and obviously what manifest when you have an upsetting battle such as the one the human race has been involved in, where some people will have been engaged in the battle longer and/​or more intensely than others. If we are going to have the truthful, meaningful, productive, effective discussion about human behaviour—which is both possible and necessary now that the upset state of the human condition has been explained and defended—then the inevitable differences in upset (in particular differences in alienation from our species’ all-trusting, sensitive, loving, selfless and sharing original instinctive self or soul) have to be acknowledged. The human race either stays living in Plato’s terrible cave of alienated and alienating darkness until it self-destroys from terminal levels of psychosis, or we get the full truth up and leave that awful cave existence for a world drenched in the sunshine of understanding, psychological freedom and togetherness.

As I mentioned in par. 745, Sir James Darling, my headmaster at Geelong Grammar School, recognised what is really an obvious truth, which is that for a person to be as functional as possible under the duress of the human condition they needed both human-condition-adapted toughness and sensitive, selfless, innocent, soulful soundness. While he was specifically talking about the qualities that education should strive to cultivate in an individual, what he said also applies to what a society of people needed if they were to be functional in the human-condition-afflicted world. In an address to The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1960 Sir James said (the underlinings are my emphasis): ‘The quality which, above all other, needs to be cultivated [in education] is sensitivity [soul]…​[Education’s] objective is a development of the whole man, sensitive all round the circumference…​the future…​lies not with the predatory [selfish] and the immune [alienated] but with the sensitive [innocent]…​There is a threefold choice for the free [innocent] man…​He may [decide to participate in the upset and selfish world and] grasp for himself what he can get and trample the needs and feelings of others beneath his feet: or he may try to withdraw from the world to a monastery [refuse to participate in the upset world]…or he may “take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing [all the dishonest, alienated denial and selfish, corrupt behaviours] end them [ultimately by solving the human condition]”…​[and so] There remains the sensitive, on one proviso: he must be sensitive and tough…​Only by a growth of sensitivity can man progress from the alpha of original chaos [upset] to the omega of God’s purpose for him [to become sound and secure]…​Sensitivity is not enough. Without toughness it may be only a thin skin…[only from] an inner core of strength are [you] enabled to fight back [defy all the dishonest denial and upset wrongness in the world]…​Can such men be? Of course they can: and they are the [real] leaders whom others will follow. In the world of books there are, for me, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, or Laurens van der Post’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, ed. Michael Persse, 1962, pp.28-36 of 223). Yes, to be most operational under the duress of the human condition required a balance of innocent, soulful ‘sensitivity’ and human-condition-adapted ‘toughness’, which is what the 30-and-40-year-old equivalent state represents.

The simple and obvious fact is that some ‘races’ are so relatively innocent and naive about life under the duress of the human condition that they lack the toughened self discipline and insecure egocentric drive to succeed of the more upset-adapted ‘races’ and, as such, can’t legitimately compete with those people, so when they see an opportunity to obtain money and/​or power and the material luxury both can bring they can’t resist taking it, whether it’s rightfully due or not. When Annie and I travelled through central Africa in 1992 everywhere we went, at every level of society, there was dysfunction, graft and corruption—even when we landed in Kenya we couldn’t leave Nairobi airport until we paid certain ‘fees’ to various airport officials. At the top of such societies you invariably find completely despotic regimes—for instance, we were told that the reason the roads beyond the centre of Nairobi weren’t sealed and were in a terrible state was because all the money for such infrastructure had been syphoned off by the country’s leaders to buy villas on the French Riviera and other luxuries. Indeed, an article titled ‘Corruption tearing at the heart of Kenya’ revealed that ‘only 1 per cent of government spending in Kenya can be properly accounted for, according to a report by the country’s Auditor-General’ (The Australian, 1 Aug. 2015). And, again, the simple and obvious truth is that at the opposite end of the spectrum of alienation there are ‘races’ where everyone is so upset-adapted, so soul-destroyed, so innocence-obliterated and manically egocentric and cynically selfish that graft and despotism is similarly endemic in their societies. Consider the events of early 2011, during the so-called Arab Spring, when the extreme despotism of almost every, if not every, Arab country right across North Africa and the Middle East provoked democracy-demanding uprisings throughout the region. During 2012 there were also reports in Australian newspapers every few days of the corruption that is endemic in China, where officials throughout the country are finding themselves unable to resist stealing whatever money they can lay their hands on. For example, under the heading ‘Top to bottom, a culture of payola in China with 29,000 corruption convictions in a year’, it was reported that ‘China’s corruption rate is astonishing even to its cynical citizens’ (The Australian, 13 Apr. 2012); while under the heading ‘Lack of mining bribes “shocks China”’, it was reported that ‘Chinese mining officials are surprised when they learn that they do not need to bribe Australian officials to secure mining projects’ (The Australian, 28 Feb. 2012). The Chinese renowned love of gambling also indicates an extremely insecure need for a win, for material success, for self-worth reinforcement. And in India it was reported that ‘rampant corruption’ is so engrained there that the Indian government’s ‘Chief Minister’s spokesman Wahid Parra readily concedes that…​it’s a virus in the society. It’s in our blood’ (ABC News, 11 Jan. 2016; see <www.wtmsources.com/185>). In India there is little or no filter-down of wealth to the huge majority of poor people in the country—no viable middle class. The city streets are festooned with a tangle of illegal electricity wires, and everywhere there is chaotic traffic, pollution and poverty—there is little or no order or functionality. And since the only thing that keeps human society going is soul, innocence, soundness, moral strength—our species’ original instinctive inclination to be selfless, loving and cooperative—once that goes all that remains is ruin. Yes, Tracy Chapman was right when she wrote and sang that ‘All that you have is your soul’ (1989)—so thank goodness that through this ameliorating understanding we all now have the means to retrieve it, or, if not immediately retrieve it during our lifetime, to reconnect to it through the Transformed Way of Living. As was outlined in par. 743 and will be described fully in chapter 9, all humans can immediately leave the soul-repressed, insensitive, denial-committed-and-thus-extremely-alienated, selfish and egocentric power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking resigned life, and become part of the secure, happy, human-condition-and-Resignation-free new world that understanding of the human condition now makes possible.

It follows then that it is only at the middle of the spectrum of alienation, amongst 30-and-40-year-old, or thereabouts, equivalent ‘races’ where there is enough upset-adapted self-discipline and toughness, but not so much that there is excessive soul-less cynicism and thus selfishness, that you get maximum functionality and operable behaviour in life under the duress of the human condition. The Anglo-Saxons are currently the stand-out example of such functionality, coming as they do from the more isolated and sheltered-from-upset north-western edge of Europe—they are actually more 30-year-old equivalents than 40-year-old equivalents. Although Anglo-Saxons come from a small, resource-deficient island, they have been so operable and thus successful and thus influential that they led the so-called ‘globalisation of the world’ to the point where ‘A quarter of the world’s population speak English…​English is increasingly becoming entrenched as the language of choice for business, science and popular culture. Three-quarters of the world’s mail, for example, is currently written in English’ (TIME, 7 Jul. 1997). An article in the National Review titled ‘Empire of Freedom’ referred to the American internet entrepreneur James Bennett’s use of the term ‘Anglosphere’ to describe a coalition of English-speaking countries—the US, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland—that are ‘characterised by a high degree of individualism and dynamism, and by a talent for assimilation’. Bennett said it is ‘no accident that it was in the Anglosphere that the industrial revolution and parliamentary democracy first emerged…​Nor is it an accident that when French intellectuals and Malaysian prime ministers wish to denounce free markets, the phrase they use is “Anglo-Saxon capitalism”’ (Ramesh Ponnuru, 24 Mar. 2003). The Anglo-Saxons exhibit the same soulful enthusiasm, vitality and energy of the Vikings from Scandinavia who were referred to in par. 859. Indeed, like the Vikings, who sacked and settled in many parts of the British Isles, the Angles and Saxon tribes who colonised eastern England (and from whom the name Anglo-Saxon comes) were of southern Scandinavian stock. Also the Normans, who conquered England in 1066, were Scandinavians who had settled on the east coast of France—the name ‘Norman’ is actually derived from ‘northman’, meaning peoples from Northern Europe (Scandinavia). Of course, the basic Celtic stock of the British Isles are, like the Scandinavians, also an exceptionally isolated and thus relatively innocent ‘race’, especially coming, as a significant proportion of them did, from the ancient Celts of central Europe who were an extremely energetic, enthusiastic, relatively innocent/​soulful 20-to-30-year-old equivalent adventurous ‘race’, but whose innocence had been (as was described earlier in pars 909-915) lost elsewhere in the less isolated parts of Europe where they had spread. This description of these early Celts from central Europe provides some indication of their 20-to-30-year-old equivalent personality: ‘The Celts were high-spirited warriors – head-hunters no less – who loved drinking and brawling [p.97 of 176] …​The flamboyant Celts originated in central Europe…​[having] moved into central Europe from somewhere east during the third millennium BC. They spoke a language that was probably the ancestral tongue of Indo-European…​As the early Celts left no written words, it was the Roman and Greek observers who caught and preserved their fierce mien. [Recording that] “Nearly all the Gauls [Celts from France] are of a lofty structure…​fair and ruddy complexion; terrible from the sternness of their eyes, very quarrelsome, and of great pride and insolence. A whole troop of foreigners would not be able to withstand a single Gaul if he called to his assistance his wife, who is usually very strong, and with blue eyes.”…​“The whole race…​is war mad and both high spirited and quick for battle, although otherwise simple and not uncouth” [p.110]’ (A Soaring Spirit: Time-Life History of the World 600-400 BC, 1988). It was the Greeks who named these northerners ‘Celts’, which meant ‘the brave ones’ (From the documentary series The Story of Europe, 2018, Ep.1). (With regard to isolation preserving innocence, this quote from the 2008 RTÉ documentary The Origins of the Irish, which was narrated by Diarmuid Gavin, provides dramatic genetic evidence of the importance of isolation in preserving innocence, in this case in preserving Europe’s original variety of humans on the continent’s extreme outer western fringe in Ireland: ‘[Gavin:] People first came to Ireland about 10,000 years ago…​As we’ll find out, many of us are directly descended from the first wave of settlers who made Ireland home… [Professor Daniel Bradley:] As to where we [the Irish] originally come from, there’s an idea and it’s a good idea, that during the last glacial period a group that survived in southern Europe in the west after the ice moved up, they would have moved up and peopled in a band the western part of Europe. [Gavin:] The stone age people carried a distinctive genetic marker which can still be detected in Europe today. But when the frequency of this marker is mapped, a striking pattern emerges. It’s found in just 2% of Turkish men, but moving west the marker increases in frequency, rising to 50% in central Europe and to even higher levels as you get closer to the Atlantic coast. And the highest occurrence anywhere is in Ireland. On average, almost 80% of our population have the marker and in Connacht [western province of Ireland] it’s found in a remarkable 98% of men. The only place to come anywhere close to those levels is in the Basque region of northern Spain.’ And these further DNA studies reported by Oliver Moody in The Times on 22 Feb. 2018 in an article titled ‘Ancient Britons overrun by folk from the Steppes’ evidence how these ancient Britons were then ‘swamped’ by the ‘Indo-European’ speaking, ‘high-spirited’, ‘flamboyant’, 20-30-year-old equivalent ‘warrior’ ‘early Celts’ from ‘central Europe’ and, prior to that, from the Eurasian ‘steppes’: ‘Within a few hundred years of the last stone [of Stonehenge] being winched into place, the native Britons who built the monument had been almost entirely replaced by lighter-skinned, bluer-eyed migrants originating in the windswept steppes of Ukraine and Russia. The results of one of the largest ancient DNA studies yet conducted, published in the journal Nature [‘The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe, Nature, Vol. 555, 8 Mar. 2018] show that more than 90 per cent of the genetic make-up of the British Isles was “swamped” by the new arrivals from the Continent. Exactly how this happened remains a mystery. What is clear, though, is that the shift was permanent as it was abrupt, stretching from Dorset to Orkney. These invaders were our forebears. “Anyone who’s got British ancestry going back a couple of hundred years will have a predominance of steppe ancestry,” said Ian Armit, professor of archaeology at the University of Bradford. “Once it’s here, that’s essentially the ancestry of the historic British population.” Until about 4,500 years ago, Britain was inhabited by neolithic farmers who had spread up the Atlantic coast of Europe by way of Spain and Brittany. They grew cereals, herded sheep, goats and cattle, and built vast monuments such as Stonehenge, the ceremonial landscape on Salisbury Plain. Then, suddenly, everything changed. People started forging tools and weapons from copper, then bronze. They buried their dead in new kinds of tombs. They began making bell-shaped clay beakers like those found at archaeological sites all over Europe. The old question is: were these metal-working Britons the same people who raised the bluestones at Stonehenge? The genetic analysis shows emphatically that they were not. An international group of more than 100 scientists led by Inigo Olalde and David Reich from Harvard Medical School examined the wisps of surviving DNA from 400 Europeans who died between 4700BC and 800BC. They were trying to work out whether the “Beaker folk” culture that began to appear all over the continent from 2750BC represented a massive migration from the east or simply new ideas and technologies that had spread through trade between tribes. Almost everywhere except Britain, the picture was a complicated patchwork of the two. In this country it seems that from 2450BC to 2000BC the native population buckled before a tide of people flowing across from the continent in what the authors call a “demographic transformation”. One of the clearest examples is a man known as the Amesbury archer, an apparently wealthy and powerful member of the Beaker folk who was buried near Stonehenge a few decades after the stone circles were completed. The chemistry of his teeth shows that he grew up in the Alps. Professor Armit said he was possibly a pioneer in the first influx of people who would become the modern Britons. Since the 19th century historians have speculated that the sudden cultural leap forward was the result of an invasion. There is, however, precious little archaeological evidence to support this. Instead, studies have shown that the forests were beginning to grow back and the construction of new monuments was tailing off several hundred years before the Beaker folk turned up. Professor Armit said the new evidence raised questions about whether the land was already underpopulated. “Most archaeologists would be sceptical that we’re looking at a violent invasion.”’ An article in the August 2019 National Geographic Magazine titled ‘Who were the first Europeans?’ similarly described the invasion of Europe by ‘warriors’ ‘from the Russian steppe’ that began about ‘3300BC’.)

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Incidentally, I have often thought how inspirational and exciting it would be to meet some of those energetic, courageous, vital, still-full-of-our-soul’s-enthusiasm-and-love-of-life, 20-to-30-year-old equivalent people, like the ancient Celts, or in more recent times, the Vikings who, from their Scandinavian home, bravely, fearlessly and adventurously wandered over most of the northern hemisphere, all through Europe, to Central Russia and North Africa and even to the then-unknown-to-Europeans land of the Americas. It is amazing to think about how afraid and timid humans can be when they become exhausted by the battle of the human condition, such as, in the extreme, a situation I read about where a person was too afraid of the world to venture beyond their home to post a letter at the nearby post office, when those Vikings ventured out in their long boats right across the then-unchartered face of our planet. Even though such exceptionally soul-infused-yet-toughened-but-not-yet-overly-toughened 20-to-30-year-old equivalent people have likely gone from Earth, I always thought it would be wonderful if we at least had a first-hand, detailed account of the lives of some of them. We have the life story of fearlessly courageous men like Lord Nelson, Winston Churchill and the polar explorers Amundsen, Nansen and Shackleton, but given the many generations and inevitable marriages with other ‘races’ that have occurred since the time when the original 20-to-30-year-old adventurous stock lived on the fringes of Europe, it seems unlikely that these men could be pure representatives of that high-spirited adventurous 20-to-30-year-old stock. However, I have discovered that there are contemporary, even first-hand, detailed accounts of the lives of those I believe have to be members of this amazingly vital original stock and stage in the human journey. As just mentioned, the Normans from Normandy in France came from Scandinavia, and in the eleventh century, not long after the Vikings were adventurously (not, as was emphasised in par. 859, ‘angrily’, like Napoleon and Hitler) marauding across Europe and beyond, there was a Norman named Tancred of Hauteville in Normandy who had 12 sons—and miraculously the absolutely amazing story of the lives of many of those sons remains in existence. Historians know from these first-hand accounts that one, Roger, became King of Sicily, where through ‘tolerant’ ‘collaboration and assimilation’ he was able to ‘build one of the most powerful kingdoms of the Medieval world’ (Prof. Robert Bartlett in his documentary series The Normans, BBC, 2010, Part 3). Another, the most courageous and adventurous of all the brothers, Robert Guiscard, conquered Italy and, according to the historian John Julius Norwich, ‘proved to be a leader of the very, very first rank and I think probably is the greatest and most successful military adventurer between Julius Caesar and Napoleon—and if he hadn’t died of typhoid when…​leading an expedition against the Byzantine Empire, he might easily have taken Constantinople and the whole history of Europe and Christendom would have been changed’ (From the documentary series The Normans: a dynasty that shaped the world, narrated by John Morgan, 2004, Part 2). Comparing ‘the two greatest Normans of their time’, Norwich wrote in his 1992 book The Normans in Sicily that William the Conqueror, who boldly conquered England in 1066, ‘used to screw up his own courage [by] reminding himself of the Guiscard’s’ (p.249 of 793). Part 3 of The Normans documentary that was quoted from above also records that Robert Guiscard’s offspring, along with the ‘eldest son of William the Conqueror’, ‘were at the heart of’ the first Crusade to reclaim Jerusalem from its Muslim conquerors. In that Crusade, Robert’s eldest son, Bohemond, led the re-taking of Antioch, ‘one of the great holy cities of the Christian world’, after which he became ‘an independent Christian prince, the head of the Principality of Antioch’ that ‘flourished under Norman rule for 200 years’. Robert’s grandson, Tancred, ‘another fierce warrior’, ‘led the’ ultimately successful ‘assault on’ Jerusalem and afterwards ‘became Prince of Galilee’. (You can learn more about these and other amazing offspring of Tancred of Hauteville in the book and two documentaries referred to in the quote sources above.) Interestingly, I’ve also learnt that Tancred of Hauteville is related to the absolutely legendary brave and able Norman knight William Marshal. Even more amazing is that the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who was King of Sicily, Germany, Italy and Jerusalem, and one of the greatest rulers of all time, was the great-great-grandson of Tancred of Hauteville!

So that’s a window into how amazingly fearless, bold, adventurous and relatively sound the human race was during its 20-to-30-year-old stage. While the following may seem egocentric on my part, none of the insights in this book could have been found if I was insecure/​egocentric so it is not prompted by egocentricity but my constant desire to know the truth. Obviously I’ve needed a lot of soundness and courage to find the insights into the human condition that are presented in this book, and while unconditional love from my mother when I was a child and having a father who was not at all oppressively egocentric when I was growing up would, in large measure, account for that soundness and courage, my genetic heritage must have also been influential; both nurture and nature form our character. And when I look into my paternal Celtic heritage there does appear to be evidence of remnants of that 20-to-30-year-old bold and adventurous strength there. ‘Griffith’ is a Welsh name, and while I don’t know when my father’s family originally ventured from Wales, an episode of the series 1000 Years of History on Ireland says that in the huge Plantation of protestants in the province of Ulster in northern Ireland that took place in the 17th century that ‘From the late decades of the 16th century right through to the end of the 17th century about 350,000 English, Scottish and Welsh migrants came to Ireland’, and that ‘maps from 1622 show how the settlements were well planned and took shape. The land is parceled out [to these protestants] in blocks of up to 2,000 acres [some half million acres in total] across six counties [in Ulster], Armach, Fermanagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal and Tyrone’ (2021), and I do know my great-great-great grandfather John? Griffith was an Anglican who lived in Cootehill, County Cavan in Ireland. (Also, my grandfather Lionel Griffith married Louisa Bevan who was the daughter of Frederick Bevan, a Canon in the Anglican church who came to Australia from Ireland and whose ancestors came from Wales in the latter half of the 1600s during The Plantations period.) And I know that my great-great grandfather Thomas Griffith adventured from Ireland to the Caribbean (where the homestead on his sugarcane plantation in St Croix is now a museum), and that the generation that followed after him came to Australia where in the country town of Albury my great grandfather Charles Griffith built the biggest stock and station agency outside of the capital cities, and that two generations after that, my father Norman Griffith (who was a bold Z Special Unit commando sent to thwart the Japanese advance at Manus Island, north of New Guinea in the Second World War) set out without any financial inheritance and developed a sheep station near Mumbil in central west New South Wales and managed to send his four sons to the then soul-cultivating and prestigious (and expensive) Geelong Grammar School in Victoria. Looking at the origins of the name itself, Griffith, or Gruffydd as it was originally called, was, according to the ‘tax roll’ ‘of 1292-3’, the fourteenth most common name ‘of Welsh people living in north-western Wales, in an area that had experienced relatively little influx of English people at that point [so it was presumably a last stronghold of relatively pure Celtic stock]’ (Heather Rose Jones, ‘Constructing 13th Century Welsh Names’, 1996; see <www.wtmsources.com/153>). Indeed, the most famous of all Welshmen, and he came from the remote mountainous region of ‘north-western Wales’, was Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the only native King of Wales to be recognised by the English, or as the title was known at the time of his reign (from 1258 to 1282), the Prince of Wales. ‘Ap’ Gruffydd means ‘son’ of Gruffydd, with Gruffydd being the first name of his father since in those days there were no surnames, so while Gruffydd was not a family name and did not indicate a Gruffydd dynasty, he nevertheless had Gruffydd in his name, as did quite a number of members of his family tree. While I am probably no more related to Llywelyn ap Gruffydd than any other Griffith, he does serve as a good example of the relative innocence, soundness, enthusiasm and strength of the remnants of the original Celts of Europe from which my father’s line emerged. To explain his fame I will quote from the 2012 BBC documentary series The Story of Wales: Llywelyn was ‘a bold man, taking command of much of Wales and capturing land from English lords’, but ‘in 1277, King Edward I gather[ed] the biggest army seen in Britain since the Norman invasion’ to defeat Llywelyn who, in ‘a cry of defiance’, wrote to King Edward saying, ‘He will never abandon his people who have been protected by his ancestors since the days of Brutus [the mythical ancestor of the Celts].’ Inevitably, Llywelyn was defeated, after which Edward ‘bestowed the title Prince of Wales on his own heir, a tradition that continues to this day’ (presented by Huw Edwards, from Part 2). Llywelyn and his brother Dafydd were certainly very brave and defiant men—indeed, their whole family must have been extremely courageous and defiant considering the lengths Edward went to try to rid himself of their line by decreeing that all the ‘child heirs of Llywelyn’s dynasty are imprisoned’. The program said that, ‘like [the legend of] King Arthur’, there is an ancient Welsh prophecy that says that one day a Welsh leader, like Llywelyn, will ‘return to save his country’, and while I’m not likely to be closely related to Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, my Celtic blood must have played a significant role in enabling me to defy the great overlord of all the dishonest denial of the resigned world and find the truth-based understanding of the human condition that, according to Professor Prosen, ‘saves the world’. In the classic 1941 film about a Welsh mining town, How Green Was My Valley, when the main character and priest, whose name, coincidentally, is Mr Gruffydd, says, ‘I thought when I was a young man that I would conquer the world with truth. I thought I would lead an army greater than Alexander ever dreamed of, not to conquer nations, but to liberate mankind. With truth. With the golden sound of the Word’, he is referring to the Bible’s truthful ‘Word[s]’. However, at a deeper level, this is an extraordinary statement that really only makes sense when interpreted as an expression of the Welsh vision that one day one of them would actually liberate mankind with the ultimate golden truth, which is the science-based explanation of the human condition. (I want to add here that in 2019—and this bracketed section was added to FREEDOM in 2019—I sent a cheek swab of my DNA to FamilyTreeDNA and the result was that I am 51% Hunter-Gatherer, 39% Farmer and 9% Metal Age Invader. As mentioned in par. 1034, the ‘hunter-gatherers’ were the original ‘stone age’ people who, as Europe began to warm about 14,500 years ago, followed the retreating ice sheet north and populated Europe; the ‘neolithic’ ‘farmers’ were the second wave of migrants through Europe who, about 7,000 years ago, spread up from the fertile crescent in southern Turkey where they had pioneered agriculture. The third wave were the ‘metal age’ warrior invaders from the Eurasian steppes who arrived in the north-western regions of Europe about 4,000 years ago. So my origins are mostly hunter-gatherer with only a small, some 10%, being of the warrior steppe variety. As I’ve described, the defiant, soul-strong psychological strength of Llywelyn, and also of King Arthur, in standing up to the Anglo-Saxon invaders has traditionally been attributed to the ‘Celt’ ‘ancestors since the days of Brutus’, and the suggestion has been that those ‘Celts’ were relatively innocent, soul-strong survivors of the first of the warrior steppe invaders to arrive in Briton, with the Anglo-Saxons being a somewhat more soul-spent but still relatively soul-strong variety of the same warrior steppe invaders—isolation being the key to preserving soul-strength because the more exposure to the upset state of the human condition, the faster innocent, sound, soul-strength is destroyed and lost. But, in trying to make sense of the undeniable soul-strength in my DNA, I’m now thinking that this ‘Celtic’ soul-strength that has long been admired ‘since the days of Brutus’ isn’t so much from the warrior steppe invaders, but from the original hunter-gatherers who, after all, were the most innocent, soul-strong invaders of Europe of all—that the original hunter-gatherers must have developed their own version of exceptional soul-strong defiant strength of character, the remnants of which still remain in the most outer regions of western Europe. This report supports this idea: ‘The Welsh are the true pure Britons, according to the research that has produced the first genetic map of the UK. Scientists were able to trace their DNA back to the first tribes that settled in the British Isles following the last ice age around 10,000 years ago. Due to its westerly location and mountainous landscape, few invaders like the Anglo-Saxons, Romans and Vikings ventured into the Welsh lands. This means the DNA of people living there has not experienced the influx of “foreign” genes like other parts of Britain. The research found that there is no single “Celtic” genetic group. The Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and Cornish were found to be the most different from the rest of the country’ (Daily Mail Online, 9 Jul. 2015). With regard to what happened outside of Briton, this other article is also very interesting because it says that ‘the latest [DNA] research in 2018 suggests that the Irish are most closely related to the people in North West France (Brittany where a Celtic language has traditionally been spoken) and in Western Norway’ (‘Blood of the Irish’, Owlcation.com, 19 Aug. 2018). I’m still waiting to receive my Paternal Y-DNA and Maternal mtDNA results, as these might reveal more about what region of Briton my mother’s and father’s ancestors are from.)

With regard to the prophesy of a Welshman one day defying all the denial and finding the truth about the human condition, a documentary about the legend of Merlin, the great Arthurian prophet/​druid/​priest/​shepherd/​guide, said that ‘The newly prosperous age [Britain in the 1700s] needed an ancient past that could rival the empires of Greece and Rome. It looked to the ruins of the British and Celtic world and in particular to the tales and traditions of the Druids and Bards…​Mountainous [north-western] Wales becomes a significant landscape in the British imagination. It was known as a place where poets mattered, carrying the memory of the nation. One image had a huge impact, the suicide of a lone bard who defied the invading armies of Edward I when he defeated the Welsh and slaughtered their poets’ (Merlin: The Legend, BBC, 2008). Yes, a powerful tale in Welsh mythology holds that when King Edward I completed his conquest of Wales and ordered all the Welsh bards—all the truth-saying poet inheritors of the ancient druid-guided culture of the Celts in Wales—to be put to death, there was one bard who defied the King and, to quote Thomas Gray’s 1757 poem, The Bard, with a ‘prophet’s fire’ swore ‘revenge’ on the King for having just killed ‘soft Llewellyn’ and other Celtic leaders of Wales, and prophesised the ‘triumph’ ‘tomorrow’ of the ‘repair’ of the ‘golden flood’ of ‘the orb of day [the sun]’ which then ‘warms the nations [of the world] with redoubled ray [with exposing but redeeming truth]’, before jumping off a cliff to his death. John Martin’s absolutely fabulously descriptive painting The Bard, below, depicts this particular defiant stand of a prophet against tyranny, ultimately the tyranny of all the dishonest denial imprisoning the human race. As William Blake wrote, ‘Hear the voice of the Bard, who present, past, and future, sees; whose ears have heard the Holy Word…​Calling the lapsed soul…​light renew!…​Night is worn, and the morn rises from the slumberous mass…​the break of day’ (Songs of Experience, 1789). The reference to ‘soft Llewellyn’ relates to his reputation as being ‘a tender-hearted prince’ that ‘though in battle he killed with fury, though he burnt like an outrageous fire, yet was a mild prince’ (John Mitford, The Poems of Thomas Gray, 1814, p.60 of 271). Like Roger Tancred who was extraordinarily ‘tolerant’, these were soul-full but bold, adventurous 20-to-30-year-old equivalent people, not soul-less, angry and egocentric 50-year-old equivalent people. (Incidentally, the tale of the Welsh bard who defied King Edward’s oppression by plunging to his death bears similarities with Australia’s greatest folk hero, the Celtic warrior Ned Kelly, who defied the overlords here with his life—and also the swagman in Australia’s unofficial national anthem, ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s famous poem Waltzing Matilda, who chose death over compliance with the establishment. So Australians have held a vision that is an extension of the Welsh prophesy—that it will supply the defiant soundness needed to liberate humanity—and later in ch. 9:11 I provide more evidence of that wondrous Australian vision.)

John Martin’s The Bard, 1817

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So what people are really doing then through their efforts to either try to or actually remove tyrants/​despots like Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, etc, etc, from power in the hope that those countries will become functional democracies is trying to make 20-year-old equivalents and 50-year-old equivalents behave like 30-and-40-year-old equivalents. But, as was explained, societies of 20-year-old equivalents and 50-year-old equivalents are going to revert to selfishness, at which point a selfish power struggle will occur where, in the end, the most ruthless will take over once again, a struggle we are currently witnessing in Syria. Having solved nothing at a fundamental level, those societies will invariably remain dysfunctional, resulting in further floods of refugees from those countries to others populated by more functional 30-and-40-year-old equivalent ‘races’. Efforts to avoid this cycle, or at least contain it somewhat, in countries where there is too much cynical selfishness only led to the creation of authoritarian, dictatorial, freedom-and-democracy-denying, free-thinking-restricted, human-mind-oppressive regimes—which were therefore still fundamentally tyrannical and despotic—like those that have been established in China, and (to a degree) by Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. As will be explained shortly in ch. 8:16I, the other form of tyranny that developed to contain excessive cynical selfishness was strict obedience to fundamentalist interpretations of religious teachings—as has occurred in many parts of the Arab world.

The fact is, a society that did not contain a significant proportion of functional 30-and-40-year-old equivalents was not going to be a functional one. Historically, ‘the chief charge [against Jews] has been that Jews are somehow uniquely engaged—at other people’s expense—in money making’ (Ideas that shaped our World, ed. Robert Stewart, 1997, p.55 of 223), and with compassionate understanding of the human condition we can understand that there was some truth in this view. The cynical 50-year-old equivalent Jews have managed to remain operational and, as a result, extremely materially successful by living amongst relatively selfless, functional 30-and-40-year-old equivalent ‘races’—which is the real reason they have been persecuted in the predominately 30-and-40-year-old equivalent countries in which they settled. (The dishonest reason for their persecution being that they were the murderers of Christ). In this light it can be seen why the Pygmies and the Bushmen have resented the Bantu for being more operational and materially successful than they are, while the Bantu in turn have resented the European Caucasians for being more operational and materially successful than they are—with the Caucasians in turn resenting and thus persecuting the Jews for being more operational and materially successful than they are. Everywhere the inevitable differences in upset between individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures have caused immense problems, so the greater truth is that it is a very great tribute to the character and courage of the human race as a whole that it has managed to maintain some semblance of functionality and cooperation under that almost impossible situation.

Indeed, indicative of the difficulty of the situation is the fact that during January and February 2011 the British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard all declared that ‘multicultural policies’ have been a ‘failure’ because ‘immigrants’ had ‘not successfully integrated’ (Daily Mail, 11 Feb. 2011). Yes, just as an individual person’s lifestyle was inevitably going to largely be a response to that person’s particular level of upset, so too a ‘race’s’ culture was inevitably going to largely be a response to that ‘race’s’ particular level of upset, which means different ‘races’ with their different cultures inevitably found it difficult co-existing. You don’t very often see 30-year-olds forming close friendships with 50-year-olds, or even 20-year-olds with 30-year-olds. Most people relate much better to their own age group. In fact, the stages that occurred with different ages under the duress of the human condition changed so rapidly and were so dramatically different that 18-year-olds typically found it difficult relating even to 21-year-olds. Outside of family situations, everyone tends to fraternise with their own age group. The same situation of incompatibility obviously applied between ‘races’ of people. Different levels of upset had different needs. For example, as mentioned in par. 783, once humans became extremely upset even the glimpse of a woman’s face or ankle became dangerously sexually exciting to men, which is why in some cultures women are completely shrouded and persecuted if any part of their body is revealed in public. Imagine then how difficult and provocative it has been for individuals from such extremely upset cultures to see young women from less upset cultures running around at liberty in bikinis and mini-skirts.

Again, as was stressed in par. 1025, such admissions of the relative innocence, or lack thereof, of different individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures could be very dangerous because they could lead to prejudiced, ‘racist’ views that some individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures are either good or bad, superior or inferior, when the truth is that while humans do vary in their degree of upset as a result of the necessary and heroic battle humanity had to wage to find self-knowledge, all humans are equally good. Upset is not a bad, evil state, but a good, heroic one. Trying to manage differences in upset between individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures has been extremely difficult, but once the prejudiced, ‘racist’ views arose of some individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures being either good or bad, superior or inferior, more worthwhile or less worthwhile, terrible atrocities and injustices very often followed. For instance, in the last century alone we have seen the Holocaust in which approximately 6 million European Jews were exterminated by the Nazis during the Second World War; the attempted ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Bantu Hutu of an estimated 800,000 of the more upset-adapted Nilotic Tutsi in 100 days of bloodshed in Rwanda in 1994; and Idi Amin throwing out of Uganda, in 1972, all the Indians and Pakistanis, some 40,000-80,000 people, who owned and operated most of the businesses there because he claimed ‘they [were] sabotaging the economy of the country’ (Jet mag. 14 Sep. 1972). No wonder then that when ascribing ‘genes for negative traits’ to ‘ethnic groups’ there has been concerned debate over ‘whether some avenues of research are best left un-trodden because what they reveal is bound to be socially and culturally incendiary, whatever the outcome. Or is it intellectually dishonest, even cowardly, not to investigate all aspects of the human condition?’ (Andy Coghlan, ‘Bun fight over warrior gene’, New Scientist ‘Short Sharp Science’ blog, 10 Aug. 2006; see <www.wtmsources.com/147>). So again, until we could explain the upset state of the human condition it could be very dangerous acknowledging differences in where individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures were in their progression from innocence to upset in the human journey from ignorance to enlightenment, but now that we have explained that all humans are equally good, it is both psychologically safe and necessary—if we are to truly understand ourselves—to acknowledge the differences.

By way of example of just how limiting it has been not being able to acknowledge the differences in upset between individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures, Plato quite sensibly wanted to have the least ego-embattled/​most innocent—the ‘philosopher kings’ or ‘philosopher rulers’ or ‘philosopher princes’ or ‘philosopher guardians’ as he variously described them—lead society. He wrote, ‘isn’t it obvious whether it’s better for a blind man [an alienated person] or a clear-sighted one [an innocent, ego-unembattled, denial-free, honest person] to keep an eye on anything’ (The Republic, c.360 BC; tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, 484), arguing that ‘If you get, in public affairs, men who are so morally impoverished that they have nothing they can contribute themselves, but who hope to snatch some compensation for their own inadequacy from a political career, there can never be good government. They start fighting for power…​[whereas those who pursue a life] of true philosophy [honest, unresigned, egocentricity-free thought] which looks down on political power…​[should be] the only men to get power…​men who do not love it [who don’t egocentrically hunger for power, fame, fortune and glory]…​rulers [who] come to their duties with least enthusiasm’ (521, 520). But as completely ‘obvious’ and right-minded as Plato’s idea was of having the more innocent run society, such honest differentiation according to who was innocent, and who was not, wasn’t possible because, once again, while the human condition wasn’t able to be explained, any differentiation between individuals according to degrees of alienation or soundness left those no longer innocent unjustly condemned as bad and unworthy. In the absence of such honesty about who was innocent and who was not, functional societies did, however, try to avoid the overly insecure and egocentric from holding power by having regular democratic elections where such people could be voted out of office. (I should clarify that, as just explained in par. 1033, a degree of human-condition-adapted, toughened self-discipline has been needed to effectively manage the difficulties of life under the duress of the human condition, so ‘races’ could be too innocent to be effective ‘philosopher guardians’—which is why the phrase ‘more innocent’ rather than ‘most innocent’ was used above.)

But now that it is both possible and necessary to talk about who was innocent and who was upset, we can see and admit that colonisation under the rule of 30-and-40-year-old equivalents did make significant sense. The ‘races’ who were most functional under the duress of the human condition tried to help the less functional become more materially developed—that is, advanced in the many arts of living with the human condition needed to progress humanity towards greater knowledge, ultimately understanding of the human condition. As Sir James Darling has written about the British Empire, ‘the function of Empire is to educate rather than to oppress’, and the British have ‘an unbeaten record in the history of civilization’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, ed. Michael Persse, 1962, pp.134, 136 of 223). Sir Laurens van der Post similarly wrote that ‘Great Britain’ created ‘the largest, the greatest and, I still believe, the best-organised, and most civilized empire in the history of the world’ (The Admiral’s Baby, 1966, p.108 of 340). All the history books written by truth-denying-in-order-to-artificially-make-everyone-equal postmodernists that condemned colonialism as the worst evil are going to have to be re-written truthfully.

In fact, I should mention here some of the human-condition-avoiding, denial-based reasons that have been put forward to explain the dysfunctionality of African countries like Kenya, including placing the blame on colonialism. Firstly, it is claimed that such countries are on the same journey as European nations, which went through their own dysfunctional stage before organising themselves into upset-restraining, so-called ‘civilised’ democracies—that the Bantu African ‘races’ aren’t any more innocent than European ‘races’ and will, in time, as mentioned earlier, be able to develop functional, materially successful democracies. In keeping with this theory, it was mentioned earlier that instead of using terms like ‘first, second and third world countries’, the current politically correct nomenclature for the different states of functionality of countries is to refer to them as being either ‘developed’ or ‘developing’. But if time, rather than degrees of innocence, or lack thereof, was the issue then ‘developed races’ from ancient civilisations should not be dysfunctional—and yet they are. The Greeks gave us Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and the foundations of ‘Western civilisation’ and yet, in 2011, through their present innocence-destroyed, burnt out, peaked, decadent, selfish greed and resulting dysfunction, brought the world’s economy to its knees through their refusal to adopt responsible financial practices—a recalcitrance that continues to this day. The other Mediterranean Caucasian countries of Italy and Spain have similarly proved to be dysfunctional, peaked societies of people, having also had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Celtic Irish, who also got themselves into financial difficulty, aren’t burnt out so much as too innocent and naive—indicative of their comparative functionality is that in contrast to their European neighbours, Ireland recognised the need to implement and maintain austerity measures prior to and following the global financial crisis and, as a result, became the first Eurozone nation to exit the international bailout. As for blaming the dysfunctionality of African societies on colonialism, there is no doubt colonialism had negative, exploitive repercussions—some truly terrible, like the slave trade—and it did seriously disrupt the old tribal system that operated throughout most of Africa, but while tribalism, an authoritarian, dictatorial system in which the most powerful ruled, brought some peace and order (as it effectively does in all non-human societies, such as in wolf packs or in any herd animal species), it was still dysfunctional in that it oppressed the individual freedoms/​liberties that humans’ search for knowledge/​creativity depends on. Of course, you can manage humans by tying them all down, as was done in tribal situations and Marxist and Confucianist regimes, but they will no longer be humans—they will no longer be conscious beings fulfilling their fundamental responsibility of exercising their minds and learning to understand existence. Overall, colonialism gave individuals many freedoms they hadn’t had that the individual then had to manage—but the challenge for humans has always been to manage their consciousness-derived freedom effectively. As has been explained, the lack of effectiveness of that management across a social structure was due to ‘races’ being either too innocent, sensitive and naive about life under the duress of the human condition, or too toughened, soul/​innocence-destroyed, cynical, opportunistic, greedy and selfish.

On the whole we can see that with understanding of the human condition it at last becomes possible to explain in psychological terms what was actually happening when history books spoke of civilisations having ‘peaked’ and become ‘decadent’. As with each individual during his or her life, under the duress of the human condition all ‘races’ eventually became overly corrupted, corruption of our original instinctive self or soul being the price of humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. In this journey from innocence to exhaustion of soul the most creative period was the toughened and disciplined, but not yet overly corrupted, 30-year-old equivalent stage. As each ‘race’ and its associated civilisation passed through this stage it made its particularly creative contribution to the human journey. This was when civilisations were at their ‘peak’; inevitably, however, they entered a more corrupted ‘decadent’ stage. To look at just the Mediterranean, Middle East, Indian and Eastern civilisations, they all made extensive contributions to the human journey during their energetic and creative 30-year-old equivalent stage. The Egyptians and peoples from the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates delta in the Middle East instigated the civilisation of the ‘known world’; for example, they invented the wheel, mathematics and writing, and divided time into minutes and seconds. As already mentioned, the Greeks and Romans laid the foundations for ‘Western civilisation’ during this most creative stage of their journey through ever-increasing levels of upset. The great religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were developed in India and the Middle East when there was still enough soundness left in their populations to produce some exceptionally sound, truthful, unresigned, denial-free thinkers or prophets. And during their most creative stage, the Chinese contributed to the human journey such influential inventions as paper, moveable type, the compass and gunpowder. The truth is ALL civilisations right back through history made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge—but just where the leading edge in the advancement of knowledge was occurring at any one time depended on what stage in the human journey from innocence to exhaustion and decadence those various civilisations were at.

I might add here a balancing comment regarding the earlier statement about the Jewish ‘race’ having benefited from living amongst more innocent, soulful, selfless 30-and-40-year-old equivalent ‘races’. At the end of the description of Adventurous Adolescentman, when analysing the graph of The Development of Mental Cleverness, it was explained that the reason brain volume plateaued towards the end of the last 2 million years of its growth is because a balance was struck between the need for cleverness and the need for soundness—between knowledge-finding yet corrupting mental cleverness and conscience-obedient yet non-knowledge-finding lack of mental cleverness, with the average IQ today representing that relatively safe conscience-subordinate compromise. It is true that the ability to find answers didn’t necessarily accompany increased intelligence because, as just described, increased intelligence tended to lead to an increase in upset and thus alienation, and alienation made thinking truthfully and thus effectively very difficult; however, a high degree of intelligence was still required to find knowledge, most especially in complex subject areas like higher mathematics and physics. Thus, if the human race couldn’t develop exceptionally high levels of intelligence then many crucial understandings about the nature and workings of our world would not have been able to be found. The Jews are renowned for being exceptionally intelligent, which is consistent with them being an exceptionally upset ‘race’, and it is from within their ranks that some of the greatest minds and insights have emerged: Albert Einstein, with his breakthrough insights into the physical nature of our universe, is the most obvious example. It is true that Einstein must have had an exceptional degree of soundness to have been as an effective thinker as he was, but he also must have been exceptionally intelligent to so successfully grapple with the extremely complex subjects he was dealing with. I haven’t ever tried to collate all the intellectual contributions to the human journey that the Jews have made (in addition to having, as was mentioned in par. 927, contributed the best collection by far of denial-free instinctual knowledge in the form of the Bible’s Old Testament), but it would be very significant, as evidenced by this extraordinary statistic: ‘just 0.2 per cent of the world population, Jews accounted for 29 per cent of Nobel Prizes in the late 20th century, and 32 per cent so far in 21st century’ (The Spectator, 6 May 2014). By, in effect, allowing exceptional cleverness/​intelligence to develop by countering its corrupting effects with the presence of people who were not so intellectually clever and thus not so upset and thus not so upset-adapted was, in the bigger picture, a fortuitous outcome for the human race. But again, talking about ‘races’ having different levels of intelligence was very dangerous while we couldn’t explain the human condition, explain that all humans are equally good—which is why James Watson, one of the Nobel Prize-winning co-discovers of the DNA double helix, was condemned and ostracised for ‘daring to suggest that race and intelligence are linked’ (The Independent, 2 Jan. 2015; see <www.wtmsources.com/149>).

Of course, while it could be very dangerous admitting differences in upset between humans while we couldn’t explain the human condition, complete denial of there being any difference was also very dangerous, because, as has been evidenced throughout this book, denial and the alienated, dark, death-like ‘cave’ existence that resulted from it, blocked access to the truthful understanding of our human condition; ultimately denial leads to the terminally alienated death of the human race. For there to be progress in the all-important human journey from ignorance to enlightenment there had to be some honesty. That is what democracy has really been about: trying to maintain a balance between unbearably confronting honesty and humanity-destroying dishonesty. We will see shortly (in parts 8:16H to 8:16Q of this chapter) how the completely dishonest denial and delusion that is currently being practised by left-wing pseudo idealists is threatening humanity with extinction. In fact, Sir Laurens van der Post’s honesty about the different degrees of upset between ‘races’ of humans provides a stark illustration of the negative and positive aspects of such honesty. As was described in par. 864, he was maliciously persecuted for daring to acknowledge the relative innocence of the Bushman people of the Kalahari—his honesty was so unbearable it made ‘the academic experts…​absolutely berserk with rage’. But Sir Laurens’ honesty about our species’ lost state of innocence also saved the human race because, as will be explained in par. 1282, it was the crucial help I needed to continue my journey to truthfully confront and ultimately solve the human condition. Sir Laurens was actually acknowledging both the negative and positive aspects of his honesty about the differences in upset between ‘races’ when, in regard to the differences in upset between the Bushmen, Bantu and European Caucasians, he wrote that ‘the indigenous people of Africa, although no longer primitive in the sense that the Stone-Age aboriginal Bushman of the Kalahari were, they were, for all their relative sophistication, far closer to their natural selves than we [white people] were. As a result they had become more and more something of a mirror reflecting a forgotten and fast-receding part of ourselves’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.37 of 275). Yes, ‘races’ who are more ‘natural’/​uncorrupted/​innocent have been ‘a mirror reflecting’ the unbearable truth of a corrupted ‘fast-receding part of ourselves’, and the truth that we are living in a dangerous state of dishonest denial or ‘forgotten[ess]’.

With regard to presenting a perfectly balanced account of all the different states of upset and their interactions and effects, such as that of the story of the Jewish ‘race’, it has to be recognised that the human journey has been such a complex story that a perfectly balanced view is beyond the powers of effective interpretation in this very early stage of viewing the history of the human race in a denial-free way. And such a detailed interpretation can actually wait because what is so important now—and this is all explained in the final chapter (9) of this book—is that the human race can leave behind its whole upset history as compassionately dealt with—our history is finally, as the saying goes, just that—it’s ‘all just history’ now. As will be explained in chapter 9, what brings all the horror of life under the duress of the human condition to an end is the Transformed Way of Living.

My job, as the synthesiser of understanding of the human condition, is to get at least the main descriptions of all the hard truths up and dealt with so that humanity can move well out into the clear, free of the past—actually, my brief is to present the new world on a perfectly laid out platter, with the old world all bundled up and tied off in neat parcels for permanent storage. Yes, as will be emphasised in the final chapter, we get the truth up and then we move on to a wonderful new world free of the agony of the human condition. We leave the old effectively dead, dishonest, human-condition-afflicted world behind. It will be explained that this new world is brought about by the indescribable magnificence of the Transformed Lifeforce State that the songwriter and singer Bono (of the band U2) sang about: ‘I’ve conquered my past [found the dignifying, human race liberating understanding of the human condition] / The future is here at last / I stand at the entrance to a new world I can see / The ruins to the right of me / Will soon have lost sight of me’; and similarly, as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anticipated, ‘Joy!’, ‘Joyful, as a hero to victory!’, ‘Join in our jubilation!’, ‘We enter, drunk with fire, into your [human-condition-understood] sanctuary…​Your magic reunites…​All men become brothers…​All good, all bad…​Be embraced, millions! This kiss [of understanding] for the whole world!’ (1824). (Incidentally, since the music of the Ninth Symphony gloriously elevates the magnificence of these words from Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem Ode to Joy, it is no wonder ‘it’s generally considered to be the supreme artistic achievement of western civilisation’ (Paul Gambaccini, ‘Your Desert Island Discs’, BBC Radio 4, 11 Jun. 2011), and was adopted by the European Union as its anthem.) Yes, it no longer matters who is more cynical, more human-condition-adapted, because the Transformed State leaves all that behind. The greater truth is we humans have all become well and truly corrupted/​upset/​messed-up/​damaged/​soul-devastated anyway, but none of that matters now because we are leaving that upset world, we are out of there; we have won the match and we can now all head for the showers and get ready for humanity’s great victory party—and soon even the different scars we all carry from the match will be healed and gone, soon the human race will be rehabilitated. Even the upset that is now instinctive, in our genes, will not be an issue because when our capacity to love is finally liberated, as it can now be, it will effectively make all our upset—both psychological and instinctive—disappear without a trace. It is all history now; ‘the ruins to the right of [us], will soon have lost sight of [us]’; ‘all good, all bad’, ‘this kiss [of understanding is] for the whole world!’

(More can be read about how variously selfish and cynical humans have become at <www.humancondition.com/freedom-expanded-selfishness>.)