More Good Info Email 9

 

Freedom Webinar 3:
The Global Refugee Crisis explained

 

 

This email presents the third part of the 3-part Freedom Webinar series that was filmed in 2015 and introduced in More Good Info Email 7 and continued in More Good Info Email 8.

In this extraordinarily insightful and thought-provoking webinar, Jeremy provides the fundamental reason for, and solution to, the Global Refugee Crisis facing the world. It’s the real debate about race relations the world needs in order to get all the hard truths up and dealt with so that humanity can move well out into the clear, free of the agony of the human condition, and all the prejudices it produced between individuals, races, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures.

Click on the player below to watch the complete webinar, or any of its 10 parts:

 

Make and see comments here

 

This video also appears on our Main Collection of Videos about the Human Condition page.

 

The Transcript of this Webinar

 

Broadcast 17 September 2015

 

Jeremy Griffith: Welcome everyone to our third Freedom Webinar. Again, my name is Jeremy Griffith and I’m the author of this book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition. This webinar is going to focus on the global refugee crisis, which we have received questions about—firstly in the form of a text question we received two weeks ago from Medhane, an Ethiopian living in South Africa, and also now from Sam in Athens, who has told us he wants to ask a question about the same subject.

 

Medhane asks [via email]: ‘The thing that I don’t understand is when is the suffering of mostly African migrants going to stop, and the problem of the dictator leaderships in Africa, and of the interference of Western countries in the internal affairs of African countries? How can African people solve the problem of our brothers and sisters not having a livelihood here and having to search for better opportunities abroad? What is the role of the UN in avoiding this problem of conflict in Africa and the civilian victims, especially women and children?’

 

Sam [Akritidis] has said he told us he has a similar question. Sam asks [via webcam]: ‘Hi, my name’s Sam, and I’m an Australian of Greek heritage and I actually am in Athens at the moment and witnessing some of the problems of Greece’s debt crisis first hand. I’m familiar with your books, and very appreciative of them, but I would very much like to have you explain to me why you think Greece is in such a mess now when it was once the cradle of Western civilisation? And, on a broader level, how does the explanation of the human condition fix the current world issues, the ones like the migrations, economic instability, the problem of displaced peoples and the wars we see flooding the news? Even recently, [standing] in a line here in Europe I was talking to an Egyptian man about this and he referred to some billionaire’s suggestion that he was going to buy some island I think in Italy or Greece to house refugees from Syria, and basically he was angrily reacting [about that idea] to me saying why doesn’t that same guy use his money to try to fix all the corruption problems in Egypt that’s producing so much hardship and heaps of refugees. Anyway, I would be interested to hear what you have to say.’

 

To answer these very topical questions requires looking at one of the most difficult aspects to have to face now that we can understand the human condition—and that is what’s dealt with in chapter 8:16E of FREEDOM, which is ‘The differences in alienation between “races” of humans’ [see also F. Essay 28]. In fact, this subject of the differences in alienation between ‘races’ is so delicate, and leads to such a serious matter, that I have written out my answers to make sure I don’t overlook anything. And this script will be with Webinar 3 on our website if you want to read it later. Basically, I’m going to deal with probably the most difficult of truths humanity has to face now that understanding of the human condition has arrived.

(Since ‘race’ is a very imprecise term, what is meant by it in this discussion 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, inverted commas have been placed around it.)

Again, I’m assuming everyone has at least watched the introductory part of the first webinar and/​or read chapter 1 of FREEDOM that present the explanation of the human condition. [We also recommend watching/reading THE Interview, which was recorded in 2020 after this webinar was filmed, as it provides the ideal, very short summary of the contents of FREEDOM.]

 

 

 

The Adam Stork story shows that when we humans became conscious and set out in search of knowledge, the price we had to pay was becoming angry, egocentric and alienated, or, in a word, upset—and obviously the more we searched for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, understanding of the human condition, the more upset we became—so everyone now is variously upset, variously had their soulful innocent state corrupted and are variously angry, egocentric and alienated.

Yes, obviously the more an individual human or even a ‘race’ of humans have been exposed to the great heroic battle that humanity has been waging against ignorance, the more they will suffer from the upset state of the human condition. That is just an obvious fact, but the implications are highly significant.

 

Now, while that is an obvious truth, the situation has been that while we couldn’t explain the human condition, explain that we upset humans are fundamentally good and not bad, it wasn’t possible to talk about the relative differences in upset and alienation between humans—because any acknowledgement of such difference would have left those who were upset condemned as bad, unworthy, inferior; even evil.

That’s the whole reason why virtually the whole of humanity has been living in Plato’s cave of denial—humans couldn’t admit the truth about their upset state until they could explain and defend it—they couldn’t go around saying ‘I’m a bad, unworthy, inferior, evil person’—if we humans had believed that, well we should have just gone out and jumped off a cliff and killed ourselves—but we didn’t because intuitively we have always believed that one day we would find the dignifying and guilt-relieving explanation for our ‘corrupted’, ‘fallen’, upset condition—but until we found that compassionate understanding, we couldn’t afford to admit we were upset, or at least how extremely upset we were—so we had no choice but to hide in Plato’s dark cave of denial.

Yes, acknowledgement of who was corrupted and who wasn’t only led to those who were upset condemned as bad, unworthy or inferior—it only led to prejudice against those who were corrupted—and the consequences of such prejudice have been horrific, such as the Holocaust where 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis during World War II.

So, as stated in paragraph 1041 of FREEDOM, any admissions of the relative innocence, or lack thereof, of different individuals, ‘races’, genders, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures could be very dangerous because they could lead to prejudiced views that some individuals, ‘races’, genders, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures are either good or bad, more worthwhile or less worthwhile, superior or inferior, when the truth—which has now finally been explained—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.

But, again, until we could explain this, prejudiced views led to terrible atrocities—such as the Holocaust; and, in more recent times, the attempted ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Bantu Hutu of some 800,000 of the tall Nilotic Tutsi in 100 days of bloodshed in Rwanda in 1994.

So it’s no wonder then that, to quote an article in New Scientist, 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…​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, yes, the problem was that until we could explain the upset state of the human condition it could be very dangerous acknowledging differences in where individuals, ‘races’, genders, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures were in their progression from innocence to upset in the human journey from ignorance to enlightenment. It WAS ‘incendiary’, far too dangerous, too unjustly condemning, too unbearable to face, far too likely to lead to racist, sexist and ageist prejudice.

 

HOWEVER, this situation now completely changes—because with understanding of the human condition at last found and we are able to understand that all humans are equally good, it is both psychologically safe AND NECESSARY—if we are to truly understand ourselves—to acknowledge the differences. As Christ said, ‘the truth will set you free’, but of course it had to be the full truth that explains and defends us—so now that we have that full truth about our corrupted condition, that truth IS what sets us free, it is what allows us to at last end the horror of the agony of the human condition and safely leave Plato’s horrifically dark cave of dishonest denial and its alienation.

In terms of these questions about the flood of refugees into Europe from the Middle East and Africa, and from Mexico into the United States, and as is occurring in many other parts of the world, what this ability to talk truthfully about the differences in upset between ‘races’ means is that we can finally have the REAL discussion about the problem of refugees.

 

The truth is that, just as there are differences in upset between individual humans, so there are differences in upset between ‘races’ of humans.

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. And the result of the differences between ‘races’ is that there are 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 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 soul-exhausted and cynical.

 

 

If we look at the picture of the journey of humanity from ignorance to enlightenment, it’s perfectly obvious that the further an individual or ‘race’ of people progressed from our species’ original all-loving state of innocence, the more they became adapted to that upset existence. I repeat, the longer an individual or a ‘race’ 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).

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.

The reality has been that 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 been too innocent to function effectively in the extremely upset-adapted, human-condition-afflicted, corrupt world. 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. He wrote: ‘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!’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.236 of 253). 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 Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.111 of 233).

The honey-coloured Bushmen are probably the most instinctively/​genetically innocent group of people living today. They are more innocent, less soul-corrupted, less psychologically exhausted, less human-condition-adapted, 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, 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. What’s more, 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, 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—and, for their part, 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.

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’.

 

While holidaying with Annie in Fiji in 1997 a local gave us this description of the structure of Fijian society: ‘The Chinese 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.’ The human-condition-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’s 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’. Again, 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.

 

So, 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 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 last month 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 at the opposite end of the spectrum of alienation, the simple and obvious truth is that there are ‘races’ where everyone is overly upset-adapted, overly innocence-destroyed 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.

It follows then from what I have been saying 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 selfishness, that you get maximum functionality and operable behaviour in life under the duress of the human condition. As I mentioned, European Caucasians represent these toughened but not too toughened 30 and 40-year old equivalent peoples.

And even amongst the Europeans, those who are from the more isolated and sheltered northern fringes of Europe are less human-condition-embattled and thus more functional and operational.

The Anglo-Saxons are currently the stand-out example of such functionality, coming as they do from the more isolated 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 the small, resource-deficient island country of England, they’ve been so operable and thus successful and thus influential that they’ve led the so-called ‘globalisation of the world’ to the point where to quote an article in TIME magazine ‘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 term ‘Anglosphere’ to describe a coalition of English-speaking countries—the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland—that are ‘characterised by a high degree of individualism and dynamism, and by a talent for assimilation’. The article 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).

So the southern countries in Europe, Greece, Italy, Spain, who have been more exposed to humanity’s heroic but upsetting battle to find knowledge are now heading towards the 50-year-old equivalent stage—which is why the excessive cynicism, graft, selfishness and greed in those countries has led to the debt crises there.

With understanding of the human condition it’s at last 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 their life, under the duress of the human condition all ‘races’ eventually became overly upset. 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. During their energetic and creative 30-year-old equivalent stage, the Egyptians instigated the civilisation of the ‘known world’; for example, they invented the wheel, mathematics and writing, and divided time into minutes and seconds. The Greeks and Romans laid the foundations for ‘Western civilisation’ during this most creative stage of their journey, as Sam said. 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.

As I mentioned, a more complete presentation of what I’ve been saying about the differences in alienation between ‘races’ is presented in chapter 8:16E of FREEDOM [see also F. Essay 28].

 

So now we’re in a position to have the real discussion about the current refugee problems occurring throughout the world, such as the flood of refugees from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, and from South America to North America.

In the case of the Middle East, paragraphs 913 to 915 of FREEDOM describe in vivid detail just how much soul-destroying anger and bloodshed from the upset state of the human condition has occurred in the Middle East over the last 4,000 years. Given this history, we have to ask, how realistic was the so-called Arab Spring when the extreme despotism of Arab countries across North Africa and the Middle East provoked democracy-demanding uprisings?

The truth that we can now understand is that what people are really doing through their efforts to remove tyrants and despots like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, and even Robert Magabe of Zimbabwe, from power in the hope that those countries will become functional democracies, is trying to make 50-year-old equivalents and 20-year-old equivalents behave like 30-and-40-year-old equivalents. But, as has been explained, societies of 50-year-old equivalents and 20-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 peoples.

Of course, what has greatly fuelled greed in countries like Africa where the relative innocence of people there has meant they haven’t been able to successfully compete, and also in countries where people are overly upset and excessively cynical, is the development of sophisticated communication technology like the internet, satellite TV and smart phones.

In the case of the materially impoverished parts of the world, when people there see programs like Baywatch (TV series 1989-2001), in which gorgeously dressed Californians in enticing swimsuits play in a fabulously ordered and materially wealthy world, they are naturally overcome with distress about what they are missing out on. The psychiatrist Clancy McKenzie gave this stark description of ‘materialism envy’ in action: ‘While visiting Machu Picchu in Peru in 1979 I noted very poor persons living in the mountains who had only the clothes they wore and perhaps a lama or two, but had beautiful warm smiles and seemed content and happy. Days later I was in Bogota in Colombia. It was a very hot day and we asked the driver to stop at an outdoor tavern to buy cold beer. The people were very impoverished, but there was a TV playing and they were able to view the “outside world” where everyone seemed to have more, and luxury was abundant. I offered to go in with the driver but he urged me to wait in the car. I soon learned why. The absolute hatred was so intense that it was palpable. These people did not have less than those in Machu Picchu but they saw others who had more, and their needs were intensified’ (Letter to Prof. Harry Prosen, 27 Mar. 2006).

So now, with communication technology opening everyone’s eyes to the world of material luxury, what it means for people who aren’t able to legitimately compete is that when they see an opportunity to obtain money and/​or power, and the material luxury both can bring, they especially can’t resist taking it. Similarly, at the opposite end of the spectrum of alienation, in parts of the world where people are overly upset-adapted and cynically selfish, their greed is greatly compounded by seeing how much material luxury exists in other parts of the world, greatly fuelling the graft and despotism in those countries as well.

I should say that materialism envy has not only made the less operational extremely envious, it has also made them resentful and angry. Indeed, their self-esteem has suffered so much that angry retaliations, like the flying of those planes into the World Trade Center, have occurred. Osama bin Laden actually said the 9/11 attacks ‘were revenge for Western humiliation of Muslims’ (TIME, 7 May 2012). When the Muslim sympathiser Tessa Kum wrote, ‘I am coming to hate you, white person. You have all the control, all the power, all the privilege’ (Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, 18 Dec. 2014), she was expressing what psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed was referring to when he wrote about ‘aspects of Islamism, which is…​resentful [of] humiliation, unable to accept the reality of the weak place of Islamic civilisation and determined to act destructively’ (ibid). So, yes, every civilisation has made its contribution to the human journey when it was at its operational best, but when it wasn’t it was naturally jealous of those civilisations who were at their operational best.

Incidentally, Christ understood and predicted this situation that would occur where everyone’s different degrees of alienation would be revealed when understanding of the human condition was finally found. As described in FREEDOM in paragraph 1154, immediately after describing how the arrival of the all-liberating but also all-exposing truth about humans will come ‘like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other’, Christ described how ‘two people will be in one bed; one will be taken [revealed as sound, relatively free of upset and alienation] and the other left [exposed as being upset and alienated]’ (Luke 17:24, 34, 35; see also Matt 24:27, 40).

So, yes, as I will point out shortly, the truth that sets us free can’t but also be the truth that exposes us.

 

I think the journalist Peter Hitchens has possibly come the closest to having the real debate about the refugee crisis. In an article last week in The Mail on Sunday titled ‘We won’t save refugees by destroying our own country’, he wrote: ‘We cannot just give it [England] away to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves…[do it so we] can experience a self-righteous glow…Britain is a desirable place to live mainly because it is an island…​Most of the really successful civilisations survived because they were protected from invasion…​Thanks to a thousand years of uninvaded peace, we have developed astonishing levels of trust, safety and freedom…​Only in the Anglosphere countries – the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – is there anything comparable…Our advantages depend very much on our shared past, our inherited traditions, habits and memories…​Mass immigration means we adapt to them, when they should be adapting to us…​the definition of a refugee is that he is fleeing from danger, not fleeing towards a higher standard of living…​[If] Europe…​merges its culture and its economy with North Africa and the Middle East…​[it] would lose almost all the things that make others want to live there’ (6 Sep. 2015).

What Australia is trying to do is to hold migrants at our borders until it can be established whether they are fleeing to a higher standard of living or are genuine refugees, but that can often be a very difficult distinction to make.

James Delingpole in Breitbart last week made the point that the ‘emotional correctness’ of ‘progressive bleeding hearts…who think it’s our job to welcome the entire world across our borders…​haven’t really stopped to consider the needs of the people they’re claiming to help…[which is for Syria’s] brightest, most energetic and enterprising citizens…to [be able to] return when…the conflict ends’ (‘Compassion signalling about a sad photograph won’t solve Syria’s refugee problem’, 4 Sep. 2015). Yes, but my point is such dysfunctionality in the Middle East can’t end in the world the way it is, so the reality is that before long ‘the entire’ dysfunctional ‘world’ is going to try to migrate to the more functional world. The flood of refugees is only going to increase.

 

Ok, so what is going to happen?

In the vacuum where there is no reconciling understanding of the human condition—or none that people have been made aware of yet—upset is going to increase everywhere even more rapidly than it has been—which will mean the need of the more exhausted to feel good about their corrupted condition by adopting ‘feel good’, ‘self-righteous’, ‘emotionally correct’ causes is only going to increase—and the extreme dishonesty, delusion and irrationality of this left-wing response will produce even more frustrated reaction from the right-wing, and increase the popularity of extremely reactionary right-wing politicians like Donald Trump in the US. The world needs strength to stand up to weak, irrational, politically correct, pseudo idealism (which is so dangerous it is explained and described in chapter 8:16 as ‘the abomination that causes desolation’) but a bullyboy like Donald Trump is only going to add to the already extreme polarisation of politics. [For the definitive presentation of what is wrong with pseudo idealism see F. Essay 35, which is such a significant essay it has also been produced as the standalone booklet titled Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution, which is freely available on our homepage as one of the WTM’s six key books.]

So, overall, what we are looking at is yet another example of the end game, Armageddon situation facing the world. This to add to the exhaustion of our environment from all the materialist consumption, the terminal levels of alienation manifesting itself in epidemics of psychological stress like depression, loneliness, anxiety, ADHD, autism, obesity, drug addiction and narcissism. This end play situation is described in chapter 8:16 [see also F. Essay 55].

In Richard Neville’s description included in paragraph 48—which is that ‘the world is hurtling to catastrophe: from nuclear horrors, a wrecked eco-system, 20 million dead each year from malnutrition, 600 million chronically hungry…​All these crises are man made, their causes are psychological. The cures must come from this same source; which means the planet needs psychological maturity fast. We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’ (Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Oct. 1986; see www.wtmsources.com/167)—what is occurring is ‘self destruction’.

As Professor Harry Prosen says on the back of FREEDOM, ‘I think the fastest growing realization everywhere is that humanity can’t go on the way it is going.’

In this article from The Australian newspaper last Friday, it says that ‘deep down a lot of us think it is a fair bet the world is going to end surprisingly soon. A survey of more than 2000 people across Australia, Canada, Britain and the US has found that more than half believe there is a greater than 50 per cent chance of our way of life ending within the next 100 years…The biggest concerns cited were worries about social ills such as violence and crime, as well as threats from moral decline…​nearly half of American respondents agreed with the statement that the world faced a final showdown between good and evil’ (‘We’re all going to die! (But I’m going to be OK)’, 11 Sep. 2015).

 

Ok, so what is the answer?

Well, the fact is that only the ‘self discovery’ that Richard Neville referred to, which is the finding of understanding of the human condition, can save the human race. Yes, since the upsetting journey from ignorance to enlightenment began some 2 million years ago, that has ultimately always been the only solution.

What this means is that the only thing that can stop all these symptoms of end game, in this case all the suffering and refugees, is the explanation of the human condition in FREEDOM and the great change of heart from living selfishly to living selflessly that that understanding alone makes possible—which is fully described in chapter 9 and which the two Tony’s and Annie spoke about in the first two webinars.

So we simply have to get these understandings to the world—because they ARE the only thing that can save the world!!

 

Sam’s second question [via webcam]: ‘So you’re saying that the Greek culture is on the more exhausted scale in terms of the age of humanity in this battle for knowledge, and you’re saying that countries like England are not as exhausted, obviously not as old, and saying there are more innocent races as well? But they’re really sort of contentious things to say—they’re almost on the verge of are you being sort of racist by giving all these cultures a, on a scale of exhausted and less exhausted it doesn’t sound so racist, but if you say someone’s naive and then you say someone’s corrupt there are certain negative connotations to it, and basically the culture can take that category and feel as if it’s a racial remark. It’s going to be very difficult for cultures to accept that.’

 

As I said Sam at the beginning, talking about differences in upset between ‘races’ did lead to racist prejudice, and so it was so unbearable it was incendiary—but with understanding of the human condition found that situation all changes because it puts an end to prejudicial views that some people are superior or inferior, more worthy or less worthy. But yes, it is a lot of truth to suddenly have to cope with. So that’s the next question I have written here to deal with: how are we humans to face the truth about ourselves? As Enrico put the question: ‘Diving into a sea of truth where everything is completely transparent one can’t but ask, “how will anybody cope with this; how in the world can anybody cross such darkness to reach light?!”’ (Email to the WTM, 24 Feb. 2011). This is the very serious matter that I said at the beginning of this webinar that this subject of differences in alienation between ‘races’ leads to.

Firstly, as I mentioned in the first webinar, notice that Plato said we have been hiding ‘a long way underground’ in the cave of denial. We can here clearly see why. The truth about the human condition was unbearable in so many ways. But let’s think about it, our situation surely is that, as Berdyaev said in paragraph 237, ‘we cannot bear to be faced with the’ ‘deadly’ ‘distinction of good and evil’, which is the issue of the human condition, ‘for ever’. Do we want to live in Plato’s horrible cave of darkness forever, or do we want to live in sunshine where everyone is living in peace and everything is radiantly beautiful—because this is the doorway we have to go through to get there—and, most importantly, going through it is, as set out in chapter 9, entirely manageable.

Basically, what we do is we get the truth up and then we move on. In the bigger dignifying, compassionate picture about human life that we have now where we can understand that all humans are equally good and worthwhile, it doesn’t matter who is upset and who isn’t—because all that is part of a world that is behind us now. We can, and must, focus on the future now. As described in paragraph 1049, we have won ‘the match’ (found the knowledge we were searching for, namely self-knowledge, understanding of the human condition), so we can now all head for the showers and join in 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 completely 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 now will be, it will effectively make all our upset—both psychological and instinctive—disappear without a trace. It is all history now; to quote Bono from U2 and the words of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, ‘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!’

It is true that I can be strong and brave about this because, being relatively innocent, I don’t have to face the music as it were and confront the hard truth about being corrupted, but that does give me the freedom to find and show you the path out of the horrible dark cave existence that humanity is living in, and is now threatening the human race with extinction. As it says in the Bible, a ‘child [the symbol of a relatively innocent person] will lead them’ to where the ‘wolf will live with the lamb’ (Isa. 11:6), basically to a reconciled new world free of the human condition.

It is certainly true that when the compassionate but exposing understanding of the human condition arrives, there is a great deal of shock to work through. Not only is the truth about the differences in alienation between ‘races’ a massive shock, for women to discover that men are not villains but actually the heroes of the story of life on Earth is a massive shock. For the left-wing to discover that the right-wing are actually the ones holding the moral high-ground and that what they on the left have been doing is subverting the human journey is a massive shock. For mechanistic scientists to discover they are leading the human race to extinction with all their entrenched denial is a massive shock. For religious adherents to discover that their God is the physical law of negative entropy, and that Christ was not a deity but a human like everyone else, only sufficiently loved in his infancy to not resign to a life of denial, is a massive shock. For mothers to discover that nurturing is all-important and that their alienation has been psychologically killing their children is a massive shock. For the whole human race to discover they’re alienated wrecks is a massive shock. [See The Shock Of Change that understanding the human condition brings that describes how to manage the inevitable shock that the arrival of understanding of the human condition brings.]

Yes, the truth that, as Christ said, ‘sets us free’ also destroys the lies, as it must. So this time when understanding of the human condition is finally found and the blinds are at last drawn on our human situation IS exposure day, honesty day, truth day, ‘future shock’ day, ‘judgment day’. As I point out in paragraph 1153, the origins of the word ‘apocalypse’, which is the original name for the Book of Revelation in the Bible (which I talked about in the first webinar), is ‘Ancient Greek: meaning “un-covering”…translated literally from Greek, [it] is a disclosure of knowledge, hidden from humanity in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation’ (Wikipedia; see www.wtmsources.com/127); ‘a cataclysm in which the forces of good triumph over the forces of evil’ (The Free Dictionary; see www.wtmsources.com/112). Yes, it is ‘a cataclysm in which the forces of good triumph over the forces of evil’—and now that understanding of the human condition has been found, ‘the forces of evil’ are the now obsoleted and unnecessary practice of denial.

 

 

THE PROCRASTINATION STAGE

 

 

THE TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE STATE

 

 

As this drawing from FREEDOM shows, having the lights suddenly turned on, as it were, cannot but be a shock so there will be a certain amount of procrastination, and we have to work through that, but let’s get the procrastination stage over with. There is no other path to safety and freedom, no other way to save the human race, and, as the flood of refugees around the world is demonstrating, we have reached end game where no more astronomical suffering can be allowed to occur, so let’s go! Let’s end all the suffering that Medhane was feeling for his brothers and sisters as he said—because now we can, and this is the only way we can, even though there are some hard truths to have to face.

So, do we have any questions?

 

Neil: We’ve had a few, we’ve had a comment from Zoe which might be a nice one to end on. The other questions we might have to leave for the next webinar given this one has been quite long.

 

Jeremy: Okay, Zoe has texted: ‘I’m fairly familiar with your book Jeremy, but I’m reeling inside at how deep this goes and the scale of its application and I can sense the transforming power of it all. I’m in shock and amazement but just wanted to say thank you.’

(Jeremy’s edited version of his response.) Well this time when the blinds are drawn on our human situation and the truth revealed wasn’t called ‘judgment day’ for nothing. I mean this truth that the more we searched for knowledge the more upset we became is really an obvious truth (indeed, all the explanations in my book, like Integrative Meaning, are actually obvious truths) but we have lived in such fearful denial of it it is a big shock to have it admitted, and there’s no getting around that! As Alvin Toffler said in his book Future Shock, future shock is ‘the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time’ (1970, p.4 of 505). In fact, to have the blinds drawn on our human situation, as this information does, is such a shock that it creates a ‘deaf effect’ problem where people can hardly take in or ‘hear’ what is in FREEDOM. [Jeremy’s 2022 booklet The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect provides extraordinary clarification of why lifting The Great Burden Of Guilt from the human race causes most people to initially experience a ‘Deaf Effect’ to what’s being presented.]

We were talking about it amongst ourselves yesterday, readers can often only get a foothold here and there in the book; find a few things they can identify with and the rest they can’t actually take in because it’s too confronting, too deafening. But if you keep re-reading the material and listen to more of these talks, this deep denial is gradually eroded. What did Plato say, we’re living ‘a long way underground’; living in deep denial, in terrible fear of this dark corner where the issue of the human condition resides. These are truths we have never been able to face before. I mean how could old Adam Stork live with the fact that he’s lost his innocence while he couldn’t explain why. He just couldn’t live with that truth. So humans learnt to block the truth of their lost innocence out. We stopped thinking about that at Resignation [see F. Essay 30] because it was too unbearable. We just got on with life, found artificial ways to reinforce ourselves through winning some power, fame, fortune and glory; derive some relief from that; artificially sustain our sense of worth.

So everyone’s hooked on doing that now; everyone’s living off that. But it’s the selfishness and greed that has resulted from having to live like that that is producing all the inequality and suffering, and now all the refugees, the flood of half the world from the dysfunctional parts of the world to the functional half of the world, and how can you blame them? Look at what’s happening in Syria, the place is just being bombed to smithereens, and looked at what happened in Libya when they removed Gaddafi; the turmoil is now equally great. As I said, it’s just going to be another wrestling match until the most powerful gains power again and then they are going to pinch all the money and buy villas in the Riviera, or whatever, and the country is going to be as dysfunctional as ever.

I was driving along the road the other day and I was looking at the beautifully constructed concrete curbing on the side of the road, and I was thinking ‘How ordered is our world here is in Australia, how functional and operational are we?’ It’s incredible—there are lots of road signs and zebra crossings, etc, etc; it’s all beautifully managed. Then compare this to India where there’s a festoon of illegal powerlines across the road, and people dying on the footpath. As I said, when Annie and I were in Kenya life there was such a mess, and I remember getting onto Qantas to fly back to Australia and feeling enormously relieved to be back in a functional realm of ordered safety.

So yes, it’s all coming unzipped, the world situation is unravelling, we are entering end game; and we’ve got to fix it all up or it’s over for the human race. Better politics, better religions, better ways to try to discipline ourselves, don’t work anymore. This might sound weird, but I was thinking that there was a time when humanity needed Christ’s vision to see how we could save ourselves from ourselves through a religion, and the Sermon on The Mount was the great speech Christ gave about that solution, which has guided humanity ever since, bought the time to get to here, but religion can no longer save us. We have got to do better than that now. We need something more substantial than that; in fact, we need the answers, the understanding that ends the human condition now, which is what FREEDOM presents. Nothing else will save the day. So I was thinking we need the equivalent of another Sermon on The Mount to guide humanity from here, and I was thinking that if I deal with this hardest part of the truth about the human condition in FREEDOM to have to face of the differences in alienation between races, then that is probably the best way to give the equivalent of a Sermon on The Mount talk for today’s now desperate situation where we have to take up support of the reconciling explanation of the human condition in FREEDOM. Let’s tackle the hardest part of this all-exposing but all-liberating truth in FREEDOM and explain how we have to, and can, cope with that.

What we are currently trying to do to solve these end play problems like the refugee crisis is hoping that the democratic process will find a solution, but, as I’ve explained, politics is just going to get more and more polarised, wrenched apart, which is what is happening in American politics; it is just frightening how dysfunctional and ineffective politics is becoming.

This book is difficult to read—people start reading it and they can’t hear what is written in it. The book is just relentless, remorseless in its truthfulness. It just keeps going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, but such a book has to emerge somewhere in the world that does that. We need the answers now; the full complete presentation. We needed the table set so we can open the door into this historically forbidden realm of the human condition and cope with all the truth there because it’s so beautifully explained and laid out.

So what I’ve tried to do today is take one of the hardest truths and deal with it, admit it and explain how the effects of it are crippling the world, and how what we’re going to try to do about it through the democratic process is not going to work. Half the world is going to end up flooding into the other half. I don’t think anybody, if they are honest, cannot see that anyone in Africa or the Middle East is just going to say, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ If I was there I’d be grabbing the nearest bit of driftwood and start paddling for Greece or wherever, and just get the hell out of there. What else could you do? The suffering that’s occurring because of the despotism and the greed and the selfishness is incredible.

I thought someone might ask the question about what’s happening in China and places like that, and so to address that I have copied these extracts from paragraphs 1038 and 1044 of FREEDOM: ‘Efforts to avoid this cycle of getting more and more upset, 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. 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.’ So, authoritarian Marxist and Confucianist regimes weren’t going to work either in countries like China where corruption is endemic.

It’s interesting (and I refer to this in paragraph 1222 of FREEDOM) that Kenneth Clark, the historian who in 1969 produced the BBC television documentary series, Civilisation, mentioned in one of the episodes in the series that ‘People who hold forth about the modern world often say that what we need is a new religion. It may be true but it isn’t easy to establish’ (episode ‘The Fallacies of Hope’). Saying ‘that what we need is a new religion’ is really another acknowledgment of the fundamental need for the human race to have a ‘change of heart’, that change from living selfishly to selflessly, if we are to solve the world’s problems. And, saying ‘but it isn’t easy to establish’ ‘a new religion’ is really, deep down, a recognition that what is needed for this change of heart to occur is for the daunting issue of the human condition to be confronted and solved.

Yes, while the ‘change of heart’ is needed, a new religion ‘isn’t easy to establish’, it has to be something that goes much deeper, in fact, that explains and resolves the human condition. The Dalai Lama was making this point when he recently said he believes that ‘secular ethics, not religion, is best placed to assist the “moral crisis” facing the world’s people…​[because it] respected all traditional faiths as well as non-believers. “Some people—some my friends—believe moral ethics must be based on religious faith,” he said. [But] “No matter how wonderful a religion, (it will) never be universal. The crisis is universal—now the remedy must also be universal”’ (The Australian, 14 Jun. 2013). That remedy that is universal, that’s not religious, is this understanding of the human condition—because it is just knowledge. That’s what we humans are, knowledge-dependent beings—see my head, it’s half brain, it needs understanding, it needs brain food and not brain anaesthetic. We need understanding, we are an understanding system. We were thrown onto this planet with this incredible computer on our heads, but the program for the computer was hidden from us and we were left to wander like a waif in the wilderness trying to find it for some 2 million years! And, now, at last, we have found the program for the computer, the explanation that makes sense of our lives at last. Yes, it’s been a terrible affliction to be left with this marvellous thinking mind without the means to make sense of our world. We want to think, we want to make sense of the world and understand our troubled human condition, but we’ve never been able to, so we’ve had to live deep underground in this great castle of dishonest denial/​lies. And all these obvious truths such as about the differences in alienation, etc, etc, haven’t been able to be admitted, but now they can be because we are defended and explained. So this is not a new religion, a religion was never going to do it, as Kenneth Clark and the Dalai Lama basically said. Clark and the Dalai Lama were actually anticipating what the breakthrough would be like. They are concerned the world is entering end game—the Dalai Lama spoke of ‘the “moral crisis” facing the world’, and there is an incredible moral crisis. As I said, there’s so much cynicism in humans now that you’re a sucker if you aren’t out to get as much as you can, so it’s just open slather. If anyone gets any money in countries that are behind the eight-ball they are just going to embezzle it or whatever. It’s just all over red-rover, we’ve got to get out of this terrible end play situation, and this human-condition-confronting-and-explaining path is the only way out; this is the only doorway that will stop all that suffering.

There are some hard truths to have to be faced, but they’re not really that hard. If you read chapter 9, it explains that there is a fabulously exciting way where we leave the old upset world behind as dealt with. So I invite everyone to read that chapter and let’s get through the procrastination stage and get on with this new world and free ourselves from the horror of our condition forever, and stop all the suffering.

 

So let’s go! In the spirit of the music included at the end of the last webinar, we’ll end this webinar with Tony Gowing (dressed up as John Lennon), singing Tony’s highly appropriate song Let’s Go! with our WTM band The Denialators.

 

 

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Watch Jeremy Griffith present the breakthrough redeeming explanation of the human condition in THE Interview; for a fuller explanation read chapter 3 of FREEDOM; and for a summary presentation of the key ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation watch Video/​F. Essay 3. And see Video/​F. Essay 8 & F. Essay 28 for how understanding the human condition ends all prejudice, including racism, forever.

 

And as always, we encourage you to get involved and become a member of the WTM to help transform the world—because at last we really can!

 

 

Discussion or comment on this email is welcomed—see below.