Part 3:11D Angry Adolescentman

 

The Angry Adulthood Stage of Adolescent Humanity

The Angry Adolescentman stage was when we encountered the reality, frustration and anger of trying but failing to defeat the ignorance of our idealistic instinctive self or soul and had to learn to Self Discipline to contain or civilise our now overly upset state.

The species: Homo sapiens—0.5 million (500,000) to 0.05 million (50,000) years ago

The individual: 30 to 40 years old

Throughout our 20s we individually, or, in the case of humanity, H. erectus, settled into the long, corrupting journey to find understanding, ultimately understanding of why we became corrupted in the first place. But, tragically, the more we searched for knowledge the more upset we became, and the more upset the human race as a whole became, and the more new generations had to contend with that ever-accumulating upset. It was an extremely upset-compounding situation. As the graph charting humanity’s increase in upset over the last two million years shows, for the first three-quarters of the journey (basically to the end of Adventurous Adolescentman, H. erectus’ reign), the rate of increase in upset was not great. However, in the last quarter of that time period (during the reign of Angry Adolescentman, H. sapiens) the graph descended markedly, and then, in the final 50,000 years (during the reign of Pseudo Idealistic Adolescentman, H. sapiens sapiens), it entered into free fall—upset began to compound at an extremely rapid rate, a rate that only ends with the rise of human-condition-understood-and-ameliorated TRANSFORMED, Adultman or Triumphantman or Godman.

A contributing factor to the speeding up of this progression in upset was the hardship and confinement of life throughout the four great ice ages that occurred during the Pleistocene epoch, the period from 1.8 million years to 10,000 years ago. These ice ages greatly contributed to the increase in upset because, in forcing close habitation between people of varying degrees of upset, they dramatically accentuated the difficulties encountered by humans coexisting under the strain of the human condition, to the point where life today, towards the bottom of the graph, has become so difficult that even coupling has proved untenable for many, with marriage breakdown a common occurrence.

The closer humans lived during humanity’s adolescence and/or the more difficult the living conditions, the greater the occurrence and spread and thus increase in upset. Innocence doesn’t last long in New York’s Times Square or Sydney’s Kings Cross where drug pushers, prostitutes, muggers and beggars work the streets. And as those from cold climates will attest, winters are particularly confining and testing, and so each great ice age did, in effect, represent one very long, trying winter. It is not surprising then that out of the hardship of each of the great ice ages came the next more upset/​soul-exhausted/​embattled/​alienated stage of humans. From the rigours of the first great ice age, called the Günz Ice Age, came the flowering of H. erectus. H. sapiens emerged after the second ice age, the Mindel Ice Age, while Neanderthal man, a precursor of H. sapiens sapiens, appeared after the third ice age, the Riss Ice Age. H. sapiens sapiens emerged after the Würm Ice Age, the fourth ice age. Each ice age also contributed significantly to the culling of the human race in terms of humans’ ability to adapt to life under the duress of the human condition—because as upset increased throughout humanity’s adolescence many individuals must have, in effect, quit the great battle humanity was waging against the ignorance of our instinctive self or soul through not being able to survive the degree of compromise to their soul that was increasingly being demanded of them, leaving only the most courageous and enduring. But just how toughened the human race became is now hidden under layer upon layer of self-restraint, or what we call ‘civility’. This restraining, civilising process will be explained shortly, but the point being made here is that beneath our facade of restraint and manufactured positiveness, which was so necessary to cope with the horror of the human condition, lies a highly genetically toughened individual.

But to return once more to humanity’s journey through its adolescence, by the age of 30 in the case of the individual, or by some half a million years ago in the case of humanity, the exponential increase in upset meant that the levels of upset had exceeded the graph of upset’s inflection point and had entered the stage where upset increased rapidly. Upset, namely anger, egocentricity and alienation, increased dramatically from that time on and while all the adjustments that were made during the Adventurous 20s had served us well—both as individuals and, in the case of humanity, as members of H. erectus—there was now an urgent need to take more specific measures to manage the new extreme levels of upset.

If we consider what happened to the 21-year-old more closely we can see why management of upset had become such a serious matter, for despite their bravery and sheer optimism, it wasn’t long before the reality of, in the case of the resigned, trying to win the battle of proving you were good and not bad—or, in the case of the unresigned, trying to reform upset behaviour—started to sour. Gradually he or she came to experience and appreciate just how truly difficult it was to self-manage and contain upset without the ameliorating understanding of upset.

The problem for those who were resigned was the harder you fought to validate yourself, the more criticism you attracted from your idealistic soul, and thus the more upset you became. Also, throughout your 20s, you were increasingly encountering the upsetting difficulty of trying to survive and compete alongside other embattled humans who were also trying to prove their worth. The resulting compounding of upset meant that by the time you were 30 you were becoming very frustrated and angry, and by the time you reached your mid-30s you were becoming a seriously upset, embattled person. While 20-year-olds were naive about the difficulties of living under the duress of the human condition, 30-year-olds had become realists about such an existence. The song I Was Only Joking, which was written by Gary Grainger and Rod Stewart and released by Stewart in 1977, contains lyrics that vividly describe the reality check of reaching 30: ‘Me and the boys thought we had it sussed. Valentinos all of us…running free, Waging war with society…But nothing ever changed…What kind of fool was I. I could never win…Illusions of that grand first prize, are slowly wearing thin… I guess it had to end.’

Our previous inability to defend our corruption has meant that it hasn’t been possible to admit it, however, the following Japanese proverb does, at least, acknowledge the stages of its development: ‘At 10 man is an animal, at 20 a lunatic, at 30 a failure, at 40 a fraud and at 50 a criminal.’ But with understanding of the human condition now found we can finally explain these stages. Ten-year-olds were ‘animals’ in the sense that their instinctive selves were unrepressed. Twenty-year-olds—and young men in particular—were ‘lunatics’ in the sense that they were swashbuckling cavaliers who deludedly believed they could take on and overthrow the ignorant world. Thirty-year-olds (and again, men in particular) were ‘failures’ in the sense that, although they were still determinedly trying to defy the inevitable, they were being forced to accept that the corrupting life of seeking power, fame, fortune and glory was not going to be a genuinely meaningful and thus satisfying way of living. As will be described shortly when the 40-year-old stage is explained, at this age men in particular were ‘frauds’ in the sense that they had become so corrupted and disenchanted with their efforts to ‘conquer the world’ that they suffered a ‘mid-life crisis’—a crisis of confidence that resulted in their decision to take up support of some form of ‘idealism’ in order to make themselves feel better about their corrupted state. Having had enough of the critically important, yet horribly corrupting, battle to champion the ego over soul, they effectively changed sides to become ‘born-again’ supporters of the soul’s ‘idealistic’ world. This ‘born-again’ conversion to taking up support of some form of idealism made them ‘frauds’ because they were deluding themselves that they were at last on the side of good when, in truth, they were working against good, in the sense that good depended on defying and defeating—not supporting—the ignorant ‘idealistic’ world of the soul. They were being pseudo idealistic, not genuinely idealistic. As will be described when the 50-year-old stage is explained, at this age men in particular were ‘criminals’ in the sense that they had become so disillusioned with the extreme dishonesty of the born-again state that they had returned to the battle of championing the ego over ignorance, but were, by this stage of their personal journey, so deeply upset that they were extremely angry and cynical about life—basically, they knew they were beaten on every front and had become bitter and vengeful ‘criminals’.

Thus, we can see that the 30-year-old stage or, in the case of humanity, the life of H. sapiens, was characterised by extreme frustration and anger. Thirty-year-olds/​H. sapiens had entered the rapidly deteriorating stage in the development of upset where they were brought into contact with the destructive and depressing horror of being either excessively upset in the case of the resigned, or having had their innocence destroyed and thus also become overly upset if they were unresigned. Upset was becoming overwhelming everywhere.

It was at this point that the radical measures alluded to earlier had to be implemented to contain the upset in the world, with the first solution to practice self discipline of the upset.

Fully aware that upset was not desirable we had been trying to, with varying success, practice self-restraint of our upset ever since it first appeared in our childhood. But what happened during our 30s when upset started to become seriously destructive of the fabric of our society was that self discipline became a critical part of our behaviour, something that everyone had to make sure they practiced. And so we learnt to manufacture a calm, controlled, even compassionate and considerate exterior, and to conceal the real extent of our, by now, inner savage fury from being so unjustly condemned by the Godly ideals of life. We, as we say, civilised our upset, brought it under control. Since this self discipline, and its civilising effect, has been the primary way of managing our extremely upset state and has been practiced since time immemorial, it has become, to a large degree, an automatic, instinctive element of human behaviour, so much so that we now hardly notice we are practicing it—to the extent that we are barely aware of just how upset we really are underneath our restrained exterior. As emphasised at the beginning of this Part, the truth is there is volcanic upset within us as a species from living for so long with the injustice of being condemned as evil, bad and worthless when we intuitively knew we weren’t but couldn’t explain why we weren’t. The Australian writer Morris West offered a rare honest insight into the extent of the upset that exists in all humans today when he wrote that ‘The disease of evil [now able to be understood as upset] is pandemic; it spares no individual, no society, because all are predisposed to it…I know that, given the circumstances and the provocation, I could commit any crime in the calendar’ (A View from the Ridge: The Testimony of a Pilgrim, 1996, p.78 of 143).

Through civility we not only concealed the extent of our anger and egocentricity, we also concealed the extent of our alienation—the extent of our estrangement from our original, upset-free, happy, innocent true selves. We manufactured smiles and politely greeted acquaintances with ‘Good morning’ and asked ‘How are you?’ and talked about totally non-confronting subjects, such as the weather. In order not to be overcome by the true negativity of life under the duress of the human condition we have had to, as it’s said, ‘put on a brave face’, ‘keep our chin up’, ‘stay positive’, and ‘keep up appearances’. But while such civility and positivity made living together possible, it was an extreme form of pretence—of being what we were not. But, in turn, while this falseness was highly corrosive of any young innocents looking on, it was far less destructive than allowing our real upset to express itself and has therefore been a very necessary and effective tool. However, after millennia of use, our civility now hides the extent to which we have blocked out the truth of our upset, corrupted, alienated condition. So when, for instance, we donned scary masks we were, in effect, exorcising our real upset self—we were being honest about ourselves; we were admitting that ‘This is what I am really like, this is who I’ve become.’ R.D. Laing spoke the truth about just how corrupted our species has become when he said, ‘The condition of alienation…is the condition of the normal man…between us and It [our true self or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete.’ It needs to be emphasised that adopting self discipline did not mean we had stopped the corrupting search for knowledge, we had just decided to try not to allow any expression or manifestation of our corruption to show. When the 40-year-old stage is explained in more detail shortly we will see that when upset developed even further, some individuals were forced to abandon, and even side against, the corrupting search for knowledge in a far more drastic attempt to slow the increase in their upset by becoming ‘born again’ to pseudo idealistically supporting some form of idealism. (This is, of course, the ‘fraud’ stage that featured in the aforementioned Japanese proverb.)

So while civility did have its place, it invariably meant bottling-up our frustrations and angers, which produced another problem of how then to relieve that pent-up state. And so, unable to be honest about our internal upset, we had to learn to valve off and relieve ourselves in ways that weren’t destructive. The origin of humour, for example, has never been able to be properly explained, but once it is understood how false humans became the source of humour becomes very clear. For the most part, adults maintain a carefully constructed facade of denial, but every now and then a mistake is made, we ‘slip-up’, and the truth of our real situation is revealed, providing the basis for humour. Occasionally situations occurred where the extreme denial, self-deception, delusion, artificiality, alienation became apparent and transparent, and in those moments the truth of that immense falseness was exposed for what it really was—so farcical it was funny; in fact, a ‘joke’. When someone tripped or fell over, for instance, it was humorous because suddenly their carefully constructed, civilised image of togetherness disintegrated. We take humour for granted now as being a natural part of our make-up, but there was a time when there was no humour because prior to becoming false there was nothing very comic or silly or funny or absurd about humans to laugh about or make fun of.

Swearing has been another way of tearing down and breaking free from the extreme dishonesty of our condition—because in what is a stark measure of just how dishonest humans have been, we don’t even have an everyday word for all the evasions and dishonest denials and delusions we practice every minute of the day, except for the swear word ‘bullshit’, or ‘BS’ or ‘bull’ or ‘crap’. To understand why ‘fuck’ is such a powerful swear word we only have to acknowledge the truth of what sex really is. As explained, while sex at its noblest level was something that marvellously complemented the human journey and as such has truly been an act of love, it has, nevertheless, at base been about attacking innocence (which women represent) for innocence’s unjust condemnation of humans’ (especially men’s) lack of innocence. ‘Fuck’ means destroy or ruin, and what is being destroyed or ruined or sullied or degraded or violated is innocence or purity. Sex has been such a preoccupation of humans and yet everyone lives in denial of the truth that it is, at base, an attack on innocence. This makes sex one of the biggest lies and thus jokes of all, which is why using the word ‘fuck’ is such a powerful attack on the world of lies, and thus such a powerful swear word.

As emphasised, however, civilising our upset didn’t stop its development, it only concealed and helped contain it. It was inevitable then, that as the corrupting search for knowledge continued, levels of upset were only going to escalate until eventually, by our late 30s, we/​H. sapiens were embroiled in a rage of hate and anger. Because of the compounding effect of upset we became immensely embattled, ‘punch-drunk’ in fact, which made us absolutely desperate about our situation. On reaching this state of extreme anger and destructiveness we began to hate even ourselves. Life had become both personally and socially unbearable, an untenable position that produced a crisis, the well-known ‘mid-life crisis’ of the early 40-year-old, or, in the case of humanity, the emergence some 50,000 years ago of H. sapiens sapiens.