Part 7:2 How Angry did we become?

Understanding the extent to which we have become upset after having to live on this planet unjustly condemned for two million years will help us appreciate the magnificence of the solution to our upset state of the TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE WAY OF LIVING. Of the three main elements of our upset—anger, egocentricity (which our selfishness is a subset of) and alienation—we will begin by examining how angry we became.

The truth is, we humans have been capable of horrendous atrocities. Our planet is encrusted with the blood spilt by our immense anger. To provide just a single example, in one book (and it doesn’t matter what its title is because such examples are innumerable) it is described how members of a persecuted faith were ‘blown from cannon mouths, hacked to death by axes and swords, and led to their deaths with burning candles inserted into open wounds in their bodies’. I have previously read about this particular incident, which occurred in Persia (now Iran) in the mid-1800s. The victims had their stomachs removed while they were still alive, had large saucer shaped candles placed inside their stomach cavity and were then forced to walk the streets until they died.

While we have learnt to civilise our upset, disguise it, underneath our manufactured facade of restrained peacefulness, even a manufactured happiness, lies volcanic anger—because the people who committed those atrocities are us, humans; within the make-up of all humans is a capacity for extraordinary violence. But we can at last understand the origin of this cauldron of anger that lies within us humans: we have been unjustly condemned for two million years! We have had to live on a planet where everything on it—innocent nature, the integrative theme of existence, others more innocent than ourselves, indeed the whole natural world—was screaming at us, ‘You are bad, evil, God (Integrative Meaning) defying and defiling, worthless, destructive, meaningless monsters!’ We never were those things, but we couldn’t explain why we weren’t! In reality, we were the opposite of evil—we were the absolute heroes of the whole story of life on Earth, but we had no way of arguing our case! Could a more horrible torture be imagined? And could you imagine one that had to be endured for so long? It would hardly seem possible.

It is difficult to think of an analogy to describe this torturous existence, but just imagine living in a community where, for instance, it is decreed that no one can plant roses, but for some reason that you can’t explain, you have to plant roses. What would happen? After a couple of days people would stop talking to you, then the shopkeepers would stop serving you, then children would start putting dead cats in your letterbox. And that is only after one week. Now try to imagine how two million years of such ostracism by our whole world would have impacted upon us. There must be an almost bottomless well of frustrated fury inside us humans! So it is fortunate, for the sake of our species’ survival, that over time the immensely upset human race did learn to civilise its upset—to restrain its anger, conceal it, hide it, contain it—but that upset, with all its volcanic anger, could never be eliminated until the dignifying and thus relieving understanding of it was found. Despite all our efforts to restrain, contain and disguise our upset it was always building, always intensifying, which means by now, two million years after upset began, the levels within us must be mountainous, which they are!

Indeed, like the Persian incident provided above, history abounds with heinous examples of unleashed upset; for instance, the thirteenth century Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan was certainly someone who lived out his upset to the full. He let it all hang out. Everyday he satisfied his anger through bloodletting, his egocentricity through domination of others, and his mind or spirit by blocking out any feeling of guilt or remorse emanating from his moral instincts. As Genghis Khan is reputed to have said, ‘Happiness lies in conquering one’s enemies, in driving them in front of oneself, in taking their property, in savouring their despair, in outraging their wives and daughters.’ And the Mongols did exactly that. They would attack vast cities and kill every person living there. They even employed specialised troops who knew all the desperate tricks people would use to try to escape, such as digging holes in which to hide. These troops would stay behind after the initial massacre and wait until those who were in hiding emerged and then they would kill them too. They were ruthless, leaving great mounds of human bones in their wake. Such is the level of fury inside of all humans now after two million years of having to live unjustly condemned on this planet.

Ralph Steadman’s The Lizard Lounge 1971

The drawings of the British cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Steadman have always managed to wrench to the surface the truth of the full horror of our human condition. In this particularly revealing drawing, titled The Lizard Lounge, Steadman depicts humans as reptiles. The drawing, which I referred to in Part 3:11F, first appeared in the American author Hunter S. Thompson’s classic 1971 novel about the utter madness of the human condition, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The arrogantly deluded, egocentric pretentiousness of all the male lizards, with their lurid looks and attitudes towards the victims of men’s upset, the sickly-looking old female crows, are all frighteningly truthful renditions of our human condition. The fierce expression of the central dragon is an honest depiction of just how angry humans, especially men, have become. We see beside the main dragon others who have lost their nerve and are ingratiating themselves to the main dragon, looking to him to do all the fighting.

Cartoon by Michael Leunig (detail) that appeared
in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper on 31 Dec. 1988

Notice how the ferociously angry expression on Steadman’s central dragon is exactly the same as the ferociously angry countenance Leunig gave Adam in his cartoon about our banishment from the Garden of Eden. We didn’t deserve to be banished from the Garden of Eden and in that cartoon Adam expresses just how resentful we humans became as a result.

But this is where men have got to—hollow eyes devoid of any sensitivity or empathy for anything real in the world, interested only in the glory that gives them relief from the criticism that they are bad when they are not; men who are totally punch-drunk with the need for power and glory; men who are taking the saying ‘give me liberty or give me death’ all the way to the wire or finishing line of ‘death’! ‘I want more glory, I want to buy 10 more companies, I’m going to conquer the world, I’ve trodden on so many people to get here and, if necessary, I’ll tread on as many more again to get the glory and relief I crave!’ We see in men’s clubs how incredibly arrogant men are. With their big armchairs and limousines parked out the back, they swagger about posturing here and there, careful not to tread on each other’s egos, only talking about the weather and the last football game, although occasionally saying ‘sell those shares’, ‘email my secretary’, ‘have your people get in touch with my people’, etc, etc. Men’s lives have been so artificial and fragile it is truly tragic.

Although it is mostly concealed from view by hundreds of thousands of years of practiced civility, the truth, as has been emphasised, is that there are volcanic levels of upset in humans. Our ability to at last admit this truth, because we can at last explain and thus understand it, means we can finally explain the ritual of human sacrifice, something that occurred in nearly all ancient cultures, including the Inca civilisation. While the sacrifice (actually murder) of our instinctive self or soul’s friends, the animals, which also often occurred, was shockingly offensive to our cooperatively-orientated, all-loving original instinctive self or soul, sacrificing (actually murdering) a fellow human was astronomically offensive to our soul. However, the upset in humans has been so great that only such astronomically shocking acts as murdering our fellow humans could exceed our astronomical levels of upset, and by exceeding the upset temporarily quell it. The associated feeling of shock overrode the feeling of upset and, in so doing, temporarily eliminated the latter. To illustrate, it was mentioned in Part 5:1 that the terrible bloodletting that took place during the Second World War represented such a valving off of upset that it brought about a period of freedom from upset, which gave rise to the freshness of the 1960s post-war generation. The ‘valving off of upset’ can be better understood as the souls of those involved being so revolted and shocked by all the bloodletting that the upset in those involved was, for a time, nullified.

It’s a phenomenon that also occurs when we shoot animals (and must have also occurred when our ancestors ritually sacrificed the life of an animal)—the shock to our soul of what hunting truly involves temporarily subsides the immense anger in us, which is why some people become addicted to shooting animals. In fact, in order for professional hunters of wildlife to shoot accurately they first have to learn to overcome the momentary mental ‘blackout’ that is brought about by the shock of what they are about to do. All hunters—indeed, anyone about to kill an animal—are aware, if they are honest, of the momentary ‘blackout’ their mind experiences when they are about to kill an animal.

Interestingly, referring to an article published in New Scientist magazine (20 Aug. 2005) titled ‘Sexy images cause temporary blindness’, the journalist Petra Newman wrote that ‘Research suggests that when shown erotic or gory images, the brain fails to process images seen immediately afterward. This phenomenon is known as “emotion-induced blindness.”…[or] short-vision blackout’ (from the publishing website Helium. Accessed April 2010: see <www.wtmsources.com/176>). While the researchers cited in the article weren’t able to explain this phenomenon, we now can. In Part 7:1 it was described how sex, as humans practice it, has been a way of attacking the innocence of women for their lack of appreciation of men’s upsetting battle to champion the conscious thinking self or ego over the ignorance of our original instinctive self or soul. Therefore, sex has been extremely offensive to our instinctive self or soul, which is why it causes the same ‘emotion-induced’ shock to our soul and thus temporary ‘blackout’ in our mind as killing animals or our fellow humans. The ‘emotion’ is our soul communicating extreme distress to our mind. Humans don’t remember sexual episodes very well and the reason we don’t is because sex, as currently practiced, is a violation of our soul and we don’t want to remember such violation.

The extraordinary extent of the innocence of our soul, and the extraordinary extent of the upset in humans now, especially in men, are two immensely confronting truths that understanding of the human condition now reveals, but what is so wonderful about the TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING is that we don’t have to fully confront the truth of the extent of the upset within us. Popular songs typically focus on the exciting potential of the human race, not on the truth of the extent of the devastation within us and around us, and they do that because it is the future of a human-condition-ameliorated world alone that is worth dreaming of, holding on to, and working towards. The abyss of confronting truths in the Humanity’s Situation drawing (shown in Part 6:1) is immense. It really is exposure day, honesty day, truth day, transparency day, revelation day, shake down day, come clean day—in fact ‘judgment day’—when we’ll be stripped naked and exposed, but thankfully there is a way to cope.