Part 7:4 How Selfish did we become?

While anger, egocentricity and alienation are the three fundamental components of upset, selfishness, while a subset of egocentricity, is such an important aspect of upset it could be identified as a fourth fundamental component in its own right. So, before describing how alienated we became, a description of the ever-increasing levels of cynicism and selfishness in human society will now be included.

In Part 6:4 I described at some length how egocentricity has been increasing at such a rapid rate that the extremely egocentric ‘power addict’ state was becoming so universal that it was about to render all parts of the world dysfunctional. Another aspect of this end play, terminal situation facing the human race was the spread of selfishness, especially cynicism.

As the Adam Stork story reveals, the human race started out in a state of innocence. Our species was once instinctively orientated to behaving in a cooperative, unconditionally selfless, loving, altruistic, consider-the-welfare-of-the-whole-above-your-own-welfare way, however, as the upsetting/​corrupting search for knowledge developed, humans naturally became more and more adapted to that upset/​corrupted life. It follows that, given this trajectory, humans could eventually become so adapted to an upset/​corrupt world that they were born cynical, to a degree instinctively expecting the world to be so corrupt that if you behaved selflessly your goodness would only be exploited by others and therefore you should look after yourself, be selfish.

The section ‘The Denial-Free History of the Human Race’ from my book A Species In Denial (see <www.humancondition.com/​asid-the-denial-free-history-of-the-human-race>) describes in some detail how 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 selfless, all-loving 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 (‘innocence’ being lack of exposure to and familiarity with the upset state of the human condition), 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 Parts 3:8 and 3:11B, the Austrian 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…[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’ (Listen, Little Man!, 1948, p.8 of 109).

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 operate 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 the fact that people became adapted to the human condition was to describe individuals or families or races 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 in the extremely upset-adapted, human-condition-afflicted, corrupt world. As mentioned in Part 5:2, Sir Laurens van der Post once described how a member of the relatively innocent Bushmen race 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!’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.236 of 253). Sir Laurens was 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 race 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 Caucasian races. For example, I once saw a documentary in which a black 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, Caucasian races aren’t as cynical, toughened and opportunistic—selfish—as races from even more ancient civilisations, like the Chinese from the ancient Yellow River valley civilisation, 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.

As mentioned in Part 4:4E, when the problem of prejudice was briefly introduced, the situation in Fiji provides a good case-study of what invariably took place when races of varying degrees of upset cohabitated.

In the late 1800s British colonists brought Indians to Fiji as indentured labour to farm sugar cane, and so 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 activities as playing music, drinking the sedating kava and eating taro roots from their gardens. It is akin to a 20-year-old, or thereabouts, equivalent race 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, opportunistic 50-year-old, or thereabouts, equivalent race.

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, therefore, can’t legitimately compete with such races, so when they do see an opportunity to obtain money or power they can’t resist taking it, whether it’s rightfully due or not. When my partner 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. At the other end of the spectrum of alienation, however, there are races where everyone is so upset-adapted and cynically selfish that graft and despotism is similarly endemic in their societies. In early 2011 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—a revolutionary wave that continues today. 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 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 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. As mentioned in Part 6:4, although Anglo-Saxons come from a small, resource-deficient island country, they have been so operable and thus successful and thus influential that they have 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 mag. 7 July 1997).

I should clarify that if all the humans who have lived in the last 50,000 years belong to the 40-year-old, Born-Again, Pseudo Idealistic Late Adulthood Stage of Adolescent Humanity, as is asserted in Part 3:11E where the stages of humanity’s maturation are described, then why am I referring to humans of today as inhabiting all these different stages, such as the 20-year-old, or thereabouts, equivalent stage, or the 50-year-old, or thereabouts, equivalent stage? The answer is that these descriptions refer to another level of refinement of the already established stages of maturation. To elaborate, while the first T-model Ford car had all the basic elements of a car in place, that didn’t mean the elements could not become much more refined over time. Well, the relatively innocent hunter-gatherer Bushmen people of the Kalahari have all the basic adjustments in place for managing extreme upset. They are, for instance, civilised, instinctively restrained from living out all their upsets; they don’t generally attack when they feel frustrated and angry. They have a form of marriage to artificially contain sexual adventurousness. They clothe their genitals to dampen lust. The women love to wear adornments such as jewellery; they are adapted to being sex objects. The men love hunting animals; they find relief from attacking innocence. Men and women don’t relate to each other as well as they do with their own gender; there is a lack of understanding between the sexes. They make jokes about their fraudulent state; they employ a sense of humour to lighten the load of the agony of being so corrupted and false. They employ fatigue-inducing dance to access their repressed soul. In short, they are members of ‘Born-Again, Pseudo Idealistic Late Adulthood Stage of Adolescent Humanity’. But while they have these basic adjustments for managing extreme upset firmly in place, they are still a relatively innocent race compared to other more human-condition-embattled-and-adapted races living today.

Before continuing to describe how races of humans have become more or less adapted to the upset state of the human condition, I should mention some of the human-condition-avoiding, denial-based reasons that have been put forward to explain the dysfunctionality of African countries like Kenya. 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—basically that black African races aren’t any more innocent than European races and will, in time, be able to develop functional democracies. In keeping with this theory, instead of using terms like ‘First, Second and Third World countries’, the current politically correct description for the different states of functionality of countries is to refer to them as being either ‘developing’ or ‘developed’. But if time, rather than degrees of innocence, or lack thereof, was the issue then 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, selfish greed and resulting dysfunction, brought the world’s economy to its knees—and they continue to undermine its stability. Another excuse for the dysfunctionality of these African societies was to blame colonialism. As I mentioned in Part 3:11C, colonialism certainly had negative repercussions 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 for human societies in that it oppressed individual freedoms/​liberties. Of course, you can manage humans by tying them all down, as was done in tribal situations and communist/​socialist regimes, but then 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. Colonialism gave individuals many freedoms they hadn’t had that the individual then had to manage—but the challenge for humans has 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 sensitive and naive about life under the duress of the human condition, or too toughened, soul/​innocence-destroyed, cynical and selfish.

In one of his famous speeches, Sir James Darling (the denial-free thinking prophet who was headmaster at Geelong Grammar School when I was a student there) 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 his address to The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1960 Sir James said: ‘The quality which, above all other, needs to be cultivated [in education] is sensitivity…[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 man…He may [become overly selfish 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 [find himself too innocent to cope with the upset world, like the Bushman who died in jail]…or he may “take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing [all the selfish, corrupt behaviours] end them”…[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 to the omega of God’s [ordered] purpose for him…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 [against all the 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, 1962, pp.28-36). 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-year-old equivalent state represents.

The end result of this, in truth, very obvious difference in functionality under the duress of the human condition was that the less functional and thus less materially successful races naturally became extremely resentful and thus angry towards the more materially successful races. Their self-esteem suffered so much that angry retaliations, like the flying of those planes into The Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, occurred—Osama Bin Laden actually said the 9/11 attacks ‘were revenge for Western humiliation of Muslims’ (TIME mag. 7 May 2012). The real debate about both the horrific inequality in the world and about the terrorism and frightening instability in the world requires analysis of the differences in upset-adaption or alienation-from-soul between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures, but until the human condition could be explained and the upset state of the human condition compassionately understood and thus defended that debate could not take place. The problem of selfishness in the world was not being addressed honestly and thus properly anywhere.

While holidaying with Annie in Fiji in 1997 a resident there 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 everyone involved is 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 Caucasians are the toughened, but not too toughened, too insensitive or too selfish, more operational 30year-old equivalent race, while the native Fijians are the 20-year-old equivalent, overly innocent race. 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 involved in the battle longer and/or more intensely than others. If you 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.

Again, such admissions of the relative innocence, or lack thereof, of different individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures have, until now, had to be avoided because they led to prejudiced views that some individuals, races, genders, 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, all humans are equally good—because, as understanding of the human condition finally makes clear, upset was the inevitable result of the necessary and heroic battle humanity had to wage in order to find knowledge. Upset is not a bad, evil state, but a good, heroic one. Trying to manage differences in upset between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures has been extremely difficult, but once the prejudiced views of some individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures being either good or bad, superior or inferior, more worthwhile or less worthwhile, arose terrible atrocities and injustices very often followed. For instance, in the last century alone, we have seen the Holocaust in which approximately six 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; Idi Amin literally 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 Sept. 1972); the just mentioned terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; the racial segregation of apartheid in South Africa that was enforced between 1948-1993; and the ‘White Australia Policy’, which in essence restricted ‘non-white’ immigration to Australia and wasn’t completely abolished until 1973.

The difficulty in managing differences between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures is that not all discrimination between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures has necessarily been wrong, although they could be said to be fundamentally unjust. For example, Geelong Grammar School was originally a school for boys only. It was only after Sir James Darling’s tenure as headmaster ended that it became co-educational. It could be argued, and probably was, that having a boys-only policy was discriminatory and unjust, but I believe Sir James Darling’s approach of educating boys and girls separately was right. With so much upset in humans, placing boys and girls together during their senior school years is too distracting and problematical, especially if you are trying to preserve and foster innocence, as I believe schooling should be focused on doing. Even though there is a need, as Sir James said, to cultivate qualities of toughness as well as preserving innocent, soulful sensitivity, I agree with Sir James’ belief that the central, ‘prime’ objective in raising new generations has to be the preservation of their innocent, sound original instinctive self or soul for as long as possible. As Sir James said about schooling, ‘the needs of the moment demand more than they ever have done the most acute sensitivity…It should be the prime object of education…to develop this sensitivity…the truly sensitive mind is both susceptible and penetrating: it is open to new ideas, and it seeks truth at the bottom of the well’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, 1962, p.63-64 of 223). Sir James similarly said, ‘It is the awakening and vivifying of the conscience…which ought to be the chief purpose of a Church school…because…conscience [our instinctive self or soul’s moral sense] is the executive part of consciousness’ (ibid. p.96). (I should include an aside here that now that we can admit that sex, as humans have practiced it, has been all about attacking innocence—as was explained in Part 7:1—we need to carefully review the whole issue of the interaction between boys and girls. Indeed, we are going to realise that a significant amount of the rapid increase in upset in generations today has been due to sexual liberalism. Under the unbearable burden of the human condition sex has been a wonderful way of relieving our upset, of making our lives more interesting and exciting, and even of expressing our love for someone, but it also involved the destruction of innocence. Sex has been a medium by which the more innocent have been psychologically destroyed by the more upset, and no one has been admitting this—and certainly no one has been telling children this. Magazines for young people, for example, are full of presentations about how to make yourself more attractive—for sex—and stories about how to improve your sex life, etc, etc. It is extraordinary how unrestrained sex has become and the consequences are contributing greatly to the drab and miserable lives of young people everywhere. As Darling said, ‘conscience’, soul, ‘is the executive part of consciousness’: destroy the innocent soul and life becomes uninspired, empty, drab and meaningless.)

In another example of an argument existing for discrimination, in Section 4:1 of Freedom Expanded: Book 2 I describe how incredibly important the survival of Celtic, Irish innocence was in Australia—that its presence basically allowed the human condition to be solved and humanity saved from extinction—and the fact is, the survival of that Celtic, Irish innocence was in large measure due to the extremely unjust, discriminatory ‘White Australia Policy’. As has been emphasised, discrimination in the form of the management of human interactions based on levels of innocence or lack thereof is not in itself bad or immoral; after all, we go to great lengths to protect the innocence of children. What is wrong or immoral is to base those management decisions on judgments about the goodness or badness, superiority or inferiority, of different levels of innocence or lack thereof. Unable to explain the human condition, explain the good reason for the upset, soul-and-innocence-destroyed, corrupted state of humans, any acknowledgement of upset invariably led to those who were more upset being, and feeling, condemned as bad or inferior or worthless, and, in response, retaliating, in which case no differentiation according to levels of upset could afford to be tolerated. The ‘White Australia Policy’ was wrong and couldn’t be tolerated not because humans aren’t differently upset, but because it led to prejudiced/​wrong views about some races being better or superior than others, which often, in fact invariably, led to serious and damaging consequences.

As I mentioned in Parts 4:1, 4:4E and 5:1, 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’ (Plato The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.244 of 405), 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’ (p.286). Completely ‘obvious’ as Plato’s idea was of having the most innocent run society, such honesty was untenable and couldn’t be tolerated because differentiation between individuals according to degrees of alienation or soundness left those no longer innocent unjustly condemned as bad and unworthy. And, as was mentioned in Part 4:4C, it wasn’t as though we didn’t know who was soul-corrupted, upset and alienated and who was relatively innocent—to ignore, deny, repress and, in the extreme, persecute to the point even, in the case of Christ, of crucifying innocence, as we have done because we found their honest, truthful innocent soundness too confronting, we had to first be able to recognise it. It would have been as easy, indeed, probably much easier, to design exams that tested a person’s level of alienation or soundness or soulfulness quotient, their SQ, than it was to design exams that tested their intelligence quotient or IQ.

Again, until we were able to explain the human condition and by so doing defend and understand the upset, corrupted state, any acknowledgement of who was upset and who wasn’t only led to prejudice, led to the more innocent condemning the less innocent as bad or unworthy or even evil.

Not only have the expressions of prejudice been innumerable and varied, they go right back to when extreme upset first developed in humans—as perfectly summarised in that greatest of all reservoirs of denial-free truth, the Bible, in the aforementioned story of Cain and Abel: ‘Abel kept flocks, [he lived the nomadic life of a shepherd, staying close to nature and innocence] and Cain worked the soil [he cultivated crops and domesticated animals and as a result was able to become settled and develop towns and cities and through greater interaction with other humans became increasingly upset]…Cain was [became] very angry, and his face was downcast [he became depressed about his upset state and]…Cain attacked his [relatively innocent and thus unwittingly confronting and condemning] brother Abel and killed him’ (Gen. 4:2, 5, 8).

The simple fact is, the longer the battle to find understanding went on, the more upset humans became—and the simple fact that flows from this is that those people and races who have been in the thick of the battle a long time will be more upset—and also more instinctively adapted to upset, including becoming instinctively cynical and selfish—than those who haven’t been in the thick of the battle for as long—and the simple fact that flows from that is that all manner of insecurities, inequalities and frustrations are going to arise from those differences.

Everywhere innocence has been affected by upset, and vice versa. As explained in Part 7:1, men have oppressed women because of women’s relative innocence. Older people have tended to limit young people’s access to power and position because young people could be too innocent and naive about the realities of life under the duress of the human condition, and it would also involve relinquishing their own power base. As mentioned in Part 4:4E when the problem of prejudice was briefly introduced, when we get up in the morning we are much fresher, more enthusiastic and idealistic than we are by the end of the day, such that our end-of-the-day-just-want-some-luxury-self wouldn’t entertain the more optimistic and altruistic enterprises of our more soulful, socially healthy and operational morning-self. By evening, most people are in need of a stiff drink to escape the tribulations of their day’s exertions under the duress of the human condition. Whatever idealistic, selfless, soul-inspired enterprises they might have been thinking about in the morning have, by day’s end, been replaced by a selfish preoccupation with a need for ego-reinforcement from others, relief from exertion and for escape from the whole horror of life under the duress of the human condition. The most productive and creative time of the day is when we are, as we say, ‘fresh’, which is the morning. That is the time of day when I do all my writing. As the day wears on I quickly lose my enthusiasm and inspiration. My life has followed the same path. Albert Einstein once commented that ‘a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so’ (Selig Brodetsky, ‘Newton: Scientist and Man’, Nature, 1942, Vol.150), and certainly, while my most creative years were not ‘before the age of 30’ they were very soon afterwards when I had accumulated enough experience of life under the duress of the human condition but still had lots of youthful enthusiasm and soul-guided inspiration. Indeed, my early 30s was a period of absolutely fabulous creativity when, in a few short years between 1975, when I was 30 and began to actively write down my thinking on the problem of the human condition, to 1983, when I was 38, I solved all the great questions in biology; it was during this time that I explained the human condition (as summarised in Part 3:2), explained the meaning of existence (Part 8:1), explained how we humans acquired our unconditionally selfless moral instincts (Part 8:4B), and explained how and when we humans became conscious (Part 8:4C). As I mentioned in Part 4:14, in 1983 I went to London in an unsuccessful attempt to interest the leading science journals in the world at that time, namely Nature and New Scientist, in the complete synthesis—my submission, which can be read on our website at <www.humancondition.com/nature>, was, however, unsuccessful because denial-based, mechanistic science would not tolerate my denial-free ideas. Again, I need to emphasise that finding these insights was due to the fact that I was thinking in a denial-free way and doesn’t at all mean that I am in any way special or gifted. The point being made here is that having to live with all the stresses from a deeply upset, human-condition-afflicted world has meant that in the course of one day in the life of a human he or she regresses from a state of fresh, boundless energy and enthusiasm to a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. Such has been the overall change in the mindset of humans over one day, over a lifetime, over generations, and over the whole two million year upsetting journey of humanity from its original state of innocent idealism to its variously embattled, punch-drunk, distressed, soul-exhausted state today! Everywhere that the battle of the human condition has been raging there have been differences in upset with all manner of consequences, some horrifically tragic.

What people are really doing 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 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. Having solved nothing at a fundamental level, the society will invariably remain dysfunctional, resulting in yet another flood of refugees from that country to countries 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 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. The other form of tyranny that developed to contain excessive cynical selfishness was strict obedience to fundamentalist interpretations of religious teachings—as has been the case in many parts of the Arab world.

In the old human-condition-afflicted-pre-TRANSFORMED world, it was not realistic to believe you could make a family with a selfish power addict father functional—because it is a contradiction in terms: you can’t be dysfunctionally selfish and at the same time be functionally selfless. Similarly, therefore, if there wasn’t a significant proportion of functional 30-and-40-year-old equivalents in a society then that society was not going to be functional. 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 where they settled. The Pygmies and the Bushmen resent the Bantu for being more operational and materially successful than they are, and in turn the Bantu resent the Caucasians for being more operational and materially successful than they are—and in turn the Caucasians resent the Jews for being more operational and materially successful than they are. Everywhere the inevitable differences in upset between individuals, races, genders, 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 under that almost impossible situation.

We can see then in hindsight that colonisation under the rule of 30-year-old equivalents did make significant sense—as Sir James Darling was quoted as saying earlier in Part 6:4 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’. 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. Although ‘stereotype’ concepts about the character of different races have been much denigrated and dismissed in the human-condition-avoiding, denial-compliant world as unfounded, there was often truth in them, which is not surprising given such concepts were conventional, widely held. In fact, most of the time I’m expressing truths that we all at least intuitively know but haven’t been able to adequately express—that is, express in a way that wasn’t prejudicially unbalanced—because we haven’t had the compassionate framework of understanding of upset needed to safely acknowledge them. Without the defence for upset it was virtually impossible to talk about upset in a way that didn’t infer that it was somehow bad. As will be emphasised next in Part 7:5, with understanding of the human condition at last found the essential equality of goodness of all people is at last established. While all humans are variously upset, all humans are equally good because upset was a result of an unavoidable and necessary battle humanity had to wage to find knowledge. The equality of goodness of all people is a first-principle-established, fundamental and universal truth now. We can now explain, understand and know that that is a fundamental truth. The prejudiced views of some individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations or cultures being either superior or inferior, good or bad, are eliminated by understanding of the human condition. With this truth of the fundamental equality of goodness of all people established it at last becomes safe—and necessary if we are to understand ourselves and by so doing ameliorate and heal our upset lives—to truthfully analyse human behaviour by recognising differences in upset between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures. The liberation of the human race is unavoidably and necessarily also ‘judgment day’, exposure day, honesty day, truth day, transparency day, revelation day—the time when ‘your nakedness will be exposed’ (Isa. 47:3). Our species’ liberation from terminal alienation and thus extinction comes at a price, which is exposure of all our falseness/​lies/​denials, but that price is not too high because the TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING allows everyone to joyously cope with that exposure.

During January and February 2011, the British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 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’ (UK’s Daily Mail, 11 Feb. 2011). 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 tended 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 Part 7:1, 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 how difficult 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.

Add envy of the material success of the more operational to the situation where the more upset found women’s beauty overly exciting and the whole situation became unbearable for the more upset—especially when, with the advent of television and the internet, they could actually see the material success and the exposed beauty of women. Imagine how distressing it has been for the less materially successful to see such luxurious surroundings and the beautifully groomed, half-naked, Californian beach babes on television programs like Baywatch. The envy and resentment in less materially successful countries of all the luxury in the West that television had made them aware of is palpable in this stark, firsthand account from the psychiatrist Professor Clancy McKenzie: ‘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 and 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).

Aside from the fact that with the speed-up of technology-led globalisation (especially phone, television and internet technologies) no longer can any group live unaffected by and thus independent of other groups, the truth is the stresses arising from the upset state of the human condition have become so great that even if different races/​cultures/​societies could stay separate (as Abraham Lincoln advocated at one stage in his US presidency to stop the friction between white and black Americans), the differences in the level of upset between members of the same race/​culture/​society has made cohesion impossible even within those races/​cultures/​societies. Indeed, the reality is that upset is now so great everywhere that people can’t even live with themselves, let alone anyone else. As mentioned in Part 3:11H, Australia has been, and, to a degree, still is one of the most sheltered and isolated and thus innocent countries left in the world, but even our society is on the brink of disintegration because of people’s inability to live with each other, as this 2011 news report, which featured on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, indicated: ‘The well-being of Australia’s children and young people has declined alarmingly in the past decade—and plunging marriage rates are partly to blame, a major study has found. Growing rates of child abuse and neglect, of children being placed in foster care, and of teenage mental health problems, including a rise in hospital admissions for self-harm, are rooted in the rise of one-parent families and de facto couples, violent and unstable relationships, and divorce, the report says’ (‘Decline in marriage blamed for neglect’, 6 Sept. 2011). It is end game wherever we like to look in the world. We have reached the point where only understanding of the human condition and the TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING that leaves the whole upset state of the human condition behind forever can save the world. What finally brings all the horror of life under the duress of the human condition to an end is the TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING.

Managing upset was always going to become impossible once upset reached a certain level. Only the finding of understanding of the human condition and the TRANSFORMED STATE that it made possible could save the human race from terminal levels of upset. We certainly have been, as Richard Neville said, ‘locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’. Thankfully the ‘race’ was won by ‘self discovery’, but it was a very near thing!

Tragically, because of our monumental insecurity about our human condition, we humans have a better understanding of the behaviour of elephants and of tiny little insects like tree-hoppers, and even of grass, than we do about our own behaviour, so if you would like to learn more about the social effects of our different states of upset read ‘The Denial-Free History of the Human Race’ chapter in my book A Species In Denial. (To read this chapter, go to <www.humancondition.com/​asid-the-denial-free-history-of-the-human-race>.) My biology professor at Sydney University, Charles Birch, was making this point about the almost complete black-out—actually, ‘block-out’—of any understanding of the all-important subject of our human behaviour when, in launching our WTM website in 1998 at the Australian Museum in Sydney, he said in his speech about the importance of our work that ‘We [humanity] are drowning in information—just look at the internet—but we are starving for wisdom’ (16 Oct. 1998).

Indeed, given this need for ‘wisdom’ in this all-important subject area of human behaviour, I should conclude this description of the different levels of upset in races of humans with the following balancing overview from the ‘The Denial-Free History of the Human Race’ essay.

‘With understanding of the human condition it at last becomes possible to explain psychologically what was actually happening when history books talked of civilisations having ‘peaked’ and become ‘decadent’. 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’, however, inevitably, they entered a more corrupted ‘decadent’ stage. The Mediterranean, Middle East and Indian civilisations 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 began the civilisation of the ‘known world’, for example they invented the wheel, mathematics and writing. 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, denial-free thinkers or prophets.

With understanding of the human condition the various stages of soul corruption can be compassionately understood. To become corrupted was an unavoidable consequence of having to participate in humanity’s heroic journey to defy ignorance and find understanding, ultimately self-understanding. To illustrate how races progress from innocence to corruption of soul I have used [in ‘The Denial-Free History of the Human Race’ essay] the history of the Aryan Anglo-Saxons and Celts. I have done this because they are currently in their ‘peak’ state of contributing to the human journey to enlightenment, and because that journey is in its crucial final stage where a great deal of honest explanation of the events that are taking place is needed. However, I could have chosen the history of the Aryan Greeks and Romans, the Aryan Indians, the Middle Eastern Semites, the Chinese (who during their most creative stage contributed to the human journey such wonderful inventions as paper, moveable type, the compass and gunpowder) and other races of Asia, or the Aztecs and Incas of Central and South America to illustrate the same journey. Each of their rich histories would have shown the same pattern of progressing from a state of innocence through an operational, exceptionally creative 30-year-old equivalent stage and on to a more corrupted, soul-burnt-out, selfish, cynical, ‘decadent’ state.

Every civilisation has contributed to the advance of knowledge. 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 or decadence the various civilisations were at, so it is in truth meaningless passing out accolades to any particular individual, race or civilisation. For example, I have employed the commonly used terms of ‘East’ and ‘West’ descriptions for the world’s different civilisations but that Europe-centric view is in truth unjustly prejudiced.

It should also be emphasised that even races at the more corrupted end of the alienation spectrum still contribute to the human journey. Every individual and every race always sought to contain and minimise the negative aspects of their particular condition and develop and maximise the positive aspects of that condition. The 40-year-old equivalent, or thereabouts, Italians, for instance, despite having progressed past their ‘peak’, still contribute to the human journey on many fronts. For example, their mature sophistication has made them masters in the creative world of design.’

I might add, to what was said in the above extract from ‘The Denial-Free History of the Human Race’ essay, a balancing comment regarding my earlier statement about the Jewish race having benefited from living amongst more innocent, soulful, selfless 30-and-40-year-old equivalent races. In Part 3:11C, when analysing the graph of The Development of Mental Cleverness, I mentioned that the graph indicated that brain volume rose rapidly from two million years ago onwards, only to plateau towards the end of that two million year period, and that anthropologists haven’t been able to account for why this growth in brain volume plateaued, however, with understanding of the human condition, we can now explain the slowdown: it 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. The average IQ today represents that relatively safe conscience-subordinate compromise. It is true that the ability to find answers didn’t necessarily accompany increased intelligence because, as 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 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 collect together and list all the contributions to the human race that the Jews have made but it would be very significant. 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.

Basically, 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 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 emphasised, what brings all the horror of life under the duress of the human condition to an end is the TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING.

Before beginning the next Part I want to include the following piece of writing because it adds to some of the points I have been making. In thinking about the obvious, but historically denied, truth that individuals and races do differ in how adapted to upset they have become, I have written that basketball players are typically very tall because the game is geared towards tall players, and cars are streamlined to cut down air resistance—the point is, everything becomes adapted to its environment. Humans have been involved in an upsetting battle, so the longer humans have been in the battle and/or the more intensely they have been exposed to it, the more affected by, and adapted to upset they will have become. It’s simply the truth. All I am saying is not ‘simply not true’, or ‘maybe only somewhat true’, as the denial-complying, defensive mind will try to assert, but both obviously true and extremely true—in fact, much truer than I’m even capable of describing it as—maybe I should try: what I’m saying is as obvious as the sky is blue. All I ever do when I’m thinking is let my mind say what is obvious. As I mentioned in Part 3:11C, I call it ‘thinking like a stone’, or ‘thinking like a child’. I have learnt over and over again that if I can’t solve a problem I am thinking about, explain something, it’s because I’m not thinking simply and straight-forwardly enough. ‘Let your inner, soul-guided true self say the obvious and you will have the answer’, is what I say to myself, because it will make sense of what I am looking at and trying to find the explanation for—what did Sir James Darling say, ‘‘conscience…is the executive part of consciousness’. That is how I found the explanation of the human condition and the hundreds of other answers I have found.

I should explain that through understanding the human condition we can understand why this ‘thinking like a stone/​child’ was necessary. We humans are so saturated with the insecurity caused by the issue of the human condition that all our thinking is tainted by it. The truth is, we hardly want to think honestly at all, which means we hardly want to think—truly, Bertrand Russell wasn’t exaggerating when he said, ‘Many people would sooner die than think.’ With our minds so trained and so steeped in dishonesty the only way to avoid the dishonesty is to not engage in any conventional thinking—you have to avoid that tainted practice, start again, go back to the most elementary thoughts and stay with them, ‘think like a stone/​child would think’, say the simple, obvious, untainted, unadulterated truth. And I should say about all my thinking, that my job, as the deliverer 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 of the past. As I have emphasised, we get the truth up and then we move on. We leave the old effectively dead, dishonest, human-condition-afflicted world behind forever. That is the indescribable magnificence of the TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE STATE. As Bono sang, ‘I’ve conquered my past / 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.’ Also, as Beethoven’s symphony anticipated, ‘Joy’, ‘Joyful, as a hero to victory!’, ‘Join in our jubilation!’, ‘We enter, drunk with fire, into your [understanding’s] sanctuary…Your magic reunites…All men become brothers…All good, all bad…Be embraced, millions! This kiss for the whole world!’

Honestly, ‘who’s fucked and who isn’t fucked’—it just doesn’t fucking matter anymore. WE ARE OUT OF THERE—GONE—THAT’S ALL OVER, IT’S HISTORY. WE, THE HUMAN RACE, IS FREE! 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 have all become well and truly fucked/​stuffed/​corrupted/​upset anyway, and it all doesn’t matter now because we are out of there, we have won the match and we 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 gone, soon the human race will be psychologically healed. It is all history now, ‘the ruins to the right of [us], will soon have lost sight of [us]’.