Part 3:4 But what was humans’ original instinctive orientation?

The Adam Stork analogy does of course raise the very important question of ‘But what was our species’ original instinctive orientation?’ It certainly wasn’t to the migratory flight path that Adam Stork is instinctively guided by, but, nevertheless, we humans must have had an instinctive orientation to life before we became a fully conscious species. All animals have an instinctive self and so do we. Carl Jung termed humans’ common, shared-by-all instincts ‘the collective unconscious’, as the following quote makes clear: ‘Jung regards the unconscious mind as not only the repository of forgotten or repressed memories, but also of racial memories. This is reasonable enough when we remember the definition of instinct as racial memory’ (International University Society’s Reading Course and Biographical Studies, Vol.6, c, 1940). Yes, we must have had an original instinctive orientation to life, and indeed that instinctive orientation must still exist within us, so what was our species’ original instinctive orientation—and what impact did it have on our human condition?

The answer to the first part of the question is that our instinctive orientation was to behaving in a completely cooperative, unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral, kind, considerate way. While we have learnt to deny this truth because it made living with our present immensely upset, corrupted angry, egocentric and alienated condition unbearable, all our mythologies, such as the story of the Garden of Eden, recognise that there was an upset-free, pre-human-condition-afflicted, innocent time in our species’ instinctive past, a time before the fabled ‘fall’, before we became, as we acknowledge, ‘corrupted’. In his 1990 book Memories & Visions of Paradise, the American author Richard Heinberg provides ample documentation of how our mythologies acknowledged the truth of a cooperative, pre-human-condition-afflicted, innocent past for humanity, writing that ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…has been lost…everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…innocence’ (pp.81-82 of 282). The eighth century BC Greek poet Hesiod also recognised this ‘Golden Age’ in our species’ past in his poem Works and Days: ‘When gods alike and mortals rose to birth / A golden race the immortals formed on earth…Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die / Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil / Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil / They with abundant goods ’midst quiet lands / All willing shared the gathering of their hands.’

So while we have learnt to deny the truth of an upset-free, pre-human-condition-afflicted past for the human race, deep down we do all intuitively know that our species did once live instinctively in a harmonious, cooperative, loving, idyllic way that was free of, and thus unaware or innocent of, upset—because we are all aware of that ‘voice’ within us, of our ideal-behaviour-expecting, fully altruistic, instinctive, ‘moral conscience’.

As has been emphasised, we humans have an undeniable capacity for brutality, hatred and aggression—which we can now understand is our psychologically upset state—but it is also very true that we have an enormous capacity for love, kindness and compassion. Furthermore, it is clear that we have an inbuilt awareness that such kind, considerate and caring behaviour is good and to be aspired to—after all, how could we have a sense of guilt, shame, recrimination and disgust about unkind thoughts and deeds committed by ourselves and others unless some deeper intrinsic part of ourselves felt at odds with such behaviour? The fact that we have called our born-with, instinctive awareness of what we have termed ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour our ‘moral’ sense, and its ‘voice’ or expression from within us, our ‘conscience’, is also indicative of this innate knowledge. This moral sense, this inclination to be caring and considerate of others, amounts to a social conscience. It is a capacity, in situations where the need arises, to behave altruistically, to put the welfare of others, ultimately of our community, above that of our own welfare—such as when we are prepared to volunteer to fight and, if necessary, die for our country in war. Indeed, while the most important question of all—‘the Holy Grail of the whole Darwinian revolution’, as some have described it—has been to explain the dilemma of the human condition, the other, almost equally great mystery facing biologists has been to explain the origins of this altruistic, unconditionally selfless moral sense in humans, for it is a truly extraordinary and special part of our makeup. So special, in fact, that the philosopher Immanuel Kant was inspired to have these fitting words inscribed on his tomb, ‘there are two things which fill me with awe…the starry heavens above us, and the moral law within us’. Charles Darwin was equally impressed when he said, ‘the moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871), acknowledging here that our moral sense is something unique to humans.

Biologists have long recognised that there are situations in nature where organisms appear to behave in an altruistic, unconditionally selfless way towards each other, such as worker bees and ants selflessly slaving for their colonies—and in situations such as those described above, where humans behave selflessly towards each other, such as soldiers giving their life for their country in war, or charity workers helping the poor. But in the case of worker ants and bees, biologists now recognise that their behaviour is a case of reciprocity, where favours are given only in return for another, which means the behaviour is not truly unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic. Being sterile and thus unable to reproduce themselves, the worker bees and ants ensure the genes for their existence are reproduced by selflessly helping their colony and its fertile queen, which means their selflessness is not unconditional because it is done to ensure their reproduction. Such reciprocal selflessness is not altruism but a subtle form of selfishness. So, in the case of humans, when we sacrifice ourselves for others are we similarly merely concerned with selfishly fostering the reproduction of our genes, or is our moral sense truly altruistic in nature? Both Kant’s and Darwin’s comments infer that our moral sense is something extraordinary in the natural world, that it is unique to humans and therefore not the subtle form of reciprocity-based genetic selfishness that occurs in other social species such as bees and ants—that our moral nature is a truly altruistic, unconditionally selfless capacity to act out of genuine love and concern for the greater good of humanity, and indeed all the constituents of our planet.

However, as mentioned in Part 3:1, virtually all biologists since Darwin have attributed humans’ competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour to savage animal instincts within us that supposedly date from a time when we had to fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate.

While excusing and thus relieving of our upset, divisive, competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour, the problem with this so-called Social Darwinism ‘explanation’ was that while it is true that we humans are capable of being extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive, we do seemingly have unconditionally selfless moral instincts—an instinctive nature that doesn’t comply with this Social Darwinist ‘selfish-competition-and-aggression-is-what-happens-in-nature-and-that’s-why-we-are-selfish’ account. As is fully described later in Part 4:12, in order to somehow explain this anomaly what many biologists initially tried to do was actually claim that our apparently unconditionally selfless moral instincts are a derivative of the same reciprocity-based, conditional selflessness that occurs in bee and ant colonies! Yes, the theory of Sociobiology and its progeny, Evolutionary Psychology, actually argued that human acts of selflessness, such as charity workers helping the poor, were actually a product of humans selfishly, albeit indirectly, fostering the reproduction of their own genes by helping others who share their genes—in which case the argument that nature is fundamentally selfish and that’s why we are was maintained.

Aside from the fact that the vast majority of those benefitting would be individuals entirely unrelated to those behaving selflessly, the other obvious problem with this reciprocity-based, conditionally-selfless ‘explanation’ for our moral nature is that it is entirely inconsistent with what we all know to be true if we are honest, and which all our mythologies, religious teachings, profound thinkers and great writers like Kant, and eminent biologists like Darwin, have recognised to be true, which is that we humans have an extraordinary unconditionally selfless, genuinely moral instinctive nature. Our moral instincts aren’t at all selfish, they are fully altruistic, truly loving.

As is fully described in Part 4:12I, when Sociobiology/​Evolutionary Psychology fell out of favour amongst some biologists because of its inability to account for our unconditionally selfless, genuinely moral instinctive nature, yet another theory was devised to supposedly explain how we acquired unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral instincts. Put forward by E.O. Wilson in his aforementioned 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth as an explanation for the human condition, this ‘Theory of Eusociality’ proposes that humans not only have selfish, savage, animal instincts derived from competing for food, shelter, territory and a mate, but also unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic instincts, and that these two opposing instinctive orientations are what cause the conflicted state of our human condition.

To very briefly describe how E.O. Wilson went about explaining how we acquired these unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic instincts it is first necessary to explain the basic biological difficulty in establishing selfless instincts—which is that if an unconditionally selfless trait does emerge in a species it will seemingly always be exploited by those who are selfish. If someone in a group says, in effect, ‘I’m going to help others’, the others are going to, in effect, reply, ‘By all means, go right ahead because it can only help me reproduce my genes—but don’t expect me to help you.’ Seemingly, whenever selflessness appears it is, in all likelihood, going to be undermined by opportunist cheaters or free riders. But what the theory of Eusociality (which emerged from what is referred to as Multilevel Selection theory, which was developed by David Sloan Wilson and other biologists) argues is that while within a group the selfish are more likely to prevail, in competition between groups, groups of selfless altruists are more likely to succeed, so in situations of between-group competition selflessness can be selected for. The idea is that where you have two groups competing against each other, as it is claimed occurred between groups of our early ancestors, groups with selfless, cooperative members will out-compete groups with selfish, non-cooperative individuals, and that it was through the selection of such successful cooperativeness in between-group conflict that our unconditionally selfless, moral instincts emerged. This is the argument E.O. Wilson commandeered to supposedly explain that we not only have selfish instincts derived from competing for food, shelter, territory and a mate, but also selfless instincts, and that the presence of these two instinctive states for supposed ‘nastiness’/​‘sin’ and ‘niceness’/​‘virtue’ is what produced our conflicted human condition. What E.O. Wilson has basically done is add selfless instincts to the supposed selfish instincts that Social Darwinists had already assigned us and claim that the presence of these two conflicting instincts within us explains the human condition.

This theory of Eusociality ‘explanation’ for our species’ unconditionally selfless moral nature and conflicted human condition is completely dishonest, for reasons that are provided at length in Part 4:12I and which I will very briefly recap here.

Firstly, even if between group competition could overcome the problem of selflessness always being exploited and thus eliminated by selfishness, which is in itself extremely doubtful, the idea that our moral instinctive self or soul is a product of aggressively attacking other groups of humans doesn’t equate at all with what we all know about what our born-with, instinctive moral conscience wants us to feel and behave towards all humans, indeed all of life. No human who is prepared to be honest would accept that our species’ unconditionally selfless, moral instinctive orientation to life is driven by an extremely selfish, competitive and divisive cause, namely to give warring groups a competitive advantage. Also, we are all aware, if we are prepared to be truthful, that our instinctive moral nature is one of universal benevolence, not one where we have instincts for both niceness and nastiness. We have a completely consider-the-good-of-the-whole-of-your-community-above-yourself, fully cooperative, all-loving, utterly harmonious, totally empathetic, absolutely innocent original instinctive orientation, which, as has been mentioned, the story of the ‘Garden of Eden’ in religious teachings and awareness of a ‘Golden Age’ state of original innocence that is referred to in all our mythologies recognises. Further, as has been emphasised, the idea that our selfish behaviour comes from selfish, savage, animal instincts derived from competing for food, shelter, territory and a mate overlooks the fact that our human behaviour involves our unique fully conscious thinking mind. Descriptions of our behaviour, such as arrogant, deluded, optimistic, pessimistic, artificial, superficial, guilty, depressed, inspired, psychotic, alienated, all imply a consciousness-derived psychological dimension to our behaviour. We humans suffer from a consciousness-derived, psychological HUMAN CONDITION, not an instinct-controlled ANIMAL CONDITION—it is unique to us fully conscious humans.

In short, the competition-for-survival explanation for our selfish behaviour completely failed to recognise that our instinctive orientation is not to behaving selfishly, but to behaving in a completely unconditionally selfless, all-loving way and that, as the Adam Stork story explained, our selfish behaviour results from a consciousness-derived-and-induced psychologically insecure and upset state in which we have been selfishly egocentrically trying to prove our goodness and worth, and selfishly seeking relief through material reinforcement.

Basically, E.O. Wilson has failed to acknowledge, let alone account for, all the fundamental aspects that we know are involved in the human condition, which are summarised in that most voted-for-for-its-truth document in human history, the Bible—that ‘God created man in his own image’ (Gen. 1:27) (we did once live in that completely integrated, unconditionally selflessly behaved, cooperative, loving ideal state), and then we took the ‘fruit’ ‘from the tree of…knowledge’ (Gen. 3:3, 2:17) (became conscious), and then we ‘fell from grace’ (derived from the title of Gen. 3, ‘The Fall of Man’) (became corrupted, psychologically upset; egocentrically selfishly preoccupied trying to prove we are good and not bad all the time), and, as a result, were ‘banished…from the Garden of Eden’ (Gen. 3:23) state of our original innocence (became insecure/​guilt-ridden) and became ‘a restless wanderer on the earth’ (Gen. 4:14) (became psychotic—our instinctive self or soul became repressed because it condemned our conscious intellect; and neurotic—our conscious intellect became distressed because it couldn’t explain itself) until we could find the reconciling, healing understanding of the ‘good and evil’ (Gen. 3:5) in our make-up and, by so doing, become ‘like God, knowing [understanding of our] good and evil [afflicted lives] (ibid)’. (Note, all biblical references in Freedom Expanded: Books 1 & 2 are from the 1978 New International Version translation of the Bible.)

Of course, it is not only in religious texts that we find accounts of the true story of humans’ journey from innocence to the emergence of consciousness and, with it, the corruption of our original innocent instinctive state, to the eventual finding of the reconciling, ameliorating, soundness-resurrecting understanding of the human condition. The following description from more recent times comes from the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev’s 1931 book, The Destiny of Man: ‘The memory of a lost paradise, of a Golden Age, is very deep in man, together with a sense of guilt and sin and a dream of regaining the Kingdom of Heaven which sometimes assumes the form of a Utopia or an earthly paradise…We are faced with a profound enigma: how could man have renounced paradise which he recalls so longingly in our world-aeon? How could he have fallen away from it?…The exile of man from paradise means that man fell away from God [cooperative ideality]…Not everything was revealed to man in paradise, and ignorance was the condition of the life in it. It was the realm of the unconscious…Man rejected the bliss and wholeness of Eden and chose the pain and tragedy of cosmic life in order to explore his destiny to its inmost depths. This was the birth of consciousness with its painful dividedness. In falling away from the harmony of paradise and from unity with God, man began to make distinctions and valuations, tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge and found himself on this side of good and evil’ (tr. N. Duddington, 1960, p.36 & 38 of 310). Further on, he wrote that ‘man is an irrational, paradoxical, essentially tragic being…Philosophers and scientists have done very little to elucidate the problem of man’ (p.49), and that ‘psychologists were wrong in assuming that man was a healthy creature, mainly conscious and intellectual, and should be studied from that point of view. Man is a sick being…the distinction between the conscious and the subconscious mind is fundamental for the new psychology’ (pp.67-68). Earlier in The Destiny of Man, Berdyaev also described very clearly why ‘Philosophers and scientists have done very little to elucidate the problem of man’ and, by so doing, bring about ‘the new psychology’—the reason, of course, being humans’ great ‘fear’, in fact, ‘primeval terror’, of confronting the truth of our psychologically ‘sick’ condition; as he wrote, ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror. Fear makes the search for truth and the knowledge of it impossible. Knowledge implies fearlessness…it must also be said of knowledge that it is bitter…Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil [which is the issue of the human condition]. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world…it must be said that the very distinction between good and evil is a bitter distinction, the bitterest thing in the world…There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless. We cannot rest in the thought that that distinction is ultimate. The longing for God in the human heart springs from the fact that we cannot bear to be faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil’ (pp.14-15).

Yes, to not be ‘faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil’ we HAD TO face the ‘deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil’—BUT while the great flaw in E.O. Wilson’s Eusociality account of our human condition is that it doesn’t deal with this real, ‘painful’, ‘ancient, primeval terror’ of the psychological issue of our human condition, for E.O. Wilson that is its greatest asset, for it offered a way to supposedly explain the human condition without having to acknowledge and engage the agonising, real, true, alienated, core, ‘deadly pain’ of the psychological condition within ourselves! The truth is, E.O. Wilson’s theory of Eusociality is a completely fake, deliberately trivialising account of the human condition. And, in being so dishonest he was effectively condemning humanity to be ‘faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil’—because, as Berdyaev said, such ‘fear’ of the real human condition ‘makes the search for truth and the knowledge of it impossible’. Only the ‘fearless’ ‘search for truth’ could deliver the actual, human-race-liberating explanation of the human condition, which has now been carried out with this, the fully accountable, ameliorating ‘truth and the knowledge’ about our condition, the product. As emphasised, all this and much more is explained when the theories of Social Darwinism, Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, Multilevel Selection and Eusociality are presented in detail in Part 4:12I.

So the question is, what is the actual, accountable, true, real explanation of the origin of our unconditionally selfless moral instinctive self or soul? Prior to the emergence of consciousness and, with it, our upset angry, egocentric, alienated human-condition-afflicted state, how did we acquire what Darwin recognised as being ‘the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’, or what Kant referred to as our ‘awe’-inspiring instinctive moral nature?

The core biological question that has to be explained is that if reciprocity and between-group selection don’t explain our moral nature, which they don’t, then how did humans develop an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral instinctive self or soul? If conflict between groups of early humans doesn’t explain how the basic biological problem of selflessness being subverted by selfish opportunism was overcome, what does? How can unconditionally selfless traits be developed genetically when such self-sacrificing traits tend to self-eliminate, that being what unconditionally selfless, self-sacrifice means? The seeming reality in nature is that the most selflessness that can be developed genetically is reciprocity, where, as mentioned, an animal behaves selflessly on the condition it will be treated selflessly in return, thus ensuring its continuation from generation to generation, which means the trait is intrinsically selfish, not unconditionally selfless like our moral instincts.

So how did humans develop an original instinctive orientation to behaving in an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic way? The following answer to this question is an abridged version of a more complete presentation that is provided later in Parts 4:4D and 8:4B.

While self-eliminating genetic traits apparently cannot develop in animals, there was one way such unconditional selflessness could develop, which was through nurturing—a mother’s maternal instinct to care for her offspring. Genetic traits for nurturing are intrinsically selfish (which, as stated, genetic traits normally have to be) because through a mother’s nurturing and fostering of offspring who carry her genes her genetic traits for nurturing are selfishly ensuring their reproduction into the next generation. However, while nurturing is a genetically selfish trait, from an observer’s point of view the nurturing appears to be unconditionally selfless behaviour—the mother is giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter, support and protection for apparently nothing in return. This point is most significant because it means that from the infant’s perspective, its mother is treating it with real love, unconditional selflessness. The infant’s brain is therefore being trained or conditioned or indoctrinated or inscribed with unconditional selflessness and so, with enough training in unconditional selflessness, that infant will grow into an adult who behaves unconditionally selflessly. Apply this training across all the members of that infant’s group and the result is an unconditionally selflessly behaved, priority-consideration-given-to-the-maintenance-and-welfare-of-the-group, cooperative, fully integrated society. And then, with this training in unconditional selflessness occurring over many generations, the unconditionally selfless behaviour will become instinctive—a moral conscience will be established. Genes will inevitably follow and reinforce any development process—in this they are not selective. The difficulty is in getting the development of unconditional selflessness to occur in the first place, for once it is regularly occurring it will naturally become instinctive over time.

The ‘trick’ in this ‘love-indoctrination’ process lies in the fact that the traits for nurturing are encouraged, or selected for genetically, because the better infants are cared for the greater are their, and the nurturing traits’, chances of survival. There is, however, an integrative side effect, in that the more infants are nurtured, the more their brains are trained in unconditional selflessness.

But for a species to develop nurturing—to develop this ‘trick’ for overcoming the gene-based learning system’s seeming inability to develop unconditional selflessness—it required the capacity to allow its offspring to remain in the infancy stage long enough for the infant’s brain to become trained or indoctrinated with unconditional selflessness or love. In most species, infancy has to be kept as brief as possible because of the infant’s extreme vulnerability to predators. Zebras, for example, have to be capable of independent flight almost as soon as they are born, which gives them little opportunity to be trained in selflessness. Primates, on the other hand, were already semi-upright as a result of their tree-living, swinging-from-branch-to-branch, arboreal heritage, and so with their arms semi-freed from walking and thus available to hold a helpless infant they were especially facilitated for prolonging their offspring’s infancy and thus developing love-indoctrination. And so it was our distant ape ancestors who perfected the ‘love-indoctrination’ process, and that is how we acquired our unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, instinctive self or ‘soul’, the ‘voice’ of which is our moral ‘conscience’.

On this point, the exceptionally maternal, matriarchal, cooperatively behaved bonobo primate species (Pan paniscus) provide a living example of a species in the final stages of developing this love indoctrination process. Indeed, not only are bonobos extraordinarily loving and nurturing of their infants and the most cooperative and peaceful of all non-human primates, they are also the non-human primate that is most often seen walking upright, which, along with their peaceful cooperative nature, we can now explain. The longer infancy is delayed, the more and longer infants had to be held, and thus the greater selection for arms-freed, upright walking. When I put forward this ‘love-indoctrination’ explanation of humans’ unconditionally selfless moral conscience and soul in 1983, I said, contrary to prevailing views, that it meant bipedalism must have developed early in this nurturing of love process, and in fact the early appearance of bipedalism in the fossil record of our ancestors is now being found. For example, it was reported that a ‘4.4 million-year-old skeleton of a likely human ancestor known as Ardipithecus ramidus’, discovered in Ethiopia in 1994, has features which show they ‘walked upright on two legs’ (‘A Long-Lost Relative’, TIME mag. 12 Oct. 2009).

As will be briefly explained shortly in Part 3:11, and more completely in Part 8:4C, this development of unconditionally selfless behaviour in our distant forebears had the accidental side effect of liberating consciousness, and with the emergence of full consciousness came the human-condition-producing, upsetting battle between our original instinctive self and newer conscious self. (The reason I am unable to explain how we humans became conscious until Part 3:11 is because I first need to explain other related concepts, which I will do shortly.)

So nurturing is what made us human. It gave us our instinctive orientation to behaving cooperatively, which led to the emergence of our conscious mind, which in turn led to the upsetting battle of our human condition. Of course, for upset humans who have understandably been incapable of adequately nurturing their children with unconditional love while the horrific battle of the human condition raged, this nurturing explanation for human origins has been far too confronting to admit or accept—as has been said, ‘people would rather admit to being an axe murderer than being a bad father or mother’ (‘A Single Mum’s Guide to Raising Boys’, Sun-Herald, 7 July 2002). The nature vs nurture debate has really been about defensively trying to argue against the importance of nurturing in the lives of our children. It is only now that we can explain the upset state of the human condition that it becomes safe to confront and admit the critical part that nurturing has played both in the emergence of our species and in the maturation of our own individual lives.

Nurturing was the main influence or prime mover in human development—not tool use, or upright walking, or language, or mastery of fire, or movement from the forest to the savannah, or any one of the other evasive explanations that denial-complying biologists have been putting forward in the mountain of books that have been published on human origins. And our species’ original instinctive self or soul, the ‘voice’ of which is our moral ‘conscience’, is an orientation to behaving in an utterly cooperative, harmonious, loving way—a truth that we have had to deny, and yet, as mentioned earlier, it is recognised in all our great mythologies. But both these truths, of an original cooperatively orientated, loving instinctive self or soul within us, and the role and importance nurturing played in the maturation of our lives, have been unbearable for upset humans to admit to while we couldn’t explain why we humans became corrupted. Later in Part 4, these two truths (and four others that have been equally unbearable) will be described in more detail.

As I mentioned in Part 3:1, given how guilty we have felt about our present seemingly evil divisive competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour—behaviour we couldn’t truthfully explain—we understandably had to invent excuses for the behaviour, the main excuses being that our competitive and aggressive behaviour is due to savage animal instincts within us that make us fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate; and, as for our selflessly orientated moral sense, well that was explained as either a subtle form of selfishness resulting from reciprocity, or, as E.O. Wilson now falsely claims, the result of conflict between groups of early humans, neither of which account for our psychologically troubled human condition. But we can now understand that our human condition is a result of a psychological dilemma that arose from a conflict between our unconditionally selfless moral instincts and our newer self-adjusting conscious mind—which is consistent with the awarenesses that have been so beautifully articulated in all our mythologies of the nature of our condition, namely that we once lived in a fully cooperative, unconditionally selfless state, and then we became conscious, the result of which was the emergence of the psychologically upset state of the human condition.

To now address the second element of the question that forms this Part—namely the impact our instinctive orientation to behaving in an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic way had on the issue of our human condition.

While in the case of Adam Stork, when he became upset—angry, egocentric and alienated—for defying his instincts and searching for knowledge, his instinctive orientation to a flight path wouldn’t have had any particular impact on or conflict with that upset behaviour, but that certainly wasn’t the case with us humans. When we became angry, egocentric and alienated for defying our instincts and searching for knowledge, our instinctive orientation to behaving in a loving, cooperative, honest way was extremely offended by that response. And so in our case, becoming upset produced further criticism from our particular instincts. When we set out in search of knowledge, we suffered a ‘double whammy’, a double condemnation: firstly for defying our instincts, and secondly for reacting in a way that was counter and offensive to our instincts. So if old Adam Stork had cause to be upset, we had double cause to be upset!

And yet the horror of our situation did not end there—it was actually even more pronounced than that, if a worse fate can be imagined! For we weren’t just doubly condemned, we were triply condemned—forced, in fact, to endure a ‘triple whammy’! To explain what I mean by ‘triple whammy’ I need to introduce another of the six historically unbearable, unconfrontable truths, which is the truth of Integrative Meaning. (As just mentioned, the six historically unconfrontable truths will be described in Part 4:4, but for reference they are, firstly, the issue of the human condition itself; secondly, Integrative Meaning, which is about to be briefly explained; thirdly, the nature of consciousness; fourthly, the truth that we humans once lived in an unconditionally selfless, all-loving state, which has been introduced; fifthly, the truth of the differences in alienation between humans; and sixthly, that nurturing was the main influence or prime mover in the emergence of humanity and in our own lives, which has also been introduced.)

To briefly explain the historically unbearable truth of Integrative Meaning. Our world is constructed from some 94 naturally occurring elements. Under the influence of the laws of physics, in particular the law of Negative Entropy (also known as the ‘Second Path of the Second Law of Thermodynamics’), these elements have come together to form stable arrangements. For example, two hydrogen atoms with their single positive charges came together with one oxygen atom with its double negative charge to form the stable relationship known as water. Over time, larger molecules and compounds developed. Eventually macro compounds formed. These eventually integrated to form virus-like organisms, which in turn came together or integrated to form single-celled organisms, which in turn integrated to form multicellular organisms, which in turn integrated to form societies of single species, which in turn integrate to form stable, ordered arrangements of different species. So everywhere we look order is developing—larger in space and more stable in time arrangements of matter are forming. It is as plain as day that is what is happening out there in our world. Everything is a hierarchy of ordered matter and what is happening overall everywhere is that matter is integrating, and yet we have denied this truth—but there is an extremely good reason why we have done so, which is that the truth of Integrative Meaning has, in fact, been the most confronting and condemning of all truths for the upset human race. This is because to develop and maintain the order of matter requires parts of the developing wholes to consider the welfare of the larger whole over their own. Selfishness is disintegrative while selflessness is integrative. In fact, selflessness—ideally unconditional selflessness or altruism—is the glue that holds wholes together and, as such, is the theme of the development of order of matter on Earth, but to acknowledge that truth left upset, selfishly-behaved humans condemned as bad, evil and worthless. Until the divisive, selfish upset state of the human condition could be explained the selfless, integrative theme and meaning of existence, which, as will be explained in Parts 4:4B and 8:1 when Integrative Meaning is more fully explained, is actually what ‘God’ is the personification of, had to be denied. And so the contrivance developed to support this denial of the truth of Integrative Meaning was to assert that there is no direction or meaning to existence and that change is random. Holistic science—derived as it is from the term ‘holism’, which acknowledges ‘the tendency in nature to form wholes’ (Concise Oxford Dict. 5th edn, 1964), or teleological science—derived as it is from the term ‘teleology’, which means ‘the belief that purpose and design are a part of nature’ (Macquarie Dict. 3rd edn, 1998)—have been avoided in favour of integrative-meaning-denying, focus-down-on-the-details-not-up-at-the-unbearable-whole-view, mechanistic, reductionist science. Again, we see what a huge part denial has played in human existence up until now. We have had to live an immensely troubled, soul-and-truth-disconnected, evasive, dishonest, fraudulent, lying-based alienated existence—a situation perfectly described in the Bible where it says, ‘Today you [Integrative Meaning/​God] are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence, I will be a restless wanderer on the earth’ (Gen. 4:14).

So, the further extremely upsetting dimension to our upset competitive and aggressive behaviour, what affords it the ‘triple whammy’ status I referred to earlier, was that it defied the cooperative, integrative ideals of life—we were, in effect, defying ‘God’! This additional guilt from seeming to be at war with the integrative ideals of existence, with ‘God’, means our upset has been absolutely extreme. Our defiance of our instincts would have made us excruciatingly guilt-ridden and thus extremely upset, which is exactly what happened. ‘Flying off course’ in our case, as necessary as it was, was an incredibly upsetting act of defiance—which is why we humans have been capable of absolutely extraordinary acts of brutality, barbarism and cruelty. While we have tried to restrain and conceal the anger within us, ‘civilise’ it, it is, in truth, volcanic—but we can now at last understand why.

When fully explained, the story of the agony of our human condition will tell a tale of diabolical anguish, but the main or primary issue in that upsetting situation was the battle that emerged between our instincts and our conscious search for knowledge—the transition from an instinct controlled state to an intellect controlled state—which the Adam Stork analogy describes. (How our instinctive orientation to behaving in an unconditionally selfless, altruistic, fully integrated way greatly compounded our upset will be more fully explained in Part 8:8.)