Part 7

How Upset the
Human Race Became

Part 7:1 The battle of the sexes

As explained in Part 3:11, the upset state of the human condition became fully developed some two million years ago with the emergence of the large-brained genus Homo, which of course includes us modern humans. Knowing this—that we have lived with the injustice of the human condition for such an immense amount of time—gives us some insight into just how upset we humans must have become. Importantly, while we have had to live in denial of our extremely upset state because we couldn’t explain and defend it, now that we can understand ourselves the truth about the extent of our extremely upset state can at last be acknowledged—and, in fact, needs to be acknowledged in order to truly appreciate the opportunity everyone now has to leave their horrifically upset, human-condition-victimised existence behind and adopt the liberated TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING.

We can begin this truthful analysis and appreciation of what two million years of living without the ability to explain ourselves has done to us by looking at what happened to, and between, men and women under the duress of the human condition.

If we return to the Adam Stork analogy, we can imagine that when Adam and Eve Stork became fully conscious and began their corrupting search for knowledge that they would have sat down together on a log and had a very serious discussion about this terrible new development, at which point Adam would have said to Eve, ‘Look, this search for knowledge is going to be so corrupting that it doesn’t make sense for both of us to take on that role, especially since you need to retain all the innocence and soundness you can to effectively nurture the next generation.’ It makes complete sense that a role differentiation would have been established, where men would have taken up the immensely upsetting job of championing the conscious thinking self or ego over the ignorance of our original instinctive self, while women preserved as much innocence as they could to maintain their role of nurturing the next generation.

As such, our ancestors’ social structure underwent a seismic change—for from nine million years ago to two million years ago the priority amongst our human ancestors was that of nurturing and since females conceived, carried, gave birth to and suckled the young it was a role that naturally fell to them. And so throughout that period of time we were a soul-centric, female-led or matriarchal society. But once that priority shifted to championing the conscious thinking self or ego over the ignorance of our instinctive self—a responsibility that naturally fell to men—humanity changed to being an ego-centric, male-role-led, patriarchal society. This was because prior to two million years ago, the role of males was that of group protector. Male gorillas, for instance, are massive in size in order to best protect the group from predatory threats such as leopards. Later in Part 8:4G, we will see how in Dian Fossey’s study of mountain gorillas she describes the gorilla Uncle Bert as a ‘protective group leader’. And so, since the threat of ignorance from our instinctive self—our instinctive self’s resistance to searching for knowledge—posed a threat to the group, namely humanity, and the role of protecting the group fell to males, men had to take it on.

In Part 8:4 we will see how the bonobos are in the process of developing, through nurturing, the fully cooperative integrative state. Bonobos are the most gentle, cooperative and intelligent of all the apes and have achieved that state through nurturing and through cultivating a female-centric, or female-dominant, society—having fostered females who have exceptional strength of character in order to rein in the aggressive competition amongst males for mating opportunities. As a result of these developments bonobos are now on the threshold of where humans once lived, which is in the utterly integrative, unconditionally selfless, ‘Garden of Eden’-like state; they are a living example of how we developed our fully cooperative, moral instincts.

But to return to the analogy of Adam and Eve Stork and their encounter with the onset of consciousness. It was suggested that, in keeping with their already established roles, it made sense for Adam to take on the loathsomely upsetting job of championing the ego over the ignorance of our original instinctive self while Eve maintained her role of nurturing a new generation, a task that required the preservation of her innocence. When giving presentations about the emergence of this role differentiation using the analogy of Adam and Eve Stork, at this point in the story I usually go out to an adjoining room where I bang on the wall and scream and shout—basically I imitate Adam becoming extremely upset from undertaking the job he’s been sent out to do. When Adam returns to Eve, I then emulate her reaction, which is, ‘You’ve turned into a monster Adam, I don’t want anything more to do with you!’ So while Eve agreed that Adam should take up the role of fighting ignorance, in not participating in that terrible battle she is somewhat naive or unaware of the ramifications of fighting that battle. She is, in effect, unsympathetic to the battle, which places Adam in the awful predicament of feeling misunderstood and unjustly condemned by Eve.

Men have had a horrible job: they have had to be strong enough, in effect, to kill soul! They have had to be strong enough to ‘fly off course’ in search of knowledge and defy our beautiful, cooperatively orientated, original instinctive self or soul! In the Adam Stork drawing, you can see the other wide-eyed innocent stork screaming at him, ‘You’re bad Adam, you’re flying off course, come back here where you should be!’ But Adam has to defy this censure without being able to explain why, without being able to explain his actions. However, as emphasised in Part 3:4, for us humans the situation was vastly more diabolical than this because our instinctive orientation wasn’t to a flight path but to behaving in an utterly cooperatively, loving, unconditionally selfless, integratively-orientated, ‘Godly’ way, so when we ‘flew off course’ and became angry, egocentric and alienated—all divisive traits—we were, in effect, in violation of ‘God’! So from an initial state of upset, men had then to contend with a sense of guilt, which very greatly compounded their insecurity and frustrations and made them even more angry, egocentric and alienated. How tough were men going to have to be to continue to do their job without receiving any respect or appreciation for why they were having to do what they were having to do, not from within themselves, from their own instinctive self or soul, or anyone else! No wonder men have become so incredibly upset.

But what could men do? They couldn’t explain themselves to women because they couldn’t explain the human condition—they weren’t able to defend their corrupted state. Adam Stork couldn’t explain why he had become so upset, so egocentric, etc. So what men, in their desperation, did is they turned on women and attacked their innocence—a development I will come to in a moment because I first need to explain that women were not the original victims of men’s upset. As mentioned in Part 3:11C, that tragic distinction went to animals because their innocence—the innocence of all of nature in fact—also criticised men. Remember, nature was a friend of our original instinctive self or soul because we grew up with nature—humanity spent all its infancy and childhood alongside nature in the ‘Garden of Eden’ that was Africa—so by association the natural world also criticised us. Hunting animals was not about food—that was our species’ first great contrived excuse for our divisive behaviour—it was about getting even with innocence for its unjust condemnation of men. As mentioned in Part 3:11C, research shows that 80 percent of the food of existing hunter-foragers is supplied by the women’s foraging, so what were the men doing hunting all day? They were getting even with innocence. Hunting—human domination over animals—was the first expression of the conscious thinking self or ego’s determination to prove that it was good and not bad.

Telling the Hunt

These photographs were included in Part 3:11C, however, I have also included them here because they epitomise what is being explained about the different situations of men and women. Telling the Hunt shows male Bushmen of the Kalahari attentively hearing about—and presumably sharing in—the success of the hunt. We can imagine the hunter recounting how he relentlessly pursued his prey, methodically stalking and finally vanquishing it, to the cheers of his audience. With their backs turned to nature, you can sense the oppression men feel from the world at large. And so in a world that condemns them they sought fellowship and support in each other’s company.

Women with infants digging roots

While the men are thus preoccupied satisfying their egos, we find the women in this second photograph having to gather the food and nurture the children; again, as the female narrator in the soundtrack of the 1986 African musical Ipi Tombi complained, ‘The women had to do all the work because the men were so busy being big, strong and brave.’

What makes these images such good illustrations is that they are of the relatively innocent race, the Bushmen of the Kalahari. While aboriginal races are necessarily more innocent than those that have advanced further along the soul’s exhaustion curve, they are still members of the highly embattled, sophisticated-in-the-art-of-denial, soul-devastated, alienated, pseudo idealistic, Homo sapiens sapiens, as these pictures confirm. The basic adaptations humans made to the human condition are clearly well established in the Bushmen—these could as easily be photos of businessmen discussing a company takeover and women shopping.

But to return to the division unfolding between men and women, as illustrated by Adam and Eve Stork. ‘Adam’ has returned from doing his job in a state of extreme upset that ‘Eve’ is not sympathetic towards. Although she agreed that he should ‘take up the sword’ of searching for knowledge because she can’t appreciate that job and its corrupting ramifications she is critical of his extremely egocentric, upset state. But what could Adam do? He couldn’t explain himself but nor could he just stand there and take the criticism—he had to do something to defend himself. But because Adam needed Eve to reproduce the species he couldn’t kill her the way he destroyed animals over their unjust condemnation, so instead he/​men violated her/​women’s innocence or ‘honour’ through rape. Men perverted ‘sex’, as in ‘fucking’ or destroying, making it discrete from the act of procreation. What was being fucked, violated, destroyed, ruined, degraded or sullied was women’s innocence. Through these means women’s innocence was oppressed and they too came to share men’s upset. Interestingly, in Christianity Christ’s mother is described as a ‘virgin’ (Matt. 1:23, Luke 1:27, 34), which we can now understand is a perfect metaphor for a mother who, as was explained in Part 5:1, is sufficiently innocent to nurture an innocent offspring such as Jesus. The renowned English writer D.H. Lawrence recognised the essential innocence of the ‘Virgin’ Mary when, in reference to her, he wrote, ‘Oh, oh, all the women in the world are dead, oh there’s just one’ (mentioned in Lawrence Durrell: Conversations, Lawrence Durrell & Earl Ingersoll, 1998, p.178 of 261).

To reiterate, men’s burden was that they had to suffer self-corruption, they had to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’, as the words from The Man of La Mancha state—a state of corruption that was compounded by the criticism inherent in women’s innocence and naivety. To subdue this criticism, men violated women’s innocence through sex. While among humans sex was originally purely a means of procreation (in the case of some species, such as bonobos, it is a means of pacification), it became ‘perverted’, used as a way to attack innocence, particularly women’s innocence. On this level, sex became rape. The feminist Andrea Dworkin recognised this underlying truth in her 1987 book Intercourse, when she wrote that ‘All sex is abuse.’

In time, however, the image of innocence in women, their physical beauty that ‘attracted’ sex, also became a means of inspiring men on humanity’s journey to self-understanding. This aspect means that while, at base, sex was rape, on a nobler level it became an inspirational act of love, an act of faith in and affection for men. A sublime partnership between men and women did develop, for when all the world disowned men for their unavoidable divisiveness, women, in effect, stayed with them, bringing them the only warmth, comfort and support they would know. As it says in Genesis, ‘The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him”…Then the Lord God made a woman…and he brought her to the man’ (2:18,22).

The German supermodel Claudia Schiffer,
Australian Elle magazine Aug. 1992

We can see now how women’s innocence fell victim to men’s upset. Throughout the battle to find understanding women were forced to suffer the destruction of their soul, their innocence, yet all the while their trappings of innocence were being cultivated. As will be explained in Part 8:4D, originally—during humanity’s long 10-million-year nurturing Infancy and Childhood stage—cute, neotenous, childlike features (domed forehead, snub nose, large eyes and hairless skin) were considered ‘beautiful’, and were favoured because they were the hallmarks of innocence and indicative of a potentially integrative individual; as Charles Darwin realised, sexual or mate selection played an important part in our species’ development. But when, during humanity’s recent two-million-year upset Adolescence, ignorant innocence became a threat, men sought out such ‘beauty’, such indicators of innocence, for sexual destruction. We’ve evasively described such cute, neotenous looks as ‘attractive’ but avoided admitting that what was being attracted was the destruction, through sex, of women’s innocence. So while all other forms of innocence were being destroyed, this image of innocence—‘the beauty of women’—was the only form that was actually cultivated during humanity’s upset adolescence. What this means is that the image of innocence (the cute, neotenous, childlike domed forehead, snub nose, large eyes and hairless skin) was being selected for throughout humanity’s ape Infancy, Australopithecine Childhood and Homo Adolescence, even though the reason for the selection changed between Childhood and Adolescence. If we look at the skulls of our ancestors again, pictured in Part 3:11, we can see there is an increase in the neotenous traits of a domed forehead, snub nose and large eyes from the time of our ape ancestors right through to the present.

So during humanity’s upset Adolescence women’s beauty became men’s only equivalent for, and measure of, the beauty of their lost pure world. The following quotes reveal just how inspiring women’s image of innocence became for men: ‘we lose our soul, of which woman is the immemorial image’ (Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.134 of 233); ‘I believe hers to have been the kind of beauty in which the future of a whole continent sings, exhorting its children to renounce what is out of accord with the grand design of life’ (ibid. p.86); ‘Woman stands before him [man] as the lure and symbol of the world’ (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Let Me Explain, 1966; trs René Hague & others, 1970, p.67 of 189); ‘Women are all we [men] know of paradise on earth’ (Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956, p.73 of 108); ‘Beauty will save the world’ (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 1868, pt.3, ch.5); ‘You give me a reason to live’ (Joe Cocker’s 1986 song You Can Leave Your Hat On); ‘I, I who have nothing / I, I who have no one / Adore you and want you so’ (Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller’s 1963 song I Who Have Nothing); ‘Sex is life’ (graffiti on a granite boulder at Meekatharra in Western Australia). Friedrich Nietzsche was another who recognised the role women played in inspiring the world with their illusion of innocence when he wrote, ‘her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, we men: it is precisely this art and this instinct in woman which we love and honour’ (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886; tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1972, p.145 of 237).

So it is little wonder men ‘fell in love’ with women. Again, their representation of innocence, their representation of our now lost pure world, has been the only form of that purity that has been continually cultivated since we were apes—which is why the beauty, the attractiveness of the image of innocence in women, has had absolutely extraordinary power, as the quotes above recognise.

The great ‘mystery of women’ was that it was only the physical image or object of innocence that men were falling in love with. The illusion was that women were both psychologically and physically innocent. For their part, women were able to fall in love with the dream of their own ‘perfection’ that men projected—of their being truly innocent. Men and women fell in love: we abandoned reality in favour of the dream. It was the one time in our life when we could romance—when we could be transported to how life once was and how it could be again. The lyrics of the song Somewhere, written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1956 blockbuster musical and film West Side Story, perfectly describe the dream of the heavenly state of true togetherness that humans allow themselves to be transported to when they fall in love: ‘Somewhere / We’ll find a new way of living / We’ll find a way of forgiving / Somewhere // There’s a place for us / A time and place for us / Hold my hand and we’re halfway there / Hold my hand and I’ll take you there / Somehow / Some day / Somewhere!’ Cole Porter’s 1928 song Let’s Fall In Love also contains lyrics that reveal how falling in love is about allowing yourself to dream of the ideal state, of ‘paradise’: ‘Let’s fall in love / Why shouldn’t we fall in love? / Our hearts are made of it / Let’s take a chance / Why be afraid of it / Let’s close our eyes and make our own paradise.’ The escape from the horror of a world oppressed and upset by the human condition that falling in love promised is also expressed in the lyrics of the 1977 Fleetwood Mac song Sara: ‘Drowning in the sea of love / Where everyone would love to drown.’

The silent recognition that women become invisible when they grow old is an acknowledgment that the role they have played, as sex objects, is behind them. It’s the innocence of youth that has been both attractive to men for sexual destruction and an inspiration to them because it represented the image of their lost pure world that they were ultimately fighting to re-establish, and as such it is that youthful innocence that women have strived to emulate—long, healthy hair, eyes made large with make-up, legs made longer with high heels to imitate the coltish, long legs of pubescent teenagers, etc, etc. Since sex was about attacking innocence, for a woman to be attractive she needed to look innocent. Men’s preoccupation with youthfulness has nothing to do with younger women having greater potential to reproduce their genes, as dishonest mechanistic scientists have told us—it has to do with sex being about attacking innocence, which means you can’t be attractive for sex if you’re not innocent looking and the most innocent age is that of the thin, long-legged, pubescent teenager, so that is what women had to imitate to be most attractive, regardless of how unnatural that is for adult, wide-hipped-for-child-bearing women.

While different cultures exhibit different perceptions of female beauty, essentially men have been ‘attracted’ by innocent looks, which are youthful, neotenous features. The popular saying ‘Blondes have more fun’ illustrates the tendency in Caucasian cultures to regard blondes as more attractive because many young Caucasians have blond hair, a sign of youth/​innocence. In his 1940 detective novel Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler acknowledged the appeal of blondes when he wrote, ‘It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window’ (ch.13). Long, healthy hair is associated with youth, which is why men find long hair on women attractive. In general, any feature unique to women will be attractive and signal a sex object to men, hence the desirability of breasts, shapely hips and a narrow waist. Different cultural and historical definitions of beauty can also be explained in terms of what signifies innocence. For instance, in times when few could afford to eat or live well, women we would now consider overweight were deemed beautiful because their appearance indicated that they had been well cared for, better nurtured and thus less embattled and more innocent.

What all of this means is that men and women became highly adapted to their roles under the duress of the human condition. Women’s beauty—their image of innocence—became valued as a reminder and an inspiration to men of their lost pure world that they were fighting to restore through the finding of sufficient knowledge that would finally end the unjust criticism emanating from our instinctive self. Women’s and men’s magazines serve as a powerful illustration of how adapted women and men have become to their roles. Almost exclusively, women’s magazines contain nothing but instructions on how to become a better sex object—from cover to cover they are all about being glamorous and seductive, specifically through trying to maintain a youthful appearance. Women’s magazines reveal just how reliant, to the point of codependency, women have become on reinforcement from men for their beauty. Men’s magazines on the other hand, apart from some material about chasing sex, are all about competition—in business and in sport, the latter of which is really a ritualised battle for success, basically emblematic of men’s need to champion the ego or conscious thinking self over an ignorant world.

So while relations between men and women did develop into a partnership, there remained between them an underlying conflict, a lack of understanding, a ‘war of the sexes’. Women’s ignorance and thus lack of sympathy for men’s role in the world is starkly apparent in this statement by the leading feminist Germaine Greer: ‘As far as I’m concerned, men are the product of a damaged gene. They pretend to be normal but what they’re doing sitting there with benign smiles on their faces is they’re manufacturing sperm’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Nov. 1991). Greer believes that the wilful, competitive, egocentric nature of men is nothing more than a selfish drive to reproduce their genes. The truth is, rather than being driven by selfishness, men have been involved in serving humanity in a most remarkable way. Their role in the world has been entirely honourable, brave and selfless. Another influential feminist, Gloria Steinem, expressed a similar complete lack of sympathy for men’s role in the world when she said, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ (TIME mag. 18 Sept. 2000). These two statements are two of the most embarrassingly wrong statements made in history, and yet, in her secret self, every woman has been making them for two million years—which we can now understand is why men have ‘fucked’ women, attacked and violated their innocence. The cruellest statement I have ever heard a man make about women is that ‘they don’t even exist’. Thank heavens then that with men now finally able to explain themselves to women the horrific battle between the sexes can be brought to an end and men and women can finally be united in real love for one another. Stacy Rodger’s affirmation in Section 3:7 of Freedom Expanded: Book 2 says it all about just how relieving it is for women to finally be able to understand men’s extremely upset, silent state.

In his brilliantly insightful cartoon, included in Part 3:7 and reproduced in the next image, Michael Leunig was accurate in his depiction of women’s lack of empathy with the horrifyingly difficult and immensely upsetting task men have had of defying the ignorance of our naive, innocent, ideal-world-demanding instinctive self or soul. In this cartoon, while Eve is shown as not disowning or deserting her man, as natural selection has taught women not to do, she is, nevertheless, deeply perturbed and distressed by his behaviour.

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

It has been an astronomically difficult job being a man. They have had to be tough enough to defy innocence, have the whole world criticise them and never be able to explain themselves; even their womenfolk considered them monsters, just useless, immensely destructive blights on Earth. But the truth, as we can now see, is that, instead of being the villains, men are in fact the heroes of the whole story of life on Earth. Consciousness is nature’s greatest invention and to have championed consciousness, to have found the greater dignifying understanding of the human condition, as men have now done, means men are the heroes of the story of life on Earth.

Not surprisingly, men’s movements have, in recent years, been growing in popularity as men try to rebuild their self-esteem because, after living with such condemnation, such crippling accusations that they are meaningless blights on this planet, they are now hardly able to show their faces to the world. The feminist movement has been so intimidating that men are now supposed to disown their masculinity and become ‘metrosexual’, effeminate versions of themselves. As described in Part 3:11H, pseudo idealism, the dogmatic, artificial imposition of the non-embattled, men-should-stop-being-egocentric-and-aggressive, ideal world, has virtually taken over the planet, destroying truth and burying humanity in the deepest and darkest corner of Plato’s cave of alienation. It is true that men’s job of conquering ignorance had produced so much upset that the world was almost destroyed by it, at which point the upset behaviour had to be harnessed, but having to resort to lies, such as that men are no different from women and irrelevant meaningless monsters, was dangerously dishonest. The question no one was asking was ‘But why are men so angry and egocentric? Why have they been destroying nature?’ And the reason no one asked those real questions was because they raised the unconfrontable issue of the human condition. Everyone has just been skating around on the surface of life, with no real questions asked or real answers sought. A tidal wave of total superficiality had swamped the world.

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

The tragedy of the situation was that the more men tried to do their job of fighting to defeat ignorance and protect the group (humanity), the more embattled, upset and corrupted they became and thus the more they appeared to worsen the situation. In the end they were turning the world into the wasteland that Michael Leunig so honestly depicted in his Adam and Eve cartoon (above). The ‘Give me liberty or give me death’, ‘No retreat, no surrender’, ‘Death before dishonour’, ‘Death or glory’ scenario was erring dangerously on the side of ‘death’. In short, the harder men tried to do their job of protecting humanity the more they appeared to endanger humanity. As a result, many men did become almost completely ineffective or inoperable, paralysed by this paradox—cowered not only by condemnation from the world at large, but by their own awareness of the extent of their self-corruption and its effects. As a result, women have had to usurp some of the day-to-day running of affairs. Not oppressed by the overwhelming responsibility and extreme frustration that men felt, women could, to an extent, remain effective. Further, when men crumpled women had to take over otherwise the family, group or community involved would disintegrate. The trend toward a return to matriarchy, such as we have recently seen in society, was a sign that men in general had become almost completely exhausted. However, total matriarchy has not emerged because as long as the fundamental battle still existed men could not afford to stand aside completely—they still needed to stay in control and vigilant against the threat of ignorance. So while some elements in the recent feminist movement seized the opportunity to avenge men’s oppression, the movement was in general borne out of necessity—but, as we saw in Part 3:11H, it was a dangerous development.

The danger of relinquishing power to women was that they were not appreciative of the nature of the battle that humanity was waging. They have not been, as it were, ‘mainframed’ to the battle—just as men have not been ‘mainframed’ to the role of nurturing as women intuitively are. For example, in the 1987 film Three Men and a Baby the men pass the baby around hoping one of the other men will change the nappy, even bribing one another to do it. Not appreciating the nature of the battle, women could be overly idealistic in their decision-making, or even overly realistic in the sense of being unduly vengeful. If you are not appreciative of and sympathetic towards the battle it is hard to know where the balance lies. The American author Camille Paglia recognised this truth when she famously said, ‘If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts’ (Sexual Personae, 1990). This ‘grass huts’ comment can be understood both literally and metaphorically because the fundamental situation was that if our instinctive self or soul (which women represented) had its way the intellect would never have been allowed to search for knowledge. The soul’s ignorance had to be defied if knowledge and ultimately self-understanding was to be found. To give in to soul was to go nowhere, to give-up, to remain in ‘grass huts’. Incidentally, Paglia also defied the feminist code when she said, ‘Wake up, men and women are different’ (The Australian, 4-5 Jul. 1992).

So while both men and women have had to live in denial of the battle of the human condition, men have been astutely aware of the issue of the human condition and their job of championing the ego to solve it; they had to maintain an awareness of the battle because they were the ones who had to fight it. Women, on the other hand, have trouble identifying with the discussion in my books about the battle of the human condition—to them, it has all largely been a mystery. If you look at the quotes used throughout my books, and there are hundreds of them, the vast majority come from male philosophers, scientists, writers, songwriters, etc. It was men’s job to champion the ego, to find the liberating understanding of the human condition, and so while all men share this awareness of the underlying battle, women do not. In Bob Dylan’s 1968 song All Along the Watchtower he referred to men, the ‘princes’ who ‘kept the view’ ‘all along the watchtower’ ‘while all the women came and went’. Men waited steadily for the answers to the human condition to arrive but women weren’t so focused. This limitation on the part of women was described by Sir Laurens van der Post in his 1976 book Jung and the Story of Our Time, when he related a dream Carl Jung had about a blind woman named Salome. Sir Laurens wrote that ‘Salome was young, beautiful and blind’, explaining the symbolism of Salome’s blindness with ‘Salome was blind because the anima [the soulful, more feminine aspect of humans] is incapable of seeing’ (p.169 of 275).

I could talk for days about the differences and dynamics between men and women because there is so much now that we can explain and needs to be explained about the world of men and women, but in doing so we once again come face to face with unbearably confronting truths. Men, for instance, have to face the truth of how diabolically upset they have become; how massively arrogant and deluded and brutal they have been—in particular, how destructive they have been of women, of nature, in fact of innocence in all its forms. Women, on the other hand, have to face the truth that they unjustly condemned men and that they have not been ‘mainframed’. They also need to face the truth about their role as sex objects and that being a sex object is about imitating innocence and that sex destroys women’s innocence, and—finally—they need to face the truth of the importance of nurturing their children.

Importantly, however, it is not necessary to fully face the truth of the extent of our upset condition. As has been explained and will be further fleshed out in Part 9, ‘The Transformation of the Human Race’, we can support the truth without fully confronting it, however, it is important to know that the truth does exist and has finally been explained because that is the all-precious ingredient for a new world that we will be defending when we take up the Sunshine Highway, TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING.

Now, at last, the world of men can be understood and through that understanding the battle between the sexes can finally be brought to an end—but not artificially through dogmatic feminist demands that men disown their masculinity and wash the dishes, etc, but rather through men being able to say, ‘This is why I am upset, there was a good reason for my upset, I happen to be good, in fact, not just good but an absolute legend, the hero of the story of life on Earth! And I have had the most horrific job that wasn’t made any easier by you women criticising me.’ And for their part women can respond with, ‘I understand that now, but our job was to keep the soulful true world alive as much as possible and to nurture a fresh generation which wasn’t made any easier by you men being so egocentric and self-preoccupied.’ So with dialogue now possible between men and women, the war between the sexes can finally come to an end.

However, as stated earlier, the problem was that the longer it took to find this reconciling understanding of the human condition the more upset amplified. Eventually, humanity arrived at the precipice of self-destruction at which point panic set in and instead of carefully persevering with the upsetting battle to find liberating understanding of ourselves, a strident majority advocated abandoning the battle and ‘flying back on course’. But to do so was suicide—a ‘loss of nerve’, as the British science historian Jacob Bronowski summed up the danger of this march of pseudo idealism: ‘I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into—into what? Into…falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex [instinct]. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us’ (The Ascent of Man, 1973, p.437 of 448). What has happened is that give-up-the-battle, ‘fly-back-on-course’, left-wing political ideology has threatened to take over the world.

One of the great dangers of left-wing political ideology was that it operated under the delusion that giving up the battle was the ideal, responsible path to take. The left-wing deluded itself that it held the moral high ground when, as we can now explain, it was the right-wing, in its preparedness to pursue the upsetting battle to find liberating understanding, that actually lay claim to that mantle. We have always known that when the truth arrived it was going to shatter many illusions and delusions. For example, instead of men being the absolute villains of the story of life on Earth they are suddenly revealed to be the heroes of that story. The truth was not as it appeared. Left-wing advocates weren’t the idealists they presented themselves to be; we can see now that they were actually advocating giving up the battle to overthrow ignorance. At the end of the day, the right-wing is revealed to have been the true idealists because only by continuing the heroic, albeit corrupting, search for knowledge could freedom from the human condition be achieved. All along, the right-wing has been doing the right thing and yet they have been erroneously labelled ‘neocons’, short for ‘neoconservatives’. The left-wing love that nickname because it is almost saying that the right-wing are ‘con men’, but we can now see that it was the left-wing that was conning us, not the right-wing. Real idealism, as opposed to pseudo idealism, involved continuing the corrupting search for knowledge.

The danger of pseudo idealism, especially those increasingly dishonest forms that emerged in the last 200 years, was described in Part 3:11H. There it was described how, in the Bible, the prophets Christ and Daniel anticipated the development of pseudo idealistic causes, describing such causes as ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ (see Daniel:11, Matt:24, Mark:13)—‘the abomination’ that leads nowhere except to even greater levels of alienation. Christ warned that when pseudo idealism threatens to take over the world we should ‘flee to the mountains’ (Matt. 24:16), because by then the artificiality of the world would be so great that there was a very real risk that the associated truthless, nerveless, terminal levels of alienation could very well destroy the world. Everywhere pseudo idealistic, left-wing causes like feminism, environmentalism and political correctness dominated.

But taking up the option of ‘flying back on course’ was never going to lead to the answers, it was only ever going to add more dishonesty, more denial, more alienation that would one day have to be seen through and dismantled. As described in Part 3:11G, the great beauty of religions, especially Christianity, was that they contained a degree of honesty. In the case of Christianity, by deferring to Christ you were indirectly acknowledging your own alienation and corruption and Christ’s lack thereof. Pseudo idealistic causes like environmentalism, on the other hand, required no honesty, no confrontation with the truth of your corrupted condition, no recognition of the underlying issue of the human condition—as the editor of TIME magazine, Richard Stengel, recognised, ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue’ (TIME mag. 31 Dec. 1990). In fact, the honesty inherent in religions such as Christianity is precisely the reason they have waned in popularity in recent years. As we humans became more upset we found it increasingly difficult to accept any confrontation with the truth of our condition, and so any emphasis on guilt became unbearable. Not surprisingly, Buddhism has been growing in popularity because it places no emphasis on guilt or on a confronting idealistic ‘God’. As one Buddhist convert said, Buddhism is ‘non-judgemental, there’s no notion of sin, there’s no notion of good and evil, you don’t embrace negativity’ (from Light at Edge of the World: Science of the Mind of Buddhism, National Geographic Channel, 2006). But to completely strip religions of their emphasis on guilt was to strip them of their aligning honesty.

Indeed, one of the most dishonest, sophisticated-in-the-art-of-denial of the pseudo idealistic causes was postmodernism, which took guilt stripping to the extreme by actually maintaining that there was no such thing as ‘truth’! What rubbish! The whole purpose of human endeavour was to find the truth, not to give up and argue that it doesn’t even exist.

However, while pseudo idealistic denials have been spreading like wildfire across the world—about men being useless and about there being no real difference between men and women, and there being no such thing as ‘truth’ anyway, etc, etc—the real truth about the role differentiation between men and women, and the impact of that differentiation on their lives under the duress of the human condition, has been sitting there, openly acknowledged, in the Bible for some 3,500 years. In Genesis, Moses said, ‘the Lord God made a woman…and he brought her to the man…[to] be united to his wife…The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame’ (2:22-25). Moses then said that when the ‘fruit’ ‘from the tree of…​knowledge’ (3:3, 2:17) was taken and the search for knowledge began, ‘the eyes of both of them [Adam and Eve] were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they…made coverings for themselves’ (3:6-7). Then, acknowledging that it became a patriarchal world after the upsetting search for knowledge began, Moses said, ‘To the woman he [God] said…Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’ (3:16). In other words, before the patriarchal search for knowledge began, humans were innocent and during this time of innocence men did not use sex, or any other means, to attack the innocence of women, but then men became upset and turned on women and attacked their innocence through the perversion of sex, at which point humans had to invent clothes in order to conceal our bodies because our nakedness incited lust. So while clothes became necessary to keep neotenised, hairless humans warm, they also became necessary to dampen lust. Even the relatively innocent Bushmen, who go about semi-naked most of the time, wear loincloths to conceal their genitals. Once humans became extremely upset even the glimpse of a woman’s face or ankle became dangerously 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. It was a reverse-of-the-truth lie to say, as it is frequently argued, that this concealment of women was introduced out of ‘respect for women’. The truth is, it was enforced because women were being disrespected.

So that is why the world has been patriarchal, what sex, as humans practice, is and why innocence has been attacked everywhere. It has been an utterly tragic story. The deeper you look into the human condition the more horrific it becomes, but thank God we can now look into it, understand it and leave it behind forever.

(Much more can be read about the life of men and women under the duress of the human condition—including explaining such battle-to-find-knowledge-sympathetic women as Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher, and the non-reproducing, seemingly-biologically-impossible sexual state of homosexuality—in my freely available, online book A Species In Denial in the chapter titled ‘Bringing peace to the war between the sexes’ at <www.humancondition.com/​asid-men-and-women>.)