Part 4:10 The danger of excessive denial/​dishonesty/​alienation in science

In this Part I will describe how the extraordinarily dishonest excuse that ‘humans’ competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour is due to supposed brutal and savage animal instincts within us’ was developed and advanced by denial-complying biologists into a whole world of dishonest explanation for human behaviour.

At the outset it needs to be re-emphasised that if we were to be honest, even for a moment, the descriptions we have for our human behaviour, such as egocentric, arrogant, evil, shameful, guilty, contemptuous, alienated, psychotic, depressed, deluded, artificial, fake, pretentious, superficial, escapist, defensive, hateful, mean, spiteful, vindictive, sadistic, denial-ridden, immoral, manic, inspired, pessimistic, optimistic, all imply a psychological dimension to our behaviour. Animals do kill each other, lions do stalk and tear the throats out of zebras, but that has nothing to do with our behaviour—few would think to apply the adjectives listed above to any animal other than humans. It is completely dishonest, a total denial in fact, to argue that the reason we humans are so aggressive is because our animal instincts ‘wired’ us that way.

Claiming that we are selfish because our genes are selfish contains no acknowledgment of the obvious involvement in our unique human situation of our fully conscious thinking mind. Ours is a psychologically derived condition. It really was absurd to try to relate our species’ mind-controlled, psychologically troubled human condition to other animals’ gene-controlled, selfish animal condition—and yet that is what the upset human race had to do in its desperation to excuse its corrupted condition while it couldn’t truthfully explain it.

The savage-animal-instincts-in-us excuse also overlooked the fact that we humans have altruistic, cooperative, loving moral instincts—what we recognise as our ‘conscience’—and these moral instincts are not derived from reciprocity, from situations where you only do something for others in return for a benefit from them (a claim, as we are about to see, biologists tried to argue), but from unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral instincts in us that, as explained in Part 4:4D, were acquired through the nurturing, love-indoctrination process. Our original instinctive state was the opposite of being competitive, selfish and aggressive: it was cooperative, selfless and loving.

Using the Adam Stork analogy we can now see the extent of the dishonesty because that analogy explains that we humans became more upset as consciousness evolved. The Adam Stork analogy undermines the excuse that ‘we-are-‘red in tooth and claw’-because-animals-are’ because it reveals that we started out innocent, free of upset, living in a ‘paradise’, ‘Golden Age’ of ‘togetherness’ and that the upset state is a newly acquired state. It explains that ‘We became upset, we didn’t start out this way—we started out free of upset.’ We humans once lived in a harmonious, Garden-of-Eden-like, upset-free, innocent state, which all mythologies recognise, as Richard Heinberg documented.

Despite the transparent falseness of the ‘savage-animal-instincts-in-us’ excuse for our divisive behaviour, without the truthful explanation of the human condition adopting that excuse was necessary. What now needs to be described is how, with the development of science, this ‘our selfishness is only natural, it’s just our animal instincts’ necessary excuse but terrible lie was supposedly given a biological basis—and, as a result, became the springboard for a great raft of supposedly rational, scientific, biological thinking on human behaviour.

Although biologists were the ones charged with the responsibility of the all-important search for understanding of human behaviour, what we are about to see is that they dangerously and irresponsibly diverted that search down a deep and dark road of terrible dishonesty. It is one thing for the layman to adopt the excuse that our selfish and aggressive behaviour is no different from the selfish and aggressive behaviour we see in nature, but it’s a serious development indeed for that excuse to be adopted by science and society as the basis of all supposedly rational thinking about human behaviour. To see how dangerously dishonest biological thinking became, we need to revisit the role that science has had to play, and the strategy it had to adopt.

As brave as it was, the fact of the matter is that recognising the elements involved in our human situation of our innocent instincts and corrupting conscious intellect (as all our mythologies did, and as Moses, Plato and some other thinkers did) ultimately got us nowhere, because we had to find sufficient knowledge to allow us to explain why and how these elements produced the upset state of the human condition. Only knowledge could liberate us. Science had to be invented and developed. The human race had to set about accumulating a first-principle-based understanding of the mechanisms and workings of our world in the hope and faith that one day, with sufficient knowledge found, we would finally be able to explain how and why the elements in our make-up of our innocent, cooperatively orientated instincts and our conscious intellect produced the upset state of our human condition.

Necessarily, while accumulating this knowledge, any truths that brought humanity into contact with the unbearably depressing issue of the human condition had to be denied. As has been explained, science has not been holistic, it has been mechanistic and reductionist—it has avoided the whole view of the issue of the human condition. It has directed its focus away from the whole overview of the issue of the human condition and down into finding understanding of the details of the mechanisms and workings of our world. Science set about accumulating knowledge, while all the time avoiding any truths that brought the unbearably depressing issue of the human condition into focus. Science has been objective not subjective in its orientation; it has ardently avoided the subjective issue of the human condition. (Note, as mentioned, ‘holism’ actually means ‘the tendency in nature to form wholes’ (Concise Oxford Dict. 5th edn, 1964); it is a recognition of Integrative Meaning, so it doesn’t itself mean to take ‘the whole view’ of existence. Even though they sound the same, ‘holism’ is not ‘wholeism’. Nevertheless, recognition of Integrative Meaning involves recognising ‘the whole view’ because it is one of the great truths that any truthful, effective, human-condition-confronting whole view of life depends on.)

The obvious limitation, however, of this tactic of avoiding the whole view of the issue of the human condition was how was mechanistic science ever going to use the understandings of the mechanisms and workings of our world to explain the human condition when it was denying any truths that brought the issue of the human condition into focus? As has been emphasised a number of times already, you can’t build the truth with lies.

The answer to this riddle is that when mechanistic, reductionist science had accumulated sufficient understanding of the mechanisms and workings of our world to make explanation of the human condition possible, someone, taking a denial-free, human-condition-confronting not human-condition-avoiding, holistic approach, would be able to use mechanistic science’s hard-won insights into the mechanisms and workings of our world to assemble the explanation of the human condition.

This ‘plan’ was all very well, but it ran the risk of producing a potentially very serious problem: the danger of the denial-complying, human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic, reductionist strategy becoming so well developed, so sophisticated in its refinement of lies, that it could become impossible to finally retrieve the truth from all those lies. Metaphorically speaking, the world could become so shrouded in darkness (lies) that no light (truth) could hope to penetrate it, and it was that degree of near total darkness, of near total denial of truth, that finally developed on Earth.

Nikolai Berdyaev recognised this great danger of alienation from the truth in mechanistic science when he wrote that ‘Philosophy…regards him [man] as belonging to the kingdom of the spirit, while science studies man…as an object…Nothing that is an object…has meaning…The only way radically to distinguish between philosophy and science is to admit that philosophy is…knowledge of meaning and participation in meaning. Science and scientific foresight give man power and security, but they can also devastate his consciousness and sever him from reality. Indeed it might be said that science is based upon the alienation of man from reality and of reality from man…The historical method which…objectifies ideas, regarding them entirely from outside…[means that] the discovery of meaning becomes impossible. It is the enslavement of philosophy by science—scientific terrorism’ (The Destiny of Man, 1931, tr. N. Duddington, 1960, p.6-7 of 310).

The prophetic English poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827) similarly decried mechanistic science’s ‘alienation of man’ ‘from reality’ when he wrote, ‘May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep!’ (Letter to Thomas Butt, 22 Nov. 1802).

The physicist Paul Davies also recognised the limitation and danger of mechanistic science when, in a quote included earlier, he commented that ‘there is a deeper reason for the wide-spread antipathy. It is connected with the underlying philosophy of science itself. For 300 years science has been dominated by extremely mechanistic thinking. According to this view of the world all physical systems are regarded as basically machines…I have little doubt that much of the alienation and demoralisation that people feel in our so-called scientific age stems from the bleak sterility of mechanistic thought…Mechanistic thought has undoubtedly had a stifling effect on the human spirit. Liberation from this centuries-old straight jacket will enable human beings to re-integrate themselves and the physical world of which they are a part’ (‘Living in a non-material world—the new scientific consciousness’, The Australian, 9 Oct. 1991).

The aforementioned biologist Charles Birch was another who emphasised the limitations and danger of the mechanistic approach when he wrote that ‘Reductionism or Mechanism…is the dominant mode of science and is particularly applicable to biology as it is taught today…[it is] A view or model of livingness that leaves out feelings and consciousness…[and] I believe it has grave consequences…In the name of scientific objectivity we have been given an emasculated vision of the world and all that is in it. The wave of anti-science…is an extreme reaction to this malaise…I believe biologists and naturalists have a special responsibility to put another image before the world that does justice to the unity of life and all its manifestations of experience—aesthetic, religious and moral as well as intellectual and rational’ (‘Two Ways of Interpreting Nature’, Australian Natural History, Vol.21 No.2, 1983).

HRH The Prince of Wales, the heir to the British throne, has said that ‘This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion…As a result, Nature has been completely objectified…and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.’ He went on to talk about humanity’s ‘deep, inner crisis of the soul’ (The Times, 9 Jun. 2010).

Arthur Koestler also recognised the consequences of mechanistic, reductionist science’s avoidance of the real issue involved in our human condition of our consciousness-induced psychosis when he wrote that the ‘symptoms of the mental disorder which appears to be endemic in our species…are specifically and uniquely human, and not found in any other species. Thus it seems only logical that our search for explanations [of human behaviour] should also concentrate primarily on those attributes of homo sapiens which are exclusively human and not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom. But however obvious this conclusion may seem, it runs counter to the prevailing reductionist trend. “Reductionism” is the philosophical belief that all human activities can be “reduced” to – i.e., explained by – the [non-psychosis involved] behavioural responses of lower animals – Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats and pigeons, Lorenz’s greylag geese, Morris’s hairless apes…That is why the scientific establishment has so pitifully failed to define the predicament of man.’ Koestler complained of ‘the sterile deserts of reductionist philosophy’, asserting that ‘a correct diagnosis of the condition of man [had to be] based on a new approach to the sciences of life’ (Janus: A Summing Up, 1978, pp.19, 20 of 354).

R.D. Laing emphasised the need for mechanistic science to investigate not just outer space but inner space, our consciousness-derived-and-induced human condition, when he wrote, ‘The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man…Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life [pp.11-12 of 156] …We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the space man. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project—indeed, as a desperately urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness. Perhaps this is one of the few things that still make sense in our historical context. We are so out of touch with this realm [so in denial of the issue of the human condition] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist [p.105]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967).

As mentioned in Part 4:4B, Plato recognised the destructive effect of denial on our intellect’s capacity to think effectively, writing that ‘when the soul [our integratively orientated original instinctual self] uses the instrumentality of the body [uses the body’s intellect with its preoccupation with denial] for any inquiry…it is drawn away by the body into the realm of the variable, and loses its way and becomes confused and dizzy, as though it were fuddled [drunk]…But when it investigates by itself [free of human-condition-avoiding, intellectual denial], it passes into the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless, and being of a kindred nature, when it is once independent and free from interference, consorts with it always and strays no longer, but remains, in that realm of the absolute [Integrative Meaning], constant and invariable’ (Phaedo, tr. H. Tredennick). He also referred to the need to be able ‘to look straight at reality’ if we are to effectively ‘learn’ when he wrote, ‘this capacity [of a mind…to see clearly] is innate in each man’s mind [we are born with a truthful, instinctive orientation to the cooperative, loving, integrative meaning of existence], and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the mind as a whole must be turned away from the world of change until it can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which is what we call the Good [Integrative Meaning or God]’ (The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.283 of 405).

But for ‘Liberation from this centuries-old straight jacket’ and ‘scientific terrorism’ of ‘the bleak sterility of mechanistic thought’, ‘the sterile deserts of reductionist philosophy’, with its ‘confused and dizzy’, ‘emasculated vision of the world’—and for ‘biologists and naturalists [to fulfil their]… special responsibility to put another image before the world that does justice to the unity of life and all its manifestations of experience—aesthetic, religious and moral as well as intellectual and rational’ and put forward ‘a correct diagnosis of the condition of man’, and, as a result, for ‘human beings to re-integrate themselves’ and end the ‘sleep’ of ‘the alienation of man from reality’ and resulting ‘deep, inner crisis of the soul’—‘the discovery of meaning’ for humans, understanding of their context and worth, understanding of the human condition in fact, had to be found, and that required defying all the extreme ‘alienation’ in ‘mechanistic thinking’. In Part 3:11H we saw how the development of pseudo idealism took humanity to the very brink of terminal alienation. As we are about to see, the same danger to humanity of terminal alienation resulted from the dishonesty of the scientific establishment, particularly in the field of biology—which is ironic given it was from within that field that the liberating understanding of the human condition had to be found.

The challenge was to take only the elements of truth about the mechanisms and workings of our world that mechanistic science had found and avoid all the denials and dishonest ‘reasonings’ that mechanistic science has been employing—in particular, the denials of our moral instincts and corrupting intellect and use of the dishonest excuse that we are selfish and aggressive because we have selfish and aggressive animal instincts. As we are now going to see there has been a veritable mountain of false biological thinking about human behaviour that had to be defied for the truthful explanation of the human condition to be arrived at. In fact, so immense was the mountain of denial, and so entrenched had it become, that humanity ran the risk of making the truth impossible to reach. That was the great risk that the necessary strategy of denial held—that the truth might never be able to be extracted from the ever-accumulating mountain of lies. With everyone determinedly lying through their teeth, how was anyone supposed to defy all that dishonesty and think truthfully about our human situation and find the real reason for all the upset madness in human behaviour. They were going to have to be exceptionally defiant of all the dishonest denial/​bullshit flooding the Earth. In fact, they would have to go off alone and think everything through about human life from a truthful base, independent of and defiant of the mountain of terrible lies, which is exactly what I had to do and did. Not only that, when they finally brought back that truth about humans to all those living in denial they were then going to have to survive attacks from that world for daring to tell the truth—as psychologists and counsellors recognise, ‘habitual…patterns [of denial] have a life of their own, and their will to live is very strong. They fight back with a vengeance when faced with annihilation’ (Courage to Heal, L. Davis & E. Bass, 1988, p.175 of 495). It has been an extremely difficult journey that is still not over because the resistance to virtually all the ideas being presented, which, as will be described later, has now subsided to a state of just-ignore-all-these-truthful-liberating-insights silence, still remains immense.

It has to be emphasised immediately that having necessarily been sound enough to defy the world of denial doesn’t in any way make me a better person than anyone else. With understanding of the human condition we can appreciate that all humans are equally good, just variously upset as a result of different encounters with, and levels of participation in, humanity’s heroic battle to champion the intellect over the ignorant instincts. The whole concept of superiority and inferiority in people is completely eliminated with understanding of the human condition. In the great spectrum of alienation that necessarily exists in the human population there have always been a few who were fortunate enough to not encounter the effects of the battle of the human condition and who were therefore relatively innocent and free of upset. According to their lot in the great battle that humanity was waging everyone had different roles to play, and the role of the exceptionally sound was to defy all the denials in the world as best they could. When humanity as a whole, through its vehicle for enquiry of mechanistic science, had found sufficient clues about the mechanisms and workings of our world then at that point there was a need for exceptional innocence to play a particular role of synthesising the denial-free explanation of the human condition, that is all. The journey to finding explanation of the human condition has required and involved the efforts of everyone.