Part 3:11G The last 11,000 years

The last 11,000 years and the rise of Imposed Discipline, Religion and other forms of Pseudo Idealism

Clearly, when the level of upset in the human race as a whole reached this final Hollowman stage humanity was at end play or end game in the race between self-discovery and self-destruction. The levels of upset had become stupendous. But what could we do about it? We were stuck between two increasingly flawed options: adopting, or in some cases returning to, the extremely treacherous and fraudulent and thus dangerous born-again, pseudo idealistic, ‘do good to feel good’ way of living, or persevering with the ever more brutal and destructive power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking, egocentric, knowledge-finding, resigned competitive existence. In fact, our lives, both individually and collectively as societies for all of the last 11,000 years—when the domestication of plants and animals first began, the significance of which will be explained shortly—have been marked by the oscillation between these two extremely flawed ways of coping with the human condition. We tried living by the born-again strategy until it became unbearably irresponsible, dishonest and dangerous, and then we tried living by the resigned competitive strategy until it became too corrupting and destructive, and so on, back and forth. As has been mentioned, these two strategies were eventually refined into what we now term the ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ in politics.

We now need to examine what happened with these two strategies when, following the advent of agriculture and the domestication of animals some 11,000 years ago, upset reached a crescendo. Of the two strategies, we’ll firstly look at the increasingly brutal and destructive power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking, egocentric, knowledge-finding, resigned competitive strategy—the approach that became known as ‘right-wing’.

The significance of the domestication of plants and animals was that it led to such a rapid increase in upset that, on the graph charting the intensification of our upset, humanity was fast approaching rock-bottom—we were racing towards the bitter and vengeful, burnt-out, out-of-control, all-restraints-thrown-to-the-wind, rampaging, warring level of upset. This was because the domestication of plants and animals enabled people to live a more sedentary, less nomadic existence, in closer proximity and in greater numbers, the effect of which was to greatly increase the spread and growth of upset in humans. As explained earlier when describing the effect the ice ages had on our species, living closely under the strain of the human condition dramatically accentuated the difficulties encountered by humans who were living with upset. So it follows that the closer humans lived during humanity’s adolescence and/​or the more difficult the living conditions, the greater the spread of and increase in upset, and that isolation from such encounters with the battle of the human condition served to minimise the spread of upset or soul-exhaustion. In short, if we were each left alone with our personal level of exhaustion, we would not be criticised by fresher souls or corrupted by the more battle-worn. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre succinctly summed up just how difficult it is for upset, alienated people to coexist when he said, ‘Hell is other people’ (Closed Doors, 1944). As mentioned earlier, we need only look at the extreme situation to see the principle in action—innocence isn’t going to survive long in New York’s Times Square or Sydney’s Kings Cross where drug pushers, prostitutes, muggers and beggars work the streets. Of course, while living closer together in more organised societies did greatly increase the spread and accumulation of upset, it also assisted the spread and accumulation of knowledge. In terms then of the race between self-discovery and self-destruction, there was at this time a speeding up in the development of both aspects.

This explanation of how the advent of agriculture and the domestication of animals led to a rapid increase in upset allows us to better understand why, in the aforementioned Biblical story, Cain became more upset than his brother, Abel: ‘Abel kept flocks [he lived the nomadic life of a shepherd, staying close to nature and innocence], and Cain worked the soil [he cultivated crops and domesticated animals and as a result was able to become settled and through greater interaction with other humans became increasingly upset]…Cain was [became] very angry, and his face was downcast [he became depressed about his upset state and]…Cain attacked his [relatively innocent and thus unwittingly exposing, confronting and condemning] brother Abel and killed him’ (Gen. 4:2, 5, 8).

By some 4,000 years ago (2,000 BC) the development of villages, the movement by people into specialised occupations, the beginnings of trade and industry, and the close personal interaction that each development inevitably brought, resulted in humans becoming so upset that some could no longer contain their upset and had to live that upset out, as the story of Cain and Abel describes—they had to allow some expression of their upset if they were to find any relief from the pressure of being so upset. Men especially began to feel the periodic need to go on a rampage of raping and pillaging. Tragic examples abound, but the thirteenth century Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan was certainly someone who lived out his upset to the full, every day satisfying his anger with bloodletting, his egocentricity through the domination of others, and his mind or spirit by blocking out any feelings of guilt or remorse coming from the moral instincts within himself. As Genghis Khan is reputed to have said, ‘Happiness lies in conquering one’s enemies, in driving them in front of oneself, in taking their property, in savouring their despair, in outraging their wives and daughters.’

The periodic need to go on the rampage and express, indeed purge, unbearable levels of upset resulted in endless rounds of payback warfare where warriors from one tribe or village would raid another tribe for their material goods and maidens, which in turn would provoke a counter raid, and so it went on. Clearly at this point, where the upset in humans had become so great that the warfare and killing and raping was being carried out incessantly, in wave after wave of ever-increasing ferocity and brutality, a new way to restrain upset simply had to be invented. For the truth is, despite Genghis Khan obtaining some momentary relief from feeling so upset by rampaging across the world, there would have been no inner peace in his own life, or, more significantly, any peace in his blood-soaked world.

Such extreme upset meant that Self Discipline could no longer contain or civilise the escalating levels of upset in society and so another form of restraint for those participating in the upsetting heroic search for knowledge had to be developed. The solution that emerged was Imposed Discipline—an agreed upon set of rules and laws that enforced social (integrative) behaviour through threat of punishment. Once developed, this new form of restraint proved significantly effective. For example, by the time Europeans arrived in North America a grand union of American Indian tribes, known as the Iroquois Confederacy, had been established by two unresigned, denial-free thinkers or prophets who had emerged from within their ranks. Recognised and described by their people as ‘prophets’, these two American Indians, named Hiawatha and ‘The Great Peacemaker’, with all their soulful sensitive feeling and denial-free clarity of thought, were able to realise that the endless rounds of payback warfare between and within the tribes could only be prevented by everyone agreeing to certain restraining rules that were enforced through punishment. The resulting discipline proved highly effective, as this quote illustrates: ‘The Iroquois Confederacy was established before European contact, complete with a constitution known as the…“Great Law of Peace”…The two prophets, Ayonwentah [Hiawatha]…and Dekanawidah, The Great Peacemaker, brought a message of peace to squabbling tribes…Once they ceased infighting, they rapidly became one of the strongest forces in seventeenth and eighteenth century north eastern North America’ (The Iroquois Confederacy and the Founding Fathers, accessed Sept. 2009; see <www.wtmsources.com/113>).

Exactly the same scenario had played out some 3,000 years prior when, in approximately 1,500 BC, the very great denial-free thinker or prophet Moses brought order to the Israelite Nation through the Ten Commandments that he had etched on stone tablets. The moral code contained in those Ten Commandments became the basis of the constitutions, laws and rules that continue to govern much of modern society and proved vital in helping rein in the kinds of upset unleashed by the likes of Genghis Khan, namely Hollow Adolescentman.

We now need to consider how the last 11,000 years affected the other strategy for coping with the human condition, which involved searching for an idealistic cause to support to make yourself feel better about your, by now, immensely upset state—the approach that later became known as ‘left-wing’.

Just as the resigned competitive practitioners invented a new strategy for coping with their problem of excessive upset, which was Imposed Discipline, so born-again, pseudo idealistic practitioners came up with a new strategy for coping with the problems associated with their excessive upset of siding against humanity’s great battle and of being excessively dishonest, which was Religion. To understand the benefit of religion we need to look further into the very serious problems associated with the born-again, pseudo idealistic strategy.

As has already been described, a serious problem with the born-again, pseudo idealistic, ‘do good to feel good’ strategy was that it involved siding against humanity’s great battle to champion the ego over the ignorance of our instinctive self. The other very serious problem with this strategy was that because you were behaving in a supposedly good, ideal way you were effectively saying that you actually were a good, selfless, cooperative, gentle, loving, guilt-and-human-condition-free, ideal person. This was unlike the resigned competitive strategy where, firstly, you were still participating in humanity’s heroic battle to find knowledge, and secondly, while you were using denial and lies to defend your upset state (asserting that there was no integrative purpose to existence, only random change, and that you were aggressive and selfish because humans had selfish instincts, and therefore there was no psychological dilemma of the human condition to have to explain), you were not deluding yourself you were a cooperative, loving, selfless, gentle, thoroughly good person free of upset. The born-again, pseudo idealist both abandoned the battle and took lying and delusion to a whole new level.

To go over this again, while the resigned competitive person continued with the heroic search for knowledge and used dishonest excuses for being upset, the born-again pseudo idealist both abandoned humanity’s heroic search for knowledge and took the business of lying about upset to the extreme of denying even being upset in the first place. It is worth mentioning that maintaining such extreme delusion was greatly helped along by the fact that we had already been practicing total denial of the issue of our corrupted, human-condition-afflicted state since resigning in our early adolescent years. So, in adopting a born-again, pseudo idealist strategy, all its advocates were doing was adding another layer of delusion to one that was already well entrenched. As mentioned in Part 3:11B, while Resignation was a form of autism, of block-out/​detachment/​denial, pseudo idealism was an even more extreme form of it, ‘autism’ being, as former president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott explained, ‘a highly sophisticated defence organization. What we see is invulnerability…The child carries round the (lost) memory of unthinkable anxiety, and the illness is a complex mental structure insuring against recurrence of the conditions of the unthinkable anxiety.’

So, in essence, there were three states of denial. Firstly, there was the unresigned, denial-free position held by unevasive thinkers/​prophets who didn’t deny that humanity was involved in a great battle, and didn’t deny the Godly, Integrative Meaning of existence, nor the moral soul in humans, nor the corrupted state of humanity. Secondly, there was the resigned competitive person who didn’t behave as if there was no great battle that humanity was involved in and didn’t deny their competitive, aggressive and selfish upset nature, but who did use dishonest excuses to cope with that upset state. And thirdly, there was the born-again pseudo idealist who denied that humanity was involved in a great battle and deluded themselves they were free of the upset state of the human condition—which basically meant they denied all the fundamental truths about our human-condition-afflicted state. The born-again, pseudo idealist took the practice of lying to the absolute extreme.

The born-again, pseudo idealistic strategy was both treacherous and extremely dishonest, traits that totally undermined the search for knowledge, because in campaigning against the battle to find knowledge you were leading humanity towards an extreme state of denial/​alienation/​separation from the truth/​knowledge, when, in fact, humanity had to continue the battle to try to get closer to and ultimately reach the truth/​knowledge/​understanding of the human condition. And, as we will see, when the born-again, pseudo idealistic state became fully developed in the form of ‘postmodernism’ even the existence of truth itself was denied! The fundamental objective of the human journey was to find the truth about ourselves, so adopting extreme denial of the truth, especially extreme denial of the truth about the human condition, was leading humanity away from its objective, misguiding humanity onto the path to oblivion, to total darkness in terms of enlightening ourselves about ourselves—which is why, as will shortly be further explained, pseudo idealism came to be described as ‘the abomination that causes desolation’.

We can see that since dishonesty was so dangerous, and pseudo idealism was the most dishonest strategy ever developed for coping with the human condition, there was a very great need to find a form of pseudo idealism that minimised this extreme dishonesty—and eventually a great counter to this extreme dishonesty was found in Religion.

Religion did, of course, involve being ‘born again’ to the cooperative ideal state, it was a form of pseudo idealism, because instead of living through yourself with all the associated overly upset angers, egocentricities and denials, you deferred to someone exceptionally free of upset—namely one of the unresigned, denial-free-thinking, integrative-ideals-or-God-acknowledging, soulful, sound, innocent prophets around whom the great religions have been founded. Because you had become overly upset you decided to end your participation in humanity’s heroic yet upsetting battle to find knowledge and instead put your faith in and live through supporting the soundness and truth of a prophet’s life and words. Rather than adhering to what your now overly upset self wanted to do and say, you adhered to the soundness and truth of the prophet’s life and words. But, the immense benefit of deferring to religion was that while it allowed you to be born-again to a form of idealism and thus contain your upset and feel good about yourself, you were minimising the dishonesty normally involved in the born-again, pseudo idealistic strategy, because you were acknowledging the soundness of the prophet and, by inference, your lack of soundness. By recognising, indeed worshipping, the integrity of the prophet, and his representation of another true, denial-free, integrative, soulful, sound state, you were indirectly admitting your own extreme lack of soundness—your separation from the integrative, true, soulful state; you were indirectly being honest about your immensely corrupted state.

Religions even countered the degree of dishonesty involved in the other strategy for coping—the resigned, competitive way of living—because most religions acknowledged the existence of a God who, as has been explained, is the personification of Integrative Meaning. Also, by acknowledging the soulful soundness of the prophet, you were recognising the existence of a cooperative, unconditionally selfless, moral soul in humans.

Another very important benefit of religion was that, on an individual level, it also helped assuage the guilt felt by pseudo idealists who were struggling with the fact that they were siding against humanity in its great battle. This is because in supporting your religion you were also indirectly supporting humanity’s heroic search for knowledge, because the truthful words of the prophet that were recorded in your religion’s scriptures, which you were showing reverence for and deferring to, were the very font of knowledge; in fact, they were the most denial-free expression of knowledge the human race had ever known. Indeed, now that we are able to explain the human condition we can demystify—explain and understand—the metaphysical content of religious texts (such as the explanation already given of the story of Noah’s Ark in the Bible, and of prophets, and of ‘God’) and what is revealed is that religious texts contain an extraordinary amount of knowledge/​truth/​understanding/​insight into our human situation. Indeed, as it turns out, the whole story of the human condition, bar its scientific explanation, is perfectly described in religious texts, albeit in the abstract, metaphysical and often metaphorical terms that denial-free truthful and thus effective thinking prophets were limited to in those early pre-science times when the great religions were established. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung recognised how aligning to the truth and thus supportive of our search for knowledge Christianity, for example, has been when he wrote that ‘[in Christianity] the voice of God [truth] can still be heard’ (Jung and Christianity, W.B. Clift, 1982) and that ‘The Christian symbol is a living thing that carries in itself the seeds of further development’ (The Undiscovered Self, C.G Jung, 1957, p.63).

In summary, religions offered humans a way to abandon living out their upsets and be born-again to ideality, but in the least dangerously dishonest and most human-journey-responsible way. They enabled humans to indirectly continue to participate in humanity’s heroic yet upsetting search for knowledge, and they provided a way for humans to significantly avoid being dishonest, because by deferring to a prophet you were able to indirectly admit the truth of your own corrupted state and the existence of another integrative, true, sound, soulful state. Religions provided a way for humans to be (to a degree) honest about their corrupted, false condition without having to openly admit and therefore nakedly confront it. In doing so, they helped minimise the truth-destroying levels of delusion and denial involved in the born-again, pseudo idealistic lifestyle. Thus, religion was a pseudo idealistic, ‘do good in order to feel you are good’, ‘give up your overly upset life and be born again to a cooperative ideal life’ way of living that allowed you to live in safe denial of your corrupted condition, but at the same time be honest about it—albeit indirectly. In the case of Christianity, it actually referred to being ‘born again’ (John 3:3), to having ‘crossed over from death to life’ (John 5:24). As Christ authoritatively said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life [through me, your ideal, soulful true self can live again]’ (John 11:25).

The criticism that could be levelled at someone extremely upset, like Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler, was that they didn’t take up religion—or, if they did claim to be religious, they weren’t being genuinely religious. Indeed, for the exceptionally upset, the aspect of religion that made it so superior to the strategy of Imposed Discipline, which the Ten Commandments represented, was precisely that it allowed you to delude yourself that you were being ‘born again’, ‘resurrect[ed]’ from your corrupted state. Rather than having good behaviour forced upon you through fear of punishment, as was the case with Imposed Discipline, religion allowed you to feel that not only were you actively participating in goodness, you had actually become a good, selfless, loving, ideal person—that you were ‘righteous’—which provided immense relief from the guilt of being overly upset. Possibly the best sales pitch for born-again religious life was that given by the apostle St Paul when he wrote, ‘Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone [Moses’ Ten Commandments that were enforced by the threat of punishment], came with glory [because they brought society back from the brink of destruction]…fading though it was [there was no sustaining positive in having discipline imposed on you], will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that condemns men is glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was fading away came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!’ (2 Cor. 3:7–11).

Thus, in coping with the now raging levels of upset in humans, the first ‘glorious’ improvement on destructively living out that ferocious upset was Imposed Discipline, which was enforced through fear and punishment. But since discipline provided little in the way of joy for the mind or spirit it was hard to maintain, it didn’t ‘last’, it was ‘fading’, especially in comparison to the immensely guilt-relieving, ‘righteous’, ‘do good in order to make yourself feel good’ way of living offered by the next ‘surpassing glory’, religion.

We can clearly see then that the ‘do good in order to delude yourself that you actually are a kind, loving, selfless, good person and not horrifically corrupted’ aspect of religion was very important, which means that only being indirectly honest about being extremely corrupted when you became religious was crucial to the effectiveness of religion—because if you had to be directly honest about being horribly corrupted you couldn’t delude yourself you were actually a kind, loving, selfless, good, not-horribly-corrupted person. This ability to not just feel good (because you were now behaving in a good way and not in the incredibly destructive way you had been), but to use this fact to delude yourself you were actually a loving, kind, selfless, good, upset-free, ideal, guilt-free, human-condition-solved, ‘righteous’ person depended on this aspect of only indirectly acknowledging your corrupted state. So although in taking up religion you were being indirectly honest about being corrupted, you were still relying on being able to delude yourself that you weren’t corrupted. In short, religions allowed people to both admit to being horribly corrupted and yet not suffer the confronting consequences of such an admission. So just as humans could not directly acknowledge their corrupted state (because without the explanation of the human condition they couldn’t defend and thus cope with that truth), religions similarly depended on not directly acknowledging/​recognising the soundness of the prophet around whom the religion was founded, even though acknowledging/​recognising his soundness was an intrinsic part of the honesty that made religions so special and effective. Religions depended on not recognising—at least consciously, explicitly recognising—that prophets were simply a sound variety of ordinary people, because that truth would directly confront their followers with the unbearable truth of their own lack of soundness. Instead, at least at the surface level of their conscious awareness, religious adherents viewed their prophets as being supernatural, divine, heavenly, from-another-world beings, because that way they could avoid any comparison with themselves. In fact, the more upset and insecure the religious person, the more fundamentalist/​literal/​superficial they had to be in their interpretations of religious scripture and the prophet himself—because being too truthful was impossibly confronting.

As such, religion involved a very delicate balance of honesty and delusion, for while it offered a way of only being indirectly honest about the corrupted state, its very existence depended on its adherents making at least a subconsciously relieving, honest acknowledgement of their own corrupted state, and on others making at least, on a similarly subconscious level, a relieving, truthful recognition of that corruption. On the surface of conscious awareness, however, each individual adherent also depended on being able to maintain their facade and delusions about being an upset-free, ‘righteous’ person, which meant there was still a great deal of dishonesty involved in religion.

The cartoon series The Simpsons provides a wonderful illustration of the subtleties involved in religion. In the series, ‘Ned Flanders’ is the born-again religious character who is typically portrayed as having a self-satisfied, ‘I-occupy-the-moral-high-ground’ attitude over the still-human-condition-embroiled ‘Homer Simpson’. Ned’s posturing drives Homer crazy with frustration because he intuitively knows Ned is deluding himself in thinking his Christianity gives him the moral high ground—that he is the more together, sound person and is on the right track—but Homer can’t explain why Ned is so extremely deluded and totally dishonest in his view of self. Homer can’t explain and thus reveal the truth that real idealism and the truly on track, moral high ground lay with continuing the upsetting battle to find knowledge, and that Ned had become so upset, so unsound, that he had to abandon that all-important battle and leave it to others to continue to fight, including Homer. Worse, in abandoning the battle, Ned has effectively sided against those still trying to win the battle, adding substantially to the opposition they had to overcome. But even Ned is intuitively aware that he is practicing delusion and so has to work hard at maintaining it. As explained earlier, maintaining a delusion meant constantly persuading yourself, and others, that you are right. Stridency and fanaticism characterised the behaviour of those maintaining a delusion, especially when, in becoming religious for instance, you were practically admitting that you were being deluded about being a sound, together, on track person yourself by having had to defer to a sound prophet.

In summary, the benefit of Imposed Discipline for the resigned, competitive way of living over the born-again, pseudo idealistic way of living was that it did not undermine a person’s participation in humanity’s great battle—it simply provided a means to manage the upset associated with that battle. However, since the religious born-again strategy both minimised the irresponsibility of abandoning the battle, and (despite the degree of delusion it still allowed) minimised the extreme denial involved in becoming born-again, religion provided a marvellous way of coping with the by now extremely destructive and unbearable levels of upset and associated guilt that affected nearly the entire human race, which Imposed Discipline could no longer contain. In fact, because of its degree of honesty and indirect support of the search for knowledge, religion was by far the most special, the most wonderful form of pseudo idealism to ever be developed. Indeed, it was religion that saved humanity from destruction through the most difficult final stages of its journey.

However, while religion did save the human race, at the very end of our species’ journey through ignorance other forms of pseudo idealism evolved that very nearly destroyed humanity. This final development will now be described and explained.