Part 4:9 Fourth Category of Thinker: The great majority of the human race who avoided the whole issue of a psychosis in our human situation by simply blaming our selfish and aggressive behaviour on supposed brutish and savage animal instincts within us that our intellect supposedly has to control

In the preceding three categories I have summarised the various admissions I have either come across or been told about of the involvement of the elements of our instinct and conscious intellect in the problem of the human condition. While some of the individuals referred to veered away from trying to confront the issue of the human condition, they did at least all take the first step that was required to find the explanation of the dilemma (and the resulting upset psychosis) of the human condition, of recognising the underlying elements involved of our instincts and intellect. What we are going to see now is how almost everyone else in the world, including virtually all scientists, totally avoided the whole issue of the real dilemma and psychosis of our human condition by simply blaming our selfish and aggressive behaviour on supposed brutish and savage animal instincts within us that our intellect has to control.

To understand why the upset human race adopted the savage-animal-instincts-in-us excuse for our divisive behaviour, we need to briefly revisit the predicament faced by upset humans that led to this development.

Most people, in fact virtually all adults, have avoided anything to do with the issue of the psychological dilemma and resulting psychosis and neurosis of our human condition. Even beginning to vaguely contemplate the nature of our human situation has been too psychologically dangerous for upset humans—as described in Part 4:4C, even asking the obvious initial question of ‘What makes humans unique?’ has been a ‘no-go zone’. Clearly what is so unique about us humans is that we are conscious, but thinking about that was a slippery slope as it quickly raised the depressing question: ‘Well, if we are fully conscious, reasoning, intelligent, extremely clever animals, what is so intelligent, clever and smart about being so aggressive and selfish that we have nearly destroyed our own planet?’

Similarly, to start thinking truthfully about the other element that must play a significant role in our situation of our instinctive heritage—the fact that like other animals we too must have once been controlled by instincts—was even more treacherous as it very quickly led to the unbearably confronting memory, that all humans carry, of an upset-free, cooperatively orientated, innocent time in our species’ instinctive past, a time before the fabled ‘fall’ that all our mythologies recognise took place when we became fully conscious—as Richard Heinberg bravely acknowledged in his aforementioned book, Memories & Visions of Paradise: ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…has been lost…everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…innocence.’ While we have had to deny it, we all intuitively know that our species’ pre-conscious instinctive state was one of living innocently in a harmonious, cooperative, loving, peaceful state. As Berdyaev said, ‘The memory of a lost paradise, of a Golden Age, is very deep in man.’ Sir Laurens van der Post was someone who was sound and thus secure enough in self to reveal this deeper awareness that all humans carry of our species’ innocent past that contrasts so completely with our current immensely upset state when he wrote, ‘This shrill, brittle, self-important life of today is by comparison a graveyard where the living are dead and the dead are alive and talking [through our instinctive soul] in the still, small, clear voice of a love and trust in life that we have for the moment lost…[there was a time when] All on earth and in the universe were still members and family of the early race seeking comfort and warmth through the long, cold night before the dawning of individual consciousness in a togetherness which still gnaws like an unappeasable homesickness at the base of the human heart’ (Testament to the Bushmen, 1984, pp.127-128 of 176). Chatwin similarly admitted this truth about our species’ past ‘divine’ innocent state when, as mentioned earlier, he said that ‘[the third century theologian Origen argued that] at the beginning of human history, men were under supernatural protection, so there was no division between their divine and human natures: or, to rephrase the passage, there was no contradiction between man’s instinctual life and his reason.’ Moses likewise acknowledged this truth when he said that ‘God created man in his own image’ (Gen. 1:27)—in other words, the integrative process of developing the order of matter on Earth originally created humans in an unconditionally selflessly behaved, cooperative, loving, integrative state. Moses also said that ‘in the Garden of Eden [ibid. 2:15]…The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame’ (ibid. 2:25). We did once live alongside nature in an innocent state.

There have been some very obvious truths that all humans have known but have had to live in denial of. In fact, these truths—specifically that humans once lived in an upset-free, cooperative, harmonious, loving instinctive state and that our more recent conscious state has been characterised by anything but intelligent, smart behaviour—are so obvious that, as was described in Part 3:8, when children, at the age of about 10 or 11, began to think philosophically about life they were so aware of them and the questions they raised about the extreme imperfections of humans’ present existence that it only took a few years of contemplation before they became so horrifically depressed that they resigned themselves to a life of denial, determining never again to revisit those thoughts and the questions they raised. The reason I talk about Resignation in the past tense is because with understanding of the human condition now found no child needs to resign his or her self to a life of living in denial ever again.

As was made abundantly clear by what happened to Marais and Koestler, and, to a lesser extent, Jung, without understanding of the human condition it has been suicidally depressing for upset humans to even begin to think truthfully about the human condition and make the initial realisation that our human situation is characterised by a conscious self that has been superimposed on a pre-conscious, innocent instinctive self.

This situation raises an obvious question: if the issue of the human condition has been impossible for upset humans to even begin to think about, how has the upset human race been coping? We had to have some way of defending ourselves. We couldn’t just stand around refusing to think for fear of the consequences—after all, we had to continue to think in order to accumulate the knowledge that would one day allow the human condition to be explained. The upset human race had to find some way to argue that we were worthy beings, some way to validate ourselves. We had to find some justification for our lives, however dishonest that justification might be, and that is exactly what we did—we invented an excuse for our species’ seemingly highly imperfect, upset state. In fact, as will be described shortly, not only did the upset human race find a way to think from a defensive, dishonest base, we went on to create a whole world of literature, analysis and discussion based entirely on those dishonest foundations. And this dishonest paradigm, or way of viewing existence, became so well established that virtually everyone believed it was the true and only world. Indeed, the intellectual world of dishonesty eventually became so refined and so well established that the very real possibility and great danger was that it would be impossible for anyone to see through the lies and replace them with honest understanding. As we will see, that world of very deep denial-based delusion and illusion is the world we humans inhabit today. Indeed, Plato, that greatest of all philosophers, was one of the very rare humans who was sound and thus honest enough to see through and expose this state of extreme denial with his cave allegory.

So what was the false excuse that the upset human race came up with that totally avoided recognising the obvious elements of moral instincts and a corrupting intellect as being involved in producing the dilemma and resulting upset psychosis of our human condition and yet allowed us to supposedly explain and justify our competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour, and upon which the upset human race has built this all-pervasive dishonest world in which we now live? The contrived excuse that we came up with was to simply assert that ‘Such behaviour is only natural because, after all, other animals are always competing with each other, fighting and killing each other; other animals are “red in tooth and claw” (from In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson, 1850) so that is why we are.’ Upset humans scanned the horizon for an excuse and said, ‘Well, animals aggressively attack each other so that is why we behave like that.’ They argued that ‘Selfish, self-preservation behaviour is only natural because that is what every other species practices. When we behave aggressively and selfishly it is just our animal instincts asserting themselves. The task for us conscious, intelligent humans is to use our marvellous reasoning mind to control those savage and brutish animal instincts within us.’

So instead of our conscious intellect being the guilty party, in the sense of being that part of ourselves that caused us to ‘fall from grace’ and have to be banished from the Garden of Eden of our original innocent, cooperatively orientated, all-loving, moral instinctive state (as Moses, Plato and all our mythologies have so honestly admitted), our conscious intellect was made out to be the faultless, good part of ourselves—a manipulation of the truth that condemned our instincts as the villain: ‘Wonderful, we are good, our conscious self is good and our instincts are awful, what a relief, I, my conscious thinking self, feels terrific.’ Never mind that this was all an outrageous, reverse-of-the-truth lie. What a trick! Instead of our instinctive past being a ‘paradise’, ‘Golden Age’ of ‘togetherness’ before ‘the dawning of individual consciousness’ brought about a world of highly intelligent people living an immensely insecure, ‘shrill, brittle, self-important life’, which in truth is ‘a graveyard where the living are dead’, our instincts were deemed bad while our intellect was viewed as wonderful! What a complete and terrible assault on the truth, but what a relief for our upset, corrupting intellect! We, our conscious thinking self, had finally made ourselves out to be the hero that we have always intuitively believed we were, but have never been able to prove, but it was a hollow ‘achievement’ based on an absolute lie! We had lifted the burden of guilt, the psychological insecurity of the issue of our less-than-ideally-behaved human condition, but we had done so fraudulently. The elements involved in the human condition of moral instincts and a corrupting intellect weren’t being looked at honestly, rather, the complete opposite was occurring—those elements were being totally misrepresented. The human condition wasn’t being confronted—it was being hidden behind the biggest mountain of lies that could possibly be assembled!

Basically, by denying that we have moral instincts and that the influence of our intellect was corrupting we could convince ourselves that there was simply no dilemma about our existence to have to be explained—no moral conscience that our conscious self was in defiance of, therefore no guilt and therefore no dilemma and resulting psychosis of the human condition to have to be dealt with.

Berdyaev exposed the extreme dishonesty of this reverse-of-the-truth lie that ‘our instincts are the villains and our intellect is guiltless, secure, in-control, psychosis-free and healthy’—a denial that reflects the all-dominant attitude on planet Earth today—when he observed that ‘psychologists were wrong in assuming that man was a healthy creature, mainly conscious and intellectual, and should be studied from that point of view. Man is a sick being, with a strong unconscious life’ (The Destiny of Man, 1931, tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.67-68 of 310). He also clearly indicated that understanding of the human condition depended on acknowledging, not denying, that ‘The human soul is divided, an agonizing conflict between opposing elements is going on in it…the distinction between the conscious and the subconscious mind is fundamental for the new psychology. Mental disorders are due to the conflict between the two’ (ibid). As Berdyaev accurately summarised, ‘man is an irrational, paradoxical, essentially tragic being in whom two worlds, two opposite principles, are at war…Philosophers and scientists have done very little to elucidate the problem of man’ (ibid. p.49). Carl Jung similarly recognised that ‘Man everywhere is dangerously unaware of himself. We really know nothing about the nature of man, and unless we hurry to get to know ourselves we are in dangerous trouble’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post, 1976, p.239 of 275).

Again, the reason ‘Philosophers and scientists have done very little to elucidate the problem of man’—that is, ‘elucidate the problem of man’ in an honest, truthful, genuinely accountable way—was because no one has been prepared to fully confront the subject of the human condition, and thus no one has been in a position to reach all the way to the bottom of the problem in their thinking and by so doing explain and resolve it. The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) described the horror of looking into the problem of the human condition and the consequences of doing so when he wrote, ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’ (from the sonnet No Worst, There Is None, 1885). The issue of the human condition hasn’t been ‘fathomed’ because no one has been able to survive the psychologically depressing ‘cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer’ that thinking about the issue caused.

Shortly, we will follow the development of this great denial/​lie that we humans are competitive, aggressive and selfish because we have brutish and savage animal instincts. In particular, we will see how biologists took this great lie and fashioned it into a supposed rigorous, first-principle-based scientific explanation of human behaviour. We will see how they created a whole world of dishonesty, an immense castle of lies, a great paradigm of madness where everyone in the world swans around, seemingly confident that the mental world they are living in is completely rational and sound, making jokes and slapping each other on the back in happy reassurance that all is well and good, awarding each other Nobel Prizes for being brilliant, etc, etc—basically sinking deeper and deeper into a terrible swamp of delusion! However, before describing this industrious development of an immense castle of lies about human behaviour, we need to look at the great and inherent danger of creating so much dishonest delusion in the first place, necessary as it was prior to having the defence of the understanding of the human condition.