Section 1:6 Isn’t the destruction of the environment the urgent issue we have to address?

QUESTION: ‘I’ve been thinking for a while now that we are going to be forced to our senses because we are fast destroying our world, so isn’t the environment the real issue we have to deal with?’

ANSWER: It is certainly true that the environment is promoted everywhere as the great ‘Save the World’ issue. But the truth is the so-called ‘Green Movement’ has only been focusing on the symptoms. To fix all the runaway problems we are surrounded by—in fact, to stop the destruction of our world and the disintegration of society that is happening everywhere we look—we have to fix the cause of the problems, which is us humans. We are the problem—our out-of-control egocentric, selfish, competitive and aggressive behaviour.

As I have said, there has been much talk of the need to love each other and to love the environment, but the real need on Earth has been to love the dark side of ourselves, to find reconciling and redeeming understanding of that—to explain the psychological origins of our deeply distressed condition and by so doing heal our troubled souls and set ourselves free—and it is precisely that all-important liberating understanding of ourselves that is going to be presented. And again, this is not one of those mindless, dogma-based, ‘New Age’ (or, more recently, ‘A New Earth’) false starts to a new world for humans that can’t and doesn’t last. This is the mindful understanding that alone could bring about the real and lasting repair of ourselves and thus our planet. We humans are conscious beings, we needed brain food not brain anaesthetic. We have to be able to think our way to freedom, not abandon thinking. To take the pain out of our brain we needed answers, specifically the answer to the crux question of why we have been the way we have been, less-than-ideally behaved, and it is that answer of answers that will be presented here in an abridged form, and more fully in Freedom Expanded: Book 1. In short, this understanding gets to the heart of the problem behind the destruction of our environment and solves it.

As to being ‘forced to our senses’ by what we are doing to the planet, as I’ve stressed, the fact is the real reason behind the destruction of our environment has been us, our extremely destructive behaviour, which at base is the issue of the human condition. And again, the problem with dealing with the issue of the human condition has been that it was such an unbearably confronting subject—in fact, a suicidally depressing subject—that we couldn’t afford to go near it until it could be safely explained.

The emergency of our plight was never going to force anyone to confront the until-now unanswerable and thus utterly unbearable and unconfrontable issue of the human condition. It is only now with the human condition explained that it becomes psychologically safe to cope and deal with the issue, and for the human race to be, as Professor Prosen said, ‘psychologically rehabilitat[ed]’.

The truth is that focusing on the environment was a way of avoiding the real issue of ‘self’. It was a way of relieving yourself of the issue of the human condition through finding a cause that made you feel good about yourself. It was a way of escaping the unbearable issue of the human condition rather than a way of ‘saving the world’, as environmentalists deluded themselves they were doing. TIME magazine editor Richard Stengel recognised this when he wrote that ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue’ (TIME mag. 31 Dec. 1990).

Yes, environmentalism, as it has been practiced, has been a way to make humans feel good, feel ‘guilt-free’, rather than a way to repair the world, because actually repairing the world required that we confront and repair ourselves and the interest of environmentalists was in doing the exact opposite, namely avoiding the issue of ‘self’—finding a way to feel good and thereby avoid having to confront the real issue of ‘self’. Environmentalists were concerned with escaping the issue of the human condition, when we had to confront and solve it if we wanted to end all the suffering and destruction going on in the world. They were leading humanity in the opposite direction to where humanity’s freedom lay. The truth is, the Green Movement has ultimately been a selfish, destructive enterprise, not the selfless, constructive one its advocates deluded themselves it was.

We humans haven’t been prepared to confront the real issue of ‘self’. In fact, we have been preoccupied finding every possible way to escape the issue of ‘self’. Materialism, for example, was about surrounding ourselves with material luxuries to make ourselves feel good about ourselves; it was a form of compensation for feeling unworthy, a way of keeping the insecurity of the human condition at bay. The difference between materialism and causes like environmentalism is that at least with materialism we weren’t pretending to be ideally behaved.

I should mention that the march to ever greater levels of delusion and dishonesty through taking up ever more deluded pseudo idealistic causes to make ourselves feel good, to escape the real issue of the human condition, is more fully described, explained and exposed in Part 3:11H of Freedom Expanded: Book 1.

To conclude this question, the great impasse humanity needed to overcome was not the issue of our destruction of the environment, it was our inability to look at ourselves—we couldn’t address the human condition; we couldn’t explain why we have been such a massively selfish, competitive, aggressive, angry, egocentric, superficial, artificial, escapist, materialistic, self-obsessed, indifferent-to-others-and-to-the-world, alienated, deluded, fraudulent, duplicitous, pretentious, numb, seared, soul-destroyed, effectively dead species—but now at last we can. And, most wonderfully, by explaining the good reason why we humans became so artificial, selfish, competitive and aggressive we can permanently heal that immensely troubled state, rehabilitate our species and, in doing so, rehabilitate our planet.

Saving the environment depended on finding redeeming and ameliorating understanding of ourselves. If you want to save the snow leopard, or the giant Redwoods, or the Okavango delta, or the Amazon, or the atmosphere, or the Earth, or those you love, or yourself, or the human race, this is the only path that can achieve that—so the truth is the sooner you support and adopt this path of TRANSFORMATION through understanding the better. The choice is self-destruction or self-discovery. Unfortunately, self-distraction—finding ways to escape the issue of self such as finding causes that make you feel good about yourself—is the ‘abomination that causes desolation’ (see Dan. 11, Matt. 24, Mark 13), the path to oblivion, the answer to absolutely nothing. It is no wonder the leading environmentalist David Suzuki conceded in 2012 that ‘Environmentalism has failed’ (The fundamental failure of environmentalism, 3 May 2012).