Chapter 8:16Q The ‘abomination that causes desolation’ ‘sign…of the end of the age’ that is ‘cut short’ by the arrival of the liberating truth about the human condition

To look at humanity’s situation overall now, it is clear we have reached the terminally alienated, end play point in the human journey where the rapidly rising tide of the charismatic and fundamentalist misrepresentations of religious teachings in the dysfunctional, materially poorer parts of the world, and the politically correct, postmodern culture in the more functional, materially affluent parts of the world are threatening to stifle the freedom of expression upon which liberating enlightenment of the human condition depends.

A reflection of the compounding rate of increase of upset in humans is that the interval between the development of one form of pseudo idealism to the next more evasive form in this chronology became shorter and shorter, shrinking from centuries to decades to years. Communism was a long time coming after the development of religion whereas the forms of pseudo idealism that followed communism appeared, or if they had been germinating for some time then became prominent, one after the other in rapidly shrinking intervals of time.

In the onrush of the psychosis-escalating struggle of the human journey it was inevitable that a point would eventually be reached where the need for relief and restraint would become so great that the delusion of dogma—the artificiality of imposing ideality to solve reality—would become invisible to its practitioners. We are now in that situation where the advocates of dogma have become blind to its short-comings and consequently are now on an all-out mission to seduce and intimidate everyone with their culture. It has been said that ‘postmodernism has peaked, and will die with the century’ (Damian Grace, ‘A Strange Outbreak of Rocks in the Head’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Jan. 1998), but this is a psychosis-driven situation where, increasingly, people have to variously live in adherence to pseudo forms of idealism to cope with their circumstances. Therefore, if you live in an affluent part of the world, no amount of opposition will halt the rise of politically correct culture, or, if you live in an impoverished part of the world, no amount of opposition to fundamentalist misrepresentations of religious teachings will halt its growth. It is only the arrival of the understanding of the human condition in this book that can halt the onrush of terminal alienation and destruction of the human race.

So, with understanding of the human condition finally found, the truth it reveals is that the underlying, real progression in all the great, so-called, ‘social reforms’ of the last 200 years was not to a more ideal world but to greater upset and its associated need for ever more guilt-stripped forms of pseudo idealism through which to live. From religion, the original, thousands-of-years-old, relatively honest, alienation-free form of pseudo idealism, developed socialism and communism, then, in the less functional, materially poorer parts of the world, charismatic and fundamentalist misrepresentations of religious teachings, and, in the more functional, materially richer parts of the world, the New Age Movement, then the feminist movement, then the environment or green movement, then the politically correct movement, and, finally, the totally dishonest, completely alienated, definitely autistic postmodernist movement; again, ‘autism’ is ‘a complex mental structure insuring against recurrence of…​unthinkable anxiety’—in this case, ‘anxiety’ about being extremely corrupted/​upset/​hurt/​soul-damaged in your infancy and childhood.

Yes, we can now see exactly what the underlying psychological situation is that has driven the pseudo idealistic strategy of the left-wing. And, in fact, the work of the psychologist Arthur Janov is very confirming of the psychosis behind the adoption of the left-wing approach. As mentioned earlier (in par. 1005), Janov developed the technique of ‘primal therapy’ in which adults are helped to work their way back in their minds to memories of the original (primal) hurt to their soul that occurred in their infancy and early childhood as a result of growing up in the extremely human-condition-embattled, psychologically upset, insecure, have-to-somehow-establish-your-worth world of today. The following extract from Janov’s famous 1970 book, The Primal Scream, was included earlier, but I am re-including it here with additional material from his book because in it Janov describes very clearly how the more upset humans became, the more they needed to find a way to escape their ‘personal horror’. He wrote (the underlinings are my emphasis): ‘Anger is often sown by parents who see their children as a denial of their own lives. Marrying early and having to sacrifice themselves for years to demanding infants and young children are not readily accepted by those parents who never really had a chance to be free and happy [p.327 of 446] …neurotic parents are antifeeling, and how much of themselves they have had to cancel out in order to survive is a good index of how much they will attempt to cancel out in their children [p.77] …there is unspeakable tragedy in the world…​each of us being in a mad scramble away from our personal horror. That is why neurotic parents cannot see the horror of what they are doing to their children, why they cannot comprehend that they are slowly killing a human being [p.389] …A young child cannot understand that it is his parents who are troubled…​He does not know that it is not his job to make them stop fighting, to be happy, free or whatever…If he is ridiculed almost from birth, he must come to believe that something is wrong with him [p.60] …Neurosis begins as a means of appeasing neurotic parents by denying or covering certain feelings in hopes that “they” will finally love him [p.65] …a child shuts himself off in his earliest months and years because he usually has no other choice [p.59] …When patients [in primal therapy] finally get down to the early catastrophic feeling [the ‘primal scream’] of knowing they were unloved, hated, or never to be understood—that epiphanic feeling of ultimate aloneness—they understand perfectly why they shut off [p.97] …Some of us prefer the neurotic never-never land where nothing can be absolutely true [the postmodernist philosophy] because it can lead us away from other personal truths which hurt so much. The neurotic has a personal stake in the denial of truth [p.395].’ What has been said here makes it very clear that postmodern deconstructionism was autistic behaviour; ‘a complex mental structure insuring against recurrence of…unthinkable anxiety’.

So, what is finally revealed about these supposed great, progressive, enlightened social reforms is that instead of those involved being more ideal people, behaving in a more ideal way and bringing about a more ideal world, as they trumpeted themselves to the world as being and doing, they were actually more corrupted/​upset/​hurt/​soul-damaged/​‘neurotic’ people, behaving in a less ideal way and bringing about an even more alienated, ‘neurotic’ devastated world. The truth was the complete opposite of what the pseudo idealists, especially the latter day, more-advanced-in-denial pseudo idealists, were claiming. What was being presented to the world was a totally fraudulent, dishonest sham—and, as emphasised, the great danger of these ever-increasing levels of dishonesty is that humanity has been taken to the brink of terminal alienation.

Again, we humans had to do what we had to do—create a guilt-free yet truthless environment in order to stay alive under the duress of the human condition—but the situation has spiralled way out of control, taking humanity perilously close to the perpetual darkness of terminal alienation. Humanity is facing a death by dogma—‘The Closing of the…[human] Mind’, as Allan Bloom so accurately described it; or ‘the end of civilization’ through a ‘triumph of the forces of darkness’, as Harold Bloom predicted; or the ‘universal ruin to the world’ that Plato said ‘more and more forgetting [denial]’ would lead to. Nietzsche recognised the necessity of denial when he wrote, ‘That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence’ (The Will To Power, 1901, Vol. II, p.289; tr. O. Levy, 1910), and in his major work Faust (1808), the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe acknowledged that lying is part of human nature while truth is not; however, the wholesale pathology that lying has developed into means humanity has arrived at a state of terminal alienation. R.D. Laing described the situation that exists now when he wrote, ‘There is a prophecy in Amos that there will be a time when there will be a famine in the land, “not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord [words of truthfulness].” That time has now come to pass. It is the present age’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.118 of 156). Yes, as necessary as lying has been, to indulge it to the point of actually shutting down thought was the greatest weakness and failing possible on a planet whose culminating achievement is the fully conscious thinking mind. Preventing the search for knowledge represented a failure of all the effort and sacrifice made thus far by life on Earth. It represented a complete loss of nerve—as the science historian Jacob Bronowski said: ‘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 [and other dishonesties that don’t]…​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 [proper] destiny. Self-knowledge’ (The Ascent of Man, 1973, p.437 of 448). The Scottish comedian Billy Connolly was certainly right to denounce political correctness as ‘the language of cowardice’ (Billy Connolly: Live 1994).

While the danger for humanity’s journey to enlightenment came from the increased levels of delusion and denial that humans have had to employ in order to cope with our increasingly insecure condition, to be truly free we had to confront and understand our condition, not escape it by adding more and more layers of denial. Denial blocked access to the truth, that being its purpose, but we had to find the truth, especially the truth about ourselves, ‘self-knowledge’. As the great Greek philosopher Socrates famously said, ‘the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance’ (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, c.225 AD), and, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Plato’s dialogue Apology, c.380 BC; tr. B. Jowett, 1871, 38)—but in the end a preference for ignorance and the associated need to oppress any examination of our lives, oppress any freedom to think truthfully, question and pursue knowledge, threatened to become the dominant attitude throughout the world. George Orwell’s bleak prediction that ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face [freedom] – for ever’ is about to be realised—as is Aldous Huxley’s fear (which he wrote about in his famous 1932 novel Brave New World) that we would become a trivial culture where ‘the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance’.

So while the greed of capitalism is certainly causing immense suffering and devastation, it is not greed that is taking the world to the brink of destruction, as everyone has been told—no, our society is being taken over by a desperate and madly behaved faction. It is a very, very serious matter that is made doubly so by the fact that almost no one is raising the alarm. Pseudo idealism has almost everyone intimidated, bluffed or seduced. Warnings about the real danger facing the world are only being voiced by a rare few, like those just mentioned—Orwell, Nietzsche, Harold Bloom and Allan Bloom. While Geoffrey Wheatcroft recognised that ‘the great twin political problems of the age are the brutality of the right, and the dishonesty of the left’, it is the dishonesty of the left that has the potential to—and is poised to—destroy the world.

Yes, of the three aspects of upset of anger, egocentricity and alienation, alienation is the really dangerous one. Interestingly, anthropologists—in their defensive, mechanistic, denial-complying, dishonest mindset—named the final two varieties of humans in the series Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens, which literally translates from Latin as ‘wise man’ and ‘wise wise man’, respectively (with ‘sapiens’ meaning ‘wise’ and ‘homo’ meaning ‘man’). Certainly, humans have been gaining wisdom or knowledge, but the more accurate description of what we have become is really ‘False or Alienated Man’, and ‘False False or Alienated Alienated Man’.

NIETZSCHE’S warnings of the danger of the ‘many sickly people’ who ‘have a raging hate for the enlightened man and for that youngest of virtues which is called honesty’ can’t be emphasised enough. To repeat what he wrote: ‘Purer and more honest of speech is the healthy body, perfect and square-built: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth [to face truth and one day find understanding of the human condition]…​You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you…​But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope!’, and ‘There comes a time in a culture’s history when it becomes so pathologically soft that it takes the side of its worst enemy [dogma]…​and calls it “progress”.’ Yes, yes, we cannot afford to lose our nerve, but everyone nearly has.

As I’ve already said, I consider SIR LAURENS VAN DER POST to be the most exceptional denial-free thinking prophet and philosopher of the twentieth century; indeed, his full-page obituary in London’s The Times was boldly headed ‘A Prophet Out of Africa’ (20 Dec. 1996; see <www.wtmsources.com/166>). He was another who was ‘pure’ and ‘honest’ and ‘square-built’ enough to speak out strongly against the extreme danger of pseudo idealism, writing that ‘the so-called liberal socialist elements in modern society are profoundly decadent today because they are not honest with themselves…​They give people an ideological and not a real idea of what life should be about, and this is immoral…​They feel good by being highly moral about other people’s lives, and this is immoral…​They have parted company with reality in the name of idealism…​there is this enormous trend which accompanies industrialized societies, which is to produce a kind of collective man who becomes indifferent to the individual values: real societies depend for their renewal and creation on individuals…​There is, in fact, a very disturbing, pathological element—something totally non-rational—in the criticism of the [then UK] Prime Minister [Margaret Thatcher]. It amazes me how no one recognizes how shrill, hysterical and out of control a phenomenon it is…​I think socialism, which has a nineteenth-century inspiration and was valid really only in a nineteenth-century context when the working classes had no vote, has long since been out of date and been like a rotting corpse whose smell in our midst has tainted the political atmosphere far too long’ (A Walk with a White Bushman, 1986, pp.90-93 of 326).

Two of the Bible’s denial-free thinking, exceptionally sound, ‘pure’ and ‘honest’, ‘square-built’ prophets—Daniel and Christ—also warned of the great danger of extreme forms of pseudo idealism when they spoke of ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ taking over the world. The Bible has, without a doubt, been the most influential book in history because it contains extraordinary honesty; indeed, as I mentioned in par. 751, it has been the most denial-free book humans have had for guidance. As DANIEL said of his own contribution to the Bible, ‘I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth’ (Dan. 10:21)—and his ability to think in a denial-free, truthful and therefore effective way meant Daniel was in a position to ‘explain to you what will happen to your people in the future’ (10:14). However, since there was no science in his day to evidence his argument, all Daniel could do was draw upon analogies to describe what he could see so clearly happening in the future. In one analogy he described ‘The king of the South’ (which we can understand is the freedom-upholding, answer-searching but immensely upsetting and corrupting right-wing) constantly at war with ‘the king of the North’ (the freedom-oppressing, dogma-based, pseudo idealistic, dishonest left-wing). He described how, for a long time, power would oscillate between these kings (as it does in democratic politics), until the complete polarisation of the two kingdoms, the two political states, came about (which has occurred), at which point ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ of left-wing pseudo idealism would finally threaten to take over the world. After describing many changes of power, Daniel said: ‘the king of the North will muster another army larger than the first…​The forces of the South will be powerless to resist; even their best troops will not have the strength to stand [pseudo idealism becomes increasingly seductive and powerful as people become increasingly upset]. The invader will do as he pleases; no-one will be able to stand against him…[but eventually ‘he’/​pseudo idealism] will make an alliance with the king of the South…​[some bipartisanship between the left and right wing will occur, but then the left-wing] will stumble and fall…​[however, in time] He will be succeeded by a contemptible person [even more dishonest forms of left-wing pseudo idealism will emerge] who will not be given the honour of royalty [they will lack religion’s honesty]. He will invade the kingdom [the religious kingdom of honesty]…​and he will seize it through intrigue [through the dishonesty of extreme forms of pseudo idealism and charismatic and fundamentalist misrepresentations of religion masquerading as real idealism]. Then an overwhelming army [from the South] will be swept away before him; both it and a prince of the covenant [religion] will be destroyed…​when the richest provinces feel secure, he will invade them and will achieve what neither his father nor his forefathers did [no force has been able to overthrow religion before]…​His armed forces will rise up to desecrate the temple fortress and will abolish the daily sacrifice. Then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation [extremely guilt-stripped pseudo idealistic causes and charismatic and fundamentalist misrepresentations of religious teaching will take over the world and lead humanity to terminal alienation]. With flattery [the truth-and-guilt-avoiding, do-good, feel-good self-affirmation that pseudo idealism feeds off] he will corrupt those who have violated the covenant [extreme forms of pseudo idealism fundamentalism will seduce the more upset away from religion’s infinitely more honest way of coping with the human condition], but the people who know their God will firmly resist him [the more secure, less dishonest will not be deceived and must strongly resist the seductive tide]…​The [left-wing pseudo idealistic] king will do as he pleases. He will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will say unheard-of-things against the God of gods [such as Richard Dawkins, Oxford University’s Professor of Public Understanding of Science, would you believe, who has, as mentioned in par. 938, said that ‘“Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus, but harder to eradicate. The whole subject of God is a bore”…​those who teach religion to small children are guilty of “child abuse”.’]. He will be successful until the time of wrath [until the all-exposing truth of understanding of the human condition arrives to save the world, as it is doing in what you are reading right here]…​He will invade many countries and sweep through them like a flood…​he will set out in a great rage [the stridency that I and Sir Laurens van der Post talked about of those trying to persuade themselves and others that their pseudo idealistic causes and fundamentalist misrepresentations of religion represent real idealism] to destroy and annihilate many…​Yet he will come to his end, and no-one will help him…​[when understanding of the human condition arrives pseudo idealism and other forms of extreme dishonesty will be totally exposed and brought to an end. However, while ‘he’/​pseudo idealism reigns] There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then’ (Dan. 11-12).

In another analogy that describes the same progression, but even more explicitly—mentioning as it does how ‘truth was thrown to the ground’—Daniel, appropriately enough, used the symbols of a (determined) ram for the right-wing and a (stupid) goat for the left-wing. He said that initially ‘No animal could stand against him [the ram], and none could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great…[greed and indifference to others was so great that even children, for instance, were put to work in coalmines, but then the] goat…charged at him in great rage…​[the left-wing emerged and] The ram was powerless to stand against him; the goat knocked him to the ground and trampled on him, and none could rescue the ram from his power. The goat became very great…​It set itself up to be as great as the Prince of the host [it set itself up to be more important than religion]; it took away the daily sacrifice from him, and the place of his sanctuary was brought low…​It prospered in everything it did, and truth was thrown to the ground…​“How long will it take for the vision to be fulfilled—the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, the rebellion that causes desolation, and the surrender of the sanctuary and of the host that will be trampled underfoot [the rebellion against religion’s honesty]…​It will take [a long time]…​understand that the vision concerns the time of the end.”…[when humans] have become completely wicked [and], a stern-faced king [the extremely upset], a master of intrigue, will arise [the left-wing pseudo idealistic, false prophet merchants of escapist denial and delusion will arise]…​He will cause astounding devastation and will succeed in whatever he does. He will destroy the mighty men and the holy people [even the strong will begin to succumb to the intimidating tide of pseudo idealism]. He will cause deceit [the misrepresentation of pseudo idealism and fundamentalism as being real idealism] to prosper, and he will consider himself superior [the extreme delusion that left-wing pseudo idealism and fundamentalism is based on will spread everywhere]…​“The vision…​concerns the distant future [that has finally arrived]”’ (Dan. 8).

So important to Daniel was this issue of the great danger from pseudo idealism for humanity in the future that he even used a third analogy to try to convey his fears about it. In this analogy, he first described the rule of a ‘king of kings’ with a ‘head of gold’ who had ‘dominion and power and might and glory’ (Dan. 2:37-38). This is a description of the original dominance hierarchy type situation (such as occurs in the animal kingdom) where some peace and order occurred in human society through the rule of the most powerful. Daniel then said, ‘After’ this ‘another kingdom will rise’ that is ‘inferior’, then ‘one of bronze’, then one as ‘strong as iron’ that ‘breaks and smashes’ ‘all the others’, but he said ‘this will be a divided kingdom…​partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle…​so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay’ (2:39-43). What Daniel has described here is how, through trial and error, the very effective—‘strong as iron’—device for managing upset of democracy is developed, but then this system of management becomes hopelessly ‘divided’/​polarised, because ‘people will be a mixture’, ‘partly strong and partly brittle’, which is clearly a description of what has happened with the strong right and the weak, pseudo-idealism-supporting left-wing in politics. Daniel then said that eventually ‘God…will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed…​[and] will crush all those [other] kingdoms and bring them to an end’, saying this is ‘what will take place in the future’ (2:44-45). Yes, as will be described shortly in pars 1135-1136, now that ‘God’ or Integrative Meaning-guided understanding of the human condition has emerged this whole ugly war between the left and the right is finally obsoleted, ‘destroyed’, ‘crush[ed]’, brought ‘to an end’.

In the New Testament, CHRIST gave exactly the same warning as Daniel, even referring to Daniel’s description of pseudo idealism as ‘the abomination that causes desolation’—but Christ went further, truthfully and courageously advising people to head for the hills, ‘flee to the mountains’, when pseudo idealism and strident fundamentalist misrepresentations of religious teachings threaten humanity with annihilation. Referring to ‘the sign…of the end of the age’, Christ said that ‘At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other [a great deal of upset will develop], and many false prophets [pseudo idealists claiming to be leading the way to peace and a new age of goodness and happiness for humans] will appear and deceive many people…​even the elect [even those less alienated, still relatively sound and strong in soul, will begin to be seduced by pseudo idealism]—if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time…​Wherever there is a carcass [the extremely upset], there the vultures [false prophet promoters of delusion and denial to artificially make the extremely upset feel good] will gather. Because of the increase of wickedness [upset], the love of most will grow cold. So when you see the “abomination that causes desolation,” spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong [throwing out real religion and falsely claiming to be presenting the way to the human-condition-free, good-versus-evil-deconstructed, post-human-condition, better, correct world]—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no-one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no-one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter because those will be days of great distress [mindless dogma and its consequences] unequalled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short [by the arrival of the liberating understanding of the human condition], no-one would survive’ (extracts from Matt. 24 & Mark 13 combined). In summary, when Christ said to ‘Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves’ (Matt. 7:15), he was warning that we had to be on guard for those who concealed their extreme upset behind pseudo idealistic causes in order to delude themselves that they were sound and ideally behaved people who were leading others to a sound and ideal world. Where true prophets confronted the issue of the human condition, false prophets were merely merchants of denial and delusion, advocates of escapism from the issue of the human condition.

(Note, it might be asked how, in such ancient times, could the threat pseudo idealism and strident forms of fundamentalist non-religion posed to the human journey have been so accurately anticipated by Christ and Daniel. But the truth is, all the nuances of the human condition can be seen in any sample of human behaviour for those sufficiently psychologically open to seeing it. In the case of pseudo idealism, you only have to be caught in heavy traffic and observe how instead of holding their place against aggressive lane swappers some drivers are clearly deriving a feel good rush from letting such drivers push in front of them, even slowing down to encourage them. With a little more observation you can extrapolate what is eventually going to happen in the world, especially if you are sufficiently free from needing to live in denial of the issue of the human condition—in particular free from having to live in denial of Integrative Meaning or God—to be able to, and want to, think deeply about such matters. Daniel for example, in explaining why he ‘could understand visions and dreams of all kinds’ (Dan. 1:17), said ‘I have greater wisdom than other living men’ (2:30), and on the question of why he was able to have his mind ‘turned to things to come’ (2:29), he ‘praised the God of heaven [he embraced the truth of Integrative Meaning and was unafraid of the issue of the human condition]…​[who] gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning [not denying Integrative Meaning enables him to think truthfully and thus effectively]. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him. I thank and praise you, O God of my fathers: You have given me wisdom and power’ (2:19, 21-23).)

The most common criticism my writings about the human condition receive is their denunciation of left-wing causes—‘What could possibly be wrong with being concerned for those who are disadvantaged, suffering and oppressed, or with loving the environment, or with wanting peace?’, people ask—but that is exactly an indication of just how bluffed almost everyone has been by pseudo idealism. As Daniel foresaw, in the end ‘even their best troops will not have the strength to stand’ against the seductive tide of pseudo idealism. He said ‘no-one will be able to stand against’ it and it will ‘invade many countries and sweep through them like a flood’ and ‘cause deceit to prosper’. Christ similarly warned that ‘false prophets will appear and deceive many people…​even the elect—if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time.’ Yes, to emphasise a point I made earlier in pars 891-892, and also in pars 1088-1089, while it wasn’t wrong to rest from the upsetting battle to find knowledge (ultimately to find self-knowledge, understanding of the human condition) when we became overly angry, egocentric and alienated—indeed rest and recuperation have been vital—what was false and dangerously misleading was to claim that abandoning the battle was the way to win the battle, and the path to follow, which is what the culture of the left-wing in politics has effectively been deludedly and dogmatically insisting happen. Compassion and kindness towards those who were suffering or less fortunate was very important, but continuing the upsetting battle to find knowledge, ultimately to finding self-knowledge, understanding of the human condition, was even more important. I might also mention, as I sought to point out earlier in chapter 6:9 and pars 888-889, and have explained fully in Video/​Freedom Essay 14, while the right-wing and left-wing were both using the dishonest ‘savage instincts’ biology to justify their philosophies, the right-wing was using it in the cause of good, namely in support of the upsetting search for knowledge, while the left-wing was using it in the cause of what was bad, indeed, extremely dangerous, namely in blocking and even determinedly opposing that all-important upsetting search for knowledge.

There is, of course, another exceptionally ‘pure’ and ‘honest’, ‘square-built’ prophet who determinedly warned of the extreme danger of evasive, dishonest denial and delusion eventually threatening the human race with extinction: PLATO. As documented in chapters 2:6 and 6:12, Plato was so extraordinarily sound that long ago, around 360 BC, he was able to truthfully describe every aspect of the human journey from ignorance to enlightenment except for the actual explanation for why humans are good and not bad, which had to await the development of science and its discovery of how genes can orientate but only nerves can understand. In his extraordinarily prophetic writing on the human journey, Plato described ‘our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come’—our original ‘simple and calm and happy’ ‘blessed and spontaneous life’—and the subsequent emergence of our conscious mind, which allowed us to become our ‘own masters’ but brought about our upset, ‘evil’ condition of ‘discord’. We were so ashamed of that discordant state that we ‘often unduly discredit[ed]’ the truth of our species’ ‘blessed’ past and any other truth that brought the ‘painful’ issue of ‘the imperfections of human life’, which is ‘our human condition’, into focus, leaving us hiding ‘a long way underground’, ‘enshrined in that living tomb’ of a ‘cave’-like state of dishonest denial where there was ‘more and more forgetting [alienation]’, to the point where we could only ‘see dimly and appear to be almost blind’—a development that Plato predicted would eventually lead to a state of terminal alienation and ‘universal ruin to the world’, from which only a denial-free approach, one where ‘God’ in the form of Integrative-Meaning-acknowledging truthfulness, had ‘again seated himself at the helm’, could—and now has—‘set them [humans] in order and restored them’!

Before summarising the extent of the danger that the practice of pseudo idealism represents it needs to be emphasised that pseudo idealism is only one form of the extremely dishonest and dangerous denial or ‘forgetting’ of the issue of ‘the imperfections of human life’, which is the issue of ‘our human condition’, that has been going on. The other extremely dishonest and dangerous form of this denial is the one that was described in chapter 6:12, ‘The great obscenity’, which is science’s obscenely irresponsible practice of unjustly dismissing and even persecuting the human-race-saving explanation of the human condition that has been presented in this and my earlier books. Recall how, in par. 611, it was pointed out that professors promenade across their campuses full of conviction of their own importance, with students certain that they too are where it’s ‘at’—but universities have become one big dishonest castle of lies; in fact, rather than centres of learning that seek truth, as they are supposed to be, universities have become hideous places that indulge, glorify and perpetuate dishonesty. So when reading the following summary of the warnings about the extremely dangerous consequences of denial as it is being practised by pseudo idealism, it should also be kept in mind that the full horror of what is described equally applies to the extremely irresponsible and dangerous trap that science has fallen into of perpetuating its denial of the truth about the human condition when that denial is no longer justified!

To summarise the danger of pseudo idealism: for such exceptionally sound, ‘pure’ and ‘honest’, ‘square-built’ prophets throughout history who weren’t living in denial and who thus ‘kn[e]w their God’—from DANIEL to PLATO to CHRIST to NIETZSCHE to SIR LAURENS VAN DER POST—to so ‘firmly resist’ and warn of the great danger of the ‘profoundly decadent’, ‘dreadful’ ‘abomination’ where there is ‘more and more forgetting’, to the point where ‘universal ruin to the world’ has been brought about, illustrates just how extremely serious the threat has become of ‘the end of civilization’ through a ‘triumph of the forces of darkness’ of guilt-stripped charismatic and fundamentalist misrepresentations of religious teachings, and of guilt-stripped forms of non-religious pseudo idealism. The situation is, as these prophets warned, one of ‘astounding devastation’ and ‘desolation’ ‘unequalled from the beginning of the world until now’ engendered by those whose ‘love’ has ‘grow[n]’ so ‘cold’ that they have such a ‘raging hate [of]…​honesty’ that they have created a pseudo idealistic ‘rotting corpse whose smell in our midst has tainted the political atmosphere far too long’, in which ‘truth was thrown to the ground’ and ‘trampled underfoot’—and the influence and hold of those responsible has become so great that any remaining opposition will soon, as Daniel predicted, be ‘powerless to stand against’ them. In the case of the West, the forefront of humanity’s journey to enlightenment—it defied and fought with all its might the spread of human-freedom-oppressing dogma in the form of communism in the former USSR and South East Asia, but it has proved incapable thus far of resisting the insidious takeover of its own culture by the freedom-oppressing dogma of pseudo idealism. During the 1950s Senator Joe McCarthy did succeed in stemming its rise in America for a short while. And with pseudo idealism having now taken over all the pillars of American society, and the rabid socialist Democrat Bernie Sanders a real possibility of becoming the next President of the United States, there has been a desperate revolt against pseudo idealistic, politically correct oppression of freedom with the aforementioned extraordinary popularity of the hyper politically incorrect Republican candidate Donald Trump. Irrespective of who wins the 2016 US election, the fundamental reality is that since taking up feel-good, pseudo idealistic causes has been the unavoidable way the more upset/​alienated have been able to cope, and since upset/​alienation is rising by the minute, it is inevitable that left-wing pseudo idealism will be unstoppable—and Daniel’s prediction that pseudo idealism/​‘the king of the North’/​‘the goat’ ‘will succeed in whatever he does’ and ‘cause astounding devastation’ will come true. Indeed, to attempt to describe how serious the situation in the West is, it is fair to say that freedom in those democracies is as under threat from pseudo idealism as a city or individual would be if it was surrounded by murderously hostile people and had, in effect, flown—or was at least hoisting—the white flag of surrender! In January 2014 The Australian newspaper published an article about Camille Paglia’s latest book, Glittering Images, in which she decried this trend. With the subtitle ‘For Camille Paglia, Western society has become too soft and weak to survive’, the article quoted Paglia as saying, ‘What you’re seeing is how a civilisation commits suicide’ (Bari Weiss, ‘In pursuit of manly equality’, 1 Jan. 2014). This problem of being ‘too soft’ reiterates Nietzsche’s ‘worst enemy’-warning that ‘There comes a time in a culture’s history when it becomes so pathologically soft that it takes the side of its worst enemy [dogma]…​and calls it “progress”.’

In the following passage, Sir Laurens provides a powerful affirmation of all that has just been said about the essential, intrinsic, absolute importance of maintaining freedom from oppression in the human journey to enlightenment: ‘I hope a war is not declared by anybody in the modern world because I don’t see the real necessity for war, but I would like to say that I think it would be immoral—it would be obscene—not to be ready at any moment to defend ourselves…​If somebody should impose war upon us, attack us, I hope that we should have the will and the power and the moral courage to realise that life, freedom, are gifts from God and creation and our duty to defend. There’s a wonderful episode in the life of Buddha where a group of villagers in the Himalayas did not defend themselves against a band of brigands who attacked and killed many of them, and he rebuked them because he said that was not what his teaching was about, that was not reverence for life of which he was speaking…it is a moral duty for us all to be ready to defend ourselves and our freedoms’ (presentation by Laurens van der Post at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 9 Dec. 1982; see <www.wtmsources.com/163>).

Well, the West’s failure to ‘defend’ its ‘freedoms’ from the massive ‘attack’ upon it by pseudo idealism means it has failed to exhibit the ‘moral courage’ necessary to fulfil its ‘moral duty’ to ‘defend’ its ‘freedoms’ against ‘attack[s]’. The result of this fundamental, ‘obscene’ failure at the leading edge of humanity’s journey to enlightenment is that humanity has reached the precipice of self-destruction—so it is no exaggeration to say that this understanding of the human condition has arrived only just in time to ‘cut short’ that tragic end.

Yes, we are in the end play situation where the dangers from excessive upset in the world have become so great that ‘even their [humanity’s] best troops will not [and have not] have the strength to stand’ up to pseudo idealism. It has become virtually impossible to find sufficient ‘pure’ and ‘honest’ and ‘square-built’ soundness (from having a relatively nurtured, loving, secure upbringing and thus not too much upset), coupled with strength of character (from having some, but not too much, genetically adapted toughness to life under the duress of the human condition), to stand against the tide of dishonesty and continue the freedom-dependent search for the liberating understanding of the human condition. Resolve and solidarity for our species’ all-important, freedom-dependent journey to enlightenment is fast disappearing, and it is the lack of solidarity, the failure to present a strong, united front, that has been especially encouraging and empowering of the radical opponents of freedom such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The essence of the concept of The United Nations is of Nations acting strongly in a United way against what is patently ‘obscene[ly]’ wrong behaviour, but such is the lack of soundness and thus courage and character and thus resolve in the world that the concept has largely failed. R.D. Laing certainly wasn’t exaggerating how sick, exhausted and spent with alienation the human race has become when, as has been mentioned before, he wrote that ‘the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be…​as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world…​The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness…​i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light’, and ‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness].’ And Pope Benedict XVI certainly wasn’t overstating the darkness of the human situation when, in his 2005 inaugural mass, he said that ‘We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light.’

So in the relatively functional democracies of the West, humanity’s 2-million-year journey to find understanding of the human condition has finally come down to a so-called ‘cultural war’ between the philosophy of the political left-wing and the philosophy of the political right-wing. Both sides have been determined that they offered the better option, but with the human condition now explained what is revealed is that, in terms of a future for the human race, the philosophy of the left-wing was completely wrong while the philosophy of the right-wing was actually completely right. The left-wing was all about dogma, delusion and escapism, while the right-wing was comparatively all about realism, honesty and responsibility.

Interestingly and significantly, there is one final irony to the saga of humanity’s great journey through ignorance, which is that the ideal world that the left-wing was dogmatically demanding is actually brought about by the right-wing winning its reality-defending, freedom-from-idealism, corrupting-search-for-knowledge battle against the freedom-oppressing pseudo idealism of the left-wing. Yes, with the freedom-from-dogma right-wing’s search for understanding of the human condition completed, the justification for the egocentric power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking way of life espoused by the right-wing ends, replaced by the ideal-behaviour-obeying attitude that the left-wing sought. In this sense, when the right-wing wins we all become left-wing; through the success of the philosophy of the right-wing, we all adopt the philosophy of the left-wing—but, most significantly, this time we are not abandoning an ongoing battle, we are leaving it won. In reality, of course, through finding understanding of the human condition the inability to explain what humanity’s journey has been about ends—an outcome that completely obsoletes the different philosophical positions of the left-wing and right-wing once and for all. Now that it can be explained that humanity has been involved in a corrupting search for knowledge, corruption is explained, which in turn exposes and thus negates the unrealistic position of the left-wing’s dogmatic insistence on idealism. For its part, the right-wing’s corrupting search for knowledge is also brought to a close with the finding of the key knowledge it was searching for, that being understanding of the human condition. Of course, the search for knowledge will continue, but not from a basis of dishonest denial, and with the key piece of knowledge we needed found of the explanation of the human condition, the priority for the immediate future will be—as will be explained in the next chapter—to take up the human-condition-reconciled Transformed Way of Living. Thus, with the arrival of understanding of the human condition, the concept of ‘politics’ comes to an end, which will undoubtedly be of great relief to everyone. Indeed, it will be explained in the next chapter that with the arrival of the truth about the human condition, the whole intellectual and psychological world that humans’ have been living in—our whole culture—is suddenly obsoleted and ended and a new, completely transformed, all-loving, peaceful human culture, civilisation and world emerges, which is certainly not before time.

Finally, it should be re-emphasised that in the greater context of the human-condition-understood view that we now have, upset is an immensely heroic state, with the most upset being the most heroic individuals of all because they have necessarily been involved in the battle that humanity has been waging longer and/​or more intensely than any others. While the stark descriptions that have been given of the extremely upset, as being ‘wicked’, ‘stern-faced’, ‘cold’, ‘sickly’ ‘carcasses’, ‘vultures’ and ‘ferocious wolves’ involved in creating a ‘rotting corpse’ of ‘abomination’ that brings ‘universal ruin to the world’, were necessary to match the no-holds-barred, gloves-off, totally brutal assault on the truth that was being ‘thrown to the ground’ and left ‘trampled underfoot’ by pseudo idealists, in the human-condition-understanding new world such rhetoric is entirely wrong and redundant.

In fact, it shouldn’t even be necessary to talk about the old struggle between the left and right wing philosophies any more than what has now been done in this book. Thankfully, humanity now has the option to move on to an entirely new existence. Indeed, there will be many subjects that no longer have to be discussed now that humanity is able to move on to another existence. We get the truth up and we move on. As will be explained in the next chapter, we leave our suitcase of experiences that took place in the old ignorant, human-condition-afflicted, power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking-and-pseudo-idealistic-coping world behind and move on to an entirely new, instinct-and-intellect-reconciled, human-condition-liberated, genuinely ‘deconstructed’ and ‘correct’, fabulous, all-wonderful, new transformed world.

I would now like to include once more the following drawing to summarise humanity’s heroic overall journey from our species’ original innocent childhood through an insecure, human-condition-afflicted, ever-increasingly upset adolescence, to a secure, human-condition-reconciled, mature adulthood.

The journey brings to mind Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, which most beautifully describes the last 200-year stage of our species’ now desperately exhausted yet still hopeful, life-or-death struggle to find liberating understanding of the human condition: ‘There lies the port [home]; the vessel puffs her sail [in hope]: there gloom the dark broad seas [but we are in a dark place]. My mariners, souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me – that ever with a frolic welcome took the thunder and the sunshine [we took the bad and the good], and opposed [any resistance and maintained] free hearts, free foreheads – you and I are old [the human race is exhausted, but]; old age hath yet his honour and his toil; death closes all: but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done’ (1833). Tennyson’s reference to the ‘work of noble note’ ‘yet [to] be done’ refers to the situation in Homer’s Greek legend The Odyssey, where Ulysses, the hero of that great exploration and adventurous odyssey, finds on his return to his kingdom, Ithaca, that there remains one final journey he must undertake. Ulysses described this other journey to his faithful wife, Penelope, thus: ‘[The prophet] Teiresias bade me travel far and wide, carrying an oar, till I came to a country where the people have never heard of the sea, and do not even mix salt with their food’ (c. eighth century BC). As has now been fully explained, because our original instinctive self or soul unbearably condemned our corrupting search for knowledge, it had to be repressed and banished. So our soul is now all alone, as if cast adrift way out in ‘the lonely sea and the sky’ (John Masefield, Sea-Fever, 1902)—or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, ‘this soul [of ours] hath been alone on a wide, wide sea: so lonely ’twas, that God himself scarce seemed there to be’ (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798). And in having killed off our all-sensitive and all-loving soul we have lost access to all the truth, beauty and magic of life, to the ‘salt’ or full flavour of existence, that our soul is aware of—leaving us in the exhausted numb, seared, flavourless, ‘fifty feet of solid concrete’-‘alienated’ world that Laing described ‘the present age’ as being like. The ‘oar’, Teiresias explained to Ulysses, is actually a ‘winnowing shovel’—so we can now understand that this other journey that Ulysses still had to undertake was into the centre of this ‘country [humans inhabit today] where the people have never heard of the sea [have no soul] and do not even mix salt with their food [are completely alienated]’, in order to ‘winnow’ from that world’s human-condition-avoiding, denial-compliant, mechanistic scientific discoveries the truth about our human condition. It is this other journey, this ‘work of noble note’—which all of humanity’s ‘Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought’ completed the preparation for—that has at last been accomplished.

So that’s it—the greatest of all stories, our story, the story of humanity’s incredibly, unbelievably heroic 2-million-year journey from ignorance to enlightenment told for the first time.

(A more complete description of all these stages that have been described of the maturation of humanity through its adolescence can be found in Freedom Expanded at <www.humancondition.com/​freedom-expanded-stages-of-maturation>.)