Chapter 2:8 The ultimate paradox of the human condition

So if we do have a cooperative past (which we do), and our consciousness is behind our destructiveness (which it is), then the ultimate paradox of the human condition, indeed the reason we are still able to get out of bed in the morning and face the world, is that, as mentioned in chapter 1:3, we fully conscious humans don’t actually believe we are fundamentally bad/​evil. Despite all the damning evidence, we don’t accept that we are a terrible mistake, a worthless blight on this planet, the ‘face of absolute evil’. In fact, the incredible determination with which we live our lives bespeaks of a core belief within us all that we are not only not bad/​evil but the great heroes of the story of life on Earth, and that one day we will be able to explain why that is true!

It follows then that while awaiting the exonerating, liberating explanation of our present egocentric, competitive, selfish and aggressive condition we couldn’t afford to concede that we did once live in an innocent, all-loving instinctive state that was corrupted by the emergence of our conscious mind. Accepting such truth without the full, clarifying explanation for it would have left us unbearably condemned as bad and worthless, sentenced to a state of completely insecure, permanent damnation. So, as dishonest as it was, there has been a need to deny the truth of our species’ cooperative, peaceful past and the role consciousness played in its corruption. Yes, while, as has been emphasised, denial in science carried with it the great risk of becoming overly entrenched, rendering its practitioners incapable of fulfilling their fundamental responsibility of acknowledging the human-condition-confronting-not-denying, fully accountable and human-race-saving, true explanation of the human condition when it eventually arrived, it has been necessary in the interim, not just because we couldn’t cope with the depression that resulted from trying to think about the human condition, but because we didn’t believe we were fundamentally bad/​flawed/​‘the face of absolute evil’.

Having explained and evidenced the fundamental elements involved in a true analysis of human behaviour, I will now describe how this denial in science led to the development of a litany of human-condition-avoiding, dishonest, not-truly-accountable biological theories on human behaviour—all of which will be exposed for the lies they are, including the most prominent and seductive offering of all, that which has been put forward by E.O. Wilson.