OUR MEANING
How being able to know and fulfil the great objective and meaning of human existence finally ends human suffering
Back Cover
Contents (as of Aug. 2023)
Aspect 3. Ending the polarised world of politics
To be continued…
Commendations for Griffith’s treatise
From Thought Leaders
‘[Prof. Stephen Hawking] is most interested in your impressive proposal.’
‘In all of written history there are only 2 or 3 people who’ve been able to think on this scale
about the human condition.’ Prof. Anthony Barnett, zoologist
‘FREEDOM is the book that saves the world…cometh the hour, cometh the man.’
Prof. Harry Prosen, former Pres. Canadian Psychiatric Assn.
‘I am stunned and honored to have lived to see the coming of “Darwin II”.’
Prof. Stuart Hurlbert, esteemed ecologist
‘Living without this understanding is like living back in the stone age, that’s how massive
the change it brings is!’ Prof. Karen Riley, clinical pharmacist
‘Frankly, I am blown away by the ground-breaking significance of this work.’
Prof. Patricia Glazebrook, philosopher
‘I’ve no doubt a fascinating television series could be made based upon this.’
Sir David Attenborough
From The General Public
‘Griffith should be given Nobel prizes for peace, biology, medicine;
actually every Nobel prize there is!’
‘He nailed it, nailed the whole thing, just like the world going from FLAT to ROUND,
BOOM the WHOLE WORLD CHANGES, no joke.’
‘FREEDOM will be the most influential, world-changing book in history, and time
will now be delineated as BG, before Griffith, or AG, after Griffith.’
‘I’m speechless – this is bigger than natural selection & the theory of relativity!’
‘I really think this man will become recognized as the best thinker this world’s
ever seen, and don’t we need him right now!’
‘Griffith has decoded the human species, we FINALLY
know what’s going on & the suffering stops!’
‘The world can’t deny this for much longer, let the light in, save the human race!’
‘THE Interview should be globally broadcast daily.
The healing explanation humans so sorely need.’
Background
Jeremy Griffith is an Australian biologist who has dedicated his life to bringing redeeming and psychologically healing biological understanding to the dilemma of the human condition—which is the underlying issue in all human life of our species’ extraordinary capacity for what has been called ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
Jeremy has published over ten books on the human condition, including:
- Beyond The Human Condition (1991), his widely acclaimed second book;
- A Species In Denial (2003), an Australasian bestseller;
- FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition (2016), his definitive treatise;
- THE Interview (2020), the transcript of acclaimed British actor and broadcaster Craig Conway’s world-changing and world-saving interview with Jeremy about his book FREEDOM;
- Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution (2021), which presents the biological reason why Critical Theory threatens to destroy the human race;
- The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect (2022), which describes how lifting the great burden of guilt from the human race initially causes a ‘Deaf Effect’ difficulty taking in or ‘hearing’ what’s being presented;
- The Shock Of Change that understanding the human condition brings (2022), which addresses how to manage the shock of change that inevitably occurs when the redeeming understanding of our corrupted condition arrives;
- Therapy For The Human Condition (2023), which is about the therapy that is desperately needed to rehabilitate the human race from our psychologically upset state or condition, elaborating on what is presented in FREEDOM; and
- The Great Transformation – How Understanding The Human Condition Actually Transforms The Human Race (2023), which gives a concise description of how the psychological rehabilitation of humans occurs, and how everyone’s life can immediately be transformed.
This book, Our Meaning, is about how being able to know and fulfil the great objective and meaning of human existence finally ends human suffering.
Jeremy’s work has attracted the support of such eminent scientists as the former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Professor Harry Prosen, the esteemed ecologist Professor Stuart Hurlbert, Australia’s Templeton Prize-winning biologist Professor Charles Birch, the Former President of the Primate Society of Great Britain Dr David Chivers, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Stephen Hawking, as well as other distinguished thinkers such as the pre-eminent philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post.
Jeremy is the founder and a patron of the World Transformation Movement (WTM)—see www.HumanCondition.com.
Our Meaning
Please Note (Aug. 2023): We are making available on our website these first sections of Our Meaning. As more recordings are made, more of its transcript, which is this book, will be added.
Summary
When the author and philosopher Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that ‘We are living through deeply anxious days, and if we are to relieve our anxiety we must diagnose its cause…What is the meaning of man? To this question no answer is being offered, and I have the feeling that we are moving toward the darkest era our world has ever known’, he was recognising that being able to know ‘the meaning’ of human suffering; know the reason for it; be able to explain our corrupted or ‘fallen’ human condition in fact, is what has been needed to end human suffering. And at the 11th hour for our species, that is now possible with the ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of our psychologically troubled human condition that I presented a summary of in THE Interview I did with English broadcaster Craig Conway in 2020, and fully explained in my 2016 book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition.
Introduction
Welcome to this 2023 presentation in which I will be elaborating on THE Interview—which was described by a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Professor Harry Prosen, as ‘the most important interview of all time’, and is the ultimate tool for quickly understanding the ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of the human condition. You can listen to, or read the transcript of, THE Interview (TI) at www.HumanCondition.com.
Before beginning this talk today, I should point out that listening to or reading the transcript of this presentation will be so much easier if you have overcome what we in the World Transformation Movement (WTM) know of as the ‘Deaf Effect’, which is a problem almost everyone experiences when they first try to listen to or read about our corrupted human condition, because it has been such a historically difficult subject to confront and think about. So if you are still finding TI difficult to take in or ‘hear’; if you are finding it boring and repetitive and are generally frustrated by it, then you are suffering from the Deaf Effect, in which case I recommend that before watching, or reading the transcript of, this talk that you watch or read The Great Guilt presentation that is designed to help overcome the Deaf Effect, which can also be accessed on the WTM’s website.
I also recommend printing the transcript of this talk that I’ll be giving today to help you follow what will be explained.
To now introduce this presentation, Our Meaning: How being able to know and fulfil the great objective and meaning of human existence finally ends human suffering.
I have been noticing in the responses to TI that the ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of the human condition is being appreciated because it brings redeeming and healing understanding to our troubled lives—it finally explains that humans are fundamentally good and not bad; and it also reveals that we humans have a cooperative, selfless and loving past rather than a brutal, savage and aggressive one. However, while those are very important aspects of what TI presents, I have also noticed that there is an extremely important aspect of the understanding that people seem to be missing, and it is this aspect that I want to elaborate on in this presentation.
So what is this extremely important aspect that needs elaboration? Well, in TI I explained that while we didn’t have the redeeming ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation for our psychologically upset or corrupted, competitive, selfish and aggressive human condition we had no choice but to deny that the human species ever lived in a cooperative, selfless and loving state (as a result of our ape ancestors successfully completing the nurturing-based love-indoctrination process). It was far too depressing and confronting to admit that our distant ancestors were peaceful and gentle while we weren’t able to explain our present often brutal and mean, seemingly evil, ‘fallen’ human condition. We couldn’t face the truth of our corrupted condition while we couldn’t explain it.
And so, as I explained in TI, to achieve this denial of our corrupted condition, what we did was say that our distant ancestors weren’t cooperative, selfless and loving but instead were competitive, selfish and aggressive savages trying to reproduce their genes just like other animals. As I pointed out in TI about this reverse-of-the-truth lie, “the false savage instincts excuse has been an absolutely brilliant excuse because instead of our instincts being all-loving and thus unbearably condemning of our present non-loving state, they were made out to be vicious and brutal must-reproduce-your-genes instincts like other animals have; and, instead of our conscious mind being the instinct-defying cause of our corrupted condition, it was made out to be the blameless mediating ‘hero’ that had to step in and try to control the supposed savage instincts within us!” (see paragraphs 63-64 of TI).
As I will now explain, the extremely dangerous and destructive consequences of this denial of our species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving innocent existence by claiming that we have savage competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts is that it meant there was no corrupted condition to have to be explained. And the result of this denial of us humans having a corrupted condition that we have to explain is that the whole purpose and meaning of human endeavour, which has been to find knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, that redeeming explanation of our corrupted human condition, wasn’t being acknowledged. If there is no corrupted condition then there is no corrupted condition to have to be explained!
Tragically, and as we will see extremely destructively, while living in denial of our corrupted human condition saved us from unbearably depressing self-confrontation, IT LEFT US LIVING A PURPOSELESS AND MEANINGLESS EXISTENCE!
Since what I have explained may be a little hard to follow, I will go over the situation again. By denying our species’ peaceful, cooperative and loving past in order to avoid having to admit our present corrupted condition, we have been denying the central purpose and meaning of human life of having to find understanding of our corrupted condition, and, as we will see, this lack of recognition of our central purpose and meaning has been absolutely psychologically devastating.
I will now go through some of the most destructive consequences of having to live in denial of the fundamental responsibility, purpose and meaning of human endeavour of having to find understanding of our corrupted human condition. And I’ll also explain how being able to now admit that purpose and meaning—which the finding of the ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation finally allows us to do—is the key to ending all the horrific aspects of our corrupted condition.
The following are the main Aspects of our corrupted condition that I will show can be completely relieved and ended by admitting our meaning of having to find the explanation for our corrupted condition’:
1. the psychologically paralysed state of the younger Millennial, Z and Alpha generations;
2. the bewildered state of relatively innocent races such as the South African San Bushman, the Australian Aborigines, the Canadian Inuits and the Amazonian Indians;
3. the polarised world of politics;
4. the human-condition-denying, crippled state of science;
5. the devoid-of-understanding spiritual world of religion and myths;
6. the conflicted lives of men and women;
7. the offensive prejudices of racism and classism; and
8. the problem of the destruction of our environment.
Aspect 1. Ending the psychologically paralysed state of the younger Millennial, Z and Alpha generations
So I will now begin this description of how having finally found the ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation for our corrupted condition allows us to admit that the fundamental purpose and meaning of the human journey was to find that explanation, and how being able to admit that purpose and meaning now enables us to end all aspects of our corrupted condition, especially those aspects listed above.
This first aspect, which is one of the most worrying—and seemingly mysterious and unsolvable—of all the problems in the world today, is the psychologically paralysed, so-called ‘snowflake’ (because they melt if placed under any pressure) emerging Millennial, Z and Alpha generations.
As we will see, these recent generations are so psychologically paralysed and crippled that they starkly and alarmingly indicate that the human race is heading into a desperately dark situation; in fact, heading towards terminal psychosis and extinction! And we will see that the main reason for the crippled state of these emerging generations is that there has been no admission of the reason for and thus meaning behind their suffering! And we will also see how being able to know the reason for and meaning behind their suffering is how they, and in fact the whole human race, can be rehabilitated, brought back to life!
So this psychologically paralysed state of the present Millennial, Z and Alpha generations will be the first example of how destructive it has been having to live in denial of our species’ original innocent state and thus of our purpose and meaning of having to find the explanation for why we corrupted that Edenic all-sensitive and all-loving existence, which, as is presented in TI, we have now finally found.
To begin the explanation I’ll present a timeline of descriptions of the exponential growth in psychological distress or psychosis since the end of World War II in 1945, a time span of 78 years, that has culminated in the terminal levels of psychosis amongst younger generations today in 2023—which the end part of the below graph that I presented in TI (par. 75) describes. We can see that the more we searched for knowledge the more psychologically upset we became, and that the human race has now reached the end play state of terminal levels of psychosis—which the successful finding of the explanation for our corrupted condition, and resulting ability to admit our meaning of having to find that explanation, is now able to relieve.
At this point I should clarify what is meant by the words ‘psychosis’ and ‘neurosis’, and by the terms relating to the therapy of them. The dictionary entry for psyche reads: ‘The oldest and most general use of this term is by the early Greeks, who envisioned the psyche as the soul or the very essence of life’ (Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, 1985 edn), and ‘soul’ is defined as the ‘moral and emotional part of man’, and as the ‘animating or essential part’ of us (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 5th edn, 1964). Therefore, since osis is defined as ‘abnormal state or condition’ (Dictionary.com), ‘psychosis’ means ‘the abnormal state or condition of our soul’, or ‘soul-illness’; and ‘neurosis’ means ‘the abnormal state or condition of our neurons or nerves’, or ‘mind-illness’. So, the preoccupation (that was explained in TI) of our nerve or neuron-based conscious intellect with repressing our condemning gene-based, instinctive, loving, ‘moral’, ‘emotional’, ‘animating’, ‘essence of life’ ‘soul’, such that we suffer from an ‘abnormal state or condition’, means we humans have been experiencing both a ‘psychosis’ and a ‘neurosis’. Also, the word ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’, since iatreia means ‘healing’ (The Encyclopedic World Dictionary); and ‘psychology’ literally means the ‘study of the soul’, since the Greek word logia means ‘study of’. But again, the situation we have been in is that we couldn’t effectively practice psychiatry and ‘heal our soul’, or effectively practice psychology and ‘study our soul’, until we could explain why our conscious thinking, self-adjusting self had to destroy the wonderful world of our cooperative and loving instinctive self or soul; understand why our conscious thinking self is actually good and not bad, and, by so doing, reconcile and heal our ‘instinct vs intellect’ split selves.
With regard to the description of the development of psychosis that I am going to be giving in this presentation, I should point out that it is only now that we have found the redeeming and relieving ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation for our corrupted condition that we can afford to fully admit, face and describe the escalation of all this psychosis. While we couldn’t explain and defend our corrupted condition, having to see how dire the psychological situation of the human race is was far too depressing and confronting, which is why the following clear documentation of the development of psychosis has been avoided. So what follows is a very honest, human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding description of how dire the predicament of the human race really is.
I begin the 78-year timeline description of the development of psychosis with the following prophetic words from the famous author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, that he wrote not in The Little Prince but in other writings just prior to and during World War II. The ‘deeply anxious days’ Saint-Exupéry refers to is obviously that terrifying period of World War II, but, as we will see, while the post-war 1950s and 1960s was a period of great relief, freshness and optimism following the terrible war years, ‘deep’ ‘anxiety’ was also going to become the characteristic of human life in subsequent decades, and ultimately lead to Saint-Exupéry’s prophesised present ‘darkest era our world has ever known’. So these are his prophetic words: ‘We are living through deeply anxious days, and if we are to relieve our anxiety we must diagnose its cause…What is the meaning of man? To this question no answer is being offered, and I have the feeling that we are moving toward the darkest era our world has ever known’ (A Sense of Life, pub. 1965, pp.127, 219 of 231). (All underlinings are my emphasis.) Yes, what I am about to describe is the development of psychosis to such an extreme level that we have entered ‘the darkest era our world has ever known’.
(I’ll include the sources of whatever quotes I use in the transcript of this talk, which will be made available as a small book.)
To begin with what was happening in the 1950s and 1960s, evidence of the relief, freshness and optimism in the 1950 ‘Builder’ and 1960 ‘Baby Boomer’ generations can be found in the healthy, happy, optimistic and excited rock ‘n’ roll music of those decades. As Rolling Stone magazine described ’50s music, ‘Not only has it proved more than a passing fad or an episode of youthful folly, it has provided the model, the template, the jumping-off point for virtually every subsequent wave of pop-music innovation. The best of Fifties rock & roll may have promised a utopia that was not to be, but as long as the music survives, the dream will live on’ (Robert Palmer, ‘The 50s: A Decade of Music That Changed the World’, 19 Apr. 1990); and the ’60s were appropriately described by Bono of the band U2 as ‘the golden age of pop’ (God Part II, 1988).
Continuing with what was happening in music as a way of documenting the development of psychosis, a film about the history of rock ‘n’ roll said about the 1970s that ‘after the 1967 climax of the summer of love…the innocent optimism of the 1960s gave way to more volatile, uncertain times…A utopia like 1967 couldn’t possibly last…no longer could you be an innocent flower child…The 1969 Woodstock Festival would see the sun set on the hippie dream’ (Seven Ages of Rock, 2007, BBC). Yes, the healthy, happy, optimistic and excited 1950s and 1960s music was replaced by the nihilistic, angry, head-banging, guitar-smashing, psychologically hurt, punk music of the 1970s; and continued to the soul-screaming-in-agony, angst-ridden, mind-numbing, manic, throbbing-with-mental-pain music of the following decades; to the now burnt out, psychologically exhausted and paralysed, often muted music of today!
In the 1980s the psychological deterioration continued, with the ‘Greed is good’ slogan from the 1987 film Wall Street expressing the focus of that era on the power and glory relief that money and materialism could provide—big cars and diamonds and fast living to counter the escalating levels of insecurity and depression about our seemingly worthless and meaningless lives. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that ‘Living well is the best revenge’ (The Great Gatsby, 1925) against the injustice of the human condition not only especially applied to the 1920s Jazz Age, it also especially applied to the 1980s. Tragically, as we will see, the ‘partying’ that characterised ‘living well’ requires a certain amount of functionality and as psychological paralysis increased in the generations after the 1980s, even the ability to put on a brave face and party became increasingly difficult, and great defunct-ness spread across the world.
Then in the 1990s the Generation X-ers who were taking over the stage were becoming even more riven with psychosis, being described as ‘living an X sort of life—cerebral, alienated, seriously concerned with cool’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 22 Aug. 1994); and being ‘steeped in irony, detachment, and a sense of dread’ (Rich Cohen, ‘Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope’, Vanity Fair, Sep. 2017).
Then in the following decade reports started to emerge evidencing the increasing prevalence of psychological disorder among younger generations, with a 2002 article headed ‘Epidemic of autism mystifies experts’ referring to a study which showed that in California the extremely psychologically distressed condition of autism ‘more than tripled from 1987 to 1998’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Oct. 2002). The following year in 2003 a TIME magazine cover story described ‘A medicated generation’ of children‘suffering from’ ‘exploding rates’ of ‘the alternatively depressive and manic mood swings of bipolar disorder (BPD)’ and also ‘attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)’, with experts admitting ‘we don’t know exactly why this increase in children and adolescents is occurring’ (see par. 71 of my book Death by Dogma [DbyD]).
Ten years later in 2013 another TIME magazine cover story described the emergence of the ‘narcissism epidemic’ of the ‘80 million strong…biggest age group in American history’ ‘Me Me Me Generation’ of ‘Millennials’. The article even prophesised that this ‘narcissism’, which it described as a ‘personality disorder’ where ‘people try to boost [low] self-esteem’, may mean that the Millennials’ ‘self-centredness could bring about the end of civilization’(par. 71 of DbyD). This ‘end’ state of extreme ‘self-centred’ insecurity of self—in fact this whole end-play state of terminal alienation—was actually predicted in the Bible where it says, ‘But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a [pseudo] form of godliness…never able to acknowledge the truth’ (2 Timothy 3:1-5, 7).
Three years later in 2016 a further TIME magazine cover story had the headline ‘The Kids Are Not All Right: American teens are anxious, depressed and overwhelmed. Experts are struggling over how to help them’, and described a ‘spectrum of angst that plagues 21st-century teens’, like ‘anxiety’, ‘depression’, ‘self-loathing’, ‘fragility’, ‘sadness’, ‘hopelessness’, and the practice of ‘self-harm like cutting themselves to relieve their psychological pain’(par. 71 of DbyD).
The following year in 2017, Australia’s ‘Five Year Mental Health Youth Report’ found that ‘There is a tidal wave of mental health issues in the schools’, and in the same year in the United States it was reported that ‘the suicide rate for 15 to 19-year-olds shot up between 2007 and 2015…by 31 per cent for boys, and more than doubling for girls’(par. 71 of DbyD).
Five years later in 2022 Australia’s government reported a ‘Double-digit annual growth in the cost of the country’s National Disability Insurance Scheme’ (The Australian, 7 Oct. 2022), largely driven it said by ‘spiralling numbers of children with developmental delay…One in 11 boys aged five to seven in Australia is now on the Scheme…With the numbers of young people with autism and psychological conditions driving the growth’ (The Australian, 3 Nov. 2022). And in 2023, it is reported that there is ‘a silent legion of kids across our nation’ suffering from psychological paralysis, where, ‘As the organisation School Refusal Australia explained in a submission to Victoria’s royal commission into mental health, “The kids are isolated, often live in their bedrooms 24/7 and are unable to leave their home. They barely function. They feel guilty and ashamed. They’ve given up”…This is not simply wagging [skipping school], as earlier generations knew it. It’s an extreme phobia’ (Nikki Gemmell, ‘The Absent Generation’, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 13 May 2023). And, another report about the psychological paralysis of the young stated that ‘One in five teens struggles to read’ (The Australian, 15 May 2023).
So it is end game wherever we look—the paralysed, can’t-cope-with-anything, aptly titled ‘snowflake’ Millennials who are coming to dominate in the world now are even describing themselves as ‘The Burnout Generation’ (‘How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation’, BuzzFeednews.com, 5 Jan. 2019). And all the forced isolation, fear, trauma and sickness caused by the COVID pandemic that began in 2020 has only compounded the surge in the already unbearable levels of psychosis and neurosis in the world, such that many of our youth are now living in a completely overwhelmed, paralysed, can’t-cope-at-all state. As a UK article reported, ‘Lockdowns proved a disaster for young people…countless kids…are so crippled by anxiety or depression that they cannot leave the house, or they are angry and bitter, out on the streets and into crime and gangs’ (Harriet Sergeant, ‘The ghost children’, The Spectator, 25 Mar. 2023).
The ‘angry and bitter’ psychological distress of many young people in the world today is so great in some they are becoming completely deranged, going berserk with internal trauma and distress and flailing out at the world with automatic weapons, randomly killing people—as is happening more and more often, most recently on 27 March 2023 in the US state of Tennessee when a 28-year-old woman shot dead three children and three adults before being shot by police.
The Tennessee woman who committed the horrific murders was transgender, she saw herself as being male, and while she or he is the first transgender person that I’m aware of to go on one of these increasingly frequent murder rampages, LGBTIQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, asexual and other sexually or gender diverse) people are becoming common; and the reason they are becoming common can be explained by the extreme levels of psychological upset in younger generations. To very briefly summarise what is explained in chapter 8:11B of FREEDOM about the roles of men and women under the duress of the human condition and about sex as humans have been practising it under that duress. Human sex has not been about trying to pass on our genes as we’ve been taught, rather it is, like most of our behaviours now, a behaviour that is being caused by, or at least greatly influenced by, our psychosis. This is because since the human condition emerged, the act of procreation has become about attacking, destroying, violating, degrading, sullying, ‘fucking’ innocence for its implied criticism of our corrupted condition (see paragraph 782 of FREEDOM). So the reason younger women are more attractive isn’t because they are more fertile as we’ve been taught, but because they are more innocent looking and thus destroyable or ‘fuckable’. It is also explained in that chapter that men had to take up the loathsome task of championing the conscious thinking ego over the ignorance of our instinctive self (see paragraph 770 of FREEDOM), so when men became overly upset (as the whole human race is rapidly becoming), adopting the women’s role of not being responsible for that horrible battle could psychologically be very appealing. And it could also be psychologically appealing for females when they become overly upset (again, as the whole human race is rapidly becoming) to not want to be a victim of men’s oppression and so want to reject the female role of being a sex object, and to also naively want to take up the more dominant and powerful role men have had. These insights allow us to understand the ‘4,000 per cent rise in children wanting to change sex’ in the UK between 2009 and 2018 (The Telegraph, 16 Sep. 2018), and why there has been this ‘explosion’ (ibid.) in ‘gender dysphoria’ or ‘transgenderism’.
And the fragility of our younger generations is having a tremendous impact in the workforce. In 2023 there are innumerable reports about businesses finding it hard to find functional Millennials and those from the Z-generation to employ, with the chair of Australia’s national broadcaster, Ita Buttrose, complaining that ‘Millennials so lack resilience they need hugging’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Jul. 2020). It is being widely reported that many of them prefer to work from home, want to take their dog to work, want to ban phone calls from management because they find them too confrontational, want the business they are in to have a climate agenda and to support the completely deluded, pseudo-idealistic, let’s-all-just-love-each-other ‘woke’ movement so they can get some feel-good relief for their unbearably depressed condition—and they even want a four-day working week, or to not work at all. (You can read about the extreme danger of pseudo idealism in my 2021 book, Death by Dogma.)
Yes, in Australia it was reported that ‘Australians calling in sick to work could cost the national economy as much as $24 billion by the end of 2022…Gen Z were nearly twice as likely than Baby Boomers to call in sick’ (Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, 12 Nov. 2022); and ‘we’ve now got a population that doesn’t want to work’ (Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph, 2 Jul. 2022); and ‘there are thousands of businesses…that just can’t get staff, let alone good employees’ (ibid. 4 Sep. 2022).
And in France, a study claims ‘the country is now mired in a “laziness epidemic” after swathes of the population said they had lost the will to work hard…This unwillingness to work at all has led to a huge shortage of labour’ (‘Weary French mired in “exhaustion epidemic”’, The Telegraph, 16 Nov. 2022).
In Spain, it is reported that ‘One in 10 young Spaniards has dropped out of education and work altogether, with no plans to resume studying or look for a job’ (‘Spanish shun work and study’, The Australian, 19 Oct. 2022).
Another report says that ‘In China today, especially among urban millennials and members of Generation Z, unease is growing over the intense stress…of daily life…[There are] calls for people to “lie flat” or tangping and do the minimum.’ The report said, ‘People know this is not what life is about…and yet they cannot find a way out’ (‘All work, no play? Chinese millennials opt to “lie flat” instead’, Christian Science Monitor, 15 Nov. 2021).
And there is Japan’s epidemic of ‘shut-ins’ or ‘hikikomori, the phenomenon of withdrawal from society’ which is predicted to ‘eventually rise above 10 million people’ (‘Japan’s “Hikikomori” Population Could Top 10 Million’, Nippon.com, 17 Sep. 2019).
And in the United States, a survey found that ‘a staggering 79 per cent’ of business owners and managers ‘find Gen Z the most difficult generation to have in the workplace’ citing ‘entitlement, a lack of effort, motivation and productivity’, some saying interacting with them ‘can be exhausting because they lack discipline’ and ‘are too easily offended’ (‘Bosses lash out at Gen Z’, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, 24 Apr. 2023).
When it comes to politics, which I’ll say much more about in Aspect 3, as I explain in my booklet Death by Dogma, in the situation that has existed where we haven’t known that we had no choice but to defy our moral instincts and participate in the corrupting search for knowledge, for the psychologically exhausted younger generations the attraction of the Left’s pseudo idealistic, ‘let’s-all-just-hug-each-other’, ‘do-good-to-make-yourself-look-and-feel-good’, politically correct, ‘woke’ culture has been irresistible. After the 2022 federal election in Australia, ‘the Australian National University 2022 Australian Election Study’ found that ‘only one in four voters under the age of 40 voted for the [right-wing] Coalition and only one in five voters among Generation Z voted for the Coalition’ (The Australian, 7 Dec. 2022). In fact, there are many predictions being made in democratic countries that before long the right-wing may never be able to win power again. A May 2019 article in The Atlantic that has the meta title ‘Young Democrats May Control the Political Future’ says that ‘the [right-wing] GOP seems to be playing a losing hand’ (Niall Ferguson & Eyck Freymann, ‘The Coming Generation War’).
In the case of education, the ‘safe space’, ‘trigger warning’ culture that psychologically crippled Millennial and Z generations need to cope with their own, and the world’s, corrupted condition is signalling an end to the search for knowledge in our academic institutions. How can you learn and seek truth and meaning, which has historically been the whole purpose of education, if you aren’t prepared, expected or even challenged to think anymore, which is what is happening. A 2017 article reported that ‘half of undergraduate students [now] think it is acceptable to silence speech they feel is upsetting’ (Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 25 Sep. 2017), and another 2017 article described how the ‘safe-space, trigger warning culture’, with its ‘intolerance of dissent in Western universities and the puritanical hectoring of social media give grounds for concern that the flowering of freedom in the past several centuries may come under threat.’ The article even states that this development ‘may mean that the entire world is heading into a great endarkenment’ (Matt Ridley, ‘Blazing Saddles a dim memory as society enters a new dark age’, The Times, 26 Sep. 2017). Yes, Saint-Exupéry’s warning ‘that we are moving toward the darkest era our world has ever known’ has come true! Allan Bloom’s insightfully titled 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind was such a prophetic anticipation of what is now happening!
In FREEDOM I included these pictures that powerfully illustrate the terminal levels of soul-destroyed, psychotic, alienation in the world. The photographs on the left and right below are of people participating in ‘post-apocalyptic zombie street parades’ where ‘Vacant stares become all the rage’ that have become popular among the young in recent times. The painting in the middle by Jean-Michel Basquiat was sold at auction in 2013 for a whopping $US48.8 million, a price no doubt achieved in part because of how much it resonates as an image of our time. (par. 1059 of FREEDOM)
Mag Boiss; Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat; Devon Christopher Adams
And this is a drawing I have done and included in my book Death by Dogma to illustrate the end play, desperately sad state of dystopia, lawlessness, unbearable psychosis, drug addiction and homelessness that is tragically now a characteristic of the streets of large cities in the US. (par. 150 of DbyD)
A report by medical doctors published by the US’s National Library of Medicine, titled ‘We are the hollow men: The worldwide epidemic of mental illness’, summarises this whole horror situation the human race has arrived at. The report begins by quoting from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men: ‘Remember us – if at all – not as lost / violent souls, but only / as the hollow men / the stuffed men / This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper’; and then says, ‘All across the world, patients are coming to their local Accident and Emergency Departments/Casualty Centers (EDs). They are in pain. Sometimes, their eyes scream out their suffering and other times they appear as cold, empty shells reflecting the hollowness the patient feels inside. Unlike patients with compound fractures or lacerations, patients with psychiatric illness have wounds that are rarely visible to the naked eye. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. This is the face of mental illness, the stark picture seen by emergency physicians and psychiatrists, with problems ranging from depression to suicide and psychosis, as well as addictive disorders’ (V. Tucci & N. Moukaddam, PubMed, NIH, Jan-Mar 2017).
So the questions screaming out to be answered is WHAT is causing all this psychosis or mental illness, and WHY is it increasing the world over to the point now that it’s threatening to bring an end to human existence? These are extremely obvious and critically important questions for which no real answer is being offered.
Yes, what the hell is going on that is bringing the human race to its knees? Just to quote from what has already been presented, Saint-Exupéry said that ‘to this question’ of the ‘meaning’ of our suffering that ‘no answer is being offered’; and from other quotes, the ‘epidemic of autism’ was said to ‘mystify experts’; and the authorities said that ‘we don’t know exactly why’ there are ‘exploding rates’ of ‘bipolar disorder’ and ‘ADHD’; and regarding the ‘spectrum of angst that plagues 21st-century teens’ it was said that ‘experts are struggling over how to help them’; and it was reported that the younger generations in China who are only able to ‘do the minimum’, feel ‘they cannot find a way out’; and ‘the hollow men’ article I just referred to goes on to describe the exponential increase in mental illness, and says ‘The statistics are frightening’ and the system is ‘stretched to the breaking point…with no end in sight’. Yes, it is being stated that no one knows the cause of the epidemic of psychosis, and that no one knows how to fix it. Relievingly, as will be described, the cause and the solution is available.
As usual with issues related to our corrupted human condition, there have been a number of human-condition-avoiding, dishonest reasons given for the ‘mental health crisis’, as our soul-destroyed or psychotic condition is being evasively referred to. These include blaming it on ‘intensive helicopter parenting’, ‘chemicals in our food and environment’, the ‘overuse of smart phones’, and ‘the mental load produced by systems of capitalism and patriarchy’ (Anne Helen Petersen, ‘How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation’, BuzzFeednews.com, 5 Jan. 2019). (Incidentally, with regard to blaming capitalism and patriarchy, now that we are able to explain the human condition we can at last understand that capitalism and patriarchy have been the saviours not the villains of the human journey because the materialistic relief that capitalism has provided for the upset human race allowed us to continue our upsetting search for knowledge, and the patriarchy that was tasked with finding understanding of the human condition has, as is described in Death by Dogma, actually now achieved just that.)
In the case of psychologists, the human-condition-avoiding, dishonest reason they have been giving for why adult minds tend to be flooded with anxious negative thoughts these days is that ‘humans have an evolutionary, hard-wired tendency towards fear and negativity, and the stresses of modern living trigger this default negative, fight or flight, survival mode in us’ (Dr. Rick Hanson & Nick Ortner, The Tapping Solution App, 15 Jul. 2022). But this is just a continuation of the false ‘savage instincts’ excuse; our instinctive ‘hard-wired tendency’ is one of love, cooperation and sensitivity, the complete opposite of ‘fear’, ‘negativity’ and ‘survival mode’.
The truth, as the previous quotes show, is that there hasn’t been any human-condition-confronting, honest explanation for the world-wide ‘mental health crisis’. Which brings us to the point of this presentation, which is the explanation of HOW having finally found the redeeming explanation of our corrupted condition allows us to admit the original innocence of the human race, and that our purpose and meaning of having to find that understanding IS what is able to bring an end to the human-race-destroying terminal levels of psychosis in the world.
With regard to the real reason for the epidemic of psychosis or mental illness (indeed the reason for our whole psychologically troubled human condition), the ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of the human condition, that I summarised in TI, presents the redeeming and healing actual reason why, when we became conscious some 2 million years ago, the human race departed from an original state of innocence and became psychologically upset or corrupted. As the chart I presented earlier shows, ever since the psychologically upset state of the human condition emerged, the upset has been increasing, but, now that we’ve found the redeeming, reconciling and healing understanding for that corrupted condition, all the upset is able to subside and end.
That is the macro reason for, and solution to, all the psychological upset in the world; however, if we look at how the psychological upset has actually been passed on and grown throughout the 2 million years of our species’ upsetting search for knowledge, it becomes clear that the two main factors or influences have been the extreme innocent sensitivity of our instinctive self or soul, and the lack of meaning that has resulted from not being able to admit our fundamental task of having to find understanding of our corrupted condition.
With regard to the factor of not being able to admit the original innocence of the human race, now that we can admit it, it becomes obvious how soul-destroying/psychosis-producing the psychologically upset, corrupted state of the human race is to the innocent instinctive self or soul of infants and children, and thus to the adults they grow into. As a result of our species’ cooperative and all-loving heritage we are each born into the world instinctively expecting it to be all-loving and all-sensitive, but instead we encounter a massively upset and upsetting world. And the more upset the world has become, the more horrifying and thus psychologically corrupting of our innocence during our formative years the upset is. It was a very compounding situation, which has led to the extremely psychologically upset state of emerging generations today.
To see the effect of upset on innocence we can look at the effect of upset on the relatively innocent Bushmen or San people of the Kalahari desert because they are the most ancient and thus most innocent race of people in the world today.
Firstly, with regard to the sensitivity of our original instinctive self or soul, which the relative innocence of the Bushman is a representation of, in his books about the Bushmen, the pre-eminent philosopher and author Sir Laurens van der Post wrote that ‘He [the Bushman] and they [the natural world they lived in] all participated so deeply of one another’s being that the experience could almost be called mystical. For instance, he seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantis, baobab tree’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.21 of 253).
And as to the effect of our upset world on the Bushman/our innocent soul, Sir Laurens wrote that ‘mere contact with twentieth-century life seemed lethal to the Bushman. He was essentially so innocent and natural a person that he had only to come near us for a sort of radioactive fall-out from our unnatural world to produce a fatal leukaemia in his spirit’ (The Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.111 of 233). And, ‘I once saw a little Bushman imprisoned in one of our gaols because he killed a giant bustard which according to the police, was a crime, since the bird was royal game and protected. He was dying because he couldn’t bear being shut up and having his freedom of movement stopped. When asked why he was ill he could only say that he missed seeing the sun set over the Kalahari. Physically the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him but he died none the less!’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, p.236).
Yes, as Sir Laurens also 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 soul that the Bushmen are a living remnant of] 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).
While the anthropologist Ashley Montagu was not able to acknowledge the original innocence of the human race in his extraordinarily honest 1970 paper, ‘A Scientist Looks at Love’, he did totally defy the dishonest ‘savage instincts’ excuse for human behaviour when he wrote that ‘There is a widespread belief that a newborn baby is a selfish, disorganized wild creature who would grow into a violently intractable savage if it were not properly disciplined. [However,] The newborn baby is organized in an extraordinarily sensitive manner…He does not want discipline…he wants love. He behaves as if he expected to be loved, and when his expectation is thwarted, he reacts in a grievously disappointed manner…survival alone is not enough—human beings need and should receive much more…We now know that babies which are physically well nurtured may nevertheless waste away and die unless they are also loved’ (The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol.51, No.9). Yes, we humans are born instinctively expecting to encounter an all-sensitive and all-loving world and because our world is nothing like that, that it is in fact brutally competitive, selfish and aggressive, our souls suffer enormously during our upbringing; we become extremely psychologically upset or ‘soul ill’ which, as I explained, is the literal meaning of ‘psychotic’. It causes ‘a fatal leukaemia in [our] spirit’, as Sir Laurens said.
Yes, as the great psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote, ‘To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.118 of 156). And yes, the playwright Samuel Beckett was only slightly exaggerating the brevity today of a truly loved, soulful, happy, innocent, secure, sane, human-condition-free life when he wrote, ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (Waiting for Godot, 1955)! Truly, as the great author Olive Schreiner wrote, ‘The souls of little children are marvellously delicate and tender things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on them’ (The Story of an African Farm, 1883, p.193 of 300); with that ‘shadow’ nowadays being of an absolutely terrifyingly angry, egocentric and alienated world, so it is no wonder recent generations are growing up psychologically paralysed.
(The extreme psychological hurt that infants and children suffer when they encounter today’s loveless world, and the psychological techniques to manage and repair that damage, is explained in my 2023 book Therapy For The Human Condition.)
The internet especially has massively exposed the young to unending amounts of soul-terrifying-and-deadening trauma. There are just so many horror stories and reports every day now, including any number of distressingly mad conspiracy theories that people’s human-condition-avoiding, bewildered minds are coming up with, such as that we are being invaded by aliens! There is madness everywhere: tragic psychotic, drug-addled people camped on, and staggering along, footpaths; there are endless stories of destitute people struggling to live in slums in countries where extremely selfish corruption has become endemic. The internet has exposed everyone to places of immense wealth and luxury, which is driving aggrieved people in poorer countries to steal whatever money they can whenever they can. Despite its immense potential, communication technology has shrunk the world in a destructive way. As I mentioned in paragraph 1052 of FREEDOM, the psychiatrist Clancy McKenzie gave this stark description of ‘materialism envy’: ‘While visiting Machu Picchu in Peru in 1979 I noted very poor persons, living in the mountains, who had only the clothes they wore and perhaps a lama or two, but had beautiful, warm smiles and seemed content and happy. Days later I was in Bogota in Colombia. It was a very hot day and we asked the driver to stop at an outdoor tavern to buy cold beer. The people were very impoverished, but there was a TV playing and they were able to view the “outside world” where everyone seemed to have more, and luxury was abundant. I offered to go in with the driver and he urged me to wait in the car. I soon learned why. The absolute hatred was so intense that it was palpable. These people did not have less than those in Machu Picchu but they saw others who had more, and their needs were intensified’ (Letter to Prof. Harry Prosen, 27 Mar. 2006). Yes, the powerful communication technology we now have is spreading cynicism, indifference, narcissism, greed, envy, hate, brutality and depravity everywhere. There is basically no love left on Earth, just darkness everywhere; and all of this extreme upset that is being spread out in front of everyone on the internet is terrifying our innocent, unconditional-love-and-happiness-expecting soul. People defend the spreading of all the horror that is going on in the world on the basis that it is responsible journalism to expose the truth, and that everyone has the right to express ‘their truth’; basically that truth is what human progress depends on. But the problem is the truths that are being revealed are miniscule, partial truths because the macro, real truth of our 2-million year corrupted human condition is being totally and completely denied. What is on the internet is really just pretend truth, truths to make us feel we are telling the truth when we are actually lying through our teeth, in effect just laughing at the extreme magnitude of our delusion—and in the meantime totally brutalising our innocent instinctive self or soul!
When I was young and growing up in the relatively free and happy post-World War II years, and in the relatively isolated-from-all-the-upset-in-the-world Australian countryside, my mother Jill went to great lengths to shelter myself and my brothers from any exposure to upset. For example, she restricted our contact with her alcoholic father and brother; avoided letting us see the horrifically tragic alcoholism and degradation in the local Aboriginal community (I’ll address this dreadful situation in the next Aspect); and she and my father Norman never talked to us about my father’s war experiences as a deadly Z-force commando; and they both made great sacrifices to send us to two of the then (but I fear no longer) most sheltered, soul-reinforcing special boarding schools in the world: Tudor House primary school in New South Wales and Geelong Grammar School in Victoria. I could talk for hours about the magnificence of my mother’s phenomenal strength of character, and of my father’s goodness, which I have described at some length in my book How Laurens van der Post Saved the World, but I know they would both be horrified about the unending exposure to trauma that the internet is subjecting present generations to!
Because we couldn’t defend our corrupted human condition there has been no acknowledgement of the all-loving and all-sensitive moral instinctive self or soul in us, and thus of the need to look after it. Instead we have been told we have vicious savage animal instincts—what a tragically necessary but absolutely horrific lie! No wonder no one has known what has been causing all the psychological distress on Earth! Our sensitive soul hasn’t been acknowledged. It’s been invisible, yet its presence is actually immense, bigger than all the clouds in the sky! Jill knew of its existence and went to great lengths to look after it, and the result is the magnificence and wonder of all my truthful and loving thinking and writing. Our soul found a friend in Jill, and then in me. That is basically what has happened to bring about the human-race-saving breakthrough understanding of the human condition! Since I’m being so honest here I should include with the influence of Jill, the influence of Sir Laurens van der Post who also admitted and looked after our innocent soul (Sir Laurens’s human-condition-acknowledging honesty is described at length in my book How Laurens van der Post Saved The World), and also of Sir James Darling, my headmaster at Geelong Grammar School, who fostered soul over intellect in education (Sir James’s Plato-inspired focus on preserving soul is described in my essay Sir James Darling’s Vision). The world owes so much to these three people, that is just the truth! I hereby knight Jill, as well as my father Norman, whose goodness provided such a haven for soul, Dame Jill and Sir Norman, so they are all knighted now!
Not being able to admit the extreme cooperative and loving instinctive expectations of our soul, and therefore how psychologically terrifying and damaging our upset world is to it, is the reason no one has been able to explain the epidemic of psychological upset in the world.
As to how wrecked the human race actually is, and therefore how terrifying it actually is for our innocent soul, consider this fearlessly honest description of the human condition given by the aforementioned psychiatrist R.D. Laing: ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life…We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [p.12 of 156] …the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] …between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded [p.118] …The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [p.116] …We are all murderers and prostitutes…We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another [pp.11–12]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). ‘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]’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192). ‘We are so out of touch with this realm [where the issue of our corrupted human condition lies] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, p.105).
Yes, living in denial of our corrupted condition—pretending ‘it does not exist’—saved us from unbearable self-confrontation, but it also hid us from the reason upset has been passed on from one generation to the next.
What now needs to be explained is how being at last able to acknowledge that the purpose and meaning of the human journey has been to find understanding of our corrupted condition (which we can now do because we can admit the original innocence of our instinctive self or soul) makes all the difference in relieving the extreme bewildered suffering of present generations, and indeed of the whole human race. In fact, as we will see with the eight aspects of our corrupted condition that I will be looking at, being able to acknowledge our meaning of having to find understanding of the human condition, would have in the past, and now does, make so much difference to those aspects, and in fact to all aspects of our corrupted condition, that it effectively solves them.
Being conscious thinking beings, we humans have a tremendous capacity to cope with suffering when we can understand why the suffering is occurring, but, on the other hand, we find it very hard to cope when we don’t understand why it’s occurring. For example, humans have been able to go to war and boldly face the prospect of death when they understand it’s for a worthy cause. However, the whole human journey since we became a conscious species has been one of suffering, and while we have subconsciously known that the source reason for our suffering is the shame and guilt we have felt for having corrupted our all-loving and all-sensitive soul, not being able to confront and admit that we have a corrupted soul has hidden us from our purpose and meaning of having to find that understanding of our corrupted condition. Our denial of our corrupted condition has left us living in a dark wilderness of seeming pointless and purposeless meaninglessness. We haven’t been able to make sense of the core suffering in our lives. As Saint-Exupéry said, to save ourselves from ‘the darkest era our world has ever known’, ‘we must diagnose its cause’, we must be able to understand ‘What is the meaning of man?’, understand the reason for all the suffering and madness.
As Sir Laurens van der Post also said, ‘The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two “hungers”. There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning. There’s ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content – you are not alone in your Spirit – you belong’ (Hasten Slowly: The Journey of Sir Laurens van der Post, 1996).
And now at last we can satiate that ‘Great Hunger’ for the ‘meaning’ of all our suffering. In the case of the Millennial, Z and Alpha generations, we can tell them that they are on the very front line of the most heroic story ever told, which is humanity’s march through the hell of ignorance of our species’ fundamental goodness in order to find the understanding of why we are actually good and wonderful rather than the evil monsters we have seemed to be. As Christ said, ‘the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32) from your suffering, and that is what has happened—we have found the liberating ‘instinct vs intellect’ biological reason for all the suffering in our lives.
It wasn’t what was happening in our lives so much as the inability to understand why it was happening that has been the real problem. As I said, we can cope with an immense amount of suffering, as long as we know the good reason for it, and now at last we have that most important of all reasons. When the artist Paul Gauguin titled and inscribed on one of his most famous masterpiece paintings, ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ (1897-1898), he was expressing our great need to know the meaning of our lives. Yes, as the ancient Greeks instructed us to do with their famous inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, ‘Man, know thyself.’
And, like Saint-Exupéry did, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung emphasised the urgency for humans to ‘know thyself’ when he said, ‘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’ (Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.239 of 275). The musician Sir Bob Geldof also emphasised the urgency when, in his aptly titled 1986 album, Deep in the Heart of Nowhere, he sang, ‘What are we going to do because it can’t go on…This is the world calling. God help us’, and ‘Searching through their sacred books for the holy grail of “why”, but the total sum of knowledge knows no more than you or I’. Yes, finding understanding of our condition has been ‘the holy grail’ of the human journey, which the famous biologist E.O. Wilson also recognised when he wrote, ‘There is no grail more elusive or precious in the life of the mind than the key to understanding the human condition’ (The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012, p.1 of 330). And the reason it has been the holy grail of the human journey was made clear by Professor Harry Prosen, the former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, when he wrote in the Introduction to my book FREEDOM: ‘I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’
These lyrics from the young American heavy metal band ‘With Life In Mind’ reveal both how traumatising our world is for young minds that haven’t yet resigned to blocking out the issue of our corrupted human condition (the process of Resignation that adolescents have had to go through is summarised in Freedom Essay 30), and how important being able to make sense of all the suffering in the world is going to be for the whole human race, especially for the present generations who are suffering so extremely from the agony of the human condition: ‘It scares me to death to think of what I have become…I feel so lost in this world’, ‘Our innocence is lost’, ‘I scream to the sky but my words get lost along the way. I can’t express all the hate that’s led me here and all the filth that swallows us whole. I don’t want to be part of all this insanity. Famine and death. Pestilence and war. A world shrouded in darkness…Fear is driven into our minds everywhere we look’, ‘Trying so hard for a life with such little purpose…Lost in oblivion’, ‘Everything you’ve been told has been a [human-condition-avoiding] lie…We’ve all been asleep since the beginning of time. Why are we so scared to use our minds?’, ‘Keep pretending; soon enough things will crumble to the ground…If they could only see the truth they would coil in disgust’, ‘How do we save ourselves from this misery…So desperate for the answers…We’re straining on the last bit of hope we have left. No one hears our cries. And no one sees us screaming’, ‘This is the end’ (Grievances album, 2010).
Yes, ‘Fear is driven into our minds everywhere we look’, and yes, ‘Trying so hard for a life with such little purpose’, we’re ‘Lost in oblivion’, ‘Everything you’ve been told has been a [human-condition-avoiding] lie’, ‘How do we save ourselves from this misery’, we’re ‘so desperate for the answers’! And why are ‘the answers’ to a life of seemingly ‘such little purpose’ so ‘desperate[ly]’ needed to ‘save ourselves from this misery’? It is because, without having the ‘answer’ of knowing the ‘purpose’ of our ‘misery’ of having to heroically search for understanding of our corrupted condition, an understanding we have now at last found, we couldn’t make sense of and thus be able to cope with our suffering.
And having the redeeming understanding for our corrupted condition also means we can be psychologically redeemed and thus have our upset healed. As I explain in chapter 9 of my book FREEDOM, and on our Transformation page, the whole human race can take up the human-condition-free Transformed Way of Living and set out all together now on the sunshine highway to the world in sunshine.
So the Millennial, Z and Alpha generations can now at last make sense of their extreme suffering, and they can also be part of the most exciting event in human history, the great break-out of the human race from the human condition! It’s all over, the human race is free, as Martin Luther King’s Jr dreamed we would all one day be, ‘Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ (‘I Have A Dream’ speech, 28 Aug. 1963).
Just imagine the change when it catches on in the wider world that the redeeming and healing understanding of the human condition has at last been found and everyone is free to take up the Transformed Way of Living and leave forever the butchered, mad world we have been living in! There is going to be so much excitement, happiness and togetherness. Yes, from everyone living in their present state of extremely depressed anxiety about the state of the world, imagine how much relief is going to flood through everyone’s body and through the whole world when the human race realises it has won its great, heroic battle to find understanding of its corrupted condition and everyone is free to leave that horrible existence! The Millennial, Z and Alpha generations especially are going to be so excited, because they have been mortified by their crippled condition, and haven’t been able to see any way out of it—but now they can understand everything and see a path home for themselves and the whole human race. If you join our Facebook Group you can already sense all the relief and excitement and happiness building! Yes, being able to make sense of our lives, find meaning in our suffering, unlocks every potential we humans have ever dreamed of!
I should mention that schooling, right through from kindergarten to university, will all change now. Instead of subjecting the young to endless human-condition-denying bullshit, they will be taught all the truth about the human condition, and about how a whole new world free of the human-condition-stricken existence has opened up for the human race, and boy-oh-boy are they going to be happy and free! A whole new variety of humans is going to emerge on Earth! Imagine when we tell young people the heroic journey the human race has been on, how amazed, relieved, proud and excited they will be. It is just beyond all our imaginings how wonderful the coming world for humans is going to be! Our world has been such a dead place to have to live in, but when the word gets out that the human race has won its freedom from the human condition, it is going to explode with excitement—and, as I said, if you join our Facebook Group you can see that explosion of excitement is already happening!
Before looking at the next aspect, which is how knowing and fulfilling our meaning can finally end the bewildered state of relatively innocent ethnic groups such as the South African San Bushman, the Australian Aborigines, the Canadian Inuits and the Amazonian Indians, I want to address the problem of how are the Millennial, Z and Alpha generations going to find out about the explanation of the human condition and from there the relieving meaning behind their suffering when their alienation/psychosis is so great they find it too depressing and confronting to look at the issue of their and the human race’s corrupted condition and so can’t discover this liberating understanding. As described in paragraph 78 of Death by Dogma, “in the WTM’s marketing of the explanation of the human condition we have learnt that advertising to Millennials and younger generations (those under 40 in 2023) is so futile that we have no choice but to avoid it”. So how do we overcome this problem of the extreme avoidance—or what we refer to as the Deaf Effect—that younger generations in particular experience when they try to listen to or read about the human condition? Well, the adoption of any new idea obviously has to start with those who are most able to appreciate it, which for the explanation of the human condition are those over 40 who don’t suffer from the Deaf Effect as much as the under 40s because they are in general not as alienated/psychotic as the under 40s. And amongst the over 40s, and in fact any age group, those who can best ‘hear’ and appreciate this explanation are the unresigned ‘ships at sea’ (Resignation and ‘ships at sea’ are explained in F. Essay 30). So ‘ships at sea’ have to encourage the over 40s to persevere reading and listening to our analysis of the human condition until many of them can ‘hear’ the explanation; and then the ‘ships at sea’ and those over 40 who have been able to ‘hear’ it have to encourage and help the Millennials and younger generations to ‘hear’ and appreciate this world-saving information.
Also before moving on to the next aspect, I should mention that there is of course a much greater meaning for human existence than needing to find understanding of our corrupted condition, and that is our involvement in the Integrative Meaning of all existence. This Negative Entropy-driven, integrative development of matter into ever larger and more stable arrangements of matter—which is a process we have been so fearful of acknowledging while we couldn’t explain our divisive behaviour that we personified it as ‘God’—is summarised in F. Essay 23, and fully explained in chapter 4 of FREEDOM.
Aspect 2. Ending the bewildered state of relatively innocent races such as the South African San Bushman, the Australian Aborigines, the Canadian Inuits and the Amazonian Indians
In the previous Aspect I explained how important it is for all humans, but especially the present extremely psychologically upset younger generations, to be able to know the reason for, or meaning of, all the upset, soul-corrupted madness and suffering in the world. What I now want to talk about is how another group of people will also especially benefit from being able to understand the extremely upset, soul-corrupted condition of the human race. They are the relatively innocent ethnic groups or races like the hunter-forager South African San Bushman, Australian Aborigines, Canadian Inuits, and Amazonian Indians like the Yanomamö.
The psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich wrote these honest words about the effect of upset on innocence: ‘The living [those relatively free of upset]…is naively kindly…It assumes that the fellow human also follows the [cooperative, selfless and loving] laws of the living and is kindly, helpful and giving. As long as there is the emotional plague [the flood of psychological upset in the world], this natural basic attitude, that of the healthy child or the primitive…[is subject to] the greatest danger…For the plague individual also ascribes to his fellow beings the characteristics of his own thinking and acting. The kindly individual believes that all people are kindly and act accordingly. The plague individual believes that all people lie, swindle, steal and crave power. Clearly, then, the living is at a disadvantage and in danger’ (Listen, Little Man!, 1948, p.8 of 109).
Yes, to quote again Sir Laurens van der Post’s description of this ‘greatest danger’ that the upset world has on the ‘primitive’ races like the Bushman: ‘mere contact with twentieth-century life seemed lethal to the Bushman. He was essentially so innocent and natural a person that he had only to come near us for a sort of radioactive fall-out from our unnatural world to produce a fatal leukaemia in his spirit’.
And Sir Laurens gave this further description—which is very similar to Reich’s—of the effects of extreme upset on those who are relatively innocent when, as I have also mentioned before, he wrote that ‘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 soul that more innocent races like the Bushman are a living remnant of] 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.’
Yes, our species’ original ‘togetherness’ and ‘love and trust in life that we have for the moment lost’ creates ‘an unappeasable homesickness at the base of the human heart’, and, as Reich said, this yearning is especially strong for the innocent ‘healthy child or the primitive’ who still ‘trust’ that we live in a world of ‘love’.
So this is why it is going to bring absolutely immense relief to finally tell everyone, especially children and more innocent people, about the extremely corrupting but at the same time immensely heroic and noble journey that the human race has successfully completed to find knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, understanding of our 2-million-year corrupted human condition.
Yes, being at last able to admit the reason for, and thus give people the ability to understand the meaning of, all the extremely upset, corrupted behaviour in the world—which we can now do because we have finally found the redeeming, good reason why we corrupted our species’ cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul—will mean that the more innocent ‘healthy child or the primitive’ WILL NO LONGER be in the ‘greatest danger’ of suffering a ‘lethal’, ‘fatal leukaemia in…spirit’.
We can at last explain and admit and tell everyone about our immensely heroic but horrifically corrupted human condition. The great denial and silence about our corrupted human condition that has caused a ‘fatal leukaemia in’ the ‘spirit’ of innocence ends. The ‘cancer’ that Simon and Garfunkel sang about in their 1964 song The Sound of Silence, ‘Fool, said I, you do not know—silence like a cancer grows’, is going to be healed by ending that ‘silence’. The reason Roald Dahl’s children’s books have been so immensely popular—his sales exceed 100 million, making him one of the bestselling fiction authors of all time—is that even though his stories of child-eating giants, etc, etc, seem ghastly to resigned, human-condition-denying, dishonest adults, to children the admission in the stories of the extreme imperfection of the world of adults is phenomenally relieving. (Again, the process of Resignation to living in denial of the human condition that almost all adolescents have had to go through is explained in F. Essay 30.) The effect of denying the corruption of self in order to avoid having to confront it has been to project that denial onto those who aren’t corrupted. When corruption is being denied because it is far too depressing to face, that denial has the effect of forcing those who are not corrupted to believe those who are corrupted aren’t corrupted. They are being forced to adopt the lie; they are being denied the truth, which is very destructive of their innocence, hence denial/silence ‘like a cancer grows’.
So the effect of resigned adults’ denial of their corrupted condition has been to project their denial on everyone else, in particular make innocents codependent to their lies, make innocence think the world of resigned adults is honest, healthy and happy when it is actually dishonest, corrupt and psychologically distressed to the core!
In effect, resigned adults have been assuming everyone else is also resigned and that it is therefore self-evident to everyone why they behave so extremely dishonestly, aggressively and competitively, but their behaviour has been a complete mystery to innocents. And since the idealistic innocence of the mind of children, of exceptionally innocent individuals and of exceptionally innocent races, was so trusting and thus codependent to the resigned, human-condition-denying state, they were brutalised to the point where, almost invariably, their innocence was destroyed. In my book Therapy For The Human Condition I explain in detail how “in the absence of understanding children [the more innocent] have been so prone to misunderstand the loveless situation they find themselves in that they almost always blame themselves for the shortfall in love”, and how resigned adults’ denial means “The effects on the minds of vulnerable, impressionable, formative young humans [the more innocent] from resigned adults’ total lack of any real honesty—their deadly silence about the real darkness and horror of the world we are living in, and their outrageously dishonest pretence that everything is fine and wonderful—has been to greatly compound the young’s [the more innocent’s] already trusting tendency to decide they must be at fault for not being loved.” Yes, contact with human-condition-denying resigned adults has left the more innocent thinking that they are totally wrong to think there is something wrong with the world; and to even conclude that there must be something wrong with themselves, that they are somehow at fault; even to conclude that they are an undeserving of the reinforcement of love, affection and kindness, un-loveable, bad person, a misreading that as I explain in Therapy For The Human Condition is psychologically devastating. Basically, denial causes all manner of distressing self-doubt in those who are subjected to it, with the greater the deception the greater the distress it causes—and there has been no greater, more distressing to innocence denial than of the corrupted state of the human condition.
Again, as Reich put it, ‘The plague [extremely upset] individual believes that all people lie, swindle, steal and crave power’ whereas the ‘naively kindly…assumes that the fellow human also follows the [cooperative, selfless and loving] laws of the [relatively uncorrupted] living and is kindly, helpful and giving’, and so without admission of the corrupted condition of resigned adults ‘the living is at a disadvantage and in’ ‘the greatest danger’ because they haven’t been exposed to and/or participated in humanity’s great, heroic battle to find understanding of our corrupted human condition as much as the more upset.
So this is especially how, as it says in the Bible, ‘the sin [upset] of the fathers [and mothers is passed on] to the third and fourth generation’ (Exod. 20:5, Deut. 5:9); and so on, from generation to generation.
The practice of denial of the corrupted human condition has owned the world, it has been the dominant activity of humans to this point in time, and the extraordinariness of all my writing is that it has defied that great dark, all-dominating world of denial. Someone—I—defied, then overcame, and is now running free of all the denial and letting the truth out at last, and that truth has saved the world from the ‘fatal leukaemia in’ our ‘spirit’ that all that lying has been causing!
It has to be emphasised that all humans are inevitably variously upset from their different encounters with and/or participation in humanity’s great, heroic battle against ignorance, but since that battle has been a vitally important one, suffering becoming upset from the battle means no one is a bad person and instead everyone is a wonderful hero. Understanding the reason for and meaning of our corrupted human condition ends the whole idea of there being good and bad people. As I explain in all my presentations, the concept of human guilt now goes from planet Earth. All humans are inevitably variously upset, but they are all fundamentally good, special and wonderful heroes!
It also has to be emphasised that, extremely destructive of innocence as it has been, while we couldn’t explain our corrupted human condition we couldn’t afford to admit who was upset and who wasn’t because to do that would have left the more upset feeling condemned as bad, inferior and unworthy, when, as just explained, they were actually immense heroes. However, as I have also been emphasising, and as I explain at length in chapter 8:16E of FREEDOM, now that we can understand the immensely good and heroic reason for our corrupted human condition we can be honest about the different degrees of innocence and upset amongst humans. And such honesty is not only now possible, it is also extremely necessary because, as is being demonstrated in this whole presentation, it is what allows all the upset in the world to end. To include another of Sir Laurens’s fabulously insightful quotes: ‘Truth, however terrible, carried within itself its own strange comfort for the misery it is so often compelled to inflict on behalf of life. Sooner or later it is not pretence but the truth which gives back with both hands what it has taken away with one. Indeed, unaided and alone it will pick up the fragments of the reality it has shattered and piece them together again in the shape of more immediate meaning than the one in which they had been previously contained’ (A Story Like the Wind, 1972, p.174 of 474).
Yes, as the saying goes, ‘honesty is therapy’, and it is the explanation of the human condition and the honesty it makes possible about the extremely upset, corrupted state of the world, and about the heroic journey that the human race has been on to find that explanation, that heals all the upset in the world—as Cat Stevens wrote and sang, ‘breaking down the walls of silence [the denial], [allows the] lifting [of the upset] shadows from your mind’ (Changes IV, 1971).
The fact is that despite it being unavoidable, there has been no honesty at all about our 2-million-year corrupted human condition, and that the denial, the great silence about that corrupted condition, has been incredibly bewildering, distressing and destructive of innocence. Manufacturing concern for indigenous races to make upset humans ‘feel good’, such as giving Australian Aborigines a ‘Voice’ in parliament, as is currently (2023) being discussed, and eulogising them for their ability to find ‘bush tucker’, and for their need for ‘country’, is just token superficial bullshit! Sure Aborigines historically probably aren’t as genetically adapted to cope with alcohol, and that is a factor in how much they are being devastated by alcohol, but the real reason many of them, like many Bushmen, Inuits and Amazonian Indians, are drinking themselves to death, is the lack of meaning in their lives. They can’t understand the extremely upset, human-condition-embattled-and-adapted world around them. No one’s telling them that the rest of the human race is immensely heroic but also extremely soul-destroyed, mad and crazy, while they are relatively soul-full and sound. (I will talk more about the differences in alienation between races in Aspect 7; and you can read more about the effect of upset on relatively innocent races in paragraphs 860-868 of FREEDOM, and more about how it’s now safe and necessary to admit differences in alienation between races in paragraphs 1041-1049 of FREEDOM.)
I should also emphasise that the Bushmen and the other relatively innocent peoples I’ve mentioned are only relatively free of upset and innocent. They have all the basic adjustments in place for managing upset. For instance, they are civilised, instinctively restrained from living out all their upsets; they don’t generally attack when they feel frustrated and angry. They have a form of marriage to artificially contain sexual adventurousness. They clothe their genitals to dampen lust. The women love to wear adornments such as jewellery; they are adapted to being sex objects. The men love hunting animals; they find relief from attacking innocence. In the case of the Bushmen, they employ fatigue-inducing dance to access the repressed soul that they, to some extent, have. In short, like all humans living today they are members of Homo sapiens sapiens. But, while they have these basic adjustments for managing extreme upset firmly in place, they are still a relatively innocent races compared with other more human-condition-embattled-and-adapted races living today. We have to go back to what humans were like 2 million years ago before upset began to see what upset-free people were like—which we have some indication of in the loving behaviour of our great ape cousins, the bonobos, some of which I described in THE Interview.
So to include again Sir Laurens’s words about how precious meaning is: ‘The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two “hungers”. There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning. There’s ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content – you are not alone in your Spirit – you belong.’
Yes, to finally be able to tell more innocent people about the extremely upset world around them is what is going to save their lives, end the ‘profound’ ‘bitter[ness]’, make them feel they ‘belong’.
Also, being able to tell them about the fabulous new world that understanding of the human condition is bringing about—the dreamed-of Transformed Way of Living that is explained in chapter 9 of FREEDOM, and on our Transformation page—will, as I described for the younger generations, make their hearts absolutely sing with relief, happiness and excitement.
Yes, the human race is at last coming home to togetherness, happiness and wellness! Again, no doubt about it, as Martin Luther King Jnr dreamed, ‘Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’
I’m now going to play (and if you’re reading the printed transcript you can watch this at www.wtmbroome.com) a song called The Truth, The Understanding that is written and sung by Mick Manolis who is an esteemed Australian musician of Aboriginal descent and the founder of our WTM Centre in Broome, Western Australia. His song expresses the freedom that he believes this understanding of the human condition will bring to his people.
Aspect 3. Ending the polarised world of politics
Possibly the starkest example of how being able to know and fulfil our meaning of having to find understanding of our corrupted human condition ends human suffering is how it ends the now horrifically polarised world of politics. In fact, while all the aspects of our corrupted human condition that I am addressing desperately need ending, this aspect of the polarised world of politics especially needs ending—which is why in this transcript I have underlined for emphasis a great deal of my explanation. So, what I’m going to be explaining now is very important.
Having at last found the ‘instinct vs intellect’ redeeming, good reason for why we humans corrupted our original cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul, we no longer need to feel ashamed and guilty about our corrupted condition, and so no longer have to deny its reality in order to keep at bay the unbearably depressing guilt and shame that it has caused us. So not being ashamed of our corrupted condition means we can at last both admit the truth that our species did once live in a cooperative, selfless and loving state and the truth of our corrupted condition, which in turn means we can finally admit that the purpose and meaning of human life up until now has been to find understanding of that corrupted condition. Not being able to admit our corrupted condition has meant we haven’t been able to admit that our meaning and purpose has been to find the understanding of that corrupted condition—again, because if there is no corrupted condition then there is no corrupted condition to have to be explained! So while denial of our corrupted condition saved us from unbearable self-confrontation, it meant we weren’t acknowledging our meaning of having to find understanding of our corrupted condition. It left us living a meaningless, directionless and purposeless existence, the consequences of which, as we are seeing in these presentations, have been absolutely devastating.
In the case of politics, while there has been no admission of our purpose and meaning of having to carry out the immensely psychologically upsetting, heroic search for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, understanding of our corrupted human condition, there has been no justification for the upset, competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour that that search unavoidably caused—and thus there has been no justification for the political right-wing’s support of competitive, selfish and aggressive individualism. But with that purpose and meaning finally admitted, not only is the Right justified, but the Left’s philosophy that basically denied there was any meaningful justification for competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour, and the Left’s resulting dogmatic insistence on cooperative, selfless and loving socialism, is finally exposed for the extremely dangerous fraud it is.
Yes, being able to admit our species’ cooperative past and thus our present corrupted condition, finally allows us to admit that our purpose and meaning has been to find understanding of that corrupted condition, and, through making that admission, be able to reveal what is actually wrong with the Left’s dogmatic insistence on cooperative, selfless and loving behaviour. Again, while there was no admission of our species’ cooperative past, there was no corrupted condition to have to be explained, and thus no recognition of the need to find that explanation. Denial of our corrupted condition has left us having to live a meaningless, purposeless and directionless life, the result of which has been that we have had no ability to explain what has actually been wrong with the idea of everyone just hugging, loving and sharing everything with each other—but being able to admit our heroic purpose of needing to find understanding of our corrupted condition, we can see that the creativity of selfish individualism and of the answers-finding capacity that freedom of expression allows has been critical in allowing humanity to fulfil that purpose, which means everything changes—in particular, the whole philosophical basis of the socialistic Left is destroyed.
To admit rather than deny our corrupted condition is what unlocks our ability to finally explain why the pseudo-idealistic culture of the Left is so dangerously wrong. Without that admission it was forever going to be impossible to stop the human-race-destroying culture of the Left! ‘What could possibly be wrong with everyone being cooperative, selfless and loving?’, the Left has basically been asking; well, it is now at last possible to tell the Left what was wrong with it! And until now the only defence for the competitive, selfish and aggressive culture of the Right has been to say that ‘Since it’s human nature to be competitive, selfish and aggressive, it is unrealistic to try to pretend it doesn’t exist, which is why the imposition of Marxist idealism destroys human incentive and motivation to be successful in, and to actively participate in, a competitive, survival-of-the-fittest world, and as a result never has and never will work’. But, as I explained in THE Interview, that defence of the right-wing is based on the false ‘savage instincts’ excuse for our divisive behaviour because we humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, not savage, competitive, selfish and aggressive, must-reproduce-your-genes, survival-of-the-fittest ones. The real reason for the right-wing has been to support the selfish individualism and freedom of expression needed to maintain the search to find understanding of our corrupted condition, a corrupted condition that we can now admit exists. So while the biological thinking behind both the Left and the Right has been wrong, the culture of the Right has been correct while the culture of the Left has been wrong.
And, most importantly, this historic conflict between supposed left-wing idealism and supposed right-wing realism could NEVER be resolved, only ever agonisingly managed through a society democratically voting to decide if it had become too idealistically selfless or too realistically selfish. It has been an endless struggle between two biologically false ideologies. The magnificence then of finally being able to admit the original innocence of the human race and from there admit the heroic purpose and meaning of the human race of having to find understanding of our corrupted condition, which has required the selfish individualism and freedom of expression that the Right supports, is that it ends forever the philosophical basis of the culture of the Left of ‘What could possibly be wrong with everyone being cooperative and loving?’. Yes, in all the discussions and arguments between the Left and the Right, you only ever hear the false justifications given for the idealistic philosophy of the Left and for the realistic philosophy of the Right—such as these extracts from interviews with the prominent American right-wing political commentator and professor of Classics, Victor Davis Hanson. To the question from an interviewer of ‘What would you say to the notion that the woke are just people trying to be kind, and to look after other people, and awaken themselves to racial and gender inequality?’, Davis Hanson replied, ‘The woke progressives do believe that their ends are so noble and that they’re on the right side of history that any means necessary to achieve their ends is justified…They are hard core revolutionary idealogues’ (‘Trump Indictment’, GB News YouTube channel, April 2023). And in another interview, Davis Hanson similarly said, ‘The Left feel that they’re morally superior because they believe in forced egalitarianism, in making everyone equal…But they also realize that that is contrary to human nature…so it requires a degree of force…so they don’t trust democracy…The biggest money in America for the last 30 years has been on the Left, and they have systematically added to their control of The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, NPR, PBS, and now they control social media, they control Hollywood of course, now they control K–12 in schools, they control academia, they even control Wall Street and the corporate board room…even though their message repels people because they’ve seen what happens in history whether from the French Revolution through to the Marxist Bolsheviks…so they need to force people to be equal and they use government to do it…they consider people who believe in human nature are always going to be selfish, right-wing…So they don’t have confidence in constitutional government or democracy…So they want to get rid of the electoral college…pack the Supreme court…it’s about power…They don’t want free debate on both sides, they want to move it way to the Left’ (Sunday Night in America, Fox News Channel, 3 Oct. 2022). And from another leading right-wing commentator, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich: ‘people on the Left are out of touch with reality…they live in a fantasy world…these are folks who saw the Lion King and thought it was documentary. They think lions and zebras [and humans, who he is inferring also have savage instincts like other animals, can be made to] dance and sing together. They are shocked to discover that terrorists wants to kill you, murderers want to murder you, rapists want to rape you. It doesn’t fit their vision. That’s not the Disney movie they want’ (Hannity, Fox News, 20 Dec. 2021). Basically he’s saying humans live in a ‘red in tooth and claw’, ‘must reproduce our genes’ ‘reality’ like other animals, and it is ‘a fantasy’, ‘Disney movie’ to pretend our savage nature doesn’t exist and that we can impose a cooperative and loving world on it. However, again, our ‘human nature’, our born-with instinctive orientation, is to be cooperative, selfless and loving, not competitive, selfish and aggressive. Our brutal behaviour is due to a psychological condition as a result of a clash between our instincts and our conscious mind. It is only now that we have the real defence of the Right and the real reason for why the Left is so wrong and dangerous that the Right can be properly defended and the madness of the Left can actually be stopped!
This belief of the Left that ‘they’re on the right side of history’ reveals a deeper aspect of their ideology. To explain this deeper aspect, while virtually everyone has had to practice denying the truth of our corrupted condition, and thus of our need to explain that corrupted condition, this denial is obviously based on actually knowing that we are corrupted and have to find the redeeming, healing and human-race-transforming understanding of that corrupted state—I say ‘obviously’ because to deny something we have to be at least subconsciously aware of that something! And subconsciously knowing this truth that we have to find the human-race-transforming understanding of our corrupted condition means that in everyone there is a subconscious desire to achieve this great transformation from our corrupted, competitive and aggressive condition to a cooperative and loving state. So part of the delusion of the Left is that they are bringing about this dreamed-of transformation for the human race, which is the view that they are ‘on the right side of history’, even though they’re actually taking humanity away from that dreamed-of transformation by repressing the search for the understanding needed to achieve it! I wrote about this particular aspect of the delusion of the Left in paragraphs 85-86 of Death by Dogma when I referred to the Left deciding to ‘fake it to make it’; to just artificially bring about the dreamed-of transformation of the human race!
What now needs to be emphasised is what I pointed out at the end of THE Interview in paragraph 118, which is that now that we have the true reconciling, redeeming and healing biological understanding of the human condition, not only is the madness of the Left stopped in its tracks, the whole ugly business of politics is obsoleted and brought to an end. This is the final irony of the saga of humanity’s great journey from ignorance to enlightenment; 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 idealistic dogma 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-supporting attitude that the left-wing wanted. 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 take up support of the ideal values sought by the philosophy of the left-wing—but, most significantly, this time we are not abandoning an ongoing battle, we are leaving it won. So suddenly there’s no longer any reason for the right-wing in politics, for it has achieved its grand goal, and everyone effectively becomes left-wing, although not in the old deluded, dishonest, pseudo-idealistic, abandoning-of-the-battle, no-redeeming-reconciling-and-rehabilitating-understanding-found, dogmatic form of the idealism of the Left.
Yes, it was a complete fraud for advocates of the Marxist, Critical Theory, left-wing to assert, as they frequently have, that ‘You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy’, because how could we conscious thinking humans ever be sustained and happy while we couldn’t understand ourselves? The obvious answer is we couldn’t! But now that we can understand ourselves, understand our 2-million-year corrupted condition and as a result can reconcile and heal the horrific psychological split between our instinct and intellect, between our innocent soul and distressed, upset mind, all humans can become free of the upset, corrupted human condition and be truly and genuinely happy and share everything, which is a fabulous transformation that is described on our Transformation page, and at length in chapter 9 of FREEDOM.
So, most wonderfully, the whole horrible business of politics ends with the finding of understanding of the human condition and the acknowledgement of our meaning and purpose of having to find that understanding—and the whole human race sets out as one united organism, letting go of the now obsoleted angry, egocentric and alienated way of living and taking up the cooperative, selfless and loving Transformed Way of Living where everyone lives in support of the redeeming understanding of the human condition!
(For further reading on the obsolescence of politics, see F. Essay 34; and, again, for further reading on the fabulous transformation of the human race from a human-condition-stricken state to a human-condition-free state, see our Transformation page, and chapter 9 of FREEDOM.)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
To explain more fully why the left-wing’s insistence on cooperative behaviour was so dangerous. As I pointed out in THE Interview, while dogmatically insisting that everyone should be cooperative and loving could make you feel that you were doing good and be superficially very psychologically relieving, such insistence on ideal behaviour denied people the freedom they needed to be able to continue the all-important upsetting search for knowledge. These movements were pseudo idealistic movements that stifled and oppressed the search for the understanding of our corrupted condition that was needed to actually free us from that state. They were regressive, not progressive as they deluded themselves they were. It was actually the right-wing who have supported the upsetting battle to find knowledge that held the moral high-ground, not the pseudo idealistic left-wing.
The culture of the Left made people superficially feel good but it was dangerously dishonest, it was fake—it was bullshit. Being concerned for others and the world is very important, but behaving that way to make yourself feel good and righteous is a dangerously selfish sickness, indeed it’s the most destructive of all drug addictions—and it’s been taking over the world. As I explain at length in my book, Death by Dogma, dogma is not the cure, it’s the poison.
Note: This is merely the beginning of this book. As more recordings are made, more
of its transcript, which is this book, will be added……so this aspect about ending the polarised world of politics, and subsequent aspects, will be continued.
Copyright
Our Meaning: How being able to know and fulfil the great objective and meaning of human existence finally ends human suffering by Jeremy Griffith
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