Part 2

The Truthful Biology

What I will now present is the fully accountable, truthful biological explanation of human behaviour, which is outlined in chapter 1, and presented in detail in chapter 3, of FREEDOM. This is the critically important part of my presentation today because it presents the understanding that saves our species from imminent ‘appalling’ terminal psychosis and extinction.

Clearly what’s been needed to haul the human race out of this cesspit of deceit and the psychological trauma it’s creating—this deathly dark cave of denial the human race (including its vehicle for enquiry, science) has been living in and the extreme and terrible psychosis that such disconnection from our true selves is causing—is a completely fresh approach to biological thinking that truthfully recognises the association between the emergence of consciousness in humans and the corruption of our original cooperative, all-loving instinctive state. And, in fact, when that honest approach is taken the fully accountable, true biological explanation of our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour becomes reasonably obvious—because it makes sense that when our species became fully conscious a battle must have broken out between it and our already established instinctive self and that this internal conflict caused us to become angry, egocentric and alienated; to become psychologically upset sufferers of the human condition.

Even if we put aside the fact that we have cooperative loving instincts and just look at the fundamental situation an animal species would face if it developed a fully conscious mind in the presence of already established instinctive orientations, we can see how a psychologically upsetting conflict between those already established instinctive orientations, and its newly emerged, self-adjusting conscious mind would have to occur.

To help visualise this development, consider the situation of a migrating bird that has just acquired a fully conscious mind.

Many bird species are perfectly orientated to instinctive migratory flight paths. Each winter, without ever ‘learning’ where to go and without knowing why, they quit their established breeding grounds and migrate to warmer feeding grounds. They then return each summer and so the cycle continues. Over the course of thousands of generations and migratory movements, only those birds that happened to have a genetic make-up that inclined them to follow the right route survived. Thus, through natural selection, they acquired their instinctive orientation.

The Story of Adam Stork

So imagine a flock of migrating storks returning to their summer breeding nests on the rooftops of Europe from their winter feeding grounds in the swamps of southern Africa. Suppose in the instinct-controlled brain of one of them we place a fully conscious mind (we will call the stork Adam because we will soon see that, up to a point, this analogy parallels the old, pre-scientific Biblical account of Adam and Eve taking the ‘fruit’ ‘from the tree of…​knowledge’; that is, becoming conscious). As Adam Stork flies north he spots an island off to the left with a tree laden with apples. Using his newly acquired conscious mind, Adam thinks, ‘I should fly down and eat some apples.’ It seems a reasonable thought but he can’t know if it is a good decision or not until he acts on it. For Adam’s new thinking mind to make sense of the world he has to learn by trial and error and so he decides to carry out his first grand experiment in self-management by flying down to the island and sampling the apples.

But it’s not that simple. As soon as Adam’s conscious thinking self deviates from his established migratory path, his innocent instinctive self (innocent in the sense of being unaware or ignorant of the need to search for knowledge) tries to pull him back on course. In following the flight path past the island, Adam’s instinct-obedient self is, in effect, criticising his conscious mind’s decision to veer off that course; it is condemning his search for understanding. All of a sudden Adam is in a dilemma: if he adheres to the route his instinctive self is following and flies back on course, his instincts will be happy but he’ll never learn if his deviation was the right decision or not. All the messages he’s receiving from within inform him that obeying his instincts is good, is right, but there’s also a new inclination to disobey, a defiance of instinct. Diverting from his course will result in apples and understanding, yet he already sees that doing so will make him feel bad.

Uncomfortable with the criticism his newly conscious mind or intellect is receiving from his instinctive self, Adam’s first response is to ignore the temptation the apples present and fly back on course. As he does, however, Adam realises he can’t deny his now questioning intellect—sooner or later he must find the courage to master his conscious mind by carrying out experiments in understanding. So, continuing to think, he then asks himself, ‘Why not fly down to an island and rest?’ Again, not knowing any reason why he shouldn’t, Adam proceeds with his experiment. And again, his decision is met with the same criticism from his instinctive self—but this time Adam defies the criticism and perseveres with his experimentation in self-management. His decision, however, means he must now live with the criticism and immediately he is condemned to a state of psychological ‘upset’. A battle has broken out between his instinctive self, which is perfectly orientated to the flight path, and his emerging conscious mind, which needs to understand why that flight path is the correct course to follow. His instinctive self is perfectly orientated, but Adam doesn’t understand that orientation, and until he does he is condemned to a divisive existence.

In short, when the fully conscious mind emerged it wasn’t enough for it to be orientated by instincts, it had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage life. But, tragically, the instinctive self didn’t ‘appreciate’ that need and ‘tried to stop’ the mind’s necessary search for knowledge, as represented by the latter’s experiments in self-management—hence the ensuing battle between instinct and intellect. To refute the criticism from his instinctive self, Adam needed the discoveries that science has only recently given us of the difference in the way genes and nerves process information; in particular, he needed to be able to explain that the gene-based learning system can orientate species to situations but is incapable of insight into the nature of change.

Genetic selection of one reproducing individual over another reproducing individual (the selection, in effect, of one idea over another idea, or one piece of information over another piece of information) gives species adaptations or orientations—instinctive programming—for managing life, but those genetic orientations, those instincts, are not understandings. The nerve-based learning system on the other hand, can, if sufficiently developed, understand change. Nerves were originally developed for the coordination of movement in animals, but, once developed, their ability to store impressions—what we refer to as ‘memory’—gave rise to the potential to develop understanding of cause and effect. If you can remember past events, you can compare them with current events and identify regularly occurring experiences. This knowledge of, or insight into, what has commonly occurred in the past enables you to predict what is likely to happen in the future and to adjust your behaviour accordingly. Once insights into the nature of change are put into effect, the self-modified behaviour starts to provide feedback, refining the insights further. Predictions are compared with outcomes and so on. Much developed, nerves can sufficiently associate information to reason how experiences are related, learn to understand and become conscious of, or aware of, or intelligent about, the relationship between events that occur through time. Thus consciousness means being sufficiently aware of how experiences are related to attempt to manage change from a basis of understanding. (Again, the Adam Stork story and related aspects are fully described in chapters 1 and 3 of FREEDOM.)

What this means is that when the nerve-based learning system became sufficiently developed for consciousness to emerge and with it the ability to understand the world, it wasn’t enough to be instinctively orientated to the world, conscious understanding of the world had to be found. The problem, of course, was that Adam had only just taken his first, tentative steps in the search for knowledge, and so had no ability to explain anything. It was a catch-22 situation for the fledgling thinker, because in order to explain himself he needed the very knowledge he was setting out to accumulate. He had to search for understanding, ultimately self-understanding, understanding of why he had to ‘fly off course’, without the ability to first explain why he needed to ‘fly off course’. And without that defence, he had to live with the criticism from his instinctive self and was INSECURE in its presence.

It was an untenable position to maintain and so to resist the tirade of unjust criticism he was having to endure and mitigate that insecurity, Adam had to do something. But what could he do? If he abandoned the search and flew back on course, he’d gain some momentary relief, but the search would, nevertheless, remain to be undertaken. So all Adam could do was retaliate against and ATTACK the instincts’ unjust criticism, attempt to PROVE the instincts’ unjust criticism wrong, and try to DENY or block from his mind the instincts’ unjust criticism—and he did all those things. He became angry towards the criticism. In every way he could he tried to demonstrate his self worth, prove that he is good and not bad—he shook his fist at the heavens in a gesture of defiance of the implication that he is bad. And he tried to block out the criticism—this block-out or denial including having to invent contrived excuses for his instinct-defying behaviour. In short, his ANGRY, EGOCENTRIC and ALIENATED state appeared. Adam’s intellect or ‘ego’ (which is just another word for the intellect since the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious thinking self’) became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself—selfishly preoccupied aggressively competing for opportunities to prove he is good and not bad, to validate his worth, to get a ‘win’; to essentially eke out any positive reinforcement that would bring him some relief from criticism and a sense of worth. In summary, Adam unavoidably became SELFISH, AGGRESSIVE and COMPETITIVE. (All the seemingly bad aspects of the intellect and their opposite, seemingly good aspects of the instinct are depicted in the two columns that flank the Adam Stork diagram above.)

But, again, without the knowledge he was seeking, without self-understanding (specifically the understanding of the difference between the gene and nerve-based learning systems that science has given us), Adam Stork had no choice but to resign himself to living a psychologically upset life of anger, egocentricity and alienation as the only three responses available to him to cope with the horror of his situation. It was an extremely unfair and difficult, indeed tragic, position for Adam to find himself in, for we can see that while he was good he appeared to be bad and had to endure the horror of his psychologically distressed, upset condition until he found the real—as opposed to the invented or contrived not-psychosis-recognising—defence or reason for his ‘mistakes’.

Basically, suffering psychological upset was the price of Adam’s heroic search for understanding. Again, this is the tragic yet inevitable situation any animal would have to endure if it transitioned from an instinct-controlled state to an intellect-controlled state—its instincts would resist the conscious mind’s deviating search for knowledge. Adam’s uncooperative and divisive competitive aggression—and his selfish, egocentric, self-preoccupied efforts to prove his worth, and his need to deny and evade criticism, essentially embrace a dishonest state—all became an unavoidable part of his personality. Such was Adam Stork’s predicament, and such has been the human condition, for it was within our species that the fully conscious mind emerged.

And the obvious compensations we humans became focused on employing to try to validate ourselves were power, fame, fortune and glory. Yes, we can now understand that materialism—the big house, sparkling chandeliers, fancy clothes, etc—and the financial capital needed to supply it, which Sir Bob protests against, gave humans the fanfare and the glory we knew we were due but which the world in its ignorance of our fundamental goodness would not give us. While spiritual relief (understanding) was still to be found, only material relief was available. Materialism and capitalism became the engine sustaining our necessary but horrifically upsetting search for understanding; ultimately for self-understanding, understanding of our corrupted human condition.

Again, this entire predicament is the fundamental situation any animal species would encounter if they developed a fully conscious mind, but in the case of humans we now have to consider how much worse the situation has been for us because our instinctive orientation wasn’t to a flight path, but to behaving utterly cooperatively and lovingly. In our case, when we began experimenting in understanding and were criticised by our instincts and unavoidably responded in an angry, egocentric and alienated way, we had to endure a further round of criticism, a second hit, a ‘double whammy’, from our instinctive orientation. Yes, in our necessary search for understanding we were first unjustly condemned for defying our instincts, and then again for reacting to that condemnation in a way that was completely counter and offensive to our loving, cooperative instincts. So if Adam Stork had cause to be upset, we had double cause! No wonder there has been an underlying volcanic frustration and anger in humans that periodically breaks out in unspeakable acts of violence, cruelty and depravity—and no wonder we have had an insatiably greedy appetite for the artificial reinforcement that materialism could give us!!

We can now see that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden accurately describes the primary situation involved in our human condition of the psychologically upsetting battle that emerged between our instincts and our conscious intellect’s search for knowledge. It says Adam and Eve/​we took the ‘fruit’ (Genesis 3:3) ‘from the tree of…​knowledge’ (Gen. 2:9, 17) and were ‘disobedient’ (the term widely used in descriptions of Gen. 3). In other words, we developed a conscious mind and free will. But in that pre-scientific story it says Adam and Eve then became perpetrators of ‘sin’ (Gen. 4:7) and as a result of becoming ‘evil’ (Gen. 3:22) were ‘banished…​from the Garden of Eden’ (Gen. 3:23) of our original cooperative and loving innocent instinctive state (the meaning of ‘Edenic’ being ‘the first home of Adam and Eve…​a state of innocence, bliss, or ultimate happiness’ (The Free Dictionary)), whereas this scientific presentation reveals Adam and Eve to be the HEROES, NOT THE VILLAINS they have so long been portrayed as. So while humans ARE immensely upset—that is, immensely angry, egocentric and alienated—WE ARE GOOD AND NOT BAD AFTER ALL!!!! (And ‘upset’ is the right word for our condition because while we are not ‘evil’ or ‘bad’, we are definitely psychologically upset from having to participate in humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. ‘Corrupted’ and ‘fallen’ have been used to describe our condition, but they have negative connotations that we can now appreciate are undeserved.)

We had developed into angry, egocentric and alienated people, but we were never going to accept the implication that we were fundamentally bad, evil, worthless, awful beings; we weren’t going to wear that criticism—for if we did, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each morning and face the world. If we truly believed we were fundamentally evil beings, we would shoot ourselves. No, there had to be a greater truth that explained our behaviour and until we found it we couldn’t rest. So for our species, it really has been a case of, as the sayings go, ‘Give me liberty or give me death’, ‘No retreat, no surrender’, ‘Never back down’, or, as Sir Bob mentioned, ‘death or glory’. Our conscious thinking self was never going to give in to our instinctive self or soul. And so every day as we got out of bed we took on the world of ignorance that was condemning us. We shook our fist at the heavens in defiance of the implication that we are bad. In essence, we said, ‘One day, one day, we are going to prove our worth, explain that we are not bad after all, and until that day arrives we are not going to ‘back down’, we are not going to take the ignorant, naive, stupid, unjustified criticism from our instincts. No, we are going to fight back with all our might.’ This photograph by Neil Leifer of Muhammad Ali vanquishing Sonny Liston ‘is considered to be the greatest sports picture of the 20th century’ (TIME, 20 Jun. 2016) precisely because it perfectly expresses every human’s desire—destructive as that could be—to vanquish our tormentor, which, at the deepest level, is ignorance of our fundamental worth and goodness.

Yes, we were going to fight back against ignorance with all our might. And that is what we have done; that is what every conscious human who has ever lived has done—and because we did, because we persevered against all that criticism, we have now finally broken through and found the full truth that explains that humans are wonderful beings after all. In fact, not just wonderful but the heroes of the whole story of life on Earth. This is because our fully conscious mind is surely—given its phenomenal ability to understand the world—nature’s greatest invention, so for us humans who were given this greatest of all inventions to develop to be made to endure the torture of being unjustly condemned as bad or evil for doing just that, and to have had to endure that torture for so long, some 2 million years (the time we have likely been fully conscious), has to make us the absolute heroes of the story of life on Earth. (pars 65-66 and ch. 3:6 of FREEDOM)

Humans were tasked the hardest, toughest of missions, and against all the odds we completed it. Humans are the champions of the story of life on Earth. We are so, so wonderful! Yes, we can finally understand the absolutely extraordinary paradox that neither Shakespeare nor Pascal could fathom, of how on earth could we humans be ‘god’-‘like’ in our ‘infinite’ ‘faculty’ of ‘reason’ and ‘apprehension’, a ‘glor[ious]’, ‘angel’-‘like’ ‘prodigy’ capable of being a ‘judge of all things’ and a ‘repository of truth’, and yet seemingly behave so appallingly that we appear to be ‘monster[s]’, ‘imbecile[s]’, ‘a sewer of uncertainty and error’ and ‘chaos’, the ‘essence’ of ‘dust’, ‘the scum of the universe’. We have finally made sense of the seemingly nonsensical!!!

And now that we have finally made sense of the seemingly-impossible-to-explain paradox of how we humans could be good when all the evidence appeared to unequivocally indicate we were bad, all mythology can likewise be made sense of at last. For instance, why was Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 novel Don Quixote voted ‘The Greatest Book of All Time’ by the world’s most acclaimed writers in a poll arranged by the Nobel Institute? Well, Don Quixote is the story of an elderly man who gets out of bed, re-names himself ‘Don Quixote of la Mancha’, dons an old suit of armour, takes up an ancient shield and lance, mounts his skinny old horse, and calls on his loyal but world-weary companion Sancho to join him on the most spectacular of adventures. As I have depicted below, coming across a field of large windmills, the noble knight says, ‘Look yonder, friend Sancho, there are…​outrageous giants whom I intend to…​deprive…​of life…​and the expiration of that cursed brood will be an acceptable service to Heaven’. And it is in that vein that their crazed and hopeless adventure went on—gloriously doomed battle after gloriously doomed battle; feeble beings charging at and trying to vanquish the ‘outrageous giant’ ignorance-of-the-fact-of-our-species’-fundamental-goodness! But that has been the lot of every human for some 2 million years! Wave after wave of quixotic humans have thrown themselves at that ‘outrageous giant’ of ignorance for eons and eons, as bit by tiny bit they accumulated the knowledge that would finally make the redeeming explanation of our human condition possible! (par. 67)

The following painting by J.M.W. Turner is another powerful portrayal of how absolutely incredibly HEROIC the human race has been, huddled together for some reassurance, and with few provisions, while we struggled as best we could through 2 million years of terrifying darkness and tumultuous storms to acquire that relieving knowledge. To be given a fully conscious brain, the marvellous computer we have on our heads, but not be given the program for it and instead be left ‘a restless wanderer on the earth’ (Bible, Gen. 4:14) searching for that program/​understanding in a dreadful darkness of confusion and bewilderment, most especially about our worthiness or otherwise as a species, was the most diabolical of tortures. As the great denial-free thinking prophet Isaiah put it: ‘justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows. Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like men without eyes…​Truth is nowhere to be found’ (Bible, Isa. 59).

J.M.W. Turner’s Fishermen at Sea, 1796

Turning to more recent cultural depictions, Turner’s Fishermen at Sea recalls the lyrics that so plead the terrible agony of our species’ seemingly lost, lonely and meaningless condition—‘How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown’. The profundity of these words have understandably led to the 1965 song from which they come, Like a Rolling Stone by that prophet of our time, and now Nobel Laureate for Literature, Bob Dylan, to be voted in 2011 as the greatest of all time by that arbiter of popular music, Rolling Stone magazine. (par. 278)

Yes, how incredibly heroic have we humans been—and how wonderful, beyond-the-powers-of-description, is it to now have freed ourselves from that horrific situation where ‘We look for light, but all is darkness…Truth is nowhere to be found’!

In summary, we humans had no choice but to persevere with our search for knowledge and suffer the psychologically upset state of being angry, alienated and egocentric until we could develop the scientific method and through that vehicle for enquiry find the redeeming explanation for our species’ upset condition of the difference between the gene and nerve-based learning systems—the key insight that reveals we humans are good and not bad after all. Yes, until science made it possible to explain the difference between the gene-based natural selection process that gives species orientations and the nerve-based conscious mind that needs to understand, every time we tried to think about our corrupted condition the only conclusion we could come to was that we conscious humans had wilfully destroyed paradise. So, despite having been dangerously mechanistic by avoiding the human condition, through the help of truthful, human-condition-confronting thinking, science turns out to be the liberator—the messiah—of humanity from the agony of the human condition.

I want to mention that there have been many thinkers throughout history who have, like Moses with his Garden of Eden story, recognised that our psychologically upset human condition is a result of us humans having become conscious and at war with our instincts, but, as I say, it wasn’t until science revealed the difference between instinctive orientations and conscious understandings that we were finally in a position to explain that humans are actually good and not bad. The ‘instinct vs conscious intellect’ explanation of the human condition is in fact very obvious, and it shows just how wrong the old ‘we-​are-​competitive-​and-​aggressive-​because-​we-​have-​savage-​animal-​instincts’ excuse is! (A history of the true, ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of the human condition is presented in chapter 2:7 of FREEDOM, and in Freedom Essay 53 on the WTM’s homepage.)

And importantly, now that we are able to understand from scientific first principles that upset is not an ‘evil’, worthless, bad state, but an immensely heroic state, we can know that while, inevitably, all humans are variously upset from their different encounters with, and degrees of engagement in, humanity’s epic search to find knowledge, ALL HUMANS ARE EQUALLY GOOD. Everyone has variously had our species’ original innocent instinctive state corrupted, everyone is variously angry, egocentric and alienated, but everyone is good, and not just good but a hero of the story of life on Earth! No longer does humanity have to rely on dogmatic assertions that ‘all men are created equal’ purely on the basis that it is a ‘self-evident’ truth, as the United States’ Declaration of Independence asserts, because we can now explain, understand and know that the equality of goodness of all humans is a fundamental truth. We can now understand why each individual, gender, age, generation, race (ethnic groups), country, civilisation and culture is equally good and worthy, and that no one is superior or inferior, and that everyone deserves the ‘rights’ of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Indeed, through this understanding, the whole concept of good and bad, basically of guilt, disappears from our conceptualisation of ourselves. Compassion, love and understanding for our human situation has finally been achieved—which is what Sir Laurens van der Post recognised was needed when he variously wrote in his books: ‘True love is love of the difficult and unlovable’; and, ‘how can there ever be any real beginning without forgiveness?’; and that ‘Only by understanding how we were all a part of the same contemporary pattern [of wars, cruelty, greed and indifference] could we defeat those dark forces with a true understanding of their nature and origin’; and that ‘Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future.’ Yes, one day, which has now arrived, there had to be, to quote The Rolling Stones’ lyrics, ‘Sympathy for the devil’; one day, we had to find the reconciling, compassionate, healing understanding of the dark side of human nature. One day, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, as polymath William Blake titled his famous book, had to occur. (par. 290)

So we now know that there was a good reason why we humans became corrupted—we had to search for knowledge, ultimately sufficient knowledge to explain the human condition. And it is necessary to emphasise here that there was no real way out of our psychologically upset condition until we found that redeeming understanding. Searching for knowledge made us angry, egocentric and alienated, but that was the price we had to be prepared to pay. At any time we could stop our upsetting search for knowledge—fly back on course in the Adam Stork analogy—which would make us feel good, stop the criticism from our instincts, but that was an abandonment of our fundamental responsibility as conscious beings to keep persevering with our search for knowledge and suffer all the upset that resulted from doing that until we found the knowledge we were after of the explanation of the human condition.

This is a key point to make, because it allows us to understand the real merits and liabilities of the left and right wings of politics. It turns out that of the twin political problems we have, of the brutality of the ‘need-to-continue-the-corrupting-search-for-knowledge-free-from-condemning-idealism’ right-wing, and the dishonest and deluded ‘I’m-being-good-by-flying-back-on-course’ pseudo idealism of the left-wing, it was actually the corrupting individualistic, materialistic and capitalistic right-wing that held the moral high ground, that was doing the right thing, being genuinely idealistic, because it was persevering with the necessary search for knowledge, whereas the pseudo idealistic knowledge-blocking dogma of the left has actually been subverting the human journey (ch. 3:9)! Such is the great paradox of the human condition that we can now finally understand: the truth was not as it appeared—the corrupting journey Adam Stork/​the right-wing were championing made them the heroes not the villains! As it says about the great paradox of the human condition in the musical Man of La Mancha that is based on the story of Don Quixote, we humans had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (par. 68).

Understanding the human condition means the tables are turned on our perception of reality. The self-adjusting conscious mind, all the manifestations of which are shown in the left-hand column of the Adam Stork diagram above, turns out to be the hero not the villain of the story of life on Earth, the ‘goodie’—while our unjustly condemning instinctive soul, and all its manifestations (as shown in the right-hand column of the Adam Stork diagram), turns out to have been the cause of all our upset anger, egocentricity and alienation, the ‘baddie’.

Again, with the reconciling understanding of the human condition now found, neither aspect of our divided self is good or bad. Our instinct and intellect are reconciled. For example, as explained in the aforementioned chapter 3.9 of FREEDOM, ‘The end of politics’, the very basis of the ‘twin political problems’ of the left-wing and right-wing in politics is now completely obsoleted—understanding brings the whole ugly, intransigent business of politics to an end.

It needs to be emphasised here that when the blinds are finally drawn on the human condition the light inevitably reveals a universe of previously denied truths—a litany of heresies. In fact, the arrival of understanding of the human condition brings about honesty day or truth day or exposure day or transparency day or revelation day, or so-called judgment day—but as I have explained, it is a day of compassionate understanding, not of cruel judgment. (ch. 9:3)

In addition to the previously not properly understood and therefore unappreciated role of the right-wing in politics, and the exposure of the left-wing as fundamentally irresponsible and dishonestly deluded about being ideally behaved, the following are some of the heresies (which are fully explained in FREEDOM) that we now have to adjust to:

• that the human race has become an extremely upset, alienated wreck (see for example pars 123 and 182);

• that dishonest, human-condition-avoiding mechanistic/​reductionist science has been leading the human race to a state of terminal alienation (ch. 2:4);

• that humans have a cooperative, loving instinctive heritage, not a brutish, savage and aggressive one (ch. 5);

• that nurturing was the prime-mover in human development, and is still critically important (ch. 5);

• that sex as humans now practise it is not about trying to reproduce our genes but rather it is a psychologically upset behaviour where we resentfully attack innocence for its seeming criticism of our lack of innocence (ch. 8:11B);

• that there are differences between ‘races’ (ethnic groups) in their levels of corruption of, and alienation from, our species’ original innocent instinctive state. Some ‘races’ are less innocent than others; or to say it another way, some ‘races’ are more adapted to the upset state of the human condition. This is an inevitable result of the upset state of the human condition having emerged in our species; some ‘races’, just as some individuals, will have been more exposed to upset and become more adapted to it. While everyone is equally good and worthwhile, everyone is variously upset. Everyone has variously lost their innocence. As soon as you have a struggle of any sort, those involved are all going to be variously exposed to it and thus variously affected by it. It can’t be any other way. But with the human condition at last resolved all the upset in humans can now be repaired. The human race is now redeemed and everyone can be rehabilitated (ch. 8:16E);

• that women are not ‘mainframed’ to the battle of the human condition in the same way men are; they are not as understanding of and thus appreciative of the battle as men are, simply because with women naturally occupied with the critical task of nurturing, the horrifically upsetting battle of searching for knowledge had especially to be taken up by men (hence society changed from being matriarchal to patriarchal), and, with that battle now finally won, what is revealed is that men particularly are the heroes of the story of life on Earth. Men are now explained and redeemed, and, more importantly, the historic so-called ‘battle of the sexes’, the lack of understanding between men and women, is brought to an end (ch. 8:11B);

• And (as is explained in chapter 4) that the meaning of existence, which we have personified as ‘God’, is the teleological, holistic, order-of-matter-developing, integrative physical law of negative entropy; and (as explained in paragraphs 877 and 929-935) that Christ was not a deity but a human like everyone else, only sufficiently nurtured with unconditional selfless love in his infancy to not have resigned to a life of dishonest denial of the issue of the human condition—a pure love that the innocence (symbolised by virginity) of Christ’s mother made possible. So religions are now obsoleted with understanding, and, as will be described next in Part 3 of this booklet, replaced with an infinitely more powerful and effective way of living a meaningful, truth-aligned life, free of your upset.

So again, the truth is not as it appeared; the previously condemned intellect and all its manifestations turn out to be good and not bad, while the instinctive state and all its manifestations turn out to have been unjustly condemning of humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. This ‘turning of the tables’ will be an immense shock; as another truthful-talking prophet of our time, Bono of the band U2, said recently, ‘truthfulness will blow things apart’. And yes, we will initially find all that exposure of our cave-living evasions, denials, lies and delusions difficult to cope with; as playwright George Bernard Shaw said, ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (par. 591). However, this ‘blasphemous’ stage, when all the previously denied truths are suddenly revealed and we are in shock, won’t last long once the wonderfully liberating potential of these understandings that is described in chapter 9 of FREEDOM and summarised next in Part 3 catches on.

And again, with the reconciling understanding of the human condition now found, neither aspect of our divided self is good or bad. Our instinct and intellect are reconciled. For example, as already explained, the very basis of the left-wing and right-wing in politics is now obsoleted, as is the prejudiced view of some individuals or ‘races’ or genders or cultures being inferior or superior to others—understanding heals the human race.

Yes, our ability now to explain and understand that we humans are actually good and not bad enables all the upset and associated misunderstanding and dysfunction that resulted from being unable to explain the source of our divisive condition to subside and disappear. Finding understanding of the human condition is what rehabilitates and transforms the human race from its psychologically upset state. In fact, as I mentioned in Part 1, the word ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’ (derived as it is from psyche meaning ‘soul’ and iatreia, which means ‘healing’)—but we have never before been able to ‘heal our soul’, to truthfully explain to our original instinctive self or soul that our fully conscious, thinking self is good and not bad and, by so doing, reconcile and heal our split selves; ‘get our old natural selves to join with our other conscious, wilful, rational, scientific selves’, as Sir Laurens van der Post said we had to do. As Professor Harry Prosen says in his Introduction to FREEDOM about the psychological effect of this human-race-saving and thus world-saving reconciling understanding of ourselves: ‘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.’ It brings about the ‘wholeness for humans’ that the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung was forever pointing out ‘depends on the ability to own our own shadow’, to understand the dark side of ourselves (par. 72). As depicted in the final Adam Stork diagram below, it reconciles our intellect and instinct and all their manifestations, thus enabling humans to become sound, secure and ‘whole’ again. It’s been an astounding journey that humanity has negotiated from happy innocent ignorance, to a state of corrupted upset, to happy upset-free soundness—a round of departure and return that was perfectly anticipated by the great poet T.S. Eliot when he wrote that ‘We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’ (par. 307).

While it will take a number of generations for all our species’ upset psychosis to be completely healed, the most important point to take on-board is that with this clarifying understanding of our fundamental goodness, all of our psychologically defensive angry, alienated and egocentric behaviour is immediately made redundant. As I explain in chapter 9 of FREEDOM, and on the Transformation page on the WTM’s website, and summarise next in Part 3 of this booklet, with the great burden of guilt lifted from the human race, the old insecure, defensive and retaliatory upset life that went with it is finally over, which means we can all immediately leave that way of behaving behind as finished with; we can immediately change from living competitively to living cooperatively—which is the great transformation in behaviour that Sir Bob has long dreamed of.

As Sir Bob’s fellow rock star, and fellow prophet of our time, Bono anticipated in his songs, everyone will now be able ‘to feel sunlight [of liberating understanding] on my face, see that dust cloud [of all our upset behaviour] disappear without a trace’. We will be able ‘to take shelter from the poison rain…​high on a desert plain where the streets have no name [in a wonderful ego-less new world]’; a place where ‘there will be no toil or sorrow…​no time of pain’ (par. 218), and everyone will sing ‘I’ve conquered my past, the future is here at last, I stand at the entrance to a new world I can see. The ruins to the right of me, will soon have lost sight of me. Love [in its purest form, which is truth, has] rescue[d] me’ (par. 1288).

Indeed, when the singer Jim Morrison wrote and sang ‘At first flash of Eden we race down to the sea. Standing there on freedom’s shore, waiting for the sun…waiting…to tell me what went wrong’ (par. 218), he was looking forward to the arrival of ‘FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition’ with its beautiful cover showing the rising sun and people jumping for joy in front of it.

Yes, now we really can have the dancing in the street that Sir Bob didn’t believe was possible when he was using a now obsoleted, dishonest biological way of thinking about human behaviour!

I concluded my presentation at the Royal Geographical Society with the playing of Martha & the Vandellas’ version of Dancing in the Street, the lyrics of which also anticipate this most wonderful, wonderful of breakthroughs that science has finally made possible: ‘Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat? Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street.’ (Note, many more exciting anticipations from songs and literature of the arrival of understanding of the human condition and the liberation of the human race that it brings about can be read in pars 1049 and 1283-1292 of FREEDOM.)

Part 3 will explain how this new truthful biology brings about the immediate transformation of the human race from the present tortured, insecure, human-condition-stricken existence to a fabulous, secure, human-condition-free life—thus ‘stopping the madness’, ‘filling the void’, ‘bringing dignity to humans’, ‘giving the world hope’, ‘ending the despair’, ‘nourishing our dreams’ and bringing about Yeats’s ‘revolution of the mind’ that Sir Bob so yearned for.