7. ABOUT POLITICS
WTM FAQ 7.1 How does understanding the human condition bring an end to the now horrifically polarised world of politics?
Biologist Jeremy Griffith’s breakthrough understanding of the human condition opens up an entirely new way of thinking about humans, which is immensely exciting, but it does present a huge change, a great paradigm shift, in how we view ourselves and the world.
For instance, we now know that we had to search for knowledge, ultimately sufficient knowledge to explain the human condition. And that the search for knowledge corrupted us—it made us angry, egocentric and alienated—but that upset state was the price we had to be prepared to pay until we found that redeeming understanding. At any time we could stop our upsetting search for knowledge—‘fly back on course’ and obey our instinctive orientation, as Jeremy explains in his all-clarifying Adam Stork analogy in Video/Freedom Essay 3—a response that would make us feel good, stop the criticism from our moral instincts, but was ultimately an abandonment of our fundamental responsibility as conscious beings to keep persevering with our corrupting search for knowledge until we found the redeeming understanding of ourselves that would end our moral instincts’ criticism of us. In short, until we found that redeeming understanding there was no real way out of our psychologically upsetting situation.
This point about our fundamental responsibility to search for knowledge even though it was upsetting and corrupting allows us to understand the real merits and liabilities of the left and right wings of politics. The twin political problems we have are the brutality of the right-wing’s need to continue the corrupting search for knowledge free from too much condemning idealism, and the left-wing’s dishonest and deluded ‘I’m-being-good-by-flying-back-on-course’ dogmatic imposition of pseudo idealistic politically correct values. However, of these two, it was actually the corrupting right-wing that was leading humanity to the understanding that was needed to free ourselves from our instincts’ criticism and by so doing genuinely ending all the upset in the world. Paradoxically it was the right-wing that actually held the moral high ground, that was doing the right thing, being truly idealistic.
The big problem is, however, that the longer the corrupting search for knowledge continued, the more upset humans became and the more tempting it was to give up the search. And it is precisely this end play situation that has now arrived where many people have become advocates of dogmatically imposing left-wing cooperative and loving ideal values on our knowledge-searching lives. The advocates of dogma are threatening the freedom needed to question, think and find (and then accept) understanding.
Basically, the pseudo idealistic causes we humans have taken up after becoming too upset, such as socialism, environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, globalisationism, anti-capitalism, politically correctism and post-modernism, all represented false starts to a human-condition-free world—because the real start to an anger, egocentricity and alienation-free world depended on finding the reconciling understanding of the human condition.
So while pseudo idealism has unfortunately horribly discredited the real start to a human-condition-free world, now that the understanding of the human condition needed for that real start has been found, the great transformation from the human condition can and has legitimately begun—and with that understanding of the human condition found, the whole necessary but ugly business of politics can happily come to a close.
In fact, as is beautifully summarised in paragraph 1136 of Jeremy’s definitive presentation on the human condition, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, the final irony of the saga of humanity’s great journey from ignorance to enlightenment is that the ideal world that the left-wing was dogmatically demanding is actually brought about by the right-wing winning its reality-defending, freedom-from-idealism, corrupting-search-for-knowledge battle against the freedom-oppressing pseudo idealistic dogma of the left-wing. With the freedom-from-dogma right-wing’s search for understanding of the human condition completed, the justification for the egocentric power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking way of life espoused by the right-wing ends, replaced by the ideal-behaviour-obeying attitude that the left-wing sought. In this sense, when the right-wing wins we all become left-wing; through the success of the philosophy of the right-wing, we all adopt the philosophy of the left-wing—but, most significantly, this time we are not abandoning an ongoing battle, we are leaving it won.
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Read more about how the explanation of the human condition puts an end to politics in Freedom Essay 35, which is such a significant essay it has also been produced as the standalone booklet titled Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution, which is freely available on our homepage as one of the WTM’s four key books. Death by Dogma includes an explanation of the danger of the pseudo idealistic left-wing’s adoption of the dishonest ‘savage instincts’ excuse and Marxist ‘blank-slate’ nonsense to dismiss our human condition; how the left-wing threatened humanity’s search for knowledge; and the progression toward ever greater levels of delusion in pseudo idealistic movements during the last 200 years. You can read more about the legitimate transformation that understanding of the human condition makes possible in Freedom Essay 15.
