1. ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
AND ITS RESOLUTION
WTM FAQ 1.14 Why aren’t these ideas mainstream? / If these ideas are so true and important then why haven’t I heard of them?/ Why aren’t all the talk shows discussing this critical breakthrough in science?
Jeremy Griffith answers this question in Part 2 of THE Interview when he points out that the issue of the human condition has been such a denied and off-limits subject that confronting it represents the ‘biggest of all blasphemies’, and how ‘science progresses funeral by funeral’ when it comes to supporting big paradigm shifts like this.
The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect and Video/Freedom Essay 11 are all about how historically afraid humans have been of the issue of our species’ 2-million-year corrupted human condition and therefore how, even though the human condition has finally been explained and made safe to confront, that historic avoidance takes time to overcome.
Plato was cited in those presentations to evidence how extreme this resistance has been. Referring to A.N. Whitehead describing the history of philosophy as being merely ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’ as evidence of Plato being the greatest of philosophers (philosophy being the study of ‘the truths underlying all reality’), F. Essay 11 presents Plato’s description of humans having lived in such fearful denial of the human condition that they have metaphorically been hiding ‘a long way underground’ in a ‘cave’ to avoid confronting the issue of our corrupted ‘human condition’. The essay goes on to describe how when someone ‘escapes from the cave into the light of day’ and ‘sees for the first time the real world and returns to the cave’ to help the cave prisoners ‘Escape into the sun-filled setting outside the cave [which] symbolizes the transition to the real world… which is the proper object of knowledge’, Plato said that ‘it would hurt his [the cave’s prisoner’s] eyes and he would turn back and take refuge in the things which he could see [take refuge in all the dishonest explanations for human behaviour that we have become accustomed to from human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic science, a description of which is given in Video/F. Essay 14], which he would think really far clearer than the things being shown him. And if he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rocky ascent [out of the cave of denial] and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight [shown the truthful, fully accountable, real description and explanation of our human condition], the process would be a painful one, to which he would much object, and when he emerged into the light his eyes would be so overwhelmed by the brightness of it that he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.’ Significantly, Plato then added, ‘Certainly not at first. Because he would need to grow accustomed to the light before he could see things in the world outside the cave’.
So not being ‘able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real’ is a powerful warning of the ‘deaf effect’ difficulty people often initially have when trying to read about the human condition, and of the need to be patient if you are ‘to grow accustomed to the light’ and be able to absorb understanding of the human condition—which is all why it will take time for this breakthrough understanding to become mainstream.
Plato also warned of how defensive and angry we 2-million-year upset humans can be towards the person who brings understanding of the human condition, writing that ‘if anyone tried to release them [the cave prisoners] and lead them up [out of the cave], they would kill him if they could lay hands on him’! As is documented in F. Essay 56 and in chapter 6:12 of FREEDOM, Jeremy and we all in the World Transformation Movement (WTM) endured years of this vicious, try-to-‘kill him’-type persecution.
Since it is well known by psychologists that ‘denials fight back with a vengeance when faced with annihilation’, it is not surprising that this most denied and repressed of all subjects of the human condition was going to meet extreme resistance when the fully accountable, true analysis of it appeared.
So that is all evidence of just how much resistance there would be to the arrival of understanding of the human condition, and why it will take time for this most critical of all breakthroughs in science to become mainstream.
To summarise
These ideas are not mainstream because, firstly, in daring to look at the real psychological nature of the human condition, Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith’s work has been treated as heretical by the psychosis-denying, mechanistic science establishment, as an anathema to be dismissed (read why in FAQ 1.10, Freedom Essay 40 and in chapter 2:4 of FREEDOM) and even persecuted (see Freedom Essay 56).
Secondly, because Jeremy’s books present the profound analysis of the human condition, some people can find what is being said hard to take in (a difficulty that is referred to as the ‘deaf effect’, which is introduced in Video/Freedom Essay 1 and more fully explained in The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect, Video/Freedom Essay 11 and Video/Freedom Essay 13: The WTM Deaf Effect Course), while others find what is being discussed unbearably confronting, and become hostile to it, a response that is also described in Freedom Essay 40.
Thirdly, for someone to be able to explain, and, through that explanation, bring reconciling and ameliorating understanding to our deeply troubled, human-condition-afflicted lives, they obviously had to be thinking from a position outside the conventional whole-view-of-the-human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic, Plato’s-cave-dwelling framework. As Einstein said, ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’! These understandings are necessarily not mainstream.
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For further description of the persecution that Jeremy and the World Transformation Movement have faced, and the reasons for it, read chapter 6:12 of Jeremy’s book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition. The persecution is also documented in the essay Persecution of the WTM.
You can read more about the ‘deaf effect’ in FAQ 1.16; and for an explanation of why the answer to the human condition had to come from outside the mainstream, read the Introduction to FREEDOM by a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Professor Harry Prosen.
