Introduction
ERE on Earth, some of the most complex arrangements of matter in the known universe have come into existence. Life with its incredible diversity and richness developed.
By virtue of our mind, the human species must surely be the culmination of this grand experiment of nature that we call life. As far as we can detect, we are the first organism to have developed the ability to think and reflect upon itself. In this world, ravaged as it is by strife, it is easy to lose sight of the utter magnificence of what we are. The human mind must be nature’s most astonishing creation.
One of the greatest demonstrations of our intellectual brilliance was sending three of our kind, in a machine of our own invention, to the Moon and back.
How far we have come!
But what a state our world is in!
Despite the tremendous successes science has brought us, our plight in terms of human happiness and the Earth’s well-being seems only to be worsening. Better forms of management—such as better laws, better politics and better economics—and better self-management—such as new ways of disciplining, organising, or even transcending our troubled natures—have all failed to end our destructiveness and bring us peace and happiness. The wars in the Middle East, Rwanda, Algeria, the Balkan, Chechnya, East Timor and Afghanistan with their scenes of torture, massacre and environmental destruction, have convinced many that there has been no fundamental change for the better.
As we enter the twenty-first century we are being increasingly confronted with the realisation that our species’ underlying problem is psychological. War, overpopulation, environmental degradation, resource depletion, species extinction, drugs, starving millions, crime, family breakdown, epidemic loneliness and depression and even sickness are merely symptoms of a deeper problem: our often destructive, insensitive, egotistical, selfish and aggressive human nature.
Environmental issues dominate our concerns but surely we are focusing on the symptoms not the cause of the problem. The real issue is ourselves, our troubled, upset nature or condition. As an article in Time magazine put it, ‘We need to do something about the environmental damage in our heads.’ (Time mag. 24 May 1993) The real frontier, challenge and adventure before us now is not outer space, as we tend to believe, but inner space—the human condition no less. As one of the greatest philosophers of our time, Sir Laurens van der Post, has said, ‘we need a new kind of explorer, a new kind of pathfinder, human beings who, now that the physical world is spread out before us like an open book…are ready to turn and explore in a new dimension.’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955, p.133)
The time has come—and it is now a matter of urgency—to switch our attention from the physical to the psychological. In a moment of forthrightness, journalist Richard Neville acknowledged that our species’ problems are psychological when he wrote (the underlinings indicate words that will be referred to again shortly): ‘The world is hurtling to catastrophe: from nuclear horrors, a wrecked ecosystem, 20 million dead each year from malnutrition, 600 million chronically hungry…All these crises are man made, their causes are psychological. The cures must come from this same source; which means the planet needs psychological maturity…fast. We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery.’ (Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend mag. 14 Oct. 1986)
The purpose of this book is to unlock the riddle of human nature; to answer this question of questions about the origin of, or reason for, our so-called ‘evil’ side—and by so doing bring dignifying, reconciling, ameliorating understanding to human life.
Humans’ historic denial of the issue of the human condition.
The greatest of all paradoxes is the riddle of human nature. Humans are capable of immense love and sensitivity, but we have also been capable of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war. This raises the question, are humans essentially good and if so what is the cause of this evil, destructive, insensitive and cruel side? The eternal question has been why ‘evil’? In metaphysical religious terms what is ‘the origin of sin’?
More generally, if the universally accepted ideals are to be cooperative, loving and selfless—and they have been accepted by modern civilisations as the basis for their constitutions and laws and by the founders of all the great religions as the basis of their teachings—then why are humans competitive, aggressive and selfish? What is the reason for humans’ divisive nature. Does this inconsistency with the ideals mean that humans are essentially bad? Are we a flawed species, a mistake—or are we possibly divine beings?
The agony of being unable to answer this question of why humans are the way they are, divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, has been the particular burden of human life. It has been our species’ particular affliction or condition, the ‘human condition’.
In fact the fundamental issue of human life, the issue of humans’ divisive nature, has been so troubling and ultimately depressing that humans eventually learnt that the only practical way of coping with it was to stop thinking about it, block the whole issue from their minds. So depressing was the subject of the human condition that humans learnt to avoid even acknowledging its existence, doing this despite the fact that it was the real issue before us as a species. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point in his now-famous line, ‘About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.’ (Philosophical Investigations, 1953)
If we call the embodiment of the ideals that sustain our society ‘God’, then humans have been a ‘God-fearing’ species—people living in fear and insecurity, made to feel guilty as a result of their inconsistency with the cooperative, loving, selfless ideals. The human predicament, or condition, is that humans have had to live with a sense of guilt—although, as is explained in this book, an undeserved sense of guilt. Whenever humans tried to understand why there was such divisiveness and, in the extreme, ‘evil’ in the world, and indeed in themselves, they couldn’t find an answer and eventually had to put the question out of their minds. Humans coped with their sense of guilt by blocking it out, sensibly avoiding the whole depressing issue. T.S. Eliot recognised our species’ particular frailty, which was having to live psychologically in denial of the issue of the human condition, when he said that ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, 1936)
It is a measure of how accomplished humans have become at overlooking the hypocrisy of human life and blocking out the question it raises of their guilt or otherwise that, although they are surrounded by that hypocrisy, they fail to recognise it or the question it raises. Revealingly, while adults now fail to recognise the paradox of human behaviour, children in their naivety still do. They ask, ‘Mum why do you and Dad shout at each other?’ and ‘why are we going to a lavish party when that family down the road is poor?’ and ‘why is everyone so unhappy and preoccupied?’ and ‘why are people so artificial and false?’ and ‘why do men kill one another?’ and ‘why did those people fly that plane into that building?’. The truth is that these are the real questions about human life, as this quote, attributed to George Wald, points out, ‘The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking.’(Mentioned in Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine, p.197) The reason children ‘stopped asking’ the real questions was because they eventually realised that adults couldn’t answer their questions, and, in fact, were made distinctly uncomfortable by them.
The truth is, the hypocrisy of human behaviour is all about us. Two-thirds of the people in the world are starving while the rest bathe in material security and go on seeking still more wealth and luxury. Everywhere there is extreme inequality between peoples and races. The following quote is a striking acknowledgment of the situation: ‘With regard to the hypocrisy of life, in 1969 in the southern states of the USA there was a problem with busing—Negroes weren’t allowed on buses designated for whites—and I remember at that time someone saying: “We can get a man on the moon, but we still can’t get a Negro on a bus!”’ (R. Smith, FHA supporter, 1990)
Humans can be heartbroken when they lose a loved one but are also capable of shooting one of their own family. We will dive into raging torrents to help others without thought of self but are also capable of molesting children. We torture one another but are also so loving we will give our life for another. A community will pool its efforts to save a kitten stranded up a tree and yet humans will also ‘eat elaborately prepared dishes featuring endangered animals’. (Time mag. 8 Apr. 1991) We have been sensitive enough to create the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, yet so insensitive as to pollute our planet to the point of threatening our own existence.
Good or bad, loving or hateful, angels or devils, constructive or destructive, sensitive or insensitive, what are we? Throughout our history, we’ve struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradictions of the human condition. Neither philosophy nor science has, until now, been able to give a clarifying explanation. For their part, religious assurances such as ‘God loves you’ don’t explain why we are lovable.
Lacking clarifying explanation for our contradictory nature, humans have had no choice other than to live in denial of the issue. This denial began when consciousness first emerged from the instinct-dominated state some 2 million years ago and has been reinforced ever since. (The emergence of the dilemma of the human condition with the emergence of consciousness, and our resulting departure from the fabled Garden of Eden where humans lived instinctively cooperatively in the so-called ‘Golden Age’, will be explained during the explanation of the human condition.) As a result, humans now live in a state of nearly complete denial of the issue, to the point, effectively, of being unaware of it at the conscious level. It is now deeply buried, part of humans’ subconscious awareness. Common to all the human race at a subliminal, subconscious level is an immense insecurity, a deep sense of guilt about being divisively behaved.
The real problem on Earth is humans’ predicament or condition of being insecure, unable to confront, make sense of and deal with the dark side of human nature. The real struggle for humans has been a psychological one.
So daunting has this subject of the human condition been that we have rarely ever referred to it. For example, while ‘human nature’ appears in dictionaries, ‘human condition’ never does. Even Charles Darwin complied with this historic denial. While he explained the origin of the variety of life on Earth and connected humans with nature, he left unaddressed the question of why humans are the way they are—divisively rather than cooperatively behaved. In fact in his 1859 book, The Origin of Species, there are almost no references to humans. Although Darwin was a biologist deeply interested in behaviour he studiously avoided the issue of human behaviour, which, at its core, is the issue of the human condition.
To Darwin’s credit however, near the end of the final chapter he did say that (again the underlinings indicate words to be reiterated), ‘In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’ There is acknowledgment here that to understand the evolution of our particular species’ way of behaving—to understand our ‘history’, our selves, our human nature—we were going to have to throw ‘light’ on our ‘psychology’, on what has been going on in our heads; on our species’ psychosis in fact.
Darwin was acknowledging the need to explain our psychology in biological terms, explain the ‘origin’ of the human condition no less. Darwin and Neville shared the same sentiment: the ‘cures’ to the problem of our species’ ‘history’ have to come from ‘light’ being ‘thrown on’ the ‘origin’ of that behaviour; because only with such self-understanding, or ‘self discovery’, can we achieve our ‘psychological maturity’ as a species. To quote again from the writings of the philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post: ‘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.’
While we lived in denial of the dilemma of the human condition our main task was nevertheless to solve the dilemma.
The situation facing humanity was most difficult and peculiar because, while the fundamental task for humans was to find ‘understanding of’ the ‘nature and origin’ of the ‘dark forces’ within themselves, until that understanding was found, they couldn’t afford to acknowledge the task. We had to do a job but couldn’t admit that we were doing it! In all but exceptional circumstances humans couldn’t afford to acknowledge—even to themselves—the fundamental dilemma of the human condition or the main undertaking they were all involved in, namely trying to find the answer to that dilemma. Humans couldn’t acknowledge it because without reconciling, ameliorating understanding of their divisive condition, confronting the issue of it was too depressing. In fact, trying to think about the problem of whether they were worthwhile beings or not could lead to such serious depression it could result in suicide.
Unable to explain and thus resolve this deepest dilemma of the human condition we humans have had no choice other than to live in denial of the whole issue. While we lacked understanding of the human condition, denying it—extremely dishonest, false and limiting a response as that was—was our only sensible means of coping with it.
Having become so practiced at denying the issue of the human condition many people now believe it doesn’t exist. The fact, however, is that the human condition is the underlying problem and issue in all human affairs and finding the explanation of it has been humanity’s main task, the real ‘holy grail’ of all our endeavours. The ultimate objective of the human journey was to find this greater dignifying biological understanding of ourselves.
Humans’ divisive nature is not an unchangeable or immutable state as many people have come to think it is, rather it is the result of the human condition, the inability to understand themselves, and therefore it disappears when that understanding is found—which thank goodness it now is.
It is extremely rare to find clear acknowledgment and description of the deeper task and responsibility humans have had, which has been to evade and deny the subject of the human condition while at the same time working towards finding reconciling understanding of it. Literary Nobel laureate, Albert Camus, is one of the few who has been capable of such acknowledgment. In a 1940 essay titled The Almond Trees he wrote: (all underlinings in quotes and text are my emphasis) ‘men have never ceased to grow in the knowledge of their destiny. We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as men is to find those few first principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.’
Solving the human condition had become a matter of urgency.
Camus referred to a ‘world which is so obviously unjust’ and ‘nations poisoned by the misery of this century’, and Richard Neville, who was mentioned earlier, talked about a world ‘hurtling to catastrophe’. To deny the issue of the human condition successfully, humans had to deny the reality of their corrupted state. Part of the strategy of avoiding the issue of the human condition was avoiding the true extent of their devastation of the world around them, and indeed within them. Humans had to, as they say, ‘put on a brave face’, ‘stay positive’, ‘keep their chin up’, and the only way they could do this in the face of their reality was not to allow themselves to see it. Part of the practice of denying the human condition was denying the negatives of this condition. If there is no negative there is no issue. This delusion sustained humans but it also blinded them to the extent of the devastation they had perpetrated upon their world and upon themselves. In these circumstances Camus and Neville’s honesty was rare.
Humanity had reached the stage that, for there to be any real advance in the human journey, this question of the human condition had to be solved, and the truth is that finding the solution had become a matter of urgency. Despite our ‘brave face’, our denial, the truth is that the human race was entering end play, the situation where the Earth could not absorb any more devastation and the human race could not endure any more alienation.
The reality is that the human race had arrived at a situation where humans desperately needed clear biological understanding of themselves, understanding that would make sense of their divisive condition and liberate them from criticism, lift the burden of guilt, give them meaning, quell the ‘infinite anguish’, bring peace to their ‘troubled’ minds and lead them to achieving ‘psychological maturity’ as a species. There had to be a scientific, first-principle-based, biological reason for humans’ divisive behaviour and the task has been to find it; find, as Camus expressed it, ‘those first few principles that will…stitch up’ or reconcile or ameliorate this condition.
To bring about the peaceful, integrated, environmentally considerate world that we all seek we ultimately had to understand our divisive nature—because without the reconciling, ameliorating explanation for why humans have been divisively behaved the underlying insecurity about being divisively behaved would only continue, resulting in ever more upset, angry, divisive behaviour. As is to be explained in this book, humans became divisively behaved as an unavoidable result of becoming conscious, self-managing beings. Once divisive behaviour appeared in our make-up, our inability to explain why it had appeared produced a self-fuelling situation where self-condemnation about being divisively behaved aggravated the situation, upset us, producing even more divisive behaviour. Only finding understanding of how divisive behaviour appeared in the human make-up could relieve and thereby reverse this awful process where upset about being divisively behaved produced even more upset, divisive behaviour.
Until humans were able to lift ‘the burden of guilt’, reconcile ‘good’ and ‘evil’, make sense of the dark side of themselves, they would not be able to pacify their troubled nature, dismantle their psychosis, ‘calm the infinite anguish’ that Camus spoke of—they would not feel as it were ‘welcomed back into God’s fold’, feel accepted on Earth. Without the greater reconciling, ameliorating, dignifying understanding of why humans have had to be divisively behaved they were condemned to a life of ‘infinite anguish’, perpetual insecurity—and continued and ever-increasing divisive and destructive behaviour—and consequent ever-increasing denial or alienation to cope with the behaviour.
As the euphemisms assert, ‘understanding is compassion’, ‘the truth will set you free’ (the Bible, John 8:32), ‘honesty is therapy’ and ‘in repentance lies salvation’—but humans have never been able to ‘understand’ themselves, know ‘the truth’ about themselves, be ‘honest’ about their condition, explain why they have been divisively rather than cooperatively behaved and in so doing end their insecurity, ameliorate their lives and thus be able to ‘repent’ and change their ways.
There has been much talk in the world of the need to love the environment and to love each other, especially the less fortunate and more innocent races, but the deeper need has been for the capacity for humans to love the dark side of themselves; bring understanding to that—because that is where the inability to love others comes from. As van der Post has put it, ‘True love is love of the difficult and unlovable’. (Journey Into Russia, 1964, p.145) Real compassion can only be achieved through understanding and it is ultimately the only means by which love can occur. Drawing from van der Post again: ‘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.’ (Jung and The Story of Our Time, 1976, p.29)
It needs to be emphasised that finding understanding of humans’ non-ideal, upset, corrupted, divisive behaviour does not condone such behaviour, it doesn’t sanction ‘evil’; rather, through bringing compassion to the situation, it allows the insecurity that produces such behaviour to subside, and the behaviour to disappear. ‘Evil’, humans’ divisive behaviour, is a result of a conflict and insecurity within them that arises from the dilemma of the human condition; resolve the dilemma and you end the conflict and insecurity. As has been pointed out, peace could only come to humans’ troubled, divisive state and world through removing the underlying insecurity of their condition.
Catch phrases of our time such as ‘human potential’, ‘self-discovery’ and ‘self-esteem’ stress this yearning for psychological maturity, self-realisation and self-justification, but the ability to love ourselves ultimately depended on being able to understand ourselves—discover why we have been a competitive, aggressive and selfish species rather than a cooperative, loving and selfless one.
Being stranded in insecure adolescence—as our species as a whole has been—where we lack understanding of our identity, of why we have been the way we have been, which is divisively behaved, is to be stalled in a deeply troubled, upset and extremely destructive state. We must move on to secure, mature, peaceable adulthood as a species or, as Richard Neville said, face ‘self destruction’. Historian Eric Hobsbawn described humanity’s stark predicament when he wrote, in his 1994 book Age of Extremes, ‘The alternative to a changed society—is darkness’. To adapt a famous expression of Benjamin Disraeli’s, stalled halfway between ape and angel is no place to stop.
The 1991 film, Separate but Equal, accurately summarised our plight as a species in the words of one character: ‘Struggling between two worlds; one dead, the other powerless to be born’—words which echo those of Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.’ (Prison Notebooks, written during Gramsci’s 10-year imprisonment under Mussolini, 1927–1937) Until understanding of the human condition was found we were powerless to change our society. Australian politician Lionel Bowen alluded to the futility of trying to reform our world without finding ameliorating understanding of ourselves when he said, ‘I think it’s just impossible to bring about change until such time as some new civilisation develops to allow change.’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 10 Sept. 1988)
What is to be presented is the long sought-after explanation of the human condition.
The birth of a new human-condition-free, psychologically healed civilisation and world has depended on finding understanding of the human condition. It is that desperately needed ameliorating understanding that is now found, and presented in this book.
To say unequivocally that this is the understanding of the human condition humanity has sought may at first seem to be unscientific. Surely, you may think, what is being put forward is at this stage no more than a hypothesis, much as Darwin’s idea of natural selection was put forward as only a hypothesis. When Darwin’s idea of natural selection was introduced, scientist Thomas Henry Huxley wrote, ‘We wanted…to get hold of clear and definite conceptions [as to the origin of the variety of life on Earth] which could be brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested. The “Origin” [of Species] provided us with the working hypothesis we sought.’ (The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, Leonard Huxley, Vol.1, 1900, p.170)
Einstein said, ‘truth is what stands the test of experience’ (Out of My Later Years, 1950) and similarly, author Morris West once wrote, ‘Life itself is the best of all lie-detectors.’ (A View from the Ridge, 1996) The principle being referred to is that of subjecting hypotheses to tests—this is the basis of ‘the scientific method’—with the greatest test of all being the test of life itself.
Fantastic and unscientific a claim as it may seem, what is presented here is the long-sought-after, desperately needed, reconciling explanation of the human condition, and the reason you will know it is, is because once you understand the explanation and begin to apply it—as will be done in this book—you will discover it is so able to make sense of human behaviour that it makes it transparent. This transparency of ourselves that understanding of the human condition brings is the ultimate ‘test of experience’ that confirms that the understanding is the long-sought explanation of the human condition. In this particular scientific study—the biological analysis of the human condition—humans are the subjects, which means humans can experience, feel and know the truthfulness or otherwise of the explanations being put forward.
The difficulty of reading about the human condition.
Being the subjects of this biological analysis of the human condition, it is not difficult for us to know the correctness or truthfulness of the results of the analysis—as the subjects that is easy to know—the difficulty for most humans is in accepting the truthful results about themselves. In fact what becomes the problem for most adults is the transparency of themselves that the truthfulness of the understandings brings about. Encountering the naked truth about themselves cannot help but be a shock. What is being introduced brings the real ‘culture shock’, ‘future shock’, ‘brave new world’, ‘tectonic paradigm shift’, ‘gestalt switch’, ‘turning point’, ‘renaissance’, ‘revolution’ or ‘sea change’ humanity has long anticipated.
The most exciting and most challenging adjustment humans have ever had to make lies directly ahead of humanity now—the next half century. Difficult as it will be given how afraid of the naked truth some people are, adjusting to the truth about themselves can be done. Humans would never have had the strength to pursue the immense journey to find knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, if they hadn’t always believed that, when they did finally find that truth, they would be able to cope with it. What makes truth-day, honesty-day, exposure-day, come-clean-day, self-confrontation-day, the day of reckoning, the day when people’s alienations will be exposed—‘judgement day’ in fact—bearable is that it is actually a ‘day’ of great compassion, a state free of any condemnation or judgement. To quote a Turkish poet, judgement day is ‘Not the day of judgement but the day of understanding.’ (Unnamed Turkish poet, mentioned in National Geographic, Nov. 1987)
The explanation to be presented is confronting—that cannot be avoided—but it is also liberating. Paradoxically, and this is why it is liberating, the answer dignifies humans in the most remarkable way. It lifts the burden of guilt from humanity. It explains humans and restores the ability to love themselves, their kind and all creation. It allows them to heal the wounds they have inflicted on the planet, on one another and on themselves. It provides humans with the key to freedom from their upset state or condition. It brings them understanding of themselves. It takes humans beyond the human condition to humanity’s adulthood.