A Species In Denial

 

by Jeremy Griffith, published 2003

 

Extracts

 

‘Good or bad, loving or hateful, angels or devils, constructive or destructive, sensitive or insensitive, what are we? Throughout our history, we have 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” may offer comfort but do not explain why we are lovable. 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.’ (p.27)

 

‘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.’ (p.26)

 

‘There had to be a biological explanation for humans’ non-ideal, upset, corrupted, insecure, divisive, competitive, aggressive, selfish, angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour and our responsibility as conscious animals has been to find that explanation.’ (p.40)

 

‘Understanding the human condition, knowing the biological reason for humans’ corrupted, angry, egocentric and alienated state, dignifies humans, makes the concept of “evil” obsolete and lifts the “burden of guilt” from the human race.’ (p.101)

 

‘The corruption of the human soul began some 2 million years ago with the emergence of consciousness, yet we can expect it to have only become well entrenched roughly 1 million years ago. This means that the great majority of our species’ ancestry, from approximately 8 million years ago…was spent living in a predominantly cooperative, loving state…Our species’ instinctive heritage, and thus instinctive expectation, is essentially one of encountering a cooperative, loving world, a world that behaviourally is almost totally at odds with the world humans are now born into.’ (p.123)

 

‘The good news is that…People can end their historic denial of our soul’s true world and of integrative meaning and return to a state of alienation-free sanity of mind, happiness and soundness of soul.’ (p.294)

 

‘The ability to understand the human condition, that is, understand why humans have been competitive, aggressive and selfish when the ideals are to be cooperative, loving and selfless, makes it possible to reconcile all the manifestations of the poles of “good and evil” in human life. The instinct and intellect, our soul and mind or conscience and conscious can be reconciled, as can mysticism and rationalism, religion and science, faith and reason and holism and mechanism. In politics, the left and right wing, or socialism and capitalism, idealism and realism can be reconciled…understanding can be brought to the rift that has existed between the more innocent individuals and races and those more corrupted, between men and women, the young and old.’ (p.317)

 

‘While religions could not liberate humans from the agony of the human condition because they could not explain why humans are good and not bad (that enlightening explanation depended on science…) in providing people with an indirect way to reconnect with the soul’s true world, they provided them with an invaluable way to withdraw from the brink of madness.’ (p.397)

 

‘Until the human condition could be resolved it was not safe to acknowledge the different roles men and women played in the journey to enlightenment. Over time it was found that the best way to control prejudice was to prevent people from acknowledging that there were any substantial differences between the sexes. The dogma of the politically correct culture emerged.’ (p.318)

 

‘The truth is, as champions of the conscious thinking self or intellect or ego, men are the heroes of the human journey to enlightenment, not the villains as they have for so long been portrayed.’ (p.322) ‘Only understanding the world of men, and why they have been so divisively behaved, could subside the anger, alienation and egocentricity that caused them to victimise virtually everything they encountered.’ (p.346)

 

‘Inequality was an unavoidable price of living in denial. The more the world became unjustly unequal the more people tried to counter this with the only means at their disposal—the imposition of freedom-denying dogmatic forms of restraint. What is so dangerous about dogma is that it has the potential to shut down the freedom of expression needed to allow the reconciling, humanity-liberating understanding of the human condition to emerge. In a world dependent on denial, the dangers associated with both the political left and the political right escalated as time went on…The great twin political problems of the age are the brutality of the right, and the dishonesty of the left. Of these, the dishonesty of the left is far more dangerous than the brutality of the right.’ (p.370)

 

‘We have reached the point in the human journey where the rapidly rising tide of the politically correct culture of deconstructionism or post-modernism in affluent parts of the world, and its fundamentalist religious counterpart in poorer parts of the world, are threatening to stifle the freedom of expression upon which the liberating enlightenment of the human condition depends. The great danger is that if the strategy of imposing idealism or “correctness” becomes universal then the freedom to differ will be denied and the responsibility to address and resolve (rather than to escape and repress) the dilemma of life will be abandoned—and real progress will be halted.’ (p.371)

 

‘Since science and religion provide two different perspectives on the one subject, namely the human situation, they must ultimately be able to be reconciled. In fact the reconciliation of religion and science, God and humans, holism and mechanism, ideality and reality, good and evil was the goal of the whole human journey of the last 2 million years!’ (p.412)

 

Note, the full edition of A Species In Denial is available here to be read or printed.