This is Freedom Essay 50

Australia’s role in the world

Written by Jeremy Griffith, 2017

As Freedom Essay 40: Judgement Day finally explained makes clear, science is the liberator of humanity from the human condition—because it found the critical insights needed to explain the human condition of the difference in the way instincts and nerves process information, namely that the gene-based, natural selection process orientates species while nerves operate from a basis of understanding cause and effect.

It was also explained that denial-free innocence had an important concluding role to playin assembling the understanding of the human condition—because only someone who had been sufficiently sheltered from all the upset in the world and who did not, therefore, have to resign to living in fearful denial of the human condition could confront and think truthfully about the issue, and by so doing use the hard-won insights found by mechanistic science of the difference in the way genes and nerves process information to put together the truthful explanation of the human condition. (See Video/​F. Essay 3 for the explanation of the human condition; and F. Essay 30 for the explanation of the psychological process of Resignation.)

Science is the liberator of humanity but innocence was needed in the end to produce the actual explanation of the human condition needed to save humanity. That is the essential plan behind the whole human journey of conscious thought and enquiry.

With the whole of the human race in support, that component of the human race that was elected to search for knowledge, namely science, had to, as it were, find all the pieces of the jigsaw that would make the explanation of the human condition possible, at which point an innocent person was needed to put all the pieces of the jigsaw together and reveal the full picture! Only innocence could reveal the truth about ourselves. As is explained in F. Essay 40, that was the real meaning of the idea of a ‘second coming’ of innocence—in the great spectrum of alienation there have always been a few innocents, but at a certain point in the human journey they had a critical role to play.

Denial-free innocence had an important concluding role to play in
assembling the key understanding that unlocks the riddle of the human condition

While we haven’t been able to openly acknowledge this plan—because while we couldn’t defend upset any talk of who is innocent and who is not was unbearable—it was, nevertheless, an awareness that every human has carried deep in their conscious thoughts. The evidence for this universal awareness that innocence has to lead us home is that it appears in all our mythologies.

The Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s famous 1837 fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes, for example, is actually a metaphorical recognition that it would require an innocent, symbolised by a child, to break the spell of all the denial that’s been blocking access to the truth about the human condition. In the fable, the child breaks the spell of deception that the emperor is beautifully clothed when he discloses the truth of the Emperor’s nakedness—he brings about the ‘Judgment Day’ exposure of the corrupted state of the human race. (see paragraph 1249 of FREEDOM)

The biblical story of David and Goliath is another metaphorical description of this situation where the whole army of humanity is besieged by the monstrous, all-pervading and all-powerful hold that denial has on the world, which the ‘nine feet tall’ giant Goliath represents, when David, who is ‘only a boy’, ‘come[s]against you[Goliath] in the name of the Lord Almighty[in the form of Integrative Meaning-accepting, denial-free, unresigned, truthful, effective thinking]’ ‘and kill[s] him’, allowing everyone to celebrate their liberation ‘with singing and dancing’(1 Sam. 17-18). (See F. Essay 23 for the explanation of Integrative Meaning.)

Of course, in the Bible there is also Isaiah’s description of how ‘a little child will lead them [humanity]’ to the state where the concepts of ‘evil’ and ‘good’—and, in the process, where the more corrupted and the more innocent—will be reconciled; to where, he says, the ‘wolf will live with the lamb’(Isa. 11:6). (see par. 1262 of FREEDOM)

The pre-eminent South African philosopher, Sir Laurens van der Post, was recognising the truth that innocence has to lead humanity home when he wrote that ‘Whatever happens, I shall be there in the end, for I, child that I am, am mother of your future self’(see par. 1278 of FREEDOM).(See F. Essay 51 for analysis of Sir Laurens’ immense contribution to understanding the human condition.)

In the great European legend of King Arthur, the wounded (alienated) king whose realm was devastated (humans unavoidably made their world an expression of their own madnesses) could only have his wound healed, and his realm restored, by the arrival in his kingdom of a simple, naive boy. The boy’s name is Parsifal, which, depending on which of the numerous sources you refer to, means either ‘guileless fool’ or ‘pure fool’. To the alienated, only a naive ‘fool’ would dare approach and grapple with the confronting truths about our divisive condition. The Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson offered this rendition of the legend, saying firstly that ‘Alienation is the current term for it [the wounded state of humans today]. We are an alienated people, an existentially lonely people; we have the Fisher King wound’(He, Understanding Masculine Psychology, 1974, p.12 of 97). He then described how ‘The court fool had prophesied that the Fisher King would be healed when a wholly innocent fool arrives in the court. In an isolated country a boy lives with his widowed mother [since the male ego can be especially oppressive of the innocent souls of children, saying that the mother is widowed provides recognition that the child wasn’t oppressed by an especially egocentric father]… His mother had taken him to this faraway country and raised him in primitive[isolated, innocent, unconditionally-loving, alienation-free, sound, soulful] circumstances. He wears homespun clothes, has no schooling, asks no questions. He is a simple, naive youth’(p.90). Johnson went on to recount that in the myth it is this boy, Parsifal, who, when he becomes an adult, is able to heal the Fisher King’s wound of alienation, so that ‘the land and all its people can live in peace and joy’(p.94). (see par. 1263 of FREEDOM)

Wagner’s Parsifal, illustrated by Willy Pogany, 1912

And in his astonishingly prophetic 1940 essay titled The Almond Trees, the literature Nobel Laureate Albert Camus also recognised this truth that the task of finding the understanding of the human condition that would ‘heal’ humanity’s ‘Fisher King wound’ of ‘alienation’ was going to require an ‘innocent’ person, symbolised by a ‘boy’ or ‘youth’ from ‘an isolated’ ‘faraway country’ that had not been overly exposed to the horrifically upset, ‘alienated’, ‘existentially lonely’ almost universal state of humans now. Camus wrote that, despite all the corrupted upset in the world, there are still ‘those shining [innocent]lands where so much strength is still untouched’ that can produce the innocent and sound ‘whiteness and its sap’ ‘strength of character’ needed to ‘stand up to’ all the alienated, fraudulent evasion and denial and last ‘just long enough to prepare the fruit’—find the world-saving understanding of the human condition.

Albert Camus (1913–1960)

freila - Fotolia

The following is an extract from what Camus wrote: ‘All we then need to know is what we want. And what indeed we want is never again to bow down before the sword, never more to declare force to be in the right when it is not serving the mind. This, it is true, is an endless task. But we are here to pursue it…​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…​When I lived in Algiers, I would wait patiently all winter because I knew that in the course of one night, one cold, pure February night, the almond trees of the Vallée des Consuls would be covered with white flowers. I was then filled with delight as I saw this fragile snow stand up to all the rain and resist the wind from the sea. Yet every year it lasted, just long enough to prepare the fruit.This is not a symbol. We shall not win our happiness with symbols. We shall need something more weighty. All I mean is that sometimes, when life weighs too heavily in this Europe still overflowing with its misery, I turn towards those shining lands where so much strength is still untouched. I know them too well not to realize that they are the chosen lands where courage and contemplation can live in harmony…​Before the vastness of the undertaking, let no one in any case forget strength of character. I do not mean the one accompanied on electoral platforms by frowns and threats. But the one that, through the virtue of its whiteness and its sap, stands up to all the winds from the sea. It is that which, in the winter for the world, will prepare the fruit’(Summer, 1954, pp.33-35 of 87). (see pars 1265-1271 of FREEDOM)

Australia, where I am from (see F. Essay 49 for a biography of Jeremy by Professor Harry Prosen), has been—at least up until recent times when communication technology especially, but also immigration and multiculturalism, have ended our isolation and spread ‘alienation’ everywhere here as well—just such a ‘shining land…​where so much strength is still untouched’. As the renowned English author D.H. Lawrence said in his 1923 novel Kangaroo, ‘You feel free in Australia… There is a great relief in the atmosphere, a relief from tension, from pressure. An absence of control or will or form [oppression, intimidation and terror from overly embattled, overly-hungry-for-success, out-of-control egos—see chapter 8:16D of FREEDOM]. The sky is open above you, and the air is open around you’(p.15 of 428). And, in fact, ‘courage and contemplation’ have been able to ‘live in harmony’ here ‘just long enough to prepare the fruit’, to find, and present in FREEDOM, the understanding of the human condition that saves the human race! And, moreover, the anticipation of this dreamed-of breakthrough occurring here has been very strong in Australian mythology.

While Australia has an ancient mythology that is grounded in the Dreamtime stories of the Aborigines, it also has a powerful contemporary mythology—at the heart of which is ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s 1895 poem The Man From Snowy River; in fact, in recognition of the poem’s significance to our nation, Australia’s $10 note features Paterson’s image and, in microprint, all the many words to The Man From Snowy River. Ostensibly the poem is about a great and potentially dangerous ride undertaken by mountain horsemen to recapture an escaped thoroughbred that had joined the brumbies (wild horses) in the mountain ranges, but what the poem is really recognising is that in Australia’s isolation and relative innocence there would emerge sufficient soundness to defeat denial and put together the human-race-saving explanation of the human condition. In the poem, an inspired stockman called Clancy persuades the station owner, Harrison, to let a ‘stripling’‘lad’—a boy—on his ‘hardy mountain pony’ join their expedition to retrieve the escaped thoroughbred; Clancy argues, ‘I warrant he’ll be with us when he’s wanted at the end.’ Again, a boy is the embodiment of the innocence that is needed ‘at the end’ of humanity’s heroic journey of accumulating sufficient scientific understandings of the mechanisms of our world to assemble the denial-free explanation of the human condition. The poem describes how the boy rides beyond where the rest of the horsemen (the resigned, alienated adults) dare to go, and follows the brumbies down the ‘terrible descent’ of a steep mountain where (if you weren’t sound) ‘any slip was death’ (to confront the unconfrontable issue of the human condition) and recaptures the thoroughbred from the impenetrable mountains (retrieves the escaped truth from the depths of denial). As the poem says, the boy ‘ran them [the brumbies]… till their sides were white with foam / He followed like a bloodhound on their track / Till they halted, cowed and beaten—then he turned their heads for home’ (he fought all the alienation and its denial that has been enslaving this world to a standstill until it finally gave up the truth). (see par. 1273 of FREEDOM)

A scene from the 1982 Australian film The Man from Snowy River

Paterson was even more explicit in his anticipation of the liberating understanding of the human condition emerging from the Australian bush (innocent countryside) in another of his works from 1889, his aptly titled poem Song of the Future. Using the analogy of the pioneers who finally forged the path through our eastern coastal mountain range (appropriately enough called ‘The Great Dividing Range’) that had barred the way to Australia’s interior during the early days of European settlement, Paterson envisaged ‘the future’ heroic, Australian-led expedition humanity would take from the alienated bondage of the human condition to the fertile, sun/​understanding-drenched freedom of a human-condition-resolved new world.

The Great Dividing Range

These are the key verses from Song of the Future: ‘Tis strange that in a land [Australia] so strong, so strong and bold in mighty youth [innocence], we have [in 1889] no poet’s voice of truth to sing for us a wondrous song [explain the human condition]… [However,] we yet may find achievements grand within the bushman’s quiet life. Lift ye your faces to the sky, ye far blue mountains of the west… Tis hard to feel that years went by before the pioneers broke through your rocky heights and walls of stone, and made your secrets all their own [broke through the wall of denial blocking access to the truth about the human condition]. For years the fertile western plains were hid behind your sullen [alienated] walls, your cliffs and crags… Between the mountains and the sea, like Israelites with staff in hand, the people waited restlessly: They looked towards the mountains old and saw the sunsets come and go with gorgeous golden afterglow that made the west a fairyland, and marvelled what that west might be of which such wondrous tales were told… At length the hardy pioneers by rock and crag found out the way, and woke with voices of today, a silence kept for years and years[brought an end to the silence of the resigned world of denial]…​The way is won! The way is won! And straightway from the barren coast there came a westward-marching host, that aye and ever onward prest with eager faces to the west along the pathway of the sun…​Could braver histories unfold than this bush story, yet untold—the story of their westward march [liberation from the human condition]…​And it may be that we who live in this new land apart, beyond the hard old world grown fierce and fond and bound by precedent and bond [bound up in sophisticated, intellectual denial], may read the riddle [of the human condition]right[synthesise the liberating truth from science’s hard won insights into our world]and give new hope to those who dimly see[those who are embedded in blind denial/​alienation], that all things may be yet for good and teach the world at length to be one vast united brotherhood.’ ‘Banjo’ Paterson was certainly an extraordinarily prophetic and gifted writer! (see par. 1274 of FREEDOM)

Across the Range: the‘gorgeous golden afterglow that made the
west a fairyland’ of the Western Plains of New South Wales, Australia

Henry Lawson is another of Australia’s greatest poets, and he too anticipated that the answer to the human condition would be found here. Making the same insights, employing the same comparisons and using the same imagery as Paterson’s poems, Lawson wrote in his 1892 poem, the also aptly titled When the Bush Begins to Speak, that ‘They know us not in England yet, their pens are overbold. We’re seen in fancy pictures that are fifty years too old. They think we are a careless race—a childish race, and weak. They’ll know us yet in England, when the bush begins to speak [when innocence makes its contribution] …​“The leaders that will be”, the men of southern destiny, are not all found in cities that are builded by the sea. They learn to love Australia by many a western creek [while Australia as a whole has been relatively sheltered and thus innocent, it is from the Australian inland countryside or ‘bush’, rather than from the cities, that exceptional innocence will appear]. They’ll know them yet in England, when the bush begins to speak…​All ready for the struggle, and waiting for the change, the army of our future lies encamped beyond the[coastal]range. Australia, for her patriots, will not have far to seek, they’ll know her yet in England when the bush begins to speak…​We’ll find the peace and comfort that our fathers could not find, or some shall strike the good old blow that leaves a mark behind. We’ll find the Truth and Liberty[the truth about the human condition that brings liberating understanding to humanity]our fathers came to seek, or let them know in England when the bush [innocence] begins to speak.’ (see par. 1275 of FREEDOM)

And in another extraordinarily prescient work (which also has the same insights, comparisons and imagery), the Australian poet A.D. Hope similarly wrote of the role of the relatively innocent continent of Australia in delivering the liberating understanding of the human condition. In his 1931 poem, actually titled Australia, Hope wrote of ‘A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey…​Without songs, architecture, history…​And her five cities, like five teeming sores, each drains her, a vast parasite robber-state, where second-hand Europeans pullulate timidly on the edge of alien shores. Yet there are some like me turn gladly home from the lush jungle of [alienated, dishonest, intellectual] modern thought, to find the Arabian desert of the human mind, hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets [innocent, unresigned, denial-free, truthful, profound, effective thinkers] come. Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare, springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes the learned doubt, the [dishonest, intellectual as opposed to the honest, instinctual] chatter of cultured apes which is called civilization over there [in England].’The prophet Isaiah was another who used the metaphor of the desert for that neglected part of ourselves from which the healing answers would come, saying, ‘A voice of one calling in the desert: “Prepare the way of the Lord [truth]; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it”’(Isa. 40:3–5). (see par. 1276 of FREEDOM)

Australia’s desert interior: ‘Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare’

In more recent Australian mythology, the Australian-made animated film Babe: Pig in the City(1998) tells the story of a little pig who, in order to save his farm, which symbolises the true world, has to take his innocence into the very heart of alienation, the city, and defy and defeat the alienation to release the captured soul of humanity, represented by the innocent animals being held captive there. To symbolise that the hazardous undertaking will require toughness as well as innocence, the pig wears a spiked collar into battle, the collar being donated by the bulldog who recognises he hasn’t got the sufficient innocence/​soundness to do the job himself. Interestingly, the Australian production company that made the Babe movies, Kennedy Miller, also produced the late 1970s and early 1980s Mad Max trilogy, which features the same theme of unrecognised (because the world practises evading and denying truthful unevasiveness) innocence taking on the alienated world and leading humanity out of bondage from the darkness of that blind, alienated world. To quote a review of the film Mad Max (or The Road Warrior as the film was titled in the USA), Max is ‘a hero in the classical tradition—a figure whose origins lie in the ancient myths; his role, in common with classical heroes, is of a man from nowhere destined to lead society into the next generation’(Sunday Telegraph, 21 Mar. 1982). Yes, these reconciling answers were not going to come from the ivory towers of the truth-avoiding mechanistic scientific establishment, but from, as Professor Harry Prosen put it in his Introduction to FREEDOM, the deepest of deep left field, from way out on the periphery of the great battle humanity has been waging against ignorance (see par. 1277 of FREEDOM). (F. Essay 19 provides excerpts from Prof. Prosen’s Introduction to FREEDOM.)

Bono in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 2010

Interestingly, in a 2006 interview with the Australian television presenter Andrew Denton, Bono, the prophetic lead singer of the rock band U2, said, ‘You do get the feeling in Australia that there’s…​something going on down here, a new society being dreamt up…​[that in Australia there is] the opportunity to lead the world’(Enough Rope, ABC-TV, episode 97, 13 Mar. 2006). (see par. 1283 of FREEDOM)

The most important point overall, of course, is that it doesn't matter where the truth about humans originated, what matters is that it now exists; the spell has been broken, the proverbial ‘elephant in our living rooms’ has finally been acknowledged and exposed. Denial no longer works—its hold has been released. The great citadel of lies has been stormed. The steel casing of denial enveloping Earth has been wrenched apart. Yes, the truth is out, and thank goodness it is because this terrifying ‘winter for the world’ suffering that Camus spoke of simply cannot be allowed to go on. This is no exaggeration: humans currently live in a place of such horrendous pain and suffering (which can be measured by the degree we block it out; by our astronomical levels of alienation) that it is as though we are living in a smouldering, toxic, sulphurous cauldron (see F. Essay 55: Endgame for the human race). BUT, there is now a path out of there to a world of soothing, healing sunshine, and amazing freedom, tranquility and beauty. All we have to do is cross the ‘SUNSHINE HIGHWAY’ bridge; adopt the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living that is described in F. Essays 15, 33, 36, 57&58. There is nothing stopping every human now from escaping the horror of the human condition, except their now completely obsoleted habituation to living in what is literally HELL ON EARTH. So while our freedom comes as such a ‘future shock’ that we initially won’t quite know how to take it up, the truth is there is absolutely nothing that justifies not taking it up—there really is no impediment to taking it up, none at all. The gateway to freedom is now WIDE open to everyone. (see par. 1284 of FREEDOM)

Yes, in Martin Luther King Jr’s words, ‘allow freedom to ring…​from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city’ because ‘all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics’, the more innocent and the more upset, the short and the tall, the big and the small, those who are left-handed and those who are right-handed, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker, EVERYONE, can ‘join hands and sing’, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last [from unjust condemnation]!’(‘I Have A Dream’ speech, 28 Aug. 1963). (see par. 1279 of FREEDOM)

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Watch Jeremy Griffith present the breakthrough redeeming explanation of the human condition in Video/​F. Essay 3, or read chapter 1 of FREEDOM. You can also read much more about Australia’s role in the world in chapter 9:11 of FREEDOM.

Discussion or comment on this essay is welcomed—see below.