This is Freedom Essay 37

 

The deeper meaning of Hollywood’s
superhero and disaster films

 

Throughout the three previous Freedom Essays—F. Essays 34, 35 (and its book version, Death by Dogma) & 36—it is explained that eventually humans’ search for knowledge, ultimately for understanding of the human condition, led to so much upset angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour that the temptation to give up the search became irresistible. As a result, many people have become advocates of abandoning the search, dogmatically insisting instead that everyone behave in a cooperative, loving, idealistic, ‘politically correct’ way. However, as those essays make clear, the only thing that gets us out of the human condition is understanding of the human condition, and so this left-wing culture, which is all about giving up on finding understanding, threatens the human race with terminal alienation and extinction.

Even though virtually all adult humans have resigned to a life of denying the whole issue of the human condition (see F. Essay 30), there is nevertheless everywhere in people a deep intuitive awareness of just how serious and dangerous our species’ plight is—given, as just pointed out, that all the indications are that we are about to fail and never find the liberating understanding of our condition and instead perish in a horrible state of terminally alienated psychosis. And for evidence of our great anxiety we only have to look at the recent flood of movies and documentaries based on zombie, apocalyptic, escape-to-another-planet, ‘we are being attacked by aliens [by our own alienation]’, doomsday-preparation and other judgment-day-and-anxious-Bible-related epic themes.

This terrifying endgame situation in the human journey that all the disaster films evidence our awareness of is explained and described in some detail in F. Essay 55: Endgame for the human race.

 

 

And, with regard to our intuitive awareness of the now desperate need for someone to bravely face down what for almost everyone is the unfaceable issue of the human condition, and by so doing find the critically important redeeming and relieving explanation of it that alone can avert disaster, there has been an on-rush of superhero films and publications—such as the cartoons brought to life by the Marvel and DC franchises, the Star Wars trilogies featuring ‘the force’, and even the magical Harry Potter films.

Most significantly, in his commendation for Jeremy Griffith’s book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, Professor Harry Prosen, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, firstly acknowledged the seriousness of our species’ plight when he wrote that ‘I think the fastest growing realisation everywhere is that humanity can’t go on the way it is going. Indeed, the great fear is we’re entering endgame where we appear to have lost the race between self-destruction and self-understanding’, and then, described how Jeremy has achieved the seemingly impossible, superhero-type task of confronting and solving the human condition, writing that ‘Astonishing as it is, this book by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith presents the 11th hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition necessary for the psychological maturation and transformation of our species.’

Yes, it has been this quest for ‘self-understanding’, understanding of our ‘good’ and ‘evil’ conflicted human condition, that lay at the heart of our obsession with superheroes. Despite the left-wing’s deluded attempts to shut down the search for knowledge, we all in truth did intuitively know that it was only by finding the reconciling ‘self-understanding’ of our human condition that we could save ourselves from the imminent disaster of ‘self-destruction’. BUT finding that liberating understanding did require a seemingly superhero-type effort by someone to confront the terrifying issue of the human condition—and who was going to undertake that frightening task because, as the philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post has written, ‘He who tries to go down into the labyrinthine pit of himself, to travel the swirling, misty netherlands below sea-level through which the harsh road to heaven and wholeness runs, is doomed to fail and never see the light where night joins day unless he goes out of love in search of love’ (see par. 1285 of FREEDOM). Yes, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about the unbearable ‘cliffs of fall’ of depression that would overcome anyone who tried to confront the human condition if they weren’t sufficiently sound in soul and full of ‘love’: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’ (see par. 108 of FREEDOM). (See Video/​F. Essay 10 for an explanation of what exactly the terrifying issue of the human condition is.)

Indeed, this is what the human race has been waiting for, someone sound enough to confront and by so doing ‘fathom’/​solve the human condition, and whenever we thought about that task from our human-condition-terrified positions, it did seem like a superhuman undertaking. But, amazingly, it is that ultimate ‘road’ ‘down into the labyrinthine pit of’ ourselves to achieve ‘heaven and wholeness’ that Jeremy Griffith has succeeded in undertaking—the result of which is, as mentioned, his seminal masterpiece book FREEDOM.

So the fabulous news is that humanity has won the ‘race between self-destruction and self-understanding’, because the redeeming, reconciling and rehabilitating understanding of the human condition has at last been found and presented in FREEDOM.

 

 

 

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Watch Jeremy Griffith present his breakthrough redeeming explanation of the human condition in Video/​F. Essay 3, or read chapter 1 of FREEDOM. You can also read more of Professor Prosen’s thoughts on the significance of FREEDOM in F. Essay 19. We also recommend Video/​F. Essay 14 and the three essays preceding this one, F. Essays 34, 35 & 36, that explain the threat posed by left-wing pseudo idealism. In fact, F. Essay 35 is so significant an 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 can be accessed for free on our homepage www.humancondition.com, as one of the WTM’s four key books.

 

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