This is Freedom Essay 34

 

Thankfully, finding understanding of the
human condition brings an end to the whole
now horrifically polarised world of politics

 

Written by Jeremy Griffith, 2017

 

Since this Freedom Essay 34 elaborates on what was explained in Video/​F. Essay 14, I recommend reading that earlier essay before this one. What Video/​F. Essay 14 describes is the extreme danger of the left-wing’s use, firstly, of the false ‘savage instincts’ excuse to justify the dogmatic imposition of ‘good’ or ‘correct’ cooperative and loving behaviour on our species’ supposedly—but not truly—competitive and aggressive unchangeable instincts (the explanation for our species’ actual cooperative and loving moral instinctive nature is given in F. Essay 21). The transcript of Video/​F. Essay 14 then goes on to explain Marxist-based Critical Theory, which holds that we just have some basic instinctive needs such as for sex, food, shelter and clothing, but that we are essentially born a ‘blank slate’ in terms of having instincts influencing our behaviour, and that it is societal pressures that cause selfish behaviour, which again, justifies the dogmatic imposition of cooperative, ‘communalistic’ behaviour.

As this F. Essay 34 will further emphasise, the great danger of the left-wing’s dogmatic imposition of cooperative and loving behaviour is that it oppresses and inhibits the all-important, albeit upsetting (anger, egocentricity and alienation-producing), search for knowledge, ultimately for self-knowledge, for the understanding of the human condition that redeems and heals the human race. (Note that the definitive explanation of the danger of the left-wing is presented in F. Essay 35, an essay that is so significant it has also been produced as the standalone, free booklet titled Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution.)

So, to briefly go over this paradoxical situation that the human race has been involved in where it has had to suffer upset in order to become free of upset. The fully accountable, psychosis-addressing-and-solving, real biological explanation of the human condition that is presented in Video/​F. Essay 3 and chapter 1 of my book FREEDOM reveals that when we humans became fully conscious some 2 million years ago a battle for the management of our lives broke out between our already established gene-based, naturally-selected instinctive orientations and our newly emerged nerve-based, understanding-dependent, self-adjusting, fully conscious mind.

 

 

What happened was that our instincts in effect criticised and opposed our conscious mind’s necessary search for knowledge—and the only way to stop this condemning criticism, and thus end the battle, was to be able to explain and understand why we had to search for knowledge and defy our instincts. But we were only just setting out in search of knowledge and it was a journey that would take us until now to find that redeeming explanation—which, as mentioned, is the difference between the nerve-based learning system that operates from a basis of understanding the world, and the gene-based learning systems that can only give species’ orientations to the world around them. Without that clarifying explanation, all we could do throughout those 2 million years was defy our instincts by attacking them, trying to prove them wrong, and by blocking out their criticism. The psychologically upset behaviours of anger, egocentricity and alienation emerged as our only means of coping while we searched for this understanding of our situation/​condition that would end our need to be retaliatory, defensive and insecure.

 

 

Obviously, at any time we could give up the upsetting search for knowledge—‘fly back on course’ in the Adam Stork analogy—and we would feel good because we would no longer be adding to the anger, egocentricity and alienation in ourselves and in the world. But doing that was fundamentally irresponsible because we were abandoning the search for knowledge which we needed to pursue until we found self-knowledge, understanding for why we had become upset sufferers of the angry, egocentric and alienated human condition. In fact, giving up the upsetting search for knowledge—and then dishonestly and deludedly trying to justify it by saying it was the right thing to do because we were ‘stopping’ all the anger, egocentricity and alienation in the world—meant we were opposing humanity’s efforts to actually bring an end to all the anger, egocentricity and alienation. We weren’t just abandoning the heroic battle to find knowledge, we were actively campaigning against it! We were behaving in an extremely destructive way, even though we were deluding ourselves that what we were doing was constructive, progressive and good.

This insight finally allows us to understand the real merits and liabilities of the left and right wings of politics. When a journalist said that ‘the great twin political problems are the brutality of the right and the dishonesty of the left’ (see par. 302 of FREEDOM), we can now understand that he was referring to the right-wing’s emphasis on continuing the upsetting, brutal search for knowledge free from the oppression of the dishonesty and delusion of the left-wing that maintained we were being good by opposing upset angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour and dogmatically imposing loving, selfless and cooperative ideal, ‘politically correct’ values.

We can now see that the left-wing was actually being pseudo idealistic because true idealism required that we continue the upsetting search for knowledge until humanity found the understanding of the human condition that would genuinely bring an end to all the upset anger, egocentricity and alienation in the world. As was explained at some length in Video/​F. Essay 14, the left-wing was leading humanity to extinction, not to peace and happiness. Yes, we can now finally explain and understand that it was actually the left-wing not the right-wing that was the real threat to humanity. We can understand that, paradoxically, it was the right-wing in politics that actually held the moral high ground, that was doing the right thing, being truly idealistic. As summarised in Video/​F. Essay 14, while the right-wing and the left-wing were both using dishonest  biology to justify their philosophies, we can now at last explain and understand that the right-wing was using it in the cause of good, namely in support of the upsetting search for knowledge, while the left-wing was using it in the cause of what was bad, indeed, extremely dangerous, namely in blocking and even determinedly opposing that all-important upsetting search for knowledge.

 

 

So the truth was not as it appeared. The corrupting journey for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge/​understanding of the human condition, that the right-wing was championing, made them the heroes not the villains. As it says about the great paradox of the human condition in the musical Man of La Mancha (which is based on the story of Don Quixote), we humans had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (Joe Darion, The Impossible Dream, 1965). We had to lose ourselves to find ourselves. We had to be prepared to suffer self-corruption if we were to become free of the human condition.

When the science historian Jacob Bronowski wrote that ‘We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex [instinct]. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us’ (The Ascent of Man, 1973, p.437 of 448), he was recognising that humans’ greatest need has been to find this reconciling understanding between our instinct and intellect.

The big problem, however, has been that the longer the corrupting search for this reconciling insight continued, the more upset humans became and the more tempting it was to give up the search and adopt the artificial relief of pseudo idealism. And it is precisely this endgame situation that has now arrived, where many people have become advocates of dogmatically imposing cooperative, selfless and loving ideal values on our knowledge-searching lives (see F. Essay 55 for further explanation and evidence of this endgame state). The advocates of dogma are threatening the freedom needed to question, think and find (and then accept) understanding. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned the exhausted human race, ‘You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you…​But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope!…​War [against oppression, especially from dogma] and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your pity but your bravery has saved the unfortunate up to now’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, 1892; tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1961, pp.70–74 of 343), and ‘There comes a time in a culture’s history when it becomes so pathologically soft that it takes the side of its worst enemy [dogma]…​and calls it “progress”’ (common tr. of Beyond Good And Evil, 1886, sec. 201).

Basically, the virtuous, righteous, pseudo idealistic causes we humans have taken up after becoming ‘fatigued’, such as socialism, new ageism, feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, globalisationism, anti-capitalism, political correctism and post-modernism, all represented false starts to a human-condition-free world—because, once again, the real start to an anger, egocentricity and alienation-free world depended on continuing the upsetting search for knowledge until we found the reconciling understanding of the human condition. As Bronowski and Nietzsche respectively said, ‘Knowledge is our destiny’ and the anti-knowledge, anti-truth and anti-progress of dogma is ‘its worst enemy’.

 

 

So while pseudo idealism has given idealism a bad name and horribly discredited the real start to a human-condition-free world, now that the understanding of the human condition needed for that real start has been found, the great transformation of the human race from the upset state of the human condition can and has legitimately begun—and with that understanding of the human condition found, the delusion of the left-wing is exposed and the work of the right is completed, which thankfully brings an end to the whole ugly business of politics.

As summarised in paragraph 1136 of FREEDOM, the final irony of the saga of humanity’s great journey from ignorance to enlightenment is that the ideal world that the left-wing was dogmatically demanding is actually brought about by the right-wing winning its reality-defending, freedom-from-idealism, corrupting-search-for-knowledge battle against the freedom-oppressing pseudo idealistic dogma of the left-wing. Yes, with the freedom-from-dogma right-wing’s search for understanding of the human condition completed, the justification for the egocentric power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking way of life espoused by the right-wing ends, replaced by the ideal-behaviour-obeying attitude that the left-wing sought. In this sense, when the right-wing wins we all become left-wing; through the success of the philosophy of the right-wing, we all adopt the ideal values sought by the philosophy of the left-wing—but, most significantly, this time we are not abandoning an ongoing battle, we are leaving it won.

In the next essay, F. Essay 35 (and its book version, Death by Dogma), this exposé of the extreme danger of the left-wing philosophy of dogmatically imposing cooperative and loving behaviour, will be further revealed with a description of the progression that has taken place over the last 200 years to ever more guilt-stripped and dangerously dishonest forms of pseudo idealism, culminating in Marxist-based Critical Theory, which is currently taking hold of society.

 

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Read more about how the explanation of the human condition puts an end to politics in chapter 3:9 of FREEDOM, or Part 2 of the booklet Transform Your Life And Save The World. And again, the definitive explanation of the danger of the left-wing is presented in F. Essay 35, an essay that is so significant 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. This book 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.