Part 3:6 Science is the liberator of humanity

I would like to elaborate on a very significant point I raised in the previous Part, regarding the critically important role science has played in assembling the details that made explanation of the human condition possible.

What has enabled this, the real story about humanity—the underlying saga that has dominated human life since we first became conscious beings—to at last be told is that after centuries of painstaking enquiry science finally gathered together sufficient knowledge for the human condition to be identified, explained and, by so doing, understood.

But of course this is not the full story. As this entire presentation attests, ever since humans first became conscious some two million years ago humanity as a whole has, against enormous resistance, persevered in the search for and accumulation of knowledge. Thus, it is on the shoulders of eons of human effort and sacrifice that sufficient knowledge—specifically knowledge of the difference in the way genes and nerves process information—was ultimately found to explain the human condition. Science is but the final refinement of that ancient quest for knowledge, the discipline the human race developed and entrusted with the specific task of searching for first-principle-based understanding, specifically self-understanding—understanding of the human condition no less. So while, as was explained in Part 3:4, science was an enterprise undertaken by upset insecure, human-condition-afraid humans, and as such has had to comply with the practice of denying any truths that confronted humans with the unbearable issue of the human condition—such as of Integrative Meaning and of a nurtured cooperative, loving past for humans—it was this denial-complying, whole-view-evading, mechanistic, reductionist enterprise, supported by the efforts of the entire human race, that enabled humanity to be liberated from two million years spent living in doubt and uncertainty about our species’ fundamental goodness, worthiness, relevance and meaning.

Science, supported by humanity as a whole, has enabled us to explain that when humans became fully conscious and able to wrest management of our lives from our instincts, our instincts resisted this takeover and that it was this opposition that unavoidably led to the ‘corrupted’, upset angry, egocentric and alienated state of our human condition. Further, it is this ability now to understand how we became upset that allows that upset state to subside.

As mentioned earlier, the WTM has, for many years, been selling a t-shirt that features the question, ‘Ask me to explain the human condition’, under which is the Adam Stork picture. Written on the back of the shirt is the answer: ‘Genes Can Orientate But Are Ignorant Of Nerves’ Need To Understand. Result: The Human Condition.’ Again, the important point I’m making here is that it was science’s discovery of the existence of nerves and genes and how they function that enabled our species’ consciousness-induced, human-condition-afflicted psychosis to be explained and thus healed.

Yes, what distinguishes humans from other animals is our fully conscious state, our ability to understand and thus manage the relationship between cause and effect. However, prior to becoming fully conscious and able to self-manage—consciously decide how to behave—our ape ancestors were controlled by and obedient to their instincts, as other animals still are. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the grandson of Darwin’s staunch defender Thomas Henry Huxley and author of such famous novels as Brave New World, acknowledged how other animals live, and also how our ancestors would have lived, obedient to their instincts, when he wrote, ‘Non-rational creatures do not look before or after, but live in the animal eternity of a perpetual present; instinct is their animal grace and constant inspiration; and they are never tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own…immanent law. Thanks to his reasoning powers and to the instrument of reason, language, man (in his merely human condition) lives nostalgically, apprehensively and hopefully in the past and future as well as in the present’ (The Perennial Philosophy, 1946, p.141 of 352). Part of this passage has been underlined because it raises the important question of what would happen if a species was ‘tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own’ instincts, as Huxley infers humans must have done when we became fully conscious? The story of Adam Stork describes what actually had to have happened.

At this point it should again be explained why it is being so strongly asserted that what has been presented is the real explanation of the human condition. It may at first seem unscientific to say unequivocally that this is the understanding of the human condition that humanity has so tirelessly sought. Surely, you may think that what is being put forward at this stage is no more than a hypothesis, much as Darwin’s idea of natural selection was put forward only as a hypothesis. As 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). For a hypothesis to become accepted as true the scientific method dictates that it must first be tested and in the case of a hypothesis about the human condition the ultimate test is how accountable it is of our own lives. As has been mentioned, that greatest of all physicists, Albert Einstein, once said that ‘truth is what stands the test of experience’ (Out of My Later Years, 1950). The Australian author Morris West similarly wrote that ‘Life itself is the best of all lie-detectors’ (A View from the Ridge, 1996). Fantastic a claim as it may seem, what is being presented here is the long-sought-after, desperately needed, psychosis-addressing-and-resolving, human race-transforming explanation of the human condition and the reason you will know this is because once you understand the explanation and begin to apply it—as will be done throughout this presentation—you will discover it is so able to make sense of human behaviour it makes it transparent. As mentioned in Section 1:13 of Freedom Expanded: Book 2, a reader of my books complained about this transparency when he wrote the following to the WTM: ‘Diving into a sea of truth where everything is completely transparent one can’t but ask, “how will anybody cope with this; how in the world can anybody cross such darkness to reach light?!”’ (Enrico, WTM records, 24 Feb. 2011). This transparency of ourselves and our world—for example, the exposure of all our falseness—that understanding of the human condition brings is the ultimate ‘test of experience’ that confirms that the understanding being presented here is the long-sought explanation of the human condition. In this particular scientific study—the biological analysis of the human condition—we humans are the subjects, which means we can experience, feel and know the truthfulness or otherwise of the explanations being put forward.