FAQ 1.53

 

Isn’t the human condition just our fear of death?

 

Jeremy Griffith explains that fear of death is a symptom of the human condition, not its cause. When our species was innocent, before the emergence of our horrifically psychologically insecure competitive, selfish and aggressive human condition, mortality was not an issue because our love for the world was completely selfless, universal and eternal.

 

Short response:

As Jeremy Griffith explains in Part 5.2 of Freedom Expanded Book 1, fear of death is not the cause of our psychologically upset angry, egocentric and alienated human condition, it is a symptom of it. He writes: “When we were innocent we were so in tune with everything around us and so happy inside and so alive that death was not an issue. Death is only an issue when we live a wretched life, where we become so selfish that it matters if we die or not. Fear of death is a product of selfishness, which in turn is a product of alienation, which in turn is the loss of the generosity and meaning we once had before we became upset.” We don’t recognise this truth that it is our loss of innocence that causes us to fear death because we don’t want to admit the truth of our species’ lost innocence, which is the issue of our corrupted human condition.

Yes, fear of death followed the advent of the human condition, it did not cause it, and when we humans are no longer tortured by the immense insecurity of the human condition, it will go.

 

Jeremy Griffith’s full response:

Every thoughtful person has had to develop a philosophy to make sense of the world and our place in it. As mentioned in paragraph 17 of The Human Condition book (THC), one of those is to say ‘that the human condition is the despair that comes with being conscious because it makes us realise we will die someday’.

This view is most closely associated with the American anthropologist Ernest Becker, who argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that ‘the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death…’. Becker drew heavily on the earlier work of the psychoanalyst Otto Rank, and together their writings advanced the view that much of human striving for power, achievement, fame and significance can be understood as an attempt to overcome what they regarded as the underlying issue of the human condition: the awareness that we will die.

However, as is explained in paragraphs 18-19 of THC, the human-condition-confronting true interpretation of the human condition is a much, much deeper and darker psychological issue than the fear of death.

The following explanation of what the human condition really is comes from FAQ 1.1 ‘What is the human condition?’: “As I explained in THE Interview and in all my other presentations, we humans once lived in a nurtured-with-unconditional-love, cooperative, selfless and loving innocent state, which the bonobo species of ape is presently on the threshold of achieving. If we stand back and think about this original cooperative, selfless and loving state and then think about how competitive, selfish and aggressive we humans are now, the contrast between the two states couldn’t be greater. And if we think about that extreme contrast and then think about the situation we have been stuck in for some 2 million years, which is the approximate time we humans have been fully conscious and at war with our instincts, where we haven’t been able to explain our so-called ‘fall from grace’, the corruption of our original all-sensitive and all-loving, innocent instinctive self or soul, then how deeply traumatised with guilt and shame must we humans have been all that time! Certainly, we learnt to block the horror of this situation out of our mind, but that has been the underlying psychological predicament we humans have been enduring. So having had to live with this insufferable, unbearably depressing guilt and shame for having destroyed the magic world of our soul is what the human condition really is!”

 

We can see that ‘fear of death’ is actually a symptom of the human condition, rather than the cause of it. As I explain in my book Freedom Expanded, the English poet laureate William Wordsworth’s fabulously honest poem Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood makes the point that we humans were once in such an ‘early childhood’-like state of innocence and full of love that our lives were universal, a part of everything, and thus enduring and ‘immortal’ that dying wasn’t an issue, it was of no real significance. The Greek philosopher Hesiod also described this pre-human-condition innocent state of universal love and immortality when he wrote of ‘A golden race the immortals formed on earth…Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…​Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…​Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die.’ Hesiod’s compatriot Plato also gave this very similar description of our species’ pre-conscious time in innocence, writing that ‘there was a time when we lived in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy…​pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now’.

I should mention that evidence for this cooperative, selfless and loving past is available beyond myths; the extraordinarily gentle and cooperative bonobos provide evidence (see chapter 5:6 of FREEDOM), as does the relative innocence of indigenous races like the Bushmen or San people of southern Africa that I describe in paragraph 263 of The Human Condition. Evidence for our cooperative, selfless and loving past can also be seen in the fossil record, with anthropologists like C. Owen Lovejoy reporting that ‘our species-defining cooperative mutualism can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [which is well beyond 5.3 million years ago]’—which I have given a detailed description of in chapter 5:5 of FREEDOM.)

Indeed, we can see that the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of innocent, loving togetherness, oneness, integrativeness and universality that Hesiod and Plato wrote about refers to the time in our species’ distant past—approximately 4 to 2 million years ago, during the era of the Australopithecines (see chapters 8:5–8:6 of FREEDOM)—when the nurturing-based love-indoctrination process had produced a perfectly loving and cooperative species (see chapter 5 of FREEDOM).

In these early stages of consciousness there would have been an extreme level of innocence and thus sufficient selflessness and love to not be afraid of dying. The more innocent we are, the more in tune we are with the integrativeness, oneness and universality of everything around us and happily alive, and thus the more death is not an issue. Death is only an issue when we live a wretched human-condition-afflicted life, where we become so selfish that it matters if we die or not. So, fear of death is a product of selfishness, which in turn is a product of our alienated human condition, which in turn is the loss of the generosity and meaning we once had before we became extremely psychologically upset. To refer back to Wordsworth, in our ‘Early Childhood’ we have ‘Intimations of Immortality’—when we are innocent and free of psychological upset we are not worried about our mortality. When we are free of the insecurity of the human condition, mortality is not an issue because our love for this world is universal and ‘immortal’, and everything is saturated and full of that love.

As I explain in paragraph 840 of FREEDOM: “Humans now are so toughened—so soul-destroyed—by the levels of anger, egocentricity and alienation in human life today that it is hard for us to imagine how loving and empathetic humans once were, but the truth is the emotional need to put flowers on the graves of those ‘near to us’ would have been so much stronger and purer in earlier times when humans were stronger and purer in soul. The emotion of love would have been so powerful that everyone would have been ‘near to us’ and remained ‘near to us’ after they died. A truly loving universe is such a different universe to the one we inhabit now. Basically people didn’t ‘die’ in earlier times—they died physically of course, but their entire spirit lived on with us. Love and feeling and emotion and togetherness was everywhere and in everyone. It is only the extremely alienated disconnection from our all-sensitive and all-loving soul in humans of more recent times that has left us needing to believe in a physical ‘afterlife’—needing to construct pyramids as a vehicle to supposedly carry us on to another life after we died, or needing to hold onto a belief in reincarnation, etc, etc. But it is love, and our love of love, that is what is truly universal and eternal/​everlasting/​immortal.”

As Wordsworth wrote in his poem, ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and streams / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light / The glory and the freshness of a dream / It is not now as it hath been of yore / Turn wheresoe’er I may / By night or day / The things which I have seen I now can see no more [because I’ve become alienated, I have had to block out all truth of another true world because it has become too condemning] // The Rainbow comes and goes / And lovely is the Rose / The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare / Waters on a starry night / Are beautiful and fair / The sunshine is a glorious birth / But yet I know, where’er I go / That there hath past away a glory from the earth…something that is gone / …Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream? [Where is my memory of that magic time I lived in?] // Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting [alienation] / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar / Not in entire forgetfulness / And not in utter nakedness [and the following words are the most beautiful I’ve ever read] / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home [as is explained in chapter 4 of FREEDOM, and in Part 1.5 of THC, God is the personification of the integrative, cooperative, selfless, loving ideals and since we once lived in the cooperative ideal state, ‘trailing clouds of glory do we come’. We come from an uncorrupted, cooperative, innocent, loving state—‘From God, who is our home’] / Heaven lies about us in our infancy! / Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy / …​And by the vision splendid / Is on his way attended / At length the Man perceives it die away / And fade into the light of common day / …Forget the glories he hath known / And that imperial palace whence he came.’

Wordsworth goes on to say that it is only a denial-free thinker or ‘prophet’ who hasn’t become resigned to living in denial and had to ‘Forget’ the true world who, from that honest basis, can plumb the depths of humanity’s estranged state: ‘Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep / Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind / That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep / Haunted for ever by the eternal mind / Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! / On whom those truths do rest / Which we are toiling all our lives to find / In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave.’

And for an example of the importance of selflessness and the unimportance of mortality that a ‘truth’-full ‘Mighty Prophet’ could see, we only have to look at Christ’s selfless sacrifice of his life so that the human race would have the cooperative, selfless and loving example of Christ’s human-condition-free life to live in support of and through. As Christ himself said about the importance of love, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16). You can see a description of the magnificence of Christ’s life in my Freedom Essay 39: Christ explained.

Yes, the human race is currently living ‘In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave’ and as a result have lost the ‘Intimations of Immortality’ of ‘Early Childhood’. Fear of death is a symptom of the human condition, not the cause of it, even though, as explained in paragraph 17 of THC, it has evasively been used as a cause of it.

 

According to Becker, our defensive, egocentric and often destructive behaviour is an attempt to cope with, deny, or transcend the anxiety we feel over having to die one day. Becker argued that humans seek to overcome this anxiety through what he called ‘immortality projects’: ‘We achieve ersatz [an artificial substitute for] immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity’ (Denial of Death). However, as I explain in paragraph 111 of THE Interview and paragraphs 139-140 of THC, our need for ‘fame, fortune and glory’ is a result of not understanding our fundamental goodness and therefore having to artificially prove our worth. As I say there, “We have had to smother ourselves with material glory while we lacked the spiritual glory of compassionate understanding of ourselves.” The insecurity of the human condition is the underlying issue everywhere we look, the reason why we have not been able to look deeply into and make sense of human life.

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Watch Jeremy Griffith present the psychologically redeeming and transforming explanation of the human condition in THE Interview. For a powerful mid-length presentation, read The Human Condition; and for a fuller explanation read chapter 3 of Jeremy’s definitive presentation on the subject, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition.