Part 2.5  The extent of our mind-mad and soul-dead, human-condition-stricken existence

Overall, our conscious mind’s insecurity about our corrupted condition has been so great that our mind has been deeply preoccupied all the time with finding relief from the horror of that predicament! As I said, pretending we love animals or love a beautiful sunset or painting or whatever, makes us feel good, but in truth our mind has been preoccupied elsewhere, owned by a terrible dead weight of depression and a smouldering fury of anger! Thank goodness a million, million times over then that science has enabled the redeeming Instinct vs Intellect explanation of our corrupted human condition to be assembled, and our insecure angry, egocentric and alienated, mind-mad and soul-dead way of living to come to an end!!

Cartoon by Michael Leunig, Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, 8 Oct. 1988

This cartoon is another brilliantly honest and revealing masterpiece by Michael Leunig. Here he truthfully depicts all the horrors of the human condition. It is not a picture of a lovely ordered city park where people peacefully and happily enjoy themselves, as we human-condition-avoiding people delude ourselves the world we have created is like. Rather, it shows a mother and child approaching the ‘Gardens of the Human Condition’ with an expression of bewildered dread on the face of the mother, and in the case of the child, wide-eyed shock. Yes, as Leunig cleverly intimates, our world is no longer an innocent Garden of Eden, but a devastated realm of human-condition-stricken, mind-mad and soul-dead humans where ‘inhumanity’ reigns. With this brilliantly honest masterpiece, Leunig has boldly revealed the truth that we humans are a brutally angry, hateful, destructive, arrogant, egocentric, selfish, mad, lonely, unhappy and depressed species. He has people fighting, beating and strangling each other, drunk out of their minds, depressed, lonely, crying, hiding and suiciding, going mad, and egocentrically holding forth—reflecting every aspect of the human condition.

Yes, as the main character in the 2005 film The White Countess noted, ‘What we see out there [in the world] is chaos; mistrust, deception, hatred, viciousness—chaos—there’s no broader canvas out there, nothing that man can go and compose a pretty picture on.’ The polymath Blaise Pascal was even more damning in his depiction of the human condition, when, in 1669, he spelled out the full horror of our contradictory nature, writing, ‘What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth, repository of truth, a sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe!’ (Pensées, 1669). William Shakespeare was equally revealing of the paradoxical true nature of the human condition when in 1603 he wrote, ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!…​In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? [Brutal and barbaric] Man delights not me’ (Hamlet, 1603)!!

So the 17 goals of ‘The [United Nations’] Global Goals’ ‘Movement’ that each ‘global citizen’ and ‘every school’ is currently being told to ‘tell everyone about’ and ‘make famous’ (namely to address ‘poverty, hunger, well-being, education, gender equality, clean water, clean energy, decent work, infrastructure, inequality, sustainability, responsible consumption, climate action, life in water, life on land, peace and justice, partnerships for the goals’) hugely trivialise our species’ plight—because all these goals focus only on the symptoms of the human condition; they embody the ‘first interpretation’ of the human condition that was introduced at the beginning of this book, an interpretation that we now know is completely superficial. To stop the destruction of our world and the disintegration of society that is happening everywhere we look we have to fix the cause of the problems at its source, which is us humans, our neurotic and psychotic existence. WE are the problem; our out-of-control egocentric, selfish, competitive and ferociously vicious, mean and aggressive behaviour. The cartoonist Walt Kelly spoke the truth when he had Pogo, his comic strip hero, say, ‘We have met the enemy and he is us’ (1971).

Yes, the underlying, REAL question that had to be answered if we were ever to find the mentally redeeming and soul-relieving understanding of ourselves was why are we humans the most brilliantly clever of creatures—‘god’-‘like’ in our ‘infinite’ ‘faculty’ of ‘reason’ and ‘apprehension’, a ‘glor[ious]’, ‘angel’-‘like’ ‘prodigy’ capable of being a ‘judge of all things’ and a ‘repository of truth’—also the meanest, most vicious, most capable of inflicting pain, cruelty, suffering and degradation? Why are humans so choked full of volcanic frustration, anger and hatred—the species that behaves so appallingly that we seem to be ‘monster[s]’, ‘imbecile[s]’, ‘a sewer of uncertainty and error’ and ‘chaos’, the ‘essence’ of ‘dust’, ‘the scum of the universe’? That is what the issue of the human condition really is—and what beyond-description-relief it is that we can finally understand and end the terror and horror of the human condition! As Professor Stuart Hurlbert, Emeritus Professor of biology at San Diego State University, has said, ‘With the world in chaos what’s really needed is someone to finally make sense of humans’ seemingly mad behaviour—which is actually what Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, who I consider to be the newest Charles Darwin, has done. His world-saving breakthrough presents the redeeming and psychologically healing understanding of ourselves, which is the fundamental paradigm shift we need to save the human race.’

‘How infinite in faculty’—at 830m high,
the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the world’s
tallest skyscraper

But ‘what a monster’—war
in Kyiv, Ukraine, 2022

Truly, with every day bringing with it more alarming evidence of the turmoil of the human situation, the issue of the human condition is the ONLY question confronting the human race, because its solution has become a matter of critical urgency. Conflict between individuals, ‘races’, cultures, religions and countries abounds (and by ‘races’ I mean groups of people whose members have mostly been together a long time and are thus relatively closely related genetically—people who have a shared history). There is genocide, terrorism, extreme greed and dysfunction, crisis-level migration of peoples, starvation, runaway diseases, environmental devastation, gross inequality, ‘racial’ and gender oppression, polarised politics, rampant corruption and other crimes, drug abuse, family breakdown, and epidemic levels of obesity, chronic anxiety, depression, unhappiness and loneliness—all of which are being rapidly exacerbated by the exploding world population, and a resulting exponential rise everywhere in the anger, egocentricity and alienation of our mind-upset, neurotic and soul-repressed, psychotic human condition. Improved forms of management, such as better laws, better politics and better economics—and better self-management, such as new ways of disciplining, suppressing, organising, motivating or even transcending our extremely troubled natures—have all failed to end the march towards ever greater levels of alienation, devastation and unhappiness. In short, the situation is now so grim the human race IS, in fact, entering end play or end game, where the Earth cannot absorb any further devastation from the effects of our mad behaviour, nor the human body cope with any more debilitating stress, or, most particularly, our mind endure any more agony, any more alienated neurosis and psychosis. The journalist Richard Neville got the truth up when he wrote that ‘the world is hurtling to catastrophe: from nuclear horrors, a wrecked eco-system, 20 million dead each year from malnutrition, 600 million chronically hungry…​All these crises are man made, their causes are psychological. The cures must come from this same source; which means the planet needs psychological maturity fast. We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’ (Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Oct. 1986; see www.wtmsources.com/167). Yes, our species has come to the critical juncture where ONLY ‘self discovery’—reconciling, ameliorating, ‘psychological[ly]’ healing understanding of ourselves—could save us from ‘self destruction’, and thank goodness that is what the human race has with the redeeming Instinct vs Intellect understanding of our mind-mad and soul-dead human condition!