Part 2.4  How angry the human condition has made us

With regard to the depth of ANGER in us humans, the following is a cartoon by the brilliantly honest and insightful Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig that accurately recognises humans’ deep anger from feeling unjustly condemned for destroying our species’ original innocent instinctive self or soul’s idyllic cooperative, selfless and loving, ‘Garden of Eden’ home.

Firstly, as was explained earlier in paragraph 85, the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, which is truthfully titled in the Bible ‘The [soul-corrupting] Fall of Man’, describes how Adam and Eve (we humans) lived originally in a ‘Garden of Eden’ paradise of peaceful, loving innocence, and then we took the ‘fruit’ ‘from the tree of…​knowledge’ and were ‘disobedient’. In other words, we developed a conscious mind and free will. But in that pre-scientific story it says Adam and Eve then became ‘evil’ perpetrators of ‘sin’ because, as we now understand, they became angry, egocentric and alienated, and as a result were ‘banished…​from the Garden of Eden’ state of cooperative, selfless and loving innocence, an expulsion that, with the benefit of science, we can explain and understand was not justified and so can end!

While we have only now been able to explain the good reason for our corrupted condition, we humans have, as I have been pointing out, always intuitively believed that we weren’t ‘evil’ for becoming corrupted and didn’t deserve to be ‘banished’, and Leunig has perfectly captured the frustrated, angry effects of feeling so unjustly treated. As I explain about this amazingly revealing cartoon by Leunig in paragraphs 288-290 of FREEDOM, we see in the cartoon the psychotic (soul-destroying) and neurotic (mind-furious) anger that the feeling of being unjustly condemned has caused us—vengeful Adam chain-sawing and razing the Garden. The guardian angel is in tears at the wanton destruction, and we can see that Eve is similarly distressed by his actions. (This aforementioned (in paragraph 54) lack of empathy by women for men’s immensely upsetting and astronomically heroic battle to defy the ignorant condemnation from our instinctive self, which Leunig has so honestly portrayed here, is explained in chapter 8:11B of FREEDOM—and I should say again that the extremely important revelation in that chapter of the different roles that men and women have had in humanity’s unbreakably brave struggle to solve the human condition is yet another insight that wasn’t possible while we couldn’t explain the human condition.) But Adam’s expression and body language shows the enormous relief and satisfaction his retaliation brings him. In giving the guardian angel ‘the finger’ in the eighth frame, Adam is symbolically saying, ‘Go to hell you bastard for unjustly condemning me!’

But, above all, in the expression of extreme anger on Adam’s face, Leunig has revealed just what 2 million years of being unjustly condemned by the whole world has done to us humans. Yes, again, since the sun, the rain, the trees and the innocent animals are all friends of our original innocent, instinctive self or soul, through that association they too have condemned us, which is why Adam’s (all humans’, but especially men’s) retaliation against nature for its unjust condemnation of him (of men especially) has left the whole natural world such a wasteland! We (men especially) burnt the scrub, tore down the trees and dumped rubbish, pollutants and cement over what was left of nature, and, as explained in paragraphs 778-782 of FREEDOM, we murdered animals because their innocence condemned us! For example, the diary of the legendary ‘white hunter’, the suitably named J.A. Hunter, reveals that he dispatched ‘966 Rhinos’ from ‘August 29th 1944 to October 31st 1946’ (Peter Beard, The End of the Game, 1963, p.137 of 280). That’s the equivalent of nearly 10 rhinoceroses every week for more than 2 years that he shot to death! Similarly, there has been ‘5,843 Sq km of Amazon rain forest reportedly lost to deforestation from August 2012 to July 2013; activists blame the 28% rise in one year on looser environmental laws’ (TIME, 2 Dec. 2013)—the deeper truth being that if we humans weren’t so hateful and couldn’t-care-less we wouldn’t destroy pristine rainforest like this.

Photo of a shooter posing with a giraffe he has just shot to death. Note the
satisfaction on his face, and the crumpled dead victim of his get-even-
with-innocence-for-its-unjust-condemnation, triumphant brutalisation!

Incidentally, we can see here how, if we really wanted to save the environment, that ‘hugging trees’ and ‘patting dolphins’ wasn’t going to do it. Pretending to be loving and kind and considerate could make us feel good but it was never going to actually fix anything. To ‘save the planet’ we had to find the understanding that would end the underlying upset in us humans. We had to confront the issue of us, the human condition, not find ways to delude ourselves we were good so we didn’t have to confront that issue. As I explain in my book Death by Dogma, pretence, delusion and escapism got us nowhere; in fact, it made the situation the human race is in much, much worse because it hid the real issue of the immensely mentally upset or neurotic and immensely soul-repressed or psychotic state of the human condition. So yes, while we have learnt to conceal how neurotic and psychotic we are—learnt ‘civility’—underneath that facade of restraint and delusion lies the level of anger Leunig has portrayed.

It was with great reverence to Leunig that I took the liberty of drawing three more frames in his Garden of Eden cartoon to complete the story by showing how having finally found the redeeming understanding of ourselves we are able to metaphorically call the guardian angel back and show it that redeeming insight, which causes the guardian angel to cry in sympathy and take us back to the Garden of Eden! What a wonderful metaphorical depiction the whole cartoon now is of our anger for being unjustly condemned for corrupting our original cooperative, selfless and loving, innocent instinctive self or soul, and how we can now return to that fabulous peaceful and loving-of-all-things way of living!

So to again consider Leunig’s depiction of Adam (males), whose expression and body language convey the enormous relief and satisfaction he feels from retaliating against his feeling of being unjustly treated. Being trapped in such a volcanic situation, it really is no wonder that the whole human race, but men in particular, have led such an evasive, escape-any-self-confrontation, denial-practising, lying, avoid-any-criticism, egocentric, soul-denying-and-repressing, pretend-everything-is-fine-when-it-actually-isn’t, neurotic and psychotic, alienated-to-the-core, superficial and artificial, self-centred, indifferent-to-other-people’s-situations, greedy, power, fame, fortune and glory-seeking existence! As I said in THE Interview, we humans have had to smother ourselves with material glory while we lacked the spiritual glory of being able to compassionately understand ourselves.

Material reinforcement had to sustain us until we found spiritual reinforcement, understanding

Self-distracting, escapist materialism and the capitalism that supplies it, have been the necessary poor substitutes for spiritualism, the ability of our conscious mind to understand why it corrupted the magical, all-harmonious, all-loving and all-sensitive world of our soul! Consider what we had lost—as Sir Laurens van der Post wrote about the sensitivity of the relatively innocent Bushmen or San people of the Kalahari desert: ‘He and his needs were committed to the nature of Africa and the swing of its wide seasons as a fish to the sea. He and they all participated so deeply of one another’s being that the experience could almost be called mystical. For instance, he seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantis, baobab tree’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.21 of 253). And how wonderfully revealing of our lost sensitivity was the quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky from his beautifully titled book The Dream of a Ridiculous Man [that one day we might resurrect our innocent, all-loving and all-sensitive self] that I presented in THE Interview!

And of course we haven’t only taken out our anger on nature, we have also taken it out on each other, with endless wars, murders and atrocities committed against our fellow humans.

Humans’ inhumanity to humans!