Part 2.6  Our denial of the human condition and its alienating effects

Since the truth of our species’ 2-million-year innocence-destroyed, soul-corrupted, ‘fallen’ human condition has been such an absolutely unbearably depressing truth, the only way we have been able to cope with it was to live in almost complete denial of the truth that our species ever did once live in a cooperative, selfless and loving innocent state, and in almost complete denial that we suffer from any form of guilt-ridden, neurotic and psychotic condition! Along with extreme denial, extreme pretence and extreme delusion have been our stocks in trade—they are what have got us through each day.

Drawing by J. Griffith © 1991 Fedmex Pty Ltd

Denial protected us from unbearably depressing confrontation with the truth of our
innocence-destroyed, soul-corrupted, ‘fallen’, massively angry, egocentric and alienated
human condition (the crown represents the egocentric, ‘I am a legend’ delusion we adopted)

The preeminent Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing extraordinarily bravely and truthfully recognised how fearful we have been of the unbearably depressing subject of our soul-corrupted condition while we couldn’t explain it, and therefore how committed we have been to blocking that truth out by denying our species ever lived in an original cooperative, selfless and loving innocent state, and, as a result of all this mental blocking out and soul-repression, how estranged from or separated from or alienated from our species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul we are. In the 1960s he wrote these absolutely astonishingly honest words that basically reiterate everything that is said in this presentation I am giving about what the human condition really is: ‘The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man [p.11 of 156] …​Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this [truth] is the essential springboard for any serious [truthful, effective, penetrating] reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life…​We are all murderers and prostitutes…​We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another…​We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [pp.11-12] …​the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …​Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary of anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love [p.23] …​The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man [expects everyone to become resigned to living in denial of the human condition]. It educates children to lose themselves [become resigned] and to become absurd, and thus to be normal [p.24] …​Each child is a new beginning, a potential prophet [denial-free, truthful, effective thinker], a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light, precipitated into the outer darkness [that we are living in] [p.26] …​Torn, body, mind and spirit, by inner contradictions, pulled in different directions, Man cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own body – a half-crazed creature in a mad world…​We are all implicated in this state of affairs of alienation [pp.46-47] …​we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them [p.87] …​If the formation is itself off course, the man who is really to get ‘on course’ must leave the formation [p.99] …​Schizophrenia used to be a new name for dementia…​that was supposed to overtake young people in particular [see the description of Resignation coming up in paragraph 160], and to be liable to go on to a terminal dementia. Perhaps we can still retain the now old name, and read into it its etymological meaning: Schiz – “broken”; Phrenos – “soul or heart” [p.107] …​we have all reason to be insecure. When the ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes in the ground, we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations [p.108] …​The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin – i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [p.116] …​between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded…​To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy…There is a prophecy in [the Old Testament book of] Amos that there will be a time when there will be a famine in the land, “not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord [words of truthfulness].” That time has now come to pass. It is the present age [p.118] …​How do you plug a void plugging a void? How to inject nothing into fuck-all? How to come into a gone world?…​I do assure you. The dreadful has already happened [p.153]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). ‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness]’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192). ‘We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the space man. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project – indeed, as a desperately urgently required project for our time – to explore the inner space and time of consciousness [which we haven’t done effectively because of our conscious mind’s fear of the human condition]. Perhaps this is one of the few things that still make sense in our historical context. We are so out of touch with this realm [so in denial of the issue of our alienated, mind-mad, soul-dead human condition] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist. It is very small wonder that it is perilous indeed to explore such a lost realm [p.105] …​True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the “inner” archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a [transformed] rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer [we can now explain why the ego or intellect had to ‘betray’ our ‘divine’ instinctive self or soul] [p.119] …​the direction we have to take is back and in [p.137]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise).

Holy dooley, what an absolutely incredibly brave and honest description of the human condition in a time when there was still no redeeming understanding of our corrupted condition like there is now! And to think I have brought compassionate, relieving and healing explanation and understanding to all the problems that R.D. Laing has so honestly described. What redemption and relief for the human race! And to do that, all I did was think truthfully—as R.D. Laing said, undertake the ‘desperately urgently required project for our time – to explore the inner space and time of consciousness’, with ‘consciousness’ being a traditional code word for our conscious-mind-troubled human condition.

The irreverent, disrespectful-of-the-intellectual-world-of-denial,
fearlessly-truth-revealing R.D. Laing (right) in 1967, addressing
the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ (whatever that means!) conference

A rare example of someone who managed to penetrate and honestly depict this ‘fifty feet of solid concrete’ wall of alienating denial of the truth of our tortured human condition was the great Irish artist Francis Bacon. While people living in denial of what the human condition actually is, maintaining ‘that it does not exist’ as Laing said, typically find Bacon’s work ‘enigmatic’ and ‘obscene’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 Apr. 1992), there is really no mistaking the agony of the human condition in Bacon’s death-mask-like, twisted, smudged, distorted, trodden-on—alienated—faces, and tortured, contorted, stomach-knotted, arms-pinned, psychologically strangled and imprisoned bodies; consider, for instance, his Study for self-portrait below! Indeed, Bacon actually said that through his art he sought to puncture the ‘veil’ Laing wrote about above, saying, ‘We nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And sometimes I think, when people say my work looks violent that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens’ (David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1993, p.82). It is some recognition of the incredible integrity/​honesty/​truth in Bacon’s work that in 2013 one of his triptychs sold for an astonishing $US142.4 million, becoming (at the time) ‘the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, breaking the previous record, set in May 2012, when a version of [the Norwegian painter] Edvard Munch’s The Scream [another exceptionally honest, horror-of-the-human-condition-revealing painting that I will be referring to again shortly in paragraph 170] sold for $119.9 million’ (TIME, 25 Nov. 2013).

Detail from Francis Bacon’s Study for self-portrait, 1976

Another example of an extremely honest description like R.D. Laing’s of our soul-corrupted, mad-with-pain-and-anger human condition was given by Jesus Christ—one of the most honest, denial-free, sound minds in recorded history—when he said, ‘O bitterness of the fire [Christ is using the metaphor of fire to describe the extremely psychologically upset anger, egocentricity and alienation in humans] that blazes in the bodies of men and in their marrow, kindling in them night and day, and burning the limbs of men and making their minds become drunk and their souls become deranged…​Woe to you, captives, for you are bound in caverns [in the next Part 2.7 we will see how Plato also described humans as being captive prisoners in a dark cave]! You laugh! In mad laughter you rejoice [pretend you’re happy and all is well when the truth is you’re full of suffering and despair]! You neither realize your perdition, nor do you reflect on your circumstances, nor have you understood that you dwell in darkness and death [you live in determined denial of your corrupted human condition]! On the contrary, you are drunk with the fire and full of bitterness. Your mind is deranged on account of the burning that is in you, and sweet to you are the poison and the blows of your enemies! And the darkness rose for you like the light, for you surrendered your freedom for servitude [to denial]! You darkened your hearts and surrendered your thoughts to folly, and you filled your thoughts with the smoke of the fire that is in you! And your light has hidden in the cloud [of darkness] and the garment that is put upon you, you [pursued] [with deceit]. And you were seized by the hope that does not exist. And whom is it you have believed? Do you not know that you all dwell among those who [lie] [… and you boast] as though [you had hope] [that you can achieve satisfaction through winning power, fame, fortune and glory]. You baptized your souls in the water of darkness! You walked by your own whims!’ This amazingly honest description of the corrupted state of the human condition is from the Book of Thomas, a recording of a conversation Christ had with Thomas, one of his disciples. I have written about Christ’s phenomenally sound and brave, human-race-saving, lies-defying, truth-defending life in Freedom Essay 39—which I encourage you to read, as many people have, for example, commented that ‘This is the best description of Christ I have ever read!’ (Jivka Foster on Facebook, see www.wtmsources.com/215).

Drawing by J. Griffith © 2004 Fedmex Pty Ltd

Jeremy Griffith’s 2004 drawing of Jesus Christ as the ‘lamb of God’ (John 1:29, 36),
someone exceptionally innocent, free, centred, secure and natural.