1. ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
AND ITS RESOLUTION
WTM FAQ 1.23 What is the significance of the ‘Mexican Standoff’ where you don’t want to deny the truth of the explanation of the human condition but also don’t want to accept all its exposing and confronting implications? / Why can people become so angry and defensive with this information that they unreasonably try to find fault with both it and the WTM, typically saying such things as “You people need to be more accepting of criticism, like listen to my ideas on how to overcome the ‘deaf effect’”, and “You are using the circular, non-falsifiable argument to block me, where if I complain you say it’s because I’m alienated, defensive and deaf”, and “You are just being unnecessarily off-putting by making claims such as this information saves the world and telling people they’re alienated and that the left-wing is threatening to destroy the human race”? / Why do some people want to call the WTM a mind-controlling cυlt when it’s obviously the opposite of that since it’s all about providing understanding that empowers a person’s mind to think, not take away their ability to think? / Why can people become so confronted by and angry with the information that they are tempted to join the truth-hating attackers of the WTM? / Why did Plato say that the cave prisoners would initially be unable to hear “a single one of the things that they are now told are real”, which is the ‘deaf effect’ problem, and even say the cave prisoners would try to kill the person who tries to release them from the cave? / What is the significance of the phrases “The truth hurts”, and “Denials fight back with a vengeance when faced with annihilation”? / What is the real meaning of the concept of ‘judgment day’?
Jeremy Griffith’s response:
If we look at the biggest denial of all that we humans have been using to protect ourselves from unbearable exposure and confrontation with the 2-million-year developed corruption of our original all-loving and all-sensitive instinctive state, we can see how difficult it is going to be coping with that truth about our corrupted state, even though that truth is a fully compassionate understanding. The fact is that the biggest denial that we have been determinedly practising is the denial of the truth of our corrupted condition, and so the sudden exposure of it, no matter that it’s compassionate, cannot help but be a great shock. Yes, living in Plato’s dark cave of denial and then suddenly being faced with the light of understanding has to be a very great shock (see Video/Freedom Essay 11 for more about Plato’s cave allegory for the human condition). When Alvin Toffler wrote in his famous 1970 book Future Shock of ‘the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time’ (p.4 of 505), he was anticipating this shock. In fact, humans’ fear of what we have referred to as ‘judgment day’ is actually fear of exposure day or truth day or honesty day or transparency day or revelation day, the time when the redeeming understanding of the human condition is found and the blinds are, as it were, suddenly drawn on the truth of our corrupted condition (see Freedom Essay 40: Judgment Day finally explained). And obviously the more corrupted a person’s original innocent instinctive self is, the more they will fear and resist exposure of their corrupted condition.
Quite naturally, when we are faced with the sudden exposure of a denial, that denial will initially fight back and resist that exposure, which is what the phrase ‘denials fight back with a vengeance when faced with annihilation’ is referring to. Our brains try to resist the sudden exposure, finding a way to deny what’s being presented. The exposing truth temporarily undermines our sense of security of self, so as soon as we can find an argument against the truth, no matter how obviously false it is, we can derive enormous relief from our cornered situation—we can get the sense of power back that we feel has suddenly been taken away. So despite being obviously false, those counter arguments become extremely precious to us and so we want to, and do, believe they are true. Our mind does fight back with a vengeance against exposure of our denials. Indeed, we can become so uncomfortable with exposure of our corrupted condition that our mind will defensively build up all manner of grievances against the undermining, exposing truth.
So, our mind does fight back with a vengeance against truth that exposes our denials, which in the case of this information can lead to attacks being made against Jeremy and the WTM that is presenting the truth. We do get an immense rush of relief from doing that, even though quite often we aren’t aware that that is what we are doing because we actually believe our criticisms are justified. And if the WTM tries to point out the flaws in those arguments, we then resort to saying the WTM is not open to criticism, that it’s a dictatorial cυlt, and that it’s just preventing the ability to counter what the WTM says by saying we suffer from an unjustified ‘deaf effect’ (see Freedom Essay 1: Your block to the most wonderful of all gifts). Our mind just goes from one defensive, retaliatory argument to the next, and it thinks the arguments are truthful and is unable to consider that it’s being ‘cornered’ by the information, having its denial exposed. Basically our mind gets caught in what we at the WTM have come to describe as the ‘Mexican Standoff’ where we don’t want to deny all the truth that is being presented, but at the same time we don’t want to accept its confronting and exposing effects. In cases where the exposure and confrontation is extreme, what can happen is that we even feel the need to join the truth-hating attackers of the WTM (see Freedom Essay 56: Why there have been ferocious attacks on the WTM).
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Death-riding the information:
One expression of the Mexican Standoff is to become agitated by people becoming extremely excited by the information. If you’re unwittingly starting to feel confronted by the information then to have people excited by it can magnify your developing feeling of disapproval of the information. But the fact is, if the human race has been living in a cave of terrible darkness and has finally been liberated from it, as our information makes clear that it finally has, if you weren’t excited that would be a form of the weird, unnatural, mind-controlled madness that happens in cυlts. As Freedom Essay 45 shows, the only real celebration anyone has ever had is of the dream of freeing ourself from the human condition—‘No more falsehoods…the mind’s true liberation…we dance unto the dawn of day’, as the ecstatic girl on the cover of the Hair album demonstrates. To say she shouldn’t be excited is to project the ‘happy clapper’-type false excitements associated with pseudo idealism onto her real excitement—and all the other great songs about the arrival of freedom from the human condition reveal the same justified excitement. Trying to pour cold water on the human race’s freedom can only be a negative reaction people have when they’re in the Mexican Standoff and want to find some way of putting the information down to relieve themselves of the self-confrontation that’s going on. It’s actually a form of death-riding the information, unwittingly trying to kill it off because it’s too exposing and confronting. Again it has to be emphasised that the Mexican Standoff is a stage that almost everyone goes through, and is not at all criticism of anyone in that state. Talk to almost any one of the WTM Founding Members and they will likely recount their struggle with the Mexican Standoff when they were going through that stage.
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The following is an excellent description of the Mexican Standoff by WTM Founding Member Tony Gowing (as presented in the ‘Wonderful Transformation Counsel’ document):
The Mexican Standoff occurs at a certain stage in virtually everyone’s digestion of Jeremy Griffith’s human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding understandings of the human condition.
What happens as you begin digesting the understandings is that you subconsciously are opening a door to something everyone who is resigned vowed never to open again, namely the whole issue of our corrupted human condition. You start to reconnect with what the human condition really is, and that can be very confronting and destabilising. And that experience can make you want to reject and attack the information; basically make you want to retreat back into Plato’s cave of denial of the whole issue of the human condition.
And you don’t even know this is happening in you, you don’t know that this all-out war with the information has emerged in you. One part of you loves this information because you have seen how it can explain everything, and you know that it can and will transform the world, so you want to excitedly talk about it, and you want to support it, but, at the same time, there is another part of you that just can’t cope with the information, it’s just too confronting and exposing of your corrupted self, and too undermining and stifling of your egocentric way of validating yourself. It’s all just too truthful and exposing and destructive of the superficial and artificial life you have been living, and that part of yourself starts to boil with resentment and anger. You want to keep a lid on it because you know it is so unnecessary, wrong and destructive now, but that boiling just keeps growing. And where you get to is you just don’t want to be around the information for another second, but then again you know you can’t reject it. Well now you are squarely in the Mexican Standoff!
I want to stress that this is a very normal stage to go through prior to becoming transformed—which is how you end this problem of the Mexican Standoff wrestling match (see Freedom Essay 15: How your life can immediately be transformed). In fact, the Mexican Standoff is not that big an issue because it can be easily ended by taking up the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living—but you first need to realise what you are going through. It’s only if you remain unaware of what’s occurring in you that the problem can escalate and escalate and boil and boil, and if that is allowed to happen, that’s when you can even reach a situation where you start to attack the information with as many dishonest arguments against it as you can invent, and you can even want to attack the project and Jeremy by saying the WTM is a vile organisation and Jeremy is mad. Basically, you can become so distressed you don’t care that you’re attacking the future of the whole human race—because this fully accountable, reconciling and transforming biological understanding of the human condition is THE ONLY thing that can save the human race from a fast approaching horrible, horrible death from terminal levels of psychosis! (see Freedom Essay 55: Endgame for the human race)
This war in yourself starts out as just a bit of discomfort and you just ignore it, but once you are aware of it and you watch your behaviour really closely you see that you are starting to do things that are distancing you from confrontation with the information. You want to read books by other less confronting thinkers than Jeremy, even build them up in your mind as being more profound and important books than Jeremy’s, when the truth is none of them reach anywhere near to the bottom of the issue of the human condition like Jeremy’s books do. You want to talk to people who are interested in every subject there is as long as it’s not actually the subject of the human condition. You start to become annoyed by all the big claims like, ‘This is the book that saves the world’. And you start saying Jeremy’s books need to be re-written in a way that’s not so confronting. This particular response where you want to, in effect, ‘dumb down’ the information can even develop into a major complaint by you where you claim that because Jeremy’s not resigned he can’t relate to people who are resigned. In fact, this thinking can develop to the point where you decide that Jeremy has this ‘blind spot’ and ‘I’ll have to take over the project now and decide what’s best from here on’! We’ve seen this happen many times, and the cornered ego gets such a rush of relief from thinking these things that it can’t see the obscenity of what it is doing. So that’s how extreme the Mexican Standoff can become!
So to summarise the situation about the Mexican Standoff. It just makes sense that when someone is able to access this information their resigned, cave-dwelling, egocentric, competitive, power and glory existence is going to suddenly find itself exposed, undermined and confronted by the truth. The truth unavoidably and necessarily exposes the lies. Obviously this clash is going to escalate, get worse and worse, and they are going to get into a Mexican Standoff where they either retreat back into the cave of denial and just ‘pocket the win’ of having insight into the human condition and go on an even more power and glory-seeking ego trip, or they leave the old way of living behind and become transformed and live in support of the information without overly confronting it so it doesn’t become too exposing and confronting. Chapters 9:4 and 9:7 of FREEDOM are particularly important in explaining how to live with the arrival of this all-relieving but at the same time all-exposing truth day, exposure day, so-called ‘Judgment Day’ explanation of the human condition.
The thing is the more you become cornered the more that cornered state will show up in all kinds of ways—which are not easy to be aware of unless you are helped to realise what is happening in you so you can understand the situation and not be an unaware victim of it but rather an aware master of what’s happening in you. And the way to be a master rather than a victim of it is to become a transformed supporter of the information while avoiding studying and confronting the information more than your level of soundness of self can cope with. The more you see and understand what’s happening in you, the more the cornered reaction will lose its power, and the more you will want to be, and be able to be, a transformed supporter of the only thing that can save the human race from a fast approaching horrible, horrible death from terminal psychosis.