Print Save the World
Written by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, 2011
Environmental problems are promoted everywhere as the great ‘Save the World’ issue, BUT the truth is we have only been focusing on the symptoms not the cause of the devastation of our world and the disintegration of society that is happening everywhere we look, which is us humans—our egocentric, competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour. And the deeper truth is, to change that behaviour and, by so doing, actually save the world we needed to find the reconciling, redeeming and thus rehabilitating, HUMAN-RACE-TRANSFORMING biological explanation of our seemingly-imperfect, even ‘fallen’ or corrupted, so-called HUMAN CONDITION!
MOST WONDERFULLY, biology is now, at last, able to provide this long dreamed-of exonerating and thus rehabilitating understanding of ourselves that was needed to actually save the world! The author Richard Neville certainly summarised our species’ plight accurately when he said, ‘we humans are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 14/10/86). Thankfully, at the absolute eleventh hour, the arrival of ‘self discovery’ finally gives us the real means to defeat the threat of ‘self destruction’ and save the world!
The reality has been that until we found the reconciling, redeeming and thus healing explanation of the human condition we could hardly afford to admit that the issue of the human condition even existed, let alone that it is THE underlying, core, real question in all of human life that we needed to solve if we are to save the world. Are humans good or are we possibly the terrible mistake that all the evidence seems to unequivocally indicate we might be? While it’s undeniable that humans are capable of great love, we also have an unspeakable history of brutality, rape, torture, murder, war and environmental degradation. Despite all our marvellous accomplishments, we humans have been the most ferocious and destructive force the world has ever known—and the eternal question that we needed to answer if we are to actually save the world has been ‘why?’ Even in our everyday behaviour, why have we humans been so competitive, aggressive and selfish when clearly the ideals are to be the complete opposite, namely cooperative, loving and selfless? In fact, why are we so ruthlessly competitive, brutal and even murderous that human life has become all but unbearable and we have nearly destroyed our own planet?!
Unable—until now—to answer this deepest and darkest of all questions of our less-than-ideally-behaved human condition, of are we humans fundamentally good or bad, we have used denial as our only means of coping with the whole depressing subject, so much so, in fact, that the human condition has been described as ‘the personal unspeakable’, and as ‘the black box inside of humans they can’t go near’. Indeed, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung was referring to this terrifying dilemma of the human condition when he wrote that ‘When our shadow appears…it is quite within the possibility for a man to recognise the relative evil in his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil’ (Aion in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9/2, p.10). Yes, the ‘face of absolute evil’ is the ‘shattering’ possibility—if we allowed our minds to think about it—that we humans might indeed be a terrible mistake!
So while the human condition has been the real, underlying issue we needed to solve if we were to exonerate and by so doing rehabilitate the human race and save the world, we have been so fearful of the issue of the human condition that instead of confronting it and trying to solve it we have been preoccupied denying and escaping it. The truth is, rather than an attempt to save the world, focusing on environmental problems was a way of avoiding the issue of ‘self’, it was a way of relieving ourselves of the real issue of our troubled human condition through finding a cause that made us feel good about ourselves—as Time magazine editor Richard Stengel recognised, ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue’ (Time mag. 31 Dec. 1990).
Environmental problems are real enough but the fact is, to save the world we had to resolve the issue of our less-than-ideally-behaved human condition that has been causing all our environmental issues and social problems. Carl Jung was forever saying that ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’ because he recognised that only finding understanding of our dark side could end our underlying insecurity about our fundamental goodness and worth as humans and, in so doing, make us ‘whole’. The pre-eminent philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post was making the same point as Jung when he said, ‘True love is love of the difficult and unlovable’ (Journey Into Russia, 1964, p.145) and ‘Only by understanding how we were all a part of the same contemporary pattern [of wars, cruelty, greed and indifference] could we defeat those dark forces with a true understanding of their nature and origin’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.24).
So, what is the all-important reconciling, exonerating and thus psychologically rehabilitating, makes-us-‘whole’, human-race-transforming, biological ‘true understanding’ of our often ferocious and destructive competitive, selfish and aggressive human condition that alone has the power to actually save the world?
Certainly, we have invented excuses to justify our species’ seemingly-imperfect competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour, the main one being that we have savage animal instincts that make us fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate. Of course, this ‘explanation’ put forward by Social Darwinists, Sociobiologists and Evolutionary Psychologists that basically argues that ‘genes are competitive and selfish and that’s why we are’ can’t be the real explanation for our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour. Firstly, it overlooks the fact that our human behaviour involves our unique fully conscious thinking mind. Descriptions like egocentric, arrogant, deluded, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, alienated, etc, all imply a consciousness-derived, psychological dimension to our behaviour. The real issue—the psychological problem in our thinking minds that we have suffered from—is the dilemma of our human condition, the issue of our species’ ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted, less-than-ideal, even ‘fallen’ or corrupted, state. We humans suffer from a consciousness-derived, psychological HUMAN CONDITION, not an instinct-derived, stimulus-and-response-driven animal condition—our condition is unique to us fully conscious humans. Secondly, the savage-instincts-in-us excuse overlooks the fact that we humans have altruistic, cooperative, loving moral instincts—what we recognise as our ‘conscience’—and these moral instincts in us are not derived from reciprocity, from situations where you only do something for others in return for a benefit from them, as Evolutionary Psychologists would have us believe. No, we have an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral conscience. Our original instinctive state was the opposite of being competitive, selfish and aggressive: it was cooperative, selfless and loving. (How we humans acquired unconditionally selfless moral instincts when it would seem that an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic trait is going to self-eliminate and thus not ever be able to become established in a species is briefly explained in the What is Science? article in The Book of Real Answers to Everything! that this article also appears in (link provided at the end of this article), and more fully explained in Part 8:4 of the freely-available, online book Freedom (link also provided at the end of this article)—however, the point here is that the savage-instincts-in-us excuse is completely inconsistent with the fact that we have moral, NOT savage, instincts. Charles Darwin recognised the difference in our moral nature when he said that ‘the moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, p.495).)
So, what is the truthful, human-condition-addressing rather than human-condition-ignoring, biological explanation of our species’ present seemingly-imperfect, competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour? The answer begins with an analysis of consciousness.