The Psychological Function of Hell

Devils and seducers-Picture is from the Vision of hell by Dante Alighieri, popular edition, published in 1892, London-England. Illustration by Gustave Dore
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It can be useful to compare belief systems to home appliances and our mind to an electrical socket. As long as an appliance has a plug which will fit in the wall-socket it can draw power, regardless of whether it is an appliance which is in good running order and does something useful or a faulty appliance which shoots out sparks which cause the house to catch on fire and burn down. We will often come to believe something which conforms to some psychological need, regardless of whether it functions well to meet that need over the long term. It may be a false satisfier. When this is the case, trying to argue against the belief based on evidence can be futile. What is needed is less to understand the belief system as to understand the nature of the need which causes us to be attached to it. We want to understand the nature of the socket if we are going to find a better appliance to plug into it.

Reading religious texts has led me to contemplate the concept of Hell. Some texts spend a lot of time talking about who will go to Hell and graphically describing it’s torments.

Jordan Peterson, in his series of lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible stories, argues that religion has to be more than “the opiate of the masses,” because, if you just wanted something to make you feel good, you wouldn’t have the concept of Hell. 

There are strengths and weaknesses to this argument. Some see religion as a tool for controlling “the masses.” In this context perhaps the opium comparison fits. A drug dealer has the addict wrapped around his little finger. How? Because if the addict doesn’t get his dose, he suffers withdrawal symptoms. His heaven becomes a hell. Either way, it works as a pacifier. The addict is either too wasted or too sick to stand up for himself.

However, I agree with Peterson that religion is too complex and meaningful a phenomena to be dismissed in this way.

I agree with him that we can look on the concepts of Heaven and Hell as representing states of being in the world. If we go down the wrong path our life can certainly become a hell. Take a happily married man with children. One day he is tempted to have an affair. From that point on his life becomes dominated by the fear of being found out. When he is, his family breaks up and he sees his children growing bitter. He knows that his simple mistake may have negative consequences into future generations, when he had hoped he would be the rock on which his children would get their best start in life. That’s a common form of hell. For someone else it might be ending up in jail.

I experienced my own hell while in hospital for a breakdown - a time when my mental suffering was so great I begged for death. The mistakes I made that took me to that point were mistakes in thinking. It wasn’t a departure from moral behaviour, as far as I’m aware. And my aim in my writing has been to try to help others to avoid ending up where I did.

Peterson’s focus has been on how the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and Soviet Gulags occurred. What is it in us that makes us capable of turning our world into Hell? From this perspective, the religious texts make some sense. If such events occur because of the collective effect of individuals abandoning moral responsibility and honesty in their own lives, then it is not beyond the bounds of probability that we could make real the horrors of the Book of Revelations. We really could all go to Hell.

The problem is that the idea of Hell, as it occurs in religion, is often not functional. Sure there are real hells and potential hells, but does the concept that we might have our flesh burned off endlessly for eternity inspire in us the kind of behaviour which will prevent us from bringing them upon us?

If we take this idea literally, what kind of cosmic order does it speak of? If we lived in a state where order was maintained by the threat of torture, we would rightly consider it the most oppressive of dictatorships. And in such a state, it would be hard to achieve anything positive. Living in permanent fear doesn’t bring the best out of people. Imagine if someone pointed a gun at your head and told you to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture, telling you that if you didn’t have it successfully assembled in half an hour they would blow your brains out.

And belief in Hell is not a defence against becoming a participant in the kinds of atrocities seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. People who professed a belief in Hell have been known to burn people alive or crucify them. Hell could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So how might this idea have developed and what is the need which it satisfies, albeit in a pathological way?

First, lets look at another psychological phenomena which fits a similar pattern - the mental illness known as obsessive compulsive disorder. This is an anxiety disorder in which a link forms between an anxiety and a ritual. A person may be obsessed about the possibility of catching a deadly disease and feel that, in order to protect themselves, they have to keep washing their hands with fresh bars of soap, perhaps unwrapping and disposing of the paper wrapper around the soap while wearing rubber gloves. Or someone may feel that, if they don’t line all of the books on their bookshelves exactly straight, one of their children will die. This is a form of what David A. Kessler, M.D. calls “capture”. [Capture : Unravelling the Mystery of Mental Suffering, 2016]. The mind has a tendency to come back to anxious thoughts - in a field of neutral information, such thoughts have a charge of significance - and so the neural pathways to those thoughts become more well-developed. If there is something which soothes that anxiety then the mind will get into the habit of associating the anxiety to that which soothes it, and so what starts as the equivalent of a dirt track becomes a superhighway circling endless around between the anxiety and the soothing ritual. This individual condition gives an idea of the socket into which the religious belief appliance can be plugged.

If we want to see how the religious conception of Hell originated we need to go back to another religious story, that of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is a symbolic way of acknowledging the birth of idealism. Idealism, in this context, means the idea that we should set a standard for our behaviour and try to maintain that standard through self-discipline and group discipline. This is the beginning of criticism. This is fine except that it gradually leads to an undermining of self-acceptance. Thus we come to resent some of the criticism. Eventually it lead to feelings of guilt, which turned our attention back towards ourselves making us more selfish and ego-embattled. It generates anger. So the story of humanity can be understood as a conflict between idealism and the wounded ego. This expresses itself as a battle between discipline and defiance, which at base is defiance of criticism.

For society to hold together we need to maintain discipline. This is what we mean by civilisation - it is our defiance we are attempting to civilise. But self-acceptance is always being eroded and the defiant impulse becomes increasingly strong.

We know that we need to restrain our defiance of moral principles so that the society on which we all depend can be maintained, but the more the pressure builds the harder that is.

I think this is where a concept such as Hell may have become perversely attractive. Normally we would think that beliefs motivate behaviour, but I think that, sometimes, behaviour can motivate a belief. You know that maintaining your discipline is important. You don’t want to suffer the individual consequences of misbehaviour. And you recognise that society is dependent on such discipline. But that is a rational motive, and what you are trying to restrain are some pretty powerful emotions or drives. Now what if someone told you that people who broke the law would suffer after they died? You might actually welcome that idea, because it might be just what you need to motivate you to maintain your discipline.

Unfortunately, this is liable to be a negative feedback loop. It helps to motivate restraint, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the erosion of self-acceptance which is driving the defiance which needs to be restrained. Thus, in order to be effective, the stories about how terrible Hell is have to get worse. And the worse they get, the more we are captured by them. And, of course, as with the person with obsessive compulsive disorder, reassuring rituals become locked in by this capture.

When we see people who place a high importance on the threat of brimstone and hellfire we can see that they are people who are having a hard battle restraining their appetites, or they are people who are cynically manipulating such people.

If we learn to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance we can heal the spirit of defiance at its source, live according to the necessary moral principles without internal struggle and discover our spiritual relationship to the universe and our fellows. Thus can we leave Hell behind us and know Heaven.

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A Big "What If?"

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What if there were a framework of understanding which could unite the perceptions of the mystic, the fundamentalist and the atheist into a single whole?

This is very much a “what if” experiment. Ride with it and see where it leads. For simplicity’s sake I’ll state speculations as if they were fact.

The universe is made up of energy. Matter is a structured form of that energy. Energy is eternal. It changes form, but it never ceases to exist. 

Energy is conscious, but it is a formless consciousness, lacking the kinds of limitation needed for the structured consciousness we call thought or sensation.

The universe is a place where structure arises from formless energy. The ways in which this happens may be mysterious to us, but our existence is evidence of just how complex and meaningful the products of that process can be. Apparently there are more connections in our brain than there are atoms in the universe. We’re pretty complex.

We are highly structured systems of energy which persist for an average of about seventy years. We have bodies which shape raw consciousness in a way we experience as physical sensations, ranging from pleasure to pain. And we have a brain which shapes raw consciousness into images and words.

The universe is a meaningful place. Complexity arises through relationship and meaning lies in relationship. The meaning of any part is defined by its relationship to the whole.

As individuals we sometimes identify with our separateness and sometimes with our connectedness to the whole. When we are in a loving relationship we identify more with the bond we share with the other person than we do with our seperate existence. Or an artist may think more of the meaning which is coming into the world through his art than he does of where his next meal is coming from.

We are not just our body. We are also meaning. We are not just the instrument, but also the music which plays on that instrument.

But we have a problem. To a significant degree we have become cut off from our source of meaning.

The creative principle of the universe is manifested by the emergence of more complex wholes from a meaningful relationship between less complex parts. This looks like the part selflessly surrendering to the needs of the whole.

We know that we are selfish, not selfless, so are we in a state of rebellion against the theme of the universe, against that which created us?

It is within the context of this question that religion arose.

Aware of our sinful, i.e. selfish, nature we could not look upon the face of God, i.e. acknowledge the theme of the universe which gave birth to us. We feared God and sought redemption through sacrifice and prayer.

To the degree that we were insecure, we needed the comfort provided by picturing a God with a human face.

ROME, ITALY - MARCH 12, 2016: The fresco God the Creator by unknown artist from end of 19. cent. in the church Chiesa di Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore. Copyright: sedmak / 123RF Stock Photo

In the Old Testament there is an emphasis on laws. If selfishness were not to lead to the collapse of the society there needed to be laws. Such laws are a compromise. They don’t solve the underlying problem, and they are based on the prejudices prevalent in the society, hence the absence of such current day laws as : “Thou shalt not own slaves.”

The New Testament seeks to address the underlying problem of the need for redemption from the selfish state into a state in which we love our neighbour as our self. That is to end the separation of humans and God.

The Bible relates stories. Our state of insecurity determines our relationship to those stories. Just as our insecurity may require God to have a human face, so it may require the stories related in the Bible to be literally true.

What matters in a story is its meaning. We read fictional stories and respond to them as if they were real. Do we weep for Little Nell? Or do we weep for ourselves, because we know what loss is like? We fear Dracula, not because vampires are real, but because we fear death, or something worse than death.

The stories we read in the Bible are profoundly meaningful, because they are stories about what we fear and about what we crave most deeply. We fear that we may lose that which makes the suffering of life bearable, and we hope to find that which redeems us from our state of fear and trembling in the face of the absolute.

We could argue forever about whether or not a story is literally true. A fundamentalist will insist that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. An atheist will insist that all of these things are impossible.

Meaning is to a story what the soul is to the body. If we get too caught up in the worldly - and whether or not something happened literally is a worldly question - then we can lose that which has a higher value. In meaning we find the transcendent. Through meaning we participate in the eternal.

Having separated ourselves from the worldly to find the meaning, we then come back to the world to make it real. What matters is not whether Jesus fed the hungry with seven loaves and a fish, but whether we ourselves feed the hungry.

KRAKOW, POLAND - DECEMBER 19, 2010; Christmas Eve for poor and homeless on the Central Market in Cracow. Every year the group Kosciuszko prepares the greatest eve in the open air in Poland. Copyright: praszkiewicz / 123RF Stock Photo

Selfishness is the knot that needs to be untied for us to feel at home in the universe that gave birth to us, for us to be re-united with God. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the insecure or otherwise suffering individual. Hit your thumb with a hammer and you’ll have trouble thinking about anything else but your thumb. In the same way, our insecurity turns us inwards. It can be a negative feedback loop. We behave selfishly. We feel guilty about behaving selfishly. The pain of the guilt directs our attention even more strongly toward our self. This makes us even more selfish. Thus the knot tightens.

Assurances that God forgives our sins may ease the problem, but they are founded on faith rather than rational understanding.

If we try cultivating unconditional self-acceptance and find that it produces a better result than trying to force ourselves to be less selfish, or punishing ourselves, then we learn through our own direct experience what it means to find redemption.

The relationship between Hell and Heaven can be understood in the relationship between the body and meaning. 

The body makes suffering possible. Meaning makes that suffering bearable. Pleasure is experienced in the satisfaction of bodily needs or the easing of bodily suffering.  The psychological insecurity which comes from being cut off from meaning may interfere with our ability to feel satiated by the satisfaction of these needs.

What is bliss? It isn’t a thought, though it may accompany a thought. It isn’t a physical sensation, though it may accompany a physical sensation. Bliss is loss of self-consciousness. Bliss is when we are so enraptured by something that we forget ourselves.

If the universe is conscious energy, perhaps bliss is it’s default state. The limitation provided by a body and mind increases its ability to manifest meaning, but carries with it the price tag of suffering, something which can be increased or decreased depending on the thoughts that form in that mind. So, from bliss we come and to bliss we will go. And while we are alive, the secret to bliss is love, the meaningful connection that allows us to forget ourselves in a union like that from which we came. This may be love with another person or love of an activity.

So the concept of eternal life is one of identification. Do we identify with the body or ego, which are temporary, or with the process in which we participate? If our consciousness is that of the universe limited by a temporary form, then we are at least as much the eternal as we are the temporal.

Concepts of life after death often revolve around the idea of the persistence of the personalty into a post-death realm, either of punishment or reward. Like the focus on stories being literally true, this is an indication of how insecurity makes us cling to what we know. We fixate on that which we can’t fully accept, and so, not truly accepting our personality we can’t imagine leaving it behind.

So let’s cultivate unconditional self-acceptance and find out whether doing so blissfully realigns us with the creative principle of the universe.

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Will Policing Our Cultural Expressions Discourage Violence?

Promotional material for X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) (dir. Bryan Singer) (20th Century Fox/Marvel)

Why does violence occur in our society? Clearly the reasons are complex and variable, but by asking ourselves a few questions we may be able to assess the best strategies to tackle the problem.

What has got me thinking about this issue are some recent examples of a particular strategy to fighting the problem of violence - particularly violence against women - in our society. This strategy argues that visual depictions of such violence and jokes about such violence are likely to be seen as condoning this behaviour. The strategy gives birth not just to censure of free expression but the production of media campaigns which try to convince us that this violence occurs in our society because we are too tolerant of it.

Our culture tells us that violence - except in self-defence - is wrong and that violence by men against women and by adults generally against children is especially heinous. As a general rule we no longer condone corporal punishment.

So the problem of violence in our society is not due to moral ignorance - it isn’t because we don’t know that violence of this kind is wrong. Or, at the very least, we know that society generally believes that it is wrong, even if we do not.

For most of us there are two reasons to obey a socially shared moral principle - to have a clear conscience and to avoid the censure of others. A psychopath might have no conscience, but even they might benefit from avoiding social censure.

Violence may occur where a subculture gives the individual greater acceptance because of this behaviour, for instance in a criminal gang. The social censure motive is then working in the opposite direction and overriding the conscience, if there is one.

A powerful physical or psychological need can override moral principles as well, e.g. the need to obtain the next fix of a drug.

And the generation of destructive impulses in the ego through a breakdown in its healthy functioning can propel the individual to act violently towards others, just as, if the impulses are directed against the self, the individual may commit suicide.

There is a great deal of speculation about Omar Mateen - the man who killed 49 people in an Orlando gay nightclub. He may or may not have been bisexual or homosexual himself. But his progressive radicalisation and eventual violent behaviour would make more sense if he were, because it would indicate the presence of a double bind - he can’t let go of his religion (which condemns homosexuality) but he can’t rid himself of the desires which are so condemned. His fear of his desires causes him to cling more tightly to the religion which cause him to feel an increasing fear of his desires which causes him to cling to the religion… It’s an untenable situation. Double binds can lead to insanity or suicide. They can also lead to murder. If one interpretation of the religion is that homosexuals should be killed (this is the interpretation given by the religious rulers of countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran) then killing as many homosexuals as possible is one way out of his double bind. On the one hand it lets him express his anger against those who have a happiness he can never have. Secondly it becomes a way for him to atone for his sinfulness. “I may desire to commit sodomy but I can make up for this by ridding the world of more acts of sodomy than I could ever have committed.” If life in the double bind is intolerable then this provides a way out which can be viewed as something other than suicide, because the final shot is not self-inflicted. Of course this is all speculation, but it is a theory which has explanatory power.

The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said, "Whoever you find doing the action of the people of Loot, execute the one who does it and the one to whom it is done.". Abu Dawud (4462)

This is a very dramatic example, but something similar happens in less dramatic ways all the time. I’ve experienced it. In my case the double bind led to me being self-destructive, but I can understand how it could so easily go the opposite way and does. A man whose self-acceptance is inextricably linked to being a provider to his family who then loses his job may express his frustration - his self-hatred - in the form of violence against his wife or his children. If he can’t escape his situation by getting another job, then he is stuck with the irreconcilable dilemma that he is unemployed and unacceptable to himself because he is unemployed. The continued love and faithfulness of a sexual partner can very often become an absolute requirement for someone's self-acceptance, leading many men and women to violently attack someone who cheats on them or breaks up with them.

So the issue underlying the problem of violence in our society is one of self-acceptance. The problem to be addressed is anything which undermines self-acceptance. If a philosophy or religion says we should not accept our sexuality, then that is a potential source of problems. If we promote the idea that anyone who does not meet a particular ideal of success or physical appearance or mental health should feel ashamed, then this could be a source of problems. (This doesn’t mean not celebrating people’s success or physical appearance or whatever. It is not a problem to have positive aspirations, the problem lies in backing them up with the threat of shame.) A lack of self-acceptance can lead to each of the problems outlined above - addiction, conformity to a violent subculture or a tendency for the ego to temporarily break down in the form of an violent outburst, something which can also become habitual.

We are presented with public service advertisements which tell us that domestic violence is a terrible problem. If this helps us to have the political commitment to support better methods of early intervention and policing of protection orders and providing more therapy services to both victims and perpetrators, then this is a good thing. But the key issue is the one not dealt with. What are the psychological factors which drive a person to violence and what can we do to help to free people from this compulsion? It isn’t simply a matter of us being too tolerant. At the moment someone lifts their fist or picks up a knife, they don’t care if we approve or not. The key to helping their potential victims is helping them. If the ads were telling us what we should do when we feel like hitting someone they might do more good.

In our impotence we turn to attempts to police culture. A poster for the movie X-Men : Apocalypse (2016) (dir. Bryan Singer) which shows the villain attempting to strangle one of the female superheroes was criticised as something which might promote violence against women. The studio apologised. It is clear that the big guy is the villain and thus his behaviour is not being validated. Big guys who pick on women who are smaller than them are not the heroes in super-hero movies. So critics are saying that to even depict bullying behaviour is to promote bullying behaviour.

This is an important issue because culture - from high art to popular entertainment - is the space in which we give free play to our imagination and by doing so allow our culture to evolve in more creative and effective ways. This is an improvisatory process which requires freedom. If we try to control culture to produce a specific end we will kill it. We will kill what gave us Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Hemingway. And we won’t end violence by doing so, because nobody hits someone just because they saw a picture of someone hitting someone. No-one kills someone simply because they saw someone kill someone in a movie. No-one kills people just because they played a video game where people killed people. Cultural representations may be imitated by someone who is propelled by some deeper motivation, but as long as those motivations remain we will not be made any safer by ridding ourselves of violent imagery.

An image like the one on the movie poster may be disturbing to some people. To someone who has been a victim of violence and is still suffering trauma as a result, such an image may be triggering. And those of us who may have a lot of generalised anger or specifically misogynistic feelings which we are trying to keep repressed may find such an image a disturbing challenge to our repressive strategy. So a major part of defending artistic freedom is addressing the problem of psychological insecurity. If the traumatised don’t find healing for their trauma and the repressed don’t find liberation from their neurosis, then we will continue to have a conflict between the desire to provide them with protection and the need of the rest of us to be free in our expression. Acceptance is the source of such healing. Avoidance, while it may be desirable as a temporary strategy, is not the solution. If something produces anxiety the answer is to expose ourselves to it and wait until the anxiety dies down. For the repressed individual it is important to learn that it is O.K. to have hostile and misogynistic feelings. It is O.K. to have any kind of feelings at all. That realisation that they are O.K. and that there is no need to fight against them as feelings will lead to a drastic decrease in their severity. It is when we don’t accept something negative about ourselves that that thing increases. So the irony is that, by over-reacting to images we feel are misogynistic, we may actually be increasing the hold of misogynistic feelings on many individuals.

Another example of this strategy is an increasing tendency for media personalities to be heavily censured for making jokes about violence towards women, etc. Again the argument seems to be that someone who hears such a joke is going to be more likely to be violent towards a woman or be tolerant of someone else being violent towards a woman.

Humour is a safety valve. It has the ability to release the kinds of tension which, if they build up too much, as in the examples above, can lead to violence. Everyone who knows me would say that i’m a very peaceful person. But I make jokes about killing children, raping women, torturing animals… Taboo humour is a great release of tension and thus a great aid to remaining peaceful. And it is a way to own our own dark side. It isn’t everyone’s way of dealing with things and I wouldn’t argue that it should be. But we should not make the assumption that tolerance of bad taste jokes will promote what they joke about, because the opposite may be true.

Happy Tree Friends (1999- ) (creators Rhode Montijo, Aubrey Ankrum) (Mondo Media)

The problem of violence in our society is a symptom of too little psychological freedom. An individual who has a lot of psychological room will tend not to want to harm another or will be restrained by his conscience or the threat of social censure in those situations where he is. The more an individual is backed into a tight psychological corner by an inability to accept themselves as they are, the more likely they are to do violence to others or to themselves.

So the deeper answer to violence in our society is to promote the philosophy of unconditional self-acceptance and to recognise that cultural freedom is not the problem but part of the solution.

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How Do We Reassure?

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Our central problem as a species is lack of faith.

This may seem like a strange thing to say given that many of our problems are so intensely wrapped up in religion. But is religious dogma a product of faith or lack of it? Of course it depends on which definition of faith you use. Faith can be defined as “belief in God or in the doctrines of religion.” In that sense, religion is faith. But the less specific, more essential, definition of faith is “confidence or trust in a person or thing.”

A dogma is not a belief system in which we have confidence and trust. In fact it is a belief system in which we lack confidence and trust to such a degree that we dare not expose it to the critique of reason.

It is the fear which characterises the absence of faith which drives us to cling to dogma.

Now I’m not suggesting that blind faith is a good idea. In the social sphere it might be dangerous to have faith that everyone is trustworthy. And to have faith that our problems will be solved without us lifting a finger is not going to be very practical.

But faith isn’t always conjured up out of thin air. We can inspire faith in each other through our behaviour. What we feel is still faith, but it is grounded in a modicum of evidence. Similarly, we have faith in the scientific method as a means of enquiry. Good results have given us reason to have confidence and trust in the process.

If fear is what causes us to lose faith in each other and in free thought and to cling to dogmas and to our embattled ego structures, then the big question is : “How do we bring a deep sense of reassurance to ourselves and each other and thus inspire the kind of faith which enables us to open up to truth, to freedom and to each other?”

The hardest knot to untie is that of fear-based religion. Just as it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove or disprove the existence of a god, so it is just as big a challenge to try to prove that that god or gods are not going to punish you if you think for yourself, act as you chose and embrace your fellows regardless of their behaviour.

What has got me thinking about this issue recently is the problem of Islamic refugees. On the one hand sympathy would lead us to want to provide refuge to anyone fleeing from a war torn country. On the other hand, if someone’s religious beliefs include the ideas the women must be subservient to men and that homosexuals cannot be tolerated, it becomes problematic to let large numbers of them into countries which have had to go through their own long struggle to establish the equality of the sexes and to let go of fear of homosexuality.

This kind of dogmatic fear-based belief system is clearly a blight on the human race, because it prevents us from being able to actually help each other with our problems.

Simply insisting that someone let go of their fear-based beliefs is clearly not going to work. This would be like tugging on a child’s security blanket. They will only hang on tighter.

What is fear of God?

Many of us believe that we may be punished by God if we do something we have been taught is wrong. In this sense, God appears to be operating as an externalisation of our conscience. We learn that certain things are right and other things are wrong. Internally, the punishment for breaching these principles is to feel guilty. Externally, as a child we may have been punished for misbehaviour by a parent.

It would be interesting to know if there is a strong correlation between the nature of our parents and our personal concept of God. It stands to reason that parents who believe that God will punish their children severely for misbehaviour are likely to feel motivated to punish those children severely preemptively on the basis of the belief that being hit with a stick as a child is preferable to being sent to Hell after death. Thus authoritarian religions no doubt operate as negative feedback loops.

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One thing I’m sure of. If the insides of our minds were exposed for all to see, the hold of dogmatic religion would end. We would all see how it fails to achieve what it claims to achieve. We would see that those who claim the greatest holiness are among the most depraved, because this is what fear-based repression does to us. And the young would lose all respect for their elders. Their respect would hopefully be replace by sympathy.

So how do we reassure?

“A ‘guru’ doesn’t necessarily teach at all. Some remain speechless for years, others communicate very cryptically. All reassure by example. They are people who have been into the forbidden areas and who have survived unscathed.” 

Keith Johnstone, Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre

I think we are all in a similar position to the depraved religious leaders. They are just deeper in the shit than the rest of us. It’s handy to imagine their situation in order to grow more comfortable with our own. What makes us most insecure is the suspicion that we are alone with our depravity. Realise that we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, in the same boat, and it is actually reassuring.

Recently I’ve been writing a bit about how political correctness seems to be getting out of control. I think this is a symptom of this dilemma. The more ashamed we feel of how hateful, scared and depraved we are the more we feel the need to take the pressure off by being hypercritical of others.

This is the end point of the development of the human condition. It began with the arrival of the idealism thought virus - the concept of good and evil. Idealism undermined out unconditional self-acceptance, our capacity for unselfish love. Loss of self-acceptance made us selfish and frustrated and aggressive. We developed all sorts of forms of self-restraint - law, ethics, religion. We developed channels for our aggression - sport, war, etc. And we found ways to transcend - art, music, etc. And we developed ways to heal - e.g. meditation and psychoanalysis.

To the degree that we practiced repression of the feelings of fear, hatred and depravity produced in us by our encounters with idealism (or other forms of criticism or rejection which undermined our sense of acceptance), they have accumulated.

The Christian and the Islamic religions both have the concept of a Judgement Day in which our true natures are revealed. One need not believe in the dogmas to see in this a perceptiveness about the larger situation. At some point, repression as a strategy was going to become ineffective. The more we battle with what we are containing within us the harder it is to deal with the external challenges of life. And since these religions are based around systems of morality and fear of judgement, it makes sense that they would give expression to such a fear through the concept of a day on which God would pronounce his judgement of us and bring punishment.

What needs to be remembered is that what concerns us is not our essential nature, but that part of us which is a product of exposure to idealism. If we are filled with hate, it is not because we were born that way, but because we have had our self-acceptance undermined. If we are depraved, it is because our loving nature has been warped by exposure to idealism and other forms of intolerance. These are thoughts and feelings only. Thoughts ask only to be thought. Feelings ask only to be felt. It is in accepting them - in thinking them - in feeling them - that we will be free of them. The truth about how we think and how we feel will set us free. And what makes this easier is that it is a universal experience. Some of us may be in the shit deeper than others, but we are all in it plenty deep, and that should be a source of great reassurance. This is where Johnstone’s concept about the ‘guru’ comes in. Anyone who calmly talks of this in a way which shows that it is something over which to rejoice, rather than something over which to despair or feel ashamed, helps others to emerge from the darkness into the light. 

The world is full of cultures of rejection and social control - from conservative religion to political correctness - but these can only lead towards disintegration. A counter-culture spreading a message of acceptance of ourselves and each other warts and all would be characterised so obviously by the joy, creativity and practicality that come from loving community that it could not be too long before it would have to be recognised as the realisation of the old religious dogma’s promise of paradise on earth.

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Why Do We Quarrel? : (The Example of the Religious Person and The Atheist)

Copyright: photochecker / 123RF Stock Photo

Sometimes something someone else says gets under our skin. We feel compelled to express our contrary view.

This is not a sign that we have confidence in our ideas. Quite the contrary. Confidence in an idea gives an individual the viewpoint which Jesus expressed in the parable of the mustard seed. A valid idea will bring forth a good harvest when it falls on fertile soil, so the best strategy is to spread it as widely as possible and waste no time on cursing the rocks who are immune to it or the barren soil incapable of giving it sustenance.

If we feel the need to enter into a quarrel it is because there is a threat to the security of our beliefs from within.

A person secure in their own religious faith may try to spread it, but will not feel the need to argue with members of other faiths or with atheists. However, for some, religion is a way of trying to maintain discipline over what is perceived as sinfulness. This is an insecure position, and in the extreme, if reason appears to threaten the structure of restraint, then reason itself must be denied and argued against. (Religion need not be like this. Some religious people do not feel at all threatened by the contrary views of others. And some of the great contributors to the progress of reason have been religious.)

Once again, when we come to atheists, there are some who are secure and some who are insecure. Reason has two main roles - 1. As a strategy for pursing understanding of ourselves and the world which gives us greater capacity to manage both. 2. As a defence against the irrational aspects of the human psyche. Emotions are not rational, and rational arguments have a limited ability to quell them.

If an atheist and a religious person are quarrelling, then each is also shadow boxing with his denied self.

If the denied self of the quarrelsome religious person is doubt in the reality of his system of belief or in its effectiveness to maintain his state of self-discipline, then what might the nature of the denied self of the quarrelsome atheist be?

Here are a couple of arguments made by atheists against religion :

1. It is irrational.

Someone using the discipline of reason to try to quell irrational feelings of fear or guilt, may see in the religious person an ally for such feelings, especially since attempting to inspire fear or guilt is a major strategy of the insecure religious individual.

2. It falsely claims moral superiority.

None of us are really morally superior, but it may be very important to our conditional self-acceptance to convince ourselves that we are. Deep down we know that it is a sham in ourselves and this is why we would rather attack what is, to us, the more obvious sham of another.

A religious individual may believe that an atheist is mad. An atheist may believe that the religious individual is mad. Believe me, as a person who has actually been clinically insane, you do no good arguing against insanity, because it is a defensive mechanism the purpose of which is to protect the individual from reality.

What lies at the heart of insecure individuals, be they atheistic or religious? Fear and guilt. Fear is sometimes useful to alert us to real dangers and motivate us to take action against them. But when the danger is not real, fear may paralyse us or drive us to counter-productive action. And guilt is useless. It pretends to be a corrective, but all it does is cause us pointless suffering and thus make us more selfish.

Unconditional self-acceptance is the solution to such feelings of guilt or fear. Freed of them, the believer can be a more appreciative servant of their God and the atheist can be immune to the compulsion to argue with the rocks who refuse his seed.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 1

Let me first explain what I'm doing here. As regular readers of the blog may be aware, I was once a supporter of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith and his writings on the human condition. Over time, however, I have become more and more critical of them. A lot of my own writings have grown out of my response to what I read in Griffith's work. Now he has a new book out. I'm only just beginning to read the book. It's a big book. It may take me some time. I have a lot to say about Griffith's ideas arising from the previous books I've read, and I'm sure that the reading of this book will give me more to say. So what I am doing is to write down my thoughts as they come to me. So this can't be viewed as a conventional book review, more like a free-wheeling running commentary. I began on Goodreads, but they have space limitations which I hit pretty quickly.

If you want to know more about Griffith and his organisation The World Transformation Movement, you can find plenty of information on their website.

I won't bother to illustrate these posts, but I will number them to make it easier to read them in order and when I add a new one I'll place a link to it at the bottom of the previous post.

Preliminary Thoughts

The author of this book believes that it is very important. So important that, when he submitted a pitch for a feature article about it to Scientific American in October 2014 and they turned him down saying that any successful application would have to be “more in the realm of science”, he described the rejection as “the most serious crime that could possibly be committed in the whole of humanity’s 2-million-year journey to enlightenment.”

I have a long familiarity with Griffith’s theories, having first encountered them in about 1989 when I read his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition. I went through a period of being an advocate of his work. I wrote a very positive review of his second book for an Australian left-wing newspaper. I wrote some articles on the net which attracted a fair bit of attention. But over the years my relationship to these ideas changed. When you desperately want to believe in a complex of ideas (and who wouldn’t want to believe that someone had found a basic scientific understanding of human behaviour which could set us free from all of our social problems and guarantee us a future?) it can be hard to really grapple with it and discover its flaws. I believe my ability to assess it rationally has increased in parallel with my development of an alternative approach to many of the issues it raises.

My personal philosophy revolves around the concept of unconditional self-acceptance. If selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual, and withholding acceptance from ourselves causes us mental suffering, then to learn the habit of accepting ourselves - all of our thoughts and feelings - unconditionally, will lead to us being less selfish. Our rationale for not accepting aspects of ourselves is generally that we want to improve, but it is just this withholding of acceptance which keeps us insecure and holds us back from all forms of improvement. Unconditional self-acceptance also provides a sound basis for rational understanding. If we are insecure about ourselves then we may feel the need to block out certain ideas or aspects of reality or to exaggerate others in order to avoid the pain of having those insecurities exposed. We see this phenomena all the time in the area of politics. We could talk all day about the terrible things done by members of the party we oppose, but we often explain away the misdeeds committed the one we support. If we feel no need to prove anything about ourselves through our allegiance to a particular party our view of this aspect of the world will be less distorted.

A high-level of self-acceptance is crucial when reading Griffith’s work. This is because it comes from the perspective of extreme idealism. He says of his first book, that it “grew out of my desperate need to reconcile my extreme idealism with reality.” Griffith’s books are not simply pleas for more idealistic behaviour. His belief is that our non-ideal behaviour needs explaining, and that a thorough compassionate understanding of it will bring it to an end. Because he is coming from an idealistic perspective, his explanation is, to use his term, “confronting”. He believes that what confronts us is his “truthfulness”. I think that what confronts us, if we are confronted, is his idealism.

Idealism is corrosive to self-acceptance, and thus to mental health. The more we accept ourselves, the more mentally healthy we are and the more honest we are capable of being in our thinking as we don’t have to pussy-foot around our insecurities. But the constant message of idealism is “you are not good enough”. If we take this message on board (and it can be hard to resist), it will make us more selfish, and if we are exposed to too much hurtful idealism we may become angry at this implied criticism and lash out at those who express it or remind us of it.

The reason I say that a high-level of self-acceptance is crucial is partly because this will protect us from being discomfited by Griffith’s extreme idealism. Griffith claims that most people find it hard to make any sense of his books at all when they first attempt to read them due to what he calls “the deaf effect”. He sees this as entrenched alienation from truthful thinking, but I think it could equally be seen as the insecure mind instinctively protecting itself from exposure to the unjust criticism inherent in idealism. I didn’t experience this “deaf effect”. I knew immediately what Griffith was saying when I read his first book, but I found the exposure to his idealism intensely painful as it undermined my self-acceptance. Of course his book also provided a “defence for humanity” the relief of which was supposed to greatly outweigh that pain. I don’t think it ever really did, but the fact that I believed Griffith was saving the world, and that I had a chance to support him, helped me to transcend that pain. It was only later, when I had lost my faith in Griffith, that I would find a way to heal it.

I’ve decided that I will slowly work my way through Griffith’s new book, writing commentary as I go. It’s a long book and I dare say my commentary will be long too.

You may ask me why I’m bothering to do this when I have already rejected Griffith’s central thesis based on his previous books. I think the value that lies in Griffith’s work is the challenge it poses. He is right when he says that the future of the human race will be short if we keep on as we are. And he is right that the root cause of most of our problems, from the political to the economic to the ecological, is psychological. The psychological rehabilitation of the human race, the healing of those aspects of our psyche which lead to our destructive behaviour, is the key challenge facing us. It really is a choice between self-knowledge or self-destruction. If Griffith doesn’t have the answers, we can at least consider his writings as the opening of a conversation we need to have. To dismiss them without a thorough analysis is to fail to take full advantage of the challenge they represent.

Let me first give my extremely simple explanation for how I believe the human condition really works. Our principle motivation, as with other animals, is the pleasure principle - we try to seek out pleasure and avoid suffering. And we are born with a tendency to accept those around us unconditionally. When someone causes us pain or we encounter some obstacle in our pursuit of pleasure, we experience frustration. We either express that frustration or we repress it. Repressing it interferes with our spontaneity and our ability to experience joy. But expressing it may lead to punishment or criticism. Criticism and taught values are incorporated into our ego in the form of what we call our “conscience”. What we think of as the battle between “good” and “evil” is between restraint of our frustrations in deference to the conscience and expression of our frustrations. Consciences are varied in how oppressive they are, depending on how extreme is the idealism on which they are based. And the amount of frustration the individual feels varies according to the traumas and trials of their life. Within this situation the key factor is self-acceptance. We begin entirely self-accepting. Criticism and frustration can eat away at that state. What gives the conscience its power is that it is instilled as conditions for self-acceptance. If we are “good” our conscience will not trouble us, but if we are “bad” it will pull our self-acceptance out from under us, a feeling we experience as guilt. We may try to compensate for a lack of self-acceptance in other ways. We may try to fill that hole with material extravagance, success in some field, token idealistic behaviour, or something else. Extreme instances of altruism can occur when an individual’s self-acceptance is so dependent on a conscientious principle that they feel that even a painful death would involve less suffering than a life lived knowing they had betrayed that principle. So extreme altruism is driven by the impulse to avoid feelings of guilt, but loving cooperation, because it feels good, is the healthy expression of the fully self-accepting individual.

The central question Griffith is grappling with is why we depart so far from what is ideal. Are we good or are we evil? The ideal behaviour that he has in mind is cooperativeness and selflessness. These are not the only ideals which have existed of course. The Nazis had the ideal of racial purity. The puritans had the ideal of asceticism. An ideal is a concept of perfection in some aspect of life. Undoubtedly he is right to look at cooperativeness as something to be valued. But what do we mean really by “selfless”. If taken literally, the word is nonsensical. To be without a self would be to not exist. But we use it as an opposite to “selfish” to indicate altruistic behaviour. What do we really mean by it, though? A person’s behaviour may serve the interests of others, but why does the individual engage in that behaviour if not to either increase their own good feelings or decrease their own bad feelings. This isn’t selfishness in the pathological sense of behaviour which deprives others of what they need or want in order to meet the psychological rather than physical needs of the individual. The unreachability of true selflessness, however, can make the concept a particularly powerful one for anyone who might want to gain influence over others by undermining their self-acceptance. While Griffith defines “love” as “unconditional selflessness”, I think that love is something else. I define it as a form of communication characterised by honesty, openness, spontaneity and generosity. Though we forget ourselves in love, it isn’t useful to think of it as “selfless” as it carries with it the reward to the self of, for that period of time, not being alone. For me, when Griffith talks of selflessness, I think of something oppressively conscience-driven rather than self-forgetfulness in the bliss of love and creative activity. This is, perhaps, an unhelpful prejudice on my part.

Why greed, hatred, rape, torture, murder and war? Griffith asks. Within my own conception of the human condition (or what I prefer to call “the human neurosis”) above, it makes sense that we are desperate to find some kind of resolution for the frustration/conscience dichotomy. Greed is an addiction to material relief from compromised self-acceptance. Because we are liable to feel guilty about our greed it forms a negative feedback loop which keeps it ever increasing. Hatred is a projection of the self-contempt of the non-self-accepting individual. Violence in general is an overflow of frustration, and sometimes a way of trying to compensate for compromised self-acceptance through a show of dominance. It is driven by the wounded ego. And war is a case where the desire to let out pent up frustration may actually align with the conscience. The conscience of the warrior tells him that the right thing to do is to defend his country and to kill the “evil ones”.

One area where I think Griffith is right is that our insecurity about our own worth has held us back from acknowledging holism - “the tendency in nature to form wholes” - and thus from achieving a functioning understanding of ourselves and the world. When we lose our capacity for unconditional self-acceptance we become selfish. To be a healthily functioning part of a whole we would have to focus outwardly, towards other people. Being forced to acknowledge that would throw our selfishness into stark relief. It would make us feel guilty. Guilt is the feeling we have when our self-acceptance is being further eroded. So we have two options here if we don’t want to make our personal situation worse. We either need to avoid recognising the tendency in nature to form wholes, or we need to develop the habit of unconditional self-acceptance in order to liberate us from guilt and thus free our minds to think holistically without feeling criticised.

I don’t consider Griffith to be a true holistic thinker though. Too much of his writing revolves around trying to reconcile dualities - “good” and “evil”, men and women, left wing and right wing - while retaining the conceptual distortions and oversimplifications inherent in dualistic thinking. He also thinks in terms of humans being “imperfect”. Perfection is an illusion that the holist needs to be rid of. The wholes we see in nature did not come about through seeking or achieving perfection. Evolution proceeds by “mistakes”, i.e. mutations. And a whole does not arise by insisting on some standard of perfection, it arises through inclusivity not exclusivity. Holism requires pragmatism not idealism. And, it seems to me, if the human race is going to come together into some kind of healthy functioning whole it will happen through an erosion of idealism in favour of love for ourselves and our fellows in all our messiness.

Harry Prosen, in his introduction, gushes about Griffith with the passion of a religious convert. I’m afraid the more someone gushes and engages in grand rhetoric the more I suspect that they are trying to keep themselves persuaded. I sometimes feel the same way about Griffith. His writings are, for something which is supposed to bring complete understanding to the human situation, rather low on concise clarity and high on verbose, emotive rhetoric. There is, however, a relatively simple theory at the heart of all this. That needs to be assessed, and so do the conclusions Griffith extrapolates from it. The tests are internal logic and the ability to illuminate the complex social phenomena of the world. There may be a simple psychological formula behind the apparent chaos of human behaviour just as simple mathematical formulae can underlie chaotic systems, but if the “proof” relies on reducing individuals to stereotypes it is no proof at all.

Griffith gives a good description of the human condition. He rightly rejects arguments that our aggressiveness is genetic. He rightly points out the limited effectiveness of most strategies for dealing with it. For those who support him, I think this is a major reason. No-one else I know is as uncompromising in their acknowledgement of the problem. The big question though is whether his attempt at explanation brings with it some form of genuine therapy for that condition. A doctor has to do more than diagnose, he has to provide a treatment.

Griffith quotes Arthur Schopenhauer : “Man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other object than causing pain…No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical nature which is far worse than the merely bestial.”

Idealism exists only in humans also. Where there is idealism there will also be the diabolical, as the diabolical (as Schopenhauer describes it) is driven by the need to rebel against the oppression of the ideals. Idealism corrodes self-acceptance and enforces the repression of feelings of frustration. In particularly vulnerable individuals this creates so much resentment that they feel compelled to do the very opposite to what that idealism insists upon. Idealism says we must be kind and generous, especially to the innocent and vulnerable. So, if someone is driven to hell by the corrosive power of idealism, they may specifically pick the innocent and vulnerable to inflict terrible suffering upon. This doesn’t mean that it is wrong to be kind, the problem lies in the insistence and undermining of self-acceptance (the guilt-tripping), which is the motivator of that compulsion. Love is the only sustainable motivator of kindness and generosity, and love begins with self-acceptance. The more we insist that people not be egotistical or aggressive, the more egotistical or aggressive we force them to be.

Now Griffith is not openly insisting on idealism. Ostensibly he is trying to heal the egotism, aggressiveness, alienation, etc. through understanding of these aspects of human behaviour which is both rational and compassionate. But is his explanation sound? And does it have the capacity to achieve that healing? If not, the poison of the idealism which lies behind his work may mean that it does more harm than good.

Read Part 2