The Wrong Reality. VIII:51d Contrary Concepts continued

Global Perspectives, the third volume of Bernice Cohen's book, ends in uncertain and contradictory confusion (because her thinking has been brought to these conclusions too soon). As I have said before, this arises from the fact that humanity is split between its morality and its automatic history. She regards the present reality as the spurting exponential growth of an economic phenomenon which has benefited us, but also as a hazardous lottery in which winners, in obedience to the mindless, savage laws of nature, are exploiting losers, which, if it continues too long, will result in global disaster. Cohen here penetrates to the ultimate problem but not to the right answers and solutions because she does not recognise that both the benefits and the drawbacks are inevitable characteristics of that phenomenon (the Machine), bothcontributing to eventual disaster. She fails to perceive that exponential growth has occurred through the power of intellect being applied, inappropriately and disastrously, to a system that was designed to achieve, by instinct, the balance of nature. She has not yet reached the point of understanding the true significance of intellect - that its fulfilment through supraconsciousness completely changes the way we should and could live.

Cohen's difficulty is that of all realists - that both the present Machine and existing human nature, being overwhelmingly in evidence, are taken to be inescapable. The problem is that amoral and immoral competition, right up to that between nations, is carrying us to disaster. Her solution is to regard the present as a transition to the time when humanity within the Machine can be policed and organised by a federated world government, on a morally just basis, using systems analysis of history to guide it in the right direction. She takes as her world model the states of America, united under a federal government, but there is a vast difference between governing the people of the USA, all of whom benefit from their entire nation being an outright winner in a world of competitive nations (though many of the benefits are questionable and, for many citizens, marginal), and trying to build a peacefully, cooperatively united world on the basis of dynamic competition. The only feature of this plan that is good, in theory, is that a world government would have no other to act or react against; otherwise the plan would not change our motives as servants of the Machine. Cohen does not say what the morally just basis of government would be, nor how the moral integrity of such a government, an island in a violently competitive sea, would be guaranteed. She expresses great belief in her systems theory but does not really explain how it will help in this transition, to the necessary extent of contributing morally. I think she should have started by recognising those moral precepts which an intellectual species must by its nature observe, and then she should have gone on to discover a humantrue social structure which would enable the human race to fulfil those moral precepts.

The foundation of Cohen's book is her conviction that competition is a human biological imperative, and her belief that this can and must be harnessed for our benefit. This approach ignores the superceding human intellectual imperative to reject competition. The principle of competition is a crude, cruel and wasteful device of instinct, a principle made necessary by the fact that no species of animal (until the human species emerged) has any other innate, independent means of securing survival. The competitive instinct isvital to animals, and there is no doubt that it isfelt by humans to certain degrees (also encouraged by the Machine and demanded for survival success). Cohen proposes that we should persevere with a social system that is dominated by the competitive principle (though it is propelling us towards disaster at an accelerating pace), in the vague and vain hope that it will somehow, gradually, go contrary to its own driving principle and adjust itself to a very different, morally just pattern.

Ms Cohen's suggested means of achieving this morally just pattern - by world government - according to systems analysis of the lessons of history (the history of a race developing in the wrong way) and by way of beneficial manipulation of the competitive money-economy, I believe to be utterly mistaken for the following reasons. Firstly (and this is one of the chief lessons of history, yet to be learned), the practice of competition is amoral and immoral, and is not a road that can possibly lead to a morally just society. So why take it? Our crying need isfor a moral society, so why do we not determine how it should be, and then build it? Secondly, competition is not a human imperative. It is characteristic of the present male temperament, up to a point, but it gets its strength from the conditioning pressures of a competitive society. It is not a strong feature of the female character. It is a principle that is foreign to the postconscious, having no humantrue meaning. The function of instinct is to serve life, not the other way about. When an instinct ceases so to serve, either it, or the species, dies out. In the human case, irrelevant instincts could and should be voluntarily eradicated from our nature and deliberately removed from our society.

I can imagine Bernice Cohen being displeased by all this, to say the least, but my criticism is on a purely supraconscious plane and is not directed against her personally. On the practical plane I admire her as one of the few individuals who have seriously undertaken to solve the problems of our world. However, it is vital to understand that those problems will be truly solved only when supraconscious intellation reaches the point where no doubts or questions remain.

I have mentioned before a common feature of the books already reviewed (also of the two yet to come) - that whilst they acknowledge the many immoralities of existing society they regard visions of fully moral alternatives as naive. Another book, Utopia, has given its title to such alternative visions. The author, Sir Thomas More, presented his ideas as having come from the mind of somebody else, Rafael, and set the scene in an imaginary place, out of this world. In this way he was able to criticise the then existing social order, and to envisage a perfect alternative, without bringing upon himself the wrath of the absolute monarch Henry VIII. By his wit and humour More contrived to convey his true meaning to those morally aware intellects for whom it was intended, whilst enabling those against whom his criticism was directed to pick up a different, innocuous and even farcical meaning, all unawares. I think that Utopia was intended to protest that just as the basic moral values are familiar to everybody, so should we all live by them. This is surely borne out by Thomnas More's eventual stand against the King, which cost him his life. But it was by the superficial and innocuous interpretation that this book came to be known. The word Utopia has become a term of derision to describe any proposal for radical social reform. It implies that any ideas contrary to the norm, regardless of their true and imperative morality, are in fact nonsensical, impracticable pie-in-the-sky, dreamed up by cranks and drop-outs too delicate to stomach the 'real' world. The great majority presently hold this opinion but no longer go in fear of a king. They go in fear of an existing reality that so overwhelms them, upon which they have become so mentally and physically dependent, and to prevail against which seems so impossible, that they have allowed themselves unknowingly to pretend to the belief that it is inescapable.

Finally I undertook to read Families, by Robin Skynner and John Cleese, (Methuen), and I'm OK, you're OK by T.A. Harris (Pan Books). Both these books tackle the human problem from a psychiatric angle. Capra, Roszak and Cohen presumed, more or less, that the range of human characteristics is fixed, though our actions are presently unpredictable, and happiness depends on radical reforms coming from outside ourselves, either from a mystical source, or by way of enlightened government, or both. The psychiatrists view seems to be that circumstances and events outside ourselves are broadly and inevitably fixed, and that happiness is a matter of maturing one's character and so adapting it to actuality as to get, and give, the maximum personal satisfaction. This latter view is summed up by Harris as the relationship, within each person, of Parent, Adult and Child compartments of self, where the object is to overcome parental bad influences and bad childish reactions, imprinted during upbringing, and to become a mature adult. This relationship is illustrated in Figure 15a :-

Psychiatrists exist to help people who are mentally sick with respect to the here and now - a very complex and skilled job. But by treating this sickness as human failure to adapt successfully to existing reality - a symptom - rather than looking to cure the basic disease by changing the anti-human norm, they are helping to perpetuate the wrong reality. They are also allowing the perpetuation of mental sickness into the future. They would argue that they haveto deal with the world as it is - that they have no alternative. But they dohave an alternative - the pursuit of supraconscious awareness. This is the right way, even if it means that the present mentally sick are not cured of their inability to adjust to the present norm, for supraconsciousness would virtually eliminate mental sickness, in time.

Both these books have been best-sellers, for the obvious reason that many people are suffering mentally. The authors believe that the work they are doing is beneficial and Harris, at any rate, believes it could bring about a peaceful and contented world. However, there has been endless effort to make humanity morally adult, from Plato to Christ to William Blake, and now psycho-analysis, with little apparent overall true success, now or in prospect. The reason is that the fundamental causes of suffering have gone unchallenged, and the true means of human fulfilment have remained unrealised.

I applaud these authors and have learned much from them. For example, it is of importance to understand that male homo-sexuality is not inborn but results from a male child's failure to 'cross the bridge' from mother to father so as to identify with the latter. In the same way, psychopaths are the product of upbringing so horrific that they retreat into an exclusive reliance on themselves, cutting out any regard or pity for others. I can see that unbalanced characters can be formed by Child and Parent fixations and from the subconscious influence of early childhood traumas. I can also see that the purpose of psychiatry is to get the adult in us to see the problem and take over. I am bound to criticise, however, because the mature adult who fits well into existing reality, the model for this curative process, does not represent the best in humanity.

'Families' is cynical in its derisive criticism of idealists as malcontents, extremists who are over-proud of the purity of their beliefs, and as people trying to be too good and 'leaving someone else having to be the baddie'. There are such extremists, of course, reckless protestors who use indignation as a substitute for intellation, but they are not true idealists. This cynical attitude towards idealism is commonly taken to be a sign of maturity, which it would be if existing reality were satisfactorily viable and/or inevitable. It is a common attitude with the Machine's winners, because they are knowingly or unknowingly biased, and with losers, because they cannot make the painful effort to see through it. The attitude is disastrous in that it makes no room for a genuine search after humantruth, believing this to be unattainable.

'Families' similarly supports the need to be 'healthily selfish'. As I have made clear already, this is another common misconception, showing unwillingness to break away from the inappropriate rules of instinct which we should have made redundant long ago. That such concepts are actually accepted as responsibly mature represents the present general failure to see that the human species is still in its infancy, needing to break with redundant instinct and the automaton just as the young child eventually needs to break with its mother.

I accept that babies can fail to establish appropriate boundaries, but just as Freud tried to explain human behaviour in terms of sex, so books such as this explain everything in terms of emotional extremes pivoting on an acceptance of existing reality's fundamental concepts, if not all its facts. To be acceptable, reason must relate to these foundations, they say, implying that independent non-conformist reason, being unrealistic, is unacceptable. This must come of a belief that attempts to cure insanity cannot succeed unless they refer to reality as their foundation, notwithstanding that existing reality is clearly insane. There is a case for asserting that, as to its foundations, the current concept of sanity is, in fact, insanity, and vice versa - that the original basis of a baby's failure to make sense of the world is that the world does not make sense.

Not only do 'Families' and 'I'm OK, you're OK' more or less accept the senseless world as it is, they also accept the human mind as mere consciousness assesses it. They are unaware even of the existence of the postconscious mind, despite indications such as the two-year-old child's sudden word-learning and our universal awareness of morality. This is to ignore the significance of a deeply disturbing fact - that in order to survive, at present (the conscious self believes), we must close ourselves off from our highest faculty, the postconscious, whose function is truth. In regard to the conscious self and the influences realistically affecting it, psychiatrists do not take account of the overwhelming amoral and immoral influence of the Machine, and of the competitive money-economy (see Figure 15b). Whether or not they deliberately discount the Machine's falseness, the psychiatrists are working for the contentment of individuals and they know that this is more likely to be achieved by going along with existing reality than by going against it. Another paradox - it is only by replacing the Machine with a humantrue society that human happiness can be secured, but this will bring little short-term satisfaction to the conscious self, only intellectual satisfaction to the supraconscious self.

It disturbs me that I have to be eternally critical - that in the eyes of some persons this chapter's criticisms of well-known and highly esteemed thinkers will appear arrogant and hurtful. It is not me-the-person who criticises, however, but my postconscious, and this is not criticism of these thinkers as persons but as conscious selves largely disconnected from their independent postconscious minds. I am aware that Harris, in Chapter 12 of his book 'I'm OK, you're OK' expresses deep concern for human morality, also belief in the existence of a moral order which is as yet only dimly acknowledged. I am well aware of the goodness generally inherent in people - of their often heroic kindness to the handicapped, politeness to each other and patience with children, despite the bad basic values of the Machine and the bad behaviour of collective society. All the books I have mentioned are tremendous achievements on the part of their thinker-authors, but they would have all come to the same humantrue conclusions had their authors become supraconscious. It is our first and vital obligation to intellate, even though this makes us misfits in the here and now. And when an individual comes to know the truths of the postconscious, it is vital that those truths be passed on directly and without fear.

I have already pointed out that Skynner and Cleese, and Harris, regard the conscious individual, with existing reality as background, as the subject of treatment. If the three parts of the individual (see Figure 15a) can be brought into harmony with each other, they say, all will be well. I say that not only does Fig.15a miss out the self's own supreme but neglected faculty, the postconscious, but it also ignores much the greatest trauma-causing and character-shaping influence - the Machine (Figure 15b below). The Machine not only falsely determines our characters but also provides fixed, organised positions into which these false characters may neatly and appropriately fit. Consequently, as the result of blanking off the postconscious and consciously embracing the Machine, most of us feel justified in what we are and do, but many do not, and it is they who may well end up on the psychiatrist's couch.

This is not to deny, of course, that every one of us is affected by childhood experience, some dramatically, but I maintain that this is consciousexperience, that existing reality offers no postconscious example to follow, and that the Machine makes it possible for the most unbalanced of characters to rise to positions of power in its hierarchies, eg Stalin, Hitler, pol Pot, and now Hussein.

If one concentrates on making one's personal life seem OK, despite its inconsistencies, then one will accept Figure 15b without question and adopt a picture of the world and universe which also looks OK, with the self as part of it, putting aside all contrary evidence and reason. This is fundamentally the wrong way round. We should be seeking the humantruth and looking to find everything's relevant place, not each establishing personal 'truths' and concocting a variation of false reality to fit round them. This commonly contrived practice may be made to seem morally acceptable by adopting a religious faith and devoting one compartment of self to that. This moral counterweight, against the opposite compartment containing the amoral automated self, gives us to claim that we are balanced adults. To continue click here