For a long time animals only lived under the sea. The land represented a great opportunity for the flourishing of life, but fish were suited to life under the sea not to life on land. I don’t know what lead to the first fish developing the ability to spend some of its time on land, but once it was there there were opportunities for new variations which, if successful, could proliferate and diversify and make full use of the terrestrial environment. When that first fish crawled up onto land it bridged a significant impasse. Similarly when we humans developed the ability for complex reasoning we bridged an impasse inherent in the limiting effects of the survival imperative and competition for mating opportunities in other species. Once that impasse was bridged we gradually took over the world.

Ideas develop in a similar way to animal species. We have ideas and if they seem useful others adopt them. Particularly powerful ideas which seem to be useful descriptions of aspects of the world take hold and become dominant. Then somebody comes up with a variation on one of those ideas, the thinking equivalent of a species mutation. Whether that idea takes off and leads to new ideas or perishes quickly depends on how well it fits either the needs of the society or the information that has been gathered about the world. Some ideas, like the theory of gravity, take hold because they are an effective description of observable reality and are useful in that way. Other ideas, such as the idea that behaving badly can lead to an eternity of pain in Hell, take hold because they effectively serve a social function, in this case control of antisocial behaviour.

So there is a survival of the fittest amongst ideas. Some ideas, such as that the sun revolves around the earth, die off when a more accountable explanation comes along.

But in the development of ideas there are also impasses. Of course in science we can be held back by the technological limits on gathering of information in our era. But, in broader philosophical thinking and in the development of a big picture framework for our scientific knowledge we can be held back by a fear of allowing ourselves to think certain thoughts.

In religious thinking we have the concept of blasphemy. While this doesn’t directly effect philosophical or scientific thinking it is important to realise that religious thinking has had a tendency to have a big influence on acceptance of even scientifically valid ideas. Darwin was fearful about publishing his work on evolution because of the effect that it would have on people’s religious beliefs, and, even today, some religious individuals resist accepting its validity.

But for the non-religious thinker there are still taboos. For an atheistic scientist any thought that might be leading him in the direction of acknowledging something that looks like God might be a taboo. And there are sexual taboos. Any re-examination of the nature of human sexuality can lead the individual to come up against those. And there is our natural fear of committing hubris. If our reason or intuition tells us we should turn the whole history of human thought on its head we may wonder who we are to do such a thing and we may doubt our own sanity.

The thoughts that can lead us to a concept of the world and ourselves that appears to work can include ones which we feel that we dare not even contemplate lest they lead us down a path to madness or irredeemable depravity. But once the impasse has been breached and those thoughts have been thought, then sometimes all the pieces of the picture rush together.

In my case, my mind was liberated by madness. I feared insanity, but I ended up there anyway, and, by good luck, it didn’t kill me. And, as the psychiatrist R. D. Laing pointed out, breakdown can also be breakthrough. During my psychotic episodes my mind broke every taboo and committed every blasphemy. Caution was not an option. I had no control over my own mind. But when I returned to sanity, the impasses had been breached. I could travel back through those previously forbidden pathways if it were required to piece together a consistent explanation for my experiences and what I perceived about human behaviour generally.

Fight Against Only That Which You Wish to Become

Since the purpose of our armouring is to protect us it stands to reason that criticism or hostility towards the armoured individual will generally be an ineffective approach to getting them to change their behaviour. Anything which makes them feel less secure will reinforce their armouring.

Very often when discussing things with those who cling to rigid dogmas, I’ve tried to point out that that dogmatic thinking is irrational or illogical in some way. I can’t ever remember a case of them giving consideration to this criticism, rather, in most cases, they would respond simply by strongly restating their faith in that dogma. This makes sense, because dogma is precisely a defence against the brain’s capacity for free thought based on the fear that such thought might lead to a scary place.

The way that things change for the better in the world is not through fighting against what is wrong but by developing an alternative to it. A good example of this is the intolerance of some conservative societies to some forms of sexuality. Such intolerance is not gone. In some societies it is still dominant. But if we look at what happened in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States where homosexuality was considered socially unacceptable by the majority of the population and sometimes illegal throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century, we will see that what brought about the change to the relatively more tolerant attitude we have today was not criticism of the conservative viewpoint, although that certainly occurred. What changed things was that a few individuals openly defied social expectation. When those who were still “living in the closet” saw the example being set and that those who were being true to themselves, while still treated appallingly in some cases, were, in general, happier than those, like themselves, who were giving in to social oppression, they began to follow that example. It is always hardest for the first individuals who break free of oppression. The more who pour through the crack that has opened in the dam of the dogmatic society, the easier it is for them all. Those who oppose homosexuality were once powerful individuals who could crush and kill the brightest in society as happened to Oscar Wilde, now they are just pathetic individuals waving placards at AID’s victims funerals. That happened not through fighting them, but by refusing to be intimidated by them and showing that a life free of sexual repression could be a happier and more productive one.

While criticism and other forms of attack rarely bring about positive change in those whose behaviour is destructive, we also have to consider the danger that, in fighting against them, we are liable to become more like them.

During the Second World War, Great Britain fought against the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy. Now the Nazis were an example of a group of individuals who were so severely neurotically armoured that they had developed such a powerful fear of certain racial groups (and certain other groups) that they felt threatened as long as those individuals were present and so tried to exterminate them. Such an unhealthy society would, at some time, have to implode, but it was very efficient at killing people, so it had the capacity to take millions of innocent individuals with it on its path to self-destruction. And that is what it did.

But what happened when Great Britain fought a war against this horrific evil? Germany was in the thrall of a charismatic leader who was unquestioningly followed. So Great Britain got its own charismatic leader – Winston Churchill. Germany instituted state censorship and engaged in extensive propaganda. Great Britain instituted state censorship and engaged in extensive propaganda. Germany armed its young men and trained them to become effective killers. Great Britain armed its young men and trained them to be effective killers. Germany carried out the wholesale slaughter of civilians through the bombing of cities. Great Britain carried out the wholesale slaughter of civilians through the bombing of cities.

This does not mean that the fight against Naziism was wrong. In a world in which neurotic armouring is the norm, you have to do whatever you can when a society starts carrying out an act of genocide.

The point is that the price we pay for that approach to fighting evil is that we become contaminated by it ourselves. We may not sink the the depths of our enemies but we follow them a good deal of the way.

Another example of this is the behaviour of some of those who fought against communism in the United States during the height of the Cold War. During the McCarthyist period individuals were fighting against communism by instituting censorship, jailing dissidents, encouraging citizens to inform on their neighbours and promoting patriotism, i.e. the submission of the individual to the concept of a collective state. And yet, surely, these were some of the very things which were wrong with communism.