Claim. Due to the fall, the physical mind — which should have been subservient object — took the subject position, while the spirit mind — which should have been subject — fell into object position, with the result that food/clothing/shelter/sex became life’s primary objective and truth/goodness/beauty/love became mere means to material ends.
Elaboration. Lee’s account of fallen anthropology is structural rather than moralistic: the problem is not that fallen humans have material desires (they should) or even that they pursue values (they often do), but that the ordering is inverted (A. A United Being of Sungsang and Hyungsang). Values still exist in the fallen world, but “in many cases these values have meaning only in the context of a self-centered, material life” — love and acts of goodness become instruments for gaining wealth and position.
This explains why religious life across cultures has emphasized spiritual discipline, fasting, vigils, and monastic withdrawal. The pattern is not contingent cultural curiosity but the universal need to reverse a universal inversion. Lee cites Jesus’s “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matt. 4:4) as canonically demanding the very priority that the fall destroyed.
The diagnostic is sharp: any culture or movement that elevates material pursuits as primary purpose — even when it produces value-goods as side effects — has institutionalized the fallen ordering. This applies to capitalism’s profit primacy as much as to Marxism’s material-base ontology. Lee’s later sections will argue both systems fail to restore Homo amans because both leave physical-mind primacy intact.
The restoration mechanism is not the suppression of physical desires but their re-subordination: physical mind serving spirit mind, material life serving value life. “All the pains, suffering, and unhappiness of human beings” trace back to this single inversion. Critics typically engage on whether so much human dysfunction can plausibly reduce to one structural reversal — but the claim has the appeal of explaining both individual neurosis and civilizational collapse from a single root.
See also. human-as-united-being-of-spirit-mind-and-physical-mind, perfection-as-spirit-mind-dominating-physical-mind, desire-is-original-not-fallen