Comments on THE Interview

Physician Gabor Maté’s work courageously defies the ‘genetic explanation’ for our psychologically upset state, and instead recognises the profound impact of ‘childhood experience’. However, what is unique about Jeremy’s work however, and why it is so important, is that it gets to the original source of all the ‘upset’ and fundamentally lifts the ‘burden of guilt’ from the human race and allows us to forgive ourselves and others and finally end our psychologically troubled human condition and therefore it does “solve the problem”. As the distinguished psychiatrist Professor Harry Prosen (who wrote the Introduction to Jeremy’s definitive book FREEDOM) said: “What Griffith is presenting is understanding of the source insecurity that the whole human race suffers from for having destroyed our species’ innocent soul. It is a universal self-blame that his understanding at last provides healing insight into. All human behavior is saturated with that universal insecure, depressing state and resulting anger, egocentricity and alienation that has developed from it, but we finally have the compassionate foundation insight needed to dismantle all that ‘upset’/psychosis. So the real psychotherapy of our collective and individual psychoses can begin”, see FAQ 1.34.

Hi Satvir, subtitles are available on all our videos, including THE Interview and its companion presentations The Great Guilt, The Great Transformation and Sermon On The Beach, using the closed captions or subtitles function (just click on the ‘cc’ icon at the bottom of the video player/window and select your language). We appreciate the difficulty accessing these understandings in languages other than English, so we have created a translations page on our website where you can find key publications in Dutch, French, German, Greek, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Afrikaans etc. These translations have been produced by the wonderful efforts of the WTM’s ever-expanding global network of support to help spread this information! Unfortunately we don’t yet have any Hindi translations, but we hope to in the near future!

    We certainly hope you keep looking into this breakthrough understanding Yvonne because you will not be disappointed. The WTM is a global not-for-profit organisation and make all our books and publications freely available on our website. There is no ‘catch’!     With regard to Christianity, as you are realising, Jeremy Griffith’s work doesn’t contradict a belief in God or Christianity, or the Bible’s content. It simply brings biological understanding to all those pre-scientific concepts. In fact, Jeremy considers the Bible to be a repository of extremely rare denial-free truth, containing all the truth about human life albeit from a pre-science view. And although this is science, it is based on a Godly nature in the sense of recognising, like all the great religions do, that we humans once lived in a pre-human-condition-afflicted state of original innocence where we were perfectly instinctively orientated to the cooperative, selfless, loving, ‘Godly’ ideals of life; ‘God’ being explained in as being the integrative meaning of life; a state that we then ‘fell’ from. You might be interested in our FAQs on Religion.

    As WTM FAQ 1.9 ‘Should people be sceptical I which ’ explains, Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, has endorsed the significance of Jeremy Griffith’s treatise, saying “I have no doubt Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.” So while initial scepticism is warranted about the astonishing claims being made about this work the amazing fact is that they all withstand scrutiny.     With regard to your difficulty in discerning what is new here, we suggest that while elements of the human condition have been recognised by certain thinkers throughout history, what is unique about Jeremy Griffith’s synthesis is he actually solves the dilemma of the human condition by clarifying the difference between the way the intellect and instincts work. That is the great breakthrough his work represents (see Freedom Essay 4 on other thinkers who have recognised instinct and intellect elements involved in creating the human condition, without being able to provide the clarifying difference between them that actually solves it).

Hi Bryan, it’s great you’ve watched THE Interview as it’s the ideal introduction to Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition. From there, at top of our homepage HumanCondition.com, it states ‘WHAT NEXT after watching THE Interview?’ and guides you through the steps to pursue your interest. This includes subscribing to our mailing list where you will receive one email per week, occasional News Flashes, and notifications for our Live Events. We also encourage people to join our Facebook Group to learn more about this amazing, human-condition-resolved new world. We are a not-for-profit organisation and make all our material and publications free to read online, watch, listen to and even download and print!

Thanks Christopher. Just so there is no confusion for those reading these comments before they have watched THE Interview, what Jeremy Griffith presents is first principle-based, rational, testable, biological understanding of the human condition. There is no faith or belief involved, it’s all about knowledge.

We are certainly all individuals, however that does not mean that we all don’t suffer from the same core psychosis, which is what is being suggested here. It is explained that from an innocent and cooperative ancestry, with the emergence of consciousness our species then became psychologically upset. Over thousands of generations this ‘upset’ manifest in all manner of defensive angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour, and is the cause, we suggest, of all the material greed (“I like cars”), desire for power (“you are a dictator”), conflict (“war”) etc etc.

We will see...

I am very fascinated and would like watch it again.

You may also find our FAQ 1.40 helpful titled ‘Aren’t the problems of the world too overwhelming to ever be fixed? / Isn’t it too late to save the world? / How can you hope to transform the world? – In particular, how are you going to change the behaviour of the rich and powerful?’. It is explained there that even those who are most committed to seeking validation through gaining power and wealth, including those entrenched in positions of power, will quickly realise how empty and obsolete that strategy is now that we have the fully accountable, psychosis-addressing-and-solving, biological explanation of the human condition that establishes our worth at the most fundamental level. That FAQ includes an excerpt from the ‘Transformation Affirmation’ of John Biggs, in which he explains how this understanding allowed him to free himself from his prior obsession with power and wealth.

Hi Mary, it’s great you’ve watched THE Interview as it’s the ideal introduction to Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition. From there, at top of our homepage HumanCondition.com, it states ‘WHAT NEXT after watching THE Interview?’ and guides you through the steps to pursue your interest. This includes subscribing to our mailing list where you will receive one email per week, occasional News Flashes, and notifications for our Live Events. We also encourage people to join our Facebook Group to learn more about this amazing, human-condition-resolved new world.

We are very pleased to have your interest William. Yes, we can now see that the purpose of religion was to be the custodian of the ideal state while the corrupting (but necessary) search for liberating knowledge was underway. To finally solve the human condition we needed to find the scientific explanation for why when the universal ideals are to be loving, cooperative and selfless are we so angry, competitive and selfish. Answering this question required finding the clarifying difference between the way the intellect and instincts work, and that is the great biological breakthrough Jeremy Griffith presents. In the end, what people discover is it is the fulfilment of a time that all religions looked forward to when we could actually explain ourselves – see our FAQs on religion.

Thank you for your considered feedback, B Herbin, we hope you pursue your interest at HumanCondition.com where you will find a guide to 'WHAT NEXT after watching THE Interview?'. For readers of this comment, Jeremy Griffith’s biological ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of the human condition allows us to understand the real merits and liabilities of both the left and right wing. His work certainly doesn’t excuse the right-wing for its corrupting behaviour, nor unfairly focus on the failing of the left, which is that its insistence on ideal behaviour had the effect of oppressing the search for knowledge, but rather brings a profound understanding to both sides which ultimately will bring an end to the whole ugly business of politics. This is fully explained in our FAQs about politics (see section 7).

Hi Reinaldo, we appreciate the difficulty accessing these understandings in languages other than English, so we have created a Translations page on our website where you can find key publications translated into Spanish as well as Dutch, French, German, Greek, Polish, Portuguese, and Afrikaans as well as others. We hope to expand into further languages very soon. Also people can watch THE Interview (and all the videos on our website) using the closed captions or subtitles function in their native language (just click on the ‘cc’ icon at the bottom of the video player/window).

Thanks for your comment Christine. We are respectful of everyone’s beliefs, but do suggest that while Christianity contained extraordinary truth about human life, it was all from a pre-scientific view, and that ultimately we needed to find the scientific explanation for why when the universal ideals are to be loving, cooperative and selfless are we so angry, competitive and selfish. Answering this question required finding the clarifying difference between the way the intellect and instincts work, and that clarifying difference means we can now understand that we had to defy our instincts, which is why this great breakthrough is described as ‘redeeming’. It follows that by finding the good reason we had to defy our instincts, we can reconcile ourselves with them, because all our defensive behaviours (our anger, egocentricity and alienation) are now redundant. We no longer need them because we have the real defense for why we had to defy our instincts. We recommend reading FAQ 6.3 ‘Does this undermine religion?’ where it is explained that, “The great founding prophets of religion actually looked forward to the arrival of the reconciling understanding of the human condition—which means supporters of religion shouldn’t see Jeremy’s scientific demystification of religious teachings as blasphemy, but as religious fulfillment!”

     We suggest that the more you consider the interpretation of the Garden of Eden story given in THE Interview, the clearer it becomes that the story is a metaphor for the emergence of the conscious mind in the presence of pre-established loving instincts, and how the conscious mind was in effect ‘condemned’ by those instincts, and as a result became angry, egocentric and alienated.      With regard to the criticism that the metaphor really refers to knowledge “of good and evil” rather than knowledge per se, it is worth pointing out that scholars have long interpreted ‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’ to mean knowledge of everything rather than simply ‘knowledge of morality’. For example, in his book Genesis, the Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann wrote that the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” is: “… concerned with knowledge (or wisdom) in the general, comprehensive sense. Any limitation of the meaning of “the knowledge of good and evil” is thereby excluded. It can mean neither moral nor sexual nor any other partial knowledge, but only that knowledge which includes and determines human existence as a whole, [the ability to master]… one’s own existence.” Similarly, biblical scholars such as Cyrus H. Gordon (The Bible and the Ancient Near East), Harry M. Orlinsky (notes to the NJPS Torah) and Nicolas Wyatt (Space and Time in the Religious Life of the Near East) have written that the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” should be understood to mean a tree whose fruit imparts knowledge of everything, and does not necessarily contain a moral concept.      Which is not to say that the consciousness does not bring with it knowledge of ‘good and evil’. As Jeremy quotes in chapter 3:2 of his definitive book FREEDOM, Nicolai Berdyaev wrote in his 1931 book, The Destiny of Man, “Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world…Moral knowledge is the most bitter and the most fearless of all for in it sin and evil are revealed to us along with the meaning and value of life. There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless.” (pp.14-16)      Again, we suggest that the meaning of the metaphor of eating the fruit from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is that we became conscious, and had to search for knowledge, with the ultimate knowledge being knowledge of our ‘good and evil’ afflicted condition. As Richard Heinberg wrote in the quote included in THE Interview: “Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…has been lost…everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…innocence…the cause of the Fall is described variously as disobedience, as the eating of a forbidden fruit, and as spiritual amnesia [alienation].”

Thanks Erin. Yes the App is a wonderful way of accessing all the hundreds of audios of most of our books, essays and videos are now in the WTM App, as well as videos and links to all the essays on the humancondition.com website. You can download the App for free at App Store or Google Play.

Thank you for your thoughts Valore. The explanation of the human condition does take time to digest but as THE Interview explains our anger, egocentricity, and alienation from our all-loving instincts and resulting disconnect from nature, isn’t the result of becoming “more and more competitive for resources”, rather it is the result of a psychosis, caused by the clash between our instinct and intellect (which chapter 3 of Jeremy’s definitive book FREEDOM further explains). Significantly a psychosis is changeable as it can be healed through understanding so the solution is simple and all-powerful. In Part 9 of Jeremy’s booklet Death by Dogma deals with the view that the source of human selfishness and greed was the accumulation of possessions following the advent of agriculture and a sedentary society.

We can now understand that while the corrupting search for liberating knowledge was underway religion played a significant role as both the custodian of the ideal state and as a means of solace for those exhausted by the corrupting journey. However, it follows that with the redeeming biological understanding of why we had to depart from our original innocence now found, those metaphysical, faith-based accounts that looked after us are now redundant. In fact, what people discover is Jeremy Griffith’s work actually reconciles science and religion by bringing biological understanding to pre-scientific concepts. See our FAQs on Religion.

We appreciate your perseverence Bruce and perhaps our FAQ 1.3 which briefly presents the explanation may be helpful. Basically, humanity needed to find the scientific explanation for why when the universal ideals are to be loving, cooperative and selfless are we so angry, competitive and selfish. Answering this question required finding the clarifying difference between the way the intellect and instincts work, and that is the great biological breakthrough Jeremy Griffith presents. We suggest that this ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation is very simple but, as explained in THE Interview, it does open up the historically off-limits subject of the human condition so people can initially struggle to access or ‘hear’ what is being explained. FAQ 1.16 further explains this initial ‘deaf effect’.

    In Part 4 of THE Interview Jeremy defines the word ‘psychosis’ saying “The psychoanalyst Carl Jung said, ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own our own shadow’, and since we can now ‘own’ the ‘shadow’ of our species’ 2-million-year-corrupted condition, the human race is finally in a position to become ‘whole’. The word ‘psychosis’ literally means ‘soul-illness’ and ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’ (derived as they are from psyche meaning ‘soul’, osis meaning ‘abnormal state or condition’ and iatreia meaning ‘healing’), but we have never been able to ‘heal our soul’, explain to our original instinctive self or soul that we, our fully conscious thinking self, is good and not bad and by so doing reconcile and heal our split selves—but now at last we can.”     You might be interested in FAQ 1.47 which explains how this explanation differs from Freud and Jung. Basically, we can now get to the very source of human psychosis, which we have never been able to do before. Which is why the distinguished psychiatrist Professor Harry Prosen (who wrote the Introduction to Jeremy Griffith’s definitive book FREEDOM) said: “What Griffith is presenting is understanding of the source insecurity that the whole human race suffers from for having destroyed our species’ innocent soul. It is a universal self-blame that his understanding at last provides healing insight into. All human behavior is saturated with that universal insecure, depressing state and resulting anger, egocentricity and alienation that has developed from it, but we finally have the compassionate foundation insight needed to dismantle all that ‘upset’/psychosis. So the real psychotherapy of our collective and individual psychoses can begin” (see FAQ 1.34).

Thanks Clara, you will find this scientific explanation of the human condition all that you hoped for, bringing rational understanding to all the extraordinariness in the universe that we knew existed but science seemed to ignore. We recommend FAQ 6.5, which explains the difference between Jeremy’s explanation and new age spirituality.

Hi Michele, it is wonderful to have your interest! The work of the WTM is a scientific pursuit and was not created for profit, so all of our information and materials (including books, videos and podcasts) are provided absolutely free of charge. We encourage you to pursue your interest by visiting the homepage — HumanCondition.com — where there is a guide to ‘WHAT NEXT after watching THE Interview?’, including subscribing to our mailing list where you will receive one email per week and occasional News Flashes, and joining our Facebook Group to learn more about this amazing, human-condition-resolved new world.

Yes it is a scientific understanding that applies to all humans, but you can know that this is the breakthrough explanation of the human condition because once you understand the explanation and begin to apply it, you will discover it is so able to make sense of human behaviour (including your own) it makes it transparent. This gives us the “real insight” into our own life and personality and, as you say, “incentive to let go of erroneous perceptions.” Healing naturally follows being able to understand our condition. In the words of the highly respected psychiatrist Professor Harry Prosen, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, are relevent: “the beauty of Griffith’s treatise is that the healing starts at the macro level of the universal human condition; the healing of the shame and blame that the whole human race has suffered from...It brings the greater context and love to all human psychosis and suffering, and then, from under the umbrella of that safe position, everyone can gradually work inwards to their particular experience of all the imperfections in human life that have now, finally, been made sense of.” (FAQ 1.34).

Thank you Johny. The fundamental ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation is actually very simple, but the very nature of the human condition means explanation of it can be difficult to access initially as it has been the most terrifying of subjects to face because it is the issue of whether we are fundamentally good or bad as a species, and we have necessarily lived in almost total denial of it. We suggest looking at Video/Freedom Essay 1 titled ‘Your block to the most wonderful of all gifts’ where Jeremy Griffith explains this initial ‘deaf effect’ and how to overcome it, which is also summarised in FAQ 1.16.

Hi Tam. Yes, through the love-indoctrination process described in Part 3, our forebears emerged from the so-called ‘animal condition’ where we were controlled by selfish instincts, and developed unconditionally loving instincts. However, that same love-indoctrination process liberated the conscious mind, which, when it became developed enough, challenged those instincts for control of our lives. At this point the human condition emerged, and once again, we found ourselves selfishly competing, but this time the cause was psychological. It is true that without this understanding humanity would be “about to hit the wall”, however the arrival of this explanation changes all that. As with any new scientific breakthrough in history it will take time to gain mainstream acceptance, but basically so exciting and relieving is this breakthrough, and the freedom from the human condition that is now on offer, that everyone will want it, and so it will catch on like wildfire and this is already happening. Just read the ecstatic responses THE Interview is receiving on our homepage!

Hi Leeanne, thank you very much for your interest. A common reaction when people hear the explanation of the human condition for the first time, is that the explanation resonates with them — that despite our competitive and selfish behaviour, we have always intuitively believed we were fundamentally good, but we have never been able to explain this contradictory, conflicted condition. That is the great breakthrough Jeremy Griffith presents here. We encourage you to keep exploring our website; you’ll see at the top of the homepage — HumanCondition.com — that it states ‘WHAT NEXT after watching THE Interview?’ and guides you through the steps to pursue your interest. This includes subscribing to our mailing list where you will receive one email per week and occasional News Flashes, and joining our Facebook Group to learn more about this amazing, human-condition-resolved new world.

    Hi Gerry, while great care has been taken to present the explanation as quickly and simply as possible (which is done in Part 1) THE Interview also explains the very nature of the human condition means discussion of it can be initially difficult to access. This is because historically the issue of whether we are fundamentally good or bad has been the most terrifying of all subjects to face, and so we have necessarily lived in almost total denial of it, which means our minds can initially struggle to hear and absorb discussion about it. Wonderfully however, this ‘deaf effect’ can be overcome with patient perseverance and everyone can access this most wonderful of all gifts of understanding the human condition! See our FAQ 1.16 which includes the question ‘Why can’t I understand what this is all about, please send me an executive summary so I have some idea of what you’re trying to say?’.     Also, FAQ 1.3 presents a very brief summary of the key ‘instinct vs intellect’ concept. Essentially, when we humans developed a conscious mind some 2 million years ago, a battle unavoidably developed between it and our already established cooperative instincts. The result of this conflict between our instinct and intellect was that we became psychologically defensive, angry, alienated and egocentric – the upset state we refer to as the human condition. But now that we can explain and understand this conflict, all those insecure, defensive behaviours are obsoleted, brought to an end, and we free ourselves from the human condition.

The central tenet of Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition is that humans have a cooperative, loving instinctive heritage, not a brutish, savage and aggressive one, and that the source of our aggression is a psychosis. And, most importantly, as Part 4 of THE Interview explains a psychosis can be healed with understanding, so our psychologically upset human nature is fixable or changeable—not unchangeable, which is what it would essentially be if our competitive and aggressive nature was instinctive; if it was something that is in our genes and we were born with.

Thanks for your comment Steven. It is a vicious cycle but with this compassionate understanding of the human condition we can now appreciate that humanity’s necessary preoccupation with finding knowledge compromised our ability to nurture our children to the extent their instincts expect, but now that that preoccupation ends we can safely acknowledge the absolute importance of nurturing in our species’ development (see also Freedom Essay 21) and in the individual development of children (see chapter 8:16C of Jeremy’s definitive book FREEDOM see contents page here). Also, to quote chapter 6:13 of FREEDOM titled, Nurturing now becomes a priority: “now that we have found that very good reason why parents have been unable to nurture their children with anything like the unconditional love children instinctively expect and need, it is no longer necessary to deny the importance of nurturing both in the maturation of our species and in our own lives. Yes, with the arrival of understanding the terrible guilt that parents have felt for not being able to adequately nurture their offspring departs. Parents can now understand that their inability to adequately love their offspring is not their fault, but the product of the ever-accumulating levels of upset in the human race as a whole that resulted from our species’ heroic 2-million-year search for knowledge, specifically for self-knowledge, understanding of why we conscious humans are good and not bad. So yes, we can finally now admit the importance of nurturing and turn our attention back to the nurturing of our offspring—in fact, it now becomes a matter of great urgency that we do both these things.”

You described male traits.

    Part 1 of THE Interview Jeremy Griffith addresses the almost universal excuse for our angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour, which is that it is due to selfish, must-reproduce-our-genes, survival-of-the-fittest, ‘savage instincts’ within us, which is what you are advocating. However, with our psychologically upset angry, egocentric and alienated state now defended, it is now safe to admit that our human instincts are loving – see Part 3 of THE Interview.     Part of the brilliance of biologist Jeremy’s treatise is he explains how humans biologically overcame the genetic imperative to reproduce, which is what you are essentially referring to, through what he identifies as the ‘love-indoctrination’ process, which produced our all-loving, altruistic instincts and he uses the example of the cooperative and maternal bonobos, who have developed this ‘love-indoctrination’ process to a lesser degree. Because of this love-indoctrination, it is apparent that while there are remnants of selfish reciprocity, sexual opportunism and aggression in bonobo behaviour, as indicated in THE Interview, the greater truth is that they are extraordinarily nurturing, and extraordinarily gentle and cooperative. The ‘love-indoctrination’ process is absolutely fascinating biology which is summarised in our FAQ 5.2 ‘How did we humans acquire our all-loving, unconditionally selfless moral conscience?/ What do bonobos tell us about our own evolutionary heritage?’

Yes, because the human condition is the study of humans’ capacity for acts of both so-called ‘good and evil’ it is the realm of inquiry where science and religion overlap, so in explaining the human condition religion is demystified and explained by bringing biological understanding to pre-scientific concepts. For instance Jeremy Griffith explains in this interview Adam and Eve is a pre-scientific metaphor for the emergence of consciousness and its clash with our pre-established, cooperative loving instincts, resulting in humans becoming psychologically upset or ‘sinful’ or ‘evil’. Jeremy’s work represents a reconciliation of science and religion, see FAQ 1.15 ‘If this is a biological explanation why are there religious references?’

There certainly are! At last we can understand our behaviour has been driven by a deep insecurity about our fundamental goodness or worth and so now that our goodness is biologically established we no longer have to behave insecurely and selfishly and can legitimately return to a selfless way of living in line with our original loving instincts. This is the rapidly transforming practical effect of being able to understand the human condition which is fully explained and illustrated on our Transformation page.

    Thank you very much for your considered comment, Mark, it’s great this understanding is resonating with you. As THE Interview explains, for humans to return to our original cooperative and loving, kind and compassionate instinctive behaviour, we had to first confront and solve the human condition. We had to answer the age-old question of why when the universal ideals are to be loving, cooperative and selfless are we so angry, competitive and selfish, to the point that the world is truly a mess and in deep peril. It is only with the intellect defended for why it had to defy our loving instincts and become angry, egocentric and alienated, do we have the foundation to legitimately bring about “a better world for the sake of our children and for the good of all humanity”, that is, return to that non-upset ideal state or home we’ve longed for, but with understanding, in a fully conscious way; as the poet T.S. Eliot anticipated, ‘We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’ (Little Gidding, 1942).     We very much hope you continue to feast on this information by subscribing to our mailing list where you will receive one email per week and occasional News Flashes, and joining our Facebook Group to learn more about this amazing, human-condition-resolved new world.