Transcript of the Introduction by Tim Macartney-Snape (AM OAM) at the launch of FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition by Jeremy Griffith at the Royal Geographical Society, London, 2 June 2016
Hello and welcome everybody to the launch of FREEDOM, especially Sir Bob Geldof who we are extremely honoured to have as our keynote speaker. I’m Tim Macartney-Snape. I’m actually a bit of an old-fashioned explorer so I feel rather at home in this world of maps and documentation of what used to be called Natural History. As a climber, a mountaineer, there is an innate compulsion to explore new terrain but I’ve always felt that in its pure form mountaineering is a metaphor for a deeper and far more important exploration.
Nearly 30 years ago I was very, very lucky to meet Jeremy Griffith. He is an explorer with a very rare and extremely precious ability to delve into those deeper areas. The mountains of the mind to borrow from Gerard Manly Hopkins, ‘Oh the mind, the mind has mountains, cliffs of fall frightful sheer, no man-fathomed’, etc. Both Jeremy and I are great admirers of Sir Bob Geldof [Sir Bob: and who wouldn’t be is what I have to add to the last comment!] for his fearless courage and great honesty in tirelessly speaking out about the crisis facing the world for which we all, for good reason, tend to try and block out. That perseverance has always inspired us to persevere against all the resistance to the desperately needed truth in Jeremy’s work because as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’, and the arrival of this understanding of the human condition was always going to rattle the rafters of orthodoxy.
Sir Bob will speak first about the crisis facing the world after which Jeremy will present the solution to that crisis. And I say the solution rather than a solution or his solution because, as you are going to see, Jeremy’s explanation of the human condition is so clarifying and accountable that it makes our crisis-causing behaviour transparent. And not only that, it lifts the burden of guilt that is the cause of our insecurity that in turn is the cause of our crisis-causing behaviour.
Now, you are about to hear Jeremy use first principle biological logic to shine the light of understanding onto the human situation, demystifying the darkness with beautiful, angst-relieving explanation that truthfully realigns the way we understand ourselves and the way that life on this planet works.
Now, today the uber-cool are into ingesting only the purest organics foods procured from ideologically sound sources. But to use computers as an analogy, what’s the use of a clean supply of electricity when your software is screwed up? The information that Jeremy will present to us today unscrews that software in our brains and it is unscrewed simply by being given the truthful explanation of how it unavoidably got screwed up in the first instance. Though the computer program, of course, uses complex code to write software, Jeremy uses words to express the logic-based biological truth about what makes us human. And it’s still astonishing to me and I think it always will be that that is all it takes to fix the world. But wait, you are about to hear it with your own ears in these hallowed precincts of the RGS, really the home of post-enlightened exploration. And what you will hear is the most amazing talk that has ever been heard. It is really the joyful culmination of all that has gone before us.
Now the most quoted author in FREEDOM is the great philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post and in his 1990 RGS Television Lecture of the Year he anticipated Jeremy’s book, exploration of the human condition, which we’re fittingly launching here today with an honoured fellow of the RGS, Sir Bob Geldof. So, before asking Bob to speak I just want to play you a short extract of Sir Laurens’ lecture back here in the other hall in 1990.
‘It’s been said that the explorers in mankind must be singularly unemployed because there’s nothing left in this world to explore. Well of course that depends on what you mean by exploration…in the sense to which exploration is both an exploration into the physical and into the spirit of man there is a lot ahead to do…the future…is in your keeping…there is exploration in reverse to do. We must go sharply into reverse…we must rehabilitate ourselves. We must get our old natural selves to join with our other conscious, wilful, rational, scientific selves…Your job is not over.’
I’d like to welcome Sir Bob Geldof.
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