Part 1.8  The truth of the ‘Instinct vs Intellect’ explanation is confirmed by its ability to make sense of all aspects of human life

Before moving on to the ‘Extended Description of the human condition’ in Part 2, it should be pointed out that now that we can explain the human condition the human race goes through a massive paradigm shift from denial to honesty. All these insights that were hidden from us by our necessary practice of denial of any truths that brought the previously unbearably depressing issue of our corrupted condition into focus become possible—such as about Integrative Meaning; about our species’ past state of innocence; about the falseness of the savage, must-reproduce-our-genes excuse for our divisive behaviour; about how nurturing gave us our moral soul and enabled us to develop a fully conscious mind; about why we have lived such an extremely fearful, psychologically insecure, superficial and artificial existence; and about how when the redeeming understanding of our soul-corrupted condition was finally found, it would lift the great, so-called, ‘burden of guilt’ from our species’ conscious mind, and liberate the entire human race from that tortured condition, making possible a whole new, neurologically relieved and psychologically rehabilitated, sane, peaceful and loving transformed world. When understanding of the human condition is finally found, as it now has been, suddenly so many previously inaccessible explanations and insights about human life become accessible. Metaphorically, when the ‘lights are switched on’ in our dark, truth-avoiding, denial-saturated ‘great building’ referred to in paragraph 66, which is, in fact, our world, the ‘light’ of understanding streams in in all directions!

And all these insights into human life—and many, many more of them will be revealed next in Part 2—together with the avalanche of explanations, answers and insights into human life that are presented in FREEDOM, confirm the truth of the Instinct vs Intellect explanation of the human condition. Indeed, the strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain—as the great physicist Stephen Hawking wrote, ‘A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations’ (A Brief History Of Time, 1988).

The evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould was applying a similar methodology to Hawking’s when he argued that Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection pointed to the coordination of so many pieces of evidence that only his theory could offer a conceivable explanation, and that in this way Natural Selection has, in effect, been proven. Gould wrote, ‘Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information’ (‘Mr Sophia’s Pony’, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, 1988).

The Instinct vs Intellect theory is very similar to Darwin’s in its ability to ‘make unified sense of’ so much ‘disparate information’ and ‘independent sources’ that it is clearly ‘the only conceptual’ explanation, in this case, for the human condition.

The following are just some of the ‘disparate’ issues that the Instinct vs Intellect explanation ‘make[s] unified sense of’, all of which you can find in FREEDOM by looking through its index, or by searching the book electronically. At least the outline of most of these explanations is presented in this book.

• It finally explains and ends forever our neurotic mind-mad and psychotic soul-dead human condition, making possible the end of loneliness, depression and anxiety;
• It explains the origin of aggression and war amongst humans and brings them to an end;
• It explains and ends the need for materialism, and our need for a superficial, artificial, self-distracting way of living;
• It explains how humans acquired our altruistic ‘soul’ and its cooperation-demanding ‘conscience’;
• It explains how humans became fully conscious and why other animals have not;
• It explains the importance of nurturing in our species’ development and in our individual lives, and the corrupting effects on children of mothers’ inability now to nurture and of fathers’ now extreme egocentricity;
• It explains why bonobos are the most cooperative of all extant apes;
• It provides a truthful explanation of the stages of maturation of infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood that both humanity and humans individually go through;
• It describes and explains the cause of teenage angst, which is the psychological act of Resignation;
• It explains the Negative Entropy-driven integrative, loving meaning of life, and why ‘evolution’ is in fact the purposeful process of ordering matter;
• It explains the extreme limitations of reductionist, mechanistic science and the immense benefits of holistic, teleological science;
• It relates and reconciles the studies of the sciences and of the humanities;
• It explains why and when humans learnt to walk upright, reduced the size of their canine teeth, lost their body hair, began tool use, began hunting and meat-eating, left Africa, and developed language;
• It reconciles science with religion, in the process explaining religion and all manner of religious metaphysics, including the concepts of God, the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, the resurrection, miracles, Judgment Day, the Battle of Armageddon, the stories of Adam and Eve including the Garden of Eden and taking the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, Noah’s Ark and The Flood, Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, after-life, heaven and hell, good and evil, humanity’s ‘fall’;
• It explains and demystifies Christ and the other great prophets;
• It deciphers humanity’s legends and myths about the search for liberating understanding of the human condition such as the story of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table’s search for the ‘Holy Grail’, Jason and the Argonauts’ search for the ‘Golden Fleece’, Ulysses’s great adventure and return to Ithaca, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Man from Snowy River in Australia’s mythology;
• It ends prejudice and inequality between individuals, sexes, ages, generations, races, cultures and civilisations;
• It explains and reconciles the left and right wings of politics, in the process ending the need for politics;
• It replaces the destructively deluded, pseudo idealistic transformation that the New Age, Peace, Green, Climate, Feminist, Indigenous, Animal Rights, Multicultural, Politically Correct, Postmodern, Critical Theory, ‘Woke’, Identity Politics, Great Reset, Socialist, Globalist movements were trying to introduce with the real psychologically healing transformation of the human condition;
• It explains and heals the ultimate source of all psychological disorders and the alarming growth in mental disease;
• It explains and heals the main underlying cause for human sickness;
• It explains sex, heterosexuality, homosexuality, love, physical beauty, the attraction of youth, romance, rape, envy and lust;
• It explains and brings an end to humans’ propensity for paranoia and all manner of conspiracy theories, such as of lost civilisations with advanced technology;
• It explains human sensitivity and creativity, especially in art (including ancient cave painting) and music;
• It explains humour;
• It explains swearing;
• It explains near-death experiences;
• AND it saves the human race from self-destruction and brings peace and happiness to human life!

Such is the power of thinking truthfully about the human condition!

Accordingly, the Instinct vs Intellect treatise has received significant scientific evaluation, and, subsequent to that, support from the many extremely eminent truthful-thinking scientists, such as those who have provided the commendations that are listed at www.humancondition.com/reviews-commendations. For example, Professor Harry Prosen, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Society, wrote in his Introduction to FREEDOM that ‘all the great theories I have encountered in my lifetime of studies of psychiatry can be accounted for under Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of human origins and behavior’. And Professor Stuart Hurlbert, Emeritus Professor of biology at San Diego State University, wrote in 2024 that ‘I am stunned & honored to have lived to see the coming of ‘Darwin II’. I say this because after Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection explained the variety of life, Jeremy Griffith has gone on to solve the other four main questions science had to answer about our world and place in it. They are: 1) the dilemma of the human condition, which his instinct vs intellect explanation in chapter 3 of his main, seminal book FREEDOM finally solves; 2) how we humans became fully conscious when other species haven’t, which he answers in chapter 7; 3) the origins of humans’ unique moral nature, which he answers in chapter 5, which it turns out American philosopher John Fiske had already explained in 1874 but mechanistic science had ignored; and 4) the truth of the Integrative Meaning of existence (which we have personified as ‘God’), in chapter 4, which only a rare few thinkers in history have been able to recognize. And having been able to solve those primary issues he has, in chapter 8, using first principle and fully accountable biological explanations been able to resolve all the secondary problems like: the polarized state of politics; the rift between men and women; the schism between science and religion; the conflict between individuals and between races (thus ending aggression and war at its source); and, above all, bring an end to the threat of terminal psychosis and our species’ extinction! A truly phenomenal, beyond description, scientific achievement!’ Additional commendations reflect the same extraordinary recognition. Professor Scott Churchill, a former Chair of Psychology at the University of Dallas, described FREEDOM as ‘the book all humans need to read for our collective wellbeing’, while former President of the Primate Society of Britain Professor David Chivers praised it as ‘the necessary breakthrough in the critical issue of needing to understand ourselves.’ World-renowned psychologist Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggested it ‘might help bring about a paradigm shift in the self-image of humanity.’ Professor John Morton, zoologist at the University of Auckland, described my book A Species In Denial as ‘a superb book…​[that] brings out the truth of a new and wider frontier for humankind, a forward view of a world of humans no longer in naked competition amongst ourselves.’ And Templeton Prize winner Professor Charles Birch, Professor of Biology at the University of Sydney, praised the work for providing ‘a genuinely original and inspiring way of understanding ourselves and our place in the universe.’ And even the just-mentioned Stephen Hawking, one of the most esteemed scientists of all time, was ‘most interested in’ and ‘impressed’ by the Instinct vs Intellect treatise (these responses to the treatise are among the commendations on the above ‘Reviews & Commendations’ page).

So yes, as Professor Hurlbert wrote, the Instinct vs Intellect explanation of the human condition finally gives humanity the ability to ‘bring an end to the threat of terminal psychosis and our species’ extinction!’

With regard to the veracity of the Instinct vs Intellect treatise, it should also be pointed out that history teems with non-scientific mystical, superstitious and super-natural reasons for humans’ often brutally aggressive and selfish nature or condition, such as that an evil force called ‘Satan’ emerged from some terrifying dark realm and enticed us humans into the clutches of evil and sin, condemning most of us to a dreadful purgatory in a fiery Hell. However, now that it has been explained, the rational, scientific Instinct vs Intellect explanation of the human condition is actually very obvious—because of course when we humans became conscious that self-adjusting capability must have clashed with our already established dictatorial instincts’ orientations that had been managing our lives prior to us becoming conscious.

Many thinkers, in fact many of the greatest thinkers in history, such as Moses with his Garden of Eden story, and Plato in much of his writing, recognised that the emergence of our conscious mind is what led to our departure from our species’ original instinctive state of cooperative, selfless and loving innocence—so they were thinking honestly enough to get at least part way to the explanation for our corrupted condition. For example, as mentioned in paragraph 50, Plato wrote of a time when we lived in a ‘blessed and spontaneous life…​[where] neither was there any violence…​or quarrel…​[and they had] no memory of the past [in other words, we lived in a pre-conscious state]’ (The Statesman, c.350 BC; tr. B. Jowett, 1871, 271-272). In Video/​Freedom Essay 4 (which is further significantly elaborated on in Freedom Essay 53) I present a description of many of these great thinkers from both ancient and contemporary times who have recognised the instinct and intellect elements involved in producing the human condition. In addition to Moses and Plato, they include Hesiod from ancient times, and from more recent times, Eugène Marais, Laurens van der Post, Nikolai Berdyaev, Erich Neumann, Paul MacLean, Arthur Koestler, Julian Jaynes, Christopher Booker, Erich Fromm, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Blake, John Milton, Robert A. Johnson and Bruce Chatwin. As was mentioned in paragraph 88, Richard Heinberg’s 1990 book Memories & Visions of Paradise summarises how universal the acknowledgement of the instinct and intellect elements involved in producing the human condition has been: ‘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 and can return to it only through the resolution of some profound inner discord…​the cause of the Fall is described variously as disobedience, as the eating of a forbidden fruit [from the tree of knowledge], and as spiritual amnesia [forgetting, blocking out, alienation, denial, psychosis]’ (pp.81-82 of 282).

However, while many of the great thinkers in history have recognised the main elements of our instinct and intellect involved in producing the human condition, it is the inevitable clash between them that is obviously, now that it has been explained, the reason WHY the presence of those elements led to the psychologically upset state of the human condition. As Heinberg wrote, we could only ‘return to’ our ‘original’ healthy, upset-free state of ‘oneness’ ‘through the resolution of some profound inner discord’, and it is precisely that ‘resolution of’ humanity’s ‘profound inner discord’ that my Instinct vs Intellect explanation has supplied.

Finally, before going on to Part 2, for the benefit of the reader it should be said that since there is a great deal to think about and digest in this massive paradigm-shifting, all-explaining but at the same time all-exposing explanation of the human condition, there is a need for patience and perseverance when reading, watching or listening to presentations of this redeeming and human-race-saving explanation. The reality is that to be able to absorb, understand and appreciate all that is being explained you will very likely need to read this book a number of times, as well as watch/​read/​listen to THE Interview a number of times, and watch/​read/​listen to the Freedom Essays a number of times, and also re-read or re-listen to the definitive presentation about the human condition and all its manifestations in FREEDOM.

Importantly, much more will be said about how we cope with the sudden arrival of the all-redeeming but at the same time all-exposing truth about our corrupted human condition in the coming Parts 2.9 and 2.10.