Reproduced from LA Weekly
(Click image to read article on LA Weekly website.)
LA Weekly’s 26 June 2025 article ‘Los Angeles Meets the World Transformation Movement: The City of Illusions and the Science of Self-Understanding’:
Los Angeles is home to movements of every kind—a hotbed of trends, reinvention, and the pursuit of personal evolution. From green juice detoxes and digital fasting to spiritual awakening retreats and DIY wellness brands, LA pulses with an endless drive to transform—mind, body, and soul.
But beneath the yoga mats and manifestation boards lies a deeper truth. LA’s obsession with self-improvement masks an underlying crisis: burnout, depression, and a gnawing sense that none of it quite resolves what we’re really struggling with.
Enter the World Transformation Movement (WTM)—a global, nonprofit dedicated to sharing Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith’s groundbreaking explanation of the human condition. In a city overflowing with philosophies, the LA purports to offer something else entirely: a scientific, psychologically liberating breakthrough that cuts to the core of human behavior and suffering.
Biologist Jeremy Griffith in Sydney, Australia
As one of the world’s leading psychiatrists, Professor Harry Prosen, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, declared:
‘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.’
Other authoritative and impressive endorsements of Griffith’s treatise, including several with deep ties to California, will be explored shortly. But here in LA, and indeed across the whole world, nothing seems more urgent than a treatise that lays the foundation for ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’.
Because for all our capacity for love, creativity and compassion, as a species we remain haunted by our darker impulses—by the cruelty, selfishness and destructiveness that seem so at odds with who we long to be. It’s this contradiction—this split at the heart of human nature—that the World Transformation Movement sets out to explain and heal.
When Anger Was Born: What’s Really Going On Inside Us?
So what is this ‘holy grail’ breakthrough for science of the ‘explanation of the human condition’? How does Jeremy Griffith explain our species’ unspeakable history of greed, hatred, rape, torture, murder and war? What is it deep within us humans that has troubled us so terribly? What is it that makes us such a combative, ruthless, hateful, retaliatory, violent, in truth, psychologically disturbed creature? How does Griffith and the World Transformation Movement explain the human condition?
The first point people are making about Griffith’s explanation is that it is reasonably obvious—once the different natures of the two main aspects of our behavior of our instincts and intellect are considered. Acquired over thousands of generations of natural selection, instincts give a species orientations to the world. However, a fully conscious mind, such as what humans developed, operates from a basis of understanding the world. Griffith explains that the obvious problem that is going to occur when the conscious intellect overrides—defies—the instinctive orientations in its quest to understand the world is that the fixed, inflexible instincts are going to resist those experiments in understanding, which is unavoidably going to “upset” our conscious mind.
Griffith asks us to imagine what would happen if we gave a migrating bird a fully conscious mind. As he writes:
‘The bird is following the instinctive flight path its species had acquired over thousands of generations of natural selection, but it now has a conscious mind that needs to understand how to behave, and the only way it can acquire that understanding is by experimenting in understanding—for example, thinking, “I’ll fly down and explore that island.” But such a deviation from the migratory flight path would naturally result in the instincts resisting the deviation, leaving the intellect no choice but to defensively retaliate against the instincts, try to prove the instincts’ unjust criticism wrong, and try to deny or block from its mind the instincts’ unjust criticism. So this is how we, being the ones who developed a fully conscious mind, became angry, egocentric and alienated sufferers of the human condition!’
What is striking about Griffith’s treatise is that it offers a good reason for why humans became sufferers of the human condition, revealing that “upset” humans are fundamentally good and not bad—a redemptive explanation that removes the need for our defensive angry, egocentric and alienated ways of coping. It provides the basis for ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’, as Professor Prosen put it.
Griffith argues that the toll of this unresolved clash—which began when consciousness first emerged some two million years ago—is what we see all around us today: anxiety, depression, narcissism, burnout, self-doubt—and the desperate need to be seen as successful or worthy. These are not isolated pathologies, he suggests, but outward expressions of this internal battle that we have had to endure between our dictatorial instincts and knowledge-seeking intellect.
Crucially, through the lens of this understanding, these so-called dysfunctions are not signs of weakness or moral failure. Rather, they’re seen as heroic, defensive adaptations—the result of our species’ noble but misunderstood effort to pursue knowledge and meaning in the face of resistance from our dictatorial instincts.
That such an explanation exists—one that makes sense of our inner turmoil and affirms our fundamental goodness—is no small offering.
Recognition That Cuts Through the Noise
The depth and substance of Jeremy Griffith’s biologically reasoned understanding of the human condition has drawn serious attention from leading thinkers—particularly in California.
The late Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, creator of the “flow” concept and professor at Claremont Graduate University, described Jeremy Griffith’s work as a potential ‘paradigm shift in the self-image of humanity.’
San Diego State University ecologist Professor Stuart Hurlbert put it more bluntly: ‘I am stunned and honored to have lived to see the coming of “Darwin II”.’
Professor Walter Hartwig, anthropologist and a former Chair of Basic Sciences at Touro University in Vallejo, praised Griffith’s ability to synthesize evolutionary biology and behavioral science, saying: ‘Griffith accurately integrates data from the fossil record, primate behavior, and comparative anatomy. Its scholarly value is comparable to the most celebrated publications in biology.’
These aren’t casual soundbites. They reflect the serious academic credibility of Griffith’s treatise and the work of the World Transformation Movement—a rare and refreshing contrast to the commercialized, feel-good narratives that dominate much of the wellness industry.
Beyond Affirmation: The World Transformation Movement and LA’s Deeper Search
If LA has a religion, it’s reinvention. Every street corner hosts a new healing method. Every profile bio claims expertise in self-growth. And yet, for all the self-work, the search for lasting peace has continued. Beneath the glow of confidence and positivity, many are still battling doubt, insecurity, and emotional fatigue—because the endless pursuit of a better self often becomes another performance, another role to play.
The World Transformation Movement offers what LA’s affirmation culture has always longed for but never fully delivered: a scientific explanation that establishes our fundamental worth. Griffith’s theory doesn’t just encourage us to love ourselves—it shows, biologically and logically, that we were never unworthy or unlovable to begin with.
By revealing that our angry, egocentric and alienated behaviors were never inherently bad, but rather defensive responses to a misunderstood internal conflict, this explanation removes the burden of shame. There’s no longer a need to transcend or escape the human condition—because now, it makes sense. It’s defended.
And once that good reason has been found, those defensive reactions—our anger, egocentricity, and alienation—are no longer necessary. They are, quite literally, made redundant. That profound psychological shift, the WTM asserts, is nothing short of transformational for the whole human race.
No more masks. No more performance. Just relieving understanding at last.
And Angelenos are beginning to echo that sentiment. ‘It’s transforming’, says Patrick from LA. ‘The information is just awesome.’
Gary in Van Nuys says it brings ‘a great relief’, adding that it ‘settles the confusion of the ego’.
Jeff from Huntington Beach writes: ‘Finally!! My belief that we are all fundamentally good has been explained!! This is earth-shattering and rebuilding! Thank you!’
A Movement Built for LA?
The World Transformation Movement is still growing its presence in Los Angeles, but its core message feels custom-built for the city’s unique psyche. It speaks not only to LA’s endless drive for transformation, but to the exhaustion of constantly having to appear transformed.
Where so many movements offer superficial fixes or borrowed inspiration, the World Transformation Movement goes straight to the root. It doesn’t offer a new identity—its redeeming understanding of us humans removes the need for identity performance altogether.
What it provides is not another patchwork philosophy, but a unified, compassionate understanding of who we are, why we struggle, and how we can finally stop pretending and start healing.
In the land of illusion and reinvention, the World Transformation Movement may just be the most real thing going.
