Reproduced from Mashable Benelux
(Click image to read the article on the Mashable Benelux website.)
Mashable Benelux’s 5 August 2025 article ‘The World Transformation Movement and the Human Condition: Why Interest is Surging in the Netherlands and Belgium’:
Transform guilt into understanding, and defensiveness into peace.
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In an age of AI anxiety, digital burnout, and algorithmic self-help, one global movement is cutting through the noise with something radically old-school: a theory. A biological explanation, to be precise—and for nothing less than the human condition.
It’s called the World Transformation Movement, and in August 2024, it got an unexpected boost in the Netherlands when Emmy Award-winning actor Pierre Bokma brought it into the national spotlight during an appearance on VPRO’s flagship interview program, Zomergasten [Summer Guests]. Known for his intellectual curiosity as much as his stage presence, Bokma spoke openly about how the movement’s core theory—developed by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith—had changed the way he sees the human condition.
That moment of primetime candour turned heads—and helped spotlight a movement that was already quietly gaining ground in Europe. With Centres of support and interest now established in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Arnhem, and Rotterdam, the World Transformation Movement is drawing in Dutch and Belgian thinkers, students, creatives, and professionals—all exploring the same, provocative idea:
That Jeremy Griffith has developed a biological explanation for our inner conflict—one that, according to a growing number of scientists and thought leaders, may be the most hopeful insight into human behaviour in history.
From Burnout to Breakthrough
Despite ranking among the happiest and most prosperous societies in the world, the Netherlands and Belgium are seeing dramatic increases in mental health challenges—especially among younger generations. Add the cognitive overload of a hyperconnected world, and it’s no surprise that more people are asking why—despite everything we have—we still feel so anxious, divided, and emotionally stuck.
It’s this now very serious and pressing question the World Transformation Movement aims to answer—not with another app or intervention, but with a radical rethink of what’s driving our psychological distress.
What is the World Transformation Movement?
The World Transformation Movement (WTM) is a global, non-profit organisation based in Sydney, Australia, that is dedicated to resolving what it sees as the core issue behind all human affairs: the human condition—our species’ extraordinary capacity for what has been termed ‘good and evil’. Central to the WTM’s mission is the promotion of what it recognises as Griffith’s groundbreaking biological explanation of this inner conflict.
The Theory, Simplified
At the heart of Jeremy Griffith’s treatise on the human condition is a scientific explanation of how two fundamentally different systems of behavioural guidance—our instincts and our intellect—came into conflict. This clash created the upset, defensive, and self-preoccupied state we call the human condition.
Here’s how it happened:
1. Instincts guide, but don’t understand. Our instincts are gene-based and evolved over millions of years to give us fixed, unconscious orientations to the world. While they help guide behaviour, they can’t think or understand—they simply expect us to follow ingrained patterns.
2. Consciousness brings understanding. With the emergence of our nerve-based, fully conscious mind some two million years ago, humans gained the ability to think, reason, and understand. This allowed us to begin experimenting with managing life independently of our instincts—a necessary step in our intellectual development.
3. A clash was inevitable. As our conscious experiments began to diverge from instinctive expectations, our non-understanding instincts could not help but push back. Without a way to explain itself, the conscious mind felt unjustly condemned—leading it to attack the perceived criticism, try to prove it was good, and block it out of awareness.
4. The result was our angry, egocentric, and alienated human condition. So, this internal battle gave rise to the psychologically distressed state we now inhabit—not because we’re bad, but because we’ve been heroically struggling to defend our conscious search for understanding.
Griffith’s supporters see this explanation as a redemptive breakthrough—one that finally makes it possible to understand and heal the psychological pain that has plagued humanity since consciousness clashed with our instincts. As the great Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung observed, ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’, and owning that ‘shadow’, they argue, depends on being able to explain our seemingly bad or ‘evil’ competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour, which is what Griffith’s theory does. Indeed, Professor Harry Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, described Griffith’s explanation as ‘the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’
From Alienation to Transformation
According to the World Transformation Movement, we can now see that all our destructive behaviour stems from this psychologically upset state of anger, egocentricity and alienation; however we can also now see that they were absolutely necessary. Without a way to explain why we were defying our instincts, these responses were the only ways we had of coping. But with Griffith’s biological explanation for why we were defying our instincts, the WTM claims those defences are no longer needed, they are redundant—paving the way, it says, to a profound psychological shift.
When the Science Meets the Arts
On Zomergasten, Bokma expressed his admiration for Jeremy Griffith, saying he was ‘struck’ by Griffith’s ‘brilliant’ explanation of the human condition. ‘Because it also helped to open my eyes,’ he said. ‘When professors start talking about a lot of these completely complex matters, we understand very little of it. You think, “When will you come up with a brilliant formula, so that we can all understand it?”…And Jeremy Griffith has done this.’
After a clip of Griffith explaining the instinct-intellect clash was played, the host noted that Bokma looked ‘completely in awe.’ Bokma agreed: ‘If you understand that instinct and your consciousness don’t have to be enemies at all…bringing your lost self back to and uniting with your actual self.’
What the Experts Are Saying
Bokma’s televised endorsement may have sparked local curiosity, but it’s far from the only vote of confidence. Around the world, prominent scientists and scholars are recognising the scope of Griffith’s work—and its potential significance.
In addition to Professor Prosen’s commendation, Cambridge anthropologist and former President of the Primate Society of Great Britain, Professor David Chivers, praised the structure and clarity of Griffith’s argument, calling it ‘a logical and sensible sequence of discussion that provides the necessary breakthrough in understanding ourselves.’
When reviewing a documentary proposal outlining Griffith’s explanation of the human condition, Goethe University paleoanthropologist Professor Friedmann Schrenk remarked, ‘I have never heard of anything comparable before…I have a feeling that the new way of thinking involved here could well lead to changes of approaches even in our respective scientific fields.’
Belgian primatologist Dr Vera Walraven also underscored the importance of the theory, saying, ‘The ideas explained are not only fascinating but also show that there is still hope for Homo sapiens.’
Professor Stuart Hurlbert of San Diego State University was even more emphatic, saying he was ‘stunned & honored to have lived to see the coming of ‘Darwin II’.’
Even the late Stephen Hawking, via his office at Cambridge, expressed interest in Griffith’s proposal.
Such high-level commendations help explain why interest is growing—and why World Transformation Movement Centres have opened across the Netherlands and Belgium.
Why it Resonates in Benelux
The World Transformation Movement doesn’t ask you to follow or believe—it invites you to understand. And it’s this emphasis on rational, evidence-based insight that’s striking a chord in Benelux, where secularism, openness, and intellectual curiosity have long defined the cultural landscape.
Across the region, WTM Centres have been quietly emerging—providing informal hubs where people can explore Griffith’s material and engage with it at their own pace. In Antwerp, Raf Van Den Plas—an engineer turned IT sales manager—describes Griffith’s explanation as life-altering. ‘The actual insight isn’t that complex, it’s very simple,’ he says. ‘And I’m convinced that by spreading this information the world will change fundamentally.’
Sven van Westen, who opened the WTM Centre in Rotterdam, says discovering Griffith’s explanation helped him find perspective and peace. ‘In my generation so many things are not as they should be and nobody’s really truly being able to admit that, so nothing is being discussed really. It’s extremely superficial. Nothing is really helping and therefore nothing changes even though we can all feel it’s really necessary.’ However, he says, ‘I can see how having this knowledge will over the next couple of generations bring about a transformed world.’
In Arnhem, civil servant Jolanda Timmerman and her husband, musician Fred Lankamp, said the theory helped them make sense of decades of frustration. ‘The insights are life changing,’ says Fred. ‘We now know humans are not bad at all—we are all equally good. In fact, we’re the heroes of the story.’
Final Thought
At a time when technology races ahead while psychological distress deepens, the World Transformation Movement offers something rare: a complete, scientifically grounded explanation of human behaviour—one that transforms guilt into understanding, and defensiveness into peace.
And in the philosophically open, emotionally inquisitive culture of Benelux, that message may be exactly what’s needed next.
