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AUSTRALIAN MEDIA RELEASE

With the world in strife, Bob Geldof urges understanding of new book on human behaviour by Australian biologist

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sydney, Australia, 27 June 2016 — Sir Bob Geldof has delivered a rousing keynote address at the Royal Geographical Society in London during the launch of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith’s book, Freedom: The End of the Human Condition, urging listeners in a world in crisis to read, talk about and understand Griffith’s treatise on the human condition.

Introduced by world-renowned mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape, Geldof said, “I’ve never felt the world more threatening, more fractious, more fissiparous, more febrile…We need to think, we need new ideas, we need proselytisers, we need obsessed people, which I think Jeremy is. We need him to be questioned. We need Freedom to be argued, we need it to be read and talked about and understood. It may be right, it may be wrong. But you need someone as committed as Jeremy to trying to understand what gets us here…Never before have we needed genius, magic and power more; and the word I’d add to that is thought and thinking…Jeremy made me think afresh and think differently.”

The culmination of a 40 year enquiry into the human condition, Griffith’s book Freedom is an honest and penetrating analysis of the origin of our species’ competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour, the result of which is the redeeming and transforming insight into our lives that Griffith says humankind has always sought.

While innumerable theories have been put forward to explain human behaviour, Griffith claims none have confronted the real psychological basis of our human condition and, by doing so, solved it.

Griffith stresses that solving the human condition is the only way we can save our species from self-destruction, a world of terrorism, unending wars and refugee crises, ecological devastation, polarised politics, and the breakdown of the family: “All the ailments the world suffers from are symptoms of the deeper issue of the human condition. Which means that to fix the world we have to fix the human condition, and that’s what Freedom does. It solves the underlying, real issue that’s been crippling the human race — and by doing that it opens up a whole new world for humankind where everyone is finally able to live free of the psychological agony of the human condition.”

Professor Harry Prosen, a past President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, has described Freedom as “The book we have been waiting for, it is the book that saves the world.”

Griffith is available for comment and interview. For images of the launch and to access other media materials, visit the book’s website at www.HumanCondition.com.

Contact: Damon Isherwood, WTM Publishing & Communications at [email protected]

About the author

Jeremy Griffith was born in 1945 and raised on a sheep station in rural New South Wales, Australia. He was educated at Geelong Grammar School and later graduated in biology from Sydney University. He spent six years in the wilds of Tasmania where he undertook the most thorough investigation ever into the plight of the Tasmanian Tiger, concluding that it was extinct. During this time, aged 27, Griffith shifted his exploratory focus to humanity, which has remained his life’s preoccupation for the last 40 years. He started writing about the human condition in 1975, established the World Transformation Movement in 1983 (originally established as the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood), published his first book, Free: The End of the Human Condition in 1988, his second book, Beyond the Human Condition in 1991, and his bestselling third book, A Species In Denial, in 2004. He lives in Sydney.

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UK MEDIA RELEASE

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WRITTEN QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition
by Jeremy Griffith

Questions & Answers

Who is Jeremy Griffith?

Born in 1945 and raised on a sheep station (ranch) in rural New South Wales, Australia, Griffith was educated at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria and later graduated in biology from Sydney University. He spent six years in the wilds of Tasmania where he undertook the most thorough investigation ever into the plight of the Tasmanian Tiger, concluding that it was extinct. During this time, aged 27, Jeremy shifted his exploratory focus to humanity, which has remained his life’s preoccupation for the last 40 years. He started writing about the human condition in 1975, established the World Transformation Movement in 1983 (originally established as the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood), published his first book, Free: The End of the Human Condition in 1988, his second book, Beyond the Human Condition in 1991, and his bestselling third book, A Species In Denial, in 2004.

What is the human condition?

The agony of being unable to truthfully answer the fundamental question of why we are the way we are — divisively instead of cooperatively behaved — has been the particular burden of human life. It has been our species’ particular affliction or condition — our ‘human condition’.

Why is it so important that we understand the human condition?

With every day bringing with it more alarming evidence of the turmoil of the human situation, it is unarguable that finding the psychologically relieving understanding of the reason for our destructive behaviour is the ONLY way we can halt the slide to total chaos and devastation. The journalist Richard Neville was frighteningly accurate when, in summarising the desperate state of our species’ situation, he wrote that ‘the world is hurtling to catastrophe: from nuclear horrors, a wrecked eco-system, 20 million dead each year from malnutrition, 600 million chronically hungry…All these crises are man made, their causes are psychological. The cures must come from this same source; which means the planet needs psychological maturity fast. We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’. Our species has come to the critical juncture where ONLY ‘self discovery’­ — reconciling, ameliorating, ‘psychological[ly]’ healing understanding of ourselves — can save us from ‘self destruction’.

What is Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition?

FREEDOM explains the difference between our instincts and intellect and the effect that difference has had on our behaviour. It describes how the anger and selfishness felt by humans is the result of these two factions within ourselves — the gene-based instinctive learning system struggling against the nerve-based intellect’s capacity to understand. This conflict, which started some two million years ago when consciousness emerged, causes humans to live with an undeserved sense of guilt that is characterised by competition and aggression. Once guilt is removed by being explained — which the explanation presented in FREEDOM now makes possible — the competition and aggression in humans will naturally subside.

How does science currently explain the human condition?

The human condition has been such a fearful, unconfrontable subject that science as a whole has become a purveyor of extremely dishonest, human-psychosis-avoiding theories — like Social Darwinism, Evolutionary Psychology, group selection — that seek to falsely account for, and thus dismiss, our paradoxical nature. We have argued that we are a victim of savage animal instincts that compel us to fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate; that we are at the mercy of a biological need to reproduce our genes. There cannot be a more dangerous example of a dishonest theory than that which appears in biologist E.O. Wilson’s 2012 book, The Social Conquest of Earth — a theory that evasively trivializes the human condition as nothing more than selfless instincts at odds with selfish instincts within us.

Do Jeremy Griffith’s ideas have any scientific support?

While the mechanistic scientific establishment as a whole has studiously avoided the true, psychological nature of the human condition, Jeremy’s ideas have attracted the support of such eminent scientists as former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Professor Harry Prosen, Australia’s Templeton Prize-winning biologist Professor Charles Birch and New Zealand’s then foremost zoologist Professor John Morton, as well as other distinguished thinkers such as Sir Laurens van der Post.

Why aren’t these ideas mainstream?

Firstly, because Jeremy dares to look at the real psychological nature of the human condition, his work has been treated as heretical by mechanistic science, as an anathema to be dismissed and even persecuted. Also, because the book presents the profound analysis of the human condition, some people can find what is being said hard to take in (what is referred to in the first chapter as the ‘deaf-effect’), and others even find what is being discussed unbearably confronting, and become hostile to it.

Secondly, for someone to be able to explain, and, through that explanation, bring reconciling and ameliorating understanding to our deeply troubled, human-condition-afflicted lives, they obviously had to be thinking from a position outside the conventional whole-view-of-the-human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic framework. As Einstein said, ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’!

Should people be sceptical of the claims made about FREEDOM?

The amazing thing is that while the absolutely astonishing claims made about FREEDOM, such as Professor Prosen asserting that it is ‘the book that saves the world’, warrant utter scepticism and accusations of deluded hubris and over-promise, the fact is they withstand scrutiny. A person can begin reading the book and the more they read into it the more they will realise the claims being made are actually true. So these outrageous claims provide the ideal way to attract interest — which is a strategy no other book could employ successfully because such claims couldn’t stand up to scrutiny; reading them wouldn’t lead to the realisation that they have provided the answers that the human race has been in search of, which is the realisation that reading this book actually produces, as Professors Prosen and Churchill say it does.

Why should people read this book?

As Professor Prosen has said, ‘the fastest growing realization everywhere is that humanity can’t go on the way it is going. Indeed, the great fear is we’re entering endgame where we appear to have lost the race between self-destruction and self-discovery.’ We need answers and we need them fast. While issues such as the environment have dominated concerns in recent times, the obvious truth is that we have only been focusing on the symptoms; everything to date has been nothing more than a band-aid. To stop the destruction of our world and the disintegration of society that is happening everywhere we look someone had to address and fix the cause of the problems, which is us humans — our psychosis. We are the problem — our out-of-control egocentric, selfish, competitive and ferociously vicious, mean and aggressive human condition. It is precisely this real problem of the human condition that FREEDOM finally delivers the psychologically redeeming, relieving and transforming understanding of.

What is the effect of understanding Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition?

Jeremy begins FREEDOM by explaining that, “This book liberates you, the reader, and all other humans from an underlying insecurity and resulting psychosis that all humans have suffered from since we became a fully conscious species some two million years ago.” The effect of finally knowing and understanding and living with this explanation is that it transforms humans from their psychologically insecure, human-condition-afflicted existence to a psychologically secure and mature, human-condition-free state. It ends all the bewilderment, confusion and uncertainty — all the insecurity — about human behaviour. In short, it unravels the whole mess we humans have been living in and unites the human race.

Who are some thinkers that Jeremy Griffith admires?

Jeremy’s work was founded on a long history of profound or ‘denial-free’ thinkers about the human condition dating back to Moses, Socrates, Plato and Christ, through to more contemporary profound, denial-free thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin and Sir Laurens van der Post among others.

Is this some sort of religion?

No. Unlike religions, which are based on faith or dogma, the understanding of the human condition, and the transformed way of living it brings about, is based on rational, first-principle-based biology; it is knowledge-driven — knowledge that, after a few generations, has the ability to eliminate all the upset in humans. So while religions were an incredibly effective means of containing the upset in humans while the search for understanding of that upset condition was being carried out, the transformed way of living is, in complete contrast, concerned with what happens after that liberating understanding is found, which is the advancement of the human race from a human-condition-afflicted state to a state completely free of that terrible affliction.

Another immense difference between this new transformed way of living and a religion is that in the transformed way of living there is no deity involved, or deference to any one personality; in fact, there is no worship of any kind. And best of all, unlike religion, there is no involvement or emphasis on guilt, because guilt — and the whole notion of ‘good and evil’ — has been eliminated forever with the reconciling understanding of the human condition.

What is Professor Prosen’s background?

Harry Prosen MD is a North American psychiatrist. His former roles include Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association. Since 1998, he has been psychiatric consultant to the Bonobo Species Preservation Society, assisting primatologists working with one of the largest collections of captive bonobo primates in the world at the Milwaukee County Zoo, studying bonobo culture and development. This work has led to Prosen receiving numerous consultations in the United States and other parts of the world concerning psychological and other problems in primates. Recently, the rehabilitation of an emotionally disturbed young bonobo named “Brian” generated substantial publicity, including a story in The Atlantic.

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ADAPTED EXCERPT FROM ‘FREEDOM’ FOR MEDIA PUBLICATION

FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition

by Jeremy Griffith

Adapted Excerpt

Word count: 2535

‘We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery.’
— Journalist Richard Neville

The Dilemma of the Human Condition

Here on Earth some of the most complex arrangements of matter in the known universe have come into existence. Life, in all its incredible diversity and richness, developed. And, by virtue of our mind, the human species must surely represent the culmination of this grand experiment of nature we call life — for, as far as we can detect, we are the first organism to have developed the fully conscious ability to sufficiently understand and thus manage the relationship between cause and effect to wrest management of our lives from our instincts, and to even reflect upon our existence. It is easy to lose sight of the utter magnificence of what we are, but the human mind must surely be nature’s most astonishing creation. Indeed, it must be one of the wonders of the universe! Consider, for example, the intellectual brilliance involved in sending three of our kind to the Moon and back.

And yet, despite our species’ magnificent mental capabilities, and undeniable capacity for immense sensitivity and love, behind every wondrous scientific achievement, sensitive artistic expression and compassionate act lies the shadow of humanity’s darker side — an unspeakable history of greed, hatred, rape, torture, murder and war; a propensity for deeds of shocking violence, depravity, indifference and cruelty.

As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other object than causing pain…No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical nature which is far worse than the merely bestial.” Yes, undermining all our marvellous accomplishments and sensibilities is the fact that we humans have also been the most ferocious and malicious and seemingly evil creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But are we really evil?

How we excused our dark side while we couldn’t truthfully explain it

Certainly we have used the excuse that our behaviour is no different to that seen in the animal kingdom — that we are competitive, aggressive and selfish because of our animal heritage. We have argued that we are, as Tennyson put it, “red in tooth and claw” — a victim of savage animal instincts that compel us to fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate; that we are at the mercy of a biological need to reproduce our genes. But this reason that biologists have been perpetuating cannot be the real cause of our divisive behaviour because descriptions of human behaviour, such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded, optimistic, pessimistic, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic, alienated, all recognise the involvement of our species’ unique fully conscious thinking mind — that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour. Humans have suffered not from the genetic-opportunism-based, non-psychological animal condition, but the conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled human condition.

The real biological explanation of the human condition that both acknowledges and explains our collective psychosis — and reveals the astronomical courage of the human race

Clearly, a fresh approach has been needed — an analysis of our human situation from a basis that recognises and confronts the psychological dimension to our behaviour. When that approach is taken the explanation of our less-than-ideal human condition is relatively straight forward. The explanation begins with an analysis of consciousness.

Nerves were originally developed for the coordination of movement in animals, but, once developed, their ability to store impressions — what we refer to as ‘memory’ — gave rise to the potential to develop understanding of cause and effect. If you can remember past events, you can compare them with current events and identify regularly occurring experiences. This knowledge of, or insight into, what has commonly occurred in the past enables you to predict what is likely to happen in the future and to adjust your behaviour accordingly. Once insights into the nature of change are put into effect, the self-modified behaviour starts to provide feedback, refining the insights further. Predictions are compared with outcomes and so on. Much developed, and such refinement occurred in the human brain, nerves can sufficiently associate information to reason how experiences are related, learn to understand and become conscious of, or aware of, or intelligent about, the relationship between events that occur through time. Thus consciousness means being sufficiently aware of how experiences are related to attempt to manage change from a basis of understanding.

The significance of this process is that once our nerve-based learning system became sufficiently developed for us to become conscious and able to effectively manage events, our conscious intellect was then in a position to wrest control from our gene-based learning system’s instincts, which, up until then, had been in charge of our lives. Basically, once our self-adjusting intellect emerged it was capable of taking over the management of our lives from the instinctive orientations we had acquired through the natural selection of genetic traits that adapted us to our environment.

However, inevitably, it was at this juncture, when our conscious intellect challenged our instincts for control, that a struggle developed between our instincts and intellect, the effect of which was the extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive state that we call the ‘human condition’.

To elaborate, when our conscious intellect emerged it was neither suitable nor sustainable for it to be orientated by instincts — it had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage life. However, when our intellect began to exert itself and experiment in the management of life from a basis of understanding, in effect challenging the role of the already established instinctual self, a battle unavoidably broke out between the instinctive self and the newer conscious self.

Our intellect began to experiment in understanding as the only means of discovering the correct and incorrect understandings for managing existence, but the instincts — being in effect ‘unaware’ or ‘ignorant’ of the intellect’s need to carry out these experiments — ‘opposed’ any understanding-produced deviations from the established instinctive orientations: they ‘criticised’ and ‘tried to stop’ the conscious mind’s necessary search for knowledge.

To illustrate the situation, imagine what would happen if we put a fully conscious mind on the head of a migrating bird. The bird is following an instinctive flight path 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 to that island and have a rest.’ But such a deviation from the migratory flight path would naturally result in the instincts resisting the deviation, leaving the conscious intellect in a serious dilemma: if it obeys its instincts it will not feel ‘criticised’ by its instincts but neither will it find knowledge.

Obviously, the intellect could not afford to give in to the instincts, and unable to understand and thus explain why its experiments in self-adjustment were necessary the conscious intellect had no way of refuting the implicit criticism from the instincts even though it knew it was unjust. Until our conscious mind (because it was in us humans that the fully conscious mind developed) found the redeeming understanding of why it had to challenge the instincts (namely the understanding found by science of the difference in the way genes and nerves process information, that one is an orientating learning system while the other is an insightful learning system), our intellect was left having to endure the resistance — in effect unjust condemnation — from our instincts, leaving it no choice but to somehow defy that opposition from our instincts.

If we think about it, the only forms of defiance available to our conscious intellect were to attack the instincts’ unjust criticism, try to deny or block from our mind the instincts’ unjust criticism, and attempt to prove our instincts’ unjust criticism wrong. In short, the psychologically upset angry, alienated and egocentric human-condition-afflicted state appeared. Our ‘conscious thinking self’, which is the dictionary definition of ‘ego’, became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself. We became ego-centric, self-centred or selfish, preoccupied with aggressively competing for opportunities to prove we are good and not bad — we unavoidably became selfish, aggressive and competitive.

So, without the redeeming understanding that science has given us of why we had to challenge our instincts (specifically that genes can orientate but only nerves can understand), humans had no choice but to resign ourselves to living a psychologically upset life of anger, egocentricity and alienation as the only three responses available to us to cope with the horror of our situation.

It was an extremely unfair and difficult, indeed tragic, position for humans to find themselves in, for we can see that while we were good we appeared to be bad and had to endure the horror of our psychologically distressed, upset condition until we found the real — as opposed to the invented or contrived not-psychosis-recognising — defence or reason for our ‘mistakes’. Basically, suffering psychological upset was the price of our heroic search for understanding.

The reality is that any animal that developed a fully conscious mind would encounter resistance from its instincts and presumably develop the equivalent of the upset state of the human condition — with the only cure being the ability to explain the good reason for its divisive condition, because only that could end the need to retaliate, block out criticism, and try to prove its worth. As the psychoanalyst Carl Jung was forever saying about our condition, “wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow”.

We can now see how the origins of our human condition has parallels with the pre-scientific Biblical account in the Book of Genesis of Adam and Eve’s experiences in the Garden of Eden, except in that presentation when Adam and Eve took the “fruit” (3:3) “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:9, 17) — went in search of understanding — they were “banished…from the Garden” (3:23) for being “disobedient” (the term widely used in descriptions of Gen. 3) and becoming ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ or ‘sinful’. In this presentation, however, Adam and Eve are revealed to be the heroes, not the villains they have so long been portrayed as. So while humans are immensely upset — that is, immensely angry, egocentric and alienated — we are good and not bad after all! And ‘upset’ is the right word for our condition because while we are not ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ we are definitely psychologically upset from having to participate in humanity’s heroic search for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge. ‘Corrupted’ and ‘fallen’ have sometimes been used to describe our condition, but they have negative connotations that we can now appreciate are undeserved.

For our species, it really has been a case of “Give me liberty or give me death”, “Death before dishonour”, “Never back down”, as the sayings go. Our conscious thinking self was never going to give in to our instinctive self or soul. Even though we had developed into angry, egocentric and alienated people, we were never going to accept that we were fundamentally bad, evil, worthless, awful beings; we weren’t going to wear that criticism — for if we did, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each morning and face the world. If we truly believed we were fundamentally evil beings, we would shoot ourselves. There had to be a greater truth that explained our behaviour and until we found it we couldn’t rest. And so every day as we got out of bed we took on the world of ignorance that was condemning us. We defied the implication that we are bad. We shook our fist at the heavens. In essence, we said, ‘One day, one day, we are going to prove our worth, explain that we are not bad after all, and until that day arrives we are not going to “back down”, we are not going to take the ignorant, naive, stupid, unjustified criticism from our instincts. No, we are going to fight back with all our might.’ And that is what we have done; that is what every conscious human that has ever lived has done — and because we did, because we persevered against all that criticism, we have now finally broken through and found the full truth that explains that humans are wonderful beings after all. In fact, not just wonderful, but the heroes of the whole story of life on Earth! This is because our fully conscious mind must be — given its phenomenal ability to understand the world — nature’s greatest invention, so for us humans who were given this greatest of all inventions to develop, to be made to endure the torture of being unjustly condemned as bad or evil for doing just that, and to have had to endure that torture for so long, some 2 million years (the time we have likely been fully conscious), has to make us the absolute champions of the story of life on Earth. We were given the hardest, toughest of tasks, and against all the odds we completed it. We are so, so wonderful.

Best of all, this breakthrough in understanding of ourselves ends all the anguish and strife in human life

The absolutely wonderfully psychologically relieving and thus transforming effect of this psychosis-addressing-and-solving real explanation of the human condition is that after 2 million years of uncertainty it finally allows all humans to understand that there has been a very good reason for our angry, alienated and egocentric lives. Indeed, this fact of the utter magnificence of the human race brings such intense relief to our angst-ridden cells, limbs and torsos that it will seem as though we have thrown off a shroud of heavy weights. The great, heavy burden of guilt has finally been lifted from the shoulders of humans. Yes, doesn’t the core feeling exist in all humans that far from being meaningless, “banish[ment]”-deserving “evil” blights on this planet we are all immense heroes? Doesn’t this explanation at last make sense of the immensely courageous and defiant attitude of all humans? And won’t this explanation bring deep, bone-draining relief to the whole of each person’s being?

Indeed, the ability now to explain and understand that we are actually all good and not bad enables all the upset that resulted from being unable to truthfully explain the source of our divisive condition to subside and disappear. Yes, finding the redeeming understanding of our troubled, psychologically upset, human-condition-afflicted existence finally enables the human race to be healed and thus transformed — it makes us “whole” again, as Jung said it would. To quote Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, on this dreamed-of, greatest of all breakthroughs in science: “I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.”

As the following picture powerfully intimates, we have needed, and now have, the key that liberates the human mind from the underlying deep, dark, psychological trauma of the human condition.

The full explanation of the human condition that is provided in this adapted excerpt is presented in Chapter 1 of FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition.

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PROMOTIONAL PAMPHLET

Adapted Excerpt from ‘FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition’ (Launch date: May 2016)

Science Reveals That Humans Are
The Heroes Of The Story Of Life On Earth

Summary

FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith presents the breakthrough biological explanation of the underlying issue in all human affairs of the human condition, our species’ capacity for so-called ‘good’ and ‘evil’. This is the now urgently needed insight that finally explains that humans are the heroes of the story of life on Earth, an insight that brings such bone-draining relief to every human’s embattled life that it will transform the human race.

The Dilemma of the Human Condition

Here on Earth some of the most complex arrangements of matter in the known universe have come into existence. Life, in all its incredible diversity and richness, developed. And, by virtue of our mind, the human species must surely represent the culmination of this grand experiment of nature we call life — for, as far as we can detect, we are the first organism to have developed the fully conscious ability to sufficiently understand and thus manage the relationship between cause and effect to wrest management of our lives from our instincts, and to even reflect upon our existence. It is easy to lose sight of the utter magnificence of what we are, but the human mind must surely be nature’s most astonishing creation. Indeed, it must be one of the wonders of the universe! Consider, for example, the intellectual brilliance involved in sending three of our kind to the Moon and back.

And yet, despite our species’ magnificent mental capabilities, and undeniable capacity for immense sensitivity and love, behind every wondrous scientific achievement, sensitive artistic expression and compassionate act lies the shadow of humanity’s darker side — an unspeakable history of greed, hatred, rape, torture, murder and war; a propensity for deeds of shocking violence, depravity, indifference and cruelty. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other object than causing pain…No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical nature which is far worse than the merely bestial.” Yes, undermining all our marvellous accomplishments and sensibilities is the fact that we humans have also been the most ferocious and malicious and seemingly evil creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But are we really evil?

How we excused our dark side while we couldn’t truthfully explain it

Certainly we have used the excuse that our behaviour is no different to that seen in the animal kingdom — that we are competitive, aggressive and selfish because of our animal heritage. We have argued that we are, as Tennyson put it, “red in tooth and claw” — a victim of savage animal instincts that compel us to fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate; that we are at the mercy of a biological need to reproduce our genes. But this reason that biologists have been perpetuating cannot be the real cause of our divisive behaviour because descriptions of human behaviour, such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded, optimistic, pessimistic, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic, alienated, all recognise the involvement of our species’ unique fully conscious thinking mind — that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour. Humans have suffered not from the genetic-opportunism-based, non-psychological animal condition, but the conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled human condition.

The real biological explanation of the human condition that both acknowledges and explains our collective psychosis — and reveals the astronomical courage of the human race

Clearly, a fresh approach has been needed — an analysis of our human situation from a basis that recognises and confronts the psychological dimension to our behaviour. When that approach is taken the explanation of our less-than-ideal human condition is relatively straight forward. The explanation begins with an analysis of consciousness.

Nerves were originally developed for the coordination of movement in animals, but, once developed, their ability to store impressions — what we refer to as ‘memory’ — gave rise to the potential to develop understanding of cause and effect. If you can remember past events, you can compare them with current events and identify regularly occurring experiences. This knowledge of, or insight into, what has commonly occurred in the past enables you to predict what is likely to happen in the future and to adjust your behaviour accordingly. Once insights into the nature of change are put into effect, the self-modified behaviour starts to provide feedback, refining the insights further. Predictions are compared with outcomes and so on. Much developed, and such refinement occurred in the human brain, nerves can sufficiently associate information to reason how experiences are related, learn to understand and become conscious of, or aware of, or intelligent about, the relationship between events that occur through time. Thus consciousness means being sufficiently aware of how experiences are related to attempt to manage change from a basis of understanding.

The significance of this process is that once our nerve-based learning system became sufficiently developed for us to become conscious and able to effectively manage events, our conscious intellect was then in a position to wrest control from our gene-based learning system’s instincts, which, up until then, had been in charge of our lives. Basically, once our self-adjusting intellect emerged it was capable of taking over the management of our lives from the instinctive orientations we had acquired through the natural selection of genetic traits that adapted us to our environment.

However, inevitably, it was at this juncture, when our conscious intellect challenged our instincts for control, that a struggle developed between our instincts and intellect, the effect of which was the extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive state that we call the ‘human condition’.

To elaborate, when our conscious intellect emerged it was neither suitable nor sustainable for it to be orientated by instincts — it had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage life. However, when our intellect began to exert itself and experiment in the management of life from a basis of understanding, in effect challenging the role of the already established instinctual self, a battle unavoidably broke out between the instinctive self and the newer conscious self.

Our intellect began to experiment in understanding as the only means of discovering the correct and incorrect understandings for managing existence, but the instincts — being in effect ‘unaware’ or ‘ignorant’ of the intellect’s need to carry out these experiments — ‘opposed’ any understanding-produced deviations from the established instinctive orientations: they ‘criticised’ and ‘tried to stop’ the conscious mind’s necessary search for knowledge.

To illustrate the situation, imagine what would happen if we put a fully conscious mind on the head of a migrating bird. The bird is following an instinctive flight path 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 to that island and have a rest.’ But such a deviation from the migratory flight path would naturally result in the instincts resisting the deviation, leaving the conscious intellect in a serious dilemma: if it obeys its instincts it will not feel ‘criticised’ by its instincts but neither will it find knowledge.

Obviously, the intellect could not afford to give in to the instincts, and unable to understand and thus explain why its experiments in self-adjustment were necessary the conscious intellect had no way of refuting the implicit criticism from the instincts even though it knew it was unjust. Until our conscious mind (because it was in us humans that the fully conscious mind developed) found the redeeming understanding of why it had to challenge the instincts (namely the understanding found by science of the difference in the way genes and nerves process information, that one is an orientating learning system while the other is an insightful learning system), our intellect was left having to endure the resistance — in effect unjust condemnation — from our instincts, leaving it no choice but to somehow defy that opposition from our instincts.

If we think about it, the only forms of defiance available to our conscious intellect were to attack the instincts’ unjust criticism, try to deny or block from our mind the instincts’ unjust criticism, and attempt to prove our instincts’ unjust criticism wrong. In short, the psychologically upset angry, alienated and egocentric human-condition-afflicted state appeared. Our ‘conscious thinking self’, which is the dictionary definition of ‘ego’, became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself. We became ego-centric, self-centred or selfish, preoccupied with aggressively competing for opportunities to prove we are good and not bad — we unavoidably became selfish, aggressive and competitive.

So, without the redeeming understanding that science has given us of why we had to challenge our instincts (specifically that genes can orientate but only nerves can understand), humans had no choice but to resign ourselves to living a psychologically upset life of anger, egocentricity and alienation as the only three responses available to us to cope with the horror of our situation.

It was an extremely unfair and difficult, indeed tragic, position for humans to find themselves in, for we can see that while we were good we appeared to be bad and had to endure the horror of our psychologically distressed, upset condition until we found the real — as opposed to the invented or contrived not-psychosis-recognising — defence or reason for our ‘mistakes’. Basically, suffering psychological upset was the price of our heroic search for understanding.

The reality is that any animal that developed a fully conscious mind would encounter resistance from its instincts and presumably develop the equivalent of the upset state of the human condition — with the only cure being the ability to explain the good reason for its divisive condition, because only that could end the need to retaliate, block out criticism, and try to prove its worth. As the psychoanalyst Carl Jung was forever saying about our condition, “wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow”.

We can now see how the origins of our human condition has parallels with the pre-scientific Biblical account in the Book of Genesis of Adam and Eve’s experiences in the Garden of Eden, except in that presentation when Adam and Eve took the “fruit” (3:3) “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:9, 17) — went in search of understanding — they were “banished…from the Garden” (3:23) for being “disobedient” (the term widely used in descriptions of Gen. 3) and becoming ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ or ‘sinful’. In this presentation, however, Adam and Eve are revealed to be the heroes, not the villains they have so long been portrayed as. So while humans are immensely upset — that is, immensely angry, egocentric and alienated — we are good and not bad after all! And ‘upset’s the right word for our condition because while we are not ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ we are definitely psychologically upset from having to participate in humanity’s heroic search for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge. ‘Corrupted’ and ‘fallen’ have sometimes been used to describe our condition, but they have negative connotations that we can now appreciate are undeserved.

For our species, it really has been a case of “Give me liberty or give me death”, “Death before dishonour”, “Never back down”, as the sayings go. Our conscious thinking self was never going to give in to our instinctive self or soul. Even though we had developed into angry, egocentric and alienated people, we were never going to accept that we were fundamentally bad, evil, worthless, awful beings; we weren’t going to wear that criticism — for if we did, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each morning and face the world. If we truly believed we were fundamentally evil beings, we would shoot ourselves. There had to be a greater truth that explained our behaviour and until we found it we couldn’t rest. And so every day as we got out of bed we took on the world of ignorance that was condemning us. We defied the implication that we are bad. We shook our fist at the heavens. In essence, we said, ‘One day, one day, we are going to prove our worth, explain that we are not bad after all, and until that day arrives we are not going to “back down”, we are not going to take the ignorant, naive, stupid, unjustified criticism from our instincts. No, we are going to fight back with all our might.’ And that is what we have done; that is what every conscious human that has ever lived has done — and because we did, because we persevered against all that criticism, we have now finally broken through and found the full truth that explains that humans are wonderful beings after all. In fact, not just wonderful, but the heroes of the whole story of life on Earth! This is because our fully conscious mind must be — given its phenomenal ability to understand the world — nature’s greatest invention, so for us humans who were given this greatest of all inventions to develop, to be made to endure the torture of being unjustly condemned as bad or evil for doing just that, and to have had to endure that torture for so long, some 2 million years (the time we have likely been fully conscious), has to make us the absolute champions of the story of life on Earth. We were given the hardest, toughest of tasks, and against all the odds we completed it. We are so, so wonderful.

Best of all, this breakthrough in understanding of ourselves ends all the anguish and strife in human life

The absolutely wonderfully psychologically relieving and thus transforming effect of this psychosis-addressing-and-solving real explanation of the human condition is that after 2 million years of uncertainty it finally allows all humans to understand that there has been a very good reason for our angry, alienated and egocentric lives. Indeed, this fact of the utter magnificence of the human race brings such intense relief to our angst-ridden cells, limbs and torsos that it will seem as though we have thrown off a shroud of heavy weights. The great, heavy burden of guilt has finally been lifted from the shoulders of humans. Yes, doesn’t the core feeling exist in all humans that far from being meaningless, “banish[ment]”-deserving “evil” blights on this planet we are all immense heroes? Doesn’t this explanation at last make sense of the immensely courageous and defiant attitude of all humans? And won’t this explanation bring deep, bone-draining relief to the whole of each person’s being?

Indeed, the ability now to explain and understand that we are actually all good and not bad enables all the upset that resulted from being unable to truthfully explain the source of our divisive condition to subside and disappear. Yes, finding the redeeming understanding of our troubled, psychologically upset, human-condition-afflicted existence finally enables the human race to be healed and thus transformed — it makes us “whole” again, as Jung said it would. To quote Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, on this dreamed-of, greatest of all breakthroughs in science: “I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.”

As the following picture powerfully intimates, we have needed, and now have, the key that liberates the human mind from the underlying deep, dark, psychological trauma of the human condition.

The full explanation of the human condition that is provided in this adapted excerpt is presented in Chapter 1 of FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition.

About the Author

Born in 1945, and raised on a sheep station (ranch) in rural New South Wales, Australia, Jeremy Griffith was educated at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria. He matriculated with first class honours in biology and in 1965 began a science degree at the University of New England in northern New South Wales. While there, Jeremy played representative rugby union football, making the 1966 trials for the national team, the Wallabies.

Deferring his studies in 1967, Jeremy hitchhiked to Tasmania, determined to save the Thylacine — the Tasmanian Tiger — from extinction. The search was to last more than six years — the most thorough investigation ever into the plight of the Tasmanian Tiger — but sadly concluded the ‘Tiger’ was indeed extinct.

The quest generated articles in the American Museum of Natural History’s journal, Natural History, and Australian Geographic, and featured in an episode of the Australian television series A Big Country.

In 1971 Jeremy completed his BSc in zoology at the University of Sydney and the following year, in the same self-sufficient spirit with which he had undertaken the ‘Tiger’ search, he established Griffith Tablecraft, a highly successful business manufacturing furniture based on his own simple and natural designs. It was during this time that, at age 27, Jeremy realised that trying to save animals from extinction or trying to build ideal furniture wasn’t addressing the real issue behind the extraordinary imperfection in human life, which is our behaviour, and that what was really needed in the world was a deeper understanding of ourselves — so it was to this issue of our species’ less-than-ideal behaviour that Jeremy turned his attention, a study that has remained his life’s focus for the last 45 years. Jeremy started writing about the human condition in 1975, established the non-profit organisation the World Transformation Movement in 1983 (dedicated to the study and amelioration of the human condition), and is the author of over 10 books on the subject, including the 2004 bestseller, A Species In Denial and in 2016, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, his “summa masterpiece”. In 2020 a much acclaimed and replayed around the world one-hour interview with Jeremy about his explanation of the human condition was broadcast in the UK. The transcript of this now famous interview is provided in the booklet THE Interview. Jeremy lives in New South Wales, Australia.

Praise

‘This biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race. This is the book we have been waiting for, it is the book that saves the world.’

From the book’s Introduction by PROFESSOR HARRY PROSEN,

former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and former Chair, Psychiatry Department, Medical College of Wisconsin

‘Nothing Dr. Prosen has said about the immense importance of this book is an exaggeration. This is the book all humans need to read for our collective wellbeing.’

PROFESSOR SCOTT D. CHURCHILL,

Professor and former Chair, Psychology Department, University of Dallas

‘The sequence of discussion in ‘FREEDOM’ is so logical and sensible, providing the necessary breakthrough in the critical issue of needing to understand ourselves.’

PROFESSOR DAVID CHIVERS,

University of Cambridge anthropologist and former President of the Primate Society of Great Britain

‘This book is actually written from a position outside of the human condition. It is just amazing; Griffith walks freely through all the psychosis of our troubled human condition and with such freedom is able to explain everything about us!’

TIM MACARTNEY-SNAPE,

biologist, mountaineer and twice-honored Order of Australia recipient

‘I am stunned and honored to have lived to see the coming of “Darwin II”.’

PROFESSOR STUART HURLBERT,

Emeritus Professor of Biology, San Diego State University

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