Reproduced from the San Francisco Examiner
(Click image to read the article on the San Francisco Examiner website.)
San Francisco Examiner’s 6 October 2025 article ‘The World Transformation Movement and San Francisco’s Search for Meaning’:
A City of Transformation
San Francisco has always been a city restless for transformation. From the Beat poets of North Beach to the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, from the human potential movement to today’s restless search for meaning, the Bay Area has long been a crucible for attempts to reimagine life and remake the world.
At the heart of all those efforts lies the same age-old dilemma: the human condition—the paradox that while humans are capable of extraordinary love and compassion, we are also prone to anger, selfishness, and destructiveness. Poets and artists tried to express it; the peace-and-love generation sought to transcend it. But, as biologist E.O. Wilson once observed, the human condition is not just a cultural or philosophical riddle—it is ‘the most important frontier of the natural sciences.’
This is the challenge Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith has taken up. His revolutionary explanation of the human condition holds that our contradictory nature was an inevitable consequence of becoming conscious—and that only through scientific understanding of the conflict it created within us can we finally resolve it. The World Transformation Movement (WTM)—the global not-for-profit founded around Griffith’s explanation—has drawn international attention. Leading psychiatrists, biologists, and anthropologists have praised Griffith’s theory as a breakthrough. Professor Harry Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, called it ‘the 11th hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition necessary for the psychological rehabilitation and transformation of our species.’
World Transformation Movement’s Fix The World logo
A Biological Answer to the Human Dilemma
So what is this “psychologically rehabilitating”, “human-race-transforming”, “breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition”?
Griffith insists the essence of his theory is actually very simple—even obvious once heard.
The idea is this: when humans developed a fully conscious mind around two million years ago (which is the time when our large association cortex [thinking] brain appeared in the fossil record of our ancestors), an unavoidable battle began between that thinking, self-managing, conscious free will and our already established rigid, inflexible, dictatorial instincts. Natural selection of genes gives species instinctive orientations, but a nerve-based conscious mind works by understanding cause and effect. When a conscious mind emerges, it inevitably begins to experiment—trying new paths, testing ideas, working things out for itself. The problem is that these experiments inevitably conflict with the species’ instincts, which are in effect intolerant of deviation.
To illustrate this, Griffith created the ‘Adam Stork analogy’. Imagine migratory storks suddenly gifted with conscious thought. Some might decide to fly off course to explore, but their instincts would in-effect ‘criticize’ the deviation. The storks would then have no choice but to defend themselves against the implied criticism; they would become resentful and angry towards the criticism, egocentrically determined to prove they’re good and not bad, and determined to block the criticism out of their mind. They would become angry, egocentric and alienated. Only once they could explain why it was necessary to ignore their instincts and follow conscious understanding—basically explain the above difference between the gene-based and nerve-based learning systems—could they reconcile the conflict and find peace.
In Griffith’s telling, that is our human story. When our conscious intellect collided with our instincts, humans were unavoidably left with a terrible and undeserved sense of guilt and insecurity about their worth and meaning. To cope, humans became psychologically defensive—angry, egocentric, and alienated. This upset state is what he sees as the human condition.
It does make sense that it was going to be psychologically upsetting when conscious free will ran into rigid, inflexible, dictatorial instincts.
What This Resolution Means
Understanding this conflict, Griffith argues, lifts the burden of guilt that has haunted humanity for millennia. Once we see that our conscious mind’s defiance of instinct was necessary and heroic, not wrong, bad, even evil, the insecure, defensive behaviors that have defined human life our—anger, egocentricity, and alienation—are obsoleted, no longer needed.
This is what the World Transformation Movement describes as the ‘end of the human condition’: a future where humans live free of the psychological torment that has defined us individually and dominated our history. It is, the WTM argues, the basis for genuine transformation of humans at both the personal and collective level.
Why San Francisco?
San Francisco has famously been the stage for humanity’s boldest experiments in transformation—from the Beats to the peace-and-love movement, and later into the rise of self-help and personal growth culture.
In the 1950s, Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem Howl captured the repressed anger and despair that Jeremy Griffith would later explain as symptoms of the human condition. He howled of minds ‘destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked’, and of lives unravelled by a society unable to face its contradictions. It was a scream of pain that resonated far beyond the poetry readings of North Beach, tapping the raw wound of human existence and fueling a longing for transformation that would spill into the streets.
50th anniversary plaque of Allen Ginsberg’s first public reading of HOWL
Beat writer William S. Burroughs, though less tied to San Francisco, put it in his typically acerbic way: ‘After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager.’’
Jack Kerouac, meanwhile, described life’s outward appearances masking inner turmoil: ‘smooth, well-ordered lives…never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.’ His words read almost like an illustration of the WTM’s point—that beneath the surface of ordinary life lies a universal struggle with guilt, contradiction, and alienation.
That energy and dissatisfaction soon spilled into the streets in the 1960s, as the peace-and-love movement sought to create a more genuine, loving society. In his “High Water Mark” monologue, Hunter S. Thompson described the feeling of ‘inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil…riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…Our energy would simply prevail.’
That wave eventually fell back, and the idealism of the ’60s foundered. Seen through the lens of Griffith’s explanation, this was inevitable: without fixing what was causing our psychologically upset behavior, no attempt at transformation—however much “energy” and enthusiasm was driving it—could last. The Summer of Love generation intuited the need for love but it had not yet solved the deeper problem: the unresolved conflict within ourselves driving our species’ angry, egocentric, and alienated behavior. To love ourselves we had to understand ourselves, solve the human condition. As Carl Jung put it, ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own our own shadow’.
Support and Skepticism
Griffith set out his ideas most fully in his 2016 book FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition, which has drawn strong response from the scientific community. In addition to Professor Prosen’s support noted earlier, it has also won endorsements from leading voices in psychology, anthropology, and biology.
Professor Scott Churchill, former Chair of Psychology at the University of Dallas, wrote: ‘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.’
Cambridge University anthropologist Professor David Chivers also emphasized its impact: ‘The sequence of discussion in FREEDOM is so logical and sensible, providing the necessary breakthrough in the critical issue of needing to understand ourselves.’
Others have been equally emphatic, with Stuart Hurlbert, Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Diego State University, describing Griffith as ‘Darwin II’ and his achievement as ‘phenomenal.’
At the same time, the boldness of the claims—that the riddle of human behavior has at last been solved—has inevitably drawn skepticism. Can a single theory really explain something so complex? Griffith’s answer echoes Albert Einstein’s observation that ‘truth is what stands the test of experience.’ He argues that the clarity his explanation brings—the way it illuminates not only our goodness but also the falseness and evasions we have lived behind—is itself the ultimate test of experience. Supporters say this transparency is what gives weight to Griffith’s claim that he has found the long-sought explanation of the human condition.
Jeremy Griffith holding his book FREEDOM
The City That Longed for Transformation
Whether San Francisco embraces Griffith’s explanation and the WTM remains to be seen. But in a city that has always longed for transformation—from the Beats’ cries of anguish, to the utopianism of the ’60s, to today’s self-help and personal growth culture—it feels like part of that ongoing search.
That has always been the role of San Francisco’s countercultural pioneers: to keep asking why, to push deeper into the contradictions of human life. Griffith recasts the timeless “why are we the way we are?” in biological terms, contending that all the anguish and complexity of human life can be traced back to a simple clash between instinct and intellect.
Kerouac might have appreciated the spirit of that claim. As he wrote in The Dharma Bums: ‘One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.’
