Reproduced from The Village Voice

 

 

(Click image to read article on The Village Voice website.)

 

The Village Voice’s 18 June 2025 article ‘Can We Explain Ourselves? The World Transformation Movement Thinks So’:

New York has always been a laboratory of ideas—where theories are tested not just in lecture halls but in lived experience. So it makes a certain poetic sense that this city, with its legacy of cultural reinvention, would host one of the centres of a movement that claims to have resolved the deepest question of all: Why do we behave the way we do?

Founded by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, the World Transformation Movement (WTM) is built around one defining claim—that the psychological suffering of humanity, the so-called “human condition”, has now been explained. Not through philosophy, religion, or pop psychology—but via a fully accountable, rational, biological understanding of human behavior.

And it’s a claim that has drawn attention from some heavyweight thinkers. Professor Harry Prosen, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, called Griffith’s central book FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition, ‘the book that saves the world’. Professor Stuart Hurlbert called Griffith ‘Darwin II’. Others, including philosopher Patricia Glazebrook, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and biologist George Schaller, have echoed the praise. Even Stephen Hawking, when presented with the thesis, expressed interest in its ‘impressive proposal’.

 

Jeremy Griffith launching FREEDOM at the Royal Geographical Society in London, 2016

 

Understanding, Not Just Believing

Griffith’s central insight is that our species’ capacity for conscious thought led to a necessary rebellion against our own instinctive programming. This inner conflict, he argues, has generated not just guilt and shame, but the entire spectrum of psychological distress and destructive behavior.

But unlike traditional theories that pathologize or moralize this as dysfunction, Griffith reframes it as a heroic phase of human development. The clash between our gene-based instincts and our intellect’s need to understand was inevitable—and fully explicable. And it’s this explanation, the WTM argues, that brings resolution.

 

‘The Struggle of the Two Natures in Man’, George Grey Barnard, The Met

 

By showing that our behavior has a good, rational biological cause—that our angry, egocentric and alienated state was the unavoidable outcome of a mind needing to understand—Griffith’s work lifts what he calls the “burden of guilt” from the human race. And with guilt gone, the need for defensive, destructive behavior dissolves. In its place comes what the WTM describes as a reconciled, healed, and psychologically redeemed state.

This scientific foundation is what the WTM sees as its defining distinction. As one supporter put it, ‘This isn’t about faith or belief—it’s the opposite. It’s about finally having a rational, biological understanding that explains why we are fundamentally good; it’s about knowing.’

 

From Music to Meaning: Juan Ubiera and the World Transformation Movement New York Centre

That perspective resonates deeply with Juan Ubiera, a musician and educator originally from the Dominican Republic who now leads the WTM New York Centre. A longtime New Yorker, Ubiera holds a master’s degree in music education and founded the Domisol Music Academy in 2012. ‘Most artists and musicians want to be in New York because it’s a Mecca for music’, he says. ‘I studied and played with different people, mostly famous Latin American singers, in nightclubs and recording studios.’

But music wasn’t his only pursuit. ‘I’ve been a seeker all my life, a seeker of the truth’, Ubiera explains. ‘Everybody wants to know the truth inside. The true self needs the truth and yet that’s not acknowledged out there.’

Having explored religion in the past, Ubiera says it didn’t give him what Griffith’s explanation did: scientific clarity. ‘So understanding is more than just faith or believing. It’s much more because our goodness is scientifically proved; I feel good because we are good and not bad!’

Now, as part of the WTM New York Centre, he’s committed to sharing the material with others. ‘It’s world-saving information. And I need everybody to have access to this wonderful information…I’m so happy to be part of this. Very, very happy to get people to know, to hear about this.’

 

Musician Juan Ubeira, founder of the
World Transformation Movement Centre in New York

 

The Bigger Picture

With over 80 World Transformation Movement Centres worldwide and content available in multiple languages, Griffith’s synthesis is gaining traction across disciplines. Dr. Roger Lewin called it ‘very impressive’. Professor David Chivers described it as ‘the necessary breakthrough in the critical issue of needing to understand ourselves’. And in the words of Professor Karen Riley, ‘Living without this understanding is like living back in the Stone Age’.

In an era where culture is saturated with diagnoses but starved of meaning, the WTM’s message lands with striking clarity: humans are not innately bad—they are misunderstood. And the solution isn’t transcendence or self-rejection, but science-based, self-understanding and self-recognition.

To learn more, visit the WTM New York Centre at www.wtmnewyork.com or explore Griffith’s freely available work at www.humancondition.com.

 

(See https://www.villagevoice.com/can-we-explain-ourselves-the-world-transformation-movement-thinks-so/)