1. ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
AND ITS RESOLUTION

WTM FAQ 1.20  Can you tell us exactly how the instinct vs intellect clash would have started? / What are some examples of early experiments in self-management that would have led to criticism from our instincts?

In his 1988 book Free: The End Of The Human Condition, biologist Jeremy Griffith uses the example of a birthday party for young children to illustrate the type of experimentation the emerging intellect might have engaged in that led it to come into conflict with our pre-established instincts. In this example, one of the children, “Seeing the birthday cake and feeling hungry decides ‘well, why not take the cake’”. Such “grand mistakes of pure selfishness”, as Jeremy describes it, would no doubt have been made by our early ancestors as they began to experiment with the power of free-will, and would have led to criticism from our moral instincts, but the reality is that any conscious mind-based self-adjusting behaviour that was inconsistent with, or challenged, what our cooperative and loving instincts expected, such as going over the hill to see what was in the next valley from where our cooperative and loving group was living, or being preoccupied with thinking about other animals’ brutal behaviour or why the sun sets every day, and as a result not being attentive to everyone else, basically any conscious mind-based self-management like that would have triggered our moral instincts to in effect criticise those conscious mind-based self-adjustments. And once that criticism of our conscious mind’s experiments in self-management started, our conscious mind’s defensive angry, egocentric and alienated responses to it would have led to further condemnation from our instincts, and the whole upsetting scenario would have grown and grown from there. Jeremy’s Adam Stork analogy in Video/​Freedom Essay 3 or chapter 3.4 of FREEDOM, or THE Interview, describes all this.

For further reading on instincts and intellect and how they came into conflict, see FAQ 1.41 ‘What are instincts and what is consciousness, and how do they differ?’, and FAQ 1.42 ‘If our instincts are loving and cooperative why would they criticise the conscious mind when it began experimenting with different behaviour?’