Freedom Essay 56

 

Why there have been ferocious
attacks on the WTM

 

 

Firstly, it is important to emphasise that while vilification of the WTM’s work of bringing understanding to the human condition has occurred, it is by no means the typical response, as the following illustrate:

 

Support from world-leading scientists

 

Over the years biologist Jeremy Griffith’s work has generated interest and acclaim from a wide cross-section of the scientific and literary world. Commendations from scientists for Jeremy’s book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, which was launched in 2016 at the Royal Geographical Society in London, include:

 

• ‘This book by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith presents the 11th hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition needed for the psychological rehabilitation and maturation of the human race!’ Professor Harry Prosen, former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association (you can see Professor Prosen discussing FREEDOM in front of the Milwaukee Zoo bonobo enclosure)

 

 

• ‘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, 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

 

 

• ‘I am stunned & honored to have lived to see the coming of ‘Darwin II’. I say this because after Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection explained the variety of life, Jeremy Griffith has gone on to solve the other four main questions science had to answer about our world and place in it. They are: 1) the dilemma of the human condition, which his instinct vs intellect explanation in chapter 3 of his main, seminal book FREEDOM finally solves; 2) how we humans became fully conscious when other species haven’t, which he answers in chapter 7; 3) the origins of humans’ unique moral nature, which he answers in chapter 5, which it turns out American philosopher John Fiske had already explained in 1874 but mechanistic science had ignored; and 4) the truth of the Integrative Meaning of existence (which we have personified as ‘God’), in chapter 4, which only a rare few thinkers in history have been able to recognize. A most phenomenal scientific achievement!’ Professor Stuart Hurlbert, esteemed ecologist and Professor Emeritus of Biology, San Diego State University

 

 

Jeremy’s other works have also attracted praise and support from eminent scientists and philosophers:

 

• ‘[Professor Hawking] is most interested in your impressive proposal.’ Stephen Hawking, world-leading physicist

 

 

• ‘Frankly, I am “blown away” as the saying goes…​The ground breaking significance of this work is tremendous.’ Professor Patricia Glazebrook, former Chair of Philosophy, Dalhousie University

 

 

• ‘It might help bring about a paradigm shift in the self-image of humanity—an outcome that in the past only the great world religions have achieved.’ Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist, Claremont Graduate University

 

 

• ‘a superb book… [that] brings out the truth of a new and wider frontier for humankind, a forward view of a world of humans no longer in naked competition amongst ourselves.’ Professor John Morton, zoologist, University of Auckland

 

You can read much more praise from scientists and thought leaders on the WTM website.

 

 

Appreciation from the general public

 

Furthermore, there has been an extraordinary range of deeply appreciative feedback (see this link for sources) to Jeremy’s treatise from people of all walks of life from all across the world—including:

 

• ‘Freedom is the most enlightening and informative book I have ever read. It offers to us in depth insight into the reasons behind our dual natured personas and the psychological complexity of the human being.’

 

 

 

• ‘The smartest author I have read in the past decade (and I place him ahead of Illich, Monbiot, Martenson, Aristotle, Plato, and Chomsky) is an Australian scientist and philosopher Jeremy Griffith…​Reading Griffith is like reading another language—you know its English, you can understand the words, but the concepts are so basic and so different that they are almost incomprehensible—it’s a paradigm shift of a read. Awesome.’

 

 

• ‘In his book he defines a number of issues that confront Humanity, he then goes on to demonstrate how they are symptomatic of a deeper malaise. The cause of the malaise is exposed, remedied and the reader is left with at the very least an understanding of themselves, and for me something of an optimism for the future.’

 

 

• ‘What’s radically different about this, is that it makes an explicit link between biological-psychological evolution, particularly instincts vs conscious thinking, and the answer it gives is radically different to anything so far. This idea or explanation has not been given so far, it is new. Although there have been many discussions about instinct vs conscious thought trying to understand them, the level of clarity about this has yet not be proposed this way…​This is a radically new insight about this phenomenon.’

 

 

• ‘This book hits hard in areas of truth that we are afraid to learn for ourselves…​I can’t thank Jeremy enough for his hard work and concern for a problem that has been unsolved since ancient times. This book is a true life changer and much needed mind opener.’

 

 

• ‘There are all sorts of philosophy books out there that try and explain the human condition, or at least how to live with it. This is the only book I have ever read that categorically gets to the bottom of it all. It scientifically explains the human condition, and with that explained, all the questions about our behavior just unlock before your eyes. I don’t care what question you have, this book will answer it. Extraordinary.’

 

 

• ‘If Plato and Aristotle were alive and read Griffith, they would die happy men.’

 

Affirmations from personal experience with the work of the WTM

 

For examples of the direct experience people have had with the work of the WTM there are many affirmations that can be watched and/or read on the WTM website. Again, these responses could hardly be more considered, supportive or enthusiastic.

 

So why has there been vilification?

 

The problem is that while the subject of the human condition, which is our species’ corrupted, ‘fallen’, instinctive-self-or-soul-destroyed, seemingly ‘evil’, angry, egocentric and alienated state, is by far the most important of all subjects for the human race to address and solve, it has also been the most confronting and unbearably depressing of all subjects for humans to face. In fact, it has been such a fearfully confronting subject that almost everyone had to resign themselves during their adolescence to living in determined denial of it. (The psychological process of Resignation is explained in Freedom Essay 30.)

What this means is that when human-condition-addressing-not-avoiding, and thus effectively penetrating, fully accountable and solving, redeeming explanation of the human condition finally appears—as it now has—a great crisis point in the human journey occurs where extreme resistance and prejudice against what is being presented threatens to destroy the desperately needed ameliorating enlightenment of our species’ now terminally psychologically upset, angry, egocentric and alienated condition.

Basically the fulfilment of our species’ 2-million-year heroic journey to find the redeeming, human-race-liberating understanding of our corrupted condition is jeopardised by a terrible loss of nerve and retreat back into darkness—which would, before long, result in the death of the human race from unthinkably horrendous levels of psychosis.

The fact that has to be faced is that only by understanding and solving the human condition can we save ourselves from the now rapidly escalating effects of it. So we either continue to fearfully resist and persecute the fully accountable, truthful explanation of the human condition, or we tolerate the work and by so doing avoid a fast approaching horrific dystopia of humans everywhere suffering from unbearable psychosis—the terrifying end-play zombie apocalypse so many of our movies, young adult novels, and even zombie street parades, are anticipating (see paragraph 1059 of FREEDOM)!

 

 

The renowned Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson recognised the absolutely critical, human-race-saving importance of finding the reconciling, rehabilitating and solving understanding of the human condition when he wrote that ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’ (Consilience, 1998, p.298 of 374), and in another of his books, ‘There is no grail more elusive or precious in the life of the mind than the key to understanding the human condition’ (The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012, p.1). But again, while ‘understanding the human condition’ is the holy ‘grail’ of ‘science’, it is, as will now be evidenced, the most confronting and thus contentious of all subjects, dealing as it does with the underlying subjective dimension to life of the issue of ‘self’—which is why solving it has been so ‘elusive’. Indeed, it has taken the minds of some of the world’s greatest philosophers to even articulate the fear of engaging with it.

 

 

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘analysis on the nature of despair is one of the best accounts on the subject’ (Wikipedia; see www.wtmsources.com/137)—with the ‘nature of despair’ being as close as the reviewer could go in referring to the worse-than-death, suicidal depression that the subject of the human condition has historically caused humans, but which Kierkegaard managed to give such an honest account of in his aptly titled 1849 book, The Sickness Unto Death: ‘the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die [and end the torture of our previously unexplained human condition]…​that despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction [of our ‘good and evil’, human condition-afflicted lives], this sickness in the self; eternally to die, to die and yet not to die’ (tr. A. Hannay, 1989, p.48 of 179).

It follows then that to confront the until now unexplained human condition has been an impossible ask for most people—as another great philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, acknowledged: ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror…​it must also be said of knowledge that it is bitter, and there is no escaping that bitterness…​Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world…​There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless’ (The Destiny of Man, 1931; tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.14-15 of 310).

In his appropriately titled poem No Worst, There Is None, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins similarly wrote, ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, articulating how fearfully confronting and depressing the previously un-‘fathomed’ issue of the human condition has been for virtually all humans. (In The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect Jeremy describes just how fearful we humans have been of the previously unexplained issue of our species’ corrupted, ‘fallen’, innocence-destroyed, Garden-of-Eden-abandoned human condition.)

 

 

No wonder then that the great psychoanalyst R.D. Laing wrote that while the ‘desperately urgently required project for our time—[is] to explore the inner space and time of consciousness…​We are so out of touch with this realm [living in such fearful denial in our conscious mind of the issue of the human condition] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist. It is very small wonder that it is perilous indeed to explore such a lost realm’! (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.105 of 156; also, see more of this quote from Laing in F. Essay 48).

Indeed, writing specifically about the all-important, human-race-saving challenge of ‘the enlightenment or ignorance of our human condition’, the great Greek philosopher Plato long ago warned that when someone tries to take us out of the dark ‘cave’ where he said we’ve had to ‘take refuge’ from the ‘painful’ ‘light’ that makes ‘visible’ ‘the imperfections of human life’, that we ‘would much object’—even predicting that some ‘would say that his [the person who attempts to deliver understanding to the human condition] visit to the upper world had ruined his sight [they would treat him as mad], and that the ascent [out of the cave] was not worth even attempting. And if anyone tried to release them and lead them up, they would kill him if they could lay hands on him’! (The Republic, c.360 BC; tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, or see the relevant section with quotes highlighted at www.wtmsources.com/227).

 

Plato’s dark ‘cave’ where the human race has been hiding in ever-increasing fearful
denial (psychosis/alienation) of its ever-increasing corrupted condition, a progression that only
reconciling, redeeming and relieving understanding of the origin of our corrupted condition can end.

 

And sure enough the vilifying, try to ‘kill him’, attacks began — in the form of highly defamatory publications — which we responsibly met by successfully suing the vilifiers in court for defamation

 

Thankfully, we live in more civilised times, but Plato’s point is clear: the temptation to ferociously vilify, maliciously misrepresent and wilfully fabricate evidence against carefully considered, argued, evidenced and authoritatively supported scientific analysis of that most ‘precious in the life of the mind’ holy ‘grail’ of ‘science’ of ‘understanding the human condition’ (as Wilson described it) produces a crisis point in the human journey where extreme prejudice and persecution does threaten to shut down crucial enquiry and progress—which clearly has to be resisted.

Certainly, during the 1990s and early 2000s, the WTM and its supporters, in particular its founding directors, Jeremy and the twice-honoured Order of Australia recipient, mountaineer and biologist Tim Macartney-Snape AM OAM, were the subject of several highly defamatory media attacks orchestrated by a fundamentalist minister of the Uniting Church, Reverend David Millikan. As pointed out, this vilification had to be, and was, strongly resisted, and in the civilised way our society prescribes, namely through the law courts in what was then the biggest defamation case in Australia’s history against two of Australia’s biggest media institutions, including the national public broadcaster.

When an absurd cult accusation and litany of outrageously dishonest fabrications and misrepresentation of us and our work were publicly broadcast across Australia in 1995, the World Transformation Movement (then called the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood) and its founding directors Jeremy and Tim successfully sued the publishers for defamation. Ultimately, these publications were completely discredited by a series of public apologies and official rulings that found what was said was ‘inaccurate’, ‘partial’, ‘unbalanced’, ‘untrue’, lacked ‘fairness’, not produced ‘in good faith’ and was ‘not justified’, with the ABC being ordered to pay almost $1.5 million in damages and costs. It was clearly, as The Bulletin magazine summarised, a ‘hatchet job’.

The fight-back against the fear campaign of persecution culminated in a 2010 judgment, the most revealing part of which, in terms of what Plato predicted, was the following, in which the NSW Court of Appeal, led by his Honour Justice David Hodgson, unanimously overturned an earlier lower Court finding about Jeremy’s scientific synthesis on the basis that it did ‘not adequately consider’ ‘the nature and scale of its subject matter’, in particular ‘that the work was a grand narrative explanation from a holistic approach, involving teleological elements’, and that other important submissions ‘were not adequately considered by the primary judge’, including that the work can make ‘those who do take the trouble to grapple with it uncomfortable’ because it ‘involves reflections upon subject-matter including the purpose of human existence which may, of its nature, cause an adverse reaction as it touches upon issues which some would regard as threatening to their ideals, values or even world views’. Essentially, what the program said about Jeremy’s work was found to be ‘not justified’, the court recognising his work as being serious, albeit heretical, ‘teleological’ science. As Tim Macartney-Snape explained in some detail in The Australian newspaper advertisement that the WTM ran to announce and explain this momentous vindication (see below), the idea that there is teleological, goal-directed change is an anathema to all but the most progressive scientists because it confronts humans with the historically unbearable issue of the human condition.

 

See our full-page advertisement in Australia’s national newspaper, The Australian,
containing Tim Macartney-Snape’s commentary on this momentous ruling

 

Yes, ‘reflections upon’ the human condition can be extremely ‘threatening’ for some people, but that doesn’t justify malicious misrepresentation and persecution of a rigorously argued and evidenced scientific analysis of that most ‘precious in the life of the mind’ holy ‘grail’ of ‘science’ of ‘understanding the human condition’.

It is worth noting that Justice Hodgson, who wrote the unanimous Court of Appeal decision referred to in the above paragraphs, was a Rhodes Scholar, a published philosopher and was, according to a former Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia, ‘one of the finest judges who ever graced a court in this country’ (www.wtmsources.com/256). Indeed, in his 4 September 2012 obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, Justice Hodgson was described ‘from an early age’ as having ‘been fascinated by what went on inside the head that gave rise to conscious experience’, and that he was said to be blessed with ‘flawless logic’ and to ‘fit the description of Plato’s “philosopher king”’ (see www.wtmsources.com/184).

 

Justice David Hodgson with his Order of Australia insignia

 

So the WTM has been through that ‘boiling oil’ test of extreme persecution and then scrutiny and was completely vindicated. Further malicious attacks, which do still occur, are just going over what has already been tested and found to be baseless and unjustified—so they are extremely unfair and, given the desperate need to find the reconciling, redeeming and psychologically healing, human-race-saving understanding of the human condition, profoundly irresponsible.

John Stuart Mill, in his seminal 1859 essay On Liberty—a document considered a philosophical pillar of Western civilisation—emphasised this irresponsibility when he wrote, ‘the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution.’

 

 

This is mindful scientific enquiry into the human condition — the very opposite situation of mindless cults

 

As mentioned, some retaliatory, angry vilification and even outrageously dishonest misrepresentation and fabrication of the WTM still occurs—including the suggestion or implication that the WTM is a cult.

Cults are basically where people give up trying to make sense of reality and its dilemmas and instead defer to some person and/or dogma-based belief system. In contrast, the WTM is concerned with providing self-empowering scientific understanding of the dilemmas of life, in particular of the ultimate dilemma of our ‘good and evil’-conflicted human condition. So, the truth—as the court judgment essentially found—is that the work of the WTM is the complete opposite of a cult, but again, as has been described, such thinking can be unbearable for some people and result in angry, defensive vilification. Moreover, this is why, in all our publications, we particularly caution people with a history of psychological instability or mental illness to be careful to avoid overly studying and confronting analysis of the human condition. Such people are advised to study it only sufficiently to be able to understand and verify its accountability or otherwise, and, if satisfied that it does explain the human condition, to preoccupy themselves supporting it rather than studying it further.

As the Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan advised in his song about the arrival of understanding of the human condition, The Times They Are A-Changin’, ‘your old road is rapidly agein’, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand [support this new paradigm]’ (see paragraph 1186 of FREEDOM). Christ was actually making the same point when he anticipated the time when ‘the meek [the more innocent/sound/less psychologically upset]…​inherit the earth’ (Bible, Matt. 5:5), and when ‘many who are first [the intellectually able] will be last, and many who are last [the psychologically innocent/sound but overly trusting and easily victimised] will be first’ (Matt. 19:30, 20:16; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30), because the implication is that the more sound have to lead the way to a human-condition-free world. It makes sense; in the old human-condition-stricken world the more intelligent led because we had to find understanding, but in the new human-condition-understood world the more sound lead the way home to the new human-condition-free/sound state. There’s a change of emphasis from IQ [Intelligence Quotient] to EQ [Emotional Quotient]—as Dylan said, ‘the times they are a’changin’’.

(See more on why the WTM is the very opposite of a cult in WTM FAQ 3:12: Is the World Transformation Movement a cult?)

 

Be your own judge

 

The WTM is a completely open and transparent organisation with a comprehensive website at www.humancondition.com where there is a great range of books, publications and audio-visual material available to be viewed or downloaded that we encourage everyone to explore so as to reach your own conclusions about the veracity and importance of the work of the WTM.

 

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

For further reading about the outrageous, reverse-of-the-truth lie that the WTM is a cult, and our successful vindication in the courts, see FAQ 3.17 for a summary of our successful legal action, and the Persecution of the WTM essay on our website. Another relevant WTM essay is Crisis Point in the Human Journey. Also, as has been mentioned, WTM FAQ 3:12: Is the World Transformation Movement a cult? is particularly relevant.

 

Chapter 9:3 of FREEDOM and Freedom Essay 40, which are about the arrival of truth day or exposure day or ‘Judgment Day’, are also extremely relevant in terms of understanding why there has been persecution of the WTM. And the limitations of mechanistic science, and why it ignores, even attacks, Jeremy Griffith and his ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of the human condition, are explained in FAQ 1.10 and FAQ 2.4.

 

And finally, we also recommend reading Chapter 9:7 of FREEDOM about the more upset having to support rather than study understanding of the human condition when it arrives, and Freedom Essay 15 on how to become transformed and free of the human condition.

 

Discussion or comment on this essay is welcomed—see below.