Reproduced from Quadrant
(Click image to read article on the Quadrant website.)
Tim Macartney-Snape’s 23 March 2025 article ‘Instinct’s Dreadful Gravity’:
Rising majestically above the Wimmera plains of western Victoria, Mount Arapiles is extraordinarily photogenic with the clear Australian light illuminating remarkable orange rock of bulletproof quartzite sandstone offering some of the best climbing in the world.
However, in an egregious manifestation of the tsunami of critical theory that is sweeping through our institutions, Parks Victoria has decided to ban climbers from the area. Access to most of the world famous climbs will be denied to some 20,000 climbers a year because of a decision to close off vast swathes—nearly 60 per cent—in order to protect indigenous heritage.
I don’t want to argue about whether or not the indigenous artwork and quarries in the area are of unique significance and need protecting from climbers, because I don’t think this is what is actually motivating Parks Victoria—although I will note that an archaeology report from 1992 found the area’s rock art to be small in number and of “minor” significance, and that the more prolific evidence of quarrying (common throughout Australia) is usually invulnerable to vandalism because of the hardness of the rock, and therefore the quarries are “difficult to either unintentionally or deliberately disturb or destroy” (Mt Arapiles-Tooan State Park archaeological survey: a report to the Goolum Goolum Aboriginal Co-operative Ltd., Vanessa Edmonds).
No, I suggest Parks Victoria’s decision to ban climbers was not motivated by a desire to protect the area’s indigenous heritage, but is symptomatic of a deep malaise within the organisation, the true nature of which is revealed in recently unearthed documents that contain the ideologically charged statement, “Pioneering of new climbing areas is also perceived by traditional owners as a continuing act of colonisation of the landscape” (The Australian, 30 Jan. 2025). Here we see its real motivation—Parks Victoria isn’t banning climbs to protect rock art or quarry scars, but because the bureaucrats within have been captured by an ideology blinding them into believing white people and the triumphs of Western civilisation are bad, and must be stopped.
This mirrors the extreme, almost obsessive behaviour we’re seeing in other areas of the culture wars, where advocates of issues like anthropogenic climate change, open borders, or gender fluidity are ready to dismantle our way of life in order to advance their dogmatic ‘woke’ or ‘critical theory’ agendas. A growing segment of society is now so desperate for the psychological relief that comes from aligning with a ‘victim’-driven cause they are trampling over the rights of the majority. It’s a desperation so deep that they are no longer guided by reality but by the superficial ideology of ‘progressive’ causes. And while there has been a rise of right-wing movements in the US, Canada and Europe, I believe the number of individuals fixated on this ‘relief hunting’ will continue to swell.
But how do you make a case against the left-wing perspective? How can you defend selfishness over kindness and compassion? When, in 1963, John Kenneth Galbraith, the American liberal economist and advisor to the Kennedys, told a National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty that the Right was engaged in “one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy, that is, the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness”, he was highlighting this core dilemma for the Right—and, really, for humanity as a whole: how do you possibly “justify” what seems to be inherently immoral behaviour, such as competitive, aggressive and “selfish” actions?
This question clearly extends beyond politics and goes to the heart of human behaviour, and if we are to bring a rational answer to it, it must ultimately be a question for scientists, especially biologists, to answer. Which brings me to the work of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, who has, I believe, provided the answer to this riddle of riddles in his book Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution.
Answering this riddle of riddles is certainly a grand claim, and as such, warrants scepticism. Of course, despite this, we shouldn’t give up the search for the explanation of why we are the way we are. As the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson wrote, “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), and “The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences” (Consilience, 1998).
How then are we to know if Griffith’s theory does get to the very bottom of the human condition? Well, despite its profundity, I suggest that when you hear it you will realise it is actually very obvious and simple; so simple that it bears out ecologist Allan Savory’s observation that “Whenever there has been a major insoluble problem for mankind, the answer, when finally found, has always been very simple” (Holistic Resource Management, 1988). Indeed, upon hearing it I found myself repeating Thomas Huxley’s famous words upon hearing Darwin’s theory of natural selection—“How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!”
Essentially Griffith explains that humans were once like other animals, driven by instinctive behaviours shaped by natural selection that provided each species with a way to orient themselves in the world. However, humans eventually developed a fully conscious, self-regulating mind rooted in an understanding of cause and effect. Axiomatically the full potential of being conscious could only be achieved by acquiring knowledge through experience. Griffith argues that this new conscious mind was inevitably destined to clash with the instinctive system, and uses the example of migrating birds to illustrate: these birds are guided by instinct to fly certain routes, having inherited these behaviours over countless generations. However, the birds have no understanding of why they follow these paths. Now, if we were to imagine these birds being endowed with a conscious, thinking mind, they might start testing their boundaries—flying to an island, for example, to explore. But these new behaviours would inevitably meet with resistance from their instincts, which would in effect criticise the birds for straying from their programmed paths. The conscious birds would then inevitably find themselves forced to defend their search for knowledge, combatting the implied criticism by defensively attacking it, trying to prove it undeserved and trying to block it out. They would become angry, egocentric and alienated. It’s only by gaining enough knowledge to understand why they’ve gone against their instincts that they can end the defensive angry, egocentric and alienated ways of coping—in effect, lift humanity’s ‘burden of guilt’, as it has been referred to in our human situation.
Since the emergence of consciousness, Griffith suggests that humanity’s lot has been to heroically suffer becoming more and more angry, egocentric and alienated until we found this redeeming and exonerating understanding that ends the need for our artificially defensive ways of coping. The paradox of the situation, he says, is beautifully captured in the musical Man of La Mancha, where it is said we had “to march into hell for a heavenly cause”.
As to the accountability and thus importance of Griffith’s work, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Professor Harry Prosen, has said, “I have no doubt that Jeremy Griffith’s instinct vs intellect explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race”. And the eminent ecologist and champion of race blind policies, Professor Stuart Hurlbert wrote, “I am stunned & honored to have lived to see the coming of ‘Darwin II’.”
The significance of Griffith’s thesis in ending the Left’s march is that it explains that while their unwavering demand that everyone conform to a cooperative and selfless ideal (‘fly back on course’) may provide a sense of moral superiority, and thus psychological relief for its supporters, in reality it suppresses the freedom of expression and individuality that are essential for the pursuit of knowledge, ultimately for self-knowledge, understanding of our seemingly ‘bad’, ‘evil’, ‘corrupted’, ‘fallen’ competitive, selfish and aggressive human condition. It’s possible to now see that it was only through obtaining a deeper understanding of our behaviour that we could truly end our defensive competitive, selfish and aggressive way of coping and create a truly cooperative and selfless world. Dogma, in this sense, isn’t the solution—it’s the problem. It hinders our quest for the profound understanding needed to rehabilitate humanity and save the world.
That was a brief summary of Griffith’s theory; to now present it, and in the process totally debunk the philosophical basis of the Left, in more detail.
Firstly, to briefly describe what instincts are. All of an animal’s systems—its nervous system to coordinate movement and shape its reactions to the environment, but also its hormonal, circulatory, digestive, immune, and reproductive systems—have been shaped by natural selection, fine-tuned over generations to help the species adapt to its environment. It is through this natural selection that the animal’s behaviours are guided by instinct.
Regarding consciousness, there is an aspect of the nervous system, distinct from the instinctive programming of behaviours, that holds the potential for its emergence. This is the capacity to store memories. When an electric impulse travels through a nerve, it leaves an imprint that remains even after the current has passed. This imprint, this memory, allows an animal to recall past experiences and compare them with present ones. By doing so, it can discern patterns, recognise recurring events, and form predictions about what is likely to happen next. With these insights, the animal can adjust its behaviour accordingly, refining its responses over time as predictions are tested against outcomes.
In humans, this ability to store and process information has become sufficiently developed to enable a deeper form of reasoning. Through these refined connections, the brain can begin to understand cause and effect, to recognise how events are related, and—crucially—to become aware of, or conscious of, these relationships over time. In this way, consciousness involves not just reacting to the environment but actively managing change from a foundation of understanding.
While some of the gene-based learning system involves the inheritance of instinctual behaviours encoded in nerve pathways, the ‘nerve-based learning system’ refers to the part of the nervous system that allows for the understanding of cause and effect, the learning from experience that leads to consciousness. The significance of this system, once it developed sufficiently, was that our conscious intellect—our ability to reason—could finally take control from the instincts that had previously governed our lives; it could assume management over the behaviours once guided solely by the slow, unyielding processes of natural selection.
Indeed, the power of the nerve-based learning system to adapt quickly to new circumstances made it almost infinitely more efficient than the gene-based system, which required generations of change to adapt. When the fully conscious mind emerged, as it uniquely did in humans, it should have led to a triumph of intellect over instinct, allowing us to better manage our lives, to adjust and evolve in real time. However, when our nerve-based conscious mind started to function independently of our instincts, essentially challenging them, our instincts pushed back and provided conflicting signals; they, in a sense, ‘criticised’ our conscious mind’s quest for knowledge.
The only way to end this conflict was to understand why the conscious mind had to defy our instincts, an understanding that would take millions of years and science’s discoveries about the differences between the ways genes and nerves operate, to realise. We can now see that when the self-adjusting intellect emerged and attempted to wrest the management of our lives from the instinctive orientations, our ‘dictatorial’ instincts could not but be at loggerheads with our intellect; be, in effect, critical of this emerging, upstart, ‘new kid on the block’, and so a conflict had to occur.
In the absence of this understanding, Griffith suggests that for over two million years (the approximate time since consciousness emerged in our hominid ancestors, as indicated by the appearance of the large association cortex in the fossil skulls of our ancestors) our species’ only way to cope with this ‘criticism’ from our instincts was to fight back. We became angry towards the criticism; in every way we could we tried to demonstrate our self-worth, prove that we were good and not bad; and we tried to block out the criticism. We became angry, egocentric and alienated—psychological responses born out of the intellect’s inability to explain its ‘disobedience’.
At any point, it would have been easy to abandon the search for knowledge: stopping the quest would have stopped the criticism from our instincts, bringing us relief from the interminable condemnation. But giving up on this search was an irresponsible, even dangerous, course of action, because it would mean abandoning the chance of finding the redeeming explanation for why we had to defy our instincts, the very thing that could free us from our conflicted state!
Significantly, Griffith’s insight allows us to understand the real basis, merits and liabilities of the left and right wings of politics. When author Geoffrey Wheatcroft described the twin political problems as “the brutality of the right and the dishonesty of the left” (The Australian Financial Review, 29 Jan. 1999) we can see that he was referring to the right-wing continuing the psychologically upsetting angry, egocentric and alienating brutal search for knowledge; and to the oppression of the dishonesty and delusion of the left-wing that maintained we were being ‘good’ by opposing angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour and dogmatically imposing loving, selfless and cooperative ideal, ‘politically correct’, ‘woke’ values.
Paradoxically, it was the right’s embrace of the arduous journey toward understanding—despite the psychological angry, egocentric and alienating toll it exacted—that positioned them not as villains, but as the true idealists in this struggle.
The Left, on the other hand, with its emphasis on imposing politically correct, ‘woke’ values of cooperation, selflessness, and love, appeared to be pursuing an idealistic vision, but in reality, it was engaging in a dangerous form of pseudo-idealism. By demanding everyone conform to a cooperative and selfless ideal (‘fly back on course’) without understanding the deeper truths of our condition, the left-wing was simply masking that condition and leading humanity astray. Far from guiding us toward peace, they were, in fact, suppressing the freedom of expression and individuality that are essential for the pursuit of knowledge and steering us toward a form of intellectual stagnation that would ultimately doom us.
The search for knowledge, especially the search for self-knowledge, is humanity’s greatest and most essential mission. When philosopher Jacob Bronowski famously wrote in The Ascent of Man, he was recognising that the need to reconcile instinct and intellect has been our greatest need: “I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the West by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into—into what? Into … falsely profound questions about, ‘are we not really just animals at bottom’; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex [instinct]. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts [that describe the human condition] and the explanations of science [that has to explain the human condition], waits ahead of us.”
Yet the longer this search has dragged on, the greater the “loss of nerve”—and therefore the more tempted humanity became to abandon the search in favour of comforting ideologies that provided a sense of moral superiority and thus psychological relief for its supporters. As Griffith explains in Death by Dogma, this desperate temptation has become a pervasive force, manifesting in increasingly dishonest and oppressive movements. From socialism to feminism, to environmentalism, multiculturalism, political correctism, post-modernism, Marxist Critical Theory, identity politics, wokeness, cancel culture and the Great Reset, etc. These ideologies, while seemingly noble, represent false starts toward a better world. They seek to impose and overlay solutions without truly understanding the underlying problems.
As Nietzsche warned the exhausted human race, “You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you…But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope!…War [against oppression, especially from dogma] and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your pity but your bravery has saved the unfortunate up to now” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), and “There comes a time in a culture’s history when it becomes so pathologically soft that it takes the side of its worst enemy [dogma]…and calls it “progress” (Beyond Good And Evil). And this is exactly what has happened. The dogmatic political correctness that pervades much of the Left agenda is not a progressive step forward—it is a regression or retreat from the painful, necessary quest for the human race-liberating understanding of our upset, ‘corrupted’, ‘fallen’ human condition.
As Griffith writes, “Dogma is not the cure, it’s the poison because it blocks the search for the rehabilitating understanding of ourselves that’s needed to actually save the world. George Orwell’s famous prediction that ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face [the human mind] for ever’ was about to come true—but, mercifully, science has finally made it possible to explain the human condition and so save us from this makes-you-feel-good-but-is-actually-horrifically-selfish-and-deluded left-wing threat of the death by dogma extinction of our species!”
The magnificence of Griffith’s instinct vs intellect explanation is that it finally resolves this riddle of riddles of how could we divisively behaved humans possibly be considered good and not bad. In giving us the “truly superior moral justification for selfishness” Galbraith called for, the Right can be properly defended and the madness of the Left can actually be stopped.
Tim Macartney-Snape AM is a mountaineer, explorer, speaker, some-time author, entrepreneur and twice honoured Order of Australia recipient. He is a Patron of the World Transformation Movement and a member of the Fred Hollows Foundation.
(See https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/philosophy-ideas/instincts-dreadful-gravity/)
