Some Of Daily Ecstatic Responses!

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Transcript of THE Interview

 

 

 

Contents

Commendations

 

Background

 

Part 1.   The psychosis-addressing-and-solving, real biological explanation of the human condition

 

Part 2.   Since this instinct vs intellect explanation is reasonably obvious, why haven’t we been taught it at school?

 

Part 3.   How did we humans acquire our instinctive cooperative and loving moral conscience?

 

Part 4.   How does the psychological rehabilitation of the human race that the arrival of understanding of the human condition finally makes possible actually occur?

 

 

 

Commendations for Griffith’s treatise

 

From Thought Leaders

 

‘[Prof. Stephen Hawking] is most interested in your impressive proposal.’

 

‘In all of written history there are only 2 or 3 people who’ve been able to think on this scale
about the human condition.’ Prof. Anthony Barnett, zoologist

 

FREEDOM is the book that saves the world…cometh the hour, cometh the man.’
Prof. Harry Prosen, former Pres. Canadian Psychiatric Assn.

 

‘I am stunned and honored to have lived to see the coming of “Darwin II”.’
Prof. Stuart Hurlbert, esteemed ecologist

 

‘Living without this understanding is like living back in the stone age, that’s how massive
the change it brings is!’ Prof. Karen Riley, clinical pharmacist

 

‘Frankly, I am blown away by the ground-breaking significance of this work.’
Prof. Patricia Glazebrook, philosopher

 

‘I’ve no doubt a fascinating television series could be made based upon this.’
Sir David Attenborough

 

Read more

 

 

From The General Public

 

‘Griffith should be given Nobel prizes for peace, biology, medicine;
actually every Nobel prize there is!’

 

‘He nailed it, nailed the whole thing, just like the world going from FLAT to ROUND,
BOOM the WHOLE WORLD CHANGES, no joke.’

 

FREEDOM will be the most influential, world-changing book in history, and time
will now be delineated as BG, before Griffith, or AG, after Griffith.’

 

‘I’m speechless – this is bigger than natural selection & the theory of relativity!’

 

‘I really think this man will become recognized as the best thinker this world’s
ever seen, and don’t we need him right now!’

 

‘Griffith has decoded the human species, we FINALLY
know what’s going on & the suffering stops!’

 

‘The world can’t deny this for much longer, let the light in, save the human race!’

 

THE Interview should be globally broadcast daily.
The healing explanation humans so sorely need.’

 

Read more

 

 

Background to THE Interview

 

Collage of Craig Conway in a radio studio conducting ‘THE Interview’, and Jeremy Griffith presenting from Australia during ‘THE Interview’

 

About Jeremy Griffith (pictured right)

Jeremy is an Australian biologist who has dedicated his life to bringing fully accountable, biological understanding to the dilemma of the human condition; which is the underlying issue in all human life of our species’ extraordinary capacity for what has been called ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Jeremy has published over ten books on the human condition, including the Australasian bestseller A Species In Denial (2003), and his definitive treatise, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition (2016).

His work has attracted the support of such eminent scientists as the former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Professor Harry Prosen, the esteemed American ecologist Professor Stuart Hurlbert, Australia’s Templeton Prize-winning biologist Professor Charles Birch, the Former President of the Primate Society of Great Britain Dr David Chivers, Nobel Prize winning physicist Stephen Hawking, as well as other distinguished thinkers such as Sir Laurens van der Postsee www.humancondition.com/​#commendations.

Jeremy is the founder and patron of the World Transformation Movement (WTM)see www.humancondition.com.

 

About FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition

Front cover of ‘FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition’

Jeremy’s book FREEDOM, which this interview is about, presents the reconciling and psychologically healing biological explanation of our ‘good and evil’ stricken human condition. In doing so it unravels the core mystery behind human behaviour, thus ending suffering and conflict at its sourceand providing the now urgently needed road map for the complete transformation of our lives and world.

FREEDOM was launched at the Royal Geographical Society in London in 2016, with the keynote address by Sir Bob Geldof. It is freely available at www.humancondition.com, or you can purchase hard copies at bookstores, including Amazon.

 

About Craig Conway (pictured above left)

Craig is an internationally acclaimed English actor, writer, producer and director who has worked in theatre, TV and film for three decades. On stage Craig has created projects for theatre companies including The National Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Northern Stage Ensemble (Founder member) and the Contact Theatre Manchester. On screen, he has starred in films such as Final Score with Pierce Brosnan, The Current War with Benedict Cumberbatch and The Courier with Gary Oldman. His TV credits include Vera, Wire In the Blood, George Gently and Our Friends In The North. Craig is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.

With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Craig decided to try to reach people through radio and conducted a series of widely broadcast interviews with people he felt were ‘seeking to make a difference in the world’, which included this interview with Jeremy.

Craig first learnt of Jeremy’s explanation of the human condition in early 2019 and became so impressed by it he started a WTM Centre in north east England to promote it; see www.WTMNorthEastEngland.​com.

 

 

 

Part 1 of THE Interview

 

The psychosis-addressing-and-solving, real
biological explanation of the human condition

 

1

Craig Conway: Hello to everyone listening. My name is Craig Conway. Now, whilst I’ve been an actor by profession, very recently I’ve been introduced to doing radio where I talk to people from all over the world. Well, today I have a very, very special guest on the line from Australia.

2

The turmoil and trauma of this pandemic has only amplified the now dire need in the world for a deeper, lasting solution to all the chaos and suffering in human life. And this deeper enduring solution is actually what this biologist I’m about to interview is going to provide us with. He is going to do it by explaining and solving the underlying cause of all the suffering, which is our ‘good and evil’ stricken so-called human condition.

3

So I don’t care what you’re doing, you need to stop and listen to this interview. In fact, I don’t care what you do for the rest of your life, if you can you just need to listen to this!

4

The interview will be in four parts, each averaging 15 minutes, which is not a lot when you consider that we’re going to be explaining the whole human condition!

5

So it’s a great privilege to introduce Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith. He’s the author of a book titled FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, and this is my copy, which I’ve had with me now for quite a long time and I take it everywhere with me, and there are now millions of people all over the globe studying, reading and researching through this book that Jeremy has brought to us. [Craig learnt of Jeremy’s explanation of the human condition in early 2019, and became so impressed by it he started a WTM Centre in north east England to promote it; see www.WTMNorthEastEngland.​com.]

6

So, I’m here to tell everyone that this book has not only blown me away, it has also impressed Professor Harry Prosen, who is a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Associationso he’s one of the world’s leading psychiatristsand he said, and I quote, ‘I have no doubt Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race. This is the book we have been waiting for, it is the book that saves the world.’ End quote.

7

Now, I think everyone listening would agree that ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ is exactly what this world needs! So buckle into your seats, this is going to be the most interestingand excitingtalk you have ever heard.

8

So Jeremy, thank you for talking with us. Tell us, how does your work bring about ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ and end all the suffering and strife, and, as Professor Prosen said, ‘save the world’?

 

9

Jeremy Griffith: Thank you very much for having me on your program Craig. Finding understanding of our psychologically troubled human condition has actually been what the efforts of every human who has ever lived has been dedicated to achieving and has contributed to finding. As Professor Prosen said, finding understanding of the human condition has been ‘the holy grail’ of the whole human journey of conscious thought and enquiry.

10

We humans have absolutely lived in hope, faith and trust that one day, somewhere, some place, all the efforts of everyonebut of scientists in particularwould finally produce the completely redeeming, uplifting and healing understanding of us humans. I know it must seem outrageous to claim that this goal of goals has finally been achieved, but it has. In fact, the human condition is such a difficult subject for us humans to confront and deal with that I couldn’t be talking about it so openly and freely if it hadn’t been solved.

 

11

Craig: Okay then Jeremy, solve the human condition for us, we’re all ears!

 

12

Jeremy: Firstly, I’m a biologist, and that’s important because I think everyone will agree that what we need is a non-abstract, non-mystical, completely rational and thus understandable, scientific, biological explanation of us humans.

13

So how are we to explain and understand the human condition, understand why we humans are the way we are, so brutally competitive, selfish and aggressive that human life has become all but unbearable. In fact, how are we to make so much sense of our divisive behaviour that the underlying cause of it is so completely explained and understood that, as Professor Prosen said, the whole of the human race is psychologically rehabilitated and everyone’s life is transformed?

 

14

Craig: Yes, that’s what we want; the human condition finally explained, fixed up and healed forever!

 

15

Jeremy: Exactly Craig. So, to start at the beginning, I know everyone listening is living with the beliefwell it’s what we were all taught at school and are told in every documentarythat humans’ competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour is due to us having savage, must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals have. Certainly while left-wing thinkers do claim we have some selfless, cooperative instincts, they also say we have this selfish, competitive ‘animal’ side, which Karl Marx limited to such basic needs as sex, food, shelter and clothing.

 

An image of two Bighorn rams butting; and two Grizzly Bears fighting

 

16

I mean, our conversations are saturated with this belief, with comments like: ‘We are programmed by our genes to try to dominate others and be a winner in the battle of life’; and ‘Our preoccupation with sexual conquest is due to our primal instinct to sow our seeds’; and ‘Men behave abominably because their bodies are flooded with must-reproduce-their-genes-promoting testosterone’; and ‘We want a big house because we are innately territorial’; and ‘Fighting and war is just our deeply-rooted combative animal nature expressing itself’.

 

17

Craig: Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve understood is the reason for our competitive and aggressive naturethat we have brutally competitive, survival-of-the-fittest instincts, which we are always having to try to restrain or civilise or try to control as best we can; I mean that’s what I was taught in school.

 

18

Jeremy: Yes, that’s what we were taught, but let’s think about thisand what I’m going to say now is very important, so I hope everyone’s listening closely.

19

Surely this idea that we have savage competitive and aggressive, must-reproduce-our-genes instincts cannot be the real reason for our species’ competitive and aggressive behaviour because, after all, words used to describe our human behaviour such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded, pessimistic, optimistic, artificial, hateful, cynical, mean, sadistic, immoral, brilliant, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic and alienated, all recognise the involvement of OUR species’ fully conscious thinking mind. They demonstrate that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour; that we don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION.

 

Cartoon stereotying Cavemen as brutish, dumb, knuckle-dragging, and club wielding

Our ape ancestors were not savage, barbaric brutes as they have for so
long been portrayed, but rather they were innocent, loving nurturers as
depicted below by the paleoartist Jay H. Matternes in Science magazine.

 

20

What’s more, we humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, the voice or expression of which we call our consciencewhich is the complete opposite of competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts. As Charles Darwin said, ‘The moral sense…​affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, ch.4). Of course, to have acquired these cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts our distant ape ancestors must have lived cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly, otherwise how else could we have acquired them? Our ape ancestors can’t have been brutal, club-wielding, competitive and aggressive savages as we have been taught, rather they must have lived in a Garden of Eden-like state of cooperative, selfless and loving innocent gentlenesswhich, as I’d like to explain to you later in this interview Craig, is a state that the bonobo species of ape is currently living in, and which anthropological findings now evidence we did once live in. For instance, anthropologists like C. Owen Lovejoy are reporting that ‘our species-defining cooperative mutualism can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [which is well beyond 5.3 million years ago](‘Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus’, Science, 2009, Vol.326, No.5949).

 

A large cohesive group of bonobos of all ages standing in close proximity on a tree trunk

Group of bonobos

 

Illustration of the human ancestor, Ardipithecus ramidus, on the front cover of Science magazine

‘Breakthrough of the Year’: cover of the
December 2009 issue of Science magazine

Paleoartist reconstruction of the 4.4 million year old human ancestor, Ardipithecus ramidus standing in its natural habitat

Matternes’s reconstruction of the 4.4 mya
Ardipithecus ramidus in its natural habitat

 

21

So saying our competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts in us is simply not trueas I’d like to come back to shortly, it’s just a convenient excuse we have used while we waited for the psychosis-acknowledging-and-solving, real explanation of our present competitive and aggressive human condition!

 

22

Craig: Wow, so that’s a pretty big statement Jeremy, I mean it’s a pretty important point you’re making here. You’re saying that our competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals, but is due to a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled condition, yes?

 

23

Jeremy: Yes, our egocentric and arrogant and mean and vindictive and even sadistic behaviour has nothing to do with wanting to reproduce our genes. That was absurd. And it is actually really good news that our behaviour is due to a conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled condition because psychoses can be healed with understanding. If our competitive and aggressive behaviour was due to us having savage instincts then we would be stuck with that born-with, hard-wired, innate behaviour. It would mean we could only ever hope to restrain and control those supposedly brutal instincts. But since our species’ divisive behaviour is due to a psychosis, that divisive behaviour can be cured with healing understanding. So that is very good news. In fact, incredibly exciting news, because with understanding we can finally end our psychologically troubled human condition. It’s the understanding of ourselves that we needed to heal the pain in our brains and become sound and sane again.

 

A gold key floating in space, orientated to be inserted in a key hole in the forehead of a woman.

 

24

As I said, the ‘savage instincts’ explanation was just a convenient excuse while we searched for the psychosis-addressing-and-solving real explanation of our divisive behaviour, which is the explanation I would now like to present.

 

25

Craig: Okay, so what you’re saying here, Jeremy, is that we don’t need the convenient excuse anymore that we have some kind of savage animal instincts because we have the real explanation of our conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled human condition!

 

26

Jeremy: Yes, and this key, all-important, psychosis-addressing-and-solving explanation is actually very obvious.

27

If we think about it, if an animal was to become fully conscious, like we humans became, then that animal’s new self-managing, understanding-based conscious mind would surely have to challenge its pre-existing instinctive orientations to the world, wouldn’t it? A battle would have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves.

 

28

Craig: Yes, that makes sense Jeremy, so what happened though when this animal became conscious and its whole life turned into a psychologically distressed mess?

 

29

Jeremy: Well, the easiest way to see what happened is to imagine the predicament faced by an animal whose life had always been controlled by its instincts suddenly developing a conscious mind, because if we do that we will very quickly see how that animal would develop a psychologically troubled competitive and aggressive condition like we suffer from.

30

So let’s imagine a stork: we’ll call him Adam. Each Summer, Adam instinctually migrates North with the other storks around the coast of Africa to Europe to breed, as some varieties of storks do. Since he has no conscious mind Adam Stork doesn’t think about or question his behaviour, he just follows what his instincts tell him to do.

 

Adam Stork Story - 1. Storks flying before Adam became conscious

 

31

But what if we give Adam a large brain capable of conscious thought? He will start to think for himself, but many of his new ideas will not be consistent with his instincts. For instance, while migrating North with the other storks Adam notices an island full of apple trees. He then makes a conscious decision to divert from his migratory path and explore the island. It’s his first grand experiment in self-management.

 

Adam Stork Story - 2. Storks flying as Adam becomes conscious
Adam Stork Story - 3. Conscious Adam sees an island

 

The Story of Adam Stork - 4. Disobedient Adam

Drawings by Jeremy Griffith © 1991-2016 Fedmex Pty Ltd

 

32

But when Adam’s instincts realise he has strayed off course they are going to criticise his deprogrammed behaviour and dogmatically try to pull him back on his instinctive flight path, aren’t they! In effect, they are going to condemn him as being bad.

 

Adam Stork Story - 5. Conscious Adam gets criticised

 

33

Imagine the turmoil Adam will experience: he can’t go back to simply following his instincts. His instinctive orientations to the migratory flight path were acquired over thousands of generations of natural selection but those orientations are not understandings, and since his conscious mind requires understanding, which it can only get through experimentation, inevitably a war will break out with his instincts.

34

Ideally at this point Adam’s conscious mind would sit down and explain to his instincts why he’s defying them. He would explain that the gene-based, natural selection process only gives species instinctive orientations to the world, whereas his nerve-based, conscious mind, which is able to make sense of cause and effect, needs understanding of the world to operate.

 

Adam Stork Story - 6. Conscious Adam’s talk with his instincts

 

35

But Adam doesn’t have this self-understanding. He’s only just begun his search for knowledge. In fact, he’s not even aware of what the problem actually is. He’s simply started to feel that he’s bad, even evil.

 

36

Craig: Okay, so what you’re saying is a war has broken out between his conscious mind and his instincts, which he can’t explain, and it’s left him feeling bad or that he is bad in some way, or even evil. So what happened then?

 

37

Jeremy: Well, tragically, while searching for understanding, we can see that three things are unavoidably going to happen. Adam is going to defensively retaliate against the implied criticism from his instincts; he is going to desperately seek out any reinforcement he can find to relieve himself of the negative feelings; and he is going to try to deny the criticism and block it out of his mind. He has become angry, egocentric and alienatedwhich is the psychologically upset state we call the human condition, because it was us humans who developed a conscious mind and became psychologically upset. (And ‘upset’ is the right word for our condition because while we are not ‘evil’ or ‘bad’, we are definitely psychologically upset from having to participate in humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. ‘Corrupted’ and ‘fallen’ have been used to describe our condition, but they have negative connotations that we can now appreciate are undeserved, so ‘upset’ is a better word.)

38

So Adam’s intellect or ‘ego’ (ego being just another word for the intellect since the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious thinking self’ (5th edn, 1964)) became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itselfAdam became ego-centric, selfishly preoccupied aggressively competing for opportunities to prove he is good and not bad, to validate his worth, to get a ‘win’; to essentially eke out any positive reinforcement that would bring him some relief from his criticising instincts. He unavoidably became self-preoccupied or selfish, and aggressive and competitive.

 

Adam Stork depicted as glowing red with anger and defiance at the unjust criticism of his instincts

 

39

So our selfish, competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to savage instincts but to a psychologically upset state or condition.

40

Basically suffering psychological upset was the price we conscious humans had to pay for our heroic search for understanding. In the words from the song The Impossible Dream from the musical the Man of La Mancha, we had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (lyrics by Joe Darion, 1965). We had to lose ourselves to find ourselves; we had to suffer becoming angry, egocentric and alienated until we found sufficient knowledge to explain ourselves.

 

41

Craig: Wow Jeremy, I mean this is just fascinating. So Adam Storkwe humansdeveloped a conscious mind and unavoidably started warring with our instincts, an upsetting war which could only end when we could explain and understand why we had to defy our instincts, which is the understanding that you have just supplied, yes?

 

42

Jeremy: Exactly, remember Adam Stork became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated because he couldn’t explain why he was defying his instincts, so now that we can explain why, those defensive behaviours are no longer needed and can end!

43

That’s basically all there is to explain, that is the biological explanation of the human condition that so explains us that, as Professor Prosen said, it brings about ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’!

 

Angry embattled Adam Stork transforming to happy liberated Adam Stork

 

 

44

Craig: This is such a simple story but so far-reaching in its ramificationsI mean it is world-changing is what it is, because it truly enables ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’! I mean that is just wonderful.

45

Okay, I’m speaking with Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith.

 

 

Part 2

 

Since this instinct vs intellect
explanation is reasonably obvious,
why haven’t we been taught it at school?

 

46

Craig: Hello, I’m Craig Conway and I’m talking with Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith about how we can end all the turmoil and trauma in the world through explaining and understanding the human conditionwhich is the instinct vs intellect explanation Jeremy has just given us in Part 1 of this interview.

47

I do have some questions Jeremy. Firstly, while it seems an obvious explanation that when we became conscious a psychologically upsetting battle must have broken out with our dictatorial instincts, but if it is so obvious, why weren’t we taught this at school? And secondly, how were our bonobo-like ape ancestors able to become cooperative and loving, which, as you said, must be the origin of our instinctive moral conscience that Darwin said distinguishes us from other animals? And my third question is, how does ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ that Professor Prosen describes actually take place; I mean do we all have to go into therapy or something?

48

Okay, by the way, I want to mention also that since there’s quite a few newand very interestingconcepts to think about, Jeremy has said that he’ll make both the video and the transcript of this interview available at the top of the website that promotes this understanding of the human condition, which is the World Transformation Movement’s website at HumanCondition.com. Now this interview will be there as a video, and the transcript as a little free book, so you can re-listen to, or read the interview again there, because, as I said, with this big subject of the human condition, there is quite a bit to take in and think about.

 

49

Jeremy: Okay, they are very good questions Craig.

50

So, to begin with your first question, which is that if this instinct vs intellect explanation is so obvious why haven’t we been taught it at school?

51

The answer is that while it has been recognisedeven from ancient timesthat the emergence of our conscious mind somehow caused us to ‘fall from grace’, or however you want to describe the corruption of our original innocent cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive state, it wasn’t until science revealed the difference between the gene-based and nerve-based learning systemswhich is that genes can orientate but nerves need to understandthat we were finally in a position to explain the good reason for our angry, egocentric and alienated human condition.

52

The Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden that Moses wrote so long ago in about 1,500 BC actually perfectly describes the psychologically upsetting battle that emerged between our instincts and conscious intellect. It says Adam and Eve/​we humans took the ‘fruit’ (Genesis 3:3) ‘from the tree of knowledge’ (Gen. 2:9, 17) and were ‘disobedient’ (the term widely used in descriptions of Gen. 3). In other words, we developed a conscious mind and free will. But in that pre-scientific story it says Adam and Eve then became ‘evil’ (Gen. 3:22) perpetrators of ‘sin’ (Gen. 4:7) because they became angry, egocentric and alienated, and as a result Moses said they were ‘banished…​from the Garden of Eden’ (Gen. 3:23) state of cooperative and loving innocence.

 

A painting depicting Adam and Eve standing naked below the tree of knowledge eating the forbidden apple

Adam and Eve,
by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1526)

A color lithograph depicting the angel Jophiel banishing Adam and Eve from paradise, the Garden of Eden

Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise, from Old Testament Stories
pub. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London (c.1880)

 

53

You see, not knowing how naturally selected instincts differ from cause and effect-operating consciousness, this story of Adam and Eve becoming conscious could only conclude that the angry, egocentric and alienated condition that emerged when we became conscious was a bad, evil, sinful state, but this scientific presentation says, ‘No, no, that pre-scientific story got it wrong’. Adam and Eve are actually not just good but the heroes of the whole story of life on Earthbecause surely the conscious mind is nature’s greatest invention and to be given the task of searching for understanding while the whole world’s condemning you was the hardest and toughest of tasksbecause that condemnation was universal. All the other innocent storks are condemning the search for knowledge, and since all of naturethe rain, the clouds, the trees, and other animalsare all associated with our original instinctive self that was condemning us, the whole world, in effect, ganged up on Adam and Eve, i.e. us humansand yet all the time we were good and not bad but we couldn’t explain why, but now at last through the benefit of science, we can.

 

54

Craig: Yeah, I hadn’t realised that, but it is true, I mean Adam and Eve taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge is a metaphor for becoming conscious, and then they were thrown out of the Garden of Eden of original innocence because it appeared that they were bad for doing so, but now thankfully we can explain that they, we humans, weren’t bad at all; in fact, we are the heroes of the story of life on Earth!

 

55

Jeremy: That’s right, we can now explain and understand that we conscious humans are immense heroes, and not villains after all. How relieving is that!

 

American journalist and educator, Richard Heinberg giving a public presentation

Richard Heinberg (1950– )

Richard Heinberg’s book ‘Memories and Visions of Paradise’

 

56

And with regard to recognition of the upsetting conflict between our moral instincts and our conscious intellect, the Biblical story of Adam and Eve is far from the only recognition of it from ancient times. Indeed, as the researcher Richard Heinberg summarised in his 1990 book Memories & Visions of Paradise (underlinings are Jeremy’s emphasis), ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…​has been lost…​everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…​innocence and can return to it only through the resolution of some profound inner discord…​the cause of the Fall is described variously as disobedience, as the eating of a forbidden fruit [from the tree of knowledge], and as spiritual amnesia [forgetting, blocking out, denial, alienation, which is our psychosis](pp.81-82 of 282). So all our religions and most of our mythologies have recognised the basic conflict within usthat the emergence of ‘consciousness’ caused our ‘Fall’ from ‘innocence’.

 

Detail of a mosaic by Monnus of Hesiod, 3rd century; in the Rhenish State Museum, Trier, Ger.

Hesiod, from the Monnus mosaic, c.200

Front cover of Hesiod’s work’, Theogeny and Works and Days’

 

57

Way back in about 800 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote of our species’ pre-conscious time of living cooperatively and lovingly in his epic poem Works and Days: ‘When gods alike and mortals rose to birth / A golden race the immortals formed on earth…​Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…​Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…​Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die / Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil / Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil / They with abundant goods ’midst quiet lands / All willing shared the gathering of their hands’ (The Remains of Hesiod the Ascræan, tr. C.A. Elton, pp.17-18). So yes, they didn’t have a troubled conscious mind, and they lived a sharing, gentle life.

 

58

Craig: Yes, I’ve heard of the idea of a ‘golden race’, but I didn’t actually know where it came from. So what you’re saying then, Jeremy, is our distant ancestors had a ‘calm untroubled mind’no human condition yet!

 

59

Jeremy: Yes, that’s right, and in 360 BC Hesiod’s Greek compatriot Plato gave this very similar description of our species’ pre-conscious time in innocence. He wrote: ‘there was a time when…​we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now’ (Phaedrus; tr. B. Jowett, 1871, 250).

 

Triptych showing marble bust of Plato and the covers of his books Phaedrus and The Statesman

Plato, c.428–348 BC; Phaedrus; Statesman

 

60

Plato also gave this other description of the innocent ‘Golden Age’ in our species’ pre-conscious past, writing of a time when we lived a ‘blessed and spontaneous life…​[where] neither was there any violence, or devouring of one another, or war or quarrel among them…​In those days God himself was their shepherd, and ruled over them [in other words, our original instinctive self was orientated to living in an ideal cooperative, loving way]…​Under him there were no forms of government or separate possession of women and children; for all men rose again from the earth, having no memory of the past [in other words, we lived in a pre-conscious state]. And…​the earth gave them fruits in abundance, which grew on trees and shrubs unbidden, and were not planted by the hand of man. And they dwelt naked, and mostly in the open air, for the temperature of their seasons was mild; and they had no beds, but lay on soft couches of grass, which grew plentifully out of the earth’ (The Statesman, c.350 BC; tr. B. Jowett, 1871, 271-272).

61

The thing is, Hesiod and Plato, like Moses, were living at a time when science still had to be developed, so they weren’t able to provide the redeeming, instincts-can-orientate-but-only-nerves-can-understand, good reason WHY we departed from ‘innocence’ and seemingly became ‘evil’, bad people.

 

62

Craig: Yes, because there was no science back then.

 

63

Jeremy: Precisely, it’s only in the last 150 years or so that science has given us A: the ability to know that the gene-based natural selection process gives species orientations to the world; and B: the knowledge of our nerves and how they are able to remember events, which, much developed, has led to our mind being able to sufficiently understand the relationship between cause and effect to become conscious of, or aware of, or intelligent about those relationships. So that’s only happened in the last 150 years, but since, as explained in pars 705-707 of FREEDOM, the fossil record of our ancestors suggests that our large association-cortexed, thinking, fully conscious brain appeared some 2 million years ago, that means for almost all of the 2 million years we have been conscious we have had no ability to explain and understand why we corrupted our original innocent instinctive self or soul. And without that redeeming explanation the only way we could cope with the astronomical guilt of having destroyed ‘Eden’, has been to deny we ever lived in a cooperative and loving innocent stateand that’s exactly where the excuse that we have savage competitive and aggressive instincts like other animals came to our rescue.

64

And, false as it is, it’s been an absolutely brilliant excuse because instead of our instincts being all-loving and thus unbearably condemning of our present non-loving state, they are made out to be vicious and brutal must-reproduce-your-genes instincts like other animals have; and, instead of our conscious mind being the instinct-defying cause of our corruption, it was made out to be the blameless mediating ‘hero’ that had to step in and try to control those supposed vicious instincts within us! And those who dared to admit the truth of our cooperative and loving past, like Hesiod and Plato, were dismissed as deluded romantics, and the whole idea of an innocent, Edenic past was said to be nothing more than a nostalgia for the security and maternal warmth of infancy, that it was ‘never an historical state’ as the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann said in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949, p.15 of 493).

 

Portrait photograph of psychologist Erich Neumann

Erich Neumann (1905–1960)

Front cover of Erich Neumann’s book ‘The Origins and History of Consciousness’

 

 

65

Craig: Yes, and we couldn’t face the truth that we had turned utopia into dystopia, into a dreadful place of conflict and suffering, yes?

 

66

Jeremy: Yes that’s right Craig, and I should point out that while most contemporary thinkers have clung to the savage instincts excuse for our divisive behaviour, there have been some who, like the ancient thinkers, truthfully recognised the basic instinct vs intellect elements involved in producing the human condition. Eugène Marais, Paul MacLean and Arthur Koestler are a few who come to mind.

 

Collage of covers of books about biology based on the ‘savage instincts’ excuse

Some of the many science books accounting for human
behaviour using the false ‘savage instincts’ excuse.

 

Eugene Marais, Paul Maclean, Arthur Koestler beside covers of their books

Eugène Marais (1871–1936), Paul MacLean (1913–2007) and Arthur Koestler (1905–1983)

 

67

But while all contemporary thinkers have had the benefit of science having revealed the difference between the gene-based and nerve-based learning systems, and have therefore had the means to truthfully explain the human condition, those who did recognise the basic instinct vs intellect elements didn’t take their thinking far enough to actually explain the human condition. And those who have been attached to the false savage instincts excusewhich is the great majority of scientistsobviously haven’t been thinking truthfully, so they couldn’t hope to explain the human condition. Which is all why it has taken the truthful thinking of the pre-eminent South African philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post, and following him, myself, to finally present the complete, true explanation of the human condition.

 

68

Craig: Okay. And Jeremy, I assume that people can read about the contemporary thinkers who recognised the instinct vs intellect elements involved in the human condition, and those who clung to the savage instincts excuse, on the World Transformation Movement’s website at HumanCondition.com?

 

Portrait photograph of Sir Laurens van der Post in army uniform
Cover of Sir Laurens van der Post’s book ‘The Lost World Of The Kalahari’

The most famous book by Sir Laurens van der Post (1906–1996) (left) is The Lost World
of the Kalahari
, which is about the relatively innocent Bushmen or San people of
the Kalahari Desert. Its title can be interpreted as ‘the lost world of our soul’.

 

 

69

Jeremy: Yes, they can, in particular in the fourth video at the top of the homepage.

70

Also, how Sir Laurens van der Post and I managed to address and solve the human condition is described in my 2020 book How Laurens van der Post Saved The World, which is also freely available on that website. Basically, what is explained in that book is that since everyone is naturally variously psychologically upset from their different encounters with humanity’s battle to find knowledge, there was always going to be a few who were fortunate enough in their infancy and childhood to escape encountering the angry, egocentric and alienated effects of that upsetting battle, and it is these few who could look into the human condition without being overly confronted by itand Sir Laurens and I were two of these extremely fortunate denial-free thinking people, which is how we were able to find understanding of the human condition.

71

I should also say that while there is growing support for this now absolutely desperately needed understanding of the human condition, mainstream science is yet to recognise and support itbut that’s what happens with paradigm-shifting, breakthroughs in science. When the physicist Max Planck said ‘Science progresses funeral by funeral’ (Marilyn Ferguson’s reference to a comment by Planck in his Scientific Autobiography, 1948; New Age mag. Aug. 1982; see www.wtmsources.com/174) he was recognising how attached each generation of scientists becomes to the way of thinking they grew up with, and therefore how slow science as a whole is to move to a new paradigm of understanding. And the playwright George Bernard Shaw also warned of how difficult it is to introduce a new paradigm of thinkingespecially one that dares to confront the historically unbearably confronting and off-limits subject of the human conditionwhen he said that ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (Annajanska, 1919). So yes, confronting the human condition when everyone has been living in fearful denial of it, even though it has finally been explained and made safe to confront, represents the biggest of all ‘blasphemies’.

 

72

Craig: Yeah, I understand completely. I mean from my limited experience, Jeremy, I know how difficult it is to get people to change their way of thinking. But your basic point is that science’s discovery of the way genes and nerves work has finally made it possible for the liberation of humanity from the horror of the human condition.

 

73

Jeremy: Yes, that is the essential truth: science is the liberator, the so-called ‘messiah’ or ‘redeemer’ of humankind, as we always hoped it would be!

 

74

Craig: And all this is in the nick of time Jeremy, because I actually don’t think the world can cope with any more upset behaviour from us humansbut of course we still need the scientific community to get on board and support this understanding.

 

75

Jeremy: Absolutely. While we’ve had to live in denial of our corrupted, psychologically upset condition while we couldn’t explain it, the truth is that on a graph showing the ever-increasing levels of upset in humans, those levels, especially of psychosis and alienation, have been increasing so rapidly lately that the line tracking their rise is near vertical with the amount of upset virtually doubling now in each new generation! Freedom Essays 55 & 59 on our World Transformation Movement’s website describes this terrifying end play threat of terminal levels of psychosis. Basically, we had virtually lost the race between self-destruction and self-understanding.

 

Graph showing the ever-increasing levels of upset in humans and the threat of terminal psychosis

The race between self-destruction and self-understanding

 

76

Indeed, early last century the author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that ‘We are living through deeply anxious days, and if we are to relieve our anxiety we must diagnose its cause…​What is the meaning of man? To this question no answer is being offered, and I have the feeling that we are moving toward the darkest era our world has ever known’ (A Sense of Life, pub. 1965, pp.127, 219 of 231), and the ‘deeply anxious days’ have very greatly increased in the century since then, so we are now very much in the midst of ‘the darkest era our world has ever known’so this world-saving, ‘reliev[ing]-of-the-‘cause’, understanding of ‘the meaning of man’, has definitely only arrived in the nick of timewhich means the scientific community definitely, definitely needs to get its act together and support this breakthrough!

 

50 francs French banknote from 1992, which includes image of French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944),
depicted on France’s 50 franc note.

Front cover of Antoine de Saint Exupery’s book ‘A Sense of Life’

 

77

So now I’ll address your other questions Craig, but I should mention that the first of the videos on the World Transformation Movement’s website warns of the difficulty not only scientists have had, but almost everyone has had trying to confront and think about the historically unbearably confronting subject of our corrupted condition which has finally been explained and made safe to confront and admit.

 

78

Craig: I’m Craig Conway and I’m speaking with Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith.

 

 

Part 3

 

How did we humans acquire our instinctive
cooperative and loving moral conscience?

 

79

Craig: We’re continuing our important conversation with Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith who’s been explaining the human condition and how understanding it can end all the trauma and suffering in the worldand boy, don’t we need that!

80

So in Part 1 Jeremy explained that we conscious humans became angry, egocentric and alienated because we couldn’t explain why we had to defy our instincts, but now that we can explain this and understand ourselves those defensive ways of coping are no longer needed and the human race is psychologically rehabilitated.

81

In Part 2 Jeremy explained that the reason we had to use the dishonest savage instincts excuse is because science had to find understanding of the way genes and nerves work, that genes can orientate a species but nerves need to understand cause and effect.

82

So Jeremy, my second question for this, Part 3, of our interview is how were our bonobo-like ape ancestors able to become cooperative and loving, which, as you said, must be the origin of our instinctive moral conscience that Darwin said distinguishes us from other animals?

 

83

Jeremy: Yes okay, so how we acquired our moral instincts has been one of the greatest mysteries in biology. The primatologist Richard Wrangham described it as ‘A question that has lain unsolved at the core of biology ever since Darwin’ (review of E.O. Wilson’s 2019 book Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies). And Darwin himself described it as the ‘one special difficulty’ with his concept of natural selection (On The Origin of Species, 1859, p.209 of 440). The reason for the ‘difficulty’and this is some basic biology for youis that genes normally can’t select for unconditionally selfless, fully cooperative traits, simply because such traits tend to be self-eliminating and so normally can’t become established in a speciesI mean, ‘By all means, you can be selfless and sacrifice your genes for me, but I’m not about to be selfless and sacrifice my genes for you.’ Which by the way means that the ‘cooperation beats competition’, ‘group selection’ theory that left-wing thinkers say explains our capacity to be selfless is biologically impossiblesee my book Death by Dogma. So the question is, how could such a selfish process as natural selection have created loving selflessness in us?

84

The answer is it was achieved in our forebears through nurturing. To explain what is so significant about a mother’s nurturing of her offspring, I first need to point out that a mother’s maternal instinct to care for her offspring is selfish because she is ensuring the reproduction of her genes by ensuring the survival of offspring who carry her genes. So maternalism is a selfish trait, which, as I’ve just said, genetic traits normally have to be for them to reproduce and carry on into the next generation. HOWEVER, and this is all-important, from the infant’s perspective maternalism does have the appearance of being selfless. From the infant’s perspective, it is being treated unconditionally selflesslythe mother is giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter, support and protection for apparently nothing in return. So it follows that if the infant can remain in infancy for an extended period and be treated with a lot of seemingly altruistic love, it will be indoctrinated with that selfless love and grow up to behave accordingly. So selfish maternalism can train an infant in altruistic selflessness. (Freedom Essay 21 on our World Transformation Movement’s website, and chapter 5 of FREEDOM explain this ‘love-indoctrination’ process, as we call it, more fully.)

 

85

Craig: So what you’re saying is that mothers’ nurturing of their infants is primarily genetically selfish because it ensures the reproduction of her genes, but to the infant it seems like it’s being given unconditionally selfless love.

 

86

Jeremy: Yes that’s right, and if we think about primates, being semi-upright from living in trees, swinging from branch to branch, and thus having their arms free to hold a dependent infant, it’s clear that they are especially facilitated to support and prolong the mother-infant relationship, and so develop this nurtured, loving, cooperative behaviour.

 

A female bonobo holding an infant bonobo close on her hip with her arm while walking upright
A female bonobo holding an infant bonobo close to her chest with her arm while walking upright

Bonobo mothers holding their infants

 

87

And in fact, bonobos, the ape species who live south of the Congo River in Africa, are extraordinarily matriarchal, or female role focused, and extraordinarily nurturing. You can find photos onlineand I’ll include some in the transcript booklet and video of this interviewthat illustrate just how nurturing bonobos are; they show bonobo mothers giving their infant their devoted and undivided attention!

 

An adult bonobo gently touches a juvenile bonobo on the chin with their fingers while looking into their eyes

Frans Lanting/Mint Images/Getty Images

A female bonobo, Lana, lies on her back while balancing a young juvenile bonobo in the air on her feet

 

 

A female adult and juvenile bonobo standing upright while holding hands and ‘dancing’
An infant bonobo reclining on a male bonobo lying on their side as they socialise

Frans Lanting/Mint Images/Getty Images; San Diego Zoo (bottom right)

Bonobos nurturing their infants

 

88

And as a result of all this nurturing, bonobos are the most cooperative and loving of all primates, which is evidenced by these absolutely amazing quotes that I just have to read to you.

89

Bonobo zoo keeper Barbara Bell writes that ‘Adult bonobos demonstrate tremendous compassion for each other…​For example, Kitty, the eldest female, is completely blind and hard of hearing. Sometimes she gets lost and confused. They’ll just pick her up and take her to where she needs to go’ (‘The Bonobo: “Newest” apes are teaching us about ourselves’, Chicago Tribune, 11 Jun. 1998).

90

Primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh says, ‘Bonobo life is centered around the offspring. Unlike what happens among chimpanzees, all members of the bonobo social group help with infant care and share food with infants. If you are a bonobo infant, you can do no wrong…​Bonobo females and their infants form the core of the group’ (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh & Roger Lewin, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, 1994, p.108 of 299).

91

A filmmaker of the French documentary Bonobos says, ‘They’re surely the most fascinating animals on the planet. They’re the closest animals to man [in that they share almost 99 percent of our genetic make-up]…​Once I got hit on the head with a branch that had a bonobo on it. I sat down and the bonobo noticed I was in a difficult situation and came and took me by the hand and moved my hair back, like they do. So they live on compassion, and that’s really interesting to experience’ (short accompanying film to the 2011 French documentary Bonobos).

92

And bonobo researcher Vanessa Woods gives this first-hand account of bonobos’ unlimited capacity for love from her study of them in their home in the Congo basin: ‘Bonobo love is like a laser beam. They stop. They stare at you as though they have been waiting their whole lives for you to walk into their jungle. And then they love you with such helpless abandon that you love them back. You have to love them back’ (‘A moment that changed me – my husband fell in love with a bonobo’, The Guardian, 1 Oct. 2015).

 

93

Craig: Wow Jeremy, I mean these are astonishing quotes, they really are!

 

94

Jeremy: Yes, they truly are amazing quotesand bonobos are our closest living relatives, as mentioned they share 99% of our DNA. So we can see that bonobos provide the perfect evidence for how our distant ape ancestors became cooperative and loving.

95

I have another picture here of a group of bonobos resting in a grassy glade, which I will also include in the transcript booklet, and it perfectly equates with the description I mentioned earlier that Plato gave about what life was like for humans back in the ‘Golden Age’ of nurtured togetherness. Plato said, ‘And they dwelt naked, and mostly in the open air, for the temperature of their seasons was mild; and they had no beds, but lay on soft couches of grass, which grew plentifully out of the earth.’ Clearly we have a perfect instinctive memory (if we don’t choose to deny it) of what life was like before ‘the fall’ because Plato didn’t know of the existence of bonobos and yet knew exactly what our bonobo-like life before ‘the fall’ was like.

 

A group of Bonobos relaxing close to each other on green grass.

Bonobos resting in a grassy glade

 

96

Now this quote is a bit long but it’s such a wonderful intuitive remembrance of our species’ bonobo-like time in an alienation-free, all-sensitive and all-loving state of innocence that I just have to read it out. It’s from the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. He wrote of a time when: ‘The grass glowed with bright and fragrant flowers. Birds were flying in flocks in the air, and perched fearlessly on my shoulders and arms and joyfully struck me with their darling, fluttering wings. And at last I saw and knew the people of this happy land. They came to me of themselves, surrounded me, kissed me. The children of the sun, the children of their sunoh, how beautiful they were!…​Their faces were radiant…​in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy…​It was the earth untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not sinned…​They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours…​but I could not understand their knowledge. They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves…​and I am convinced that the trees understood them. They looked at all nature like thatat the animals who lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love…​There was no quarrelling, no jealousy among them…​for they all made up one family’ (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 1877).

97

This description of being ‘conquered by their love’ is so like the description just given by the bonobo researcher Vanessa Woods, when she said bonobos ‘love you with such helpless abandon that you love them back. You have to love them back’. Again we see how accurate our memory is, if we don’t deny it, of what life was like before ‘the Fall’.

 

Black and white portrait photograph of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)

Front cover of Dostoevsky’s book, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’

 

 

98

Craig: That quote is so wonderful, it’s just amazing, thank you Jeremy, I’m glad you read it out. This nurturing explanation for our moral instincts seems reasonably obvious, and evidenced by those quotes about bonobo behaviour and also by the photographs of the bonobos, so why haven’t I heard about this until now?

 

99

Jeremy: Well, just like the obvious truth that our species once lived cooperatively and lovingly, this truth that we acquired our moral instincts through nurturing has been an unbearable truth while we couldn’t explain why we humans became angry, egocentric and alienated and as a result lost the ability to adequately nurture our offspring with unconditional selflessness or love. The truth of our species’ Edenic all-loving and all-sensitive innocent past, and the truth that nurturing is what made us human, have both been impossible truths to accept while we couldn’t truthfully explain our present immensely corrupted human condition, explain why our species became so corrupted and lost the ability to fully nurture its offspring. As it’s been observed, ‘parents would rather admit to being an axe murderer than a bad mother or father’! (John Marsden, Sunday Life, The Sun-Herald, 7 Jul. 2002).

 

Portrait photograph of John Fiske

John Fiske (1842–1901)

Front cover of of John Fiske’s book ‘Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy’

 

100

In fact, this reasonably obvious nurturing explanation for our moral conscience was first put forward by the American philosopher John Fiske in his book Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, which was published in 1874, only a few years after Darwin published his theory of natural selection. And, at the time, Fiske’s explanation was actually recognised as being, and I quote, ‘far more important’ than ‘Darwin’s principle of natural selection’ and ‘one of the most beautiful contributions ever made to the Evolution of Man’ (Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet, 1972, p.262 of 482). And Darwin himself went so far as to write to Fiske saying, ‘I never in my life read so lucid an expositor (and therefore thinker) as you are’ (1874; Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 2). But again, while we couldn’t explain our loss of ability to adequately nurture our offspring, this ‘far more important’ insight than ‘Darwin’s principle of natural selection’ was let die and eventually disappeared from biological discourse!

101

I might point out that 1) Darwin’s natural selection explanation for the variety of species; 2) Fiske’s and my nurturing explanation for our moral instincts; 3) the instinct vs intellect explanation that I’ve given for the human condition; 4) the explanation I give in chapter 7 of FREEDOM for how we humans became fully conscious when other species haven’t; and 5) the Negative-Entropy-driven integrative meaning of existence (which we have personified as ‘God’) that I explain in chapter 4 of FREEDOMwhich together are the five main questions science has had to answer about our world and place in itare all reasonably obvious, straightforward, simple explanations that bear out biologist 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, 1st edition, p.3). As FREEDOM makes clear, having to live in denial of the human condition has blocked our access to so many reasonably obvious truths.

 

102

Craig: Thanks Jeremy. This is really amazing to learn about how science has denied our species’ cooperative and loving heritage, and the nurtured origins of that cooperative and loving soul. But it all really does make senseI mean we certainly needed the defence for our corrupted condition before we could face the truth about it.

103

I am speaking with Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith.

 

 

Part 4

 

How does the psychological rehabilitation of the
human race that the arrival of understanding of the
human condition finally makes possible actually occur?

 

104

Craig: Hello and welcome back to Part 4 of the interview. I’m Craig Conway and I’m here with Jeremy Griffith, the biologist who has just explained how humans acquired our moral instincts. This is an absolutely remarkable interview!

105

So continuing on, Jeremy, what about my third question for this final Part 4 of the interview, which is how does ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ that this understanding gives us actually take place; do we all need to go into therapy or something?

 

106

Jeremy: Well, what this realand actually very obviousinstinct vs intellect explanation of the human condition fundamentally does is lift the ‘burden of guilt’ from the human race. It establishes that we humans are good and not bad after all. While we are all inevitably variously angry, egocentric and alienated from our different encounters with humanity’s heroic battle to find knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, understanding of our corrupted condition, we can now know that every human is fundamentally good. And this ability to understand and know there was a good reason why the human race became psychologically upset, is the key, relieving understanding we have been in search of ever since we became conscious some 2 million years ago and our corrupted condition emerged.

107

That is the key relief for our mindbeing finally able to understand that we are good and not bad is what brings us the greatest psychological relief of all. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung said, ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own our own shadow’, and since we can now ‘own’ the ‘shadow’ of our species’ 2-million-year-corrupted condition, the human race is finally in a position to become ‘whole’. The word ‘psychosis’ literally means ‘soul-illness’ and ‘psychiatry literally means ‘soul-healing’ (derived as they are from psyche meaning ‘soul’, osis meaning ‘abnormal state or condition’ and iatreia meaning ‘healing’see pars 63 & 72 of FREEDOM), but we have never been able to ‘heal our soul’, explain to our original instinctive self or soul that we, our fully conscious thinking self, is good and not bad and by so doing reconcile and heal our split selvesbut now at last we can.

 

108

Craig: Well, there is an adage that says ‘The truth will set you free’, so what you’re saying then Jeremy is that the truth of our fundamental goodness is the truth that we needed to set us free from the human condition.

 

109

Jeremy: Precisely, and while that is the main relief our mind needed, obviously the more we digest that relieving understanding, the more healing relief comes to every aspect of our upset conditionand to have had to endure being unjustly condemned as bad for 2 million years does mean there is a great deal of upset to heal.

110

To appreciate how much upset exists in us humans now, imagine living for just one day with the injustice of being condemned as bad, even evil, when you intuitively knew but were unable to explain that you were actually the complete opposite of evil, namely truly wonderful, good and meaningfulin fact not just good but the hero of the story of life on Earth! You would be hurt to the core and furious wouldn’t you! Now extrapolate that experience over 2 million years and we can begin to appreciate just how much volcanic frustration and anger must now exist within us humans! While we have learnt to significantly restrain and conceal‘civilise’ as we refer to itthe phenomenal amount of upset within us, under the surface we all must be boiling with rage, and sometimes, when our restraint can no longer find a way to contain it, that anger must express itselfhence our capacity for shocking acts of cruelty, sadism, hate, murder and war.

 

A collage showing examples of the volcanic anger in humans: Nazi rally; skulls from Pol Pot regime; Klu Klux Klan; wartime execution

We humans aren’t bad but we are certainly mad!

 

111

And no wonder we have led such an evasive, denial-practising, lying, avoid-any-criticism, escapist, alienated, superficial and artificial, greedy, egocentric, power, fame, fortune and glory-seeking existence. We have had to smother ourselves with material glory while we lacked the spiritual glory of compassionate understanding of ourselves.

 

Images showing: a winning sports team; a pile of money; a luxury sports car; and a lavish house

Material reinforcement had to sustain us until we found spiritual reinforcement, understanding.

 

112

So there is an enormous amount of upset to subside and heal in us humans, and that will obviously take time. In fact, we have to expect that it will take a number of generations to be completely ameliorated. But the good news, and this is very important, is that while it will take a number of generations to heal all the upset in us humans, everyone can immediately live free of their upset. The reason we can live free of it is that while we lacked the real defence and reinforcement of understanding of our corrupted condition, we absolutely needed the artificial defences and reinforcements of attacking any criticism of our corrupted condition, of denying and blocking it out, and of finding any positive reinforcement we couldanger, alienation and egocentricity are what sustained usbut now that we have the real defence and reinforcement of our fundamental goodness, all these artificial defences and reinforcements are obsoleted, they are no longer needed. In fact, to continue using the old artificial defences of retaliation, denial and the search for relieving power, fame, fortune and glory when our fundamental goodness has been established is not only clearly pointless but also unnecessarily destructive of ourselves, everyone around us and our planet. That way of living is now completely obsoleted, finished with.

 

113

Craig: That makes total sense; I mean our artificial ways of reinforcing ourselves are obsoleted by the real reinforcement of ourselves. One way of living ends, a new one begins, free of the human conditionphew, thank God for that!!

 

114

Jeremy: That’s for sure! Basically, now that our corrupted condition is finally truthfully explained, honesty replaces denial and the world heals. ‘Bullshit’, which is our everyday word for all the dishonest denial that’s been going on, protected us from all the truths about our corrupted condition that we couldn’t properly explain, but it was destroying the world and it now stops.

115

With this end of lying in mind, there’s one more thing I should explain, which is that socialism, the new age movement, the politically correct ‘woke’ movement, and all the other idealistic movements, were actually all false starts to a human-condition-free world because the upsetting battle to find knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, the psychologically relieving understanding of why we are good and not bad, still had to be completed. In fact, while dogmatically insisting that everyone should be cooperative and loving could make you feel that you were doing good and be superficially psychologically very relieving, such insistence on ideal behaviour denied people the freedom of expression and individualism they needed to be able to continue the all-important upsetting search for knowledge. These movements were pseudo idealistic movements that stifled and oppressed the search for the understanding of our corrupted condition that was needed to actually free us from that state. They were regressive, not progressive as they deluded themselves they were. It was actually the right-wing who have supported the upsetting battle to find knowledge that held the moral highground, not the pseudo idealistic left-wing.

116

The culture of the Left made people superficially feel good but it was dangerously dishonest, it was fakeit was bullshit. Being concerned for others and the world is very important, but doing that to make yourself feel good is a dangerously selfish sickness, indeed it’s the most destructive of all drug addictionsand it’s been taking over the world. As I explain in my free book, Death by Dogma, dogma is not the cure, it’s the poison.

117

You can see here that the true instinct vs intellect explanation of the human condition finally enables us to explain and expose what’s wrong with the Leftand it’s not a moment too soon because its culture is rapidly taking our species to death-by-dogma extinction.

 

A procession of crazed looking marxist dummies, with the top of their heads cut off, march off a cliff

We 2-million-year psychologically upset humans needed to be able to think our way to
sanity. Suppressing freedom of thought turned humans into brainless robots destined
to march off the edge of hope into the chasm of terminal psychosis and extinction.

 

118

Now, most wonderfully of all, the instinct vs intellect explanation of the human condition not only exposes the culture of the Left for the human-race-destroying lie that it is, it also, as I said, brings to an end the whole upsetting search for the rehabilitating understanding of why we’re good and not bad, and what this means is that it’s no longer oppressive of that upsetting search to take up support of cooperative and loving idealismbecause that search is over. In fact, taking up support of cooperative and loving idealism is now the only way to live that’s justified! Suddenly there’s no longer any reason for the right-wing in politics and everyone effectively becomes left-wing. In fact, the whole business of politics basically ends with the finding of understanding of the human condition, and the whole human race sets out as one united organism letting go the angry, egocentric and alienated part of ourselves and supporting cooperative, selfless and loving idealism. (Much more is explained about pseudo idealism in Death by Dogma on the World Transformation Movement’s website.)

 

Two fists violently clash together in conflict transitioning to two hands embracing in peace and reconciliation

 

 

119

Craig: Yes, ending the polarised world of politics will certainly be one of the biggest reliefs imaginable!

 

120

Jeremy: Absolutely Craig. It will be a massive relief.

121

So that’s how the whole world suddenly, immediately changes from a psychologically embattled angry, egocentric and alienated state, to a world where everyone has decided to abandon their still-to-be-healed competitive and aggressive behaviour and takes up support of a cooperative and loving existence. [See www.humancondition.com/transformation for a full description of this great transformation.]

122

So finding understanding of the human condition brings to an end the insecure, upset, artificial-reinforcement-dependent angry, egocentric and alienated world. A new human-condition-resolved, cooperative, selfless and loving world now emerges. Light comes streaming into the dark cave-like world of denial that we have been living in, and it will all be like waking up from a nightmare!

 

Computer graphic of people greeting the rising sun with outstretched arms

 

123

Basically, with the ability to understand ourselves, we can return to our original cooperative and loving state, but this time fully conscious. As the poet T.S. Eliot anticipated, ‘We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’ (Little Gidding, 1942).

 

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith of life as three valleys, with an Edenic childhood, a scorched adolescence and a sunny adulthood

Humanity’s Journey from Ignorance to Enlightenment, see chapter 8 of FREEDOM.

 

A series of seven human fossil skulls arranged in order of increasing brain case size and corresponding species maturation.

Humanity’s stages of maturation, see chapter 8 of FREEDOM.
(Note, our large brain appeared some 2 mya – see earlier reference in par. 63.)

 

124

Craig: Wow Jeremy, that has been absolutely incredible, enlightening, enthralling, and I really can’t thank you enough for sharing with us your knowledge and your insight. To think about the human race being transformed just in the nick of time is, I think, what everybody out there who has listened to this will be hoping for.

125

And your book FREEDOM, again, is available on HumanCondition.com for everybody to accessand it’s free on there as well. So please follow this interview up, listen to it again and again, try your best to understand what Jeremy is saying here, but get online, get the information and keep studying, and let’s hope we can all enjoy and embrace a new change for the world, for all of us.

126

Jeremy, it’s been wonderful to talk with you. Thank you for joining us, and we will hopefully speak to you againbut even better, that we’ll be seeing your work in the lives of everybody across the planet very soon.

127

I’m Craig Conway, this has been my interview with Jeremy Griffith.

 

END OF INTERVIEW

 

Genevieve Salter: So everyone, don’t forget you can learn all about this fabulous, world-saving breakthrough understanding of the human condition at HumanCondition.comincluding a description of how the psychological rehabilitation of humans actually occurs, and how everyone’s life can immediately be transformed at www.humancondition.com/transformation!!

And I want to mention that what you’ll see there following this interview is a series of videos that elaborate on what’s been outlined in the interviewso there’ll be some repetition, but going over the concepts in more detail does help with the understanding and absorption of them.

In the first of those videos Jeremy warns us of our historic fear of the subject of the human condition and the resulting ‘deaf effect’ that reading or hearing about the human condition often initially causes.

 

Visit www.HumanCondition.com to view the film of this interview,
and to watch the series of introductory videos Genevieve has referred to.

 

 

 

Ways to acquire THE Interview booklet:

 

1. Purchase copies from bookshops, including Amazon, for around $US11 each (in 2024). These are beautiful 14 x 21 cm perfect bound, glossy-covered, colour booklets.

 

2. Purchase bulk copies at a very low price from the WTM for giving away, minimum order of 20. These are the beautiful 14 x 21 cm perfect bound, glossy-covered, colour booklets. The price is around $US5 (in 2024) each, which includes delivery to most places in the world.

 

3. Print your own copies as either A4 or US letter PDF, or the smaller A5 or Half US letter PDF for easy carry and distribution, but these stapled folded booklets look more like pamphlets than the lovely little books above.

 

See details here.

 

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  • Gideon Etuk King on December 27, 2024 at 12:15 pm

    Awesome Interview. The absolute definition of Mankind and the nature of humanity.

  • Margaret Diana on December 27, 2024 at 12:21 am

    This is quite impressive, quite an eye opener. I am quite optimistic to hear, learn more and gain understanding by delving into the human condition.

  • Adina on December 26, 2024 at 1:02 am

    Thank you!

    • David Ledford on December 27, 2024 at 12:05 am

      This is already making good sense and I feel I must learn more. Thankyou ppl

  • Darius on December 26, 2024 at 12:15 am

    Wow!!! 🌹❤️🔥

  • Lucky on December 26, 2024 at 12:10 am

    I have always wondered why we are stagnant in our thinking, afraid as if we had reached our last place in our cerebral rigours, and boom another biological Martin Luther.

  • Rene Atuegbe Albert on December 26, 2024 at 12:05 am

    After watching the interview, I was touched and excited. How I wish everyone would feel the same way and PREPARED FOR THE RAPTURE that will SOON take Place!!!

  • Aive Maga on December 25, 2024 at 9:55 am

    Very impressive indeed, I think it is a new break through for us humans.
    I really appreciate to have a electronic copy please. I am from Papua new Guinea 🇵🇬

    Merry Christmas.

    • WTM Admin on December 25, 2024 at 4:26 pm

      Wonderful to have your interest Aive and having the human condition solved is certainly is a new breakthrough for us all!! You can freely access all the different electronic formats of THE Interview HERE on our homepage where you can also freely access Jeremy Griffith’s other key books. Our homepage also provides a guide through the steps to pursue your interest, including subscribing to receive our free weekly emails, and joining our Facebook Group, which provides a wonderful platform for participating in, or just observing, interesting and exciting discussions with others about this amazing, human-condition-resolved new world.

  • Dr. John McDuffie on December 25, 2024 at 4:51 am

    Want to know more

    • WTM Admin on December 25, 2024 at 6:59 am

      It’s great you want to learn more, John! At the top of our homepage — HumanCondition.com — it states ‘WHAT NEXT after watching THE Interview?’ and guides you through the steps to pursue your interest. This includes subscribing for our free, weekly ‘Freedom Essay’ emails, and joining our booming Facebook Group.

  • Rod Morley on December 25, 2024 at 1:43 am

    We have it in ourselves to make the change needed. If we do not change, we will probably destroy the Human Race and this planet.

    • WTM Admin on December 25, 2024 at 6:52 am

      We aren’t sure if you fully understand what has been presented Rob, but up until now it actually hasn’t been ‘right’ to make the “change needed” while the corrupting journey to find understanding had yet to be completed. We have ‘had’ to be angry, egocentric and alienated because that has been the price for finding knowledge. What is so extraordinary about Jeremy Griffith’s treatise is that it logically and accountably defends human selfishness and egocentricity and with this defence of our ‘dark side’ now achieved all our defensive, destructive behaviours are now redundant. We no longer need them because we have the real defence for our psychologically upset behaviour. This is the essence of the transformation that is now available; everyone can immediately choose to live in accord with that understanding, which is what is so immensely exciting – see FAQ 4.1 to read all about the Transformed State.

  • Miguel Reyes on December 25, 2024 at 1:03 am

    THANK you 😊

  • Linn on December 25, 2024 at 1:00 am

    Wonderful insightful information 👏

  • Indrajit Dutta on December 25, 2024 at 12:30 am

    Brilliant

  • Tomasa on December 25, 2024 at 12:15 am

    Jeremy’s Theory of understanding Humanity 2 million years ago and Humanity now. He elaborated the condition of Darwin’s theory which is in conflict with the Creation in the Bible, the latter was absorbed by humanity to now and the evolvement of science. That makes the difference. Thanks Jeremy for your observations related to Darwin’s Theory now sharing to the world the conditions of humanity millions of years ago.

  • Julie Walls on December 25, 2024 at 12:00 am

    This is a wonderful revolutionary feat. Way to go.. so when Adam gets the win which he so desperately wanted it’s a release of dopamine in our reward center in the brain which is basically addiction. Hmm so profound

    • WTM Admin on December 25, 2024 at 6:37 am

      Certainly there are biochemical flow-on effects of being able to understand the human condition at last, but the real relief comes from understanding that we are basically good. It is the ability to understand that brings profound relief from all manner of anxiety such as our need for distraction.

  • Erin Berg on December 24, 2024 at 10:25 am

    Fascinating

  • Aruna Reddy on December 24, 2024 at 9:28 am

    Yes everyone can benefit… but need to talk
    to someone to understand more

    • WTM Admin on December 24, 2024 at 1:37 pm

      Absolutely they can Aruna and, as a first step, we encourage you to join our over 70,000 members in our WTM Community Facebook Group as it’s proving to be such an effective platform to maximise interaction amongst our global supporters, for everyone to benefit from each others’ questions and responses, and from our guidance, and it’s where all the latest thought-provoking cutting edge discussions about this biological explanation of the human condition are taking place and it’s a wonderful place to share in all the excitement and wonder about this new paradigm of understanding ourselves! We also encourage you to subscribe to our mailing list and our homepage provides a wonderful guide on the best way to learn more — and it is all free! This includes, after THE Interview, the other three Introductory Videos, our Main Videos and Jeremy Griffith’s Key Books. From there our WTM Community page includes more about how to get involved in this amazing, human-condition-resolved new world!

  • Kevin on December 24, 2024 at 6:28 am

    EPIC !

  • Stewart Kotler on December 24, 2024 at 6:11 am

    Neanderthals were extremely violent they had bigger brains and that part of the brain that was superfluous had meant to the aggressive violent behavior of the Neanderthals to evolution and natural selections the actual brain of humans shrunk during this evolutionary period

    • WTM Admin on December 24, 2024 at 7:48 am

          Thank you for your comment Stewart but the evidence is that Neanderthals were not extremely violent and aggressive, they were sensitive and peaceful. As presented in THE Interview the core of Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition is that humans have a cooperative, loving instinctive heritage, not a brutish, savage and aggressive one, and that the source of our aggression is a psychosis that has been compounding ever since the instinct and intellect clashed some 2 million years ago. It follows then that the further back in history we go, the less psychologically upset our ancestors were. As is mentioned in THE Interview, the anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy reported that “our species-defining cooperative mutualism can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [which is well beyond 5.3 million years ago]”. In chapter 8 of Jeremy Griffith’s definitive book FREEDOM, the whole human journey is explained, showing that humans lived in a cooperative state for at least 5 million years before the emergence of the human condition some 2 million years ago. It is this period of our history that emerges as an instinctive memory of a ‘Golden Age’ as recorded by writers such as Hesiod, Plato and Moses.
          In chapter 8:11C of FREEDOM, and especially paragraph 830, Jeremy beautifully explains how much ‘creative and spiritual sensitivity’ was demonstrated by these early Homo species, as shown through the fossil remains including “a Neanderthal burial site at the Shanidar Cave in Iraq…contains traces of pollen grains, indicating that bouquets of flowers were buried with the corpses. The creative and aesthetic sense of our ancestors of nearly half a million years ago, as indicated by the pigments and paint grinding equipment, suggests that the creative and spiritual sensitivities demonstrated by the Neanderthals were in existence long before their time.” A discovery in 2024 showed that a Neanderthal band cared for a child with Down Syndrome until it was 6 years old – not violent and aggressive behaviour at all! A reduction in brain size in Homo Sapiens accounted for through changes in overall body size; not suprisingly some parts of the Homo brain associated with higher cognition functions have actually increased in size.
          Finally, Jeremy explains that Homo Sapiens displaced other species through being more psychologically upset angry, egocentric and alienated. In Part 3 of THE Interview Jeremy explains how consciousness developed some 2 million years ago as a result of nurturing or the love-indoctrination process and refers the viewer to Chapter 7 of FREEDOM for a comprehensive explanation. Since then there has been only one major development going on and that was the psychological one. As more upset examples of Homo emerged they inevitably displaced more innocent, older versions, just as in our own time more ‘primitive’ races have been displaced by the more upset. You might be interested in paragraph 907 of chapter 8:15 of FREEDOM, which discusses “Anthropology now evidences this progression in upset, with the more innocent Neanderthals [which lived from 400,000 to 40,000 years ago], Denisovans, Flores man and Red Deer Cave people being replaced around this time by more upset modern humans.”

  • Rocky amundsen-weiby on December 24, 2024 at 12:48 am

    Very insightful 👏

  • Jacob banks on December 24, 2024 at 12:20 am

    Watched 45 mins and couldn’t wait to share

    • WTM Admin on December 24, 2024 at 10:23 am

      That’s fantastic Jacob!! Everything on the WTM website is freely available to share, including THE Interview where there is a ‘SHARE’ button underneath the video player at the top of the homepage HumanCondition.com. As well all our publications include a share button along with the other options for audio, downloading, printing, translations, commenting etc.

  • Gina Anderson on December 24, 2024 at 12:15 am

    I don’t know what to say except it all makes sense

  • leo andreski on December 24, 2024 at 12:09 am

    Jeremy Griffith’s analysis lacks sufficient insight into the fact that the essence of existence is mystery and that the instantiant existant exists in and as this mystery observing it from the condition within it that is it.

    • WTM Admin on December 24, 2024 at 7:56 am

      Leo, we suggest that the more you digest this explanation, the more you will see that it does not rob life or explanations of life of its ‘spiritual’ dimension. We thought you might find our FAQs about religion of interest, in particular FAQ 6.7 ‘How can a scientific explanation ever hope to account for and encompass the great ‘spiritual’ dimension we know exists in life? / Isn’t ‘spirituality’ beyond a purely rational explanation?’

  • Rosa cole on December 24, 2024 at 12:05 am

    Good to know Gracias 🙏

  • Judy Kennedy on December 24, 2024 at 12:03 am

    Enlightening,I need to learn more

    • WTM Admin on December 24, 2024 at 7:27 am

      Hi Judy, it’s great you’ve watched THE Interview as it’s the ideal introduction to Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition. From there, at top of our homepage HumanCondition.com, it states ‘WHAT NEXT after watching THE Interview?’ and guides you through the steps to pursue your interest. This includes subscribing to our mailing list where you will receive one email per week, occasional News Flashes, and notifications for our Live Events. We also encourage people to join our Facebook Group to learn more about this amazing, human-condition-resolved new world. We are a not-for-profit organisation and make all our material and publications free to read online, watch, listen to and even download and print!

  • Andrew Sakail Narugi on December 23, 2024 at 8:23 am

    Absolutely 💯 % explanation

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