The psychosis-addressing-and-solving, real biological explanation of the human condition
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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.]
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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 Association—so he’s one of the world’s leading psychiatrists—and 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.
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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 interesting—and exciting—talk you have ever heard.
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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’?
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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.
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We humans have absolutely lived in hope, faith and trust that one day, somewhere, some place, all the efforts of everyone—but of scientists in particular—would 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.
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Craig: Okay then Jeremy, solve the human condition for us, we’re all ears!
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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.
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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?
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Craig: Yes, that’s what we want; the human condition finally explained, fixed up and healed forever!
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Jeremy: Exactly Craig. So, to start at the beginning, I know everyone listening is living with the belief—well it’s what we were all taught at school and are told in every documentary—that 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.
[Collage of two Bighorn rams about to butt heads, and two Grizzly Bears fighting]
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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’.
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Craig: Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve understood is the reason for our competitive and aggressive nature—that 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.
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Jeremy: Yes, that’s what we were taught, but let’s think about this—and what I’m going to say now is very important, so I hope everyone’s listening closely.
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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.
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What’s more, we humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, the voice or expression of which we call our conscience—which 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 gentleness—which, 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]
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So saying our competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts in us is simply not true—as 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!
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Jeremy: Yes, and this key, all-important, psychosis-addressing-and-solving explanation is actually very obvious.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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 alienated—which 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.)
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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 itself—Adam 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.
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So our selfish, competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to savage instincts but to a psychologically upset state or condition.
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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.
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Craig: Wow Jeremy, I mean this is just fascinating. So Adam Stork—we humans—developed 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?
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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!
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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’!
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Craig: This is such a simple story but so far-reaching in its ramifications—I 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.
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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?
<click here for Part 2>
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