This page contains comments by Trevor Rogers (TR) on the introduction to the book Freedom: the End of the Human Condition by Jeremy Griffith on 2 June 2016.  TR’s comments are based on a single pass through Jeremy’s introductory speech, which Jeremy himself says is an ideal introduction to his book, and on skimming the online book itself.

TR:  Review Summary

It’s a complex world, and understanding any analysis of it and proposed solutions is difficult and time consuming.  Most people don't have the insight, knowledge, courage and persistence to devise a global; narrative, and Griffith is to be applauded for his attempt.  But his analysis is flawed and incomplete.  He tells us the cause of the human condition is guilt and repression caused when our conscious minds realize what horrible corrupt beings we are.  He assumes that in preconscious times we were (as a species and as infants) naturally loving and compassionate, ignoring that when we became conscious we immediately saw our brutish behaviour, which must have coexisted with our compassionate side.  He does not recognise the significance of choice in determining value.  He narrowly defines the human condition to be the conflict between instinct and intellect, and he defines narrow solutions – that we should use modern science to understand, be compassionate and overcome our guilt.  He does not address the historical grievances between ethnic groups and nations, hoping that all this will come out in the wash when upset people are redeemed.  He fails to address the ongoing need to contain our competitive instincts because he thinks they are virtually unreal, arising out of consciousness, and the issues are all now resolved, given his explanation of our history.  Would that it were so.

Presentation by biologist Jeremy Griffith at the launch of Jeremy’s book “FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition�, at London’s Royal Geographical Society on 2 June 2016

 (Please note, Jeremy’s presentation here expands on his launch address and represents a condensation of FREEDOM and, as such, is recommended as the ideal introduction to it.)

Expanded transcript of Jeremy Griffith’s address

(Watch Jeremy’s address at www.humancondition.com)

Thank you Tim, my wonderful, wonderful friend on this long and very difficult journey to this day, for your kind introduction.

Most especially I want to thank Sir Bob Geldof for your inspiring and encouraging keynote address for the launch of my book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition. My gratitude to you for agreeing to help with the launch of FREEDOM is completely bottomless, because in my view, Sir Bob, your concern for humanity is second to none, and your preparedness to relentlessly point out the horror of our species’ predicament makes you the conscience of the world. I love your honesty so much that to me it’s like the coming of the summer rains that water the parched Earth! Thank you.

And, as Tim mentioned, Sir Laurens van der Post has been the great inspiration in my life’s work of addressing the human condition, so it's very special to me that although his daughter Lucia was unable to be here because she is currently in Botswana, her husband, Neil Crichton-Miller, offered to attend in her absence.

I would like to begin by referring to some of the amazingly honest statements made by Sir Bob about the extremely serious plight of the world.

You have just stated that you’ve ‘never felt the world more threatening, more fractious, more fissiparous, more febrile, more fucked up than it is now.’

And in your 1986 album Deep in the Heart of Nowhere, you sang, ‘What are we going to do because it can't go on…​This is the world calling. God help us’, and ‘Searching through their sacred books for the holy grail of “whyâ€�, but the total sum of knowledge knows no more than you or I.’

At a conference a week or so ago in Montreal, you asked, ‘Where is the public good in the vast inequality wrought by modern capitalism…​which is just a euphemism for greed?’, and you said, ‘I’ve never felt greater fear and greater anger than I do today.’

In 2002 you pleaded, ‘Can the void, the nothingness, that we appear to inhabit ever be filled?’

In your 2006 book Geldof in Africa, you wrote about ‘attempting to make sense of…the scale of the horror, the utter devastation’—and referred to ‘world leaders’ pathetic plans’ to help. And asked, ‘What will ever stop the madness?’

In your brilliant W.B. Yeats documentary last month, you pleaded for Yeats’ ‘revolution of the mind’ where ‘peace, pluralism and respect’ will replace hate and aggression, and you referred to ‘the ludicrous notion of death or glory’ practised in Ireland during the 1916 Easter Uprising.

And, finally, at the very end of Geldof In Africa you wrote, ‘I’m sick of standing in squares and linking arms…​of tear gas and pop concerts…Feed the World. Yes. For we starve for justice. We hunger for dignity. We thirst for the end of degradation and hurt. Feed the world, for we are empty of hope and too full of despair and have nothing to nourish our dreams.’ Basically, what you’re pleading for is the food we really need, which is understanding of the human condition.

Yes, the real and ultimate frontier that we needed to explore was never outer-space but inner-space—as Sir Laurens van der Post said in the extract (included above) that Tim played in his Introduction from Sir Laurens’ Royal Geographical Society’s Television Lecture of the Year in 1990, ‘we have to go sharply in reverse, join our old natural selves with our wilful conscious self’. Again, the message is that to make any progress in our human situation we had to solve the human condition.

And as I will seek to make very clear today, unless the reconciling understanding of the human condition was found, as it now is in FREEDOM, the rapidly escalating pain and alienation in humans was only going to increase at such a rapid rate and to such an extent that all the suffering the human race has experienced to this point in time would be miniscule in comparison to the amount of human suffering that was coming.

The fact is, what is being presented here today provides the only doorway out of the incredible crisis the human race is now in, so please, please listen to what I have to say. Basically I’m going to present the essence of what’s in FREEDOM, and I might mention that it's been a 50 year journey to get to this day and this venue and this presentation in, most gratefully, the esteemed company of Sir Bob.

 

The structure of my address from here begins with Part 1. The Dishonest Biology. This will be followed by Part 2. The Honest Biology. On my return to Australia I will record another video fully explaining how the truthful understanding of the human condition that is presented in Part 2 is able to immediately transform the lives of all humans and save the human race, at which point Part 3. The Resulting Transformation will be added to this presentation.

Please note that you can find more detailed descriptions of all the following concepts in the chapters or paragraphs in FREEDOM that are mentioned throughout the text.

 

Part 1. The Dishonest Biology

Sir Bob, you’re a fabulous humanitarian, but with regard to such fundamental questions as ‘the holy grail of “why�’ the human condition exists, you said to me a few days ago that ‘they are questions for biologists like you Jeremy to answer’—and on that score you remarked that ‘We’re not all going to turn into people who are all hugging each other Jeremy because we're all competitive by nature. The question is how do we relieve ourselves from our unchangeable primal instincts [that are selfish and competitive]?’ Essentially you were expressing the view virtually everyone has been subscribing to, which is that we humans have a competitive and aggressive animal heritage, and thus we have brutish and savage genetic instincts that we can’t change, but, as I am now going to explain, that’s all been a great lie, albeit a very necessary one. And after explaining why this has been a lie, I will go on to explain that our condition is a psychological condition, and psychoses can be healed with understanding.

TR: The innate evil comes from Christianity, innate incompleteness from Hinduism, innate aggression from Darwinism ‘survival of the fittest’.  But it is now obvious that altruism also evolved.

It is certainly true that humans have used the excuse that we are competitive, aggressive and selfish because we supposedly have instincts that compel us to compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate in order to reproduce our genes like other animals do—but of course this cannot be the real reason for our competitive and aggressive behaviour.

TR: Why ‘of course’?  It may be true, despite his assertions to the contrary.

First, we humans have cooperative and loving moral instincts, the voice or expression of which within us is our conscience—as Charles Darwin recognised, ‘The moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (paragraph 375 of FREEDOM). And in order to have an instinctive altruistic moral nature, our distant ancestors must have been cooperative and loving, not competitive and aggressive like other animals.

Second, descriptions of human behaviour, such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded, pessimistic, optimistic, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic, alienated, etc, all recognise the involvement of our species’ unique fully conscious thinking mind—that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour. Humans have suffered not from the genetic-opportunism-based, non-psychological animal condition, but the conscious-mind-based, PSYCHOLOGICALLY troubled HUMAN CONDITION (par. 40 of FREEDOM).

TR: Our conscious mind also evolved.

So saying our behaviour results from having competitive and aggressive instincts like other animals simply does not stack up, it is not true; it's just an excuse, but, again, an extremely necessary one, as I will now explain.

TR: Does he separate consciousness from physical laws?

To start, let’s imagine that it is true that our distant ancestors did live cooperatively and lovingly, the instinctive memory of which is our ‘moral sense’ or conscience that Darwin recognised distinguishes us from other animals.

So, following that first step, let’s imagine that Plato was right when, long ago, in 360 BC he wrote of ‘our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were…​simple and calm and happy…​pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now’, a time when we lived a ‘blessed and spontaneous life…​[where] neither was there any violence, or devouring of one another [no sex as humans practice it now], or war or quarrel among them…​[and we] dwelt naked, and mostly in the open air…and had no beds, but lay on soft couches of grass’ (par. 180 of FREEDOM).

And, similarly, let’s imagine that Plato’s compatriot Hesiod was right when, in his poem Theogony, he wrote, ‘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…​Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…​They with abundant goods ’midst quiet lands. All willing shared the gathering of their hands’ (par. 180).

And let’s imagine that our mythologies were also right; that, as the author Richard Heinberg summarised, ‘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. That 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. And that 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, alienation]’ (par. 181).

TR: Agreed many religions begin with a paradise.

And let’s then imagine that the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right when he said about even some humans living today that ‘nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state’ (par. 181). And that anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy was correct in his summary of the evidence that anthropology has now revealed, which is that ‘our species-defining cooperative mutualism can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [well beyond 5.3 million years ago]’ (par. 183).

TR: What evidence species-defining cooperation began over 5.3 Myo?  Is not both cooperation and competition evident throughout animal evolution: ants, bees, herd animals, primate groups?

And let’s imagine that it is also true that primatological studies of bonobos (the variety of chimpanzee living south of the Congo river) reveal a great deal about how loving and cooperative our distant primate ancestors likely were.

TR: Chimpanzees and bonobos are equally distant cousins, both them and humans probably descending from a common ancestor.  Bonobos are NOT our ancestors.

To evidence this last point, consider these absolutely amazing observations of bonobos. Firstly, from filmmakers who were producing a documentary about them: ‘bonobos are surely the most fascinating animals on the planet. They’re the closest animals to man. They’re the only animals capable of creating the same “gaze� as a human.’ And ‘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’ (par. 418).

TR: Acknowledging great traits doesn’t make then our ancestors.

Photograph by Finlay MacKay for TIME

Kanzi’s human-like gaze (from paragraph 418)

Yes, as bonobo keeper Barbara Bell said, ‘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.’ And that ‘They’re extremely intelligent…They understand a couple of hundred words…​Working with them is like being with two and a half year olds’ and ‘They love to tease…Like during training, if I were to ask for their left foot, they’ll give me their right, and laugh and laugh and laugh’ (par. 451).

 TR: Dogs can recognise many words.  Ravens are clever.  Elephants help each other.

Researchers have also reported that ‘bonobos historically have existed in a stable environment rich in sources of food…and unlike chimpanzees have developed a more cohesive social structure’. For example, ‘up to 100 bonobos at a time from several groups spend their night together. That would not be possible with chimpanzees because there would be brutal fighting between rival groups’ (par. 415).

TR: Agreed bonobos and chips are different.  Chimps are just as close to us humans as bonobos.

© Fiona Rogers / shahrogersphotography.com

Bonobo group (from paragraph 415)

Note that what’s being said about bonobos is amazingly similar—well, it's almost identical—to what Plato described long before bonobos were even known of, which was that our distant ancestors ‘dwelt naked, and mostly in the open air…and they had no beds, but lay on soft couches of grass’. And, in Hesiod’s words, ‘They with abundant goods ’midst quiet lands / All willing shared the gathering of their hands.’

Bonobos’ unlimited capacity for love is also apparent in this wonderful first-hand account from researcher Vanessa Woods: ‘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’ (par. 451). That is just amazing!

And significantly, bonobo society is, unlike other primate societies, matriarchal and focused on the nurturing of their infants, as this quote evidences: ‘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’ (par. 416).

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

Bonobos nurturing their infants (paragraph 417)

All these descriptions (and you can read many more in chapter 5 of FREEDOM) provide powerful insights into how amazingly cooperative and loving bonobos, our closest living relative, are. In fact, the following picture shows just how similar our species are, comparing as it does the skeleton of our early australopithecine ancestor (who lived between 3.9 and 3 million years ago) with the skeleton of a bonobo (chs 8:2 and 8:3).

TR: Bonobos and chimps are equally close relatives.

Left side: Bonobo skeleton. Right side: Early australopithecine.
(Drawing by Adrienne L. Zihlman from New Scientist, 1984)

On the back of those primatological insights, let’s now imagine that the American philosopher John Fiske was right when, in 1874 (only a few years after Darwin published his great book Origins), he proposed that it was through the nurturing of our infants (like what the bonobos practise) that our distant primate ancestors acquired cooperative loving moral instincts. As I explain in chapter 5 of FREEDOM, the reason nurturing can create a cooperative moral sense is that while the trait for nurturing is a selfish trait, as genetic traits have to be to survive, it has the appearance of being selfless. While the mother is selfishly reproducing her genes by fostering her infant, from the infant’s perspective, it is being treated unconditionally selflessly—the 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, they will be indoctrinated with that selfless love and grow up to behave accordingly. Being semi-upright from living in trees, and thus having their arms free to hold a dependent infant, primates are especially facilitated to develop this nurtured, loving, cooperative nature. So let’s imagine that it was entirely appropriate that Fiske’s nurturing theory for the origin of our moral nature should have been described at the time, as it was, as ‘far more important than Darwin’s principle of natural selection’ and ‘one of the most beautiful contributions ever made to the Evolution of Man’ (par. 488).

TR: Nurturing does promote selflessness, in humans.  Other species nurture infants.  The mother gets lots in return: connection to the world, relief from full breasts, etc.  Kangaroos have pouches to hold infants – even better than arms to nurture.

But selflessness comes from more than just nurturing.  There have to other rewards – the connection, the feel good when you do good requires physical, evolutionary links.  it's not just psychological.

With all this in mind, let’s now imagine that it was the emergence of our conscious mind that caused our species to depart from that original all-loving, all-sensitive, completely happy and cooperative idyllic state—that ‘human consciousness’ ‘separated’ us ‘from an original innocence’, as Heinberg wrote. And let us imagine therefore that Shakespeare was right when he acknowledged how seemingly destructive and stupid we marvellously conscious humans are, writing ‘What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!…​in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? [Brutal and barbaric] man delights not me’. And that the philosopher Blaise Pascal was similarly precise in his damning observation, ‘What a contradiction then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, and yet imbecile worm of the earth, repository of truth, a sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe!’ (par. 41).

TR: So our idyllic cooperation etc was mindless or unconscious!

Did the brutality suddenly appear with consciousness?  All predators are brutal, Some spiders eat their mates.  Males in herds compete for supremacy, in lions, elephants, deer, kangaroos, etc. 

The dual nature – benevolent and barbaric – did not begin with consciousness.

With Shakespeare’s and Pascal’s denunciations of our conscious brain now ringing in our minds, let’s next imagine that science writer Roger Lewin was right when, in commenting about how depressing and confronting the subject of consciousness is, he said that to ‘illuminate the phenomena of consciousness’ is ‘a tough challenge…​perhaps the toughest of all’. And that René Descartes’ reaction when he too tried to ‘contemplate consciousness’—that ‘So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown…​that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool [of utter depression]’—was completely understandable given what a destructive force consciousness has appeared to be (par. 624).

TR: It is indeed hard to define consciousness.  No surprises or awards to him.

But this is a misrepresentation of Descartes’ doubt: he consciously tried to doubt everything he could, to determine what was absolutely certain, and concluded ‘I think therefor I am’ but also came to many more, albeit more uncertain, conclusions.

Yes, when taking into account our species’ instinctive cooperative past, how ashamed of our conscious mind’s seeming destruction of it must we be!

TR: Explicitly blaming destructiveness on consciousness, which is unwarranted.

Now, if all these imaginings are right (and I suggest that by the end of this presentation humans’ conscious mind will be so well defended, yes defended, by the true explanation for our corrupted state that you will be able to admit that these imaginings are, in fact, all true), namely that our distant ape ancestor lived completely cooperatively and lovingly and then we became fully conscious and for some reason, unbeknownst to ourselves, we began to behave competitively, aggressively and selfishly, then how absolutely terrible a predicament must that have been!

TR: Bonobos had their disputes.  They weren’t completely cooperative and loving.  Aggression and selfishness did NOT begin with consciousness.

Instead of being loving, cooperative and gentle, humans had developed a propensity for shocking deeds of violence, depravity, indifference and cruelty. For some reason we had turned into seemingly evil monsters—sufferers of the human condition. And having become preoccupied with egocentric competition for power, fame, fortune and glory meant there was little or no time left to properly nurture our children, which meant they in turn became victims of our corrupted condition, and so on, through generation after generation—the guilt of which explains why John Fiske’s explanation of the nurturing origins of our moral nature has been completely ignored and forgotten, despite it being an insight that was described at the time as being ‘far more important than Darwin’s’. It has been said that parents would rather admit to being an axe murderer than a bad mother or father, and it's true: the importance of nurturing in the development of humanity and in our own lives is a truth we have not been prepared to admit (ch. 6:4).

TR: The human condition is not equivalent to evil monstrosity.  According to Wikipedia “The human condition is "the characteristics, key events, and situations which compose the essentials of human existence, such as birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, and mortality."�  The definition also covers our sense of alienation, aloneness, insecurity and insignificance, rather than our violent or egocentric tendencies.

Few have forgotten the nurturing origins of our moral nature.  It is explicit in most religions, especially Christianity.  It is routine in education.  Many parents admit to bad parenting.  A refusal to admit is reflects the belief that nurturing morals is critical.

We can now see that it makes complete sense that the guilt associated with trying to think about and confront the truth of the horror of our corrupted condition has been so great that we could only cope with it by not coping with it, by adopting all manner of dishonest denial—basically by blocking out all memory of our species’ cooperative and loving past and any thoughts about how corrupted we as a species had become since we gained a conscious, thinking mind. We didn’t want to admit our species once lived cooperatively and lovingly, and we didn’t want to face the issue of the human condition.

TR: Religion and simplistic Darwinism and economics has made us forget our inherited altruism.    But’s unrelated to becoming conscious.  Our species never lived without conflict.  Bonobos are not us, but a different species.  We have characteristics of both bonobos and chimps as well as some unique to our species, as they do too.

But Griffith adopt a Freudian approach here: that consciousness makes us aware of our horrible corrupted condition and we take any steps to deny it, forget it, ignore it or explain it away.  There is plenty of evidence that this is not the only way people cope.  Freud dealt with people with psychological problems, so his source data is biased. 

Consider people put in other stressful situation such as war: it seems that roughly a third of returned soldiers have ongoing debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); about a third have some PTSD but can still function OK; but about a third don't have PTSD.  it's probably similar with facing the human condition: some can, some can’t; some eat drink and be merry, others despair; some face it and live OK. 

There are many analyses of the problem.  To say we all repress it is fictional.  To say we accept the Darwinian explanation of life red in tooth and claw only because it overcomes our horror at ourselves is in a way insulting.  Especially when the Darwinian explanation of innate competitiveness may be true (though he denies it).

Plato’s famous description of ‘our human condition’ in which he depicted humans as having to ‘take refuge’ ‘a long way underground’ in a dark ‘cave’ because they couldn’t face the ‘painful’ ‘light’ of the truth of the ‘imperfections of human life’, is, in fact, a deadly accurate portrayal of this inability to cope with our species’ corrupted reality; of how deeply resigned we humans have become to living in denial of the issue of the human condition (pars 81-84).

TR: Plato wasn’t thinking that consciousness was the cause of evil.  He promoted more consciousness, more rationality, philosopher kings, not less.

Computer graphic by Jeremy Griffith, Marcus Rowell and Genevieve Salter © 2009 Fedmex Pty Ltd

Jeremy’s drawing of humans finally being able to escape Plato’s metaphorical
dark cave of denial into the healing sunshine of understanding of the human condition

TR: Just as an incidental remark, the focus on the sun is too Eurocentric.  It comes from the northerly European annual cycle of cold, wet, dark winters when people try to stay indoors, and warm, bright summers when people go outside to farm.  The dance looks like a spring fertility rite: all happy.  In the tropics, in central Australia, the middle east, south Asia, sub-Sahara, and Central America the sun gets oppressive.  There we prefer the cool – even the locals stay in the shade, use\ing fans and air-con if they can afford them.  The light is a very biblical expression for this reason.

As is described in chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM, between the ages of around 12 to 15 adolescents try to confront the human condition; they question and try to think truthfully about the seeming complete wrongness of human life, how it is all completely contradictory to what our original instinctive moral self or soul expects. But by the time they reach 14 or 15 their thoughts become so depressing that they learn that they have no choice but to resign themselves to never trying to confront the issue of the human condition again. In this respect, the individual goes on the same journey as the conscious-mind-based human race; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Humanity started adopting denial to cope, and it was a strategy that each generation of humans also had to learn to adopt on a personal level.

TR: This is a simplistic and misleading description of adolescents finding identity.  Not all face the issue, not all are concerned, not all forget.

I might mention here that occasionally some adolescents refuse to properly resign and take up the strategy of denial of the issue of the human condition. I call these semi-unresigned individuals ‘ships at sea’ (par. 1209) because they refuse to pull into port and escape the storms that occur when they try to grapple with the human condition during their early adolescence. I’m certain that Sir Bob’s extraordinary capacity for honesty about the extent and horror of the human condition in the world is because he is, to a degree, a ‘ship at sea’. Reading his 1986 book Is That It? is like reading one long ‘Resignation poem’, a practise many adolescents engage in during Resignation, and one I also talk about in chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM. Sir Bob repeatedly writes about ‘a civil war inside my head which accelerates until I think my brain will explode’, which is a classic description of a ‘still-wrestling-with-the-human-condition’ unresigned mind. As you have said Sir Bob, ‘I will always rail against those things I abhor. I will always try and avoid the cant and hypocrisy I loathe so much. I will continue being an “awkward bugger�.’ Yes, truthful, unresigned people make the world of the resigned feel incredibly awkward, but thank God for such truthsayers. The only reason I can explain the human condition, as I’m about to do, is because I have an unresigned mind that still confronts and thinks truthfully about the human condition—which is why I so love Sir Bob’s honesty about the state of the world.

TR:  Many are like Sir Bob. 

Of course, the resulting human-condition-confronting truthfulness of FREEDOM means it is a difficult book for resigned minds that are committed to avoiding the issue of the human condition to read. In fact, as I describe in chapter 1:4, resigned minds are so trained to avoid thinking about the human condition that when they start reading my work about it they suffer from a ‘deaf effect’ where their minds initially find it very difficult taking in or ‘hearing’ what’s being said, to the extent that they even end up thinking their incomprehension must be due to poor expression, or that the treatise is too dense to comprehend or even completely meaningless!

TR: Sir Bob said he found it dense and has not read it all.  “He wrote the book, half of it is so dense I couldn’t plough through it, so I just got the essence and I called him up and I said ‘Why am I doing an hour? You’re the scientist, you can put empiricism and study behind this idea you have.’�  Yet he is a semi-unresigned individual, a ‘ship at sea’.  (So apparently is his mother: there seem to be many who can minimise the upset.)

The ‘deaf effect’ occurs with all new ideas, and has nothing to do with this particular psychological explanation.  People resisted the germ theory, many still resist evolution.  Many people resisted Skinner’s behaviourism, but too many accepted it.  Now many behaviourists resist cognitive science and modern neuroscience, which directly addresses peoples’ mental constructs, thoughts, emotions and feelings, and consciousness itself.  Griffith also seems to have rejected the wide domain accepted as a challenge by modern neuroscientists.

Conversely, unresigned minds don't have to patiently allow their minds the time to overcome the deaf effect when reading FREEDOM; the blocks are not in place, and so they can ‘hear’ its truthful explanation of the human condition with such ease it is instantly life-saving, as this typical response from a ‘ship at sea’ that we received this week shows: ‘Have watched the video presentations [on your website] and have read to part-way through chapter two when I read the line; “To be confused and frightened to the point of being sickened by human behaviour, indeed to be suicidally depressed by it, is the effect the human condition has if you haven’t resigned yourself to living a relieving but utterly dishonest and superficial life in denial of it.� This has shaken me to the core, as it describes my tormented life of 67 years, and it tells me why it has been so, which nothing or no-one has been able to. Having discovered this immense truth, I hope I can find in the rest of this book a way to cope with the avalanche of emotions it has unleashed. At the moment I feel overwhelmed and vulnerable, which I presume is not unknown to yourselves when this realisation occurs in people like me, and would dearly love to receive some guidance on this. I honestly believe that if anything can save the world, this book has the potential to; if the world can cope with it. Thank you. Bill [real name withheld]’. We will counsel ‘Bill’ to be patient as a lifetime of confusion unravels itself, and we will invite him to join the ‘Former Ships at Sea Club’ in which he can share his experiences. We will also explain to him that chapter 9 of FREEDOM (a summary of which will appear as Part 3 of this booklet) describes how the world can cope with all the confronting truth about the human condition.

TR:  I have often thought that a person who is not depressed about the state of the world is not aware of it all.  But that doesn’t validate the analysis that consciousness is the root of all evil.

It is pertinent here to include my ‘valleys drawing’ that depicts humanity’s journey from ignorance to enlightenment (this drawing appears a number of times in FREEDOM). At the start of the frame you can see humanity, or in the individual’s case, the young adolescent, leaving the valley of our/​their innocent childhood and having to resign to an absolutely horrible life of living with the horror of the human condition through denial. As I mentioned, this stage of Resignation, which takes place during adolescence and historically has been too unbearable to acknowledge once that transition has occurred, is described in chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM where you’ll find some excruciatingly honest accounts from adolescents negotiating this horror.

TR: The Outsider addresses this apparently wilful blindness, as do existentialists.  Erich Fromm Fear of Freedom had an explanation in racial history and infant maturation of the sense of alienation.  Self-awareness can be frightening.  But it is not the original cause of brutality, as other species’ brutality attests.

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 1996-2015 Fedmex Pty Ltd

 

So, until such time that we had the understanding (the enlightenment) we required—namely the fully accountable, truthful explanation of human behaviour that will be presented in Part 2—virtually all humans had no choice but to sensibly resign themselves to not trying to confront the suicidally depressing issue of the human condition. But in the face of such pain and condemnation, denial alone wasn’t enough. What we desperately needed to come up with was an excuse for our corrupted condition that would relieve ourselves of the excoriating truth that our conscious mind had seemingly wrecked paradise.

So what relieving excuse for our behaviour could we find that we could gratefully and determinedly wrap our arms around?

Well, we looked about and saw that other animals are always fighting and competing and tearing each others throats out, and so to save ourselves from suicidal depression, we said ‘That’s why we’re competitive and aggressive—we too have savage animal instincts that compel us to compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate’. Despite knowing full well that we have a cooperative and loving moral instinctive nature that can only have been derived from a time when we lived cooperatively and lovingly, and therefore that it's patently untrue that we have a savage competitive and aggressive ancestry, our fear of suicidal depression was so great that we gladly embraced the lie that our distant ancestors were brutish and aggressive. Further, we gladly embraced the idea that the task then of our uniquely conscious mind was to try to control these supposed brutal, savage instincts within us.

TR: He posits that we can't have both competitive and cooperative traits, and since he is so sure we have cooperative traits the explanation of competitive traits must be a cover up for our sense of guilt.  This is Freudianism.  We do of course rationalise, but in this case it's true that we also inherited competitive traits.

This was an absolutely brilliant excuse because instead of our instincts being all-loving and thus unbearably condemning of our present non-loving state, they were made out to be vicious and brutal; and, instead of our conscious mind being the cause of our corruption, it was made out to be the blameless mediating ‘hero’ that had to manage those supposed vicious instincts within us! (par. 153). Rather than our instincts being good and our conscious mind bad, our instincts were made out to be bad and our intellect to be good, which, while fabulously relieving, was in-effect a complete reverse of the truth lie!

TR: Only if we can’t inherit both competitive and cooperative traits.

This excuse that we have competitive, brutish and savage animal instincts gained further momentum when it was given a biological base through the misrepresentation of Darwin’s idea of ‘natural selection’ as being a ‘survival of the fittest’ process. Natural selection is the process by which some members of a population reproduce more than others in a given environment, and, in the first edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin rightfully left it undecided as to whether those individuals that reproduced more could be viewed as winners, as being ‘fitter’. In later editions, however, Darwin’s associates, Herbert Spencer and Alfred Wallace, persuaded him to substitute the term ‘natural selection’ with the term ‘survival of the fittest’, which is the defence most people today use to justify their competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour: “I’m just making sure I’m a winner!� (ch. 2:9). (The reason it was ‘right’ that Darwin originally left it undecided as to whether selfishness is meaningful or not is explained in chapter 4 (in particular par. 358) of FREEDOM. Basically, nature, like everything else in the universe, is concerned with developing the holistic, teleological, negative-entropy-driven order of matter, which is a cooperative, integrative process, not a selfish, divisive one.)

TR: Agreed Darwinian evolution has been misrepresented to support selfish behaviour.  It is the gene that is selfish: the whole organism may promote reproduction of the gene by being selfless and cooperative.

Teleological explanations have been abandoned by science.  There is no evidence nature, or everything else in the universe, is cooperative or integrative.  This is a far stretch from saying consciousness causes brutality: an unwarranted extension.

The problem that emerged with this corruption of Darwin’s idea (what became known as Social Darwinism) was that it couldn’t explain instances of selfless cooperation in nature, such as that which apparently occurs in ant colonies, or when humans behave in accordance with our moral conscience and help others in need. So to circumvent this problem, the theory of Evolutionary Psychology/​Sociobiology was created which claimed that apparent instances of selflessness in nature, such as that seen in ant colonies, was really a case of those animals indirectly selfishly fostering their own genes by fostering their relatives. In the case of ants, this explanation holds true, but when used to explain our moral nature, it too was found wanting; as the journalist Bryan Appleyard pointed out, biologists ‘still have a gaping hole in an attempt to explain altruism. If, for example, I help a blind man cross the street, it is plainly unlikely that I am being prompted to do this because he is a close relation and bears my genes’ (ch. 2:10).

TR: Again simplistic sociobiological explanations of acts of consideration are useless.  No creature calculates the degree of kinship (two siblings or 8 cousins).  We evolved to help our kin, who we identify by physical familiarity.  As communications increase and we have a wider view, our unconscious circle of kin expands, so helping the blind man still seems natural because he is now “one of us�.  We need to improve sociobiology, not abandon it.

To contrive a solution to this problem, the Multilevel Selection Theory was created. Its proponents, the most prominent of whom is Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, claimed that humans have some selfish instincts selected at the individual level and some selfless instincts selected at the group level. Although this idea of ‘Group Selection’ giving rise to selfless instincts has been fully discredited on the grounds that any selflessness that develops will always be exploited by cheaters (‘By all means, help me reproduce my genes but I’m not about to help you reproduce yours’), by accepting the Multilevel Selection Theory human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic, reductionist biologists have nevertheless been adopting it (ch. 2:11).

TR: Many do reject group selection.  Many others still accept it.  We can't decide.  But we can explain the existence of both cheaters and co-operators without contradiction.

Overall, while the Multilevel Selection Theory added unconditionally selfless instincts to selfish instincts in the mix of what allegedly forms our species’ instinctive make-up (thus countering Evolutionary Psychology’s offensive denial of the fact that we have altruistic moral instincts), in essence, it still amounted to a continuation of the same old reverse-of-the-truth, ‘escape-rather-than-confront-the-human-condition’ agenda—that humans have villainous selfish instincts and a blameless conscious mind that has to ‘step-in’ to control them (par. 210).

TR: Not all evolutionary psychology denies we have altruistic moral instincts.  No-one suggests we have a blameless conscious mind.  Religionists and others do suggest our conscious mind needs to control our base instincts. There are many ways to do it.

One big problem—which Sir Bob referred to—with this ‘we-are-selfish-because-we-have-selfish-instincts’ excuse is that it implies humans are intrinsically imperfectable; it implies we can't change our selfish and competitive primal nature because it's in our genes and instinctive. But as is about to be explained, our instincts are to be cooperative and loving and it was a conscious mind-based psychosis that caused us to behave competitively, aggressively and selfishly—and since psychoses can be healed with understanding, we can be cured of our competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour. Humans are not intrinsically imperfectable (par. 218).

TR:  Here he equates being able to overcome instincts with being perfectable (or at least not intrinsically imperfectable – he avoids explicitly saying perfectable).  He overlooks the issue of causality or chaos: determinism or quantum indeterminism.  Rather than face this issue directly he re-asserts our instincts are cooperastive.

Tragically, however, the whole of biological science is now based on this fundamental lie that ‘we have competitive and aggressive instincts’. Libraries are full of this dishonest nonsense. Afraid of being holistic and teleological and confronting the human condition, science has instead been evasively mechanistic and reductionist (ch. 2:4). As Charles Birch, my Templeton Prize-winning Professor of Zoology at Sydney University when I was a student there, has said, ‘Science can't deal with subjectivity [the human condition]…what we were all taught at University is pretty much a dead end’, and ‘biology has not made any real advance since Darwin’ (par. 225). The polymath Arthur Koestler similarly recognised that ‘the citadel they [mechanistic scientists] are defending lies in ruins’ (par. 223).

TR: When he was at university Behaviourism was rife.  Science does now deal with subjectivity: eg Self comes to mind : constructing the conscious brain, Antonio Damasio.

The overall point is that when Sir Bob subscribed to the ‘selfish-instincts-in-humans’ account he was only doing what virtually every other human has been doing. Unfortunately, however, while it’s fully understandable that we humans had to invent—and then resign ourselves to believing in—an excuse to cope with our diabolically corrupted condition, it means biology, and the human race that depends on it for understanding of our behaviour, is now festering in a cesspit of human-condition-avoiding, dishonest biological crap; it is living ‘deep underground’ in Plato’s metaphorical ‘cave’ of darkness.

TR: I agree the myth that we are born selfish is bad.  Doesn’t mean the rest is true.

In fact, if the redeeming and psychologically rehabilitating true explanation of the human condition that I’m about to present hadn’t arrived to liberate humans from Plato’s ‘cave’ of terrible darkness from practising so much dishonest denial, the alienation from our true self that results from that denial would only have continued to increase, so that very soon the human race would have succumbed to an absolutely horrific state of terminal alienation. Indeed, the recent flood of movies and documentaries based on zombie, apocalyptic, escape-to-another-planet, ‘we are being attacked by aliens [by our own alienation]’, doomsday-preparation, ‘we need a super hero to save the world’ and other judgment-day-and-anxious-Bible-related-epic themes—and the actual breakout of such extreme psychosis that some people are led to fly hijacked planes into buildings, and drive trucks into crowds of people, and fire bullets into anyone they can corner—and such overall psychological fear in young people about the incredibly corrupted state of the world that there is now an epidemic of children suffering from highly anxious and agitated Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and from the can’t-cope, completely detached state of autism—all reflect the fact that the end play state of terminal alienation for humans is upon us (ch. 8:16G).

TR: It seems a push to link all these simply to a single cause, but that’s his point.  I also links all these to the current ennui, disillusionment, alienation, etc that comes from an inadequate understanding of our current reality and how we should respond.  But reasonable global beliefs and values are a long way from his analysis.

 

Part 2. The Truthful Biology

 

What I will now present is the fully accountable, truthful explanation of human behaviour, which is outlined in chapter 1 and presented in detail in chapter 3 of FREEDOM. This is the critically important part of my presentation today.

Clearly what’s been needed to haul the human race out of this cesspit of deceit and the psychological trauma it’s creating—this deathly dark cave of denial the human race has been living in and the extreme and terrible psychosis that such disconnection from our true selves is causing—is a completely fresh approach that truthfully recognises the association between the emergence of consciousness in humans and the corruption of our original cooperative, all-loving instinctive state. And, in fact, when that honest approach is taken the fully accountable, true explanation of our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour becomes reasonably obvious—because it makes sense that when our species became fully conscious a battle must have broken out between it and our already established instinctive self and that this internal conflict caused us to become angry, egocentric and alienated; to become psychologically upset sufferers of the human condition.

TR: Why is it that “it makes sense that when our species became fully conscious a battle must have broken out between it and our already established instinctive self�.  There is no obvious reason why the sudden onset of consciousness should create an opposition to cooperative behaviour.  Wouldn’t it become even more obvious that cooperative behaviour is better?  He has given no justification yet for his assumption.

Even if we put aside the fact that we have cooperative loving instincts and just look at the fundamental situation an animal species would face if it developed a fully conscious mind in the presence of already established instinctive orientations, we can see how a psychologically upsetting conflict between those already established instinctive orientations, and its newly emerged, self-adjusting conscious mind would have to occur.

TR: Now he starts the justification.

To help visualise this development, consider the situation of a migrating bird that has just acquired a fully conscious mind.

Many bird species are perfectly orientated to instinctive migratory flight paths. Each winter, without ever ‘learning’ where to go and without knowing why, they quit their established breeding grounds and migrate to warmer feeding grounds. They then return each summer and so the cycle continues. Over the course of thousands of generations and migratory movements, only those birds that happened to have a genetic make-up that inclined them to follow the right route survived. Thus, through natural selection, they acquired their instinctive orientation.

TR: Above: So far so good. 

Below: Graphic is not yet relevant.  It reflects a hippie, leftie, new-age cultural bias rather than a scientific approach.  It looks like amateur sociobiology.  Is instinct really “religion … left wing … women … blacks … yin … light�.  Are women and blacks exempt from the evil of consciousness?  Are only white western men culpable?

 

The Story of Adam Stork

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2016 Fedmex Pty Ltd

Imagine a flock of migrating storks returning to their summer breeding nests on the rooftops of Europe from their winter feeding grounds in southern Africa. Suppose in the instinct-controlled brain of one of them we place a fully conscious mind (we will call the stork Adam because we will soon see that, up to a point, this analogy parallels the old, pre-scientific Biblical account of Adam and Eve taking the ‘fruit’ (Gen. 3:3) ‘from the tree of…​knowledge’ (Gen. 2:9, 17); that is, becoming conscious). As Adam Stork flies north he spots an island off to the left with a tree laden with apples. Using his newly acquired conscious mind, Adam thinks, ‘I should fly down and eat some apples.’ It seems a reasonable thought but he can’t know if it is a good decision or not until he acts on it. For Adam’s new thinking mind to make sense of the world he has to learn by trial and error and so he decides to carry out his first grand experiment in self-management by flying down to the island and sampling the apples.

But it's not that simple. As soon as Adam’s conscious thinking self deviates from his established migratory path, his innocent instinctive self (innocent in the sense of being unaware or ignorant of the need to search for knowledge) tries to pull him back on course. In following the flight path past the island, Adam’s instinct-obedient self is, in effect, criticising his conscious mind’s decision to veer off that course; it is condemning his search for understanding. All of a sudden Adam is in a dilemma: if he adheres to the route his instinctive self is following and flies back on course, his instincts will be happy but he’ll never learn if his deviation was the right decision or not. All the messages he’s receiving from within inform him that obeying his instincts is good, is right, but there’s also a new inclination to disobey, a defiance of instinct. Diverting from his course will result in apples and understanding, yet he already sees that doing so will make him feel bad.

TR: There is no simple dichotomy, of conscious, knowledge and curiosity on the one hand and blissful ignorance but correct instincts on the other.  Consciousness comes to mind as species evolve: many birds – such as parrots and ravens – are highly conscious already.  Even within humans there is arrange of awareness, if we take into account mentally disabled and brain injured people.  Even within the same individual, we get tired, drunk and emotional and our level of consciousness fluctuates.

In evolutionary terms, consciousness arose to support life, to increase the planning ability, and allow more explicit choices, as the parable of Adam suggests. 

But accepting a new option, tasting the apple, may not be against all the other instincts.  The opposition he creates here is imagined, not real.  We could decide to stop over at an apple isle on the way, and hence shorten the migration, leading to lower losses on the way and increased abundance of the species, potentially more satisfying and less strain.  These improvements are the benefits of consciousness.  Conflict is not the only possible outcome.

Uncomfortable with the criticism his newly conscious mind or intellect is receiving from his instinctive self, Adam’s first response is to ignore the temptation the apples present and fly back on course. As he does so, however, Adam realises he can't deny his now questioning intellect—sooner or later he must find the courage to master his conscious mind by carrying out experiments in understanding. So, continuing to think, he next asks himself, ‘Why not fly down to an island and rest?’ Again, not knowing any reason why he shouldn’t, he proceeds with his experiment. And again, his decision is met with the same criticism from his instinctive self—but this time Adam defies the criticism and perseveres with his experimentation in self-management. His decision, however, means he must now live with the criticism and immediately he is condemned to a state of ‘upset’. A battle has broken out between his instinctive self, which is perfectly orientated to the flight path, and his emerging conscious mind, which needs to understand why that flight path is the correct course to follow. His instinctive self is perfectly orientated, but Adam doesn’t understand that orientation.

TR: Again, he has not established that conscious decisions are normally contrary to unconscious.  The instinctive self leads lemmings to mass suicide, some male spiders to be eaten by their mates, many species to overpopulate and cause famine, buck to fight (perhaps to the death) to mate, and so on.  Adam’s “instinctive self� may not be “perfectly orientated� to his environment and is individual well-being.  Adam’s consciousness doesn’t come in mid-flight: it develops over generations and over years, so Adam is likely to have already completed a migration and understood the benefits, as well as the difficulties and pain.  A brief stop on the way to restock with apples may be a good outcome.  Many migratory birds have stopovers on the way.

In short, when the fully conscious mind emerged it wasn’t enough for it to be orientated by instincts, it had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage life. But, tragically, the instinctive self didn’t ‘appreciate’ that need and ‘tried to stop’ the mind’s necessary search for knowledge, as represented by the latter’s experiments in self-management—hence the ensuing battle between instinct and intellect. To refute the criticism from his instinctive self, Adam needed the discoveries that science has only recently given us of the difference in the way genes and nerves process information; in particular, he needed to be able to explain that the gene-based learning system can orientate species to situations but is incapable of insight into the nature of change.

TR:  He’s still assuming there is an inevitable opposition between instinct and consciousness.  Adam could be the bird who discovered how to use sticks as tools to extract ants from inside logs, enhancing the bird’s nutrition and pleasure.

Human consciousness learned about hunting and gathering and farming well before modern science.  Humans learnt how to make cities, in Asia, India and Europe, with sewerage systems, fresh water systems, cooperation between traders, supply chains, manufacturers, service providers such as laundries and baths, and markets.

He acknowledges here that there are limits to the “instinctive self�, or “gene based learning�: that it “is incapable of insight into the nature of change� or anything else.

Genetic selection of one reproducing individual over another reproducing individual (the selection, in effect, of one idea over another idea, or one piece of information over another piece of information) gives species adaptations or orientations—instinctive programming—for managing life, but those genetic orientations, those instincts, are not understandings.

The nerve-based learning system on the other hand, can, if sufficiently developed, understand change. Nerves were originally developed for the coordination of movement in animals, but, once developed, their ability to store impressions—what we refer to as ‘memory’—gave rise to the potential to develop understanding of cause and effect. If you can remember past events, you can compare them with current events and identify regularly occurring experiences. This knowledge of, or insight into, what has commonly occurred in the past enables you to predict what is likely to happen in the future and to adjust your behaviour accordingly. Once insights into the nature of change are put into effect, the self-modified behaviour starts to provide feedback, refining the insights further. Predictions are compared with outcomes and so on. Much developed, nerves can sufficiently associate information to reason how experiences are related, learn to understand and become conscious of, or aware of, or intelligent about, the relationship between events that occur through time. Thus consciousness means being sufficiently aware of how experiences are related to attempt to manage change from a basis of understanding. (Again, the Adam Stork story and related aspects are described in chapters 1 and 3 of FREEDOM.)

TR:  Here he acknowledges that instinct and consciousness are not always in conflict. 

But memory, of course, does not require consciousness.  Most animals, from bees to lizards to fish, have memory and use the insights it provides to seek out food and shelter and avoid harm, without being conscious or self-aware.

What this means is that when the nerve-based learning system became sufficiently developed for consciousness to emerge and with it the ability to understand the world, it wasn’t enough to be instinctively orientated to the world, conscious understanding of the world had to be found.

The problem, of course, was that Adam had only just taken his first, tentative steps in the search for knowledge, and so had no ability to explain anything. It was a catch-22 situation for the fledgling thinker, because in order to explain himself he needed the very knowledge he was setting out to accumulate. He had to search for understanding, ultimately self-understanding, understanding of why he had to ‘fly off course’, without the ability to first explain why he needed to ‘fly off course’. And without that defence, he had to live with the criticism from his instinctive self and was INSECURE in its presence.

TR:  To some extent we can agree that consciousness does lead to insecurity, and the result is usually the construction of mythical stories to explain things and provide examples of how to behave.  These stories are assembled into religious dogma or cultural guidelines, ranging from Australian Aboriginal songlines to theistic mythologies such as Christian and Muslim traditions. 

To resist the tirade of unjust criticism he was having to endure and mitigate that insecurity, Adam had to do something. But what could he do? If he abandoned the search and flew back on course, he’d gain some momentary relief, but the search would, nevertheless, remain to be undertaken. So all Adam could do was retaliate against and ATTACK the instincts’ unjust criticism, attempt to PROVE the instincts’ unjust criticism wrong, and try to DENY or block from his mind the instincts’ unjust criticism—and he did all those things. He became angry towards the criticism. In every way he could he tried to demonstrate his self worth, prove that he is good and not bad—he shook his fist at the heavens in a gesture of defiance of the implication that he is bad. And he tried to block out the criticism—this block-out or denial including having to invent contrived excuses for his instinct-defying behaviour. In short, his ANGRY, EGOCENTRIC and ALIENATED state appeared. Adam’s intellect or ‘ego’ (which is just another word for the intellect since the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious thinking self’) became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself—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 criticism and a sense of worth. In summary, Adam unavoidably became SELFISH, AGGRESSIVE and COMPETITIVE. (All the seemingly bad aspects of the intellect and their opposite, seemingly good aspects of the instinct are depicted in the two columns that flank the Adam Stork diagram above.)

TR:  But on the contrary, many people became compassionate and cooperative. 

Small bands of hunter gatherers for the most part cooperated with each other.  Bands combined into larger tribal units for the common good.  Traditional hunters consciously developed and enforced rules to divide up the proceeds of the hunt.  Farmers necessarily cooperated with planting, irrigation and harvesting and so on. 

We don't deny that there are also elements of selfish, aggressive and competitive behaviour but it was not unavoidable. 

Again he refers to the diagram above which contains new-agers lists of good and bad: white & men = bad; black & women = good.  it's racist and sexist.  It offends me.

But, again, without the knowledge he was seeking, without self-understanding (specifically the understanding of the difference between the gene and nerve-based learning systems that science has given us), Adam Stork had no choice but to resign himself to living a psychologically upset life of anger, egocentricity and alienation as the only three responses available to him to cope with the horror of his situation. It was an extremely unfair and difficult, indeed tragic, position for Adam to find himself in, for we can see that while he was good he appeared to be bad and had to endure the horror of his psychologically distressed, upset condition until he found the real—as opposed to the invented or contrived not-psychosis-recognising—defence or reason for his ‘mistakes’.

TR:  But anger, egocentricity and alienation are NOT the only three responses available.  To say so is far too superficial and simplistic.  Resignation to one’s lot, submission to God’s will (inshallah), duty to one’s family, connection to one’s tribe, religion or nation: all are common, almost universal responses, in addition to these three.  On the positive side, though many suffered, many were content.  Some indigenous groups lived in pleasant climates with plentiful food supplies and lived long lives: no doubt often happy.  Curiosity and inventiveness led to improvements in hunting, farming and civilised life.  Many people participated in meditation, religious rituals and mystical experiences that overcome the sense of alienation.

It is NOT inevitable that “while he was good he was bad�.  This is based on the false antagonism between instinct and consciousness, because he thinks they are always opposed. 

Basically, suffering psychological upset was the price of his heroic search for understanding. Again, this is the tragic yet inevitable situation any animal would have to endure if it transitioned from an instinct-controlled state to an intellect-controlled state—its instincts would resist the conscious mind’s deviating search for knowledge. Adam’s uncooperative and divisive competitive aggression—and his selfish, egocentric, self-preoccupied efforts to prove his worth; and his need to deny and evade criticism, essentially embrace a dishonest state—all became an unavoidable part of his personality. Such was Adam Stork’s predicament, and such has been the human condition, for it was within our species that the fully conscious mind emerged.

TR:  He reinforces the supposedly inevitable opposition of instinct and consciousness.

And he explicitly asserts that fully conscious minds only emerged in humans.

And the obvious compensations we humans became focused on employing to try to validate ourselves were power, fame, fortune and glory. Yes, we can now understand that materialism—the big house, sparkling chandeliers, fancy clothes, etc—and the financial capital needed to supply it, which Sir Bob complains about, gave humans the fanfare and the glory we knew we were due but which the world in its ignorance of our fundamental goodness would not give us. While spiritual relief (understanding) was still to be found, only material relief was available. Materialism and capitalism became the engine sustaining our necessary but horrifically upsetting search for understanding; ultimately for self-understanding, understanding of our corrupted human condition.

TR:  Power, fame, fortune and glory were for most of human history, and for most humanity today, the province of the few.  It seems wrong to diagnose a universally human psychosis based on the action of the few rather than the many.

We can still acknowledge that modern western materialism and rampant capitalism have adverse effects.  But among the global few who benefit from them, many rising in the middle class (say in India or China) or succeeding in the middle and upper classes (in the “West�) are quite content.  There is rising discontent in the lower middle classes in the West, and always has been discontent in the world’s poor.

Again, this entire predicament is the fundamental situation any animal species would encounter if they developed a fully conscious mind, but in the case of humans we now have to consider how much worse the situation has been for us because our instinctive orientation wasn’t to a flight path, but to behaving utterly cooperatively and lovingly. In our case, when we began experimenting in understanding and were criticised by our instincts and unavoidably responded in an angry, egocentric and alienated way, we had to endure a further round of criticism, a second hit, a ‘double whammy’, from our instinctive orientation. Yes, in our necessary search for understanding we were firstly unjustly condemned for defying our instincts, and then again for reacting to that condemnation in a way that was completely counter and offensive to our loving, cooperative instincts. So if Adam Stork had cause to be upset, we had double cause! No wonder there has been an underlying volcanic frustration and anger in humans that periodically breaks out in unspeakable acts of violence, cruelty and depravity—and no wonder we have had an insatiably greedy appetite for the artificial reinforcement that materialism could give us!!

TR:  Repeats his incorrect assumption that human ancestry was one-sidedly loving. 

He suggests that human periodically break out into unspeakable acts of violence, which as stated, is true.  But he assume either that such violence is a steady constant or getting worse.  In fact, as Pinker demonstrates convincingly, humanity is over the long term becoming less violent, more tolerant and compassionate.  Despite World Wars I and II the 20^th century was the least violent ever: hard to believe given the portrayals in many history books and the media, but demonstrably true.

We can now see how the story of Adam Stork—which describes the primary issue involved in our human condition of the psychologically upsetting battle that emerged between our instincts and our conscious intellect’s search for knowledge—has parallels with the pre-scientific Biblical account in the Book of Genesis of Adam and Eve’s experiences in the Garden of Eden, except in that presentation when Adam and Eve took the ‘fruit’ (Gen. 3:3) ‘from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (Gen. 2:9, 17)—went in search of understanding—they were ‘banished…​from the Garden’ (Gen. 3:23) for being ‘disobedient’ (the term widely used in descriptions of Gen. 3) and becoming ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ or ‘sinful’. In this presentation, however, Adam and Eve are revealed to be the HEROES, NOT THE VILLAINS they have so long been portrayed as. So while humans ARE immensely upset—that is, immensely angry, egocentric and alienated—WE ARE GOOD AND NOT BAD AFTER ALL!!!! (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.)

TR:  We can agree with a criticism of Genesis and the Catholic notion of original sin.  We can agree that humans are NOT completely BAD intrinsically, but nor are they completely good intrinsically.  He doesn’t accept that we inherited both cooperative and competitive, good and bad, traits.

Even though we had developed into angry, egocentric and alienated people, we were never going to accept that we were fundamentally bad, evil, worthless, awful beings; we weren’t going to wear that criticism—for if we did, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each morning and face the world. If we truly believed we were fundamentally evil beings, we would shoot ourselves. There had to be a greater truth that explained our behaviour and until we found it we couldn’t rest. So for our species, it really has been a case of, as the sayings go, ‘Give me liberty or give me death’, ‘No retreat, no surrender’, ‘Never back down’, or, as Sir Bob mentioned, ‘death or glory’. Our conscious thinking self was never going to give in to our instinctive self or soul. And so every day as we got out of bed we took on the world of ignorance that was condemning us. We defied the implication that we are bad. We shook our fist at the heavens. In essence, we said, ‘One day, one day, we are going to prove our worth, explain that we are not bad after all, and until that day arrives we are not going to ‘back down’, we are not going to take the ignorant, naive, stupid, unjustified criticism from our instincts. No, we are going to fight back with all our might.’ This photograph by Neil Leifer of Muhammad Ali vanquishing Sonny Liston ‘is considered to be the greatest sports picture of the 20th century’ (TIME, 20 Jun. 2016) precisely because it perfectly expresses every human’s desire—destructive as that could be—to vanquish our tormentor, which, at the deepest level, is ignorance of our fundamental worth and goodness.

TR:  Though he says we were never going to accept that we were fundamentally bad, this is the stated position of many Christian Churches, Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical, and it is the lived experience of many followers of these churches.  He is factually incorrect.  These followers didn’t shoot themselves.  They applied themselves to living according to God’s supposed wishes.

Our conscious thinking self was never going to give in to our instinctive self or soul.  But it's not true.  Many mystics sought to diminish our conscious thinking self.  Hinduism and Buddhism are based on the notion of overcoming the illusion that we are separate from the ultimate reality or that we, as egos, exist at all.  Christian and Sufi mystics seek direct connection to the god head, bypassing the conscious self.

The accolade that the picture below is the greatest sports picture of the 20^th century is written by a boxing commentator, and does not represent the majority.  He has been sucked in to the ever-present media hype.  It is misleading to say “it perfectly expresses every human’s desire—destructive as that could be—to vanquish our tormentor�.  Naturally, if we are tormented, we want to overcome the tormentor: that is a sensible, reasonable position to take, not a sign of innate aggression or a psychotic reaction against our loving nature.  This picture is not of a person vanquishing a tormentor: Sonny Liston was a champion boxer voluntarily in a sporting contest that made him millions.  Boxing does require aggression, that’s why many people want to ban it.  Why not show the champion runner John Landy risking a medal to check on a fallen competitor, or sportspeople shaking hands with their competitors after a match.  These would emphasise our cooperative nature dominates even in a competition.

This is misleading, simplistic, selective propaganda.

 

Photograph by Neil Leifer, 1965, Sports Illustrated

 Yes, we were going to fight back against ignorance with all our might. And that is what we have done; that is what every conscious human that has ever lived has done—and because we did, because we persevered against all that criticism, we have now finally broken through and found the full truth that explains that humans are wonderful beings after all. In fact, not just wonderful but the heroes of the whole story of life on Earth. This is because our fully conscious mind is surely—given its phenomenal ability to understand the world—nature’s greatest invention, so for us humans who were given this greatest of all inventions to develop, to be made to endure the torture of being unjustly condemned as bad or evil for doing just that, and to have had to endure that torture for so long, some 2 million years (the time we have likely been fully conscious), has to make us the absolute heroes of the story of life on Earth (pars 65-66 and ch. 3:6).

TR:  To say that every human being ever has fought back against ignorance is false.  Many people are content with what they know and their lot in life. 

With scientific understanding consciousness now need not be in opposition to instinct.  We have discovered, he suggests, the key to understanding, and thus are wonderful.

We can be pleased that reasonable people can now obtain the benefits of scientific understanding, and also of our breadth of philosophical understanding, our knowledge of long term global history, and so on.  This doesn’t mean his solution is true.

Humans were tasked the hardest, toughest of missions, and against all the odds we completed it. Humans are the champions of the story of life on Earth. We are so, so wonderful! Yes, we can at last understand the absolutely extraordinary paradox that neither Shakespeare nor Pascal could fathom, of how on earth could we humans be ‘god’-‘like’ in our ‘infinite’ ‘faculty’ of ‘reason’ and ‘apprehension’, a ‘glor[ious]’, ‘angel’-‘like’ ‘prodigy’ capable of being a ‘judge of all things’ and a ‘repository of truth’, and yet seemingly behave so appallingly that we appear to be ‘monster[s]’, ‘imbecile[s]’, ‘a sewer of uncertainty and error’ and ‘chaos’, the ‘essence’ of ‘dust’, ‘the scum of the universe’. We have finally made sense of the seemingly nonsensical!!!

TR:  Having both cooperative and competitive traits seems paradoxical or nonsensical only if you assume that it is impossible to start with.  It may be an ideological position, or a religious dogma, but it is not scientific or historically valid. 

And now that we have finally made sense of the seemingly-impossible-to-explain paradox of how we humans could be good when all the evidence appeared to unequivocally indicate we were bad, all our mythology can likewise be made sense of at last. For instance, why was Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 novel Don Quixote voted ‘The Greatest Book of All Time’ by the world’s most acclaimed writers in a poll arranged by the Nobel Institute? Well, Don Quixote is the story of an elderly man who gets out of bed, re-names himself ‘Don Quixote of la Mancha’, dons an old suit of armour, takes up an ancient shield and lance, mounts his skinny old horse, and calls on his loyal but world-weary companion Sancho to join him on the most spectacular of adventures. As I have depicted below, coming across a field of large windmills, the noble knight says, ‘Look yonder, friend Sancho, there are…​outrageous giants whom I intend to…​deprive…​of life…​and the expiration of that cursed brood will be an acceptable service to Heaven’ (ch. 1:3). And it is in that vein that their crazed and hopeless adventure went on—gloriously doomed battle after gloriously doomed battle; feeble beings charging at and trying to vanquish the ‘outrageous giant’ ignorance-of-the-fact-of-our-species’-fundamental-goodness! But that has been the lot of every human for some 2 million years! Wave after wave of quixotic humans have thrown themselves at that ‘outrageous giant’ of ignorance for eons and eons, as bit by tiny bit they accumulated the knowledge that would finally make the redeeming explanation of our human condition possible! (par. 67)

TR:  For eons and eons, wave after wave of quixotic humans have thrown themselves against ignorance, accumulating knowledge, bit by bit.  But that contradicts his notion that the only three responses available were anger, egocentricity and alienation.  We have always also had in our nature a desire to make peace, do good, and support our community.  His historical analysis is flawed.  His psychological analysis is flawed.

 

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2015 Fedmex Pty Ltd

 

 The following painting by J.M.W. Turner is another powerful portrayal of how absolutely incredibly HEROIC the human race has been, huddled together as best we could for some reassurance, and with few provisions, while we struggled through 2 million years of terrifying darkness and tumultuous storms to acquire that relieving knowledge. To be given a fully conscious brain, the marvellous computer we have on our heads, but not be given the program for it and instead be left ‘a restless wanderer on the earth’ (Bible, Gen. 4:14) searching for that program/​understanding in a dreadful darkness of confusion and bewilderment, most especially about our worthiness or otherwise as a species, was the most diabolical of tortures. As the great denial-free thinking prophet Isaiah put it: ‘justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows. Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like men without eyes…​Truth is nowhere to be found’ (Bible, Isa. 59). (par. 278)

 TR:  Again he belies his history of the only three responses.  We have ben heroic.

J.M.W. Turner’s Fishermen at Sea, 1796

 

Turning to more recent cultural depictions, Turner’s Fishermen at Sea recalls the lyrics that so plead the terrible agony of our species’ seemingly lost, lonely and meaningless condition—‘How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown’. The profundity of these words have understandably led to the 1965 song from which they come, Like a Rolling Stone by that prophet of our time, Bob Dylan, to be voted in 2011 as the greatest of all time by that arbiter of popular music, Rolling Stone magazine.

Yes, how incredibly heroic have we humans been—and how wonderful, beyond-the-powers-of-description, is it to now have freed ourselves from that horrific situation where ‘We look for light, but all is darkness…Truth is nowhere to be found’!

TR:  So despite some negative traits, we have had and still show positive traits.

He destroys his own explanation.

In summary, we humans had no choice but to persevere with our search for knowledge and suffer the psychologically upset state of being angry, alienated and egocentric until we could develop the scientific method and through that vehicle for enquiry find the redeeming explanation for our species’ upset condition of the difference between the gene and nerve-based learning systems—the key insight that reveals we humans are good and not bad after all. Yes, until science made it possible to explain the difference between the gene-based natural selection process that gives species orientations and the nerve-based conscious mind that needs to understand, every time we tried to think about our corrupted condition the only conclusion we could come to was that we conscious humans had wilfully destroyed paradise. So science is the liberator—the messiah—of humanity from the agony of the human condition.

TR:  So he puts us persevering with our search for knowledges concurrently with suffering the psychologically upset state of anger, egocentrism and alienation, yet still denies that we have both good and bad traits. 

Science allows us to understand the difference between gene-based (instinctive) and nerve-based (conscious) learning systems.  With this we can agree, provided we also include a reasonable approach to philosophy and history as well as science.

But there can be different explanations of this difference.  Perhaps his isn't the best.

And importantly, now that we are able to understand from scientific first principles that upset is not an ‘evil’, worthless, bad state, but an immensely heroic state, we can know that while, inevitably, all humans are variously upset from their different encounters with, and degrees of engagement in, humanity’s epic search to find knowledge, ALL HUMANS ARE EQUALLY GOOD. Everyone has variously had our species’ original innocent instinctive state corrupted, everyone is variously angry, egocentric and alienated, but everyone is good, and not just good but a hero of the story of life on Earth! No longer does humanity have to rely on dogmatic assertions that ‘all men are created equal’ purely on the basis that it is a ‘self-evident’ truth, as the United States’ Declaration of Independence asserts, because we can now explain, understand and know that the equality of goodness of all humans is a fundamental truth. We can now understand why each individual, gender, age, race, country, civilisation and culture is equally good and worthy, and that no one is superior or inferior, and that everyone deserves the ‘rights’ of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Indeed, through this understanding, the whole concept of good and bad disappears from our conceptualisation of ourselves. Compassion, love and understanding for our human situation has finally been achieved—which is what Sir Laurens van der Post recognised was needed when he variously wrote in his books: ‘True love is love of the difficult and unlovable’; and, ‘how can there ever be any real beginning without forgiveness?’; and that ‘Only by understanding how we were all a part of the same contemporary pattern [of wars, cruelty, greed and indifference] could we defeat those dark forces with a true understanding of their nature and origin’; and that ‘Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future.’ Yes, one day, which has now arrived, there had to be, to quote The Rolling Stones’ lyrics, ‘Sympathy for the devil’; one day, we had to find the reconciling, compassionate, healing understanding of the dark side of human nature. One day, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, as William Blake titled his famous book, had to occur (par. 290).

TR:  It is not a given that “we are able to understand from scientific first principles that upset is not an ‘evil’, worthless, bad state, but an immensely heroic state�.  This is a value judgement, not a scientific statement.  He has asserted that from the beginning of consciousness the conflict with instinct led to the psychotic perception that we are bad, but that the continual and ongoing search for the truth is heroic.  It isn't science.  Perhaps the science is presented in detail in the book, but the evidence should have been mentioned here, and indeed I suspect he thinks he has done so.

We cannot say all people are equally good, or “the equality of goodness of all humans is a fundamental truth�.  If being good involves helping others, then obviously some are better at this than others.  We generally judge Hitler and Pol Pot to be bad, and it is right for us to oppose such oppressive and destructive people.  .  We are entitled to say that all people should be treated equally before the law, and to adopt the principle of equality as an a prior position when encountering someone new, but to say all people are equally good is overstatement at best or misleading twaddle that leads to a failure to resist malpractice at worst. 

The choice to treat others as equals is a moral choice, not a scientific fact.  Science does explain that simple concepts of race and many mooted difference between the sexes are inconsistent with the facts, but that is a separate judgement from moral goodness.  His diagrams explicitly show that white men are bad and black women are good.  This is inconsistent with his assertion of equality of goodness.

He says “each individual, gender, age, race, country, civilisation and culture is equally good and worthy, and that no one is superior or inferior, and that everyone deserves the ‘rights’ of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’�.  But to say that is to damn all those societies that did not respect the ‘rights’ of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, that promoted and enforces racism, sexism, ageism, nationalism, etc.  His diagrams show capitalism and cities to be bad, but socialism and leftism is good: he seems to be saying all civilizations and cultures are equally good but some are more worthy than others.  it's a nonsense.

He says “the whole concept of good and bad disappears from our conceptualisation of ourselves. Compassion, love and understanding for our human situation has finally been achieved�.  Yet we are all equally good.  And though we can agree that there is over the long term an increase in compassion, love and understanding, as evidenced by a reduction in violence, progress in human rights, and more liberal democracies, there is still much inequality, poverty, oppression, injustice, selfishness and alienation.  Compassion, love and understanding for our human situation has NOT finally been achieved.  Even if his analysis were true it means only that the relatively small number of people who understand and agree with him have developed compassion, love and understanding for our human condition.

Bit he continues with his millennialism: “Yes, one day, which has now arrived, … we had to find the reconciling, compassionate, healing understanding of the dark side of human nature.�  He conflates the restricted set of his followers with all of mankind.  It is one thing to say ‘I have the solution’ and quite another to say ‘the world is saved’.  Even if his analysis is correct he should be more modest, and it does not look correct.

So we now know that there was a good reason why we humans became corrupted—we had to search for knowledge, ultimately sufficient knowledge to explain the human condition. And it is necessary to emphasise here that there was no real way out of our psychologically upset condition until we found that redeeming understanding. Searching for knowledge made us angry, egocentric and alienated, but that was the price we had to be prepared to pay. At any time we could stop our upsetting search for knowledge—fly back on course in the Adam Stork analogy—and that would make us feel good, stop the criticism from our instincts, but that was an abandonment of our fundamental responsibility as conscious beings to keep persevering with our search for knowledge and suffer all the upset that resulted from doing that until we found the knowledge we were after of the explanation of the human condition.

TR:  So this is a millennial view of history, a grand narrative, that assumes we were prepared to pay the price, that we had a responsibility to persevere with the pursuit of knowledge, and what we were after was the explanation of the human condition.  It is a narrow perspective on reality.  Most of the pursuit of knowledge was dedicated to raising productivity so that we could live better: obtain more or better food, clothes and houses.  Advances such as bows and arrow, ploughs, irrigation, sewerage systems, medicine, steam engines, motorcars, telegraph, television and internet had more prosaic aims than understanding the psychology of our human condition: they were mostly aimed at improving our physical conditions. 

Most of us weren’t prepared to pay the price, most of us had no choice.  There was no responsibility to pursue knowledge, it was just what some of us did, out of conscious curiosity or a perceived need to improve our lot.  So we can accept his grand narrative only as a rhetorical flourish, made with artistic license, with little connection to the truth.  But is sounds majestic and uplifting.

So let’s skip over this as irrelevant to the overall argument.

This is a key point to make, because it allows us to understand the real merits and liabilities of the left and right wings of politics. It turns out that of the twin political problems we have of the brutality of the ‘need-to-continue-the-corrupting-search-for-knowledge-free-from-condemning-idealism’ right-wing, and the pseudo idealism of the ‘lets-everyone-just-fly-back-on-course-and-be-good’ left-wing, it was actually the corrupting individualistic, materialistic and capitalistic right-wing that held the moral high ground, that was doing the right thing, because it was persevering with the necessary search for knowledge, whereas the pseudo idealistic dogma of the left has actually been subverting the human journey (ch. 3:9)! Such is the great paradox of the human condition that we can now finally understand: the truth was not as it appeared—the corrupting journey Adam Stork/​the right-wing were championing made them the heroes not the villains! As it says about the great paradox of the human condition in the musical Man of La Mancha, that is based on the story of Don Quixote, we humans had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (par. 68).

TR:  This is one perspective on the differences between the left and right of politics.  But it is only one, and not necessarily persuasive.

He assumes the right pursued knowledge avoiding the idealism of the left.  Indeed, the left wishing to preserve equality between cultures often derided unfortunate results which contradicted their position.  When Hans Eysenk reported that American blacks had IQs about 15% lower than American whites, even using non-culturally specific tests which show no such disparity with Eskimos and other minority groups, he was violently attacked as a racist.  The left should have shown how the science was wrong.  But on the other hand, the right, taking this to include capitalists, supported research that promoted their vested interests, opposing for instance controls on tobacco and denying human induced global warming.  The right were not purely disinterested seekers of truth.  But his description of the right being on the moral high ground seems inconsistent with his diagram showing the right-wing and capitalism on the bad “intellect� side.

Nor can we accept that the idealistic left was impeding progress: subverting the human journey.  Much leftist research showed how bad the conditions were for the poor, what little control they had over their circumstances, and championed human rights.  This is directly on the topic of the human condition, but perhaps not pointing the way he likes.

Marx investigated the human condition, the alienation of the majority, in what he thought was a scientifically and historically valid way, yet he was of the left.  Much of the libertarian literature, such as JS Mill, emphasised freedom and personal responsibility, emphasising the loneliness of individual humans rather than creating communitarian cohesiveness. 

So let’s skip his remarks on left/right politics as an irrelevant aside.

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2016 Fedmex Pty Ltd

Understanding the human condition means the tables are turned on our perception of reality. The self-adjusting conscious mind, all the manifestations of which are shown in the left-hand column of the Adam Stork diagram above, turns out to be the hero not the villain of the story of life on Earth, the ‘goody’—while our unjustly condemning instinctive soul, and all its manifestations (as shown in the right-hand column of the Adam Stork diagram), turns out to have been the cause of all our upset anger, egocentricity and alienation, the ‘baddy’.

TR:  So now he turns the tables and the intellect is the goody: men, whites, dishonest, sexual, etc, while the instinct is the baddie, women, blacks, honest, happy, etc.

This is a confused message.  He should clear it up, with less accusatory statements.

At first he says consciousness caused the alienation etc because it opposed instinct.  Now he says instinct caused the alienation etc because it opposed heroic intellect.  It makes a mockery of attributing blame to one side or the other, if we can switch so easily.  According to him both sides opposed each other causing alienation etc.  In fact there is no reason to believe that there was an inevitable opposition: intellect and instinct were often in cahoots: as Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions.

Again, with the reconciling understanding of the human condition now found, neither aspect of our divided self is good or bad. Our instinct and intellect are reconciled. For example, as explained in the aforementioned chapter 3.9 of FREEDOM, ‘The end of politics’, the very basis of the ‘twin political problems’ of the left-wing and right-wing in politics is now completely obsoleted—understanding brings the whole ugly, intransigent business of politics to an end.

TR:  If his analysis is right, and people accept it, then politics may be better.  But there is a lot of detail to be worked through to get to that position, even assuming the two big iffs are true.

It needs to be emphasised here that when the blinds are finally drawn on the human condition the light inevitably reveals a universe of previously denied truths—a litany of heresies. In fact, the arrival of understanding of the human condition brings about honesty day or truth day or exposure day or transparency day or revelation day, or so-called judgment day—but as I have explained, it is a day of compassionate understanding, not of cruel judgment (ch. 9:3).

TR:  Just expressing his idealism.  We wish it were true.

In addition to the previously misunderstood role of the right-wing in politics, the following are some of the heresies we now have to adjust to:

• that the human race has become an extremely upset, alienated wreck (see for example pars 123 and 182); 

TR:  Alternatively there are signs of progress, in medicine, longevity, tolerance, human rights, reduction in violence, population control, wider democracy etc.  Generally, in the more affluent societies, China and America included, children are becoming more educated, more aware and informed and probable more sane.

• that dishonest, human-condition-avoiding mechanistic science has been leading the human race to a state of terminal alienation (ch. 2:4);  

TR:  Mechanistic science has been in decline for decades.  Science is now more wholistic.  It is our politicians that are destroying our modern world.

• that humans have a cooperative, loving instinctive heritage, not a brutish, savage and aggressive one (ch. 5); 

TR:  We inherit both good and bad traits: we are cooperative and competitive.

• that nurturing was the prime-mover in human development, and is still critically important (ch. 5); 

TR:  Nurturing is one side.  We were also competitive.  Most animals are too.  it's natural and not all bad.

• that sex as humans now practise it is not about trying to reproduce our genes but rather it is a psychologically upset behaviour where we resentfully attack innocence for its seeming criticism of our lack of innocence (ch. 8:11B); 

TR:  This is an obscure statement that may be developed better in the book.  We could be, in his scenario, out of touch or conflicted between instinct and intellect, so perhaps we exhibit psychologically upset behaviour, and we may be resentful.  But who and where is the innocence?  How does innocence attack us for our corruption?  This sounds mythological rather than scientific or historical.

• that there are differences between ‘races’ (ethnic groups) in their levels of corruption of, and alienation from, our species’ original innocent instinctive state. Some ‘races’ are less innocent than others; or to say it another way, some ‘races’ are more adapted to the upset state of the human condition. This is an inevitable result of the upset state of the human condition having emerged in our species; some ‘races’, just as some individuals, will have been more exposed to upset and become more adapted to it. Everyone is variously upset. Everyone has variously lost their innocence. As soon as you have a struggle of any sort, all those involved are going to be variously exposed to it and thus variously affected by it. It can't be any other way. But with the human condition at last resolved all the upset in humans can now be repaired. The human race is now redeemed and everyone can be rehabilitated (ch. 8:16E); 

TR:  He introduces this as a heresy that we now have to adjust to: he thinks it's true.

He says above “all humans are variously upset from their different encounters with, and degrees of engagement in, humanity’s epic search to find knowledge, ALL HUMANS ARE EQUALLY GOOD�.  This allows for ethnic groups to differ in the level of corruption.  But we don't know from this speech which ones, but we discover this in section 16E of chapter 8 of the book:

“The honey-coloured [Kalahari] Bushmen [from central Africa] are probably the most instinctively/ genetically innocent group of people living today. They are more innocent, less soul-corrupted, less human-condition-adapted, less adapted to upset, less toughened, than dark-skinned Bantu Africans, but in turn Bantus are not as toughened and thus as operational and successful in the human-condition-afflicted corrupted world as Caucasians from Europe. … In turn, European Caucasians aren’t as cynical, toughened and opportunistic—selfish—as people from even more ancient civilisations, like the Chinese from the ancient Yellow and Yangtze River valley civilisations, the Indians and Pakistanis from the ancient Indus and Ganges River valley civilisations, and the Arabs and Jews from the ancient Tigress, Euphrates and Nile River valley civilisations.�

This suggests that humans are more alienated the longer their civilisation.  He overlooks that the ancient Chinese Han empire was concurrent with the ancient European Roman empire, but we can certainly agree that for most of history Western Europe was well behind the more eastern civilisations: Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, earlier Muslim empires, Indian and Chinese.

Griffith says some ethnic groups are more “upset� than others, but all humans can now be repaired.  Humans are now redeemed.  It seems that the advanced capitalist West is in most need of redemption, which many non-Westerners would agree with.  A trouble with this analysis is that it uses concepts that all originate in the west: Griffith is a westerner.  Many Asians tell us that they explicitly oppose the freedoms of the west, that Orientals have a different and better communal approach to life.  Yet according to Griffith they are among the most selfish, most alienated peoples and what they need is Freedom.

• that women are not ‘mainframed’ to the battle of the human condition in the same way men are; they are not as understanding of and thus appreciative of the battle as men are, simply because with women naturally occupied with the critical task of nurturing, the horrifically upsetting battle of searching for knowledge had especially to be taken up by men, and, with that battle now finally won, what is revealed is that men particularly are the heroes of the story of life on Earth. Men are now explained and redeemed, and, more importantly, the historic so-called ‘battle of the sexes’, the lack of understanding between men and women, is brought to an end (ch. 8:11B); 

TR:  Can we really say that while women have been home tending the babies, men have heroically battled for knowledge.  Most men battled alongside their wives for food and lodging, as hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers.  Many men battled for glory, riches, land, fame and fortune.  A few men sought the truth.  So did a few women, but many women would have been behind the successful men, and many women were suppressed by the almost universal patriarchal societies they lived in.  Only modern liberal democracies are now beginning to allow women true freedom.

• And (as is explained in chapter 4) that God is the teleological, order-developing, physical law of negative entropy, and (as explained in paragraphs 877 and 929-935) that Christ was not a deity but a human like everyone else, only sufficiently loved in his infancy to not have resigned to a life of dishonest denial of the issue of the human condition. So religions are now obsoleted with understanding, and, as will be described in Part 3, replaced with an infinitely more powerful and effective way of living a meaningful, truth-aligned life, free of your upset. 

TR:  Griffith focusses on Christian mythology in this summary and in the parts of the book I have read.  This is inadequate for a book proposing a resolution to the whole of humanities woes.  Christian mythology is typical of many theistic religions, but not necessarily the best.  Eastern contemplative religions which emphasis illusion and redemption through self-realization might be more appropriate for his message.  Primitive religions and Taoism might be even closer.  So why quote the Bible?

More tellingly, Griffith believes (para 263): “there is a teleological, order-of-matter-developing, integrative, cooperative theme or direction or purpose or meaning to existence, which God is the personification of.�   And again (para 313): “While the conventional view in science is that there is no direction or purpose or meaning to existence, and that change is random, there is, in fact, a very obvious theme, direction, purpose and meaning to existence, which is the ordering or integration or complexification of matter into ever larger and more stable wholes.  Indeed, the answer to the great question of ‘what is the meaning of life’ is that it is to live in accordance with this integrative, order-of-matter-developing, cooperation-and-selfless-behaviour-dependent theme or meaning of existence.�

He make the mistake that many religious followers have, that apparent order in the universe must be driven by god or pulled by god.  Teleological forces supposedly pull things into their natural or final state.  Perhaps “oaken� forces pull an acorn into a fully grown oak tree.  Science now explains how the current chemical composition of an acorn causes it to develop gradually into a tree.  There is no need for teleology.  The tree is not inherent in the acorn: many acorns get eaten, crushed or simply rot.

The apparent order in evolution is not completely random, as many suggest.  Random variations between individuals allow for their progeny to be different from the rest of the species.  But which progeny survive to reproduce is not random, but based on their “fitness� to the environment.  As the environment becomes more complex, more complex or varied progeny survive better.  Giraffes grow long necks, gazelles can run fast, minds and consciousness allow for more intelligent survival choices.

So the integrative theme Griffith proposes is not really real: it's an outcome of Darwinian evolution, not teleological forces.  This is the basis of his explanation of the meaning for existence, but it has no substance. 

Worse still he commits the naturalistic fallacy: we cannot infer an ought from an is.  Some say ‘people are the hairless apes’ so we should shave off the remaining hair we have (including head hair for some).  Other say god created us naturally with hair so we should not cut our hair (like many Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and hippies).  We cannot make a moral decision about hair based on its physical existence.  We cannot assume that integration or the like is the meaning of existence for us as individuals, even if there were some integrative principle in the universe (and there doesn’t seem to be).

So again, the truth is not as it appeared; the previously condemned intellect and all its manifestations turn out to be good and not bad, while the instinctive state and all its manifestations turn out to have been unjustly condemning of humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. This ‘turning of the tables’ will be an immense shock; as another truthful-talking prophet of our time, Bono of the band U2, said recently, ‘truthfulness will blow things apart’. And yes, we will initially find all that exposure of our cave-living evasions, denials, lies and delusions difficult to cope with; as George Bernard Shaw said, ‘all great truths begin as blasphemies’ (par. 591). However, this ‘blasphemous’ stage, when all the previously denied truths are suddenly revealed and we are in shock, won't last long once the wonderfully liberating potential of these understandings that is described in chapter 9 catches on.

TR:  The truth is often surprising.  That point in itself is OK.

And again, with the reconciling understanding of the human condition now found, neither aspect of our divided self is good or bad. Our instinct and intellect are reconciled. For example, as already explained, the very basis of the left-wing and right-wing in politics is now obsoleted, as is the prejudiced view of some individuals or ‘races’ or genders or cultures being inferior or superior to others—understanding heals the human race.

TR:  I’d suggest that there are real differences between left and right wing politics, though these should be much smaller than most politicians believe.  As Pinker points out, what was radical left 50 or 80 years ago become standard practice in the right wing today.  The Conservative government of Great Britain accepts human induced climate change and has an aggressive policy to minimise and mitigate it.  The corresponding conservative party in Australia is still reluctant to accept that climate change is human induces and is taking only token steps to counter it.  Apart from historical and geographical changes, the real difference between left and right is where to draw the line between individual responsibility and state support for equality: there are no obvious grounds to choose which policy is correct where these values overlap.  We can say American opposition to basic national health insurance is wrong, and the USSR’s policy of a right to a job (leading to gross inefficiency, laziness and corruption) was also wrong.  We will explore the boundaries between responsibility and equality as different states try different solutions over time.

Yes, our ability now to explain and understand that we humans are actually good and not bad enables all the upset and associated misunderstanding and dysfunction that resulted from being unable to explain the source of our divisive condition to subside and disappear. Finding understanding of the human condition is what rehabilitates and transforms the human race from its psychologically upset state. In fact, the word ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’ (derived as it is from psyche meaning ‘soul’ and iatreia, which means ‘healing’)—but we have never before been able to ‘heal our soul’, to truthfully explain to our original instinctive self or soul that our fully conscious, thinking self is good and not bad and, by so doing, reconcile and heal our split selves; ‘join our old natural selves with our wilful conscious self’, as Sir Laurens van der Post said we had to do. As Professor Harry Prosen says in his Introduction to FREEDOM about the psychological effect of this human-race-saving and thus world-saving reconciling understanding of ourselves: ‘I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’ It brings about the ‘wholeness for humans’ that the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung was forever pointing out ‘depends on the ability to own our own shadow’, to understand the dark side of ourselves (par. 72). As depicted in the final Adam Stork diagram below, it reconciles our intellect and instinct and all their manifestations, thus enabling humans to become sound, secure and ‘whole’ again. it's been an astounding journey that humanity has negotiated from happy innocent ignorance, to a state of corrupted upset, to happy upset-free soundness, a round of departure and return that was perfectly anticipated by T.S. Eliot when he wrote that ‘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’ (par. 307).

TR:  So “humanity has negotiated from happy innocent ignorance, to a state of corrupted upset, to happy upset-free soundness�.  it's a variation of a universal narrative, with a structure common to all religious narratives.  In western monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) there was the idyllic, innocent Garden of Eden, but the world became corrupted by human intellect and hubris, until the saviour (Jesus) or the Prophet (Mohammed) came to show us the way to heaven.

So point this out is not to say it is untrue.  It is the nature of all good stories.  But a good story structure does not automatically mean a good story.

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2016 Fedmex Pty Ltd

While it will take a number of generations for all of our species’ upset to be completely psychologically healed, the most important point to take on-board is that with this clarifying understanding of our fundamental goodness, all our psychologically defensive angry, alienated and egocentric behaviour is immediately made redundant. As I explain in chapter 9 of FREEDOM, and summarise in Part 3 of this book, with the great burden of guilt lifted from the human race, the old insecure, defensive and retaliatory upset life that went with it is finally over, which means we can all immediately leave that way of behaving behind as finished with; we can immediately change from living competitively to living cooperatively—which is the great transformation in behaviour that Sir Bob has long dreamed of.

TR:  So he is realistic in acknowledging it will take generations for us all to be healed.  But even if we do cease our defensive angry, alienated and egocentric behaviour, it is optimistic to say we can immediately change from living competitively to living cooperatively.  This is a major flaw in the argument.  Because he denies that we inherit both competitive and cooperative traits, he believes we will lose the competitive traits (only due to the conflict between instinct and intellect) and become cooperative (our natural state).  This is the great transformation that is risky.

Because of our flawed natures, too many times have societies attempted a great transformation and failed.  The French Revolution ended in a blood bath, in France and across Europe.  The Russian and Chinese Revolutions led to tyranny and mass starvation.  Pol Pot’s Cambodian revolution led to the killing fields.  We must be wary that a push for this great transformation doesn’t metamorphose into a political force that coerces and oppresses the unreconstructed “upset� ones.  Our concern is mitigated by the thought that the book will have no great impact.

As Sir Bob’s fellow rock star Bono anticipated in his songs, everyone will now be able ‘to feel sunlight [of liberating understanding] on my face, see that dust cloud [of all our upset behaviour] disappear without a trace’. We will be able ‘to take shelter from the poison rain…high on a desert plain [in a wonderful ego-less new world] where the streets have no name’; a place where ‘there will be no toil or sorrow…no time of pain’, and everyone will sing ‘I’ve conquered my past, the future is here at last. I stand at the entrance to a new world I can see. The ruins to the right of me, will soon have lost sight of me. Love [in its purest form, which is truth, has] rescue[d] me’ (par. 1288).

Indeed, when the singer Jim Morrison wrote and sang ‘At first flash of Eden we race down to the sea. Standing there on freedom’s shore, waiting for the sun…waiting…to tell me what went wrong’ (par. 218), he was looking forward to the arrival of ‘FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition’ with its beautiful cover showing the rising sun and people jumping for joy in front of it.

Yes; now we really can have the dancing in the street that Sir Bob didn’t believe was possible when he was using the now obsoleted, dishonest biological way of thinking about human behaviour!

(The presentation concludes with the playing of Martha & the Vandellas’ version of Dancing in the Street, the lyrics of which also anticipate this most wonderful, wonderful of breakthroughs: ‘Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat? Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street.’)

TR:  So Griffith can find in popular songs evidence of a longing for a blissful future.  This is evidence for a longing, not evidence for a blissful future.

Like many who hope for and work towards a better world I do believe that the understandings that we get from modern science and long term global history will help us to overcome our concerns with the human condition.  But we also need to consider issues in philosophy, learn from the traditional world religions, and take into account cultural development. 

We can devise a universal narrative that is philosophically, scientifically and historically valid, that addresses our religious and cultural concerns, that provides meaning and purpose and enable us to find our roles within it.  This narrative enables us to adopt global core values such as truth, diversity, reality, life, love, beauty, responsibility, equality and hope.  It enables us to define reasonable guidelines for our personal behaviour and political action.  This approach concludes that we need to promote understanding, rather than psychological healing.  It accepts our complex competitive and cooperative human nature, focusing on education not transformation.

See www.globalbeliefs.com

 

Part 3. The Resulting Transformation

This Part 3 will be included here when Jeremy returns to Australia and films a further presentation of how the new truthful biology brings about the immediate transformation of the human race from the present tortured, insecure, human-condition-stricken existence to a fabulous, secure, human-condition-free life—thus ‘stopping the madness, filling the void, bringing dignity to humans, giving the world hope, ending the despair and nourishing our dreams’ that Sir Bob so yearned for. This presentation will be a summary of what appears in chapter 9 of FREEDOM.

 TR:  The above is the position as at August 2016.  I may respond to Part 3 after it is posted.

 

Appendix

Summary of our species’ heroic journey from ignorance to enlightenment

Now that we can understand the good reason we conscious humans corrupted our all-loving original instinctive self or soul, and can therefore truthfully acknowledge all the stages our ancestors went through from our innocent, early bonobo-like Australopithecus childhood ancestors, through to the upset adolescent Homo varieties of our ancestors, the true story of our species journey from ignorance to enlightenment can finally be told. This journey is described in chapter 8 of FREEDOM where the following sequence of fossil skulls of our ancestors appears, and, after that, my sequence of drawings of the stages the human race has journeyed through.