Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 12

Appeals to Authority

When I use a quote I do so for one of two reasons. I either believe that the idea expressed in the quote is illuminating or otherwise useful in its own right, or it is a quote from someone like Jesus whose ideas have a great importance for many people which makes an interpretation of what they may mean culturally significant. (I don’t believe that just because Jesus said something it is necessarily true. Being a human being like the rest of us, he was presumably not without his flaws.)

I make great use of concepts I take from the work of the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, such as character armour, but I don’t expect anyone to find these ideas more credible because he was the one who first expressed them. In fact, he is not widely respected. In his day and now most people who are familiar with his writings consider him to have been a bit of a nutcase. If the concept of the character armour carries weight it is because of its inherent explanatory power, not because of who expressed it.

For Griffith, worldly authority means a lot. When trying to persuade us that Don Quixote is profound he points out that it was “voted ‘The Greatest Book of All Time’ by the world’s most acclaimed writers in a poll arranged by the Nobel Institute”. He points out that Professor Harry Prosen, who wrote the introduction to his book is “the former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association”. Of Plato he says : “Alfred North (A. N.) Whitehead, himself one of the most highly regarded philosophers of the twentieth century, described the history of philosophy as being merely “a series of footnotes to Plato.” And he always makes sure to put “Sir” in front of the names of those who have been knighted - “Sir Laurens van der Post”, “Sir James Darling”, “Sir David Attenborough”. (Is this simply a mark of respect or does he expect us to take what they say more seriously because this honour has been bestowed upon them?)

The worth of a piece of writing is intrinsic. If it has truth or beauty, it has them regardless of what some group of famous authors say about it. Academic credentials mean that someone has met certain intellectual criteria, but as Griffith would have to admit, given his contempt for the ideas of fellow biologist E. O. Wilson, they are no guarantee of sound thinking or judgement. If those scientists who reject Griffith’s work have no credibility in his eyes, why should a scientist who supports him necessarily have any credibility in the eyes of the rest of us?

And what is a knighthood? It is an “honour” conferred by the British monarchy, a pathologically hierarchical manifestation of our social neurosis. The monarchy is just a bunch of people with the same kinds of strengths and weaknesses as the rest of us. The status which is conferred upon them has no intrinsic basis. It is not based on them being wise or virtuous or psychologically healthy. Truth carries its own authority which has nothing to do with the human mouthpiece through which it is expressed. The only reason we respect authority, as opposed to such intrinsic values as truth, justice and the inherent value of all humans, is because we are neurotic. Cowering within our own armour, we kowtow to those whose egotism is more dominant than our own. Or, we compensate for our own unjustified feelings of inferiority by vicariously participating in the illusory superiority of another. When Jesus said : “Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” Mark 13:2, he wasn’t talking about physical buildings, he was talking about neurotic structures of authority.

If Plato and Cervantes’ are worth reading, and I think they probably are, it is because of what their works actually are in themselves not how they are viewed by others.

Why all of these appeals to authority? It is the Trojan Horse strategy. If you try to convey your message to the world of authority and they reject it what do you do? You clothe it in a coating of things which that world does respect.

But if the central message is not true, this strategy too will fail.

Development of Order of Matter

Griffith says : “From the fundamental ingredients of our world of matter, space and time, matter has become ordered into ever larger (in space) and more stable or durable (in time) arrangements.”

In fact the opposite is often, if not generally, the case. Living things, which are more ordered, are generally smaller and less durable than simpler forms of matter. Rocks can be very big and very durable. A redwood tree is more complex, but smaller and less durable. And a human being is even more complex than a redwood tree, but once again smaller and less durable.

He says that the law that governs the development of ever more complex forms of matter is the “‘Second Path of the Second Law of Thermodynamics’, or ‘Negative Entropy’, which states that in an open system, where energy can come into the system from outside it (in Earth’s case, from the sun, and, in the case of the universe, from the original ‘big bang’ explosion that created it)…” Now I don’t know much about the big bang, but can it be said to be a source of energy from outside? Certainly the energy released could drive negative entropy, but if the amount of energy in the universe is fixed, it would still be a closed system now and thus this process of negative entropy would not be infinitely sustainable.

From Erwin Schrödinger : “What an organism feeds on is negative entropy…” I don’t get that. Surely an organism is negative entropy and what it feeds on is entropy. It is the breakdown of other forms of matter which provides the energy for the building up of the organism’s living matter. It is the breakdown of matter in the sun (entropy) which provides us with heat and light and it is the breakdown of the other organisms we consume in our stomach (entropy) which provides us with the energy we need to do things.

Is the universe not a chaotic system in which order arises naturally through the interplay of the forces of creation and destruction? It does not arise, as human hierarchies arise, by deference to a higher authority, but by an anarchic confluence of self-interest. Surely single-celled organisms formed communities and later became incorporated into multi-celled organisms because there were survival advantages to the individual in doing so. Order among we humans can be either naturally occurring - a group of stamp collectors are brought together by their love of stamps - or hierarchically imposed - as in the case of the nation state with its laws and authoritarian institutions. I worry that Griffith’s concept of the development of matter leans towards the authoritarian - i.e. deference to the dictatorship of our “selflessness-orientated” genes. I see no need for that. My vision of a united humanity is more like the group of stamp-collectors. Love feels good. Self-interest, once we are liberated from our neurosis, propels - rather than compels - us to it.

Bruce Lipton gives a much better presentation of the idea of the development of order within living systems on the way to a united humanity than Griffith does. You can find it in his book Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (And a Way to Get There from Here) : https://www.brucelipton.com/books/spontaneous-evolution

Asking for Everything Is the Best Way to Get Nothing

Griffith goes on and on about how the theme of existence is “unconditional selflessness”. All the wonders of nature are only possible because the parts of each organism are willing to die in service of the whole. Little if no acknowledgement of the benefits the whole provides to the part. Who would want any of this depressing view of existence?

The desire to cooperate and be in loving communion with others arises naturally. We go down that path, when our character armour doesn’t stand in the way, because it feels good to do so. But what if someone told us that that road led to martyrdom - to the sacrifice of our life for the common good? We might shrink back from it altogether. Sure, people do give their lives for others. But we needn’t expect a willingness to do that from all in order to benefit from their capacity to cooperate in less extreme ways.

This is the nature of idealism - to hold up the ultimate and, in so doing, to drive us away from the centre and towards the other extreme. Most of us can be reasonably cooperative and loving. To what degree depends on our level of self-acceptance. When the words “unconditionally selfless” are bandied about our self-acceptance is liable to be undermined. Reasonably co-operative and loving doesn’t seem to be enough. So we are driven away from our midway position, perhaps into the state of depression (a form of suffering which makes us more selfish) or into a state of defensive hostility against the one who implicitly criticises us by holding up this, for us, unreachable ideal.

Now Griffith is not simply advocating “unconditional selflessness” (or any ideal). He believes that deep down we want to be ideal. What he is trying to do is to remove the impasse to that by providing a defence for our historically non-ideal behaviour. This all makes sense from the point of view of his theoretical concept of the world. It doesn’t work in practice though, because his theory is wrong.

Maybe we will one day have a truly united humanity in which all of the members are willing, if necessary, to give their life for others. But it won’t be because we saw that as a worthy end and strove for it. Love and cooperation bring their own rewards. To be a member of a loving community is to be nurtured with bliss like a baby at it’s mothers breast. It is that bliss that makes the members of that community strong, and only then, with that strength, can come the willingness to give oneself back to the whole.

Read Part 13

Fantasies and Sexual Healing

Our erotic desires are a pull towards healing. While bodily pleasures are appealing in their own right, our specific emotional needs determine the focus of our sexuality. Intercourse with the opposite sex may be the most natural way to procreate, but most of our sexual behaviour is not about breeding. A desire for a healing of the psychological tear between the masculine and the feminine underlies heterosexual behaviour. Exclusively homosexual behaviour in males might be driven by a desire for a healing between the individual and the patriarchal society. Lesbians seek healing away from the more troubled masculine psyche and in bisexuality we may see a less neurotic, less fixated, form of sexuality in which the sharing of sexual pleasure is not restricted by the gender of the participants.

Often we also have sexual fixations around particular situations or kinds of activity. The erotic is like an ambulance crew which goes straight to the spot where we are most wounded.

I'll first use myself as an example. During my early adolescence I developed a strong sense of shame about masturbating. This can't be attributed to any messages I picked up from my parents, but may have been a response to the way that other boys joked about the act as if anyone who did it was pathetic. The point is that I went for about six months without masturbating and felt that a black cloud of shame was hanging over my head. Eventually I talked about this with my parents and they reassured me that masturbation was perfectly natural and that I had done it when I was a baby. So I went back to masturbating, but in later years I still felt uncomfortable about how women would view me if they knew how much I did it.

Later, as I began to explore my sexual fantasies and eventually began to write erotica, I found that one of the things which gave me intense pleasure was the idea of a woman watching me masturbate. Here we have an example of the erotic as a process of healing. What was most erotic was a sexual transaction which reassured my deep-seated fear of rejection.

I recently read an account by a woman, who had been raped and who writes erotica, of how writing a rape-based story helped her to take back ownership of her own sexuality. And another woman who suffered a similar trauma has told me of how rape-play with a sexual partner is extremely erotic for her as long as she feels safe.

This fits with the idea that erotic desires and erotic fantasy represent a process of healing of our deepest wounds.

But does our society facilitate or hinder such healing?

Trauma lies not so much in the things which happen to us as in the way we think about those things. Many individuals go through very scary or painful experiences and then more or less forget about them as soon as they are over. Giving birth tends to be very painful and I'm sure it can be a frightening experience when it occurs, but once the mother has a healthy baby in her arms it seems to be quickly forgotten. What makes for trauma is on-going questions like : “Was it my fault?", “What will people think?", etc.

What is needed to heal trauma is self-acceptance – the realisation that what happened can't be changed, that whatever one feels is always all right and a trust that the mind knows the way towards healing. Erotic fantasy need not be a part of that, but for some of us it is, and this needs acceptance.

Prevalent social beliefs can work against this process. In the case of rape or child molestation an emphasis on the need to condemn the act and the perpetrator can lead to a feeling that the survivor of the abuse should remain in the role of victim. The act of finding healing and renewed confidence through fantasies which eroticise the experience may be viewed as a retroactive condoning of it. But really this has nothing to do with the fact that the abuse was wrong and can be criminally prosecuted.

When it comes to trauma resulting from sexual abuse part of the suffering is bound to come from the sense of shame which accrues even to the victim in a society which still carries a deep-seated fear of sexuality. We often think differently about someone who has been raped than we do someone who has been stabbed, and yet both are violent acts in which the body is invaded.

It might seem strange to say that our society has a deep-seated fear of sexuality when we look at what shows on television and the easy access to porn on the internet. But sex is not treated simply as the pleasurable physical act which it is. In polite society you can say you just drank a really nice cup of tea, but try saying you had a very satisfying masturbation session last night. Why should the two be any different? Only because we live in a society founded on the repression of sexuality and which, thus, rightly fears the power of sexuality to disrupt it. In and of itself an act of sexual intercourse is like dancing, a pleasurable physical activity involving intimacy between two or more individuals. But you can dance in public and you can't have sex in public. And in the media, nudity and even loving sexual behaviour are treated as if they were more offensive to our deeper selves than violence is. They aren't. Loving sexual interactions, heterosexual or homosexual, are perfectly in harmony with our deepest nature which is to be unconditionally loving. Violence runs against that nature, but its depiction in the media plays an important cathartic role in our neurotic society. The reason why nudity and sex, when not aggressive or abusive, are treated as something dangerous is because these things are dangerous to our neurotic selves. They are not dangerous to non-neurotic adults or to children who have not yet become neurotic. But it is those who are particularly neurotic who impose the fear-driven rules of society.

It is important to be understanding about this fear of sex. Someone who is homophobic has no more choice about the fact than a arachnophobe has about being scared of spiders. In both cases they can learn to be free of fear, but it requires sensitivity on the part of those who are trying to help them.

And, of course, sex can have a dark face when combined with neurotic armouring. There is nothing wrong with enjoying fantasies about raping people, but to do the thing itself is evil. And some adults use their position of authority over children to satisfy themselves sexually. This is only the most socially-unacceptable form of abuse of adult authority over children. Being indoctrinated into a religion, being forced to perform in child beauty pageants, being told they are expected to go into the family business - any of these things, and many more, can have as big a detrimental effect on a child's life as an adult as sexual abuse. In general, to teach a child to obey authority because it is authority (“You'll do it because I say so.") is to lay down the conditioning which can make the child a future victim of other authority figures, be they dictatorial politicians or sexual predators. Once again, it is our society's fear of sex which leads us to concentrate our outrage on the sexual abuse of children and ignore or even condone other forms of abuse.

If our sexual fantasies are leading us toward healing, then what is the meaning of the current popularity of fantasies revolving around bondage, discipline and sado-masochism? These fetishes are nothing new, but the bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James (which I haven't read) is taking the world by storm, indicating that these kinds of fantasies are now a part of the mainstream.

One way of looking at the erotic appeal of bondage and discipline is that, if someone is fearful of their own erotic desires, the sense of safety that comes with being in bondage or submitting to another's discipline, allows them to explore those desires without danger of a scary loss of control.

But maybe there is another interpretation which can be put on this kind of fantasy. If the erotic offers a path out of shame or trauma, through returning to the source of shame or trauma and eroticising it, then perhaps we eroticise bondage and slavery as a path to freedom from the bondage and slavery of our neurosis.

You can also find this post on the How to Be Free forum here. You may find further discussion of it there.