Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 19

“Non-Religious Pseudo-Idealistic Causes”

Because he feels that our whole human history has been driven by guilt - i.e. driven by our need to battle against, and eventually find liberation from, the guilt produced in our insecure minds by the condemnation of our genetic programming for selflessness, Griffith grades the level of alienation (departure from responsible truthfulness) involved in any movements which run counter (or try to run counter) to our destructive or anti-social tendencies according to how little emphasis they place on guilt (how “guilt-free” they are). This is faulty reasoning. If we understand that how truthful we are capable of being is dependent on how self-accepting, and thus free of dogmatic armouring we are, we can see that less guilt can tend to lead to more truthfulness in our thinking. This is not to deny that we may achieve unawareness of feelings of guilt by blocking them out or transcending them, and thus being less truthful in our thinking. But we can’t assume that that is always the case. Guilt-inducing forms of idealism, such as religion, are, in and of themselves, corrupting of self-acceptance and thus of our ability to think truthfully. This explains the spectacular levels of irrationality we often see exhibited by religious fundamentalists.

As I have said above, each of the causes he discusses have been pursued with varying degrees of idealism vs. pragmatism, dogmatism vs. free thinking. Each addresses itself to a serious problem. Sometimes the cure may be worse than the disease, but the successes have also to be acknowledged. Communism under Stalin was monstrously oppressive, but the socialists in Britain after the Second World War established a welfare state which greatly improved the lot of the poor and thus the health of that society as a whole. Having a healthy impact on society is less a case of being left wing or right wing and more a case of how self-accepting the individual is and thus how generous and open and non-oppressively they can pursue their ends. Stalin had very seriously compromised self-acceptance. He was a psychopath. That had nothing to do with his politics.

The New Age Movement

The New Age Movement actually tries to address the key problem for we humans, which is our psychological state. It has provided useful techniques for healing, but it has also often been given to high levels of irrationality and the cult of personality. It does have one major advantage over religion (apart from the absence of guilt) and that is that it is not authoritarian or dogmatic. It may be largely self-directed, but that means that it is relatively free of the sickness of trying to force one’s idealism on others.

Feminism

Griffith says : “Yes, the Feminist Movement maintained that there was no real difference between people - and especially not between the sexes.”

This seems a gross generalisation to me. There has been great diversity amongst feminists. I think some feel that there really is a major difference between men and women. Others feel that the difference in roles is more based on socialisation. But Griffith himself admits that women can perform very masculine roles, e.g. Margaret Thatcher.

What seems to bother him about the feminist movement is a lack of compassion for men, an inability to understand why we have been patriarchal. This is understandable when we consider the issue of armouring. Patriarchy is an armoured state. Armouring exists as a defence. To criticise the armoured individual is to increase their need for their armour. So, while feminism has been a shot in the arm for women, who have been oppressed by the patriarchal order for so long - while it gave them a strong sense of sisterhood - it didn’t make it easier for men to abandon patriarchal behaviour.

Environmentalism

Griffith says : “…the Environmental or Green Movement … removed all need to confront and think about the human state because all focus was diverted from self onto the environment — as the aforementioned quote acknowledged, ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue.’”

I was involved with the environment movement for a while, and I wouldn’t say that it was entirely “guilt-free” for me. The concept of “sinfulness” in religion can seem abstract, but there is nothing abstract about considering one’s carbon footprint, i.e. contribution to global warming. The degree to which people in the environment movement realistically address the problems which confront us varies. Sure you have people who just want to hug trees and put themselves in front of a bull dozer, but you have others who are trying to find practical pragmatic solutions to real problems.

Griffith is right that the root cause of our environmental problems is our own life style and thus our own psychology. I’m sure many, if not most, environmentalists would agree with that statement. But Griffith’s bullshit theory is not the answer to that problem.

A sign of how uncritically Griffth will use a quote which seems to support something he is trying to say is that he uses this quote from Ray Evans, whom he refers to as “an Australian business leader and political activist” : “‘Environmentalism has largely superseded Christianity as the religion of the upper classes in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. It is a form of religious belief which fosters a sense of moral superiority in the believer, but which places no importance on telling the truth.” As usual he insists on putting words in other people’s mouths by making it “…telling the truth [about the real issue of our corrupted condition]” Whether Ray Evans actually believes we have a “corrupted condition” we don’t know.

So who is this Ray Evans who thinks that telling the truth is so important? According to Source Watch : “Evans was Executive Officer at Western Mining Corporation (WMC) from 1982 until 2001, during which time he was a close associate of WMC CEO Hugh Morgan. "My role was to engage in the culture wars and provide him with feedback," Evans says of his work for Morgan.”

So he has been a representative of the mining industry which is threatened by the arguments of environmentalists.

Does he have a commitment to telling the truth?

The quote Griffith uses comes from a document Evans wrote in 2006 called Nine Facts About Climate Change (The Lavoisier Group).

I’m not a climate scientist. Neither is Evans. But if you want to decide for yourself how good Evans is at telling the truth, you might want to read that document and then read a critique of it which seems to fairly convincingly expose it as composed mostly of, often ludicrous, misinformation. I’ve only read a little of Green Scientist’s critique, but enough to decide who I think has the most respect for the truth :

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_10.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_18.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_21.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_23.html

In his youth Griffith was himself a member of the environmentalist movement. His search for the Tasmanian Tiger was an example of the more escapist form of environmentalism in which the real issues of human behaviour are left behind.

Political Correctness

There is good reason to criticise political correctness. It is a censorship of the ability to express anything other than positive feelings in many situations, and the negative feelings which are not expressed or acknowledged will tend to build up. The sickness festers below the surface when what is needed is for it to be drained off through healthy forms of expression and thus be able to heal. Politically incorrect humour provides an important safety valve here. 

But Griffith goes overboard in his tirade : “This is not to say that in a critical battle, such as the one humanity has been involved in, showing care and compassion towards those who were suffering from the effects of the battle was not important. It was very important, because although we have all been involved in the upsetting battle, selflessness is still, as has been repeatedly emphasised, what binds wholes together; it is the glue within humanity’s army. However, while caring for those struggling to keep up was important, it was obviously more essential to support those on the frontline who were still carrying on the battle to ensure the war was ultimately won.”

This makes sense if humanity was actually engaged in a collective battle, as Griffith’s central thesis says, but I don’t believe this is true. Each of us has been engaged in our own private battle, while giving and receiving support from others. That battle has been the battle to maintain our self-acceptance, and we don our armour to fight that battle. In Griffith’s conception, the more combative right-wing members of society have been bravely fighting for us all. But, in truth, this combativeness has been a particular approach to dealing with the insecurity which comes from criticism, especially from idealism. How much we contributed to society was dependent on how generous or creative we were. Combativeness has always been an insecurity-based sickness which has drained energy from society. But we couldn’t help but become combative when criticism, often in the form of idealism, undermined our self-acceptance. Griffith is right that the combative need our concern as well, but not as loyal attendants and supporters of their campaign. We need, rather, to recognise that they are victims of their own insecurity and need healing and liberation as much as anyone else.

We can see so clearly in statements like the following that what Griffith is seeing in “pseudo-idealists” is a projection of his own denied self. Deep down he knows what he is and what he has been engaged in, but unable to face the truth he sees it as a paranoid projection on the world around him : “Their conduct was completely selfish and not at all the selfless, idealistic behaviour they made it out to be and deluded themselves it was.” How many socialists, feminists, environmentalists etc. do you know who believe themselves to be “selfless”? But we do know someone who believes himself to be selfless.

Postmodernist Deconstructionist Movement

I don’t know a lot about this, so I’ll try to wing it.

Griffith says : “While language is artificial it nevertheless models a real world, so to say that just because language is artificial there can be no universal truths is ridiculous, but again, when the need to escape the truth becomes desperate, any excuse will do; just baffle the world, and yourself, with intellectual baloney, such as this from Jacques Derrida, one of the high priests of deconstructionism, who gave this highly intellectual (instinct/soul/truth-less) description of why truth supposedly doesn’t exist: ‘Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written, as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring’”

The way I understand what Derrida is saying is this : If you take any idea out of its context it loses its meaning. Therefore context is all that really matters.

This is the essence of holism. Nothing can be understood except within the context of a greater whole. Contrary to his claims, Griffith isn’t a holist and doesn’t understand holism.

But doesn’t what Derrida says sound like a critique of Griffith’s method, i.e. to take quotes out of context and try to build his own picture of the truth with them?

This is the way I understand post-modernism or deconstructionism. Imagine there is a murder. The police are investigating. There are ten witnesses, but no video footage of what happened. As usually happens, everyone’s story is markedly different. How are the police going to come to the most accurate understanding of what happened? They first record everybody’s narrative. Then they find out more about the lives and characters of the witnesses. By understanding the context in which their narrative fits - what their biases are - they try to detect what factors might be causing each person’s narrative to be distorted in a particular way. And so they deconstruct their narratives in order to be able to deduce from them a more objective account of what actually happened.

In a way, by trying to interpret the things people say in the context of how innocent or upset he feels they are, Griffith is himself practicing a crude form of deconstructionism.

Griffith makes the complaint we so often hear about right-wing conservatives being underrepresented in the national public broadcasting networks of the UK and Australia. I think this is because their tendency to cling in a reactionary manner to outdated dogmas makes them less capable of commentating in a meaningful way about the changing realities of the world. (Just look at right-wing American commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, who are not capable of any kind of coherent analysis and can only give in to their insecure need to spew venom.) They are part of the old world which is dying, not the newer, healthier world which is being born. Which is not to say that more left leaning journalists can’t sometimes be superficial.

Griffith says : “…finally, the totally dishonest, completely alienated, definitely autistic postmodernist movement; again, ‘autism’ is ‘a complex mental structure insuring against recurrence of…unthinkable anxiety’ — in this case, ‘anxiety’ about being extremely corrupted/upset/hurt/soul-damaged in your infancy and childhood.” Again we can see Griffith’s projection of his own situation onto the world, here in a particularly suggestive form.

Why would he feel that post-modernism, i.e deconstructionism, poses such a terrible threat to the world? Because his “liberating understanding of humanity” might be deconstructed. It is his “autistic” “complex mental structure” which is the only thing standing between himself and some terrible anxiety he experienced in his infancy or childhood. What that was we can only guess, but his tendency to see so many things as “an attack on innocence” is suggestive.

Death by Dogma

Griffith has been blind to the subtleties of these social phenomena, and has lumped them altogether as a “death by dogma” which would “crush the human face forever”, because he is seeing himself reflected in the mirror of the world. Those of us who are not blinded by our own delusions can see that, while there are some within these movements who dogmatically insist on restricting freedoms in favour of an idealist conception of how the world should be, this is the exception rather than the rule. It is Griffith who is promoting a rigidly idealism-demanding dogma, which, were we to fall for it, would indeed “crush the human face forever”. While I’m sure he believes in it himself, his “defence for humanity” is a fraud.

“The Abomination That Causes Desolation”

Griffith believes that “the abomination that causes desolation”  which the prophet Daniel warned about, and which was also referred to by Jesus, is a reference to what he terms “pseudo-idealism”, i.e. socialism, feminism, environmentalism, political correctness, post-modernism, etc.

I won’t deal with the Daniel version as that is pretty long and complicated.

Here is the passage where he cuts and pastes together bits from Matthew 24 & Mark 13, with his own extrapolations :

“Referring to ‘the sign…of the end of the age’, Christ said that ‘At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other [a great deal of upset will develop], and may false prophets [pseudo idealists claiming to be leading the way to peace and a new age of goodness and happiness for humans] will appear and deceive many people…even the elect [even those less alienated, still relatively sound and strong in soul, will begin to be seduced by pseudo idealism] — if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time…Wherever there is a carcass [the extremely upset], there the vultures [false prophet  promoters of delusion and denial to artificially make the extremely upset feel good] will gather. Because of the increase in wickedness [upset], the love of most will grow cold. So when you see the “abomination that causes desolation” spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong [throwing out real religion and falsely claiming to be presenting the way to the human-condition free, good-versus-evil-deconstructed, post-human-condition, better, correct world] — let the reader understand — then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no-one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no-one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days of great distress [mindless dogma and its consequences] unequalled from the beginning of the world until now — and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short [by the arrival of the liberating understanding of the human condition], no-one would survive’.

Griffith here uses this bit from Mark : “…So when you see the “abomination that causes desolation” spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong…” But the equivalent passage in Matthew 24:15, says “So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel…”

We’ve seen how Griffith is projecting his situation onto the world. We have also seen that idealism has been a thought virus which has been the source of all of humanity’s problems. It is thus “the abomination that causes desolation”. How is it “in the holy place”? Griffith identifies idealism with holism. The word “holy” means “whole” or “of the whole” and holism is the acknowledgement of wholes. But idealism and holism are incompatible. Idealism is dualistic - it is founded in the division of behaviour into “good” and “bad”. Holism is necessarily pragmatic, inclusive rather than exclusive.

So why would this be such a problem? If we were to be convinced by Griffith’s argument that idealism is in our genes, then we would have no defence against it and its corrosion of our self-acceptance, and thus our capacity for love. Destroy our capacity for love and you destroy the human race. To speak metaphorically we would have been branded by Satan for eternal damnation.

The Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living

Griffith’s answer to the question “where to from here” is what he calls “The Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” - basically an appeal to repression and transcendence of our “upset” in deference to his view of what an ideal world should be like. He insists that this is not a new religion, because it is not deference to a deity but to “knowledge”, i.e. his crackpot theory.

When I became a “life member” of Griffith’s organisation it was called The Centre for Humanity’s Adulthood. Then it became The Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood. At that time they were the subject of a current affairs program which, by implication, presented them as a cult. They fought a long legal battle to defend themselves against “defamation”. They won, at least on some key points. Later they changed their name again to The World Transformation Movement.

Ironically, in 1987, Stuart A. Wright, in his book Leaving Cults: The Dynamics of Defection, used the the term “World-Transforming Movements” to describe certain kinds of cults, including The Children of God, The Unification Church, and Hare Krishna.

This summary of some of the defining features of such organisations is worth thinking about :

http://jmscult.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=a6bf7b2947d8cc56b272fcdf3ab92c5e&topic=856.msg2099#msg2099

Griffith says : “Regarding the degree to which we should each investigate these explanations, obviously it is necessarily to sufficiently verify to our own satisfaction that they are the liberating understandings of the human condition that the whole human race has been tirelessly working its way towards for some 2 million years — but we shouldn’t risk investigating them to the extent that we start to become overly exposed and confronted by the truths they reveal… The more intelligent and/or the more educated in the human-condition-avoiding, denial-based, mechanistic, reductionist paradigm, who pride themselves on being able to think and study and grasp new ideas, will initially be especially tempted to study these understandings beyond what their varying levels of security of self can cope with, but it won’t be long before everyone learns that such an approach is both psychologically dangerous and irresponsible and, in any case, unnecessary.”

As you can tell from my analysis here, I have looked deeply into these ideas. Griffith is not wrong about the psychological danger involved in doing so. I ended up in a mental hospital strapped down to a hospital bed after a suicide attempt. I was begging the doctors and nurses to kill me because I felt that the whole history of humanity was going to come to nothing entirely because of a failure on my part. Griffith’s ideas are incredibly toxic if you truly absorb them and take them on board. The combination of extreme idealism and the false frame of reference created by his attempt at explaining our psychology can easily put a person in a sanity-destroying double bind situation. The good news is that I gradually picked up the pieces of my shattered self, came to understand what was wrong with Griffith’s theory, and in so doing found security, happiness, freedom from depression (which had plagued me since my teens) and the creative inspiration to pursue my writing.

I highly recommend reading praising reviews of Griffith’s books and also watching the videos on his website in which members of the WTM talk about what his ideas mean to them. I think you will see evidence of a general tendency to praise his “understandings” to the roof, but with little evidence of a fluent understanding of them. I don’t blame them. Don’t go to hell if you can avoid it. For me it is fine. I can now study Griffith’s work all day with no problems, because I know which bits are truthful and which bits are not. In fact I understand Griffith’s work better than he does himself, because I am on the outside of his psychosis looking in. He has to be evasive of things which I don’t.

A Summing Up

What makes Griffith’s writing hard to dismiss is that there is so much truth in it.

He says : “Similarly, the Bible states that ‘the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32), and while we know this statement to be truth, the problem has been that all the partial truths — such as that humans are the most brutal and destructive animals to ever walk the earth — condemned our upset state, fuelling it further, which means that, ultimately, for the truth to genuinely set us free, it had to be the full truth that explains why humans are all good and not bad.”

The central problem with Griffith’s work is that his “defence for humanity” is not true. This means that he is bombarding us with what he calls “partial truths” which “condemn” us without having made it safe to do so. It may feel safe to him, because he doesn’t see himself as being in the category of any of those who might be “condemned”. He is not aggressive. He is not a materialist. He doesn’t recognise himself as being alienated. And he is certainly not a mother whose inability to love her child has rendered that child autistic. He is not being “condemned”, at least on a conscious level, by these grim facts. He feels that it is now safe for him to confront us with these hard to face facts and also idealistic expectations, because he has provided us with a compassionate dignifying understanding of why we are so fucked up, an explanation which “proves”  that we are all immensely heroic.

What he is trying to do is to provide a collective character armour for all of humanity. Even if it were not a bullshit explanation for our behaviour, what we need is not more armour. What we need is that our enemy be killed so that it is safe to leave our armour behind. And the enemy we have to kill is idealism. What we need is to liberate our capacity for love (including forgiveness). Idealism - such as the expectation that we should be “selfless” - is corrosive to our self-acceptance, our love of ourselves, and thus of our ability to love others. It is love (unconditional self-acceptance and acceptance of others) which will give us the ability to face all of those grim facts. Once a mother realises that her child doesn’t expect her to be perfect and that the cultivation of self-acceptance can heal any psychological damage she might inadvertently do to her child’s emotional make-up, she will be able to relax and open up to a fuller and more joyful loving relationship with that child. We have been too loaded down with grim facts while having the nourishment we need to face them sapped by idealistic expectations.

It is true that “the truth will set you free”, because it is our lies which imprison us and separate us from each other, but before we can become truthful we have to become unconditionally self-accepting, so that we are invulnerable to criticism or feelings of shame about those aspects of ourselves or our situation we have been trying to hide with those lies. And an accepting and forgiving attitude towards others also makes it easier for them to put aside their defences and be set free.

Photo from World Transformation Movement Facebook page