BOOK REVIEW : Transform Your Life and Save the World - Through Living In Support Of The Biological Truth About The Human Condition by Jeremy Griffith

I’ve been studying the writings of Jeremy Griffith for over 25 years. You may wonder why I would take such an interest in the writings of a man whose books I give one star ratings to. If his ideas are no good, why waste my time on them?

The truth is that I agree with much of what Griffith says and I’ve always felt that there is something in his theory which is essential to addressing humanity’s most serious problems. On the other hand, I think he is wrong in many ways. If he presented his theory as a theory to be assessed like any other, I would give his books five stars, because they are a passionate and original exploration of very deep issues. But he doesn’t present it as a theory. He claims that he is presenting the holy grail of liberating knowledge which all humanity has been striving towards since the dawn of human consciousness. Anyone who has dipped into his books or even read the blurbs on the back covers will know what I mean when I say he goes the hard sell. And he sometimes gets carried away when expressing his disagreement with others. He has labelled fellow biologist Edward O. Wilson “the anti-christ” and described the rejection of one of his articles by Scientific American : “…the most serious crime that could possibly be committed in the whole of humanity’s 2-million-year journey to enlightenment…” This kind of behaviour may lead many people to view Griffith as some random nut-case, but there are those for whom the combination of the self-hype and the fact that Griffith genuinely delves deep and acknowledges aspects of human psychology most of us would be more comfortable denying leads to an unwavering commitment to these ideas. So I value his writings as a catalyst for my own thinking, but have to rate his works with a single star because I believe that, while he has the best of intentions, the way he presents his ideas is wrong and dangerous.

If you want to know what his central theory is you are better off reading it here than trying to wade your way through his massive tome Freedom : The End of the Human Condition to which this booklet is intended to be an introduction.

The basic concept is that we have a genetic orientation to selfless behaviour which is what we experience as our conscience. Most other animals are genetically selfish. The change in our genetic orientation from selfish to selfless occurred through a process called “love indoctrination” whereby the mothers of our proto-human ancestors nurtured their infants for genetically selfish reasons, but to the infants it seemed like selflessness. Thus they were “indoctrinated” into the idea that selflessness is the meaning of life. Over many generations this orientation to selflessness became encoded in our genes. But, as our conscious mind developed, it needed to experiment with self-management, rather than blindly follow the guidance of the selfless instincts. When this led to us acting in ways which our instincts interpreted as selfish, they criticised us. Our conscious mind became insecure in the face of this criticism - we became angry (against the criticism), egotistical (always needing to assert our worth in the face of our instincts condemnation of us) and alienated (blocking out any aspects of reality which might seem to support the criticisms coming from our conscience.) Thus we had a loving cooperative beginning as a species (which we mostly retain an orientation to in our genes) and our dark side since then has been a psychological byproduct of the emergence of consciousness.

I’m willing to believe we had a cooperative beginning as a species and I definitely believe that our propensity for selfishness, competition and aggression is a psychological phenomenon. I also believe that the critical nature of idealism is the root cause of the psychological insecurity (or neurosis) which drives our dark side.

Where I disagree with Griffith is on the source of idealism. He sees it as something genetic, whereas I see it as a social phenomenon - a product of the conscious mind, not the instincts.

A clear distinction has to be made here between idealism and love. I don’t feel that Griffith makes this distinction and thus he goes very far wrong. He identifies our conscience with this genetic orientation, but at the same time he says that this genetic orientation is the source of our capacity for love and cooperativeness. The conscience is something which tries to control our behaviour by making us feel bad if we go against it. Love on the other hand cannot be forced. If it is not freely given then it isn’t love. Cooperation in a superficial sense can be forced. People can be made to cooperate. But this isn’t cooperation in the fullest sense of the word - to work with - they may be with us physically, but if there is compulsion then they will not be with us in the relational sense.

I have no problem with the idea that we have a genetic orientation to being loving and cooperative. We see these qualities in young children and we can often see the evidence that emotional disturbance of one kind or another lies behind deviation from such a nature. But, unlike the conscience, love is not dictatorial. In it’s purest form it is all-accepting and all-forgiving. The conscience is certainly not that.

It seems clear to me that the conscience is a part of the ego - the conscious thinking self - in which we store our learned moral principles. How else do we explain that what makes us feel guilty differs from person to person and culture to culture? If our conscience were genetic we would see no such diversity. Guilt can be understood as the sense of psychological pain which accompanies the withdrawal of self-acceptance.

I see no need for the theory of “love indoctrination”. Nature at base is integrative - competition occurs within a cooperative framework. The motivation for we animals is the pleasure principle - to seek that which makes us feel good and try to avoid what makes us feel bad. (In humans this gets very complicated because of our ability to make decisions based on predictions about the future, our psychological needs and our metaphysical belief systems.) For animals, good and bad feelings are the messengers for the genes. An animal which experiences maximised pleasure when mating with a healthy member of his species and is willing to compete for that pleasure may prove more fit in the process of natural selection. And a female member of a species who feels enough discomfort at the prospect of losing her infant to fight to protect it will also be likely to have an advantage. And where there is not enough food for everyone, those who are most motivated to compete will pass on their genes. But these animals compete when there is an advantage, in terms of achieving pleasure or avoiding suffering, in competing.

Griffith places a lot of emphasis on the bonobos as an example of what our cooperative past may have been like. Bonobos are peaceful, cooperative and matriarchal, while chimpanzees are more aggressive, competitive and patriarchal. The chimpanzees developed in an ecosystem where food was less plentiful. The bonobos spend a lot of their time rubbing genitals with each other fairly indiscriminately. Why would the bonobos not be cooperative and peaceful? Everyone has enough food. Living cooperatively means living in a peaceful supportive community and spending much of your time rubbing genitals. Where is the pleasure advantage in competition?

As for our ancestors, if they lived in an environment where there was plenty of food to go around, then the only source of competition would be mating. But would competing for mates in such an environment confer a significant evolutionary advantage? It would in a more hostile environment with a high infant mortality rate. There it would be a numbers game. But if most infants grew to adulthood, then environmental advantage would go to those who were best nurtured and thus healthiest. In this kind of ecological niche, genetic advantage would favour nurturing as it does with the bonobos. And there would be no genetic drive to compete which needed to be “indoctrinated” out of us. All that was needed was a space where competition was not advantageous. Maybe the chimpanzees too would like to be living cooperatively and spending their time rubbing genitals, but if there isn’t enough food to go around they have to stick with their less pleasant lifestyle.

So how did it all go wrong? I think Griffith is right that a conflict arose between the instincts and the intellect, but not in the way he thinks. If our instincts are to be loving and cooperative then they would have to be forgiving and uncritical. Forgiveness is essential to love and necessary if ongoing cooperation is to be facilitated. Idealism on the other hand is unforgiving and is a divisive influence. Idealism encourages us to judge ourselves or others against a standard which is, by definition unreachable. Ideality and reality are opposites, thus ideals can never be achieved in the real world. The ideals produce just the kind of response in the insecure ego that Griffith attributes to them. But they originate in the conscious mind, not in the instincts. They are a product of the conscious mind’s attempt to understand the world and manage it’s own behaviour.

How did we arrive at the concept of idealism? To have an idea of good and evil we would need something with which to contrast our loving cooperative behaviour. The behaviour of predatory animals would have provided that contrast. The role of protecting the tribe against them would have fallen to men as women needed to concentrate on nurturing the infants. In hunting against them we would have had to cultivate our own competitive and aggressive potential. While necessary, this would have had a disruptive effect on the group, something which the women would have had to try to control. So we have behaviour labelled “bad” and other behaviour labelled “good” and social pressure to restrain the former and cultivate the latter. A moral system. In time individuals would have begun second-guessing criticism. They would have internalised the moral system. They would have gained a conscience.

Of course this was necessary, but the problem is that idealism has a tendency to undermine self-acceptance. We end up feeling guilty about our transgressions and the resultant insecurity makes it harder for us to open up to our deeper loving nature. Our wounded ego becomes a bigger and bigger barrier to improving our behaviour. We become, as Griffith says, angry, egocentric and alienated.

Griffith likes to use his theory as a way of explaining the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but there are some aspects of that story which can be explained by what I have just said which he does not attempt to explain. Eve was the first to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and she was tempted to do so by a snake. If predatory animals were what led us to the origin of idealism, then that explains the snake. If women were the first ones to insist on a moral system, that explains how Eve ate first. And it was not simply the Tree of Knowledge (as Griffith often says in support of his theory that conscious thought in general was the key factor), but the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (i.e. knowledge of morality or idealism). We can quite safely use our minds to explore and experiment wherever we don’t arrive at hurtful self-criticism. It was not the search for knowledge which corrupted us, as Griffith claims, but the idealism which we played with along the way.

Griffith’s placing of idealism in the genes leads him to this absurdity : “…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…” If our instinctive self resides in our genes, then how can we explain anything to it? How can genes listen and understand? But if the split is one which idealism has caused within our conscious mind, then a healing integrity of understanding is possible.

I could go on and on analysing and criticising Griffith’s attempt to explain the human condition, and I have done that elsewhere, but here I just wanted to deal with the central issue as all other failings proceed from there.

I care about Jeremy Griffith and his followers and I care what happens to the human race. My motivation is the pleasure principle. It would be pleasant for me to see the members of the World Transformation Movement liberated from the impasse caused by their support of a faulty theory. And it would be pleasant to live in a world where the human race has a chance to survive, whether they are a part of making that possible or not.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 17

The Sex Object

I think Griffith is right about our species becoming neotenous - having childlike features - because of a selection for such features by males based on our association of those features with the neurosis-free loving child. But I disagree with his idea that this mutated into a selection of women with such features based on their appeal to some desire in us to destroy innocence.

He believes that men now use sex to attack innocence. A youthful appearance in a woman gives the appearance of innocence, so this attracts us to want to “fuck” her, i.e. destroy her innocence. But women are not really innocent. It is only the appearance of innocence which attracts us. And women, being in need of ego-reinforcement, cultivate this appearance of innocence - the sex object - in order to be able to feel good about their ability to attract such attention. And they come to believe the illusion and think they actually are innocent. And the more alienated we become the younger the sex object has to look, hence the skinny adolescent look in fashion-models which young women then try to emulate and become anorexic or bulimic.

I don’t think it works like that.

Armouring is the key to understanding the sex object. While some men become so insecure that they become violently misogynistic and rape women (and I don’t know that this has anything to with whether they look innocent or not), I don’t think that most men are attracted to women by a desire to destroy something in them. What we want is love. The neotenous features may be one thing which triggers in us a primal sense that a woman is unusually loving. This is a pre-rational response. I’m sure that most of us, if we thought about it, would admit that there is no guarantee that a pretty woman will be more loving, in fact some of them are egotistical because of their beauty. The aim though is to be loved. The problem is that armoured individuals have a strong need of love but an inability to return it because of the inflexibility of their armouring. Since men are often more armoured than women, the situation of men leaving a string of broken hearts behind them, is perhaps more common, though there are plenty of promiscuous women as well.

And the armouring is essentially conditions for feeling good about ourselves, so for some men the way of proving themselves is to sleep with lots of women, and the more beautiful they are the more impressed they can feel with themselves and the more impressed other men will be with them. So “conquest” can be a factor in armoured sexual behaviour, either in men or in women. And the cultivated sex object self can be a major part of the armouring of women for the same reason.

But, since there is no innocent genetic orientation to selflessness to be attacked, nothing very terrible is happening in human sexual behaviour except that we are experiencing great distress at times because of our inability to drop the armouring and love each other.

In an armour free world there would be nothing wrong with living the free love philosophy advocated by the hippies, because it is not the sharing of tender erotic pleasure which is damaging (quite the opposite, it is powerfully healing). What has always been the problem with our sexual lives is that we couldn’t come together without being bruised and battered by collision with each other’s armour.

It should also be said that an intense fixation on a particular standard of beauty is a symptom of neurosis. The less neurotic we are the more we open up to seeing beauty and erotic appeal in other body types. Fashion models may mostly be very skinny and neotenous, but the world of fashion is dominated by uptight neurotic individuals. In real life most of us have a far wider range of body-types and ages which we can find attractive. I think that, as we become less neurotically armoured, the range of individuals to whom we might feel sexually attracted opens up. What focuses and restricts our sexuality is our fixations and inhibitions. For instance I consider that the only reason I’m heterosexual rather than bisexual is that I retain an inhibition against sexual desire for another man. It is not because heterosexuality is a natural state.

As for eating disorders, I have a theory about how they may sometimes come about. A young girl is growing up. Her father’s mode of interaction with her has been fairly steady. But then she begins to develop sexually. This is liable to make her sexually desirable to her father. This makes him uncomfortable, so he avoids looking at her body. The girl, not understanding why her father now seems repulsed by her body, thinks there is something wrong with it - that she is getting fat. She starves herself. She desperately wants to feel good about herself. But the more she starves herself, the more everyone is repulsed by her, the more she thinks she is fat. It’s a negative feedback loop. I think this would be greatly helped by a more sex positive attitude. Encouraging masturbation as a way of showing direct appreciation for the body itself might take the emphasis away from an obsession with its appearance.

Homosexuality

It is in his ideas on homosexuality that Griffith really goes off the deep end. First he has to explain why young women are less innocent than young boys. “Incidentally, since women are now highly adapted to sex it mean a virgin is not truly a virgin, she is not truly an innocent girl and thus completely ‘attractive’, because all women are now instinctively aware of ‘sex’.” So I suppose that is why women like sex, because they are born corrupted, after 2 million years of their ancestors having to put up with being fucked until they liked it! Then he says : “…if a man is extremely hurt and corrupted in his infancy and childhood, when he becomes sexually mature he will not be naive enough to believe that women are still innocent and will not, therefore, find them sexually attractive. The last bastion of ‘attractive’ innocence for such men is younger men, because they are not as exposed to sexual destruction as women have historically been. To explain the effeminate mannerisms particular to male homosexuality, if you have had your soul, which is your core strength, destroyed in childhood, then taking on the extremely difficult male role of having to fight against the ignorance of the soulful, idealistic world would be an untenable position that would make the female position of not having to fight a much more preferential option.”

First of all, what is this about women not being sexually attractive to us if we know they aren’t innocent? Why do so many of us guys like jacking off while watching women act like total whores, if a belief in their innocence is necessary for us to be sexually attracted to them?

Secondly, who says that homosexual desire acts only in the direction of youth? Many older homosexuals have plenty of lust for each other.

Many homosexuals are effeminate (as are some heterosexuals), but is being effeminate really an easier path? Quentin Crisp was a very effeminate homosexual who was repeatedly bashed for this behaviour, yet he proudly continued with it. And Francis Bacon had to take the horse whip. Often, far from being a cowardly behaviour, effeminacy has been a brave defiance of the pressure to play the macho patriarchal game. The cowardice (insecurity) lies with the armoured males who are so threatened by this behaviour that they feel the need to violently punish it.

My view is that we have an inborn potential for bisexuality. The bonobos practice bisexuality. It makes sense. We are motivated by the pleasure principle. Rubbing genitals with either gender can produce such pleasurable feelings. Some of us do grow up to be bisexual. Others adapt to the social expectation to be heterosexual. And others fixate on homosexuality because of an encounter with homophobia in our society. Because our society is less tolerant of same-sex desires, someone who feels such desires, perhaps, initially, as well as heterosexual desires, may fixate on those desires because they are something about which they are in need of finding acceptance. In the same way, a little boy who is punished for dressing up in his sister’s dress may grow up to be a transvestite, because his psyche has fixated on an instance of withheld acceptance.

I may be heterosexual myself, but I love homosexuality. I love homosexual culture and even homosexual pornography. Seeing people sharing their own particular kind of pleasure and expressing themselves freely in their own unique way fills me with joy.

Snuff Movies

He says : “However, because there has been no honesty about the existence of the different levels of upset and alienation amongst humans, they [relatively innocent girls] can be deceived by men who are much more upset and, therefore, much more sexually advanced down ‘the rungs of the perversion ladder’ (where one is holding hands, two is kissing, three is touching her breast, etc, etc, etc, to the extent that some people became so horribly psychologically sick and perverted that they derived excitement from watching ‘snuff movies’ of people being killed — yes, sexual depravity is an accurate measure of alienation).”

Oh, dear. Better not hold hands with anyone or the next thing you know the pair of you will be watching snuff movies together!

By the way, nobody has ever actually found a real snuff movie. It was a myth created by reactionary anti-pornography campaigners.

Remember Titus 1:15 :

“To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted.”

How corrupted must somebody be if even holding hands is not pure to them?

Women in Tights

He says : “…it’s not commonly acknowledged that suits were invented for men so they could hide their big guts, while dresses were invented for women so they could accentuate their waists and breasts and conceal their big bottoms and thighs, but, while men still wear coats, everywhere in Western society now women have forsaken skirts for trousers, and even tights, as if their role of inspiring men with their beauty no longer matters. This is, in truth, yet another illustration of women’s lack of awareness of the nature of the struggle that the human race has been involved in — and of the irresponsibility of feminism, which encouraged women not to ‘march with her regiment.’ Women’s role has understandably become unbearable for them but the battle to find understanding still had to be won.”

Well, I don’t know. I get a lot of inspiration out of the sight of a nice juicy female bottom clad in tights. Thank you feminists!

The Ultimate Thought

He quotes George Seaver : “The ultimate thought, the thought which holds the clue to the riddle of life’s meaning and mystery, must be the simplest thought conceivable, the most natural, the most elemental, and therefore also the most profound.”

He says of himself : “Basically, I learnt to trust in and take guidance from my truthful instinctive self or soul. I learnt to think honestly, free of alienated, intellectual bullshit, and all the answers, all the insights that I have found, and there are many hundreds of them, a breakthrough insight in almost every paragraph, were found this way. I have so perfected the art of thinking truthfully and thus effectively that you can put any problem or question in front of me to do with human behaviour and I can get to the bottom of it, answer and solve it.”

If this is true, why is his writing so convoluted and his “explanations” of human behaviour so reliant on crude stereotypes, which just happen to conform to the norms of the society in which he grew up? I think he is too afraid to really look at modern social culture in detail for fear that his precious “innocence” will be contaminated. That isn’t strength. That is weakness. That isn’t security. That is insecurity.

I’m not a biologist, but is not my writing about psychology simpler and more illuminating of the world than his?

If I were going to take the challenge set by Seaver I would express the simplest thought this way - Criticism makes us worse. Acceptance makes us better.

Griffth takes a whole unwieldy book to provide his solution to the problem of the human condition. Mine only takes 8 words. Who has the better ability to think simply, clearly and insightfully?

I have no genetic program for selflessness in me. I don’t feel the suffering of the people of the world. I don’t feel the suffering of the animals. I don’t feel any of that. My interest is entirely in my own well-being. But my well-being, my capacity to experience all of life’s pleasures, is dependent on the psychological healing of the world. I don’t feel others suffering, but it would make me very happy to see that suffering healed. To see the depressed smile again. To see the lonely find love. To see the animals and plants coming back. To see the sickness of shame lifted from the bliss of the erotic. I want to live in a world free from from all condemning idealism. A world where everyone is free to be as they want to be.

Am I being honest? I leave it for you to decide. Do I hide my shortcomings? Do I hide those things about myself that another person might criticise?

Things become very complicated when you begin to use words to hide behind instead of to reveal yourself.

Read Part 18

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 13

Griffith’s Compassion for Animals

“Unfortunately, because animals’ innocence (lack of the psychological upset we humans suffer from) confronts us with our lack of innocence (our vicious angry, egocentric and alienated state), we humans so hated, despised and resented animals that we have hunted and shot them for ‘sport’ ; but one day we are going to have so much sympathy for animals because of what they have to endure trapped in a life of having to relentlessly compete with each other, often with their closest friends! (‘Friends’ in the sense of those with whom they have shared their life and developed emotional bonds.) Certainly the same extremely competitive state exists for plants and microbes, but, not having the developed nervous system that animals have, their awareness of the agony of that horrifically competitive existence could obviously not be anywhere near as great as it is for animals.”

If we tried to justify our anger and selfishness by comparison to the savagery and selfish competition we see in the animal world, why would animals (apart from gentle baby animals maybe) confront us with our “lack of innocence”? There are plenty of cases of deliberate cruelty to animals, but a lot of what we do to animals, like hunting, I think reflects indifference to their interests rather than hatred. If an animal is just an object to you, then testing your skill by seeing if you can shoot it makes sense. Hunters generally don’t look angry to me. Not like people shooting people. I think people hating other people is more common than people hating animals. But that isn’t something Griffith can so easily use to make us feel guilty.

I’ve expressed the view elsewhere that compassion is projected self-pity. This doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a wonderful thing, a motivation for us to respond to the suffering of others because it resonates with our own neurotic suffering, but we shouldn’t mistake it for a state of mental health.

It seems as if, historically, compassion for animals amongst humans has not been particularly strong, but it has become much stronger among many people in recent times, with the rise of animal rights and veganism. While this might lead to a reduction in suffering by animals, and there is nothing wrong with that, I see this as a byproduct of our neurotic suffering. We see in the animals a reflection of our wounded selves.

I don’t “hate” or “despise” animals, but I’m not going to lose any sleep at night over the fact that they need to compete with their “friends” for a fuck.

This tends to reinforce my view that idealism is not a natural expression of the psyche of a well-nurtured individual, but rather a characteristic which arises from severe neurosis, equivalent to obsessive compulsive disorder, in which anything which is perceived by the sufferer as “not right” causes them great discomfort. The healthy self-accepting individual is not selfish and is cooperative and generous, but is able to accept the world as it is, including any unavoidable suffering which goes on within it, with equanimity. In that way no energy, which might be used to make things better, is drained away.

Love-Indoctrination

The theory of love-indoctrination is probably the strongest element in Griffith’s work. This is his attempt to explain how a cooperative society of proto-humans could develop from out of the genetic selfishness of other animals. The idea is that mothers nurture their children for genetically selfish reasons, because the children contain their genes, but to the children it looks like selfless behaviour and so they are socialised into a culture of such behaviour.

I have no problem with that. It makes perfect sense. And it makes perfect sense that maternalism will be genetically selected as the more maternal the offspring the better the chances of their own offspring to survive.

The problem comes in the next step : “…the training of individuals in unconditional selflessness. And with this unconditionally selfless behaviour recurring over many, many generations, the unconditionally selfless behaviour will become instinctive — a moral soul will be established — because genes will inevitably follow and reinforce any development process occurring in a species; in this they are not selective.”

There are two problems with this. Griffith is saying that learned behaviour becomes instinctive if it continues long enough. I believe this is not the accepted view amongst most biologists. In this video, Richard Dawkins talks about some isolated instances where learned behaviour might develop into an inherited instinct, but note that, even in these rare cases, it only does so if what is learned confers a competitive advantage on the individual. Learned selflessness would be likely to be disadvantageous to the perpetuation of someone’s genes and so be self-eliminating :

https://richarddawkins.net/2015/04/darwin-day-2015-questions-6-how-does-learned-behavior-evolve-into-inherited-instinct/

Griffith does acknowledge the problem that selflessness would be self-eliminating if it wasn’t universal to the group. But this still doesn’t explain how it could become encoded in the genes. Natural selection is a process of the winnowing out of those less fit for their environment. If everyone is equally fit, there is no winnowing and therefore no reinforcement of any genetic traits. The only way I can see where cooperative traits would be genetically encouraged is if there were sexual selection for cooperativeness, for instance if the females refused to mate with selfish males. (Actually, Griffith says this later : “…females were not only not dominated by males, but dictated mate choice by choosing to reproduce with non-aggressive, cooperative males — hallmarks you would expect of a society highly focused on maternal nurturing of their infants.” But he mentions that only to make the point that the females were “more maternal” he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that this selective breeding is the only way a cooperative culture could become genetically reinforced.

I think Griffith is right about our extended nurturing period socialising us into being a cooperative species, and also that it was what liberated our fully conscious mind. But I don’t think we acquired a genetic programming for unconditional selflessness. I think our co-operative way of life was maintained because it felt good, and was only disrupted when we began to think about the disparity between our way of life and that of predators, and in so doing gave birth to the toxic concept of idealism.

I believe that the human mind itself liberates us from the dictatorship of the genes which affects other species. Using our mind we can see that cooperating with others is a way to achieve the things we want. It is through our ideas and imaginings, and the communication of them that leads to a confluence of our emotions, that we come together in meaningful ways. It is ideas which bring us together or tear us apart, depending on whether they make us more or less self-accepting and accepting of others.

Now you could say that, when I say that it feels good to cooperate, this is because we have a genetic orientation to it. But, even if that were true, I don’t think it is a dictatorial one. It is the learned conscience which troubles us. If I like eating chocolate more than I like eating potatoes, but for health reasons I have to eat potatoes and avoid chocolate, I may be unhappy because I’m missing out on the pleasure I crave, but I’m unlikely to feel guilty about the fact that I’m eating potatoes. I don’t see that a genetic orientation to cooperation, in a human with a fully-functioning mind, would be condemning of that mind’s experiments in not being cooperative. On the other hand, if at a vulnerable age, we are told we will go to Hell if we play with ourselves, that will tend to bring about major turmoil in the mind because we are being condemned by an authority figure for doing something natural. I don’t believe that anything inside our body is unforgiving in that way.

Bonobo Sex

Griffith says : “Indeed, it is an indication of how difficult it is to develop love-indoctrination that even bonobos, living as they do in their ideal conditions, and who ‘have developed a more cohesive social structure’ than chimpanzees, still find it necessary to employ sex as an appeasement device to help subside residual tension and aggression between individuals…sex amongst bonobos is like the ‘naked and they felt no shame’ sex that Moses described our innocent Adam and Eve/bonobo stage-equivalent ancestors as practising, not the anti-‘social’ sex that humans currently practise, where…it is used to attack/fuck innocence…”

What he seems totally unwilling to even consider is the possibility that the sharing of pleasure, sexual or otherwise, is literally the making of love, that it is through the mutuality of our pleasure that we nurture each other and open the bonds of loving communication.

Nurturing

Griffith is right that nurturing is very important to the development of the individual, but his explanation of why is bullshit. He believes that we are born expecting an ideal world and ideal behaviour from those around us. Since “selfless” nurturing behaviour is what we expect, we are hurt if we don’t get it, and we can never recover from that hurt.

Not only is there no evidence, as far as I can see, for this idea, it is an idea which is itself positively toxic to the nurturing process.

The basis for mental health is unconditional self-acceptance. Ideal nurturing then would be unconditionally accepting nurturing. This would give the child a sound grounding in self-acceptance. But to be unconditionally accepting of her child, a woman will need to be unconditionally self-accepting. If she believes that the child is born expecting her to be perfect in her behaviour, then that is liable to put pressure on her, make her feel guilty. She will therefore not be able to give her child unconditional love.

Griffith feels that an ideal mother needs to have had as little as possible exposure to sex. So any mother who reads Griffith’s work and believes him, and who has a normal enjoyable sex life, is liable to worry about the effect that this will have on her child.

To make it worse, even though Griffith knows that people have trouble understanding his “defence for humans” he still goes around promoting his nurturing-sabotaging views on nurturing to those who haven’t understood it.

He also promotes the idea that we can never fully recover from insufficient nurturing, but the problem with insufficient nurturing is that, like encounters with corrosive - and thus corrupting - idealism, it leaves us with highly conditional self-acceptance. But this can be repaired by learning the habit of unconditional self-acceptance.

In a sense, what Griffith is unwittingly doing is crippling people and then giving them wheelchairs.

Development of the Conscious Mind

Griffith believes we had to be selfless to become fully conscious because selflessness is the theme of existence and we can’t acknowledge that and think truthfully if we are not selfless. So other animals, being genetically selfish, could not develop reason.

I think it makes more sense to consider that other animal’s minds have had to be focused on the struggle for survival. A longer nurturing period provided our minds the chance to develop in a less focussed way, freeing us up to have the complex pathways needed to think more deeply about the world around us.

It is true that selfishness blocks us from thinking  holistically, because to see the whole picture we have to be relatively free of personal bias. If we are unconditionally self-accepting then we can acknowledge all aspects of the world around us without any of those aspects having to be blocked out or exaggerated to meet the needs of our self-acceptance.

No doubt our proto-human ancestors were unconditionally self-accepting before the arrival of corruption in the form of idealism. And, if we reject idealism and cultivate unconditional self-acceptance now we can once again learn to think truthfully.

Selfishly Unselfish?

If we did have a genetic orientation toward selfless behaviour which makes us feel bad when we go against it, does it not follow that we would feel better if we went with it? So doesn’t it follow that, whether we go with it or against is determined by our own good or bad feelings? In this case, if returning to selfless behaviour will make us feel good, are we not being selfless for a selfish reason?

Integrated Bonobos

Griffith’s description of the social integration of the bonobos, the way a troop seems almost like a single connected organism, is impressive. His love of the animals comes through just as strongly as does his disappointment in we humans. But Griffith is not like those bonobos. He is not integrative. His idealism makes him divisive. It forces us to put up our armour - to become more selfish than we already where.

This is the problem with idealism. What we want is to be able to accept ourselves unconditionally. Idealism and being confronted about our “non-ideal” nature in the presentation of a highly dubious theory meant to provide a defence for us and a chance at healing, is liable to undermine that self-acceptance even more. So if I were not such an accepting individual, when Griffith says how the possibility that the bonobos might end up being made extinct “is truly unbearable to think about” I might feel like taking a gun and killing every one of the cute little creatures just to make the self-righteous prick feel as bad as he makes others feel. O.K. So I’m being deliberately extreme there, but I think the point I’m making is an important one. To withhold acceptance from someone, or to make it conditional on them supporting your theory about the human condition, is liable to push them towards more aggressive and selfish behaviour, whereas unconditional acceptance soothes. If he really wants to save the bonobos, he needs to recognise that the lack of acceptance he embodies is what is pushing people towards more and more destructive acts. If they practice evasion of truths they find painful to confront that is a sensible containment. Better that than that they confront them and be made either hostile or self-destructive.

We do need to be able to know ourselves and to look at the realities of the world head on, but we can only safely do that when the psychological infrastructure is in place, when we have learned to practice unconditional self-acceptance.

Read Part 14