The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet

 "Totalitarianism is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society.”

One of the most important questions which face us as a species is why we have a propensity to go collectively insane in horrendously bloodthirsty ways. Why the Holocaust? Why the killing fields of Cambodia? Why Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Why Stalin’s purges?

Wars of conquest, horrible as they are, make sense to us. We can understand wanting something possessed by another and using force to get it. But these periods of madness lead societies to implode. They begin by vilifying particular subsets of their population, but the elimination of the victim classes leads to a widening net of destruction which may end up with the annihilation of those who initiated the purge. Hitler assured the German people that he was saving enough gas for them so that they wouldn’t have to face the reality of defeat. And many of those who enacted Stalin’s purges ended up finding themselves on the list. Whatever is going on in these times of madness is not something which can lead to a stable outcome.

Mattias Desmet has written a truly remarkable book on this topic. Building on the classic work of Hannah Arendt, he provides a framework for understanding the psychological landscape of totalitarianism which is concise and easy to understand. You’ll find yourself saying, “Ah, ha! Of course,” often.

He places this phenomena in the deepest of contexts, both that of the developmental psychology of the individual and the historical evolution of ideas.

As a child we learn language. We want to know the precise meanings of words, but words are described using other words. Meaning is always deferred. This sense of uncertainty can either be accepted as an opportunity for creativity or lead to an anxious hunger for some kind of certainty. The deepest question for the developing child is “What does the Other want?” What is the secret to being loved by the Other? The need for a sense of certainty about this question can lead to narcissism. Healthy development requires the ability to live with uncertainty.

The history of ideas also saw us faced with a choice between accepting that the essence of reality will always be unknowable or a mechanistic way of conceiving of the universe as something which can be fully explained and successfully manipulated to create an earthly paradise. The mechanistic worldview continues to dominate even though discoveries in physics which were made in the twentieth century reveal it to be unfounded. The mechanistic schema is that the realm of physics determines that of chemistry which determines that of biology which determines those of psychology, sociology and economics. But we now know that psychology has the ability to determine physical phenomena such as the movement of atomic particles.

Desmet explains that totalitarianism is the full expression of the mechanistic worldview.

What inspired him to assemble the notes on this topic he had been making over recent years and put them forward to the public in the form of this book was the social and political response to the Corona Virus. In the acceptance of authoritarian control imposed on society and the othering of the unvaccinated, he saw the basic patterns of what at other times has turned into full-blown totalitarianism.

I’m sure that many would resist this interpretation. Sure scientific studies have now shown that the lockdowns led to more collateral damage deaths than they could possibly have prevented Covid deaths. Sure we know that the Covid shots didn’t end up preventing anyone from contracting or passing on the disease (and thus don’t fit the traditional meaning of the word “vaccine” regardless of how much benefit they might hypothetically have in limiting symptoms for the individual.) But we believed these things in good faith. Is it fair to say that we were hypnotised as a result of our social isolation and free-floating anxiety? You or I might not have been a part of the mass formation perhaps, but extremes of behaviour were exhibited by large numbers of people which it does make sense to interpret in that way. Hostility toward “anti-vaxxers” certainly persisted beyond the point at which we knew that they posed no more risk to others than anyone else. And how do we explain people’s willingness to have their male children (who had an infinitesimal chance of a bad outcome from Covid) given a shot which carries a very significant chance of damaging their heart?

Desmet doesn’t go into detail about these issues. You can go to Alex Berenson or Dr. Robert W. Malone amongst others for that. His point is that we have a propensity to manifest totalitarianism. It isn’t just something that happened in foreign countries in decades past.

There is a spiritual vision at the heart of the book which points the way to a cure for our madness. If transhumanism is the latest form of totalitarian dystopia in waiting, the way forward is for us to embrace our humanity, and its grounding in the mysterious creativity of the universe, all the more deeply.

Mattias Desmet

BOOK REVIEW : The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde

When he wrote this essay, first published in 1891, Oscar Wilde was very optimistic about the ability of socialism to rid society of poverty, and advanced machinery to rid society of burdensome toil. Or was he? I don't know much about the context, but Wilde was a playful provocateur. Perhaps by taking the promises made by socialists and running with them, he was trying to expose the fallacies of their thinking and explore what really might be necessary for an improvement in society.

He claims that the chief advantage of Socialism would be rescuing us from having to be concerned about alleviating the hardships of others. Poverty might be ended without the need for charity, which is degrading to the recipient.

What he means by socialism is the abolition of private property. He is not simply talking about some extension of a state funded welfare system. Of course he is writing well before the horrors which attended so many experiments with communism in the twentieth century. So it is possible his optimism is genuine.

We think of socialism as the surrender of the individual to the collective. Irony is at the heart of Wilde's wit, and here the irony is that he takes the promised Utopia of Socialism and explains how it can only succeed if it leads to the full flowering of Individualism.

The reason to abolish private property is that its protection and maintenance distracts us from cultivating our Individuality. The more we are our property the less we are ourselves.

His vision of socialism is more like anarchism. All forms of authority will cease and along with them all forms of punishment.

He turns to the teachings of Jesus, which he presents also as a call to Individualism.

It is common for people to wrongly associate Jesus' teachings with Socialism. There is a huge difference between appealing to one's followers to voluntarily help the poor and advocating that the state should force them to do so. Wilde isn't saying that Jesus was a Socialist. He's merely saying that Jesus advocated Individualism and asserting the opinion that Socialism, if properly pursued, would lead to greater Individualism.

He adds that Individualism would end family life, but that this would make the love of a man and a woman more than it has been, the implication being that that which is enforced is less genuine. Again he appeals to Jesus' refusal to recognise the members of his own family.

In the latter part of the essay, Wilde turns to literary criticism to show how hard it is for Individualism to find acceptance in various written forms.

Wilde's take on things may tend to be unrealistic. He argues ending private property will end crime. But in the broad strokes of his thesis is much food for thought.

It makes sense that a peaceful, cooperative and loving society, if such a thing is possible, would have to be made up of those in whom Individuality has found an unhindered expression. We can see an apt analogy in nature. A thriving healthy group of plants or animals are those least impeded in following their instincts.

Is a society possible where everyone is free from impositions on their Individuality and yet cooperation allows for the practical solution of the problems facing the group?

I think so, but the process to get there will not be easy as the healthy loving impulses are often buried beneath much resentment.

The abolition of private property is impractical because it requires either the consent or the control of the masses. On the other hand, Wilde is right that Individualism is the answer. The way to achieve it is through a mixture of assertion and healing. Strength and soundness are needed to stand firm in the face of all that opposes it. This is where Wilde's pointing to Jesus is so relevant. We don't need screwed up people uninhibitedly living out their reckless disregard for the well-being of themselves or others. Of course, we might see that they are not Individuals, because they are more of a programmed expression of those who have damaged them than of their authentic self. 

But we need a path of healing and it may be that the words of Jesus, rather than those of Socialists, have the ability to provide it.

Anyway, there is much to recommend Wilde's vision :

"For what man has sought for is indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment."

BOOK REVIEW : A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century : Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein

 

The challenges which face us as a species are legion. What should we do?

First we have to know who we are and where we are. We need to understand our programming and the ways in which it interfaces with the world around us, both its natural elements and those we have constructed.

The central challenge is one of hyper-novelty. Our instincts change extremely slowly and so are still adjusted to the way we were living many thousands of years ago. Culture changes more quickly, but still requires much time to test its innovations. A technological advance can spread throughout the world almost instantaneously, but a culture of social habits which allow it to be used for our net benefit rather than net deficit might take decades. Social media gives a case in point. It has brung us great benefits, but we are struggling to know how to manage downsides such as addiction and toxic forms of social interaction.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein set out in this book to provide us with tools which we can use to orientate ourselves and begin to improvise strategies for a liveable future.

I sometimes become annoyed with people who interpret human psychology with an evolutionary lens. Clearly our psychology exists within the process of evolution, but it sometimes seems as if people will use evolution as an excuse to reduce everything to the question of what does or does not lead to the prospering of the genes. So we are told that people wear ostentatious clothes for the same reason that some species of bird have bright feathers, i.e. it helps to attract a mate. That is all very well as far as it goes, but it doesn’t acknowledge that a post-menopausal woman may wear fancy clothes because it feeds her ego to get attention. The authors talk about rape as a product of evolution - a reprehensible form of reproductive strategy. This makes sense, but the rape of non-impregnable individuals is very common. Men rape other men and they rape prepubescent children. Rape can be an expression of a distortion of the ego which does not confer any benefit on the individual's genes.

So it seems to me that, just as culture is nested within and interacts with the system which is the genetic evolution of the species, so the psychology of the individual is nested within genetic evolution and culture, and it would be foolish, in trying to understand it, to reduce it to a role of servant to that larger system. Very often we are not even servants, but rather saboteurs, to ourselves.

This is just to give some idea of my own biases. I was not disappointed in the way this book approached the topic of evolutionary psychology. It emphasises the importance of viewing cultural evolution as being in service of genetic evolution. Just as mutations in genes lead to variations which either persist or don’t depending on fitness for life in the environment, culture is a series of experiments (conscious in this case) which lead to changes in society which either prove adaptive or not.

If an aspect of culture is costly in effort or resources and persists for a long time, then we can assume that it is adaptive in some way. The authors call this “The Omega Principle”. This doesn’t mean that the content of this cultural form is necessary true. It may be a myth which encourages socially beneficial behaviour. If a tribe believe that anyone who steals will go to Hell, it will probably lead to them being more cohesive and prosperous even if it isn’t true.

One of the key influences on this book is G. K. Chesterton. You may get a little sick of just how many times the author’s refer to “Chesterton’s fence,” but it is understandable given what a useful analogy it is. Chesterton pointed out that, if you are walking across a field and you see a fence and you don’t know what the fence is for, it is a really good idea to find out before you tear it down. This is Conservatism 101. Tradition is the wisdom we have inherited. Be careful that any change is going to be in your own best interest.

There is an interesting balance between this caution and the authors’ acknowledgement that, at this crisis point of hyper-novelty, we need to prioritise consciousness over culture. Culture is the repository of old solutions and consciousness is what we use to find a new path. I suppose the idea is that we need to learn the lessons from culture in the process of finding a new way.

There is plenty of practical advice in the book, grouped in bullet points at the end of each chapter. A lot of it centres around limiting hyper-novelty - processed foods, pharmaceuticals, unnatural light, etc. There is much parenting advice. And a lot about getting out into nature and being more sociable in person. Their argument against watching pornography seems like very sound advice for others, though I won’t be following it myself. I’ll also give spending time in potentially dangerous wild environments a miss for the time being.

One part of the book I found very interesting was their comment on the growth in diagnoses of autism and the way they link it to young children being “babysat” by screens. This fits well with what I have read from some other writers and it makes complete sense. I’m curious how it will be received though. In the past, explanations posited for psychological disorders which centred around the behaviour of parents have been very strongly resisted.

It’s a book which is very easy to read and full of fascinating information. I never knew that we humans can be usefully thought of as a kind of fish.

The final chapter deals with the question of where do we go from here - how do we secure ourselves a future. The key insight is that we need to find a psychologically satisfying alternative to material growth. We need to be exploring and utilising a new frontier - “The Fourth Frontier” - because it won’t satisfy us to stagnate without adventure. It has to be something other than maximising our exploitation of the Earth’s resources in the service of an increasing population and its indulgence. It’s a fuzzy picture, but I suppose it has to be. It can’t be someone’s planned utopia. It has to be something emergent from the interactions of us all. Thus it can’t be knowable in advance.

I also highly recommend the authors' Dark Horse podcast.

BOOK REVIEW : Death By Dogma : The Biological Reason Why the Left is Leading Us to Extinction, and the Solution by Jeremy Griffith

I’ve been wrestling with the ideas of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith for over thirty years

What’s the problem? Why not simply accept them or reject them?

I agree with him that the human race suffers from a psychological condition which threatens our future. We are prone to forms of selfishness, aggression and irrationality which have brought us great suffering and squandered opportunities throughout history. And, now, there are so many more of us, we are beset by new forms of irrationality, we seem more miserable than ever, even though our lives are longer and more comfortable, our ecosystems are threatened and we have weapons that could make the world uninhabitable in minutes.

I see it as a psychological problem through observation of myself and others. My behaviour is dependent on the insecurity of my ego in different situations, and I can observe the same to be true of others. If my ego were secure at all times, I would always be cooperative and loving and clear-thinking. When my ego is wounded by shame at a mistake, by criticism or mistreatment of some kind, I am liable to be angry or depressed, ungenerous, rebellious or withdrawn.

How secure could the ego be? How resilient to the vagaries of human existence? Could we all be so secure that love and reason would rule our lives?

That’s what I want - A human race made up of rational loving individuals living peacefully and creatively together in a healthy ecological system.

We clearly can’t get there by force, or by discipline. Whatever is wrong with our psyches, which makes us so prone to feelings of insecurity, needs to heal through self-understanding.

So here is Jeremy Griffith claiming to have the solution. He has a grand narrative to explain what he calls “the human condition”. This is the thing. No-one else that I know of has a grand narrative so all-encompassing.

When I first encountered this narrative, in his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, I felt divided. On the one hand, it was reassuring that someone recognised that there was a problem of this kind and claimed to have the explanation which would solve it. On the other hand, his book was so drenched in an extreme idealist’s vision of the world that it felt more like torture than liberation to read it. He would deny that it was idealistic, because it is a defence for why our behaviour is not ideal. But when someone says that “sex is an attack on innocence” or talks about how an ornate spoon represents several starving Ethiopians, these things are dagger wounds to the insecure ego regardless of the context. And I had never even had sex. But here was I conjuring up the image that I was somehow molesting a small child within me by masturbating to lustful fantasies.

Griffith warned that his book was “confronting” and that we usually coped with these things by being “evasive”. So the question always remains as I critique these ideas - am I following reason or am I evasively fooling myself in order to escape from a reality I find oppressive?

The way it is supposed to work is that the “defence for humanity” is supposed to give me so much relief that the rest doesn’t matter.

I don’t buy that defence. I did at first, but I don’t think it survives close examination.

The problem with presenting a defence within the context of confronting material is that it can lead to the “cripple them and then give them a wheelchair” problem. You don’t want to be too ruthless in your assessment of a defence if its collapse is liable to dump you undefended into the briar patch where “sex is an attack on innocence” and your cutlery drawer is full of dead Ethiopians,

Griffith claims that we have an instinctive orientation toward selflessness. He identifies this with our conscience. He believes we acquired it through something he calls “love indoctrination”. Our ape-like ancestors had an extended nurturing period made possible by a food-rich and predator-scarce environment. The mothers' nurturing of their offspring was a genetically selfish process in the sense that the offspring were repositories of their own genes. But to the infants this looked like selfless behaviour. So the infants learned that selflessness was meaningful. Somehow what was learned by their minds became encoded in their genes. I’m not sure how this works.

Griffith views this instinctive orientation as something dictatorial and unforgiving of deviation. I’m not sure how love can be dictatorial or unforgiving.

When we began to develop our intellects we needed to experiment with different kinds of behaviour. Griffith says we began to feel criticised by our instincts when we deviated from selfless behaviour. Clearly he doesn’t mean literally criticised, as only the conscious mind can criticise. Presumably he means that we felt like we were doing something wrong and thus became insecure, leading to anger, egocentricity and alienation.

In one of his early books, Griffith had a cartoon he had drawn which showed the inner child responding to the individual at each stage of life. Eventually the child is pointing an accusatory finger and saying : “Now you are really bad!” This gets to the heart of what feels wrong to me about Griffith’s worldview. I don’t feel like I have one of those creatures at my core. My guilts seem superficial. They are pain in the flesh of my ego. But when I experience love it comes from a deeper level where there is no judgement. This seems to fit with what we find in religious writings.

If we have a horrified little child judging us from our core, then healing for the individual and the world will be hard, especially if that child is actually an instinct not amenable to explanation.

Griffith says that we are born with instincts which expect a perfect world and we are deeply wounded when we discover that it is so imperfect.

If we have a loving all-forgiving core then we won’t mind that the world isn’t perfect. We’ll just want to do our bit to make it better.

Griffith first wrote an essay called Death by Dogma for the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood newsletter back, I think, in the early 1990s. He’s had a couple of major books out since then which included the same ideas. Now he has this new version which updates the discussion to include the topical subject of Critical Theory.

Is what Griffith himself is presenting a dogma? The scientific method is supposed to involve presenting a hypothesis which attempts to explain the available data and then looking for ways to falsify it, i.e. prove it wrong. Griffith’s approach has been to look specifically for evidence (and quotes from famous people) which back up his hypothesis. This is called confirmation bias. It comes across as an attempt to defend through fortification. And much of his rhetoric is an attempt to persuade by something other than reason. To be fair, if people find it hard to understand the significance of his hypothesis (simple as it is), I suppose he has to sell them on the  idea of making the effort. What we should look for in any explanatory framework for human behaviour is a simple formula which explains the complexities and paradoxes of history and culture no matter where we look and how finely we examine the details. If the advocate of such a framework has to oversimplify and cherrypick in order to provide evidence for its veracity we are right to suspect that it is a pseudo-scientific dogma.

The problem with this new booklet begins with the back cover blurb :

“The Left’s dogmatic insistence that everyone behave in a cooperative and loving way makes its advocates feel good but…”

We have all experienced dogmatic insistence from individuals on the left, but is what they are insisting on “cooperative and loving behaviour.” Cooperative and loving behaviour is something which can only arise spontaneously. Submission to another’s will is not cooperation. To the degree that those on the left demand something, what they demand is submission to their will. It has nothing to do with love, which by it’s nature must be open, spontaneous, honest and generous. What we see is the resentment-driven aggressiveness of the wounded ego masquerading as love and compassion.

With this booklet Griffith is playing catch-up. The justified backlash against Critical Theory had not really got started when his major work Freedom : The End of the Human Condition was released in 2016. It is no secret to those of us who've read Cynical Theories : How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay that Critical Theory is a threat to our society and our ability to practice science, and thus advance our understanding of ourselves. Pluckrose and Lindsay have an advantage over Griffith in their ability to investigate the topic and make it understandable to the rest of us. They don’t have to make the facts fit a pre-existing explanatory structure. They can approach the topic in a scientific rather than propagandistic manner.

Griffith precedes his critique of Critical Justice with a rundown of his ideas about our instincts and a history of earlier dogmas.

He presents his refutation of conventional theories about our competitive and aggressive nature. He rejects ideas about competitive genetic instincts and the role of testosterone in influencing competitive behaviour, etc., because we have words like “egocentric”, “depressed”, “sadistic”, etc. It isn’t necessarily either/or. We might have an instinct to sow our genetic seeds and yet, also, be prone, when emotionally wounded, to become depressed or sadistic. Personally, I think that emotional wounds play a bigger role in competitive human behaviour than genetic competitiveness, but that doesn’t prove there is in us no retention of the impulses of our pre-human ancestors.

Griffith is wrong when he presents the conscience as something instinctive. We may have an instinct for loving behaviour, but that is not what we call our conscience. Our conscience is a part of our ego in which we store our expectations about ourselves. Love is open and free of content. Conscience is rigid and specific in its dictates. Much of the conscience is learned. How else do we explain the fact that different people, in different cultures, feel guilty about different things.

Central to this essay is Griffith’s concept of “pseudo-idealism”. By this he means progressively superficial demands for some improvement in the social world which are essentially dishonest because they mask the person’s “upset”, i.e. their deep well of emotionally-wounded anger, despair or depravity, and don’t recognise the need for moral compromise inherent in the search for meaning. For Griffith, there is a simple progression of dogmas each of which calls for a retreat from the battle and insistence on cooperative social behaviour enforced by some form of discipline. Each is more alienated than the last, less acknowledging of the failings of the individual, that is more delusional and self-congratulatory.

There is no such thing as “pseudo-idealism”. There are just different kinds of idealism, all of them divisive and destructive. Idealism, the tendency to demand that oneself, others or the world as a whole, conform to a concept of perfection, is the root of all evil. Perfection is impossible. To demand it is to breed anger and egocentricity.

The most evil form of idealism would be that which is so total as to condemn humans for not being selfless. The fact that something is less extreme than that doesn’t mean that it is “pseudo”, i.e. pretend idealism.

Now perhaps Griffith thinks of it as “pseudo-idealism” because he thinks that adherents are pretending to be ideal. If so, they are not fooling anyone but themselves in most cases.

Griffith says that Moses was an exceptionally sound individual who gave us the Ten Commandments. Most Biblical scholars agree that Moses was not a real person, that he is a mythical composite for a number of other figures. When it comes to the Ten Commandments, would it really take an exceptionally sound individual to compile a list of dos and don’ts based on the complaints that people in their tribe had about each other? Who wouldn’t be able to identify not killing each other, not stealing from each other and not sleeping with each other’s wives as important principals for maintaining peace in the tribe based on the experience of things which had caused fights in the past? To read the words of Jesus in the Gospels is to be awestruck at the clarity of vision and purity of nature of their source. The Ten Commandments, not so much. Griffith claims that they are still the basis of our law today. Are they? Sure we have laws against killing and theft, but would a person not be punished for those offences in Ancient Greece or Egypt? In most countries it is not against the law to covet one's neighbour’s wife or property. It isn’t illegal to have graven images. Even adultery goes unpunished in many societies. Christopher Hitchens pointed out that it might have been better to forget the coveting laws and put in something against rape and the molestation (or mistreatment in other ways) of children. I think a truly sound individual would have put in laws against those things. Their absence is no mystery if the commandments arose as a reflection of what had caused conflict amongst the men in the tribe. It was a patriarchal society where crimes against women and children could easily be ignored.

Moses and the Commandments by Gustave Doré

Griffith uses the example of Christianity as his primary example of a religion centred around a uniquely sound prophet. He doesn’t mention Islam, although one of his illustrations includes the crescent moon symbol amongst the symbols of other religions. Leaving it out is a good way of avoiding controversy. Where does this religion fit into his progression? Anyone who knows much about the life of the Prophet Mohammad knows that he was very different from Jesus. He hardly conforms to my concept of a sound individual.

Griffith sees Communism as a form of “pseudo-idealism” for people who found the concept of a potentially judgemental God too disturbing. He presents it as being aimed at imposing a cooperative and selfless society. This he sees as a betrayal of our obligation to pursue understanding (through science) of our selfish psyche and thus achieve liberation from it. I think it works better to conceive of Communism as an idealistic thought virus. It provides an excuse for people to unleash their resentment against those more successful than themselves. This is one of the sources of its bloodshed. It also encourages dishonesty to cover for the misalignment between behaviour and espoused ideals, on the part of the rulers or the ruled. Of course violent oppression is also brought on by the imposed nature of the experiment, which Griffith is acknowledging. The reason I see a thought virus as a better way of describing these forms of dogma is that a virus can affect different parts of an organism in different ways and can lead to a progression of different symptoms.

Griffith has a very simple formula at the heart of all this. Our instincts are toward selflessness. Our emerging intellect needed to experiment with departure from selfless behaviour in order to find understanding of itself. The instincts criticised this. Our intellect thus became insecure and responded with anger towards our selflessness-demanding instincts. We became egocentric. Our duty now was to plow on through increasing levels of self-corruption in order to eventually find the understanding which would liberate us and allow us to become selfless again.

Each of the forms of “pseudo-idealism” Griffith examines is, in this formula, an attempt to retreat back towards our instinct’s demand for ideal behaviour and thus deny the need to find and confront the truth about ourselves. Of course, it’s never an insistence on complete selflessness. It’s an insistence that the capitalists stop exploiting the workers or that we stop chopping down so many trees, or something like that. But if those insisting cast themselves as “the good guys” and interfere with the freedom of the human enterprise, then it could derail the whole project. Griffith sees the human condition as a battle against the ignorant condemnation coming from our instincts. It is responsible for the battle weary to leave the battle, adopt some form of behaviour which will allow them to feel better about themselves, but the battle must be pursued by those capable until it is won.

For Griffith, there is a simple progression of dogmas each of which calls for a retreat from the battle and insistence on cooperative social behaviour enforced by some form of discipline. Each is more alienated than the last, less acknowledging of the failings of the individual, that is more delusional and self-congratulatory.

I don’t think we have a dictatorial instinct for selfless behaviour which criticises our experiments in self-management. I think we are born with an instinct for loving behaviour and an intellect which has the weakness that it can become more insecure as it develops if it picks up contradictory programs. Idealism - in the sense of an unforgiving insistence on certain useful forms of behaviour - arose experimentally as we learned to think. This acted as a thought virus to spread insecurity, and thus anger and egocentricity, throughout society. Forgiveness and love (open, honest, spontaneous and generous behaviour) could act as a healing force to the insecure ego, but it could also be seen as implicit criticism and attacked, e.g. Jesus.

To get back to Griffith’s progression of “pseudo-idealisms” - the next is the New Age Movement. What Griffith fails to acknowledge is that The New Age Movement isn’t a dogma. Particular gurus may have their own dogmas that they push, but the movement is really just a loose collection of practices and gurus. It hardly represents the kind of threat that Communism does. It’s voluntary and appeals mostly to those who need something they aren’t likely to get anywhere else. Griffith sees it as more alienated than Communism because it doesn’t acknowledge cooperative ideals. That may or may not be true depending on which guru they are following. Some gurus set up communes.

Next comes The Feminist Movement, which he claims “maintains that there is no difference between people, especially not between men and women.” He believes the feminists are more removed from reality than the New Agers because they don’t acknowledge that there are psychological differences between men and women, and specifically that the fact that men are egocentric is a sign of their heroism not that they are villains. Again he is oversimplifying. Not all feminists believe there are no psychological differences between men and women. The concept of feminism as a route to solving all of society’s problems has the characteristic of an idealistic dogma, but for women to insist on their right to vote and be paid more are simply pragmatic pursuits of self interest. To work together to build rape crisis shelters or defend their access to abortion, likewise, are hardly acts which impede the freedom of society to search for understanding. Where feminism can be a destructive thought virus is when it takes the form of social constructivism. Here there is the belief that the only psychological differences between men and women are those which we are socialised into. As for men, where there is aggression there is insecurity driving it, so Griffith is probably right that the dark side of men will not be healed by more criticism, even if that criticism has to be expected.

With the next development - The Environment or Green Movement - we again see that it is something which grows out of pragmatic approaches to real world problems but which can take a dogmatic form based in tokenistic behaviour or a lack of realistic thinking. There is a lot of “virtue signalling” about environmental issues. On the other hand, they are real. The seas really are full of plastic. The ice caps are melting. The problem is that it is our lifestyle which causes the problems, and it is easier to wave a placard than it is to restrain our consumption. We need psychological healing if we are to heal the planet. Griffith thinks the answer is to absorb his explanation for the human condition and then promote it to all your friends. I don’t think that will work, because I think he’s got his explanation wrong. If his explanation were correct there would be no need for the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living - i.e. to transcend your hurting psyche and live off the excitement of bringing liberation to the world. He says you could use his explanation to go back and reexplain all the traumas of your life to yourself in a “truthful” way using this “information”. I think the only reason that would be so time consuming is that what he is presenting is not the truth but a dogma and you would be attempting to go through and brainwash yourself. If it were the truth, it would effortlessly seep through your thinking bringing its illumination.

I don’t know a lot about post-modernism but my understanding is that it amounts to scepticism of received “truths” taken to the extreme. On the plus side this may mean deconstructing dogma. On the negative side it may mean rejected the means - reason - by which one approaches the truth. If it is a form of idealism, it is one which makes doubt an ideal. It doesn’t seem to, in and of itself, be a demand for ideality in one’s self or others. I believe Foucault was all about analysing systems of power and saw categorisation as one way in which power is exerted over groups. This is a philosophy amenable to “social justice” idealists, but I’m not sure whether Foucault felt that he was making the world a better place. No doubt there are better places to go to get an understanding of what post-modernism is than Griffith. Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book above might be a good start.

Griffith gives an account of conflict between the left and right in evolutionary theory. He also talks about how easy it has been to defend left wing ideas politically and how hard it has been to defend right wing political ideas. He ends with “the ideology of the Left was wrong while the ideology of the Right was correct”. But surely the social system which was working its way toward self-understanding needed a balance of cooperative behaviour and competitive behaviour, some arguing for more assistance for those falling behind and some arguing for progress at all costs. The whole enterprise could be sabotaged by too much insistence on group interests but also by too much individualism without responsibility. If the right were always correct, then slavery would have been O.K. Surely the ideology of the Right was correct when it didn’t go too far, and the ideology of the Left was O.K. when it didn’t go too far.

This mapping of a righteous battle for self-understanding onto specific human behaviours is an uneasy match. Most human enterprises require a good deal of cooperation and generosity. This cooperation and generosity may arise from transcendence of more selfish impulses, but, if there is a battle to achieve self-understanding it is an aid to it. So isn’t this person still participating in that battle? By contrast, someone may live out their aggressive tendencies in defiance of the demands of the instincts, but in such a destructive way  that it disrupts the search for knowledge.

Griffith feels that now we can all become left-wing (in the sense of desirous of and practicing loving and cooperative behaviour) and we can all give up being selfish or aggressive. It may be a little hard to imagine : “I’m selling my yacht and giving the money to the poor because some dude in Australia wrote a book saying I’m really a hero.”

Griffith mentions that Critical Theory drew on Sigmund Freud as well as Marx. The member of The Frankfurt School (birthplace of Critical Theory) in whom these two influences came together was Wilhelm Reich. Reich had been a student of Freud’s, who, like Jung, had split from him. Reich was a member of the German Communist Party at the time when they were fighting the growing power of the Nazis. He would later disavow his support for Communism, or any other mass movement, seeing them all as forms of “the emotional plague”. I find Reich’s account of the human situation, in many ways, more accountable than Griffith’s. Reich saw us as having loving instincts which can be experienced as erotic impulses. If we are taught to fear such impulses they become selfish or even sadistic drives. This gives a clear way of explaining how sex exists on a continuum between a tender act between two people who have got to know each other intimately and a sadistic act like rape. His concept of “character armour” (as presented in his book Character Analysis) gives a practical way of studying ego embattlement. He saw this form of embattlement as the common state of humans. Thus he acknowledged that alienation is now the norm, our thinking and feeling and, even our bodily functioning, being structured by the neurotic (i.e. fearful) ego. He also took inspiration, late in his life, from the teachings of Christ, in his book The Murder of Christ. No doubt the Critical Theorists took some inspiration from Reich, but they don’t seem to have paid much attention to his key insights. Now maybe the emphasis on the sexual in Reich’s ideas needs to be seen in its context. He grew up in a time when it was the norm for parents to punish their children for masturbating. The church and teachers spread the message that natural erotic responses were sinful. One of the ways in which the innocence of children was attacked was teaching them to fear these feelings in their body. Reich would say that the reason someone’s sexual behaviour in adulthood is perverse or even sadistic is because they were taught that their first innocent sexual impulses were something dirty. And repression of erotic sensations brings with it repression of love in all its forms.

Regarding Critical Race Theory Griffith says : “To impose a new world of love and kindness between ethnic groups or races, it was simply asserted that it was philosophically sound to claim that there is no difference between races; and further that any contention that there were differences was just a dishonest, manipulative, racist, artificially invented device used to oppress and ill-treat certain races.” Griffith believes that different races differ in their level of alienation dependant on how long they have been involved in the battle to find knowledge. Hence, Asians are more alienated than blacks. While it is true that one can make statistical comparisons, e.g. seeing that Asians tend to perform better academically, it isn’t clear to me that that is not a matter of culture rather than genes. Would an Asian child who was adopted by a family which didn’t place such a strong emphasis on academic achievement still have an advantage? It’s wrong to make the assumption which Critical Race Theory makes that all variation in success is evidence of racial prejudice. But Martin Luther King’s principle that we should not assess people based on the colour of their skin is the answer to it. If everyone is allowed to proceed on the basis of their merits, then, if some groups have an inherent advantage, that will manifest as it will. But if we were to operate on the belief that such an advantage exists, we might make unfair decisions on its basis.

Griffith leaves out all mention of one of the key offshoots of Critical Theory or “wokeness” - Queer Theory. Queer Theory is based around subverting the concept of normal especially with regard to sexuality. So, for instance, it sees our society as “hetero-normative”, i.e. oppressively imposing the judgement that one is not normal if not heterosexual. One of the dangers of Queer Theory is that some of its adherents want to “normalise” sex with children.

The concept of an idealistic thought virus, appealing to the intellect while sowing seeds of greater insecurity in the psyche or providing tools for gaining power or wealth or providing an excuse or justification for the cathartic unleashing of aggressive behaviour, seems to me to better fit the complexity of the different ideological dogmas which face us in the world today.

It is the divided self which makes us prone to thought viruses. We have a dark side where our resentment dwells. Then we have our “good persona” which needs to have a positive self-perception and which may be sensitive to criticism. The thought virus may take hold with the idea “if you don’t adopt me you’ll be bad”, e.g. “if you don’t support BLM you are racist.” Or such a hook may sometimes not be necessary. The “good persona” is necessarily sensitive to criticism, because it is a precarious barrier against encounter with the dark side. This generalised sensitivity explains the call for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces”. The sense or righteousness of the “good persona” is at the opposite end of the spectrum from knowledge. Knowledge is precisely that which can stand in the face of all criticism.

The divided person who has been infected by the thought virus for some form of idealism, projects their own dark side onto the enemy of that ideal. If anti-racism is the ideal, then white supremacists are all around. The hostile resentment and entitlement he sees in them is that which lurks in his own subconscious.

What often causes the worst behaviour is when the conscience aligns with full expression of aggressive resentment. That conscience is our ideas of what is right or wrong. If we believe that it is right to torture or murder people because this is just punishment for something they have done, the dark side pours out through the “good persona”. In a somewhat milder form this is what we see when “social justice warriors” send death or rape threats to those who challenge their dogma.

The cure for thought viruses is individuation - the owning and reintegration of the dark side. Individuality is the state and practice of not being internally divided. This can also be described as having integrity, i.e. the parts of one’s psyche are integrated. Such an individual is authentic and substantial, not an empty vessel to be filled by whatever intellectual contagion may come along.

Honesty is inseparable from individuality. It means being guided by our own individual perception of reality. Then the question arises as to how accurate that perception is. But it will not be accurate unless it is our own. We must be guided by our own senses and our own reason. Others can provide ideas and data, but it must be sifted and integrated by our own reason if are not to be false.

Griffith believes we are doomed if his message doesn’t reach a broad audience quickly. I don’t think his explanation is correct, but I do find engaging with it is a stimulus to potentially productive insights. Most of what hope I have for the human race comes from my own experience that a breakdown can also be a breakthrough. If there is an answer which will arise from the debates going on in the world, it could spread like wildfire if it works to unlock the mind-prisons of dogma. When we run out of lies, there is nowhere to go but into the truth. Whatever that proves to be.

I take some comfort from the prophecy : “For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Matthew 24:27

This suggests that when an answer arrives we will know it because it will effortlessly race throughout the whole of humanity as if instantaneously. We see this with new technology, so why not with knowledge which unlocks what William Blake called “the mind-forg’d manacles.”

BOOK REVIEW : The Parasitic Mind : How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad

 

Very often the truth hurts. But the truth also sets us free. A safe space may feel comfortable, but only when you leave it do you realise that it was a prison.

This book is important because it is a rallying cry against those who want to make the world a prison on the pretext of kindness - to replace free thought, free expression and the scientific method with various forms of utopian dogma.

Gad Saad is a brave man. (He’ll tell you so himself.) It’s a dangerous business to tell the truth about the Islamic religion particularly. And the subject of biological and psychological differences between the sexes has become a minefield. As Saad points out, it can become risky to talk about things as obvious as the sun in the sky if others are committed to an ideology dependent on denying them.

I have my differences with Saad on a key topic. I won’t say that he is wrong and I am right. I just feel that the issue is far from settled. As an evolutionary psychologist he has a tendency to see superficially similar behaviour in humans and other animals as having the same explanation. For instance conspicuous consumption - buying a Ferrari - has the same underlying cause as the evolution of a peacock’s tail. Fair enough, I see his point. A Ferrari may serve to increase a man’s mating opportunities. But is human selfishness always comparable with the genetic selfishness of other animals? What about the issue of the hunger to assuage the wounded ego? Is the only reason a man tries to have sex with lots of women that his genes want to reproduce themselves. Or can it be that he is trying to compensate for the voice inside that tells him he’s a piece of shit. The two may not be mutually exclusive. A homosexual man who has sex with many partners is not going to pass on his genes by doing so, but it may feed his wounded ego. There are aspects of human behaviour which can be more easily explained once we acknowledge this element. (I’m indebted to the Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, also a strong critic of “political correctness”, for his critique of the false equivalency issue in evolutionary biology.)

Saad says : “The pursuit of these two ideals [freedom and truth] was not imposed on me by my parents; rather it is a manifestation of my personhood as inscribed in my genes.”This seems to me to be a conclusion arrived at by a false dichotomy - i.e. aspects of our ego are a product either of our nature or our nurture. Now maybe we are all born with a genetic orientation toward the ideals of freedom and truth, and most are then socialised out of that commitment. But it doesn’t make much sense that such a commitment is something - like red hair - which one person gets from their genes and others don’t. The thing with socialisation is that it is not a simple substance we passively consume. We can react against it due to our personal experience. Being hurt by another’s lie at an early age could lead someone to pride themselves on being truthful. At that time when our inborn self-acceptance is beginning to erode, we need to find some self-concept within which to maintain our pride, our character armour as psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich described it. When someone calls us something ending in -ist or -phobe, our defence is “but I’m the champion of truth.” And during the long dark night of the soul when we look inside ourselves and see the swamp of lusts and resentments and bitterness, likewise we say “but for all that, I’m the champion of truth.” Or it might be : “But I’m the guy who banged a thousand chicks and drives a sport’s car.” Our behaviour is not necessarily directly comparable with that of other animals, because they have (as far as we are aware) no conscience and thus no long dark night of the soul.

This is important, because the issue of the human condition of the wounded ego and guilty conscience may be crucial to an understanding of the ideological parasites that Saad is discussing.

When feminists talk about “toxic masculinity” they are not making it up out of the air. In individuals, masculinity can take a toxic form. Rape, wife bashing, gay bashing… There are many instances where a man’s ego becomes insecure in a way which makes him feel compelled to inflict violence, humiliation or power dominance over someone more vulnerable than himself. The problem is the way the concept is misused. Masculinity is not inherently toxic. Stoicism is not toxic. Willingness to use violence to protect others is not toxic. What makes masculinity turn toxic is the addition of malevolence arising from the wounded ego. And this also turns femininity toxic. So we should be able to come together on the recognition that malevolence is our joint enemy, and that the healing of the wounded ego is the long term solution. 

Parasites feed off of the weak and vulnerable. Perhaps the ideologies Saad documents are the vultures Jesus referred to when he said of the end times :

"Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather." Matthew 24:28

These ideologies are spread from academia and through popular culture, but why do they find such a receptive audience? We don’t live in a good time for the retention of a healthy flexible ego. Broken marriages, access to all the most disturbing aspects of life at an early age over the internet, the breakdown of community and shared values, lack of opportunities to spend time in nature… All these things can contribute to children growing up into ego-wounded adults.

The Social Justice Warrior role can be particularly seductive to desperately wounded egos. What do they need? A way to “prove” they are a good person. Something which protects them from any aspect of reality which might feel painful to them in their wounded state. And something which allows them a guilt-free outlet for any malevolence. This is similar to the mentality which targeted “the witches” or was behind the Holocaust. A simple belief system which enables individuals to believe that evil exists only outside themselves. 

So we need to challenge the idea pathogens themselves, but addressing the issue of how we heal wounded egos is also crucial. A person with a healthy secure ego is one who has the flexibility to change in the light of newly discovered truth and one who enthusiastically embraces any form of cooperation which serves the common good. We need such people.

Saad suggests adopting the spirit of the honey badger when fighting for the truth. There may be times when that is appropriate. He gives the example of a bakery which sued for defamation when accused of racism. That’s an appropriate response in that case, because if someone defames one business and gets away with it, that will encourage people to do the same to other businesses. But when Saad describes his “honey badger” behaviour on Twitter, I’m less sure. He talks about an exchange where he referred to someone as “a retarded schmuck” and “degenerate”. Now if I didn’t know the person who used those terms - if this tweet was my introduction to him - my first thought would be that I was encountering an insecure individual who was unable to make his arguments through cool reason and was expelling his frustration at his own impotence by using cheap putdowns. Crude ad hominem insults are usually resorted to by the person in the weaker position. This is why so many people call Saad a “racist”, “sexist”, “Islamophobe”, etc. By calling someone a “retarded schmuck” isn’t he just sinking to a similar kind of behaviour? The big dangers when fighting someone are that we may sink to their level, become more like them, and maybe even let slip some of our own malevolence.

Be the rock of truth against which the deluded smash their bloodied fists and thereby advertise their impotence. That would be my suggestion, where it is possible to do so. A tremendous sense of authority comes with being able to remain calm in the face of abuse. I think this is what Jesus was pointing out when he recommended turning the other cheek. A hot-tempered response is a signal of weakness. Speak the truth far and wide and fearlessly, but let the abuse hurlers expose their weakness by their own behaviour. Engaging with them is a waste of your precious time.

So I may look at things a little differently from Gad Saad on some questions, but the door needs to be pushed back open which guarantees us all an open forum within which to use reason to explore reality and look for solutions. He has taken on a Herculean part of that task and he deserves our support. The more of us who join the fight, the less courage is needed by each. It is always hardest at the start. If he can do it, we can do it, and, in time, everyone can leave their safe space and find freedom.

BOOK REVIEW : THE Interview That Solves The Human Condition and Saves The World! by Jeremy Griffith

 

This is a review of a booklet which is the transcript of an interview. You can watch the interview or download a free copy of the booklet here.

The cover of this booklet tells us that “This world-saving interview was broadcast across the UK in 2020 and is being replayed on radio & TV stations around the world.” I’d love to see more information on which radio and television stations in which countries have played the interview. I’ve done a Google search for “Jeremy Griffith” with “Craig Conway” hoping to get some idea of how people in various parts of the world responded to these broadcasts, but I haven’t come up with much other than the World Transformation Movement’s own promotions and Craig Conway’s social media.

There is such a thing as under-selling and over-selling something. If one presents one’s product without any major promise of its value, it may be that hardly anyone tries it out. As Jesus pointed out, you don’t want to hide your light under a bushel. But if you lay the promises on too thick, you are liable to illicit suspicion in the prospective consumer that you are a snake-oil salesman or that you are blowing your own trumpet so loudly and repetitively in order to drown out your own inner critic. The title of this booklet “The Interview That Solves The Human Condition and Saves The World!” should suffice to bring that light out from beneath any bushel. Make the claim and then deliver on it. What a person says in praise of themselves or their own work should count for very little. What matters is whether it delivers for the reader. Does it enlighten them? Do things make sense in the world that didn’t make sense before? Politicians and priests will make glorious promises expressed in soaring rhetoric. But their aim is not to appeal to the reason, but to stir up an emotional response, often one which overrides the reason. An appeal to reason should be cool and calm and challenge the reader to find fault with it.

The blurb about Griffith in the front of the booklet says that “his work has attracted the support of  such eminent scientists as… Stephen Hawking…” This seems a bit misleading to me. Griffith put together a documentary proposal in 2004, which he distributed widely to scientists. He received a reply from someone representing Hawking saying that Hawking “is most interested in your impressive proposal” and “please let us know further details in due course.” I would not interpret this as meaning that Hawking was a supporter of his work. It sounds more like polite curiosity. Before using someone’s reputation to lend credibility to one’s controversial theory, it seems to me that it is only right to make sure that they understand what that theory is and have publicly expressed some kind of praise for it.

Griffith says that “the human condition is such a difficult subject for us humans to confront and deal with that I couldn’t be talking about it so openly and freely if it hadn’t been solved.” I think this is false reasoning. Assuming that we can only talk freely about the human condition, as Griffith defines it, if we have a framework of belief (or understanding) which tells us we are not bad, then all that is needed is for Griffith to have a belief which tells him that he is not bad in order to move around smoothly in that framework. The proof of the framework has to be in its explanatory power.

I agree with Griffith that genetic selfishness can’t explain our competitive, selfish and aggressive tendencies. It is very easy to see that differences in these qualities between individuals are often the result of psychological insecurity. And, in a social species, being competitive, selfish or aggressive would only be a genetic advantage in limited circumstance and for limited times. Success in business, or winning a mate and raising a family, etc., is more dependent on the ability to be a cooperative team member than it is on trying to exercise some form of forceful control over others.

But it does seem we have always been an insecure species, always feeling we need to prove something about ourselves as individuals or tribal groups. We develop feelings of resentment which lead us to take out our frustrations by causing the suffering of others.

A capacity for love and cooperation is always there, though, when we are in a situation where we feel safe from criticism. Mutual acceptance and self-acceptance has the power to heal our insecurity and resentment.

Just because our behaviour has a psychological component, however, doesn’t mean that an impulse to propagate our genes may not also be a part of the motivation for our behaviour. It isn’t an either/or.

I see no reason to see our conscience as something instinctive, as Griffith does. Different individuals in different societies have different ideas on morality. They feel guilty about different things. It makes more sense to me to see the conscience as a part of the ego, an internalisation of a learned moral system. A system of expectations we have about ourselves. For me, guilt is always tied up with thinking. I think critically about my behaviour and I feel emotional discomfort. This leads me to concluded that the conscience resides in the conscious mind, i.e. the ego.

How insecure are we actually about being selfish or competitive? I think it depends on the degree to which we have been told we shouldn’t be selfish or competitive. It’s a negative feedback loop. Being criticised makes us more insecure which makes us more selfish. But this is a social phenomenon. I see no evidence that the criticism comes from somewhere below the conscious mind.

Is psychosis the correct term to use to describe the psychological condition which produces our dark side? A psychosis is a mental illness which causes its sufferer to be seriously cut off from reality. But what do we mean by “reality”? I’ve experienced the state which psychiatrist’s call psychosis. I was cut off from reality in the sense that I thought things were going on around me which were not going on around me. Griffith is saying that psychosis is the norm, that we are all cut off from reality as we go about our daily lives. But we have a good enough grasp on reality to do the things we have to do on a daily basis. Of course we are cut off from reality to some degree, because we process the information about the world around us through our conceptual framework which is a product of our view of ourself which may not be an honest one. I prefer to think in terms of neurosis, emphasising the experience of feeling insecure, because that doesn’t require wrestling with the question of whether we can ever experience unfiltered reality and whether it would be advantageous for us to do so. It must be hard to shop for breakfast cereal while your doors of perception are so open that all things appear infinite.

Griffith’s central thesis is that our psychological insecurity and resultant selfish, egotistical and aggressive behaviour is the result of a conflict which broke out early in our development as a species when our newly formed conscious mind came into conflict with a pre-existing instinctive orientation. “A battle would have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves.”

At first, because we know we have some kind of conflict within us, we may find this argument convincing. But is it?

Are instincts dictatorial? Griffith uses the example of a bird’s flight path. If we were to place a major obstacle in that flight path, would the birds be driven by the dictatorial nature of their instinct to fly headlong into it? Or would they fly around it, following their instinct in a way which was responsive to a changing environment? Surely a lion’s instincts can tell her how to hunt, but not where the game is to be found on any particular day. For that she has to allow her behaviour to be guided by the data taken in from her senses.

If this is the case, then why would a conflict necessarily arise between our instincts and our developing conscious intelligence. Intelligence is a tool, like the senses, with which we can pursue the orientation given to us by our instincts. Why should we expect the instincts to fight back against any experiment in new behaviour?

And Griffith claims that our instinct is for loving, cooperative, selfless behaviour. So wouldn’t an instinct of this kind have to lovingly, cooperatively and selflessly surrender to something which took it in a new direction? An aggressive, selfish instinct might fight back, but not one of this kind.

Griffith describes our instincts as “dogmatic”. The definition of “dogmatic” is “inclined to lay down principles as undeniably true”. But this is something only the conscious mind can do. Instincts are stored information which has proven beneficial to the survival of the members of a species. The fact that it has been beneficial in this way is evidence for its accuracy, but to dogmatically insist upon its truth is something only the conscious mind is capable of. Griffith says that our instincts “are going to condemn him [our mythical ancestor Adam Stork] as being bad.” Again, only the conscious mind can condemn someone on moral grounds. Griffith seems to be projecting the nature of the idealistic judgemental human onto our pre-conscious orientating system.

My contention is that we do have a conflict between good and evil going on within us and that we do become insecure in the face of idealism which criticises us, and that this leads to us becoming ego-embattled - egotistical, selfish, aggressive and alienated. But I see idealism as being a product of the experimentation of the conscious mind. The war within is not between our ego and our instincts, but between conflicting influences within our ego. Our ego is the battleground. If we turn off our ego for a while and reconnect with our instinctive orientation, I believe we will find it to be an all-accepting, all-forgiving, non-judgemental openness to loving interaction with others. Of course we need our conscious mind to understand the world and make decisions. Our loving instincts are not sufficient on their own, but we should not project onto them any aspect of the battle going on in our ego.

This problem of treating the instincts as if they are capable of conscious thought runs through Griffith’s Adam Stork story. He says that Adam ideally would have sat down and explained to his instincts why he wasn’t bad. But this makes no sense, because the instincts are incapable of understanding. You can’t explain anything to them. It is Adam who has to explain to himself that he is not bad. If it were a matter of our instincts understanding us, the problem would be insoluble because it would depend on something which is impossible, i.e. instincts understanding anything at all.

Griffith has said that he was extremely idealistic in his youth. Presumably this led to him being very critical of other’s non-ideal behaviour. Is it possible that when he thinks of the instincts he is thinking of his youthful self. He needed people to explain to him why their behaviour was not as ideal as he felt it should be, but they were unable to do this. Is he seeing in the story of humanity the story of his life? This has to be a strong tendency for anyone who sets out to articulate an all-encompassing account of human behaviour.

Griffith relates his theory about this conflict between the instincts and the conscious mind to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, but he doesn’t deal very thoroughly with that myth. He says that Adam and Eve ate “from the tree of knowledge”. He leaves out the bit about it being the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”. This is misleading. If it is simply the “tree of knowledge” then this suits his theory that the key event was development of the ability to reason. But “tree of knowledge of good and evil” suggests that it is specifically talking about moral knowledge - i.e. idealism, which distinguishes between some forms of behaviour which are categorised as “good” and other forms of behaviour which are categorised as “evil”. General knowledge about how the world around us works need not undermine our self-acceptance and thus make us selfish and ego-centric, but idealistic standards against which we can find our behaviour and that of others wanting does undermine self-acceptance and lead to a negative feedback loop which actually promotes “sinful” behaviour. Hence our fall from grace.

Griffith claims that his work has not been accepted by mainstream science because it conflicts with the prevailing paradigm, but I see no evidence that he presents a credible testable hypothesis.

There is a problem with Griffith’s concept of “love indoctrination”. The idea is that our ape-ancestor’s mothers nurtured them for genetically selfish reasons, but to the infants it looked like selfless behaviour, so they were “love indoctrinated”, i.e. they learned lovingly selfless behaviour. This is supposed to have happened before the liberation of full consciousness, but learning requires a conscious mind. Conscious learning is overlaying and supplanting the underlying genetically selfish instincts. How does this learning from experience end up encoded genetically so that we are born with the orientation? And how can something which is by its nature patient and forgiving become the source of a dictatorial instinct which is intolerant of experimentation?

Is it not possible that what love needs to manifest is simply a niche were it will not be eliminated? Where an animal who doesn’t compete for food dies and the genes of an animal that doesn’t compete to breed are eliminated, evolution selects against love. But in a social animal living in a food rich environment for millennia, there is no evolutionary disadvantage to opening up to the intrinsic pleasure and group advantage of love. The essence of nature is to create through the formation of wholes, so the formation of a loving whole amongst humans goes deeper than instinct to the very heart of the creative principle itself.

This could explain why bonobos developed as such a loving species. In them we may see what our ancestor’s were like before we began to undermine our self-acceptance by applying idealistic moral judgements to ourselves and each other. As Griffith quotes primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, “If you are a bonobo infant, you can do no wrong…” Idealism is the opposite of nurturing. Forgiveness returns us to our own capacity for love, while judgement against a standard of perfection makes us angry and resentful and drives us on to the kinds of actions which will attract only more judgement.

Because he sees the human condition as arising from resentment of the instinct’s judgement of our non-ideal behaviour, Griffith feels that each of us is a deep well of upset. “And no wonder we have led such an evasive, denial-practising, lying, avoid-any-criticism, escapist, alienated, superficial and artificial, greedy, egocentric, power, fame, fortune and glory-seeking existence.” While we are prone to these things, this seems the view of an idealist who only sees the negatives. I find Wilhelm Reich’s concept of the character armour more helpful for understanding the dark side of our nature, i.e. that our personality rigidifies around the battle to justify ourselves. All that is needed is for us to feel truly safe from criticism for this often very destructive defensive structure to begin to soften. But Griffith builds his description of the human condition out of idealistic criticisms, what he sees as “confronting truths”. This might be acceptable if his theory actually worked, but because it doesn’t, I see his writing as a kind of Trojan Horse which promises to defend us against condemnation and thus encourages us to open up to statements like this one which, taken on their own, sound like condemnation. This may make us all the more desperate to embrace his theory uncritically. After all, now that he has presented us in such a harsh light, we need something to feel good about ourselves again.

But if the problem lies not in our instinctive orientation but in idealism as a cultural phenomena, I think all that negative behaviour Griffith describes can still be explained - idealism does make us egotistical, selfish and aggressive - but the way in which this phenomena plays out in the world can be understood with less of a temptation to resort to simplistic over-generalisations, as Griffith does when tackling such subjects as politics and sexuality. One need only see idealism as a kind of thought virus, taking different forms - religion, communism, Critical Social Justice Theory, etc. - spreading from individual to individual and producing different forms of negative symptom in different contexts. The key factor is that we have a form of idea which leaves those it contacts feeling criticised in a way which, rather than being the source of healthy correction, sows the seeds of resentment and ego-embattlement. By contrast there must be a healthier form of idea which heals and brings us back toward the capacity for reason, the courage needed to face our problems and the love to bring us together as a community. We will know when we have found this idea, because it will spread like wildfire, everywhere transforming the darkness into light. It won’t require effort for people to embrace it. By their fruits shall ye know them.

Griffith talks about socialism, the new age movement, the politically correct movement etc. as “pseudo-idealist”. The definition of “idealism” is “the unrealistic belief in or pursuit of perfection.” Idealism is always a bad thing, because perfectionism poisons any attempt to improve things in the world. The term “pseudo-idealist” would mean someone who is only pretending to have an unrealistic belief in or pursuit of perfection.” Is it worse to be a pseudo-idealist than to be a genuine idealist? They are both negative social phenomena. But is everyone who calls themselves a socialist or a member of the new age movement in pursuit of perfection? There are right wing people who have a perfectionistic view of society which makes them intolerant of others as well. Hitler was an idealist. His ideal was racial purity. The battle between different forms of idealism can not be understood as a simple dualism. Griffith is prone to see it all as an expression of his battle between the selflessness-demanding instincts and the understanding-seeking ego. So he sees the left who call for a fairer society as oppressive of the search for understanding and the right who call for more self-reliance and less regulation as championing the search for understanding, even though someone on the left may be a champion of free enquiry and someone on the right may want to reduce spending on pure research. You can’t simply lay some grand worldview over the struggles of individuals in the world and think you have understood them. You have to acknowledge that there is usually more variety between individuals in particular groups than there is difference between the groups. Griffith wrote an article for a conservative on-line publication “explaining” the irrationality of the left. The readers responded enthusiastically to the claim that the left were crazy, but I doubt if many of them looked more deeply into his work. I’ll be impressed if he gets the same audience to accept his claim that “there’s no longer any reason for the right-wing in politics” and that they should become “effectively…left-wing.” Left or right, you get a lot of people who just want to be told what they want to hear. I put my hope in deep thinkers, some of whom come from the left and some from the right. Left wing examples include James Lindsay and Bret Weinstein, who are at the forefront of the battle to expose Critical Social Justice Theory. There are wise people on the right too, but there are also people who are irrational enough to believe that Donald Trump is the best politician in the world at the moment or who are caught up in bizarre conspiracy theories.

So I agree with Griffith that our species suffers from a psychological insecurity, that some of our distant ancestors were free of this condition, that the human race is not essentially bad but rather heroic and that we can heal the problems of the world with knowledge about the origin and nature of this condition. What I don’t believe is that it originated in a conflict between our instincts and our intellect. I don’t believe our instincts are dictatorial or unforgiving, but quite the opposite and I believe the origins of the problem originated with the development in the conscious mind of our ancestors of idealistic, i.e. perfectionistic, standards for the judgement of moral behaviour. The stricter the standards the more they drive us to the opposite by undermining self-acceptance and generating resentment. Like Griffith I feel we are right on the brink of the abyss. That’s why diagnosing our condition accurately is so important. I don’t feel that he has done so. If he presented his theory as just that and encouraged readers and listeners to find fault with it, I would give this booklet a higher rating, but any work has to be assessed against what it promises. This one literally promises the world, and delivers something far less than that.