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a mistake, by criticism or mistreatment of some kind, I am liable to be angry or depressed, ungenerous, rebellious or withdrawn.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.

The Empire of the Most Easily Triggered

Photo by ruslanshug

In How to Be Free I argue that neurosis is the norm for humans. By this I mean that we have an insecurity about our own worth which makes us especially prone to negative emotions. As a result our ego - our conscious thinking self - is preoccupied with self-defence - we are ego-embattled. Our rigidly defensive personality can be conceived of as our character armour (to take a concept from the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich). It is a protection against threats from without - the criticism of others - and within - any potentially disorienting emotion, such as fear, anger or grief, or impulse, such as sexual lust, which we keep repressed.

The more embattled the individual, the more important it is to maintain strict control over their own psychology, and this may be paralleled with an impulse to control the social world around them. So I expressed the view in my book that this need might explain oppressive rule, with those who are most insecure about their own worth feeling the need to rise to the top of the hierarchy and impose discipline on the masses. That may be a bit over-simplistic, as competent leadership can also bring people to the top of a hierarchy. Not all leaders are tyrants. It may, however, go some way to explaining the motivation behind tyranny. After all, the life of a tyrant can be a harsh and unpleasant one, and so a fear-based need may explain the surrendering of opportunities for care-free enjoyment.

At the moment we are faced with a different kind of authoritarianism - the decentralised authoritarianism which arises from Critical Social Justice Theory and its mob-enforced political correctness. It is no coincidence that the tertiary institutions where this new dogma was born also popularised the “safe space” and the “trigger warning”. Insecurity is the driving force behind this form of authoritarianism as well.

In some ways this could be seen as a reverse of the phenomena which Critical Social Justice Theory is ostensibly aimed at addressing.

While racism may have originated in tribal conflicts and sexism in friction resulting from the division of labour between nurturers and group protectors, it becomes ever more severe through a process of negative feedback as individuals become more and more insecure. These responses rigidified into armouring. The insecure individual dehumanises, silences and attacks those he has already exploited or mistreated in some way, because they are to him the outer mirror of that quiet voice inside which tells him he is doing wrong. Of course there can be other aspects of the phenomena arising from something like repressed sexuality which causes him to see members of another race as sexually dangerous or to see women’s sexuality as a threat.

The insecurity which arises from Critical Social Justice Theory is different, but it can lead to a similar kind of fear-based oppression.

What we need to be aware of is the inability to tolerate difference, in this case difference of opinion. The secure individual may view another individual’s difference of opinion on some key question as a challenge, but they will not interpret it as a personal attack.

I think what has happened with Critical Social Justice Theory is that it provides a false explanatory structure for the world. A sound explanatory structure will have a healing effect on the traumatic wounds an individual may be carrying. It will make the individual more courageous and less resentful. It will give them a way of understanding any bad treatment they have experience in life as something which doesn’t reflect badly on them as an individual and direct them toward a positive strategy to addressing the injustices they find in the world around them now. It will make them more tolerant of differing opinions and better able to engage in productive discourse with those who hold them.

But Critical Social Justice Theory is a poor explanatory structure which feeds on the wounds of the traumatised individual, encouraging feelings of resentment and directing them against anything, such as reason and evidence, which might undermine that explanatory structure. It encourages confirmation bias.

Just as racists and sexists are easily triggered, and thus have tried to maintain control over society in order to keep their fears or guilts at bay, so those who have a very poor explanatory structure as their only strategy to live with whatever wounds they are carrying - and the anxiety which arises from them - will end up trying to exercise control over any social manifestation of the realities this explanatory structure is in denial of.

I keep coming back to Biblical concepts, even though I’m not a believer in the supernatural.

To me the Kingdom of Heaven is the society which would arise if our insecurity about our own worth were healed. It is the absence of the control impulse. Love is open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. It is a process which brings us together naturally when we give up trying to control each other. Reason and evidence provide the grounding for this as they are the way in which we discover our collective reality.

Critical Social Justice Theory is an attack on love and reason. Thus I identify it with the Anti-Christ, that which falsely claims to be solving the world’s problems but actually is anti-The Kingdom of God.

We are told, in the Bible, that there will be a final conflict before the arrival of the Kingdom of God, that there will be a Judgement Day and many will be thrown into The Lake of Fire.

If you are caught up in a false explanatory structure which is your strategy for holding all your psychological pain at bay and you are telling yourself that you are the good guy fighting for a better world, it is going to be very painful to be confronted with the truth that you are on the side of destruction and have been deceived. All the pain rushes back in and with no defence. Perhaps that is what is meant by being thrown into The Lake of Fire.

But if that is true, the good news is that it isn’t eternal. The Kingdom of Heaven still lies on the other side of that agony, because love is the sea that refuses no river. All that is needed is to stop fighting against it.

The Anti-Christ May Come As a Social Justice Warrior

Drawing by vladischern

I’ve reached a crossroads where I realise that I need to take a stand and make my position clear.

I was telling a Christian friend yesterday that I’ve come to the conclusion that predictions of the rise of an “Anti-Christ” in the Bible refer to the domination of the world by a particular dogmatic cluster which has been described by various people as “critical theory”, “identity politics”, “postmodern Marxism” or “cultural Marxism”. The latter two terms may not be completely accurate, but what matters is what is being pointed to by them, not how accurate the name is.

There are other people who are much better than me at dissecting and critiquing these ideas. I recommend Jordan Peterson or Bret Weinstein.

The reason I have come to identify these belief systems with the figure of the Anti-Christ is that they promise what Jesus promised - an end to the injustices of the world - but it is not what they deliver.

For me, as an unbeliever, Jesus represents a principle of truth, love, non-judgement, forgiveness and generosity. Love - open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication - is the answer. But I believe that the dogma of identity politics, which has spread through our culture, brings lies, hatred, judgement, vindictiveness and selfishness, all the time claiming to fight those things.

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)

Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:

Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house:

Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!

But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day:

For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.

And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

Matthew 15-22

The “abomination of desolation” refers to offerings give to a false God. To me the significance of this expression is that we are coming to a time when “social justice” replaces love as our highest good. Justice is important, but, by its very nature, it can only be achieved by force and control. Love, the attitude which allows us to treat all our fellows as equal embodiments of the divine, leads us toward healing and a better world for all naturally.

The rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement has made it all so clear. The cat is out of the bag. We have a movement which claims to be about saving black lives, but it calls for the defunding of the police. Since far more black lives are lost to violent crime than to police brutality, this means it is promising one thing and delivering the opposite. If you point this out you may be labelled a racist. This thought virus is powerful and deadly. The sensible approach to reducing police brutality would be to spend far more money on the police so that they can spend more time training and so that enough police can be employed that it is very easy to fire any police officer the first time they show signs of racism or a propensity to use excessive force. No matter how dissatisfied anyone is with the police, they should be able to realise that any power vacuum created by a reduction in the effectiveness of the police will be filled by violent criminals.

When I went onto Twitter today I found someone who appreciates my writing saying : “If you've ever heard me say that heteronormativity is a product of patriarchy, this is where I got the information from. The book is called "How to Be Free" by Joe Blow.” The following pages of my book were attached to illustrate this.

So here is my crisis. What do I do when I find my writing being associated with that which I identify as the Anti-Christ?

I don’t blame anyone for making this connection. I talk about some of the same things that are talked about in critical theory. I talk about the psychological basis for patriarchy and fear of homosexual desire. But I don’t support calls to “smash the patriarchy” as those in the grip of identity politics sometimes do. I talk of patriarchy mainly in the past tense, because our society no longer excludes women from positions of power.

What about “heteronormativity”? It is defined as “the belief that heterosexuality, predicated on the gender binary, is the norm or default sexual orientation. It assumes that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of opposite sex.”

I don’t really disagree with that. Gender is binary. Biologically there is male and female. There are psychological characteristics which we identify as masculine or feminine. There isn’t some third gender with which we identify characteristics. Of course there are men who exhibit more feminine characteristics and women who exhibit more masculine characteristics, and there some people who have about an even mix. It is like colour. There are only three primary colours. All the other colours are mixtures of those. All gender identities are mixtures of the masculine and the feminine. And heterosexuality is the statistical norm, and heterosexual families are the organisation best suited to producing healthy children - all other things being equal.

None of that is to say that we should idealistically insist on that which may be the statistical norm. There are many ways of doing things effectively in the world.

In my book I posit that bisexuality is the underlying form of sexuality. I arrived at this conclusion as a result of what I learned about our close primate relatives - the bonobos - who engage in erotic exchanges irrespective of gender. Also because we have the biological capacity to share erotic physical pleasure with others irrespective of gender. And because many heterosexuals are uncomfortable with homosexuality, which implies, to me, that there is a contrary desire for it buried beneath the public face. All of this is just speculation on my part.

Another incident which has focused this problem in my mind has been the treatment of J. K. Rowling over her discussion of transsexuality. I read her blog post on the topic, which I found to be remarkably sensible, well-informed, open-minded and compassionate. Yet, she has been roundly attacked. This tells me that we are at a very dark time. To speak the truth in a way which challenges this pervasive dogma is dangerous, but necessary.

Some may think me paranoid to use concepts like thought virus or even demonic possession to depict what is happening, but I think it helps to visualise how it works - the way that it has a life of its own, which operates through people without them being aware of what is happening to them.

I’ve said that idealism is the root of all evil and is a thought virus. Identity politics (lets stick with that term) is the most dangerous form of idealism which has ever existed, because it has spread most broadly to the global community. Religious groups have often done terrible things because of an idealistic insistence on imposing their dogma on others. And communists and fascists have slaughtered millions as a result of their idealistic dogma. If the current lie can be exposed in time, it may not come to that. But I have no doubt that, if not exposed as the lie that it is, this current dogma will lead to even worse horrors and, in fact, the end the human race.

So, there, I’ve explained where I stand. If anyone wants to quote my writings as a way of supporting this dogma, they are welcome to. That is their business, not mine. From the very beginning I’ve renounced what I call “the control strategy”. I take no ownership of my ideas. They are offered to be used as the person receiving them sees fit. To my mind this is how I differentiate myself from what I call “the Anti-Christ”. You will see those who are in “his” thrall trying to control others expression through intimidation or censorship.

I am, and have always been, on the side of freedom and love.

"Ye shall know them by their fruits." Matthew 7:16

Is Objective Truth Possible?

Surely we are all in denial about something. That's why our social world is so divisive. Partial truths warring against other partial truths. If only some deity would come along and force us to see where we are full of shit. As an unbeliever, perhaps I'm suffering from Apocalypse envy, but sometimes I wish the world could just be blasted with a thunderstorm of incontrovertible truth that would put us all on the same page.

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Can Dogma Drive Out Dogma? : The Case Against Jeremy Griffith and the World Transformation Movement

“Yes, terminal alienation is upon us; humanity has entered end play, a death by dogma.”

Jeremy Griffith, Freedom : The End of the Human Condition

“You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.” 

Matthew 7:5

There is currently a massive publicity campaign in support of Jeremy Griffith’s new book Freedom : The End of the Human Condtion. It has been billed as “The Book That Saves The World.” When an article by Griffith outlining his theory about the human condition was rejected by Scientific American as being “not in the realm of science,” Griffith described this as “the most serious crime that could possibly be committed in the whole of humanity’s 2-million-year journey to enlightenment…”

A central message in Griffith’s book is that humanity is currently facing a “death by dogma” which will lead us to a state of terminal alienation. There is no doubt that there are some dogma’s which may threaten our existence - religious, political, economic… An effective response to the challenges - social and environmental - which face us will require thinking outside the dogmatic box.

But is Griffith’s 799 page opus the answer we are looking for?

Often when we look around at our complex world, we see a pattern in it which reflects our own situation. Griffith sees an all-pervading dogmatism in social phenomena such as the New Age movement, feminism, socialism, deconstructionism, etc. Wikipedia gives this definition : “Dogma is a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted.” While there are no doubt groups of individuals within each of these social movements who adhere to some kind of set of unquestionable beliefs, is this really the norm in any of them as a whole? Is there not debate, questioning, disagreement? And what is the percentage of society which is caught up in any of these social movements? It is true that some of them, such as deconstructionism and feminism are very influential in the academic world, and so dogmatic forms of these movements can threaten the place we have set aside for free enquiry. But generally, when they become too dogmatic, there is a healthy resistance put up to them. Probably of more concern is religious dogma which drives violence and oppression, particularly in the Middle East. And that is not a new problem.

So if it is hard to see this death by dogma dragging us all to terminal alienation, what might Griffith be seeing? Could it be a reflection of his own condition? Has his theory about the human condition become a dogma that neither he nor the members of his organisation The World Transformation -Movement - dare “question or doubt”? If his explanation is false but he and his followers cling to it, then that makes it a delusion, and to be in a state of delusion, cut off from the real world, is what we mean by the word “alienation.”

One of the main ways we can tell the difference between genuine insight and dogma is fluidity during debate. If someone has a sound understanding of some topic then they can debate about it very freely using their own words and responding to different questions raised in a spontaneous way. It is clear that they have a good map if they can move around the terrain of the topic without getting lost. Dogma is characterised by a tendency to quote the originator a lot rather than express things in one’s own words. The other party’s disagreement is liable to cause agitation rather than being a challenge smoothly taken up. In a dogma everything has to be referred back to the conceptual framework. Points can’t be debated in isolation from that framework. Also, very often, with dogma, a person who disagrees is accused of being in denial - e.g. a dogmatic Christian might say that an atheist can’t see the truth because he is “a slave to sin”.

Now that Griffith’s writing is reaching a wide audience, the test will be to see how he and his advocates handle criticism. Will they debate freely with their critics? Will they encourage us to doubt and try to find fault, as is consistent with the scientific method? And if they do debate with critics, will their application of their “knowledge” be flexible and spontaneous?

If this is not the case, they have a built in excuse. Griffith lays it out in Freedom :

“The danger is that if we study this information beyond what our particular level of soundness and security of self can cope with we risk becoming overly confronted by the extent of our corrupted condition and dangerously depressed… Regarding the degree to which we should each investigate these explanations, obviously it is necessary to sufficiently verify to our own satisfaction that they are the liberating understandings of the human condition that the whole human race has been tirelessly working its way towards for some 2 million years—but we shouldn’t risk investigating them to the extent that we start to become overly exposed and confronted by the truths they reveal. Having lived without any real understanding of human life it is natural to want to keep studying these explanations that finally make sense of the world, both within and around us, but, again, such analysis can lead to becoming overly confronted and depressed by the extent of our own corrupted state, and that of our world… The more intelligent and/ or the more educated in the human-condition-avoiding, denial-based, mechanistic, reductionist paradigm, who pride themselves on being able to think and study and grasp new ideas, will initially be especially tempted to study these understandings beyond what their varying levels of security of self can cope with, but it won’t be long before everyone learns that such an approach is both psychologically dangerous and irresponsible and, in any case, unnecessary.”

Could studying these ideas lead to mental health issues, such as depression. Yes. If we are insecure about our own worth, and which of us isn’t to some extent, then studying Griffith’s books might well lead to depression. Why? Because they are drenched in a very extreme form of idealism which can undermine our self-acceptance and make us feel guilty. Just as a tiny example, in his second book Beyond the Human Condition (1991) he says :

“On the table in front of me is a silver teaspoon with an ornately engraved handle. It is very much an old world teaspoon. The bright silver and the embellishment glorified us when the world unjustly condemned us. It ‘said’ we were wonderful when the world in its ignorance wouldn’t. Without such materialistic reinforcement we could not have sustained our effort to find understanding. Materialism wasn’t bad, in fact it was most necessary, but now it will gradually become unnecessary. The time and money spent digging up the silver and embellishing the spoon can now be spent helping others. We deserved to be glorified but the time and energy spent seeking glory impoverished others. The human condition made us self-preoccupied or selfish. We can now look at that teaspoon and recognise that it is a two or even three starving Ethiopians extravagance.”

So there is a compassionate defence of materialism, but there is also the image of two or three Ethiopians starving to death because we have an embellished spoon. If we were to really take this on board and look around at all the things we own and count up all those dead Ethiopians it could be pretty depressing for us. Of course the aim is not to depress us, but to defend us and thus make us able to face the grim truth. Even if we are as wonderful as Griffith claims, though, do we really want to count that wonderfulness by the measure of death by starvation of Ethiopians?

Griffith could have presented his central thesis without any reference to starving Ethiopians or any of the other “confronting” material which is an expression of his extreme idealism.

Here is the essence of Griffith’s theory :

The human condition began when a conflict arose between our instinctive orientation and the need of our developing intelligence to experiment with self-management. We have a genetic orientation towards ideal, i.e. selfless behaviour. This is our conscience. Most other animals have a genetic imperative to compete, over food or mating opportunities, etc. It was an extended nurturing period in our species which overcame this competitive tendency. This process is called “love-indoctrination”. In caring so diligently for their children the mothers were still following the imperative to foster the survival chances of their own genes, but the offspring were not to know this and would interpret the behaviour as selflessness. Thus they would learn that selflessness was meaningful, and, over time, a genetic orientation towards selfless behaviour would become “hardwired” into us.

But “love-indoctrination” also liberated our capacity for reason. Our reasoning mind had no knowledge of our instinct for selfless behaviour and it needed to experiment with self-management in order to realise its potential. When we experimented with behaviour which contravened our genetic conscience, it criticised us. Unable to explain why we had to go against its programming, we became frustrated with it and the oppressiveness of its unjust criticism. We became angry at it. It’s criticism made our ego insecure and thus embattled. We became egotistical. And we tried to block out awareness of it and the world of wholeness and honesty it represented. We became alienated. All of our selfishness and aggression - our dark side - thus arose from the necessary - indeed heroic - defiance of our soul/conscience/genes’ unwitting attempt to oppress the search for knowledge. We are thus all heroes and good and evil are reconciled.

This theory could have been presented in a brief booklet. There is no great complexity to it. What fills out the rest of Griffith’s books is a mix of self-promotion and his extreme form of idealism. From Beyond the Human Condition :

“Sunglasses aren’t always worn to shade the eyes from the sun. Often they were worn to alienate ourselves from the natural world that was alienating us. They were an attack on the innocence of daylight.”

As with the Ethiopians we can see the compassionate defence for wearing sunglasses, but that just leads us to the (rather absurd) stinger that we are “attacking the innocence of daylight.”

Griffith talks about a phenomena he calls “the deaf affect.” He says that many people won’t really hear what he is saying at first. They will need to re-read the book or watch explanatory videos, which have the reassuring effect of seeing a person calmly talking about potentially confronting concepts.

When I read Griffith’s first book Free : The End of the Human Condition (1988), I didn’t experience any “deaf effect”. I grasped it all immediately. But I had the “advantage” of being a depressed person.

I think that what this deaf effect is is the mind’s defence against extreme idealism. It isn’t profundity per se that we have a problem with, but anything which poses a serious threat to our self-acceptance.

I can’t be sure how others respond to Griffith’s writing, but I have a theory.

If the brain protects itself against the corrosive effects of extreme idealism, then that aspect of the book will be the last part to sink in. At first there will be the effusive promises of an end to all the world’s problems. Then an intriguing, on the surface credible, theory about the origin of our darker side. And only after that will the starving Ethiopians become real.

At this point the individual will be advised to adopt the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living - simply supporting the “understandings” without confronting them any more. And anyone who does continue to study this theory and expresses criticism of it will be told that they have become overly confronted and are now trying to deny what they know deep down to be the truth. Believers, justifiably afraid of looking at all that depressing idealism, will tend to accept this assessment.

I don’t believe any of this is deliberate. It is just a kind of naturally occurring perfect storm that has grown out of Griffith’s attempt to reconcile his extreme idealism with reality. The fact that he believes that there is a direct correlation between high IQ and alienation means there is a built-in defence against the criticism of those who are more intelligent and scientifically qualified than Griffith. It is not that his science is poor, but that they are too alienated to be able to admit to its truth.

When someone comes up with a theory of human behaviour the tendency is to have a blind spot, to build the theory around an unconscious attempt to normalise their own position. So a competitive scientist may be prone to confirmation bias towards their theory that our competitive and aggressive tendencies are inborn, part of our genetic inheritance from our ape ancestors.

It seems to me that Griffith’s theory is built around the unconscious motive of normalising his extreme idealism. He puts forward the idea that we have an inborn genetic orientation to idealism. On close examination this doesn’t work. He is saying that this genetic orientation to idealism - this inborn demand for selfless behaviour from ourself and others - was intolerant of our conscious mind’s need to experiment with self-management and find understanding. But such a genetic orientation could not have been at the centre of a loving, integrative, cooperative society before this conflict arose, because idealism is not integrative. Idealism is disintegrative. The only kind of genetic orientation which could have been at the centre of a loving, integrative, cooperative society is an instinctive orientation towards loving behaviour, and essential to loving behaviour is forgiveness. Arguably the most powerful example of love in our culture was Jesus praying forgiveness for the men who nailed him to the cross. The evolution of a cooperative society would mean the favouring of individuals who were willing to forgive unloving behaviour, because if unloving behaviour is forgiven the individual is re-integrated into the group. Idealistic intolerance for unloving or selfish behaviour would lead to resentment, which, while it could be repressed for a while, would eventually bring a rift in the integration of the group.

Because to be loving is one of our ideals, it is easy to make the mistake of believing that an orientation which would facilitate loving behaviour would be one which idealistically insists on loving behaviour. But it is an important distinction because idealism has a tendency to undermine the capacity for love of the idealist and those who interact with him. Unconditional self-acceptance is the basis for the capacity to love others. We are born with an orientation towards love, acceptance, forgiveness… No-one is born with an unforgiving insistence that they or others conform to any kind of ideal. Griffith may have been such an idealist as a young man, but if he were born that way then he was born very different from other babies. The fact that they so easily bond with the adults around them indicates that they are not comparing them against some inborn expectation of ideality.

The problem with grand theories of human behaviour is that those who come to believe in them can easily fall afoul of confirmation bias. Evidence which appears to confirm the theory attracts attention while evidence which contradicts it is either not seen or explained away.

It makes sense to me that idealism has been the origin of the dark side of human behaviour. Idealism criticises us, and over time we are liable to hit back at that criticism, and as our self-acceptance is undermined we are liable to become more selfish. But idealism is not in our genes. It is a social phenomenon arising from the thinking of the rational mind. It seems to make sense to distinguish between good behaviour and bad behaviour and to try by an act of will to pursue the former and avoid the latter and to insist that others do likewise. What is not so obvious is that by holding onto idealism in this way we undermine our self-acceptance and thus make it harder to sustainably maintain good behaviour.

In his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, Griffith says, “Above all finding the explanations presented in this book was an exercise in learning to stand by exactly what my conscience wanted to say, was learning to trust my conscience and not those around me.” This is in the context of talking about himself as a prophet. He is saying that he had to learn to trust his conscience, i.e. to not “question or doubt” it. A free thinker questions and doubts everything, subjects it the test of reason. If obedience to the conscience takes precedence over all else, will the mind not end up finding a way to rationalise the conscience’s preconceptions and thus create a dogma?

Down through history there have been some people who have been extremely insightful and they have sometimes been labelled “prophets”. But others have been labelled prophets who were powerful declaimers of the prejudices of their times. All those rules and regulations in the Old Testament about what you can and can’t do on the Sabbath and how long women are unclean after they have their period have nothing to do with insight. They may be a powerful expression of a learned set of culturally specific ideals, but that is all. Insightful individuals are often not tied down by learned ideals. They can break on through to a bolder apprehension of truth because they are not a slave to their learned conscience.

Now is the time of the big test. It is time for us to see if Griffith’s theory is truth or dogma.

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