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 : 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 : 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 : Atheism : The Dumbest Religion on Earth by Monk E. Mind

The first thing you should know about this book is that it was not written by a religious believer. We have probably all heard someone who identifies as a Christian claiming that atheism is really just another religion. And those whose worldview is founded on the concept that their religious belief is wisdom might well judge atheists to be foolish. So when you see a book with this title, the natural expectation is that it will be the work of a religious person who has become sick of atheists labelling them as the dupe of an irrational belief system and is indulging in an “I know you are but what am I?” comeback.

What we have here is an ex-atheist - he says he is countering arguments he himself used to make. For him, God is not a matter for belief or disbelief. Because belief and disbelief are for matters which can’t be definitively settled.

It’s all about semantics for Monk E. Mind.

All words he says refer to either objects or concepts. Objects have shape. Concepts describe the relationship between objects. To exist is to be an object with a location. Only objects exist. The universe and space are concepts, therefore they don’t exist. God would only refer to something existing if that something had a shape and a location.

The name Monk E. Mind seems appropriate for the author of this book as his authorial voice suggests nothing so much as a noisy little primate scampering around pulling mocking faces and hurling his faeces at anyone who comes close. His faeces in this case being his pseudo-reasoning and pedantry.

Monk E. Mind was also the author of a book called Rope Hypothesis and Thread Theory. The Rope Hypothesis is a physics model proposed by an engineer named Bill Gaede, who first came to public attention as an industrial spy for the Cubans. When I did a bit of reading and watched him on YouTube, I found that his philosophy is the same as that presented by Monk E. Mind in this book. Is Monk E. Mind a pseudonym for Gaede, or for a disciple of his? I don’t know. Gaede used his own name for his magnum opus Why God Doesn't Exist.

One of the key qualities needed by anyone who wishes to pursue a deeper understanding of any subject is humility. Boldness can be very useful for breaking free of unhelpful patterns of thought, but only the individual who has humility will be on the look out for their own errors and learn from them. Monk E. Mind is so full of the idea that his vision is superior - dancing and crowing about how remarkably stupid scientists are for believing in things like black holes - that he can’t see the obvious fallacies on which his arguments are based.

“People that do not define are using word magic,” he says. But what about those who make up their own definitions? Monk E. Mind has built a house of cards out of his own personal definitions for words.

Clear effective written communication requires that the writer and the reader agree on the definitions of the words being used. Dictionaries are there to help us to get on the same page. There is a kind of democracy about dictionaries in that it is in the best interest of the lexicographer to match what is meant by the majority of individuals when articulating a definition. People kicking up a fuss because they feel a word has not been defined in the way in which they intend it would hurt the reputation and sales of the dictionary.

If someone comes up with their own personal definition which doesn’t appear in any dictionary then the onus is on that definition to have, for us, an obvious advantage over the definitions used by as many as 1.5 billion other individuals (if we are communicating in English).

The argument Monk E. Mind presents rests entirely on his own definitions for words.

“Object : that which has shape.”

An ideal triangle doesn’t exist, but, by definition, it has shape. It’s a triangle. Shape is all it has.

Google’s definition is “a material thing that can be seen and touched.”

Of course you could object that objects can’t be seen by a blind man or that an object on the surface of the moon can’t be touched because it is too far away. But that would be silly, and lets not be silly.

“Concept : the relation between objects”

A concept isn’t necessarily a relation between objects. It can an relation between other concepts. A mathematical formula is a concept which is a relation between numbers. Numbers are concepts.

Google’s definition is “an abstract idea”.

So how do they define “abstract”? “(E)xisting in thought or as an idea but not having physical or concrete existence.”

So theories about gravity are abstract, but gravity itself is physical (it effects the movement of physical objects.) According to Monk E. Mind’s definition, gravity itself would be a concept presumably.

“Exist : object with location; something somewhere; physically present.”

So relationships between objects don’t exist? The planets exist, but the solar system doesn’t?

Google say that to exist is to “have objective reality or being”.

They define “objective” as “not dependent on the mind for existence; actual.”

Now remember Monk E. Mind is saying that only objects can exist and that objects are what have shape. Google allows the solar system to exist, because it isn’t dependent on the mind, even though it is not an object but a relationship between objects.

Gravity is not an object, but does it depend on the mind for its existence? If you jump off of a tall building you will splatter on the pavement whether you believe you will or not.

Most of us use the term “exist” to refer to relationships as well as objects. For us laws exist, even though they may have originated in the human mind. They exist because they can have consequences on our actions and the actions of others.

And most concepts of a monotheistic God can be understood as a universal system of law. For a pantheist like myself these are natural laws potentially accessible to science. To religious individuals God’s law may be moral in nature. But unless someone worships something like a golden calf, one’s God is a relationship rather than an object.

Bringing it closer to home - are you an object or a relationship? The human body has a border, but we are not simply our body. We are the whole process which animates that body. In the same way to speak of God is to speak of the whole process which animates the universe.

One may have the view that the universe has no such coherent process, and even if we do have the view that it does, we may disagree greatly on the nature of that process, especially the degree to which it resembles a human personality. I don’t see an insistence that such a process doesn’t exist because it isn’t an object doing anything to silence debate on this topic.

“Because matter and motion are eternal, there was no first cause to motion or creation of matter, therefore no Creators are possible!”

Would Monk E. Mind tell a painter… a sculptor… an engineer… an architect… a movie maker… that creation is impossible? They know that they don’t create their own raw materials, but creation is the arrangement of raw materials into a new and meaningful whole.

Mr. Mind claims that matter can’t be created. I’m not particularly well-informed on science, but I do remember being taught at school that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We were also taught that matter is made out of energy and can break down to release that energy. So it makes sense to say that energy can’t be created, but if it changes and can have the form of elements which react with each other to form different kinds of matter and might lead to forms of matter which are alive and eventually living forms which are intelligent, then it seems to me that creation is something that can take place. Something more complex and meaningful can arise from something pre-existing. We see it in our own culture when individuals come together to form an organisation which is, in some way, more than the sum of themselves as parts. For creation to be the theme of life does not necessarily require that it ever had a beginning. One might believe in God as the eternal creative theme of a universe which has always existed.

The author claims that matter can’t be created. Can he prove it? And, if he can’t prove it, why should we not simply ignore his argument?

Ah, but science is not about proof, he insists. It is about explanation only.

“science: rational explanations for reality”

But how do we arrive at these rational explanations?

Google defines science as “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”

So that definition tells us how we can arrive at our rational explanation - “through observation and experiment”.

Monk E. Mind says :

“…you need to get over…the idea of facts, truth, proof and evidence. Reality is having none of it. These things are founded on the limited sensory system and the beliefs of man. They are opinions. Facts are the opinions from authority. What is true for you may not be true for your neighbor. Proof, which is based on evidence (observation), at best confirms what the person already believes.”

Only objects exist, according to the author. So love, energy, waves, circles, squares, magnetic fields, motion, the universe, numbers and the mind don’t exist, but rocks do. But on what basis does he make the claim that rocks exist if he doesn’t recognise facts, truth, proof or evidence (observation)? He can see them and feel them, but that is nothing but unreliable observation. And if truth is a useless concept, what, in his view, differentiates his ideas from those of others he rejects?

So he wants us to arrive at our goal - “rational explanations” - but rejects the method by which we are trying to get there. Maybe his rational explanations are going to come to him by divine revelation.

One fallacious form of argument is the argument from authority. That an idea is expressed by a person who has some form of social acknowledgement of expertise in an area doesn’t, in itself, make the idea more worthy of credence. It has to work in and of itself, regardless of the source.

The author says that there are no authorities, and challenges the reader to reject his explanations because he is “a Wal-Mart greeter” who “learned this from a shoe shine boy.”That would be all well and good if his explanations were sound and illuminating, but we need to be just as rigorous with the thinking of a Wal-Mart greeter as we would with someone like Richard Dawkins. If his new definitions of words are not useful, his lack of academic credentials won’t make them so.

“Any one person with the willingness to do so has the ability to learn anything that another human can learn.”The problem is that learning requires time and access to information. The ideas about physics expressed by someone with a PhD. in the subject may not be completely reliable, because humans are fallible and science is a process of elimination of unsatisfactory explanations, but the advantage they have over the average Wal-Mart greeter is that the time they have been able to devote to their study is not severely limited by the time requirements of supporting themselves with a low paying job, and they have been able to engage in discourse with others knowledgeable in the field. They may also have had the chance to do experiments. Having said that, if the Wal-Mart greeter can express something that makes the physicist slap his head and cry “How could I have missed something so obvious?!?” of course we will pay attention.

Let’s get to the title of the book. On what basis does Monk E. Mind come to the conclusion that atheism is a religion? Unsurprisingly, he starts by making up his own definition for the word “religion”.

“religion: irrational explanations for reality”

What do we mean by “explanations”? According to Google, an explanation is “a statement or account that makes something clear.”

Given how mystical many religions are and the degree to which their dogma, rather than making things clear, tends to need its own explanation, this hardly seems a satisfactory definition.

Google gives us : “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods”.

Sounds more like the religions I’ve come in contact with.

Ah, but how to troll the atheists without finding some dishonest way to equate them with that which they reject?

To demonstrate his contention that atheism is a religion he points to a Supreme Court judgement and a dictionary definition. This indicates that some people consider it a religion, but unless they can produce a reason why they consider it a religion which is based on a definition on which we can all agree, this is an empty argument from authority. The soundest argument he has here perhaps is that official forms often have a question about the person’s religion which give one option “Atheism” and another option “No Religion.” The existence of such forms proves nothing, but if someone who identifies as an atheist ticks the “Atheism” box rather than the “No Religion” box, one could reasonably ask why they are accomodating the false listing of atheism as a religion when they have the option of having nothing to do with this error by simply ticking “No Religion.” This is a small point.

Now I’ll indulge in a little armchair psychoanalysis. Monk E. Mind is contemptuous of atheists, who he presents as hypocrites for criticising others for having a faith-based belief system when that is what they have themselves. He lumps atheists together and he lumps scientists together, claiming that they believe in magic. The individual in a state of severe denial often projects the disowned aspect of their own psyche onto the world around them, showing a diminished acknowledgement of differences between individuals within the groups onto which they are projecting. Monk E. Mind is arguing that we should seek easily visualisable explanations for what happens in the world around us and that we not bother to test these explanations experimentally. That is what religious people did in a pre-scientific era. Perhaps his exasperation with others is a projection of his subconscious fear that his game of semantics may be “the dumbest religion on Earth.”

I don’t think we need to trouble ourselves much with this book. It is full of ideas. Ideas are not objects. Ideas are concepts. Only objects exist. Concepts don’t exist. There’s nothing to see here.

[This review has been heavily revised as a result of feedback from the author.]

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 14

Love Indoctrination or Love Liberation

Sometimes when Griffith talks about his concept of “love indoctrination” it seems like something almost aggressive. “…all the other relatively developed/integrated/social mammals are still battling to develop and maintain love-indoctrination to the point where it has overcome selfish competition amongst males to reproduce their genes.” This concept of love as something you have to be “indoctrinated” into, that has to be controlled by dictatorial instincts, feels so wrong to me.

A mother loving her child is not “indoctrinating” it. She is accepting it unconditionally and responding to its needs. She is not trying to control it. Indoctrination is an attempt at control. I know Griffith isn’t trying to say that she is, but he is presenting this process as one controlled by the genes.

To me love is something which is liberated when the obstacles which impede it are removed. I can see where the need to compete in harsh environments or for breeding opportunities would act as an impediment to love. But surely social animals are not competing all the time. Are there not signs of love - of affection and cooperation between them - in those times when they are not? I don’t watch a lot of nature programs, so I can’t really speak from experience.

And if a food rich, relatively predator free, environment provided the opportunity for our proto-human ancestors to increase their nurturing time, would there have been a need for “indoctrination” in love, would love not have been liberated by the removal of its impediments. With the need to compete for food removed, and the mind - freed up by the longer nurturing period to no longer be rigidly focussed on survival issues and thus develop the power to self-manage - having the power to transcend the dictatorship of the genes’ insistence on competition for breeding opportunities, surely the potential for love, which lies buried under all those inhibiting influences in other animals, could have a chance to flower.

Griffith says : “No, the only accountable explanation for the emergence of the fully conscious mind in humans and for what is blocking its emergence in other species is the nurturing, love-indoctrination explanation…” But doesn’t my idea that all what was needed was the space and time away from competitive imperatives make sense? Why is there the need for nurturing to be seen as a process of “indoctrination” rather than liberation?

And I think that here there is a sharp distinction between my concept of love and Griffith’s concept of love. And between how he is going about trying to help the world and the way I am trying to go about helping the world. I believe we all have a virtually limitless capacity for love which just needs the impediments to it to be removed in order that it should flow forth and heal the world. Unconditional self-acceptance is the source of this love. The impediment to its expression is our armour. Our armour is defensive. To put it aside we need to feel safe. We can increase our own feelings of safety by cultivating unconditional self-acceptance and we can spread a feeling of safety through the world by spreading a practise of acceptance of other people as we find them. Idealism and other attempts to push people to change only make such change harder for them. Let freedom and acceptance reign and love will guide us towards a healing of our society and our world.

But Griffith, with his belief that a person’s capacity for love is, to a large extent, bound by the limitations of the nurturing that they received, the saving of the world involves our accepting of his theory, without spending too much time on confronting thought about it, and passing it on to future generations, who will gradually be healed by their ability to understand the world and the fact that, with the importance of nurturing acknowledged and the need for our previous aggression, egotism and alienation explained away, they will finally get the nurturing they need. But if his theory is wrong, as I believe that it is, doesn’t this sound a bit like “indoctrination”?

Where Is the “Human Condition” In Me?

Fundamental to Griffith’s theory is that there is a conflict going on within us between our supposed genetic orientation to selflessness and our ego. Now for much of my life there was a conflict going on within me. Do I send money to starving kids in Africa or spend it on myself? Do I watch porn or do I stop supporting this “shameless objectification of women”? Do I eat pork knowing that pigs are often kept in atrocious conditions or do I not?

So Griffith’s theory seemed to have relevance to my experience.

But over time I went through a process of introspection, much of it spurred on by a need to assess Griffith’s ideas.

One key point arose when I was troubled about the pig issue. I felt so guilty I considered becoming a vegetarian. But then I thought through my response. If I did give up eating pig meat, how would I feel about the fact that pigs were still suffering? “It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest,” I honestly admitted to myself. As long as I’ve got a clean conscience why should I care about the pigs? So I realised that my feelings of guilt were entirely selfish. I was walking around wondering if I were good enough. Someone hands me a brochure about suffering pigs. I eat pig meat. This sends me the message : “You aren’t good enough.” But it is all about my ego. It goes no deeper than that. My compassion for the pigs is virtually non-existent.

So I didn’t give a shit about the starving Africans or the pigs or supposedly exploited women. All I cared about was my own happiness.

But, what I’ve found over time is that all that guilt I’d been feeling about not being good enough had been sapping my enthusiasm for doing things for other people. Once I decided to give up on worrying about whether I’m good enough I was liberated to really enjoy the things I chose to do for myself and had a whole lot more energy to be more helpful to others. Guilt-driven attempts to do the right thing by others left me depressed and were always unsustainable. But unconditional self-acceptance means that when I do feel like making a contribution to someone else’s welfare I do so with full enthusiasm and no internal conflict or resentment.

Now I do what I like. I feel no guilt. I have no war going on inside me. I do whatever feels good and right at the time.

So where, I have to ask myself, is this “human condition” in me? Where is this bottomless well of anger I’m supposed to have deep down inside. Where is this condemning genetic conscience? If these things are real, why can’t I feel them anymore? Am I wrong to assume that that conflict I experienced was nothing to do with my genes, but occurred entirely within my ego?

The Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome?

Griffith says : “Another malicious device that has been used to try to dismiss my work is claiming it puts readers in a ‘non-falsifiable situation’ where if you oppose this information you are said to be suffering from denial, leaving you no way to disprove or falsify the explanation being put forward — but the problem really exists at the superficial level because the ideas being put forward can be tested as true or otherwise. These are not untestable hypotheses that must be accepted on blind faith… In fact, since humans are the subject of this particular study, each person can experience and thus know the truth or otherwise of what is being put forward. Once the explanations are presented and applied you will discover they are able to make such sense of human behaviour that your own and everyone else’s becomes transparent.”

I’ve been living with these “insights” for about 25 years and they didn’t make my behaviour or that of others transparent. Initially I was attracted to the ideas because they resonated with a conflict which was going on inside me. But Griffith’s “explanations” of much of human behaviour, especially sexual behaviour, never rang true to me. It was the need to resolve that conflict inside, and the faith that his ideas could do that because he said they could, which led to my initial support. But later I would discover that the conflict that troubled me was within my ego - a battle between my ego’s need to maintain self-acceptance and various forms of idealism which threatened to rob me of it. Over time my need to have faith in Griffith’s ideas declined and my ability to find a grounding in my own conceptual framework increased. I stopped suffering from the depression which had plagued me off and on from the time of my adolescence, and the bipolar disorder, with which I had been diagnosed in 1995, so that now I have been happy and stable for at least eight years. And in the wake of abandoning belief in Griffith’s ideas, I feel that the world really has become transparent to me. Reader’s can judge for themselves whether my writings are insightful, but obviously they seem that way to me.

If Griffith’s ideas do represent a superficially credible but ultimately delusional belief system which has  the ability to latch on to us by virtue of our desperate need for a solution to humanity’s problems and an inability to deny them if they resonate with our internal ego-battle - if their “confronting” idealism undermines our self-acceptance and makes us need to hang onto their supposed “defence for humans” - would anyone who was on the inside of that condition be aware of it, or would it require someone who was now safely outside of it to point it out?

Read Part 15

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

Appeals to Authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Development of Order of Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asking for Everything Is the Best Way to Get Nothing

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

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

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

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

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

Read Part 13

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 9

Confirmation Bias

This is how science works. We look at an accumulation of data. We try to come up with an hypothesis to explain that data. And then we try to disprove our hypothesis. This is how we test it. We hunt for any possible data which might be an exception to our rule. And we ask ourselves if any other hypothesis might better explain the data.

What we don’t do is to set out to find evidence for our hypothesis. The process of trying to disprove it will provide extra evidence in every case in which we fail to disprove it. But if we want to arrive at the truth we have to apply the principles of the survival of the fittest. We have to make it harder for our hypothesis not easier if we want to really test it.

When someone comes up with an hypothesis and then sets out to find evidence to back it up or to help them persuade others of its truthfulness, that is what we call confirmation bias. Because we already have the tendency to filter the information coming in to us from the world around us through our character armour, and our belief system is a part of that armour, we are very prone to confirmation bias. This is why conspiracy theories are often so persuasive. We see the data which tends to support the theory, but we filter out all of the data which contradicts it.

Griffith takes confirmation bias to new extremes. He has sifted through our culture looking for brief quotes which he can present, often incomplete and out of context, to back up his hypothesis. While he does give his own spin to scientific data gathered by others, he spends an awful lot of time in the realms of philosophy and religion. These are valid realms of human thought, but they rely largely upon the test of whether the statements they contain resonate with the psyche of the reader. Given the unreliability of the psyche, they lack the objectivity we look for, but don’t always find, in science. Something said by Plato or Jesus may correspond with our beliefs, or contemplation upon it may open up new vistas of insight to us, but this is a personal experience which cannot necessarily be transmitted to others. Science deals with empirical facts not metaphysical descriptions.

And the case of Goya’s The Sleep of Reason shows that Griffith is not just committed to sifting data in search of support for his hypothesis, and evading any data which contradicts it, but is capable of actually misreading the English language in order to do so.

The divided self sees in others a projection of its own denied nature. When anyone tries to criticise Griffith’s hypothesis - for instance pointing out, as one critic has, that Griffith’s claim that the Bushmen of the Kalahari are “Christ-like” is thrown into question by the fact that they had a very high murder rate before coming under the influence of missionaries - he will accuse them of being “evasive” and “embattled”. But is he not the one being evasive and is he not the one who is embattled, desperately scrabbling for anything he can use to fortify his hypothesis and attacking the credibility of anyone who disagrees with him?

He may not be wrong that scientists and science journals to whom he has sent examples of his work are “confronted” by it. The criticism of idealism has a tendency to undermine our self-acceptance. They may have looked at his work with the distaste many of us show for Bible tracts full of declarations of our sinful nature.

But they are right to reject them because Griffith is a very poor scientist who places too much emphasis on ideas from outside the realm of science - philosophy and religion - and allows confirmation bias to contaminate any of his attempts to interpret genuine scientific research.

The Difference Between an Explanation and a Defence

The human neurosis is a disease. If someone comes to a doctor suffering from cancer, what does he do? Does he tell them how brave they were to develop cancer? Of course not. He uses his understanding of the condition to cure it.

Our neurosis consists of our insecurity and the armouring we adopt to protect ourselves in the light of it. The condition itself is a defensive one.

Griffith feels that what we need to cure the human condition is a “defence for humanity”. He feels that what we need to know is that we have been tremendous heroes for defying our genetic conscience’s oppressive insistence that we conform to the ideals, something which, had we done it to too great a degree, would have kept us from ever finding liberating understanding of our condition.

This is a problem. The part of us which may want to believe we are heroic is our character armour. Griffith’s approach to liberating is to reinforce the cage which is holding us prisoner in the first place. What we need is to feel that the self within the armour is securely acceptable, then we won’t need it. When Griffth tells us we are heroes he is pumping us up just like Anthony Robbins. When Griffith expresses contempt for the human potential movement that Robbins and others represent, he is projecting onto them the disowned truth that he is using the same strategy.

But someone like Anthony Robbins just tries to pump people up. He doesn’t think that, by doing so, he can get them to give up being competitive and selfish. He doesn’t put people in a double bind situation. Griffith does. By confronting us with his extreme idealism he undermines our self-acceptance and increases our need for our armour. Then he makes an appeal to that armour - telling us how brave we are to be wearing it. And he wonders why his acknowledgement of its validity hasn’t allowed us to take it off.

This situation arises because Griffith misdiagnoses our condition. He believes that criticising idealism comes from our biological nature and that the mind is the source of our antagonism against idealism, and he believes that our erotic impulses are a product of the mind’s insecurity in the face of that biological nature, a way to attack it for its criticism of us. But idealism arises from the mind. Antagonism to it arises both from the mind and from the body. Idealism restricts free thought and thus it does have to be resisted to find understanding. Idealism can also become intolerant of the body’s natural drives, such as the erotic, which is not principally the drive to reproduce, but rather the prime motivating force of life itself, the seeking of pleasure and love. So there are two impasses to us achieving liberation from the human condition. One is the need to recognise the toxic nature of idealism, which promised to be the road to heaven but was actually the road to hell. The other impasse, resulting from the first, the need to embrace the healing power of the erotic, distinguishing it from the twisted forms which sex has often taken due to our armouring.

Jesus had insight into this situation. In emphasising that God forgives us he recognised that our “sinfulness” was defensive. He didn’t say that we were heroic for being sinners. He said we were forgiven. An acquittal ends a court case much faster than a better defence lawyer.

If our aggressiveness, egotism, selfishness and alienation are heroic, was Jeffrey Dahmer expressing heroism when he raped, killed and dismembered seventeen men and boys and indulged in necrophilia and cannibalism with their corpses? Of course Griffith will talk about the need to exercise restraint and to “leave the battle” when we are too upset. But if someone like Dahmer was capable of restraint or “leaving the battle”, wouldn’t he have done so? What kind of defence of humans is it which leaves some humans, even those whose deeds are as extreme as Dahmer’s, undefended?

But Dahmer’s behaviour doesn’t have to be defended any more than cancer has to be defended. As William Burrough’s pointed out “The face of “evil” is always the face of absolute need.” We can know that the circumstances of Dahmer’s life - his experiences and the ideas with which he came in contact - eroded his self-acceptance in such a way that he was forced to adopt an extreme form of character armour which compelled him to commit these crimes. We need only know what the disease is and how to treat it and prevent it in future.

I think the importance Griffith puts on our “immense heroism” is once again a case of projection. He has committed himself to hanging onto what he believes to be the truth in the face of all temptations to compromise. Deep down he must feel that he is a hero for doing this. Yet he insists that we are the battling heroes. And the appeal of supporting him may often lie in the same direction. His supporters can clothe themselves in the armour of the warriors for a new and unpopular idea.

Read Part 10

Book Review : Beyond the Human Condition by Jeremy Griffith

Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith has attracted a fair bit of attention over the years with what he claims to be a liberating first principle biological explanation for the human condition, i.e. our species' capacity for good and evil.

For a time I was a supporter of Griffith's theories. Why would I not be attracted to the idea that some great riddle had been cracked which would lead to an end to all of humanity's problems - a reconciliation between the left wing and right wing in politics, between science and religion, between men and women - an end to war, poverty, mental illness? With his first book - Free : The End of the Human Condition - Griffith really laid on the hard sell, but the book was genuinely deep and full of references to the fossil record and primate behaviour. Back then I was prone to depression. Reading that book hurt like hell. They say that the truth hurts, so this seemed to be in its favour.

If you want a brief, concise and well-presented introduction to Griffith's theory and what he thinks it means for humanity, this second book - Beyond the Human Condition - is the one to read.

The first thing to acknowledge is that Griffith spends little of his time in the book arguing from reason. Much of the text consists of quotes from some of his favourite writers, most notably Laurens van der Post, as well as the Bible. He also paraphrases from popular songs the lyrics of which he wasn't able to obtain the rights to quote. This is not a scientific approach. The fact that Bruce Springsteen once said something in a song does not constitute evidence.

“As the quotes in this book reveal, all I have been able to add to the perception/soundness of Jesus Christ and Sir Laurens van der Post is the biological reason for the repression of our soul."

So how credible is this biological explanation for the human condition? Let's first summarise its essence.

Most animals compete for food or mating opportunities. Because our proto-human ancestors lived in the fertile environment of the Rift Valley in Africa their nurturing period grew longer. The mothers were nurturing their infants for genetically selfish reasons, because they contained their own genes. But to the infants this seemed like selfless behaviour. Not knowing anything about genetics, they thought their mother's cared more about them than about themselves. And so they learned that this was the way to be - they became “love-indoctrinated". This led to the flowering of our ability to reason about the world, because we could think holistically rather than have our view of the world fractured by the us and them duality inherent in competition. It was also the origin of our soul or conscience, our instinctive sense of what was right, because learned behaviour over many generations becomes encoded in the genes.

So now we had a rational mind and a genetic orientation towards selfless behaviour. But the rational mind needed to experiment. Some of these experiments would have led to behaviour which contravened the genetic conscience, which would give the message that we were doing something wrong. Unable to explain our need to experiment with self-management, we became frustrated and eventually angry with this genetic conscience. This led to anger at anything which reminded us of it, such as nature or, if we were men, women. This was the origin of our dark side. And yet we were not villains, we were the greatest of heroes for defying the oppression of our idealistic instincts and taking on self-corruption in order to find understanding of ourselves, which eventually would lead to the understanding of how we became “upset" in the first place, and with that understanding would come liberation from our condition.

I'm no scientist, but I can see two problems with this theory on a level which can be examined through observation of behaviour and through introspection.

If our conscience was learned through being exposed to the nurturing behaviour of mothers, then it should share the qualities of that nurturing behaviour. Griffith gives the analogy that our conscience is like the genetically-encoded flight path of a bird. Such a flight path is presumably rigidly dictatorial as it remains the same year after year. But the loving behaviour of a mother is anything but rigid or dictatorial, it is flexible and improvisational. She is engaged in a dynamic relationship with her offspring which is tolerant of most behaviour as long as it is not dangerous for them. So how does the infant develop from this a rigid dictatorial and unforgiving genetic blueprint for behaviour?

Is it really credible that our conscience is stored in our genes? Why is it that what makes us feel guilty varies from person to person and culture to culture? Why do some people appear to have no conscience? Is it not more likely that the conscience is learned, that it is a part of our ego, the part where we store our expectations about ourselves?

Griffith aligns love and idealism. But are these not contradictory phenomena? We say that the purest form of love is unconditional love, and what is idealism but the placing of conditions on our acceptance of ourselves or our acceptance of others? Idealism can all too easily consist in hatred of all that is not viewed as ideal.

He is right to identify idealism as something oppressive, but he does not go far enough.

He has said that his first book “grew out of my desperate need to reconcile my extreme idealism with reality." He views much of “upset" human behaviour as “an attack on innocence", including consensual sex. He believes that recreational, as opposed to reproductive sex, began during the time of Homo Erectus when men, angry at women's criticism of their lack of ideality, began raping them, something which was later civilised into something which could be considered an act of love between men and women. He doesn't seem to give any acknowledgement that orgasms feel good in and of themselves, hence masturbation. This in spite of the fact that he often points to bonobos, who spend a large part of their time rubbing genitals with members of both genders, as an indication of what our Australopithecine ancestors might have been like.

Bonobos

Griffith views himself as an innocent. He says that the rest of us want to attack innocence. He says this has been necessary because innocence is oppressive, and that we are heroes for having taken on the job of fighting back against that oppressiveness. Would it be unfair to describe this as an appeasement strategy?

I think that idealism is the heart of the problem, the root of all evil. This is kind of what Griffith is saying, but not quite. He thinks idealism was the problem only as long as we didn't understand ourselves, and now he thinks he has made such an understanding possible, thus making idealism no longer a problem.

I think idealism is a kind of conceptual virus which has plagued humanity. Now this doesn't mean that we are wrong to want peace and togetherness and kindness and to want to be less selfish. This is the insidious nature of the negative feedback loop that is idealism. It advertises itself as the road to Heaven when it is actually the road to Hell. The harder we strive for the ideals, the further they recede.

This is because the good things we want can only grow out of love, and the foundation of love is unconditional self-acceptance. Throughout our lives our self-acceptance is being undermined by criticism, rejection and by the condemnation implied by those apparently unreachable ideals. The oppression of our conscience, of those ideals we find so hard to meet, or, if we are religious, that perfect God who makes us feel like pathetic worms for our lack of perfection, all of these things can build up a seething pit of resentment in us towards those who seem to be more in tune with the ideals than ourselves. Sometimes, unable to acknowledge this well of darkness in ourselves, we project it onto others, going into battle against the terrible other.

William Blake

If love is the answer, then what is love? Love is a mode of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. Fear, of others and of the darkness within us, causes us to become rigid, to adopt character armour, which is the barrier to love. All we need to open up to the love which will bring us the peace and togetherness and freedom from our ego-prisons that we desire, is to feel safe enough to put aside our armour. Our armour is our egotism. And it is our alienation, that which blocks us from experiencing the world as it really is and from thinking honestly about ourselves and that world.

It is true that we have always needed a way to love the dark side of our psyche. But love is not appeasement. Love doesn't bolster our ego by saying, “You're a hero." Love releases us from our enslavement to that ego, by saying, “You are forgiven now, and you will be forgiven always." This was the essence of Jesus' message. If God is a mythological figure representing the creative principle of the universe, which in human affairs takes the form of love, then every time we realise we have made a mistake, as long as we are honest about it, God is there to forgive us. This is not some supernatural assurance. The creative principle of the universe works through evolution. Deviations from the norm are what lead to new and wonderful things. Nature is no dictator, insisting on some kind of perfection. And all human discord can be healed by love, which does not judge. At the moment our self-acceptance is conditional and therefore our love for others is conditional too. But in time the barriers to unconditional love will melt away, and then all is forgiven. Love is the sea that refuses no river.

Griffith is a major critic of what he terms “pseudo-idealistic" movements - environmentalism, socialism, the New Age Movement, “political correctness", etc. He sees them as superficial and escapist, because they don't address the deeper psychological issues. This is fair enough up to a point. But he sees them as being so powerful in the world now and so dogmatic that they might shut down the search for understanding altogether. He quotes George Orwell :

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face [freedom] - for ever." 1984.

To emphasise the danger he also quotes from the Bible (with his own extrapolations) :

“'He [the self-deception that accompanies superficiality] will invade the kingdom [of honesty] when its people feel secure [when superficiality becomes popular enough], and he will seize it [the kingdom of honesty] through intrigue...Then they [those pushing self-deception] will set up the abomination that causes desolation [the superficiality that leads to oblivion]. With flattery he will corrupt those who have violated the covenant [self-deluding superficiality will seduce the exhausted], but the people who know their God will firmly resist him [the less exhausted will not be deceived].'"

Daniel, 11:21, 31, 32.

“'So when you see the 'abomination that causes desolation' (spoken of through the prophet Daniel) standing where it does not belong [claiming to know the way to the new age] let the reader understand... For then there will be great distress [mindless superficiality and its consequences], unequalled from the beginning of the world until now - and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short [by the arrival of the truth], no-one would survive.'"

Matthew 24 and Mark 13

These passages, and the emphasis and interpretation Griffith puts on them, deserve closer examination. Sometimes we see in our enemies a reflexion of a truth we are hiding from ourselves.

“He [an extreme idealist] will invade the kingdom [the establishment] when its people feel secure, and he will seize it through intrigue [disguising his insistence on the ideals with a cloak of pretend science]... Then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation [idealism]. With flattery [by telling us we are heroes] he will corrupt those who have violated the covenant [technically, those who have broken from the agreement to follow the precepts of the gospel, but probably more broadly those who have been dishonest, judgemental or unloving], but the people who know their God [those who understand the true nature of love] will firmly resist him."

Now lets look at the passages from Matthew and Mark. In Mark it says “...standing where it does not belong..." but in Matthew it is more specific saying “...standing in the holy place...". If “the abomination that causes desolation" is idealism, then in what way might it have been put “in the holy place"? “Holy" means “whole" or “of the whole". Griffith identifies idealism with holism. He puts idealism in the place of holism. Idealism, being founded on a dualistic split between good and evil, cannot be reconciled with holism. Holism is necessarily pragmatic.

So why the talk about “great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world until now - and never to be equalled again"? Certainly we live in very troubled times. How is this related to the presentation of a theory that we are genetically idealistic?

If idealism has been the poison virus contaminating the human race throughout its history (ever since it arose in the experimenting mind of one of our ancestors), then to nail it down to our very bodies themselves is the final straw. No escape, no defence. The enemy is within!

Just after that in Matthew 24:19, Jesus says : “How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers!"

Griffith believes that infants are born with an instinctive expectation of an ideal world, thus they will be damaged by their mother's lack of ideality.

“In every generation, individual women had a very brief life in innocence before being soul-destroyed through sex. They then had to try to nurture a new generation, all the time trying to conceal the destruction that was all around and within them. Mothers tried to hide their alienation from their children, but the fact is if a mother knew about reality/upset her children would know about it and would psychologically adapt to it."

I'm sure that being a mother is a tough job to begin with without this kind of unfounded pressure. I don't believe infants are born expecting anything particular, and what they most need is a relaxed mother. If love is open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication, it will be impeded by feelings of anxiety or guilt. And being sexually repressed won't help either.

You might say, “But how can this bring great tribulation to the world when hardly anyone has actually read it?" Every book written is in some way an articulation of a broader and deeper social current. We could look at Griffith's books not so much as a wind blowing us off course as a weather vane in which the direction of that wind is indicated. They are a crystallisation of the pathology of idealism which has plagued us down the centuries. Job's prayer was : “Oh, that my enemy had written a book!" Through Jeremy Griffith, idealism has done just that.

Jeremy Griffith's new book

For more information about Jeremy Griffith check out the World Transformation Movement website.

You can also find a critical review of Griffith's new book, along with some very interesting discussion  between supporters and critics here.