Selfishness : The Human Dysfunction

Photo by Andriy Dovzhykov

The central form of human dysfunction is selfishness. This has to be distinguished from self-interest. It is natural and functional that we should desire a pleasant and meaningful life for ourselves and our loved ones. Selfishness is when we have a need - other than the physical requirements of continued existence - which is so strong that we satisfy it at the expense of our own well-being or the well-being of others, either in the short or long term.

Selfishness is addiction. We can see how addiction to drugs, alcohol, unhealthy foods, gambling, sex, etc., is defined by the detrimental effects, either on ourselves or others, that temporary satisfaction of the need brings with it. And greed (addiction to the accumulation of wealth) can lead to decisions where the well-being of other individuals or collective well-being (think of damage to ecological life-support systems) are undermined.

If selfishness disappeared from the human species we would all have a chance to live lives much richer in pleasure and meaning. In theory, even the least well-off individual would be better off than the most fortunate individual now, because to live on a imperilled planet full of misery is a burden that no amount of wealth can lift.

Of course, as long as there are generous people and selfish people, the generous have to be judicious in how they mete out that generosity. It would do nobody any good if they were simply taken advantage of by the selfish.

But if selfishness is our problem, what is its cause?

An addiction is a strategy for temporarily escaping the pain of existence. In some cases this may be physical pain, but more often it is psychological pain.

So if we are to improve our ability to thrive as a species, the key frontier is understanding our psychological pain and how to relieve it naturally, thus freeing us from our addictions.

The problem with utopian ideas, such as communism, is that they try to treat the symptoms instead of the disease. At least access to the means of satisfying one’s addiction has a pacifying effect. Leave the need and take away the means of satisfying it and you breed even more hostility.

The suggestions I make in my book How to Be Free for doing something to heal the pain of existence are quite modest. I’m sure there is more to know and more and better techniques.

Let’s attack the problem. Let’s share what we know. Let’s seek to know more.

It's O.K. If You Hate Me

Photo by Denis Pepin.

It seems that the battle between the conscience and the insecure ego is playing itself out around us all the time. It is the theme of our times and it has been the story of our history from the very beginning. And, surely, it is not just around us but within us that the battle rages.

I feel myself torn. Those who play the conscience of our times articulate the realities of our situation ecologically and socially. While they may not always get it right, they are pointing to things which cannot be dismissed without burying one’s head dangerously in the sand.

On the other hand, when such individuals inspire even violent hatred, that is not something alien to me. I identify with those who feel this way. I feel it in me too. Preach at me. Tell me what is wrong with me. Remind me of the things I deep down know are true but desperately wish were not true. And I’ll wish you were dead.

This dilemma is the story of our species. What we need in order to behave lovingly towards each other is self-acceptance. From this comes our ability to be generous, open, spontaneous and honest. But an unforgiving insistence on such behaviour means that our self-acceptance is progressively undermined by feelings of guilt. Beyond a certain point, the more the conscience insists, the more the ego resists.

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or insecure organism. Thus guilt, far from correcting the totality of our behaviour, makes us selfish.

And the dictatorial demands of the conscience on the selfish individual generate malevolence - the desire to revenge ourselves on the critical voice by doing something ever worse.

Of course we couldn’t do without the conscience. We needed to have some concept of what loving behaviour would look like which could continue to exist in our minds long after the love needed to realise it had died from our hearts. If we had been able to forgive our failures to meet that standard, then that love would never have died, but we have never been able to forgive ourselves enough.

The history of the human race has been one of great courage, determination and initiative. When we think back at the dangers and challenges our ancestors met head on and the terrible suffering they experienced, and inflicted upon each other, it is remarkable that beings of mere flesh and blood could persist through all that.

As Hamlet said, “…conscience does make cowards of us all.” Historically we persisted against the odds partly because we repressed our conscience. Our conscience would tell us that it was wrong to conquer, to steal and to oppress. But we did it anyway. If we had followed our conscience exclusively we would probably be living in huts in the jungle eating nuts and berries - without science and without the benefits of technology.

This doesn’t mean we could or should continue to live a life of conscience-suppressing domination. We just don’t want to lose the spirit and courage which we will need to meet our current crises. If we are to find a new relationship with the conscience it mustn’t be one in which our spirit is broken, crushed beneath it’s unforgiving jackboot.

If we are to have a sustainable new way of living it will have to be an expression of exuberance arising from an unalloyed love for ourselves. It can’t be some humiliating act of penance for past misdeeds.

The courage that brought us through the nightmare of history was the courage of divided beings. We were carrying the burden of a condemning conscience. If we can heal this conflict and all of the social divisions it gave rise to, then we will find a courage and determination we have never known.

How do we do this?

We need an understanding of this underlying human dilemma.

We need to unconditionally accept thoughts and feelings, recognising that they are the inevitable product of our current situation and that, the more we acknowledge them consciously, the more easily we can chose appropriate behaviour in the light of them. To accept a thought does not mean to believe that it is a truth. And to accept a feeling does not mean to act upon it.

We need to be able to honestly articulate our psychological position.

Acceptance is what shrinks the dark side of us. It was inflamed by unforgiving criticism, and criticism open or implied continues to exacerbate it.

So what if someone hates me? I say : “It’s O.K. if you hate me. If I were you I know I would hate me too.”

Hatred is a cover emotion for underlying feelings of guilt or shame. If we can feel that our feelings of hatred, as an emotion, are accepted, perhaps the feelings of guilt or shame can come into consciousness. The idea that an emotion is accepted acts against the impulse towards repression, while criticism of that emotion encourages repression of whatever lies beneath it.

Sometimes sadism masquerades as righteousness. Sometimes the sense of humiliation which we experience when we look at our own sins makes us need to point out the sins of others and glory in their humiliation.

Instead we could realise that we are all in the same boat. If we can feel love and behave benevolently in the world, then we are one of the lucky ones whose situation in that world has not been one that killed our love and drove us to malevolence. If our love is real and our benevolence not a show, then we will have no interest in the egotism which would take credit for it.

The path towards healing for society is the path of honesty. That means acknowledging our own darker emotions and accepting them in others.

Photo by Bram Janssens.

A Big "What If?"

Copyright: alexmit / 123RF Stock Photo

What if there were a framework of understanding which could unite the perceptions of the mystic, the fundamentalist and the atheist into a single whole?

This is very much a “what if” experiment. Ride with it and see where it leads. For simplicity’s sake I’ll state speculations as if they were fact.

The universe is made up of energy. Matter is a structured form of that energy. Energy is eternal. It changes form, but it never ceases to exist. 

Energy is conscious, but it is a formless consciousness, lacking the kinds of limitation needed for the structured consciousness we call thought or sensation.

The universe is a place where structure arises from formless energy. The ways in which this happens may be mysterious to us, but our existence is evidence of just how complex and meaningful the products of that process can be. Apparently there are more connections in our brain than there are atoms in the universe. We’re pretty complex.

We are highly structured systems of energy which persist for an average of about seventy years. We have bodies which shape raw consciousness in a way we experience as physical sensations, ranging from pleasure to pain. And we have a brain which shapes raw consciousness into images and words.

The universe is a meaningful place. Complexity arises through relationship and meaning lies in relationship. The meaning of any part is defined by its relationship to the whole.

As individuals we sometimes identify with our separateness and sometimes with our connectedness to the whole. When we are in a loving relationship we identify more with the bond we share with the other person than we do with our seperate existence. Or an artist may think more of the meaning which is coming into the world through his art than he does of where his next meal is coming from.

We are not just our body. We are also meaning. We are not just the instrument, but also the music which plays on that instrument.

But we have a problem. To a significant degree we have become cut off from our source of meaning.

The creative principle of the universe is manifested by the emergence of more complex wholes from a meaningful relationship between less complex parts. This looks like the part selflessly surrendering to the needs of the whole.

We know that we are selfish, not selfless, so are we in a state of rebellion against the theme of the universe, against that which created us?

It is within the context of this question that religion arose.

Aware of our sinful, i.e. selfish, nature we could not look upon the face of God, i.e. acknowledge the theme of the universe which gave birth to us. We feared God and sought redemption through sacrifice and prayer.

To the degree that we were insecure, we needed the comfort provided by picturing a God with a human face.

ROME, ITALY - MARCH 12, 2016: The fresco God the Creator by unknown artist from end of 19. cent. in the church Chiesa di Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore. Copyright: sedmak / 123RF Stock Photo

In the Old Testament there is an emphasis on laws. If selfishness were not to lead to the collapse of the society there needed to be laws. Such laws are a compromise. They don’t solve the underlying problem, and they are based on the prejudices prevalent in the society, hence the absence of such current day laws as : “Thou shalt not own slaves.”

The New Testament seeks to address the underlying problem of the need for redemption from the selfish state into a state in which we love our neighbour as our self. That is to end the separation of humans and God.

The Bible relates stories. Our state of insecurity determines our relationship to those stories. Just as our insecurity may require God to have a human face, so it may require the stories related in the Bible to be literally true.

What matters in a story is its meaning. We read fictional stories and respond to them as if they were real. Do we weep for Little Nell? Or do we weep for ourselves, because we know what loss is like? We fear Dracula, not because vampires are real, but because we fear death, or something worse than death.

The stories we read in the Bible are profoundly meaningful, because they are stories about what we fear and about what we crave most deeply. We fear that we may lose that which makes the suffering of life bearable, and we hope to find that which redeems us from our state of fear and trembling in the face of the absolute.

We could argue forever about whether or not a story is literally true. A fundamentalist will insist that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. An atheist will insist that all of these things are impossible.

Meaning is to a story what the soul is to the body. If we get too caught up in the worldly - and whether or not something happened literally is a worldly question - then we can lose that which has a higher value. In meaning we find the transcendent. Through meaning we participate in the eternal.

Having separated ourselves from the worldly to find the meaning, we then come back to the world to make it real. What matters is not whether Jesus fed the hungry with seven loaves and a fish, but whether we ourselves feed the hungry.

KRAKOW, POLAND - DECEMBER 19, 2010; Christmas Eve for poor and homeless on the Central Market in Cracow. Every year the group Kosciuszko prepares the greatest eve in the open air in Poland. Copyright: praszkiewicz / 123RF Stock Photo

Selfishness is the knot that needs to be untied for us to feel at home in the universe that gave birth to us, for us to be re-united with God. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the insecure or otherwise suffering individual. Hit your thumb with a hammer and you’ll have trouble thinking about anything else but your thumb. In the same way, our insecurity turns us inwards. It can be a negative feedback loop. We behave selfishly. We feel guilty about behaving selfishly. The pain of the guilt directs our attention even more strongly toward our self. This makes us even more selfish. Thus the knot tightens.

Assurances that God forgives our sins may ease the problem, but they are founded on faith rather than rational understanding.

If we try cultivating unconditional self-acceptance and find that it produces a better result than trying to force ourselves to be less selfish, or punishing ourselves, then we learn through our own direct experience what it means to find redemption.

The relationship between Hell and Heaven can be understood in the relationship between the body and meaning. 

The body makes suffering possible. Meaning makes that suffering bearable. Pleasure is experienced in the satisfaction of bodily needs or the easing of bodily suffering.  The psychological insecurity which comes from being cut off from meaning may interfere with our ability to feel satiated by the satisfaction of these needs.

What is bliss? It isn’t a thought, though it may accompany a thought. It isn’t a physical sensation, though it may accompany a physical sensation. Bliss is loss of self-consciousness. Bliss is when we are so enraptured by something that we forget ourselves.

If the universe is conscious energy, perhaps bliss is it’s default state. The limitation provided by a body and mind increases its ability to manifest meaning, but carries with it the price tag of suffering, something which can be increased or decreased depending on the thoughts that form in that mind. So, from bliss we come and to bliss we will go. And while we are alive, the secret to bliss is love, the meaningful connection that allows us to forget ourselves in a union like that from which we came. This may be love with another person or love of an activity.

So the concept of eternal life is one of identification. Do we identify with the body or ego, which are temporary, or with the process in which we participate? If our consciousness is that of the universe limited by a temporary form, then we are at least as much the eternal as we are the temporal.

Concepts of life after death often revolve around the idea of the persistence of the personalty into a post-death realm, either of punishment or reward. Like the focus on stories being literally true, this is an indication of how insecurity makes us cling to what we know. We fixate on that which we can’t fully accept, and so, not truly accepting our personality we can’t imagine leaving it behind.

So let’s cultivate unconditional self-acceptance and find out whether doing so blissfully realigns us with the creative principle of the universe.

Copyright: noltelourens / 123RF Stock Photo

Can We Assess The Effectiveness of Religion in Containing the Impulse Toward "Sin"?

Copyright : Katarzyna Białasiewicz : https://www.123rf.com/profile_bialasiewicz

I’ve been thinking about religion as a form of discipline. For some people a central part of their religion is rules and regulations and a strong belief in reward or punishment to help them abide by those rules and regulations.

This aspect of religion can be a cause for conflict between some religious people and some atheists. A religious person for whom this aspect of religiously-reinforced discipline is very important may ask an atheist what is to stop them from committing terrible violent crimes if they don’t believe there is a God who would punish them if they do. The atheist may point out that they don’t want to commit terrible violent crimes anyway. The implication is that the religious person is either making up the whole issue or is a terrible person because they feel they need some form of faith and discipline to keep them from committing acts of rape or murder.

There is a very serious issue here which needs close examination. It is important that we don’t arrogantly jump to conclusions about other people’s psychological state, about the role that religion plays for particular individuals and whether we have something to offer which would work better for them.

The containment of the impulse towards sin is one of the central roles of religion. In order to assess how successfully this goal is met in any particular individual we have to first consider what we mean by “sin”. Sin is the religious word for selfishness. (Religions sometimes consider some things sinful which those of us who do not share their framework of belief would, quite reasonably, not consider to be selfish, but the principle still holds because these are things which seem selfish to them within that framework. If they believe that God forbids something then clearly anyone who does it is putting their own desires before God’s wishes and is thus being selfish.)

Selfishness can be inwardly directed or outwardly directed. Greed and gluttony are examples of inwardly directed selfishness, while outwardly directed selfishness covers hostility towards others. This runs all the way from deliberate rudeness and attempts to dominate all the way through to rape, torture and murder.

Let’s simplify things for the moment by ignoring the distinctions between different kinds of selfishness and the fact that each of us differs with regard to which forms we are most prone to feel or act upon. Let’s reduce this all to a single factor - the impulse toward sin.

The strength of the impulse toward sin is bound to vary enormously across the range of individuals. Selfishness originates in suffering and in the insecurity of the ego. Some of us have suffered tremendously and others have not. Some of us are secure in our ego and others are not. What are the key factors? Experience and the conceptual framework - to what degree we have been loved or abused and the way we think about our experience and life in general. In reality this is very complex. Some experiences wound us and others encourage our healing, and our conceptual framework changes through our life. The key point is that nobody is to blame for the strength of their impulse toward sin and we cannot know what lies in the psyche of another.

If someone suggests that belief in God is the only thing stopping them from committing rape or murder, there are a number of possibilities :

1. They may be deliberately exaggerating the seriousness of the battle in order to make a point. 

2. They may fear that they might commit rape or murder without their faith in God because they feel the impulse toward sin so strongly, even though they wouldn’t actually act this way if their faith was to disappear. (This is like my experiences with OCD where anxious thoughts that I might do great harm to myself or someone else were part of the mechanism of repression of my angry feelings.) 

3. They may genuinely sometimes experience a powerful impulse to rape or murder. We shouldn’t discount this possibly. If we look at the incidence of rape and murder across cultures and across history and consider that the number of times when someone experiences the impulse to commit that act is bound to be far greater than the number of times that impulse is actually carried out, we should not be too quick to dismiss a person’s assertion that they need their religious faith to keep them from committing such an act.

To give a very simple example of the importance of the conceptual framework, two individuals may both be subjected to mistreatment by the same person - one may have acquired a stoic philosophy in which his self-image is dependent on showing himself to be unmoved, while the other may feel that his self-image is dependent on getting revenge. The person who sets out to get revenge may find that the effect of the original offence magnifies over time as the revenge, even if successful, brings with it other problems and, perhaps, other emotional wounds. Again, this is ridiculously simplistic, but that is necessary to see the issues at the heart of infinitely complex experiences.

A person’s religion is a major part of their conceptual framework. There are different religions of which there may be different variations, and everyone has their own personal framework which may take some bits and ignore others, interpret things differently and place different emphases. 

If we are really going to assess the success of an individual’s religion in helping them to contain their impulse toward sin, or make progress in healing the wounds which lie at the root of that impulse, we first need to know how strong that impulse is in them. And we are unlikely to find this out because admitting to having a particularly strong impulse toward sin means opening oneself to criticism as a bad person, something which is completely unjustified.

Those who’ve followed me for some time will know that I have been influenced by the ideas expressed by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith but that I am also a trenchant critic of those ideas. One of Griffith’s strengths is that he acknowledges this key question. He uses the term “upset” for what I have described as “the impulse toward sin,” but he makes the point that none of us wants to think of ourselves as a “bad person” or be perceived that way by others, therefore the whole issue of how screwed up we are inside is off-limits. And, yet, this off-limits problem is our most important one.

To be fair to the atheist critic of religion, it is possible that many, even all, religions might be essentially destructive conceptual frameworks. Rather than helping us to contain our impulse toward sin, or heal it, they may amplify it.

I can think of a couple of examples of how this might happen. Take sexuality. Some religions tend to encourage sexual repression. To a degree there is good reason for this. Promiscuity and infidelity can bring problems for the individual and for the wider society. But repress sexuality in the wrong way and erotic urges can be transformed into sadistic ones.

One thing I’ve talked about a lot is how idealism tends to undermine self-acceptance and with it the capacity for feelings of love toward others. This can be a major part of religion. The religion says we shouldn’t be so sinful. This makes us feel guilty. Our feelings of guilt make us self-directed and sap our capacity for generous feelings toward others.

There are other aspects of religious belief though. Faith can be a comforting influence and many no doubt find a supportive community through religion.

It is hard to assess the effectiveness of religion because we don’t know what it is working with. If we see a religious person behaving badly, how do we know whether the religion has turned a person with a low impulse toward sin into a person with a high impulse toward sin or whether it has taken a person with an extremely high impulse toward sin and succeeded in turning them into a person with a moderate impulse toward sin?

Another problem is that religion is a massively complex and diverse social phenomena. When we look at it it is a bit like looking at a blot test. A person who thinks religion is evil will see all of the wars and intolerance and hypocrisy and won’t see the individuals who have been spiritually enriched, inspired to community service or redeemed from a destructive lifestyle. And the religious will likewise tend to see the positives associated with their own brand of belief and few of the negatives.

I would like to think that the philosophy I express in How to Be Free can help us to achieve a conceptual framework which, with or without religion, enables us to heal our wounds and reduce our impulse toward sin. It may be too hard for us to talk about our own personal battle for fear of judgement, but we can still benefit from anything that helps us with it.

Copyright: twinsterphoto / 123RF Stock Photo

BOOK REVIEW : How Soon Is Now? : From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation by Daniel Pinchbeck

Can the human  race survive? That is the question addressed by this book.

I’m not sure when I started thinking that we were doomed. Perhaps some time in the 1980s. It seemed obvious to me. We have an economic system dependent on ever-increasing levels of growth, which means ever-increasing consumption of material goods and energy, the production of which are eating away at our ecological life-support systems. Even before there was much attention being given to climate change, it was clear that we were headed toward a metaphorical cliff, and the fact that very few people, at the time, seemed to want to acknowledge it made it seem as if a solution was unlikely. Then, as now, I tried not to think about it too much, but it hung like a black cloud over my head.

Pinchbeck, after much inner-exploration with psychedelic drugs, has come to the belief that we have unconsciously brought this crisis upon ourselves as a way to motivate ourselves through the process of a dramatic metamorphosis as a species - that it is our initiation by crisis into existence as a specie organism - a fully-integrated global society. A similar idea has been expressed by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman in their book Spontaneous Evolution (Hay House, 2009), which he credits as an influence.

One of the problems with the ecological crisis (not to mention associated humanitarian and economic crises) is that they inspire feelings of fear and guilt in many of us. Fear and guilt can be paralysing emotions. How are we to be motivated to act? Those who would motivate us flood us with scary facts, but these just make us feel more frightened, guilty and hopeless, and so we turn off and seek some form of comfort in more materialism or superficial escapism.

What we need more than scary facts is hope. We need a vision of how something can be done. And Pinchbeck does a great job of outlining such a vision. Of course he can only sketch in the broad outlines of what is possible. He’s not a specialist in energy systems or farming or economics. He has to point us in the direction of those who can help us in these areas.

This is a consistently fascinating book. Pinchbeck’s hyperactive mind and personal, indeed sometimes confessional, approach ensure that. But I didn’t find it an easy book to approach. There is a bitter comfort in putting things in the “too hard” basket. I start to read that I should give up eating meat and minimise buying new products and a large part of me says, “Let the planet burn. Let the innocent people die. I’m not going outside my comfort zone.” And I don’t even drive a car. What is the response likely to be from those who live far outside the bounds of ecological limits? I’m reminded of Matthew 19:24 “…it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” There’s no room for excess baggage aboard the specie individual.

What is at the basis of this stubbornness? When faced with a challenge, sometimes we grasp it enthusiastically and sometimes we put our head in the sand. I don’t want it to be implied that I’m not a good person. That isn’t what Pinchbeck is saying, but it is how it feels. And how it feels is what matters to motivation. Why does it give us pleasure to do things which deep down we may feel we shouldn’t? Why does the rich celebrity who travels to Africa and sees people living in poverty (and does some charity work there), nevertheless live in a ridiculously ornate mansion? In our insecure state there is a kind of relief to be found in defying what our conscience tells us we should do. This is also the lure of the forbidden. Are we going to squirm in humiliation beneath the bully who says “You mustn’t!” or are we going to feel the power and release of screaming “I will!” To my mind this is the key impasse to the realisation of the kind of plan that Pinchbeck puts forward. His emphasis on the spiritual underpinnings of the transformation acknowledge this, but I think that there are aspects of this psychological dimension that need to be understood more clearly.

The cultivation of unconditional self-acceptance will need to provide the grounding for change. A fully self-accepting individual need not experience a call for a change in their lifestyle as a condemnation. It is through unconditional self-acceptance that we unleash our capacity for the love of others and thus provide a basis for true community. Without this there is a danger that a spreading cultural imperative to adopt an ecological lifestyle might manifest itself in a toxic culture of eco-shaming, equivalent to some of the examples we see today where political correctness has taken a particularly hostile form - decentralised authoritarianism in which individuals take out the frustration of self-imposed discipline by victimising anyone who doesn’t do likewise, or doesn’t appear to be doing likewise. A healing evolution has to be motivated by warm and generous feelings.

I suspect that some may be very nervous about Pinchbeck’s references to Marx and calls for a post-capitalist economic system. The problem is that we’ve seen capitalism bring us rapid technological development and an increase in material comfort for a larger proportion of the world’s population. And we’ve seen an alternative - communism - produce most of the worst horrors of the 20th Century. Capitalism’s success was riding on temporary trends. Now it’s in trouble. Can we transition to something which suits our needs better while avoiding the catastrophe that was communism? Again, I think a lot hinges on the psychological. Has capitalism worked well because it accommodates our selfishness, allowing that selfishness to be the motive engine that drives it, or is our selfishness a product of capitalism? Are we encouraged to want more and compete more because the system doesn’t foster a sense of community which would be counter-productive to it? Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, but I think new economics will be more likely to succeed if the insecurity of ego which lies at the heart of our selfishness is healed.

Pinchbeck also examines the subject of sexuality. Is our materialistic consumption partly fed by pervasive disappointment in our erotic lives? Are we meant to be monogamous? I think this is an important subject to look at. It’s been a troubled area for Pinchbeck himself. But when we repress any aspect of our being we also end up repressing our capacity for openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity - our capacity for love. So if we are going to have a community which functions more smoothly and productiveness, it needs to be one which knows what to do about erotic desires as an alternative to repressing them. There is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all answer to this, something which Pinchbeck acknowledges.

When it comes to spirituality, Pinchbeck really throws it all in. He even touches on reincarnation, clairvoyance, tele-kinesis and astral travel. (David Icke’s lizard men get a mention to.) This may lose him credibility in the eyes of many, but he does provide a lot of food for thought for the open-minded. Do these things seem more credible to someone who has taken ayahuasca? Maybe. Since I’m not prepared to take some of these things with a handful of magic mushrooms, I’ll take them with a grain of salt, but it is important to acknowledge that he is only presenting these things as “maybes” and the fact that he has a very open minded on these subjects doesn’t diminish the importance of the bulk of what he has to say. I think he is right that we will need something similar to the religious spirit - a shared vision of something greater than ourselves to unite and motivate us.

He places a lot of importance on the media as a possible way of generating fast change. If new trends spread like wild-fire across television and social media, why not the enthusiasm for this rescue mission along with all the information we will need to bring it about? And look at how the propaganda effort turned around U.S. society to fight World War II. It has to be said though that it is easier to appeal to our hedonism, our paranoia about germs crawling around our bathroom or our latent aggression and xenophobia, than it is to genuinely inspire us toward a community effort. We need autonomous individuals, not sheep, but with that caveat aside I think he is right that both mass and social media can provide us with the network we need to share practical skills and information as well as the kind of vision Pinchbeck provides us with in his book - one of a bright future that yet may be.

Can We Find Anything Useful in Christianity?

Copyright: udra / 123RF Stock Photo

There are many who criticise the supernatural beliefs of the religious. I prefer to take a different approach. What useful and valid ideas are there in a religion which don’t depend on such supernatural beliefs? If we don’t believe in the supernatural, we may be tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, denying ourselves something profoundly useful because it is presented in a framework which also includes supernatural beliefs. And to take what is not supernatural out and test its effectiveness to bring benefit undercuts the argument that any benefit the religion may confer is evidence for the reality of the supernatural agency or agencies which are believed to lie behind it.

If we look at the philosophy expressed by Jesus in the gospels in isolation from any supernatural belief and outside the context of any particular form of Christian dogma, it centres around the concept of sin as humanity’s central problem and love as its solution.

What is meant by “sin”? This is another word for selfishness. Take the example of gluttony. To enjoy eating is natural and healthy, but if we take more than our share and/or more than is health for us, then selfishness is taking precedence over the interests of others and over our own larger self-interest. Selfishness is not simply self-interest. We are all motivated by self-interest. Our behaviour is driven by our perception of what will maximise our pleasure or minimise our suffering. Selfishness is when our present needs are so powerful that they override our wider self-interest.

What causes selfishness? Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or threatened individual. If you hit your thumb with a hammer you will have trouble thinking about anything other than your thumb.

While physical suffering can certainly make us self-directed for the period that it continues, it is not the central source of selfishness. The central generator of human selfishness (i.e. “sin”) is guilt. This is because guilt has the ability to form a negative feedback loop. If we feel guilty about our selfish behaviour then the guilt increases our suffering and thus our selfishness.

It was from this dilemma that Jesus wanted to deliver us. This selfishness generating sense of guilt is what alienates us from our basic loving nature.

What is love? Love is something which allows individuals to communicate and cooperate in a way which brings into existence a larger whole. It is that which allows a group of individuals to operate as a family or, on a larger scale, a community. Loving communication is characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. So clearly selfishness is a barrier to love.

Copyright: wavebreakmediamicro / 123RF Stock Photo

Jesus gave a name to the ultimate possible form of loving community - “the Kingdom of Heaven”. He saw this as something which exists both within and without the individual. It exists within us as our capacity to feel love and around us in the ways in which love is expressed and the potential that exists for it to be expressed further. The terms “Heaven” and “Hell” do not require a belief in the supernatural to be meaningful. It is illuminating to read each as referring to an imagined potential. Heaven is how the world could be if our natural capacity for love is set free and Hell is a vision of the world of suffering which the guilt-driven double bind inflicts upon us. If we look around at the suffering in the world from war, poverty, preventable disease, mental illness, etc., then we can see that Hell is already with us and that there is the potential for it to get far worse.

Love is driven by pleasure. The pleasure-giving chemical Oxytocin is released into our blood-stream when we engage in loving behaviour, thus rewarding and reinforcing it. Negative emotions such as fear or guilt block this from happening. If we view “God” as a personification of love (amongst other things) then the concept that “God forgives our sins” is a way of acknowledging that what is needed to move away from destructive forms of behaviour is to let go of guilt and fear and reconnect with our love of ourselves and, from that basis, our love of others.

While selfishness is the state in which we thinking mainly of ourselves, bliss is the state in which we forget ourselves. We can see this by thinking about the experience of orgasm. The French refer to it as “le petit mort”  or “the little death” because, in the moment of ecstasy, the ego (the conscious thinking self) is temporarily lost or forgotten. This is a good example because it challenges the puritanical stream of Christianity which saw suffering as being good for the soul and pleasure being harmful. Such a philosophy will tend to make the individual more dependent on belief in a supernatural afterlife by encouraging them to make their current life wretched, but it is unlikely to make them any less self-obsessed, and thus any more loving. Sexual lust is viewed as a sin for the same reason that gluttony is. If someone’s appetite for something is so great that it overrides their concern for the interests of others then it is a form of selfishness which stands as a barrier to love. But healthy erotic desires only turn into lust when we repress them for some reason, often because we have been encouraged to feel guilty about them. Sexual intercourse which consists of the affectionate sharing of pleasurable feelings is rightly described as “making love” (it is accompanied by the release of Oxytocin into the bloodstream). Even where sexual activity may take less healthy forms, repression is generally not the solution. Remove feelings of guilt and behaviour naturally moves in a healthier direction without the need for self-denial.

Creative activity is another example of love at work. While we are caught up in a problem solving exercise or in the creation of a work of art, our attention may be directed towards something outside ourselves to the extent that we forget about ourselves entirely. Only when we are finished do we realise that we are hungry or cold or tired.

The irony is that many turn away from Christianity because all the talk of sin makes them feel more guilty. It seems as if Jesus’ attempt to free us from Hell and admit us to Heaven has largely backfired. But this set of powerful symbols and stories, which has entered so deeply into the collective consciousness of our culture, still holds the potential to guide our transformation if we find the key to unlock it’s potential to do so.

Copyright: leonidtit / 123RF Stock Photo

Selfishness is Self-Denial

The key problem in human societies has always been selfishness. It puts us in the position of competing with each other when cooperation is the way to maximise our creativity and make sure that the needs of all are provided for.

But how well do we actually understand selfishness?

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or insecure individual. If you hit your thumb with a hammer you find it hard to think of anything else. It is a natural process that our attention focuses where there is a need or a threat.

Sometimes we are encouraged to feel guilty about being selfish. This doesn’t help. Guilt is a source of pain and pain makes us more selfish. It’s a negative feedback loop.

We may think that we have to chose between selfishness or self-denial. This is a false dichotomy. Selfishness is self-denial.

The fact that we want pleasure for ourselves is not a problem. It may very well be the solution. Selfishness consists less in the seeking of personal pleasure than it does in lacking the courage to truly maximise that pleasure.

Copyright: melnyk58 / 123RF Stock Photo

Think of the society within which we live as a garden. Each of us lives in a hut within that garden. The garden has run to seed. It is a tangle of weeds.

We can hide away in our huts most of the time. We can spend our time and resources putting up new wall-paper, shag-pile carpet, decorating with fancy adornments, buying a new 4K television… Our hut provides us with a place to hide from other people and from looking at the weeds. Sure we have our pleasures, but they are meagre.

With more courage we could learn to spend more time outside of our hut. Instead of decorating it we could be pulling weeds and planting flowers and fruit trees. Instead of being alone we could be doing this with others - talking and joking.

The more we transform the garden and the closer bonds we form with our fellow garden-dwellers, the longer we will want to spend outside.

Eventually we won’t want to return to our huts unless it is cold or rainy. We will wander around tending to the plants, eating the fruit, smelling the flowers, singing and dancing and making love with our neighbours.

And finally we realise that our selfishness was really a perverse form of asceticism. All we were doing was shutting ourselves out from paradise.

Trying Too Hard to Be Good Made Us Capable of Evil

Copyright: zatletic / 123RF Stock Photo

There are two forces at war in the human breast - love and idealism. 

Love is the impulse to accept. To accept ourself. To accept others. To accept the world as it is. To accept life as it is.

Idealism places limits on our acceptance of ourselves, others, the world and/or life as it is. Idealism is a bottle of poison labelled “medicine”. It advertises itself as the road to Heaven, but is really the road to Hell.

Love gives us the ability to cooperate. It gives us the ability to heal social divisions. It allows us to forgive. Love is the road to Heaven, but sometimes it is portrayed as the road to Hell. If we view life as a battle between Good and Evil, then to accept evil would appear to mean letting it win. But fighting against evil is what generates evil and always has. Accepting evil is what heals it. This is true of the evil within us as well as the evil of others. If we find a flaw in ourselves, it will grow only if we fixate on it, that is if we fight against it. And the evil behaviour of others is defensive. It arises from fear. The fear may not be of a threat to the body, but to the individual's ability to accept themselves. A guilty conscience is a major motivator of hostile behaviour. What all of us desire in our heart of hearts is to be accepted totally, so that we can give up our defensive battle. All of the atrocities which have been committed through the whole of human history have grown out of a lack of acceptance.

In the history of religion we can see the intertwining of these two elements. 

On the one hand, a religion is a repository of ideals, of high standards, and thus an eroder of self-acceptance. If we accept ourselves unconditionally, then we tend to be loving and cooperative naturally, because such behaviour makes us feel good. When we set high standards for ourselves and come to believe that anything less is unacceptable, we rob ourselves of the joy which would feed loving behaviour. If we beat ourselves up about being “sinful”, that will make us more “sinful”.

The unconditionally self-accepting individual - the individual who loves himself - has no resentment toward others. He has his bliss.

But those of us who strive to meet our ideals by an act of will unavoidably build up a well of resentment towards those how are not suffering as we are suffering.  We envy those who allow themselves to commit the “sins” we won’t allow ourselves to commit. And we resent the joyful existence of the innocent. The innocent also confront us with the falseness and misery of our own state.

From this arose the concept of the blood sacrifice. Unable to acknowledge that idealism itself was the source of all “sin”, religions often came to accept that resentment towards innocence needed some kind of outlet. Unable to see that what needed to die, if love were to rule the world, was idealism, they substituted the resented innocent. In some religions the sacrifice would be a lamb. In some a baby. In some a virgin woman.

Some interpretations of Christianity view Jesus the same way. They say that what frees the believer of sin is that the messenger was killed.

This isn’t just a religious thing. Men raping women or molesting children are acting on exactly the same impulse. Trying to find relief for the pain of their guilty conscience by inflicting suffering on those who are psychologically healthier and freer in spirit than themselves.

But the possibility of forgiveness and redemption and an admonition to love one another is also often present in religions. The problem is that this would always remain an unfulfilled potential until we came to realise that idealism and the idea that we need to strive through discipline to be better people, or that we need to insist that others do so, was the very thing which gave rise to our capacity for greed, murder, rape and domination.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 10

Darwin vs. Wallace

Griffith points out that “Darwin’s associates, Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace, persuaded him to substitute the term ‘natural selection’ with the term ‘survival of the fittest’” in this letter from Wallace : http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-5140

He says that this made possible the “Social Darwinism” excuse for our competitive behaviour.

I’m not very well-informed on Darwin, Wallace and Spencer, but from what I have been able to discover via Wikipedia, and a reading of Wallace’s letter, the attribution of such a motive to Wallace seems inappropriate. Spencer was the proponent of Social Darwinism. It was his term which Wallace recommended to Darwin, but Wallace’s stated reason was that too many people interpreted “natural selection” as implying that Darwin was saying that there is a conscious spirit within nature which makes a selection. They didn’t understand that talk of nature “choosing” something was merely metaphorical. “Survival of the fittest” has an inevitability about it which in no way suggests the involvement of an intelligence.

One could argue that that was Spencer’s stated argument, but that subconsciously he wanted something which would enable us to feel more comfortable about our competitive behaviour. The problem with such an interpretation is that Wallace’s articulation of the theory of natural selection which was formulated simultaneously and independently of Darwin’s and presented jointly with it, did not emphasise competition between individuals in the way that Darwin’s did. According to Wikipedia : “Darwin emphasised competition between individuals of the same species to survive and reproduce, whereas Wallace emphasised environmental pressures on varieties and species forcing them to become adapted to their local conditions, leading populations in different locations to diverge.”

Maybe Griffith’s argument would be more consistent if he said that our need to find an excuse for our competitive behaviour is why the sounder articulation of Wallace was supplanted by Darwin’s more “evasive” competition-emphasising version.

Are We Genetically Selfish or Genetically Selfless or Neither?

I feel no compulsion to perpetuate my genes. And I am just as likely if not more likely to do something to help someone I’m not related to than someone I am. So the idea that genetic selfishness is a major factor in my behaviour, as it supposedly is in other animals, seems unsupported.

If other animals are genetically selfish, and we are not, then how did this occur? Griffith has an explanation, but it seems to be more than is really needed.

Our nurturing period is longer than other animals, presumably because our ancestors lived in a food-rich environment which provided them with more leisure time to care for their infants, as Griffith suggests. He claims this led to the development of a hardwired genetic orientation toward loving selflessness.

Why would that be necessary?

In other animals a harsh environment means that they have to begin concentrating early on the battle to survive. There minds have to be focused on this. Only many many generations of relative freedom from the battle to survive, living in a leisurely nurturing environment, provided the space necessary for the brain’s potential to form new pathways not strictly limited to the needs of day-to-day survival. So we developed intelligence and the ability to reason.

Now animals have to blindly follow their instincts. They have no choice. Having an intelligent brain means we don’t have to follow our genetic impulses if we don’t want to. We can breed or not breed. It’s up to us. The brain brings with it other things to do which can be equally, if not more meaningful. To discover something which is helpful to the group, such as a new source of food, may give us a more meaningful kind of heritage than simply breeding. Finding understanding and communicating on a higher level are imperatives which come from the mind which can smoothly coexist with or over-ride a genetic imperative to perpetuate our genes.

Why would a cooperative past for our species require a genetic orientation towards cooperation? Cooperation is what feels best when we are not selfish. It can easily be motivated by the pleasure principle. Now selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. That suffering can be from an injury or physical sickness, it can be from hunger, thirst or cold, it could be from frustration in our attempts to perpetuate our genes, but for we humans, as often as not, the suffering which makes us selfish is neurotic suffering. Neurotic suffering arises from compromised self-acceptance. The most powerful underminer of self-acceptance is idealism which tells us : “You are unacceptable in some way.” Because the kind of behaviour which idealism criticises is generally defensive behaviour, with offence sometimes seeming the best defence, idealism sets up a negative feedback loop which generates more anti-social behaviour.

Of course things like food shortages, harsh living environments and physical disease might compromise our cooperativeness to some degree, but in the absence of idealism-bred neurosis we would have a good chance of maintaining our solidarity in the face of such challenges, because love - open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication - is such a richly rewarding pleasure-giving experience that we would sacrifice much to maintain access to it. At its deepest level it makes us know that we are life itself, so we may feel we will really lose nothing if we have to give our life because of it.

So no genetic orientation to selflessness is needed to explain the human condition. It all began with a single “mistake” which our conscious minds made. That mistake was deciding that it was meaningful to try, by an act of will, to avoid certain behaviours which we called “evil” and pursue other behaviours which we called “good”. We placed conditions on our love of ourselves and others and thus undermined the unconditional love which is the normal healthy state of any intelligent mind.

Idealism can be understood as a conceptual virus which has plagued humanity and in Griffith’s defiant attempts to “confront us” with our “non-ideal state and behaviour” we see it in its most virulent form. We humans have arrived at a desperate place. Conflict, social breakdown, ecological collapse… These are all real. But Griffith’s ideas are not the solution, they are the very distillation of the problem. What he brings us is poison labelled as medicine.

Read Part 11

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 1

Let me first explain what I'm doing here. As regular readers of the blog may be aware, I was once a supporter of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith and his writings on the human condition. Over time, however, I have become more and more critical of them. A lot of my own writings have grown out of my response to what I read in Griffith's work. Now he has a new book out. I'm only just beginning to read the book. It's a big book. It may take me some time. I have a lot to say about Griffith's ideas arising from the previous books I've read, and I'm sure that the reading of this book will give me more to say. So what I am doing is to write down my thoughts as they come to me. So this can't be viewed as a conventional book review, more like a free-wheeling running commentary. I began on Goodreads, but they have space limitations which I hit pretty quickly.

If you want to know more about Griffith and his organisation The World Transformation Movement, you can find plenty of information on their website.

I won't bother to illustrate these posts, but I will number them to make it easier to read them in order and when I add a new one I'll place a link to it at the bottom of the previous post.

Preliminary Thoughts

The author of this book believes that it is very important. So important that, when he submitted a pitch for a feature article about it to Scientific American in October 2014 and they turned him down saying that any successful application would have to be “more in the realm of science”, he described the rejection as “the most serious crime that could possibly be committed in the whole of humanity’s 2-million-year journey to enlightenment.”

I have a long familiarity with Griffith’s theories, having first encountered them in about 1989 when I read his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition. I went through a period of being an advocate of his work. I wrote a very positive review of his second book for an Australian left-wing newspaper. I wrote some articles on the net which attracted a fair bit of attention. But over the years my relationship to these ideas changed. When you desperately want to believe in a complex of ideas (and who wouldn’t want to believe that someone had found a basic scientific understanding of human behaviour which could set us free from all of our social problems and guarantee us a future?) it can be hard to really grapple with it and discover its flaws. I believe my ability to assess it rationally has increased in parallel with my development of an alternative approach to many of the issues it raises.

My personal philosophy revolves around the concept of unconditional self-acceptance. If selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual, and withholding acceptance from ourselves causes us mental suffering, then to learn the habit of accepting ourselves - all of our thoughts and feelings - unconditionally, will lead to us being less selfish. Our rationale for not accepting aspects of ourselves is generally that we want to improve, but it is just this withholding of acceptance which keeps us insecure and holds us back from all forms of improvement. Unconditional self-acceptance also provides a sound basis for rational understanding. If we are insecure about ourselves then we may feel the need to block out certain ideas or aspects of reality or to exaggerate others in order to avoid the pain of having those insecurities exposed. We see this phenomena all the time in the area of politics. We could talk all day about the terrible things done by members of the party we oppose, but we often explain away the misdeeds committed the one we support. If we feel no need to prove anything about ourselves through our allegiance to a particular party our view of this aspect of the world will be less distorted.

A high-level of self-acceptance is crucial when reading Griffith’s work. This is because it comes from the perspective of extreme idealism. He says of his first book, that it “grew out of my desperate need to reconcile my extreme idealism with reality.” Griffith’s books are not simply pleas for more idealistic behaviour. His belief is that our non-ideal behaviour needs explaining, and that a thorough compassionate understanding of it will bring it to an end. Because he is coming from an idealistic perspective, his explanation is, to use his term, “confronting”. He believes that what confronts us is his “truthfulness”. I think that what confronts us, if we are confronted, is his idealism.

Idealism is corrosive to self-acceptance, and thus to mental health. The more we accept ourselves, the more mentally healthy we are and the more honest we are capable of being in our thinking as we don’t have to pussy-foot around our insecurities. But the constant message of idealism is “you are not good enough”. If we take this message on board (and it can be hard to resist), it will make us more selfish, and if we are exposed to too much hurtful idealism we may become angry at this implied criticism and lash out at those who express it or remind us of it.

The reason I say that a high-level of self-acceptance is crucial is partly because this will protect us from being discomfited by Griffith’s extreme idealism. Griffith claims that most people find it hard to make any sense of his books at all when they first attempt to read them due to what he calls “the deaf effect”. He sees this as entrenched alienation from truthful thinking, but I think it could equally be seen as the insecure mind instinctively protecting itself from exposure to the unjust criticism inherent in idealism. I didn’t experience this “deaf effect”. I knew immediately what Griffith was saying when I read his first book, but I found the exposure to his idealism intensely painful as it undermined my self-acceptance. Of course his book also provided a “defence for humanity” the relief of which was supposed to greatly outweigh that pain. I don’t think it ever really did, but the fact that I believed Griffith was saving the world, and that I had a chance to support him, helped me to transcend that pain. It was only later, when I had lost my faith in Griffith, that I would find a way to heal it.

I’ve decided that I will slowly work my way through Griffith’s new book, writing commentary as I go. It’s a long book and I dare say my commentary will be long too.

You may ask me why I’m bothering to do this when I have already rejected Griffith’s central thesis based on his previous books. I think the value that lies in Griffith’s work is the challenge it poses. He is right when he says that the future of the human race will be short if we keep on as we are. And he is right that the root cause of most of our problems, from the political to the economic to the ecological, is psychological. The psychological rehabilitation of the human race, the healing of those aspects of our psyche which lead to our destructive behaviour, is the key challenge facing us. It really is a choice between self-knowledge or self-destruction. If Griffith doesn’t have the answers, we can at least consider his writings as the opening of a conversation we need to have. To dismiss them without a thorough analysis is to fail to take full advantage of the challenge they represent.

Let me first give my extremely simple explanation for how I believe the human condition really works. Our principle motivation, as with other animals, is the pleasure principle - we try to seek out pleasure and avoid suffering. And we are born with a tendency to accept those around us unconditionally. When someone causes us pain or we encounter some obstacle in our pursuit of pleasure, we experience frustration. We either express that frustration or we repress it. Repressing it interferes with our spontaneity and our ability to experience joy. But expressing it may lead to punishment or criticism. Criticism and taught values are incorporated into our ego in the form of what we call our “conscience”. What we think of as the battle between “good” and “evil” is between restraint of our frustrations in deference to the conscience and expression of our frustrations. Consciences are varied in how oppressive they are, depending on how extreme is the idealism on which they are based. And the amount of frustration the individual feels varies according to the traumas and trials of their life. Within this situation the key factor is self-acceptance. We begin entirely self-accepting. Criticism and frustration can eat away at that state. What gives the conscience its power is that it is instilled as conditions for self-acceptance. If we are “good” our conscience will not trouble us, but if we are “bad” it will pull our self-acceptance out from under us, a feeling we experience as guilt. We may try to compensate for a lack of self-acceptance in other ways. We may try to fill that hole with material extravagance, success in some field, token idealistic behaviour, or something else. Extreme instances of altruism can occur when an individual’s self-acceptance is so dependent on a conscientious principle that they feel that even a painful death would involve less suffering than a life lived knowing they had betrayed that principle. So extreme altruism is driven by the impulse to avoid feelings of guilt, but loving cooperation, because it feels good, is the healthy expression of the fully self-accepting individual.

The central question Griffith is grappling with is why we depart so far from what is ideal. Are we good or are we evil? The ideal behaviour that he has in mind is cooperativeness and selflessness. These are not the only ideals which have existed of course. The Nazis had the ideal of racial purity. The puritans had the ideal of asceticism. An ideal is a concept of perfection in some aspect of life. Undoubtedly he is right to look at cooperativeness as something to be valued. But what do we mean really by “selfless”. If taken literally, the word is nonsensical. To be without a self would be to not exist. But we use it as an opposite to “selfish” to indicate altruistic behaviour. What do we really mean by it, though? A person’s behaviour may serve the interests of others, but why does the individual engage in that behaviour if not to either increase their own good feelings or decrease their own bad feelings. This isn’t selfishness in the pathological sense of behaviour which deprives others of what they need or want in order to meet the psychological rather than physical needs of the individual. The unreachability of true selflessness, however, can make the concept a particularly powerful one for anyone who might want to gain influence over others by undermining their self-acceptance. While Griffith defines “love” as “unconditional selflessness”, I think that love is something else. I define it as a form of communication characterised by honesty, openness, spontaneity and generosity. Though we forget ourselves in love, it isn’t useful to think of it as “selfless” as it carries with it the reward to the self of, for that period of time, not being alone. For me, when Griffith talks of selflessness, I think of something oppressively conscience-driven rather than self-forgetfulness in the bliss of love and creative activity. This is, perhaps, an unhelpful prejudice on my part.

Why greed, hatred, rape, torture, murder and war? Griffith asks. Within my own conception of the human condition (or what I prefer to call “the human neurosis”) above, it makes sense that we are desperate to find some kind of resolution for the frustration/conscience dichotomy. Greed is an addiction to material relief from compromised self-acceptance. Because we are liable to feel guilty about our greed it forms a negative feedback loop which keeps it ever increasing. Hatred is a projection of the self-contempt of the non-self-accepting individual. Violence in general is an overflow of frustration, and sometimes a way of trying to compensate for compromised self-acceptance through a show of dominance. It is driven by the wounded ego. And war is a case where the desire to let out pent up frustration may actually align with the conscience. The conscience of the warrior tells him that the right thing to do is to defend his country and to kill the “evil ones”.

One area where I think Griffith is right is that our insecurity about our own worth has held us back from acknowledging holism - “the tendency in nature to form wholes” - and thus from achieving a functioning understanding of ourselves and the world. When we lose our capacity for unconditional self-acceptance we become selfish. To be a healthily functioning part of a whole we would have to focus outwardly, towards other people. Being forced to acknowledge that would throw our selfishness into stark relief. It would make us feel guilty. Guilt is the feeling we have when our self-acceptance is being further eroded. So we have two options here if we don’t want to make our personal situation worse. We either need to avoid recognising the tendency in nature to form wholes, or we need to develop the habit of unconditional self-acceptance in order to liberate us from guilt and thus free our minds to think holistically without feeling criticised.

I don’t consider Griffith to be a true holistic thinker though. Too much of his writing revolves around trying to reconcile dualities - “good” and “evil”, men and women, left wing and right wing - while retaining the conceptual distortions and oversimplifications inherent in dualistic thinking. He also thinks in terms of humans being “imperfect”. Perfection is an illusion that the holist needs to be rid of. The wholes we see in nature did not come about through seeking or achieving perfection. Evolution proceeds by “mistakes”, i.e. mutations. And a whole does not arise by insisting on some standard of perfection, it arises through inclusivity not exclusivity. Holism requires pragmatism not idealism. And, it seems to me, if the human race is going to come together into some kind of healthy functioning whole it will happen through an erosion of idealism in favour of love for ourselves and our fellows in all our messiness.

Harry Prosen, in his introduction, gushes about Griffith with the passion of a religious convert. I’m afraid the more someone gushes and engages in grand rhetoric the more I suspect that they are trying to keep themselves persuaded. I sometimes feel the same way about Griffith. His writings are, for something which is supposed to bring complete understanding to the human situation, rather low on concise clarity and high on verbose, emotive rhetoric. There is, however, a relatively simple theory at the heart of all this. That needs to be assessed, and so do the conclusions Griffith extrapolates from it. The tests are internal logic and the ability to illuminate the complex social phenomena of the world. There may be a simple psychological formula behind the apparent chaos of human behaviour just as simple mathematical formulae can underlie chaotic systems, but if the “proof” relies on reducing individuals to stereotypes it is no proof at all.

Griffith gives a good description of the human condition. He rightly rejects arguments that our aggressiveness is genetic. He rightly points out the limited effectiveness of most strategies for dealing with it. For those who support him, I think this is a major reason. No-one else I know is as uncompromising in their acknowledgement of the problem. The big question though is whether his attempt at explanation brings with it some form of genuine therapy for that condition. A doctor has to do more than diagnose, he has to provide a treatment.

Griffith quotes Arthur Schopenhauer : “Man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other object than causing pain…No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical nature which is far worse than the merely bestial.”

Idealism exists only in humans also. Where there is idealism there will also be the diabolical, as the diabolical (as Schopenhauer describes it) is driven by the need to rebel against the oppression of the ideals. Idealism corrodes self-acceptance and enforces the repression of feelings of frustration. In particularly vulnerable individuals this creates so much resentment that they feel compelled to do the very opposite to what that idealism insists upon. Idealism says we must be kind and generous, especially to the innocent and vulnerable. So, if someone is driven to hell by the corrosive power of idealism, they may specifically pick the innocent and vulnerable to inflict terrible suffering upon. This doesn’t mean that it is wrong to be kind, the problem lies in the insistence and undermining of self-acceptance (the guilt-tripping), which is the motivator of that compulsion. Love is the only sustainable motivator of kindness and generosity, and love begins with self-acceptance. The more we insist that people not be egotistical or aggressive, the more egotistical or aggressive we force them to be.

Now Griffith is not openly insisting on idealism. Ostensibly he is trying to heal the egotism, aggressiveness, alienation, etc. through understanding of these aspects of human behaviour which is both rational and compassionate. But is his explanation sound? And does it have the capacity to achieve that healing? If not, the poison of the idealism which lies behind his work may mean that it does more harm than good.

Read Part 2