The Case for Jeremy Griffith

I’ve written a lot about the case against Jeremy Griffith’s explanation for the human condition. Here I will try to walk with him as far as I can go.

His explanation grew out of his need to reconcile his idealism with what he encountered in the social world around him.

His idealistic behaviour was an expression of his instinctive orientation toward love, which was sheltered by similarly loving nurturing.

From observing himself he deduces that our instincts are toward idealistic behaviour.

In time he will discover that most other people do not behave in this way. People are often selfish, egotistical or cynical. And the world is not run on idealistic principles or it would not be in the mess it is in.

He comes to the conclusion that people become angry, egocentric and alienated when they encounter the message that they should behave idealistically. They are angry at the criticism. They try to defend themselves from the attack on their ego by fortifying it. And they shut their ears to what is being said. If this means blocking their mind from acknowledging certain aspects of reality, then that means they become alienate, i.e. cut off from reality.

It’s worth pointing out that the anger isn’t necessarily one way. Griffith talks about expressing a great deal of anger, in his youth, at what he saw as the wrongness of other people’s behaviour.

Griffith supposes that all children will go through the process of trying to make sense of why the people around them don’t act according to what they perceive in themselves as the correct form of behaviour.

Eventually, he says, they will “adopt resignation”, i.e. find a strategy of adaptation to the non-ideal world they find within them now as well as without.

The state before resignation is innocence.

Sex could be an innocent expression of the loving instincts, but by the time we reach sexual maturity, egotism characterises our behaviour. So Griffith sees sex as “an attack on innocence” - he sees the egotistical element of it.

Perhaps it would be fairer to talk about something like sex (to the extent that one can generalise) being used as an attack on the oppressiveness which originally originated in innocence. There may be sadists who want an innocent one to suffer, but most of us just want guilt to fuck the hell off. And that doesn’t just come from directly from innocence, but censorious prudes who may be anything but innocent.

Anyway, there’s a battle against the oppressive ideals, a battle which is necessary if those ideals are not going to oppress the freedom necessary to find liberating self-understanding.

Griffith came up with a hypothesis to explain what he had experienced in his own life. Our instincts were like him, in his youth, pointing a finger and accusing people of being selfish and superficial. Our conscious mind had to set off to find a defence for itself. Humanity, as a whole, was responsible for the knowledge gathered by science, though it is Griffith who assembles it and finds the liberating truth, thus being a representation of the start of the problem and its finish.

Griffith’s takeaway is that we are the heroes of existence because we were willing to fight a great battle against ignorance.

I don’t remember how much this meant to me when I was supporting Griffith. I know I saw value in it as a “selling point” when writing about Griffith’s book for others.

When I knew him, Griffith had a way of saying “I love your courage” when he hoped that someone would stop doing something. The theory is that, if egotistical behaviour is part of this grand battle against criticism, then the proper response is to show appreciation for the behaviour instead of criticising it.

When he tried it on me it didn’t have any effect. I could see through it as a strategy, but also receiving praise from others is rarely if ever the motive behind something I do.

So, even if Griffith’s explanation for the human condition is correct, will the perception that we are an heroic species have a healing impact on individuals? Isn’t “you’re a hero!” a bit like a cocaine shot to the ego, which burns out as quickly as it hits? And even if it didn’t, isn’t “I’m a hero” just a cage to live in?

What interests me the most is therapy. How do we become free of the embattlement of the ego?

The most beautiful thing in the world is redemption. A redemption story in film or literature is the most likely to move me to tears.

For as long as I can remember I’ve identified with we human beings at our worst. Griffith in his youth may have looked on at egotistical and superficial behaviour with anger at its wrongness. And most of us will tend to view those who commit atrocities as alien monsters.

My imagination has always taken me inside the destructive individual to see someone who is already imprisoned by a character structure which makes them the centre of their own little hell, which they then inflict on others.

I can imagine that something in the human spirit which corresponds with the condemning innocent that Griffith represented in his youth might be the jailer which locked us in our prisons.

Does his explanation of the human condition set us free?

I can only imagine this being the case if it brings on a cathartic release of the frustration pent up within that condition. Maybe some kind of almighty primal scream aimed at the condemning innocence which was the unwitting source of all the horrendous evil and suffering ever committed or experienced by we humans on the planet earth.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Mythical Communities?

 

Photo by Cathy Yeulet

What is the nature of community? Today we often hear talk of "the black community", "the gay community", the "trans community" etc. To what degree can a single physical characteristic like race, gender or sexuality be the formative determinant of something which can genuinely be characterised as a community?

Merriam-Webster defines "community" as "a unified body of individuals" and then goes on to give a variety of examples.

Wikipedia says : "A community is a social unit with commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area or in virtual space through communication platforms."

I begin with myself. I'm white, male and heterosexual. I don't feel that I'm a part of a white community or a male community or a heterosexual community. When I experience a sense of community it is irrespective of race, gender or sexuality and based on other factors.

There may be many factors which can be the basis of community, but here are some I can identify :

1. Proximity

A family or a workplace can be a community regardless of any differences between the individuals who make it up.

2. Culture

People can be united by a shared cultural heritage, including shared history, myths and first language.

3. Belief system

People can be brought together by a shared belief system, such as a religion or political allegiance.

4. Interest

People can be brought together by a shared hobby, or shared interest in music, movies, literature or sport, etc.

5. A common threat

People can be united by a threat which is posed to all of them, for instance, when one country launches a military attack against another it is usually enough to cause the citizens of that country to unite in the spirit of self-preservation.

I think the reason we might talk about a "black community" or a "gay community" etc. is that we may perceive the group to be united by a common threat. Whether this is true now, is open to argument, but a stronger argument of this kind can be made when looking into the past. When racial segregation was legal and homosexuality was illegal, oppression might provide a unifying factor producing a sense of community amongst members of these identity groups.

To the extent that someone feels they are a part of a "black community" or a "gay community", is it because they are part of a community which is united by a particular cultural attitude to that shared characteristic? Will a black atheist necessarily feel more communal unity with a black Christian or Muslim, than with a white atheist? Will a gay conservative feel more communal unity with a gay radical or a straight conservative?

There is no doubt that there are communities within the black and gay demographics, based around the factors of proximity, culture, belief system or interest. But can each demographic as a whole be classed as a community? Where is the proof that race alone is a unifying factor which can compete with something like political affiliation? People who argue that there is a black community tend to then have to resort to claiming that some people are "not really black" because their political beliefs set them at odds with other members of the demographic.

Some find it politically useful to argue that demographics are communities, but evidence needs to be provided that this argument is meaningful.

One of the most extraordinary claims is that there is such a thing as "the LGBTQ+ community". Here it is not even a common identity characteristic which is considered to be the basis for a sense of unity, rather this is a group said to be unified by what they are not. The argument is that everyone who is not heterosexual has enough in common with everyone else who is not heterosexual to be unified by that fact.

Conflict is rife within all demographic groups, be they based on race, sex, sexuality or gender identity.

If we want to come together in meaningful and creative ways, I think we need to do this through :

1. Proximity - getting to know our neighbours.

2. Culture - learning about each others histories and traditions.

3. Belief systems - finding and embracing those beliefs which heal conflict and build community and using reason and science to eliminate beliefs which, because they are lies, can only feed division.

4. Shared interest - especially those, like music, which have always had to power to be the expression of a communal soul

5. Recognition of common threats - ecological, medical and social - and the need to cooperate as a community to address them.

Whatever our race, sex, sexuality or gender identity, that's fine. But we can't look to these qualities to unite us, and mustn't let these qualities divide us.

BOOK REVIEW : The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich

This book by controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich is unlikely to appeal to traditional Christian believers. Reich theorises that Jesus must have had sex with one or more of the women who surrounded him during his ministry. If Jesus was a naturally loving individual, Reich concludes, he must have exhibited the free genital expression intrinsic to a healthy character structure. 

Reich was not a traditional believer. He views Jesus as a man whose presence had a profound impact on the world because he was so healthy and the rest of us are so sick. The very tendency to interpret his specialness as something otherworldly, something supernatural, and to create myths of magical events such as virgin birth and resurrection from the dead around his memory, is evidence of how alienated we are from the functioning of our own bodies. 

We are born with primary instincts which direct us toward loving behaviour through the pleasurable streaming of the life energy in our bodies. But we are born into a society which is antagonistic to such feelings. The frustration of the primary instincts causes them to be re-channelled into secondary drives. These can take many forms, including various kinds of egotism, aggression, anxieties, etc.

What Reich admits he cannot explain is how this occurred in the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve gives this change from healthy functioning to antagonism towards the free operation of the life force, i.e. God, a mythological expression. We are caught in a terrible trap and that trap is our own neurotic character structure, which alienates us from each other and from nature. In the first chapter Reich gives a description of The Trap and the various ways we try to reconcile ourselves to imprisonment within it. Religion is one source of solace, a promise of a life outside the trap after death.

But Reich presents Jesus as a man who never entered The Trap. A man with a healthy character structure, a man who unselfconsciously gave expression to our original loving instincts. His wisdom was the honest clear thinking anyone would exhibit who was not impeded by the fears and frustrations that come with being divided against one’s own life energy.

Central to this condition is fear of our sexual feelings. This is the hook on which our loving instincts get snagged.

In Western culture things have changed a lot since Reich’s death in 1957. We are more honest about sexuality. He played a role in opening things up. It was he who coined the term “Sexual Revolution”. But that doesn’t mean that the problem he highlighted is any the less with us. What he felt was repressed in us was not so much sex itself but the loving expression of “the genital embrace”. It’s possible to have sex several times a day and still be a denizen of The Trap. Reich uses the term “four-lettering” to describe compulsive neurotic sex - the “wham bam thank you ma’am” kind of copulation that is all the world away from the gentle process which builds slowly and naturally to an orgasm which frees the soul to meld with that of one’s partner.

Maybe attitudes to adolescent sexuality are more enlightened than they were in Reich’s day. He talks of the sexual agony of the adolescent. This is something I could identify with. Even though I had sexually liberal parents, I was greatly disturbed by the onrush of powerful sexual desires at puberty. I remember wishing at one point that my sexual desires could be medically removed, because they were such a source of terrible anxiety. Why? I don’t know. Reich felt that young people were psychologically damaged by the sex negative attitudes of parents, teachers and the church, which caused them to fight against and repress their sexual desires instead of expressing them in a healthy way. Thus one generation of sexual cripples cripples the next.

Once again, the fact that young people today are more sexually active would not necessarily be a positive sign for Reich. Compulsive unloving sex is just another neurotic symptom.

In this book, which was written only a few years before he was imprisoned and died, Reich doesn’t try to make a carefully reasoned or evidenced argument about human nature or about the life and death of Jesus. This is written more in the mode of the prophet crying in the wilderness. His early work was supported with references to case studies and anthropological research. Here he simply states what he strongly believes to be true and it is up to us to either feel that it makes sense of our own experience and what we have read in the gospels about Jesus or that it doesn’t. Given that, in the middle of his career, Reich claimed to have discovered scientific evidence of the life energy, which he called “orgone” - evidence which was taken seriously by very few other scientists - perhaps this less scientific approach is preferable. One need not agree with everything Reich says to gain from the stimulation of his iconoclastic thought. We all need to be shaken up from time to time.

The story of the life and murder of Christ is, arguably, the most important story in Western history. Even those of us who are not Christians know its major events. It permeates our culture. It doesn’t matter that Reich is no Biblical scholar. Even if this were a fictional story, it is one which embodies the central human dilemma. Reich is using the basics of the story as a way of contemplating and illustrating the human condition. And he doesn’t hide the fact that he identifies aspects of his own situation with that of Christ. He too, at least in his own mind, is a speaker of truths unwelcome to the authority figures of his time. He too had reluctantly taken on a leadership role.

Reich presents Christ as a man who only gradually discovers that he is special. He has to learn that others are not free in the way that he is. His psychological freedom and loving nature make him very attractive to those around him. He wants to help them. But he doesn’t understand that their character structure is such that they will suck up whatever love he shows them and then resent him because they can’t be like him. They will seduce him into becoming a leader - into marching on Jerusalem - but it will all be for nothing. He will be killed because those with a sick character structure always have a murderous resentment for those who are still truly alive inside themselves.

It is this tendency which is the central subject of the book. For Reich, the murder of Christ is something that happens all over the world ever day. Christ was an embodiment of our original loving instincts as they are expressed in the body. And the Murder of Christ continues through the stifling of the expression of those instincts in every child. Who is the murderer of Christ? Reich points the finger at all of us.

Like Listen Little Man!, another book Reich wrote in the latter part of his life when he was at the centre of much hostility, The Murder of Christ is often a harshly accusatory book, but we may gain much through our encounter with its thorniness. Today we know more about the chemistry of love. We know that there are forms of intimacy, sexual or otherwise, which cause our bodies to produce the chemical Oxytocin. The experience of this chemical in our blood stream, which produces warm feelings of affection and bonding and thus, no doubt, works to melt the rigidity of our angry, frightened or resentful ego structure, is perhaps what Reich and his patients experienced as the flow of “orgone energy”. Perhaps it is true that a significant element in the dark side of our life as humans - aggression, sexual predation, greed, depression, loneliness - arises through a fear of bodily sensations which, were we less troubled by them, could lead us to a more loving society.

Eva Reich, Jerome Siskind, Peter Reich, Wilhelm Reich and Ilse Ollendorff in Maine

BOOK REVIEW : You Can Stop Masturbation... And End Any Addictions By Reading Simple Stories and Charts by Sesan Oguntade

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

The Sex Object

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

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

I don’t think it works like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homosexuality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snuff Movies

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

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

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

Remember Titus 1:15 :

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

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

Women in Tights

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

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

The Ultimate Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Part 18

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 16

Mistaking Satan for God

God and Satan are two mythological figures. God is our personification of the creative principle of the universe, which in our own species is manifested as love. Satan is seen as the originator of evil behaviour, and yet he is recognised as having come from God, as having been one of God’s “fallen angels”.

Our capacity for reason is clearly a product of the creative principle of the universe (God), but it brought with it the distinction between “good” and “evil” which led to the destructive mind virus we call “idealism”. Love requires unconditional acceptance, but idealism made our acceptance conditional and thus gradually eroded our capacity for love and sowed the seeds of conflict.

If idealism is what brought evil into the world, then Satan is a mythological way of referring to idealism.

In our increasingly insecure state we recognised that we were out of harmony with the theme of life - i.e. love, but by feeling guilty about that, by giving in to Satan’s whispered suggestion that embracing idealism was the way back to harmony with God, rather than recognising that God works precisely by refusing to judge or to expect perfection, we went down a dark path, one in which we would quickly come to adopt Satan as our God.

People often wonder why there is such a difference between the judgemental, jealous, condemning God of the Old Testament, and the forgiving God spoken of by Jesus and of which it is said : “God is love.”

This is because the God which cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, who drowned the world in a flood, etc., was really Satan. Of course these are mythological events, but the point is that they are stories about a harsh judger of humanity, and that judger of humanity has been what William Blake referred to as “the accuser”, i.e. the originator of destructive behaviour, the enemy of the real God (love). And to the degree that we have worshipped that God we have been Satan worshippers.

Blake expressed this in the Epilogue to his poem Gates of Paradise :

"To The Accuser Who is The God of This World
Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce
And dost not know the Garment from the Man
Every Harlot was a Virgin once
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan
Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine 
Of Jesus & Jehovah thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline
The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill."

If we can throw off idealism (the habit of standing in judgement of ourselves or others) then there is no need to worship God. We can be God, we can be love personified.

Patriarchy

Griffith’s view that we have a genetic instinct towards selflessness which criticised our attempts to self-manage, means that he sees the attempt to find understanding of the world and ourselves as “a battle against the ignorance of our instinctive self”. Because this was “a battle” he feels that it naturally fell to men, and because women are biologically nurturers, and thus aligned with “our instinctive self”, it brought about a rift between the sexes which required the institution of patriarchy, so that the men could pursue the battle to find understanding with support rather than interference by the women.

I don’t think this is at all what happened. I see no evidence that we have a genetic instinct for selflessness which criticises us. However, as I’ve outlined previously, conflict arising from the requirements of the nurturing role provided by the women and the group protector role provided by the men, would have led to the distinction being made between “good” and “bad” behaviour - aggressive vs. nurturing - and thus the thought virus of idealism came into being.

Armouring is our defence against criticism. Since the men would have been more vulnerable to criticism because theirs was the aggressive role, they had to become more armoured. And it was a negative feedback loop. The more armoured they became the more criticism they were subjected to because of their relative lack of responsiveness and generosity to others.

This situation progressed until society became patriarchal. The armour is a form of control - it protects us against threats from without and within. A lot of repression is involved. A lot is bottled up within the armour. And since we project our inner battles onto the outside world, the more desperately embattled an individual is in their armour, and thus the more self-control they need to keep it from breaking down, the more they also feel the need to control the behaviour of those around them which resonates with that internal threat. And so the most armoured individuals came to exercise control over society. The more embattled the men in charge of a society the more oppressed the women in that society will be. It takes a secure, i.e. relatively armour-free, man to not feel threatened by a woman’s freedom.

I don’t think the need to find understanding, in general, comes into it. Clearly an understanding of our psychology, particularly the relationship between idealistic criticism and armouring, was needed. But I don’t know that men were necessarily in any better position to find that understanding then women. And the search for general understanding is something which can be pursued by anyone with a functioning brain irrespective of their gender.

So I see patriarchy not as a retrospectively justified strategy in the journey toward self-knowledge, rather I see it as a symptom of an unavoidable mental illness which occurred along the way.

Feminism’s critique of patriarchy and defence of a woman’s right to perform any role in society is fundamentally sound. The only problem is that, since the role of patriarchy was as a form of armouring, and armouring is a defence against criticism, feminism didn’t exactly make it easier for men to become less patriarchal. It is the practice of unconditional acceptance (except of destructive behaviour towards others) that makes a world of equality possible.

By contrast, Griffith’s approach to healing is to try to demonstrate that the patriarchal role has been a heroic one, necessary to the salvation of the human race from the human condition, but one which can now disappear because understanding of the human condition has been achieved. But to tell someone they are a hero is surely a reinforcement of their armouring. What heals is to be made to know that one is simply acceptable. It is the difference between trying to repair someone’s self-esteem, which needs always to be maintained, and encouraging them to leave the self-esteem economy altogether.

Sex

According to Griffith : “Unable to explain their behaviour to women, men were left in an untenable situation: they couldn’t just stand there and accept women’s unjust criticism of their behaviour — they had to do something to defend themselves — but because women reproduced the species, men couldn’t kill women the way they destroyed animals, and so instead men violated women’s innocence or ‘honour’  through rape. Men perverted sex, as in ‘fucking’ or destroying, making it discrete from the act of procreation. What was being fucked, violated, destroyed, ruined, degraded or sullied was women’s innocence. The feminist Andrea Dworkin recognised this underlying truth when she wrote that ‘All sex is abuse’.”

Here we see the real irrationality coming out in Griffith’s thinking. Because his own sexual desires are a threat to his “innocent good little boy” persona, he views sex as essentially an “attack on innocence.” Now it is true that women don’t like to have sex, or anything else, forced upon them. That is an attack. But he is assuming here that recreational sex could only occur if it were forced onto women. He is saying that an innocent woman has no desire for erotic pleasure. He talks about ‘honour”, but surely the concept of sexual honour is a product of a sexually repressive society. “A good and proper woman doesn’t want to do those beastly things. She just lays back and thinks of England.” I can imagine that many women will find this attitude insulting. And when he quotes from Andrea Dworkin he fails to point out that she was a lesbian who was molested by a man in a movie theatre at the age of nine.

He says : “Well, sex as humans have been practising it has similarly been extremely offensive to our instinctive self or soul, and has caused the same ‘emotion-induced’ shock to our soul and thus temporary ‘blackout’ in our mind, as this study found : ‘Research suggests that when shown erotic or gory images, the brain fails to process images seen immediately afterward. This phenomenon is known as “emotion-induced blindness.’”

That doesn’t seem terribly significant to me. If we see something which induces a strong emotional reaction in us then our mind remains focussed on that for a while before being able to focus on something else. I’m sure that the degree of this response would be lessened in individuals like myself who are very desensitised to erotic and gory imagery. I don’t think it has anything to do with some sensitive innocent instinctive self. I’m sure that, if you met up with an old friend in the street, it would take you a while, as you walked away after talking to them, to really open up to concentrating on the world around you, because your emotion had drawn your attention away from your environment.

And the degree of disturbance which erotic or gory imagery has on the individual is generally based on how repressed that individual is. If we are repressing a lot of sexual desires within us, then erotic images are liable to be disturbing to us as they resonate with what we are repressing. On the other hand, a child watching the same image would probably view it with untroubled curiosity or amusement, because he or she does not yet have the desires required to resonate with what is seen. And gory footage will be most disturbing to someone who is repressing a lot of anger, as the violence resonates with their repressed feelings of hostility.

He says : Humans don’t remember sexual episodes very well and the reason we don’t is because sex, as currently practised, is a violation of our soul and we don’t want to remember such violation.

I don’t know what evidence he is basing this on. I haven’t had much sex in my life, but I think I remember those episodes better than a lot of other things. My view of the soul and Griffith’s seem quite opposed. I feel that masturbating to pornography is one of the things which nurtures my soul, providing some healing from the soul-crushing repression of the erotic which is the norm in our society.

He goes on : “The main point being made here, however, is that sex became a way of attacking the innocence of women, the result of which was that women’s innocence was oppressed and, to a degree, they tragically came to share men’s upset.”

I think that it is true that women became armoured as a result of macho retaliations to their criticism of men, but I don’t think sex was a driving force in this. As we become armoured, free erotic sex becomes channelled, egotistical and sometimes aggressive sex, but the development of the armouring as a response to criticism is the driving factor, not the sex. In fact, orgasms have a tendency to temporarily release us from our armouring, hence the expression “the little death”, i.e. death of the ego.

Griffith’s attempts to describe and explain human sexual behaviour and psychology are spectacularly off-base, but unfortunately they have the ability to seem credible to some people because they fit with the sexually repressive ideas, often religiously based, which have historically warped our society.

Read Part 17

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 6

The Test of Experience

He quotes Albert Einstein : “Truth is what stand the test of experience.” I love that quote. This is the test I apply with my own tentative speculations. But we should always remember the history of cults, conspiracy theories and fanaticisms. Our capacity to be persuaded by something which later turns out not to have been true is fairly high. What I look for in myself and others is the fluid and spontaneous application of a would be insight. If ideas can be used easily and flexibly to illuminate phenomena and can be assimilated relatively effortlessly and used in independent ways by others, then all bodes well for their soundness. We should be wary of ideas which require a hard sell to get people interested, repetitive exposure to be assimilated and are applied to phenomena in a simplistic way which relies on regurgitating the rhetoric of the originator. All of these things are suggestive of dogma.

What Griffith’s ideas have not done for me is to stand the test of experience. Since I rejected them and began to follow my own path my mental health (which had troubled me since adolescence) has improved to the point that I haven’t experienced any depression or other symptoms of mental illness for at least eight years. And I have found an explanation for the human condition which can be shared fairly simply. I know how accountable I find this explanation, but readers will arrive at their own conclusions.

The  “Deaf Effect”

Griffith explains his need to repeat himself and the fact that people find it so hard to really take in what he is saying by referring to what he calls “the deaf effect”. He claims that the subject of the human condition has been so daunting, so off-limits to our brains, that we have had to protectively block it out with denial. In reading his books our brains sense we are being asked to enter forbidden territory and therefore they put up defences which interfere with comprehension.

As I’ve said previously, I think there is some truth to this in the sense that his books are drenched in extreme idealism and since idealism is corroding of our self-acceptance, we may well try to block it out.

He says that watching the videos on the World Transformation Movement’s website will help with this process, because the sight of someone calmly talking about this forbidden territory will reassure us that the danger of going into it has been addressed. It may be true that watching the videos will help readers to feel less defensive, but the argument that it would not be possible to talk about the topic so calmly unless one had achieved full understanding of it and thus made it safe is not true. The calmness would also be there if the speaker had an unshakeable faith in a dogmatic unfounded explanation of that subject. Whether understanding has been achieved has to be judged according to the explanatory ability of the theory, not by the calmness or self-confidence of the person espousing it.

If we learn the habit of unconditional self-acceptance then we will be able to read any book without any fear that anything in it will undermine us - thus we will be able to see it clearly and without bias and assess what it does or doesn’t have to offer us clearly.

One thing that worries me about Griffith’s work is that it contains two principle ingredients :

1. Exposure to extreme idealism. This is what Griffith describes as its “necessarily confronting” content.

2. A defence for our non-ideal condition and behaviour.

If exposure to the first ingredient undermines our self-acceptance, what is the chance that we will be fussy about the accountability of the latter. It may be a case of “any port in a storm.”

So, while I feel that Griffith’s work is a useful exploration and forces us to address serious issues, there is a danger that, if it is not a truthful explanation of the human condition (and I don’t believe that it is), it may be acting like a kind of conceptual parasite fastening onto readers by virtue of their insecurities about their own worth. Does this “information” offer genuine liberation for them or only a way of “proving” their worth through their faith in Griffith’s theory and support for it’s dissemination (what Griffith calls “holding the key aloft”.)

A Praising Review?

Griffith quotes this passage from an Amazon review of his book A Species in Denial :

“tears stream down my face, so overcome have I been by this book. It is the greatest book on the planet, no wait, in the universe. In fact it is the greatest anything in the universe”

It is interesting to look at the full review from which this extract is taken. At the time there were a number of rapturous five star reviews of the book on Amazon, including some by members of Griffith’s organisation. Am I wrong to interpret Beta’s review as a parody of the praising reviews? If so, why does Griffith’s seem oblivious to this?

Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, 1796-97

Griffith interprets the title of this painting as meaning that “reasoning at a very deep level” confronts us with depressing thoughts about the issue of the human condition. This seems to me to be a twisting of meaning to suit his purpose. “The sleep of reason” clearly refers, not to “reasoning at a very deep level”, but to the cessation of reasoning. When we sleep our reason shuts down and we may have nightmares. Likewise, in waking life, we use reason to defend us against that which we fear, and those fears (“monsters”) may overwhelm us if we let our reason slip. This might actually fit in well with Griffith’s argument that much intellectual activity, including many scientific theories, act as “evasions” of things we are afraid to face, but the way in which he uses it to illustrate the issue of resignation from the struggle to find understanding of the human condition seems inappropriate in spite of the fact that Goya’s painting looks as if it could be depicting a depressed individual.

Resignation

There is no doubt that most of us have a pretty rough transit through adolescence. Griffith puts this down to what he calls “resignation”. The idea is that we are born with this instinctive orientation toward selfless behaviour, but we are born into a world in which people don’t obey those rules. Why? The wrongness of it all is a mystery to us. Towards the end of childhood we might express our frustration and confusion by lashing out. After that we realise that that is no use. We have to find some understanding of this state of affairs. During adolescence we go through the agonising process of trying to do this while gradually realising that the problem is now inside ourselves as well. Resignation is the final reluctant decision to give up the fight to understand, in order to avoid suicidal depression, and adopt the false alienated existence of most adults.

The way I look at the same process is that maturation from infancy to adolescence involves increasing repression. The rebelliousness in later childhood is an attempt to keep releasing our feelings of frustration rather than bottling them up, but generally we are made aware that we have to bottle them up to some extent to fit in with society. And we are given our moral values. The war between our frustrations and our conscience tends to have a corrosive effect on our self-acceptance. We may well be trying to make sense of this, and of the behaviour of others, especially adults.

And during adolescence our sexuality comes fully on stream. Griffth downplays the significance of this, claiming that talk of “puberty blues” is an evasive excuse for what is really happening. Puberty he says “has been going on since animals first became sexual.” But this is itself an evasion of the fact that fear-based sexual repression has been the norm for our species since the dawn of civilisation if not before. The enjoyment of erotic pleasure is a basic part of our biology. Foetuses sometimes masturbate in the womb. It seems likely that our proto-human ancestors were like the bonobos, engaging freely and indiscriminately in erotic activity with their fellows. But, as our self-acceptance was undermined by the arrival of idealism, we became insecure and jealous. This meant that we had to exercise restraint on our expression of our erotic desires in order to maintain the stability of our newly neurotic society. The more discipline-based, hierarchical and patriarchal our society became, the more of a threat was posed by the erotic. What happens during adolescence is that our sexual straitjackets are applied by the adults around us. Our erotic impulses have to be contained lest they cause discomfort to these neurotic adults. This can be pretty stressful. I remember at high school, the natural desire of we young boys to enjoy the erotic sight of naked women in magazines was treated by the teachers at our Catholic school as a kind of sickness. We were encouraged to feel shame about this aspect of our natural innocent biological nature.

Unaccountable shame about masturbation was an early symptom of my troubled adolescence. I wasn’t told that I shouldn’t masturbate, in fact my parents had given me a sex education book to read earlier which made it clear that it was a healthy natural activity. I suspect the shame I felt could not so easily be reached by this rational explanation, but that I was picking up on and absorbing the sense of shame that my fellow students and my teachers felt about their own masturbatory activities.

I did ask myself about the human condition. Why did we spend so much effort on seeking wealth, fame, power, or whatever, when, at base, what we most wanted was to be loved? All of those pursuits were poor ways to find love, but if we all decided to love each other we could be happy. Something seemed to be blocking that from happening, but what?

Next I developed an obsession that I was going to gouge out my own eyes. Was this Oedipal? Oedipus put out his eyes. Was it because I read in the New Testament “And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.”? After all, I was ashamed of my lusts, and looking at sexy women was what inflamed those lusts. I don’t know.

The next major stage in my troubled adolescence was when, after a bout of the flu, I had a thought about killing my baby niece. This was the time when I really had to battle with the human condition. Was I evil? Was I a monster, that I could even think of killing an innocent baby?

In Griffith’s scheme this would be me encountering the inevitable evidence of the “upset” caused in my ego by the blind criticism of my genetic conscience. My resentment at the criticism of my innocent conscience made me want to attack innocence in the world around me, in this case in the form of an infant.

That is not what was happening. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. I was run down because of the flu and the stress of trying to reconcile my natural instincts - including my erotic desires - to society’s restrictions and judgements while maintaining a functioning level of self-acceptance. Being in this state naturally made me selfish and desirous of the attention of those around me. But the baby was getting all the attention. So I fantasised briefly about killing the baby. At first the thought carried little emotional weight. But then I began to think that it was evidence that I was a bad person. It began to undermine my self-acceptance. The more I fixated on this unacceptable thought, the more power it gained over me. I was transfixed by fear and came to feel I might actually act upon it. So what was going on was not a relationship between my conscious mind and some genetic orientation to selflessness. What was happening was that a conceptual negative feedback loop had arisen as a result of my intolerance towards my selfishness and a harmless violent fantasy.

What I needed as an adolescent wasn’t some grand story about the heroic nature of the human race’s need to defy the unjust condemnation of it’s genetic orientation toward selflessness during the search for liberating understanding. What I needed was a more sex-positive attitude in the adults around me and an understanding that thoughts and feelings, no matter how anti-social, in and of themselves do no harm and should be accepted unconditionally.

It is true that we tend to adopt a false self during adolescence. This is our armouring brought about by the erosion of our generalised self-acceptence and the dependence of what is left on the maintenance of a fixed self-image. For instance, in females, this is the time when they may adopt a sex object self, where the ego-reinforcement (condition of self-acceptance) which comes from attracting the sexual interest of others becomes more important than the healthy enjoyment of erotic experience itself.

Read Part 7