By Victor M Fontane
Biologist Jeremy Griffith’s ‘Instinct vs Intellect’ explanation of the human condition accounts for human anger, egocentricity and alienation. Unlike most mainstream scientists, Griffith argues that our anger and egocentricity are not instinctive traits, but are psychological, the result of a clash between our pre-established instincts and emerging conscious mind.
In short, the theory states that when the conscious mind emerged (some 2 million years ago) and began to exercise its ability to self-manage, the pre-established instincts could not help ‘resisting’ the conscious mind’s deviations from the instincts’ fixed patterns of behavior.
The theory then says that because the intellect could not explain why it was right to begin acting independently of the instincts (which required the biological explanation of how genes can orientate, but are ignorant of the nerves need to understand), the intellect became insecure in the face of this ‘criticism’ emanating from the instincts. And so in order to continue searching for knowledge, the intellect became defiant – it grew angry toward the criticism, it became preoccupied with proving it was good, and it blocked the criticism out. It became angry, egocentric and alienated, the traits that characterize the human condition.
The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain and its simplicity. As Stephen Hawking wrote, “A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.” (A Brief History Of Time, 1988).
Stephen J. Gould was applying a similar methodology to Hawking when he argued that Darwin’s theory of natural selection pointed to the coordination of so many pieces of evidence that no other configuration other than his theory could offer a conceivable explanation, and that in this way natural selection has, in effect, been proven (The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 2002).
Griffith’s ‘instinct vs intellect’ theory is very similar to Darwin’s in its ability to coordinate so many pieces of evidence that it soon becomes clear that it is the only conceivable explanation. It obviously explains why humans are angry, egocentric and alienated, but it also explains religion, teenage angst, the driving force in hominid evolution including the hominid fossil record, why science has been mechanistic, men and women, sex as humans practice it, the role of nurturing, the source of our morality, why bonobos are the most cooperative of all extant apes, why there has been such difficulty understanding consciousness, racism, politics, political correctness, the alarming growth in mental disease, all manner of mythology (e.g. Noahs Ark, Adam and Eve, Judgment Day, Prometheus), Christ, cave paintings, humour and swearing, Negative Entropy and what we mean by ‘God’ etc.
Even in Darwin’s own time, despite genes and the mechanics of genetic heredity not yet being known, the theory of natural selection was able to be accepted because it met Hawking and Gould’s criteria; and, sure enough, it was effectively applied in plant and animal breeding. And while we know a great deal about the mechanics of the gene and nerve-based learning systems, no doubt there is still more to be learnt, however, like Darwin’s idea of natural selection before the current understanding of genetics, an excess of evidence already exists to establish the scientific validity of Griffith’s ‘instinct vs intellect’ treatise.
Griffith’s treatise has received support from such extremely eminent scientists as Professor Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Society, who wrote, “all the great theories I have encountered in my lifetime of studies of psychiatry can be accounted for under his explanation of human origins and behavior”, and even the esteemed, aforementioned Steven Hawking was impressed by Griffith’s treatise, which you can see on the homepage of the World Transformation Movement.
Essentially, what has happened is that humans have become so habituated to living in Plato’s dark cave of denial that when finally given the means to exit the cave and stand in the warm, healing sunshine of self-understanding, we have refused to leave! And, most frighteningly, in choosing to stay there means denial and the alienation from our true self that results from that denial can only continue to increase, so that very soon the human race will succumb to horrific terminal alienation.
The fact is, the human race has lived a haunted existence, dogged by the dark shadow of its imperfect human condition, forever trying to escape it—the result of which is that we have become immensely superficial and artificial; ‘phony’ and ‘fake’, as the resigning adolescents so truthfully described it, and living on the absolute meniscus of life in terms of what we are prepared to look at, feel and consider. We are a profoundly estranged or alienated species, completely blocked-off from the amazing and wonderful real world, and from the truth of our self-corruption that thinking about that beautiful, inspired, natural, soulful world unbearably connects us to—as the absolutely ‘fear’-lessly honest Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing has written: ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life…We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [p.12 of 156] …the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] … between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus [God has absconded]. Or [more precisely] we have absconded [from God/ the integrative ideals] [p.118] … The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light.
So with the arrival now of the redeeming explanation of the human condition our human-condition-avoiding minds are clearly going to apply all that determinedly practiced block-out, denial and evasion to prevent us from taking in or ‘hearing’ what is being presented. As soon as discussion of the human condition begins, our minds will be subconsciously alert to the fact they are being taken into a historically off-limits realm and start blocking out what is being said. Our minds will suffer from a ‘deaf effect’ to what is being presented, with the consequence being that we will struggle to read and absorb the liberating and transforming explanation of the human condition. Our habituated practice of denial will prevent us from gaining our FREEDOM from the human condition!
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