Can human conflict ever be brought to an end?
by Jeremy Griffith
This is Freedom Essay 29 of the Freedom Essay Series
As was described in the previous Freedom Essay (F. Essay 28), life under the duress of the human condition has been horrific-beyond-description, with, for example, racial prejudice resulting in the Holocaust where 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis during World War II, and in more recent times, the attempted ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Bantu Hutu of some 800,000 of the tall, elitist Nilotic Tutsi in 100 days of bloodshed in Rwanda in 1994. Indeed, every day brings news of horrendous atrocities, such as is currently occurring in Syria, as this news report shows:
We would like to think the world is becoming more civilised, however, horror headlines and images such as this paint a far different picture of where humanity is really at. And the crisis in Aleppo is not some rare exception — violence, prejudice in all its forms, wars and terrorism characterise the age we live in.
The truth is that in a world in crisis, the only way real and lasting peace can be achieved is to deal with the primary cause of all human conflict, which is us humans, our destructive behaviour — our human condition, in fact. As biologist Jeremy Griffith says in the first video in the Main Videos towards the top of our homepage at www.humancondition.com (see Video/F. Essay 1):
“Solving the human condition doesn’t just bring immense relief and happiness to our personal situations, it solves all the world’s problems at the source — it is the key to ending the dystopia we live in of polarised politics, failed economies, rampant greed, corruption, hate, conflict, inequality, envy, starvation, over-population, mess, refugee floods, and terrorism, and everywhere environmental devastation.”
The reason the issue of ‘the human condition’ has long been described as ‘the holy grail’ of the whole of the human journey of thought and enquiry is precisely because it is only that deeper understanding of our psychologically troubled human condition that can fix our world — as journalist Richard Neville has written:
… the world is hurtling to catastrophe: from nuclear horrors, a wrecked eco-system, 20 million dead each year from malnutrition, 600 million chronically hungry… All these crises are man made, their causes are psychological. The cures must come from this same source; which means the planet needs psychological maturity fast. We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery. (Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Oct. 1986; see www.wtmsources.com/167)
And astonishing as it is, it is that key psychologically relieving and maturing explanation of the human condition that Jeremy has found. His treatise explains that the destructive potential in each of us is the result of a psychosis in the human species that resulted from a 2-million-year-old clash between our emerging consciousness and our pre-established instincts.
Basically, when we humans developed a conscious mind some 2 million years ago, a battle unavoidably developed between it and our already established instincts. The result of this conflict between our instinct and intellect was that we became psychologically defensive, angry, alienated and egocentric — the upset state we refer to as the human condition. But now that we can explain and understand this conflict, all those insecure, defensive behaviours are obsoleted, brought to an end, and we free ourselves from the human condition. (From Video/F. Essay 3)
It takes time to absorb the full ramifications of Jeremy’s explanation, but the more you digest it, the more you realise that this psychologically ‘upset’ state is behind all the conflict and suffering on the planet. And since the human condition is essentially a psychosis, the other wonderful realisation is that it can be permanently healed through understanding.
This is why Professor Harry Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, has written:
What this book of books, in fact this greatest of all books, does is take humanity from a state of bewilderment about the nature of human behavior and existence to a state of profound understanding of our lives — understanding that drains away all the pain, suffering, confusion and conflict from the world. This is the book we have been waiting for, it is THE BOOK THAT SAVES THE WORLD!
And why Dr Scott Churchill, Professor and former Chair of the University of Dallas Psychology Department, has written:
Nothing Dr. Prosen has said about the immense importance of this book is an exaggeration.
Watch Jeremy Griffith present the breakthrough redeeming explanation of the human condition in THE Interview; for a fuller explanation read chapter 3 of FREEDOM; and for a summary presentation of the key ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation watch Video/F. Essay 3. And for further reading on the emergence of the human condition, and just how brutal our species became as a result, we recommend you read chapters 3:3–3:5 of FREEDOM.
These essays were created in 2017–2023 by Jeremy Griffith, Damon Isherwood, Fiona Cullen-Ward, Brony FitzGerald & Lee Jones of the Sydney WTM Centre. All filming and editing of the videos was carried out by Sydney WTM members James Press & Tess Watson during 2017–2023. Other members of the Sydney WTM Centre are responsible for the distribution and marketing of the videos/essays, and for providing subscriber support.
This article was originally published at www.humancondition.com.
