Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
Watch Jeremy Griffith Interview – completely free – now HumanCondition.com
At the centre of Jeremy Griffith's thesis — set out in THE INTERVIEW with British broadcaster Craig Conway and more fully in his book FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition (made freely available on the Fix The World website) — is a biological account of the impact consciousness has had on our already established instinctive orientations to existence.
Griffith explains that around two million years ago our ancestors developed a sufficiently enlarged association cortex — the thinking brain — for full consciousness to emerge. Fossil skull evidence charts this significant expansion in brain volume over that period.
Nerves, originally evolved to coordinate movement, developed the capacity to store impressions — memory — and to compare experiences across time. This allowed our distant ancestors not merely to react instinctively, but to reason, experiment and attempt to manage events from a basis of understanding.
The difficulty, Jeremy Griffith argues, was that this new intellect emerged in a body already guided by instincts shaped through natural selection. Once our "self-adjusting intellect" began exerting itself, established instinctive orientations resisted its experiments.
To illustrate the dilemma, Griffith offers an analogy: imagine placing a fully conscious mind in a migrating bird. The bird's instincts guide it along a flight path naturally selected over thousands of generations. But the conscious mind wants to experiment — perhaps to fly down and explore an island. Instinct resists the deviation. The intellect cannot obey its instincts without abandoning its search for knowledge, yet it cannot initially explain why its experimentation is necessary.
The result, he argues, was a profound and unresolved psychological conflict.
Until the intellect could justify why it had to defy its instincts — namely, because genes function as an orientating learning system while nerves, when fully developed, are capable of insight and understanding — it experienced that resistance as condemnation. That condemnation, in Griffith's account, produced defensiveness.
He contends that the responses available to the intellect were to attack the instinct's "criticism", attempt to prove it wrong, or block it out. Over time, humanity developed what he describes as our angry, egocentric and alienated human condition.
Jeremy Griffith further argues that these defensive behaviours persisted because the intellect could not explain why its defiance of instinct was necessary. In his view, once that biological explanation is grasped, it becomes the "real" defence, removing the psychological need for the "artificial" defences of anger, egocentricity and alienation.
Professor Harry Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, described the work as presenting the "11th-hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition necessary for the psychological rehabilitation and transformation of our species."
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Freely watch THE INTERVIEW now HumanCondition.com
Watch Jeremy Griffith Interview – completely free – now HumanCondition.com
At the centre of Jeremy Griffith's thesis — set out in THE INTERVIEW with British broadcaster Craig Conway and more fully in his book FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition (made freely available on the Fix The World website) — is a biological account of the impact consciousness has had on our already established instinctive orientations to existence.
Griffith explains that around two million years ago our ancestors developed a sufficiently enlarged association cortex — the thinking brain — for full consciousness to emerge. Fossil skull evidence charts this significant expansion in brain volume over that period.
Nerves, originally evolved to coordinate movement, developed the capacity to store impressions — memory — and to compare experiences across time. This allowed our distant ancestors not merely to react instinctively, but to reason, experiment and attempt to manage events from a basis of understanding.
The difficulty, Jeremy Griffith argues, was that this new intellect emerged in a body already guided by instincts shaped through natural selection. Once our "self-adjusting intellect" began exerting itself, established instinctive orientations resisted its experiments.
To illustrate the dilemma, Griffith offers an analogy: imagine placing a fully conscious mind in a migrating bird. The bird's instincts guide it along a flight path naturally selected over thousands of generations. But the conscious mind wants to experiment — perhaps to fly down and explore an island. Instinct resists the deviation. The intellect cannot obey its instincts without abandoning its search for knowledge, yet it cannot initially explain why its experimentation is necessary.
The result, he argues, was a profound and unresolved psychological conflict.
Until the intellect could justify why it had to defy its instincts — namely, because genes function as an orientating learning system while nerves, when fully developed, are capable of insight and understanding — it experienced that resistance as condemnation. That condemnation, in Griffith's account, produced defensiveness.
He contends that the responses available to the intellect were to attack the instinct's "criticism", attempt to prove it wrong, or block it out. Over time, humanity developed what he describes as our angry, egocentric and alienated human condition.
Jeremy Griffith further argues that these defensive behaviours persisted because the intellect could not explain why its defiance of instinct was necessary. In his view, once that biological explanation is grasped, it becomes the "real" defence, removing the psychological need for the "artificial" defences of anger, egocentricity and alienation.
Professor Harry Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, described the work as presenting the "11th-hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition necessary for the psychological rehabilitation and transformation of our species."
____
Freely watch THE INTERVIEW now HumanCondition.com
