FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

by Jeremy Griffith, Harry Prosen (Introduction)

The fastest growing realisation everywhere is that humanity can't go on the way it is going. Indeed, the great fear is we are entering endgame where we appear to have lost the race between self-destruction and self-discovery the race to find the psychologically relieving understanding of our good and evil-afflicted human condition.

WELL, ASTONISHING AS IT IS, THIS BOOK BY AUSTRALIAN BIOLOGIST JEREMY GRIFFITH PRESENTS THE 11TH HOUR BREAKTHROUGH BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THE HUMAN CONDITION NECESSARY FOR THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REHABILITATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF OUR SPECIES!

The culmination of 40 years of studying and writing about our species' psychosis, 'FREEDOM' delivers nothing less than the holy grail of insight we have needed to free ourselves from the human condition. It is, in short, as Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, asserts in his Introduction, THE BOOK THAT SAVES THE WORLD!

Griffith has been able to venture right to the bottom of the dark depths of what it is to be human and return with the fully accountable, true explanation of our seemingly imperfect lives. At long last we have the redeeming and thus transforming understanding of human behaviour! And with that explanation found all the other great outstanding scientific mysteries about our existence are now also able to be truthfully explained — of the meaning of our existence, of the origin of our unconditionally selfless moral instincts, and of why we humans became conscious when other animals haven't. Yes, the full story of life on Earth can finally be told —and all of these incredible breakthroughs and insights are presented here in this greatest of all books.

'FREEDOM' is supported by a very informative website.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Self Help, Biology, Sociology

798 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 2016

About the author

Jeremy Griffith (1945-) is an Australian biologist who has dedicated his life to bringing fully accountable, biological understanding to the dilemma of the human condition–the underlying issue in all human life of our species’ extraordinary capacity for what has been called ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nowadays, more than ever, an opinion is just an opinion, ‘you say potato, and I like potahto’—we don’t have to agree, there are no real answers, everybody has a right to a theory, no one is wrong. The current measuring stick for the success of an idea is its popularity, everything and everyone is now ultra democratic, the mob decides. But, given that Kim Kardashian has 20 million followers on Twitter, it seems obvious that the popularity test still has some kinks to iron out when it comes to finding real substance and meaning. So what if the mob can’t see what’s best for them? What if we really are all living in a matrix, in Plato’s Cave of deep denial about our species reality?

Jeremy Griffith’s new book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition rises above all the narcissistic, neurotic, celebrity-crazed, mindless buzz-feed that currently dominates our world, it redefines meaning and substance. It defies opinion, popularity and the feel-good superficiality that we are all drowning in and, as with any great truth, the information contained in FREEDOM, just is. Griffith is an Australian biologist, who has written several books on the human condition including the bestseller A Species In Denial, and although it’s a book about science, you don’t need to be a scientist, an intellectual or even particularly philosophical, any human can read this book and know from whatever situation they have come from that finally our world, ourselves, and everything in it has been explained.

I could tell you that this book, in my opinion, is the greatest book ever written (and by the way, that is my opinion), but as I said, the information in this book is beyond opinion, it is pure, clean, basic truth—our old friend the truth that we try so hard to love and fight for in our lives and fool ourselves that we succeed, knowing deep down that no matter how hard we try, there are some truths that we just can’t grapple with, that we can’t even bare to think about, about ourselves and about just how horrible and destructive our world has become, a world that we have consciously created and live in together as a species. This wonderful book deals with ALL those truths, it confronts them in the most head-on, revealing and profound way. In fact, this book provides the whole human race with a much needed lesson in truth, beauty and what is really important on this planet. It deals with what really makes us human; the most advanced and powerful tool ever known, our fully conscious brains and the real underlying issue in all human affairs, the human condition.

The core element in FREEDOM is Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition, an all-encompassing holistic, first-principle-based biological explanation of why humans are so competitive, egocentric and selfish, when the accepted ideals in life are to be loving, cooperative and selfless. Griffith’s ideas are presented in stark contrast to any of the popular current mainstream, mechanistic biological theories that are proffered as doing the same thing, such as popular Harvard biologist, E.O Wilson’s Theory of Eusociality. In fact, Griffith claims that Wilson’s current theory about human nature is not just wrong, but an incredibly dangerous and irresponsible lie.

Unlike Wilson, who claims that the human condition is the conflict within us between selfish and cooperative genes, a situation over which we have no control and therefore no moral dilemma to resolve, Griffith claims that the human condition is a psychological problem, a psychosis, that can be completely cured by a truthful explanation and understanding of its origins. Essentially, Griffith explains that our fully conscious brain, which is unique to humans, is a super computer that was developed without an instruction manual, and over the last two million years the human race collectively has been going about life, slowly but steadily putting together the manual that can finally explain ourselves, and FREEDOM is that manual.

Until now, Griffith explains, it has been a lack of understanding of ourselves that has led to a deep underlying insecurity about our sense of worth and only by being able to understand the human condition—why, when clearly the ideals in human life are to be cooperative, loving and selfless are we ourselves and our society as a whole so competitive, greedy, selfish and destructive as all the evidence around us so overwhelmingly indicates—can we, as a species, hope to unwind our insecurity and end our self-destruction, what Griffith terms our ‘upset’ behaviour.

Griffith logically tackles all the big subjects with seeming simplicity and ease, somehow breezing through ‘unanswerable’ questions starting with the human condition and just how off-limits a subject it has been, and how dishonestly misrepresented it currently is by mechanistic biology and popular, new-age philosophies. Once he has resurrected and explained exactly what the human condition is he goes on to tackle the meaning of human existence, the origins of our moral instincts, the true nature and origin of our conscious mind and the importance of nurturing in our historical and future development, to name but a few. Helpfully and incredibly insightfully, Griffith also draws heavily on all kinds of thinkers, both contemporary and ancient, and has an incredible ability to summarise complex theories and thought patterns into short easily understandable sentences. He explains and dissolves the battle of the sexes, the dichotomy of left and right wing politics and removes all the dogma from religion. This book seriously takes the reader on a journey of enlightenment from the depressing uneasiness of the human condition to a wonderfully optimistic and exciting future for humans. Honestly, doing justice to the depth of insight and subject matter covered is simply not possible.

Any preconceived psychological ideas I had about myself, humans in general and the world we live in, were completely demolished and a whole new framework of understanding built in its place by this awesome book. ‘Confronting’ is a word that Griffith uses a lot to describe the effect that this deep discussion about the human condition has on us humans who live with a lot of denial about our problems. Personally, I think he could use it a whole lot more because the truths he unlocks about our human situation, and there are countless, definitely shake all the (seemingly solid) mechanistic foundations on which we currently live and ultimately, will fundamentally change them forever. However, Griffith constantly reassures us that our destructive behaviour and insecurity has all been an unavoidable part of the journey we’ve been on to understand ourselves, providing the reader with the security to push on through his work while at the same time unearthing truths that, without understanding, are positively unbearable—a point he makes regularly. Packaged within his relieving and compassionate explanations that deeply resonate, these truths, although terrifying, are at last able to be faced by all.

Most reassuring of all is that there is a big, bold, enveloping sunrise at the end of this seemingly daunting book—an explanation of how we can live now that we can understand ourselves, which essentially is in a state of freedom from the oppression of our human condition. Griffith doesn’t condone our upset behaviour but rather gives us the critically needed explanation to end it. As he enthusiastically, sometimes ecstatically describes all that is possible for our species and our planet now, an inspiring and transporting conclusion to the book unfolds—a happier ending there never was! This book is an intriguing, sometimes very difficult, continuously demystifying, exposing, moving, logical and accountable journey through the story of humankind with an explosively positive final chapter that blasts each and every one of us into a completely new, human-condition-understood, wildly exciting, ecstatic-feeling-inducing future, that has only existed in our wildest dreams . This is humanity’s collective story, and one which makes the time taken to seriously think about and absorb what is presented very valuable, and very important. As you near the end of this incredible book or even as early as chapter 2, you may come away with the same feeling as me, that the answers we’ve been searching for have finally been found and there will be freedom for the human race after all.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Dawn of our Emancipation: FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition by Jeremy Griffith

From time to time we are stopped in our tracks. Something disrupts our veneer and strikes a deep chord in our psyche, transcending our day to day lives, leaving a lasting imprint.

Jeremy Griffith’s summa work FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition left me in a state of shock, awe and hope for our future. It captivated and stirred me, awakening my senses from a world in turmoil and a world drowning in superficiality. It also unsettled me—the subject matter and implications for me as an individual and for us as a species ensured this. Even the title unnervingly confronts us with the stark reality of a planet seemingly on the brink of self-destruction.

To context the significance of the realm Griffith works in; Professor Harry Prosen, renowned psychiatrist and former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association said this about the importance of the book for humans;

‘This book of books, indeed this greatest of all books, effectively takes humanity from a state of bewilderment about the nature of human existence to a state of profound understanding of our lives. It is a case of having got all the truth up in one go! I believe this is the most sensational information to ever appear on planet Earth’. ‘I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’

As to the seriousness of this ‘psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ Griffith quotes the great Scottish clinical psychiatrist R. D. Laing who starkly articulates just how compromised he feels the human psychological situation is;

‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness]’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192).

Griffith himself says this about the direful state of human affairs;

‘Conflict between individuals, races, cultures and countries abounds; there is genocide, terrorism, mass displacement of peoples, starvation, runaway diseases, environmental devastation, gross inequality, racial and gender oppression, rampant corruption and other crimes, drug abuse, obesity, family breakdown and epidemic levels of depression, unhappiness and loneliness… In short, the situation is now so dire the human race is, in fact, entering end play or end game, where the Earth cannot absorb any further devastation from the effects of our behaviour’ (Chapter 2, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition).

With this backdrop to our human situation, Griffith puts forward that ‘the issue of the human condition is the ONLY question facing the human race, because its solution has become a matter of critical urgency’ (Chapter 2, FREEDOM). A biologist by trade, Griffith’s working life has been spent writing about, understanding and explaining the human condition (he has written seven other books, including Australasian best seller A Species in Denial). Grounded in biology, his writing is bold, upfront and honest, cutting a swathe through the world we live in. Yet, for all the confronting truths he unlocks about our human condition, and there are many, Griffith has the uncanny ability to walk in the reader’s shoes, to make sense of all that seems inexplicable in our world and in ourselves in a way that will deeply resonate.

Griffith’s discourse is comprehensive, and doing justice to the depth of insight and subject matter covered is not possible in this short review, however it is suffice to say that Griffith moves with apparent ease through profound and consequential subject matter. He draws on the likes of Plato, Nietzsche, Van der Post, Darwin, R.D Laing and others and he deals head on with explaining men and women, politics and religion. He takes the reader on a journey of enlightenment from explaining the development of order of matter on Earth and the meaning of life to leading the reader through the psychological maturation of humanity from the origins of our conscience, the development of consciousness and the emergence of the human condition.

What lies at the heart of Griffith’s insight is his biological explanation of the human condition and the liberation from life under the duress of the human condition that he claims is now possible. To that end, in Chapter 2; ‘The true nature of the human condition’, Griffith presciently reconnects the reader with the deeply buried-inside-us-all issue of the human condition. He confronts us with narrative on the contradictory nature of our behavior, describing both our capacity to be loving, selfless and compassionate and paradoxically to be selfish, aggressive and brutal. Griffith then raises the fundamental questions that he suggests we face as a species: Why are we the way we are? Where does our contradictory nature and this dark side to our behavior come from? Does this divisive behavior mean that we are fundamentally “bad” or “flawed”? and; How will this behavior ever be bought to an end?

With these all-encompassing questions posed, Griffith then fearlessly, logically and compassionately, through first degree biology goes about answering them. In essence he suggests that we have a cooperative past and that our original instinctive orientation, the representation of which is our conscience or soul was to the ‘universally accepted ideals of life, to be cooperative, loving and selfless’ and that in fact we once lived in an all loving and selfless ‘Garden of Eden’ state. Griffith then goes on to explain that the human condition, this paradox of good and evil that we have in our make-up only appeared with the development of consciousness. Griffith identifies this key moment as happening some two million years ago:

‘… once our nerve-based learning system became sufficiently developed for us to become conscious and able to effectively manage events, our conscious intellect was then in a position to wrest control from our gene-based learning system’s instincts, which, up until then, had been in charge of our lives… Moreover, at the point of becoming conscious the nerve-based learning system should wrest management of the individual from the instincts because such a self-managing or self-adjusting system is infinitely more efficient at adapting to change than the gene-based system, which can only adapt to change very slowly over many generations. HOWEVER, it was at this juncture, when our conscious intellect challenged our instincts for control, that a terrible battle broke out between our instincts and intellect, the effect of which was the extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive state that we call the ‘human condition’’ (Chapter 2 , FREEDOM).

With this established Griffith reasons that without understanding of this dilemma or paradox of the human condition, of why when the ideals in life are, and our original instinctive orientation was, to be cooperative, loving and selfless are we humans capable of such ‘extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive’ behaviour that we have been left carrying a deep ‘burden of guilt’ and insecurity about our fundamental sense of worth. However, and the simplicity of this can seem beguiling, Griffith explains that it is through being able to understand why our human condition emerged and the very good reason for all of our behaviour, or put another way through now having the biological explanation of our fundamental worth, that this burden of guilt can lift from our psyche enabling the behavior to subside and the cycle of destruction plaguing our planet to end, bringing about real and transformative change to the world. In fact, Chapter 9 is inspirationally titled “The ‘dawn…of our emancipation’”! And this future that Griffith sees clearly needs inclusion;

“Everyone in every situation and predicament can now rise up as radiant new beings from their corpse-like state. Everyone can now come back to life—can wake up from their human-condition-afflicted torpor and look outwards and see each other and the world for the first time, and move across and help each other, and do anything and everything that needs to be done to end the suffering and pain that plagues this planet. We humans have, in truth, all been asleep, owned by so much pain and suffering. And, certainly, we are going to be in shock for a little while absorbing the realisation that we have finally won our freedom from the agony of the human condition—but it’s on, the great awakening, the rising up of the human race from its deep slumber. From the festering, stalled state it has been in for far too long, waiting for these liberating understandings of the human condition, the human race is finally on its way!” (Chapter 9 , FREEDOM).

In a world consumed by suffering, anger, desperation, corruption, violence and despair, and with society disintegrating and rotting in dogma and meaninglessness FREEDOM is timely and seismic. Timely in the desperately needed answers, meaning and understanding it brings to our world, and seismic in the truth and hope that this knowledge brings to our future. Every human needs a copy of this book.

[Damon Isherwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will literally change the world. You must read this.

[Will Once · Rating 1 out of 5]

This has to be the worst book I have read in a very long time. Spectacularly poor. I'd give it zero stars if GR allowed me to.

Let's start at the beginning. The basic premise of the book is that mankind is in the last chance saloon because we don't understand the duality of our nature - that we are capable of both good and evil deeds. Apparently, this is in stark contrast to the animal kingdom which doesn't kill, rape or torture for pleasure. And we "learned" to be evil when we "became conscious" - around about the time that we stopped being hunter gatherers and started to become farmers.

What utter twaddle. Ever watched a cat play with a mouse? Much of the book's core science (if we can call it that) comes from discredited writing by Laurens Van Der Post who tried to claim that the bushmen of the Kalahari were 100% non violent and "children of nature". Which they are not.

The dodgy pseudoscience wouldn't be so bad if the book was reasonably well written. Unfortunately, it isn't. It is a dense and almost unreadable rant which stuffs far too many polysyllabic words into every sentence to make up for its lack of content. This book is more than 800 pages long. Frankly, it feels longer.

Then we have a hectoring tone which criticises anyone who dares to disagree with the book as being afraid of the truth, or having failed to understand what the book is saying.

Bizarrely, the book uses quotes from popular songs and cartoons (I wish I was making this up) in order to "prove" its points.

The worst sin of all has to be the underlying arrogance. This is the only book to save the world. The messianic author is the only person to have worked all this out. The sycophancy and arrogance is nauseating.

The one good point is that the book is free on the web (google "human condition").

Avoid, avoid, avoid.

[Tony Miall · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much "noise" or distraction in the world these days it's almost impossible to find any clear air to just think and have the room to absorb anything meaningful. Fiction is designed to take us away from the day to day and any so called facts are hidden amongst so much peripheral clutter that they are like finding the all so elusive needle in a hay stack. But reading this book was like someone turned on the lights, it answers so many questions and reconciles nearly every issue I previously thought irreconcilable. When I read this book I couldn't help but feel transported away from a world that seems so hopelessly lost and destined to implode into one so full of redemption, promise and fulfillment. This book cuts through all the noise and is literally as though it's been written by someone from another planet. It is so direct and to the point and cuts so deep into the issue of what it is to be human. I can't believe how lucky I am to have come across such a penetrating and liberating piece of work and can not recommend it highly enough.

[Susan Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Your natural tendency to try and pigeon-hole this book will fail. This is not a ‘feel good’, new age treatise or based on any faith. ‘Freedom’ is a profound biological understanding of the human condition, our capacity for good and ‘evil’, a most magnificent, mind-blowing gold mine of logic and understanding.

After reading it, life goes from the usual bewildering and confusing mess to transparent clarity. Everything and everyone around you is suddenly biologically understandable, ‘like a veil been lifted’ it has been described by one reader. It resurrects the deep all-important questions of life -- questions we all once asked when we were children -- and for the first time in millions of years, ANSWERS THEM! (Why we blocked out these questions as adults, in fact why we necessarily lived in complete denial of the whole issue of the human condition is dealt with early in the book and apart from being fascinating, it is important to understand as it affects our early absorption of these ideas). It makes sense of yourself -- it completely explains who you are – from every perspective be it biologically, psychologically or physically. It makes sense of the whole world around you from any perspective you like, politically, religiously, sexually, culturally etc. Another reader has described ‘Freedom’ as ‘the manual to life’ and I couldn’t agree more. It is the ultimate ‘brain food’ that humans have been searching for so long, and it is immeasurably, exhilaratingly redeeming, empowering and transforming. There is nothing in the world that means more to me than the information in this book and once you read it, you too will see how it saves the world no less. It really is beyond your wildest dreams!

The key chapter for me is Chapter 3 and specifically ‘The Story of Adam Stork’. This story is the best thing you will EVER read. It explains the seemingly impossible -- how we humans are actually good and heroic when we appear to be so ‘bad’ and so broken. Every great thinker and writer and philosopher through the ages have tried and failed to bring understanding to this core issue of our human condition. I have read for instance, “the problem of the origin and universality of sin…is probably one of those problems which the human mind can never satisfactorily answer” (The Bible Reader’s Encyclopedia and Concordance). Well Jeremy Griffith has answered it! This finally, unbelievably, is ‘it’ -- the biological explanation that explains ‘us’! At the heart of the Story of Adam Stork is the understanding of the difference between our instinctive self (gene-based learning system) and our intellectual self (nerve-based learning system). When our intellectual self emerged some 2 million years ago, it went in search of understanding and an unavoidable battle broke out between it, and our already established instinctive (and, it is revealed, loving and cooperative) self. Without a reconciling understanding of what was going on, this battle between our two selves has ensued in each one of us for the last 2 million years and has led to all our ‘anger, egocentricity and alienation’, or ‘upset’. Astonishingly, what Griffith reveals is that this corrupting journey to self-enlightenment was unavoidable. Finally, our upset nature is EXPLAINED and DEFENDED! We are not the ‘baddies’ or evil monsters, but the complete opposite -- “…humans are wonderful beings after all. In fact, not just wonderful but the heroes of the whole story of life on Earth”! (‘Freedom’, para 66). Humans truly are redeemed! This is beyond amazing. A beyond-comprehension breakthrough!

The flow-on and far-reaching effects from this simple explanation are unbelievable. Our human condition is the root cause of all our problems, and now Jeremy Griffith has solved it, our problems are literally all solved! With this understanding, our upset can now subside. It is like a logic-driven magic wand unravelling and reconciling every question, every part of human behaviour, conundrum, every ounce of pain and suffering, every inequality and every dilemma, every hypocrisy, every pole, every argument big or small, every devastation of our physical world. It literally transforms everything you look at including yourself. Chapter 8 is a case in point, an unbelievably fascinating read. Jeremy Griffith tells the true, denial-free, never before told story of the human race over this entire 2 million year period. As he writes “[it] is the most amazing and epic journey of any species to have existed on Earth--and it’s our story, the story of the incredibly, phenomenally brave and heroic human race!” (‘Freedom’, para 704)

Another crucially important part of ‘Freedom’ is Chapter 9 as it deals with how we cope with the extent of our personal corruption now being revealed which is initially a painful experience. This understanding does wrench you out of your necessary-until-now denial -- and it needs to for our species to evolve. Each one of us does live in this hugely divided state: a loving and cooperative instinctive self on one hand, and an incredibly upset one on the other, and this upset has produced astronomical selfishness, suffering, pain and devastation in ourselves and our lives and indeed across the whole planet. But ‘Freedom’ does not leave you there. As you absorb this information more deeply, you realise that this book really has personally reconciled this deepest of chasms inside. It is like we are filling in the Grand Canyon with understanding and we can now ‘own’ our dark or upset selves and be ‘whole’ -- for the first time ever in life’s history. Humans ARE finally defended, gloriously so -- we are upset but we are good! The battle to find understanding, that produced the human condition, is now over and the world that opens up for humans now is just spectacular. To quote from para 1218, “Out of an overwhelmingly complex and problematic existence a straight forward and totally effective, extremely-rapidly-repairing-of-human-life-and-the-Earth, way of living for humans is now able to emerge.” This way of living is called the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living and is detailed in this vitally important chapter.

Throughout ‘Freedom’ and including the book’s cover, Griffith uses the wonderful analogy of the sun rising over the horizon, which represents “the arrival of understanding and the dawn of humanity’s all-magnificent freedom from the darkness and horror of the human condition.” (para 1293). A collection of quotes are included from people who have drawn from this age-old vision including Plato and his cave allegory, and Jim Morrison of ‘The Doors’. I find Plato’s cave allegory especially resonating. Living in a dark cave is exactly what living under the duress of the human condition is like, a life with no answers; while the sunlit plains of relieving understanding is exactly what life is like once you read and absorb ‘Freedom’. It really does transform your life from being an utterly preoccupied and selfish victim of the human condition to a person effectively free of the human condition, saturated in relief and excitement about yourself, all humans, and the absolutely fabulous future before us. As Griffith writes “we get the truth up and we move on” (para 1138). We can leave ‘the cave’ life now forever and live in the sunlit plains of freedom!

We all fit into this story, the greatest story ever told and we are all reconciled and redeemed through this book. All the lives, hopes and dreams of you, and everyone that has ever lived, are fulfilled through this understanding. In fact it fulfils the whole of life on Earth. This is not a fleeting thought or inspiration, it is with you forever. You are standing in this new landscape of knowledge where we all belong. ‘Freedom’ is what we have all been dreaming of and hoping would arrive. This is the book that saves the world. All I dream of now is that you will read it!

[Brony Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel inspired to write something about this truly amazing book, but where to start! In summary, I believe the significance of Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition contained in FREEDOM cannot be overstated. So I love Professor Harry Prosen’s Introduction because it accurately conveys the enormous breakthrough contained in this book, as well as describe who Jeremy Griffith is and how he came to produce so many penetrating insights into human existence.

I cannot do justice to the absolute wealth of explanation that is contained in FREEDOM, but I might quickly try to summarise its contents. Chapter 1 starts by re-connecting the reader with what the human condition actually is, which is really important because what you will realise from reading this book is that we all walk around in a state of total denial of the issue of the human condition and therefore in a completely superficial, alienated state.

Then in chapter 2, to help illustrate our denial, Griffith explains the very real, but not spoken about, psychological process that adolescents go through called ‘Resignation’, where we try to face the issue of our species’, and our own, troubled, destructive behaviour and, not being able to truthfully answer the fundamental question of why we are the way we are, are forced to block out this historically unbearable issue — and I challenge anyone to read that section and not feel like your deepest self hasn’t finally been reached. Then once this all-important issue of the human condition has been established, Griffith proceeds to concisely summarise and totally demolish the current mechanistic scientific paradigm that is dedicated to avoiding the issue of our psychologically disturbed human condition. This exposé is an amazing feat in itself, and so relieving because it is patently obvious how deficient all the ‘genes are selfish and that’s why we are’ theories have been in accounting for human life, even though they’ve been taught in our schools and universities and reported in the media as established fact.

Then in chapter 3 Griffith explains in first principle biological terms the underlying issue in all human affairs of the human condition — our capacity for ‘good’ and ‘evil’— which is undoubtedly the most liberating and relieving passage of explanation to have ever been written. To be able to know deep in my bones that even though I’m full of the human condition, full of insecurity, selfishness and divisiveness, that I am fundamentally a ‘good’ and worthwhile person and that there is a very good reason for my troubled state, is just phenomenal. This explanation finally brings meaning and understanding to all the suffering in the world and my own life which has brought enormous peace and love to my whole being. This chapter alone saves the human race and cannot be read too many times!

I love chapter 4. It explains the meaning of life, no less, and in the process demystifies ‘God’. I find it connects me with the profound beauty that is the whole journey of life on Earth and brings more awe and majesty and love and meaning and wonder to our lives than an overseeing, supernatural God ever could. This knowledge does not strip us of our spirituality, it nourishes it exponentially.

And chapter 5 is captivating. It contains the biological explanation for how we humans acquired our loving, moral sense or ‘soul’— a hot topic in current scientific literature but an answer that is actually incredibly obvious once you hear it. In fact, Griffith says that all his breakthrough ideas are obvious, the key is being able to confront the issue of our human condition, and once someone thinks from behind that wall of denial, they are able to unravel the great ‘mysteries’ that have historically confounded humans. Solving the human condition is literally the unlocking point to explaining so much about life on Earth, especially human life. And Griffith’s eloquent nurturing explanation for our moral instincts is one of the long sought after mysteries that he’s been able to solve as a result. He draws on the latest fossil evidence and the evidence provided by our closest living relative, the gentle bonobo. Bonobos really are the most wonderful living proof of this ‘love indoctrination’ process—we can see their loving ‘soul’ being nurtured into existence before our eyes.

Chapter 6 is another demolition of dishonest biological thinking that is being published by academics around the world, this time exposing the theories that have been put forward for how we acquired our altruistic, cooperative instincts. FREEDOM is full of wonderful, honest quotations from thinkers throughout history where they have let out some rare honesty about the human condition, and this chapter contains a passage that cuts to the bone from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu about how critically important it is to our psychological development that we receive nurturing in unconditional love during our early years.

Chapter 7 explains the age-old conundrum of human consciousness, and importantly, why we humans became conscious when other animals haven’t. This is more extraordinary, denial-free, truthful thinking, and the answer is again remarkably simple, but I think to be able to fully absorb it requires an appreciation of the earlier chapters and, in particular, just how alienated and therefore hamstrung our thinking has been as a result of our fear of the human condition.

Chapter 8 is a gripping narrative of the entire psychological journey our species has been on, from our cooperatively behaved, innocent hominid ancestors at the dawn of consciousness, through to ourselves, the psychologically troubled species that is Homo sapiens sapiens. Along the way Griffith explains many aspects of human existence, including the differences in the historical roles of men and women. I must say, coming from the women’s perspective, it has been extremely liberating to be able to understand men at last, and especially why we women have been treated as ‘sex objects’. This unravelling of the ancient psychological war between the sexes is a revelation in itself.

And chapter 9 provides the extremely important and incredibly exciting solution to how the hell do we humans cope with having the blinds drawn so suddenly on all our mad behaviour! FREEDOM is full of massively confronting truth, but the most incredible realisation to be made is that it is finally okay to admit what has been going on on Earth because Griffith has explained and defended our ‘upset’ behaviour in first principle biological terms. We truly have been set free from our insecurity about our worth! And, by being fundamentally explained and defended at last, our preoccupation with finding egocentric relief (such as with seeking hunger for power, fame, fortune and glory) is lifted, and we are free to become a unified force, joyously focused on repairing humanity and our world rather than our own selfish, seemingly insatiable need for self-distraction and reinforcement which is currently destroying our planet.

Any one of the insights contained in any one of these chapters is an astonishing breakthrough with startling implications. I have read Jeremy Griffith’s earlier books, but I imagine for someone new to discussion of the human condition they will find the contents of FREEDOM a great deal to absorb. But to say I encourage readers to put in the effort to ponder on its profound insights is to put it mildly — because once you do absorb this explanation of the human condition, your life, and eventually the whole world, will be transformed. This deeply truthful, accountable explanation of the human condition has helped me so, so much — I’m an example of someone who has been brought back to life through being able to understand the world and my place in it and I live with so much optimism and excitement for the future, which is extraordinary given how many serious, serious problems humanity is faced with.

How to recommend the book that literally can, and will, save the world!? Do yourself, and the world, the BIGGEST favour and quietly read this book.

[Genevieve Salter · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition Jeremy Griffith, a biologist whose focus is solely on ending the suffering on Earth, brings everything he has to bear on the subject of the human condition and the result is a hand-held journey into the deepest, darkest, innermost part of your mind, and straight to your heart making sense of the bewildering chaos of life. At times it’s not an easy book to read in the sense that it’s very confronting and it can sometimes seem like it’s all too much. But as you read you will realise that all the things you thought were unexplainable, or were too painful to even think about, or were too controversial to navigate, or that you never really knew were there, are tackled in this book in a most complete way and with the promise of a free and exciting future for humanity.
The great underlying paradox that this book brings reconciliation to is how we could be capable of so much love and cooperative selflessness on the one hand and so much ‘evil’ on the other. Using a simple analogy Griffith explains this paradoxical situation and how it arose in our human ancestors two million years ago. He explains how the development of a conscious mind in the human species led to a clash between our instincts and this newly developed intelligence. Chapter 5 of FREEDOM documents the fossil evidence confirming his theory, including how we developed a conscious, thinking brain in the first place—all just fascinating stuff, especially his treatise on the cooperative and matriarchal bonobos.
But our darkness is undeniable with terrifying levels of depression in teenagers, rising levels of obesity, increasing unrest in the Middle East and indifference in the West, alarming rates of suicide, murder, paedophilia—no one can argue that we are setting ourselves up for a world of unbounding happiness in the future. For me, the most significant part of Jeremy Griffith’s explanation is that, despite the scary depths of us, despite the horrible things we do to others, ourselves and our planet, in fact, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we are an incredibly heroic species and there has been a reason for ALL of this. In the author’s words ‘We were given the hardest, toughest of tasks, and against all the odds we completed it. Humans are the champions of the story of life on Earth. We are so, so wonderful!’ (par 60) That most difficult of tasks was to champion the use of a fully conscious mind, and we’ve succeeded.
The world seems so silent about the depths of our sorrow. In fact, growing up, no one told me anything about how the world works and why there seemed to be so much unhappiness, why people fought with each other or were greedy or cruel, why sex and beauty was such a big deal etc etc, but this book does. The concept of Resignation, as with so many concepts throughout FREEDOM, releases us all from our lonely, individual corners of a dark room and introduces us to the warm light of this truthful understanding. It IS like breaking free from an underground prison as Plato described it, his allegory being referred to often in the book. For my life, reading FREEDOM was a total game-changer. I cannot love this book more because it is so needed and it’s so real in what it delivers—FREEDOM. You should push past any initial scepticism or confrontation you may feel when reading as you will be rewarded with the precious jewel that FREEDOM is. It can be a difficult journey but oh is it worth it, not just for you but for the human race and all of life.

[Connor FitzGerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is no ordinary book. Jeremy Griffith’s summa masterpiece FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition is the spectacular culmination of more than 40 years of researching and writing about the human condition, its effect on the psychological state of humanity and its relieving and transforming explanation. The more I read the more I could see why leading psychiatrist Professor Prosen described this book in his Introduction as the “greatest of all books”. This is because FREEDOM presents the profound and comprehensive explanation of ALL the elemental questions that have baffled humanity – science in particular – surrounding our existence on this planet. The Contents page alone reads like the collected works of all of humanity’s greatest ever thinkers and prophets; and it’s a fair assessment, judging by the vast array of quotes that Griffith draws on. Topics include: the explanation of the human condition, the meaning of life, why and how did consciousness emerge in humans, the origins of the human soul, the transformation of the human race and many others. Griffith outlines particularly the four great unconfrontable truths that have stalled any meaningful scientific enquiry, namely the biological explanation of precisely what the human condition is, the meaning of existence, how we humans acquired our altruistic moral instincts and how we became conscious when other animals didn’t. These, Griffith explains, are the major stalling points that science has heroically but fearfully tried to penetrate, but without the fundamental explanation of ourselves it has been a confounding and increasingly impossible task.

A warning to the reader that this is not another “feel-good” intellectual publication but one that leaves you with an eerie sense that something profound is being discussed over which you have little control! For those not familiar with Griffith’s earlier work the “Notes to the Reader” at the beginning of the book addresses this discomfort; “Readers are warned that the issue of the human condition that this book addresses
has been such a difficult subject for humans to confront that reading about it can initially cause a ‘deaf effect’, where it is hard to take in and absorb what is being said. However, with patience and re-reading this deaf effect wears off, allowing the compassionate and immensely relieving insights to become accessible” .

The relevance of Griffith’s book cannot be lost on the reader – from both a macro and micro view of human life on this planet, the situation is overwhelmingly desperate – from the visible signs of our wrecked environment, overpopulation and overcrowding, governmental dysfunction, escalating conflicts and rampant self-interest to the less visible but no less distressing epidemics of psychosis, neurosis, depression, and other disorders stemming form colossal levels of alienation from our natural world. The situation is very serious, the need for clarity urgent. It is in this arena that Griffith compassionately illustrates what the problem is – the human condition – and then goes about paragraph by soothing paragraph to outline the simple, logical, dignified, biologically-based explanation for this condition. The psychological outlook on our lives is upturned and re-laid out in the most simple, rational and refreshingly original explanations. Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing (whom Griffith readily quotes) wrote, “The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man” (par 224). Griffith outlines that paradoxically, the human condition is “the all-important issue that had to be solved…[but] it has been the great unacknowledged ‘elephant in the living room’ of our lives, THE absolutely critical and yet completely unconfrontable and virtually unmentionable subject in life” (par 130). Interested yet?

Chapter 3 explains that the human condition is the underlying insecurity and resulting psychosis that humans’ live with, unable to explain, despite our deepest intuition, that we are fundamentally good. When the evidence is overwhelming for our apparent badness/worthlessness as a species, how can we actually be good/worthwhile and an integral part of existence on this planet? How do we explain and account for our dark and “evil” natures? The answer lies in understanding the two million year old conflict between our instinctive, genetically orientated brain and our intelligent, nerve-based brain. “…since our altruistic, moral instincts are only genetic orientations to the world and not understandings of it, when our fully conscious, reasoning, self-managing mind emerged it would, in order to find the understandings it needed to effectively manage events, have had to challenge those instinctive orientations, which would have led to a psychologically upsetting clash with our moral instincts” (par 224).

It is explained that these necessary pioneering efforts of the newly emerged conscious mind, defied our already established instincts and caused the psychological conflict that has compounded over two million years resulting in the states of extreme psychosis and neurosis we see today. We became angry, egocentric and alienated or in a word: upset. Further, Griffith reveals that suffering becoming upset as a result of becoming conscious was “the tragic yet inevitable situation that any animal would have to endure if it transitioned from an instinct controlled state to an intellect controlled state” (par 64).

More often than not, publications that attempt to explain elusive subjects like the human soul, religion and consciousness etc., tend to get lost in their own maze of well-meaning intellectual confusion, but what this book reveals is the absolutely incredible, terrifying, confronting, most heroic, completely unabridged, truthful story of us humans from start to finish. Never before has there been such a totally symmetrical and holistic illustration of the problem facing the world and its compassionate solution.

Chapter 9 (the book’s final chapter) provides the crescendo of Griffith’s masterpiece which outlines the beauty, simplicity and meaningful happiness involved in adopting the “Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” which is the wonderful solution to the obvious dilemma of how anyone in the world is going to cope with having to absorb and accept so much confronting and exposing truth about themselves?!?
It’s difficult to express the scope and breadth of the impact that this book will have on the world – for it will be felt for centuries to come. However, one hurdle remains for humanity before we can reach the ultimate fully-integrated, peaceful and reconciled state – the distressing question that is posed in the title of the book: FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition Is it too late? Is humanity, and particularly our scientific establishment, too entrenched in our alienated human condition to adopt what is being explained? Reading this book puts us squarely in the hot-seat of our species predicament. The outcome is up to us.

[Anthony Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Understand Yourself and Those Around You!”

Imagine knowing WHY the world is in the mess that it currently is in. Imagine being able to truly understand and love yourself and those around you. Imagine having genuine hope for the future of humanity! Well... imagine no more. You simply have to read this book for yourself!

"Freedom: The End of the Human Condition" explores the traditional 'no-go-zone' of the subject of "the human condition" - humans' capacity for both good and evil - and fully explains it in layman's terms. Griffith is able to go where nobody else has been able to go before... unlocking and explaining the most impenetrable of subjects, holistically using biology, philosophy, anthropology, and even popular culture to hit the mark! The depth and breadth of the book's material is simply astounding: covering such profound and important topics such as: "The role of nurturing in our development"; "The three fundamental truths of the human condition"; "The psychological rehabilitation of the human race" and "The Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living".

This book could be the most incredible, truly powerful, and transformative book you will ever read! In a nutshell, it solves almost all of the world's problems! "Freedom" is simply a masterpiece, an instant classic, a modern day tour de force that fully explains and dignifies humans, and by so doing, offers us a REAL roadmap to peace on earth!

[Jolanda98765 · Rating 5 out of 5]

An expression we use in Netherlands is "When someting sounds too good to be true, it will be too good to be true". But not for this book that claims to save the world. The strange thing with this book is that it doesn't tell you how to think, what to do, how to live your life, it only explains things and these explanation you can test for yourself in every day situations, the more I come familiar with this book and the understanding it brings, the better it gets!! Find out for yourself and read the book.

[Prudie Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book can stop all the suffering on this planet – in you and me and in the world – it is the profound explanation of our human predicament – the confronting truth – but the answers that finally dignify humans and liberate us. It has the answers that we have been looking for – it won’t disappoint you – it solves everything!

[Michael Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are all sorts of philosophy books out there that try and explain the human condition, or at least how to live with it. History is full of them. Lately some scientists have tried to get in on the act, arguing that everything can be reduced down to our genes. Think Dawkins and E.O. Wilson. I have read them all, well a lot of them anyway. Some are just epic fails. Some are awesome, but not because they explain everything, but because they tell you how to live with it all. And then there is this book. This is the only book I have ever read that categorically gets to the bottom of it all. It scientifically explains the human condition, and with that explained, all the questions about our behavior just unlock before your eyes. I don't care what question you have, this book will answer it. Extraordinary.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this book 2 stars because some wonderful literature and lyrics *are* cited by the author. But I found the subject matter repetitive, unnecessarily wordy and dismissive. The premise that humans are intrinsically kind and loving is not a new concept. Nor is the duality with which humans struggle unfamiliar. But there is circuitous thinking, under-examined "scientific" conclusions and not the insight that is promised in this huge book.

And how convenient that those who do not accept the findings are deemed to be in denial!

The numerous high ratings for this book conjures for me the story of the emperor's new clothes. Some of us see the emperor is in his birthday suit. This I do not deny!

Masterpiece this book is not. It does not deliver what is promised!

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you genuinely want to understand human behaviour and make sense of the mess in the world - then read this book!

[PJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading 'Freedom' I know this: that everything is going to be alright, in fact wonderful. The terror, neurosis and horror in this world is about to subside, as this book delivers no less than the self-knowledge we humans have desperately needed at this critical point in time. Looking around at the state of our planet, it is clear that the world is heaving under the pressure of all the problems we face - yet this book alone puts us squarely back on course to a promising future. Anyone concerned about the state of the world should have this book at the top of their reading list.

"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". George Seaver (page 140)

Jeremy Griffith's treatise on the human condition is precisely this and so much more. This far-reaching explanation starts right at the beginning at our biological origins, with the explanation of our 'human condition' presented via an incredibly simple, yet powerful analogy followed by pages of truthful insights, providing a complete understanding of ourselves and our world.

I was walking to work the other day after reading 'Freedom' and it occurred to me how secure I was in the knowledge that our moral instincts are genuine, that we did come from an original state of cooperativeness (see Chapter 5) and even though we currently are immensely destructive and damaged, that was necessary and can change now. There's a plethora of books that talk of peace of mind, but nothing compares to this ability now to 'know' and the peace of mind that gives you.

There is a particularly moving description on page 50 regarding how humans have been waiting for this moment, and on page 76-78 regarding an honest passage from Catcher in the Rye. It's impossible to describe the level of empathy the author has for humans in his writing and how intuitively it rings true - I strongly encourage you to experience it for yourself.

A quote I came across recently keeps coming to mind: "Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - there's no need to say another word".

I believe it has and it's 'Freedom'

[Dean Paradiso · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the strangest books I've picked up (in a bookstore) for a long time- resulting in a few hours that I won't be getting back. The book is a massive 800+ page long thesis work describing the poor state of humanity today and historically (one star for this effort, which is actually correct), possible reasons for this (according to psuedo-science, psychology, and random pickings by the author such as pop songs), and a possible solution for this malaise. The "Solution" which has something to do with 'transformation', 'selflessness', and affirming one's 'goodness' instead of evil, is buried deep, deep, within pages of complex, convoluted text and impenetrable verbiage. There's also ample advertising for organisations that the author has founded. At the end of the day, I really can't see any difference in the grand 'solution' being offered in this massive book, and that of something written by New Thought authors like Og Mandino or Napoleon Hill- just think yourself to goodness and happiness, and forgive the past- which as experience shows, just isn't enough to overcome the power of the dualistic, egoic self that is actually taking on board the 'mission' to 'save the world' via ineffective means such as those proposed here.
For a real 'end of suffering' try some of the more tried and true spiritual traditions, which have actually produced those who have been Self-realized and free. Alternatively, try something similarly contemporary with a more practical curriculum (such as MBSR, ACIM, etc.)

[Monica Kodet · Rating 5 out of 5]

The psychological maturation of the human race is on!

This book answers with fascinating, head on, undeniable rigour all the obvious but impossible questions about human life, you know the ones you hope your children won't ask but do....Where do humans come from? Why do people kill each other? What is the meaning of life? Why doesn't Daddy love me? What is love? Profound, honest thinkers throughout history are very present and at home in this book. The scale of it is mind-blowing.

Jeremy Griffith explains the whole picture of humanity's journey from ignorance to enlightenment in biological, evolutionary terms. Central to it all is this issue of the 'human condition'— how the development of our conscious brain which needs to explore and understand the world created an internal 'war' with the instinctive part of ourselves which expects love and cooperation (our conscience), and how our inability to understand what was happening inside us left us with underlying sense of guilt, distress and fear about who we are. Are we good or are we bad? A universal psychosis or condition that has compounded over millions of years and caused all the anger, suffering and destruction that we have had to 'block out' in order to survive and cope. Until we could satisfy our conscious brain and fully understand this fundamental dilemma and the very good reason for our 'dark side', humanity has been stalled, 'locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery'.

To claim the end of the human condition should of course trigger scepticism but at the end of the day it either makes sense or it dosen't. There is loads of evidence backing Griffith's central idea which is actually very simple, but the most powerful evidence for me lies in it's ability to unlock and makes sense of everything around and in me, and to honestly but compassionately address the screaming obvious issue of 'us' and how messed up we have become. Our world is in crisis because we are in crisis and no-one is talking about that on a real level. Isn't 'that's just the way we are' avoidance of the whole issue? Is our conscious brain capable of putting man on the moon but incapable of explaining and dealing with ourselves? The logical, refreshing and transforming news this book presents is that our condition is not genetic, but psychological and can be overcome. As Canadian Psychiatrist Professor Prosen says 'Jeremy Griffith's biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race'.

Its honesty can be immensely challenging but powerfully relieving at the same time. How can something that deals profoundly with who we are and the seriousness of our situation not be? Without concrete evidence for our fundamental goodness, we haven't been able to face ourselves but with this knowledge the human race can finally move on. These explanations bring the ultimate love to humans and the ability to love our dark side changes everything! It truly does set us free!

I could talk about FREEDOM forever and hopefully if humanity can get over its deep resistance to the subject of the human condition soon everyone else will be too. It empowers me to understand and access the incredible, heroic journey all humans have been on in search of knowledge and how I fit into that. Knowing that all the pain, suffering and horror around and in me has been a necessary, inevitable part of that brings incredible peace, meaning and love to it all and into my whole being. If everyone was filled with this powerful, reconciling, transforming knowledge then everyone would be dancing in the sun because when everything looks so depressingly bleak, being able to understand it all actually turns that around. You can see a path forward for humanity out of all the mess. It fills you with hope, happiness, excitement, and just life.

[Sally Edgar · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘...the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die…that despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction, this sickness in the self; eternally to die, to die and yet not to die...there is not a single [adult] human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there doesn’t dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something, or a something he doesn’t even dare strike up acquaintance with…he goes about with a sickness, goes about weighed down with a sickness of the spirit, which only now and then reveals its presence within, in glimpses, and with what is for him an inexplicable anxiety.’ I totally relate to this quote from the great philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in his 1849 book, The Sickness Unto Death. It strikes me at my core and I imagine it would for anyone in a quiet, reflective moment. Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith uses these words in his latest book ‘Freedom: The End Of The Human Condition’ to explain 'how unbearably confronting—in fact, suicidally depressing—grappling with the issue of the human condition has been'.

It's what I so love about this book - it hits you up front and centre with the core issue facing humanity, the issue of the human condition, the agonising question of why on one hand we have this immense capacity to love but on the other have the capacity to hate, even murder, and then provides the rational, logical, first-principle biological, and breathtaking, answer that we've all been waiting for - that despite appearances we are in fact good, we are fundamentally worthwhile, there is nothing to despair about anymore, our anxiety, our pain, our suffering all comes to a stop, in a second! It is enthralling and it is true.

This book provides the definitive roadmap for how we can all live now free of the chains of the human condition, how we and all of our ancestors have dreamed of living - and fought so courageously to bring about: free, happy, peacefully, in harmony.

For the sake of humanity, I urge you to read this book to connect with the issue of the human condition, to understand it has been solved and to learn how we can live free of it. You will not be disappointed - you will instantly improve your life and the children of the future will thank you from the bottoms of their hearts.

[Ulrik Helms · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this book you can come to the conclusion that everything, including your self, has a good purpose. I know it might sound strange but it is actually the completely liberating understanding of why we humans are the true heroes of the story on life on earth and not the villains as we have been taught to be. This was for me a paradigm shift in my understanding of my self and my fellow humans and the biggest "aha" moment of my life.

Jeremy Griffith has packaged knowledge and wisdom from different sources like biology, culture history, paleontology, genetics, psychiatry, lyrics and philosophy into a completely liberating and soul redeeming package unlike anything I have ever seen before.

I might warn you though that the information can be very confrontational due to the many truths we previously could not confront but which we now can with this understanding. But to support the reader in this uncovering of some sensitive subjects Griffith has founded the World Transformation Movement on www.humancondition.com. Fantastic videos, essays, online support and forum for discussions free of charge for everyone.

However the good thing is that if you allow yourself to slowly digest this topic and what is on offer here, this science and knowledge will actually liberate your psyche and soul beyond anything you thought was possible. It might in fact and seriously be the best "aha" and "halleluja" moment" of your life!

So I can't recommend enough how much I think you should read it because it has transformed my life past everything I thought was possible.

Read it, ponder it and do your own research and you will soon find out that it will be worth every second.

[Tess W · Rating 5 out of 5]

FREEDOM is a big book and necessarily so, if it is to explain fundamentally what it means to be human. When I tell people this book is the most important book you will ever read, I’m naturally met with surprise, doubt and sometimes disdain that I should be so naïve or strange. But say it how it is! It’s no fluffy, walk in the park, self-motivational book or one claiming to solve the world’s problems via a new means of saving the environment or curbing population. This book stands back and looks on at our species and at our planet and delves into the very heart of the problem, ALL of the problems. In short (v.v. short) it explains what happened to humans, how we went from being instinctively driven (like all other species on Earth) to becoming conscious - the crux juncture in the human journey when one could say, the “shit hit the fan”.

It is this stage in the human story (that occurred some 2 million years ago) that Griffith explains produced an internal clash that now defines what it means to be a human; why we’re so self-driven and egotistical, why we are so self preoccupied, why we need materialism and spiritualism, why religions were invented and what they have done for humans (and why they are now so dangerously fundamentalist), why the relationship between men and women is so fraught … I could go on. But basically the human condition underpins every one of our actions, every single human, no matter how young or old, is ‘inflicted’ by this state of being a human under the duress of the human condition and as such, unless we understand that – in biological terms – we will never be freed from the psychological mess we are all in.

[Aussiescribbler Aussiescribbler · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’ve been studying Griffith’s writings for more than 25 years. Originally I was a supporter, even though I felt that his theories were flawed. My attitude was that this was the most all-encompassing attempt I had yet come across to get to grips with the psychological roots of our species’ social and ecological problems. “At the very least this will start the discussion we need to have,” I felt.

Over time my attitude changed. Now I look on it less as a first stab at a cure and more as a distillation of the disease itself.

I have points of agreement with Griffith. I do believe that our problems as a species can be traced back to a pervasive sense of insecurity about our own worth. As our self-acceptance is undermined we become more embattled and more selfish. Idealism is one of the major things which undermines our self-acceptance. The message of idealism is “You’re not good enough.” Where we part company is with regard to the source of idealism. Griffith believes that it is innate. He believes that we are born expecting ideal behaviour from others and that we have an instinctive demand for selfless behaviour from ourselves. I don’t see any evidence for this. I believe that idealism is essentially a thought virus, that it arose from our capacity for reason and took hold because we found it hard to argue against. On the surface it seems to make sense that, if we want a better society and want to be better people, the way to do so is to insist on high standards, to try to pursue better behaviour by an act of will and insist on it from others. The fact that this approach tends to undermine our self-acceptance and thus robs us of our capacity for such improved behaviour is not obvious.

I think that we are born instinctively loving, that is with a tendency to accept others as we find them as long as they don’t cause us suffering. As our self-acceptance is gradually undermined we become more insecure, and one form that this insecurity may take is to that we become disturbed by deviations in other people’s behaviour from how we feel they should be, based on the principles of proper behaviour we have learned from others. This is comparable to obsessive compulsive disorder in which the peace of mind of the individual is conditional on certain strict requirements being met.

So idealism can make us intolerant towards others and angry about what we feel are their imperfections. But also, because exposure to idealism’s criticism of us socially undermines our self-acceptance, it can push us in the direction of ever-greater levels of embattlement. Our anger at our own apparent inability to meet the demands of idealism can be turned inwards in the form of depression, which in the extreme may lead to suicide, or it may be turned outward in the form of anger towards those who express or represent to us the ideals we feel unable to live up to. Some individuals who become embattled in this way, may, if they feel backed very tightly into a corner, feel intense resentment and hostility towards the psychologically healthy, those whom Griffith would term “the innocent”. I believe that this is why some people end up feeling compelled to inflict suffering on defenceless children.

Griffith calls this despair or hostility “upset”. He sees “upset” as something which tends to be cumulative and which is easier to transcend than it is to heal. To heal our “upset” he feels would require using his “insights” to go back over the events of our life and re-explain them to ourselves in the light of his defence. This is something he does not recommend we do. He recommends transcending our “upset” by adopting the “Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” in which we access the optimism and joy which is possible through supporting and disseminating his ideas and participating in any ameliorating strategies which may arise from them.

My view is that the situation is not this bleak. I don’t believe we need a defence. All we need is to learn to stop fighting with these hostile thoughts and feelings. There is a huge difference between accepting them and acting on them. The less we accept them - the more we fight against them - the stronger they grow and the harder it may be to prevent ourselves from expressing them in our action in some way. Freed of our insecurities through learning the simple practice of unconditional self-acceptance we will find ourselves able to “go to work for humanity” autonomously rather than needing the leadership of another. If the world is to be saved it will have to take place through a decentralised process. Always having to refer back to the wisdom of the “prophet” won’t work. This is not how living systems work.

This book is a Trojan Horse for the idealism virus. A “defence” for everything about us which is “non-ideal” is conditional upon the acceptance of the frame of reference of idealism. There is absolutely no need for us to be ideal, even if such a thing were possible.

What matters is that we find a way to cooperate with each other enough to solve as many of our problems as we can solve. This will require us to become less selfish. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. One of the things which may be causing us suffering is feeling guilty about being selfish. This is a negative feedback loop. What can break us out of this loop is to recognise that unconditional self-acceptance will make us less selfish, while trying to be less selfish will only increase the problem. Griffith sets out to defend us for not being “selfless”, as he claims our genes would insist we should be. The aim of this approach may be to encourage unconditional self-acceptance by allowing us to feel “defended”, but does it work?

The term “selfless” is inherently idealistic. Our behaviour can only ever be motivated by self-interest. If Griffith feels that not bringing his message to the world will lead to a situation which will make him feel bad and saving the world will make him feel good, then he is being motivated by self-interest. There is nothing wrong with this. Self-interest is not selfishness. Selfishness is a form of pathological self-directedness. If you do decide to follow Griffith’s advice and take up the “Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” your motivation will be that it feels good to be a part of the solution to the world’s problems. There is nothing wrong with self-interest. What matters is whether it is enlightened or unenlightened self-interest. Unenlightened self-interest will lead us to pig out on junk food because it gives us pleasure today, while enlightened self-interest would encourage us to eat a healthy diet because we are thus more likely to feel good tomorrow. When we do something which appears to benefit ourselves at the expense of others, we compromise our own longer term interests.

Griffith admits that his book is confronting. He believes that it is confronting because it is so truthful. I believe that it is confronting because it is so full of a particular kind of idealism. Most of us are very insecure about our self-worth as I’ve said. When we are in such a state, truth is not the only thing which will confront us. We may be confronted by anything which appears to be critical of us, whether it is rational or not. Look at how many people have experienced shame about masturbation, when there is no rational reason to view it as something harmful to ourselves or others.

My experience with Griffith’s writings was that they tended to further undermine my already compromised self-acceptance via their confronting aspects while offering in return a “defence” which appeared fatally flawed.

So I was left with a challenge. How could I find for myself what I had not got from Griffith’s work. I recognised that the problems of the world arose from a widespread condition of psychological insecurity which makes us more selfish. Not only our happiness but our continued survival as a species depends on us finding a way to liberate ourselves from selfishness - to liberate our capacity for love.

Gradually, as I wrestled with the challenge of Griffith’s work, a vision of a radically different approach to the problem formed in my mind. I expressed the essence of that vision in my book How to be Free by Joe Blow. The philosophy I outline there has worked for me and others have told me that it has worked for them. My book, like Griffith’s, is free to download as an ebook. It is also very short, and, I think, pretty easy to understand. (I use the pseudonym Joe Blow as a way of de-emphasising myself, so that the ideas are assessed on the basis of their own intrinsic value or lack there of. I have no worldly authority anyway. I’m not a trained professional in any field.)

My suggestion is that you read my book and then read Griffith’s. If Griffith’s work really is “the holy grail of insight we have needed to free ourselves from the human condition” then you will soon forget my flimsy effort. On the other hand, if my book helps you to be a little more secure in self than you were before, the experience of having read it will better equip you to fairly assess the validity of Griffith’s book.

[Adams Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book feels like the truth. I can't explain it. He talks about all sorts of topics that are really really really interesting and he just describes the world so well, what a mess it is all in, a mess we are all in! The chapters on childhood and nurturing and his 'love indoctrination' theory are jsut really fascinating and really impressed me. I'm doing lots of 'really reallys'!!. I felt impelled to writes a review because it just feels like a really (!) important book that I do hope others read too.

[Tom King · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book comes off like a pseudo-scientific version of a David Koresh sermon - one of those all-nighters where the cult leader harangues his followers spending hours telling him he's going to tell them some great and magnificent "truth" and that all these other so-called experts are against him because they can't handle the truth, but if they'll just listen to him, the truth will be explained. Then he never quite gets to the truth and tells you that you'll have to come back tomorrow night and he'll explain the rest of it. Griffiths spends the first two chapters of his book telling you what he's going to tell you and why you won't like it and probably won't understand it unless you read the book two or three more times, but he promises that that in chapter 4 paragraph 7 or something, the truth of the human condition will be explained and will set you free from guilt.

Of course if you go to chapter 4, paragraph 7 you'll be treated to another repetitive, name-dropping, collection of confident assertions that the "human condition" is clearly explained or will be in Chapter 8 or that it was in Chapter 3 and you were just too stupid to get it. And then Griffith sets sail on another of those boundless oceanic sentences from which my college grammar instructor would be hard pressed to extract a subject and predicate from somewhere within the tangle of hyphens, semi-colons and parentheticals. (Griffith just loves his hyphenated words).

I got the impression that he was leading up to the idea that our natural state was running around naked and not having much sex and living as a cooperative member of the collective. He mangles up a mish-mash of academic sounding references to Plato, Darwin, Moses and a panoply of religious and scientific characters, flinging them at you so quickly and in such a disorganized way, it's like stepping into the mind of someone with severe bipolar experiencing an almost psychotic manic episode. Having two bipolar family members, I recognize the pressured speech and the skirting along the edges of word salad that characterizes the prose in this book, pretending to be academic brilliance.

This gets my lowest rating for poor writing, muddled logic and creepifying content. Hey, Mom, look at all the citations! This must be brilliant because I can hardly read it. Of course, Griffith dodges that problem by starting out claiming that people are so resistant to knowing the truth about the mystical "human condition" which is the root of all our problems, that we may find that we cannot understand what we are reading. (see David Koresh, Reverend Moon, the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, Charles Manson, Ervil LeBaron, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite)

I'm not saying Griffith is going to go off and commit human sacrifices, but the style of the book and website, his array of followers who shout his praises and who actually vow that Griffith's brilliant work is going to "save the world", give me pause. Of course, as a Christian I follow someone who claimed he would save the world (at least the bit that wanted to be saved). I suppose a fairer comparison between Griffith and a similar leader would be to compare him to L. Ron Hubbard. He started out with claims that he could save the world and a scientific sounding book. I tried once to read "Dianetics", Hubbard's book and Scientology's "bible". Hubbard's reminds me a lot of Griffith's work.

Will understanding the "human condition" save the world from war and stuff? I don't think so. Okay, confuse the world maybe, but save it? I'm not sure letting our reasoning mind assent to our stumbling around naked, merging with the collective and following our instincts is going to solve any world problems. Of course, I suppose if the enlightened folk who belong to Griffith's gang of acolytes are put in charge, we won't have to actually think about such things anymore.

This book has a creepy sort of vibe to it. Griffith would say it's because I am in denial and cannot deal with the truth. Jack Nicholson should play Griffith in the movie. Sorry guys, I don't think this awkward and oppressive book solves anything. I just don't.

© 2017 by Tom King

[Prudie Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book can stop all the suffering on this planet – in you and me and in the world. It is the profound explanation of our human predicament, the confronting truth but the answers that finally dignify humans and liberate us. It has the answers that we have been looking for. It won’t disappoint you and it solves everything!

[Roz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be in every school, university in fact everywhere! We all know the world is in a mess and we need to do something about before it is too late. This book gives us the CAUSE of the problem, not a list of symptoms, like all other books do and then what to do about it. The book lays in the palm of your hand, it brings meaning to everything, without exception

[Jody Ellis · Rating 1 out of 5]

A insulting text that treats the reader like a moron with persistent stupid analogies and examples where I'm left feeling like I'm a 2yo being spoken down to.

The sheer arrogance is overwhelming. 'Humanity is the only species capable of enlightenment and thus higher thinking and doing things that go beyond instinct.' Is this author that sheltered that they haven't read legitimate peer reviewed papers on monkeys showing compassion, elephants mourning their dead, Dolphins having sex for fun. Dogs suffer depression.

Cartoons from media personalities are apparently great examples that prove the authors point and the sheer agonising volume of filler words is painful beyond belief. Examples from discredited authorities that have been proven beyond shadow of a doubt to be wrong and liars are this authors shining light.

This book, so large I could kill someone with it, is absolute rubbish and what is most concerning is this guy used to head the Canadian psychiatric association. How??? I can't believe how let down I am by this book, I had high hopes, I was excited about it, keen to read it and then I'm like 'this reads like every get rich like me' self help book I've read or like the shopping Chanel on TV.

The sly thing is, his 'critical acclaim' is all based on the proposal! Over 700 pages of what most people already know, thanks for insinuating we as a species all need saving by telling us what we already know and that this! This book is what will save us????

No it won't my poor misguided author. Thanks for the firm slap in the face.

[Lyn Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his book ‘Freedom’, Griffith takes a holistic approach to explain the nature of and solution to the human condition. He agrees on only one point with EO Wilson: the 'human condition' is the most important frontier of the natural sciences.
At the heart of his sweeping exploration of the human condition, Griffith presents the reader with a simple analogy of a stork he names Adam (after Adam and Eve). Through this simple analogy, we are acquainted with the biological story of humanity. It’s a story of a conflict between our historical instincts and our highly developed intellects. Griffith argues that the holy grail of understanding- the treasure of all treasures, can be found in a simple biological story which all humans, no matter what race or religion can understand and appreciate. Griffith argues that this understanding will set humanity free from the human condition. The arguments were so convincingly put, that I could imagine a human-condition-free world, where children won't have to grow up with the upset raging all around them.
It only takes a brief moment to look around us and at the news headlines every day to realise that we humans need a new way of interpreting ourselves and our interactions with nature. For me Freedom was at times a hard read but always a thoroughly convincing read!

[Temwa Mwafulirwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

in a simple sentence am a changed mind beyond my self

[Maria · Rating 1 out of 5]

A White Misogynist Homophobic Christian Male’s attempt to give “scientific” proof to the Bible

I must confess, I started reading this book with some skepticism, which proved wrong when I found some fascinating ideas throughout the book. But soon this amazement faded away and I ended up finishing this book ten times more skeptical (and outraged) than I was before. Some main points:

— The author claims to have worked his whole life as a biologist on his quest; nevertheless, the big majority of quotations in this book are taken from the Bible. Indeed, the Bible serves as the basis for his thesis; philosophical quotes abound too, making sure there are plenty of them anywhere, although they don’t relate to science at all. Scientific aspects are used, but only in specific chapters where a specific idea is to be defended. In general, any scientific remark in this book serves only as much as it helps Griffith develop his opinion which is already (and admittedly) taken from the Bible.

— The author promises to relieve us from suffering by explaining us the underlying conditions of our human species. What kind of suffering is he exactly talking about, would one wonder? Death? Hunger? War? Failed marriage? The author doesn’t say; he just takes for granted that by exposing some universal problems we are automatically freed from them. From a certain point in the book he usually says “but now that we know”, as if everything is solved then. Lately in the book he claims that this acknowledgment about the human condition will by itself be the start of real change in the future. How? Still to explain.

— Climate change is, in the author’s words, a clear example of a psychological process through which we focus on issues foreign to us in order to avoid addressing the real issues within ourselves. Which is to say, climate change is a false problem and people who concern about it are running away from the real issues. This argument, of course, is an easy way to get out of any discussion without directly addressing it. But the author is smart enough not to even get into the arguments about climate change: he just claims that anybody worrying about it is compensating for something else. Why climate change as an example? Is it just climate change? How does this denial process occur? Can it happen to any field of opinion? One can ask him all this, because he didn’t bother explaining. Apparently, he's just focused on climate change.

— For the author, the feminist movement is a movement without a cause, because it neglects many centuries of human History when men — not women — took the “heroic” task of the quest for knowledge. He complements this idea stating that the home-based nurturing role is necessary to reproduction but counterproductive for discovery, for which the female role is adverse to knowledge. Therefore, male egocentrism has been — and will always be — necessary and justifiable for conquest and development.

— For the author, male homosexuality is a perversion from the natural healthy sex drive. In his opinion, sex is already a perversion in itself: it drives toward destruction of innocence. Therefore, the most innocent creature a corrupted man would want to sexually deprave would be young men, since they are more sexually pure than women: considering that women have been historically more prone to sexual advance, they are more sexual aware (and therefore less innocent) than men.

— Very likely, any person who doesn’t agree with this book is suffering from the “deaf-effect”, which is, in Griffith's point of view, what happens when one wants to block out a truth by succumbing to a subconscious state of denial. Which is to say, if you don’t agree with this book, you should try to slowly change your mindset until you do agree.

My, this list could go on…

Fairly speaking, I should praise the amount of coherence that unfolds from beginning to end: Griffith worked hard to make a universal explanation of the world to the very last detail, encompassing biology, sociology, history, philosophy, materialism and anthropology. But unifying coherence by itself doesn’t necessarily make proof of truth: his book might either be seen as a work of genius or as a ridiculous catalog of deluded assumptions with no scientific support. He might have an interesting point about the role of nurture and some differences between he sexes, but his conclusions are ideological, far-fetched and lack scientific structure. This book is actually full of the political chaos which is typical of our times, which so obviously unmasks any work trying to present itself as scientific. It isn’t. It is a personal point of view, a view that doesn't even make an effort in hiding personal biases and religious beliefs, and although this book should have credit for its effort at unity, this “theory-of-everything” is as dangerous as is any attempt to push humanity backwards in terms of human rights, scientific knowledge and freedom of expression. In regard to these, this book is really outraging and offensive.

One might even ask, after all, whose suffering is Griffith trying to solve — or which people is he trying to help with his so boldly-ubiquitous-advertised book? Is he trying to help any random human individual? This answer is NO — not gay people, not women, not the "Lefts", not atheists, not believers of other religions, not new age communities, not scientists of all kinds of fields. His message is simple and powerful: If you submit to my coherent and unified white-rightwing-male-oriented view of the world, everything will be in balance, the human race will be golden. Which is, of course, the statement that many ideologies, cult organizations and religions have been practicing in human history. Fortunately for us, this book is just a book, and I hope any person inclined to human rights, inclusiveness and cultural diversity will find Griffith's thesis plain stupid, as will any person working in the science community.

Would I recommend this book to anyone, then? That will only depend on you. If you are searching for a convenient way to give proof to Christian Creationism while at the same time rejecting climate change, sexual diversity, gender issues and left-wing politics all in a unified theory that amounts to 500+ pages and disguises itself as scientific, this is surely the book for you.