The World Transformation Movement: Ignorance and inconsistencies

YouTube keeps pushing their clips to me

Disclaimer: I have no intention to judge people, their characters, or their motives. I’m only trying to point out fact from fiction, true from false.

The clip coming by most is an interview with the founder of the WTM, the Australian biologist and author Jeremy Griffith by a follower of his: THE Interview That “Solves The Human Condition And Saves The World!”

I find it fair enough that an introduction is conducted by a believer. An attack on someone with a novel idea might ruin the presentation.

I decided to give it a hearing for you, my readers, to save you time.

PART 1

He starts out by claiming to have found a rational, biological, and scientific solution to all human suffering. If he hadn’t, he couldn’t say so.

1. That last point is untrue. There are lots of false statements around.

Why are we brutally competitive, selfish, and aggressive?

2. My father, OBM, would say: Speak for yourself. Most women are more giving than selfish.

We have been taught that all competitiveness, selfishness, and aggression we all have must come from instincts from our animalistic past. But we are conscience and have a psychological compound. And we have moral drives, which is the opposite of brutality. We value cooperation, love, and consciousness, which we must have gotten from our ape-like ancestors. We see them in some apes. If not, from where could they have come?

3. I was not taught that competitiveness, selfishness, and aggression are the core human problems. How about addictions and fears?

4. Reductionism is the primitive and obsolete science that we are simply the sum of our building blocks. This is not true. A brick house has qualities that bricks don’t have (shelter). That we are social doesn’t mean we must have gotten that from our animal ancestors. But even if so, so what?

He then says that our problems are not biological but psychological.

5. This is called a strawman argument. He first raises a baseless claim that we are all taught that we are mean because of our animalistic instinct, and then, he rejects that claim. That’s an easy win.

6. NB: He just left his area of expertise. He’s not a therapist or sociologist. It shows because he now throws in the word psychosis for unhappiness.

Now, if you’d think he goes to describe humans, you’re wrong.

He now depicts the first humans as having a war between their inherited automatic instincts and their new freedom-loving conscience will.

7. He just claimed that humans don’t have these animal instincts, but the early ones did? This ‘war’ smells of what many religious thinkers claim, especially in Christianity, that the body is evil and the mind is good.

This ‘war’ leaves humans angry, etc. First, he claimed that aggression came not from the survival of the fittest. Now, he claims the great human brain is angry at the genes for wanting to have a say. The genes say: be nice and social because that way, we survive best, but we want the freedom to fight and be mean. And our instincts say we’re bad for not obeying. And his human side gets angry, defensive, and egotistical to fight that charge.

8. But is that true? Are we sometimes angry because our animalistic side pulls us in another direction than our human side? Our bodies tell us not to overeat, but we want the freedom to do so? Rather, we overeat not to feel unhappy, and then the body dysfunctions.

9. I think what he’s implying is that humans are naturally good. And that bad is an aberration. For that, we need no new theory. All of modern psychology says that.

Once we understand that, our problems are solved.

10. Not that I can see how. So far, he doesn’t say how.

PART 2

Adam and Eve were heroes and good because they began experimenting and were not evil for not obeying their genes and instincts.

11. When you don’t want to drink another beer but you do it anyway, that’s a triumph of our human consciousness? No, that is its failure!

12. The Bible predicts you’re in big trouble when you call up down, left right, and bad good. Boy, is he lost. What gymnastics to feel good!

13. Suddenly, he says morality comes from our instincts that conflict with our fantastic intellect. (This reminds me of Hitler hating the Jews for giving humanity a bad conscience. First, Christianity makes you feel bad, and then, blame the Jews.) Clearly, Griffith is battling Christianity’s guilt.

Only 150 years ago, we developed a consciousness of cause and effect.

14. He does not know the history of philosophy at all. That’s no shame. But know what you don’t know and have the humility not to lecture about it.

Blaming our genes for our aggression has been our excuse against astronomical guilt. And we had to stay aggressive to maintain we were good. We can now reject our aggression and be our own loving selves.

15. His theory doesn’t survive Occam’s razor. When cutting away all the redundant points, humans are good, and when evil, not our truest selves.

Science has not acknowledged this because it’s a paradigm shift.

16. Sorry, it’s not. It’s only very new to those who don’t know psychology.

We live in the darkest of times ever.

17. Humanity, as I see it, is plagued by the same ills as ever.

PART 3

Natural selection eliminated nicer animals and geared toward aggression. So, how come humans developed such a social and nice moral instinct?

18. He’s only talking about the males. In his idea, females should surrender to the top dog. But we see that women are nicer and much more social.

Our goodheartedness comes from our mothers’ nurture. The mother is selfish for caring unconditionally, but the infant perceives it as selfless.

19. He has not raised children. They’re the greatest teachers of selflessness because every parent who doesn’t have four parents per child available could strangle the kids. Generally, we don’t do this because they are so cute, and our human consciousness stops us, not our instincts.

20. Children feel very well if parents and educators love them selflessly or if they have ulterior motives (As in: you should obey, support me, etc.)

Thinking it gets all this altruistic love, the baby turns into a caring grownup.

21. He’s again only talking of men, with women doing all the child-rearing. But, if his theory were true, every mother would be selfless from her selfless mother, and mothers wouldn’t need to pretend altruïsm anymore.

Because we go upright, women have their hands free to carry their kids for a prolonged time, intensifying this ‘mistaken’ feeling they are loved a lot.

22. Again, he sins against his own training, which I count extra. Rather, humans are biologically different from all other mammals in that our skulls (brains) are so large that we hardly can get born, so we emerge totally ‘pre-term,’ immature. We can’t talk, walk, or even lift our heads. Therefore, grownups can teach us longer than any other baby animal.

Bonobo mothers are exceptionally nurturing, which explains why these apes are so nice and unaggressive.

23. A few nice pictures of a bonobo mother playing with her child don’t prove this. You’d have to show that grizzly bears and all other animals do that less. Google ‘animals cuddle snuggle with their young,’ and you’ll find pictures from here to the end of the world. Many images show that the most aggressive animals do cuddle even the young of other species! His mistake here is the primordial sin of statistics: cherry-picking. Bad work.

24. Worse, a little Internet search shows that male bonobos often do engage in frightening aggressive group behavior, even more so than male chimps! Logically, this must be. A species (including humans) that is only nice is also nice to the dangerous and bad, which is not nice at all.

25. I must admit that I get a little annoyed at the pretentiousness and glee with which he proclaims all these dozens of non-truths. And, even if he’s right, he has still not said how this is going to heal us from all our suffering.

Bonobo apes’ DNA is almost 99% identical to humans.

26. So is pigs’ DNA. The DNA that makes who we are lies chiefly in the ‘junk DNA’ that regulates when and how much we switch on particular genes.

From our bonobo-like ancestors, we inherited this subconscious notion of Eden-like paradisiacal life.

27. I have firsthand proof showing that in our first months in the womb, our nervous system does not register hurts. We each come from Eden.

Endless quotes of people describing humans ‘before the Fall.’ He says that our morality comes from our bonobo ancestors (DNA) and our nurturing.

28. With great pathos, he says the obvious, that our essence comes from our nature (genetics) and nurture. But he’s ecstatic about it.

But once we became selfish, we failed to nurture with unconditional love.

29. He’s completely inconsistent. First, he says we fake love, then, we’re truly altruistic, and then, we can’t nurture unconditionally anymore.

He brings endless quotes from many authors about how good we are.

30. Any rabbi can tell you that. Humans, after the Fall, are still innocent. Christianity still needs to learn that from the Jews.

PART 4

How to rehabilitate humanity? By recognizing we are guiltless, every human is fundamentally good, and we became nasty for good reasons.

31. His explanation of why we became nasty is baseless and unnecessary. Get over the “astronomical” guilt they talked you into. You always were good, innocent, holy, and pure. Whatever bad you did or wanted to do is like mud stuck under your favorite boots—which you wouldn’t throw out for being soiled a bit. Your g-dly essence can never be undone.

His therapy: “The truth will set you free.”

32. This is the New Testament, John 8:32, arguing the Jews. Well, actually, the Jews could set you free. Stop guilt-tripping. You don’t need Jesus, or sacrifices, or anything but your decision to improve to set you free.

For two million years, we have been called bad by our bonobo biological morality toward goodness. We are, therefore, very angry.

33. Clearly, he has no therapy experience so he doesn’t know how to deal with evil. He simply denies it exists. That’s not helpful.

We all learned to fake being civilized, but we must all be boiling with rage.

34. Again, my father would say: speak for yourself.

Now, we don’t need to defend ourselves and can stop lying and doing damage. In a few generations, humanity will be redeemed.

35. Just say all day: “I’m good and holy,” and you will do less damage. That’s nothing new. If Christianity had not preached that humans (without Jesus) are evil and not inclined to any good, they never could have perpetrated the Holocaust, explains Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo.

All left-wing idealistic dogmas wanted us to love, not from the heart. They repressed seeking the deeper cause of our upsets and our basic goodness.

36. Only his solution is perfect. That’s repressive! To make himself a name.

We can now do away with being right-wing and fake-left-wing.

37. Try to sell that to Putin, Trump, or Xi. How about helping democracy?

My Conclusions

A. He ‘solves’ the guilt problem that he got from his Christian roots and biologist training, but that does not exist for most Jews, most men, most women, and most psychologists (as different from Freudian therapists).

B. A fake expert is someone highly critical of everyone and all theories around, but not his own. Even the layperson can spot this easily!

C. He is very ignorant, and so must be his followers. That’s not shameful, but start learning widely and deeply instead of reinventing the wheel.