Well, well, so another parent has come out to tell the world about the dangers for their children with the FHA/WTM mob who have stolen their possible futures and driven their kids into their leader's less then admirable ravings about how to save humankind and the world..another sect or cult leader who recently lost his final appeal to the High Court against defamation claims against the ABC and Four Corners. Now he faces a massive bill of about One Million Dollars in legal fees and costs.

And their Media Room doesn't even mention this- so much for level unbiased reporting on their website- but it has AWAYS BEEN ONE-EYED AND NEVER GIVES A LEVEL VIEW!

As for the writer SOCRATIDIS on the blog, another member of the FHA/WTM, for certain! They just cannot stand critisism and go way beyond the pale to defend their

tardy,stained characters

Watch your kids, there are always people out there like this mob, ready to absorb them into their group and steer them from a bright future to follow their cause!

'K

 Um wait what?! the order of the universe is towards chaos. It's literally the second law of thermodynamics from which our fundamental understanding of how things happen takes place. literally for something to be possible the OVERALL entropy of the universe must increase. Yes molecules form ordered states (Hi I'm Mr. B an organized formation of matter) but overall the entropy of the universe increases. Anyone taking an introductory physical chemistry class or hell even my biomolecules prof mentions this will tell you the second law must always hold. 

I think I can lend a unique perspective to this debate as I am someone who has taken the time to understand the material. I joined the Foundation for Humanity's Adulthood in about 1989. I am one of the few individuals who ever had a life membership. (They disbanded them as they realised that the membership fee was way too little to cover the photocopying cost of their newsletters, which at one time increased in size to about 60 to 80 pages.)

I am a person who had a long history of mental illness - depression and OCD. I read Jeremy Griffith's first book - Free : The End of the Human Condition - some time after it was released in 1988 having seen it given a mocking review on an Australian television book show. They mocked. But to me it seemed intriguing. I desperately wanted to believe that an end to the human condition - the propensity for depression like my own and all of the conflicts, greeds and needs which were tearing apart the world and destroying the environment - was possible. I was very scared about actually reading the book though. It dealt with things I found disturbing. As a depressed persoon I was particularly prone to feelings of guilt - about sex and about being selfish, things like that. But, even though I was feeling depressed, I decided to grasp the nettle and read the book. It seemed to make sense. It was a theory on a grand scale. It did say that sex was, at base, an attack on innocence. I couldn't understand why this should necessarily be. I could understand that some people use sex as a weapon - as in rape - and that some people are selfish about sex and even use forms of psychological pressure to persuade others to give them pleasure. But I couldn't understand how two equal individuals sharing physical pleasure could be an attack on anything. But, I told myself, you do feel guilty about masturbating. There must be some reason for that. And the book suggested that we have a tendency to evade uncomfortable truths, so maybe my inability to understand how consensual sex was an attack on innocence was a failing of my own based on my inability to confront the truth.

Over time I would get to know Jeremy personally. We talked on the phone. I met him when he came to Adelaide. And later I would go to his home in New South Wales a number times to listen to talks, meet other members and organise his library, much of which consisted of books I had donated to the Foundation. I also sent him other books which I felt backed up his theories. You will find quotes from R.D. Laing and Soren Kierkegaard in his book A Species in Denial. I introduced him to the work of those two thinkers and pointed out some of the quotes he later used. I read his first three books, as well as many Foundation newsletters, listened to talks in person and on tape. I typed up a transcript of his taped discussion of Laurens Van Der Post's essay - The Other Journey.

I desperately wanted to keep believing. I didn't want to go back to being without hope. And I could see noone else tackling the issue of the human condition in this kind of depth.

But there was so much that didn't make sense. And my own intuition kept throwing up alternative ideas. In the end Jeremy and I had a falling out. I won't go into the details. I don't want to be sued. I had a major psychotic breakdown and ended up in hospital. I had previously been diagnosed with depression and OCD. Now I was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Whenever I tried to contact the Foundation after that they said that it was important for a person like me with a mental illness not to try to be involved with something so confronting. This was good and responsible advice. Attempts at contact did tend to lead to destabilisation for me for quite a while. Later, as I broke further and further free of what I now see as Jeremy Griffith's dogma and have discovered my own way of looking at the issue of the human condition I have become more and more stable and happy.

While I have a lingering fondness for Jeremy and those who I met in the Foundation, I no longer try to show them that he is wrong. When people have invested that much of their ego in an idea it is too much to expect them to be open to the possibly that they were 100% wrong. And there is no need to challenge the Foundation. They are irrelevant. Jeremy's previous books were widely distributed. The latest one can't be bought on Amazon. There was a proposal for a documentary involving a broad selection of the scientific community. That could never happen because Jeremy would never share a platform with people who did not accept his theories. And people like Stephen Hawking, who expressed interest in the proposal, would find Griffith's ideas ridiculous if he took a close look at them. So now all that is left is some YouTube videos which look like nothing more than the workshops of the New Age self-improvement gurus that Jeremy loves to mock. If these people are really liberated why are they not inspired enough to speak without a script?

Initially Jeremy Griffith believed that the "information" he was providing would liberate people directly. One of his early videotaped lectures, of which I still have a copy, finishes with him going outside into the garden and holding up a sign saying : "Let's Go!" It didn't happen that way. If what he was putting forward was the truth maybe it would have. Certainly it wouldn't have required a strategy of "holding the key aloft" (i.e. living through support of something which cannot actually liberate you but which you believe will liberate future generations). This is comparable to "born again" Christianity. In fact Jeremy himself made the comparison when he reluctantly came to the conclusion that his "understandings" were unable to directly liberate people. The problem was originally described in the Foundation newsletters as "the Mexican standoff" - the unwillingness of those supporting the "information" to "abandon their resigned minds" and "adopt serving". "Serving" meaning serving the needs of the world.

To pick just one example of how unaccountable parts of Jeremy's theory are he says that infants are born with an instinctive expectation that the world will be ideal and that the people in it will be behaving selflesslessly and that what causes the trauma of chlldhood is that this expectation is not met. The world is not ideal and adults are selfish rather than selfless. But this makes no sense. How is this expectation of ideality encoded in the genes? And how many children, before the age of adolescence when they have become ego-bound themselves, point at their parents and accuse them of being bad (as Jeremy's cartoon of the inner child does in his first book Free). He says that we acquired this dictatorial program insisting on selfless behaviour (he identifies it with the conscience) when the nurturing period of our ape ancestor's increased two million years ago. The mothers, operating according to the principles of the selfish gene theory by which we try to make sure that our own gene's prosper, nurtured the children for a longer time and this allowed the children to become "love indoctrinated", i.e. they interpreted the genetically selfish behaviour as selfless loving behaviour on the part of the mothers and learned from this example that being selflessly loving was the right way to be. Griffith then believes that this orientation towards selflessness allowed for the birth of full consciousness because only a selfless individual can acknowledge the integrative nature of reality and perceive the meaning of the world around them. He believes that this hardwired dictatorial programming for selflessness is a part of our genes, and that our deepest moral beliefs are therefore not cultural but genetic. And then he believes that this orientation was too dictatorial to allow us to experiment with our newly developed intelligence, so we had to repress it. But without it we lacked a moral compass. And anyway it was still there deep down attacking us for not obeying it. So we became angry, egotistical and alienated and driven to attack "innocence" (i.e. anything which reminded us of our dictatorial selflessness-requiring genetic programming).

There are loads of problems with this. One is the very concept of a dictatorial instinct for something as complex and dependant on circumstances as selfless behaviour. Jeremy uses an analogy of a stork and its flight path. But a stork's flight path remains the same. What constitutes selfless behaviour in one situation differs from what constitutes selfless behaviour in another situation. One cannot do anything selfless without making a rational decision based on one's current circumstances. And if our orientation were that flexible it would have not had a problem with experimentation. The implication in Jeremy's theory is that selflessness and love are synonymous. I'm not sure that selflessness is a terribly meaningful term when taken literally - to have no self would be to not exist - though it is usually meant to mean self-sacrificing. But one thing we can see from observing human behaviour is that love is an improvisation not something which happens under the guidance of something dictatorial.

My view is that the conscience is not genetic, but rather a part of the ego. It is that part of our ego structure in which we store our expectations about ourselves (at least to the degree that those expectations are related to beliefs on what constitutes good behaviour). Mostly we learn these values from our parents, our teachers, our peers and our broader culture (particularly religions). But each of us has a different conscience, hence the fact that different individuals and different cultures tend to feel guilty about different things. If it were genetic there would be greater universality about what initiates feelings of guilt.

As for our deepest nature, I believe that it is to be unconditionally loving. After all, that is how we were when we were babies - we bonded with adults without placing conditions on that bonding. Unlike a dictatorial imperative to be selfless, unconditional love is flexible and does not expect others to be ideal.

By the time of A Species in Denial Jeremy's theory had become ridiculously convoluted and illogical. A particular weak point was his insistence on explaining sex entirely in terms of an attack on innocence. This led to this laughable attempt to explain homosexuality :

It follows that the more corrupted a man is, the less naive he is and thus the more he is aware that women are not innocent. Therefore, if a man is extremely hurt and corrupted in his infancy and childhood, when he becomes sexually mature he will thus not find women sexually attractive. The last bastion of 'attractive' innocence for such men is younger men, because they are not as exposed to sexual destruction as women have historically been.

I know women are not innocent and it doesn't stop me wanting to fuck them. Look at all the porn on the internet. Those women ain't innocent, but plenty of us guys prefer a "corrupted" woman.  And as for homosexuals, they don't all go for younger men. And as Kinsey's research showed, homosexuality isn't a clear cut either/or option.

I won't go further into detail. I have an alternative theory to Jeremy's about how the human condition came about, what its nature is and what a possible solution might be. Unlike Jeremy's recent work it is short, easy-to-understand, and occasionally even intentionally funny. I make no claims for it beyond this - that I find it a more accountable way of explaining things to myself and I have found the ideas and techniques I put forward in it helpful in my progress to greater psychological stability and happiness.

You can find it here. It's free :

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/88690

I feel concern for Jeremy, all of those who have been involved with the Foundation and the WTM and for the parents who miss their offspring. My view is that this has all been a tremendous tragedy. I truly believe that Jeremy utterly believes in his theories and truly has believed all along that he is doing this to save the world and thus the pain that it entails is justified. But I also believe that it has all grown out of a basic mistake he made in the very beginning which was to assume that his extreme idealism was evidence of exceptional innocence or psychological soundness. He says that his theories grew out of a desperate need to reconcile his extreme idealism with reality. And there are some stark examples of that idealism in Free such as when he says that at some time in the future, rather than using ostentatious silverware, everyone will carve their own wooden spoon and carry it around their neck. Now if, as I argue, the basic human nature (when free from the neurosis which comes with hurt and insecurity) is to be unconditionally loving, like the non-idealism-demanding infant, then we can see that extreme idealism, far from being a symptom of "innocence" and psychological soundness is rather an extreme form of neurosis which can express itself in a passive-aggressive or aggressive-aggressive insistance on ideal behaviour in others. Such an individual, before he starts building a more sophisticated strategy to get what he wants perhaps, may be "black in the face with anger."

In Free Jeremy said : The very last thing we will believe is that it is what it claims to be - the full liberating truth about ourselves. We will suspect it to be an expression of some form of disguised psychosis and will see its authority, its sense of conviction, as offensive arrogance.

My contention is that it is, in fact, a disguised psychosis originating in a delusion about being unusually sound. This is why Jeremy has always had such a paranoid control mentality when it comes to public discussion of his ideas. Charles Darwin was viciously attacked by his critics, but he didn't spend over ten years on a libel case against any of them.

Even if one were to accept that Jeremy's ideas were unavoidably confronting, the fact is that he presents them in a way which is even more aggressively "confronting" than has any practical purpose. In Beyond the Human Condition he says :

It should be pointed out that our destruction and corruption of innocence has been going on at all levels. We even destroyed our own innocent soul by repressing it. All forms of innocence unfairly criticised us, so all forms of innocence were targets for our attack. Sunglasses aren't always worn to shade the eyes from the sun. Often they were worn to alienate ourselves from the natural world that was alienating us. They were an attack on the innocence of sunlight.

Assuming one buys his basic thesis, it would be more compassionate to say : Sometimes we wore sunglasses to protect ourselves from the apparently condemning nature of sunlight. But his bias, and this runs through his work, is to emphasise attack, even, here, to the ridiculous extent of suggesting that we could mount an attack on something as insubstantial as sunlight.

This emphasis on the idea that all humans are obsessed with attacking innocence and that all forms of what he personally sees as non-ideal behaviour amount to an attack on innocence, when combined with the fact that he views himself as having been (at least in his youth) exceptionally innocent, can be read as a projection of his own hurt over having been (or percieving himself as having been) under attack. And while his books spend a lot of time trying to appease this attacker (we the reader) by saying how necessary it was that we attack him/innocence and how courageous we were for doing it, ultimately he is also trying to force his extreme idealism onto the reader in an aggressive way. He says he wants to "lift the burden" of guilt from humanity, but, in my experience, his ideas, if one genuinely "confronts" them in a spirit of wanting to believe, actually lay down a totally unnecessary burden of guilt. And I believe that this is his subconscious purpose - to get revenge on the world for some past hurt. But I also believe this is totally unconscious. That is the tragedy. I'm sure he doesn't want to cause suffering, but he can't help it because he can't face the genuinely confronting truth about himself.

I don't agree. I think what Jeremy has done is to dare to talk about the human condition and to attempt a scientific explanation for it. He is not the first who attempted this. Check out the work of Wilhelm Reich, who wrote about "the trap" that we cannot find our way out of. In The Murder of Christ he puts forward the view that Jesus, in his own way, tried to show the way out of the trap and was killed as a result. His take on Jesus is similar to Jeremy's. That he was a particularly psychologically healthy individual who was killed because those who suffer from what Reich calls "the emotional plague" always feel threatened by psychological health. Reich's work may not cover all that Jeremy covers, but it is much more consistent and practical. And his account of sex, something in which he specialised, is far more accountable that Jeremy's. As Reich puts it, in The Murder of Christ, The longing for the fusion with another organism in the genital embrace is just as strong in the armored organism as it is in the unarmored one. It will most of the time be even stronger, since the full satisfaction is blocked. Where Life simply loves, armored life "fucks". So, like Jeremy, he acknowledges that sex is very often an act of aggression, but, unlike Jeremy, he sees the erotic as something healthy and a genuine expression of love, in and of itself, not as an act of love because the victim shows love towards the aggressor by letting it happen.

The reason why Jeremy's books are poorly organised and his theories poorly explained is because they lack integrity. Like the other scientists he criticises, he has built his theories around those things he doesn't want to confront.

This is particularly true in the case of sexuality. Jeremy talks a lot about bonobos, our nearest genetic relatives, and uses them as an indication of what life might have been like amongst our pre-human ancestors. They are matriarchal. They are non-aggressive. They are principally vegetarian. But he skirts over their sexuality. He makes the assertion that our original nature was to be monogamous. As evidence for this he quotes a song called The First Cut is the Deepest by Cat Stevens. It's a nice song, but not exactly scientific evidence. But what is the sexuality of the bonobos. They have no pair bonding at all. They engage in uninhibited erotic exchanges, so called genital-genital rubbing. These exchanges take place between members of the same sex, between adults and children, and between members of the same family, with the exception that adult males don't rub genitals with their mothers. This is not aggressive, or even penetrative, sex, but it is erotic behaviour. To have a theory which works, means making the obvious deduction that our pre-human ancestors engaged in generalised erotic behaviour like the bonobos. Once we start from that beginning we can see that our sexual history can be charted by acknowledging our increasing need to repress healthy erotic behaviour as we became progressively more neurotic as the human condition developed. When males first became aggressive, the females would have tried to use sex to pacify and re-socialise them. This kind of behaviour can be observed among chimpanzees. Monogamy, far from being our original orientation, would have been an artificial form of restraint introduced when increasingly egotistical males started to fight over the sexual favours of the women. All of this makes perfect sense. But, I would suggest, Jeremy can't present his theory in a coherent way because he is wedded to the unsupported a priori assumption that monogamy is the natural state for humans.

This is just one example. Jeremy's work is riddled with such evasions.
 

wow, i fully expected to find dana at the end of all this. welcome, whatapath.

LOL

This thread has suggested to me for awhile that there isn't enough criticism of this group out there. By all rights this old topic should not be popping up in search responses, yet it does.

Thanks for all the welcomes! This looks like an interesting forum (well, lots of stuff I agree with anyway ). I'll try to drop by now and then.