To Fix The World, We Need to Fix Ourselves First

For decades, the environmental movement has focused on urgent, tangible goals: cutting emissions, protecting biodiversity, restoring ecosystems. And yet, despite growing awareness and unprecedented technological capability, the destruction continues.

Former Yale School of the Environment dean Professor Gus Speth once reflected on this problem. After decades working at the highest levels of environmental policy, Speth concluded that the greatest challenges were not scientific or technical, but human, writing that, “I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy.”

He went on to say that “to deal with those issues we need a spiritual and cultural transformation – and we scientists do not know how to do that.”

But what if the reason humanity has struggled to achieve such a transformation is that we have never fully understood the source of the selfishness, greed and apathy that Speth identified as the real problem?

The search for an explanation of what biologist E. O. Wilson called “the human condition” has occupied scientists, philosophers and religious thinkers for centuries. Wilson described understanding the human condition as “the most important frontier of the biological sciences” and observed that “there is no grail more elusive or precious in the life of the mind than the key to understanding the human condition.”

Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith believes he has found that key. He argues that the human condition – the paradoxical reality that humans are capable of extraordinary cooperation, love, and creativity, yet also selfishness, greed, violence, and destruction – is the result of an unresolved psychological conflict that arose when consciousness emerged in our ancestors and began operating in opposition to instinctive orientations established by evolution.

According to Griffith, this evolutionary clash can now be scientifically explained. More significantly, Griffith believes that understanding this condition makes possible the kind of spiritual and cultural transformation that Speth argued is necessary if humanity is to stop destroying the natural world.

It is an extraordinary claim, but one that has attracted support from a growing number of prominent scientists, conservationists and thought leaders.

The late wildlife biologist George Schaller, one of the world’s leading conservation scientists, described Griffith’s insights as “fascinating and pertinent” and said they “must be developed and disseminated.”

Similarly, Ian Player, the South African conservationist best known for helping save the white rhino, wrote that Griffith was “getting answers to much that has puzzled and bewildered humanity for a long time.”

Within academia, the eminent ecologist Stuart Hurlbert, Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Diego State University, went further – remarking that Griffith’s work was akin to a “Darwin II” discovery, in that it addresses the unresolved question of the human condition following Darwin’s explanation of biological evolution.

In his commendation for Griffith’s book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, Professor Harry Prosen, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, firstly acknowledged the seriousness of our species’ plight when he wrote that “I think the fastest growing realisation everywhere is that humanity can’t go on the way it is going. Indeed, the great fear is we’re entering endgame where we appear to have lost the race between self-destruction and self-understanding”, and then, described how Griffith has achieved the seemingly impossible task of confronting and solving the human condition, writing that “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 maturation and transformation of our species.

At the core of Jeremy Griffith’s theory is a deceptively simple idea: humans are the only species to have developed a fully conscious, reasoning mind – and that development came at a cost. Like all animals, our hominin ancestors lived under the guidance of instincts. But according to Griffith, as consciousness began to emerge in these distant ancestors, a profound conflict developed between instinct and intellect.

Crucially, instincts cannot understand, they can only direct. So when the conscious mind began experimenting and deviating in its necessary search for knowledge, our instincts effectively “criticized” that behavior as wrong. Unable to explain its departure from the instinctive directives, the conscious mind became insecure and defensive – it became retaliatory, preoccupied with proving its worth, and blocking out the criticism. Griffith argues this is the origin of the anger, egocentricity and alienation that characterize human behavior, and ultimately underpin humanity’s social and environmental problems.

He argues these behaviors are not indicators of inherent human flaws but rather legitimate, albeit ‘artificial’, defensive responses that had to be adopted in the absence of the real explanation for why the intellect was challenging the instincts.

For centuries, humans have tried to fix the world through religion, morality, politics, activism, education and social engineering. Yet despite enormous progress in science and technology, the underlying drivers of anger, egocentricity and alienation continue to wreak havoc on the world.

Griffith argues that lasting change cannot come from attempting to suppress these behaviours, because they are symptoms of a deeper psychological insecurity. According to his theory, humans became defensive because the conscious mind could not explain why it had challenged our instincts. As a result, our species adopted ‘artificial’ defences of anger, egocentricity and alienation in an attempt to protect itself from a sense of guilt and condemnation it did not understand.

The significance of Griffith’s explanation, he argues, is that it finally provides the understanding that was missing. Having at last found the explanation it had been searching for, the human ego is satisfied at the most fundamental level. As a result, the artificial defences of anger, egocentricity and alienation are no longer psychologically necessary, because the conscious self no longer needs to defend or justify its condition.

Griffith’s explanation therefore amounts to more than a theory of human behaviour. If correct, it provides the means to resolve the insecurity driving human selfishness and destructiveness, making possible the kind of spiritual and cultural transformation that Speth argued was necessary to fix the world.

It is this conviction – that humanity must address the underlying causes of its behaviour before it can solve its larger problems – that led to the establishment of the international non-profit organisation Fix The World. Founded to promote Griffith’s explanation of the human condition, the organisation makes its educational resources available for free and supports a growing global network of people exploring the implications of the theory.

If Speth is correct that selfishness, greed and apathy lie at the heart of the environmental crisis, then the environmental movement faces a challenge that extends beyond policy, technology and conservation. It must also grapple with the question of human behaviour itself.

That possibility has often sat uneasily within environmentalism, which has tended to focus on external systems and regulations rather than the deeper psychological forces that drive our behaviour. If those forces remain unaddressed, humanity may find itself continually treating symptoms while leaving the underlying cause intact.

Whether Griffith's explanation ultimately proves correct remains to be seen. What his work undeniably does is turn attention to a question that environmental debates often avoid: not simply how to fix the world around us, but the necessity of fixing ourselves first.