Jeremy Griffith
Jeremy Griffith is an Australian biologist and the author of many books and publications about the human condition including the 2004 bestseller A Species In Denial, and in 2016, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, his “summa masterpiece”.
The issue of the human condition, which is humans’ capacity for what has been called ‘good’ and ‘evil’, is really the agonising core issue that we humans have needed to understand about our behaviour—and it is that all-important issue that Jeremy has dedicated his life to solving.
Born in 1945 and raised on a sheep station in rural New South Wales, Australia, Jeremy gained first class honours in biology in the state matriculation exams and in 1965 began a science degree at the University of New England in northern New South Wales. Deferring his studies in 1967, Jeremy hitchhiked to Tasmania, determined to save the remarkable dog-like marsupial, the Thylacine, or ‘Tasmanian Tiger’, from extinction. The search was to last more than six years — the most thorough investigation ever into the plight of the Tasmanian Tiger — but sadly concluded it was extinct. The quest generated articles in the American Museum of Natural History’s journal, Natural History, and Australian Geographic, and featured in an episode of the Australian television series A Big Country.
In 1971 Jeremy completed his BSc in zoology at the University of Sydney and the following year, established Griffith Tablecraft, a highly successful business manufacturing furniture based on his own simple and natural designs. It was during this time that Jeremy realised that trying to save animals from extinction or trying to build ideal furniture wasn’t addressing the real issue behind the extraordinary imperfection in human life, which is our species’ ‘good and evil’-conflicted behaviour, and that what was really needed in the world was a deeper understanding of ourselves — so it was to this issue of the human condition that Jeremy turned his attention, a study that has remained his life’s focus.
The ability to understand this essential aspect of ourselves is what makes the TRANSFORMATION of humans possible, and with that TRANSFORMATION of ourselves comes the TRANSFORMATION of our world—hence the name of the organisation Jeremy established in 1983 to support and promote these understandings of the human condition: the WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT (WTM).
Jeremy's work has received significant acclaim from scientists and the general public alike.
Read more about Jeremy Griffith here.
Some thinkers that Jeremy Griffith admires
Jeremy Griffith’s work is founded on, and inspired by, a long history of profound or ‘denial-free’ thinking on the human condition dating back to Moses, Socrates, Plato and Christ, through to more contemporary thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin and Sir Laurens van der Post.
See, for example, Video/Freedom Essay 4 or chapter 2:7 of Jeremy’s book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, in which evidence from some of history’s most profound thinkers is provided for the three fundamental elements involved in the explanation of the human condition: that our conscious mind caused our upset state to emerge; that the human condition is a psychological state, not an instinctive one; and that our species’ original instinctive orientation was to living in a psychosis-free, peaceful and harmonious state of cooperation, love and selflessness.