I read Jeremy Griffith’s first book Free : The End of the Human Condition in about 1989. Shortly after that I took out membership in what was then called The Centre for Humanity’s Adulthood. It would later be re-named The Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood and I would take out life membership in the organisation when it had that name.
I was someone who had experienced a great deal of depression in my life. I tended to feel that there was no hope for the survival of the human race, based on the reasoning that our economy is founded on ever-increasing consumption of finite resources.
Griffith’s book gave me hope that a radical transformation of the human race was possible, one which would enable us to work together cooperatively to achieve a sustainable way of living and would bring an end to war and other forms of violence and conflict. On the other hand, I found the book very disturbing. I was prone to feelings of guilt about the fact that I was living a comfortable life while others were starving and shame about my sexual feelings. While Griffith’s book is presented as a defence for humanity, an explanation for why we have had to be non-ideal in our behaviour, nevertheless, Griffith says that sex is an attack on innocence and talks about a silver teaspoon as “a two or even three starving Ethiopians extravagance.” The book was meant to free me from feelings of guilt, but when I read those passages I felt more guilty. So I was conflicted. There was hope, but hope in something that carried oppressive feelings with it.
It was probably a few months after reading the book that I got up the courage to write to the organisation. I sent them a copy of a book that I very much liked – Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone – with some passages underlined which I felt were relevant to points Griffith made in his book. After a little bit of correspondence, Griffith rang me one day, wanting to make sure I wasn’t spending too much of my time thinking about his work.
Some time later he visited Adelaide and I attended a barbecue with him. He was a very friendly approachable man.
I got into the habit of buying up copies of books on his reading list when I saw them in secondhand bookshops. I would send him boxes of books that he could put into a library to lend out to others. And when I read a book which I felt had passages which could be used to illustrate his points I would underline them and send it to him. I introduced him to the ideas of R. D. Laing and Søren Kierkegaard, underlining passages he has since quoted in his writings. And the battered old library copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra from which he read in one of his videos is the one I send him.
Eventually I travelled over to his home in Terrey Hills, N.S.W. for a get-together. I was made very welcome and had a lot of fun. There was some serious partying and I drank a good deal more beer than I’m used to.
I would eventually visit a couple more times, spending some time helping him to organise his library.
Mostly my experiences over there were wonderful. I have some very fond memories. I think Griffith thought that, because I was involved with an urban ecology project in Adelaide that I would be one of those uptight politically correct kind of people. I think he tried to test me occasionally by making non-PC comments to me.
Attending a lecture by Jeremy Griffith – “The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, and Its Limitation : The Human Condition” – at Naamaroo Conference Centre, Chatswood – Saturday 2nd December 1995. (Someone had just asked Griffith if he saw any parallels between what he was saying and Scientology and he asked if any members of the Foundation knew enough about Scientology to answer that question. I was turning around to hear the response that no-one did.)
There was one experience which bothered me in which Griffith was expressing some concern about how he might be perceived by other members of the group and it led to an angry altercation between himself and a female member. Later I was told not to talk to her about it.
At one stage Griffith said I might be interested in transcribing some tapes of him doing a commentary on a Laurens van der Post essay. Then he said not to worry, I could just listen to them. But I was really keen to help out, so I typed them up on a word processor and then took those pages and typed them up on a computer at the place where I was working on the urban ecology project.
The final page of my transcription of Jeremy Griffith’s 14 hour commentary on Laurens van der Post’s essay The Other Journey.
So I did quite a bit to help out. But I did have my doubts about Griffith’s ideas. What I told myself was that this was the best attempt that I was aware of to make sense of the whole human mess. If there were things Griffith got wrong, the best thing to do was to help him promote his ideas and get them out into the public eye. Only then would they be assessed, the flaws exposed and someone else would correct those flaws.
But something went wrong. I found myself getting into these psychological knots.
Griffith views homosexuals as being comparable to the men in primitive societies who don’t pass the initiation ceremonies and end up staying with the women. Of course, in reality these men in those societies are not necessarily homosexual. Griffith had this concept he calls “the Mexican stand-off”. The idea is that someone sees his explanation of the human condition as true, but if it is true, then they should abandon their mental framework and replace it with a mental framework based on this revealed truth. That they don’t do that is “the Mexican stand-off”. It seemed to me that maybe less combative men, so called Sensitive New Aged Guys, or snags, might be able to make this mental transformation more easily, so I wrote a little essay about it, referring to the snags as “the men who had stayed with the women”, forgetting that he linked them with homosexuals. He said, “This is an important insight from the homosexual point of view.” I was thrown into a spin. “Why does he think I’m homosexual? Maybe I am a homosexual and my desires for women are just an attempt to evade that fact?” Because he presents the idea that those who don’t recognise the truth of his “understanding” are “evasive” or “in denial”, someone who wants to believe in his ability to free humanity can be sent into this kind of self-doubting tailspin. At least it is what happened to me.
He kept referring to me as a “born-againer” – i.e. a person who tries to escape from their state of psychological “upset” by taking on some kind of “pseudo-idealism” – environmentalism, feminism, socialism, the New Age movement, etc. I was volunteering for an environmental organisation. But this assessment didn’t ring true to me. I only got involved in those kinds of activities after reading Griffith’s book had given me a sense of hope. I identified more with his description of a “ship at sea”, i.e. a person who is not psychologically sound but remains open to the truth and is therefore tossed this way and that by life. I wrote to him questioning him regularly interpreting people’s behaviour as signs of “evasiveness” and saying I felt that I was more of a “ship at sea” than a “born-againer”. Because he stressed the importance of being honest, I felt he would appreciate me being upfront in this way.
The next day I got a call from him at my place of work. He said he was going to send me a tape of him reading my message to other members and responding to it. He said that when I heard what he had to say I might not want to remain a member of the organisation.
At first I thought, “Well, if he doesn’t want my help, he can do without it.” But I was in emotional turmoil. I needed him. I didn’t want to go back to feeling there was no hope for humanity. So when I got home I sent him an email saying that I had been studying his ideas too much and that it was irresponsible, because I might have got depressed and killed myself or something. This was not honest. I was telling him what he wanted to hear.
He rang me and said that when I had sent the original message, it was as if a dark cloud hung over all the members. They had liked me so much and now I had done this. But, I had worked out for myself what the problem was without even hearing the tape, and now everyone was smiling and happy again.
When the tape arrived and I listened to it, I heard Griffith describing me as “Ma-a-a-a-sively deluded!” for thinking I was a ship at sea.
I was in a double bind. I believed in being honest. Griffith told me to be honest. But when I was honest, I was rejected and when I lied I was accepted.
I span out of control and had a psychotic breakdown. I sent a really crazy message to the organisation. Griffith rang me at work the next morning to say I better take a break from the group. By the end of that day I was locked up in a mental hospital. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
My psychotic breakdown led to a long depression which ended up requiring shock treatment.
When Griffith’s next book came out, for a while I bought copies and donated them to libraries. I had returned to my belief that only attracting attention to Griffith’s ideas would lead to their flaws being exposed and corrected.
Over time I began to develop my own critique of his ideas. For a long time it was disturbing to think about them very much. About ten years after my first breakdown I would have another similar one. But, gradually, I began to reconfigure aspects of Griffith’s ideas with ideas I’d picked up from other sources and my own observations of my thinking during various forms of mental distress and form an alternative theory.
I wrote up my ideas in a short book called How to Be Free by Joe Blow. I used the pseudonym Joe Blow to express my philosophy that it doesn’t matter who I am, what matters is whether the ideas are effective in helping people. I distribute it for free. On U.S. iBooks it has, for some time, been in the top 100 most downloaded free ebooks and has received 978 five star ratings.
I’m banned from participating on the World Transformation Movement discussion board. I would love to be able to engage in open discussion with members of the organisation.
