Little to no experience until you asked the question. So I spent some time reading and listening to Jeremy Griffith. (I assume this is the WTM you’re asking about?)
I find the same problems with his ideas that I’ve found with every philosophy, theory and faith I’ve investigated:
- Simplism
- Denial
- Overextended claims (well beyond evidential basis)
The idea that the human condition is the result of a conflict that arose between instincts and intelligence is interesting and worth thinking about. The idea that this is the primary cause for the unbelievably vile, inhuman behavior of human beings for the last 10,000 – 15,000 years (archaeology continues to discover evidence that prehistoric humans weren’t nearly as vicious) is pretty incredible and in no way based on verifiable evidence. It’s incredible because it would be far more likely that the same evolutionary development that consisted of increasingly complex biosystems that worked in increasingly difficult-to-achieve harmony up to the advent of instinct-driven species would then yield intelligence that worked in concert with and capitalized on instinct instead of came into conflict with it.
It’s also more likely that instinct did not react violently and antagonistically to the possibilities that intelligence began to reveal. I have a two-year-old grandson that I spend a lot of time with. His first two years have not been characterized by his rapidly developing intelligence getting antagonized and berated by his instincts, let alone condemned as bad or evil by them. No, all that shit comes from adults, not instincts. When left to figure things out with whatever help he needs, he shows a remarkable ability to reconcile the conflicting information posed by intelligence as opposed to instinct.
Griffith does not recognize these angles but presents his ideas in such a way as to exclude them from consideration, even from awareness. I saw no indication that he is aware of them, at least.
So, regardless what the answer to the “was it or wasn’t it” instinct vs. intelligence question turns out to be, Griffith has problems in that he presents one side of a question as if it were a given, as if there is no question. This is a typical rhetorical trick used in sales, con jobs, manipulative religions, politics and cults, just to name a few enterprises that have no interest in the truth but rather in leveraging purported truths to exploit the trust and goodwill of their marks.
And like I mentioned, even if his instinct vs. intelligence explanation were the best we’ve ever had, Griffith has no evidence that in fact such a conflict arose, let alone that any such conflict was/is the primary or sole cause for the human condition. His claims are entirely speculative. I downloaded his book. I expect I’ll see lots of evidence for claims he makes on the basis of the assumption of the instinct-intelligence conflict, but not a shred of evidence that shows there ever was such a conflict, let alone that it had the colossal role he attributes to it.
All this is beside the fact that there is a far more potent, amply evidenced, verifiable and obvious explanation for destructive, atrocious human behavior, one that goes much deeper than any evolutionary explanation ever could: the near-indelibly damaging effects of traumatic abuse and neglect throughout infant and childhood development (not to mention prenatal development), especially in authoritarian societies. This is the denial I mentioned, and it’s glaring in every philosophy, theory and faith I’ve investigated. No one wants to go back there and face what happened to them, mostly because we’ve already lived through it, escaped it (one way or another), and it’s a terrifying place to be. It’s easier to blame things on conjectured scapegoats that are comfortably abstract than to confront what really happened to us that makes us want to hurt, kill and destroy.
