Long before he set out to explain humanity to itself, Jeremy Griffith was looking for something else entirely.
In the late 1960s, deep in the wild and rain-soaked landscapes of Tasmania, a young Australian biologist was following faint tracks through dense forest, accompanied only by a hound dog named Loaf – his quarry, a creature many believed had already vanished forever. Griffith was searching for the Tasmanian Tiger, or thylacine, a striped marsupial predator deemed extinct decades earlier.
At just 21, Griffith had deferred his university studies, hitchhiked across Australia, and committed himself to proving that the species might still survive. What began as an audacious expedition soon became the most extensive search ever undertaken for the animal.
Between 1967 and 1973, Griffith lived for long stretches in remote wilderness, establishing observation sites, investigating reported sightings, and even pioneering early forms of automated wildlife cameras. His work drew national and international attention, with scientific journals and television programs captivated by both the mystery of the thylacine and the persistence of the young man pursuing it.
In the end, the evidence pointed in only one direction. The thylacine was gone – driven to extinction by human hunting and habitat destruction. Years later, this loss would be officially confirmed, but Griffith was already wrestling with the question of how we could have ever allowed it to happen.
From Examining Animal Extinction to the Bigger Question About Ourselves
For Jeremy Griffith, the extinction of the thylacine raised a deep and troubling question. If humans could eliminate such a remarkable creature, and countless others, what did that say about human behavior itself?
Why, he wondered, are humans capable of such creativity and care – and yet equally prone to selfishness, aggression, and destruction?
Born in 1945 and raised on a sheep station in rural New South Wales, Griffith grew up immersed in nature. He studied biology at prestigious schools and showed promise not only as a scientist but also as an athlete, even trialing for Australia’s national rugby team. By his early twenties, he had completed a degree in zoology and later ran a successful furniture business that drew tourists, both for his natural designs and impressive showroom in the hinterland of northern New South Wales.
Yet by his late twenties, Griffith chose to step away from conventional careers altogether. Instead, he began the most demanding project of his life: a sustained attempt to understand the psychological conflict underlying human behavior – what he came to call the human condition.
A Biological Explanation of Psychological Conflict
Working largely alone in the early years, and often writing before dawn, Jeremy Griffith pursued a question that theologians, philosophers, and psychologists had long wrestled with: Why are humans so deeply conflicted?
His answer was neither moral nor ideological, but biological.
Griffith proposed that humans evolved with instinctive drives that favor cooperation and social harmony. However, when humans developed a fully conscious, thinking mind, that new intellect inevitably challenged and disrupted instinctive guidance. According to his theory, instincts responded to this disruption by effectively “criticizing” the intellect, generating feelings of guilt, insecurity, and self-doubt.
This internal clash, he argued, lies behind humanity’s most persistent problems – from personal anxiety, alienation, and violence, to large-scale conflict and environmental damage. Crucially, Griffith casts this struggle not as evidence of human “evil” but as the unavoidable byproduct of the evolution of consciousness itself.
Understanding that, he believed, changes how humanity views itself. As he wrote in one of his earliest books, Beyond The Human Condition, “Human nature is not the immutable state we have often considered it to be; rather it is the symptom of a condition – the human condition – that will disappear now that the condition is relieved.”
From World Transformation to Fix The World
In 1983, Griffith formalized his work by founding what became known as the World Transformation Movement, a non-profit organization dedicated to sharing this biological explanation of human behavior. In 2026, the organization decided to adopt a new name intended to reflect both its purpose and its urgency: Fix The World.
The name is both a title and a proposition. The premise is straightforward but challenging: humanity cannot fix its societies or environment without first understanding itself.
Griffith’s ideas are presented most fully in his major work, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition, which supporters describe as a comprehensive account of human psychological development and the resolution of the conflicted human condition. The book has drawn praise from senior figures in psychology and biology, including the late Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, who referred to it as the long-sought breakthrough in understanding human behavior. Ecologist Professor Stuart Hurlbert of San Diego State University called Griffith’s work “A truly phenomenal, beyond description, scientific achievement!” and likened Griffith to a modern-day Darwin.
An Open, Global Dialogue
Today, Fix The World operates internationally through the efforts of volunteers and makes its materials freely available at www.HumanCondition.com. The organization emphasizes open access and independent verification, encouraging readers to engage with the ideas without obligation or enforced ideology.
This openness reflects Griffith’s conviction that any explanation of human behavior must withstand scrutiny — and that genuine understanding cannot be imposed, only discovered.
Optimism Rooted in Understanding
Jeremy Griffith’s journey – from searching for a vanished animal in remote wilderness to confronting humanity’s inner turmoil – reflects a broader shift in perspective. Conservation, he came to believe, cannot succeed without psychological insight into human behavior.
Environmental damage, social division, and conflict are not isolated symptoms of a distinct psychology, but expressions of the same unresolved inner struggle.
In a world facing overlapping crises, Griffith’s work offers a different kind of optimism based on the possibility that understanding human behavior – fully and honestly, and without blame – can finally allow humanity to move beyond defensiveness, fear, and self-condemnation.
From the forests of Tasmania to a global conversation about human behavior, Griffith’s path has been anything but conventional. Yet his conclusion is strikingly simple: if human behavior created the problems we face, then understanding that behavior may be the most realistic way to finally fix the world.
