Few political declarations in modern Britain have been as definitive — or as divisive — as Margaret Thatcher's insistence that "there is no alternative" to capitalism. To supporters, it was a defence of discipline, enterprise and economic realism. To critics, it signalled a narrowing of the moral code: a system elevated above its social cost.
Decades later, Britain still argues about the moral status of capitalism. Is it the engine of prosperity and innovation, or a system that rewards greed and entrenches inequality? The disagreement is not purely economic. At heart, it is a dispute about human nature — about whether competition reflects strength or moral failure.
Fix The World, the international non-profit organisationdedicated to advancing a scientific explanation of the human condition, was founded by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith. The organisation suggests that both sides of this argument are addressing symptoms rather than causes. It advances a comprehensive biological explanation of the human condition — an account that has drawn praise from figures in psychology, anthropology and the biological sciences.
Rather than asking whether capitalism is just or unjust, Fix The World poses a more fundamental question: why are humans so psychologically driven to compete at all?
If that question sounds abstract, its implications are not. If Fix The World is correct, capitalism is not merely an economic arrangement but the outward expression of an insecurity whose origins lie deep in our evolutionary past. To understand that claim, it is necessary to go back some two million years — to the emergence of human consciousness itself.
At the centre of Griffith's thesis — set out in an interview with British broadcaster Craig Conway and more fully in his bookFREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition(made freely available on the Fix The World website) — is a biological account of the impact consciousness has had on our already established instinctive orientations to existence.
According to Griffith, around two million years ago our ancestors developed a sufficiently enlarged association cortex — the thinking brain — for full consciousness to emerge. Fossil skull evidence charts this significant expansion in brain volume over that period.
Nerves, originally evolved to coordinate movement, developed the capacity to store impressions — memory — and to compare experiences across time. This allowed our distant ancestors not merely to react instinctively, but to reason, experiment and attempt to manage events from a basis of understanding.
The difficulty, Griffith argues, was that this new intellect emerged in a body already guided by instincts shaped through natural selection. Once our "self-adjusting intellect" began exerting itself, established instinctive orientations resisted its experiments.
To illustrate the dilemma, Griffith offers an analogy: imagine placing a fully conscious mind in a migrating bird. The bird's instincts guide it along a flight path naturally selected over thousands of generations. But the conscious mind wants to experiment — perhaps to fly down and explore an island. Instinct resists the deviation. The intellect cannot obey its instincts without abandoning its search for knowledge, yet it cannot initially explain why its experimentation is necessary.
Source: International Business Times UK
