'FIX THE WORLD': The Organisation Reframing Britain's Capitalism Debate

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 organisation dedicated 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.

The 'Instinct–Intellect' Clash

At the centre of Griffith's thesis — set out in an interview with British broadcaster Craig Conway and more fully in his book FREEDOM: 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.

The result, he argues, was a profound and unresolved psychological conflict.

Until the intellect could justify why it had to defy its instincts — namely, because genes function as an orientating learning system while nerves, when fully developed, are capable of insight and understanding — it experienced that resistance as condemnation. That condemnation, in Griffith's account, produced defensiveness.

He contends that the responses available to the intellect were to attack the instinct's "criticism", attempt to prove it wrong, or block it out. Over time, humanity developed what he describes as our angry, egocentric and alienated human condition.

Griffith further argues that these defensive behaviours persisted because the intellect could not explain why its defiance of instinct was necessary. In his view, once that biological explanation is grasped, it becomes the "real" defence, removing the psychological need for the "artificial" defences of anger, egocentricity and alienation.

Professor Harry Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, described the work as presenting the "11th-hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition necessary for the psychological rehabilitation and transformation of our species."

How Fix The World Interprets Capitalism

Within this biological framework, capitalism appears in a different light.

Faced with growing psychological distress from defying instinct, humanity became increasingly angry, egocentric and alienated. Reassurance became essential — ways of demonstrating that we were still fundamentally good and worthwhile.

The pursuit of individual achievement, success and material reward came to dominate human life. Status and accumulation offered visible proof of personal value. Materialism — and the capitalism that supplied it — functioned, in this account, as a substitute for the deeper need to understand and resolve the conflict within ourselves.

Fix The World argues that capitalism not only provided the economic engine to generate material rewards, but also created the freedom and incentives through which the search for knowledge — ultimately self-knowledge — could continue. By rewarding effort, innovation and competition, markets became the framework through which humanity could express and endure its psychological turmoil while gradually accumulating the understanding needed to ameliorate its condition.

Seen through this biological lens, capitalism is not the source of moral corruption but a necessary phase in our species' psychological development — an economic system that enabled humanity to endure unresolved insecurity while advancing the search for redeeming understanding.

British Scientific Engagement

Although originating in Australia, the ideas advanced by Fix The World have attracted attention in Britain.

Professor David Chivers, University of Cambridge anthropologist and former President of the Primate Society of Great Britain, described the reasoning in FREEDOM as "so logical and sensible, providing the necessary breakthrough in the critical issue of needing to understand ourselves."

Sir David Attenborough, responding to a documentary proposal based on Griffith's work, remarked that a "fascinating television series could be made" from it.

The late Professor Stephen Hawking also expressed interest in the proposal.

The engagement of such figures indicates the theory has entered serious scientific and intellectual discussion.

A London Moment

Jeremy Griffith spoke at the Royal Geographical Society in London alongside Sir Bob Geldof at the UK launch of FREEDOM.

At the event, Geldof — who has spent decades confronting tensions between economic power and moral obligation — argued that the roots of our turmoil must be properly understood at a time of global fracture.

"I've never felt the world more threatening, more fractious, more fissiparous, more febrile," he said. "We need to think, we need new ideas... We need Griffith to be questioned. We need FREEDOM to be argued, read, talked about and understood... It may be right, it may be wrong. But you need someone as committed as Jeremy trying to understand what gets us here... Never before have we needed genius, magic and power more — and thought and thinking... Jeremy made me think afresh and think differently."

Geldof's intervention underscored a broader point. In an era of political polarisation and institutional distrust, theories that attempt to confront the source of human conflict demand serious public examination.

Fix The World and the Question Beneath the System

The organisation's central claim — and the basis of its broader educational outreach — is that once the instinct–intellect conflict is understood, the insecurity driving competition and the pursuit of material wealth diminishes. Ambition and innovation remain, but the defensive need to prove oneself subsides.

If this account of the human condition is correct, debates over capitalism versus socialism ultimately reflect competing responses to a deeper condition. The more fundamental question, Fix The World argues, is whether humanity now chooses to address the psychological roots of these systems.

For a country accustomed to arguing over economic models, this presents a deeper challenge: not simply to understand how markets function, but to understand why humans constructed and relied upon them in the first place.

Whether one accepts the thesis advanced by Fix The World and Jeremy Griffith or not, it reframes Britain's capitalism debate—shifting attention from surface ideology to the evolutionary and psychological forces that shape it.