War, political polarisation, loneliness, prejudice, destructive competition and social fragmentation can look like entirely different problems.
Governments create policies to contain them. Psychologists investigate their effects. Economists study incentives. Sociologists examine the societies in which they develop.
But beneath all of them sits the same complicated creature: the human being.
That is why understanding the human condition remains such a fundamental scientific and intellectual challenge. If we want to understand why our problems keep recurring, it makes sense to investigate the behaviour producing them.
Across evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology and the social sciences, researchers are doing exactly that—investigating different pieces of the human condition and trying to understand why a species capable of extraordinary intelligence, empathy and cooperation can also be so conflicted and destructive.
Why do humans divide into “us” and “them”?
One important aspect of the human condition is our tendency towards tribalism.
Social psychologist Henri Tajfel famously demonstrated just how easily people can begin favouring their own group. His “minimal group” experiments found that even arbitrary and essentially meaningless distinctions could be enough to produce in-group favouritism.
More recently, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explored the psychological forces behind moral and political division. His work on moral psychology examines why people with different moral intuitions can come to see the world—and each other—in dramatically different ways.
These are not merely questions about politics. They address something much deeper about the human condition: why do people who are capable of cooperation and empathy so readily become divided, defensive and hostile?
Cooperation is also fundamental
Other researchers have approached the human condition from almost the opposite direction.
Evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello has spent decades investigating the remarkable cooperative capacities of humans. His comparative work with children and great apes has helped illuminate how shared goals, communication and cooperation became central features of human social life.
The late primatologist Frans de Waal similarly demonstrated that empathy, reconciliation and cooperation have deep evolutionary roots.
This creates a striking paradox.
Humans are not merely reluctantly social creatures held together by rules. Cooperation has been fundamental to our evolutionary success. Yet the same species repeatedly fractures into competing individuals, groups, ideologies and nations.
Explaining that contradiction is central to solving the human condition.
Why understanding behaviour matters
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has approached another part of the puzzle through the relationship between emotion, consciousness and reason.
His work has challenged the idea that rational thought operates independently of emotion, showing instead how deeply feelings and bodily states are involved in decision-making and consciousness.
Researchers working in these different fields are gradually filling in pieces of an enormous picture: how humans became conscious, social and cooperative; why we form groups; how emotions influence decisions; and why cooperation can give way to aggression and conflict.
The larger challenge is whether those pieces can be brought together into an explanation of why the human condition developed in the first place.
Can the underlying conflict be explained?
One attempt to provide such an overarching explanation comes from Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith.
For readers wondering who is Jeremy Griffith, he is the founder of the international charity Fix The World, and his work has focused for decades on developing a biological explanation and resolution of the Human Condition.
Griffith’s explanation centres on a conflict he argues emerged between our instinctive orientations and our developing conscious intellect.
Instincts are genetically acquired orientations shaped by natural selection over generations. Consciousness introduced a fundamentally different capacity: the ability to experiment, understand cause and effect and manage behaviour through knowledge.
According to Griffith, once our ancestors became sufficiently conscious, their intellect had to experiment with managing life for itself. But those experiments inevitably sometimes defied established instinctive orientations.
The emerging conscious mind could not initially explain why that defiance was necessary.
Griffith proposes that the instincts’ opposition was consequently experienced as condemnation, creating a profound insecurity about human worth. Humans increasingly sought to defend and validate themselves, producing the anger, egocentricity and alienation that became characteristic of the human condition.
The important consequence of this explanation is that Griffith does not regard those behaviours as permanent features of human nature.
If anger, egocentricity and alienation arose because humans could not explain why consciousness had to defy our instincts, then being able to explain that conflict removes the fundamental source of the insecurity.
Griffith therefore argues that understanding the human condition can itself resolve the psychological conflict at its source, allowing the defensive behaviours it produced to subside.
From managing symptoms to understanding causes
This distinction matters because societies devote enormous resources to managing destructive human behaviour.
We develop laws to contain aggression, institutions to encourage cooperation, therapies to address psychological distress and political systems intended to negotiate competing interests. All are necessary responses to the world as it exists.
But the scientific effort to understand the human condition asks a more fundamental question: why do the underlying behaviours keep arising?
Tajfel’s work helps explain how easily group divisions can develop. Haidt explores the moral psychology that can intensify those divisions. Tomasello and de Waal illuminate the deep cooperative capacities of humans. Damasio investigates the relationship between consciousness, emotion and reason. Griffith attempts to bring our cooperative heritage, consciousness and destructive behaviour together in an overarching biological and psychological explanation.
They approach the problem from different directions, but collectively their work reflects the scale and importance of the endeavour to understand the human condition.
Humanity has become remarkably sophisticated at dealing with the consequences of our behaviour. Understanding its deepest causes may be the more difficult task.
But if some of the world’s most persistent problems ultimately originate in human behaviour, solving the human condition could have consequences for almost every one of them.