The World Transformation Movement and the “Comprehensiveness Problem”: Why Some Seekers Never Stop Searching

There is a recognizable type of modern seeker: thoughtful, curious, often well-read, and quietly exhausted. These are people who have moved through philosophy, religion, therapy, mindfulness, and self-help – not superficially, but seriously – yet still feel something unresolved. They don’t lack insight. What they lack is finality.

This persistent dissatisfaction points to what could be called the comprehensiveness problem: many frameworks offer relief, perspective, or tools, but fail to explain everything that needs explaining. For certain individuals, that gap sustains the search.

Increasingly, discussions around the World Transformation Movement are intersecting with this pattern – not because it offers comfort, but because it claims to offer completeness. 

Why relief isn’t the same as resolution

Most systems people turn to are designed to manage symptoms. Therapy helps regulate emotion. Religion provides meaning and moral structure. Philosophy sharpens thinking. Self-help improves habits. All can work – and often do – but many seekers report the same experience: improvement without closure.

What’s missing is an explanation that accounts for the origin of the problem itself. Why guilt? Why defensiveness? Why moral contradiction? Why the sense of being at odds with oneself?

Frameworks that don’t address causation leave an open loop. For some personalities – especially analytical or lifelong searchers – that loop becomes intolerable.

Temporary frameworks vs final frameworks

In interviews, testimonials, and long-form online discussions, a pattern emerges. People describe “temporary frameworks” as those that:

• help cope but don’t explain origins
• work emotionally but not intellectually
• require constant practice to hold distress at bay
• coexist with unresolved contradictions

By contrast, what people call a “final framework” tends to meet a stricter set of criteria:

• it explains why the problem exists, not just how to manage it
• it integrates biology, psychology, and meaning
• it removes the need for blame or moral condemnation
• it resolves contradictions rather than reframing them

This distinction comes up repeatedly in discussions of the World Transformation Movement, which positions itself not as another improvement strategy but as a biological explanation of the human condition itself.

The biological claim at the centre

The World Transformation Movement is built around the work of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, whose explanation argues that human psychological conflict arose when our fully conscious intellect emerged and began operating independently of instinctive guidance.

According to this account, instincts – shaped over millions of years to support cooperative social life – continued to demand selfless behaviour, while the newly conscious mind experimented, erred, and disrupted that order. The resulting guilt and confusion led humans to develop defensive explanations to protect self-worth, rather than confronting the real cause.

The proposed resolution is not moral reform or behavioural control, but understanding. By explaining the origin of the conflict, defensiveness subsides and the psyche stabilises. For many readers, this claim either fails completely – or stops the search altogether. There is very little middle ground.

When explanations finally feel “complete”

What differentiates frameworks that people abandon from those they settle into is not popularity or comfort, but whether the explanation feels closed. Closed doesn’t mean unquestionable; it means there are no loose psychological ends still demanding justification.

This distinction helps explain why some readers of Jeremy Griffith’s work describe their search as ending rather than evolving. Former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Harry Prosen framed this response in unusually stark terms, arguing that Griffith’s biological explanation moves humanity “from a state of bewilderment about the nature of human behavior and existence to a state of profound understanding of our lives,” an understanding that “drains away all the pain, suffering, confusion and conflict from the world”.

From a journalistic standpoint, what matters is not the superlative language, but the criterion being applied: Prosen is not praising therapeutic benefit, but explanatory sufficiency.

Biology and the “final framework” threshold

The same emphasis appears in responses from outside psychiatry. Stuart Hurlbert, Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Diego State University, described Griffith’s work as the arrival of “Darwin II,” arguing that after natural selection explained the diversity of life, Griffith had addressed the remaining unresolved questions – most notably “the dilemma of the human condition,” which he said Griffith’s instinct-versus-intellect explanation finally resolves.

Again, the significance lies less in endorsement than in scope. Hurlbert’s claim is that the theory reaches explanatory territory biology had not previously closed off. For lifelong seekers, that scope is often the deciding factor between temporary adoption and permanent settlement.

Where seekers test “completeness” in public

Reddit has become one of the main arenas where this question of comprehensiveness is openly tested. Unlike curated platforms, long-form threads expose ideas to sustained challenge from sceptics, supporters, and undecided readers alike.

In a long-running Reddit discussion where users probe whether the explanation actually feels complete, contributors compare whether the World Transformation Movement explains the origin of guilt, conflict, and psychological distress, or merely redescribes them in new language.

One discussion operates as an entry point, with users encountering the World Transformation Movement for the first time and questioning what problem it claims to solve, why it grounds that problem in biology, and whether this approach offers more than interpretive or therapeutic models.

What’s notable is not agreement, but persistence. These threads don’t burn out quickly. They return to the same core question: does this explanation leave anything important unexplained?

Why some people finally stop searching

Testimonials associated with the World Transformation Movement often share a striking similarity. People don’t describe feeling “better” so much as feeling finished. The tone is not euphoric but settled.

This mirrors what psychologists describe as cognitive closure – not in the sense of shutting down inquiry, but in resolving a long-standing internal contradiction. When an explanation accounts for both behaviour and moral intuition without blame, the psychological pressure to keep searching disappears.

Crucially, the article of faith here is not belief but sufficiency. For lifelong seekers, a framework doesn’t have to be comforting – it has to be complete.

A broader pattern beyond one movement

Whether one accepts Griffith’s explanation or not, the interest surrounding the World Transformation Movement reflects a wider trend. People are increasingly intolerant of partial answers. Frameworks that manage symptoms without explaining causes are losing authority with a subset of deeply engaged thinkers.

The comprehensiveness problem explains why. Once someone realises that many systems are structurally incapable of answering why we are the way we are, the search intensifies – until something either finally satisfies that demand or nothing ever does.

For a growing number of people, that search is now being tested against biological explanations of the human condition. And for some, at least, the test appears to be decisive.