The basic moral principle

Modern society has lost sight of the only moral principle of any importance, so that the individual citizen is basically unprotected against unlimited oppression.

Since the ignored principle is never enunciated, it is difficult to express one’s horror at what already goes on, and at even worse developments that might go on. If someone says, ‘People ought to be heavily taxed in order to pay for state-administered medicine and education’, I am shocked and horrified, but inhibited from replying: ‘People ought to be taxed as little as possible, and certainly not at all to provide funding for organised crime.’

Usually I do not reply in this way, because I realise that prolonged explanation would be necessary. In reality, at least as much explanation should be required to make plausible the idea that individuals should be taxed to provide for greater oppression of individuals by the collective, but one realises that a high proportion of the population has learnt to proceed smoothly to this conclusion without examination, or even recognition, of the underlying assumptions being made.

If I say that people should be taxed as little as possible, and least of all to finance collectively organised oppression, this depends on the basic moral principle that society should interfere as little as possible with the individual’s freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit.

The basic moral principle applies between individuals as well, and everyone should respect the right of others to evaluate for themselves the weighting to be placed on the factors which enter into any given situation, since in reality the existential situation is one of total uncertainty.

However, in practice it is only socially appointed agents of the collective, such as doctors, teachers, social workers, etc, who are invested with legally conferred powers to impose their valuations on others. They should be deprived of these (immoral) powers.

In the presence of the modern ideology, the deplorable practice has arisen of taking into account only factors which appear obvious to a large number of people, and of assuming that any others should be ignored.

In place of the basic moral principle enunciated above, an alternative one is implicitly assumed. This is to the effect that what is ethical consists of what the majority of people agree to regard as ethical. Dissenting individuals can, and should, be forced to submit to the views accepted by the majority of people in their society.

As people are subjected to continuous indoctrination in modern society, from the educational system, which increasingly regards indoctrination as a primary objective, and from the continuous stream of propaganda being put out by such media as television and newspapers, it is not surprising that there is a nearly universal tendency to prefer currently fashionable ways of evaluating things.

We may suppose that similar unanimities of evaluation were usually found in primitive tribal societies. This is notwithstanding the fact that a member of modern society, under the influence of the prevailing ideology, would tend to regard some of the practices of primitive societies as immoral. This however does not present itself to the modern mind as a problem, since there is an implicit belief that the human race has recently arrived at the best possible way of evaluating things, and that the way it thinks now is unquestionably right.

Extract from The Corpse and the Kingdom

The basic moral principle — II

Part 1 of ‘The basic moral principle’ is here.

Having stated the basic moral principle, it can be seen that it is freely violated in modern society.

What destroyed my education, and has made it impossible for me to recover from the effects of that destruction ever since, was not au fond the hostility and oppressiveness of any particular individuals, but the intrinsic immorality of the modern ideology. My parents were operating in an environment in which there was no shortage of people to prescribe to them how they should regard me.

The legislation which prevented the taking of the School Certificate and other exams before a certain age was a clear violation of the basic moral principle. It was denying to the individual who might be taking exams, or to his parents who were supposed to be considering his interests, the right to evaluate for himself how serious were the advantages or disadvantages, in an existential perspective, and in view of his individual characteristics and outlook, of taking an exam of a certain kind at a particular age.

People’s lack of sensitivity to this basic principle of morality, even so soon after the Second World War when the Welfare State had been in force for only a few years, was shown by the fact that even supposedly conservative newspapers found no fault with the legislation. Protests were made on behalf of a few children who were clearly going to be prevented from taking exams that they were well able to take, but newspaper articles which discussed such individuals were only too willing to impose solutions of their own, on the lines of ‘If he/she is so clever, he/she can easily pass the time reading books/playing chess/doing good works.’

This shows that the willingness to impose solutions and interpretations on other people’s lives was already well developed. No doubt it always has been, and that is why there is little hope of the basic moral principle being upheld, except in a free-market society in which an individual can defend himself against other people’s ideas of what he ought to want by paying with money for what he does want.

Of course, the young person is necessarily at a disadvantage so long as he has to depend on decisions being made on his behalf by a parent, and even more so if he is dependent on decisions being made by someone who has not even some sense of genetic bonding with him. One of the things which would have saved my education from complete disaster, so that its inverse could be said to be the cause of its ruin, would have been an age of legal majority which was related to mental rather than chronological age. On the most conservative estimates of my IQ, I would certainly have been, on that basis, of age and free to make decisions for myself well before the School Certificate situation arose.

Clearly those most likely to be disadvantaged by the age-limit legislation were the most precocious (in those days it was not yet explicitly stated that there was no such thing as precocity). So this legislation conveyed to all and sundry that there was no need to take into account any special individual requirements that might arise from special ability. This was treated as implying also that the possibility of any special needs arising from unusually extreme individual characteristics should not on any account be entertained. The latter is pretty much the principle that has been applied to me throughout my life. Could it be that people realise that ignoring the particular requirements which arise from outstanding ability is a good way of providing it with the handicaps which are desirable to cancel the likelihood of its possessor being able to make use of it? Of course by now it has become acceptable to assert that there is no such thing as precocity or outstanding ability anyway. At that time people liked to refer gloatingly to cases of child prodigies who had ‘fizzled out’. The implication of this was not that they had not retained their ability, but that some strange innate deficiencies had rendered them unfunctional in later life. From time to time throughout my life, including quite recently, I have read newspaper articles quoting educational ‘experts’ as remarking on the number of early high achievers who finish up without an academic career. This is supposed to constitute a proof that this is a perfectly natural outcome, but it might just as well be taken as a demonstration of the hostility towards them, and their consequent inappropriate treatment by the educational system.

Some twenty years ago, in connection with the then fashionable proposals for the further deterioration of the university system, Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University was quoted* as saying, ‘Why exactly should Britain’s plumbers and secretaries and telephone operators have to pay for you to come to Warwick? You will earn far more than them. You will have much more interesting jobs.’ This shows how hopeless it is to expect the state to provide for the differing needs of individuals. In reality, there are many factors, of which measurable IQ is only one, which affect the circumstances and types of activity which an individual needs for his well-being. It is impossible to quantify the weighting of these factors in an individual case, and it is a violation of the basic moral principle to impose conditions on him which take into account only very few factors.

And, supposing (as I do) that IQ and other innate characteristics strongly influence the individual’s aptitudes and temperament, let us remember how heavily outnumbered by the majority of the population at large is the minority (about 3%) even with IQs above 130, at which level a child is (or used to be) referred to as ‘gifted’. Really outstanding IQs, at a level which used to be described as ‘near genius’ or ‘potential genius’, constitute a tiny minority of the ‘gifted’ population. So how can it possibly be expected that a democratic society will provide adequately for the needs of, say, the top 1% of the population, of whom the remaining 99% are jealous, and whose success and well-being they resent?

* The Times, 31 May 2000.

Tribalism and ethics

The essential feature of ethics — that is to say, respect for the right of the individual to have what he wants and to decide for himself what is of importance to him, so long as it is not interfering with the rights of others to pursue what they consider important for them — arose in association with capitalism. It was an ethic that could only arise when individuals had at least the potentiality of paying for what they wanted within the structure of the society they lived in.

This ethic has been nominally taken over by the modern trend towards tribalism. We will retain the great advances in knowledge and control of our environment which were made when collective control was somewhat weakened, but we will not consider it moral for individuals to pursue whatever goals they consider conducive to whatever sort of wellbeing they choose for themselves, unless we happen to agree with them. (‘We’ is a vague collective entity consisting of social agreement about what is right and proper.)

We aim to remove freedom, so far as we can, but we sweeten the pill by confirming our belief in the ‘individual’. Indeed, we respect the ‘individual’ more than ever before and complain that the previous state of society had too little of this respect. But when the nature of this ‘respect’ is formulated, it does not come out to anything so simple and absolute as respect for other people’s power to decide; it comes out as a concern for their well-being, based on some sort of ‘balanced’ assessment of their total wants and needs. By implication this is an assessment that we will make, not them, and ‘balance’ provides a lot of scope for overriding a person’s strongest inclinations if our respect for them is ‘balanced’ by our respect for something else that they should be inclined to want instead.

Extract from the forthcoming book by Celia Green, The Corpse and the Kingdom, due to be published in 2021.

Morals or money?

Melanie Phillips complains of the loss of moral principles in modern society.

Two ... incidents happened recently. A 79-year-old woman has died from head injuries after trying to fight off teenage muggers who robbed her of the bag containing her husband’s ashes.

This attack followed hard on the heels of a story about a teenage burglar who, asked to write a letter of apology to his victims, wrote instead that he wasn’t bothered or sorry at all, and that the burglary was all their fault for leaving their window open.

Such incidents suggest that we are dealing with something beyond merely ruthless acquisitiveness and contempt for the law. They suggest a total absence of empathy for another person, which is the basic requirement of morality and, in turn, of a civilised society. They illustrate a brutalisation of humanity. (Daily Mail, 28 November 2011)

Describing a speech by Phillip Blond (credited as a key architect of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea), she writes:

He [Blond] condemned the doctrine of ‘moral relativism’ according to which no values or way of life can be said to be better than any other.

Melanie Phillips concludes her article thus:

For if we really want to stop Britain’s terrifying drift into brutalisation, where a widow is robbed of her husband’s ashes and the young become strangers to remorse or reason — not to mention the summer’s riots and the economic crash — we surely have to accept that the moral vacuum into which we are staring is one that Britain’s bedrock faith must once again fill.

In 1945, with the onset of the Oppressive State, the link between the individual and reality was broken. Henceforth what determined the well-being or otherwise of yourself and your children would not be whether you could pay for what you and they needed, but whether other people would accept your needs as deserving of support with the money confiscated from other people in taxation.

This achieved a progressive shift in the ownership of resources from the middle class and aristocracy (the elite) to the least functional sections of society.

Nearly 70 years on from 1945, we read of the reduction in the size of families of the middle class, and of the deterioration in the quality of the upbringing which they are able to provide for their offspring. At the same time we read of reduction of benefits available to pensioners, and of unemployed fathers of large numbers of children, many of whom are living on benefits and all of whom, presumably, are receiving an expensive state education.

Attempts may be made to tweak the situation and to ‘kick-start’ the economy by further taxation of the above-average in order to provide ‘help’ for individuals or projects considered socially acceptable, but can such attempts ever work?

Over any considerable period of time it appears to be impossible that policies of this kind could prevent the continuous decline of civilisation. This is because the real causes of the ever-increasing drains on ‘public money’ are never mentioned. Among them is the geometrically increasing cost of supporting the population of those who are not, and never can be, productive members of society (even if interfering in other people’s lives as a doctor, teacher or social worker is considered as a positive contribution to society).

If you do everything possible to multiply the population with the lowest IQs, you will soon have an immense and growing burden on the resources which can be provided by taxpayers.

Oh, but that is only if the factors that influence IQ are at least to some extent hereditary, you may exclaim, and this is something that we find quite unacceptable and will on no account consider.

Nevertheless if, as I strongly suspect, the size of the dysfunctional population, and the expense of providing for it, continues to increase with every generation, it is a matter of indifference how far the factors which lead to this outcome are hereditary or otherwise. This population becomes a burden on the economy which outweighs any efforts which may be made to increase its income by productive activity.

The behavioural standards of a society with this characteristic are likely to decline inexorably towards brutal levels, whatever ostensible morality is being urged on the population.

Brief analyses such as these should be being expanded into research papers. We call on those who recognise the pro-collectivist bias in current academic research to support Oxford Forum.

Penalising the middle class is ‘fair’

Daily Mail, June 27, ‘Middle classes must find £50,000 for care.’ State can't afford more, of course. It could not wish, for example, to cut its expenditure in ways that would discourage the least functional members of society from having the largest possible families, many of whom are likely to need ‘care’ throughout their lives.

It is only fair (the argument goes) that the so-called middle classes on the other hand should have their assets reduced, ideally to zero, which they are able to leave to their children by inheritance. Their children are quite likely to have above-average IQs, and it is only fair that they should be handicapped, rather than having their advantages in life increased still further by inheritance.

State pensions are now means-tested so that anyone who has more than the barest subsistence on retirement will find it difficult not to be brought ever closer to that level. Those who live the longest are likely to have the highest average IQs, and are thus most likely to have their savings eroded to zero before they die. Which is only fair, and redresses an injustice.

Formerly those over a certain age were dependent on their own resources to provide housekeepers, full or part-time, or on the voluntary help provided by friends or relatives. The reduction of the state pension greatly increased the number who were unable to provide even a necessary minimum of paid help for themselves, and the probability of people’s assets being reduced to zero has made it much less likely that it would seem worthwhile to friends or relatives to help them protect their independence in the hope of an increased inheritance.

On another page of the Daily Mail there is an article on why the elderly suffer ‘needless’ fractures. ‘Thousands of elderly people are needlessly suffering excruciating fractures because doctors are failing to spot osteoporosis.’

The National Osteoporosis Society's report says many patients are diagnosed only after they have broken several bones, causing them agonising pain and restricting their movements. Campaigners believe doctors fail to carry out simple checks when elderly people suffer fractures to establish whether they have the disease. More than three million people in Britain suffer from osteoporosis, which causes thinning of the bones, and it is most common among elderly women. ...

The report says 26 per cent of those with osteoporosis suffered multiple fractures before being diagnosed. A survey of 700 sufferers found 35 per cent waited more than a year after first breaking a bone to be diagnosed, while 22 per cent waited five years. (Daily Mail, 27 June 2011)

Well, what do you think doctors are for? Surely you don't imagine they are there to prevent people with above-average IQs from suffering?

As has been pointed out before, a person who survives to an above-average age is likely to have an above-average IQ, also above-average forethought, conscientiousness, and so on. Becoming a doctor never required too much in the way of IQ and it is very likely that the average IQ of doctors has fallen. People from the ‘poorest’ backgrounds are encouraged to qualify as doctors, while the ‘middle class’ are discriminated against, in this as in other areas.

It used to be said, over a decade ago, that doctors regarded 55 as the cut-off age for women, after which it was not worth diagnosing anything serious.

Michelle Mitchell, charity director for Age UK, said: ‘Funding for social care is already inadequate. We are fearful that even more vulnerable older people will be left to struggle alone and in some cases lives will be put at risk’. (Daily Mail, 27 June 2011)

Actually, funding for ‘social care’ is not inadequate but excessive. There should be no such thing as ‘social care’.

Associations such as Age UK, Age Concern, Saga etc. should encourage their members to contact us via our website and, if it is not already too late, come for holidays in Cuddesdon as a preliminary. Then they should come to live as close as possible to us, and if they do some voluntary work for us, we will help them in setting up cooperative operations to make themselves independent of state help – i.e. to keep the Welfare Wolf from the door. And, maybe, even work towards greater prosperity by cooperating in business ventures.

The Ten Commandments

One difference between territorial and tribal morality is that, within a territorial system, a certain number of people may freely choose to live according to tribal morality among themselves, but the reverse is not true. You cannot have a small free market society within a communist society, but within a capitalist society it is quite possible for people to set up communes or co-operatives if they wish. Tribal morality depends on making various assumptions, amounting to a belief system, about the psychological motivation of people other than oneself. Territorial morality does not, being almost entirely negative: do not interfere with anyone else’s territory. It is not necessary to have any opinions about the likelihood of people invading one another’s territory with benevolent motives.

Consider how many features of the Ten Commandments are at variance with modern neo-tribal morality. We may suppose that the Commandments represent a fairly primitive form of territorial society, and these principles are enunciated in breaking away from earlier tribal societies, which would not have observed them. A territory is defined within which the individual is not to be interfered with. He owns his life and property; he should not be killed or stolen from.

His property may include oxen and asses, men servants and maid servants, and these are not to be stolen or even coveted. Marriage partners own one another, and they alone have the right to have sex with one another.

Fathers and mothers are to be honoured, presumably to preserve the solidarity of the family unit; in particular, the solidarity of the offspring, that is, with the only two people on whose good will he has any claim. Further, it is immoral to bear false witness against someone else. This falls rather short of the respect for objectivity and contract required for commercial transactions, but perhaps refers to the commonest use of dishonesty in tribal societies. You see how easily, nowadays, fictional slanders of a socially acceptable kind can be used to damage people to whom one feels hostile.

This is only a territory-defining ownership, and falls somewhat short of an abstract recognition of an individual’s right to freedom of decision. Nevertheless, you will see how many features of it are rejected in modern television morality.

(extract from Letters from Exile)

Tribal versus territorial morality

Extract from my book Letters from Exile:

Essentially, there are two conflicting fields of morality or idealism. The first is old-fashioned territorial morality, of the kind promulgated in public schools and Catholic convents. Then there is neo-tribal morality, antagonistic both to high ability and to any possibilities of psychological development in a centralised or expansive direction. But even before starting to delineate these, I have to establish the extremely agnostic basis on which I operate.

The first stage in my awareness of the existential situation originated when I was about eleven. I had shocking perceptions of the unknowability of the existential situation in which one found oneself, and a realisation that the existential uncertainty was the final term in any enquiry, philosophical or scientific, into the nature of things. This provided me with an extremely strong drive to react to the existential situation in the most purposeful way possible. Although all ascriptions of purpose were arbitrary and ultimately futile, in one sense it was fairly clear how to react to the situation.

I applied this observation, which I came to call the uncertainty principle, to any evaluations which I encountered which seemed to pass without question. The human race had evolved in the way it had, and it ran its affairs in the way it did; it was understandable enough that social groups should favour some kinds of behaviour as desirable, and others not. It was also understandable that people reacted in the ways they did as the resultant outcome of psychological forces, which were determined by evolution as well as their own experience of life and deliberate attempts to act in certain ways. So I was (and still am) a moral relativist. (Modern dictionaries of ethics say you cannot be a moral relativist, because if you really were, you would start to commit crimes. So a moral relativist who does not commit crimes is insincere.)

I suppose that these elements in my position, along with my IQ, account for the exceptionally overt hostility which I aroused. I had a strong motivational drive which was not the result of social influence, and I was rigorously relativistic in my attitude to morality. In the same way that modern ethics denies the possibility of being a moral relativist, so modern psychology asserts that all motivation and personality attributes arise from rewards offered by the individual’s environment.

Incidentally, the fact that statements of this level of unanalytical naivety are made by philosophers and psychologists in an academic context reflects the decline in the average IQ of those holding university positions, and ensures that the decline will continue, since what is required for academic success is sufficient uncriticalness to reproduce and imitate assertions of this kind.

When I was at school I never expressed my morally relativistic views, apart from the most generalised expositions of the existential uncertainty to one of the nuns at my convent (my maths teacher). However, I suppose that people sensed the unacceptability of my psychological position from an absence of the cues which most people give that they are really hooked on social approval or get some sort of emotional feedback out of the prevailing collective evaluations, probably most clearly indicated by moral indignation against nonconformists. Modern social psychology asserts that people derive their values from the group in which they are living, and clearly this is what modern society would like to be the case.

Constant reflection on the existential situation prevented me from acquiring the sort of moral indignation which most people seem to feel about certain things. This was partly the reason why I was soon an object of opprobrium myself, and have remained so ever since. By attempting to provide myself with opportunities which society did not wish me to have, I qualified as a criminal.

Also I never acquired any idea of how society should ideally be. I thought that even if I could think of something that would be better, and provide me with better opportunities for doing research, I certainly did not have the resources to bring about political changes and then do research in one lifetime, so I had better concentrate on making the best use of the social structures as they were to get the necessary opportunities for doing research. Later I came to take a far more negative, and not merely agnostic, view of human psychology, and thought that it would be absolutely impossible to influence it in any positive direction. Its psycho-dynamics were such as to ensure negative outcomes whatever ideals it professed, as with the religion of love (Christianity) which had justified so much torturing and killing.

Another illustration of this was currently being provided by the modern society in which I lived, which called itself compassionate, and which was engaged on a programme designed to convince me of its absolute mercilessness towards me and my parents. When I was thrown out at the end of my education, I formulated this as, ‘There is nothing so bad but that people will make it happen to you, nothing so bad that people will give you any help in averting it.’

People who subscribe to the modern belief in society like to associate ‘ruthlessness’ with acquisitiveness, whether of land-space or money. You could call this projection, in the Freudian sense. There is nothing so ruthless as the agent of the collective who lives for no reward in life but the exercise of power over other people.

Evidently human psychology has a tremendously strong reaction against the potential independence of the individual mind. There is plenty of historical evidence of this in its constant persecution of heretics and nonconformists, both before and after Bruno was burnt to death for saying that the universe was infinite. Persecutory drives are not absent from modern society, but more discreetly expressed, which does not mean less destructively.

Neo-tribal morality is universally dominant in schools (only a bit less so in private schools), in universities, in virtually all published material, and on the television screen. It is almost impossible to meet anyone who does not soon demonstrate allegiance to some aspect of it.

Nietzsche recognised approximately the distinction between territorial and tribal morality in his master/slave moralities, but being influenced by his own social environment, he did not get it quite right. I think it is true to say that he accepted the dichotomy too much on the terms of the tribal (Christian) morality of his time, as that between the expansively selfish and the unassuming compassionate, which is much the way it is perceived by the modern neo-tribal collectivist.

Moral indignation is directed at independence and autonomy, but more overtly at any territory, mental or physical, within which an individual can act independently of social pressures. So of course it is directed at capitalism and commercialism, as representing the possibility of acquisition by an individual of territory which is larger than that which tribal society is prepared freely to grant him. Indignation is also directed at any exercise of individual judgement within that territory. Hence it was inevitable, if my parents insisted on seeking social advice, that I would be taken away from the convent. Convents are second only to parents as objects of anti-authoritarian hatred.

The basic moral principle

Modern society has lost sight of the only moral principle of any importance, so that the individual citizen is basically unprotected against unlimited oppression.

Since the ignored principle is never enunciated, it is difficult to express one's horror at what already goes on, and at even worse developments that might go on. If someone says, 'People ought to be heavily taxed in order to pay for state-administered medicine and education', I am shocked and horrified, but inhibited from replying, 'People ought to be taxed as little as possible, and certainly not at all to provide funding for organised crime.'

Usually I do not reply in this way, because I realise that prolonged explanation would be necessary. In reality, at least as much explanation should be required to make plausible the idea that individuals should be taxed to provide for greater oppression of individuals by the collective, but one realises that a high proportion of the population has learnt to proceed smoothly to this conclusion without examination, or even recognition, of the underlying assumptions being made.

If I say that people should be taxed as little as possible and least of all to finance collectively organised oppression, this depends on the basic moral principle that society should interfere as little as possible with the individual's freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit.

The basic moral principle applies between individuals as well, and everyone should respect the right of others to evaluate for themselves the weighting to be placed on the factors which enter into any given situation, since in reality the existential situation is one of total uncertainty.

However, it is only socially appointed agents of the collective, such as doctors, teachers, social workers etc, who are invested with legally conferred powers to impose their valuations on others, and who should be deprived of these (immoral) powers.

In fact, in the presence of the modern ideology, the deplorable practice has arisen of taking into account only factors which appear obvious to a large number of people, and assuming that any others should be ignored.

In place of the basic moral principle enunciated above, an alternative one is implicitly assumed. This is apparently an idea to the effect that what is ethical consists of what the majority of people agree to regard as ethical. Dissenting individuals can and should be forced to submit to the views accepted by the majority of people in their society.

As people are subjected to continuous indoctrination in modern society, from the educational system which increasingly regards indoctrination as a primary objective, and from the continuous stream of propaganda being put out by such media as television and newspapers, it is not surprising that nearly universal tendencies to prefer currently fashionable ways of evaluating things are to be observed.

We may suppose that similar unanimities of evaluation were usually found in primitive tribal societies, but a member of modern society under the influence of the prevailing ideology would regard some of the practices of primitive societies as immoral.

This does not present itself to the modern mind as a problem, since there is an implicit belief that the human race has recently arrived at the best possible way of evaluating things, and the way it thinks now is unquestionably right.

On the basic moral principle that the freedom of the individual to form his own evaluations is supremely important, even if in practice the majority of people will adopt the valuations suggested by the ideology which prevails in the culture of their place and time, the functions of society acting on a collective basis should be as limited as possible. As Herbert Spencer suggests, they should be limited to what is necessary to protect the liberty of individuals from encroachment by other individuals.

Basic moral principle, short form:
It is immoral to impose your interpretations and evaluations on anyone else.

Higher-level morality and social morality

It may be observed that there appears to be no overlap between higher-level morality and the sort that derives from believing in society or other people.

What I have encountered all my life is universal opposition, justified by a rationalised belief that if I was prevented from getting what I wanted to get, and could easily have been getting, I would stop wanting what I could get something out of, and turn into a different kind of person who did not want it or need it, whether on account of being physically dead or otherwise.

When I was at school I could have been getting everything I wanted with very little help, except with making arrangements for degree level physics and chemistry practicals. All that would have been necessary would have been less interference. Once the harm had been done and I had been thrown out, a bit more active help would have been necessary to reverse the harm that had been done to me so that I could get back my minimum requirements for a tolerable life, which were a hotel environment, as provided by a resident college, and the salary and status of an Oxbridge professor.

On a higher level one acquires a very strong aversion to seeing any apparently conscious being frustrated or suffering, and the idea of anyone putting someone else into a decentralising position is horrific. This is in part because one thinks a consciousness could and should be on a higher level, but so long as it is preoccupied with trying to get things out of other people it can’t be.

Of course, in most cases, you know that superimposing another layer of tantalising opposition is only adding to psychological obstructions that are already quite sufficient to prevent the person from knowing his own mind/getting a higher level. Nevertheless it is horrific to think of that extra layer being instated.

Since the age of 13 (and less obviously before) I have been treated with extraordinary cruelty, and a determination to make me suffer as much as possible, and to make me realise that alleviation of my suffering depended on some help or permission from other people which they would not give.

This was less surprising when I was at school and college where I was surrounded by hostile left-wing people, predominantly not aristocratic, and almost without exception socialists. (Socialism is fundamentally immoral, from a higher level point of view.)

But Rosalind Heywood persuaded everyone at the SPR without exception to oppose what I was clearly trying to get, so as to force me to give up. That is amazingly immoral from a higher level point of view. The SPR population would count as highly principled on normal terms; old-fashioned aristocrats who had been to public schools and held positions of responsibility, pillars of society, many of them Christians.

But it did not occur to any of them that a policy of frustrating someone in order to manipulate them into distorting their psychology was immoral and objectionable.

Nobody ever objected to this policy of paternalistic frustration as immoral. They neither objected to other people doing it nor refused to play ball themselves, but allowed themselves to be drawn in to ‘being cruel to be kind’ as Rosalind Heywood encouraged them to think of it.

So one can only say that socially acceptable morality, however sophisticated and worked out, contains no awareness of the basic moral principle – I mean of what, from a higher level point of view, is the basic moral principle.

Or perhaps you could say that there is an awareness of the basic moral principle but this is expressed only by acting against it, instead of on it, whenever opportunity arises.