Attending conferences

Just in case it may ever be used as an excuse for not giving me a Professorship that I do not like attending conferences, may I say that there is all the difference in the world between attending conferences, however boring and rubbishy, if it is part of a job for which one is being rewarded with salary and status, and doing so as an unsalaried and statusless person living in very bad circumstances.

The Society for Psychical Research always held it against me that I spared myself attendance at their conferences, after they had cut off all sources of financial support.

Actually, other things being equal, broadcasting and giving seminars is something for which I have a natural aptitude, and do not mind doing. I even quite enjoy putting things across.

Sitting through other people’s papers and joining in discussions of them is another matter altogether, and would always be fairly negative, although I would always accept it as part of the job if I had a sufficiently statusful and well-rewarded appointment.

The Oxford media

Copy of a letter sent several weeks ago by my colleague Dr Charles McCreery to a presenter on Radio Oxford, to which he has had no reply.

I understand that you have invited Celia Green and Christine Fulcher to put their names forward for inclusion on the guest list for a launch party for a book you have written.

We invited you to a launching party which we had in Cuddesdon about two years ago for Celia Green’s latest book, Letters From Exile: Observations on a Culture in Decline. To the best of my recollection, we did not receive an acknowledgement of this invitation.

Altogether dozens of invitations were sent out for this function, to which in the end only one guest turned up. A high proportion of all the invitations were to people in the Oxford area, as opposed to London , so that any difficulty in travelling here could not have been an explanation.

Over the last forty years Celia has published nine books, none of which has been reviewed by the Oxford Times.

The last time Celia was invited to be interviewed on Radio Oxford was in connection with a lecture she gave which happened to have the phrase ‘Da Vinci Code’ in the title, so that the station apparently thought it could be assimilated to the then popular interest in a non-scholarly book.

What I would do with £10 billion

As I said in a previous piece of writing, 10 billion pounds has been spent, effectively to lower the average IQ of the undergraduate population. I would accept £10 billion without any qualms and would be sure of being able to make good use of it in applying my abilities and those of my associates to contributing to the advancement of science and contributing to the intellectual debates of the present time.

People have often asked me ‘What would I do?’ in a certain field of work and ‘How much would I need for it?’ Well, actually, I would do the best and most progressive things within the resources available, which is what I did when I went to the Society for Psychical Research, within the very restricted resources available and living in appalling circumstances (without a hotel environment). What I did was the best I could do to open up large-scale fields of research. Working on them on an adequate scale would, incidentally, have provided a hotel environment to make my life tolerable rather than intolerable, and permitted me not only to be intellectually productive but to get some sense of wellbeing out of being so.

Working within resources of £10 billion would enable adequate institutional (including hotel) facilities to be set up.

If £10 billion were given to me it would be increasing access to university life for some of those who have been deprived of it by their underprivileged early lives (exposed to the hostility of state education) and subsequent inactivity caused by poverty.

Would it not be making a better use of £10 billion to provide access to opportunity and status for people with high IQs who have been artificially deprived of them, rather than on reducing the proportion of higher IQs in the undergraduate population — and hence subsequently in the academically statusful graduate population? What is the point of spending money on that — one might ask, if one did not already know that the point of the state-financed school and university system is to disadvantage higher IQs, and to disadvantage those with the highest IQs the most.

My work has no relation to my interests

Copy of a letter to a philosophy professor

While the standard ways of interpreting things in the modern oppressive ideology decree that a person who has been deprived of a career and has no way of earning money or drawing ‘social security’ is not to be regarded as being prevented from using their ability in a productive way, and that anything they may manage to do is supposed to correspond exactly to their most passionate interest, I should like to point out that actually I have never been able to do anything meaningful since being thrown out of Oxford University without a single usable degree fifty years ago.

This is not, realistically, surprising as I have never had even a one-person salary with which to support myself and provide myself with the institutional environment which is absolutely necessary to me.

So why should anything I have managed to squeeze out be regarded as any indication of what I would have been doing if not totally deprived of financial support? Why, without money, should one be expected to be able to do anything at all? That I have produced anything at all is a tribute to my exceptional ability and extreme determination, and should (in a non-oppressive society) be regarded as a reason why I should not continue to be kept absolutely deprived of opportunity by lack of a salary and status.

Everything I have squeezed out, including the DPhil thesis, bore no relation to what I should have liked to be doing but was an application for readmission to the ranks of the salaried and statusful. The choice of material both in psychology and philosophy was determined under duress and the work was carried out in oppressive circumstances.

There is absolutely no way in which I have ever been free to ‘follow my interests’ or derive gratification from expressing my views or ‘sharing my ideas’ in my ignored publications.
The only one of my books that could be regarded as an expression of anything I might want to say just because I thought it was the case, was The Human Evasion and I wrote that only because I was still under extreme duress (six years after being thrown out) and unable to do anything. I had had no intention of writing about my psychological ideas.

I had not intended to use my psychological ideas in any way except that of facilitating my own productivity. I thought that my understanding of centralised psychology would make it possible for me to be very happy and productive as soon as I got back to the circumstances necessary for an academically and intellectually productive life. But in fact the goal of re-entry to a university career at a suitable level of seniority or, indeed, any level, was no nearer, in fact receding; and my energy level was declining in boredom.

So I thought that I should write at least something based on my memories of centralised psychology before they became too inaccessible. I thought that The Human Evasion might get me established as a writer, whose book-sales might make up for my lack of an academic salary and enable me to do research work of some kind that might be regarded as establishing a claim to reinstatement as an academic.

Reflections on being a philosopher

It is true that few of the best known philosophers had university appointments, but that does not mean that a philosopher (or any other sort of intellectual) can do without one in the modern world. The great revolution has happened, which has virtually destroyed intellectual and cultural activity outside of state-funded universities. All the philosophers I can think of had private incomes of some sort and also had, in effect, a hotel or at least boarding-house environment, which it was then much easier for middle class or upper class people to have regardless of social recognition. (Working class or poor people could be, of course, and occasionally were, supported by the aristocracy.) And, of course, there was not at that time the same social stigma which now leads to the oppression and censorship of those who are having to function outside of socially-recognised academic institutions.

The idea that scientific research and other intellectual activities should be carried out under the auspices of collectivist institutions has arisen along with the idea that what is done in socially-recognised universities should only be done in them. The suppression of scientific and intellectual activities outside of universities has been much more successful than the encouragement of such things within them.

I have been and still am at a great and almost prohibitive disadvantage to those with university appointments in having to finance my own hotel environment from scratch with no means of livelihood. Of course being a woman has made it even harder. Modern ‘feminism’ has not eliminated the advantage which men have of being able to provide themselves with at least a minimal hotel environment by getting a female partner.

* * * * *

Regarding the idea that I am a 'sceptic'. I don’t actually want to advocate philosophical scepticism. If you have been forced into the position of an outsider, as I have, people are always trying to ascribe to you belief systems, whereas in fact you are primarily critical of their belief systems.

Any belief system is occlusive (I mean, it reduces awareness of hard-edged reality). But, of course, if you are trying to get a philosophy DPhil at all you cannot say anything you mean very directly. I would much have preferred to write my thesis as an attack on, say, modern moral philosophy, which is very pernicious and depends on unexamined assumptions that are never questioned. But it would not have got me a DPhil, and even what I did write was too near the bone as an implicit attack on modern philosophy of mind, so that I could very easily not have got the DPhil at all.

So it has got around that I ‘advocate’ philosophical scepticism. It is a bit better than being accused of believing in spiritualism, but not really what I would want to be supposed to be trying to put across.

Anyone working here and having contact with us would become aware of references to the 'existential uncertainty'. Actually this is very integral to my ideas about realism in psychology, but is a little more complicated than simply having a blanket scepticism.

Tall poppy syndrome

I read an article recently (see below) which purported to demonstrate that there is nowadays in this country a hatred of success. This was done by referring to a game which was played for money. In this game one of the options was to reduce someone else’s winnings, by some sacrifice of your own.

It was found that players often made use of this option. I expect the conclusion that will be drawn from this piece of research is that success should not be permitted because other people dislike it. It has already been stated that research shows that what makes people happy is not what advantages they have themselves, but there being nobody who has more.

(The only form of success to which people have little resistance is that of socially appointed oppressors of humanity, in which case the successful person may enjoy some status and power over others so long as he retains his position, but is unlikely to become rich enough to enjoy any autonomy. He is not going to be free to do anything he wants in any way he could get anything out of, and will always be expected to get his kicks out of frustrating and oppressing other people.)

Actually I have been a victim of the 'tall poppy syndrome' all my life, without having ever been allowed to become a tall poppy. Perceiving that my ability might make it possible for me to become successful, I was scythed down as a precautionary measure. When I was thrown out of the university and started to save money (which I had no tolerable way of earning) to work towards being able to afford the institutional environment which I needed to have, I rapidly became a tall poppy in the eyes of other people, since I became the owner of a small house far more quickly than those who had acceptable careers and salaries, although I was living in it from hand to mouth, with no heating in the winter, since I had no source of income. Hence, I was always perceived as the capitalistic landlord or employer to be fleeced and done down as far as possible.

Similarly, I suppose that the anticipatory tall poppy syndrome has contributed to the fact that funding and career advancement have always been withheld, no matter what efforts I made to demonstrate my ability to make the best possible use of any opportunities or breaks which I might be given. I have always had the impression that the more successful such research as I could do in poverty and exile might be, the more rigorously was withheld any reward which might have permitted me to give any further demonstration of my functionality.

Sometimes, when I have commented on the fact that funding or salaried career advancement (even to carry on work in fields which I had initiated) would preferentially be given, on whatever excuse, to anyone rather than myself, however desperate my need for it might be, people have hastened to ascribe this to cut-throat competition for commercial advantage. There would always be someone who wanted the money or position for themselves. This is in line with the modern idea that the profit motive is the only source of all evil.

However, the tall poppy syndrome (applied in anticipation) provides a much better explanation of the insuperable obstacles to progress which I have encountered in practice. It has certainly appeared to me that people were prepared to exert themselves against me, even though no benefit would accrue to themselves beyond their sadistic enjoyment of my continuing frustration.

(written in 2002)

Extracts from article in Daily Mail, February 13, 2002, written by Tim Utton:

Scientists believe they have proved that we don’t like success and are jealous of self-made millionaires. The researchers discovered that Britons hate ‘winners’ and would happily give up some of their own earnings to damage those who are more successful …Volunteers were tested in an experiment using real cash in which some became richer in a betting game involving choosing numbers at random. Players could anonymously ‘burn away’ the winnings of better-off rivals but forfeited some of their own cash each time they did so. Almost two-thirds destroyed the money of those doing better than them, despite the high cost to their own pocket. Professor Andrew Oswald and colleague Dr Daniel Zizzo, of Oxford University, found that half of all the cash winnings had been deliberately destroyed by envious rivals … “This research shows up for the first time how envious people can be, particularly when they start at an equal level and see others becoming richer.” The research will be seen by some as proof that ‘tall poppy syndrome’ has taken root. The phrase, first coined in Australia in the 1980s, refers to the tendency to scythe down those who are deemed to have got above themselves.

Translation into Russian does me no good

The Human Evasion has been translated into Russian and now appears on some website. If my ideas are of ‘interest’ to people even to that extent, why don’t they want to come and find out more about them by working here, or send money commensurate with what is needed to write and publish more of what I have to say? As it is, all the use it will be is that I can improve my reading of Russian by reading it; usually I find it very difficult to find anything to read in Russian that is not as boring and rebarbative as most mediocratic writing being produced in all languages at the present time.

And what good will it do one to be able to read Russian better? No good at all, really. Improving my Russian is only a way of patienter (as the French would say).

Russia is not even an EU country, so that if any Russian speakers did want to come and augment our sadly inadequate workforce they couldn’t, and wealthy Russian-speaking businessmen who might (?) want to give us badly-needed money probably speak and read English anyway.

Drinks party

Copy of a letter

Thank you for coming to our drinks party. As you said, it was a funny time of day, but this arose because we usually do such things in the function room at the Mitre, which is being refurbished. The rooms at Infinite Ideas which we hired instead are very suitable rooms, but unfortunately not available for evening times.

Just to amplify some things I said at the party. You seemed to find it difficult to understand what I meant by being ‘squeezed out’ without a single usable qualification at the end of the ruined ‘education’. Actually, I refer to that as being ‘thrown out’, and what I refer to as being ‘squeezed to death’ came later, and is still going on.

The reason I use the terminology in this way is that people like to assume or imply that I am a ‘drop-out’, and that I turned my back on normal careers voluntarily. Actually I was thrown out of an academic career very much against my will, and knew that I could not make a career or even earn money in any other way. I could not get any support for attempting in any way to get back into a university career, even moral support or the barest recognition of the fact that that was what I was trying to do.

And if you speak of my being thrown out (into the wilderness, onto the dungheap) as being squeezed out, that might seem to imply that the squeeze was a one-off thing. Actually the attempt to squeeze me to death was applied as soon as I set up my incipient academic institution in Oxford, within which I hoped to be able to do research with which to reclaim a position in the academic world. I lived more or less literally under siege and have done so ever since.

You asked what 'centralisation' was. It is a lot easier, of course, to say what decentralisation is, which prevents centralisation from arising. All modern psychology (which includes psychology of religion) is about decentralisation. It is promoted by people who are themselves decentralised, so it is not even a realistic account of how unrealistic psychology works.

I have put on my blogspot some comments on the film Sleuth which provides very clear illustrations of people being forced into decentralised positions. Under threat from other people, they have no attention free to consider their own internal psychological criteria or to become aware of the fact that they are in a shocking existential situation which they do not know anything about.

I don’t use words like 'supernatural' or 'transcendent', but I do use the word 'inconceivable' to apply to the qualitatively different mental contents of a higher level. That, however, is not present in any sort of pre-higher level centralised psychology.

Correction: re physics department

When I said that one residential college might do for several departments of my independent university, I was thinking that it might do if only the most senior people lived in the residential college, and there might be some people from outside who evidently accept for themselves that they should be able to live without domestic and other ancillary staff, and apparently expect us to pretend that we can do so as well.

But really all personnel, however junior, should be able to live in a hotel/residential-college/stately-home environment so as to apply its energies as efficiently as possible to the work of the organisation.

I should like to correct what I said before. If we started with one research department, say theoretical physics or neurophysiology, and then added another, we would need to add to or enlarge the residential facilities, fully to cover the needs of all personal.

Workers relieving the imprisonment

copy of a letter

Well, to express my own position, I have always found it stressful and somewhat damaging to have to work with people who have some version of the normal worldview, which means they are antagonistic to us, and especially to me, because while other people here also suffer from our very bad social position, it may be less clear to them exactly why.

It has always been very clear to me from the time I was thrown out what I need to have in life and what I was suffering in being deprived of it. When we interact with outsiders we are always having to appear to accept their implicit assertion of social interpretations, i.e. that they only help us at all within social parameters, we are to be treated as less important and less to be worked for than socially set up institutions, etc.

Well, actually, it has been and still is pretty terrible for me. People sometimes say I shouldn’t complain of the ruin inflicted on my life by the ruined ‘education’. I’m still alive, they say.
I suppose imprisonment is a fairly good parallel as a situation in which one stays physically alive but is deprived of all other functions, and there are many examples in history of the imprisoned going out of their minds with the intensity of the claustrophobia and sensory deprivation (cf. A Tale of Two Cities).

Sensory deprivation is known to cause people intense distress and an urgent need to get out of it. On account of my IQ and channel capacity I am really seriously deprived without an extraordinary quantity of intellectual processing. Without it I am forced to remain on a painfully low energy level, although that may not seem out of the way by other people’s standards.

I need to be running at least one research department producing several streams of information so there is enough to think about, and, of course, in the living conditions of a residential college (hotel environment )so that I never have to break off the continuous scanning function. If this were going on, it might not be interrupted by a good many academic activities, such as university teaching, but it is interrupted, very painfully, by interacting with physical objects in ways that require concentration, or with other people, when you have to pay attention to their intractable psychologies, such as teaching in schools or working in offices.

I have a need for uninterrupted continuity when my mind is working at all, and in fact all the channels go on working continuously. People at Somerville commented on the way I would come up with an observation on something that had cropped up some time before, all the intervening conversation having been about other things, and they would realise I had been thinking about it all the time the other conversation had been going on.

Actually it takes me a lot of psychological ingenuity and memories of a higher level to remain reasonably functional and apparently tolerant of my position. It has been a long time since we got a new person and it seems increasingly difficult to get workers, perhaps because it is now much clearer that we are not a bunch of drop-out ‘enthusiasts’ who like living like this.

Now it has been so long since we got anything like a break that I don’t know whether I could, or how well I could, tolerate anyone working here other than full-time, as if they accepted the desperate urgency of our need, even if they don’t.

My only hope in life was to get on with taking exams young before people noticed and could mess it up. I used to say to my mother, ‘You should have made sure I took as many exams as possible as young as possible’, and she would say, ‘Oh, but people would have hated you.’ ‘They hate me anyway,’ I would say, ‘and I would rather be hated for having what I want than hated for still wanting it when I have been deprived of it and need their help in getting it back.’

The usual run of emails

Copy of a note to the person who manages emails to celiagreen.com:

Thank you for the emails you forwarded but they are depressing, as usual. The person with a fairly high IQ in Wigan, who says he can’t get on in modern society, does not, as usual, suggest coming to work, but tries to draw one into correspondence without sending any money, although we have made it clear enough that people can only find out about working here by coming on a provisional basis as voluntary workers. However, we have emailed him an invitation to the seminar and a notice about the seminar.

The CBC Radio Canada thing [wanting me for an interview at very short notice] is very rushed and subject to all sorts of negatives. As usual they want us to talk about lucid dreams when all we have to say is that we are being prevented from working on them, and what is being done by other people is very bad; as it doesn’t say it is live it is probably liable to editing, as was the last thing we did for CBC ages ago, so probably nothing significant we said would survive.

The irony of being "free"

Comments on being ‘free’ to do what ‘interests’ me

(copy of a letter)

Let us consider the amazing assertion by a philosopher at Somerville College that if I got a proper full-time salaried academic appointment I would be less free than as an unsalaried, statusless outcast.

What makes her think that I would value ‘freedom’ more than a social identity? I might well choose to sacrifice ‘freedom’, if I had any, for the sake of social status. I never expected, or wanted, to have to live without social status, and I was deeply grieved and shocked to find myself thrown out of society fifty years ago, not only without the Professorial status which I should have acquired at about 15, but without any status at all as an academic on a career track that could ever lead to a Professorship.

If, when I was thrown out 50 years ago, I had had the choice between (a) a Professorship, even with less than ideal residential hotel facilities, and (b) an equivalent salary, perfect hotel environment, and freedom to do whatever I liked within these conditions, but with no hope that what I did could ever secure for me any academic advancement, I would have settled for the Professorship.

Only if there was real hope of my ‘free’ but statusless environment leading to an ever-increasing scale of operations might I have considered it worth sacrificing the social identity of a Professor — which would have made (and still would make) one’s relations with society so much more ‘interesting’, to use that much-abused word. Even an expanding scale of operations as an identity-less freelance individual would have seemed sterile, in a certain way.

The model of the situation in which the ‘freedom’ of being unsalaried and statusless could appear preferable to a salaried Professorial position does not hold water, because if progressive and expanding work were ever possible, it would lead to social recognition and hence to academic reinstatement. So the idea of choosing a permanently exiled life in order to be ‘more free’ is an artificial one, and certainly never occurred to me, even when I hoped to be able to get a decent level of financial support from parapsychological sources.

I never actually considered the work I did manage to do as an outcast as sterile, in the sense of useless for making a return to an academic career, although it turned out to be so. The nostalgic pull towards a social identity was very strong. In practice, any possibility of opportunity for expansion appears to have been ruled out by my lack of identity.

The idea that I could prefer the ‘freedom’ provided by the bad, constricted and hopeless circumstances of the academic outcast to the much better circumstances of even imperfect Professorships is ludicrous and cruel.

I might have felt that the hotel-equivalent circumstances left something to be desired, but the salary would have provided me with enough to pay for at least a parttime housekeeper cum p.a., so I would have had at least the minimum conditions for getting something out of life.

A cruel pretence

(copy of a letter)

There is a very cruel pretence that the outcast professor is not suffering from being deprived of an institutional (hotel) environment and social recognition as a leading intellectual, i.e. as a person with a salaried and prestigious Professorship.

When I was thrown out fifty years ago I accepted that there was a brick wall in front of me and that all I could do was scrape at it, trying to make a tunnel through it. Everyone promoted the cruel fiction that I was being ‘free to follow my interests’. This was the worst possible slander of someone in my terrible position, because it represented me as not needing help (and I don’t mean ‘help’ in the form of counselling) in the form of money and people and support in getting money and people.

How do you suppose it feels, after fifty years of totally unrewarding toil in bad circumstances, trying to work towards an institutional (hotel) environment and an Oxbridge Professorship, to be told by a philosopher at Somerville that if I got back onto a salaried career track that could lead to a Professorship, I would be ‘less free’! The most violent possible rejection of all that constitutes one’s individuality. The most violent insult possible to add to grievous injury. And she, and all at Somerville, have slandered and even libelled me in this terrible way.

There should be recognition of this as a criminal act with a legal penalty. A suitable penalty would be that she should be condemned to come and work in my incipient and downtrodden independent university doing whatever she can most usefully do, probably filling in with the domestic and menial tasks, from the lack of staff to do which I am always suffering grievously. Also she should forfeit all her assets to contribute towards the funding which I need to build up the capital endowment of my university, which is still too painfully squeezed for me to be able to make use of my ability to do anything, let alone to function at an adequate energy level.

The web does us no good

(copy of a letter)

I am fairly sure that however much attention we may seem to get on the internet, it will never do us any good. It is one of those semi-permeable membranes that can never be broken through. We are just seen to be a different sort of being from socially recognised Professors with academic status and salary. At any rate, it has never yet done us any good.

People have come to work here (a few people — not enough, even if they had all stayed) only as a result of seeing my books on library shelves alongside books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who have the salary and social status of which we have been deprived. The only advantage I can see in our somewhat enlarged presence on the internet is that, if and when we manage to get one of our books (distress flares) onto a library shelf, some people may be familiar enough with my name to borrow it, hence reducing the likelihood that the library in question will quickly relegate it to the cellar or the scrapheap.

The article on lucid dreaming on Wikipedia is very low-grade, so that the association with that subject seems likely to do us harm rather than good. I have never yet been able to obtain academic status and funding to do the research that I saw, myself, as arising out of my initial demonstration that there was, in fact, a potential field of research.

One thing that makes me fairly sure that the internet is unlikely ever to do us any good is that people have always been keen on encouraging us to use it as a means of ‘publication’, getting people to pay for downloading, etc. I have always worried about anything other people encouraged me to do, and been pretty sure that what they most violently opposed was probably the right course to pursue.

Doing the washing-up

(copy of a letter)

You commented on the fact that "Mary Poppins", as you called our incipient potential associate, did some washing-up before she went away.

This is indeed a loaded issue and I will try to explain our position a bit more, because I hope that you, like any other permanent contact that we acquire, may one day pass on some of the right ideas about us to somebody who might be interested enough to come and work here themselves, even if only part-time or temporarily. Although in fact we could easily make use of several full-time people and suffer badly from our shortage of manpower.

In exile from an academic career, I have had no option but to work towards setting up an institutional environment of my own, and the most essential part of a college or research department is the domestic and caretaking staff for keeping the environment going within which intellectual work may eventually become possible.

So we do express the hope that anyone who comes to visit in order to get to know the situation better will be prepared to lend a hand with whatever work may be going on, and this is likely to be domestic, as it is not possible for people who are new to the situation to contribute constructively to office work or word-processing associated with correspondence or books in preparation.

I spent a long time talking to the two people who came, as one has to do with potential associates, and I talked quite a lot about work we had done in the past and how it was only lack of funding that had prevented us from continuing to develop various things. Also we gave them a meal at the pub and paid for their taxi back, because I do not want potential associates to feel out of pocket after coming to spend time here.

But in fact the washing up was all either of them had done on two visits, the first one quite long, during which I had spent several hours giving them information which they seemed to want to have, mostly about areas of research which I do not like thinking about. I have no interest in empty speculation when the data cannot be increased by actual research. I mean, when I am not being able to do any research — although some fictitious theorising, and fraudulent or rubbishy ‘research’, may be being done by other people with academic status and salaries.

If I did not stipulate that visitors have to be prepared to do a modicum of whatever is necessary, our lives could be totally occupied with entertaining people who are prepared to waste our time. And don’t worry, I never get a good deal out of it, usually I get an even worse one, because most of those who come to visit take care not to stay long enough to do even that much work, or for me to start saying anything I want to say.

In case you think we have a lot of money to spend on garden plants, remember that we are outcast intellectuals, the true underclass of the egalitarian society. We cannot afford holidays, or only the shortest and cheapest, occasionally, so we think it best to make our gardens interesting so we will not suffer too much from staying at home throughout the year. Also this has the effect of enhancing the value of our houses when we come to sell them.

You know I would still be willing to lend you some money and help you make capital gains in a Pillings ISA, if you would ever like that. This is something I am prepared to do for any fairly permanent contact that we can manage to get.

It is very difficult to get people to realise that there could be any advantages in coming to work here because the modern world is anti-capitalist (as well as anti-ability).

In fact, since we are attempting to make academic careers without being able to derive any status or salary from society by giving tutorials and lectures or by doing research, we have to substitute investment for those things as a source of income, and it is a very stressful and time-consuming way of making a living. Also of course we have to pay for many facilities for ourselves which non-exiled academics are provided with. Oxbridge colleges still provide their resident academics with automatic dining hall (which implies washing up) facilities. In addition to which we have to pay for the publication of our own books. When I finished my D.Phil. philosophy thesis, Oxford University Press refused to publish it, which it would have been almost certain to do if I had been a Professor or even held any lesser appointment. My thesis was radically undermining of a large part of what is being produced worldwide by salaried academic philosophers – there are said to be 10,000 of them in America alone.

Therefore, although I got the D.Phil. for the thesis, it was largely ignored, except that its ideas were reproduced by some salaried philosophers, twisting them to produce a quite different conclusion.

Of course, you may say that the reason I do not have a Professorship, or any other statusful and salaried academic appointment, is that it was always clear that I was liable to write theses which would not be found congenial by a majority of modern philosophers.

More about the opposition

(copy of a letter)

I said we have to try to get value for money when anyone comes to work here, and I suppose I may be slandered as wanting people to work hard for low pay. But actually, of course, surrounded by a hostile society as I have been, it has been almost impossible for me to get anyone to do anything and what I have actually paid out for it in terms of money and effort has been very high.

This is part of what people would understand much better if they had any sort of continuous contact with us and did not just stay as far away as possible where they can maintain fictional social interpretations of our position.

I was starting from absolute scratch and knew that I would need to build up a lot of capital to create the most minimal residential college environment for myself. So although I have done much better than people expected, and they regret the minimal viability I have achieved, I still need to think in terms of capital progress, and it is still very seldom possible to make it, in spite of the very modest improvements in our position, which have been achieved in the teeth of the most violent opposition. Violent, that is, when there seemed to be any chance of my getting any improvement in my position in terms of either money or people.

So now the high-IQ ghetto can just about support itself in reasonable physical health, but without having enough manpower either to be academically productive or for life to be in any sense rewarding for us; it is still a case of trying to prevent everyone from going downhill as a result of trying too hard to do more than is really possible, because of course we feel that it is only by being as conspicuous as possible (sending up distress flares) that we have any hope of bringing ourselves and our need for workers and supporters to the attention of the very few sufficiently exceptional people who could bring themselves to have anything to do with us.

Surviving physically without sending up distress flares is really more than we can manage, so it is always easy for people to get run down trying too hard, as in the case of the recent publication of Fabian’s book, which was as abortive as usual.

We can’t expect anyone to find our ideas congenial; everyone has been brought up in modern oppressive society and believes in society, i.e. in the oppression of the individual. However, we are quite respectable people (on old-fashioned terms) and it is not illegal to criticise the prevailing ideology, although it arouses covert persecution. One has to think oneself lucky that the persecution is not of the overt variety which might result in one finding oneself in a forced labour camp.

Drinks party

We gave another drinks party, talking about our real position and need for people; audience totally unresponsive, as usual, in fact probably internally agaces.

Fabian says: there is no way we can get our position across to the outside world. We will not get anyone to work for us who is any good except for a miracle.

How does he know that?

I knew, even before I was thrown out, that there was no sympathy being expressed for the predicament of outcast intellectuals, but I did not foresee that there would be none at all, in fact hostility as soon as people guessed at one’s true position.

So, no, I have never thought it possible for a person like me to have even a tolerable, as opposed to excruciatingly intolerable, life, outside of a high-flying career in a university. In exile from it I have never been able to contemplate earning money in any other way, and I have had to aim at recreating for myself conditions identical with those which I should have been having in the best sort of university career.

The first essential has always been to work towards the hotel environment of a residential college, plus administrative and secretarial facilities.

As this appears to be an immediate turn-off to people, we have to try to publicise ourselves as widely as possible, to find the very unusual, miraculous people who might actually want to help us. In this we are opposed by social forces which wish us to remain as inconspicuous as possible so that it remains maximally easy for our situation to be misinterpreted by the largest possible proportion of the population.

The high-IQ ghetto

(copy of a letter)

We here, the high IQ ghetto, are in a heavily disadvantaged position in modern society. We struggle against adversity as best we can, but it makes it almost impossible for people here to have any normal relations with their families and former or potential friends.

Everyone who believes in the modern ideology - which is everybody - knows that we are not to get the smallest particle of real help, but we may be subjected to gratuitous obstruction and slanders ad lib. But they want people here to continue to interact socially as if there was nothing to be made up for, and as if the people here accepted that they should be treated in the ways they are and have been.

When one is seriously up against it, one cannot do this. It is a very painful and depressing experience to interact with people who could be helping one in various ways and are not doing so.

So far as I am concerned, I found it too painful to meet any of my college ‘friends’ after I had been thrown out, because it was too painful to ask them for money and be refused, or to meet them and refrain from asking them for money. Only spontaneous offers on their part could have opened the way to social interaction.

Later (decades later) I had crawled up the side of the pit into which I had been thrown far enough to face the refusal that would result when I asked them for money or to come and work here. Then I started to invite them, but none of them were willing to meet me, except in noisy and protective social circumstances which would inhibit my expositions of my position, and where they would have potted palms readily available to hide behind as a means of escape.