Right and wrong ways of reacting to slander

What none of my college or other ‘friends’ have done for me, and are still not doing.

In the first place, they could have come to work for me themselves, even if only in vacations from their salaried jobs. Whether they did so themselves or not, they could have encouraged their sons and daughters, and any other younger friends and relatives, to come and work in their vacations, and encouraged them also to think in terms of making a permanent career with me.

Even if they had never given me any help throughout their working lives, one might have expected that when they retired they might feel they had more freedom to do so.

They could have moved nearby, and perhaps bought houses with spare rooms which could be used by my struggling organisation as storage rooms or office rooms. Or if they did not want to move nearby, they might have been suffiently well off(since at least some of them would have inheritances to add to their own savings) to buy second or holiday homes in or near Cuddesdon.

They would not need to live in these houses themselves for us to derive some benefit from them as extra space. If they did live in them, occasionally or continuously, they could also come and do voluntary work for us, and/or act as ‘supporters’ in fund-raising activities and appeals to specific potential donors. Or, of course, they could contribute financial support themselves, and leave money or assets in their wills.

Especially those who have no children to leave it to, and I know of several who do not, and especially those who failed to oppose the slanderous gossip that always arose around me.

‘Someone says her father is pushing her?’ anyone should have said on hearing it. ‘It is no business of ours. One should not pass on slander that may be untrue. Whether true or not, slanders of that kind can be extremely damaging and do untold harm to the lives of those who are gossiped about. Personally, I will not indulge in considering such things for a moment.’

Those who failed to stand up for me and my parents in this way should now realise how wrong they were not to do so, and should feel all the more moral obligation to make reparation to me now, since I am still struggling to restore myself to a tolerable and productive position in life.

Open letter to a former associate – an Oxford classics graduate

We were sorry when you went away. You know we had a high opinion of your abilities and you were a tremendous asset. Since you left things have gradually got better in certain ways (not because of your having left, of course), and we regretted that, having been with us for so long through many difficult years, you left before we could provide you with even the advantages with which we are now able to provide people.

Building up in so antagonistic a society has been very slow and painful, and above all we find it extremely difficult to get people to work here for any length of time. We have to pay what seems to us quite a high hourly rate for any work we do get, and I always regret it when we pay people who are nothing to do with us, when we would prefer to think that we were helping to improve the position of someone who might be permanent.

If you were to move to Cuddesdon I think we could help you to become increasingly prosperous financially, and we are always aiming to help people here to become property owners. When I remember the sorts of things which you did when you were here before, and appeared not to mind doing too much, I think that any of these things would be extremely valuable to us now, and they are particularly difficult to get people to do, as everyone nowadays seems to be thinking in terms of pretentious and ostensibly highly skilled things, which they are not in fact good at.

We remember that you are a car driver and that could be very useful.

I hope you will consider coming. We would try to make things as good as possible for you if you did. Also please mention us when you are talking to anybody else. I think there are a lot of people these days struggling to get by on pensions, benefits, or otherwise, who could supplement their income fairly painlessly by coming to live nearby and doing a few hours a day of regular work (or more hours, up to full time, if they wanted to).

An appeal to Harvard

I try to know as little as possible about what research or pseudo-research is being done in subjects in which I am being prevented from doing research myself, including (and especially) those which were initiated by our pioneering work in those fields. The work we did when we had the Cecil King money was intended to obtain funding for further work in those fields in circumstances equivalent to those enjoyed by salaried academics, either immediately associated with an adequate appointment in a university, or leading to one as rapidly as possible.

Actually the work on out-of-the-body experiences and lucid dreams, although as groundbreaking as it could possibly be in such bad and constricted circumstances, led to no positive result for me at all.

Instead, research started to be done in these areas by academics who already had salary, status and access to facilities etc.

Now I see, blood-boilingly as usual, an item in the Daily Mail about ‘research’ on lucid dreams at Harvard, etc. What their psychological advantages are supposed to be, and what sort of people are supposed to have them.

I have already put on our website a request for all those who have ‘worked’ on lucid dreams, as part of a normal salaried career, to make a contribution of at least £1000 per annum towards supporting me and enabling me eventually to do something, bearing in mind that I have to provide myself with an institutional environment and ancillary staff.

I hereby make a further appeal to those researchers at Harvard who are able to make comfortable careers in an area that probably would not exist at all without my efforts, to make a similar contribution, in recognition of the injustice which keeps me in a position of constriction and inability to develop the area which I pioneered.

I also appeal to anyone interested in the advancement of scientific knowledge to contribute as substantially as possible to the costs of setting up a research department within my organisation.

Tale told by an idiot (Pt. 3)

It should go without saying, but perhaps it is as well to repeat, that there had been no sign of any intention to set up a research project in Oxford or elsewhere, in the area which I was proposing, until it became necessary to block mine. None of the retired professors nominated by Rosalind Heywood had shown any inclination to exert themselves in such a way, and if it had been necessary to go ahead with Rosalind’s plan (i.e. if I had not withdrawn from it), I think she might have found some or all of those named very reluctant to play any part in it. When, later, she wanted to find rivals to lay claim to Cecil King’s money, so that I would not get any more of it, she found this very difficult and it took her some time to persuade John Beloff to do a small piece of research on a hypnotic subject, to support her contention that Cecil King should not continue to give money to my organisation, but should scatter his money widely among people with academic status, although they were actually well enough set up already to have been doing some research if they had wished to do so.

What she could, and did, easily succeed in doing was to generate indignant opposition to the idea of my being so presumptuous as to do anything at all, so that the population of those who had any association with the SPR became energetic in blocking my applications for funding from any source, both by encouraging Professor Hardy to stand firmly in my light, and by running me down to any potential source of funding.

I was amazed and also, in the circumstances of my life, horrified that motivation to obstruct me could be so easily and universally aroused. Lady Faith Culme-Seymour, for example, came to Oxford to visit Hardy and express enthusiasm for his lethargic intentions, and also to attempt to persuade me to do his work for him, for no money. This showed an energy and willingness to exert herself which was rare among SPR members, except when they were opposing me. I wondered why she should feel so strongly that someone who had once been thrown out by the university should never be allowed to do any work which might establish their claim to re-entry to an academic career. It was easier to understand the antagonism to me which was shown by Professor Hardy himself. He had academic status and I did not and, under the influence of Rosalind Heywood, he seemed to regard it as an insult to academic status in general, and hence to his own, that I should attempt to do anything on my own initiative, without having received instructions to do so from on high.

Lady Faith, on the other hand, was an aristocrat with no academic pretensions. Until recently, people of her class had done whatever they could afford to do in the way of research, whenever they felt like it. She might even have regarded me as one of the disadvantaged poor, whose failure to get a research scholarship and an academic career could be ascribed to my having attended low-grade schools. In fact, however, she and everyone else in a similar position hastened to join Rosalind in her energetic campaign to ensure that it was impossible for me to obtain money from any source.

As has already been mentioned, it was not only the case that I had no salary from an academic career, which was the only sort of career I could have, but also I could not even draw income support as my ruined education had left me without a usable qualification, i.e. one that would be regarded as justifying me in applying for any university appointment that I might be able to accept.

I was, and continue to be, very shocked that people who were well set up in life and had no apparent reason for doing me down should evince such obviously destructive motivation towards someone in as bad a position as I was.

Tale told by an idiot (Pt. 2)

This is a continuation of an earlier post about my attempts to set up a research organisation in Oxford.

When I withdrew from the plan for a research institute in which I was to be a secretary with no possible motivation for being so (I was to be offered neither a salary out of which I could have saved money towards my institutional environment of the future, nor any suggestion that what I did would in any way enhance my claims to re-enter an academic career in a university) I did not expect this to cause offence. Surely I had every right not to wish to participate in a project so different from that which I had originally proposed and for which Salter and Sir George had been prepared to seek support.

However, it did lead to offence being taken by Rosalind Heywood, which she broadcast in her inimitable fashion. I can only suppose that she managed to make it sound as though I had turned down an absolutely wonderful proposal which was just what a young and statusless person should have wanted.

In fact, she must have made the proposal expressly so that I would turn it down and it could be regarded as a cause of offence. If she had really hoped I might accept it, she would have incorporated something which might attract me, such as a suggestion (however fictional) that one of the retired professors would be likely to support me in getting a Fellowship at his college, but she did not.

It would seem that my initial proposals for a research institute in Oxford were considered too threatening, in that the Oxford location would make it likely to attract some publicity and hence, perhaps, some financial support which would make me able to do something and make my life less intolerable.

Reacting to this risk, Rosalind superimposed her entirely different proposals on my original ones. When I, foreseeably, would have nothing to do with them, the resulting outrage was sufficient to ensure that all previous plans to seek funding for my plan were aborted. Rosalind was a formidable strategist.

So I was left with my original constitution but no money. The next few years were very bad but I had no alternative but to go ahead, although it now appeared that my hopes of financial support or of re-access to a university career had been definitively destroyed. Everyone joined in the plan to drive me out of Oxford by squeezing me to death.

As an unforeseeable but partial and temporary break, Cecil King came out of the blue and provided a modicum of funding. This, I suppose, re-ignited the original fear that an Oxford location might attract support. Cecil King was quickly turned against us, and the plan for Professor Hardy’s research centre came into being – in Oxford, as similar as possible to my organisation, but with a statusful person at its head, so designed to block any possibility of funding that might otherwise have come to me.

An invitation to give a lecture

Copy of a reply to an academic who invited me to give a philosophy lecture

Dear Dr ...

Thank you for your invitation to give a lecture for the cultural season at the ... academy.

However, I am afraid I have to decline the invitation, as I am far too occupied with supporting myself by my own efforts. We are totally unfunded by any organisation or individual, academic or otherwise, and my colleagues and I have to support ourselves and the institutional framework by investment. This takes up most of our time and energy.

My response might be different if the academy were prepared to make a significant donation to Oxford Forum which would go towards covering our ongoing costs.

If, as you say, you admire my opinions, and wish me to be able to express them, I would be very grateful if you would encourage people and organisations to give me financial support. I am currently being prevented from publishing books or taking part in academic events by complete lack of funding.

Thank you again for your invitation.

With kind regards, etc.

More about how to do research

What I last wrote about “B” reminded me of another indication of how much less effective in its methods the Hardy Centre was than us.

One day B brought in to the Department* a collection of reports of would-be religious experiences, and asked those present to see whether they could pick out the subjects with a psychiatric history. Only Charles was able to do this; nobody else could do it at all, and it did not appear that B or anyone else at the Hardy Centre would know how to do this.

The first time I told an academic about this some years ago, they said, “How can you tell?” (which ones are psychiatric). And I said it depended on being aware of psychological dimensions which were not recognised in modern psychology.

People often ask questions like this in relation to fields of research which one can see how to make progress in, as if anything one knows about them must be so simple and obvious that it can be explained to them in one sentence. Or, maybe, that it must be so subtle and complicated that nobody could understand it, including myself.

Actually, I had very extensive information about psychological dimensions which might be relevant, which I had acquired by surviving the psychological attacks on me in the course of my ‘education’, by absorbing the past history of the Society for Psychical Research and the life experience of Salter and Sir George, by reading old-fashioned psychology and modern psychiatry, and by interviewing the subjects who came into the SPR office to report experiences, including some who clearly were classifiably psychotic.

What is recognised in the personality tests of modern experimental psychology is very limited, the object being to recognise as the norm the psychology of a decentralised person with an IQ of 100. In order to extend the range of personality factors that could be taken into account, it would be necessary to set up new questionnaires from scratch, which would be very time and labour intensive. Most tests are not standardised for different levels of IQ, although some are standardised for different occupations.

It is not only the case that I had discovered a lot more about psychology than had been known previously, but also that modern experimental psychology had deliberately reduced its range, so that the potentially threatening parts of the most enlightened pre-1945 psychology were excluded. (Hence the name ‘Experimental Psychology’ to distinguish it from old-fashioned ‘Psychology’. )

* Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology

How to do research

What I wrote about Professor Hardy recently reminded me that “B” had said how impressive he had found the books we wrote on the basis of our appeals for cases, showing how much information we had got out of them. Tacitly he admitted that the Hardy Centre had, in contrast, really got next to nothing out of its appeal for cases of religious experiences.

“B“ was another person (with a degree in psychology) who was employed by Professor Hardy as an assistant, to avoid employing either me or Charles, since I had rejected the constant approaches which were made to persuade me to work for Hardy for nothing, and especially to get something out of the cases which lay around in boxes.

So perhaps I ought to explain how remarkable was what I derived from the work that was possible within the very constricted funding provided by Cecil King. Nobody else could have produced anything so constructive even by spending far more money and working in far better circumstances than I was forced to do.

Plenty of people with (at least fairly) high IQs and academic status had known about the phenomena as reported, without recognising the various types into which they could be classified, and how they might be related.

This work should have been seen, and still should be seen, as ample justification for providing me with a professorship and at least one research department within which further research could proceed within the areas that had been opened up.

In fact, the breakthroughs that had been made in defining previously unrecognised areas were acknowledged only in the sense that “research” in those nominal areas was initiated, and carried out by people who already had academic salary and status and who were sufficiently identified with the modern outlook to avoid any sensitive issues. On the other hand, I and my associates were kept statusless, unsalaried and deprived of support in any form.

Reflections on Professor Sir Alister Hardy, founder of the Religious Experiences Research Centre

If you are motivated to believe that innate ability does not exist and all ability is the result of social interaction, then it is important to keep people who have been obviously precocious deprived of opportunity.

When Professor Sir Alister Hardy gave a paid research job to someone with a PhD in law so that he could make something of the boxes of case reports (of religious experiences) which had been received in response to an appeal superficially resembling those which I had previously made, he did not even attempt to contribute suggestions about how they were to be analysed. This was in the early Seventies, a few years after he had founded the Religious Experiences Research Unit (as the Religious Experiences Research Centre was then called) based at Manchester College, Oxford.

The person he employed as paid Research Assistant - without offering the job to either me or Dr Charles McCreery, who had extensive knowledge of all relevant areas as well as previous experience of analysing our own appeals, although not while holding an academic appointment - was a PhD in law, with no relevant knowledge or experience. But no doubt Hardy and his advisors, who included Rosalind Heywood and Dame Janet Vaughan of Somerville, thought no one could criticise him for appointing someone with a PhD instead of me, who had only a BLitt. All that counts is academic status. His qualification was in nothing relevant, and mine was as relevant as possible, although the work I had done in getting it had provided only a small part of the information which I had acquired in areas which were actually relevant.

Although Dr McCreery did not have a research degree at that time, he also was really much better qualified than the PhD in law, since he had a degree in Experimental Psychology (supposedly relevant, although really not much, though certainly more relevant than law) as well as the extra information which he had acquired in working with me on the research I was able to do while partially funded by the King money, including the appeals for cases.

The PhD in law who was hired was just waved at the boxes of cases and left alone to do whatever he could think of. He conceived the idea of running the cases through a computer to analyse the frequency with which certain words occurred, but I never heard that he had any idea which words might be more relevant than any others.

But the object of the exercise was to keep me destitute and inactive, and it succeeded in that.

A token of good faith

Someone who had contacted us to say they were coming to one of our Tuesday afternoon coffee meetings* emailed us the day before the meeting to ask if she could bring "my friend [X]", without giving any information about X. As X happens to be the name of a well-known American academic blogger, we replied as follows.

Dear __
Yes, please bring the taxi receipt and we will reimburse you.
Yes, it is fine to bring your friend. However, I should mention that where salaried academics are concerned, we are only willing to meet them if they first make a donation of £1,000 (or more). The coffee meetings are intended primarily for people of student age. While we are happy in principle to meet other academics, you will understand that it is potentially invidious and galling for us to meet those who have managed to survive the negative aspects of contemporary academia, whether through luck or through lowering their standards, and who are not giving us any support either by donations or by coming to work here in vacations.
We are in the position of intellectuals unjustly exiled from academia and having to support themselves by their own efforts. It seems reasonable to us to expect fellow intellectuals inside the system who are financially comfortable to make a token contribution to our efforts, if they want to interact with us.

The person in question responded by saying she refused to come without her friend, and so would not come at all.

The policy described is one we have applied for many years, and which we shall continue to apply until such time as we are in a comparable position to salaried academics, of being paid for being intellectually productive rather than having to spend almost all our time maintaining ourselves, and our embryonic organisation, at a minimum subsistence level.

* These are currently being held weekly on Tuesdays at 4.30 pm. For more details, email cgoxfordforum@yahoo.co.uk

Copy of a letter to recent lottery winners

Dear Justine Laycock and Nigel Page,

I read in a recent Daily Mail that you have won £56 million on the lottery.

You may be considering various charities and other causes to donate some of your winnings to. I would like to suggest that you consider us.

You have possibly heard about the ‘Climategate’ scandal, in which it was revealed that the investigation of climate change by British universities is not being carried out with the high standards of objectivity and impartial devotion to truth that one might have hoped for.

Unfortunately, this decline in standards has become a feature of academia in general. Because of government pressure, and an ideology which regards getting the ‘morally correct’ result as more important than whether it is true, much of what the universities produce is now worse than useless. In some fields, such as philosophy or economics, their net contribution is clearly negative.

Modern culture is increasingly being distorted by the large role played by the state. It needs to regain the participation of private patronage, as used to happen in the past.

Oxford Forum is a research organization which was set up to oppose increasing ideological bias in mainstream academia. Its aim is to expand into an independent college cum university which would generate and publish research in several areas including philosophy, the psychology and physiology of perception, and theoretical physics. We are actively seeking potential patrons to provide funding for its activities.

One way in which someone could help our efforts in a way that would also benefit themselves is to purchase properties in the area where we are based, and allow us to use them while they were not actually living in them. The area near us is regarded as a good area for investing in property.

I hope you may consider my suggestions.

The bloodless revolution

Copy of a letter to a professor of philosophy

As a person with socially conferred status, hence both agent and beneficiary of the ideology of the oppressive society, you should wish to visit us frequently to hear about the realities of modern society as perceived by those who are its victims.

I first said long ago, soon after being thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’, that every feature of modern society can be accounted for by motivation to make life as difficult as possible for someone exactly like me, and hence to ensure that they could not use their ability in any progressive or constructive way.

It amazes me that the revolution in everyone’s ways of thinking and interpreting situations has been so universal. Of course no previous revolution has had the advantages of both universal ‘education’ (indoctrination) and of broadcasting media pumping out propaganda. But is that the only reason for so wholehearted a switch to an oppressive belief system? Independent and critical thought is not impossible, even if not what human psychology is principally programmed to do.

Just after the war, in the late 1940s, what had happened was said to be the "bloodless revolution”. Less physical blood on the streets, but perhaps no less cruelty and sadistically caused suffering, only less obvious to the naked eye.

The true raison d’etre of state education, including at university level, is to destroy people like me. Directly, by preventing them from getting into the sort of career they need to have. Indirectly, by creating a population that will give them no help in any way in recovering from their destitute and outcast position, knowing that they should not give them money, help them get into socially statusful positions, nor do any work for them in any useful way.

Any way, that is, that would “make their lives easier” as a highly-paid fundraising consultant said to me, accounting for why he would only make up applications to support complete cut-price research projects which would place us (already exhausted and overworked) under an obligation to do even more work of an unsuitable and damaging kind, instead of contributing even slightly to the alleviation of our position, so that we might be able to be slightly more intellectually productive in a way that was less painfully damaging, even if in no way permitting a sense of well-being.

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Appeal to lucid dream researchers

As explained in the previous post, my choice of lucid dreams as a research topic was determined by what I thought was most likely to get me reinstated as a salaried academic. Not only did my work on the topic fail to achieve this objective, but I found to my chagrin that it was being used by other people as a basis for developing their careers without this doing me the slightest good.

Many years later I wrote an open letter appealing to all those who had worked on the topic after me, to contribute some of their salary to relieving my position of exile and frustration.

I have now put this appeal on my website.

The disadvantaged underclass

copy of a letter to a visitor

We are looking forward to meeting you on Monday. The reason that we are very keen on getting to know people, but seldom can, is that we are in an anomalous and outcast position and want to make known our need for associates, moral and financial supporters, voluntary and paid workers, temporary, occasional, potentially permanent and long term.

But we are the disadvantaged underclass of modern society and no one wants to hear us say this. If we do meet anyone, saying this is usually sufficient to put an end to the acquaintance.

Typical interchange:

"We are badly in need of help and maybe you could tell your group with such and such interests about us, as they are prepared to do voluntary work in other contexts, so some of them might work for us."

Answer:

"You are not in need of help. You are physically alive/you have written some books/you get all the moral support you need out of one another. Goodbye. I need to leave immediately."

There are many elements in our situation which are at variance with, or ruled out of consideration by, the dominant fictitious ideology. We will not be able to put in much background in our meeting on Monday, so I am now writing a few of the most essential and unacceptable things in advance of meeting you.

We do not subscribe to any part of the modern received ideology. I am old enough, and was precocious enough, to have effectively lived in the pre-socialist world for quite a long time, but in 1945 it came in fast enough and hard enough to ruin my education and not only my life, but those of my parents. The forces that had ruined my education were continuously operative in preventing my recovery from my outcast situation when I had been thrown out at the end of the ruined "education" with a second class degree (i.e. no degree at all, only a disqualification), no research scholarship, and with the lives of both my parents ruined by the breakdown of my father's health.

I am still completely alienated from society, in that I still derive no feedback from it in any way for anything I have been able to do; I do not regard this as an acceptable situation and I need help in working towards a situation in which I can remedy it. If people do not give me any help themselves, I hope that they will at least help me by publicising my needs to anyone who might be free to give us some of the help we need and who might even derive some advantage themselves from a long-term (or short-term) association with us.

Capital, freedom and the King's head

Copy of a reply to an email from a person living overseas, who appears to have been a fan of my books for some years. What I have written is of general relevance to people who might consider coming.

I gather you are thinking of coming to this country. There are problems associated with someone coming from outside the EU, and I am afraid we could not give you any help with them. Things are very difficult these days with all the restrictions on personal liberty that have arisen. We are extremely overworked as it is. You would have to solve these problems for yourself, if at all.

The idea has been widely encouraged, in this country and elsewhere, that the difficulties of becoming sufficiently independent to do what you want to do by building up capital (if you have not inherited enough without building it up for yourself) can be avoided by accepting an impoverished life and finding something ‘creative’ or ‘interesting’ to do within it.

I do not myself subscribe to this idea, although unfortunately I think that some people have taken my books as providing support for it.

If anyone wants to come and form an association with us, it is very desirable that they first build up enough capital, by saving out of income if necessary, to get themselves to Oxford in a trouble-free way and pay for rented accommodation for themselves near to us.

It is only by building up money for oneself that one increases one’s freedom of action, which includes freedom from social interference.

In the pre-1945 world, saving money had a numinous respectability. Children had money-boxes, provided by the Post Office, with the King’s head on the front. When the boxes were opened, the coins could be used to buy savings stamps or savings certificates, which were stuck into books with the child’s name on the front, encouraging him to think of his capital – built up by saving – as his territory and as an extension of himself.

Now capital is seen as faintly immoral, and idealistic young people are encouraged to believe it would be better if it was not in the hands of private individuals at all.

Picking one's way through the debris

copy of a letter to a person who came to one of my seminars

You seemed to understand why what I say in my books, and my outlook in general, arouses such hostility and makes me an Outsider. If I meet you again I hope you might explain it to me because, however odd it seems to you, I do not actually see anything outrageous in it. I am just, as I always was, a perfectly respectable bourgeois capitalist, and since my official ‘education’ left me excluded from an academic career, it seemed to me obvious and inevitable that I would proceed to try to build up an academic institution (an independent university) around myself. But, of course, by now I am familiar with the fact that this arouses extreme hostility.

Nowadays, practically everyone takes socialism for granted and discussions proceed within that context, so my views are regarded as ‘extreme’ although they are more or less what everybody else took for granted before the socialist ideology became dominant. A crucial date was 1945, when the ‘Welfare State’ (the Oppressive State) was initiated, which was also when I started attending the Ursuline High School, aged 10.

You say that I said in some book that existential psychology is optimistic. That is a very vague statement, especially as there is so little existential psychology around, and it is probably only true at all of a fairly advanced sort of psychology with considerable awareness of the existential situation.

So it is more meaningful to say what is the case so far as I personally am concerned. I certainly have no optimism at all about developments in the society around me, or about my chances of making any progress that depends on any response or feedback from the social environment, which becomes ever more hostile and unfavourable to my efforts to improve my position and become intellectually productive. And leaving myself out of it, the global future appears unsavoury and uninteresting, wiping out the advantages of the recent brief period of Western civilisation. The world appears to be ‘progressing’ towards a type of global communism, via terrorism and street riots, so far as I can tell from the French television news.

Nevertheless, it is true that I have an underlying optimism which enables me to keep going, and to keep hoping that I can pick my way through the falling debris of society, and even hope to find ways of improving my position by trying (among other things) to appeal to outsiders for financial support. The deterioration of society around us makes it even more difficult for us to progress, and thus even more urgent for us to appeal as widely as possible for the financial support we need, as well as for people to come and work here, and for moral support of all kinds.

Adler and modern society

If there were any principle of permitting expression of all valid points of view, then we would have a claim on financial support and social recognition for our squashed and suppressed philosophy department.

But why should one expect that to be the case? Neither Nazi Germany nor Marxist Russia permitted the expression of views critical of their ideology, so why should socialist Britain? In fact socialist America and Europe as well. We have never had any interest taken by any overseas university in the possibility of setting us up properly with funding and status.

Why should a state-financed system have any interest at all in providing opportunity for intellectual activity of any kind? Both Nazi Germany and communist Russia successfully eliminated contributions to culture from relatively high-IQ sections of the population and reduced them in numbers. This was not explicitly stated as the real object of the exercise, but should one expect any ideological movement openly to state its real aims and objects?

As Adler said (but it applies more precisely to the users of public money – freedom confiscated from individuals – than to the individuals who may be left with very limited resources) what someone is aiming at in life may be more realistically inferred from the situations he consistently brings about than from his verbal protestations.

Accepting that the society in which I live is aiming to destroy people like me, which seems the only realistic conclusion, it is no surprise that my life is still so bad.

The genius of the proletariat

I think that statusful agents of the collective should want to visit the least fortunate members of society to hear how they experience the difficulties of their position. But I know that this is an old-fashioned idea which seems natural to me because I remember pre-Marxist society, and it has no applicability within the current quasi-Marxist society in which everyone, even those old enough and middle-class enough to remember society before the revolution, has converted to the new religion and regards themselves as agents of it.

The idea that innate ability is to be done down and suppressed has always been intrinsic to communist ideology. This is a quotation from a book about Marxism which shows that Trotsky had this idea.

The proletariat, [Trotsky] argued, could not produce any culture at the present time because it was not educated, and, as for the future, socialist society would not create a class culture of any sort but would raise the whole of human culture to new levels. The dictatorship of the proletariat was only a short, transient phase after which the glorious classless society would set in – a society of supermen, any one of whom could become the intellectual equal of Aristotle, Goethe, or Marx. *

What such ideas mean in practice, in Britain today and for at least the last 60 years, is that those who have shown any signs of the sort of ability that makes them potential geniuses (i.e. who might do something noticeable if not prevented from doing so) are thrown down and out, and kept down and out.

* L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, 1978, p 52.

Letter to a Professor

Well, of course, we need (and should be getting) help from many points of view to prevent me being prevented from contributing on an adequate scale (or, indeed, any scale at all) to the many areas now regarded as ‘academic’. Urgent though those needs are, please do not lose sight of the fact that my most urgent priority is still to get started on my 40-year academic career within a socially accredited university. I have explained to you how I was prevented in doing this by hostility and opposition when I was first thrown out by Somerville half a century ago.

The passage of 50 years makes it not less, but exponentially more, urgent, to get started immediately.

The same is true of some of my associates; the reason we are not applying for Professorships on their behalf at present is our extreme shortage of manpower, which is far below the minimum necessary for the very smallest residential college.

As a person who has everything in life from the lack of which everyone here is suffering so badly, academic status, salary, opportunity to contribute and direct work in several areas, and who knows about a person in a state of grievous deprivation, who has been prevented for fifty years from getting started on the career they need to have, you should recognise an obligation to help me in every way possible to get into the position out of which I was cheated by the hostility aroused by my ability.

Now I know that as an agent and beneficiary of the oppressive society you do not wish to do anything against the collective will of that society, like everyone else from whom I have sought help and not obtained it, and often received active opposition instead.

Nevertheless it is possible to envisage an ought which is not recognised by the society in which one finds oneself living, and both I and the others who are here with me think that you should feel an obligation to give help to me/us, and should act upon it.

On being "influential"

I would like to comment on the word ‘influential’ in one of my testimonials, in the phrase ‘influential published work on abnormal perceptual states’. This implies that the ‘research work’ which has been done, and the books and other material which have been written, in areas nominally related to those in which I attempted to start working myself, is in some way meaningful as a consequence of it. It is true that much of it may be regarded as resulting from my initial work in the sense that it is highly unlikely that it would have been done if my work had not been published, but it was no substitute for what my colleagues and I would have done, and would still start to do as soon as not prevented from doing so by lack of financial support.

It has always been a line of academics to taunt and insult me, statusless and unsalaried as I was (and still am), by describing me as ‘free to follow my interests’.

The system of social interpretation to be followed in the oppressive society is universally known and applied. Whenever we meet or interact with potential supporters and associates, which is usually a very brief encounter and generally abortive, they may ask what we have ‘done’ or ‘are doing’, and when they can identify an area of work by name they start to tell us about rubbish that is being ‘done’ in that nominal area. We ask them to stop telling us about this, or sending us provocative and irritating reports, as we are not even in a position to publish our criticisms of it, which we would do if we were adequately rewarded with salary and status for doing so, although being able to criticise other people’s work would still be no substitute for being able to get on with what we would do ourselves if not kept rigorously deprived of opportunity.

Or else they just start to put on a phoney show of ‘fascination’ as if that was meant to ingratiate themselves with us, when they are doing nothing to contribute either money or work to our constricted position, nor to publicise our need for such things among their contacts.