Comments on modern psychology – comparison of Princess Diana with the Queen Mother (continued)

To make the obvious explicit in the case of Princess Diana contrasted with the Queen Mother, the reason I say I find modern psychology incomprehensible is that I can quite easily imagine myself behaving as the Queen Mother did, and never giving away anything that the royal family would not consider it to be in their interests to have given away. But I cannot imagine at all the psychological events that went into Diana's very damaging public discussion of Prince Charles, to whom she was married. And yet I suppose a lot of people can imagine this, since such betrayals of confidence appear to go on all the time in modern society, at all social levels, so I suppose that there is no longer any such thing as a concept of something being in confidence between individuals.

From the television dramas one gathers that it is considered interesting and attractive to promise not to give something away, and then to do so, which shows there is an awareness that you do not have to keep your word, although you may have led someone to believe (more fools they) that they can rely on you to do so.

When people do insist on not giving away information about someone, this is virtually always portrayed as misguided. They are covering up for a criminal or pervert in withholding information from police or doctors, setting other people at risk and preventing the criminal or pervert from getting the punishment he deserves or the "help" which he needs.

Cases almost never occur in the television dramas in which an individual is protected by discretion from wrongful persecution by agents of the collective.

I say "almost" never because there was a case recently in which a policeman threw away a cassette which might have incriminated someone. But the "someone" was a doctor, hence "good". The crime of which the doctor might have been convicted was (so far as I could gather from a very inattentive observation of the unattractive episode) that of assisting a suicide in framing someone on whom he wished to take revenge, so that they would be supposed to have murdered him when he was found dead.

Princess Diana and the Queen Mother

When I say that I find people's psychologies incomprehensible this is because I find nothing in them that corresponds to basic principles in my own; in fact there seems often to be a deliberate inversion of them. I imagined that since Sir George Joy had had a mystical experience up a mountain in Arabia, even if he would do nothing to help me he would not actively create difficulties for me. I thought this would be a general principle which someone who had had a mystical experience would apply to anyone with an obvious aim or sense of direction. In fact it turned out not to be so and he joined in with the machinations against me as enthusiastically as anyone else. A friend of mine from Somerville, who had been brought up in a hotbed of socialist ideology, commented on my naiveté in having supposed he would do anything to help me, at least in the sense of not hindering me.

She seemed amused that I should have thought such a thing, as if she had more insight than I did, and no doubt she did, because this is one of the things that I always find incomprehensible, as I can find no parallel to it in my own psychology.

In fact one finds that what one might have supposed to be principles in the context of old-fashioned bourgeois psychology no longer are, and instead inversions of them appear to be regarded as appropriate principles of conduct

The behaviour of Princess Diana when she married into the Royal Family, in comparison with that of the late Queen Mother, might be regarded as a striking example of this. The Queen Mother maintained absolute discretion about the affairs of the royal family, even to members of her own family. Princess Diana, although from an equally aristocratic family, lost no time in spilling the beans on Prince Charles to the media, and washing her dirty linen as publicly as possible, which was successful in gaining the sympathy of the population for herself and accelerating the decline of the monarchy, which in turn is associated with an increasing level of criminal behaviour throughout the country. (The social workers etc. who act ostensibly against the criminal or antisocial behaviour are actually no less criminal than the muggers and rapists, although in slightly less obvious ways.)

Politeness is bourgeois

The communists thought of politeness as a product of bourgeois fetishism. By now, rudeness has become the norm in this country. Agents of the collective with power over individuals (doctors, teachers etc.) are now amazingly rude by the standards of fifty years ago; and fifty years ago had already seen some slippage from the norm that had prevailed earlier. On the other hand, of course, all agents of the collective are supposed to be above criticism, although there are now so many of them that it is wildly improbable to suppose that a high standard of impersonal motivation or objectivity could be maintained by more than a tiny proportion of them.

The lack of scepticism towards people with some status was certainly not the attitude that I had acquired from pre-socialist literature. One did not give up on thinking about the individual psychologies of headmasters, priests or aristocrats because of their social position.

Actually old-fashioned politeness can be seen as trying not to make it more difficult than need be for other people to remain, or to become, centralised, by showing respect for their territory of decision. Modern social interactions make any centralised position almost impossible to maintain.

I once described myself to an academic philosopher as a bourgeois capitalist, which of course is automatically pejorative in the modern world. I became identified with that position well before I went to the Ursuline school at the age of ten.

By the time I was five I had read the equivalent of what a fairly bright child would get through in their entire primary school education, and by the time I was ten I had read a similar amount as a person would have read by the time they were twenty. The local juvenile library was supposed to provide for readers up to the age of sixteen, and I had exhausted it before I was eleven, supplementing it with what adults at that time read for fun, as found in my grandfather’s library.

There was practically no trace of modern egalitarian or communist ideology in any of this, nor of the modern belief system of psychological interpretations that is now universally encountered.

A totally lost point of view

It is amazing how completely the modern ideology has wiped out the worldview that was present approximately at the peak of the British Empire, which was the worldview of the books which I read in my grandfather’s library.

It is perhaps no accident that Christianity arose at about the peak of the Roman Empire. Clearly there was a good deal in both situations that would favour centralised psychology, moral relativism and existential awareness.

In both cases you have an upper class with territories consisting of landed estates and servants or slaves, putting its push into sending out armies; thus very militaristic and hierarchical. War makes people very aware of reality as threatening, and the awareness that one’s own life is always at risk may lead to existential perceptions. (As Nietzsche said, ‘Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius ... Live at war with your peers and yourselves.’)

One encounters other civilisations, other cultures, and becomes aware that many social structures, many different power structures, many variants of religious belief are possible. There may be suggestions that some cults or priesthoods have some knowledge of, or access to, psychic forces.

So perhaps you get a kind of open-minded existential agnosticism, like that of Rider Haggard or like my own; and ideas associated with centralised psychology are not far away in the traditions of an aristocratic and militaristic ruling class.

Now the outlook is entirely different. There are all sorts of ideas about ‘social justice’, and an antagonism to centralisation and existential awareness. It is as if everyone has entered into a social contract. The state will protect its citizens from the most obvious threats so that they will never have to think about reality, and in return they surrender their liberty. They will actually have no rights at all; society will own them, and their children, body and soul, and will tell them what they should want and need. If any individual says that he wants or needs something else, he will be told that he does not really want or need it.

Ideological themes in social work

In an earlier post I discussed the recent case of a mother deemed ‘too stupid’ to look after her own child, and expressed surprise that even conservative journalists no longer find it shocking that children should be removed on such grounds.

This case, discussed at greater length in another recent Daily Mail article, presents a number of interesting issues.

A) The first is the way that reacting emotionally to a stressful situation seems to be taboo, since it is interpreted as implying that your viewpoint is irrational.

Her confrontational, argumentative nature - (she likens herself to a lioness trying to protect her cub ) - must have done her no favours with social workers. In truth, she is not the most sympathetic of characters, her voice steadily rising as she angrily dismisses the 'mad' social workers and lawyers involved in her case as the real 'idiots' or 'bimbos'. She just sounds very, very angry, frustrated and upset - convinced, in her humiliation, that social workers acted out of their intense dislike of her rather than the welfare of the child. [1]

I have referred previously to the idea that anger at the way one has been treated is taken as weakening one’s case. Also taken as weakening one’s case is the expression of criticisms of social workers or other agents of the collective. A similar phenomenon can be observed in another recent case, in which a woman’s twin babies were taken away from her after she joked that their caesarean birth had ‘ruined her body’, which allegedly showed that she felt ‘bitter’ towards her children.

And when the desperate mother lost her temper at social workers who had taken her babies, officials said she had ‘anger problems’ and could pose a threat to her twins. [2]

B) A second issue raised by the article about the 'stupid mother' case relates to the concept of property.

... Rachel has been fighting to get back the child she claims was 'stolen' from her ... She has a one-track mind: the child belongs to her, no matter what. [1]

It is well known that left-wing ideology has tended to be hostile to the idea of property. But this scepticism about its moral defensibility has now become more or less universal, and is no longer confined to people who think of themselves as left-wing. Even people as ostensibly pro-property as libertarians now seem uncertain about defending it. The recently established British Libertarian Party has avoided the word ‘property’, dropping it from the more traditional libertarian slogan of ‘life, liberty, property’ in favour of ‘life, liberty, prosperity’. The concept of prosperity is ill-defined and does not, without qualification, imply an individual territory of decision.

The mother says her child has been ‘stolen’: this is supposed to show she has a ‘one-track mind’, i.e. she is (allegedly) wrong to think in terms of the child belonging to her, or being part of her territory of control.

C) The third issue raised by the 'stupid mother' case is unrealism about human psychology, and ignorance (actual or feigned) about the underlying power relations of a social interaction, particularly between an individual and an agent of the collective.

... as with many such cases, nothing relating to Rachel's story is entirely clear-cut. Listening to her, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for her distress. And yet who would envy the social workers charged with making these difficult decisions? [1]

‘It is impossible not to feel sympathy for her distress.’ But evidently possible to the extent of acquiescing in the outcome. Analogously, outside observers may think they experience some reservations about such cases when encountering face-to-face the suffering caused, but it is clearly possible for most people to allow such suffering to continue nonetheless, presumably on the basis that a decision by an authorised agent of the collective legitimates the outcome, however gruesome.

‘Who would envy the social workers?’ Lots of people, I should think. Many people find power enjoyable, and quickly become desensitised about the suffering their decisions cause. ‘Mmm, lots of difficult decisions to make about whose lives to destroy and in what way. What fun!’

[1] How dare they say I'm too dumb to be a mum: defiant mother speaks out after courts rule she's 'too stupid' to care for her child, Daily Mail, 4 June 2009
[2] 'Social workers took away my twins after I'd joked that birth spoilt my body', Daily Mail, 20 June 2009

Even more people involved in the oppression of children

I see that family courts are now to be open to journalists, instead of secret, which may conceivably be a consequence in part of our drawing attention to some of the more obvious horrors on our blogs. Actually this will do no good; one only tries to highlight one or two of the worst cases to illustrate the fact that this is bound to result from the principle of individual freedom being violated. In fact what is proposed will make court processes even more cumbrous and costly to the taxpayer, thus increasing the violation of individual liberty involved.

Whether my blog has actually had any effect in producing this worsening of the situation I do not know. I always try to put in my commentaries that what is important is the immorality of there being social workers and family courts at all, funded by taxation, and that this immorality should be recognised and reversed. But I continue to be suppressed, and treated as if I do not exist, so that I get no opportunity to express publicly my views as they really are.

The reaction that a situation will be improved by more people being involved in oppressing the individual is a standard one. People often refer to the concept of ‘checks and balances’ as if that made intervention/interference all right in principle. When I describe the horrors of my ‘education’ to educational experts, they often assert that decisions are now referred to a larger number of people, and not left to isolated individuals – such as, presumably, the Reverend Mother at my convent who nearly let me have a chance in life.

In fact, on that occasion, large numbers of people did wade in and prevent her from letting me have my chance. As I said to a couple of educational experts whom I met in Oxford some years ago, if you have schools at all, the only hope for the exceptional individual is that he encounters an individual who feels free to allow him exceptional opportunity without consulting others. Certainly if a committee or a plurality of people are involved, he will only get oppression instead of opportunity. A chain is as strong as its weakest link, and a committee is as enlightened as its most oppressive member.

Neither of the educational experts I met offered me any help at all in getting back into (or rather, started on) a suitable academic career. They could each have contributed £1000 a year out of the salaries which they were so lucky as to have, for example, or come to work for me for a few weeks every year in their holidays to contribute to the infrastructure of my squeezed and deprived academic institutional environment.

Pretending to be shocked

Would a court have decided a 24-year-old single mother was ‘too stupid’ to care for her three-year-old daughter if this wasn’t so? According to a weekend news report, ‘Rachel’ – her full name withdrawn for legal reasons – has had this happen to her.

We’re indignant if the rights of mothers are asserted and children die as a result. We’re indignant if social work professionals and courts assert what they see as the rights of children. There are no reliable general rules here. It’s particular circumstances. So I’m reluctant to get carried away about this case. Of course, it’s offensive to say someone’s too stupid to look after children, but it doesn’t mean this is always wrong. So let’s stop pretending to be shocked about it. (Peter McKay, Daily Mail, 1 June 2009).

"We’re indignant if the rights of mothers are asserted and children die as a result."

Perhaps some people have been brainwashed into believing that if a child dies because of parental neglect, this is because ‘the rights of parents have been asserted’, and the implication is that we should oppose the ‘rights’ of parents. But this is obviously a highly tendentious way of putting it.

"Of course, it’s offensive to say someone’s too stupid to look after children, but it doesn’t mean this is always wrong."

It is curious that McKay thinks what is objectionable about the concept ‘too stupid for the normal restrictions on state removal of children to apply’ is merely the part about calling someone stupid. It is strange that this view of the situation, ignoring the moral principle involved, is being expressed by a journalist in a supposedly conservative newspaper.

There have always been plenty of parents who, depending on the criteria applied, would have been deemed ‘too stupid’ to bring up children. It is a long way from there to the position that children should be taken under the supervision of strangers, whenever agents of the state judge parents to be inadequate.

"Let’s stop pretending to be shocked about it," suggests McKay. If pretending to be shocked is all the resistance we have left to this appalling system, we had better keep pretence rather than nothing. When even the pretence is gone, what will be left to prevent the continuation of this process to its horrific but logical extreme: that children are the responsibility first and foremost of the state, and parents will only be allowed to interact with them if they first get permission?

Jailed for speaking to your child

There seem to be several horrors in the papers every day, which we are not able to speak out against, except in ways that attract no publicity and do us no good.

A mother was apparently jailed for speaking to her child in the street, having been forbidden to see it because social workers and the judge think that what she is suspected of saying to her children (when considering their complaints against their father) may cause them great emotional harm. As if the judge, or anyone else, has any idea what constitutes 'emotional harm'.

A psychiatrist's report on the mother contains the judgment that her "willingness to listen and agree with the children's complaints has undermined any attempts made to provide better management of the children." But why should it be the state's job to "manage children", or to decide what constitutes doing it better?

The Daily Mail blames this kind of thing on the secrecy of family courts, but what difference would it make if they were not secret, but open to public comment by all and sundry who have themselves been brainwashed into a belief in society? The allegations against my father were not secret, except from me, but a very wide population enjoyed believing in them, and still does.

The only solution is not to have family courts at all, nor social workers, nor income tax which is what funds the whole nefarious business. No one expresses this point of view or puts the case in support of it, and my suppressed and strangled unrecognised independent (real) university continues to be prevented from doing so.

Modern academia is corrupted by the prevailing ideology. Corruption usually implies financial incentives or bribery although this is not in fact necessary. But actually it is true of modern ‘universities’, which are corrupted by the money which they receive from taxpayers and others, as a reward for subscribing to the ideology, and also for imposing it upon the individuals who fall into their power.

As Andrew Alexander pointed out semi-realistically a couple of weeks later in the Mail (20 May), it is not the motivation to acquire money on the part of agents of the collective which leads to the corruption of modern society, but the interest in power over other people’s lives which can be enjoyed by those who administer ‘public money’.

Emotional 'management'

Managing emotions will be given the same importance as English and maths in Sir Jim Rose’s primary school education reforms unveiled yesterday. ‘Personal development’, along with the three Rs and computer skills, will form the centrepiece of the plans, which will be introduced in September 2011. Children will learn to take turns and share, prepare healthy meals, manage their feelings, and avoid drug and alcohol abuse ... lessons in managing emotions will encourage pupils to curb anger and jealousy and encourage empathy. (Daily Mail, 1 May 2009)

So, children in primary schools are to have lessons in ‘managing their emotions’, including anger and jealousy. I expect they will learn how to direct the anger they experience at being under duress in a prison environment, not towards the teachers and other adults who keep them oppressed, but towards those of their contemporaries of whom they feel jealous because they seem to be doing too well, and not feeling downtrodden enough. They will learn to gain satisfaction from making them feel more downtrodden and will look forward to the time when, as adults, they can express their anger by interfering in the lives of those of whom they feel jealous, by becoming teachers, doctors, social workers or other ‘experts’

By doing this they may be able to avoid becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol. Nowadays such things are referred to as ‘abuse’. ‘Drug abuse’ refers to making use of a pharmaceutical for your own purposes, whereas having your mind zonked out by a drug prescribed by a ‘medical doctor’ is not referred to in this way.

Avoiding ‘drug abuse’ and ‘alcohol abuse’ is part of what is to be taught in the ‘personal development’ programme for primary schools, which will also teach the ‘management’ of anger and jealousy.

How about providing training in the management of anger and jealousy for teachers; also members of education authorities, university tutors and college Principals, etc.? So that they do not take out the anger and jealousy they feel when confronted by someone cleverer than themselves, by destroying the lives of the most exceptional people who are in any way under their power?

How about training all people with social status and influence to direct their anger against other influential people who have ‘let the side down’ by abusing their power in damaging the lives of those over whom they had power, and to put the energy resulting from such anger into providing reparation for the victims of such abuse?

Chardonnay as a gateway drug

As many as 40,000 drinkers are dying every year because the Government has utterly failed to deal with Britain’s alcohol problem, leading experts said yesterday.
Doctors and academics [i.e. agents and beneficiaries of the oppressive state] lined up to condemn round-the-clock drinking, brought in by Labour, and the availability of cheap alcohol in supermarkets. (Daily Mail, 24 April 2009).

Why should it be the business of the Government to prevent people from killing themselves with alcohol and overeating, if that is what they want to do? The object of taking away liberty from individuals in the form of taxes is to create justifications for taking away even more, so as to create the largest possible population of people in a dysfunctional state, to be supported by the increasingly small population of functional people paying taxes. At the same time, taxpayers will have to pay for supporting the ever-increasing population of doctors (who live off the herds of their dependent victims) and academics (who pontificate ‘expertly’ about the morality of these goings-on).

Professor Tom Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Surgeons ... firmly blamed the Government ... ‘a change in licensing laws ... made it difficult to turn down applications for licences, with no need to take public health into account’. (Ibid.)

It is interesting how alcohol has now apparently, in the minds of the medical profession, become a matter of ‘public health’. This concept used to be applied principally in situations where the health of an individual would impinge directly on that of others, e.g. infectious diseases; providing an excuse for interference on the grounds that one person’s behaviour affected another person’s physical health. Perhaps eating sweets will be the next thing to be classified as a matter of ‘public health’.

Martin Plant, professor of addiction studies at the University of the West of England, said: ‘Supermarkets at the moment are displaying the morality of the crack dealer ...’ Professor Plant warned that alcohol was a ‘gateway drug’ leading to cannabis and cocaine addiction in many teenagers. (Ibid.)

The sort of comment which used to be dismissed as ‘moral hysteria’ is now apparently being made by academics. Will chocolate be the next thing claimed to be a ‘gateway drug’, leading to alcohol consumption, and from there to cannabis, cocaine, heroin, prostitution, burglary, etc.?

Exploiting the credit crunch

copy of a letter to an academic

The ‘credit crunch’ (so-called) is really just a further stage of development in the ongoing socialist destruction of civilisation, most central to which is the destruction of the lives of the most able and functional. This is, of course, already far advanced; the school and university system was already geared to ruin someone like me when I was exposed to it sixty years ago.

Naturally the obvious worsening of the situation is blamed on ‘free market capitalism’, thus justifying further reductions of individual liberty, but in reality what is being demonstrated is the destructive success of socialist principles and ideology.

My unrecognised university is being prevented from pointing out how this has really come about, while other people (including a former investment banker in yesterday’s Financial Times) are publicised as saying, ‘Free market capitalism has failed!’ – so now (presumably) we can openly abolish individual liberty completely.

As an influential person with socially conferred status, you should not find it acceptable that expression of our point of view is stifled and suppressed, and you should wish to give us help and support in publicising it.

I do not accept your claim that there are already people in universities expressing our points of view, so there is no ‘need’ for us to be given opportunity or publicity. If there are any such people, they are heavily outnumbered, and are putting the case very feebly. And you should also feel an obligation to work towards redressing the wrongs and injustices which we have suffered at the hands of those with socially conferred status. On that basis, we should now be given status and opportunity even if what we would produce would be no better and no different from the work being produced by other people who already have the status and support which we have been denied.

As you may see from some of the things which I have written recently, ethical standards usually seem to be abandoned by those in authority when dealing with people like us. However, that is no justification for a person with socially conferred status wishing to cover up for the wrongdoings of other such persons, rather than attempting to redress them.

Gordon Brown's 'National Service'

Terrible things appear in the papers practically every day and my unrecognised university is still unable to publish any criticisms of them.

An additional infringement of individual liberty is proposed by Gordon Brown.

‘Every teenager will have to do at least 50 hours of community work before the age of 19, Gordon Brown has announced. The Prime Minister believes youngsters would be less likely to turn to crime if they had a sense of citizenship. The scheme, a form of ‘national service’ for teenagers, will ensure that they spend a minimum of 50 hours working with charities and vulnerable groups such as the elderly or disabled. Forming part of Labour’s next election manifesto, it will be woven into plans to make everyone stay in education or training until the age of 18 by 2011. Mr Brown said: ‘It is my ambition to create a Britain in which there is a clear expectation that all young people will undertake some service to their community, and where community service will become a normal part of growing up in Britain. And, by doing so, the contributions of each of us will build a better society for all of us. ‘ He added: ‘That would mean young people being expected to contribute at least 50 hours of community service by the time they have reached the age of 19.’...

The Prime Minister first proposed the idea of a National Youth Service to channel teenagers into voluntary work last year. It is due to be formally launched in September, and would become compulsory if Labour was re-elected. The scheme – which could include teenagers helping out charities both in Britain and abroad – is likely to become part of the National Curriculum. (Daily Mail, 13 April 2009)

Being forced to spend even more time doing things which they have no motivation to do will actually only make teenagers even more demoralised and decentralised than they already are.

I know two people who had a little experience of what is called ‘community service’ several decades ago, when things were less bad than they are now, and both found it an unpleasant and disappointing experience.

In both cases they were attempting to ‘help’ people who had already forfeited their liberty and had fallen into the clutches of the oppressive society. The first person’s experience was earlier, and voluntary, trying to feed disabled children in a disorganised institutional environment.

The second person’s, over a decade later, was compulsory because it was a school ‘lesson’ and he was forced to attend all ‘lessons’ provided by the school in order to attend the school at all. This is an oppressive, although commonly accepted, state of affairs. As I have pointed out before, children should be free to attend only those lessons which they find relevant to their own purposes.

However, the second person was forced in this way to go to a hospital to ‘cheer up’ old people who had fallen into the power of the medical Mafia, and found himself trying to make conversation with an old lady in a hospital bed who did not seem to find anything he had to say interesting. She may well have found it particularly depressing to be confronted by a bright young person who, ostensibly, still had his life ahead of him.

No doubt most of those who will be subjected to ‘help’ from demoralised young people will already be being abused by those ‘trained’ to help them. You could call Gordon Brown’s plan the ‘Compulsory Community Abuse’ programme.

Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Alf Hitchcock last year suggested jobless teens should be sent on a non-military form of National Service to curb the rising tide of fatal stabbings. (Ibid.)

Now what, I wonder, is there to prevent resentful youths, torn away from their knife gangs, from stabbing the old people and disabled children with whom they are forced to associate?

Stepp'd in so far

And betimes I will, to the weird sisters:
More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know,
By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4)

A quotation from Macbeth which expresses the predicament of Western civilisation, determined to go ahead with egalitarian socialism (communism), although by now many must be able to see that its consequences so far have been disastrous.

‘Strange things ... which must be acted’. However crazy things are already, this is no bar – indeed, it is a spur – to the invention of even more crazy egalitarian policies, which those concerned are driven to implement by an apparently irresistible compulsion.

Comments on socialism

As Margaret Thatcher is alleged to have said: ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money’.

But by the time the money runs out, a lot of people will have been empowered by other people’s money to interfere damagingly (and for quite a long time) in other people’s lives, and that is what socialism is all about. So what’s wrong with that?

Erosion of respect for individual liberty

Respect for individual liberty is protected, if at all, by the market forces of a capitalist society; when that protection is eroded by socialism, anything goes.

A Christian lady has been blamed for allowing a 16-year-old Muslim girl whom she was fostering to convert to Christianity.

As well as showing dislike of Christianity, this demonstrates that the individual is supposed to be entirely the product of social influences. According to those in power, those around the individual should be able to decree his opinions and attitudes. If an unwanted inclination arises, his parents or guardians should be able to eradicate it, and be punished for failing to do so. (This Christian lady has been disqualified from fostering, and the drop in income means she can no longer afford the farm she used to rent to look after vulnerable teenagers.)

From the Daily Mail, 9 February 2009:

A foster mother has been struck off the register for allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity. The woman, who has looked after more than 80 children in the past ten years, is considering suing the council over the decision. Although she is a practicing Anglican, she said she had put no pressure on the girl who was baptised last year at the age of 16. She said social workers had also raised no objections to her own attendance at church.

But officials insist she failed in her duty to preserve the girl’s religion and should have tried to stop the baptism. Last April, they ruled that the girl, now 17, should stay away from church for six months. The foster mother’s removal from the register followed in November.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has launched a legal challenge to the decision with funding from the Christian Institute. Mike Judge, a spokesman for the institute, said:

'All people should be free to change or modify their religious beliefs. That surely must be a core human right in any free society. I cannot imagine that an atheist foster carer would be struck off if a Christian child in her care stopped believing in God ...'

The carer is a single mother of two in her 50s who has worked with young children for much of her life. She has had an unblemished record since becoming a foster parent in the North of England in 1999 ... The move has stripped her of her sole source of income, forcing her to downsize to a one-bedroom flat.

Similar attitudes were shown towards my father, when I was at school, for failing to prevent me from wanting to take more exams than other people, and at an earlier age. The fact that I was known to have a very high IQ was not regarded as any excuse.

It is asserted and implied in many academic productions in the fields of philosophy, education, and psychology that there is no such thing as individuality, as distinct from the results of social influence and interaction.

The relevant departments of my suppressed independent university are still unable to publish criticisms of these tendentious assertions, so censorship continues to prevail.

Lying (from the forthcoming book 'The Corpse and the Kingdom')

I have observed that in my experience the human race seems to like it best if the socially agreed view of the situation not merely distorts but actually inverts one or two of the salient facts.

To this one may add the observation that people tell lies more often than seems necessary to arrive at the (apparently) desired objective, and that they like to engage in manipulating other people's psychology. The less successful the manipulations are being, and the more self-evident it is that the victim of the manipulation is aware of what is going on, the more forcefully and obsessively do they insist on behaving as if he is unaware.

A motivation for this may be postulated. Reality (however much they may insist that it is impossible to define it except by reference to social agreement) is seen as a sort of threat, or potential rival, to social agreement. And there can be no more satisfying way of asserting the supremacy of the latter than by insisting that it is right when it is obviously wrong.

Market forces alone protect the freedom of the individual to act realistically and independently of social agreement. Hence a society in which market forces are weakened is likely to contain a suicidal drive.

I have alluded elsewhere in this book to a story about a tribe of native Americans who sallied forth to battle clad in ‘magic’ shirts which were no protection at all against real lead bullets. This is an acceptable story because it is supposed to illustrate the inferiority of superstition to rationalism, or the foolishness of supposing that there might be more to the situation than met the eye of a materialistic monist.

But there are times when modern society strikes me as being very like that tribe.

Of course this is only a hypothetical suggestion, which cannot be taken too far, at least not on the level of social organisation. No doubt this psychological factor, if present on that level, is modified by many others. How, for example, would one account for the fact that the suicidal drive is not shown by completely communist countries, and to a differential extent even by countries which are not? Part of the answer might be that once market forces have been completely eliminated and the state has assumed full control of what may be thought and expressed, external reality is no longer felt as a threat in the same way, so there is no longer any need to behave suicidally.

Ideology in a horoscope

Cancer
What do you give the person who has everything? If you really care you will try to arrange for them to experience what it is like to have nothing. But what if you are a benign universe trying to help a Cancerian who feels overwhelmed by options? How about a challenge to which they cannot rise: or the experience of being powerless in a crucial situation. What you are being obliged to learn is precious beyond measure.
(from Jonathan Cainer’s horoscopes, Daily Mail 21 June 2008.)

This extract from a horoscope expresses a prevalent tendency in the official and widely understood psychological system of the Oppressive Society.

When I was 13 you could say that I had ‘everything’. I was fully functional and on a high energy level. An equally perfect life lay ahead of me, indefinitely into the future, so long as I got on with taking degrees and other qualifications as fast as I could. My past life lay behind me, dull and regrettable.

But, I thought, I should not blame myself for not having realised how to live. It was just an existential fact that I had not known enough about the world and about the exam system in particular. Don’t look back, I said to myself, just get on with it now.

I had not reckoned on the obstructions. As my aunt put it, decades later, I was ‘too happy’. There were too many people who wanted me to ‘experience what it was like to have nothing’, to be placed in positions in which I could not be motivated, faced with ‘challenges to which I could not rise’, and ‘powerless in a crucial situation’. And so in the end I would be thrown out destitute, to experience permanently ‘what it is like to have nothing’.

Nowadays it is argued that children being educated at home may miss out on the ‘failures that might be thought essential rites of passage’ which a school is supposed to provide. (Financial Times Magazine 21/22 June 2008, article ‘A class apart’ by Rob Blackhurst.)

According to Margaret Sutherland of Glasgow University, gifted pupils are not being allowed to fail, and this has emotional consequences. ‘To be constantly told that you have done well means these children are not being challenged.’ (BBC News, 9 August 2005.)

On a website called Gifted Exchange, there is another example of this way of thinking.

Charles Murray [in an article called ‘Aztecs vs. Greeks’] calls for the gifted to be given a challenging, classical education. He further states that we need to encourage gifted kids not to become just smart but wise. ‘The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one’s own intellectual limits and fallibilities — in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today’s education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them.’

Observe that both Margaret Sutherland and Charles Murray are relying on a teacher-pupil relationship to place the victim in the position of being unable to satisfy a mentor, when this may be unnecessary or actually damaging to working directly for the exam. I was perfectly well able to take exams without teachers and needed only sample papers and textbooks. But I was constantly forced into positions of supervised ‘preparation’ in which I was doing work which I could not be motivated to do in order (as I knew) that the teacher/tutor could have the opportunity to make me feel inadequate.

The editor of the Gifted Exchange site, Laura Vanderkam, agrees with Charles Murray and says:

If anyone reads Aztecs vs. Greeks and decides to push for education that holds gifted kids’ feet to the fire, intellectually, then I’ll be happy.

This is just an incitement to those who are running the lives of gifted children to humiliate and frustrate them. Educators and other people in a position of power over children do not need any incitement.

Once the link of direct payment by an individual has been broken, there is nothing to prevent something being provided which is quite different from what he might have paid for. Probably most parents would be unlikely to pay for an ‘education’ which was explicitly aimed at making their child fail. Nor can the situation be remedied by verbal rationalisations. Whatever statements of intention are made for PR purposes, the motivation of those in power will determine what happens, and what reason is there to think that the motivation of educators is benevolent? No solution is possible that involves telling people with the power to run other people’s lives what their attitudes should be. The only possible remedy is to abolish state-financed schools and universities.

’We appeal for £2m as initial funding for a social science department in our unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish analyses of the unexamined assumptions underlying current discussion of the philosophy of education.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Binge Britain

Daily Mail 14 February 2008:

Another man has been beaten and left for dead after politely asking a gang to stop urinating into his garden. ... Gareth Avery, 48, suffered a broken jaw and cheekbone and deep cuts after being punched and kicked by at least two men and a woman ... [He] was left for dead outside his home in Weston-super-Mare when he tried to protect his house from a gang.

In the last few days alone, 17-year-old Joe Dinsdale was stabbed to death on an estate plagued by drunken youths and Nick Baty, 48, died after a month in a coma following an assault. ... As the toll grew, a police chief urged Britain to "wake up" to the full horrors of binge-drinking.

Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, hit out at the drinks trade for making profits "on the back of this misery". ... Mr Jones castigated parents who are responsible for handing over alcohol to more than half of underage drinkers, and warned it was time for Britain to "wake up" to the grim realities of the binge-drinking epidemic.

As usual, parents and commercial interests are blamed for the consequences of the Oppressive State, including the oppressive educational system. A headline inside the paper reads ‘The real price of booze’. No, this is the real price of socialism. The parents are to a large extent themselves the victims of an educational system that left them with no purpose in life, and no way of getting a ‘buzz’ out of life other than getting drunk and/or beating somebody up.

People in Russian forced labour camps set great store by knocking their minds out with drinks of highly concentrated tea, and many drunks lying in the streets of communist Russian froze to death. Alcoholism was an inevitable side effect of communism in Russia, as it is of egalitarian socialism in Britain.

More about the punishment of fathers

With further reference to the case of the father jailed for helping his pregnant wife to leave the country:

The sentence of 16 months in prison may seem excessive, but observe how efficiently it fulfils the function of opposing rebellion against the absolute powers of decision and prescription possessed by agents of the collective.

Rebellion (or assertion of independence) against arrangements made by the collective depends on the freedom of action (money) possessed by the individual. The father in this case could afford to transport his wife to the continent. He is described as a ‘businessman’ so presumably he would have been able to send her money to support her. The prison sentence has probably effectively destroyed his livelihood, and it could well be permanently. So perhaps his wife will find herself with no means of support in a foreign country with a very young baby and an 8-year-old child to look after. She might think of seeking part-time work, but she will need a baby-sitter if she does, which might have been fairly easy to arrange if her mother and other relatives and friends were living nearby. But she cannot return to this country without jeopardising her liberty and that of her children.

So everything possible is being done to drive her back into dependence on the British state with the complete loss of liberty and of her children’s liberty which that could entail.

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’, and my plans for acquiring qualifications with which to return to a career in a university were strenuously opposed, I hoped for support and help from my parents, if from no-one else. My father was blamed for any vestige of sympathy towards my plans and, as his health broke down under persecution, he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance. My mother’s life was reduced to that of looking after an invalid.

Destroying my father’s income and health was the best possible means of removing my only likely support in working towards re-entry to a university career. I had hoped to persuade my parents to move to Oxford and to continue living at home with them, which would have provided me with a college/hotel environment within which to carry on with my independent but, at least for the time being, unsalaried academic career.

Society had decreed that I should be classified as a non-academic person, and any help which might be given to me in attempting to return to a suitable university career was rebellion against authority and to be treated as criminal, as I was myself for making such attempts at all.

There is method in the madness of the witch-hunting carried out by modern society in this country, irrational though it may appear to be.

Incidentally, in a subsequent article in the Daily Mail (9 February 2008) about the case of the exiled mother, she is described as ‘an articulate and educated woman from a middle-class professional background’. So this may very well be another example of the way modern ideology facilitates class warfare, and the rule of the working-class or those with lower IQs, in oppression and persecution of those with some admixture of aristocratic genes or above-average IQs.

Punished for caring about your child

A father is in jail and his wife is in hiding abroad with her children after he helped them flee the country to escape social services, it emerged yesterday. The businessman’s wife was heavily pregnant with their first child – and was terrified the baby would be taken at birth by social workers – when he drove his family to Dover, and then on to Paris. She had a second reason for fleeing – she believed her eight-year-old son from a previous marriage was to be adopted against her wishes.

Her 56-year-old husband was arrested on his return to Britain, and later jailed for 16 months for abducting the eight-year-old, known as Child S. [The case] raises further disturbing questions about the secret family courts which only last week were in the spotlight when social workers illegally snatched a newborn baby from its mother.

Such cases are shrouded in the heaviest secrecy – with families threatened with jail if they discuss their fears that their children are being removed unjustly. But the story of the father and his family in hiding can be revealed for the first time because he appealed in a criminal case – which can be reported – begging for his 16-month jail sentence to be reduced. His plea to the High Court was dismissed and the father, who has never seen his baby daughter, was led away in tears. ...

The three appeal judges were told yesterday how Child S’s parents had separated in 2004 after a volatile and violent marriage. The mother claims she was told the boy would be taken into temporary foster care until she ‘sorted her life out’. But when she asked for his return, social services refused. After months of legal battles, a family court judge sided with the council’s plan to put the boy up for enforced adoption. By this time, the mother was pregnant. A friend said; ‘She was led to believe by social services she would have no chance of keeping the child she was carrying, which is outrageous. She was in despair.’ ...

Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Bennett acknowledged the ‘powerful emotions’ involved, but said: ‘Such proceedings taken by a local authority must be respected by parents. Those who act must expect a prison sentence because a real punishment is called for and to deter others who might be subject to the same pressures.’ ...

The father – who has adult children from a previous marriage – is being destroyed by prison, a friend said outside court. (Daily Mail, 7 February 2008.)

The quotation from the judge in the above case reminds me of a remark made last year by Chris Woodhead (former Inspector of Schools): ‘Parents who condone truancy should be punished.’

When the Welfare State (better called the Oppressive State) was introduced in 1945, it was said that education, medicine and helpful benefits of all kind were to be provided free (i.e. out of taxation). At that time I think many people would have been shocked at the idea that someone might be fined and punished with imprisonment for failure to take advantage of the goodies on offer.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if the State makes itself responsible as the ultimate provider (out of taxpayers’ money) of every recognised need, then it also owns its beneficiaries body and soul, and, as the provider of liberty, may take it away or decree how it is to be used, as it sees fit.

Only a capitalist society can provide its citizens with a territory within which they are free to make decisions; these territories vary in size but may be enlarged by individual effort. A communist/socialist society provides its citizens with no freedom. The freedom which they seem to enjoy is illusory, since it may be removed at any time if they fail to comply with the draconian edicts of the State. You are punishable if you fail to force your child to attend school, whether or not it is being bullied, physically or psychologically, by other pupils or by the teachers, and whether or not it is learning anything that will ever be of any use to it. It is not up to you to decide whether your child may live with you, even if you are supporting him or her completely, and receiving no ‘benefits’ from the State.

Incidentally, is not a prison sentence of 16 months excessively harsh in comparison with penalties for actions which are clearly harming their victims, such as grievous bodily harm, arson, burglary, etc? This gentleman had done no more than assist his wife in leaving the country, accompanied by her own child as a willing companion.