All shall have nurses

David Cameron suggests a home nurse for every mother producing a baby, paid for by confiscation of freedom from taxpayers, of course, even those who have been ruined by exposure to social hostility during their ‘education’ and left (as I have been) with no qualification with which to earn money or eligibility for the so-called ‘social support’ when unable to derive an income from society.

How about, ‘Cameron wants a hotel environment for every intellectual’? That would be a lot more original than ‘Cameron wants a home nurse for every mum’ (Daily Mail, 4 February 2008).

Cameron, I gather, is what is called a ‘conservative’, and the proposal is supposed to help ‘middle-class’ parents. But parents with above-average IQs are (as I plausibly surmise) under-represented among those who can tolerate having families in the captivity of modern society.

And of course, getting a nurse into every new mum’s household will enable the nurses to report to the social workers (also paid out of taxation) about which mothers should be regarded as “unfit” and have their babies taken away to be brought up at the taxpayer’s expense. How many mothers will have the sense to realise how dangerous this is and say “No, thank you” to the nurses?

The Conservative leader will today publish a blueprint for changing attitudes to childhood, which calls for a ‘profound cultural change’ in the way Britain treats its children. ... Success in raising rounded children [whatever they are] is not just about intensive supervision, it’s about enabling children to discover the world for themselves. (Ibid.)

Well, you could say that, i.e. children might be allowed to make their own decisions about arrangements for themselves. Abolishing compulsory ‘education’ and incarceration in state schools would be a good start.

Being "spiritual"

Copy of a letter to a philosopher

You said that some Rosicrucian SS men gave some help to a Buddhist who was also a communist, because he, like them, was a spiritual person, and you wondered what I thought of this story. This is quite difficult to answer, so perhaps it is worth trying.

Basically, I am really just agnostic. People are always trying to get me to endorse some element in the modern ideology as desirable or ‘better’, and although I wrote The Human Evasion very carefully to avoid appearing to be advocating some approach to life, I did nevertheless acquire a sort of fan club (none of whom ever came to work here, either to find out more about my ideas or because I advertised our need for help).

According to this fan club I was supposed to be advocating ‘going with the flow’, which I suppose means following the line of least resistance, giving in to all the social pressures. And, I suppose, general hippie-ish dropping-out. What I am putting on my blog and website now provokes vitriolic reactions, and my ‘fans’ appear to feel let down because I have lowered my standards of wisdom and enlightenment.

I do not have any insight to speak of into what might be called spirituality. I never had an outlook like that and could not have seen how to start acquiring one if I had wanted to; I cannot imagine wanting to.

The person at the Society for Psychical Research who expressed the greatest appreciation of spirituality, wherever it might be found, was Rosalind Heywood [see also here, here, here and here]. She also played routinely on the element in human psychology which had appeared to me most incompatible with centralisation — viz. the belief in society as the source of significance.

When she wanted to influence someone, which was usually to the detriment of someone else, whether me or otherwise, she would always start by flattering the person for the significance which a numinous society had conferred upon them. ('You are/were a great Professor / Ambassador / Colonial Governor etc.')

So I think it is the case that all sorts of spirituality are likely to contain a belief in the significance to be derived from other people/society, even if this is not obvious because they consider themselves to be free and uninhibited by repressive bourgeois standards, or by a belief in capitalism or individualism.

A typical Rosalind anecdote:

While waiting in a corridor at Eton to meet her son, whom she was visiting, she had become aware of the presence of a great and infinitely wise (vaguely angelic) Being who brooded over and guided the Etonian goings-on.

You observe that this story gets in the information that her son was at Eton, as well as demonstrating Rosalind’s belief in the sacred numinousness of statusful social institutions. She had a similar story about waiting to meet an MP in the House of Commons, also presided over by a Being of superhuman wisdom.

Tory tax breaks

Sweeping changes to the tax and benefits system worth more than £3000 a year to some families will be unveiled by the Conservatives today. In a decisive attempt to promote marriage, a transferable tax allowance for married couples would boost incomes by an immediate £1000 a year. This would be topped by additional benefits of up to £2058 for those eligible as part of far-reaching reforms designed to end discrimination against couples in the welfare system. The changes would help both families with children and childless couples caring for elderly relatives. The suggestions come from the Conservative Party’s social justice policy group, chaired by former leader Ian Duncan Smith. (Daily Mail, 10 July 2007)

Where is the justice in that? ('Social justice' = injustice.) The money to benefit couples would have to come from somewhere, so from those who remain single. That would include those who, like me, were left at the end of their ruined education with no usable qualification at all with which to make the sort of career to which they were extremely well suited and needed to have, and so certainly would not have got married until they had built up enough capital to finance an independent academic institution (in my own case) or whatever environment they needed to have in which to lead a functional and fulfilling life (in the case of people with high IQs or otherwise in a similar predicament).

Open Letter to Paris Hilton

Dear Paris,

I read in a newsletter from America that many journalists have expressed pleasure at your being ‘taken down a peg or two’ or ‘getting your come-uppance’ in being imprisoned for driving under the influence of alcohol.

The modern world is dominated by the desire to degrade the successful and it is certainly unwise to break the law, which exposes a person to the hostility of other people. To the extent that there are clear-cut territories within which the individual is free to make his own decisions, he can protect himself from the destructive forces of modern society.

Unfortunately, those who are in a favourable position as a result of the successes of their forebears may be relatively protected from the hostility of the society around them and fail to realise how great it is. The Queen of England is an example of this; she appears to be genuinely uncritical of socialist and egalitarian ideology, and not merely as uncritical as she needs to be for purposes of public relations.

Regrettably, however realistic one’s own outlook may be, one is exposed to other people’s lack of realism at the ‘educational’ stage of one’s life and may not be able to prevent one’s life being ruined. This is what happened to me, at any rate.

We are an independent academic organisation which is as nearly as possible squeezed to death, and kept inactive and inconspicuous, by lack of salaries, status, financial support and even moral support in applying for funding or improving our position in any way. We have been widely slandered and networked against. Nevertheless we are extremely respectable in an old-fashioned bourgeois sense.

Any one supporter could make an immense difference to our ability to publish criticisms of modern academia and society generally (which are desperately in need of expression), perhaps even eventually to make some progress in neglected areas of research.

So although we may not seem to be the sort of people you usually find interesting, we warmly (but not hopefully) invite you, Paris Hilton, to visit us with a view to becoming a Patron and supporter of our enterprise, the last line of defence against anti-individualism.

I say ‘not hopefully’ because there is no indication that even the most right-wing have any sympathy at all with our position. There is apparently no ideal, principle or tradition of defending individuals against society at large.

With best wishes,
Celia Green

Sally Clark: a reminder

Sally Clark, the mother who was wrongly jailed for killing her two sons, has died. Her family said in a statement she was found dead at her home Friday morning. The cause of the 42-year-old's death has not been revealed. But relatives said she never recovered from the appalling miscarriage of justice she suffered.

Mrs Clark, was a solicitor from Wilmslow, Cheshire, when she was convicted of smothering 12-week-old Christopher in 1996 and eight-week-old Harry a year later, on the evidence of paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow. He told a court the odds against two cot deaths in the same family were 73million to one. ...

Her three years and three months in jail - she was given two life sentences at Chester Crown Court in October 1999 - saw her reviled and abused as the worst kind of criminal, although many inmates became convinced of her innocence. Her husband Stephen never accepted her guilt and fought tirelessly to clear her. At one point the couple's third son, now eight, was taken into care.

Mrs Clark died in the home at Hatfield Peverel, near Chelmsford, Essex,which her husband bought while she was in a local jail. Her family said they did not know what caused her death but added: 'She never fully recovered from the effects of this appalling miscarriage of justice. 'Sally, a qualified solicitor, was a loving and talented wife, mother, daughter and friend. She will be greatly missed by all who knew her.' Family friend Penny Mellor said: 'It is the most appalling tragedy heaped on other tragedies.’ (Daily Mail, 17 March 2007)

Clearly Sally Clark had an above-average IQ and would have been perceived as privileged, successful and middle-class, which made her a suitable target for hostility.

The principle of ‘innocent until proved guilty’ has been abandoned in modern society. Now you are likely to be considered guilty until proved innocent, or until judged to be innocent by a jury which will consider you thus only if there is what they believe to be convincing evidence for some alternative explanation of the ‘crime’. What is regarded as 'convincing' includes the opinions of doctors, that is, people appointed by society to have the power to make decisions on behalf of other people about things which concern them. Sally Clark was eventually acquitted, so it is possible to say she was innocent, but how many more are convicted and imprisoned on equally unsatisfactory grounds?

A civilised society might be defined as one in which the individual has a clearly defined territory within which he is free to evaluate his priorities for himself, and be free from interference so long as he does not break clearly defined laws of interaction with other individuals and their territories. We are not living in a civilised society. It is now possible for people living in perfectly respectable ways to find that they have quite inadvertently, as a result of some accident, come under suspicion of criminal acts and may be convicted.

Some early photos

In a recent post commenting on India Knight's false dichotomy between "intellectual stimulation" and "social life" I mentioned that I have photographs of myself "playing with children at the seaside who may have been twice my age and were certainly twice my size."

Here they are.



I am on the left in the one above.



Here I am on the right. The twin brother of the boy on the left is in the background.

Modern ideology and A Little Princess

The system of interpretations and evaluations that forms the modern anti-individualistic ideology is now apparently universally understood and applied, so it may be difficult to realise that it is a quite recent development.

I was shocked by it when I first started to encounter it at 13 or 14. There was really no hint of it in what I had read up to that time. ‘Socialist’ writers such as H G Wells and Bernard Shaw took a pretty detached view of the goings-on of human society and suggestions that it might be nice if all people lived in larger, cleaner houses, or lived in a cleaner, healthier and more aesthetic way, did not draw attention to the erosion of liberty that would be necessary even to attempt to bring this about.

My ideas of human society were based primarily on books written in Victorian or Edwardian times, with a bit of influence from such things as cynical Aesop’s Fables. I always took note of ideas about motivation and reflected upon them.

Consider, for example, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The message of this book, to me at any rate, was that no one will do anything for anyone unless they are paid with money for doing so. In the story, Sara is left by her father at a select boarding-school. She is a parlour boarder and treated as a show pupil by the headmistress, who nevertheless resents her cleverness and self-possession, until her father dies and she is left penniless. Then she is made to sleep in an attic, where a scullery-maid also sleeps, and to work for her keep as a drudge and errand runner in all weathers, and assistant teacher of elementary French.

It is only if you have a parent who will pay for things for you that you have them, and what you have will be in accordance with how much the parent has to spend. Otherwise you will be reduced to the state of the servant girls and beggars in the streets.

Of course, people other than parents may give other people things; when Sara was well off she used to buy items of food for one of the scullery maids, and when she is poor she gives some buns to a starving beggar girl. This attracts the attention of the lady who runs the bun-shop, and she (the lady) takes in the beggar girl and feeds and clothes her from then on — in effect, adopts her, but without having to account for what she is doing to any agents of the collective.

In those days there was no compulsory education and adoption was a matter for individuals to undertake if they chose with no need to seek permission.

That was the way the world was; the way people treated you depended entirely on whether you could pay for what you wanted, or needed.

Eventually Sara is found and rescued by a wealthy friend of her father’s, who has been looking for her. While he is looking for her he is made aware of how many children are living in poverty. He is sorry for them, and harrowed to think that Sara may be in a similar state, but his friend tells him that his resources are limited. He could not provide for all the destitute children, but must concentrate on finding and helping Sara, whose father was his friend.

In the world as depicted in the books that I read there was no disapproval of ambition. The respectable bourgeois worked hard and rose in the world if he could; his children lived in well-built houses with a few servants and might have Mary Poppins as a nanny.

My father had been a very poor boy, and the great efforts he had made to rise in the world had not got him very far; he was headmaster of a primary school at the London docks. My parents were respectable but still very far from rich. Nevertheless, their efforts had resulted in their being able to give their child a better start in life than they had had themselves; they had delayed having me until they had saved enough money to be sure that they would be able to pay for a professional training for me.

When I came top of the grammar school scholarship exam at the age of ten, very soon after the 1945 Labour landslide election, egalitarian ideas were bubbling invisibly below the surface, but nothing I had read had prepared me for the idea that I should not want to take exams as fast and as hard as possible, and that I should be prevented from doing so because not everyone could. To take more exams than other people and at an earlier age was apparently viewed as reprehensible; it was an attempt to score off other people. Having social interactions with other people should be one’s sole aim in life. One should not want to do scientific research just because it was what one wanted to do and what would enable one to feel most alive. One should, apparently, only want to spend one’s life doing good to other people, in some shape or form, and interacting with them socially.

These ideas may not seem strange or surprising to a modern reader, but it was the first time I had encountered them and I found that they were being used to obstruct and hinder me.

By the time I was 13 my worldview was essentially formed; none of the books I had read had depicted, or appeared to advocate, an egalitarian society in the modern sense. Practically all societies of the past, as described, had contained some large households which provided a hotel environment for those living in them (sometimes even called ‘hotels’, at least in France and Italy), and it had never been regarded as reprehensible to attempt to rise in the world by any activities regarded as legal.

In retrospect, as a recipient of a grammar school scholarship, I was in the position of Sara in A Little Princess. With my fees not being paid by my father but by the state, I was exposed to the tender mercies of the local education authority and community generally, as Sara was exposed to those of Miss Minchin — who could no longer be bothered to provide her with a formal education, but allowed her to read the schoolbooks in the empty schoolroom when she had run her errands for the day. And she did this, not because she felt any concern for Sara’s need to rise in the world to a position that might suit her, but so that Sara might become useful to Miss Minchin as an inexpensive teacher when she was a few years older.

Similarly, my tormentors did not mind how seriously they blocked my attempts to establish my claim on the sort of university career I needed to have; my acquisition of skills and qualifications was reduced to a snail’s pace, but I was allowed to proceed with heavily handicapped supervised ‘courses’ which might eventually lead to my being useful, not to myself, but to society, in a lowly capacity as a teacher of maths.

Then I was thrown out into a society where all my efforts to recover from a bad position and regain an academic career of a suitable kind were blocked by the continued advance of the modern ideology, according to which, as I found, it is criminal to go on trying to get a career that society has shown it does not want one to have.

The effects of a collectivist society

Adler said, what a person is motivated to do is shown best by the effects he actually brings about in his life, not by what he says he is aiming at. This may not apply too well to an individual with little control over his own circumstances, but applies a lot better to collectivist societies with massive resources derived from large numbers of individuals by taxation.

Two items in yesterday’s news show the onward march of the hidden agenda of modern society, to penalise and reduce the numbers of the formerly respectable and law-abiding population by favouring and enlarging the criminal population with, on average, lower IQs.

Extract 1

Up to 3,000 foreign criminals will be released from prison on to Britain's streets without any attempt to deport them, Government papers have revealed. A note sent to probation staff says as few as 250 convicts from European countries will face even preliminary deportation proceedings every year. It pins the blame on an EU directive which rules that committing a serious crime is no longer sufficient grounds for removal. … As a result, the vast bulk of the estimated 3,300 European criminals released from British jails each year - including burglars, thieves and muggers - will simply walk free.

The note to probation staff revealed that just "approximately 250-300" offenders will face even an attempt at removal - which could of course be unsuccessful. ... It emerged that Ministers are floundering on a second promise relating to foreign convicts - to send home foreign nationals imprisoned in Britain. Jails are at bursting point - with a record 80,812 inmates on Friday - so Labour is desperately trying to secure agreements to send 11,000 convicts back home to serve their sentences. But it is expected to take years for any significant number to be removed. (Daily Mail 28 May 2007)

Extract 2

Wrongly jailed after a woman cried rape, Warren Blackwell applied for compensation for his three wasted years in prison. Torn from his family and sent to languish in jail as a convicted sex attacker, the innocent father-of-two imagined he was due a hefty sum for the miscarriage of justice. Instead, he was flabbergasted to learn the Home Office now intends to charge him nearly £7,000 for "board and lodging". The money is for the cost of food and accommodation while he was behind bars, and will be deducted from whatever compensation he receives for wrong imprisonment.

Mr Blackwell, 37, said: “They accept they put me in prison wrongly and accept I’m due compensation. Then they say, ‘Thank you for your stay with us, hope you didn't miss your family too much during three years in the clanger, now off you go - oh, and here's your bill.’”

"I was jailed not just for a crime I didn't do, but for one that never even happened in the first place. She made the whole thing up, as was accepted by the High Court." Mr Blackwell's ordeal began when his accuser, now 39, claimed she had been seized with a knife outside a village club early on New Year's Day 1999, taken to an alley and indecently assaulted. She picked him out of an identity parade and a jury found him guilty, even though there was no forensic evidence and he had no previous convictions. ...

Eventually, the case was investigated by the Criminal Cases Review Commission which found his accuser had fabricated at least seven other allegations of sexual and physical assault. She frequently changed her name and police forces did not realise they were dealing with the same woman. (Daily Mail 28 May 2007)

In this case, as in many others, it is now possible to label the victim as innocent because a review board had declared him to be so, since some new evidence has come to light which affects the probabilistic weighting which they give to something being true. But suppose the woman in question had not had previous convictions for dishonesty, or this had not come to light, but she had nevertheless made her accusations against Mr Blackwell? This shows how easy it is for people to be convicted on probabilistic judgements based on purely circumstantial or unsupported evidence.

It is doubtful whether judges or juries take seriously the old-fashioned principle that a person is to be regarded as innocent until he is proved guilty. There appears to be more of an idea these days that a person is to be considered guilty unless and until a socially acceptable alternative explanation can be proposed.

"Middle-class child neglect"

In an article by India Knight entitled ‘Middle-class child neglect’ the following occurs:

Middle-class mothers ... are likely to raise their children in self-created ghettos of rarefied so-called excellence. (Sunday Times, 29 April 2007, p. 15.)

Maybe she is aware of my usage of the word ‘ghetto’ in calling us ‘the high IQ ghetto’. However I do not mean by that an enclave within which we can use our abilities in highly specialised or very suitable ways. The usage is as in ‘Jewish ghetto’, a place where very able people can struggle for the merest physical survival, surrounded by a hostile society which aims to cut off supplies and support.

We also attempt to work laboriously and tediously towards creating , in the first instance, a more tolerable and adequate environment within which at least a very small use of our abilities may be made.

Knight seems to be among those who are encouraging society to become ever more hostile to the able by instilling guilt in those middle-class mothers (probably themselves with above average IQs) who provide their children with opportunities which are more likely to be needed or enjoyed by those with above-average IQs.

She supports the fallacy that there is an either/or involved. ‘Stimulation’ versus ‘social skills’, as if above average achievement necessarily implied detracting from time spent on social interaction, and with no reference to the possibility of individual differences in IQ or other aptitudes.

When I was five I had already read as much as a fairly bright child might have been expected to get through in the course of its primary education. By ‘fairly bright’ I mean ‘potential university graduate later on’, and at that time that would imply a higher IQ than it does now.

People often suggest that I must have gone short of playing with other children, but in fact I did not. My mother, who was a very experienced teacher, saw to it that I had playmates who were a match for my mental, rather than chronological, age and I have photographs of myself playing with children at the seaside who may have been twice my age and were certainly twice my size.

There was no sense in which I cut down on interactive activities in order to devote myself to my reading matter, but I am sure that I made full use of unoccupied intervals of time. When I was four, I was told, I once travelled from London to Wiltshire on a crowded evacuee train, sitting on a suitcase in the guard’s van with my head in a book the whole way. (My parents were, of course, guilty of having provided me with a ‘stimulating’ book.)

The only real dissent

(copy of a letter)

There are at least two outrageous news stories every day in the Daily Mail and my suppressed Oxford Forum publishing company (supported only by our own money) can’t publish books fast enough.

In fact we are the only voice of real dissent.

Surely you know someone who could give us a million pounds, just for starters, to make our protests a trifle louder?

Other sources of protest are feeble and halfhearted. For example, and typically, today’s horror article in the Mail, entitled “All pupils should be checked for criminal tendencies, says Blair”, contains this feeble and (as usual) concessive piece of faint criticism from the director of Liberty (no less), Shami Chakrabarti. She is quoted as saying,

“Who for example can disagree with the idea of ‘early intervention’? But ...”

Well, I can disagree for one, and so can everyone else at Oxford Forum. All intervention is immoral, and so is the taxation that is used to support it.

It is high time that this was said, even if it can at best only very slightly decelerate the headlong rush to destruction of Western civilisation. And no one is going to say it but us.

Women in tribes

Let us consider how the characteristics of human psychology may derive from the structure of tribal society.

There is no ‘drive to infinity’, or drive towards any goal outside the tribal group. There is no concerted attempt to increase control of the environment, nor is it possible for any individual to make wholehearted attempts to better his own lot. The object of everything is to reinforce belief in the importance of the tribal customs, so that the people in the tribe can live out their life-cycles according to these patterns, often with little change for centuries or millennia.

There is relatively more scope for the men to assert significance in forms of aggression towards something external to the tribe, since they have from time to time to defend the tribe from the encroachments of other tribes, and probably to kill animals for food. This kind of assertion of significance still takes the form of asserting that they are able to deprive another personality of its life, i.e. that on behalf of the tribal significance they are able to assert their superior potency by depriving of potency. Nevertheless this relatively externalised assertiveness gives male psychology its slight margin of generosity and flexibility.

The women, on the other hand, having no way of asserting themselves outside the tribe, and concerned with the bringing up of children, have no outlet for their drive but in the satisfaction they can obtain from subordinating the children, and no doubt everybody else as well, to the tribal customs. (One can hear the tribal echoes in many common expressions: ‘She must be helped to adapt to a non-academic life’, i.e. ‘She must be brought into subordination to the tribal customs’.)

from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom

"Liberal instincts"

Extracts from article

After dinner, Amy popped down to the corner shop. It was 10.30pm. When she returned, she staggered through the front door smeared with mud — and soaked with blood from a dreadful wound in her chest. In the 500 yards between shop and home she had been followed by a youth whose face was concealed by a hood, pushed to the ground, robbed of her bag and stabbed in the ribs with a screwdriver. ...

On our streets today it is the middle-class young people — the products of our liberal homes — who are being targeted. Amy is convinced there is a growing war on London streets between the dispossessed of the graffiti-covered estates and the middle classes: "Trust me, Dad. He wouldn't have gone for one of his own." So is there anybody out there who is accountable? The terrible fact is that, in these well-tended million-pound-plus houses with their state-of-the art security systems, people have long known what's going on in the street outside. But they have closed the blinds and simply turned away. And so have I. ...

We have put our heads in the sand for too long about this problem and have done nothing about the indifference of the authorities to much that is wrong in our society. We certainly backed the wrong policies on education — no one who could possibly avoid it would send a child to a comprehensive school around here. ...

As I, and all the others with Paul Smith suits and briefcases, strode past the addicts shooting up outside the Tube, and the Special Brew drinkers on the kerb, I used to think smugly: "Well, this doesn't touch me." But, the chances always were that it would in the end. And it did, in the worst possible way. (‘The night my daughter was stabbed — and my liberal instincts died’ by Michael Williams, Daily Mail, 5 March 2007.)

My comments

The writer of this article, as usual, seems to assume that some expected norm of civilised behaviour can be produced by confiscating freedom (by means of taxation) from the functional and non-criminal members of society. “Educational policy” is implicitly blamed for an increase in crime, and the implied solution must be to take more money away from the “middle class” in order to bestow benefits on those who behave badly.

Of course it is true that the schools are producing an ever-increasing population of demoralised young people. But it is questionable whether any tweaking of the system can produce any beneficial effect, since egalitarian ideology is already rampant throughout modern society — not only within the schools and universities — and pours out of every television screen.

If there has been an increase in criminal behaviour it is not necessarily attributable only to social influences. The modern ideology has favoured the expansion of the lower-IQ population by financial support, medical treatment and support for dysfunctional offspring, or offspring of dysfunctional parents, all at the expense of the taxpaying population, which has therefore tended to delay and curtail its own families.

This favouring of reproductive activity by the “poor” may in itself have increased the incidence of crime, regardless of their educational or social experience, as there may well be — and there is some evidence that there are — genetic factors predisposing to crime.

Some time ago I saw a statistic to the effect that men who had at least one criminal conviction were producing 30 percent more offspring than men who had no criminal record. If there are genetic factors involved, this would not have to continue for many generations to create a noticeable increase in criminal activity.

This is a quotation on this subject from Dysgenics by Richard Lynn:

The high correlations obtained by Tygart (1991) of criminality with number of siblings suggests that genetic deterioration with regard to conscientiousness may be about twice as great as that for intelligence. Our finding that the fertility of criminals in Britain is about 50 percent greater than that of the population as a whole corroborates the conclusion that this is a serious problem. It may well be that dysgenic fertility for conscientiousness and criminality – which has received the least attention from eugenicists, and which has made a significant contribution to rising crime rates in many Western nations in the second half of the twentieth century – is the most serious of the dysgenic problems confronting modern populations. (Praeger, 1996, p.209)

Middle classes hit hardest

Extract from ‘Middle classes are hit hardest in the pocket’, Daily Mail 5 March 2007:

Middle earners are bearing the brunt of the highest tax levels for a quarter of a century to prop up failing public services, a report concludes today. … A family with £45,000 a year in disposable income will see 48.7 per cent of it disappear in direct and indirect taxes. ...

A study, from the centre-right think tank Reform, warns ‘Taxes are rising to their highest level for 25 years. … the billions of pounds raked in to increase spending on schools and hospitals have been squandered in a decade of Labour rule. … Its writers say Britain is ‘very poorly placed internationally for the next ten years, with low taxation and excellence in education crucial for future success. … Less than half of children currently achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths.’

The report... warns that on current trends, from 2012 young people can expect to pay high taxes and compulsory payments towards higher education and pensions. The effective tax burden for a typical graduate will be 47.6 per cent, before any other costs of living are added on.

My comments

There are constantly being new proposals for increasing the burden of taxation, such as prolonging compulsory education, setting up databases, including fingerprinting for 11-year olds, ID cards for all, monitoring and charging for every mile driven by every motorist, more money to be spent on treating obese or alcoholic children and taking them away from their parents, inspectors to invade houses at any time to see if there have been any improvements which could be used as a justification for raising the Council Tax, which is needed to provide ‘help’ and intervention for the dysfunctional, and so on. But who is complaining? It shouldn’t take my IQ to realise that the object of the exercise is to reduce the most intelligent, functional and independent members of the population to poverty, and dependence on a population of agents of the collective (doctors, teachers, social workers etc) with a low average IQ.

A form of genocide

Communist/socialist revolutions are always aimed at reducing the presence in the population of ‘upper class’ or high IQ genes. The genocide that is going on in this country now is relatively concealed and results from the inception of the Welfare State, better called the Oppressive State, which at the time was hailed by many as ‘the bloodless revolution’. So considering more open forms of genocide enables one to see more clearly what is really going on here and now.

A high IQ or aristocratic ancestry is correlated with both cultural and intellectual interests and with financial and managerial success; populations that achieved too much freedom of action for themselves were persecuted on both counts. Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China killed landlords and intellectuals. In Cambodia, similarly, the communists killed the ‘middle class’. The French Revolution sent aristocrats to the guillotine. The Nazis (National Socialists) killed Jews, who were commercially successful, had strong family solidarity and, statistically, above-average IQs. That means that although the IQ bell curve for German Jews and German non-Jews overlapped to a large extent in the middle regions, the population of people with remarkably high IQs, say over 160, was likely to contain a considerably higher proportion of Jews than of non-Jews. This corresponded to the social observation that the Jewish representation was conspicuous among such people as successful bankers, leading intellectuals, and scientific inventors.

The Holocaust must have had a significant effect on the IQ bell curve for Germany, shifting it downwards. A similar effect is being produced more gradually in this country by covert long-term policies. It is made more difficult for those at the upper end of the IQ range to achieve tolerable living conditions, so they reproduce more slowly. The ‘highly educated’, as they are euphemistically called, have smaller than average families. At the same time, the dysfunctional are given every inducement to reproduce freely, and every generation increases the population of handicapped people, requiring to be supported and subjected to medical treatment throughout their lives at the expense of functional taxpayers.

How many generations will it take, or has it already taken, for this to produce a downward shift in the IQ bell curve as perceptible as that created by the mass murder of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany? Do not overlook the power of geometric compounding.

"Curing" the homeless

Herbert Spencer was a prestigious Victorian philosopher, now out of fashion. According to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ‘Spencer enjoyed immense popularity in his own time, especially in America. ... Sinking in esteem by the century’s end to hitherto unimagined depths, Spencer is today remembered primarily as the enthusiast for extreme laissez-faire or Social Dawinism...’ (from article about Herbert Spencer by Michael Ruse).

Herbert Spencer was opposed to state interventionism and also to female suffrage, on the grounds that women would be too likely to support paternalistic (or interventionist) policies.

Personally, I regard the basic moral principle as being that one should refrain from imposing one’s own evaluations and interpretations on other people, but leave them as free as possible to make their own best guess in view of the existential uncertainty. The modern, and totally different, principle, appears to be that the individual should be willing to sacrifice his own interests in order to contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number of people. I find this horrifying.

An article by John Bird in the Mail on Sunday of 18 February, under the headline ‘Lock up the homeless’, is headed, in large letters, ‘No one knows more about the homeless than the founder of The Big Issue. In a tough and provocative article, he argues that the present policy is useless and the only "cure" for most is compulsory treatment in mental hospitals’.

In the article, the author declares: ‘The way the Government ... "treats" this problem is just plain wrong. The system isn’t curing anything. ... the illness that caused the crisis in the first place is still there, untouched and untreated. What nobody wants to acknowledge is that 90 per cent of people in and around homelessness have drink and drug problems. ... It is addictive behaviour and the only way to tackle it and stand any chance of "curing" the homeless is to treat it as the mental problem it is. Addiction doesn’t fall under the remit of the 1983 Mental Health Act. [An oppressive and intrinsically immoral Act, by the way.] But it should.’

John Bird refers to the cases of two individuals.

Jim was somebody I knew well. He died last year from alcohol abuse, having been slowly rotted by the system that, nominally at least, kept him out of homelessness for 25 years. He teetered on the edge of society, there to be a pain to the hard-working people he lived among. ... The taxpayers paid for Jim to drink himself to death because nobody would accept that his addiction was a state of mental illness.

Bill is in a similar situation. He is a walking disaster. Mentally unstable, a nuisance to himself and others. He has been housed for five years but still lives the life of a homeless person. He simply no longer sleeps rough. His flat is full of last week’s takeaway wrappings. Sometimes he remembers to charge up his electric key. Most times he is in the dark. He lived in a hostel for a while and had to behave. But he was never 'cured'. And so, when he was rehoused, his existence was always going to be that of a sustained victim. He never eats properly or sleeps through the night, is jobless and unemployable. But, as far as some homeless agencies are concerned, he’s been ‘successfully rehoused’. It just shows how much the system masks the problem — to the tune of an estimated £60,000 a year in Bill’s case.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, but the piper is paid with freedom confiscated from taxpayers, thus reducing their ability to build up enough capital to do what they would find most rewarding, which might include having children and educating them. If it costs £60,000 a year to keep a homeless person physically alive, that is about as much as it costs to send six boys to Eton. So the freedom of the taxpaying population is being reduced by that amount for every homeless person it ‘successfully rehouses’.

If the Government had not wished to keep Jim, and others like him, alive at the taxpayers’ expense, these homeless people would have drunk themselves to death more quickly, and the population of drifting homeless would not have become so offensive to the non-homeless population as to justify incarcerating them in the power of the iniquitous medical Mafia, which will not hesitate to deprive them of their mental, as well as physical, liberty by the enforced administration of mind-altering drugs.

‘Colonialism’, the imposition of your own standards on a subject population, is in other contexts disapproved of. You could say that John Bird’s article is expressing 'lifestyle colonialism'. If your subjects do not bring themselves into conformity with your ideas of an approvable lifestyle — however much at variance with their own culture it may be — you consider yourself justified in bringing them into line, by whatever sanctions you see fit.

The quality of life of British children

"Devastating UNICEF report blames family breakdown for giving British children the worst quality of life in the affluent West."

(Front page headline from Daily Mail 14 February 2007.)

My comments

I blame the Welfare State, and the interventionist socialist ideology behind it, for giving British children (and many adults, including me) a terrible quality of life. And what is ‘affluent’ supposed to mean, when the vast majority of the population is sending their children to state schools, and exposing their children and themselves to the tender mercies of the NHS?

A man is kicked to death

Businessman Stephen Langford was kicked to death in the early hours of Saturday 9 December on the High Street, Henley-on-Thames. Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley, commented in the Daily Mail of 11 December 2006:

‘It has come to something when a man can be kicked to death in one of the safest towns in England and right in front of the local police station. I hope that Stephen’s death will rally all of those who believe we have gone too far in tolerating yobbery and thuggishness in our streets. It is time for society collectively to declare that enough is enough.

We need to bring back respect for authority in schools and in the home and we need to clear these thugs off the streets.’

In the same edition of the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips commented on the situation of ‘social injustice’ prevailing in this country. In her column entitled ‘Strong words are not enough. Only tough decisions can make Britain better’, she ascribed this to social damage being done by family breakdown.

She discusses a review published by Ian Duncan Smith, former Tory leader who heads his party’s Social Justice Commission.

‘Mr Duncan Smith’s analysis lays bare the stupendous abandonment by the welfare state of the very people it purports to protect. His review spells out the appalling scale of drug and alcohol abuse, worklessness, failed education and indebtedness.

Ms Phillips continues:

‘The sheer scale of the social damage done by family breakdown is staggering. But even more astounding is the total refusal of the political class to acknowledge or deal with a phenomenon estimated to cost the country more than £20 billion per year. On the contrary, our intellectual and political leaders have done everything in their power to accelerate the collapse of the two-parent family.’

Ms Phillips suggests that the only way to stop the rot is to uphold marriage, which ‘would mean restoring its privileged position in the tax system, removing the numerous incentives to lone parenthood…. and creating a climate in which lone parenthood is regarded as a misfortune to be avoided rather than a ‘right’ to be rewarded.’

My comments

Civilisation has broken down. But it is the Welfare State itself, with its assault on individual liberty and autonomy, that has produced the evergrowing population of demoralised criminals and dysfunctional dependents who now drain the resources, and damage the lives, of the ‘unfairly successful’ elite with above average IQs, too ‘obsessed’ with increasing their wealth and social status to give free rein to their own criminal tendencies.

We note that the appearance of this entrepreneur (who was kicked to death) was probably smart and moralised, and he looked intelligent and handsome.

That arouses enough righteous hostility in the modern world to justify lethal attack, otherwise unmotivated.

Christians' interest in other people

(copy of a letter)

I always notice it when other people appear to agree with something I have said, and wonder what they may be using it to reinforce, which is almost certainly something I don’t agree with.

You seemed to endorse the idea that Christians pretended to be interested in other people, and then you said that you did not mean this as a distinction from any other group of people, but that nobody was interested in other people. Well, of course, first of all you have to say what sort of interest you are talking about. People are, mostly, very interested in other people but in a negative and destructive way, which is usually rationalised as benevolent or altruistic.

However, Christianity is, at least in principle, preferable to the modern belief in society/socialism/collectivism/etc., which advocates only attitudes and ways of going on which are totally incompatible with being on a higher level. It is true that pre higher level I never thought of other people as very important, in the way that you are apparently supposed to. But, without paying any attention to it, I never cultivated any of the common forms of meanness or dishonesty, which seem to be positively favoured in the modern ideology.

If you can’t think of anything better, cultivating generosity towards people is, at least vaguely, higher level. But, of course, if it depends on a set of specific beliefs and not on having had a higher level (or, perhaps, cultivating some higher level realistic ideas pre-higher level) it is vulnerable to confusion with socialism and other forms of belief in society.

Christianity seemed to be advocating some form of post-higher-level psychology, and that would seem to be a bit better than nothing. Injunctions to generosity could, since the underlying motivation was likely to be very weak and conflicted, easily be used to produce guilt and repression, but those things are not so definitively anti-higher-level as the attitudes that believers in society seem to identify with.

Blair's new "social contract"

One might think that the oppressiveness of society in this country had gone far enough and might already be regarded as having reached a ne plus ultra, since the country is no longer a place where one could wish to live. But horrors will never cease, and an article in The Guardian of November 24 carries the headline

BLAIR PLANS NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT
Agreements between individuals and state on health, schools and police

‘Agreements’ indeed. As if I agreed to pay taxes towards the various forms of oppression; I am just forced to do so in order to comply with the law, however damaging or destructive I consider them (it) to be.

So now it is not going to be enough to pay taxes towards these forms of oppression, but if one tries to get anything out of them, the agents of oppression will demand even greater powers than at present to violate the basic moral principle* by imposing their demands upon any exercise of one’s own judgement about one’s priorities.

‘Parents might … be asked to sign individually tailored contracts with a school setting out what the parents must do at home to advance their child’s publicly-funded education’ – meaning, their child’s enforced exposure to what society sees fit to impose upon it. ‘Publicly-funded’ means publicly determined, it does not mean that the oppressive society at large pays to provide what you would choose to have. It is assumed to be a ‘good’ although it may be very harmful indeed.

But it is ‘good’ in the eyes of the oppressive society, which now claims the right to intrude on even more of the existing life of child and parents as well.

The medical ‘profession’ is already criminal anyway, so it hardly makes much difference that they wish to make decisions against your will about things that vitally concern the individual, and will withhold even such immoral treatment as they are prepared to give, unless the individual devotes long periods of time to living in accordance with their dictates.

‘A local health authority will only offer a hip replacement if the patient undertakes to keep their weight down.’ The patient is not to be allowed to decide for himself what risks he is prepared to take, although it is he who will suffer if the operation were to go wrong.

It is clear anyway that nothing can be done to make the medical profession acceptable, other than to abolish it completely. Of course there could still be formal qualifications guaranteeing a certain minimum of information, although perhaps it would inevitably be accompanied by indoctrination with unethical ideas. But no one should be limited to obtaining information, let alone prescriptions (permission to use pharmaceuticals), exclusively from oppressors who are ‘qualified’ by the passing of such exams.

The article starts with this remarkably euphemistic sentence:

A new contract between the state and the citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for quality services from hospitals, schools and police is one of the key proposals emerging from a Downing Street initiated policy review.

‘Quality services’ – whatever can this mean? What is provided by the state as what it wishes to impose on the individual is not a ‘service’, it is an oppression. And it cannot possibly be of any ‘quality’ in the sense that word may be used of something for which an individual might pay himself.

---

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

Data rape

Labour faces further accusations of ‘Big Brother’ tactics over claims that the police and security services will be able to access anyone’s medical records. Highly sensitive information on mental illness, abortions, pregnancy, HIV status, drug-taking and alcoholism will be stored on a national NHS computer database from as early as next year. The plans, part of the Government’s troubled £20 billion NHS computer programme, have been condemned as ‘data rape’ by civil liberty campaigners. At present, police can persuade GPs to divulge facts about their patients or insist on a court order. But under the new system, data would be disclosed centrally and anonymously at the touch of a button.

At the moment, 50 million confidential patient files are held on paper by family doctors. These will soon be loaded on to a central computer system called Spine – whether patients agree or not. Dr Richard Vautrey, from the British Medical Association, warned: ‘If patients don’t have confidence in the national IT system and the way the information is revealed, then they will be reluctant to share those details and that will undermine the confidence they have in their GPs.’ (Daily Mail, 2 November 2006)

Does anybody have ‘confidence’ in their GPs now? Well, more fool they. It has always been the case that what you told to your GP in ‘confidence’ would be freely transmitted to any other member of the medical Mafia, only not to people outside it (though even that was no doubt violated). I have been told various things about other people which were allegedly passed on by their doctors.

And, of course, confidentiality towards other doctors was what was most important to you, because if you got fed up with your GP’s refusal to let you have what you wanted, you would want to be able to start completely afresh with another socially authorised oppressor of humanity.

Even if it was pretty certain that he would think in exactly the same way as the GP from whom you wished to release yourself, at least you wanted to be sure that previous interpretations and misinterpretations would not be passed on, but that you could at least start afresh with presenting your own case in the most favourable way to a tabula rasa, even if it was a tabula rasa with the same basically sadistic psychology and motivation, combined with an equally low IQ.