The right and wrong kinds of inspiration

Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail wrote recently about the Inspirational Women of the Year awards. (Nobody had nominated me.) Typically, the nominees had suffered a severe setback in life, such as major physical injury, but continued to live with apparent enthusiasm, setting up a charity to provide help and counselling to people with similar injuries.

‘It does require putting your own moans last’, Bel Mooney said. ‘They identify a need and just go for it. As Katie Piper said, “You can look to the left and to the right and see people with far worse problems.”’

Clearly someone who responds to a bad situation in their own life by trying to ameliorate it, as I did, is taking their own ‘moans’ seriously and hence cannot qualify for approval or admiration, although they appear to qualify for unlimited opposition.

My colleague Charles McCreery’s mother, Lady McCreery, was well aware of what made women qualify for being regarded as ‘inspirational’. She went every year to the lunches at which these awards were made, being a close acquaintance of the Marchioness of Lothian, who ran them for some years, having started them.

When Charles brought her to meet me, soon after I first met him, Lady McCreery took an instant dislike to me. Of course, it is quite possible that she had already gathered from other statusful people that I was persona non grata. On the face of it, it might appear that I was not doing anything very different from what had been done by acceptable people regarded as ‘inspirational’, in responding to adversity in my own life by setting up an independent academic institution for research in previously neglected areas.

Lady McCreery told Charles that she had got me taped at once. I was, she said, ‘patronising, offhand and humourless’.

Far from wishing to bring my efforts to the attention of the Marchioness of Lothian and other supporters of inspirational women, she proceeded to stop at nothing to thwart my efforts.

Social outsiders, their parents and their siblings

I have known some other people who suffered, as I did myself, the consequences of living in a society that is hostile to individuality, especially that of the exceptionally able. In such a society the ‘educational’ system is geared to deprive the able of opportunity and to turn their families against them, unless, as very often happens, they (the individuals) can be turned against their families, blaming them for ‘pushing’ them, and they become dropouts.

Parents may not realise that society has become different from what it was before its transformation by the ‘Welfare State’, and that it is now necessary for them to protect their children from the destructiveness of teachers and of the ‘educational’ system in general (as well as from doctors, social workers, etc).

Other members of a person’s family, as well as the parents, are likely to be turned against them. Any sign of being ‘got down’, or feeling bad about the position into which they have been forced by the system, is taken as a sign of ‘having problems’, which is supposed to imply a need for ‘help’ (i.e. interference) as there cannot possibly be any objective cause of difficulties. This enables the person's siblings, or others, who may be jealous of their real (if maltreated and suppressed) ability, to stick the knife in.

If the opportunities with which the educational system has left them are ultimately too unsuitable, so that they are driven to attempting to do something under their own auspices instead of within the system, they are regarded as not needing help since that is not a ‘proper’ job or way of life.

Of course this is much to the advantage of any sibling, who will get larger shares of any handouts from which their outlawed brother or sister is now excluded.

Socialism and slavery

So many things turn up, and so fundamental, that I should be writing about and am prevented from doing; but this is just the downfall of civilisation, and it is meant to destroy people like me.

So just a brief note. I recently saw something on the French television about the cholera in Haiti, said to be so virulent a strain that it will be years before Haiti is free from it. I did not follow this exactly; some of the woman commentators speak very clearly, but this was not one of them. But the gist of it certainly was as follows: people whose ancestors had been slaves were so angry about the past history of the island, and about the social inequalities which persisted, supposedly as a result of it, that they had been putting cholera into the water systems so that it would spread to all parts of the island.

This would be in revenge (revanche) for the slavery (esclavage). It sounded as if they were just helping the epidemic along, rather than having started it in the first place.

So this is what the modern ideology has brought Haiti to, as a supposed improvement on its former state. There will evidently be a larger proportion of people who fancy having power over other people as doctors, and a fair percentage of the population will continue to lose their freedom to the disease, whether or not they ever recover from it, and whether or not they do so without falling into the hands of the medical profession. There will be many more doctors, one supposes, than there ever were landowners with slaves working for them. And it is not likely that anyone will acquire any freedom to do more than keep themselves physically alive and contribute (by taxation) to the support of the doctors and nurses, and their slaves.

Is this not an epitome of what socialism is aimed at?

Can retrospective legislation ever be ‘fair’?

Herewith some brief notes on some of the issues which arise in connection with recent terrible proposals concerning pensioners. I could and should be able to write much more about this and to get it published; only lack of financial support prevents me from doing this. People coming to work here on a voluntary basis would to some extent enable us to do more.

In the Daily Mail of 17 November there is an article about how governments etc. are letting down pensioners by providing them with no way of getting an income out of their savings.

The author of this article suggests that pensioners might be allowed to invest in special bonds paying a ‘decent’ rate of interest, but that the investment should be limited to a maximum of £20,000, so that ‘wealthy’ pensioners would not be able to benefit unfairly by getting an income which they did not really ‘need’. As usual, ‘need’ is defined in a way which implies that no one receiving more than about the level of income support can possibly be in ‘need’ of more.

Of course, most people with some capital must have suffered from the credit crunch, as the powers-that-be wanted them to do, since we know that the aim of modern society is to prevent those who have above average ability from acquiring any freedom of action to go with it.

In another article in the same issue of the Mail, about how pensioners can ‘sensibly’ get more income from their savings, investing in ordinary shares is described as ‘dangerous’. However, it is a lot less so if you have realistic information about what you are doing.

Over the years, we have invited many people to come and live near us so that they could do some work for us on a voluntary or paid basis, and also get the benefit of the information which we receive and discuss, which is relevant to investment and other financial matters.

* * *

The Pensions Minister Steve Webb, defending the raising of the age at which state pensions will be payable, especially for women, has argued that everyone was living longer, so it was ‘only fair’ that they should start to receive their pensions at a later age. This, however, presumes on the modern view of pensions as a ‘contract between the generations’. Originally people were supposed to be paying, with their contributions, for the income that they would eventually receive, which would be paid out of the income of a fund to which they had contributed. In such a situation, of course, the fund would go on being there even after any particular person had stopped drawing from it, for the benefit of future pensioners, and it would be constantly amplified by the contributions of those who did not live long enough to draw on it at all.

In fact, this fund never existed; see the book The Great Pensions Swindle previously referred to. Nevertheless, people were paying contributions into a supposed scheme which had undertaken to produce a pension bearing some relationship to the cost of living, or to the average wage, at a certain definite age, and this was something which people took into account in deciding whether to pay contributions into this scheme or not.

If it was wished to change the age at which pensions would be paid out, on old-fashioned principles it would be necessary to start a completely new scheme which only applied to people who started paying contributions after the new scheme had started. Retrospective legislation, or retrospective change in legislation, is unprincipled, but this is an idea that has been lost sight of.

Ros Altmann, the Director General of Saga, the association for over-50s, has criticised the postponement of the pension age, especially for women, not on the grounds that it is (in effect) retrospective legislation, but because the changes are too rapid and do not give those who are approaching retirement age ‘enough time’ to think about how they can arrange their affairs to compensate for the change.

One might think that an association of people over 50 would have old-fashioned enough ideas to stand up for principles, such as the principle against retrospective legislation. However, the majority of those who are over 50 now have spent most of their lives under the auspices of the modern ideology. In order to have been born before the onset of the Welfare State in 1945, a person would need to be over 65.

Open letter to a former associate – an Oxford classics graduate

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

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

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

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

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

A teacher from the Dawn of Time

As I was precocious and read a lot, when I was ten I was certainly as familiar with the pre-1945 world as someone born ten years earlier than I was. This was a very different world, qualitatively, from the post-1945 world. However, in spite of the apparent advantages of the pre-war world, the current ideology must have been incubating within it, and I did not get any support except from people who were a good deal older than I was, more like 40 years older than ten.
When I went to the Society for Psychical Research I was initially supported by Sir George Joy and Helen Verrall (Mrs Salter) in plans which others opposed on account of my lack of social status. And those who were most instrumental in my being promoted to the Lower Fifth when I was thirteen, a maths mistress called Miss Bookey and the Reverend Mother, were both something like 40 years older than I was. All three of us were living in a world view distinct from the current one, but the modern ideology was already active and soon asserted itself.

Celia Green with her parents,
William Green and Dorothy Green, c.1947

Miss Bookey enacted the role of the teacher who could see what opportunities would be good for her inexperienced pupil, and exerted herself to bring them about. You could call this paternalism in the old-fashioned sense. I never experienced anything like this attitude again.
Miss Bookey started to teach me when I was eleven at the start of the Lower Fourth year (second year of grammar school). She appeared to be enthused by my exceptionality and was quoted as having said admiring things about me (e.g. that I was ‘luminous with intelligence’). At the same time she appeared actively to like me.
I remember an incident which, subsequently, I took as an indication that she already had it in mind to get me into a higher form. I asked her for some information about geometry which was not provided by the thin and very introductory book used in that form. ‘It isn’t in your book,’ she said. ‘In the higher forms they use a much larger geometry textbook. Wouldn’t you like to be working from the larger book?’ She peered at me as if trying to read my mind. ‘Oh yes, I would,’ I said uncertainly, wondering what was the relevance of this. Was she going to offer to lend me one of these books?
Nothing appeared to come of this at the time, but some time later, probably about a year later, the Reverend Mother proposed to my father that I should be moved up a year, and when this had happened Miss Bookey (who did not teach the Lower Fifth which I had entered) came up to me in the playground looking very happy and pleased with herself, and asked me how I was getting on.
‘Oh, it’s wonderful,’ I said, ‘Everything is fine. I am just amazed that I am still getting As. I really thought that when I moved up I should be prepared to get Bs and Cs at first.’
‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘You could never get Cs.’ And we parted on that note of congratulatory admiration.
I remember also, as an incident that somehow expresses the outlook of a bygone age, that when I had been told I was going to be moved up a year I received a message from the Reverend Mother asking whether I had done any maths in advance of that which had been done by the form I was in.
I went to the Reverend Mother’s room and said that I was afraid I had not, and (a bit apprehensively) that I hoped this would not make any difference to my being moved up into the Lower Fifth. The Reverend Mother was, like Miss Bookey after the move, looking very happy and pleased with herself. ‘Oh no,’ she said laughingly, putting on an act to a teacher who was sitting in the room. ‘It won’t make any difference to that. But it might affect whether you move up to the Upper Fifth. I was wondering whether to move you up two years straight away.’
Actually I had constantly asked my father to help me get started on later chapters in the maths textbooks, as well as on topics that were completely beyond them, such as trigonometry and calculus, but he had always refused on some pretext or another, such as that I could not do calculus until I had done more algebra first.
In languages, my father had been unable to hold me up, as he could not prevent me from proceeding to more advanced reading. He had given me some initial help in visiting Foyle’s Bookshop to pick out the very easiest readers, although there were sometimes signs that he disapproved of what I chose to read.

Simon Cowell's £165m: is it enough?

Discussing the rivalry of two people called Simon Cowell and Simon Fuller, today's Mail on Sunday Review quotes someone as saying: ‘This is not about money – both men have more money than they could spend in their lifetimes.’ They are said to have £165m and £350m respectively. Well, that is taking a distinctly limited view of what they might want to do in their lifetimes.

Suppose, like me, they need to set up an independent university to be productive in many areas of research, starting with just one residential college, at least one scientific research department with laboratories, a few departments for purely intellectual research in philosophy, history, education, etc, and a university printing press to publish books. I do not think £350m would go all the way to setting up such an establishment and running it for long, as deriving an income from capital becomes ever more hazardous.

But do not get me wrong. I would be very pleased to be given any lesser amount and would make the most productive use of it that I could.

In the same issue of the Review, there is a two-page article by a salaried academic called Ian Morris about his own tendentious and fashionable views, reminding one of the burning need for a historical department to be set up under my auspices to publish criticisms of such views, along with a more realistic account of the rise and ongoing fall of Western civilisation. The article in the Review is introduced by this paragraph:

Last week, historian Ian Morris revealed how, at the end of the last Ice Age, a simple accident of geography gave the West the advantages that led to it dominating the world for the last two centuries. His argument forces us to accept that our success was nothing to do with superior brains, leaders or culture – and that the East is on the brink of taking over. That idea may be hard to get used to . . .

No, it isn’t hard to get used to. It has been prevalent for a long time. What would be hard to get used to would be the accounts of the situation that my history department would publish if it were able to. And it should be able to; only financial support is needed to make it so.

Professor Ian Morris is at Stanford University, where research on lucid dreams was carried out for decades by salaried academics, and may still be being carried out – without any funding being offered to me to enable me to continue contributing to the development of this field of research, which had been initiated by me.

Lucid dreams: watching others get the benefit

copy of a letter to a journalist

When you came you asked me whether I regretted having written the first book on lucid dreams, and I should like to answer that in writing. It may be too late for your article, but I am often asked similar questions by journalists, and maybe when I have written it down it can go in my forthcoming book.

In my previous letter to you I referred to academics who make applications for funding for a project, don’t get any, and then find someone else is doing a similar project. Do you suppose they regret making the application? Of course with hindsight they may think that if they had known the outcome they would not have bothered. However, they could only have found out what the outcome would be by making the application, so in a sense I suppose they do not regret having made the attempt.

My position about lucid dreams is similar. I had no wish to write a book about lucid dreams, and would not have done so if I had had any way of proceeding with actual laboratory research on lucid dreams or on anything else, but all the possible sources of funding with which I had contact were impervious. So I made what was in effect an application for funding. I had no way of doing that except by publicising to the world my acquaintance with this potential field of research.

Of course, the academic who finds his ideas being copied has no cause for complaint. His ideas are not protected by patent or copyright, and if he makes them known to the personnel of a grant-giving body they may leak. There is no law against insider dealing in this area. In any case, even if there were, he would find it difficult to pin anything on anybody, unless his application drew on unpublished material known only to himself and this clearly appeared in the design of the other person’s project. This is very unlikely to be the case, and if specialised information is not involved, the other academic can always claim that he thought up the project independently. Great minds are said to think alike, and mediocre ones certainly do.

And, of course, it does the rejected academic no real harm (unless you count emotional bitterness as harmful) to see someone else implementing his ideas. In this respect, however, the emotional pain has been decidedly more severe in my case in relation to lucid dreams than that of the average rejected academic is likely to be. The academic has his status and salary; a certain modicum of lifestyle and intellectual activity is assured. I was attempting to compensate for my lack of these things by getting funding to enable me to live a decent academic life, and this was a desperate long shot at best.

It therefore caused me some intensity of despair to observe that one of my long shots had in fact succeeded to the extent of providing other people, already safely on academic career tracks, with a field of research. As the minimal funding which had made possible the writing of the book had run out, there was no way in which I could hope to improve on the application for funding which I had just made. A person on a desert island cannot exactly say that he regrets having fired a distress rocket without success; he understands what led him to do it, and in the same circumstances he would do the same again. But if I had known what the consequences of initiating this field of research would be I might have refrained. The expansion of work and interest in this field can only appear to someone in my position as a cruel mockery of it, a refinement of torture which I could have done without.

Update

I am applying, and shall continue to apply, for Professorships and Research Lectureships in psychology and other subjects – without as yet having ever been shortlisted – in order to develop the possibilities opened up by my pioneering work in lucid dreaming and other areas.

I continue also to apply for funding for a residential college cum research department within which to carry out research work, to increase the claim of myself and others here to fully salaried senior academic appointments in Oxford, Cambridge or overseas universities of approximately equivalent status.

An appeal to Harvard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cottage with a view

copy of a letter to a salaried academic

Things go on here without getting any better, and without anyone ever responding to our appeals for help of all kinds.

At the moment, for example, there is a way in which someone could give us some help, although we know that in general people do not want to give us any help, and want us not to get any.

A cottage very near to us is up for rent. We are very constricted for space and if someone were to rent this cottage and let us have the use of the whole of it, or some rooms, it would be a great help and a great relief. This is a pleasant village with good views and near to Oxford, so someone could use it as a second home for holidays, or come to live in it sometimes when they were visiting us, say as a senior supporter or a voluntary worker.

We might have a bit more success in getting temporary workers if we were able to offer them free accommodation in a nearby house.

Anyway, it would be a great help. We are too short-staffed at present to consider renting it ourselves; also, the rooms are a bit too small for one of us to want to live there on a permanent basis. It has no garden to speak of, but a patio-style area where one can have pot plants, with views over a valley. The village pub is a few minutes away and its food is not too unhealthy.

I know it is probably hopeless to tell people about this. However, I may be able to put this letter on my blog, although so far that has always been fruitless too.