Apparently there is now an Office of Fair Access (meaning to universities). As usual, ‘fair’ refers to some underlying and unquestionable assumptions, such as that all differences in ability or temperament are the result of environment, and that it is right to try to iron these out, so that equality of outcome is achieved.
How about an ‘Office of Fair Reparation and Reinstatement’ to rectify the positions of those (such as myself) who are left without a qualification with which to enter any career that is possible to them? This is using the word ‘fair’ in a different sense, referring to what is really the case, and not what people who believe in the modern ideology would like to think was the case.
As usual, it is necessary to emphasise what people like to overlook; that a person left without a single usable qualification (that is, of use to them as the sort of person they are) is even debarred from the minimal income that might be derived from so-called ‘social security’. Such a person cannot draw income support because he is not in a position to ‘seek work’ as he is not qualified for any work which he could actually do.
The ‘educational’ system does not admit to any responsibility for providing the individuals subjected to it with qualifications suitable to their career needs, or commensurate with their ability. It cannot do so because innate ability is not supposed to exist, and differences in attainment which arise from, or can be ascribed to, environmental influences are there to be ironed out, in pursuit of equality of outcome.
If differences of ability were admitted, it would not seem too difficult to understand that a person with the most exceptional academic ability might have an absolute need for the most high-flying type of academic career and, in reality, could not have any other.
As it is, this is not understood and it is rigorously excluded from consideration, because the educational system wants to be perfectly free to destroy the prospects in life of the most able.
19 July 2007
18 July 2007
Translation into Russian does me no good
The Human Evasion has been translated into Russian and now appears on some website. If my ideas are of ‘interest’ to people even to that extent, why don’t they want to come and find out more about them by working here, or send money commensurate with what is needed to write and publish more of what I have to say? As it is, all the use it will be is that I can improve my reading of Russian by reading it; usually I find it very difficult to find anything to read in Russian that is not as boring and rebarbative as most mediocratic writing being produced in all languages at the present time.
And what good will it do one to be able to read Russian better? No good at all, really. Improving my Russian is only a way of patienter (as the French would say).
Russia is not even an EU country, so that if any Russian speakers did want to come and augment our sadly inadequate workforce they couldn’t, and wealthy Russian-speaking businessmen who might (?) want to give us badly-needed money probably speak and read English anyway.
And what good will it do one to be able to read Russian better? No good at all, really. Improving my Russian is only a way of patienter (as the French would say).
Russia is not even an EU country, so that if any Russian speakers did want to come and augment our sadly inadequate workforce they couldn’t, and wealthy Russian-speaking businessmen who might (?) want to give us badly-needed money probably speak and read English anyway.
12 July 2007
Egalitarianism and the female image
While I think that fundamentally what has been against me all my life has been the modern ideology of egalitarianism, with its hatred of innate ability, precocity, and individual autonomy in every form, it is certainly the case that being female and hence at the mercy of female teachers, tutors, headmistresses, college Principals and (at the SPR) Rosalind Heywood, has always made everything as bad as it could possibly be.
Women on the whole are unsympathetic to drive and ambition, especially in other women, and from the age of 14, if not earlier, I have always had at least one woman — and usually two — networking energetically against me.
A friend was saying recently how much this must have increased the opposition against me. ‘Well’, I said, ‘I thought the way was open. There had been one or two women scientists, Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. I did not realise there was anything against ambition. I had read about the lives of a lot of people and it was not illegal to want to work and use one’s ability to get into the right sort of position in life. If anything, it was approved of.’
‘But all the people in the past who had risen in the world by hard work were men. Were there any other women among the figures of the past that you had read about?’ I had to admit that there were not.
As my friend pointed out, women even more than men are expected to demonstrate uncritical submission to, and acceptance of, social evaluations. Although I did nothing to draw attention to it, I was radically sceptical and open-minded in all contexts, expecting it to be sufficient that I behaved as a respectable person in line to become a pillar of society as my parents were, although I would need to aim at a more prestigious level of society than that in which they had been forced to live out their lives as members of socially displaced high-IQ families.
I had not, at 12 or 13, acquired the belief in society that most people have, and I had never identified with the female image. I read boys’ books predominantly, thinking that reading books for girls was exposing one to becoming identified with pernicious psychological influences, even if it was difficult to work out what they were.
I suppose that my lack of identification with the female image also aroused hostility (as did my precocity and drive) although I do not know how it came across to people. I was wearing the same school uniform as the other girls and got on with doing the required work as well as possible. So what was wrong with that?
Women on the whole are unsympathetic to drive and ambition, especially in other women, and from the age of 14, if not earlier, I have always had at least one woman — and usually two — networking energetically against me.
A friend was saying recently how much this must have increased the opposition against me. ‘Well’, I said, ‘I thought the way was open. There had been one or two women scientists, Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. I did not realise there was anything against ambition. I had read about the lives of a lot of people and it was not illegal to want to work and use one’s ability to get into the right sort of position in life. If anything, it was approved of.’
‘But all the people in the past who had risen in the world by hard work were men. Were there any other women among the figures of the past that you had read about?’ I had to admit that there were not.
As my friend pointed out, women even more than men are expected to demonstrate uncritical submission to, and acceptance of, social evaluations. Although I did nothing to draw attention to it, I was radically sceptical and open-minded in all contexts, expecting it to be sufficient that I behaved as a respectable person in line to become a pillar of society as my parents were, although I would need to aim at a more prestigious level of society than that in which they had been forced to live out their lives as members of socially displaced high-IQ families.
I had not, at 12 or 13, acquired the belief in society that most people have, and I had never identified with the female image. I read boys’ books predominantly, thinking that reading books for girls was exposing one to becoming identified with pernicious psychological influences, even if it was difficult to work out what they were.
I suppose that my lack of identification with the female image also aroused hostility (as did my precocity and drive) although I do not know how it came across to people. I was wearing the same school uniform as the other girls and got on with doing the required work as well as possible. So what was wrong with that?
10 July 2007
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).
"Standing up for God"
In an article in the Daily Mail (8 July) Peter Lewis, referring to the recent books The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, asks ‘Won’t anyone stand up for God?’
The fact is that modern society does not believe in the individual; it owns him body and soul. ‘Social constructionism’ tells us that the individual is what society sees fit to make him, and he is nothing else whatever. Any sort of God represents competition to society. There might be something else that evaluated things differently and might also exert some influence on the individual mind. Cognitive psychology forbid that such a thing might be!
And so the few remaining remnants of belief in anything outside the current belief system are attacked on grounds that are wildly irrelevant. For example: there cannot be a God of any kind, because a lot of people who said they believed in a God did a lot of torturing and killing of other people. (“Not, mind you, that we have anything against torturing and killing except when it is useful for blaming Christians, capitalists and other sorts of evil people, but in that case we mind about it a lot, especially when the numbers involved are very large. Christians and capitalists have caused a lot of suffering and death to enormous numbers of people.”)
Actually the resistance to the idea of God, or of some external influence with which an individual might make contact, is closely related to the fear of the individual having internal psychological determinants arising from his genetic constitution or, indeed, his early upbringing, unless they are easily overridden by social pressures, counselling, psychiatric ‘help’, etc.
I was always very sceptical from a philosophical point of view, and aware of the uncertainty inherent in all aspects of the existential situation; at the same time I found it quite easy and sensible to regard myself as a respectable bourgeois intellectual and had no inclination to deviate from the behaviour suitable to such a person.
At my Catholic convent school I was regarded as a materialist and atheist, because I did not believe in God, although I think what they really minded about was that I did not believe in society.
At Oxford I was surrounded by atheistic socialists who despised my drives to live purposefully and to do research, on the grounds that they arose from internal psychological determinants which I had not been told to have. So now I was accused of believing in God. ‘I know Celia,’ sneered a female senior executive at the BBC, atheist socialist and friend of the Principal of Somerville, ‘She doesn’t want to do research for any sensible reason, but because she thinks she is divinely suited to it.’
Belief in God became a widespread accusation against me, so much so that when I set up (if you can call it that) my first tiny apology for an academic institution, I was accused of intending to start a new religion, and letters for and against this view went to and fro among influential people. But the most supportive of them only went so far as to defend me against this allegation and neither gave me, nor suggested giving me, any actual help in my grim situation.
Addendum
Actually I had set up my incipient university research department and residential college in desperate response to being thrown out at the end of the ruined education with no research scholarship and no way of entering an academic career that could lead to a Professorship. To do that was to give precedence to my desperate needs as internally determined, even though they had not been recognised by society. So I was paying attention to considerations other than those prescribed by society — which is what it is feared a belief in God might lead to.
The fact is that modern society does not believe in the individual; it owns him body and soul. ‘Social constructionism’ tells us that the individual is what society sees fit to make him, and he is nothing else whatever. Any sort of God represents competition to society. There might be something else that evaluated things differently and might also exert some influence on the individual mind. Cognitive psychology forbid that such a thing might be!
And so the few remaining remnants of belief in anything outside the current belief system are attacked on grounds that are wildly irrelevant. For example: there cannot be a God of any kind, because a lot of people who said they believed in a God did a lot of torturing and killing of other people. (“Not, mind you, that we have anything against torturing and killing except when it is useful for blaming Christians, capitalists and other sorts of evil people, but in that case we mind about it a lot, especially when the numbers involved are very large. Christians and capitalists have caused a lot of suffering and death to enormous numbers of people.”)
Actually the resistance to the idea of God, or of some external influence with which an individual might make contact, is closely related to the fear of the individual having internal psychological determinants arising from his genetic constitution or, indeed, his early upbringing, unless they are easily overridden by social pressures, counselling, psychiatric ‘help’, etc.
I was always very sceptical from a philosophical point of view, and aware of the uncertainty inherent in all aspects of the existential situation; at the same time I found it quite easy and sensible to regard myself as a respectable bourgeois intellectual and had no inclination to deviate from the behaviour suitable to such a person.
At my Catholic convent school I was regarded as a materialist and atheist, because I did not believe in God, although I think what they really minded about was that I did not believe in society.
At Oxford I was surrounded by atheistic socialists who despised my drives to live purposefully and to do research, on the grounds that they arose from internal psychological determinants which I had not been told to have. So now I was accused of believing in God. ‘I know Celia,’ sneered a female senior executive at the BBC, atheist socialist and friend of the Principal of Somerville, ‘She doesn’t want to do research for any sensible reason, but because she thinks she is divinely suited to it.’
Belief in God became a widespread accusation against me, so much so that when I set up (if you can call it that) my first tiny apology for an academic institution, I was accused of intending to start a new religion, and letters for and against this view went to and fro among influential people. But the most supportive of them only went so far as to defend me against this allegation and neither gave me, nor suggested giving me, any actual help in my grim situation.
Addendum
Actually I had set up my incipient university research department and residential college in desperate response to being thrown out at the end of the ruined education with no research scholarship and no way of entering an academic career that could lead to a Professorship. To do that was to give precedence to my desperate needs as internally determined, even though they had not been recognised by society. So I was paying attention to considerations other than those prescribed by society — which is what it is feared a belief in God might lead to.
02 July 2007
Double standards on child abuse
In a recent child abuse case a mother was jailed for standing by while her daughter was raped by members of a paedophile ring.
... it was the ‘grievous breach of trust’ on the part of [the mother] to her child that had stunned the High Court ... (Daily Mail, 23 June 2007)
The judge announced that the mother had had a duty of care, and he said of one of the perpetrators, jailing them as well, ‘You were prepared to take advantage of this young child to satisfy your deviant desires and it is clear from the reports you display no real remorse or understanding of the damage caused to her by your conduct.’
The attitude to abuse perpetrated by agents of the collective is very different. I think that my parents should have considered, and all parents should consider, that they have a duty of care to protect their children from abuse by agents of the collective, most obviously those in the educational system. The educational (including the university) system cannot fail to be abusive, since its agents (official and unofficial) wish to believe that there is no such thing as exceptional ability, so they are necessarily motivated to prevent it from expressing itself.
Of course, I do not wish to blame my parents for failing to protect my interests against an abusive system, since the ideology wishes to blame parents and exonerate the agents of the collective who are the real abusers. I blame the agents of the collective, who should have felt a ‘duty of care’ not to turn my parents against me.
By failing to protect me from the abusive age-limit on taking exams by letting me take the School Certificate when I was 13, my parents exposed me to years of abuse under the auspices of the ‘educational’ system which caused great suffering and the ruin of our lives to three people, i.e. myself and my parents.
None of the agents of the collective (official or unofficial) who contributed to the ruin of our lives has every shown any sign of ‘real remorse or understanding of the damage caused’ by their conduct.
However, people’s attitude to abuse by the educational system is quite different from their attitude to abuse by child rapists.
I arouse hostility if I ‘whinge’ and express my need for help (real help, not ‘help’) to retrieve my position, and there is no tendency at all to wish those who contributed to my ruin to ‘pay for’ their crimes, even by imprisonment let alone by doing anything that would help me work towards alleviation of my position.
26 June 2007
Some more notes about pain
Copy of a letter, following on from this.
I think that the pain thing is complicated for most people by the fact that their ‘individualistic’ drives are repressed by their need to derive significance from social approval so that they think they are ‘really’ bad, inadequate, evil and deserving to suffer. I suppose this is one of the things that Christianity plays on. However, it really makes it more necessary to reject the belief in society and its evaluations, while no doubt making it even more difficult to do so (or even to start wanting to do so).
However, I can tell you what I was thinking about before I got the solution to pain, although I had really eliminated the inhibitory belief in society 18 months earlier (and at the time that had been experienced as an appalling and irrevocable loss).
Here you are, existing and threatened from all sides, especially threatened by mortality and the extinction of consciousness, and not knowing anything about anything. This gives you a tremendous drive to react against this claustrophobic situation, and a sense of immediacy and urgency because you could die at any time. This went into my urgency about exam-taking; however young I was, I might die the next day and I had to get on with it. Apart from any considerations about needing to do things at the right age for oneself in terms of one’s mental, rather than chronological, age.
So you have very strong drives to assert yourself against the threatening unknown that surrounds you, but you are afraid of failing and reminding yourself of how puny you are. So you try to find out what you can succeed in doing and to put your drives into things that won’t immediately bring you up against your finiteness.
People play on this and want to make you feel that if you are less good than some other person at doing a certain kind of thing, that is a permanent limitation that you must accept and live within, not think that circumstances might all be different on some other occasion.
So you get a fear of doing something in which you might fail. People who are academically successful usually have techniques for pretending, both to others and themselves, that they are not trying. E.g. Bill Gates playing bridge all day and only working for his degree at night, Kierkegaard putting in an appearance at theatres in the intervals, and then going home to swot up on the classics (or whatever it was he liked to show off about).
But, I had thought, this leaves you with very little of your emotional drive. If you want to try with 51%, and 49% is wanting to preserve itself from failure by not trying, you have 2% of your motivation left. But every failure, of whatever kind, is a horrifying reminder of finiteness and mortality and hence (if you are centralised enough) drives you back onto the point of ricochet and rebounds as the drive to infinity. Because in reality it is not any finite goal that you are aiming at; you want to be omniscient and omnipotent, and it is terrible that you are not. So everything can be made unconflicted if it is turned back into, or recognised as an expression of, the drive to infinity.
And in fact by applying this I had achieved freedom from conflict and certainly had the impression of deploying extremely strong emotional drives, even for someone who had always been uninhibited and regarded as ‘intense’.
But pain presented a serious problem. Any psychological thing, however bad, can be relatively easily ignored. Well, relatively, at least in comparison with pain. As you said, even if they tell you that you have cancer and will die soon, you are still alive. They may be wrong, it may not happen. Anyway, perhaps you can still enjoy yourself.
When Bill’s brother John actually was dying of cancer and Bill took this seriously, John said (as Bill told me), ‘Well, I feel bad about it sometimes, especially when I wake up in the night, but if I do something like going to dinner with your sister, I feel all right again.’ [names changed]
However, pain is difficult to ignore. It is there and you do not want it to be there. It is a proof that your will can be violated (something that you try to overlook as far as possible) and ultimately violated by death. So it is actually a proof of mortality and the ultimate horror of the situation.
It is difficult now to remember how desperate my situation was then. I had to get a solution to pain, if only because I abhorred anaesthetics. And so I set my emotional drive at the problem and determined that my subconscious should forthcome this solution, which I had to have.
This led to the most intolerable existential claustrophobia and nostalgia; I would be driven back onto the point of ricochet and get a violent recoil driving forward again at the problem which had to be solved.
In fact I suppose you can say one was being driven further and further away from any possibility of being related to ‘normal’ life on ‘normal’ terms, past the point of no return. And, of course, it is the great problem with higher level psychology that you lose everything, and lose it irrevocably, before you get everything. It is not a case of giving up on what you have got (or might have) because you see that something else will be better. You give up on it because it is not good enough, although you are still shut in and cannot see how to get anything else.
I have written elsewhere about the despair of finiteness; and it may sound like resignation. But actually it was very complex. I was extremely angry, claustrophobically appalled, and disgusted, that a consciousness should be in such a position, without knowing anything or having any way of finding anything out. It certainly was not resignation in any sense that made the situation tolerable; it made it seem more intolerable than ever, as I reassured myself, wondering whether to go along with it. I had a principle against resignation, which was unrealistic. But a despair so profound as this was dangerous. However, I said to myself, if it arises from a perception of reality that my psychology really reacts in this way to the situation, that is realistic, be the consequences what they may, and so I entertained the despair of finiteness.
Nietzsche, who did not get a higher level, said, ‘If there were God, how could I bear to be no God? Consequently there is no God.’ More precisely, ‘Whether there is God or not, I cannot bear to be no God. Consequently my life in finiteness is worthless and I have no interests worth defending.’
I think that the pain thing is complicated for most people by the fact that their ‘individualistic’ drives are repressed by their need to derive significance from social approval so that they think they are ‘really’ bad, inadequate, evil and deserving to suffer. I suppose this is one of the things that Christianity plays on. However, it really makes it more necessary to reject the belief in society and its evaluations, while no doubt making it even more difficult to do so (or even to start wanting to do so).
However, I can tell you what I was thinking about before I got the solution to pain, although I had really eliminated the inhibitory belief in society 18 months earlier (and at the time that had been experienced as an appalling and irrevocable loss).
Here you are, existing and threatened from all sides, especially threatened by mortality and the extinction of consciousness, and not knowing anything about anything. This gives you a tremendous drive to react against this claustrophobic situation, and a sense of immediacy and urgency because you could die at any time. This went into my urgency about exam-taking; however young I was, I might die the next day and I had to get on with it. Apart from any considerations about needing to do things at the right age for oneself in terms of one’s mental, rather than chronological, age.
So you have very strong drives to assert yourself against the threatening unknown that surrounds you, but you are afraid of failing and reminding yourself of how puny you are. So you try to find out what you can succeed in doing and to put your drives into things that won’t immediately bring you up against your finiteness.
People play on this and want to make you feel that if you are less good than some other person at doing a certain kind of thing, that is a permanent limitation that you must accept and live within, not think that circumstances might all be different on some other occasion.
So you get a fear of doing something in which you might fail. People who are academically successful usually have techniques for pretending, both to others and themselves, that they are not trying. E.g. Bill Gates playing bridge all day and only working for his degree at night, Kierkegaard putting in an appearance at theatres in the intervals, and then going home to swot up on the classics (or whatever it was he liked to show off about).
But, I had thought, this leaves you with very little of your emotional drive. If you want to try with 51%, and 49% is wanting to preserve itself from failure by not trying, you have 2% of your motivation left. But every failure, of whatever kind, is a horrifying reminder of finiteness and mortality and hence (if you are centralised enough) drives you back onto the point of ricochet and rebounds as the drive to infinity. Because in reality it is not any finite goal that you are aiming at; you want to be omniscient and omnipotent, and it is terrible that you are not. So everything can be made unconflicted if it is turned back into, or recognised as an expression of, the drive to infinity.
And in fact by applying this I had achieved freedom from conflict and certainly had the impression of deploying extremely strong emotional drives, even for someone who had always been uninhibited and regarded as ‘intense’.
But pain presented a serious problem. Any psychological thing, however bad, can be relatively easily ignored. Well, relatively, at least in comparison with pain. As you said, even if they tell you that you have cancer and will die soon, you are still alive. They may be wrong, it may not happen. Anyway, perhaps you can still enjoy yourself.
When Bill’s brother John actually was dying of cancer and Bill took this seriously, John said (as Bill told me), ‘Well, I feel bad about it sometimes, especially when I wake up in the night, but if I do something like going to dinner with your sister, I feel all right again.’ [names changed]
However, pain is difficult to ignore. It is there and you do not want it to be there. It is a proof that your will can be violated (something that you try to overlook as far as possible) and ultimately violated by death. So it is actually a proof of mortality and the ultimate horror of the situation.
It is difficult now to remember how desperate my situation was then. I had to get a solution to pain, if only because I abhorred anaesthetics. And so I set my emotional drive at the problem and determined that my subconscious should forthcome this solution, which I had to have.
This led to the most intolerable existential claustrophobia and nostalgia; I would be driven back onto the point of ricochet and get a violent recoil driving forward again at the problem which had to be solved.
In fact I suppose you can say one was being driven further and further away from any possibility of being related to ‘normal’ life on ‘normal’ terms, past the point of no return. And, of course, it is the great problem with higher level psychology that you lose everything, and lose it irrevocably, before you get everything. It is not a case of giving up on what you have got (or might have) because you see that something else will be better. You give up on it because it is not good enough, although you are still shut in and cannot see how to get anything else.
I have written elsewhere about the despair of finiteness; and it may sound like resignation. But actually it was very complex. I was extremely angry, claustrophobically appalled, and disgusted, that a consciousness should be in such a position, without knowing anything or having any way of finding anything out. It certainly was not resignation in any sense that made the situation tolerable; it made it seem more intolerable than ever, as I reassured myself, wondering whether to go along with it. I had a principle against resignation, which was unrealistic. But a despair so profound as this was dangerous. However, I said to myself, if it arises from a perception of reality that my psychology really reacts in this way to the situation, that is realistic, be the consequences what they may, and so I entertained the despair of finiteness.
Nietzsche, who did not get a higher level, said, ‘If there were God, how could I bear to be no God? Consequently there is no God.’ More precisely, ‘Whether there is God or not, I cannot bear to be no God. Consequently my life in finiteness is worthless and I have no interests worth defending.’
25 June 2007
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
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
21 June 2007
The basic moral principle
Modern society has lost sight of the only moral principle of any importance, so that the individual citizen is basically unprotected against unlimited oppression.
Since the ignored principle is never enunciated, it is difficult to express one's horror at what already goes on, and at even worse developments that might go on. If someone says, 'People ought to be heavily taxed in order to pay for state-administered medicine and education', I am shocked and horrified, but inhibited from replying, 'People ought to be taxed as little as possible, and certainly not at all to provide funding for organised crime.'
Usually I do not reply in this way, because I realise that prolonged explanation would be necessary. In reality, at least as much explanation should be required to make plausible the idea that individuals should be taxed to provide for greater oppression of individuals by the collective, but one realises that a high proportion of the population has learnt to proceed smoothly to this conclusion without examination, or even recognition, of the underlying assumptions being made.
If I say that people should be taxed as little as possible and least of all to finance collectively organised oppression, this depends on the basic moral principle that society should interfere as little as possible with the individual's freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit.
The basic moral principle applies between individuals as well, and everyone should respect the right of others to evaluate for themselves the weighting to be placed on the factors which enter into any given situation, since in reality the existential situation is one of total uncertainty.
However, it is only socially appointed agents of the collective, such as doctors, teachers, social workers etc, who are invested with legally conferred powers to impose their valuations on others, and who should be deprived of these (immoral) powers.
In fact, in the presence of the modern ideology, the deplorable practice has arisen of taking into account only factors which appear obvious to a large number of people, and assuming that any others should be ignored.
In place of the basic moral principle enunciated above, an alternative one is implicitly assumed. This is apparently an idea to the effect that what is ethical consists of what the majority of people agree to regard as ethical. Dissenting individuals can and should be forced to submit to the views accepted by the majority of people in their society.
As people are subjected to continuous indoctrination in modern society, from the educational system which increasingly regards indoctrination as a primary objective, and from the continuous stream of propaganda being put out by such media as television and newspapers, it is not surprising that nearly universal tendencies to prefer currently fashionable ways of evaluating things are to be observed.
We may suppose that similar unanimities of evaluation were usually found in primitive tribal societies, but a member of modern society under the influence of the prevailing ideology would regard some of the practices of primitive societies as immoral.
This does not present itself to the modern mind as a problem, since there is an implicit belief that the human race has recently arrived at the best possible way of evaluating things, and the way it thinks now is unquestionably right.
On the basic moral principle that the freedom of the individual to form his own evaluations is supremely important, even if in practice the majority of people will adopt the valuations suggested by the ideology which prevails in the culture of their place and time, the functions of society acting on a collective basis should be as limited as possible. As Herbert Spencer suggests, they should be limited to what is necessary to protect the liberty of individuals from encroachment by other individuals.
Basic moral principle, short form:
It is immoral to impose your interpretations and evaluations on anyone else.
Since the ignored principle is never enunciated, it is difficult to express one's horror at what already goes on, and at even worse developments that might go on. If someone says, 'People ought to be heavily taxed in order to pay for state-administered medicine and education', I am shocked and horrified, but inhibited from replying, 'People ought to be taxed as little as possible, and certainly not at all to provide funding for organised crime.'
Usually I do not reply in this way, because I realise that prolonged explanation would be necessary. In reality, at least as much explanation should be required to make plausible the idea that individuals should be taxed to provide for greater oppression of individuals by the collective, but one realises that a high proportion of the population has learnt to proceed smoothly to this conclusion without examination, or even recognition, of the underlying assumptions being made.
If I say that people should be taxed as little as possible and least of all to finance collectively organised oppression, this depends on the basic moral principle that society should interfere as little as possible with the individual's freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit.
The basic moral principle applies between individuals as well, and everyone should respect the right of others to evaluate for themselves the weighting to be placed on the factors which enter into any given situation, since in reality the existential situation is one of total uncertainty.
However, it is only socially appointed agents of the collective, such as doctors, teachers, social workers etc, who are invested with legally conferred powers to impose their valuations on others, and who should be deprived of these (immoral) powers.
In fact, in the presence of the modern ideology, the deplorable practice has arisen of taking into account only factors which appear obvious to a large number of people, and assuming that any others should be ignored.
In place of the basic moral principle enunciated above, an alternative one is implicitly assumed. This is apparently an idea to the effect that what is ethical consists of what the majority of people agree to regard as ethical. Dissenting individuals can and should be forced to submit to the views accepted by the majority of people in their society.
As people are subjected to continuous indoctrination in modern society, from the educational system which increasingly regards indoctrination as a primary objective, and from the continuous stream of propaganda being put out by such media as television and newspapers, it is not surprising that nearly universal tendencies to prefer currently fashionable ways of evaluating things are to be observed.
We may suppose that similar unanimities of evaluation were usually found in primitive tribal societies, but a member of modern society under the influence of the prevailing ideology would regard some of the practices of primitive societies as immoral.
This does not present itself to the modern mind as a problem, since there is an implicit belief that the human race has recently arrived at the best possible way of evaluating things, and the way it thinks now is unquestionably right.
On the basic moral principle that the freedom of the individual to form his own evaluations is supremely important, even if in practice the majority of people will adopt the valuations suggested by the ideology which prevails in the culture of their place and time, the functions of society acting on a collective basis should be as limited as possible. As Herbert Spencer suggests, they should be limited to what is necessary to protect the liberty of individuals from encroachment by other individuals.
Basic moral principle, short form:
It is immoral to impose your interpretations and evaluations on anyone else.
19 June 2007
Drinks party
Copy of a letter
Thank you for coming to our drinks party. As you said, it was a funny time of day, but this arose because we usually do such things in the function room at the Mitre, which is being refurbished. The rooms at Infinite Ideas which we hired instead are very suitable rooms, but unfortunately not available for evening times.
Just to amplify some things I said at the party. You seemed to find it difficult to understand what I meant by being ‘squeezed out’ without a single usable qualification at the end of the ruined ‘education’. Actually, I refer to that as being ‘thrown out’, and what I refer to as being ‘squeezed to death’ came later, and is still going on.
The reason I use the terminology in this way is that people like to assume or imply that I am a ‘drop-out’, and that I turned my back on normal careers voluntarily. Actually I was thrown out of an academic career very much against my will, and knew that I could not make a career or even earn money in any other way. I could not get any support for attempting in any way to get back into a university career, even moral support or the barest recognition of the fact that that was what I was trying to do.
And if you speak of my being thrown out (into the wilderness, onto the dungheap) as being squeezed out, that might seem to imply that the squeeze was a one-off thing. Actually the attempt to squeeze me to death was applied as soon as I set up my incipient academic institution in Oxford, within which I hoped to be able to do research with which to reclaim a position in the academic world. I lived more or less literally under siege and have done so ever since.
You asked what 'centralisation' was. It is a lot easier, of course, to say what decentralisation is, which prevents centralisation from arising. All modern psychology (which includes psychology of religion) is about decentralisation. It is promoted by people who are themselves decentralised, so it is not even a realistic account of how unrealistic psychology works.
I have put on my blogspot some comments on the film Sleuth which provides very clear illustrations of people being forced into decentralised positions. Under threat from other people, they have no attention free to consider their own internal psychological criteria or to become aware of the fact that they are in a shocking existential situation which they do not know anything about.
I don’t use words like 'supernatural' or 'transcendent', but I do use the word 'inconceivable' to apply to the qualitatively different mental contents of a higher level. That, however, is not present in any sort of pre-higher level centralised psychology.
Thank you for coming to our drinks party. As you said, it was a funny time of day, but this arose because we usually do such things in the function room at the Mitre, which is being refurbished. The rooms at Infinite Ideas which we hired instead are very suitable rooms, but unfortunately not available for evening times.
Just to amplify some things I said at the party. You seemed to find it difficult to understand what I meant by being ‘squeezed out’ without a single usable qualification at the end of the ruined ‘education’. Actually, I refer to that as being ‘thrown out’, and what I refer to as being ‘squeezed to death’ came later, and is still going on.
The reason I use the terminology in this way is that people like to assume or imply that I am a ‘drop-out’, and that I turned my back on normal careers voluntarily. Actually I was thrown out of an academic career very much against my will, and knew that I could not make a career or even earn money in any other way. I could not get any support for attempting in any way to get back into a university career, even moral support or the barest recognition of the fact that that was what I was trying to do.
And if you speak of my being thrown out (into the wilderness, onto the dungheap) as being squeezed out, that might seem to imply that the squeeze was a one-off thing. Actually the attempt to squeeze me to death was applied as soon as I set up my incipient academic institution in Oxford, within which I hoped to be able to do research with which to reclaim a position in the academic world. I lived more or less literally under siege and have done so ever since.
You asked what 'centralisation' was. It is a lot easier, of course, to say what decentralisation is, which prevents centralisation from arising. All modern psychology (which includes psychology of religion) is about decentralisation. It is promoted by people who are themselves decentralised, so it is not even a realistic account of how unrealistic psychology works.
I have put on my blogspot some comments on the film Sleuth which provides very clear illustrations of people being forced into decentralised positions. Under threat from other people, they have no attention free to consider their own internal psychological criteria or to become aware of the fact that they are in a shocking existential situation which they do not know anything about.
I don’t use words like 'supernatural' or 'transcendent', but I do use the word 'inconceivable' to apply to the qualitatively different mental contents of a higher level. That, however, is not present in any sort of pre-higher level centralised psychology.
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