Biography of General Sir Richard McCreery

On Wednesday (14th November) a book was published about the life of the late General Sir Richard McCreery, the father of my colleague Dr Charles McCreery. According to the book, Sir Richard was ‘arguably one of the finest British fighting generals of the Second World War.’

The book gives a misleading impression of the life of Charles McCreery and of our past history as an organisation for academic research, an organisation which was intended to supplement the university career of Dr McCreery, among others. The General was, in effect, antagonistic and his hostility had damaging effects on Dr McCreery’s prospects in life and those of the Institute of Psychophysical Research, with which Dr McCreery had become associated.

What is said in the book omits most of what happened and gives a misleading impression of the little that is mentioned.

Other members of the McCreery family should have exerted themselves (but have never done so) to repair the damage to Charles McCreery’s prospects, by disinheritance and otherwise, which resulted from the General’s unjustifiable hostility towards this organisation, and towards Charles McCreery’s association with it.

Readers of the book might like to look at the category Charles McCreery and his family on this blog which provides further insights into the General’s life. The following six posts may be of particular interest.

A Registrar of Oxford and other deflating gas-bags

Slandered by academics

Treacherous parents and a treacherous fund-raiser

Slandered by aristocrats (part 1)

Your name will be up there one day

The sacrifices of sadism are the greater

Hostility to research on hallucinatory phenomena

text of a letter

This is an account of the conversation about Charles McCreery’s sister Sarah, which I had with Sir George Joy.

Sir George was the only one of our ostensible supporters who visited us fairly regularly and to whom we talked about what was really going on. During my early years at the Society for Psychical Research he had been more like a wholehearted supporter. This had lasted long enough for him to play the role of senior supporter in getting the covenant from Cecil King, chairman of the group that owned the Daily Mirror, but by now he (Sir George) was as worried as anyone that we might get enough money to enable us to do something noteworthy, and acted as if threatened by anything that might increase the chance of that.

The conversation with him about Sarah McCreery must have been fairly early on, because it was very much in the context of everyone having made a lot of effort to convince Charles’s parents, and Sarah, that there was no reason why types of experience which had been associated in the past with parapsychology could not be studied quite objectively and scientifically. What we were proposing to do was in no way different from other psychological research, and we had a large number of prestigious academic Consultants to ensure that we never deviated from the best standards of experimental design.

So I said to Sir George something on the lines of, ‘I hope Charles’s family are genned up enough by now.’

Sir George conveyed to me that Charles’s sister certainly appeared not to be, and that she was stirring up people connected with the SPR, including himself, in demanding further details about what it was really all about, and what Charles’s motivation could be for becoming involved in it.

I was rather dismayed to hear this and said something on the lines of: ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. What more is there to know? She sounds like a troublemaker. Can’t you get her to simmer down?’

It was clear by that time, although we accepted it philosophically, that Charles’s family were a bad investment. A good deal of time and effort had been expended on dealing with the usual prejudices about anything connected with parapsychology but, after making trivial covenants of £10 a year each when they first became Patrons, General and Lady McCreery had not made any further donations. Nor had any of their relatives or contacts, many of whom were wealthy.

In the years that followed, each time we started a new research project, we applied to the Research Committee of the SPR for funding to supplement our small covenanted income from Cecil King, and we were always turned down. There were plenty of ways in which the projects could have been made more informative, and a better preparation for future work, if it had been possible to spend more than the absolute minimum on carrying them out. Of course the negativity of the SPR might have been as bad as this anyway, but certainly it was increased rather than decreased by the agitation frequently expressed by members of the McCreery family.

It seemed that the most we could hope for was passivity on the part of the McCreerys. Nevertheless, Charles continued to work hard at keeping in with them, because it was so important that he should retain his position as an accepted member of his family and of his social class.

Sarah McCreery certainly did us no good with the SPR, which was already hostile, by contacting Sir George to express her doubts and criticisms.

* * *

Hallucinatory phenomena, as well as other phenomena associated with psychical research, aroused, and still arouse, strong reactions or prejudices. For example, there was a prejudice that the existence of such things must be regarded as a proof of spiritualism or other belief systems.

In fact, the work which we were able to do on them, restricted as it was by a lack of adequate finance, established the existence of some types of experience convincingly enough for them to become acceptable in academic contexts. Nominal research on them began to be done in university laboratories around the world, while complete resistance remained to allowing us to carry out research on them any further. We were as unable as before to obtain academic appointments, or funding for an academic institution, including facilities for research on the topics which we had pioneered, although research of a kind was now being done on them by people with the initial advantage of academic status and salary.

The only recognition of our position as pioneers in these fields was that Charles McCreery and I were, many years later, offered the opportunity to work for DPhils, as the hallucinatory phenomena had by then become acceptable topics for academic research.

* * *

Charles McCreery’s family have treated him outrageously. I was shocked that a respectable family with professed high moral standards could behave in such ways. His appeals for reparation, or even for support independently of any admission of responsibility for harm done, were greeted by assertions that his father was such a great man that other members of the family felt that respecting his wishes was the primary consideration. (I.e. that if he wished one of his sons to be unjustly treated, no right-thinking person could wish to remedy that.)

I was, however, amazed that no friends or relatives of the family felt it incumbent on them to use their influence to make the family behave honourably.

We are seeking money to enable us to do the research which we need to do outside the university system to establish our claim to be given suitable, high status positions inside the university system, and to take much further our work in various fields, including those associated with hallucinatory experiences which were initiated by us.

Discrimination against the cleverest by schools, universities and families

It is a feature of the downfall of Western civilisation that above-average ability is discriminated against; this is expressed in the form of preventing it from having ‘unfair’ advantages. In the case of people with exceptional IQs, not only is the school and university system geared against them, but their families are encouraged to turn against them, especially if they make any attempt to recover from the position in which they have been placed by a disadvantageous education. (‘Education’ here means ‘process of acquiring, under the supervision of negatively motivated teachers and tutors, qualifications considered necessary for careers of certain kinds’.)

The paradigm of the ‘pushing parent’, supposedly providing the clever offspring with unfair advantages in the taking of exams, came in with the Welfare State. Less well advertised is society’s fear that middle or upper-class families might give financial and social support to clever offspring attempting to recover from the ill effects of an education over which they had no control. In practice this is not a serious risk; families, rather, appear spontaneously to invent accusations against their cleverest members, which justify them in treating them as if they had voluntarily placed themselves into a socially disadvantageous position.

The family members of the outcast person are probably already jealous of his superior ability, and readily latch on to the opportunities for casting him in a bad light, which can only be to their advantage in obtaining increased shares of any inheritances.

Inheritances, and any social support which the family might give, are now far more important to the outcast than they would have been if his way into a suitable career had not been blocked. At the same time he can be represented as a left-wing, anti-capitalist dropout who despises money, and who lives in poverty as a matter of free choice – but who can also be criticised as ‘greedy’ if he asks for money. (In spite of the vast quantities of money poured out in grants for rubbishy work, carried out in socially recognised academic institutions by people of no particular ability.)

Fast Track to losing your freedom

The time it takes to diagnose dementia is to be slashed from 18 months to just three following a scientific breakthrough. David Cameron will this week announce the creation of a chain of brain clinics to end the agony of those who find out they have Alzheimer’s when it is too late for help. Experts say early diagnosis will give those suffering from the early stages of dementia 18 months of extra independent living, transforming the lives of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable and elderly.

More than 400,000 people in Britain are suffering from dementia but are denied the care and support they need because their condition is undiagnosed – in part because they have to wait a year and a half for it to be confirmed.

Patients at risk will be able to do a series of tests on an iPad in the comfort of their local GP’s office. In only ten minutes the software can determine the difference between people with normal and abnormal memory.

Those at risk would then be referred to an NHS brain health centre where they would have more extensive memory tests while hooked up to an MRI scanner. A new computer program can detect signs of dementia such as brain shrinkage and damage to blood vessels that can affect memory. The results would be beamed back to the GP.

The Government is also investing in a series of mobile diagnostic clinics which will park outside GP surgeries, so people can be tested on their own doorstep. (Daily Mail, 5 November 2012)

The population of people over what is, at present, pensionable age is a population with an above-average IQ.

Once a person has been ‘diagnosed’ with Alzheimer’s they are potentially regarded as incapable of making decisions in their own interests, leaving the way clear for their GP to pop them into the killing fields of a ‘care home’, with or without their consent.

The article from which the above extract is taken stresses how comfortable and easy the process of diagnosis will be made.

Given what is emerging about the treatment by state hospitals of those who are seen as ‘past it’, one should be wary of the medical mafia finding easy ways to diagnose ‘dementia’.

During the Second World War, Jews who signed up for ‘relocation’ (which would turn out to be to a concentration camp with gas chambers) were rewarded with supplies of flour and other food. ‘If they did not want to help us, why would they give us flour to keep us alive?’ some said desperately.

‘Mobile brain clinics’ may come to have the same resonances as ‘gas chambers.’

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources.

I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

West of the Moon, East of the Sun

Charles Morgan (1894-1958) was a writer who expressed a kind of psychology that is suppressed or outcast in the modern world. This comes across most clearly in his novel Sparkenbroke, published in 1936.

There is a sense of incalculable possibility that human psychology may lead to something different, which was also expressed by J.R.R. Tolkien in a poem in The Lord of the Rings, and by H.G. Wells in his short story The Door in the Wall.

As Tolkien’s poem¹ puts it,

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

In H.G. Wells’s story, a boy finds a door which leads into an enchanted garden, and throughout his life is haunted by glimpses of it, but is always prevented from entering by some urgent consideration of his normal life.

The following extract² from Charles Morgan’s Sparkenbroke shows that in 1936 it was not yet unfashionable to admire genius, nor to entertain ideas about the possibilities of human psychology, which now might be called ‘elitist’.

“Do you remember where Lord Sparkenbroke wrote this?” [Mary] asked, and quoted his words. [“The gods offer their own nature to all of us, but only a god knows how to accept.”]

[The Rector] said at last, answering her unspoken question … “When he says that the gods offer their own nature to all of us, he’s writing what most people will deny. They deny the offer because they can’t bear to remember their refusal of it; but I think it’s true that the offer is made. I know it was made to me. There was a moment in my life when I was capable of changing my nature, perhaps of becoming a saint. It was partly my curiosity for mankind, and partly – by an odd paradox – my love of it, that prevented me, and instead of a saint made new I became what you see – a scholar, something of a pedant; a parish priest, a little puffed up by the simplicity of my life; not a failure, not unhappy, but not what Piers [Sparkenbroke] calls ‘a god.’ ‘Only a god ... knows how to accept.’ It’s a hard saying, and harder for Piers than for the rest of us; he knows how to accept but cannot. The offer was made to him when he was a child. It is made to him continually, it is always open to him – that’s the meaning of genius. But because his genius and his life are incomplete he can’t fully accept.”

“But everyone?” she said. “He – yes. And you. But everyone?” … He said instantly: “I think so. To me it’s one of the Christian evidences, though Piers wouldn’t see it as such. Everyone – usually when very young – goes through a kind of spiritual crisis. It varies greatly in intensity and it arises in form with the temper of the age, but in its essence the thing doesn’t change. Sick of a world seemingly stuck fast in the mud of human nature, the young man believes, in certain instants, that he alone has wings. In those instants, he does indeed possess them. He has power to tread the air as St. Peter the water. He cries out, like St. Paul, ‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ and for answer, the gods, as Piers says, offer their nature to him. No one knew this better than Paul himself, but even he couldn’t accept fully, even his great genius was incomplete. And the rest of us? In the very impulse of flight the young man remembers the earth and fears it and desires what he fears. …

We turn away because we have not yet power to cast off our own natures, and are, as it were, stagnant, standing apart from that principle of energy, of movement, of perpetual becoming which, as Heraclitus conceived of it, is an essential principle of the universe:

Man is a king in exile.
All his greatness
Consists in knowledge of that Kingdom lost
Which, in degree of quickness, is his fate
And character on earth.

We are in exile. We have lost our power to ‘become’ because we haven’t the genius to die and be reborn – that is Piers’s idea. If the genius of death fail us while we live; if – as he puts it – we can’t die of ourselves; if we’re so weak that we can’t seize any of the opportunities of transcendence, then death itself will accomplish what we cannot, endowing us with the resurrection.” …

And, pursuing the line of his own thought, he began to speak to her of Voltaire and of the value of scepticism in driving faith back upon its sources.

Sparkenbroke was published about twenty years before the onset of the oppressive (Welfare) state in 1945, at which time Morgan appears still to have been a well known, prestigious and even fashionable writer. When I was at Somerville some ten years later, he was still well known: other undergraduates had heard of him and had opinions about some of his books. But by now the opinions were becoming dismissive. He was not down-to-earth; what he wrote was divorced from real life.

Any idea of relating human life to something beyond itself had become annoying, and was treated with hostility.

I aroused hostility myself, partly no doubt on account of my high IQ, but also in part because my motivation was driven by internal determinants, not by a wish to comply with social pressures.

Mary Adams of the BBC, atheist socialist, and friend of the Principal of Somerville (who was also an atheist and a socialist) said, when I mentioned Morgan’s name, that he was ‘insanely Christian’. My own drive to get on with doing research was also ascribed by her to pathological psychology. I was supposedly ‘schizoid’ and ‘reclusive’. She said of me that I wanted to do research ‘not for any sensible reason, but because she thinks she is divinely suited to it’.

Before the onset of egalitarian ideology, an interest in transcending normal experience was not associated with social dysfunctionality. The man in H.G. Wells’s story, for example, who is haunted by the memory of his door in the wall, is a successful politician and Cabinet Minister.

Nowadays, any motivation other than that of social conformity is automatically diagnosed as pathological and ‘autistic’.

1. The Return of the King, George Allen & Unwin, 1955, p.308
2. Sparkenbroke, Macmillan, 1936, pp.284-287

Vlucht in de Medemens

text of a reply to someone who recently wrote to me, having read the Dutch edition of The Human Evasion (‘Vlucht in de Medemens’) some years ago, and having put part of it on the web

Dear ...

I wrote The Human Evasion under duress. I was in a terrible position, having been exiled from a university career, and my previous distress flares had brought me no alleviation of my position.

I thought people would be inclined to turn the book into a belief system, and in writing it I tried to make this as difficult for them as possible. I am amazed that it can be taken as showing that ‘there is a way out’!

I do not think that freedom, as you suggest, is a word for ‘nothing left to lose’. Freedom, in my mind, is something that society has been trying to keep me deprived of throughout my life.

If part of my book is being inserted into someone else’s book, or on someone else’s website, could there at least be added a note expressing my position, namely that I am desperately in need of help (or freedom) in the way of money (commensurate with setting up institutional environments, since I am still excluded from the socially accredited ones from which I was thrown out in the first place), and in need of people coming to work here. Also, what I have published has been only the tiniest fraction of what I might have said if there were any market for it.

If you have any sympathy with my position, or even recognition of the fact that I myself regard it as intolerable and in need of relief, come for a vacation, perhaps at Christmas – though that is just a delay to coincide with a social convention, so why not come immediately.

You would have to help with any work that needs to be done and which you know enough to do, which limits it to jobs regarded as ‘unskilled’ or ‘menial’. You would get to know a bit about our outlook, and what we regard as our urgent need for opportunity to do what is (from some points of view) important.

Also, you would get to know about the advantages that people might gain in association with us. Even if you never come permanently yourself, you would at least be able to give other people more realistic cues.

When the Dutch edition of The Human Evasion was published I was fed up (as with every other edition of my books published by an outside publisher, and hence with any chance of being reviewed, and bought and read on a decent scale) that I was given no opportunity to contribute an introduction explaining my position and desperate needs. Without such an introduction to put each book in context, from my point of view it might as well not have been published at all, and the efforts that had gone into writing it in bad circumstances were abortive.

How about coming? There is a pub very near to us where you could get bed and breakfast.

update

People often seem to use their own lack of money as an excuse for not coming to help. They say to themselves ‘Celia Green obviously needs money, and I don’t have any’, and do not even offer to come to do some work here, however enthusiastic they may sound about my ideas (as they interpret them). Usually they do not even come for a visit when I have definitely invited them to come.

There are occasional exceptions to this rule, but they are very infrequent. It would have been nice if this person was one of them.

I am now very used to people’s unexpansiveness, but this long-standing feature of human psychology is no more helpful to me now than it was when I had just left college and was attempting to set up my own research department, with residential and dining facilities and live-in caretaking staff.

The fact that I need financial support on the scale necessary to set up institutional environments does not mean that we could not find ways of supporting potential new workers; however, no plans can be made until we have experience of their compatibility with us and of what, in practice, they are able to do.

A ‘level playing field’?

The provision of free state education used to be described as creating a ‘level playing field’. However, it may be wondered whether the real purpose was to iron out the advantages of genetic IQ.

In the early 1940s, and probably also earlier, it was still acceptable to suggest that the effect of state education would be to oppose and damage the prospects of those with above-average IQs.

The following, for example, is an extract from an essay entitled ‘The Uncommon Man’, in which the novelist and essayist Charles Morgan discusses the oncoming ‘age of the Common Man’, and the educational conformity which he thought would result.

If the governing idea is to be that of the Common Man and all things are to be shaped to his supposed needs, education must conform to his conformity, and educational authorities, with a dutiful eye on the Common Boy, must deny exceptional opportunity to exceptional boys. (*)

I do not know what the powers of ‘educational authorities’ were at the time Morgan wrote this. I believe they were given much greater powers of interference in the 1944 Education Act, so that they subsequently had the right to enquire into, and specify changes in, the running of private schools and the circumstances of those being educated at home.

The essay by Charles Morgan was certainly written before the 1944 Education Act, and about ten years before I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam (the exam then usually taken at 16) at the age of 13.

In 1944, when Morgan’s collection of essays, Reflections in a Mirror, was published, I was eight or nine, and unaware that I was about to run the gauntlet of a hostile educational system.

However, the ideology which was to shape the Education Act and later education policy was already having some effect on my life, via my parents and my school.

At the small private primary school I attended, I was sheltered from the hostile attention of the local authority and was treated politely, as was everyone else there. When there were periods for reading on one's own, while the other pupils read books from the general collection available in the classroom, the headmistress provided me with more adult books (for example, historical novels which could be regarded as educational).

Yet neither the school nor my parents made any efforts to encourage my attempts to learn sciences or languages, or to make me aware of exams in such things that I could be working for.

When I taxed my mother with this, long after my university career (and my parents’ lives) had been ruined, my mother claimed that there were no exams like the School Certificate that could be taken during the war years.

‘Well, at least’, I would say, ‘I could have been learning some languages, and even sciences, properly so that I could take exams in them as quickly as possible as soon as it became possible to do so.’

In drawing attention to the negative effects of the new ideology, Charles Morgan was expressing a position which is unlikely to be viewed as acceptable nowadays. Nevertheless, the ideology was clearly on the way in even in 1944, and people of Morgan’s class were tacitly accepting the greater part of it. Earlier in the same essay, Morgan wrote:

There are two kinds of law – law that requires and law that forbids. ... To refuse all [law that requires] would be to revert to an extreme policy of laissez-faire, and this is neither possible nor to be desired.

But there is a real distinction between those who wish to preserve and those who, in pursuit of the theory of the Common Man, wish to overthrow that balance between positive and negative law upon which has hitherto rested our whole conception of a community at once orderly and free.

Unfortunately for critics of conformity, once you accept the need for state intervention, and limit yourself to arguing about the detail, you have essentially lost the battle.

* originally published in The Times Literary Supplement, reprinted in Charles Morgan, Reflections in a Mirror, Macmillan, 1944

‘Class warfare’ as a cover for IQ warfare

Critics have accused Ed Miliband of ‘class war’ tactics after he devoted most of a party political broadcast to the fact he went to a comprehensive school.

In an attempt to compare his background with that of Eton-educated David Cameron, the Labour leader makes repeated references to the fact he was educated at Haverstock School in North London.

But a backbench Tory MP called the broadcast ‘a bit rich’, given that Mr Miliband’s background is far from ordinary. Weaver Vale’s Graham Evans, who grew up in a council house and left school with few qualifications, pointed out Mr Miliband was born to a very well-off family which was part of the ‘Labour elite’. ‘Whenever a wannabe prime minister tries to use class war, I think it’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I am a working class lad who went to a comprehensive, but I think it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it’s where you’re going to that matters. It is a bit rich for him to say I am a normal bloke just because I went to a comprehensive school. Most will look at the broadcast and think he’s just from the Labour elite.’

Mr Miliband is the son of Marxist academic Ralph Miliband, who was close to prominent Labour figures in the 1960s and 1970s and lived in a large house in Primrose Hill, North London.

In the broadcast, to be shown tonight, Mr Miliband is filmed in a classroom at his former school. He says: ‘I’ll always be grateful to Haverstock because I honestly don’t believe I’d be leader of the Labour Party if it wasn’t for the grounding, the education, the learning about life that I had from this school.’ The broadcast also includes former teachers and students who were taught politics by Mr Miliband at Harvard University in 2002 and 2003.

Meanwhile, in a New Statesman interview shadow chancellor Ed Balls said he thought private schools were a barrier to social mobility and social justice but admitted he ‘enjoyed’ his private education at Nottingham High School. (Daily Mail, 2 October 2012)

It seems extraordinary that Ed Miliband’s academic success must be ascribed either to his comprehensive school or to his advantageous home background. The debate about the causes of his success is able to continue indefinitely without even a passing reference to the possibility that he might have inherited an IQ somewhat above average from a father who was known as a leading intellectual.

I know that there is a strong wish to believe that there is no hereditary factor at all in IQ or in related personality attributes. But it is remarkable that this has led to a universal belief so strong that any mention of the possibility that it might not be so is suppressed.

Apparently the social consensus would like to believe that intelligence is created by social influence. Society must own the individual body and soul. There can be no doubt that it owns him bodily by the time it has set up a National Health Service, and an army of social workers to take him into care (away from his parents) at the earliest possible age, if they see fit.

In spite of all this, there remains a lingering suspicion that IQ is not created by ‘education’.

In the article quoted, Ed Miliband is also credited with saying that the country has ‘deep problems – about who Britain is run for, and who prospers in it, about one rule for those at the top and, too often, another rule for everyone else’.

Considering the distribution of power, one might well conclude that Britain is ‘run’ for the benefit of people with a fairly high, but not necessarily outstanding IQ, who have a liking for political power, and for interfering with others.

In other words, the country is run for the benefit of agents of the collective, of whom Ed Miliband himself is one of the better-paid ones, who are rewarded for interfering in people’s lives. Prominent among them is the medical ‘profession’, as well as teachers, social workers, lawyers, and purveyors of psychological ‘help’.

It might be imagined that the country is run for those who receive the benefits which are administered by agents of the collective, but if you think this, you should think again.

What they receive is what others consider suitable for them, and generally involves surrender of freedom. Even when it is money rather than a dubious ‘service’ which is being provided, this is handed out only when there is an obvious drain of a socially acceptable kind on the expenditure of the recipient.

Should the state choose for you? Certainly not.

A recent advert in the Financial Times shows a female professor at the London Business School, asking the question:

‘Should financial regulation intervene in the portfolio choice of investors?’

Why is the gender of the professor chosen to represent the London Business School female? Is it coincidence, or has it been selected to make some ideological point? If the latter, what point? That the School has its share of female professors? Or are readers supposed to regard it as more natural to have an interventionist position expressed (or at least considered) by a woman? Herbert Spencer thought that women were more likely than men to adopt interventionist positions, and one can certainly posit evolutionary models which would fit with this.

The LBS could have asked me to comment on whether the position invoked by the advert is philosophically defensible, or logically flawed, but they did not, perhaps in part because they guessed which answer I would give.

Modern economics is rather keen on the concept of ‘bad choices’, and much has been made in recent years of one version of this, the so-called phenomenon of ‘cognitive bias’. It is supposed to be possible to demonstrate, experimentally, that people make choices that are not optimal. In fact, no such demonstration is possible.

This is not to say that the concept is nonsensical to begin with. I dare say the average human being has a psychology that is full of unresolved conflicts, which trip him up in a way that prevents him getting what he really wants. But demonstrating that this is the case, by comparing his actual choices to supposedly superior ones, is another matter altogether. From a strict point of view, it simply cannot be done.

Consider person X making a choice between option A and option B. The choice is made in favour of A, through some action on his part, and consequences start to follow. How are you, an outside observer, going to assess that it was B which was the optimal choice from his own point of view? Because A causes him harm of a kind that B does not? But how can you assess what weights X places on different benefits and detriments, or whether indeed a detriment really is a detriment, from his point of view? He may choose to smoke, for example, precisely because he does not wish to live to the maximum possible age.

What if things become extreme enough, you may argue. If A causes him to lose his wife, and his job, surely he cannot have wanted to choose A? Of course, we have to distinguish between consequences he foresaw and those he did not. Your assessment of the probabilities of different possible consequences may be different from his. ‘Oh, but the way things turned out proves that my probability assessments were correct.’ Well, no. Also, even if he himself thought that the hoped-for outcome of his decision had a low probability, the value he assigned to that outcome may have been so high that the choice was still rational from his point of view.

What if X now seems miserable in a way that is hard to envisage he would have felt if he had chosen B? Even if it were possible to make comparisons between his current emotional state and the one he might have derived from the other option, and possible to rank one above the other on his behalf (it is not), it still would not prove that he should not have taken the gamble.

What if X claims he would not have made the decision if he had known something which he did not know at the time, but which he now does, i.e. if he had had access to information P? And what if a lot of other people say the same thing? (For example: ‘now we have read the leaflet about lung cancer, we think we would never have become smokers if we had been able to read it when we started smoking’.) Would that mean that if awareness of P were increased, decisions would necessarily be made that were ‘better’ for those kinds of individuals? No.

What if additional knowledge does not come into it, and the individuals just say ‘I was foolish’, or ‘I did not think it through’, or ‘I was under the influence of alcohol’, and claim that in a more normal, sensible state they would have chosen B, not A. Can we not at least then conclude they made a ‘bad’ decision? Not really, for the same sorts of reason.

One cannot reach any strong conclusions from what someone says, especially after the event, because of the principle of ‘cheap talk’. If what you say has little or no effect on what happens to you, then arguably nothing can be read into your statements except (possibly) your intention to influence the listener. Only actual choices can reveal something about a person’s desires or interests, and even those only in an imperfect way.

You (a) do not know whether a person’s claims about what they would have done are meaningful, and (b) do not know what their optimal choices, given all available information, would have been. What is more (allowing for the sake of argument the possibility that there is a better choice, and that others know what it is), you can certainly not assume that intervening to produce the outcome of the optimal choice has the same ranking, from the person’s point of view, as the case in which he chooses the outcome for himself.

Such considerations, showing that (strictly) you can never judge that another’s choices are imperfect, can never know what the optimal choice would have been, and can never recreate it artificially even if you knew it, are routinely waved aside.

We can guess the reason why the possible objections are ignored. The assumptions that we can know what is good for people, and that we can bring it about, may seem to provide legitimacy for intervention. It can be claimed that the intervention is done, not for the intervenor’s benefit, but for the sake of the victim.

Conversely, consideration of the philosophical flaws underlying theories of irrationality tends to undermine the arguments in favour of intervening, whether in portfolio choice or any other area of decision-making.

Theories which provide justification for the exercise of power should always be regarded with greater scepticism than those which are neutral with respect to power, and certainly not with less.

The Bourgeoisie strikes back (or is prevented from doing so)

Lenin is said to have declared that the way to crush the bourgeoisie was to grind them between the millstones of inflation and taxation.

This seems to be the programme that has been, and is being, followed in this country and throughout Western civilisation.

There is a smallish house for sale near here, and also a small house for rent near here. Any potential supporter could buy or rent one of them, as a holiday home and/or for us to use. It seems that in modern society we have no potential supporters, but I just mention it.

The agent for the house for sale is Penny & Sinclair.

The agent for the house for rent is Morgan & Associates