Censorship and child psychiatry

The censorship is terrible. We just had a very obvious example of it. Obviously it militates invisibly against our books. But in this case Fabian wrote some comments on an article* about child psychiatrists. The article made the psychiatrists sound as barmy and irresponsible as I expect them to be, and this was so obvious that I am not sure what the author of the article intended. Children are getting more psychiatric? Schools are getting better at causing breakdowns in their pupils? More children are being drugged out of their minds? Or perhaps – capitalism and ambitious parents are reducing everyone, children included, to nervous wrecks?

Whatever the author intended, Fabian sent a comment (comments invited and assured of publication so long as on-topic and not abusive). Fabian’s comments were very mild by my standards and certainly not abusive, but suggested that there might be a bias in favour of interpreting anything exceptional as pathological (some of the 'deranged' children were a bit intelligent) and that if psychiatric cases were becoming so frequent among school children, should one not consider that the educational system itself might be at fault?

Fabian’s comment was put on and then removed. This is censorship. There is no possibility in modern society of criticising social authorities or the establishment such as doctors and schools; criticism will be suppressed.

* 'Troubled Children', New York Times 11 Nov 06

Centralisation and the Nobel Prize

It is very difficult to say anything about higher level psychology without it leading to misinterpretations. For one thing it is very layered.

As I said, I got centralised by accepting that I had lost my destiny, I couldn’t make society give me any of the things of which it had seen fit to deprive me; I didn’t think that I ought to be able to, because other people were not under my control. I could not prevent everyone from being against me if they wanted to be.

There was nobody in my life any more. What mattered to me most was that if I could ever manage to get a Nobel Prize I wouldn’t be able to get anything out of it because I had no respect for the sort of people who awarded it as sources of significance or recognition. But I had to think I wouldn't, in order to be free to go on pursuing it in such hopeless circumstances. I was going to go on for ever pursuing the things that I might once have had easily; I still did not want anything except the open-ended mental landscape that I had once had.

Similarly, however much I had thought that my interests in finiteness were not worth defending, this only made my frustration the more intense at being in exile from academia and from opportunity, and I was appalled at my degradation among the Professors at the Society for Psychical Research in being deprived of the status which I should already have had myself for several years, and being treated as a statusless, young and female secretary. This prevented me absolutely from identifying with my social image in their eyes, or caring what any of them said or thought about me, and I could only apply all the drive I had to working towards reinstatement in a proper Professorship as soon as possible, even if the only ways I had of working towards it were useless in the eyes of society.

I believe the approved method for becoming reconciled to your position is not to think about the important issues, pretend you don’t mind and you haven’t anything against anybody who messed up your life, pursue beauty or intensity or happiness in a vacuum, and interact with lots of people. This is supposed to give you some sort of feeling of belonging or being valued, or something.

Charles Morgan, forgotten novelist

I think Charles Morgan’s life must have gone wrong somehow, although he was a literary prize winning author. He was a classicist and (I guess, from the social class with which he is familiar) an aristocrat.

In spite of the elation of Sparkenbroke, he seems to have been more identified with the tone of defeated ordinariness characteristic of his other books.

Nevertheless, Sparkenbroke came as a breath of fresh air to me at 14, when I was sinking under the oppression of Woodford High School and both my present wellbeing and future prospects were severely threatened. Here was someone who was getting something out of life, in a hotel environment and free to use his ability. How wonderful. It reminded one that life could be worth living, but provided no solution to getting it back in bad circumstances.

The only other writer I got anything out of was Nietzsche. But he, too, reminded me of an emotional intensity that was desirable, with no suggestion as to how it was to be re-accessed.

I remember a poem out of Sparkenbroke, I suppose written by Morgan himself, which seems a bit more meaningful now than it did then.

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.

On the proposal to raise the school-leaving age

There is a proposal to raise the school-leaving age to 18. How truly terrible. Incarceration, and exposure to social hostility, from 5 to 18!

Yet another blow against the intelligent and driveful. In the case of a person with an IQ of 150, no release from prison until the mental age of 27. Schools are no longer a place that is suitable for the academically inclined, and I would recommend most people, whether academically inclined or not, to leave school at the earliest possible age and concentrate on becoming as rich as possible by business or investment. If he/she builds up a cushion of capital, he can then think about cultural, intellectual or artistic interests. (He could come and join my consortium, even if only temporarily, which might give him some constructive ideas!)

There is, as usual, no consideration for mental age. A person with an IQ of 180 reaches a mental age of 18 when he has a chronological age of 10. It is already the case that many with IQs above average become too disenchanted with the school experience and leave school as soon as they can, rather than staying on to try to get to university. As the school and university experience becomes increasingly trivial and demoralising, so the desire to extend and enforce it becomes stronger in those with the power to legislate for this.

If it were possible to leave school as soon as a certain level of proficiency at reading, writing and arithmetic has been attained, as it was in my grandfather’s day (who had a high IQ and left school at 12), it is easy to imagine that many of the brightest might leave school at about 8 and set about making their way in the world.

Who is to pay for the extra two years of incarceration, by the way? Taxation has already reached a level at which it is difficult to see how more can be squeezed out of the productive population, except by such ingenious measures as:
- fining parents for the misdemeanours of their children, who are being trained at school in discontented rebelliousness against property-owners, or
- fining the parents for failing to force their children to attend the schools when they have no wish to do so.

And who is to say that the ways in which these children want to spend their time would be more damaging than time spent in school?

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

More about taking exams

(copy of a letter)

Whenever I meet people I get reminded of things I need to say about my present and past life which might seem to me too obvious to state explicitly. This is useful in a way; I am still trying to squeeze out my autobiography (up to the age of 21) and other books with painful slowness, and one day will try to force them upon the attention of society.

You said “I must have been pleased" about getting a distinction in the mock maths exam when I was 14. A point that escaped everyone’s attention then, and still does, was that it illustrated how realistic was my bitterness at the contrast between the rate at which I could and should have been acquiring qualifications if I had not been caught by an age-limit (so that I could not even quarrel with people to be allowed to take the exams I proposed to take instantly), and the supervised slow-track of sensory deprivation (doing far too few subjects) into which I had been forced against my will.

You said I had "only done schoolwork" in physics and chemistry. That was the cunning of the conspiracy against me (whether conscious or subconscious). If I was never allowed to get any qualifications for real, I could never prove to anyone how close I had been to taking them. You said "I had read the A-level textbooks". Well, actually, only skippily, but I could see they would be no problem – nor would there be with any degree level textbooks I had managed to obtain. Reading them for real when there was a real goal in prospect would take a few weeks for each subject – say a couple of months for the degree-level exams to be really generous – and I did not want to spoil things for myself by doing anything prematurely, i.e. before it was a matter of preparing for a real, public exam as fast and as hard as possible.

Other people with high IQs sometimes do the same thing, however they rationalise it to themselves. Fabian, for example, made jokes in the back row at lessons at his boring and demoralising school, to pass the time as best he could, and did not do any work until the exam was imminent. Then, preparing for the exam was a challenge (in the old-fashioned sense – not the sense in which gifted children are nowadays said to ‘need challenging’ by sadistic teachers) and what got him distinctions on his S-level (scholarship level) papers was a few weeks of really intensive work.

Remember, this is the high-IQ ghetto.

As the decades have passed, things have got worse. Now there is even more conflation of supervised preparation with exam-taking. It is true that in the end I could not overcome the adverse effects of the nightmarish stress of taking only one degree exam, too late in life, in the subject most vulnerable to stress. The exam-taking was the only potentially positive part of the operation, but by then my situation was too bad. What had made it so was the long years of supervised frustration. So of course it is no solution at all to use the stress of the final exam as an excuse for eliminating it altogether and substituting the supervised ‘preparation’ as being what the degree is about. This supervised ‘preparation’ was the bad part of it that finally made it impossible for me to recover sufficiently for the exam-taking part.

Inverting the situation as usual, of course they increasingly want to spare candidates the possibility of stress in the exam by making their degree depend entirely on the supervised preparation, whereas in fact a complete disjunction is required. What is needed is the possibility for taking or retaking the exam without preliminary social interference.

As it was, I knew that the stress had become too great and tried to secure a fail-safe strategy for myself so that I could go on and take another degree immediately in maths or otherwise if I did not do well enough. But everyone wanted it to be a matter of life or death, so that the stress would be as bad as possible, and no one would give me any financial or even moral support in my attempts to set up a fail-safe plan.

So I knew I could count on no support from anyone; but even so I could not have foreseen that the furious hostility and desire to degrade vented upon me would be as bad as it eventually was.

I have known of other people at Somerville who had always done well in exams by coming over inspirational at the last moment, and hoped/expected to be able to do this for their final degree exam, but found that they could not generate the motivation at so late a stage in their lives, and got seconds instead of firsts.

It is easier to work for reward than to avoid punishment, and working to avoid a punishment of unthinkable horror (which is what exile from an academic career was for me) may be totally incapacitating.

Data rape

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

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

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

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

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

Developing an observer

(copy of a letter)

Well, if you want to develop a 'soul', or whatever, you could try the following.

Gurdjieff sets great store by developing an ‘observer’; that is, you regard yourself as something that is watching what is going on in your mind. This is probably a prerequisite for centralisation or existential perception. This means you don’t identify with your psychology, it is something you observe. You don’t feel responsible for what you observe in your psychology, because you can’t prevent it from being there. This is often very difficult, because people do feel that their psychology is what they really are, and any part of it which they regret or think other people might disapprove of may give them serious feelings of worthlessness and despair.

There is a lot of social influence in the direction of making people feel that they ought to be able to control what is in their own psychology or to apply some fictitious sticking plaster to cover it up, but this is not helpful. People might eventually get a bit more freedom of choice about what they want to reinforce or manipulate, but that isn’t likely to happen while they are still feeling responsible for what they are observing. More often than not there are things which they are trying to change instead of observing them, and trying to feel differently about. This is both decentralising and deprives you of a lot of emotional energy, although it can be very difficult to get into the right position.

People often feel that their life has been ruined in some way or another and if they see how bad it is and how irrevocable they are afraid it is, they will give up, so it is better not to see it too clearly. Then, of course, one has to cultivate realism, but this is often not obvious because a lot of things are peddled as realistic attitudes which are not. People generally have a lot of value judgements and don’t think that there may be exceptions. E.g. going to school is always a ‘good thing’, doctors are always trustworthy, universities are infallible.

Any value judgements that have a certain amount of social support are likely to be occlusive but one can avoid becoming identified with them by remembering that in any given case there may be a large number of factors which you can’t begin to evaluate, possibly including some inconceivable ones. Of course, in the examples I have given it is not difficult to imagine counter examples; you only have to envisage the possibility of one irresponsible and incompetent doctor. Any value judgements that imply ‘shoulds’ are particularly dubious.

No advantages, no money, no people

Everything that has ever happened to me works very well on the hypothesis that everybody knows that I am to get no real advantages ever that can possibly be prevented. Any amount of persecution and opposition is OK, but no money, no people to work for me.

This is still the case. As I was thrown out 50 years ago absolutely destitute, with no career, no tolerable way of earning money, no capital with which to do investment, no friends or supporters who would give me money or support my attempts to get it, I felt the pinch very severely, and of course it is still very depressing (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) for everyone here that the brick wall remains so absolutely impervious, and there is no reason to hope that it will ever get less so.

Beating our heads against the brick wall, I mean attempting to interact with the social environment in any way (e.g. by publishing a book, giving a seminar, or meeting a new potential associate), is always just an expenditure of effort and a crushing reminder that nothing has changed; one is still non-existent in the eyes of society and of every individual microcosm of it (except as an object of attack and persecution).

It takes a lot of energy to withstand and recover from the effects of this, every time it happens, and to lick our wounds in preparation for our next tiny onslaught on the barriers erected around us by a hostile society.

But, anyway, that is how it is. It seems as if every individual knows, and has access to a computer database for working out, that we must never secure a net advantage from any interaction with a person, so they will only work on penal terms, or leave quickly if there is any chance of their becoming a positive factor.

It is rather like the exam-taking process. It seemed as if it was something from which I would be able to secure real benefits, but other people were involved; I was not a free agent, and the whole process could be made into a negative.

Stockbrokers assessing your "needs"

Ever since I was thrown out ruined at the end of my ‘education’ (actually a period of incarceration in which I had been deprived of freedom) I have found the only elements in the situation from which I could get any positive benefit in my efforts to repair my situation, were the higher level toleration and endurance of extremely negative circumstances, and the free market system, insofar as it was still free in a virtually communist society.

My efforts to get any feedback out of other people by trying to do work in bad circumstances, or write books in bad circumstances, that might induce them to reward me with status and income, have turned out so far to be absolutely abortive.

This country long ago passed the point of no return as a country in which I would be living except under duress. It used to be the case that, although everyone wanted to make sure you did not get any money (freedom of action), once it was in your possession you were free to use it to try to improve your position, or give it to other people to use as they saw fit to improve their position.

Now stockbrokers are supposed to ‘assess’ your position and needs, and prescribe for you what risks (as defined by stupid 'trained' financial experts – about as reliable a guide to beneficial outcomes as stupid educational experts) are appropriate for you to be permitted to take. This is, I have to keep repeating, a violation of the basic moral principle, which is that it is immoral to impose your interpretations and evaluations on anyone else, and you should always leave a person as free as possible to react to the uncertainties of the existential situation.

Now things have gone so far that a stockbroking firm is seen in the press defending itself from criticism by asserting that it refuses to sell speculative US shares to people over 80.

This is indeed an oppressive society. It could easily be the case that a ruined academic, having failed to make much headway over a grim lifetime, saw so-called ‘speculative’ investment as their last chance to become rich enough to set up an independent university department and residential college in which to live again, at least for the last ten years of their life, and if they failed in that before the age of 82 or 85, they might well prefer to commit suicide. Not that I would do so myself; I don’t have a suicidal personality.

Plenty of people, not only outcast academics, might well regard speculative investment as their last chance of having whatever they want to get out of life.

There are also increasingly penal restrictions on the amount of money which you are able to give to other people without taxation, depending on subjective assessment by tax inspectors (probably of working class origin) of whether you are giving money to another person ‘regularly’ and ‘without affecting your own standard of living’. Whether or not the recipient is in a disadvantaged position in society (relative to his actual and realistic needs) does not enter into it. In a civilised society, the donor should be free to form his own opinion of objective hardship which he is aiming to relieve by giving money to someone else.

A mock maths exam

(copy of a letter)

Perhaps I should attempt to explain the true context when I refer to my useless little bits of apparent success in a social context. ‘You must have been pleased’, you said of my distinction mark in a mock maths exam. Well, it had been a mildly pleasant and enlivening way of spending the few days of unsupervised preparation, a brief holiday from my increasingly desolate and wearing life in the Sixth Form with no exams to prepare for. (This was after I had been prevented from taking the School Certificate exam and hence delayed in registering as a candidate for London University external degrees.)

Although enlivening, in these few days I did not reach as high an energy level as I could have been experiencing every day if I had taken the School Certificate and proceeded to take as many exams as possible as fast as possible. I was also bitterly aware that it was not an exam I had taken for real and could put on my CV. I was thoroughly browned off with coming top of school exams, with nothing permanent to show for the effort that had been put into them, and I did not want to have to do any more of it. It just added to my disaffection with anything not done for real and in the context of a public exam.

Then again, it was a reminder of the right way of doing maths, but I had no way of changing my circumstances so that I could stop doing everything in the worst possible way. I had no right to make decisions about my own arrangements, although my mental age (a concept not yet censored out of existence) was no less than 21 (if my IQ had been 150), not less than 25 (assuming an IQ of 180 which I had been said to have), and not less than 35 assuming an IQ of 250 (which might reasonably have been guessed from my early reading).