University gender gap

Men are becoming an endangered species on university campuses, education officials warned yesterday. Latest figures show that women made up a remarkable 57 per cent of all first time graduates in 2006. They are outnumbering men in every subject including engineering and mathematics.

The trend has prompted fears that the men are being left behind as education plays to strengths associated with women such as diligence and attentiveness. Girls outscore boys in GCSEs and A-levels. The Higher Education Funding Council for England, which distributes cash to universities, warns that young men may struggle to get on in the workplace. David Eastwood, the quango’s chief executive, says employers increasingly favour graduates. ‘The wider worry is that if we are not careful we are going to arrive at a position where young lads are alienated, they are underskilled,’ he added.

Professor Alan Smithers, an education expert from Buckingham University, said: ‘The performance of girls has outstripped that of boys, first of all in GCSE, but since 2000, at A-level as well. ‘Boys may do better with the big bang terminal examination approach, whereas girls more often have patience and persistence to put in coursework.’ The proportion of men at university declined steadily throughout the 20th century. By the early 1990s, female graduates were outnumbering males for the first time. (Daily Mail, 31 January 2007)

My comments

It is already the case that boys of school leaving age are alienated. They are often what I would call demoralised criminals, which is what the educational system is aiming at producing. The whole object of the modern ideology is to destroy the individual, which means what I call centralised psychology (see my book Advice to Clever Children). Boys and men were more likely to be associated with some kind of centralised psychology -- albeit expressed in the form of very crude ideals -- so they have been particularly under attack in the modern world.

‘Girls more often have patience and persistence to put in coursework’. Girls were supposed to be interested in social interactions and be less achievement orientated, so it is not too surprising that they are better able to tolerate boring and pointless group activities, and boring and pointless work set by hostile (?) teachers.

If people are forced to undergo periods of supervised preparation for any exam they wish to take to obtain a qualification, it is inevitable, even if not deliberately planned, that the system will discriminate against types of people that school and university teachers dislike, such as those with high IQs and/or a lot of drive of their own, rather than an obsessional interest in other people and in using social structures to gain power over them.

Highly paid GPs

Comments on article entitled ‘Another dose of cash for GPs’ (Daily Mail 30 January 2007)

Highly-paid family doctors are to be offered even more money to start working in the evenings and weekends again. The move comes just three years after the vast majority of GPs stopped out-of-hours work. Since then GPs have seen their pay soar to an average of £118,000 under a new contract which scrapped their responsibility to patients outside normal working hours. Now ministers are prepared to effectively bribe GPs through fresh financial incentives to change their working patterns again after a major patient survey showed growing dissatisfaction with the current service.

My comments

Well of course, the whole object of modern ideology is that those who live by legalised crime (doctors, teachers and social workers) should have constant increases in their immoral earnings, so that the freedom of action of able and intelligent individuals should be constantly reduced by increasing taxation (confiscation of liberty).

And what modern society is aiming at is an ever increasing army of the presumptuous and unprincipled medical, educational and social Mafia. The greatest encouragement is given to those with low IQs and working class backgrounds to join some branch of this Mafia, so that they may have the fun of running and ruining the lives of the former middle and upper class, with above average IQs and possibly some recollection of oldfashioned bourgeois principles of respect for the liberty of other individuals. So that this dwindling and underprivileged class will have its freedom restricted both by having to pay for the immoral oppression, and by having ever increasing areas of their own lives subjected to it.

"The need for balance" and other euphemisms

... in the end there is no substitute for regulators such as the Financial Authority’s Callum McCarthy, a man who knows how to balance the need for intervention against Ronald Reagan’s warning: “Don’t just do something, stand there”. (Irwin Stelzer, The Sunday Times, 21 January 2007.)

My comments

This is what you might call ‘praising interventionism with faint damnation’ and that is as far as any criticism of the modern ideology goes, to the extent it can be found at all.

We at Oxford Forum are the only people attempting to publish the radical criticism that is really needed and so our books and, indeed, our existence, are censored and suppressed. There is no possibility of the downfall of civilisation being averted, reversion to a genuinely free market situation is not possible. Nevertheless we should be able to publish contrarian points of view on a scale more commensurate with the problem.

And I should be able to set up a Department of Philosophy, sub-Department Ethics and Political Theory, to make the world aware of the unexamined assumptions that go into all the pernicious pseudo-philosophy that is currently supposed to constitute the whole of what can be put forward in those areas.

Doing rubbish research

(copy of a letter)

I have to be awfully careful, when I am talking to you, not to appear to support your (i.e. everybody’s) underlying misinterpretations of my position.

Well now, when I said that the recognition of my priority in the field of lucid dream research had never done me any good, you suggested that I might have been invited to work with one of these nitwits with academic status and salary, and I pointed out that it would have been a complete waste of time and what was needed was research on a large scale carried out under my direction. That, perhaps, sounded dangerously close to the idea that I preferred to do something outside of a university career that was interesting and of real progressive value.

Now actually there has never been any question of my being able to do anything for such purist reasons. Everything I did since being thrown out fifty years ago has been motivated only by my need for career progression, as rapid as possible, towards Professorial status and salary and towards the living conditions of a residential college (hotel environment). I was certainly prepared to do any rubbish research that was possible in my atrocious conditions if it was going to secure career progression towards restarting a liveable life.

If I had been offered a position doing rubbish research in a university within the constraints of some academic’s ideas I would have asked myself whether it would lead to career progression towards my goals. I would also have had to ask myself whether it would be possible for me to do what was proposed. Doing single-channel experimental work myself, without a research assistant, would be only marginally possible if I was doing it in the best residential college circumstances, although it could be imagined that I would accept an appointment to do such a thing if and only if it was a way of obtaining those circumstances. I had always accepted that some of my time in an academic career might have to go to waste on teaching etc. in order to secure the circumstances and status of an acceptable life.

In my present constricted circumstances, which are still far from providing me with an adequate institutional environment within which to do even the smallest amount of work in a satisfactory way, small scale experimental work has been, and still is, out of the question. That is why I have not done further work on lucid dreams, or on any of the other fields in which I attempted to establish that a field of possible research existed for which I might (should) be provided with the circumstances to enable me to develop it. (Whether as a Professor in a university, or working in my own academic institute to produce work which would eventually establish my claim to a Professorship.)

There is no possibility whatever of any work that I can do in my present constrained circumstances being of any interest to me, or of my being able to derive any sense of wellbeing from so constricted a life.

Schools and demoralised criminals

(copy of a letter)

As you know, I always notice when someone indicates agreement with something I have said, and I wonder what they may take me as endorsing when I do not endorse it at all.

You seemed to agree that schools are producing a population of ‘demoralised criminals’, so perhaps that means that you are in favour of ideas that schools, having become more boring and demoralising, and offering ever less scope for aspiration or ambition, should now superimpose on the existing system stricter discipline and regimentation, so that those who are least criminal and demoralised, as well as those who are those things most, will have their lives made even worse.

The modern solution to the consequences of socialism, taxation and intervention, is always more socialism, taxation and intervention.

In just the same way, having flooded the country with terrorists and immigrants, legal or otherwise, there will be ‘justification’ for greater interference with the liberty of the respectable non-criminal middle class by such means as identity cards and databases. Socialists say: ‘Why should they mind if they have nothing to hide, so long as only agents of the collective can access the data?’ But who is to say that agents of the collective will be any more scrupulous and any less spontaneously destructive than the agents of the collective in the educational and university systems who have slandered and persecuted me throughout my life, and my parents until they were dead?

It should not be necessary to discuss what schools ‘should’ be like. Schools are a very dubious concept anyway; that they were ever invented shows how nasty the human race is, and compulsory education is clearly absolutely immoral.

"Morality skills"

Another terrible article about IQ in The Times. I am being prevented from writing and publishing replies to the pernicious ideology that pours out.

Heading of article (18 December 2006):

We are about as smart as we're going to get, says IQ pioneer
- Test results are starting to level out
- Morality skills are the "next step"

My comments

It is only to be expected that the ‘rise’ in IQ consequent on the inception of the Welfare State will level out and eventually turn into a decline.

I do not place any particular reliance on the truthfulness or objectivity of academic research workers, so when I read that rises in IQ were reported, I used to think that they might well be shifting the mean, changing the types of question, or just fudging the results to suit themselves. But in fact there is a plausible way of accounting for any rise in average IQ that has really occurred.

Research in America, as reported in the controversial (i.e. largely suppressed) book Dysgenics (David Lynn, Praeger 1996) indicates that the rise may well have been caused by ironing out the effects on adult IQ of poor nutrition and medically untreated diseases, some of which cause brain damage, in early life. Those with the lowest IQs had suffered most from this double whammy, and the rises in IQ were commensurate with those resulting from the medical treatment of disease in control populations. The rise in IQ occurred only in the lowest strata of the population, although of course this raised the overall average IQ to a lesser extent.

A counteracting negative factor, although less immediately noticeable, arose from the provision of medical treatment in early life. A higher proportion of the least functional populations survived to reproductive age. Estimates have been made of the percentage increase per generation of various disabilities, including mental disabilities, resulting from genetic defects.

What are we supposed to understand by ‘morality skills’? Indoctrination in egalitarian collectivist ideology, one supposes, with its dogmatic but unstated beliefs. It takes a very high IQ, as well as some unusual personality factors, to realise what is behind these beliefs, as they depend on a large number of unexamined assumptions about underlying issues that are never even mentioned.

Ignored and/or misrepresented by the media - as usual

My Press Release about the new scheme for 'gifted' children has been rigorously ignored as usual. The one about the terrible proposals for increasing taxation (= confiscation of liberty), in order to interfere even more with children who are already deprived of their liberty by the immoral legislation that makes ‘education’ (= exposure to social hostility) compulsory.

If the media actually wanted some real information about the issues, they might have consulted me, given that I am actually a former gifted child, unlike all the 'experts' waffling about the supposed issues involved in being gifted.

People lift the odd word or quotation from my published material (as they did with Fabian’s book about the legalised crime of the medical ‘profession’) so that they can incorporate them in their own watered-down articles which ignore the real issues.

A Guardian online article about raising the school leaving age uses the word ‘incarceration’ from my November post on this topic in its headline, and gives an anonymous link to my blog, following the convention that I have no social identity. I am merely "one blogger" who thinks that "raising the school leaving age to 18 would be like sentencing intelligent, though not necessarily academically-minded, teenagers to jail", a very watered-down version of my views. Whereas the real point is that all compulsory education is immoral and should be abolished.

Aphorism of the month (January)

The only way most people show evidence of a brain is in the cunning of their stupidity.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Further to injunctions

Whether or not descriptions are turned into injunctions, the only psychological allusions in Christianity are to psychological events in centralised psychology, subsequent to the rejection of society/other people as a source of significance. As the social environment is by far the most obviously available source of significance, this is a very important watershed, so one might wish for some indication of how to get there. But the descriptions of higher level (centralised) generosity encourage the Christian to focus his attention on interactions with other people and society at large, and to reinforce dependence on them as a source of significance.

In fact, you could say that Christianity (as it is, which seems unlikely to have much to do with what anyone who got a higher level would want to promote) is designed to prevent the development of higher level psychology. People who have some higher level tendencies, without being centralised, are likely to want to see something in it, and be drawn into an occlusive kind of psychology (although certainly no worse than socialist egalitarianism).

We can take it as established that there was a higher level mixed up in the origins of Christianity somewhere, but Vladimir Lossky, for example, seems to prefer the idea that there was no psychological development in the life of Christ. That is, either he was in a deified (higher level) state throughout, or (Lossky’s preferred scenario) in a kenotic deified state throughout, which would appear to correspond approximately to a post-higher level state.

But there are many metaphorical references in the Gospels to the dramatic shifts in perspective that occur in pre-higher level psychology, and the Kingdom of Heaven is something that is "entered into", so it would appear that the person who got the higher level definitely got it at some point, and had not had it before then. It is possible to take all the transitional metaphors as referring to the final acquisition of the higher level, but if you assume that the preceding psychological transitions also occurred, it is possible to find what may plausibly be regarded as allusions to them.

Injunctions in the Gospels

(copy of a letter)

You asked why any bits of psychology in the Gospels (even Thomas) are almost always turned into injunctions. Well, a mass religion is not going to be an aid to developing higher level psychology.

But some psychological insight may go into selecting the descriptions of purely higher level psychological reactions in the Gospel of Luke:

… and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also. (Luke 6: 29.)

Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh
away thy goods ask them not again. (Luke 6: 30.)

which not only advocate behaving in a way depending on higher level motivation, but invert the crucial psychodynamic of normal or anti-higher level psychology. Not only does normal psychology have no psychodynamics in favour of acting in this kind of way, but its very strong and crucial psychodynamics is to act inversely. Meanness and refusal is the distinguishing characteristic arising from belief in society. Believers in society swarm past the Little Match Girl, refusing to buy her matches which she wants to sell them to save herself from freezing to death.

One may observe in passing that the idea in modern oppressive society is to turn the believers in society, who shun the matches of the Little Match Girl, into agents of the collective - social workers, doctors and teachers who will have power to interfere in her life, and so be able to oppose her and refuse to give her what she wants more actively and continually. This will save her from freezing to death until she dies in a decentralised state in an NHS hospital.

The obvious effect of injunctions to generosity is to associate them with a social ‘ought’. Anyone with a glimmer of pre-higher level psychology who finds attractive at least the idea of giving people what they want is likely to realise that he does not actually have the motivation to do this, at least not very much, and will feel guilty and inadequate. In any case, the injunctions associated with an authoritarian ‘ought’ will arouse resentment, by reference to childhood experience, especially in those who were not brought up as only children.

All other vague psychological directives in the New Testament are only applicable (I mean applicable in a sense that is any use for developing higher level psychology) after the belief in society has been eliminated. It is only then that injunctions to single-mindedness have any real point, and anyway would probably be unnecessary.