"Curing" the homeless

Herbert Spencer was a prestigious Victorian philosopher, now out of fashion. According to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ‘Spencer enjoyed immense popularity in his own time, especially in America. ... Sinking in esteem by the century’s end to hitherto unimagined depths, Spencer is today remembered primarily as the enthusiast for extreme laissez-faire or Social Dawinism...’ (from article about Herbert Spencer by Michael Ruse).

Herbert Spencer was opposed to state interventionism and also to female suffrage, on the grounds that women would be too likely to support paternalistic (or interventionist) policies.

Personally, I regard the basic moral principle as being that one should refrain from imposing one’s own evaluations and interpretations on other people, but leave them as free as possible to make their own best guess in view of the existential uncertainty. The modern, and totally different, principle, appears to be that the individual should be willing to sacrifice his own interests in order to contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number of people. I find this horrifying.

An article by John Bird in the Mail on Sunday of 18 February, under the headline ‘Lock up the homeless’, is headed, in large letters, ‘No one knows more about the homeless than the founder of The Big Issue. In a tough and provocative article, he argues that the present policy is useless and the only "cure" for most is compulsory treatment in mental hospitals’.

In the article, the author declares: ‘The way the Government ... "treats" this problem is just plain wrong. The system isn’t curing anything. ... the illness that caused the crisis in the first place is still there, untouched and untreated. What nobody wants to acknowledge is that 90 per cent of people in and around homelessness have drink and drug problems. ... It is addictive behaviour and the only way to tackle it and stand any chance of "curing" the homeless is to treat it as the mental problem it is. Addiction doesn’t fall under the remit of the 1983 Mental Health Act. [An oppressive and intrinsically immoral Act, by the way.] But it should.’

John Bird refers to the cases of two individuals.

Jim was somebody I knew well. He died last year from alcohol abuse, having been slowly rotted by the system that, nominally at least, kept him out of homelessness for 25 years. He teetered on the edge of society, there to be a pain to the hard-working people he lived among. ... The taxpayers paid for Jim to drink himself to death because nobody would accept that his addiction was a state of mental illness.

Bill is in a similar situation. He is a walking disaster. Mentally unstable, a nuisance to himself and others. He has been housed for five years but still lives the life of a homeless person. He simply no longer sleeps rough. His flat is full of last week’s takeaway wrappings. Sometimes he remembers to charge up his electric key. Most times he is in the dark. He lived in a hostel for a while and had to behave. But he was never 'cured'. And so, when he was rehoused, his existence was always going to be that of a sustained victim. He never eats properly or sleeps through the night, is jobless and unemployable. But, as far as some homeless agencies are concerned, he’s been ‘successfully rehoused’. It just shows how much the system masks the problem — to the tune of an estimated £60,000 a year in Bill’s case.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, but the piper is paid with freedom confiscated from taxpayers, thus reducing their ability to build up enough capital to do what they would find most rewarding, which might include having children and educating them. If it costs £60,000 a year to keep a homeless person physically alive, that is about as much as it costs to send six boys to Eton. So the freedom of the taxpaying population is being reduced by that amount for every homeless person it ‘successfully rehouses’.

If the Government had not wished to keep Jim, and others like him, alive at the taxpayers’ expense, these homeless people would have drunk themselves to death more quickly, and the population of drifting homeless would not have become so offensive to the non-homeless population as to justify incarcerating them in the power of the iniquitous medical Mafia, which will not hesitate to deprive them of their mental, as well as physical, liberty by the enforced administration of mind-altering drugs.

‘Colonialism’, the imposition of your own standards on a subject population, is in other contexts disapproved of. You could say that John Bird’s article is expressing 'lifestyle colonialism'. If your subjects do not bring themselves into conformity with your ideas of an approvable lifestyle — however much at variance with their own culture it may be — you consider yourself justified in bringing them into line, by whatever sanctions you see fit.

Pussyfooting about compulsory education

Exceedingly pussyfooting criticism of compulsory education, from an article by Professor Dennis O’Keefe, published by the Libertarian Alliance:

As elementary education got going in the late nineteenth century, before and after compulsion, and up to the Second World War, the curve of British crime fell. With the huge growth of secondary, tertiary and further education since then, it has all rocketed back to square one. One flinches from drawing mechanistic associations, but the contingent growth of anti-social activity side by side with the parallel expansion of mass schooling raise questions too obvious to be ducked. (from ‘Compulsory Education: An Oxymoron of Modernity’)

Why should one ‘flinch from drawing mechanistic associations’? It is clear enough that compulsory education, in this day and age, is aimed at producing demoralised criminals. Nor is it the case that only secondary and tertiary education produce them. As the concepts of compulsory and state education have developed, so also has the ideology that is applied at all levels.

When, recently, I and my associates were resident in East London, we found that waiting for a train at a railway station exposed one to being the target of rocks thrown by children of primary school age, something that was unheard of when I lived in East London soon after the inception of the Welfare (or Oppressive) State. Although even then the ideology was far enough advanced to be severely damaging to the education of a person of exceptional drive and ability.

If I gave a seminar in Oxford on this topic, nobody would come, because I have no academic position or social status. This results from the damage inflicted on my life by the post-war educational and academic systems.

Middle class students

Middle-class students [euphemism for: those with above-average IQs] emerged as the hardest-hit by rising tuition fees as universities warned of further increases. Official figures showed demand for college places hitting record levels despite the introduction of £3,000 a year ‘top up’ fees last September. But the increase was lowest among youngsters from better-off families — the students who miss out on grants and most of the bursaries designed to cancel out the fee increase for the poorest students.

Leading universities are already pressing for the limit on fees to be raised still further within two years — it is due for a review in 2009. They say tuition fees would have to double or even triple to cover the cost of degree courses. (Daily Mail 15 February 2007)

My comments

It is a long-standing policy of modern society to favour the poorest students (poorest in both senses, since high IQ and autonomous drive are correlated with having successful or ‘middle-class’ parents). This follows from the fact that the primary objective of modern society is to destroy exceptional individuals, who would be likely to be the most successful were they not discriminated against.

This is really a form of genocide, more concealed than that of the Nazi holocaust, since its objective is to reduce the presence in the population of representatives of ‘superior’ gene pools.

But making entry to ‘higher education’ difficult for those with above-average IQs could be a blessing in disguise for those who can overcome their social conditioning sufficiently to realise this. Going to university no longer has any point, and I would not recommend it to anyone without consideration of the special factors that may be present in their case.

This place (Oxford Forum) is a Noah’s Ark, and those who perceive the hopelessness of a normal career, taxed from cradle to grave, followed by living on a pension that is ‘withering on the vine’ as well as being means-tested, should think about coming to join my incipient independent university cum business consortium.

The quality of life of British children

"Devastating UNICEF report blames family breakdown for giving British children the worst quality of life in the affluent West."

(Front page headline from Daily Mail 14 February 2007.)

My comments

I blame the Welfare State, and the interventionist socialist ideology behind it, for giving British children (and many adults, including me) a terrible quality of life. And what is ‘affluent’ supposed to mean, when the vast majority of the population is sending their children to state schools, and exposing their children and themselves to the tender mercies of the NHS?

Aphorism of the month (February)

‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’

... is as true today as ever it was. Only now ‘le plus fort’ is always the agent of the collective.


(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Schopenhauer and friendship

This is what Schopenhauer says about friendship:

In many cases, there is a grain of true and genuine friendship in the relation of man to man, though generally, of course, some secret personal interest is at the bottom of them - some one among the many forms that selfishness can take. But in a world where all is imperfect, this grain of true feeling is such an ennobling influence that it gives some warrant for calling those relations by the name of friendship, for they stand far above the ordinary friendships that prevail amongst mankind. The latter are so constituted that, were you to hear how your dear friends speak of you behind your back, you would never say another word to them.

Apart from the case where it would be a real help to you if your friend were to make some great sacrifice to serve you, there is no better means of testing the genuineness of his feelings than the way in which he receives the news of a misfortune that has just happened to you. At that moment the expression of his features will either show that his one thought is that of true and sincere sympathy for you; or else the absolute composure of his countenance, or the passing trace of something other than sympathy, will confirm the well-known maxim of La Rochefoucauld: “Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous deplaît pas.” Indeed, at such a moment, the ordinary so-called friend will find it hard to suppress the signs of a slight smile of pleasure. There are few ways by which you can make more certain of putting people into a good humour than by telling them of some trouble that has recently befallen you, or by unreservedly disclosing some personal weakness of yours. How characteristic this is of humanity!

It is not only that people look pleased at one's misfortunes, they may sometimes be observed to look dismayed at one's good fortune.

I was once in receipt of some financial support for a period of seven years. During this period I moved into a larger house. Speculation among my friends and well-wishers may well have arisen that I would not be able to maintain myself, along with my various colleagues, in this more desirable house once the financial support came to an end. One of these colleagues paid a social call on a Professor and his wife. "And what will you do when your grant comes to an end?" the wife enquired, operating under cover of the social convention which enables people to enquire into your affairs on the assumption that their intentions are benevolent. "Oh, we will go on living in the same house," my colleague replied, and told me afterwards how the face of the Professor's wife dropped with surprise and regret. One may add, of course, that the Professor's wife was living in a more than comparable lifestyle to any we had ever enjoyed, and with far greater social status and security, so that her reaction was not due to our continuing to have some advantage which she did not have herself.

Esther Rantzen and the medical profession

Extracts from an article by Esther Rantzen
about her daughter suffering from ME

When I saw my once active, energetic daughter walking heavily upstairs, and struggling to get off a sofa, at first I put it down to teenage lethargy. Now I know better, I can date the onset of the fatigue. It was triggered by a bout of glandular fever in 1992 when Emily was 14 — a common enough illness in young people, but she never fully recovered. She went back to school after a week or two, but from then on she was overcome with a tiredness that sent her back to sleep in the library or at the back of the class. She went to the school nurse, who ‘counselled’ her, mainly about the depressing effect of my career on her emotional health. Emily argued with the nurse, and never told me. I would have left my job in television instantly if Emily or I had thought the school nurse was right, but this didn’t look like emotional depression to us.

During the next two years she had longer and longer periods off school and in bed, missing out on two thirds of her education, but she still managed to catch up on her own so that her grades at GCSE were a perfect clutch of A-stars. Once again, looking back, I realise that effort was the last straw. The next term she collapsed, and left school permanently. At this point our GP referred her to a neurologist, thank heavens. Had we been referred to a psychiatrist, as many ME patients are, I might have come under suspicion of abusing her, been diagnosed with Munchausen by Proxy, and told that I was deliberately causing my daughter’s illness myself.

It may sound far-fetched, but I have met families to whom that had happened, and mothers who not only had the anxiety and distress of a child’s illness to deal with but the hideous experience of having to defend themselves against accusations of abuse. When a child’s illness baffles the medical profession they sometimes look around for someone to blame, and mum is often the nearest and easiest target. I have campaigned on behalf of parents and children who suddenly find a care order slapped on their sick child. I’ve heard of terrible scenes when screaming children were torn from their parents’ arms and locked in closed psychiatric wards. I know of one father who went to prison rather than allow that to happen to his son.

Luckily our consultant neurologist was one of the few at that time — this was 12 years ago — who recognised ME as a genuine illness, and told us that Emily was a classic case. There wasn’t much he could do, and he was quite honest about that. He told us that nobody knows what causes ME or how to cure it. (Daily Mail, 6 February 2007)

My comments

This article provides a vivid picture of the parlous position of those who are in any way above average in modern egalitarian Britain. Esther Rantzen is not overtly critical of this state of affairs; she had obtained a way of using her ability to gain reward and attention from the society around her precisely by identifying with socialist ideology and becoming a prominent promoter of interventionist ideas.

And yet she describes a state of affairs in which it is dangerous for a middle-class parent to consult a doctor about their child. They are liable to be blamed and have a psychiatric interpretation placed upon them by doctors who are working-class by upbringing and have lower IQs than their own. Their children can be taken away from them at the drop of a hat and they or their children may be incarcerated in prisons or mental institutions. This is the modern form of class warfare.

And consider the ‘counselling’ given by the school nurse, quite likely also a person of working class background and low IQ. The blame for the illness of Esther Rantzen’s daughter is placed upon her and her above-average career, thus trying to turn daughter against mother and (if possible) destroy Esther Rantzen’s career.

Before the inception of the Welfare State, such presumptuous willingness to tear down the respectable middle class was unheard of. If there was a school nurse at all, she was certainly not handing out incitements to persecute parents. People with above average IQs are, at times, surprisingly willing to consult people with lower IQs than their own, who are jealous and resentful of their actual and potential success in life.

And, although of course Esther Rantzen does not mention the possibility, it is perfectly possible that her daughter was just another victim of the ‘feminisation’ of education, which discriminates against people with ability and drive, and which has resulted in more girls than boys going to university.

It is more than likely that a daughter of Esther Rantzen would have an above average IQ and a strong drive to achievement; this could easily lead to depression in modern society. What opportunities is it prepared to offer to such people? Although, of course, only physiological causes are considered as initiating the daughter’s depressed state.

Esther Rantzen follows convention in describing her daughter’s absence from school as ‘missing out on two thirds of her education’, but in fact her daughter’s GCSE successes and the fact that she has been offered a place in Oxford illustrate how little attendance at school has to do with examination success, at least in a positive sense, although there may well be many cases in which it is a massively negative factor.

The feminisation of education

Extracts from ‘The lost boys’ by Jill Parkin

The swimming bag hit the car floor with a thump and my son hit the car seat with an even bigger thump, grumbling: ‘What’s the point?’ His primary school had just lost a swimming competition, largely because their head teacher had picked a team on the basis of enthusiasm rather than ability. To paraphrase that old cliché, it wasn’t the winning that mattered, it was the taking part.

The story of my son’s swimming competition is also the story behind yesterday’s figures showing that boys going to university are now outnumbered by girls in every subject, with 23,000 more places awarded to women than to men. The simple truth is that by the time our boys have done 12 or even 14 years in the feminised environment of today’s schools, they all ask: ‘What’s the point?’

The problems start in the classroom. Instead of the make-or-break sprint to the exam deadline, boys have to endure stultifying coursework. This system of continuous assessment means that anyone who can call up Google on a computer can cut and paste answers from the internet at home. Girls, with their more patient approach to learning, thrive under such a system. But where’s the challenge and excitement for boys? Exams used to be a chance for them to show off and think on their feet. Not any more. No wonder all too many of them fall by the wayside, and are opting out of the chance to go to university.

It’s a teacher truism that little girls want to please and little boys want to win. The trouble is that our whole system is geared to a strange idea of egalitarianism which has somehow been confused with fairness. It is egalitarian to put anyone who can float in a swimming gala, but it is not fair to those who can swim and want to compete.

Boys’ testosterone and its companion competitive streak need to be acknowledged. If they are ignored, boys get listless and they start retreating into their hoodies and terrorising the rest of us. Eventually, they spend their time brawling, picking up ASBOs instead of A-levels. (Daily Mail 1 February 2007)

My comments

The author of this article is appealing for recognition of a genetically determined difference between large groups of the population, i.e. males and females. However, we are far removed from any possibility of the recognition of individual innate differences.

I once said to a television researcher who was interviewing me as a prospect for a programme, ‘People should take into account that if someone is clearly outstanding in one respect, such as IQ, they may also have some unusual peculiarities of temperament which are very likely to lead to problems if no allowance is made for them.’ She expressed disagreement without saying anything, as other people have done to whom I have said this. ‘No,’ she looked as if she was saying, ‘allowance certainly should not be made for people with high IQs to differ from the average in any other way than their ability to score highly on IQ tests.’ I was duly not invited to take part in the programme for which she was researching.

It was my misfortune to be subjected to an educational process which may have not yet been, as this writer expresses it, ‘feminised’, but which was just as bad — if not worse — as a girl in girls’ schools and a women’s college. And in an ideological climate that was about to ‘feminise’ society. What made this misfortune so severe was that I had, to an extreme extent, the intellectual and temperamental characteristics which were recognised as more typically masculine than feminine. The female IQ bell curve was said to be narrower than the male; women were less likely to be geniuses or idiots. My IQ was off the scale at the upper end of the curve, a state of affairs which, although rare in any case, is even less likely to occur in a female than in a male.

Combined with a temperamental liking for intellectual challenge and excitement as defined in this article, this made me very vulnerable to the slow and ‘take it easy’ approach which was imposed on my education. I had a lot of channel capacity and needed to be using it; that is, I needed to be taking more subjects than most people (even than most future Oxford dons) and getting qualifications in them a lot faster.

Psychology is real and inconvenient

People are always wanting to think that I am advocating some particular psychological attitudes in a way that is applicable to the population in general, and hence to themselves if they go away from here or never come in the first place. The few websites that have links to mine mostly contain expositions of my psychological ideas which make them sound as if they are supportive of hippyish dropout psychology.

Matters are not helped, either, by the fact that both religions, and modern collectivist ideology (the new world religion), instil in people the idea that psychological events are either good or bad, and that their psychology is something for which they are responsible and should be able to alter to taste, so that they are bad if they fail to make it conform to what is socially regarded as good.

So people are very likely to have a lurking fear that they are intrinsically evil or worthless, associated with a fear of self-assertion and autonomy, since anything of that kind led to their being slapped down in infancy, and even throughout their ‘educational’ years. But so long as they don’t try to break away from the social guidelines — which in practice are tolerant of dropping out in the approved manner, as well as of having a salaried and highly-taxed ‘career’ in the approved manner — they can kid themselves that they are not minding about anything and need never confront their real problems.

Well, as a matter of fact, it is exceedingly difficult to change one’s psychological position; when I had psychological problems everyone was keen on telling me that they did not exist. I had to keep telling myself that psychology was real. It did not work in what might appear to be the rational way, or the way that would have been convenient for oneself.

But eventually, after a lot of failed attempts to make something work, and especially after proving to myself very thoroughly that the methods proposed by counsellors etc. did not work (not that I went near such people, but the recommended attitudes are ubiquitous in the modern world), I gradually acquired some degrees of freedom and found that it was possible to make some choices and re-direct certain things.

There was no way, at this stage, that I could have foreseen the extraordinary higher level outcome.

Doing the washing-up

(copy of a letter)

You commented on the fact that "Mary Poppins", as you called our incipient potential associate, did some washing-up before she went away.

This is indeed a loaded issue and I will try to explain our position a bit more, because I hope that you, like any other permanent contact that we acquire, may one day pass on some of the right ideas about us to somebody who might be interested enough to come and work here themselves, even if only part-time or temporarily. Although in fact we could easily make use of several full-time people and suffer badly from our shortage of manpower.

In exile from an academic career, I have had no option but to work towards setting up an institutional environment of my own, and the most essential part of a college or research department is the domestic and caretaking staff for keeping the environment going within which intellectual work may eventually become possible.

So we do express the hope that anyone who comes to visit in order to get to know the situation better will be prepared to lend a hand with whatever work may be going on, and this is likely to be domestic, as it is not possible for people who are new to the situation to contribute constructively to office work or word-processing associated with correspondence or books in preparation.

I spent a long time talking to the two people who came, as one has to do with potential associates, and I talked quite a lot about work we had done in the past and how it was only lack of funding that had prevented us from continuing to develop various things. Also we gave them a meal at the pub and paid for their taxi back, because I do not want potential associates to feel out of pocket after coming to spend time here.

But in fact the washing up was all either of them had done on two visits, the first one quite long, during which I had spent several hours giving them information which they seemed to want to have, mostly about areas of research which I do not like thinking about. I have no interest in empty speculation when the data cannot be increased by actual research. I mean, when I am not being able to do any research — although some fictitious theorising, and fraudulent or rubbishy ‘research’, may be being done by other people with academic status and salaries.

If I did not stipulate that visitors have to be prepared to do a modicum of whatever is necessary, our lives could be totally occupied with entertaining people who are prepared to waste our time. And don’t worry, I never get a good deal out of it, usually I get an even worse one, because most of those who come to visit take care not to stay long enough to do even that much work, or for me to start saying anything I want to say.

In case you think we have a lot of money to spend on garden plants, remember that we are outcast intellectuals, the true underclass of the egalitarian society. We cannot afford holidays, or only the shortest and cheapest, occasionally, so we think it best to make our gardens interesting so we will not suffer too much from staying at home throughout the year. Also this has the effect of enhancing the value of our houses when we come to sell them.

You know I would still be willing to lend you some money and help you make capital gains in a Pillings ISA, if you would ever like that. This is something I am prepared to do for any fairly permanent contact that we can manage to get.

It is very difficult to get people to realise that there could be any advantages in coming to work here because the modern world is anti-capitalist (as well as anti-ability).

In fact, since we are attempting to make academic careers without being able to derive any status or salary from society by giving tutorials and lectures or by doing research, we have to substitute investment for those things as a source of income, and it is a very stressful and time-consuming way of making a living. Also of course we have to pay for many facilities for ourselves which non-exiled academics are provided with. Oxbridge colleges still provide their resident academics with automatic dining hall (which implies washing up) facilities. In addition to which we have to pay for the publication of our own books. When I finished my D.Phil. philosophy thesis, Oxford University Press refused to publish it, which it would have been almost certain to do if I had been a Professor or even held any lesser appointment. My thesis was radically undermining of a large part of what is being produced worldwide by salaried academic philosophers – there are said to be 10,000 of them in America alone.

Therefore, although I got the D.Phil. for the thesis, it was largely ignored, except that its ideas were reproduced by some salaried philosophers, twisting them to produce a quite different conclusion.

Of course, you may say that the reason I do not have a Professorship, or any other statusful and salaried academic appointment, is that it was always clear that I was liable to write theses which would not be found congenial by a majority of modern philosophers.