'Trained' - to support the ideology

copy of a letter to an academic philosopher

As usual, I was not shortlisted for the Cambridge Professorship in philosophy, which would have given me a small part of the income and social status that I need for my suppressed philosophy department to start publishing its very relevant and much-needed contributions to academic philosophy.

I know it is your opinion that no contributions from me or other members of my department are ‘needed’ because, as you said, ‘Philosophers are criticising one another.’ And I know also that because you have socially conferred status as an academic your opinion is supposed to be authoritative and meaningful, whereas mine is not. However, I do not actually accept that my opinion is of less value than yours, although I do not have the social recognition as an academic which I should have.

It is very definitely my opinion that all areas of philosophy which are perceived as having a bearing on the theory and practice of socialist ideology (which is nearly all of them) are virtually worthless. In fact, their only raison d’etre is to provide tendentious support towards the downfall of Western civilisation and the reversion to a barbaric tribalism.

A ‘trained’ philosopher is one who has learned to take seriously what other ‘philosophers’ say; and to argue about, or write descriptions of, the situation within the parameters which are defined by never questioning certain basic and all-important assumptions. The fact that these assumptions are not questioned usually means that what is written can be readily exposed as incoherent and inconsistent, often even without direct reference to the underlying assumptions that are implicitly being made. However, this is something that socially appointed philosophers do not do – it is what they have been ‘trained’ not to do (nor, even outside the system, is it being done by anyone at present), but it is what we would do.

So I do think that the contributions which my philosophy department has been being prevented from making in the last 50 years should be regarded as being of sufficient value to justify the financial support which would make them possible. Although, of course, my opinion of what is worth doing is socially regarded as automatically discredited compared with, for example, yours, since you have a statusful and salaried academic position, whereas I do not.

Incidentally, all modern philosophers evidently feel justified in rejecting my writings as ‘not proper philosophy’, and hence in believing that it is right and proper for me to be prevented from making any contribution to academic philosophy or any other area by being starved of money and social status. However, nothing I have published has been intended as ‘philosophy’ in the sense of being intended to contribute to academic philosophy or having anything to do with my claims on a salaried and statusful appointment as a philosopher. I have written nothing while holding a salaried appointment as a philosopher, and if I had done, what I would have written would have been quite different and consisted of exposing the weakness and inconsistency of what is produced in great quantities by ‘philosophers’ with salaried appointments.

Crazy crusade

Tendentious stuff continues to pour out of universities based on the unfounded assumption that there is no such thing as innate ability or genetically determined personality characteristics. Or perhaps one should say, founded only on wishful thinking.

The ‘critical obstacle’ to an official crusade to widen the social class mix of students is [state school students’] poor performance compared with private school pupils, it was claimed. In a veiled attack on Labour’s record, [Cambridge University] said it had failed to break the ‘pernicious link between deprivation and educational attainment’...

In an analysis, Dr Geoff Parks and Richard Partington said state schools were ‘unlikely’ to hit the target of accounting for over two-thirds of admissions to leading universities ‘unless their exam performance improves’ ... But, said Dr Parks and Mr Partington, the real barrier to top universities was an ‘uneven’ education playing field and the link between a child’s prospects and their social background.

The research follows a Commons inquiry which found that almost £400 million has been spent on boosting recruitment of working-class students to university with barely any effect. Cambridge’s intervention will rile Universities Secretary John Denham, who believes leading universities should do more to change their social make-up. (Daily Mail, 28 February 2009)

Well, of course there is an uneven educational and academic playing field. Exceptional ability arouses hostility in its egalitarian-minded teachers and tutors, both at school and at university.

It is easy to prevent the exceptional from demonstrating their ability realistically in exam results. It is also possible, though maybe less easy, by methods such as 'dumbing down', to improve the exam results of those with much less aptitude for academic activities, which may well be combined with little natural inclination to pursue them. Both procedures seem to be a standard feature of modern education, though their effects are apparently insufficient to satisfy the expectations of ‘researchers’.

A further £400 million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on making the position of the able in modern society even worse, while even the tiniest support is rigorously withheld from the relevant departments of my suppressed independent university, continuing to prevent it from publishing criticisms of such things as this tendentious report, which has the spurious claim to authoritativeness of coming from Cambridge, socially recognised as a ‘university’ and massively supported with taxpayers’ money.

Even a four-hundredth part of £400 million (0.25%), that is £1 million, if donated to my independent university, would enable it to contribute to current debates by writing and publishing a few books and articles for a period of 2 or 3 years. That would only be a drop in the ocean of what is really needed, but it would be a start and get us out of the deadlocked stasis in which we remain at present.

On being "influential"

I would like to comment on the word ‘influential’ in one of my testimonials, in the phrase ‘influential published work on abnormal perceptual states’. This implies that the ‘research work’ which has been done, and the books and other material which have been written, in areas nominally related to those in which I attempted to start working myself, is in some way meaningful as a consequence of it. It is true that much of it may be regarded as resulting from my initial work in the sense that it is highly unlikely that it would have been done if my work had not been published, but it was no substitute for what my colleagues and I would have done, and would still start to do as soon as not prevented from doing so by lack of financial support.

It has always been a line of academics to taunt and insult me, statusless and unsalaried as I was (and still am), by describing me as ‘free to follow my interests’.

The system of social interpretation to be followed in the oppressive society is universally known and applied. Whenever we meet or interact with potential supporters and associates, which is usually a very brief encounter and generally abortive, they may ask what we have ‘done’ or ‘are doing’, and when they can identify an area of work by name they start to tell us about rubbish that is being ‘done’ in that nominal area. We ask them to stop telling us about this, or sending us provocative and irritating reports, as we are not even in a position to publish our criticisms of it, which we would do if we were adequately rewarded with salary and status for doing so, although being able to criticise other people’s work would still be no substitute for being able to get on with what we would do ourselves if not kept rigorously deprived of opportunity.

Or else they just start to put on a phoney show of ‘fascination’ as if that was meant to ingratiate themselves with us, when they are doing nothing to contribute either money or work to our constricted position, nor to publicise our need for such things among their contacts.

Comments on socialism

As Margaret Thatcher is alleged to have said: ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money’.

But by the time the money runs out, a lot of people will have been empowered by other people’s money to interfere damagingly (and for quite a long time) in other people’s lives, and that is what socialism is all about. So what’s wrong with that?

Attending conferences

Just in case it may ever be used as an excuse for not giving me a Professorship that I do not like attending conferences, may I say that there is all the difference in the world between attending conferences, however boring and rubbishy, if it is part of a job for which one is being rewarded with salary and status, and doing so as an unsalaried and statusless person living in very bad circumstances.

The Society for Psychical Research always held it against me that I spared myself attendance at their conferences, after they had cut off all sources of financial support.

Actually, other things being equal, broadcasting and giving seminars is something for which I have a natural aptitude, and do not mind doing. I even quite enjoy putting things across.

Sitting through other people’s papers and joining in discussions of them is another matter altogether, and would always be fairly negative, although I would always accept it as part of the job if I had a sufficiently statusful and well-rewarded appointment.

Erosion of respect for individual liberty

Respect for individual liberty is protected, if at all, by the market forces of a capitalist society; when that protection is eroded by socialism, anything goes.

A Christian lady has been blamed for allowing a 16-year-old Muslim girl whom she was fostering to convert to Christianity.

As well as showing dislike of Christianity, this demonstrates that the individual is supposed to be entirely the product of social influences. According to those in power, those around the individual should be able to decree his opinions and attitudes. If an unwanted inclination arises, his parents or guardians should be able to eradicate it, and be punished for failing to do so. (This Christian lady has been disqualified from fostering, and the drop in income means she can no longer afford the farm she used to rent to look after vulnerable teenagers.)

From the Daily Mail, 9 February 2009:

A foster mother has been struck off the register for allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity. The woman, who has looked after more than 80 children in the past ten years, is considering suing the council over the decision. Although she is a practicing Anglican, she said she had put no pressure on the girl who was baptised last year at the age of 16. She said social workers had also raised no objections to her own attendance at church.

But officials insist she failed in her duty to preserve the girl’s religion and should have tried to stop the baptism. Last April, they ruled that the girl, now 17, should stay away from church for six months. The foster mother’s removal from the register followed in November.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has launched a legal challenge to the decision with funding from the Christian Institute. Mike Judge, a spokesman for the institute, said:

'All people should be free to change or modify their religious beliefs. That surely must be a core human right in any free society. I cannot imagine that an atheist foster carer would be struck off if a Christian child in her care stopped believing in God ...'

The carer is a single mother of two in her 50s who has worked with young children for much of her life. She has had an unblemished record since becoming a foster parent in the North of England in 1999 ... The move has stripped her of her sole source of income, forcing her to downsize to a one-bedroom flat.

Similar attitudes were shown towards my father, when I was at school, for failing to prevent me from wanting to take more exams than other people, and at an earlier age. The fact that I was known to have a very high IQ was not regarded as any excuse.

It is asserted and implied in many academic productions in the fields of philosophy, education, and psychology that there is no such thing as individuality, as distinct from the results of social influence and interaction.

The relevant departments of my suppressed independent university are still unable to publish criticisms of these tendentious assertions, so censorship continues to prevail.

Lying (from the forthcoming book 'The Corpse and the Kingdom')

I have observed that in my experience the human race seems to like it best if the socially agreed view of the situation not merely distorts but actually inverts one or two of the salient facts.

To this one may add the observation that people tell lies more often than seems necessary to arrive at the (apparently) desired objective, and that they like to engage in manipulating other people's psychology. The less successful the manipulations are being, and the more self-evident it is that the victim of the manipulation is aware of what is going on, the more forcefully and obsessively do they insist on behaving as if he is unaware.

A motivation for this may be postulated. Reality (however much they may insist that it is impossible to define it except by reference to social agreement) is seen as a sort of threat, or potential rival, to social agreement. And there can be no more satisfying way of asserting the supremacy of the latter than by insisting that it is right when it is obviously wrong.

Market forces alone protect the freedom of the individual to act realistically and independently of social agreement. Hence a society in which market forces are weakened is likely to contain a suicidal drive.

I have alluded elsewhere in this book to a story about a tribe of native Americans who sallied forth to battle clad in ‘magic’ shirts which were no protection at all against real lead bullets. This is an acceptable story because it is supposed to illustrate the inferiority of superstition to rationalism, or the foolishness of supposing that there might be more to the situation than met the eye of a materialistic monist.

But there are times when modern society strikes me as being very like that tribe.

Of course this is only a hypothetical suggestion, which cannot be taken too far, at least not on the level of social organisation. No doubt this psychological factor, if present on that level, is modified by many others. How, for example, would one account for the fact that the suicidal drive is not shown by completely communist countries, and to a differential extent even by countries which are not? Part of the answer might be that once market forces have been completely eliminated and the state has assumed full control of what may be thought and expressed, external reality is no longer felt as a threat in the same way, so there is no longer any need to behave suicidally.

Cleverness and success

It is starting to be admitted that a high proportion of the cleverest do not make it, in the sense of becoming members of the immensely expanded ‘university’ population. We suppose that ‘cleverest’ has at least some correlation with ‘having the highest IQs in the old-fashioned sense’. IQ was defined originally as a predictor of academic success in the system that prevailed at the time.

It is not difficult (one might say, it has not been difficult) to devise an ‘educational’ system which favours certain personality types rather than others, and favours specific levels of IQ, which may be far below the highest occurring. But then, of course, the personality types which are discriminated against are to be described as defective in some way; it cannot be that the system has treated them with particular hostility. Bruce Charlton* refers to ‘awkward, abrasive and wildly creative’ individuals, as well as to ‘clever crazies’ and ‘idiot savants’.

I might infer from my own experience that when an obvious anomaly occurs, in that someone with obviously exceptional ability is being cast out, as I was, it is regarded as a justification for slandering them with psychological interpretations of any kind, which do not have to bear any relation to factual reality, except perhaps as an inversion of it.

Nor is it necessary for the various slanders to be consistent with one another. When I was at school I was supposed to be both a reluctant mediocrity driven by an ambitious father, as well as (in other contexts) greedy, selfish and ambitious in wishing to acquire qualifications as fast as possible and much younger than other people, so as to sneer at and score off those who were not able to do so.

On being thrown out of college, I am pretty sure (from what came back to me) that I was widely credited with being both reclusive and wildly creative. Both being reasons for assuming that I did not want to return to an academic career, and that my attempts to do so should be opposed.

In a recent blog piece, Fabian Tassano comments on the possibility that his ideas may have had some influence on what is expressed by some journalists, but always without any acknowledgement which might draw attention to his existence or make his books slightly more saleable.

A journalist may wish to adorn his work with references to Harvard economists or Booker-winning novelists, but what incentive does he have to cite someone with no significant social status? Only a moral one. In other words, none.

Actually I would put the case more strongly. In the case of a statusless person who has been unfairly deprived of their rightful position in society, all and sundry behave as if they had a moral obligation to keep him down and out.

* 'Why are scientists so dull?', Oxford Magazine, Issue 281.

Outliers

Another book (Outliers – The story of success by Malcolm Gladwell) has been published on how there is no such thing as genius or ‘a born scientist’, supposedly proved by the fact that the Beatles put in a lot of time performing and star hockey players practise a lot. This book is receiving a lot of critical attention, far more so than any of our books ever do. Our books are always as far as possible suppressed and ignored.

On a very unpleasant TV police drama series about a serial killer, of which I watched only a few fragments as it was so unpleasant, I saw a father being interviewed about his daughter who had been murdered. The father was saying that his daughter had been ‘very focussed’ on her studies and believed in working hard so as to have no difficulties in later life. This was evidently regarded as indicative of wicked attitudes on the part of the father, and putting him in line to be suspected of murdering her.

I am afraid that when I was at school and until his health broke down, my father played into the hands of my enemies in the local educational community in this sort of way. I was always very angry at him discussing me with people behind my back if I knew about it. I thought that both my father and any educational expert should seek my permission before saying anything that was supposed to be representing my interests, and ascertain that I accepted their views as doing so. In fact I did not trust my father nor anyone he might talk to about me to represent my interests at all. I think my father was wrong to be drawn into discussing me behind my back, or even in my presence, but I blame the wicked agents of the collective far more than I blame him for allowing them to influence him against me.

At a recent seminar I said to a fairly young ‘psychologist’ that there used to be this theory about ambition and a desire to get on in young people being the result of ‘pushy’ parents, and he said this idea was still held and it was certainly true, according to his own observations, of every young person he had ever known.

I do not know of any case in which I would be so confident as that of being able to identify the causes of someone’s attitudes.

In the same police drama, discussing a girl who had been murdered who was said to have taken a cheap method of transport, the investigator asked, ‘Why did she do that?’
‘So as to save money’,
‘Why would she want to save money? She did not have a family.’

When I went to the Society for Psychical Research after being thrown out (thrown out of academia and hence, in fact, out of organised society) I saw that saving money was the only thing I could do to help myself, and I worked on it every day. Could I add a few extra shillings to my capital at the end of the day? From then until now, increasing my capital, however slightly, by saving out of negligible income has remained the centre of my life. Saving money is not acceptable, as I discovered, and no one was prepared to make concessions for the fact that, needing the best sort of university career as badly as I did, and deprived of all normal means of progressing towards a tolerable life, I had to start building up capital towards the cost of setting up an independent university for myself, with at least one residential college with dining facilities, at least one research department, and a university press for publishing books.

Within four years of leaving college I had saved £2,000; I could not conceal this from W.H. Salter and Sir George Joy when they were ostensibly supporting me in making plans for setting up my first mini research department cum residential college in the Coombe-Tennant house. It aroused shock and disapproval, even in Salter, who had lived off a private income all his life, and from then on everyone united in attempts to squeeze me to death and force me to sell the small house in Kingston Road, Oxford, which was the first house I bought.

So when I announced to Sir George that I had bought the freehold of a larger house in Banbury Road, that was the end of decades of building up capital by saving, against opposition which took the form of trying to squeeze me to death.

It was, and still is, very like a siege. No supplies or relief of any kind are allowed to reach the beleaguered garrison.

Academic training

To revert to the question of why everyone has always opposed me. Well, unfortunately, as it seems, I represent a number of things that the modern ideology wants to obliterate.

Socialism (or reversion to tribalism) is aimed at the elimination of individual freedom (= money = territory of decision). Hence, in academic contexts, it leads to a great increase in ‘supervised’ intellectual activity, and allowing/forcing people to do things ‘under supervision’.

In my teens I visited Cambridge with my parents; I remember feeling very miserable at the time. Perhaps this was the visit on which I struggled to obtain physics entrance papers in Heffers when my father had finishing buying maths ones for me.

However that may be, we met a young man out walking a dog and my parents chatted to him after getting directions from him. He was a research student, I was told, living in lodgings in a nearby house. He had taken his degree and that was what he was doing now. I became even more depressed. I had not taken a single degree yet and I was being forced to attend a school against my will.

Actually doing research, or living in any way I could get anything out of, was even further off in a gloomy future.

I think that the concept of a research student became much more dominant in post-war academia; as an undergraduate I was told that a D.Phil had not formerly been regarded as a necessary first stage in an academic career; in many subjects people who got Firsts could proceed straight away to appointments. To have a D.Phil had been an indication that you had probably got a Second, and needed to strengthen your claim by a further qualification.

Professor Richard Oldfield, at that time Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, had allegedly taken a degree in French and then gone along to the Department of Experimental Psychology, said he would like to do research in psychology, and started to do so. However, as with some other people who had been permitted academic status on what would nowadays be regarded as inadequate grounds, it may be observed that his outlook was thoroughly compatible with the modern ideology and in no way out of place in the modern world.

Wittgenstein provides another, even more eminent, example of a person who was allowed to proceed to academic status and distinction without prior ‘training’, as the following extract illustrates. It is highly unlikely that he would nowadays be allowed to do so.

Wittgenstein’s published output was tiny. In his lifetime, he published just one book, one article and one book review ... [The book review] was published in 1913 in a Cambridge undergraduate magazine called the Cambridge Review, and was his very first publication. Wittgenstein was then a student of philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, halfway through his second year of study. In many ways, though, it would be misleading to picture him at this time as an undergraduate student, or, in any case, it would be misleading to think of him as, in any sense, an ‘ordinary’ undergraduate student. For one thing, at twenty-four, he was a few years older than the usual second-year undergraduate, having spent three years before he went to Cambridge as an engineering student in Manchester. For another thing, he was already regarded by two of the most influential philosophers of the day, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, as a significant philosopher in his own right ...

... Wittgenstein was not following a conventional undergraduate course in philosophy ... there is nothing to indicate that he ever seriously considered sitting any examinations. His formal status was that of an undergraduate, but he regarded himself, and, more remarkably, was regarded by others, not as a student of philosophy, but as an original philosopher, attempting to find solutions to problems that were at the very cutting edge of the discipline.

It is possible, I think, that Cambridge is the only university in the world that would have accepted Wittgenstein on these terms. Had he broken off his engineering studies in order to study philosophy at ... any other leading university of the time, he would have fallen at the first hurdle, most likely rejected because of his almost complete ignorance of the works of any philosophers other than Frege and Russell. And, even if he had overcome this hurdle, he would have been obliged to do what, in fact, he never did throughout his entire life, namely study the works of the great philosophers of the past. Only after he had shown some understanding of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, etc. would he have been allowed, as a graduate student, to devote himself to his own research.

At Cambridge, to its great credit, all that was required of Wittgenstein in order to reach this last stage – the stage at which he spent his time trying to solve philosophical problems rather than learning how previous philosophers had tried to solve them – was that he arouse the interest and admiration of Bertrand Russell. (Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, Granta Books 2005, pp5-6.)