‘Working Class Children Betrayed by Labour’

The Daily Mail is not much less obsessed with the ideology than any other newspaper. Today it has a front-page headline ‘Working Class Children Betrayed by Labour’, with the ridiculous first two sentences:

Bright children from poor homes are failing to get into university because of under-performing state schools and not class bias. That is the finding of a major study, covering hundreds of thousands of children, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. (Daily Mail, 21 April 2009)

(And what did the major study cost, I wonder?)

Whatever is the point of getting to ‘university’ anyway, one might ask, if one were allowed to do so. What is it supposed to lead to? And if it does not lead to anything, what advantage is it supposed to be to the individual?

The campaign against people with high IQs and in favour of people with low IQs was well advanced in the 1940s and 1950s when it ruined my life. The only possible remedy is to abolish state education and compulsory education altogether. And I continue to be censored and suppressed by lack of salary and status.

Really bright children are unlikely to be dependent on schools for learning anything. Someone I knew at Somerville was found to be able to read when she went to school at five, although her mother’s hostility to her had led to her concealing this. She learnt Latin and Greek by reading the classics in the public library, outside of school hours.

Exploiting the credit crunch

copy of a letter to an academic

The ‘credit crunch’ (so-called) is really just a further stage of development in the ongoing socialist destruction of civilisation, most central to which is the destruction of the lives of the most able and functional. This is, of course, already far advanced; the school and university system was already geared to ruin someone like me when I was exposed to it sixty years ago.

Naturally the obvious worsening of the situation is blamed on ‘free market capitalism’, thus justifying further reductions of individual liberty, but in reality what is being demonstrated is the destructive success of socialist principles and ideology.

My unrecognised university is being prevented from pointing out how this has really come about, while other people (including a former investment banker in yesterday’s Financial Times) are publicised as saying, ‘Free market capitalism has failed!’ – so now (presumably) we can openly abolish individual liberty completely.

As an influential person with socially conferred status, you should not find it acceptable that expression of our point of view is stifled and suppressed, and you should wish to give us help and support in publicising it.

I do not accept your claim that there are already people in universities expressing our points of view, so there is no ‘need’ for us to be given opportunity or publicity. If there are any such people, they are heavily outnumbered, and are putting the case very feebly. And you should also feel an obligation to work towards redressing the wrongs and injustices which we have suffered at the hands of those with socially conferred status. On that basis, we should now be given status and opportunity even if what we would produce would be no better and no different from the work being produced by other people who already have the status and support which we have been denied.

As you may see from some of the things which I have written recently, ethical standards usually seem to be abandoned by those in authority when dealing with people like us. However, that is no justification for a person with socially conferred status wishing to cover up for the wrongdoings of other such persons, rather than attempting to redress them.

Gordon Brown's 'National Service'

Terrible things appear in the papers practically every day and my unrecognised university is still unable to publish any criticisms of them.

An additional infringement of individual liberty is proposed by Gordon Brown.

‘Every teenager will have to do at least 50 hours of community work before the age of 19, Gordon Brown has announced. The Prime Minister believes youngsters would be less likely to turn to crime if they had a sense of citizenship. The scheme, a form of ‘national service’ for teenagers, will ensure that they spend a minimum of 50 hours working with charities and vulnerable groups such as the elderly or disabled. Forming part of Labour’s next election manifesto, it will be woven into plans to make everyone stay in education or training until the age of 18 by 2011. Mr Brown said: ‘It is my ambition to create a Britain in which there is a clear expectation that all young people will undertake some service to their community, and where community service will become a normal part of growing up in Britain. And, by doing so, the contributions of each of us will build a better society for all of us. ‘ He added: ‘That would mean young people being expected to contribute at least 50 hours of community service by the time they have reached the age of 19.’...

The Prime Minister first proposed the idea of a National Youth Service to channel teenagers into voluntary work last year. It is due to be formally launched in September, and would become compulsory if Labour was re-elected. The scheme – which could include teenagers helping out charities both in Britain and abroad – is likely to become part of the National Curriculum. (Daily Mail, 13 April 2009)

Being forced to spend even more time doing things which they have no motivation to do will actually only make teenagers even more demoralised and decentralised than they already are.

I know two people who had a little experience of what is called ‘community service’ several decades ago, when things were less bad than they are now, and both found it an unpleasant and disappointing experience.

In both cases they were attempting to ‘help’ people who had already forfeited their liberty and had fallen into the clutches of the oppressive society. The first person’s experience was earlier, and voluntary, trying to feed disabled children in a disorganised institutional environment.

The second person’s, over a decade later, was compulsory because it was a school ‘lesson’ and he was forced to attend all ‘lessons’ provided by the school in order to attend the school at all. This is an oppressive, although commonly accepted, state of affairs. As I have pointed out before, children should be free to attend only those lessons which they find relevant to their own purposes.

However, the second person was forced in this way to go to a hospital to ‘cheer up’ old people who had fallen into the power of the medical Mafia, and found himself trying to make conversation with an old lady in a hospital bed who did not seem to find anything he had to say interesting. She may well have found it particularly depressing to be confronted by a bright young person who, ostensibly, still had his life ahead of him.

No doubt most of those who will be subjected to ‘help’ from demoralised young people will already be being abused by those ‘trained’ to help them. You could call Gordon Brown’s plan the ‘Compulsory Community Abuse’ programme.

Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Alf Hitchcock last year suggested jobless teens should be sent on a non-military form of National Service to curb the rising tide of fatal stabbings. (Ibid.)

Now what, I wonder, is there to prevent resentful youths, torn away from their knife gangs, from stabbing the old people and disabled children with whom they are forced to associate?

Bullying

When I was describing to a colleague the goings-on in Somerville, he commented that bullies always attack the weak. I thought: in Somerville that meant the vulnerable. If you have motivation or aspirations you are vulnerable; many of the young women arriving at Somerville were ambitious and maybe needed to make up for past deprivations, so they were vulnerable to Dame Janet’s[1], bullying by threat and intimidation. The only undergraduates safe from being bullied were the people who were not needy in any way, such as ___ (daughter of ___ ) who, even if sent down from Oxford, would have suffered little setback in her pursuit of wealthy upper-class men as suitable husbands.

The ‘bullying’ issue is interesting because I think the psychodynamics that produce bullying are closely related to those that produce the socialist ideology; i.e. a sense of inadequacy and impotence leading to a compensatory reaction against it in the form of a drive to have a strong effect on other people.

[1] Dame Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, 1945-1967.

Easter vac workers

copy of a letter

Easter is upon us. ‘Holiday’ times are always particularly bad for us, as any domestic or other workers which we can get become even less reliable and tend to announce without notice that they are going to absent themselves for a holiday of weeks or months abroad. So if you know anyone who might like to earn some money quickly, let them know. But they probably need to have a car, as we could not arrange accommodation for them at such short notice, and would not do so in any case if they had not worked for us before.

Stepp'd in so far

And betimes I will, to the weird sisters:
More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know,
By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4)

A quotation from Macbeth which expresses the predicament of Western civilisation, determined to go ahead with egalitarian socialism (communism), although by now many must be able to see that its consequences so far have been disastrous.

‘Strange things ... which must be acted’. However crazy things are already, this is no bar – indeed, it is a spur – to the invention of even more crazy egalitarian policies, which those concerned are driven to implement by an apparently irresistible compulsion.

William Sargant and the idea of brainwashing

At my last seminar an Iraqi lady commented that the way we had been treated sounded like what happened in an authoritarian regime, only where she came from they would shoot you for expressing any criticism of the system, not merely suppress you.

Later she asked, ‘What were they threatened by?’ I think the answer is that any respect for individuality per se is a threat to the total power that socialists seek over all minds as well as all physical bodies.

When I first met Mary Adams[1] after being thrown out by Somerville, she was carried away with enthusiasm for a wonderful book by William Sargant entitled Battle for the Mind[2],on the strength of which he was becoming a celebrity and a Great Name.

At the time I did not see the point. The book contained some examples of tribal initiation rituals in which people were made to lose consciousness, and of the techniques of brainwashing and Chinese thought reform. I could make parallels between the brainwashing techniques and the ways I had been treated at school and at Somerville, but this did not seem to me very interesting.

When I started publishing my own books and they did nothing at all for my status or reputation, I thought that I did not see what William Sargant’s book had had that mine had lacked: its content of ideas seemed very small. But there seemed to be an idea that by knocking out people’s minds you could create a tabula rasa which could be programmed like the mind of a newborn baby.

I gradually came to realise that it supported the very important piece of modern ideology that there is nothing in the individual that society cannot wipe out, whereas my books always suggested the possibility of ways in which the individual might become less dependent on the physical and less vulnerable to social influences.

Only recently I came to realise that William Sargant was (from my point of view) a horrifying monster of iniquity. He was a psychiatrist(!) which implies that he was immoral enough to have become a medical doctor first, and he used atrocious ‘therapeutic’ techniques on his victims, drugging them to sleep for weeks and subjecting them to ECT at the same time. This killed some and left others permanently lacking memories for parts of their past lives.

Sargant’s fame was relatively short-lived and other psychiatrists did not espouse his overtly physicalist methods en masse; I think that he was a bit too crudely obvious in applying his methods; but he was expressing a universal underlying motivation to subject individuality to the power of the socially authorised by means of the physical.

One of Sargant’s ideas was that if brainwashing had been around at the time of Christ, it would have been possible to cure Christ of his beliefs, whatever they were, and make him go back to being a carpenter.

[1] A former Head of Television Talks at the BBC.

[2] Battle for the Mind: The Mechanics of Indoctrination, Brainwashing & Thought Control by William Sargant, Pan Books, 1957

Socialist ideology among people of influence

Dame Janet Vaughan[1], like Mary Adams[2], was a Fellow Traveller, as communist sympathisers were then called. In Mary Adams’s environment I picked up on a lot of the basic attitudes of communism. As they came out in communist propaganda, they were blunt and unvarnished, without the justificatory ideology in which modern British socialism has wrapped them.

The hatred of innate ability was very clear, with no complicated suggestions that it was evenly distributed over all social classes. Working class to be promoted, precocious achievement to be prevented.

Mary Adams quoted with approval the Russian prescription that children should not be allowed to read before the age of seven; they should be having social interactions. If you wiped out of my mind all the associations arising from everything I had read before the age of seven, and the conclusions which I drew from it, a very significant part of my mental background would be gone. In fact it would not be possible, as so much of what I thought later depended, implicitly or explicitly, on my early reading.

A belief in socialism implies in practice a wish to deny opportunity to innate ability and independence of mind, particularly in combination. At least, I have always found it to be so.

So it was singularly unfortunate for me to go to Somerville, where Dame Janet was a violent and ruthless implementer of communist ideals. It is not surprising that tutors at Somerville took every opportunity to trip up those with high IQs or aspirations to achieve something in their lives.

Recently there was an article about some ‘gifted children’ in the Daily Mail (25 March 2009), applying to them the system of interpretation already in existence at the time of my education, and applied to me both by the local community in Essex and by Dame Janet.

In this system of interpretation, ‘ambition’ can only be the result of parental influence and is likely to make them ‘abnormal’; taking exams is described as ‘pressure’, getting ahead of other children is likely to isolate them from others (which is regarded as a bad thing), and ‘normality’ and ‘normal social interactions’ are stressed as overridingly important.

From an old-fashioned point of view it might seem strange that a person with strong communist sympathies, implying as they do a hatred of innate ability and personal ambition, should have been considered a suitable person to appoint as Principal of an Oxford college.

[1] Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, 1945-1967.

[2] A former Head of Television Talks at the BBC.

My attempts to get freedom, and reversion to tribalism

My attempts to get any freedom of action in my life have always been strenuously opposed; when I was at school or university, taking exams in my own way and under my own auspices was seen as freedom, and prevented. When I was thrown out as an adult, attempts to get more freedom than none at all made me a criminal and I was a person to be opposed.

The theme of reducing freedom, and increasing intervention and supervision, is dominant in modern society. The object of the modern religion is the complete elimination of freedom from human life. On the face of it, what is aimed at is reversion to tribalism. Presumably in tribal societies there is no possibility of doing anything but to live out one’s life according to the tribal conventions, fulfilling the demands of the tribal lifestyle and with one’s every action under constant scrutiny from other members of the tribe. One would be very vulnerable to slanders, whether founded or not, as one is in modern society, and conforming to the social consensus about what one should do, and precisely how it should be done, would be all-important.

But in modern society the underlying principles are understood and acted upon in a very abstract way. Until I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam at 13, I could have been supposed (at least by a superficial observer) to be doing whatever I did because I was told to do it, not because it was what I wanted to do myself. But then it became clear that I really wanted to get on with taking exams to acquire qualifications by reference to my own internal criteria, and I became a reprobate to be hunted down, as I have been ever since, apart from the very short time when it appeared that some of the most old-fashioned members of the Society for Psychical Research would actually support me in getting funding for an institutional environment of which I would be the Director, i.e. have some unsupervised freedom to do what I saw as needing to be done.

When I was 14, after having been prevented from taking the School Certificate exam, I felt that my cover had been blown, and I resented that. (By cover I mean the ostensible equivalence between what I wanted to do and what other people wanted me to do.) The people supposedly responsible for considering my interests should have been prepared, I thought, to give me cover at least until I had acquired some usable qualifications.

You could see the hatred of freedom in the modern religion as related to the Old Testament Garden of Eden story; the individual must remain obedient to God-Society by having no will of his own; if he eats the apple and starts to act on his own knowledge of good and evil, he is disobedient to God and is to be driven out of organised society as a depraved criminal.

This is more or less the interpretation of the Fall of Man story that occurred in some forms of Gnosticism: the apple (the forbidden fruit) was the gnosis, and in at least one version Jesus was the serpent, encouraging human beings to pick and eat it.

Further reflections on my past history

Sir George Joy and W.H Salter, who at first supported me (at least within normal social parameters) were both relatively cut off from the full impact of the modern ideology.

Once it became known that I aimed to remedy my position by building up capital, aiming at enough capital to provide endowment for at least a small residential college in the first instance (although even that first objective appeared hundreds of years in the future), Rosalind Heywood quickly and effortlessly turned everyone against me. By that time she knew of Somerville’s hostility towards me and that it was the wish of the Principal, Dame Janet Vaughan, that I should be driven away from Oxford. The Principal had socially conferred status and everyone wanted her to have her way. Of course Rosalind might, and probably would, have concluded quite independently that I was the sort of person who, once thrown down, should be kept down, but she would never wish to stand up for an outcast person against a Dame Janet.

So, to prevent my returning to Oxford which would make Dame Janet livid – she had already been made livid by my returning after a fashion with the Perrott Studentship to do a post-graduate degree - the offer that the Coombe-Tennants would buy me a large house in Oxford had to be withdrawn. At the time I did not understand Sir George’s look of shocked apprehension when I said that I could not take any more prevarication and would have to use my own pathetic savings to buy a much smaller house.

In retrospect I do understand it; the breakdown of the Coombe-Tennant house offer was intended to prevent me from returning to Oxford, and if I bought myself a house, however small, I would be living in Oxford against the will of Dame Janet. ‘You can’t do that’, Sir George said, shocked and apprehensive. ‘Well, yes I can’, I said. I did not add, ‘But only just’, because he knew that anyway.

I was forced to sell all my equity investments at a bad time in the markets (none of my ‘supporters’ offered me a bridging loan to enable me to sell at a better time) and it took every penny I had. I had scarcely any income, so everyone devoted themselves to driving me out by starvation.

You may say that the hostility which has always surrounded me (at least after being thrown out) emanated from Somerville as its centre. One of the things I became aware of at the Society for Psychical Research was that it is a small world at the top; all influential people are on the same networks, and all think and act alike. So, as I sometime say, ‘Once one person is against you, everyone is against you’.

The intensity of Professor Sir Alister Hardy’s hostility towards me probably owed something to his wife’s connection to Somerville via her sister, the Bursar, although the flame was constantly fuelled by Rosalind.

When I got some minimal support from Cecil King[1], Mary Adams[2], a little shocked but not too much because she could foresee how soon he could be turned against me, said, ‘It’s a miracle’. And in a way, I suppose it was. Cecil King had plenty of top-level contacts and it could not have been long before he knew of Somerville’s intentions concerning me; but he had approached the SPR out of the blue and I had managed to make use of Sir George’s last remnant of ambivalence towards me to squeeze out an absolute minimum of support. Which immediately made everyone very angry indeed.

[1] Then Chairman of IPC, publishers of the Daily Mirror.
[2] A former Head of Television Talks at the BBC.