Emotional 'management'

Managing emotions will be given the same importance as English and maths in Sir Jim Rose’s primary school education reforms unveiled yesterday. ‘Personal development’, along with the three Rs and computer skills, will form the centrepiece of the plans, which will be introduced in September 2011. Children will learn to take turns and share, prepare healthy meals, manage their feelings, and avoid drug and alcohol abuse ... lessons in managing emotions will encourage pupils to curb anger and jealousy and encourage empathy. (Daily Mail, 1 May 2009)

So, children in primary schools are to have lessons in ‘managing their emotions’, including anger and jealousy. I expect they will learn how to direct the anger they experience at being under duress in a prison environment, not towards the teachers and other adults who keep them oppressed, but towards those of their contemporaries of whom they feel jealous because they seem to be doing too well, and not feeling downtrodden enough. They will learn to gain satisfaction from making them feel more downtrodden and will look forward to the time when, as adults, they can express their anger by interfering in the lives of those of whom they feel jealous, by becoming teachers, doctors, social workers or other ‘experts’

By doing this they may be able to avoid becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol. Nowadays such things are referred to as ‘abuse’. ‘Drug abuse’ refers to making use of a pharmaceutical for your own purposes, whereas having your mind zonked out by a drug prescribed by a ‘medical doctor’ is not referred to in this way.

Avoiding ‘drug abuse’ and ‘alcohol abuse’ is part of what is to be taught in the ‘personal development’ programme for primary schools, which will also teach the ‘management’ of anger and jealousy.

How about providing training in the management of anger and jealousy for teachers; also members of education authorities, university tutors and college Principals, etc.? So that they do not take out the anger and jealousy they feel when confronted by someone cleverer than themselves, by destroying the lives of the most exceptional people who are in any way under their power?

How about training all people with social status and influence to direct their anger against other influential people who have ‘let the side down’ by abusing their power in damaging the lives of those over whom they had power, and to put the energy resulting from such anger into providing reparation for the victims of such abuse?

Chardonnay as a gateway drug

As many as 40,000 drinkers are dying every year because the Government has utterly failed to deal with Britain’s alcohol problem, leading experts said yesterday.
Doctors and academics [i.e. agents and beneficiaries of the oppressive state] lined up to condemn round-the-clock drinking, brought in by Labour, and the availability of cheap alcohol in supermarkets. (Daily Mail, 24 April 2009).

Why should it be the business of the Government to prevent people from killing themselves with alcohol and overeating, if that is what they want to do? The object of taking away liberty from individuals in the form of taxes is to create justifications for taking away even more, so as to create the largest possible population of people in a dysfunctional state, to be supported by the increasingly small population of functional people paying taxes. At the same time, taxpayers will have to pay for supporting the ever-increasing population of doctors (who live off the herds of their dependent victims) and academics (who pontificate ‘expertly’ about the morality of these goings-on).

Professor Tom Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Surgeons ... firmly blamed the Government ... ‘a change in licensing laws ... made it difficult to turn down applications for licences, with no need to take public health into account’. (Ibid.)

It is interesting how alcohol has now apparently, in the minds of the medical profession, become a matter of ‘public health’. This concept used to be applied principally in situations where the health of an individual would impinge directly on that of others, e.g. infectious diseases; providing an excuse for interference on the grounds that one person’s behaviour affected another person’s physical health. Perhaps eating sweets will be the next thing to be classified as a matter of ‘public health’.

Martin Plant, professor of addiction studies at the University of the West of England, said: ‘Supermarkets at the moment are displaying the morality of the crack dealer ...’ Professor Plant warned that alcohol was a ‘gateway drug’ leading to cannabis and cocaine addiction in many teenagers. (Ibid.)

The sort of comment which used to be dismissed as ‘moral hysteria’ is now apparently being made by academics. Will chocolate be the next thing claimed to be a ‘gateway drug’, leading to alcohol consumption, and from there to cannabis, cocaine, heroin, prostitution, burglary, etc.?

‘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.