Havelock Ellis on genius

The following is an extract from A Study of British Genius by the psychologist Havelock Ellis, published in 1904.

Every original worker in intellectual fields, every man who makes some new thing, is certain to arouse hostility where he does not meet with indifference [...] It is practically impossible to estimate the amount of persecution to which this group of pre-eminent British persons has been subjected, for it has shown itself in innumerable forms, and varies between a mere passive refusal to have anything whatever to do with them or their work and the active infliction of physical torture and death.*

I, throughout my life, have certainly encountered a great deal of hostility, which I suppose arose from the fact that I was perceived as someone who might do something innovative or unfashionable if I was allowed to do anything.

The hostility and obstruction that is aroused by people with high IQs and/or autonomous motivation not only ruined my education and subsequent life but has played a large part in the deterioration of Western civilisation.

SBG was revised in 1926 but has been largely ignored for at least the last fifty years, as has the particular approach which Ellis took to the topic of genius, a topic which itself has been fairly unfashionable for some time. Bringing Ellis’s work up to date is one of the ways in which we could be helping to keep suppressed points of view alive, particularly by relating it to modern prejudices in the areas in which it deals. We hereby appeal for funding to do so.

* Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, Hurst and Blackett, London 1904, pp. 221-223

Born in captivity

What people have against allowing child prodigies to be successful is that they might be able to get identified with their lives, to be functional in a way that they were getting something out of, and at the same time to get social approval and even applause or admiration for what they were allowed to be functional in doing. As I did, for a very short time. Those with exceptional ability could have quite a good chance of getting a form of centralisation which appears to be compatible with social approval. This is regarded as a terrible threat and is to be prevented at any cost, primarily by ensuring that they never get any money, which equates with opportunity.

People who appear to have more income than is necessary for the barest physical survival, without any servants, are heavily taxed so that resources can be applied to maximising the low-IQ population which has very little chance of ever getting to know its own psychological criteria in an approximately centralised way. This also maximises the population of those born in medical captivity with no chance at all of reaching an age at which they can decide anything for themselves, as they start their lives (and may very likely end them) in the horrifically decentralised position of captive victims of the medical Mafia, dependent on sadistic intervention and supervision to prolong their lives.

So the effect of modern socialist ideology has been to reduce as nearly as possible to zero the population of those with the best chance of living in a centralised way and hence getting something out of life of which other people would be jealous, while also vastly increasing the population of those born into slavery to spend their tormented lives gratifying the sadistic impulses of their torturers. It is difficult to think of anything more psychologically horrific than this. Certainly the lives of these victims of socialism are unlikely to provoke jealousy, although other people may claim that their lives have been enriched by the sweet and loving personalities of the sufferers.

In the psychiatrist's chair

Why are people hostile to us?

It appears that social approval is very important to people. When they see someone aiming to do something without social approval, even something perfectly legal and respectable, because he or she has not given up on what they originally wanted to do, it makes them angry. Why is this? Is it because it reminds them that at some time in their lives they gave up on something important to them, perhaps gave up their original ideals and aspirations, lowered their standards and became uncritical of socially approved goings-on, in order to go with the flow and take advantage of the reduced and rather mouldy pickings that were on offer?

Perhaps so, and perhaps it is so even when people have no conscious awareness of having done this.

We here are trying to build up an institutional environment in order eventually to fulfil the same functions as intellectual writers and researchers (in the sense of heads of research departments) as we should have been able to fulfil within the context of the recognised universities, but found ourselves blocked in working towards doing so.

When people see us doing this it evidently arouses no sympathy or inclination to help us move even a little faster towards our goals. Rather, it arouses anger and energetic opposition. Perhaps this is because it reminds them of the aims and aspirations that they have themselves given up. Probably they have a predominant underlying anger, resentment, and sense of loss; some very obviously so. If people are reminded of what they have given up, the anger is aroused, but it is directed against individuals who have not given up, and practically never against the society that has ruined their lives, or the agents of that society who made things difficult for them at crucial times in their lives.

“Consequently, there are no gods”

The reflections on genetics on my previous post may seem disreputable to the modern mind, as perhaps do many of my other reflections referring to genes. Genetic inheritance has been a highly politicised topic for some time, but this now seems to have expanded to the point where any reflections about the heritability of human characteristics are seen as controversial, and hence to be avoided in any kind of research.

There is clearly a strong motivation to believe there is no such thing as inherited ability. This may be harmless as an opinion held by any one individual. It causes a problem if, as has now happened, the viewpoint becomes dominant and turns into the dogmatic belief of a collective. This belief system, of being unwilling to admit that something may be the case and so in practice asserting that it is not the case, has a distorting effect on judgement and can make a society behave unrealistically.

In particular, a refusal to countenance a phenomenon which is seen to have effects that are regarded as distasteful influences many areas of modern academia, in particular in such subjects as history, education and ethics.

As I, and my colleagues, do not share this (and other) dogmatic beliefs which now severely limit almost everything that comes out of established academia, we potentially have an important role to play in correcting these biases. For this reason, we should be being supported. But also for this reason, it is regarded as important that we should not be supported, but suppressed, to the point of pretending we do not exist.

An example of the kind of logic which tends to be employed in determining the research that gets done was provided to me by an Oxford undergraduate who was a product of the comprehensive school system. Among other things, this undergraduate asserted to me that:

(a) state education cannot be bad, as it had managed to get him to Oxford;

(b) ability cannot be inherited because if it were, society would need to assign top positions to aristocrats, which would be intolerable.

These examples may seem crude, but I believe that they are analogous to the hidden logic that drives a lot of the content of modern academia. There is a reverse causality at work, along the lines of “if A were the case, B would follow, but B is not acceptable, therefore A cannot be true.” (Rather reminiscent of Nietzsche saying “If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.”)

Usually, the reasoning that B necessarily follows A is itself flawed. B is often some policy which people seem to feel would have to be followed if A were true, and which they think they would not like, but of course there is no reason why a policy you do not like has to be implemented, just because a new piece of information could be seen as supporting it. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that an objective finding might have policy implications which conflict with ideological preferences is nowadays taken as a reason to avoid any research which might generate the suggestion that it is true.

The drawbacks of marrying heiresses

Land-ownership in Europe was inherited by eldest sons, which was understandable as it carried military obligations, to raise armies and fight on the side of the king or other superior when required to do so. Females inherited only when there was no male heir.

Marrying an heiress with estates of her own, which was often done (for example) by British aristocrats in the 19th century, was a way of enlarging the estates of the family into which she married. This raises the question: why did the heiress’s family have no male heirs – why was she the heir in the first place? Was there some anti-male factor in their genes? If a family continued to marry into such families, perhaps it was decreasing its ability to produce viable male offspring.

I recall reading in H.G. Wells’s Outline of History that the Habsburgs ‘married their way to world power’. This led ultimately to one of the largest empires of the Middle Ages but also to the prevalence of haemophilia in the royal families of Europe. Haemophilia is genetically determined, carried by females as a recessive gene but more or less rapidly fatal to males who inherit it.

A somewhat similar pattern seems to have been shown by my ancestors the Cleares (then spelt Clere), descendants of the Duke of Clere Monte, who came over with William the Conqueror. For a time they flourished and their coats-of-arms became ever more complicated as they added the insignia of heiresses. They had several manor houses in Tudor England.

Eventually, however, they had no male heir of their own, having produced female triplets. These, presumably, married into various aristocratic families, leaving the name of Cleare (or Clere) to be carried on by their father’s younger brothers and any other male relatives, without estates attached.

There are various indications that, even after losing their estates, people with the name of Cleare were IQ-ful and got into responsible positions. The only people with that name outside my mother’s family of whom I have become aware were a retired bank manager, and someone with a doctorate in chemistry who was on the Board of Directors of Johnson Matthey.

The effect of marrying heiresses on European dynasties is one of the many issues which could be developed by the History Department of my unrecognised independent university for which, once again, I appeal for funding to enable it to contribute to modern debates by drawing attention to suppressed points of view, instead of being stifled and suppressed as it is at present.

Anger management and the Tarot

Extract from a book attempting to apply a system of Tarot card interpretations to psychology

The man who, to become superior like the sphinx, has struggled with his destiny at the tenth level of consciousness of the wheel of fortune has learned a great deal in this conflict ... He had to learn to imagine himself in the place of his opponent, thereby adopting and accepting the standpoint of the other person. Suddenly the whole matter appeared to him in an entirely different light ... As a consequence of this, everyone around him admired him for his imperturbable composure and began to emulate it. People again came to seek his advice in all kinds of matters. [Part of interpretation of card no. 11, entitled ‘Power’] *

It should not be supposed that I find the psychology advocated in books on the Tarot more comprehensible than that advocated in modern society at large. In fact, I quote this extract because of its similarity to what is likely to be heard in "anger management" classes.

In practice I find, and always have found, that my lack of acceptance of my social position, as well as my attempts to work towards remedying it, arouses anger in those to whom I express it, and apparently a wish to reject my own experience of my position. There is certainly no sign of a willingness to imagine themselves in my place, since I am angrily told that I should be able to think and feel about it quite differently from the ways I do.

For my part, I am quite unable to think myself into the position of those who are angry and morally indignant at me, as I cannot imagine myself, at any time in my life, having such reactions towards someone who complained of their position and of the difficulties which they experienced in attempting to ameliorate it.

* Elisabeth Haich, The Wisdom of the Tarot, Unwin, 1975, pp.91-92

The hallucinatory mirror

Copy of a letter to someone who asked for a signed copy of our “Apparitions” book.

Charles said you wanted to have a signed copy of Apparitions (which we wrote, so long ago, as a sighting shot) and this reminded me of an anecdote about one of the more unusual types of hallucinatory experience. These have of course received little attention because they do not fit in with the preferred spiritualist model.

Sometimes a feature of the environment is consistently seen as being there by a certain person, less often by more than one person.

An academically successful Chinese lady, very socialist and materialist in outlook, told me this story as having happened in a high school or college in Korea (I think). One of the girl students told another that whenever she went to the toilet she looked at herself in a mirror which was on the wall, and always saw herself as more beautiful than she really was. The other girl said, "But there is no mirror in that toilet". The girl who had seen it there was too scared ever to go into that toilet again.

It seemed clear enough from our appeals that there is a wide variety of such experiences with consistent characteristics and it was very shocking to find, not only that we would not be allowed to do any kind of research on a more adequate scale, but that we would prevented even from continuing to do appeals of the same kind on the same fairly constricted basis. There was endless scope for such appeals both in the fields in which we had already made them and in others, and we had surely demonstrated our ability to get information out of them which was in advance of anything previous. We could have gone on getting a lot (on normal terms) out of research of this kind, but we were squeezed into total inactivity, although appeals mimicking ours were made by other people in salaried academic positions, without any constructive results and with very tendentious encouragement of misinterpretation.

Hallucinatory experiences shed doubt on the solidity of the physical environment, a belief in which is considered desirable (in fact, in an unanalytical way, essential) to support the ideology of the oppressive society (the oppression of the individual by society). Books by academic ‘philosophers’ on the philosophy of mind may start by stating baldly in their first few pages, "There is an objective physical world which is common to all observers and observer-independent", or else assume this to be the case throughout without explicit mention of the fact that this assumption has been made.

Even the ‘psychical researchers’ of the heyday of Western civilisation were relatively blind to the hallucinatory experiences which occurred, unless the experiences suggested a model of a ‘spirit’ or conscious being with a quasi-spatial body (sometimes called the ‘astral body’) moving around in ‘normal’ physical space.

Two pensioners left to die

News item: two pensioners found dead.

Old, frail and struggling with the bitter weather, it was obvious that Jean and Derek Randall's lives were at risk. As Mr Randall's health failed and he accepted he could no longer look after his wheelchair-bound wife, a neighbour and the couple's MP contacted social services, the NHS and even Age Concern in the search for a care home place. But, despite weeks of phone calls, no help was provided. Last Thursday a concerned neighbour looked through the couple's letterbox and spotted 76-year-old Mr Randall lying dead in the hallway.

... Last night a neighbour declared: 'I believe they died because everyone who is supposed to care for the elderly in our society did not do it. Everyone passed the buck.' (Daily Mail)

Why were they not popped into a "care home", it is asked – in which they would not be paying guests who were free to leave, but incarcerated dependants of the state? Their lives would not necessarily have been prolonged, they might well have been shortened. And they would have been living at the mercy of other people, and in a decentralised state, possibly drugged out of their minds.

What pensioners need is not "care homes" into which they can be shovelled to end their lives in captivity, but pensions which are not means-tested and sufficient to enable them to employ housekeepers etc. so they can continue to live in freedom without invoking the "aid" of the oppressive society.

"Care homes" run by the state should be abolished, as should state-funded "education".

Appeal to lucid dream researchers

As explained in the previous post, my choice of lucid dreams as a research topic was determined by what I thought was most likely to get me reinstated as a salaried academic. Not only did my work on the topic fail to achieve this objective, but I found to my chagrin that it was being used by other people as a basis for developing their careers without this doing me the slightest good.

Many years later I wrote an open letter appealing to all those who had worked on the topic after me, to contribute some of their salary to relieving my position of exile and frustration.

I have now put this appeal on my website.

My "work"

copy of a letter to a recent visitor

You referred to some of the books I have written and forced into publication as part of my "work" when I rejected your previous description of them as part of my "career". So far as I am concerned, what one does in such bad circumstances is quite a different matter from what might be described as "work" in minimally adequate circumstances, such as those which might be provided by a university career.

I would never have worked on lucid dreams except under the duress of finding something which might get me back into a university career and which fell within the remit of the (only partially adequate) funding which I received for a short time from Cecil King.

You could say that it was "work" in the same sense as the chalk drawings of a pavement artist, inadequately clothed and fed and in a position of complete social degradation. If evidence of his ability in these circumstances led to enough coins being thrown down, he might be able to afford food and accommodation, and use his ability to express himself in oil paintings. He might in due course be elected to membership of the Royal Academy, show his paintings at public exhibitions, and eventually make significant amounts of money from selling them. In other words, he might then be able to make an actual career out of painting.