A token of good faith

Someone who had contacted us to say they were coming to one of our Tuesday afternoon coffee meetings* emailed us the day before the meeting to ask if she could bring "my friend [X]", without giving any information about X. As X happens to be the name of a well-known American academic blogger, we replied as follows.

Dear __
Yes, please bring the taxi receipt and we will reimburse you.
Yes, it is fine to bring your friend. However, I should mention that where salaried academics are concerned, we are only willing to meet them if they first make a donation of £1,000 (or more). The coffee meetings are intended primarily for people of student age. While we are happy in principle to meet other academics, you will understand that it is potentially invidious and galling for us to meet those who have managed to survive the negative aspects of contemporary academia, whether through luck or through lowering their standards, and who are not giving us any support either by donations or by coming to work here in vacations.
We are in the position of intellectuals unjustly exiled from academia and having to support themselves by their own efforts. It seems reasonable to us to expect fellow intellectuals inside the system who are financially comfortable to make a token contribution to our efforts, if they want to interact with us.

The person in question responded by saying she refused to come without her friend, and so would not come at all.

The policy described is one we have applied for many years, and which we shall continue to apply until such time as we are in a comparable position to salaried academics, of being paid for being intellectually productive rather than having to spend almost all our time maintaining ourselves, and our embryonic organisation, at a minimum subsistence level.

* These are currently being held weekly on Tuesdays at 4.30 pm. For more details, email cgoxfordforum@yahoo.co.uk

Copy of a letter to recent lottery winners

Dear Justine Laycock and Nigel Page,

I read in a recent Daily Mail that you have won £56 million on the lottery.

You may be considering various charities and other causes to donate some of your winnings to. I would like to suggest that you consider us.

You have possibly heard about the ‘Climategate’ scandal, in which it was revealed that the investigation of climate change by British universities is not being carried out with the high standards of objectivity and impartial devotion to truth that one might have hoped for.

Unfortunately, this decline in standards has become a feature of academia in general. Because of government pressure, and an ideology which regards getting the ‘morally correct’ result as more important than whether it is true, much of what the universities produce is now worse than useless. In some fields, such as philosophy or economics, their net contribution is clearly negative.

Modern culture is increasingly being distorted by the large role played by the state. It needs to regain the participation of private patronage, as used to happen in the past.

Oxford Forum is a research organization which was set up to oppose increasing ideological bias in mainstream academia. Its aim is to expand into an independent college cum university which would generate and publish research in several areas including philosophy, the psychology and physiology of perception, and theoretical physics. We are actively seeking potential patrons to provide funding for its activities.

One way in which someone could help our efforts in a way that would also benefit themselves is to purchase properties in the area where we are based, and allow us to use them while they were not actually living in them. The area near us is regarded as a good area for investing in property.

I hope you may consider my suggestions.

Linking precocity to criminality

Hatred of exceptional ability is fundamental to the modern ideology. I just saw a television drama (an Inspector Lynley story, ‘A Traitor to Memory’) which seemed to express this in inverted form.

Any drive to use exceptional ability, or to protect it in another person, is associated with criminal attitudes towards others and willingness to do them the greatest possible harm.

In this episode, a murder happens to someone vaguely associated with a successful violin player. He himself, his parents and his personal assistant are all clearly unsympathetic characters. His personal assistant, formerly a violin player himself, gave up on his own career to become first teacher and then personal assistant to his ‘beloved prodigy’ – as the politically correct working class female detective expresses it sneeringly.

‘I was a good musician but Gideon is a great one’, says the contemptible and criminal PA. ‘A talent such as that occurs once in a century.’

It transpires that the violinist killed his disabled little sister (who had Down’s syndrome) because the strain of supporting both a highly talented offspring and a dysfunctional one was too much for his parents, who had told him they could not afford to pay for him to go to the prestigious school of music.

‘But I had to go there,’ he says. ‘I was born to be a musician.’

Everyone around Gideon then went on treating him (inappropriately, you are evidently supposed to think) like an exception who must be shielded from his own actions. They wished to protect the prodigy, by taking the blame for the murder of his sister themselves, or by bribing an innocent person to do so. Gideon must be protected from knowing about anything that might be painful to him, so one person after another gets killed to prevent them from saying the wrong thing to him.

All this is most implausible, but it does illustrate the fundamental hatred of exceptional ability and of the drive to get into a position to use it to the full, a drive which I had and still have.

Propaganda such is this is evidently very effective at determining people’s attitudes. It is not necessary to say explicitly, ‘People with exceptional ability should be prevented from using it to get into the sort of career to which they are suited and which they need to have.’

If anyone precocious or successful in any way at an early age is always presented as depraved and criminal, as well as anyone who seems to wish to support them in their ambitions, putting across the idea that criminality is associated with any precocious person as well as with anyone who shows sympathy with any precocious person, everyone gets the point and the association of ideas is firmly fixed in their mind. It does not seem to require any particular level of IQ to be influenced by the association of ideas that is intended, although being analytical and critical about it seems to require not only a high IQ but unusual independence of mind.

This association of criminality with precocity and with the support of precocity was apparently well in place at the onset of the Welfare State in 1945, and it makes it easier to understand why I was treated as a criminal, and why my father was as well when he tried to gain acceptance for my proposals for the taking of exams. It would have been a much better strategy for him to leave me alone as quietly as possible to get on with whatever I wanted to do, if he had been cynical enough to adopt it, although no doubt it could not have gone on for long without arousing violent antagonism.

More about home education

Home tuition loophole. Khyra’s mother and stepfather used home education as a cover for her horrific abuse. If parents wish to remove a child from state school to teach them at home, they simply have to notify the head teacher. By law, they must provide a ‘suitable’ education according to the ‘age, aptitude and ability’ of the child. But there is no requirement to follow the national curriculum or to provide a set number of hours of education. Local authorities can make informal inquiries to establish if parents are offering a suitable education. But the law allows parents to refuse to let officials see the education that is taking place. They simply have to show examples of the child’s work – with no need for the youngster to be present. *

The above extract is evidently implying that the degree to which individual liberty survives in the ‘educational’ system is regrettable.When I got the top scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, it was almost entirely on the strength of work which I had done under my own auspices and which the local education authority had not known about. I translated all four languages on the optional translation paper, having become proficient in reading languages by reading them. I had deliberately prepared myself for the General Essay papers by informing myself of the views of major philosophers of the past, and a Somerville don later said to me that my essay papers were the most remarkable she had ever seen. Even the maths, on which my marks would not on their own have got me the top scholarship, owed nothing to tuition from anybody or to the supervised courses which I had been forced to undergo, and which had not even been intended as ‘preparation’ for the specific purpose of taking university entrance exams.

It is a complete fallacy to suppose that ‘teaching’ necessarily has much relevance to outcome, or that conformity to the ‘national curriculum’ or ‘set hours’ of supervised ‘work’ would be a good thing in any individual case.

The contribution of the ‘education authority’ to my education was consistently negative, as it, or individual members of it, discouraged my father (a headmaster) from allowing me to take the School Certificate exams (normally taken at 16) when I was 13, then from supporting me in going to a post-graduate summer school at a French university when I was 15, and finally from supporting me in starting to take external degrees from London University when I was 16. On the other hand, they encouraged him to get me into supervised school and university courses against my will. I did not think they were relevant to my purposes and being forced to attend them was anything but beneficial.

Incidentally, the comments in the Daily Mail refer to the current law ‘allowing’ local authorities to make ‘informal’ enquiries in cases of home education, as though this were somehow less intrusive than ‘formal’ enquiries. I am not quite sure where a line could be drawn between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ enquiries in any case. ‘Informal’ ones can have sufficiently damaging effects on the life of the victim being ‘enquired’ about, as I know to my cost.

* Daily Mail, 26 February 2010.

Home education: a scapegoat for abuse

Yesterday’s Daily Mail reports the case of a girl of seven beaten and starved to death, in spite of the involvement of social services and the Education Department. “Beyond belief ... how 9 officials let a girl of 7 starve to death in a modern British city”*. As usual, instead of concluding that the entire philosophy behind ‘child protection’ is flawed, it is implied that the answer is to have even more intervention.

Because the girl was supposedly being educated at home, the finger is being pointed at the loophole whereby parents may choose to exclude their child from the state education system if they think the child would do better being taught at home.

Just because a child is forced to attend a state school does not mean anyone is going to notice more readily that it is being abused at home. People seem to be very good at ignoring the signs of real abuse, whether they are paid to notice them or not. This, one may think, is because people have no real motivation to prevent suffering, although they may have some to enjoy inflicting it. Paying them money and giving them powers of intrusion into other people’s lives does not affect their underlying motivation, and one may think that this is the real cause of the ineptitude of the collectivist ‘services’. There is no reason to think that providing them with even more money and powers of intrusion and interference will produce any more beneficial results.

Also, there is no reason to think that enforced attendance at a school would assist with the process of preventing real abuse from taking place. The girl did attend school for a while, and some concerns were raised when she was found stealing food from another pupil’s bag, but they did not result in any useful action. No doubt, however, a case such as this will be used as ammunition for eroding still further the liberty of the individual.

*Daily Mail, 26 February 2010.

The murder/suicide of aristocracy

The Duke of Devonshire has announced the death of the aristocracy.

‘The aristocracy is not dying, it’s dead! Coffin’s nailed down, it’s in the ground. It doesn’t exist, except that people have titles.’ *

This is of course true. Aristocracy in theory and practice has been vigorously opposed since the inception of the welfare state. Its wealth has been largely decimated by estate duties, although the Duke himself remains relatively wealthy. After decades of propaganda via television and other media, aristocrats are now generally hated and despised, and their influence has waned to the point of being negligible. A few of them from time to time have provided some resistance to the ideologically-driven changes which have brought this country to its present state, but most have been entirely passive.

The Duke sounds thoroughly modern in his endorsement of the gradual transformation of his class.

‘Look, I’m only here by pure chance, I haven’t earned any of this?'

In 1999 the Labour government got rid of most of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords, and it is now planning to remove the last few so that there will never again be anyone in the House of Lords by virtue of inheritance. The Duke says that if that were to happen, he would give up his title altogether. This seems an unnecessary move, and presumably reveals his lack of sympathy for the idea of aristocracy.

The modern idea is to have all legislation determined by people who have been ‘elected’ – that is to say, chosen by a majority of the people who happen to bother to vote in an election. There is no reason why this process should necessarily produce an outcome satisfactory from any viewpoint (economic, moral, humanitarian), in most or even any cases.

The advantage of having at least some people in power who are unelected is that there is a greater chance of having some genuine diversity of viewpoint. Pure democracy seems to generate a model of politician similar to a second-hand car salesman catering to a market composed of average citizens (i.e. ones with an IQ of 100).

The benefit of having aristocrats in the House of Lords, as in any sphere of influence, was that they were inclined, by upbringing and no doubt by genetic makeup, to value individual independence and territory, and were therefore more likely to promote liberty and other principles that favoured the individual versus the state, such as the rule about double jeopardy, which has now been abolished.

The old House of Lords offered slight resistance to the intrusive legislation that tends to come out of Parliament more or less automatically, because those elected to power will always tend to seek to increase rather than diminish that power. With the removal of the aristocracy from most spheres, a countervailing force to the continual and inexorable expansion of state power and intrusiveness has been removed.

The Duke of Devonshire says that the final removal of all hereditary peers from the House of Lords would be a ‘clear-cut [sign of] what the people wanted’, presumably meaning that it would show that ‘the people’ want to abolish aristocracy. This is absurd. What the House of Commons does has little to do with the wishes of the majority; it is driven primarily by the preferences of the political elite. But even if it were true, it would not necessarily make it a good thing. An important attribute of aristocrats was that they were in the habit of using their own judgement about what is right, regardless of what the majority thinks. The majority might think, for example, that Jews ought to be oppressed, and the majority probably does think that people with high IQs should not be able to derive any advantages by using their ability.

* * *

No members of the aristocracy have given us significant financial support in our efforts to prevent the suppression of unfashionable points of view. Many have known of our existence, but without making any attempt to get accurate information about us by making personal contact. The Duke’s father, so I was informed, was once approached by one of our senior supporters, himself an aristocrat, but with no positive result.

Instead of surrendering to the ideology purely because it purports to be based on ‘what the people want’ or on what is supposed to be ‘good for them’, the Duke of Devonshire should devote some of his wealth to supporting those who might produce genuinely progressive culture. This is a role which the aristocracy used to play, but which they have now given up, presumably on a similar basis, i.e. that the kind of culture the majority wants is already being produced.

If the Duke were to support us, the aristocracy might once again serve a useful function. We appeal to him to do so.

* Sunday Times, 21 February 2010.

Care workers back death tax

Apparently, care workers support bringing in a death tax.

That is to say,

families with assets over a set amount would have to find the money to pay a death duty bill – possibly meaning they have to sell their homes – even if they do not draw on social services care for their ageing relatives ... Ministers released a document insisting that social care experts and charities agreed with their plans for a tax. *

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

What is a ‘care worker’ anyway? People who are agents and beneficiaries of the oppressive society, being paid salaries out of confiscated (public) money to exercise power over people.

One might think, and I do think, that if you have state pensions at all they should not be means-tested and should be adequate to enable a retired person to employ whatever housekeeping and other help they need. But of course there should not be state pensions at all. Deterioration in the direction of total oppression was bound to take place once such a thing had been initiated, even if at the outset there was no suggestion of means-testing, and the possibility of being forced into subjection to ‘aid’ from the NHS did not arise, since there was no NHS.

But now, even if you manage to keep yourself at liberty and do not fall into the clutches of the NHS before you die, it is proposed that your estate should pay a levy on your death as a contribution to the bad and expensive ‘help’ which might have been meted out to you.

* Daily Mail, 20 February 2010 ‘Care workers back death tax, says Burnham'.

Further on nonsense research

In the article referred to in the previous post, we have an ‘academic’ with socially conferred status and salary paid out of taxpayers’ money, informing us that it is in our best interests not to have money which might make us free not to support ourselves by doing ‘jobs’. Evidently we should be overjoyed that the government takes away our money in taxes, so that it can be allocated to the support of salaried academics such as him, and to salaries for other jobs, doing which will give people a sense of purpose and self-esteem.

Who but policy-makers would be interested in such ‘research’ being carried out and published? People with money to spare would scarcely be interested in paying to find this out. Those without money to spare might conceivably like the rich to be told that they should wish to get rid of it by giving it to the poor ... but they would have no money to spare. Would a freelance intellectual, supported by his private income, be likely to find this a stimulating field of enquiry?

The government alone, stuffed as it is with policy-makers, has an interest in encouraging such pronouncements, and plenty of (taxpayers’) money available to do so.

Much academic ‘research’ has the underlying motive of justifying the extension of future confiscatory and interventionist policies. This has been true from a very early stage of the development of egalitarian Britain.

I am reminded of someone I knew, with an IQ little, if at all, above average, who became a lecturer in the new and imaginary subject of sociology at a polytechnic (now, of course, called a university). Sociology, like many new academic subjects, was designed to be accessible to people with low IQs, having little detailed informational content. My acquaintance was keen on Durkheim, whose work had much the same implications as the more modern ‘research’ drawn on by Dr Boyce. What makes people commit suicide, Durkheim said, was not disastrous changes in their objective (including financial) circumstances, but finding themselves isolated from social groups to which they formerly belonged. So, policy-makers, it doesn’t matter a bit if you make people’s circumstances worse, so long as you provide them with plenty of inexpensive group activities.

Mary Adams of the BBC used to expound the inspiring idea, which she had picked up in communist China, that domestic pets should not be allowed because their company prevented the elderly from becoming desperate enough to attend socially provided Day Centres where they could sit around (in a group) with other elderly people.

Tendentious pop psychology financed by taxpayers

The newspapers continue to be full of nonsense stories, some of them generated by the so-called university system. In Wednesday’s Daily Mail we have an expert on happiness, Dr Chris Boyce from Warwick University, described as an 'economic psychologist', telling us why the latest lottery winners are bound to be unhappy. Presumably his assertions are based on years of training, including studying other people’s 'research', which probably cost millions to carry out.

Boyce’s own research generated the conclusion that a course of psychological therapy costing £800 provides the same amount of 'happiness' as a £25,000 windfall.

Or, to put it another way, therapy is 31 times more cost-effective in making people happier than a lottery win. *

If I had done research which produced this apparent result, I would be highly dubious of it, and suspect that there was something flawed in my methodology. In Boyce’s case, he seems to have taken the result at face value.

Boyce has a number of theories about why large amounts of money ought to make people unhappy. It is not clear whether these theories have empirical support, or simply reflect his own prejudices. In any case, research which claims to be investigating 'happiness' is almost certain to be dodgy, because there is no good way of measuring such a thing. You cannot simply go by what people happen to answer on a particular day in response to a question which cannot itself avoid being biased in one way or another.

Boyce’s theories about what ought to make people happy, and what ought not, include the following:

(1) A lottery winner spending his money in a visible way will find that his neighbours will be 'consumed with envy'.

(2) If he moves to better premises, his old friends will be no less jealous, and his new milieu could 'well be less than welcoming'. 'How will he escape the sycophants and money-grubbers?'

(3) He will still be jealous of others with more status or money, even if there are now fewer of them.

(4) Salaried jobs appear to Boyce to be an essential part of every person’s life.

Now we don’t know if they particularly enjoyed those jobs, but we can be certain of this: in leaving them, they will lose yet another component of a joyful life: connection with other people ... Without the discipline and structure provided by their jobs, there is a very real danger than their lives will lack purpose; their sense of self-worth will plummet.

And it goes on in this way.

I have no wish to single out Dr Boyce for this type of inanity. No doubt there are plenty of others like him, who produce tendentious pop psychology built around a tiny nugget of low-grade 'research'. But if you added up all their salaries, and the cost of the associated institutional environment, you would arrive at a rather considerable annual budget. If even a quarter of this was instead used to finance my own research organisation, there could be some hard-edged criticism being produced of the kind of biased folk sociology which nowadays seems to qualify as 'economics'. Now would that not be a far more productive use of resources?

* Daily Mail, 17 February 2010, article ‘Sorry ... but that £56 million won’t make them happy’ by Dr Chris Boyce.

The bloodless revolution

Copy of a letter to a professor of philosophy

As a person with socially conferred status, hence both agent and beneficiary of the ideology of the oppressive society, you should wish to visit us frequently to hear about the realities of modern society as perceived by those who are its victims.

I first said long ago, soon after being thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’, that every feature of modern society can be accounted for by motivation to make life as difficult as possible for someone exactly like me, and hence to ensure that they could not use their ability in any progressive or constructive way.

It amazes me that the revolution in everyone’s ways of thinking and interpreting situations has been so universal. Of course no previous revolution has had the advantages of both universal ‘education’ (indoctrination) and of broadcasting media pumping out propaganda. But is that the only reason for so wholehearted a switch to an oppressive belief system? Independent and critical thought is not impossible, even if not what human psychology is principally programmed to do.

Just after the war, in the late 1940s, what had happened was said to be the "bloodless revolution”. Less physical blood on the streets, but perhaps no less cruelty and sadistically caused suffering, only less obvious to the naked eye.

The true raison d’etre of state education, including at university level, is to destroy people like me. Directly, by preventing them from getting into the sort of career they need to have. Indirectly, by creating a population that will give them no help in any way in recovering from their destitute and outcast position, knowing that they should not give them money, help them get into socially statusful positions, nor do any work for them in any useful way.

Any way, that is, that would “make their lives easier” as a highly-paid fundraising consultant said to me, accounting for why he would only make up applications to support complete cut-price research projects which would place us (already exhausted and overworked) under an obligation to do even more work of an unsuitable and damaging kind, instead of contributing even slightly to the alleviation of our position, so that we might be able to be slightly more intellectually productive in a way that was less painfully damaging, even if in no way permitting a sense of well-being.

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil