The irony of being "free"

Comments on being ‘free’ to do what ‘interests’ me

(copy of a letter)

Let us consider the amazing assertion by a philosopher at Somerville College that if I got a proper full-time salaried academic appointment I would be less free than as an unsalaried, statusless outcast.

What makes her think that I would value ‘freedom’ more than a social identity? I might well choose to sacrifice ‘freedom’, if I had any, for the sake of social status. I never expected, or wanted, to have to live without social status, and I was deeply grieved and shocked to find myself thrown out of society fifty years ago, not only without the Professorial status which I should have acquired at about 15, but without any status at all as an academic on a career track that could ever lead to a Professorship.

If, when I was thrown out 50 years ago, I had had the choice between (a) a Professorship, even with less than ideal residential hotel facilities, and (b) an equivalent salary, perfect hotel environment, and freedom to do whatever I liked within these conditions, but with no hope that what I did could ever secure for me any academic advancement, I would have settled for the Professorship.

Only if there was real hope of my ‘free’ but statusless environment leading to an ever-increasing scale of operations might I have considered it worth sacrificing the social identity of a Professor — which would have made (and still would make) one’s relations with society so much more ‘interesting’, to use that much-abused word. Even an expanding scale of operations as an identity-less freelance individual would have seemed sterile, in a certain way.

The model of the situation in which the ‘freedom’ of being unsalaried and statusless could appear preferable to a salaried Professorial position does not hold water, because if progressive and expanding work were ever possible, it would lead to social recognition and hence to academic reinstatement. So the idea of choosing a permanently exiled life in order to be ‘more free’ is an artificial one, and certainly never occurred to me, even when I hoped to be able to get a decent level of financial support from parapsychological sources.

I never actually considered the work I did manage to do as an outcast as sterile, in the sense of useless for making a return to an academic career, although it turned out to be so. The nostalgic pull towards a social identity was very strong. In practice, any possibility of opportunity for expansion appears to have been ruled out by my lack of identity.

The idea that I could prefer the ‘freedom’ provided by the bad, constricted and hopeless circumstances of the academic outcast to the much better circumstances of even imperfect Professorships is ludicrous and cruel.

I might have felt that the hotel-equivalent circumstances left something to be desired, but the salary would have provided me with enough to pay for at least a parttime housekeeper cum p.a., so I would have had at least the minimum conditions for getting something out of life.

The only real dissent

(copy of a letter)

There are at least two outrageous news stories every day in the Daily Mail and my suppressed Oxford Forum publishing company (supported only by our own money) can’t publish books fast enough.

In fact we are the only voice of real dissent.

Surely you know someone who could give us a million pounds, just for starters, to make our protests a trifle louder?

Other sources of protest are feeble and halfhearted. For example, and typically, today’s horror article in the Mail, entitled “All pupils should be checked for criminal tendencies, says Blair”, contains this feeble and (as usual) concessive piece of faint criticism from the director of Liberty (no less), Shami Chakrabarti. She is quoted as saying,

“Who for example can disagree with the idea of ‘early intervention’? But ...”

Well, I can disagree for one, and so can everyone else at Oxford Forum. All intervention is immoral, and so is the taxation that is used to support it.

It is high time that this was said, even if it can at best only very slightly decelerate the headlong rush to destruction of Western civilisation. And no one is going to say it but us.

Giving money to beggars

When I say that I could never draw social security however hard up I was, because I had been left without any usable qualifications, I mean not merely hard up relative to the cost of remaining physically alive, but hard up relative to the cost of providing myself with the equivalent of a residential college (hotel) environment and the secretarial and other facilities that might have been provided by the sort of academic career which I should have been having, as well as a Professorial salary.

I felt very hard up indeed, and saved money very hard out of my miserable pittance of a salary at the Society for Psychical Research, although it looked as though it would take thousands of years to reach a level of capital at which I could provide myself with the circumstances I needed to have; unless something completely improbable and unpredictable happened in my favour.
I certainly found it very grim to be in such a situation; I could never have believed that anything so terrible could happen to me, nor that if it did, there would be absolutely nobody who would give me any help in remedying my position. Nevertheless I went on giving money to beggars, in order to remember the higher level perspective and not feel totally shut in to an ostensibly hopeless imprisonment in the ‘normal’ world.

I remember one time when Sir George was visiting me in Oxford where I was doing a post-graduate degree which I hoped would provide me with a way of re-accessing an academic career. In the event it did not, because there was nobody who did not want me to be kept down and out, including my own supervisor, Professor Price, who was under the influence of two sources of hostility against me, the Principal of Somerville and Rosalind Heywood at the SPR.
However, while doing this thesis I was in lodgings near Somerville and Sir George and two other Somervillians were in the room with me. A beggar knocked at the door and asked for money. I got everyone to turn out their loose cash and see what they felt able to contribute. Sir George produced a note, but rather disapprovingly. Admittedly he was having to survive on a totally inadequate pension, so he might just have said he was needing it too badly himself, but what he said was, ‘You shouldn’t give him so much. He will only get drunk on it.’

‘That is entirely beside the point,’ I said. I might have added, but didn’t, ‘Money is what he asked for, so that is what he shall have, and what he does with it is nobody’s business but his own.’

Then I went back to the front door to give him the collection.

The evolution of dishonesty

In dealing with external physical reality, it would seem that all the evolutionary forces must be on the side of honesty and realism. It will do a farmer little good to pretend he has not noticed the signs of an approaching storm. But when living beings are dealing with others, even with those of their own species, there are many ways in which it can be useful to mislead other life forms about the true state of affairs, including your disposition and intentions. Transparent plankton could be said to be pretending not to be there, although they are, and by the time one arrives at something so complex as a normal plant, one finds the most elaborate reproductions and imitations being offered in order to induce insects to behave in the way that will best disseminate the plant's pollen.

Simple forms of dishonesty in animal life are well-known; for example, the bird that feigns an injured wing in order to lure a predator away from its nest. But clearly by far the greatest opportunities for dishonesty must be found in the social interactions of human beings, whose social forms are so much more complex and varied than those of other animals. We must suppose that a high degree of social dishonesty can greatly enhance the organism's chance of survival and successful reproduction, to the extent that the evolutionary pressures upon it depend on competition and successful interaction with its own kind rather than on attempts to overcome the difficulties presented by the physical world around it. Such a favourable strategy will probably become, as there is every reason to think it has become, a dominant mode of human behaviour and, like other successful strategies, it is likely to occur in association with a liking for this form of behaviour and a tendency in the direction of using it.

But since other people are aware of this strategy, a high degree of sophistication must be aimed at, and it may be that that will be best achieved if a person contrives to deceive himself concerning his own motives and intentions.

From the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom

The choice is: school or prison

Extracts from ‘Fines or prison may be used to keep pupils in class to 18’ (Daily Mail 23 March 2007) with some comments by me in italics.

Under Alan Johnson's plan children starting secondary school next year will be the first generation expected to stay in education or training until they reach 18. Teenagers face £50 on-the-spot fines and even jail if they refuse to stay in education until they are 18, it has been revealed ...

[Alan Johnson’s] proposals will have massive implications for employers, particularly small firms which rely on low-wage teenagers. Bosses face criminal sanctions if they refuse to release teenagers for training and so do parents who put children aged 16 to 18 to work in the family business without sending them off for training ...

In a green paper titled Raising Expectations, Mr Johnson outlined four options for over-16s - school, college, apprenticeships or work-based learning. [No mention, of course, of correspondence courses which do not expose a person to direct social hostility. The Open University is not open to those under the age of 18.]

Youngsters employed for at least 20 hours a week would need to do part-time study totalling 280 hours a year. ... Schools, colleges and employers providing training would be placed under a duty to report youngsters if they drop out.

Those persistently refusing offers of education and training would be handed 'attendance orders' setting out where, when and how often they should turn up. Like anti-social behaviour orders they would bring criminal sanctions if breached. ... Mr Johnson insisted: 'No youngster would be in the criminal area of the law unless they are very hardcore and we have gone through a very very fulsome process, including counselling.' ["Counselling" — deprivation of liberty so as to have one’s mind exposed to brainwashing.]

My comments

Terrible things are going on. The appalling proposals for accelerating the breakdown of civilisation pour out faster than I can put even a few comments about them on my inconspicuous and widely ignored blog. Now they propose to deprive everyone of their freedom of action until they are 18. If people had any awareness of the importance of liberty as an abstract principle there would be rioting in the streets.

There seems to be even less outrage at this idea than there was when the school-leaving age was raised from 15 to 16. But at that time most journalists had themselves been educated before the inception of the Welfare State in 1945; nowadays most journalists have themselves been brought up within it.

I believe that when income tax came in at a penny in the pound someone is supposed to have commented, ‘This is the end of civilisation’. For a long time this was quoted as a funny old-fashioned attitude, because everything seemed, in most people’s eyes, to be proceeding in an acceptable way. But I must admit that by now it seems blatantly obvious that if someone said that, he was right, and even if no one said it, it is true. The idea of any supposed benefit being provided by the state, and financed by the reduction of liberty of individuals, can only lead to ever-increasing oppression and persecution.

If you can get a supposed or real benefit only if you can afford to pay for it yourself, you are at least protected from being placed at the mercy of what other people with to impose upon your life instead of what you might, if you could, choose to pay for.

People brought up in the modern world scarcely ever question the unexamined assumptions which are universally made, and which it is taboo to question. It is assumed that education is ‘a good’, so anything that goes under that name is unquestionably ‘a good’, and more of ‘a good’ must be ‘better’ than less of it.

Compulsory education came in at the end of the 19th century, adding to the writing on the wall that resulted from the inception of income tax; then there was female suffrage, then the Welfare State in 1945. Now, sixty years later, we are reaping the whirlwind that has resulted from those events.

Women in tribes

Let us consider how the characteristics of human psychology may derive from the structure of tribal society.

There is no ‘drive to infinity’, or drive towards any goal outside the tribal group. There is no concerted attempt to increase control of the environment, nor is it possible for any individual to make wholehearted attempts to better his own lot. The object of everything is to reinforce belief in the importance of the tribal customs, so that the people in the tribe can live out their life-cycles according to these patterns, often with little change for centuries or millennia.

There is relatively more scope for the men to assert significance in forms of aggression towards something external to the tribe, since they have from time to time to defend the tribe from the encroachments of other tribes, and probably to kill animals for food. This kind of assertion of significance still takes the form of asserting that they are able to deprive another personality of its life, i.e. that on behalf of the tribal significance they are able to assert their superior potency by depriving of potency. Nevertheless this relatively externalised assertiveness gives male psychology its slight margin of generosity and flexibility.

The women, on the other hand, having no way of asserting themselves outside the tribe, and concerned with the bringing up of children, have no outlet for their drive but in the satisfaction they can obtain from subordinating the children, and no doubt everybody else as well, to the tribal customs. (One can hear the tribal echoes in many common expressions: ‘She must be helped to adapt to a non-academic life’, i.e. ‘She must be brought into subordination to the tribal customs’.)

from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom

Higher-level morality and social morality

It may be observed that there appears to be no overlap between higher-level morality and the sort that derives from believing in society or other people.

What I have encountered all my life is universal opposition, justified by a rationalised belief that if I was prevented from getting what I wanted to get, and could easily have been getting, I would stop wanting what I could get something out of, and turn into a different kind of person who did not want it or need it, whether on account of being physically dead or otherwise.

When I was at school I could have been getting everything I wanted with very little help, except with making arrangements for degree level physics and chemistry practicals. All that would have been necessary would have been less interference. Once the harm had been done and I had been thrown out, a bit more active help would have been necessary to reverse the harm that had been done to me so that I could get back my minimum requirements for a tolerable life, which were a hotel environment, as provided by a resident college, and the salary and status of an Oxbridge professor.

On a higher level one acquires a very strong aversion to seeing any apparently conscious being frustrated or suffering, and the idea of anyone putting someone else into a decentralising position is horrific. This is in part because one thinks a consciousness could and should be on a higher level, but so long as it is preoccupied with trying to get things out of other people it can’t be.

Of course, in most cases, you know that superimposing another layer of tantalising opposition is only adding to psychological obstructions that are already quite sufficient to prevent the person from knowing his own mind/getting a higher level. Nevertheless it is horrific to think of that extra layer being instated.

Since the age of 13 (and less obviously before) I have been treated with extraordinary cruelty, and a determination to make me suffer as much as possible, and to make me realise that alleviation of my suffering depended on some help or permission from other people which they would not give.

This was less surprising when I was at school and college where I was surrounded by hostile left-wing people, predominantly not aristocratic, and almost without exception socialists. (Socialism is fundamentally immoral, from a higher level point of view.)

But Rosalind Heywood persuaded everyone at the SPR without exception to oppose what I was clearly trying to get, so as to force me to give up. That is amazingly immoral from a higher level point of view. The SPR population would count as highly principled on normal terms; old-fashioned aristocrats who had been to public schools and held positions of responsibility, pillars of society, many of them Christians.

But it did not occur to any of them that a policy of frustrating someone in order to manipulate them into distorting their psychology was immoral and objectionable.

Nobody ever objected to this policy of paternalistic frustration as immoral. They neither objected to other people doing it nor refused to play ball themselves, but allowed themselves to be drawn in to ‘being cruel to be kind’ as Rosalind Heywood encouraged them to think of it.

So one can only say that socially acceptable morality, however sophisticated and worked out, contains no awareness of the basic moral principle – I mean of what, from a higher level point of view, is the basic moral principle.

Or perhaps you could say that there is an awareness of the basic moral principle but this is expressed only by acting against it, instead of on it, whenever opportunity arises.

Basic morality and people at the SPR

(copy of a letter)

The years after being thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ were shockingly disillusioning. I did not have much in the way of illusions and I did not expect much of people, but I thought it was not absolutely out of the question that the odd person, here or there, might act in what seemed to me a natural way. However, I did need help very badly, having no means of support and no way of working my way back into an academic career which could lead to a Professorship. I could not, as I have already pointed out, draw Social Security without falsifying my position. I certainly experienced my situation as unbelievably horrifying, so that the universal meanness and opposition was something I could not fail to experience very painfully.

All I hoped of Sir George was that he would not oppose me, even if he would do nothing to help me, which was based on nothing but his mystical flash up a hill in Arabia because, I thought, the basic moral principle is so obvious that quite a short exposure to the higher level situation would give someone a great aversion to frustrating anyone in getting what they wanted in any way, even if they had no resources, financial or motivational, for trying to help them.

I remember saying to Sally, ‘He may not do anything to help me, but at least he won’t actively oppose me’, and she said nothing, perhaps thinking that she understood psychology better than I did. If so, she was right, as before long he was machinating against me and trying to manipulate me as much as anybody.

Rosalind Heywood considered herself a very spiritual person, who could tell whether or not there was a host in situ in a Catholic church in its box on the altar (whatever you call it) by whether or not she could hear a kind of holy singing noise. She got the holy noise in proximity with sacred objects of other religions as well.

She played infallibly on a certain dimension of human psychology and I never knew anyone resist her for long. Sir George did resist her attempts to get him and Salter to oppose my plans on one occasion, but it did not last. This was an unusual experience for her and she looked shaken as she left the office after a confrontational interview, but she was not one to accept defeat. A few weeks later Sir George’s support for me had vanished (how much communication had taken place between them, by telephone or otherwise, I do not know).

Conversion to her point of view was irreversible. I have no doubt that she did sell to all concerned that every particle of support to me should be choked off because it would be kinder to force me to give up on setting up an independent academic establishment. It could not succeed and the sooner I was made to give it up the better. Any support, however tiny, would only be prolonging the agony. This, of course, is head-on violation of the basic moral principle that you do not impose your interpretations and evaluations on somebody else, but give them what they say they want if you can (or if you are able to muster the energy in view of your own problems).

But the idea of frustrating someone, and pretending that you are doing it out of benevolence, is attractive to human psychology, which has a desire to frustrate and to express its power by causing suffering, as fundamental as the higher level drive to do the opposite.

So everybody associated in any way with the SPR and Oxford University joined in trying to squeeze me to death in my own best interests, just as, when I was at school, people had been able to oppose me in everything I wanted on the pretence that they were liberating me from the pressures placed on me by an ambitious father, in both cases no doubt enjoying the opportunity to combine active malevolence with a smug sense of their own compassion and sympathy.

A cruel pretence

(copy of a letter)

There is a very cruel pretence that the outcast professor is not suffering from being deprived of an institutional (hotel) environment and social recognition as a leading intellectual, i.e. as a person with a salaried and prestigious Professorship.

When I was thrown out fifty years ago I accepted that there was a brick wall in front of me and that all I could do was scrape at it, trying to make a tunnel through it. Everyone promoted the cruel fiction that I was being ‘free to follow my interests’. This was the worst possible slander of someone in my terrible position, because it represented me as not needing help (and I don’t mean ‘help’ in the form of counselling) in the form of money and people and support in getting money and people.

How do you suppose it feels, after fifty years of totally unrewarding toil in bad circumstances, trying to work towards an institutional (hotel) environment and an Oxbridge Professorship, to be told by a philosopher at Somerville that if I got back onto a salaried career track that could lead to a Professorship, I would be ‘less free’! The most violent possible rejection of all that constitutes one’s individuality. The most violent insult possible to add to grievous injury. And she, and all at Somerville, have slandered and even libelled me in this terrible way.

There should be recognition of this as a criminal act with a legal penalty. A suitable penalty would be that she should be condemned to come and work in my incipient and downtrodden independent university doing whatever she can most usefully do, probably filling in with the domestic and menial tasks, from the lack of staff to do which I am always suffering grievously. Also she should forfeit all her assets to contribute towards the funding which I need to build up the capital endowment of my university, which is still too painfully squeezed for me to be able to make use of my ability to do anything, let alone to function at an adequate energy level.

More timewasting for the "gifted"

I see they are going ahead with their absolutely horrific proposals to provide even more expensive interference in the lives of any child with an IQ slightly above average. It is very unlikely that the type of ‘educational’ facilities proposed — lectures, classes, groups, summer schools etc — will actually be advantageous rather than disadvantageous, even for those with the lowest IQs in the top 10% of the population.

This is the time-wasting type of ‘educational’ activity (what they call “stretching not pushing”, and “facilitating not spoon-feeding”) . What is really preventing all and sundry from getting anything out of their ordinary ‘schools’ is not that there is not enough ‘teaching’ but that there is too much (in the modern sense of the word). It is simply designed to demoralise, and extra periods of demoralisation provided at the taxpayers’ expense will be no good for anybody (except in the sense of ‘good’ used in "there is no good injun but a dead injun").

If someone with an IQ of 120 or so manages to get to a timewasting and demoralising university after running the gauntlet of this sort of education at school with extra timewasting specially provided, it will be in spite of, not on account of, this extra handicap.

I hope, at any rate, it will be possible for victims of the scheme, or their parents on their behalf, to refuse to expose themselves to these ‘opportunities’. Cigarettes and investments have to carry risk warnings, and the same principle should be applied to ‘educational opportunities’, invitations to which should be accompanied by a warning, ‘Accepting this invitation may do you (or your child) harm and not good, and may do irrevocable damage to your (or his) prospects in life’.