Crowding out the opposition

Letter sent to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford

Dear Lord Patten,

I note and deplore your comments on the fund-raising campaign launched by Oxford University, allegedly to ‘give it the freedom to choose whichever students it likes’, and deplore the fund-raising campaign itself, which is only making matters even worse for my genuinely independent, even if socially unrecognised, incipient university which is realistically trying to maintain intellectual standards, or would be doing so if not kept unproductive by a rigorous lack of support.

Removing an overt and explicit pressure from the Government will do nothing to restore Oxford University to freedom from the prevailing anti-individualistic ideology which it has been instrumental in promoting. Nearly all individual academics have been discriminating for decades against genuine ability and in favour of low IQs and politically correct attitudes. I am sure that their doing so will continue, as will the decline in standards, whatever official pronouncements may be made.

Appealing for funding from sources other than the Government will only make the situation even worse for a genuinely independent university, such as ours. There are several areas of potential research in which we have been prevented from operating for several decades, those to whom we applied for funding often saying that they preferred to support work (in that nominal area or otherwise) in a university.

The implication seems to be that you cannot go wrong in supporting a socially recognised institution and, as an implicit corollary, that you should positively avoid permitting work that should be the domain of a ‘proper’ university to be done outside of one.

Why is it regarded as reprehensible to permit such work to be done outside of a ‘proper’ university ? Perhaps there is a fear that if anyone not socially recognised as the right sort of person were allowed to do anything, this might have the effect of making them appear superior to the socially accredited academics (which should not be allowed to become apparent, whether or not it is actually the case).

It is also possible that findings might be made in research which did not appear to be immediately supportive of the prevailing ideology, and work seriously critical of the productions of socially accredited academics might be published.

If more financial contributions than at present were made to Oxford University, those who might give to us to enable us to become productive would have their available resources still further reduced, in the same way that progressive impoverishment of individuals by taxation makes it less possible for them to give any support to us, even if any of them could transcend the modern ideology sufficiently to consider doing so.

Perhaps one should see in this appeal for funding by Oxford University (and perhaps by other universities) another ‘stealth tax’. One knows that the Government is struggling with its ‘need’ to increase public spending by raising taxation, when it is already at a crippling level. Encouraging universities to apply for private funding so that there is less need for Government subsidy may enable the Government, certainly not to reduce taxation, but to spend more of its resources elsewhere.

Yours sincerely, etc.

Means-testing pensioners

Pensioners, like the middle class in general, are victimised by modern legislation. The modern ideology does not accept innate differences but it does, in practice, discriminate against those with above-average IQs, and against personality characteristics associated with above-average IQs, such as conscientiousness and forethought.

The population of pensioners, whether or not classifiable as ‘middle class’, are likely to have above-average IQs, if only because they have managed to reach pensionable age. They fail to protest at the burdens imposed upon them, perhaps to some extent because, like my own parents, they are inclined to accept legal impositions without complaint.

People over 50 now constitute 43% of the voting population (this proportion is expected to rise to over 50% by 2031) and are in a position to exercise significant pressure on the political parties which wish for their electoral support.

Pensioners and prospective pensioners should never have accepted the means-testing of pensions. The effect of this policy is that those who have been so thrifty and frugal as to acquire savings, as well as making sure that they always paid the requisite annual contributions, whatever their circumstances, are being penalised so that more ‘support’ can be diverted to those who ‘need it most’, i.e. those who have made no attempt to build up independence of the state throughout their working lives.

Many of those who qualify for the supplementary ‘income support’, which would put their pension back up to the level it might be at if not means-tested, fail to claim it. They are exhorted to apply for what they are ‘entitled to’, the only reason usually suggested for their reluctance to do so being ‘pride’. But in fact they can only apply by submitting to ‘assessment’ of their circumstances by agents of the collective, who may quite well decide that it is not ‘in their interests’ to be allowed to live in their own home any longer, and they may be popped into the killing fields of the old people’s ‘homes’ whether they like it or not.

Ultimately, the state has the right to force an elderly person to live in a care home, or even to have them sectioned as a psychiatric patient. They will not be allowed the option of quietly starving or otherwise coming to grief in their own homes, which might very well be a less painful and distressing way of ending their lives than what awaits them in ‘care’.

Pensioners and their associations, such as Age Concern, Help the Aged and the National Pensioners Convention, should not tolerate means-testing. It was not regarded as acceptable in the original Pensions Act of 1911, which proposed that the pensions being set up should be paid for by contributions and would be payable to rich and poor alike.

Now Gordon Brown proposes an extra levy on salaries to ‘pay for care in old age’, in addition to compulsory pension contributions. Again, there is no way of opting out of this by saying that one will never be a drain on the state’s provision of ‘care facilities’ for the elderly, but would rather die in one’s own way in one’s own home.

‘The question of ethics with regard to pension policy is one of the issues on which Oxford Forum could be producing fundamental critical analyses if it were provided with adequate funding. We appeal for £2m as initial funding to enable us to write and publish on this and similar issues, which are currently only discussed in the context of pro-collectivist arguments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Leaders are socially constructed

Copy of a letter to someone I got to talk to for a couple of hours (rare occurrence!)

I have not previously encountered this alleged experimental finding which you quoted from anthropology textbooks, that if you put 20 people in a room, one ‘leader’ will always emerge with a couple of sub-leaders. If it is in anthropology textbooks I am sure that tendentious conclusions are expected to be drawn from it.

As, for example, that leadership does not depend on any individual attributes or qualities, genetic or otherwise, but may be imposed or constructed upon any individual by environmental circumstances. It is social constructionism again, depending on a profound underlying belief (or wish to believe) that there are no innate characteristics and that society can turn any sheep into a shepherd if it chooses and, even more delightfully, force any former shepherd into the position of a sheep.

So — the family court business arises, with low-IQ doctors and social workers ruling the lives of high-IQ professional people, and prescribing for how many hours per week they may see their children under supervision, etc.

It is now openly admitted that medical schools exercise positive discrimination in favour of the ‘underprivileged’, which means of course discriminating against people from successful middle-class backgrounds, and that really means discriminating against those with higher IQs and/or aristocratic ancestry.

What I would do with £10 billion

As I said in a previous piece of writing, 10 billion pounds has been spent, effectively to lower the average IQ of the undergraduate population. I would accept £10 billion without any qualms and would be sure of being able to make good use of it in applying my abilities and those of my associates to contributing to the advancement of science and contributing to the intellectual debates of the present time.

People have often asked me ‘What would I do?’ in a certain field of work and ‘How much would I need for it?’ Well, actually, I would do the best and most progressive things within the resources available, which is what I did when I went to the Society for Psychical Research, within the very restricted resources available and living in appalling circumstances (without a hotel environment). What I did was the best I could do to open up large-scale fields of research. Working on them on an adequate scale would, incidentally, have provided a hotel environment to make my life tolerable rather than intolerable, and permitted me not only to be intellectually productive but to get some sense of wellbeing out of being so.

Working within resources of £10 billion would enable adequate institutional (including hotel) facilities to be set up.

If £10 billion were given to me it would be increasing access to university life for some of those who have been deprived of it by their underprivileged early lives (exposed to the hostility of state education) and subsequent inactivity caused by poverty.

Would it not be making a better use of £10 billion to provide access to opportunity and status for people with high IQs who have been artificially deprived of them, rather than on reducing the proportion of higher IQs in the undergraduate population — and hence subsequently in the academically statusful graduate population? What is the point of spending money on that — one might ask, if one did not already know that the point of the state-financed school and university system is to disadvantage higher IQs, and to disadvantage those with the highest IQs the most.

One secret of successful parenting

A book on “parenting” has been written, telling people how to help their child continue to tolerate his or her life in the children’s prison (known as a “school”) and to minimise some of the most obvious damage, physical and psychological, being caused by it. But the assumption seems to be that they should help the child to go on going through this instead of taking him away.

Whether it’s a minor incident or a more serious problem that is upsetting your child, start by tuning into his feelings so you can find out what’s happening ... He may be unusually quiet, aggressive or you might notice bruises ...

If your child hates school: School-related problems often come down to confidence ... Praise your child for packing his school bag, remembering to feed his pet or doing a school project – this will help him build up a repertoire of things he knows he’s good at. (review of Seven Secrets of Successful Parenting by Karen Doherty and Georgia Coleridge, Daily Mail 24 April 2008)

What parents should do is consider leaving the country, as well as taking the child away from school. Even being educated at home he would, in this country, be potentially liable to assessment and supervision by the local “education” authority.

Unfortunately for me, my parents also felt it was their responsibility to try to kid me along that I should find a way of reconciling myself to the arrangements being imposed on me despite my protests and against my will. I do not blame them for this, but I do blame those who encouraged them to side with the oppressive forces of society against their own offspring.

My parents had themselves grown up in the pre-Welfare-State world of the early decades of the twentieth century. They thought of teachers and people running the educational system as responsible, highly-principled middle-class people with at least moderately high IQs, with whom it was right for parents to cooperate.

They did not realise the world had suffered a sea change in 1945 when the Welfare State came in, and that nothing was as it had been before.

The corpse and the kingdom

First introductory scenario

You are perceiving things, but the status of your perceptions is entirely indeterminate. You do not know the significance of this situation, or whether it has any. Among the things that you seem to perceive are other people, but you are unable to determine whether they have consciousness, as you seem to yourself to have. Perhaps they are automata. Or perhaps they are just hallucinatory figures in your hallucinatory dream.

Second introductory scenario

What you are perceiving seems to be a physical universe and it seems to be possible to infer certain things about the past history of this universe. It is possible to suppose that your consciousness is a by-product of physical and chemical events in your organism, and that other people are conscious in a similar way to yourself as a result of similar events in their organisms.

The human race, of which you are a part, seems to have been on the planet on which you are living for a very small part of the inferable history of the physical universe. The lifetime of the human race, and the space it occupies, is infinitesimal even in relation to the time and space that the human race is able to infer in the physical universe that surrounds it. It is inferred that there may be millions of other stars as well able to possess life-bearing planets as our sun. It is inferred that previous life-forms on this planet, such as the dinosaurs, occupied it for hundreds of millions of years.

The human race has a strong tendency to believe that what the human race regards as good and valuable is of great importance. What is important to a human being (and in what other sense could the word important have meaning) is to be determined by reference to the local consensus of belief about what is important in the social environment which surrounds that human being.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

A world class warfare system

Some comments from a member of the education establishment:

I want to narrow the disparities between people’s attainment, between the highly motivated and the less well motivated, because I want everyone to have a bite at the cherry and a chance to do well ... What I want to ensure is that all universities are really part of a world class system. That means they all have to have resources concentrated on them, right across the board. (Tessa Blackstone, on BBC Radio 4, 26 March 2008, my emphasis)

Here again we find, sixty years after 1945, an overt expression of the motivation that ruined my education, my subsequent life and the lives of my parents (who also had high IQs and a lot of drive and conscientiousness). Also the prevalent social motivation, gaining strength with the passing years and decades, has continued to oppose my attempts to restore myself to a realistic relationship with the society in which I have the misfortune to find myself.

What is being aimed at is not universities being part of a 'world class system', but being part of a ‘class system’, that is, an instrument of class warfare. In effect, Tessa Blackstone is arguing that the greatest possible resources should be devoted to preventing those with higher IQs and strong motivation from achieving more than those with lower IQs and no noticeable motivation at all.

Those who represent the greatest obstruction to the egalitarian outcome are the exceptional; it follows that by far the easiest way to achieve greater equality of outcome is to eliminate the highly able and highly motivated from the picture. Thus, according to exponents of this point of view, those with the highest IQs and the strongest motivation should be thrown right out on the dungheap, and it should be made plain to them they have no place at all in modern society.

Seminar

I am giving a seminar in Oxford on the 29th, entitled
"Existential psychology and early Christianity".

Details here.

Reading is "not natural"

It seems that 2008 is National Reading Year: I wonder whether this is because the disfavouring of the ‘middle class’ that has proceeded apace since the inception of the Welfare State in 1945 has by now had a noticeable effect on the literacy of the population as a whole.

From a review of Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf (Financial Times Magazine 5 April 2008):

“Reading is not natural,” writes Wolf, a professor of child development: only a few thousand years old, reading is too new to be encoded into our genes. Which means we have to learn it the hard way.

I do not see that you can assume that. The human mind seems to have abilities for dealing with things that cannot in any obvious way have developed by evolution, that is, by natural selection in favour of aptitude for dealing with specific things of that kind.

It is acceptable for writers on child development to write about factors which may have an influence without mentioning innate intellectual ability, correlated with measurable IQ. But this is associated with the fact that it is acceptable, in a particular case, for people to interpret the situation in terms of the only factors which are explicitly taken into account.

As they did in my case. Whether or not reading was ‘encoded in my genes’, whatever was necessary for learning to read, very rapidly and without apparent effort, evidently was. As it was acceptable to interpret this as my parents ‘pushing’ me, it was interpreted in that way and this was considered justification for frustrating and opposing me and for persecuting my parents. This was several decades ago and I am sure that the tendency to adopt such interpretations, and to act on them in interfering in people’s lives, is no less, but almost certainly greater, than it was then.

To quote further from this review,

For some, their problems are a product of their word-poor upbringing: middle-class children have on average heard 32 million more words by the age of five than their less advantaged peers. This makes a difference: the best predictor of how easily a child will learn to read is how often they are read to as a toddler.

Perhaps for some, but for how many? I have known people who, living in the most middle-class and highly educated households, with a constant coming and going of influential and articulate people, remained unable to read until a relatively advanced age and would have been very unlikely to get grammar school scholarships. On the other hand, I have also known people who were deprived of attention as young children in unfavourable circumstances, but learnt to read at an early age and were, or would have been, highly placed in grammar school scholarship exams.

“The best predictor of how easily a child will learn to read is how often they are read to as a toddler.” But the majority of people with high IQs have attentive middle-class mothers, themselves with high IQs, who are likely to read to young children. It is not necessarily true that high IQ children who are read to frequently will learn to read much more easily, or earlier, than children with equally high IQs who are not read to at all.

Engineering students

According to the Daily Mail (28 March), over the last 8 years 10 billion pounds of taxpayers’ money has been spent on a campaign of working towards the Government’s target of having 50% of the population between the ages of 18 and 30 in universities, which includes of course ex-polytechnics.

The recruitment campaign is regarded as having failed because the population of university entrants is only 0.6 of a percentage point higher than in 1999.

Ministers had set a 2010 target of 50 per cent of young people entering higher education by the time they are 30. Official figures yesterday revealed that the proportion in 2006/7 was 39.8 per cent – down from 42 per cent in the previous year and only 0.6 percentage points higher than in 1999. …

Conservative universities spokesman David Willetts said: ‘At this pathetic rate of progress it will take a further 118 years to hit the Government’s target. We need to do far better to spread the opportunities for young people. Under this Government we are completely flat-lining.’

Of course, at the same time as encouraging the sections of the population with the lowest IQs and least academic aptitude to go to university, those with above average IQs (referred to as the ‘middle class’) have been increasingly discouraged, and are becoming disillusioned with the prospect of burdening themselves with debt for the sake of worthless ‘degrees’ which employers, including me, do not regard as any guarantee of competence in anything.

So, while the overall number of university entrants has scarcely risen, the proportion of lower IQs to higher IQs almost certainly has, and further attempts to promote ideas such as those expressed by David Willetts may well result in a complete exclusion of those with IQs above 140, or even 130, from university life.

Meanwhile, people with exceptionally high IQs, such as Charles McCreery, Fabian Tassano or I, cannot get even minimal salaries to enable us to contribute to the philosophical ‘discussions’ which go on, let alone pay for the institutional environment that we need to work in.

Even if we had a one-person salary apiece for working in our (socially unrecognised) independent university, it would not pay for the institutional environment that we need to work in, as well as the extra people (the equivalent of research students) to write papers on issues related to our own which we could also make very good use of.

An academic gets a lot out of his residential college with dining hall facilities etc which we have to pay for and work on maintaining for ourselves, so even with salaries we would not be as free to be productive as if we had a socially recognised residential college to live in.