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

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.

The disadvantaged underclass

copy of a letter to a visitor

We are looking forward to meeting you on Monday. The reason that we are very keen on getting to know people, but seldom can, is that we are in an anomalous and outcast position and want to make known our need for associates, moral and financial supporters, voluntary and paid workers, temporary, occasional, potentially permanent and long term.

But we are the disadvantaged underclass of modern society and no one wants to hear us say this. If we do meet anyone, saying this is usually sufficient to put an end to the acquaintance.

Typical interchange:

"We are badly in need of help and maybe you could tell your group with such and such interests about us, as they are prepared to do voluntary work in other contexts, so some of them might work for us."

Answer:

"You are not in need of help. You are physically alive/you have written some books/you get all the moral support you need out of one another. Goodbye. I need to leave immediately."

There are many elements in our situation which are at variance with, or ruled out of consideration by, the dominant fictitious ideology. We will not be able to put in much background in our meeting on Monday, so I am now writing a few of the most essential and unacceptable things in advance of meeting you.

We do not subscribe to any part of the modern received ideology. I am old enough, and was precocious enough, to have effectively lived in the pre-socialist world for quite a long time, but in 1945 it came in fast enough and hard enough to ruin my education and not only my life, but those of my parents. The forces that had ruined my education were continuously operative in preventing my recovery from my outcast situation when I had been thrown out at the end of the ruined "education" with a second class degree (i.e. no degree at all, only a disqualification), no research scholarship, and with the lives of both my parents ruined by the breakdown of my father's health.

I am still completely alienated from society, in that I still derive no feedback from it in any way for anything I have been able to do; I do not regard this as an acceptable situation and I need help in working towards a situation in which I can remedy it. If people do not give me any help themselves, I hope that they will at least help me by publicising my needs to anyone who might be free to give us some of the help we need and who might even derive some advantage themselves from a long-term (or short-term) association with us.

Signs of the times (1)

Recession drives adult children back live with parents

Newspapers continue to be filled with news of the development of the oppressive state and the downfall of civilisation, while the relevant departments of my suppressed and unrecognised university continue to be prevented from contributing their comments to the intellectual life of this time.

Front-page news today: Year of recession forces half a million adults aged 35 to 44 to return to live with parents.

But, in spite of the pressures on those living independently, and in spite of publicising our position as best we can on the internet, none of these people come to live nearby to become associates with our cooperative consortium for working towards a large and adequately financed institutional environment supported by a business empire, until such time as it can get recognition and support from the sources available to the ersatz universities of the oppressive society.

Parents, of course, may provide their offspring with advantages, such as ironing their shirts, without the offspring contributing any useful work or money to alleviate the position of the parents in return, and this – i.e. benefits without contributions – is something we could not do. But the prospects for long-term progressive improvement of our position, and hence of any new associates, would in most circumstances be better, although dependent on their actually coming. With no one willing to work for us we have, of course, found it almost impossible to improve our position from Ground Zero, although we might have been able to develop much faster with more people.

Signs of the times (2)

'Tough love'

There are often articles in the press about the increasing problems of both pensioners (poverty-struck and surrounded by feral neighbours) and "graduates" of "universities" finding themselves without prospects in life in modern oppressive society.

Now the government (specifically the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) has issued an appalling "guide" on how parents "should" "help" graduate children. Obviously violating the basic moral principle of not imposing on people an official interpretation of how they should evaluate the existential possibilities of their situation, this guide viciously suggests that parents should throw their children out of house and home, to make them earn a living or else claim disability allowance. Oh yes, it actually advocates sending them to enter into an abusive interaction with a qualified sadist (“doctor”) if they show signs of depression!

And allow them to "relax" after qualification but not for too long, says the guide. Don't let the weeks turn into months, and cut their allowance so they will be forced to seek a "job" - or, of course, a disability allowance.

All of these ideas were applied to me, only then it was "don't let the days turn into weeks" and hide my Post Office Savings Book, so I would feel that I had no capital in the world except the coins I saved whenever I was given a bus fare and walked instead.

I never blamed my parents for this; I knew they were under pressure from people like the Principal of Somerville. Dame Janet Vaughan would have had no scruples about slandering me to a local educational authority and telling them to place pressure on my parents and hence on me.

Hence my plan was aborted to get my parents to move to Oxford so that I could live at home while writing my unofficial physics thesis. Thus at the end of the ruined "education", during which I had been prevented from acquiring qualifications, society moved in for the kill and completely ruined the lives of three people, not just the one who had been in its clutches.