Stigmata

Recently I watched a film about the Gospel of Thomas called Stigmata (released in 1999). It was apparently quite successful commercially and its appeal seems to depend on sadism (flashbacks to crucifixion) and sex, the latter associated with implicit attacks on the Catholic church for being repressive and promoting celibacy. The Church is supposed to see the Gospel of Thomas as a threat to its authority. In reality I don’t see why it should, as it has very little explicit content; being vague and allusive on normal terms.

The saying from the Gospel of Thomas that was quoted in the film was ‘the Kingdom of God is inside you and it is all around you’, followed by ‘it is not found in structures made of stone and wood’, which is not in my editions at all. And in the text it is ‘the Kingdom’, not ‘the Kingdom of God’.

However, the piece about ‘The Kingdom is within you and without you’ can be taken to refer to ‘what is in your mind now and the everyday life around you’, or it can be taken to refer to the salient features of some kind of mystical experience, with inconceivable information being present in your mind and also being there to be read off from the surface of everything which is existing around you. This would be, however, entirely outside ‘normal’ experience.

Taking it the first way, as the film probably wished to suggest, leads to the modern outlook of preoccupation with ‘real life’ and the physical world, including plenty of sex.

The expression ‘The Kingdom of God’ used in the film is not used anywhere in Thomas, where, if ‘Kingdom’ is qualified at all, it is in the forms ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ and ‘Kingdom of the Father’. The word God is very rarely used in Thomas, perhaps not at all outside the saying ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, to God the things that are God’s, and to me that which is mine.’ In place of God, the expressions used are ‘the Father’ or ‘the Living One.’

Incidentally, the film claims, inaccurately, that the Gospel of Thomas is in Aramaic, this increasing its claim to authenticity, since it is supposed to have been the language spoken by Christ. In fact the Gospel of Thomas is in Coptic, which was a mixture of Greek and ancient Egyptian. However, it is said that there are signs of a Hebrew or Aramaic linguistic origin, which is a problem for modern Christian scholars who would like to ascribe its divergences from the Synoptics to some non-Christian source.

Note about usage of the word ‘rich’ in various gospels

The concept of ‘rich’ has entirely different connotations in the Gnostic gospels from those it has in the Synoptics.

In Thomas, the word ‘rich’ appears to refer to emotional richness, freedom from conflict, hence freedom from belief in society. ‘Let he who is rich become a king.’

In the Synoptics, ‘richness’ is usually associated with something negative. The way this is normally interpreted is that wealth and trading activities are seen as morally suspect. Hence the supposed wrath in the Jerusalem temple. But perhaps it really refers more broadly to being well set up. How about ‘rich in socially conferred approval or status’? People who have socially conferred status do not seem to feel free to use their own judgement in supporting a victim of social oppression, or in any other way of which society would disapprove. They are committed to having no views independently of the social consensus which has rewarded them.

‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a person with social position to do anything against the will of society.’

A well-known philosopher, who grudgingly conceded I was a ‘genius’, said he could not write a puff for my book Letters From Exile (or, presumably, use his influence to help me to get any reviews for it) because if he did his colleagues would ‘think he had lost his marbles’. But he was retired and his career could hardly have been damaged, whatever they thought.

We appeal for £1m as initial funding for a social science department in my unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish preliminary analyses of areas in the history of ideas that are currently being ignored because they do not fit with the prevailing ideology.

Reflection of the month

Communism and Capitalism

Capitalism depends on certain aspects of the conditions in which we live – on the structure of time and the conservation of matter. The basis of capitalism is that if a tiger rushes towards you, you need a gun. If you acquired a gun at some point in time previous to the tiger's attack, and have it ready to hand, this is useful. If you have not actually got a gun, but know that you could acquire one at some point in the future, this is not so good. The problem is to survive so as to reach that future.

The essence of communism is that nobody may have guns unless everybody has guns, and the only way anybody can get guns is if the Collective-at-Large sees fit to make a universal issue. And you may not have a better gun than the Collective sees fit to issue for everybody. So if the Collective does not actually get round to issuing any guns at all, everybody will be equally liable to be eaten by tigers.

Attitudes to academic appointments

I think that the academics at the Society for Psychical Research were more uninhibited and less rationalised about what went on in connection with academic appointments than they would probably have been even in their own Senior Common Rooms.

For example, it was said that H.H. Price became Wykeham Professor of Logic by being the least brilliant but also the least controversial of three candidates. The other two had definite original opinions which aroused strong opposition from some of the electors. Price had bland and middle-of-the-road views which were offensive to no one; hence he got the Professorship. (*)

They brought in an American ‘professor’ of zoology for the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology at Edinburgh (‘professor’, of course, only means ‘lecturer’ in America ), treating American academic appointments as equivalent to English ones. But when American professors visited the SPR office, it was freely said (although not of course in their hearing) that an American PhD was about the equivalent of a 3rd class Oxbridge degree.

That, of course, was what was being said when I was at the SPR in the late fifties. Since then academic standards have declined apace in this country and, from all I hear, are likely to have declined in America about as fast (on account of their also wishing to apply ‘egalitarian’ principles and to deny the existence of innate ability — as evidenced by their throwing money at Professor Anders Ericsson, the academic whose research purports to show that there is no such thing as innate ability).

So it is possible that the relative rankings have shifted a bit as both American and British degrees are worth a lot less than they used to be.

But of course there is no reason anyway why degree classes should be precisely correlated with ability to fulfil the requirements of an academic position, as was much more realistically recognised, and occasionally acted upon, in the early decades of the last century. (There were anecdotes at Somerville about Professors who had got 4th class degrees but been allowed to proceed with their careers.)

* I have no opinion about the accuracy of this view of Price’s appointment, but I think it illustrates the fact that, before about 1945, there was much more recognition of the disjunction between a person’s merit and ability to fulfil a certain social role, and their possession or otherwise of that socially conferred role. Nowadays there is a stronger and almost dogmatic belief that a person who has been unable to get social status is automatically inferior to those who have it.

State pensions and Trojan Horses

Hundreds of thousands of pensioners are living in poverty because they are not claiming the benefits due to them, official figures suggest. Ministers admitted that 700,000 pensioners would be lifted over the poverty line at a stroke if they simply got all the help to which they are entitled. Opposition MPs say many are put off claiming by the complexity of Gordon Brown’s benefit system, which involves complicated forms and lengthy telephone applications. (Daily Mail, 12 August 2008)

This is all the result of a means-tested pensions system, which should never have been introduced and which should be abolished. The real deterrent to applying for “benefits” is, or should be, not the complexity of the forms and procedures, but simply the fact that it cannot be done without drawing to oneself and one’s circumstances the attention of agents of the collective, who may easily attract the attention of other agents of the collective, who may decide that one should be deprived of one’s liberty. Those who complain of the present system naturally miss the point, because they are themselves in most cases agents of the collective who have nothing against people being deprived of their liberty.

For example, Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman Jenny Willott said: “The system must be simplified to ensure poor pensioners get the cash they so desperately need.”

The charity Age Concern also fails to address the real issue, instead taking seriously the rationalisations given for failing to apply. Research carried out by this charity shows that the reason given by almost 50% of respondents is that they find means-testing too intrusive, and by 40% that they are discouraged by complicated forms.

Opposition MPs do have some objection to means-testing, describing it as “demeaning”, and arguing that means-testing is

expensive to administer and acts as a disincentive to save. Officials trawl through details of people’s pensions, earnings, benefits and savings to work out whether they should receive top-ups. (ibid)

But no one mentions the real and absolute deterrent to applying, which is that in the course of “trawling”, officials may decide that it would be better for a person not to be allowed to go on living where they are living, or in the way they are living, at all.

It is very dangerous to draw the attention of the Oppressive State to your affairs, and probably many who fail to apply realise this, if only vaguely or subconsciously.

Until relatively recent years, pensions were the only “benefit” which was free from this danger. They were paid as a right to those who had made enough contributions, not to those whose “need” would be assessed as greatest by agents of the collective.

Means-testing of pensions should be abolished.

‘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

Plugged into the belief in society

When I say that people at the SPR were only interested in socially conferred status, I mean that they appeared to be there only to participate in certain kinds of social goings-on. There is a tendency these days to identify a field of work with those socially appointed to work in that nominal field. (Physics is to be defined as ‘what physicists do’, philosophy is ‘what philosophers do’, and psychical research is ‘what parapsychologists do’.)

So experiments supposed to prove some particular thing (ESP, PK) would be done by a person with academic status, such as S.G. Soal (maths lecturer at Queen Mary College), or physicist John Taylor (professor at King's College London) who encouraged schoolchildren to do ostensible PK for him, and then decades of active social interaction on an international basis would take place. In the first place, the experiments had to be taken very seriously and hailed as unquestionable proof because they were done by someone with socially conferred status, and then there was the interest of discovering whether a statusful person could be publicly and professionally disgraced.

In my case, the storms which surrounded me arose from the emotional interest of preventing someone who had already been disgraced and outcast from managing to climb back to social salary and status. Preventing someone who has been deprived of it, and thrown out from getting it back, is as good an outlet for emotional drive as is worshipping the productions of socially appointed academics and having controversies about whether they can be deprived of it.

While spiritualism never caught on in my mind, the idea did appear pragmatically useful that people were all somehow plugged into a network of belief in society. So that they were all really expressing a single set of aims and objects, and the attitudes and interpretations expressed by any one of them could be taken as informational about the attitudes that would be held by any other. (Attitudes about everything, actually, but in particular about whether there is anything "paranormal", or whether people like me should ever be permitted to recover from their ruined education.) It does not appear to me impossible that ESP enters into this, although it makes no difference in practice whether or not this is so.

I have certainly found the unanimity of the responses I receive remarkable, over a wide spread of nationalities, genders, social classes and IQ levels. I felt at the time of my ‘education’ that one could not see how the dance of death was so precisely choreographed. Of course a lot of overt social slander does go into it as well, but one finds the same interpretations being produced by people who are ostensibly not on the obvious slander circuits.

It is all rather like the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. More and more of the population is replaced by a zombie replica, and anyone who has not yet been taken over must not give overt evidence of this; if they fail to behave exactly like the others the whole population turns and points at them and pursuit begins.

Iatrogenic drug addiction

A form of torture practised by the medical 'profession', and in many ways the most horrifying, is the infliction of suffering, in the form of 'treatment', against the will of the 'patient' (victim). This includes the compulsory 'medication' of those 'diagnosed' as 'mentally ill', who can in some cases be re-incarcerated for forcible 'treatment' if they fail to present themselves for regular torture when they are 'released into the community'.

Even when 'treatment' is not compulsory, doctors have no scruples about getting 'patients' (victims) hooked without warning on mind-altering drugs which will have severe side-effects if the 'patient' attempts to regain his independence of them. At least, their scruples only appear when it is a question of refusing to let the 'patient' have a form of medication which he wants to have. Doctors then become very sensitive indeed to every possibility, however remote, of any side-effect, and most unwilling to let the 'patient' decide for himself whether the risk of this possibility is one which, in view of his own motivation and knowledge of his own constitution, he wants to take.

Curiously and informatively enough, people appear blind to the horror of people being hooked for life by doctors on drugs which effectively deprive them of the use of their own minds — actually a more horrific deprivation of liberty than the infliction of physical pain against the will of a conscious 'patient' (victim), which would be regarded as torture if the doctor who inflicted it was not a properly trained and qualified person.

The hatred and persecutory fervour of modern society is reserved for those who wish to alter their mental outlook by the use of chemicals of their own choosing, and for those who sell them the chemicals they want to have. Self-inflicted drug dependence is regarded as an 'evil' from which victims (who are not 'patients') should be rescued against their will by the expenditure of massive amounts of taxpayers' money, while the drug dependence so freely created by doctors arouses no such opprobrium, although in many cases its continuity is enforced by compulsory medication. The voluntarily drug-dependent person is still free to decide to break away from the addiction, whereas the involuntary victim of compulsory medication is not. Nevertheless it is the former that is described as 'abuse' of drugs, whereas those who are compulsorily and permanently under prescribed influence, are described as 'users'.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Physiological correlates

copy of a letter to a Professor of Philosophy

When I see you I always worry about things I say which you seem to agree with, because I am afraid you see it as supporting some socially acceptable interpretation which I need to reject.

I said that getting a grant from Trinity College, Cambridge to do a postgraduate degree (meant to be a DPhil) at Oxford was not a solution to my problems (my appalling situation) and you appeared to agree. But I cannot think what you could have been agreeing with, as it seems unlikely that you accept, any more than anyone else did, or does, that I was in absolute and urgent need of (i) an institutional (hotel) environment and (ii) a Professorship, and was suffering severely without either.

Until I had the first of these, and probably also the second, there could be no question of my getting anything out of life or getting any positive feedback (‘interest’) out of anything I did, whatever it was. It was (and still is) just a question of endurance in crossing a desert, and trying not to let my energy level decline too fast. Over the decades things have improved slightly, at least to the extent that I can now beat my head against the wall of hostility by expressing my complaints openly.

I was not in a hotel environment while doing the D.Phil which turned into a B.Litt, and travelling a lot, and in such circumstances it was easier to do something rather dull. Of course people like to imagine that I found anything connected with psychical research ‘interesting’, but although the thesis topic had to be associated with that area, I saw it only as a way of working back towards a university career.

Even if I had succeeded in getting into one, I would still have gone ahead with the plan to set up a research institute, financed by the Coombe-Tennants and other SPR* connections, as a way of amplifying my activities. Organising experimental research on a large scale is something that would make me feel more functional and alive, because it uses more of my channel capacity, as is the giving of seminars and broadcasting.

* * * * *

The academic subjects most closely associated with ‘parapsychology’ seemed to be physiology and psychology. People at the SPR wanted me to do the thesis on ‘spontaneous cases’, discussing them on the same terms as they all did (evidential value, alternative explanations, etc.), but I did not see how that could lead back into an academic career; so I had to aim at psychology and physiology, bitterly regretting that I did not have degrees in either, since my time at school and at Queen Mary College had been, although through no wish of mine, so uselessly misspent.

Neither physiology nor psychology appealed to me as subjects in which to take degrees as they had relatively little informational content, and I would only have taken degrees in them after acquiring degrees in physics and chemistry. However, now I had to scrape the barrel of possibilities and the barrel was bare, although if I had taken degrees in physics and chemistry first, it would probably not have mattered whether or not I had followed that by taking degrees in physiology and psychology as well. But I might have done, as I had basically intended to acquire as many qualifications as possible and then see what were the best career opportunities arising.

Philosophy, of course, would also have been a possibility, but especially by the end of the three years, Professor Price was as much against the idea of my returning to an academic career as everyone else.

So in fact I wrote the thesis on physiological and psychological conditions of states in which ESP was reported to occur, although at the interview at Trinity I had to pretend that I was also going to be analysing spontaneous case material, and only as a side issue considering physiological correlates. There was clearly a great resistance to the idea of anything being done in that area, and the interviewers boggled in the usual way. ‘What could you possibly do about that? What physiological correlates could there be? What do you mean by that?’

* Society for Psychical Research

Medicine and 'fairness'

Now that it is considered acceptable for the state to transfer power from individual citizens to agents of the collective so that 'services' (for which a better term might be 'oppressions') may be provided, it comes to pass that persons in socially authorised academic establishments (i.e. universities) make studies of how the systems of oppression 'ought' to work.

A friend of mine once found himself at a college dinner sitting next to an economics student whose subject was the different ways in which 'health care' (physiological oppression) was being or should be provided by various governments. "Well, at least," he (my friend) said, "I hope you won't recommend that anyone should give any further power to doctors to make subjective decisions about how medical resources should be allocated. They have far too much power already."

"But it's not acceptable to have decisions made about who gets the resources on the basis of ability to pay for them," she (the other person) said.

"Countries that didn't find that acceptable, and I don't see why they shouldn't, could at least have the resources allocated among the individuals who apply for them on a random basis. Nothing could be so unacceptable as arbitrary power in the hands of doctors or any other agents of the collective" my friend replied.

"But that wouldn't necessarily produce the fairest outcome either," she demurred.

This brings us to the extraordinary notion of 'fairness'. We see that the transfer of power to agents of the collective makes it far more dangerous that people should indulge in such ideas. So long as they were notions that were entertained by individuals, and which individuals could, if they wished, use any resources at their own disposal to bring about, they were relatively harmless. Nowadays, however, academics can write papers on what 'ought' to be the case and advise governments accordingly, the governments then feeling free to instruct agents of the collective to implement the ideas in practice.

The idea of 'fairness' and 'rights' arise from a modern set of ideas, which has practically the status of a religion, and for which as little justification in reality can be found. It is not so long ago that governments considered that women should not be able to obtain anaesthetics for childbirth, because God clearly preferred them to suffer. Even at that date, before its powers were so monstrously increased, we see the medical 'profession' in the role of social oppressor.

Nowadays it can withhold diagnosis and treatment from anyone whose life, in its opinion, is not worth prolonging. But having decided, in effect, to kill them, it is under no obligation to provide them with a reasonably easy death, which would require the admission of the objective and the overt administration of pharmaceuticals.

Preliminary scenario 2

Supposing that the physical world may be taken at face value and that the inferences drawn from it about the past of the planet are correct, we have the following picture of the past of the human race. Through geological ages the world cooled and life began to swarm upon it. Life forms struggled for survival and more complex forms emerged and developed. Very, very recently in geological time tribes of ape-men began to appear approximating to present-day humans in intelligence. Tribal groups wandered and fought for territory. Gradually they began to settle in favourable places and to develop some of the techniques that were possible to settled dwellers, always subject to attack by other marauding tribes who envied their advantages. But settlement became gradually the predominant style of life, and settled tribes began to manage their affairs so that they remained in one place for long periods of time.

There was little freedom for individuals within these tribes, which began to be what we call civilisations, and increased control of the environment was gained slowly. It could have been gained much faster if the human race had had a tendency to value the sort of ability among its members that might lead to advances in knowledge, but it did not. Similarly, species might have evolved much more rapidly if they had had a tendency to recognise and protect those individuals among their number who differed most extremely from the norm in a way that would tend towards the next evolutionary development; but why should they do that? Why should it seem of any importance to a lungfish, even supposing it to have a high level of intelligence, that they should evolve sooner rather than later into amphibians that could live on the land? If it had seemed of importance to them, they could have protected and aided the fish with the largest lungs and the strongest fore-fins.

The advantages that might have accrued to the human race from a tendency to value and protect intellectually gifted individuals were less remote, but still unquantifiable, and it would have been necessary to appreciate intellectual ability for its own sake, not for the benefits it might produce, which would have been difficult to foresee. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine that it might have happened. A tribe which happened to have it inbuilt into its genetic constitution that it admired and protected exceptional individuals among its members might have been at a sufficient advantage in the struggle for survival for this genetic constitution to have become predominant. There is little sign that this happened; perhaps the time-scale within which the human race was struggling towards settled civilisation was simply too short for such a factor to take precedence over the survival value which attached to other factors, such as the value for the tribe of compliant members, and the value for individual survival of destructive jealousy towards individual rivals.

However, even so, the advances in control of the environment built up exponentially, slow as they were. The human race farmed better, made better tools, built better shelters to live in. But the great leap in control came suddenly and accidentally, as a result of a short period of increased freedom for individuals. This came about as a result of the development of the idea of individual property and commerce. This made it possible for some individuals to gain a good deal of freedom for themselves within the tribal framework, and the ability to make use of the commercial possibilities was correlated with intellectual power. The concept of individual property was associated with a right of the individual to bequeath property (i.e. freedom) on his death; he tended to leave it to his descendants and they tended to inherit the abilities which had made it possible for him to gain his property in the first place. Only "tended" of course, but that is all one can hope for in an evolutionary situation. This made possible an enormous expansion in scientific knowledge and a development of idealistic principles, which included, at least for a time, an ideal of appreciation of exceptional individuals and of progress as an abstract concept.

But the tribal forces in human psychology reasserted themselves. So much had been gained in the way of knowledge, now they could see their way (or thought they could) towards living perfectly adequate tribal lives without allowing individuals any further freedom from tribal control. People could live blandly and uneventfully, they could enjoy the pleasures of feeding and breeding, they could be free from disease and discomfort until they blandly and uneventfully died. There was no longer any need for intellectuals. The tribe would have a few in the tribal universities but no one would have to be allowed to become rich any more. The tribe would take possession of all the advantages created by individual freedom and use them to keep individuals in a state of contented unfreedom.

This is the point of history at which we live.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Ideology in a horoscope

Cancer
What do you give the person who has everything? If you really care you will try to arrange for them to experience what it is like to have nothing. But what if you are a benign universe trying to help a Cancerian who feels overwhelmed by options? How about a challenge to which they cannot rise: or the experience of being powerless in a crucial situation. What you are being obliged to learn is precious beyond measure.
(from Jonathan Cainer’s horoscopes, Daily Mail 21 June 2008.)

This extract from a horoscope expresses a prevalent tendency in the official and widely understood psychological system of the Oppressive Society.

When I was 13 you could say that I had ‘everything’. I was fully functional and on a high energy level. An equally perfect life lay ahead of me, indefinitely into the future, so long as I got on with taking degrees and other qualifications as fast as I could. My past life lay behind me, dull and regrettable.

But, I thought, I should not blame myself for not having realised how to live. It was just an existential fact that I had not known enough about the world and about the exam system in particular. Don’t look back, I said to myself, just get on with it now.

I had not reckoned on the obstructions. As my aunt put it, decades later, I was ‘too happy’. There were too many people who wanted me to ‘experience what it was like to have nothing’, to be placed in positions in which I could not be motivated, faced with ‘challenges to which I could not rise’, and ‘powerless in a crucial situation’. And so in the end I would be thrown out destitute, to experience permanently ‘what it is like to have nothing’.

Nowadays it is argued that children being educated at home may miss out on the ‘failures that might be thought essential rites of passage’ which a school is supposed to provide. (Financial Times Magazine 21/22 June 2008, article ‘A class apart’ by Rob Blackhurst.)

According to Margaret Sutherland of Glasgow University, gifted pupils are not being allowed to fail, and this has emotional consequences. ‘To be constantly told that you have done well means these children are not being challenged.’ (BBC News, 9 August 2005.)

On a website called Gifted Exchange, there is another example of this way of thinking.

Charles Murray [in an article called ‘Aztecs vs. Greeks’] calls for the gifted to be given a challenging, classical education. He further states that we need to encourage gifted kids not to become just smart but wise. ‘The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one’s own intellectual limits and fallibilities — in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today’s education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them.’

Observe that both Margaret Sutherland and Charles Murray are relying on a teacher-pupil relationship to place the victim in the position of being unable to satisfy a mentor, when this may be unnecessary or actually damaging to working directly for the exam. I was perfectly well able to take exams without teachers and needed only sample papers and textbooks. But I was constantly forced into positions of supervised ‘preparation’ in which I was doing work which I could not be motivated to do in order (as I knew) that the teacher/tutor could have the opportunity to make me feel inadequate.

The editor of the Gifted Exchange site, Laura Vanderkam, agrees with Charles Murray and says:

If anyone reads Aztecs vs. Greeks and decides to push for education that holds gifted kids’ feet to the fire, intellectually, then I’ll be happy.

This is just an incitement to those who are running the lives of gifted children to humiliate and frustrate them. Educators and other people in a position of power over children do not need any incitement.

Once the link of direct payment by an individual has been broken, there is nothing to prevent something being provided which is quite different from what he might have paid for. Probably most parents would be unlikely to pay for an ‘education’ which was explicitly aimed at making their child fail. Nor can the situation be remedied by verbal rationalisations. Whatever statements of intention are made for PR purposes, the motivation of those in power will determine what happens, and what reason is there to think that the motivation of educators is benevolent? No solution is possible that involves telling people with the power to run other people’s lives what their attitudes should be. The only possible remedy is to abolish state-financed schools and universities.

’We appeal for £2m as initial funding for a social science department in our unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish analyses of the unexamined assumptions underlying current discussion of the philosophy of education.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Institutionalised opposition

copy of a letter

Further to my previous comments, even if I had not taken up the grammar school scholarship at 10 and had simply worked straight away for degrees, there would still have been the incalculable and ever-present risk of notice being taken of me by the local ‘education’ authority. So far as I can gather, in the 1945 Education Act, local authorities were given powers of inspection and interference over the ‘education’ of everyone, whether at private or state schools, or at home. This would have been a time-bomb for me which might have blown up at any time.

What I found so disgusting at the time (when I was 16) was that I was not only no longer in receipt of a grammar school scholarship but was past school-leaving age, so I do not see that they had any right at all to enquire into my affairs or to discuss them with my father.

Now, not only is the school-leaving age higher than it was then, but it is being proposed that until the age of 18 the local authority should have the power to make everyone do something approved of by them, some kind of officially recognised ‘training’, etc.

This is an absolutely terrible idea, and only compete abolition of the concept of compulsory education, including the concept of the powers (explicit and implicit) of local education authorities could restore an acceptable situation.

As could be seen in my case, they had, even at so early a stage in the development of the Oppressive State, no scruples about uninvited invasion into the life of someone over whom they had no official jurisdiction.

In fact it may very well have been the unprincipled Mother Mary Angela, the nun who taught maths, who set them onto me when I was on the verge of making a bid for freedom. I remember how she reacted when I told her of my plans to get on with taking degrees as fast as possible. Very similar, really, to Sir George Joy’s reaction when I said that if he prevaricated any longer about the Coombe-Tennants buying a house for me I would buy one myself, although a smaller one than they had been planning to buy for me. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said, with something like fear or apprehension, and Mother Mary Angela said something similar on being told that I could get on with taking degrees straight away.

‘Oh but I can,’ I said joyfully to Mother Mary Angela. ‘I have gone into all the regulations and I am perfectly well qualified.’ I knew she wanted to oppose me in everything I wanted but I still had not realised how dangerous it might be to let her have any information about my intentions. In fact, of course, tremendous and widespread opposition arose which obliterated my joyful hopes and condemned me to yet another year of supervised ‘preparation’ for a distant qualification.

Similarly, I suppose that Sir George feared my setting up in Oxford because, on however small a scale I was able to operate, the Oxford location would be sufficient to attract some publicity and hence the possibility of financial support. So the campaign to starve me out began, and when the King money provided partial alleviation for me, Professor Sir Alister Hardy had to be mobilised to stand in my light. Which, of course, he did very effectively, although he had no idea what to do and his ‘projects’ were only superficial and mechanical imitations of mine. I had used punched cards so he would use punched cards – or rather his employees would, when he had some. (Computers were still cumbrous and not easily available.)

It does appear (from my experience of life) that when ability is combined with drive and a strong sense of direction, it arouses opposition. So, paradoxically, although the attacks on my father which obstructed my plans always took the form of allegations that he was pushing me, they were very likely instigated by those who had the clearest perceptions of the fact that he was not doing so, such as my aunt and Mother Mary Angela. Mother Mary Angela clearly disliked the fact that I had found a way to start taking degrees, and probably all the more because it was so clearly my own autonomous idea, into researching which I had put a lot of initiative.

It is possible to imagine a hypothetical society in which my drive and independence would have aroused admiration and support, but clearly this is not a society in which I have ever lived.

Seminar

I am giving a seminar in Oxford on the 26th, entitled
"Should pensioners revolt against means-testing?".

Details here.

Seeking supporters

Copy of a letter to someone I managed to speak to (rare event)

Further to our conversation of yesterday, I thought I would like to send you a complimentary copy of my most recent book, which I hope you will accept as a gift.

If you were able to make our presence known about it would be very helpful. We are looking for supporters of every kind. We cannot really be functional in any way as an academic institution without substantial capital endowment, and it is no use our approaching billionaires etc without independent people to represent our case to them. (I have plenty of negative experience of doing so.) The only time I ever got any money I had an ex-Colonial Governor to put my case to Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the IPC group.

We would also like people to move nearby to give us, and one another, moral support in protesting against the infringements of liberty which have already been going on for a long time on an exponential basis.

With best wishes, etc.

Preliminary scenario 1

Each individual finds himself involved in a strange and complicated story. He cannot remember exactly how it began. If he believes what the other people in the story tell him, he is going to die, which means perhaps that he will cease being conscious of anything again. The environment in which he finds himself is one of staggering complexity. The universe of astronomy surrounds his planet, leading to no edge, but to abysses of unimaginable mathematical paradox. The earth under his feet is supposedly made of particles, the studies of which lead to no final definition of their ultimate types and characteristics, but to abysses of unimaginable mathematical paradox.

Probably there is in his home a box with a flat front which shows moving coloured pictures of his world, impressing upon him the intolerable multifariousness of all the forms of life that have ever crawled or swum or flown in the darkest and deepest, hottest and coldest, wettest and driest crevices of his planet. Again, no precise limit can be set upon their numbers, though vague estimates can be made of the number of unclassified insects of a certain type that probably remain to be found and labelled in the basin of the Amazon.

There seem to be other people in this story with him, but there is a great difference between himself and them. He is conscious of his own feelings, but only by implication and inference of theirs. Are they conscious of themselves as he is conscious of himself? If he talks to them about this they usually discourage him from thinking of such an absurd idea (but he may have read about dreams in which figures in the dream argue vigorously and mockingly with the dreamer about whether they are real). Is his the only consciousness? What is the point of all this, and does the point of it have anything at all to do with him? Is the whole universe a casual uncaused appearance, a sudden shocking bauble emerging from unbeing?

Why should it? Why should it not? What could cause such a thing? Of course his ideas of caused and uncaused break down; as usual at the edge of things his thought is mocked by the unimaginable.

Perhaps the universe is just a material thing and his consciousness only an accidental byproduct. That is to say the universe is nothing but this turbulence of forces, ultimately based upon unimaginable mathematical relationships. The turbulence has happened to produce living forms — that is, patterns of matter that are able to generate further similar patterns — and those which are of some complexity seem to themselves to be conscious. But the semblance of consciousness has no more reality than the electromagnetic field of a machine; it will stop being there when the machine stops, and the mechanical mathematical universe will go on indifferently.

Is all this his dream and will he ever awaken? Are all the people and perhaps the animals dreaming too, and is this a communal hallucination in which they are all caught? Or is he the dream, as some have suggested, of a magician or a god? If so, what are the intentions of the dreamer?

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Confiscating the freedom of some, in order to appropriate the freedom of others

The driving force of socialism is not to provide benefits for anyone, but to destroy individual freedom. By taxation, the state deprives individuals of freedom of action, reducing the territory within which they are able to decide for themselves how to run their affairs, and using the money from taxpayers to buy areas of freedom from other individuals.

This was very clearly shown by the way in which, at 16, I was forced to spend a very damaging year at London University instead of being left alone to take an external London degree (or degrees) with correspondence courses before going to Oxford or Cambridge.

My plans were all made — so far as they could be without some assistance in arranging the practical work that formed part of the courses in physics and chemistry — and my father had expressed willingness to pay for the correspondence courses in question.

I was offered a tutor, apparently spontaneously, by the local authority. I had made no application to them, although it is possible that a treacherous teacher at my Ursuline convent school had done so, which was beyond her rights, since I had left school and was no longer in receipt of a scholarship which might be regarded (and had been regarded) as making it other people’s business to make (and prohibit) decisions and arrangements about my affairs.

This led to an interview which left me with a clear perception that this was nothing I wanted anything to do with. But, as I now realise, the whole thing was motivated by a ravening desire to regain oppressive control of my life, from which I considered myself lucky to have escaped. My plans were aimed at helping myself, so far as was now possible, to recover from the seriously bad effects of the last three years (since being prevented from taking the School Certificate exam — usually for 16-year-olds — at 13).

The local ‘educational’ community stormed, and my father withdrew his support for my plans, making instead, and without consulting me, appalling arrangements for me to go to a college of London University. I had both a state scholarship and a County Major scholarship. The state scholarship was to be kept until I went to Oxford. So now my father, being unwilling to support me against determined opposition by people in positions of ostensible authority, applied for me to be allowed to use the County Major Scholarship to go to London University. If only they had refused! Then I could not have gone, and would have been able to revert to my former plan.

But in fact the education committee was willing to pay (with taxpayers’ money) for me to be forced to do what I did not want to do, losing my self-determination by having inflicted upon me a most horrific year, all the more damaging because it came after three previous years in which I had had no control over my life.

A member of the committee was quoted to me as saying (ironically and hypocritically), as they agreed to buy my life for a year, ‘We wouldn’t stand in her way’.

In fact it would have been better for me if I had never taken up the grammar school scholarship in the first place (aged 10) but had worked on my own to take degrees as soon as possible.

In saying that my father was not willing to support me I do not mean to be critical of him. Who would have been willing directly to oppose socially appointed authorities? It is by no means commonly done and would be extremely difficult to do. My father, for all his aristocratic genes, had been brought up as a poor boy in East Ham, suffering from every sort of neglect and insecurity. I do blame those who used their socially conferred positions of influence to pressurise him into withdrawing his support for my plans, inflicting irreparable damage on my prospects in life, reparation for which should still be regarded as due to me.

How to provoke hostility

At the last seminar I got six people, but I am afraid this may be only because the title ‘Gnosticism and Existential psychology’ contained no hint that I might be critical of modern Existentialists, such as Sartre, who are identified with the rejection of capitalism and bourgeois morality, i.e. they are identified with the destruction of civilisation by socialism.

However, I have improved my technique by making an initial exposition of my real reason for giving the seminar, to make people aware of the position of my independent university in a hostile society, and its needs for workers and supporters of all kinds. This arouses overt hostility, and some go away very quickly, but the eventual outcome from my point of view is certainly no worse than hoping I may get to talk to someone realistically at the end.

In our position, provoking the hostility to express itself openly has to be regarded as a positive achievement.

One man came early and heard the whole of this preliminary exposition. He was very hostile to the possibility that having a high IQ might mean that a person needed particular opportunities and circumstances to use it, and also that they might contribute anything useful to society which other, less intelligent people could not. He quoted the example of his great uncle (probably now dead) saying that although this uncle had a high IQ, he had not used it for anything better than creating crossword puzzles for some broadsheet newspaper, and that he hadn’t been capable of anything more even if he had had better circumstances. So this meant that having a high IQ could not ever mean that you might need better circumstances to enable you to do all the things that you were capable of, and that it could not mean that I actually needed anything more (such as a hotel environment) than I already had. He then claimed that people in general are not hostile to those with high IQs; they are just indifferent.

This man was about to waste his time (and taxpayers’ money) in Oxford starting a Masters degree in 'psychodynamics and neurolinguistics'.

He stayed a fairly long time, and when he left, he said, ‘I am off to find somebody I can do good to,’ in a rather reactive way. I replied, ‘I need someone to do good for me’. Of course he didn’t respond.

I contrasted the Gnostics with modern Existentialist philosophers, making the point that Gnosticism had been a form of Existentialism that did not lead to materialistic socialism. As I was doing so, it occurred to me that this illustrates the extreme hostility to any form of potentially centralised existential psychology that is aroused in ‘normal’ psychology. The Gnostics and the Cathars were always subject to persecution, torture and death by other Christians, and their documents suppressed, to such an extent that information about the content of the Gnostic gospels can only be gathered from what is quoted in the polemical writings of other Christians (the Gospel of Thomas being the sole exception), and information about the beliefs of the Cathars only from the records of the various inquisitions of their replies, or supposed replies, under torture.

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.

Hooked on excellence

Joan Bakewell on her grammar school (Stockport High School for Girls):

The school was relentlessly competitive and selective. ... The six houses [named after "significant women of achievement”] competed for a silver cup awarded to "the most deserving house", the winner arrived at by compiling exam results with netball and tennis tournaments, house drama competitions and musical achievements. There were even awards for deportment — for virtually anything that could be marked. We got hooked: it became a way of life. ...

The rules were remorseless, dragooning us in every particular of behaviour. Uniform even meant the same indoor shoes for every pupil; hair-ribbons had to be navy blue. The school hat had to be worn at all times to and from school; girls caught without were in trouble. The heaviest burden was the no-talking rule: no talking on the stairs, in the classroom, in the corridors, in assembly — anywhere, in fact, except the playground. We were a silent school, shuffling noiselessly from class to class, to our lunch, to the cloakroom. ...

Among this welter of disapproval — conduct marks, detentions and, finally, a severe talking-to by Miss Lambrick [the headmistress] — physical chastisement was unnecessary. We were cowed long before things became that bad. The cane in the headmistress’s room was redundant. When a girl got pregnant — the worst conceivable crime — she was expelled without fuss before she could contaminate the rest of us. (quoted in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, Bloomsbury 2007, pp. 566-567)

But, as Joan Bakewell says, ‘We got hooked: it became a way of life.’ And, as I observed it at my convent school, it did not seem too bad a way of life. I did not get the impression that most of the girls were suffering very much; children and young people do, I think, quite easily get ‘hooked’ on sets of rules and standards of excellence to apply to every aspect of their lives. Trying to keep all the rules as well as possible even produces a sort of centralisation (to use my own psychological term).

At least so far as my convent was concerned I do not think that ‘disapproval’ was the predominant attitude conveyed, or that the girls were ‘cowed’ in trying to avoid it. I got the impression that they got hooked on ‘being good’ and they felt ashamed and disgraced if they slipped up, but not in such a way that they became identified with being disgraced and gave up on trying to be an admirable rule-keeper.

Joan Bakewell is implicitly critical of her competitive and highly-organised school life, implying that there is some obvious ideal of which it falls short, or which it actively violates. This, I suppose, is an acceptable attitude, probably the only acceptable attitude at present towards any school that makes possible any kind of centralisation.

It may well be that fear of disapproval and punishment was a stronger feature of Joan Bakewell’s situation than it was at my convent, which was originally a fee-paying school, and had become a direct grant school which accepted a certain proportion of pupils with grammar school scholarships. Parents are more likely to pay for their children to attend schools that allow them to feel good about themselves than are agents of the collective acting through ‘education’ authorities.

Centralised psychology depends on distinguishing between what is under your own control and what is not. The reactions and evaluations of other people are not under your control, and it may be helpful in later life to be aware that people can be hostile and will make nasty things happen to you if they can catch you out in breaking one of their rules, which they will be motivated to do. So you need to concentrate on what you can do to help yourself by taking whatever opportunities you can to improve your position.

Schools which convey that anything goes, and that the worst that can be done to you is to be sent home and provided with a tutor at the expense of the taxpayers, may be a bad preparation for adult life.

One frequently hears of people who ruin their lives by incurring terrible penalties, such as imprisonment and the breakdown of their livelihood, as a result of attempting to break the law in flagrant ways with little apparent sense of danger; for example, the hapless couple John and Anne Darwin, who recently attempted to start a new and prosperous life in Panama on the proceeds of the life insurance payments resulting from the husband having pretended to be dead, while really living in a house adjoining his own, in which his wife was still living openly.

Dalziel and Pascoe

Watching modern television while I use my exercise machine is certainly giving me a feeling for the contemporary landscape. It is no wonder that I feel excluded from it, and that there is no sympathy with my position. It is a very closed world, with few ideas, but those implicitly dogmatic. It is, effectively, a new religion.

As in other series, the characters in the police series Dalziel and Pascoe are role models for ‘getting by’ in ‘real’ life. Clearly you never get identified with being purposeful or intense; you fulfil the requirements of your job, which are often unpleasant and inconvenient, but interspersed with frequent breaks for eating, drinking and sex. Such things are the opium of the people, evidently. You do your own household chores, which also helps to ensure that your mind will never have to pay attention to what it is thinking about for very long at a time.

Dalziel is a senior and very experienced policeman, but still has to do his own fetching and carrying. At one stage, he asks his younger assistant Pascoe where some documents are. ‘In the car,’ says Pascoe. Dalziel looks as if he might like them brought in, but Pascoe says, ‘When did your last slave die?’ Dalziel goes and gets his documentation from the car for himself.

This reminds me of the George Damper cartoon in the Daily Mail in which Mrs Damper refuses to get a refill of George’s glass of water after it has been fouled by a bird. ‘If you want a refill, you will have to get it yourself,’ she says.

If any television character shows signs of minding about anything, other characters, maybe including doctors and psychiatrists, ‘help’ him not to think about it. If some specific reminder of the vulnerability of the finite situation affects him psychologically, e.g. being attacked produces agoraphobia, he is told that it is normal to react to such a specific nasty event. He is only reacting ‘normally’ and should not think he is important or different enough for it to matter whether he is suffering from it, and he should not try to find a solution for himself.

Something unquestionably unacceptable is dismissed as ‘part of life’. Put it behind you, don’t let your feelings get to you, and get back to the normal round of filling in the paperwork for the boss, followed by beer and pot noodles.

Doctors, psychiatrists and hospitals are unquestionably ‘helpful’ and never to be feared for the harm they might do you. A ‘friend’ who is a psychiatrist finds it hurtful that her friend with a problem does not rush to tell her all. ‘But I am trained and certificated and thoroughly qualified in every way!’ she says reproachfully.

Binge Britain

Daily Mail 14 February 2008:

Another man has been beaten and left for dead after politely asking a gang to stop urinating into his garden. ... Gareth Avery, 48, suffered a broken jaw and cheekbone and deep cuts after being punched and kicked by at least two men and a woman ... [He] was left for dead outside his home in Weston-super-Mare when he tried to protect his house from a gang.

In the last few days alone, 17-year-old Joe Dinsdale was stabbed to death on an estate plagued by drunken youths and Nick Baty, 48, died after a month in a coma following an assault. ... As the toll grew, a police chief urged Britain to "wake up" to the full horrors of binge-drinking.

Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, hit out at the drinks trade for making profits "on the back of this misery". ... Mr Jones castigated parents who are responsible for handing over alcohol to more than half of underage drinkers, and warned it was time for Britain to "wake up" to the grim realities of the binge-drinking epidemic.

As usual, parents and commercial interests are blamed for the consequences of the Oppressive State, including the oppressive educational system. A headline inside the paper reads ‘The real price of booze’. No, this is the real price of socialism. The parents are to a large extent themselves the victims of an educational system that left them with no purpose in life, and no way of getting a ‘buzz’ out of life other than getting drunk and/or beating somebody up.

People in Russian forced labour camps set great store by knocking their minds out with drinks of highly concentrated tea, and many drunks lying in the streets of communist Russian froze to death. Alcoholism was an inevitable side effect of communism in Russia, as it is of egalitarian socialism in Britain.

Reflection of the month

Compassion

It is alleged that a wicked judge, sentencing a man who had stolen a loaf, replied to his explanation that he had to live, ‘Je n'en vois pas la nécessité.’ More recently, it is alleged that an ex-servant has said that there would be no servant problem if people stopped wanting servants.

Both remarks, if true, demonstrate the psychological verity (which there are, quite independently of these particular remarks, no grounds whatever for doubting) that human beings have no noticeable awareness of one another’s needs. Not, that is to say, any awareness that expresses itself in a tendency to supply those needs. In a certain sense, however, they may be said to have an awareness. If you should ever find yourself hanging from a precipice by your fingertips and a fellow human being happens by, be careful what you say. If he realised your position he might tread on your fingers.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

More about the punishment of fathers

With further reference to the case of the father jailed for helping his pregnant wife to leave the country:

The sentence of 16 months in prison may seem excessive, but observe how efficiently it fulfils the function of opposing rebellion against the absolute powers of decision and prescription possessed by agents of the collective.

Rebellion (or assertion of independence) against arrangements made by the collective depends on the freedom of action (money) possessed by the individual. The father in this case could afford to transport his wife to the continent. He is described as a ‘businessman’ so presumably he would have been able to send her money to support her. The prison sentence has probably effectively destroyed his livelihood, and it could well be permanently. So perhaps his wife will find herself with no means of support in a foreign country with a very young baby and an 8-year-old child to look after. She might think of seeking part-time work, but she will need a baby-sitter if she does, which might have been fairly easy to arrange if her mother and other relatives and friends were living nearby. But she cannot return to this country without jeopardising her liberty and that of her children.

So everything possible is being done to drive her back into dependence on the British state with the complete loss of liberty and of her children’s liberty which that could entail.

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’, and my plans for acquiring qualifications with which to return to a career in a university were strenuously opposed, I hoped for support and help from my parents, if from no-one else. My father was blamed for any vestige of sympathy towards my plans and, as his health broke down under persecution, he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance. My mother’s life was reduced to that of looking after an invalid.

Destroying my father’s income and health was the best possible means of removing my only likely support in working towards re-entry to a university career. I had hoped to persuade my parents to move to Oxford and to continue living at home with them, which would have provided me with a college/hotel environment within which to carry on with my independent but, at least for the time being, unsalaried academic career.

Society had decreed that I should be classified as a non-academic person, and any help which might be given to me in attempting to return to a suitable university career was rebellion against authority and to be treated as criminal, as I was myself for making such attempts at all.

There is method in the madness of the witch-hunting carried out by modern society in this country, irrational though it may appear to be.

Incidentally, in a subsequent article in the Daily Mail (9 February 2008) about the case of the exiled mother, she is described as ‘an articulate and educated woman from a middle-class professional background’. So this may very well be another example of the way modern ideology facilitates class warfare, and the rule of the working-class or those with lower IQs, in oppression and persecution of those with some admixture of aristocratic genes or above-average IQs.

Punished for caring about your child

A father is in jail and his wife is in hiding abroad with her children after he helped them flee the country to escape social services, it emerged yesterday. The businessman’s wife was heavily pregnant with their first child – and was terrified the baby would be taken at birth by social workers – when he drove his family to Dover, and then on to Paris. She had a second reason for fleeing – she believed her eight-year-old son from a previous marriage was to be adopted against her wishes.

Her 56-year-old husband was arrested on his return to Britain, and later jailed for 16 months for abducting the eight-year-old, known as Child S. [The case] raises further disturbing questions about the secret family courts which only last week were in the spotlight when social workers illegally snatched a newborn baby from its mother.

Such cases are shrouded in the heaviest secrecy – with families threatened with jail if they discuss their fears that their children are being removed unjustly. But the story of the father and his family in hiding can be revealed for the first time because he appealed in a criminal case – which can be reported – begging for his 16-month jail sentence to be reduced. His plea to the High Court was dismissed and the father, who has never seen his baby daughter, was led away in tears. ...

The three appeal judges were told yesterday how Child S’s parents had separated in 2004 after a volatile and violent marriage. The mother claims she was told the boy would be taken into temporary foster care until she ‘sorted her life out’. But when she asked for his return, social services refused. After months of legal battles, a family court judge sided with the council’s plan to put the boy up for enforced adoption. By this time, the mother was pregnant. A friend said; ‘She was led to believe by social services she would have no chance of keeping the child she was carrying, which is outrageous. She was in despair.’ ...

Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Bennett acknowledged the ‘powerful emotions’ involved, but said: ‘Such proceedings taken by a local authority must be respected by parents. Those who act must expect a prison sentence because a real punishment is called for and to deter others who might be subject to the same pressures.’ ...

The father – who has adult children from a previous marriage – is being destroyed by prison, a friend said outside court. (Daily Mail, 7 February 2008.)

The quotation from the judge in the above case reminds me of a remark made last year by Chris Woodhead (former Inspector of Schools): ‘Parents who condone truancy should be punished.’

When the Welfare State (better called the Oppressive State) was introduced in 1945, it was said that education, medicine and helpful benefits of all kind were to be provided free (i.e. out of taxation). At that time I think many people would have been shocked at the idea that someone might be fined and punished with imprisonment for failure to take advantage of the goodies on offer.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if the State makes itself responsible as the ultimate provider (out of taxpayers’ money) of every recognised need, then it also owns its beneficiaries body and soul, and, as the provider of liberty, may take it away or decree how it is to be used, as it sees fit.

Only a capitalist society can provide its citizens with a territory within which they are free to make decisions; these territories vary in size but may be enlarged by individual effort. A communist/socialist society provides its citizens with no freedom. The freedom which they seem to enjoy is illusory, since it may be removed at any time if they fail to comply with the draconian edicts of the State. You are punishable if you fail to force your child to attend school, whether or not it is being bullied, physically or psychologically, by other pupils or by the teachers, and whether or not it is learning anything that will ever be of any use to it. It is not up to you to decide whether your child may live with you, even if you are supporting him or her completely, and receiving no ‘benefits’ from the State.

Incidentally, is not a prison sentence of 16 months excessively harsh in comparison with penalties for actions which are clearly harming their victims, such as grievous bodily harm, arson, burglary, etc? This gentleman had done no more than assist his wife in leaving the country, accompanied by her own child as a willing companion.

All shall have nurses

David Cameron suggests a home nurse for every mother producing a baby, paid for by confiscation of freedom from taxpayers, of course, even those who have been ruined by exposure to social hostility during their ‘education’ and left (as I have been) with no qualification with which to earn money or eligibility for the so-called ‘social support’ when unable to derive an income from society.

How about, ‘Cameron wants a hotel environment for every intellectual’? That would be a lot more original than ‘Cameron wants a home nurse for every mum’ (Daily Mail, 4 February 2008).

Cameron, I gather, is what is called a ‘conservative’, and the proposal is supposed to help ‘middle-class’ parents. But parents with above-average IQs are (as I plausibly surmise) under-represented among those who can tolerate having families in the captivity of modern society.

And of course, getting a nurse into every new mum’s household will enable the nurses to report to the social workers (also paid out of taxation) about which mothers should be regarded as “unfit” and have their babies taken away to be brought up at the taxpayer’s expense. How many mothers will have the sense to realise how dangerous this is and say “No, thank you” to the nurses?

The Conservative leader will today publish a blueprint for changing attitudes to childhood, which calls for a ‘profound cultural change’ in the way Britain treats its children. ... Success in raising rounded children [whatever they are] is not just about intensive supervision, it’s about enabling children to discover the world for themselves. (Ibid.)

Well, you could say that, i.e. children might be allowed to make their own decisions about arrangements for themselves. Abolishing compulsory ‘education’ and incarceration in state schools would be a good start.

My work has no relation to my interests

Copy of a letter to a philosophy professor

While the standard ways of interpreting things in the modern oppressive ideology decree that a person who has been deprived of a career and has no way of earning money or drawing ‘social security’ is not to be regarded as being prevented from using their ability in a productive way, and that anything they may manage to do is supposed to correspond exactly to their most passionate interest, I should like to point out that actually I have never been able to do anything meaningful since being thrown out of Oxford University without a single usable degree fifty years ago.

This is not, realistically, surprising as I have never had even a one-person salary with which to support myself and provide myself with the institutional environment which is absolutely necessary to me.

So why should anything I have managed to squeeze out be regarded as any indication of what I would have been doing if not totally deprived of financial support? Why, without money, should one be expected to be able to do anything at all? That I have produced anything at all is a tribute to my exceptional ability and extreme determination, and should (in a non-oppressive society) be regarded as a reason why I should not continue to be kept absolutely deprived of opportunity by lack of a salary and status.

Everything I have squeezed out, including the DPhil thesis, bore no relation to what I should have liked to be doing but was an application for readmission to the ranks of the salaried and statusful. The choice of material both in psychology and philosophy was determined under duress and the work was carried out in oppressive circumstances.

There is absolutely no way in which I have ever been free to ‘follow my interests’ or derive gratification from expressing my views or ‘sharing my ideas’ in my ignored publications.
The only one of my books that could be regarded as an expression of anything I might want to say just because I thought it was the case, was The Human Evasion and I wrote that only because I was still under extreme duress (six years after being thrown out) and unable to do anything. I had had no intention of writing about my psychological ideas.

I had not intended to use my psychological ideas in any way except that of facilitating my own productivity. I thought that my understanding of centralised psychology would make it possible for me to be very happy and productive as soon as I got back to the circumstances necessary for an academically and intellectually productive life. But in fact the goal of re-entry to a university career at a suitable level of seniority or, indeed, any level, was no nearer, in fact receding; and my energy level was declining in boredom.

So I thought that I should write at least something based on my memories of centralised psychology before they became too inaccessible. I thought that The Human Evasion might get me established as a writer, whose book-sales might make up for my lack of an academic salary and enable me to do research work of some kind that might be regarded as establishing a claim to reinstatement as an academic.