New definitions for ‘saving’ and ‘planning’

As I have previously said on this blog, the state now appears to feel free to change legislation in ways that are effectively retrospective, in that they make a mockery of past efforts by forethoughtful taxpayers – such as myself and my colleagues – to plan for their life after normal retirement age.

Commentators whom one might expect to be critical of such retrospectiveness seem to share the basic philosophy that it is not too unacceptable, sounding mildly disapproving at best but in many cases simply taking it as read that, say, the presence of a budget deficit justifies breaking what was once thought of as a relatively sacrosanct principle.

Ruth Sunderland, for example, refers to the complaint made by many women that the rapid shifting of the age at which they will start to receive their state pensions ‘simply does not leave them enough time to plan’. But she does not appear to complain of the sudden introduction of means-testing. Those who had been paying into the state pension scheme could not have planned for that change because it was retrospective, and they had no warning it was going to happen.

Having undermined savings efforts by breaking a principle in one area, the government evidently feels justified in breaking principles in complementary areas; for example, using the idea that it is legitimate to be forced to save.

In an alarming speech, Martin Weale [a leading expert at the Bank of England] urged Britons to wake up to the fact that their level of saving is too low and that they are spending too much. ... The top economist said people were deluding themselves about the type of retirement they could expect, unless they were happy to work ‘much later’. ...

Starting next year, new rules will force all bosses to pay into a pension for their workers for the first time, unless the worker decides to opt out. ... Pensions minister Steve Webb said ... ‘Our workplace pension reform is vital. From 2012, automatic enrolment will mean millions of people saving into a pension for the first time, with a contribution from their employer.’ (Daily Mail, 26 August)

Having one’s money confiscated is not the same as saving, even if money is also confiscated from your employer at the same time, thus surreptitiously reducing the resources which he has available to pay you directly.

If this money were not confiscated, those who wished to save in the normal sense of the word, i.e. build up their own capital, might use it to do so. Hence this legislation is reducing the possibility of savings being made.

Theoretically the money will be preserved from the irresponsible activities of those who might wish to use it for something else before reaching what the government of their day decrees to be ‘retirement age’. Possibly those who might choose to act in this way do so knowing that their family history indicates the likelihood of their dying before receiving anything in the way of retirement pay; or having decided, consciously or unconsciously, to get lost on a mountainside somewhere and die of exposure before they suffer from the drawbacks of ageing.

At a time when the national finances are under severe strain, later retirement ages for both sexes are unavoidable. ... Pension planning is a long-term undertaking that ideally should be carried out over an entire working lifetime. (Ruth Sunderland, Daily Mail, 14 October)

Later retirement ages are only ‘unavoidable’ if you rule out such possibilities as abolishing state education, child benefit at all levels of income, the NHS, etc.

And you can only plan with money that is in your own hands.

In my twenties, being deprived of the possibility of earning a living as an academic, unable to envisage earning a living in any other way, and also deprived of the possibility of income support when receiving no income from any employment, I made great efforts to ensure that I would pay the voluntary contributions into the state pension scheme. In deciding to do this, rather than to keep an equivalent amount in my own hands and invest it as best I could over the years, I was considerably influenced by the fact that the state pension was paid ‘as of right’ as a result of contributions made, and was not a ‘benefit’ supposedly related to your ‘needs’ as assessed by agents of the collective.

I paid in contributions every year over a period of about forty years, and had started to receive a disappointingly withered pension, when it was announced that state pensions would now be means-tested. Some years later it was announced that the age at which people would receive them was not what they had previously expected, but was liable to shift forward at the whim of the government.

So my attempts to ‘plan’ for my income after the age of 60 had been misguided, as I had not taken into account the possibility of retrospective legislation.

Oxford Professorship in Psychology: not even shortlisted

In response to my application for the Oxford Professorship in Psychology I received a brief rejection letter from the University's Personnel Officer. Herewith the text of my response.

As it said in my letter, I hereby appeal to any senior academic to come to visit me at my impoverished independent university, to discuss ways of supporting me, so that I do not go on being prevented from contributing to the intellectual life of my time.

I continue to apply for professorships and other posts. I still need to start on my forty-year academic career with full salary and status at professorial level.

Dear ...

Thank you for your letter of 6 May. It appears I was not even shortlisted for the Professorship of Psychology being offered by the Department of Experimental Psychology in association with Magdalen, for which I made an application in March.

It is an indication of the oppressiveness of modern society that nobody considers it their business to enquire into the predicament of the victims of social outrage and support them in recovering from it.

And yet, not long ago, a teenager with an IQ said to be 130, currently in prison, was awarded damages against an education authority which had failed to provide him with enough intellectual stimulation. This was regarded as having led to his turning to crime instead of to gainful employment. I realise this provides no grounds for my entertaining any hope that I could sue for loss of my earnings from an academic career as well as my father’s loss of salary as a headmaster when he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance.

Normally in this situation I would ask you if you would let me come to see you to explain my position, to make it more likely that you will remember me if a suitable appointment arises. However, I realise that it would be unlikely to do me any good if you did grant me an interview with you. Nevertheless, I think that you should wish to come to see me to find out what help you could give me in returning to a normal position in society.

One form of help which you could certainly give me, even without coming to see me, would be money. Without a salary, and having to provide myself with an institutional environment as best I can, it is almost impossible for me to write books expressing my views, to publish those which have already been written and stockpiled awaiting editing, or to carry out any of the research which I have now been prevented from doing for several decades, and which I need to do to enhance my claim on restoration to the sort of career which I should have been having all along.

In your position, I would probably be happy to contribute half of my salary on a regular basis if I heard of someone in so grievously anomalous a situation as mine is.

This is a standing invitation to you or any other senior academic, to come to visit me at my impoverished independent university, to discuss ways of supporting me, morally or financially, so that I do not continue to be prevented from contributing to the intellectual life of my time, as a headmistress (who perhaps lost her job for the crime of allowing me to be too happy at her school) once said that I was certain to do.

However, I am not inviting you or anyone else to come without warning, and an appointment would have to be made well in advance, and accompanied by a donation of at least £5,000 towards the support of my institution, or to me personally. In fact, it would be better if made to me personally, as our affairs are too constricted and under-staffed to accept any additional burden in the way of processing and accounting for donations.

I do not expect you to come, although I think you should, but a donation of that size would at least prevent a visit, if it were to happen, from being an entirely fruitless drain on our time and energy.

Yours sincerely,

etc.

The real reasons for a ‘failure to fulfil’

copy of a letter

I was talking with Fabian, and asked him why he thought it was that there was such a resistance to the idea of reparation being made to a person who had been placed in an unsuitable and unacceptable position as a result of their ruined ‘education’.

Fabian told me about somebody who wrote rudely in response to his blog that ‘society does not owe anyone an academic career’.

I said, ‘But I think it does, if it has taken over the running of someone’s education, so that they have no control over it, and thus end up deprived of the sort of career they need to have, which they could easily have got for themselves if left alone to get on with it.’

Fabian seemed to agree but said, ‘I suppose there is an idea that it is somehow morally wrong to sue public institutions for reparation, although perfectly acceptable to sue private ones.’

As I have said before, I am sure that suing would be a waste of time and energy because judges would be on the side of the ideology of the public institutions.

But individuals might (and should) realise that victims of the system who are regarded as beyond the pale for reparation by the collective, could and should be recognised as needing help from individuals to get back into a social and financial position approximating to that in which they should have been if not subjected to social interference.

An article in the Daily Mail (10 September 2011) about Simon Norton, the subject of the previous post, refers to a study of gifted children by researchers at Middlesex University.

Simon is, of course, far from the only brilliant child who has failed to live up to the enormous expectations placed upon him.

A study published last year found that out of 210 gifted children whose progress was followed into later life, only 3 per cent went on to fulfil their early potential.

Researchers from Middlesex University found that many failed to excel because of the way they were treated — often put under too much pressure and separated from their peer group so they found it difficult to make friends.

Researchers at Middlesex University are, of course, not academic exiles, and the interpretations they give of what went wrong with the lives of gifted children are the accepted and mostly fictitious ones.

Among the people with high IQs I know or have met who live in exile from society, I cannot think of any who would have ascribed their problems to ‘pressure’ or ‘high expectations’, even if none of them would have been so unequivocal as I would myself in ascribing the problems to the hostility of modern society towards exceptional ability.

If adequately funded, as it should be, the appropriate department of my suppressed and unrecognised independent university could publish, not only criticisms of such research as that done in Middlesex University, but also make studies of its own, taking other, more realistic, factors into account.

An uncomplaining, unfrustrated genius

Simon Norton is a former child prodigy, whose story superficially resembles mine. A book about him, The Genius in the Basement by Alexander Masters, was recently publicised in the Daily Mail.

Very precocious, very high IQ, but now exiled from academia and living as a recluse. What went wrong? He is quoted as saying vaguely that perhaps he did not apply himself enough. No suggestion that it was hostility that threw him out, or that he is suffering agonies of frustration now.

But then in some respects his story is very different from mine.

His family were wealthy, with a long-standing business. He went to Eton and became a lecturer at Cambridge.

He was, apparently, only interested in maths, and that probably makes him a sort of person by whom people feel less threatened than they do by me.

Even now that he has been thrown out, he does not complain of suffering. He is supported by an income from his family and by rents from tenants in a house which he owns. He makes no attempt to provide himself with a hotel environment but tries to avoid the problems of material living by subsisting below the respectable level, rather than by working up to an above-average lifestyle. Allegedly, his clothes are dirty and his diet restricted. He hates shopping and does it in a perfunctory rush. He does not try to employ a housekeeper to do it for him.

Perhaps this is supposed to demonstrate that the most precocious and initially successful can be thrown out of a university environment without it leading to them complaining about how much they are being prevented from doing.

Notes on my CV

Herewith the ‘Notes on my CV’ referred to in the previous post.

In interpreting a CV it is normal to consider only what a person has been permitted by society to do as evidence of what they are able to do. However, in my case I have to ask for the realities of the situation to be considered, as my life has consisted of being artificially prevented from doing what I could have been doing very well and wanted to be doing.

Given my extreme precocity, it was both cruel and unreasonable to expect my education to consist of taking about the normal number of exams at about the usual age. The post-war legislation which prohibited the taking of any exams at all until after the 16th birthday had a particularly terrible effect on my life. I therefore took many fewer exams and at much later ages than I could and should have done.

My life was one of agonised frustration and deprivation. I did not get to university until far too late an age, by which time I was too old and had been suffering for too long to take any interest in the process of taking a first degree. My college continued to apply the policy of refusing to accept that any problems which arose from a retarded education needed to be taken into account.

Recently people have been suing the educational system for providing them with inadequate skills and qualifications. I should have been able to sue for being left with no paper qualification with which to enter the academic career which, in view of my ability and aptitudes, I needed to have.

I did not accept that I could have any other sort of career or that life would be tolerable without a career.

In spite of my lack of paper qualifications I was perfectly well able to teach or do research in several subjects, so that the lack of a paper qualification and of support from my college was the only reason for my not applying for appointments teaching e.g. maths or physics.

My only motive in everything I did was to effect return to a full-time academic career as quickly as possible. The research I did was not determined by considerations of interest to myself but by what I could get funding for.

It may be considered that I was ill-advised to attempt to do research in what would be, even if accepted, a new area of academic work, as a means of returning to an academic career. In fact I was not advised at all, as my college refused to give any consideration to my need to work my way back to a university career. Whatever advice I had been given I would, in my desperate situation, have been forced to work on anything for which I could get funding.

There appears to be a social convention that a person is not subjected to suffering and hardship by being deprived of a career, however high their IQ and however great their temperamental need to put their drive and effort into a progressive situation. Anything they do in exile is supposed to have been done because of a particular interest in it. Neither of these things has been true in my case. My life without a career has been one of severe hardship and deprivation and the increasing desperation of my urgent need to return to a university career has caused me agonising frustration for many years past.

It is the social difficulties that have prevented me from applying to return to an academic career at an earlier age (any applications I did make being turned down) so I must ask that my age be not held against me since I have made the best progress I could. So far as I am concerned I am just in the position of someone in their early twenties attempting to start on a full-time, full-length academic career.

My CV shows that I have held a (usually unpaid) position at the Institute of Psychophysical Research for many years. Since the death of Professor Hans Eysenck, who had been Director, I have resumed the position of Director. This is not, and has never been, an alternative to an academic career. The organisation was founded by me, not as an expression of interest in any particular field of research, but as a vehicle to facilitate my return to a university career by providing an environment within which publishable research could be done. In this objective it has failed, as funding has been rigorously withheld since a seven-year covenant thirty years ago. It could be argued that, without any financial support at all, it has provided me with added liabilities to increase my sufferings rather than alleviate them.

Being deprived of a career is very like being condemned to indefinite imprisonment. One is deprived of every normal social function or interaction, of everything that could make life worth living. The horror of the situation is only marginally modified by whether or not one was actually innocent when first condemned. As it happened, I was ‘innocent’, since I was perfectly well able to fulfil the functions of an academic career.

I advocate the abolition of the state controlled educational system since, if it could ruin my education and my life, it could ruin anybody’s.

Oxford’s Professorship in Psychology

There follows the text of a letter of application which I made for a Psychology Professorship at Oxford University last year.

The ‘notes on my CV’ referred to will be posted separately.

I would draw attention in particular to the last paragraph, which for these purposes I have put in bold.

I hereby appeal to anyone in a position to provide finance for it, to consider this as an application for funding to set up a department of psychology under my direction.

I am applying for the Professorship of Psychology being offered by the Department of Experimental Psychology in association with Magdalen College, as advertised in the University Gazette, and attach my CV, which includes the contact details of three referees, together with notes on my CV and a testimonial from the late Professor H J Eysenck.

As my position is an anomalous one, I would be grateful if you could read the notes on my CV, as they give information about how I came to be in this position. As you will see, my CV is one that was prepared to go with an application for an appointment in philosophy, rather than psychology. I cannot in fact comply with all the ‘essential’ criteria listed on the website. However, I can comply with some of them. You will note on my CV that I have carried out research in psychology. It was pioneering research which broke new ground in various areas, but for which I received little recognition (more overseas than in this country) and no funding after the initial (very minimal) funding had lapsed. I also have decades of administrative and fund-raising experience.

I am in fact capable of carrying out research, teaching, and administration in areas in which I do not have paper qualifications, owing to my own ability to learn new topics very fast and very thoroughly in any situation in which I need to learn them.

For realistic information about my life, abilities, and situation, please see the Preface ‘How this Book came to be Written’ to my book The Lost Cause, a copy of which I am sending to you under separate cover. (This is the book version of my Oxford D.Phil thesis on causation entitled Causation and the Mind-Body Problem.)

I apologise for the anomalies in my application: these arise from the extreme social misplacement which has resulted from my ruined education. There is no recognition of the predicament of the exiled academic. I am making this application in spite of being above the normal age for a Professorship because the process of recovering from a ruined education is extremely slow, in fact there is no provision for it to be possible at all. There was a time lag of decades before the work which I had done in exile from an academic career led to my being offered testimonials from senior academics who were willing to act as my referees, and this still did not lead to my reinstatement in a normal academic career.

After still further delay, one of the areas of work which I had initiated (lucid dreaming) came to be recognised as a suitable topic for doctorates in both philosophy and experimental psychology. I still did not have funding for the expenses of research including a research assistant, without which I could not have done a DPhil in experimental psychology, so I applied instead to do one in philosophy.

The enclosed notes can give little impression of what I would have achieved by now if I had had a normal life, i.e. one that was normal for a person like me. As it is, they are a statement of how efficiently the expression of my abilities has been prevented by the society in which I have been living. Academics advising me have often said, ‘Don’t say anything about your ability, only about what you have done’, and ‘Don’t mention your unofficial teaching and research.’ But society can prevent one from doing anything officially, i.e. within a normal academic position. Is what one does outside its auspices, in an attempt to regain reinstatement, automatically to be regarded as disqualified from consideration?

Since I have had to work outside of a normal university context in attempting to establish a claim to reinstatement, it is difficult for me to give any academic referees at all. Nevertheless I give such as I can, and it should be considered remarkable that I have managed to acquire any at all. At one time I was sent a portfolio of testimonials from North American academics, who had worked on lucid dreams in some of the ways suggested in my book Lucid Dreams, similar to the testimonial from Professor Harry Hunt which appears on page xxxviii of my book The Lost Cause. However, these never did me any good and I have mislaid them, so it would be a lot of work to find out the present addresses of those concerned.

I give the referees I do, as best I can, because it should be regarded as amazing, and highly creditable, that I am able to give any at all. However I expect that my referees will observe the usual conventions that (a) one’s case is not to be considered highly anomalous and in need of redress, that (b) only work done by the holders of official academic positions counts as academic, and that (c) there is supposed to be no such thing as ability which is transferable from one field of intellectual activity to another. Therefore they can do no more than damn me with faint praise for the few pieces of work which I have been able to do within the restrictive parameters of what is regarded as ‘relevant’.

Finally, I should like to make a statement. It may be that you reject this application out of hand, on the basis that it does not meet the ‘essential requirements’, or that I otherwise fail to fit the University’s idea of what a psychology professor ought to be like. However, it is my belief that if the University really wanted to contribute to the advancement of psychology, rather than merely occupy a prestigious role in what has developed under the label of ‘academic psychology’, it would take this application very seriously indeed.

No better way of saying it

Someone recently wrote the following to me:

I guess the fact that you insist that you should have a different social position than the one you actually have makes people more negative towards you. As you have written many times, insisting on this is taboo since it is supposed that society is fair and puts everyone in their appropriate place. Perhaps you could do better if you communicated the issue differently. Of course, this is a tricky question, since it might involve some degree of dishonesty, which is inherently undesirable.

This was my reply:

How to express the discrepancy between my actual and my natural social position is not merely a tricky question but has always been an unavoidable and insoluble one. It is omnipresent so I may as well write more about it, not that this will lead to any acceptance of the realities of my position.

I am afraid that whether or not I make it explicit, hostility is automatically aroused by the discrepancy between my outcast position and the position I need to be in and should be in.

At least, one supposes that it is the violation of the taboo by my being as I am (whether or not I mention it explicitly) that arouses the hostility, since the hostility takes the form – among other things – of actively imposing misinterpretations upon me according to which I am in a suitable and tolerable position and do not need any help in working my way back towards one which is more appropriate and less intolerable.

It may be supposed that my alienated position in society arose in the first place as a result of the more fundamental hostility to my being precocious and likely to break new ground in any area in which I got the opportunity to do anything.

In fact, I was seen as a threat, but I was not aware of it. I did not at that stage have a view of myself as being more likely than other people to question the unexamined assumptions which usually dominate the way everyone thinks.

However, for whatever reason, my education was mismanaged – or from other people’s point of view, very well managed – so as to drive me inexorably to the disaster of exile. Confronting the horrors of life outside of a high-flying university career, I found that no one would even consider letting me remedy my position by taking degrees in other subjects as rapidly as possible and at my own expense so as to have a qualification that might be usable for entering a suitable career. If I had been permitted to do this I would not have been totally ineligible for income support when deprived of an income. If I had had a First in physics or chemistry, or even in a language, I could have been eligible for support as someone applying for university lectureships.

But having achieved their objective of throwing me out with a second-class degree in maths (a subject which I would never myself have considered, although there were many in which I would have considered taking degrees and making university careers) the powers that be were not going to allow me to escape from disaster at one bound.

And no doubt they were horrified that I did find a way of getting a postgraduate grant from Trinity College, Cambridge, although that did not, in itself, make me eligible for university appointments in any subject.

When my way was again blocked at the end of the Trinity College studentship, I was back in the position of ineligibility for support of the most minimal kind from the Welfare State, since I was not (without support from my college or supervisor) qualified for the kinds of jobs I would have been able to do.

I could only have been eligible for unemployment benefit by being dishonest enough to pretend I was applying for jobs as a schoolteacher, as my college wished me to do. No doubt there are many drawing the dole who have no intention of taking up the jobs for which they apply, but I was sure that, however many people do this without comment, I would be likely to be found out and persecuted, and anyway I set too much store by keeping my mind clear of social dishonesties.

You suggest that communicating the difficulties of my position differently might be better. But actually there could be nothing to communicate if I suppressed my need for a university career, since I have no interest in any field of research except for its potentialities for career advancement.

There is no point in saying that there are great potentialities for the advancement of science in a certain area if one cannot actually do anything in that area on account of poverty and social degradation.

There are a few people around who claim to find some aspect of parapsychology ‘interesting’ without doing anything about it, and maybe come up with vague ‘theories’, such as that ESP has been influential in evolution, but I do not understand people who think like that.

Tunnelling out of prison with a spoon

What was unacceptable to people in my attitude to my situation when I was thrown out at the end of the ruined education is still unacceptable today. So here is how it arose.

When I was thrown out without a paper qualification to enter any suitable academic career, I accepted that my life was ruined and that I had certainly, but for the existential uncertainty, lost my destiny. And that might be expected to lead to the dropout position; you are excluded from the sort of career which you need to have, society offers no ways, so (perhaps) you will give up on trying to get anything out of life and drift around until you are dead. But while on the face of it I had lost my destiny, at the same time I knew that I would pursue it however hopelessly, recognising that I still needed academic status and a hotel environment, and that, unless and until I got them from a university appointment as a Professor or at least a Research Fellow with a high salary, I would aim to make the money with which to buy for myself an institutional environment with ancillary staff.

The fact that I saw myself as working towards what I needed to re-start my life does not, and never did, arouse any sympathy.

I saved half my pay at the Society for Psychical Research (reduced as it was by taxation), which was something like £8 a week. Doing so, I aimed at an independent research establishment with ancillary staff. Eighteen months later I would have grants to support my studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and save half of those as well, but for the first 18 months I was saving half of only my salary.

This aroused no sympathy; no one that I had known in the past came to enquire how I had got into so terrible a position or to offer help of any kind. Even former teachers such as Miss Bookey and the Reverend Mother, who had once supported me in a meaningful way, stayed away and kept silent, implicitly reinforcing the idea that my rejection by the University of Oxford was realistic and not anomalous.

I remember the horror with which I viewed my position; at least, I remember that I did view it with horror, although as my position now is somewhat alleviated I cannot entirely reproduce the feeling at that time. I had never intended to become an outcast without hope of return, but it had happened, and existentially that was what I now was. All I could do to help myself was to save what I could from my permitted cash at the end of each day to add to my capital. Another few shillings towards the cost of at least one residential college and at least one research department. Hopelessly disproportionate, of course, but that was what I was aiming at.

I have never met anyone who reacted in this way towards being thrown out: starting to build up the necessary capital to buy what one might otherwise have got by having the right sort of career in a university. Other people ‘get used’ to the sort of life they can have as dropouts, adopting compensatory ‘interests’ or social life, and expressing philosophical acceptance of their situation. Or else they become drugged zombies, in which case they, too, express philosophical attitudes towards their position.

Michael Gove and the bear pits

The right every child deserves, to be taught properly, is currently undermined by the twisting of rights by a minority who need to be taught an unambiguous lesson in who’s boss. (Michael Gove, Education Secretary, quoted in Daily Mail, 2 September 2011)

‘Rights’ and ‘duties’ are both fictitious, socially determined concepts, and actually are both forms of oppression. They do not arise from an individual’s own drives, or from the real threats of his physical environment. They arise from a social belief system about the drives an individual should have and how he should react to the threats of both the real physical and the real social environment.

Actually ‘rights’ are typically oppressive because they deprive individuals of the freedom not to take up their supposed rights, as well as depriving other people of freedom (by taxation) in order to pay people to enforce the rights of the individual: doctors to make decisions for him against his will, teachers to supervise the incarcerated multitudes, social workers and psychiatrists to induce the individual to find his ‘rights’ tolerable.

Complying with the rights imposed upon him without complaint is a ‘duty’, and of course a person can be blamed by the society around him for not fulfilling his ‘duties’. This is an artificial moral evaluation.

[Michael Gove] insisted it was clear that Britain’s social malaise had its roots in the breakdown of discipline in the home and the classroom.

No, the social malaise is the malaise of the Oppressive State, it is the inevitable consequence of socialist ideology, in which those who impose ‘rights’, such as teachers, become ‘the boss’.

The right of a child to go to school is now the duty of a parent to send their child to school, possibly against his will, and both the parent and the child are to be punished if this does not happen. This illustrates the absurdity of ‘rights’ in modern society.

A victim of the state education system comments:

‘The state of the education system in this country is rotten. Schools have become bear pits, where the bright and conscientious are held in contempt at best, and more likely to be attacked in numerous ways.

Celia Green’s brief analysis is a minute example of the material that we could publish on this and other subjects, and can be taken as an appeal for funding to allow Oxford Forum to expand as an independent university and challenge the disintegration of standards in this country.

We should be supported by every parent who has the least interest in seeing their children not come to harm, psychological and/or physical, by being in contact with the state education system.’

Abortion policy: other motives

Women considering a termination could be offered independent counselling as part of the biggest shake-up of abortion laws for 20 years.

The move is designed to give women a breathing space before going ahead, and pro-life campaigners claim it could cut the abortion rate by a third, or 60,000 terminations a year. At present counselling is offered by abortion providers, but there are concerns that the advice may be biased because they are run as businesses.

Under the proposed changes, abortion clinics would be told to offer free access to independent counselling run on separate premises by a group which does not carry out abortions. (Daily Mail, 29th August 2011)

Allegedly, there is a fear that a financial motive might enter into the counselling given by abortion clinics; consequently, women should be given counselling which is ‘free’ (to them, but not to the taxpayer) and which cannot be influenced by any financial motive (of profit to the abortion clinic, or reduction of cost to the taxpayer in the form of child benefit, education etc.).
But, without going into the rights and wrongs of abortion per se, is anyone considering the possible motivation of MPs to increase the rate of growth of the population?
- We may guess that the IQ of the population of women seeking crisis abortions is below that of the population as a whole. Those with above average IQs are more likely to be sufficiently forethoughtful and efficient to avoid unwanted pregnancies.
- We know that MPs are motivated to ensure that legislation achieves a transfer of financial resources (freedom of action) from a population with higher average IQs to one with lower average IQs. This motive is in no way diminished by the fact that the policy has been applied so successfully since the onset of the Welfare State in 1945 that the country is already bankrupt.
- In the eyes of MPs, that is no reason at all for putting a brake on the increasing rate of decline, which can all be conveniently blamed on populations with above-average IQs, such as pensioners and bankers.
- After all, their salaries as MPs depend on their having appealed to the electorate as likely to advocate redistributive policies of this kind, and will depend on it again at the next election.

There are many similar examples of ideology on which critical analyses could be being published by Oxford Forum if it were provided with adequate funding to do so.
While it is true that Western civilisation is in general beginning to crumble, the decades of Welfare State culture and its redistributive policies in this country in particular have finally brought it to its knees, with children unable to speak by school age, old people being abused and killed in care homes and hospitals, riots in major cities, and one of the fastest rising national debts in the world.
This state of affairs has been allowed to run free of any criticism or reform from either the academic community or former aristocracy, both of which are by now fully complicit in the wholesale destruction.
This is a plea for funding for our independent university, or at least one active and fully financed research department. We appeal to all universities, corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support, either financial or by working here.
We represent the only possible chance to halt, or at least soften, the impact of the impending crash.

“I could do you a lot of harm”

extract from Letters from Exile

In some sort of television drama, a wealthy man was represented as saying: ‘I write the rules, I deal out the hands, I decide who wins’.

What is this but Freudian projection? Is this not what goes on in the mind of every socialist agent of the collective, every principal of a college, tutor, educational expert, etc? Never explicitly stated by these persons, but ascribed explicitly to wealthy individuals, who are their most serious threat of opposition.

As cuddly, avuncular, socialist Professor Hardy* put it, ‘I am a very influential man and I could trample your tin-pot organisation underfoot’. Well, he did, pretty well, he and everyone who thought like him. With absolutely no money we were frozen into inactivity. But although we could do nothing, because I had sunk all my savings in a house, they could not force us to leave the house or to leave Oxford.

But they thought that they, as influential agents of the collective, should be able to. When I got my miserable pittance of money from the great and influential socialist Cecil King, Mary Adams of the BBC thought I should be more frightened than I was at receiving even such minimal support from so great a man, and said, ‘He’s very powerful. He could do you a lot of harm if he turns against you. He could get the local council to drive a road through your house.’

* the late Professor Sir Alister Hardy, an eminent zoologist who took to parapsychology in his retirement

Hopping mad

copy of a letter

You said I was ‘hopping mad’ about the item in the paper about rubbishy ‘research’ on out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) being done by the British Psychological Society and others.

Yes, but you should stop to think why I am infuriated by such things. People would like to think it was because such topics ‘interest’ me in some way that is independent of my financial position. Actually I react strongly to those things and to any reports of money being spent to set up university departments, research centres of various kinds, etc. because money is so important. I know it, and unfortunately the enemy knows it, in the negative sense.

People like to talk as though ‘doing research’ or ‘being interested in some particular subject’ was independent of the circumstances of life, e.g. a hotel environment with caretakers, housekeepers and so forth.

But it certainly is not so in my case and I can’t hope to achieve the energy level that makes life worth living until I have a residential college environment with residential staff. Until I have it, what matters most to me is working towards it, i.e. increasing my capital.

So what infuriates me about people doing rubbishy research on OBEs etc. is that they have at least salaries, and that all my efforts to demonstrate the existence of fields of research in which I might work has resulted only in providing nominal topics for people already provided with salary and status (perhaps not all magnificently, but at any rate more than me).

As I was thrown out of the university system, I know that I need a lot of money to provide myself with an equivalent institutional environment. Perhaps I would not know this if I had not accidentally had a good time at one point in my life which gave me an awareness of what life could and should be. But I only know how good it could be for me, not for anybody else.

Egalitarianism means that a person has no socially recognised right to live in a way determined by his individual characteristics. If I say anything explicit to the effect that my life, and perhaps that of other people with high IQs, was easily ruined because teachers and other social agents could easily override, or be genuinely unaware of, unusual requirements which arose from, or were associated with, unusual ability, I have observed that my interlocutor is moved to noises of active rejection. Usually when I say things implicitly critical of the ideology, people let it wash over them without reply, and one knows the implications will be lost on them. But in this case they seem to have to assert their definite belief that no exceptional requirements could possibly be associated with exceptional ability.

As the headmistress of the terrible state school I briefly attended said, it would be good for me not to be treated as an exception. But, as I thought at the time, how could that be, since I was exceptional?

I am not actually hopping mad about not being able to do research in any particular field; I am hopping mad all the time about not being able to get money.

It is really a terrible waste of my ability that I have to apply it to making enough money merely to keep physically alive without, as yet, having been able to buy for myself the minimal circumstances of a liveable life.

Standards have declined ... a lot

Standards have declined a lot and in particular there is much less scope for autonomy. I thought of the best sort of university career as absolutely necessary to provide me with living circumstances which would enable me to get something out of any independent research or writing which I would have enough freedom to do in addition to what was required by the salaried university appointment.

Professor Eysenck had the same sort of approach, but in spite of his top position and status he was able to do very little of what he would have done if he had been free to do it.

The concept of research studentships and supervised research have come in increasingly over the last century. It is now exceedingly difficult for the very restricted supervised ‘research’ to lead to any opportunity of anything better, salaried appointment or research grant.

So I think everyone now should seriously question the value of degree-taking; the fact is that the modern ideology is against the able, and there are not really any suitable openings in modern society.

I think people with families who have any recognition of their disadvantaged position should move to be near us, and it might well be the case that their offspring could do better for themselves by making a career in association with us; there are many possibilities and cooperation could be advantageous, but we cannot make specific proposals except in relation to specific individuals whom we know well enough.

Of course many nowadays go to university for the sake of the social life and ‘spending a few years not doing much work’ as a public school leaver said to me. This, of course, implies an attitude of indifference to the debts acquired in those few years, which, if they knew us, they would find was not compatible with our outlook.

Although most of what goes on in universities is now rubbishy, I do still need a top academic position, because without it, especially in the modern world, one has no hope of support for research, or anything but censorship and suppression for one’s books.

I need an academic position because I did (and still do) need to do certain kinds of things, regarded as academic, within an institutional (hotel) environment for myself in the first instance.

I imagined at first that my continuing to work towards such things, in such exceedingly grim circumstances, might be taken as proof of my extreme deprivation in being unable to progress within a normal (high-flying) academic career, and that my doing anything at all in such circumstances might be taken as justification for rewarding my pathetic efforts with a salary or funding for my independent research institute. But (as I found out) not on your life!

My struggling in such painful circumstances was taken as evidence of my enthusiasm for lucid dreams and such; I was regarded as ‘free to follow my interests’, and hence, of course, not needing help of any kind. A university appointment, people wished me to believe, would make me less ‘free’.

My original objective, when I found myself cast out, was to set up an independent university surrounded by a business empire. That still has to be the case, as we appear to be no closer to funding on an adequate scale or even a minuscule scale from any outside source, institutional or individual.

I do not think that most of the able people who find themselves adrift and increasingly squeezed in the modern world realise what they have been deprived of or how to work towards it, and most of them do not have the same highly determined need as I do for academic status. Mine is quite specific to an expansive and multi-channel person, with a lot of drive and a strong sense of purpose.

If you get it, you should come

Copy of correspondence on Facebook between a reader of one of my books and myself. I continue to get enthusiastic comments from individuals while going on being studiously avoided by the intellectual establishment. My books have been too controversial even to be regarded as controversial; they have just been ignored.

Reader: ‘Great book. Having read this and more of CG's books I am still recovering from the intellectual shock. Forty years as an Anglican priest teaching God is other people – now back to the drawing-board!’

My reply

Dear ...

Do you think that recovering from the intellectual shock is the thing to do? I wrote The Human Evasion as a distress flare, because I could get no opportunity to get on in any way, to indicate that there was a lot more I could be saying.

Only one person picked up on the fact that a genius might be needing help, and came. She is still here.

We are living in the last days of Western civilisation, destroyed by socialism, and desperately need reinforcements, failing which even temporary help of any kind is more than we can get from anybody.

Here we are, desperately in need of help. Could you (should you) not come to find out more about our needs, at the same time finding out about the most fundamental issues in psychology? At least you could then tell other people something realistic about us.

And you might realise that the most important thing you could do would be to retire to Cuddesdon, selling your house if you have one, and buying something near us instead.

At any rate, we do need people to recognise our need for support, and they cannot get to know more without coming, however temporarily.

Planning for the future

There have been many articles recently about the bad treatment of people of pensionable age who get into care homes. Often the appalling treatment is ascribed to the fact that the home in question is privately run. There is a profit motive and this is not compatible with kindness, it is supposed. The State (I mean the taxpayers) must spend much more money on the care of the elderly.

Of course the private homes are not very private. They are an extension of the State system, and are supposed to be motivated by having a slender margin of profit. Tweaking a collectivist system in this way cannot be expected to improve it significantly. The same is true of the educational system. ‘Free’ schools, and other schemes to give parents ‘power’ within the system, will still have to conform to many requirements which will cripple any possibility of serious improvement.

The fact is that even if conditions within the homes were good instead of bad, and whoever they were run by, they would be in principle unacceptable because their inmates are deprived of their liberty.

This is the hidden snag in social benefits; all must pay for them in taxes and loss of freedom, no one may opt out.

Those who wish to opt out from having a ‘benefit’ imposed on them will be hunted down. Someone I knew, who bought something recently in Boots (pharmacist) for someone else, was asked if he was a carer. It is an infringement of liberty that one should be exposed to this sort of thing, and shops that indulge in it should be boycotted.

Now, in fact, it is impossible to buy any of a wide range of things in pharmacists without being asked, ‘Is it for yourself? Are you on any medication?’ And one is forced to reply to such questions or, I suppose, you will not be allowed to buy what you have asked for. Respect for the autonomy of the individual has declined so far that there is no sign of protest at this state of affairs. Not even mild protest in letters to the Press, let alone riots in the streets.

While there has been no outrage at the retrospective means-testing of state pensions, it is paradoxically (or dishonestly) claimed in Parliament that setting up a new tax, allegedly to pay for the capping of payment out of assets by those who get into care homes, is justified by wishing to enable people to ‘plan for their futures’. It is supposedly more important for people to know that if they are forced into a care home there will be a limit on what they are forced to pay for it, than for people to be able to rely on their pensions bearing some relation to the cost of living and not being means-tested, as for some decades they expected them to be while they contributed to them. (During those decades, I always thought it was rather mean that, after paying contributions for the pension while one was of normal tax-paying age, one should then have to pay income tax on the pension income if it were combined with any other income which one happened to have. Since it was so, one thought that the government was getting its pound of flesh to satisfy its wish to reduce everyone to the same level – which is, ultimately, complete loss of freedom of action for all.)

Planning on the basis of government assurances is impossible; the government may change its mind at any time about what pocket money it can afford to let you have.

Out-of-the-body experiences

Some recent articles about out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) in the Daily Mail demonstrate the usual confusions about the topic. Research allegedly shows that these experiences are not (A) ‘paranormal’, or evidence for survival, but (B) associated with brain malfunction. This simple dichotomy is supposed to cover all possibilities, and – the presumption seems to be – once we have satisfied ourselves that it is indeed a brain malfunction, by narrowing it down to a particular area of the brain or a particular brain process, we can stop regarding it as a question to be resolved by research, and relegate it to the realm of minor curiosities.

There has always been tremendous resistance to the concept of out-of-the-body experiences, so much so that before Dr Charles McCreery and I started to work on them in 1964, they were not accepted either by the Society of Psychical Research, who were supposedly ‘interested’ in experiences beyond the normal range, nor by the academic world outside of the SPR, which was already firmly reductionist.

It is therefore not surprising that the fear of any progress in the scientific understanding of them continues in the form of attempts to dismiss them as ‘imaginary’ in the sense of by-products of brain malfunction. Before we made our first appeals for cases, senior academics associated with the SPR told us that we should not do so; we would be destroying our academic reputations and branding ourselves as spiritualists. OBEs were, they asserted, imaginary.

Now that our first appeals have been followed up by other appeals, and OBEs have had to be accepted as an acceptable topic for academic theses and for work in laboratories by persons with salaried academic appointments, correlations with neurological events are seen as ways of restoring OBEs to the ‘imaginary’ category, which, as before, means ‘of no interest for further research’.

When my colleagues and I published our pioneering study on OBEs in 1968 (the first scientific examination of the topic) we looked at the detailed phenomenology of the experience, i.e. its subjective features, without trying to correlate it with some set of physical conditions, anomalous or otherwise. This was largely because of lack of funding, and absence of an institutional environment – if we had had both, we certainly would have looked first at the electrophysiological correlates. However anomalous or ‘pathological’ OBEs might be, their interest to us was not in classifying them as ‘pathologies’, but as shedding light on normal processes such as perception and consciousness, which could be done only by considering psychological and physiological correlations.

Four decades on, in spite of much ostensible research into these and other phenomena by people other than ourselves, to which we were prevented from contributing by a rigorous lack of financial support, understanding of neither OBEs, nor the normal processes I have mentioned, has advanced much. Merely being able to point out parts of the brain which may be involved does not get one very far.

Grasping the mechanics of waking vs sleeping consciousness, or of the top-down, hypothesis-forming processes of perception, calls for models of a kind which we are no nearer to having than we were forty years ago. Not surprising, given the continuing obsession with exclusively physicalist methods and explanations: those which refer only to things that can be directly measured with the apparatus of physics and chemistry. (I mean in contrast to explanations that involve analyses of subjective mental states.)

Many researchers have looked at OBEs, since our original study, in the attempt to explain them away. None have been able to provide a conclusive account – such as that they are always caused by lack of oxygen, or by failure of a particular cortical structure. None of them seem to have appreciated the more important feature of the phenomenon, namely their potential role in the elucidation of normal mental processes. It seems likely that this will continue to be the case.

Having placed the phenomenon of OBEs on a scientific footing, we should have been provided with finance to take the work further, leading to the possibility of important advances in our understanding of conscious experience and its relation to brain physiology. As we did not have an institutional environment with residential and laboratory facilities, we need funding to set this up in the first instance. Such funding should still be provided now, even more urgently, to prevent the continuing waste of our abilities which could and should be being used in making significant advances. This would be true even if people other than ourselves had shown any sign of adopting a sufficiently analytical and open-minded approach. In fact they have not. The resistance to the possibilities suggested by the phenomena, which had prevented their being recognised by academia before our book on them was published, continues to restrict and distort the work carried out, and the unsatisfactory conclusions drawn from it.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

The Tavistock Clinic

copy of a letter

It is certainly not the case (as people have often assumed) that we did not want people to have outside careers. Charles McCreery was very dubious and critical of what was going on in modern psychiatry and experimental psychology and therefore was not much attracted by either, but the penniless dropout option was even worse and he certainly never considered it.

I had set up the Institute as a way of getting back into a recognised academic career for myself in which so far I had failed.

This made it all the more desirable that new associates should have the best careers they could, so as eventually to lend their support as statusful academics to my applications for re-entry.

Everything depended on getting enough money for an adequate institutional environment. Certainly the objective of our fund-raising was to set up a research institute large enough for research to be carried on within it with adequate living circumstances for intellectuals, the research being of a kind that would constitute a claim on recognition by socially authorised academia. If we had got adequately set up, it seemed a possibility that Charles might work with us doing research, instead of (at least in the first instance) having a salaried career outside. Then one would have been considering how we could aim the work we were doing at getting a D.Sc for each of us to stake a claim to university status as a senior level.

Professor H.H. Price, however, had been unhelpful when I talked to him about what qualified for a D.Sc. Work had to be published in the official journals; but could it be, if one did not have a university appointment? He did not say. And he offered no help in obtaining either funding for the research or a university appointment.

Everything depended on how well we could get set up financially, as the enemy realised, blocking every attempt to raise money, and slandering Charles so that he would be disinherited.

Our lives were made so difficult that, in spite of the lack of money, Charles did not pursue possibilities at either the Tavistock Clinic or the Department of Experimental Psychology. Due to the constant hostility, the merest physical survival became a problem.

Then of course we could be (and were) represented as preferring to live in poverty instead of having normal careers. If we had been well enough set up to do research in adequate circumstances, Charles might have preferred doing that to what was open to him either as a clinical psychologist or doing a D.Phil at the Department. But nothing could have been worse than what happened; all ways ahead blocked, impoverished and besieged. Well, I suppose what would have been even worse would have been if they had been able to pin something on one of us, so that we were at their mercy as criminal wrongdoers. I am sure they would have liked to.

As it was, they could only pretend that we had deliberately chosen our position as impoverished outcasts, on account of some weird ‘interests’.

Somerville College, of course, represented me as ‘free to follow my interests’, and Charles’s family placed similar interpretations on him.

Forty years later, we are still essentially facing the same problems. We are seeking to restore our rightful positions in mainstream academia, as well as seeking funding for our institution, but are still blocked by the hostility of modern society to genuine ability, and to genuine independence and real impartiality. Of course, the hostility takes the form of the spurious theory that anything worth supporting is already going on inside universities, and anything outside should be stigmatised.

Evolution, subspecies and the Welfare Junkies

If a radical change is introduced in the structure of a situation, such as was introduced in 1945 with the onset of the Welfare State, there are two reasons why what people anticipate as the consequences of this change may turn out to be wildly inaccurate, even if their anticipations are not rationalised and intended to conceal their real motives.
It is a fact of genetics that if a situation arises which favours some new subsection of a species of plants or animals, that subspecies will quickly arise and expand, with characteristics which are increasingly well adapted to the favourable situation. And the development of the subspecies will increase geometrically with every generation.
It is a less well established fact, but may be surmised, that human psychology adapts itself to the circumstances in which it finds itself. If it knows that its survival and that of its offspring is entirely dependent on its own achievements in making provision for them all, it will be motivated in certain ways. If, on the other hand, it finds that it will be rewarded (at least to a certain extent) for dependency, it will go into a psychological mode that will make the best use of these circumstances, and drives and ambitions which it might otherwise have will fall into abeyance (or repression).
In the Daily Mail of 9 July, A. N. Wilson wrote an article about the growth of populations of welfare junkies, as shown on a BBC television programme.

The participants on the programme will probably not live as long as the average middle-class person who abstains from heroin and a daily diet of chips. But they are still — those of them who do not die of an overdose — going to live a full span. Most of these families, who have never worked and are not really in a position to work, or to do anything useful ... will simply have to be ‘contained’ by society. ...When they have wrecked their livers with alcohol and their digestions with fried food, they will be taken to expensive National Health Service hospitals. And when they can no longer manage on their own, they will be taken into even more expensive care homes. ...We have had 66 years of a fully-funded welfare state.
(From article ‘The welfare junkies’)

My parents, with very high IQs and aristocratic ancestry, lived to 82 and 89 respectively with very little contact with the NHS until the very end, when they were considered too old for it to be worth trying to prolong their lives. On the other hand, it is probable that many who would not previously have survived to pensionable age now do so, at considerable expense to the NHS. And these are probably more likely to go into care homes than those with the highest IQs, such as my parents, who had good genetic constitutions, a frugal and forethoughtful lifestyle, and a devoted offspring (in me) who would do everything possible to prevent their being taken into care.
The proportions of different types of people within the population of pensioners has been changing continuously since 1945. Before that date, careful and conscientious people like my parents, with above-average IQs, probably predominated, and people who had lived as Welfare Junkies, or in some equivalent way, were probably a small minority. If the relative proportions have not already been reversed, they are surely on the way to being so.

Gospel of Thomas, saying 21

Mary said to Jesus: Whom are thy disciples like? He said: They are like little children who have installed themselves in a field which is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say: ‘Release to us our field’. They take off their clothes before them to release it (the field) to them and to give back their field to them.

The children have been installed (born into) a world (field) which is not theirs. The owners of the field (society at large) say ‘The field is ours, and it is ours to say whether you are the sort of person who ought to be a professor running several departments. You are what we say you are and nothing else.’

The children take off their clothes (their social identity, representing how society wants them to think of themselves) and leave the field to society, within which it can assign social status.

What this saying does not say (at least not explicitly) is that the children, in abandoning the field and throwing off a false social identity, do not stop being people who need to be professors running several departments, and hence go on trying to buy the field back, while knowing that they have no control over the owners of it.

The only real solution

The only real solution to the disastrous downfall of Western civilisation, at least so far as this country is concerned, is to abolish the Welfare State (the Oppressive State) altogether. That means abolishing the NHS and the state-funded ‘educational’ system, and the so-called ‘social services’. But perhaps a few things that are really useful come under the heading of ‘social services’, such as road-mending. I expect the costs of the social interference and persecution are well wrapped up.

So let us say, for a start, that the state-funded ‘educational’ system and the NHS should be abolished completely, along with all agents of the collective described as ‘social workers’. Of course, Members of Parliament were not elected for the likelihood of their supporting such ideas and they would not be likely to be re-elected if they did. But they are in a position in which they could choose to vote for what is in the real interests of the country, even if at the expense of their own careers.

Attempting to improve various aspects of the present situation, which are recognised as ‘bad’ by reference to some belief system about the way things ought to be, can only result in ever greater loss of liberty, i.e. oppression.

The following extracts from the Daily Mail of July 14 express the pressure that is being put upon liberty by taxation (confiscation) in order to maintain ‘benefits’ and ‘services’.

The burden of extra levies will fall upon the public for half a century to cope with the aftermath of the credit crunch and the impact of our ageing population. ...Robert Chote, head of the OBR [Office of Budget Responsibility], said: ‘The Government is likely to have to tax more or spend less elsewhere to keep the public finances on a sustainable path.’ His report warned that the public finances will be set on an ‘unsustainable upward trajectory’ as Britain's population lives for longer. NHS spending is expected to rise from 7.4 per cent of GDP in 2015/16 to 9.8 per cent in 2060/61 as a result of our ageing population. It says that if health spending continues to increase as quickly as it has in previous years, it could account for 15.1 per cent of GDP in 50 years – more than double its current cost.

As usual, the expansion in the amount of ‘public money’ that is needed is blamed upon the ‘ageing population’. The overall population, and the expensiveness of maintaining it, are increasing in many ways quite independently of people living longer. The population is being increased by immigration, and by the rapid expansion of certain sectors of the population. These factors are an inevitable consequence of socialist ideology.

NHS spending will rise to 15% of GDP and further, not as a result of ‘our ageing population’, but as an inevitable consequence of its intrinsically oppressive nature. The latter also determines the appalling level of inefficiency to which it has sunk, which is now perceptible to the most unsophisticated observer.

Describing the defects of any one sector of the population within the parameters of what is acceptable, i.e. on rationalised terms, taking into account very few factors, and attempting to reduce the defects by tweaking the oppressive system, can only lead to an ever greater loss of individual liberty.

An amazing sleight of hand

Andrew Dilnot will propose a cap of between £35,000 and £50,000 on the amount people have to pay towards their care in their last years – with the taxpayer picking up the balance. His proposals would leave the Treasury with an estimated bill of more than £2bn – which would have to come from taxation or cuts elsewhere in Whitehall. (Independent, 4 July 2011)

By an amazing sleight of hand, the Dilnot proposals to tax other pensioners more, in order to ‘cap’ the amount which has to be paid by those who go into care homes, are represented as compassionate towards the middle class, and towards the ideas of thrift and inheritance.

‘Life is littered with potential financial catastrophes, from costly-to-treat illnesses to house fires, but in most cases the risks are pooled, whether through the state or the insurance market,’ said The Guardian. When it comes to care, those with more than £23,250 are on their own facing potentially unlimited liabilities. The results are ‘dire’. So Dilnot’s plan is very welcome, as a way of ‘staving off ruin for an unlucky minority’...

It’s easy to see the Dilnot report as a ‘caring and sharing’ left-wing proposal, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times: a ‘market failure is being corrected’ by a new social insurance scheme (and a new tax). But I think this is wrong. It is not, in fact, about looking after vulnerable people. ‘It's about insuring the inheritance of their children: the state will protect the assets of quite wealthy people from the possibility that they will be used up to pay for their care’, and thus not be available for their relatives to inherit. (From article ‘The cost of growing old’, The Week, 9 July 2011)

Now we know that nobody cares about unlucky minorities, especially those with higher-than-average IQs, and we know also that inheritance is almost as deplorable an idea as heredity.

The several billions a year which the Dilnot scheme would cost the taxpayer (we may assume with some confidence that £3.6bn is a conservative estimate) could be covered, he suggested, by a ‘specific tax increase’ on pensioners.

Whether or not these billions, which would be necessary to cap the care home costs of an ‘unlucky minority’, would be confiscated from other pensioners or from some other part of the taxable population, it should be pointed out that, instead of capping care home fees, the billions might be applied to reversing the means-testing of pensions and raising them to a more realistic level. Those who did go into care homes would then have more funds available to pay towards their own care, but not, of course, so much as if they were (as is intended) the sole beneficiaries of the billions.

In the Oppressive State, all sections of the population with above-average IQs are to be destroyed. So one starts by hating capitalists and landowners who would not be in the positions they are if it were not for above-average functionality and realism on the part of themselves and their ancestors.

But if they are torn down you still have some people of above-average functionality in the population, whose ability and conscientiousness have not yet got them into favourable positions. Before the advent of the Oppressive State in 1945 it was probable that a person who reached the age of sixty fell into this category. They were likely to have a good genetically determined physical constitution and to have avoided the hazards of life which might have led to their death at an earlier age. So they were likely to be realistic, conscientious, forethoughtful and independent-minded. That is, they were likely to be the sort of people that the Oppressive State seeks to destroy.

So you would think it would seem quite a good idea to believers in the modern ideology that pensioners should have their assets reduced to zero, so that there is nothing for their children to inherit.

But if the population of pensioners is split into those who run up significant costs in ‘care’ versus those who do not, and it now appears that the former population is likely to have a lower average IQ than the latter, there is in fact a motive for penalising the latter to reduce costs on the former.

Otherwise one cannot see why believers in the modern ideology should see anything against the idea of the assets of a pensioner being reduced to zero. Ah, but if there is a population with an even higher average IQ that can be penalised to prevent this – then it is an opportunity for a further tax.

We may suppose that now university graduates are so heavily penalised (unless they have a good probabilistic claim to a relatively low IQ), the pensioners are the only remaining population with an above-average IQ which can be squeezed still further. But why is this necessary? Pensions have been withered on the vine for decades and cut by means-testing, so why now propose an extra tax on them to reduce the charges on those who go into care homes?

A possible explanation arises from the fact that the population of pensioners has now become sufficiently differentiated in IQ for a transfer of resources from one section of this population to another to fulfil the criterion that all ‘benefits’ should constitute a transfer of assets from a population with a higher average IQ to a population with a lower one.

Withered on the vine

The state pension was cut (made means-tested) in 2003. Those who were already receiving it, such as myself, or who were within sight of qualifying to receive it, such as some of my colleagues, had been paying into it for several decades during which there had been no hint that it would ever be cut (means-tested) although for some time state pensions had been described (apparently officially) as ‘withering on the vine’, and attempts to increase them in line with inflation or the national wage had presumably lapsed, although I had not been paying attention to what was going on. At any rate, the pension which I started to receive in 1996 was pathetic, bearing no relation to pensions in private schemes or to average salaries. It was increased each year by nugatory amounts, so that the gap between it and a realistic pension appeared to widen rather than be decreased.

In 2003 it was announced that state pensions were to become means-tested, the concept having apparently metamorphosed from that of a replacement for a salary to that of a benefit whose purpose was to save the most needy from starvation. The basic state pension itself was to fall in real terms, and it was no consolation to me that if I became poor enough I could apply for pension credit. This was something I would never do.

Probably many had (and have) the same aversion to this idea as I had myself, although in a less clear-cut form, and the failure (or refusal) of many to apply for benefits to which they were entitled has been ascribed to ‘pride’ or to the complicated nature of the forms to be filled in. (Snooping systems are now being set up to identify hidden carers and hidden cared-for, to induce them to apply for ‘benefits’.) When some element in living costs rose noticeably, optional bits and pieces for special purposes (such as for council tax and the winter fuel payment) were sent in addition to the pension, but not guaranteed to continue indefinitely.

The Coalition commenced its era of reform, announcing that the state pension would now be increased per annum in accordance with wages, the CPI, or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest. This is called the triple lock. Cunningly, the government chose to use the CPI (Consumer Price Index) and not the RPI (Retail Price Index) which at the time was higher than all three.

Now that the withered state pension was rising by this guaranteed amount each year, the bonus for council tax could vanish. As energy prices were rising dramatically, proposals to scrap the winter fuel payment were opposed, and it remained, but has now been cut from £250 per annum to £200.

So the rises in the state pension have been offset by the loss of these temporary subsidies, and the rises in the amount actually received each year by an individual who chooses not to expose himself to state assessment by applying for top-up benefits are correspondingly reduced. Clever!

More misdirection of attention

‘The Mail accepts that, with people living longer, we must pay more towards the cost of our old age.’ (Daily Mail, editorial, 5 July 2011)

Similar things have been said by people associated with Saga and other organisations for the over-fifties.

This is just accepting and reinforcing the misdirection of attention. The Government needs more money to spend and the costs of all its favourite indulgences are no doubt expanding exponentially. But the causes of the explosive growth of expenditure are wrapped up in the classifications of the imaginary society supported by public money (i.e. by taxation – freedom of action confiscated from individuals.) How far do the costs of ‘education’ and the NHS arise from the ever-growing population of the genetically dysfunctional, many of whom can never support themselves in the sense of earning money, even in such fictitious capacities as those of social workers, tea ladies in hospitals, psychiatrists, playgroup supervisors, etc.?

This population has grown geometrically since the sectors of the population most likely to produce dysgenic offspring have increased with every generation, while those least likely to produce them, the so called ‘middle class’, have dwindled as they faced ever-increasing disincentives to having children.

The object of modern society is to destroy those with above-average IQs and/or aristocratic genes. The populations which have the highest average IQs are the only ones that deserve to be taxed – in the view of the modern ideology.

This has already been demonstrated by the onslaught on university graduates, still a population with, overall, a higher than average IQ. The pensioners are vulnerable because those who live longest have relatively high IQs and general functionality.

This is why they should be taxed, not because their living longer than before is a dominant factor in the rising costs of the NHS, the ‘educational’ system, etc.

The associations which are supposed to represent the interests of high-IQ populations, such as Mensa and the National Association for Gifted Children, make no attempt to defend those interests or to protest against a system that is geared against them. The same is true of the associations which are supposed to represent the interests of the elderly; their leaders acting as agents of the collective in keeping the victims quiet and compliant. The members of their associations could be forming pressure groups or, better still, forming cooperative organisations to keep the Welfare Wolf from the door.

Members of the associations mentioned are invited to move to Cuddesdon, and might appreciate the advantages of forming their cooperative associations around us as a nucleus.

The Duke of Edinburgh and others

My colleague Fabian Tassano has put some comments about the Duke of Edinburgh on his blog, and I am reminded of his correspondence with us. We thought that he, if anybody, should be able to think that the most statusful agents of the collective might be in the wrong, and that a status-less person, even if slandered and vilified, might need and deserve support, which they were unable to get from the ‘proper’ social sources, and that this could only be given them by independent-minded individuals.

Indeed, a descendant of the European nobility might feel that he had a responsibility to support those who were attempting to maintain the standards achieved by an intellectual golden age against the ravages of the encroaching tribalism.

And, one would think, such a person might, if not wishing to be openly associated with social outcasts such as intellectual dissidents, have available to him channels by which he could arrange for financial support to reach those who represented old-fashioned ideals and enable them to be more of an influence within the turbulence of modern society. Also one would imagine, such a person might communicate with other individuals who could approach those he wished to help, as if out of the blue, and become the moral and financial supporters they so sorely needed.

But, as it happened, Prince Philip did none of these things, and nor has any other wealthy and influential person to whom we have appealed over the decades and who appeared to take some interest in us. Nor have any of these people given help in their own right in the form of a donation. It seems to be accepted as a law of the Medes and Persians that we are never to be given any real help at all, in the form of money, in the form of useful work or moral support in fundraising, or in the form of suitable university appointments.

I find the meanness towards us of the most wealthy and influential hard to understand. In their position, if I had corresponded with or interviewed a person evidently claiming to be badly in need of support to do something they could clearly see how to do, I could not myself send them away, or terminate the correspondence, without sending them at least a few thousand pounds as a consolation prize and reward for the time and trouble they had put into presenting their case to me.

On the other hand, of course, those who opposed us did so covertly, and with great effect. Our most ostentatious nominal ‘supporters’ would network against us widely and indefatigably, ensuring that no useful help would reach us from any source. And the effects of this networking were permanent. Once it was known that we were personae non gratae with other members of the international establishment, there was no way in which such information could be forgotten or revised.

As those of Prince Philip’s generation die out, our chances of finding a supporter become even more negligible, as we have only ever had even lukewarm support from those born well before the onset of the Welfare State in 1945, who have at least some memory of the standards and ideals in the early decades of the last century.

Paying for others to enjoy a fate worse than death

It is said that the Dilnot report will recommend that people of pensionable age should not have their assets reduced by more than a third by paying for ‘care’ from the state. This does not reassure me at all, since I know that both I and any of my associates would regard exposing ourselves to state ‘care’ as to be avoided at any cost. Going into a ‘care home’ would indeed be a fate worse than death.

What does worry me is what new tax will be proposed to pay for the ‘care’ that the state does get to impose on people. There are many forms of benefit which are lavished on favoured sections of the population which could easily be cut and replaced by repayable loans, but of course it is only the population of pensioners which is to be penalised.

For example, if nurseries, crèches and supervised ‘play groups’ for the under-fives were abolished, and children could not start school until five (or even six or seven?), a good deal of taxpayers’ money would be saved and parents would be discouraged from having more children than they could manage to look after themselves. As it is, the burden of looking after their children is greatly reduced by the proportion of their time that they spend out of sight, out of mind, at school. ‘Social help’, which I believe is provided for families burdened with too many children, could be cut completely or provided only on payment, as ‘social care’ for the elderly is now. ‘Housing benefit’ is also related to family size, and could be provided in the form of repayable loans, similar to the loans made to university graduates.

Reducing the provision of nursery schools might also reduce the cost of ‘education’ at higher age levels, since it would tend in the direction of making parents aware of the advantages of keeping their families down to a more manageable size. Formerly, parents were responsible not only for feeding and looking after their own children, but also paying for schools if they wanted their children to attend them.

If parents were not relieved of much of the burden of looking after children, the saving to the taxpayer could probably be sufficient to reverse the cut in the state pension (euphemistically described as ‘means-testing’) and to increase it to a realistic level which would be sufficient for a high proportion of its recipients to provide themselves with adequate housekeeping and other services, or to have friends or relatives living with them, independently of the state.

Paul Burstow (Care Services Minister) refers to ‘social care’ as having a ‘nasty little secret’. ‘It is not free and never will be free.’ Quite right. That is the ‘nasty secret’ of all state benefits. As I said of my state-funded education, it was not free. It was paid for with the ruin of my prospects in life, the ruin of my parents’ lives, and the gratification that all agents of the collective, official and unofficial, could derive from so satisfactory an outcome.

Chancellor George Osborne is resisting the plans because he believes they are too close to the ‘death tax’ proposed by Labour before last year's general election, under which everyone would have paid £20,000 into a compulsory insurance scheme whether they eventually need care or not. But Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Lib Dem care minister Paul Burstow are both supportive. (Daily Mail, 27 June 2011)

So we know that Paul Burstow is in favour of something close to the former idea of £20,000 ‘compulsory insurance’. How does he put it according to the Daily Mail (2nd July)?

[Mr. Burstow] promised that while the elderly will be expected to contribute, they will not pay as much as many of them have to pay now.

I.e. while those of pensionable age (including those who do not, and would not, have anything to do with ‘social care’) will be forced to contribute, they will not pay as much as many of them (that is, many of those who do go into ‘care homes’) have to pay now.

It is true that £20,000 (the starting figure proposed for the ‘compulsory insurance’ suggested by Labour) is ‘not as much’ as various amounts in excess of £50,000 which are currently being paid by many of those who fail to protect themselves from ‘social care’.

But why should those who do not and never would submit to ‘social care’ be forced to pay this tax, which is supposed to justify putting a ‘cap’ on what is paid by those who do?

They have already had their pensions drastically reduced because the cost of providing for pensioners is supposedly so great. Saying that a pension is ‘means-tested’ is just a euphemism for calling it ‘reduced’ (or ‘cut’), which is what it is, so far as I am concerned, as I would not seek an income supplement for which I had to be ‘assessed’ by agents of the collective, even if I might be supposed to be eligible for it. I was only so persistent in paying in voluntary contributions for so many years because I thought the resulting pension would be paid to me as of right.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources.

I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

Penalising the middle class is ‘fair’

Daily Mail, June 27, ‘Middle classes must find £50,000 for care.’ State can't afford more, of course. It could not wish, for example, to cut its expenditure in ways that would discourage the least functional members of society from having the largest possible families, many of whom are likely to need ‘care’ throughout their lives.

It is only fair (the argument goes) that the so-called middle classes on the other hand should have their assets reduced, ideally to zero, which they are able to leave to their children by inheritance. Their children are quite likely to have above-average IQs, and it is only fair that they should be handicapped, rather than having their advantages in life increased still further by inheritance.

State pensions are now means-tested so that anyone who has more than the barest subsistence on retirement will find it difficult not to be brought ever closer to that level. Those who live the longest are likely to have the highest average IQs, and are thus most likely to have their savings eroded to zero before they die. Which is only fair, and redresses an injustice.

Formerly those over a certain age were dependent on their own resources to provide housekeepers, full or part-time, or on the voluntary help provided by friends or relatives. The reduction of the state pension greatly increased the number who were unable to provide even a necessary minimum of paid help for themselves, and the probability of people’s assets being reduced to zero has made it much less likely that it would seem worthwhile to friends or relatives to help them protect their independence in the hope of an increased inheritance.

On another page of the Daily Mail there is an article on why the elderly suffer ‘needless’ fractures. ‘Thousands of elderly people are needlessly suffering excruciating fractures because doctors are failing to spot osteoporosis.’

The National Osteoporosis Society's report says many patients are diagnosed only after they have broken several bones, causing them agonising pain and restricting their movements. Campaigners believe doctors fail to carry out simple checks when elderly people suffer fractures to establish whether they have the disease. More than three million people in Britain suffer from osteoporosis, which causes thinning of the bones, and it is most common among elderly women. ...

The report says 26 per cent of those with osteoporosis suffered multiple fractures before being diagnosed. A survey of 700 sufferers found 35 per cent waited more than a year after first breaking a bone to be diagnosed, while 22 per cent waited five years. (Daily Mail, 27 June 2011)

Well, what do you think doctors are for? Surely you don't imagine they are there to prevent people with above-average IQs from suffering?

As has been pointed out before, a person who survives to an above-average age is likely to have an above-average IQ, also above-average forethought, conscientiousness, and so on. Becoming a doctor never required too much in the way of IQ and it is very likely that the average IQ of doctors has fallen. People from the ‘poorest’ backgrounds are encouraged to qualify as doctors, while the ‘middle class’ are discriminated against, in this as in other areas.

It used to be said, over a decade ago, that doctors regarded 55 as the cut-off age for women, after which it was not worth diagnosing anything serious.

Michelle Mitchell, charity director for Age UK, said: ‘Funding for social care is already inadequate. We are fearful that even more vulnerable older people will be left to struggle alone and in some cases lives will be put at risk’. (Daily Mail, 27 June 2011)

Actually, funding for ‘social care’ is not inadequate but excessive. There should be no such thing as ‘social care’.

Associations such as Age UK, Age Concern, Saga etc. should encourage their members to contact us via our website and, if it is not already too late, come for holidays in Cuddesdon as a preliminary. Then they should come to live as close as possible to us, and if they do some voluntary work for us, we will help them in setting up cooperative operations to make themselves independent of state help – i.e. to keep the Welfare Wolf from the door. And, maybe, even work towards greater prosperity by cooperating in business ventures.