How to provoke hostility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing rubbish research

(copy of a letter)

I have to be awfully careful, when I am talking to you, not to appear to support your (i.e. everybody’s) underlying misinterpretations of my position.

Well now, when I said that the recognition of my priority in the field of lucid dream research had never done me any good, you suggested that I might have been invited to work with one of these nitwits with academic status and salary, and I pointed out that it would have been a complete waste of time and what was needed was research on a large scale carried out under my direction. That, perhaps, sounded dangerously close to the idea that I preferred to do something outside of a university career that was interesting and of real progressive value.

Now actually there has never been any question of my being able to do anything for such purist reasons. Everything I did since being thrown out fifty years ago has been motivated only by my need for career progression, as rapid as possible, towards Professorial status and salary and towards the living conditions of a residential college (hotel environment). I was certainly prepared to do any rubbish research that was possible in my atrocious conditions if it was going to secure career progression towards restarting a liveable life.

If I had been offered a position doing rubbish research in a university within the constraints of some academic’s ideas I would have asked myself whether it would lead to career progression towards my goals. I would also have had to ask myself whether it would be possible for me to do what was proposed. Doing single-channel experimental work myself, without a research assistant, would be only marginally possible if I was doing it in the best residential college circumstances, although it could be imagined that I would accept an appointment to do such a thing if and only if it was a way of obtaining those circumstances. I had always accepted that some of my time in an academic career might have to go to waste on teaching etc. in order to secure the circumstances and status of an acceptable life.

In my present constricted circumstances, which are still far from providing me with an adequate institutional environment within which to do even the smallest amount of work in a satisfactory way, small scale experimental work has been, and still is, out of the question. That is why I have not done further work on lucid dreams, or on any of the other fields in which I attempted to establish that a field of possible research existed for which I might (should) be provided with the circumstances to enable me to develop it. (Whether as a Professor in a university, or working in my own academic institute to produce work which would eventually establish my claim to a Professorship.)

There is no possibility whatever of any work that I can do in my present constrained circumstances being of any interest to me, or of my being able to derive any sense of wellbeing from so constricted a life.

An advantage in a life of adversity

(copy of a letter)

As I was saying, and perhaps should write about, the higher level was certainly a great advantage in the life of adversity that confronted me on leaving university. If I had not had a higher level I would have needed essentially the same things and needed to work towards them in the same ways, but it would have been a lot harder if I had still had the deficits and cravings with which I had arrived at Somerville. It was so long then since I had been able to get anything out of life that I needed to get something quickly, in many ways, and could not easily reconcile myself to further unrewarding chores.

I knew that the idea had been that as I was prevented from getting anything I wanted out of life, I would adopt the prevailing worldview as a compensation, but in fact it still presented itself to me as totally unattractive.

When hunger becomes too dominant it detracts from functionality. I suppose, however, that it was an advantage that my deprivations, although severe and painful, were not based on emotional deprivations in early life, as I think most people’s are.

Anyway, I cut other people or society out of my life as a source of significance, because I saw that any wish to derive support from that quarter was being used against me.

By the time I was thrown out without a usable qualification, and with no way of making a career, I was extremely well stoked up emotionally and all the deficits had been filled in. Which was just as well in the circumstances. If it had been otherwise, it is difficult to imagine how I could have been so pragmatic and extraverted in the terrible circumstances in which I found myself.

I was destitute and friendless in the world, my position was shocking. Every social contact was horrifying, and it was easy to imagine a protective reclusiveness. But I had derived from the higher level an assurance that there would be a way ahead and it would lead somewhere. This was where I found myself and I had to see how it might contribute to my return to an academic career. Disgraced and outcast as I was, I met everybody, explored every avenue, became aware of everyone’s attitudes and opinions. And saved money. I had a daily allowance for expenditure and at the end of each day the surplus was carried forward or transferred to permanent savings. My savings represented my freedom of action; one day there might be an opportunity and whether I was free to take it would depend on exactly how much money I had. Every penny counted.

Meanwhile I lived without an identity. I had been cheated out of the social position which I should have had, and now I was dead in the eyes of the world. At the SPR I was surrounded by professors and appalled to find myself - not only without the professorial status that I should have acquired myself, in less hostile society, at about 15 - but without any status or hope at all, being not even on a career track that could lead to a Professorship.

I was shocked and horrified, but I was well stoked up emotionally by the higher level, and I could proceed as purposefully as possible without deriving any feedback or reinforcement from anything I did or from any social reinforcement. That was the difference from when I arrived at Somerville. Having been thrown out, it did not do to think about how I appeared in anyone’s eyes, and I could proceed purposefully without doing so.

I realised for the first time how the despair which I continually rejected was being converted into anger when a member of the SPR Council commented on my dogged weariness and suggested I take a holiday. At least he might refrain from pretending that he cared about what was good for me. If he cared, he would be helping me to get back into the academic career that I should be having, with residential hotel facilities. I sold myself into slavery in the SPR office; I sold my life by the day, having nothing else to sell. Holidays were for Professors, not for slaves.

Charles Morgan, forgotten novelist

I think Charles Morgan’s life must have gone wrong somehow, although he was a literary prize winning author. He was a classicist and (I guess, from the social class with which he is familiar) an aristocrat.

In spite of the elation of Sparkenbroke, he seems to have been more identified with the tone of defeated ordinariness characteristic of his other books.

Nevertheless, Sparkenbroke came as a breath of fresh air to me at 14, when I was sinking under the oppression of Woodford High School and both my present wellbeing and future prospects were severely threatened. Here was someone who was getting something out of life, in a hotel environment and free to use his ability. How wonderful. It reminded one that life could be worth living, but provided no solution to getting it back in bad circumstances.

The only other writer I got anything out of was Nietzsche. But he, too, reminded me of an emotional intensity that was desirable, with no suggestion as to how it was to be re-accessed.

I remember a poem out of Sparkenbroke, I suppose written by Morgan himself, which seems a bit more meaningful now than it did then.

Man is a king in exile;
All his greatness
Consists in knowledge
of that kingdom lost,
Which, in degree of quickness,
Is his fate and character on earth.

Degree-taking a dead loss

(copy of a letter)

Well, you may say a second class degree in maths is some good, and of course that was what everyone wanted to make me accept at the time (instead of offering me any help) when I was just aware of being thrown out empty-handed. But the fact was that since it did not get me into the sort of academic career which I absolutely needed to have (residential, with hotel facilities, and socially statusful, such as a Fellowship or Professorship) it was useless to me. I hadn’t got anything out of doing the work for it either, because it had for many years been a case of working without any motivation, in fact in a state of nightmarish stress which reduced my functionality to the lowest possible ebb.

If you neither get anything out of the experience, in fact you get negative experience, and you are left without any usable qualification to provide you with entry to the sort of career which you need to have, and without any tolerable way of supporting yourself at all, then doing a degree is a dead loss. And the B.Litt and D.Phil were, in neither case, positive experiences. They were both just attempts to struggle back towards the sort of career which I needed to be having by doing some tedious and pointless work in bad circumstances, and they produced no result in providing me with academic position or salary, or even access to funding to do research in my own independent academic institution. So all my degrees, so far as I am concerned, were a dead loss, although the maths was the most agonising.

Drinks party

We gave another drinks party, talking about our real position and need for people; audience totally unresponsive, as usual, in fact probably internally agaces.

Fabian says: there is no way we can get our position across to the outside world. We will not get anyone to work for us who is any good except for a miracle.

How does he know that?

I knew, even before I was thrown out, that there was no sympathy being expressed for the predicament of outcast intellectuals, but I did not foresee that there would be none at all, in fact hostility as soon as people guessed at one’s true position.

So, no, I have never thought it possible for a person like me to have even a tolerable, as opposed to excruciatingly intolerable, life, outside of a high-flying career in a university. In exile from it I have never been able to contemplate earning money in any other way, and I have had to aim at recreating for myself conditions identical with those which I should have been having in the best sort of university career.

The first essential has always been to work towards the hotel environment of a residential college, plus administrative and secretarial facilities.

As this appears to be an immediate turn-off to people, we have to try to publicise ourselves as widely as possible, to find the very unusual, miraculous people who might actually want to help us. In this we are opposed by social forces which wish us to remain as inconspicuous as possible so that it remains maximally easy for our situation to be misinterpreted by the largest possible proportion of the population.