Fathers and agents of the collective

(copy of a letter)

Well, I am as always grateful for the chance to see you, and as usual I am reminded of things I need to emphasise when writing for publication. The way your mind works continues to amaze me, although I know it is just like everybody else’s.

Everyone always focuses attention on conflicts with parents, while exonerating or making light of the hostility of agents of the collective. I have (and had at the time) no doubt that my parents’ remarkable treatment of me after the disastrous degree exam was really an expression of the hostility of the educational system - the latter seeing the situation as giving free rein to its wish to tear and rend me, only (as previously) they remained invisible and distant, using my parents as their channel of communication.

I blame the Essex education authority, Somerville and the educational system in general for destroying, not only my career prospects, but my relationship with my parents and the lives of my parents. It was, I thought, like pouring corrosive acid down a metal pipe. It reaches its target at the other end all right, but the pipe is itself damaged in the process. It should be possible to sue for very large financial damages, and the fact that it is not is a clear indication of the oppressiveness of modern society.

When my father ran from door to door blocking my exit I have no doubt he was implementing the ideas of the Essex Authority on how I should be treated. ‘She needs to learn that she can’t have everything she wants just when she wants it,’ had been quoted to me after one of his conversations with local people. My father was rigorous in his paternalistic concealments, and if he quoted anything to me from the outside world it meant that he wanted it to influence me.

The agents of the educational system were totally ruthless towards me (in the sense of merciless, although 'ruthless' is usually used in commercial contexts, where it is in fact less unmanageable). My parents were more ambivalent towards me, and would have treated me okay if they had not been told not to. As it was, although they had jealousies of their own that could be played on, my parents had a marginal sympathy with me, and their normal personalities broke down under the stress of being required to 'execute' their own offspring.

Rather like Abraham having to sacrifice Isaac really, especially as the concept of God is so close to that of Society in ‘normal’ psychology.

The Man in the Iron Mask

I just saw a film, a recent version of The Man in the Iron Mask, which seemed rather unusual for a recently made film, and reminded one of the way in which so many psychological dimensions are ironed out in the modern world.

I don’t really know modern actors, but somebody called Leonardo di Caprio was the young king and also his twin brother.

The film permitted itself to be rather glorifying of heroism and idealism, instead of insisting on prosaicness and physical degradation, as is usual these days. The Four Musketeers are in this film ("one for all, all for one") .

When d’Artagnan is trying to persuade the king’s brother, Philippe, whom they have just released from prison, to take his place because Louis is not making a good job of being the sort of ideal king they have always wanted to serve, Philippe demurs, saying he would rather just be free and live in the country tending lambs. Why should he take on this demanding and arduous role? D’Artagnan says, in effect, that one cannot go by what seems pleasant or attractive.

"We are all instruments of God", he says, "and sometimes it is very difficult but one has to keep faith."

I wonder what the affiliations of the producer and director of this film are. The modern view is so much that there cannot be any factors to be taken into account beyond what any social worker or counsellor would advise.

Your back to the wall

(copy of a letter)

I was saying to you the other day that there is a back to the wall quality in centralisation. Of course people have a great resistance to recognising that they are (or may be) alone against the world, because they cannot prevent other people being hostile if they choose to be.

All you can be in control of is a very small bit of your own psychological territory, so it is no use trying to operate within what other people think you ought to do, or thinking that you should be able to get other people’s permission or approval before you identify with wanting what you want and being what you want to be. People are, of course, tremendously conditioned to think you ought to be able to ‘prove yourself’ or something.

The fact is that the buck stops here, i.e. in your own mind. A successful child prodigy, allowed enough social territory within which to be fully functional and purposeful, can avoid realising this and think that one should be able to go with the social flow. As soon as I found that I wasn’t being able to be functional and purposeful within it, I became a criminal in everyone’s eyes.

I think that my father showed his own decentralisation in wishing to feel that he was supported by good advice and he had a tendency to seek it from some father figure or expert before making any important decisions.

When I complained to my mother that it had been crazy to get opinions from other people about whether I should take the School Certificate, she used to say, ‘He always did that. He went and asked the vicar if it would be right to marry me.’ In that case the advice did not seem to put him off doing the right thing, but he once bought a disadvantageous house on the advice of an estate agent who said he would treat him just like his own son.

So most people probably are going with the flow, and very much disinclined to do anything without social support.

Although the first form of back-to-the-wall centralisation makes you an outlaw and an outcast, you can see that it is actually quite closely related to the royalty development, in which also the buck stops here. A king has to make his own best guess because he is the best there is, and although he may consider other people’s points of view he has ultimately got to be prepared to oppose them if necessary.

And, of course, in relation to the existential situation, you have got to make your own best guess about what it is best to take a risk on.

It is of course perfectly valid to decide that someone else has more information in a certain area than you have yourself, and defer the decision-making to them. Also, of course, it would be quite acceptable for someone to ask another person, whether medically qualified or not, to decide on the details of what medication he should take.

What is not acceptable is to impose the judgements of agents of the collective on all and sundry so that they are not free to make their own decisions about things that vitally concern them. There is an ‘educational’ Mafia which is very nearly as criminal as the ‘medical’ Mafia, except that its powers of interference and oppression are less explicitly spelt out.

A man is kicked to death

Businessman Stephen Langford was kicked to death in the early hours of Saturday 9 December on the High Street, Henley-on-Thames. Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley, commented in the Daily Mail of 11 December 2006:

‘It has come to something when a man can be kicked to death in one of the safest towns in England and right in front of the local police station. I hope that Stephen’s death will rally all of those who believe we have gone too far in tolerating yobbery and thuggishness in our streets. It is time for society collectively to declare that enough is enough.

We need to bring back respect for authority in schools and in the home and we need to clear these thugs off the streets.’

In the same edition of the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips commented on the situation of ‘social injustice’ prevailing in this country. In her column entitled ‘Strong words are not enough. Only tough decisions can make Britain better’, she ascribed this to social damage being done by family breakdown.

She discusses a review published by Ian Duncan Smith, former Tory leader who heads his party’s Social Justice Commission.

‘Mr Duncan Smith’s analysis lays bare the stupendous abandonment by the welfare state of the very people it purports to protect. His review spells out the appalling scale of drug and alcohol abuse, worklessness, failed education and indebtedness.

Ms Phillips continues:

‘The sheer scale of the social damage done by family breakdown is staggering. But even more astounding is the total refusal of the political class to acknowledge or deal with a phenomenon estimated to cost the country more than £20 billion per year. On the contrary, our intellectual and political leaders have done everything in their power to accelerate the collapse of the two-parent family.’

Ms Phillips suggests that the only way to stop the rot is to uphold marriage, which ‘would mean restoring its privileged position in the tax system, removing the numerous incentives to lone parenthood…. and creating a climate in which lone parenthood is regarded as a misfortune to be avoided rather than a ‘right’ to be rewarded.’

My comments

Civilisation has broken down. But it is the Welfare State itself, with its assault on individual liberty and autonomy, that has produced the evergrowing population of demoralised criminals and dysfunctional dependents who now drain the resources, and damage the lives, of the ‘unfairly successful’ elite with above average IQs, too ‘obsessed’ with increasing their wealth and social status to give free rein to their own criminal tendencies.

We note that the appearance of this entrepreneur (who was kicked to death) was probably smart and moralised, and he looked intelligent and handsome.

That arouses enough righteous hostility in the modern world to justify lethal attack, otherwise unmotivated.

More about "helping" gifted children

In the horrendous Sunday Times article about further oppression for gifted children [see posts of 19 Dec], the fact that some students who went to university at a relatively early age left without completing their degrees is taken to indicate that it is a bad idea to allow this to happen. The fact is, they may just have realised there could be no future for them in the academic world, and the earlier the age at which one realises this the better.

If I had been a bit more experienced in psychology I might well have realised, when I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam at thirteen, that there was too much motivation against somebody like me, and that I had better leave school forthwith, or as soon as legally possible, and devote my attention to making money, since becoming rich enough to set up my own institutional environment was the only way in which I would ever be able to have the sort of intellectually productive life which I needed to have. The prospect of having to make enough money for oneself to set up an institutional environment is a daunting one, and the sooner gets started on it the better.

Students who left university in disgust at fourteen or fifteen may have come to a realistic perception that the modern academic world provided no opportunities for real ability and drive, and that they would do better going it alone.

If thy hand or thy foot offend thee

The despair of society, or other people, comes before the despair of finiteness and, I would suppose, inevitably so, as the illusion of the meaningfulness of human society and hence the ability to derive from it a sense of meaningfulness for one’s own life softens or blanks out altogether the threatening existential environment. Devaluing the significance that society can bestow upon one is very traumatic but produces an extraordinary change in one’s psychological position. And so one wonders whether there are any indications of this in Christianity as part of the process of getting a higher level. In fact (Matthew 18: 8, 9) comes close to the way one felt about it:

If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.

And if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast if from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life having one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

I thought of myself as being in the position of an animal caught in a trap, that gnaws off its paw to regain its freedom. There is a loss, a terrible and irrevocable one, but there is no other option. ‘Half a loaf is better than no bread at all,’ I said to myself, thinking that if I were ever to work again for social success and status, if ever there were a way of doing that, I had to abandon any sense of the meaningful glamour that such things could confer upon one.

Nevertheless I needed pragmatically what society could, but could not be made to, provide. I gave up altogether on any sense of solidarity with respectable members of society who had once seemed to regard me as an approvable person who would be, and already was, a member of their club. Henceforth I would be an outcast and outlaw, although I would not stop identifying with the standards that should be upheld by such persons, and which, in fact, I would exemplify better than did those who persecuted me.

But, of course, the centralisation made possible by the loss of dependence on society developed towards a higher level and it was not for very long that I lived without consolation. It certainly was much better to get a higher level (enter into life), all deficits being supplied and oversupplied to an unimaginable extent, than to remain in a state of separation from the significance (i.e. in normal psychology) with one’s craving for social feedback intact. Although from a higher level point of view the normal state of consciousness appears nightmarish and intolerable, the metaphor of being cast into hell fire seems to arise from a non-higher level interest in judgement and punishment.

But there you are; a man cannot serve two masters (especially if one of them is wholeheartedly opposing the intentions of the other) and at this point a choice had to be made. It is a peculiarity of pre-higher level psychology that you get something much better, not by anticipating and preferring it, but by rejecting what is already present to you as not good enough or as constituting a negative factor.

I suppose I should repeat as often as possible that the rejection of society as a source of significance is not a manoeuvre that is possible within ‘normal’ psychology. It had only become possible to me at 19 in extreme circumstances and after several years of attempting to retain or regain centralisation in the very adverse circumstances of my life between 14 and 19.

Exceptionality

There was once a woman who said of me, with that sublime lack of analyticalness which characterises those who know they have social support: ‘If she is really exceptional it won't make any difference to her whether she takes exams very young or not.’

Let us consider some of the things that she might have meant by this.

The first possible meaning is tautologous. It is: ‘Provided she subsequently succeeds in gaining social recognition she will not be able to say that she was prevented from gaining social recognition by not taking exams very young.’

A family of other possible meanings depend implicitly on assertions of the type: ‘All true ability achieves social recognition.’ In the case of the past, it is clearly not the case that all those who are currently regarded as having possessed true ability achieved social recognition during their lifetime. So our implicit assumption must be somewhat of this form: ‘All those who, subsequent to the present century, will be socially recognised as having true ability, will achieve social recognition during their lifetime.’

Or again, she may have meant: ‘The human race as a whole is so indifferent to superficial tokens of success, so much in the habit of using its independent judgement to assess ability, and so generously inclined to the ability it notices, that no obstacles will be placed in the path of a person of very great ability, even if that person has spent the first 20 years of his life not using the great ability.’

If this was what she meant, she was a poor observer of human nature. Even if the argument were true, of course, it would still provide no positive reason for gratuitously writing off a considerable expanse of years as unusable.

Then again, she may have meant: ‘The human race is so aware of the characteristics which denote purposiveness that, no matter what social recognition anyone may have achieved by their ability to recapitulate the present knowledge of the human race, as soon as they set out to add to that knowledge they are certain to encounter every resistance and opprobrium.’ There is certainly something to be said for this view, though, again, it is difficult to see that it possesses great persuasive force if it be paraphrased in the form: ‘It will not make any difference whether you are well-fed when the siege begins, because once the siege has begun you certainly will not get any food.’

Or she may have meant: ‘No matter how many years you spend in an inspirational state, and no matter what your achievements in those years may be, they will still in retrospect be finite; and the difference between a number of years spent in an inspirational state and the same number of years spent in considerable misery will always, in retrospect, be finite.’ There is something in this position, although one should always view with caution attempts to quantify anything so incalculable as consciousness.

Or she may have meant: ‘The intellectual level of the human race is so low that even if someone is obliged to go through life without a knowledge of those things which they would have learnt if they had been educated, their intellectual life will not thereby be impoverished. E.g. Greek literature contains no ideas which any thinking person could not originate for themselves, so no one will be losing anything if they cannot read Greek.’ This is true, though it does nothing to demonstrate that the mental operations involved in learning Greek may not be desirable in themselves. Further, it does not allow for the refreshing effect of variations in syntax and alphabet upon the jaded mind.

Or she may have meant: ‘If this person is as exceptional as all that, I can try as hard as I like to smash him up, since I shall not be able to prevent him from achieving social recognition, and so I shall not have done him any harm. If, on the other hand, my attempts to smash him up result in his failing to achieve social recognition, this will prove that he was not exceptional and therefore I shall have done no harm in smashing him up.’ If stated in terms of physical rather than intellectual well-being, few people would find this argument acceptable. ‘If I hit this man on the head with a hammer and he dies, it will prove he was so feeble he is no great loss. If I hit him on the head with a hammer and he does not die, I shall not have done him any harm because he will still be alive.’

Or she may have meant: ‘True despair comes only to those who have no longer any hope of being accepted by society; and the sooner this happens to someone the better.’

Further comments on gifted children

(copy of a letter)

Dear H

I have sent you a draft of some comments [see previous post] on one of these appalling articles about plans for the oppression and persecution of gifted children, which is obviously quite bad enough as it is, having being getting worse all the time since the 1940s and 50s when it was already bad enough, in its early stages, to destroy my life and the lives of my parents.

As usual, one has to start by rejecting fictional rationalisations and it is made very difficult to get to the real issues. A thing that would be a real help to victims would be to repeal the powers of supervision and interference of local education ‘authorities’, which appear to have come in, in their present form, in the 1945 Education Act, and which give them ‘rights’ to inspect private as well as state schools.

I can never get anyone to tell me how these ‘rights’ are defined, but so far as I can gather, if a parent exercised the right - which he still has - to ‘educate’ his child at home, the local ‘authority’ could still write reports about him, visit his child at home (?), remove child for interrogation(?), etc.

And would it be possible for the child to enter itself for the taking of an exam without the permission of its parents or the local ‘authority’? This is the sort of freedom that would be of real help (and not ‘help’) to the precocious.

I have not written to the Editor of the Sunday Times offering to write a riposte to the article by Sian Griffiths, because I know from past experience that I would not even receive a reply.

"Helping" gifted children

Another terrible article about gifted children in the Sunday Times of Dec 17th, entitled: ‘How to stop a gift turning into a curse’ (by Sian Griffiths). Answer: you can’t, because gifted children are automatically cursed by being in a society that is hostile to ability, in fact to individualism in any form.

But, a person in the position of making arrangements for gifted children may hope, when they are thrown out at the end of their ruined ‘educations’ with no way of entering a suitable career, or of becoming rich enough to set up a suitable environment for themselves in which to achieve some self fulfilment, that they will be too psychologically smashed up to whinge about it.

Under the next £60m, four-year contract to CfBT (Centre for British Teachers), from next autumn, parents and teachers will get ‘credits’ to ‘spend’ on trips, exhibitions, lectures and extra teaching in and out of school.

Note that using these ‘credits’ to help the gifted take more exams at a younger age than normal is not mentioned.

This, I suppose, is the sort of ‘help’ for gifted youngsters on which the government proposes to spend more of taxpayers’ money. This, of course, will have the effect of increasing taxation of those, like myself, who are thrown out at the end with no tolerable way of earning money, and with a need to build up capital out of anything they can make for themselves to the point where they can provide themselves with the circumstances which they should have been able to obtain from a suitable career.

Thus, it may be seen that providing more ‘help’ for those who are in the clutches of the system, will be an added disadvantage to those whose lives have already been damaged by it, and are working, in circumstances already difficult and disadvantaged, towards remedying its effects.

It is absurd to suggest that the government, and the ideology in general, is not doing ‘enough’ to destroy the lives of the ‘gifted and talented’. If there were any real desire to help them, they might be provided with independent incomes, or, at the least, tax credits when they are thrown out with no way of earning even a living, let alone the cost of the institutional environment which they may need, as I certainly did and still do, within which to work towards a satisfactory and productive life. Actually, a large tax-free capital sum, entirely free of strings as to how it was to be spent, would be the best thing.

This organisation, called the Centre for British Teachers (CfBT), has been set up to provide destructive ‘help’ for the gifted. As a former, and present, victim of the system I can only say how much I deplore this development, and how strongly I advise the parents of the gifted, and gifted children and teenagers themselves, to shun and avoid all contact with it, as well as with state schools as in general.

Christians' interest in other people

(copy of a letter)

I always notice it when other people appear to agree with something I have said, and wonder what they may be using it to reinforce, which is almost certainly something I don’t agree with.

You seemed to endorse the idea that Christians pretended to be interested in other people, and then you said that you did not mean this as a distinction from any other group of people, but that nobody was interested in other people. Well, of course, first of all you have to say what sort of interest you are talking about. People are, mostly, very interested in other people but in a negative and destructive way, which is usually rationalised as benevolent or altruistic.

However, Christianity is, at least in principle, preferable to the modern belief in society/socialism/collectivism/etc., which advocates only attitudes and ways of going on which are totally incompatible with being on a higher level. It is true that pre higher level I never thought of other people as very important, in the way that you are apparently supposed to. But, without paying any attention to it, I never cultivated any of the common forms of meanness or dishonesty, which seem to be positively favoured in the modern ideology.

If you can’t think of anything better, cultivating generosity towards people is, at least vaguely, higher level. But, of course, if it depends on a set of specific beliefs and not on having had a higher level (or, perhaps, cultivating some higher level realistic ideas pre-higher level) it is vulnerable to confusion with socialism and other forms of belief in society.

Christianity seemed to be advocating some form of post-higher-level psychology, and that would seem to be a bit better than nothing. Injunctions to generosity could, since the underlying motivation was likely to be very weak and conflicted, easily be used to produce guilt and repression, but those things are not so definitively anti-higher-level as the attitudes that believers in society seem to identify with.