Esther Rantzen and the medical profession

Extracts from an article by Esther Rantzen
about her daughter suffering from ME

When I saw my once active, energetic daughter walking heavily upstairs, and struggling to get off a sofa, at first I put it down to teenage lethargy. Now I know better, I can date the onset of the fatigue. It was triggered by a bout of glandular fever in 1992 when Emily was 14 — a common enough illness in young people, but she never fully recovered. She went back to school after a week or two, but from then on she was overcome with a tiredness that sent her back to sleep in the library or at the back of the class. She went to the school nurse, who ‘counselled’ her, mainly about the depressing effect of my career on her emotional health. Emily argued with the nurse, and never told me. I would have left my job in television instantly if Emily or I had thought the school nurse was right, but this didn’t look like emotional depression to us.

During the next two years she had longer and longer periods off school and in bed, missing out on two thirds of her education, but she still managed to catch up on her own so that her grades at GCSE were a perfect clutch of A-stars. Once again, looking back, I realise that effort was the last straw. The next term she collapsed, and left school permanently. At this point our GP referred her to a neurologist, thank heavens. Had we been referred to a psychiatrist, as many ME patients are, I might have come under suspicion of abusing her, been diagnosed with Munchausen by Proxy, and told that I was deliberately causing my daughter’s illness myself.

It may sound far-fetched, but I have met families to whom that had happened, and mothers who not only had the anxiety and distress of a child’s illness to deal with but the hideous experience of having to defend themselves against accusations of abuse. When a child’s illness baffles the medical profession they sometimes look around for someone to blame, and mum is often the nearest and easiest target. I have campaigned on behalf of parents and children who suddenly find a care order slapped on their sick child. I’ve heard of terrible scenes when screaming children were torn from their parents’ arms and locked in closed psychiatric wards. I know of one father who went to prison rather than allow that to happen to his son.

Luckily our consultant neurologist was one of the few at that time — this was 12 years ago — who recognised ME as a genuine illness, and told us that Emily was a classic case. There wasn’t much he could do, and he was quite honest about that. He told us that nobody knows what causes ME or how to cure it. (Daily Mail, 6 February 2007)

My comments

This article provides a vivid picture of the parlous position of those who are in any way above average in modern egalitarian Britain. Esther Rantzen is not overtly critical of this state of affairs; she had obtained a way of using her ability to gain reward and attention from the society around her precisely by identifying with socialist ideology and becoming a prominent promoter of interventionist ideas.

And yet she describes a state of affairs in which it is dangerous for a middle-class parent to consult a doctor about their child. They are liable to be blamed and have a psychiatric interpretation placed upon them by doctors who are working-class by upbringing and have lower IQs than their own. Their children can be taken away from them at the drop of a hat and they or their children may be incarcerated in prisons or mental institutions. This is the modern form of class warfare.

And consider the ‘counselling’ given by the school nurse, quite likely also a person of working class background and low IQ. The blame for the illness of Esther Rantzen’s daughter is placed upon her and her above-average career, thus trying to turn daughter against mother and (if possible) destroy Esther Rantzen’s career.

Before the inception of the Welfare State, such presumptuous willingness to tear down the respectable middle class was unheard of. If there was a school nurse at all, she was certainly not handing out incitements to persecute parents. People with above average IQs are, at times, surprisingly willing to consult people with lower IQs than their own, who are jealous and resentful of their actual and potential success in life.

And, although of course Esther Rantzen does not mention the possibility, it is perfectly possible that her daughter was just another victim of the ‘feminisation’ of education, which discriminates against people with ability and drive, and which has resulted in more girls than boys going to university.

It is more than likely that a daughter of Esther Rantzen would have an above average IQ and a strong drive to achievement; this could easily lead to depression in modern society. What opportunities is it prepared to offer to such people? Although, of course, only physiological causes are considered as initiating the daughter’s depressed state.

Esther Rantzen follows convention in describing her daughter’s absence from school as ‘missing out on two thirds of her education’, but in fact her daughter’s GCSE successes and the fact that she has been offered a place in Oxford illustrate how little attendance at school has to do with examination success, at least in a positive sense, although there may well be many cases in which it is a massively negative factor.

The feminisation of education

Extracts from ‘The lost boys’ by Jill Parkin

The swimming bag hit the car floor with a thump and my son hit the car seat with an even bigger thump, grumbling: ‘What’s the point?’ His primary school had just lost a swimming competition, largely because their head teacher had picked a team on the basis of enthusiasm rather than ability. To paraphrase that old cliché, it wasn’t the winning that mattered, it was the taking part.

The story of my son’s swimming competition is also the story behind yesterday’s figures showing that boys going to university are now outnumbered by girls in every subject, with 23,000 more places awarded to women than to men. The simple truth is that by the time our boys have done 12 or even 14 years in the feminised environment of today’s schools, they all ask: ‘What’s the point?’

The problems start in the classroom. Instead of the make-or-break sprint to the exam deadline, boys have to endure stultifying coursework. This system of continuous assessment means that anyone who can call up Google on a computer can cut and paste answers from the internet at home. Girls, with their more patient approach to learning, thrive under such a system. But where’s the challenge and excitement for boys? Exams used to be a chance for them to show off and think on their feet. Not any more. No wonder all too many of them fall by the wayside, and are opting out of the chance to go to university.

It’s a teacher truism that little girls want to please and little boys want to win. The trouble is that our whole system is geared to a strange idea of egalitarianism which has somehow been confused with fairness. It is egalitarian to put anyone who can float in a swimming gala, but it is not fair to those who can swim and want to compete.

Boys’ testosterone and its companion competitive streak need to be acknowledged. If they are ignored, boys get listless and they start retreating into their hoodies and terrorising the rest of us. Eventually, they spend their time brawling, picking up ASBOs instead of A-levels. (Daily Mail 1 February 2007)

My comments

The author of this article is appealing for recognition of a genetically determined difference between large groups of the population, i.e. males and females. However, we are far removed from any possibility of the recognition of individual innate differences.

I once said to a television researcher who was interviewing me as a prospect for a programme, ‘People should take into account that if someone is clearly outstanding in one respect, such as IQ, they may also have some unusual peculiarities of temperament which are very likely to lead to problems if no allowance is made for them.’ She expressed disagreement without saying anything, as other people have done to whom I have said this. ‘No,’ she looked as if she was saying, ‘allowance certainly should not be made for people with high IQs to differ from the average in any other way than their ability to score highly on IQ tests.’ I was duly not invited to take part in the programme for which she was researching.

It was my misfortune to be subjected to an educational process which may have not yet been, as this writer expresses it, ‘feminised’, but which was just as bad — if not worse — as a girl in girls’ schools and a women’s college. And in an ideological climate that was about to ‘feminise’ society. What made this misfortune so severe was that I had, to an extreme extent, the intellectual and temperamental characteristics which were recognised as more typically masculine than feminine. The female IQ bell curve was said to be narrower than the male; women were less likely to be geniuses or idiots. My IQ was off the scale at the upper end of the curve, a state of affairs which, although rare in any case, is even less likely to occur in a female than in a male.

Combined with a temperamental liking for intellectual challenge and excitement as defined in this article, this made me very vulnerable to the slow and ‘take it easy’ approach which was imposed on my education. I had a lot of channel capacity and needed to be using it; that is, I needed to be taking more subjects than most people (even than most future Oxford dons) and getting qualifications in them a lot faster.

Psychology is real and inconvenient

People are always wanting to think that I am advocating some particular psychological attitudes in a way that is applicable to the population in general, and hence to themselves if they go away from here or never come in the first place. The few websites that have links to mine mostly contain expositions of my psychological ideas which make them sound as if they are supportive of hippyish dropout psychology.

Matters are not helped, either, by the fact that both religions, and modern collectivist ideology (the new world religion), instil in people the idea that psychological events are either good or bad, and that their psychology is something for which they are responsible and should be able to alter to taste, so that they are bad if they fail to make it conform to what is socially regarded as good.

So people are very likely to have a lurking fear that they are intrinsically evil or worthless, associated with a fear of self-assertion and autonomy, since anything of that kind led to their being slapped down in infancy, and even throughout their ‘educational’ years. But so long as they don’t try to break away from the social guidelines — which in practice are tolerant of dropping out in the approved manner, as well as of having a salaried and highly-taxed ‘career’ in the approved manner — they can kid themselves that they are not minding about anything and need never confront their real problems.

Well, as a matter of fact, it is exceedingly difficult to change one’s psychological position; when I had psychological problems everyone was keen on telling me that they did not exist. I had to keep telling myself that psychology was real. It did not work in what might appear to be the rational way, or the way that would have been convenient for oneself.

But eventually, after a lot of failed attempts to make something work, and especially after proving to myself very thoroughly that the methods proposed by counsellors etc. did not work (not that I went near such people, but the recommended attitudes are ubiquitous in the modern world), I gradually acquired some degrees of freedom and found that it was possible to make some choices and re-direct certain things.

There was no way, at this stage, that I could have foreseen the extraordinary higher level outcome.

Doing the washing-up

(copy of a letter)

You commented on the fact that "Mary Poppins", as you called our incipient potential associate, did some washing-up before she went away.

This is indeed a loaded issue and I will try to explain our position a bit more, because I hope that you, like any other permanent contact that we acquire, may one day pass on some of the right ideas about us to somebody who might be interested enough to come and work here themselves, even if only part-time or temporarily. Although in fact we could easily make use of several full-time people and suffer badly from our shortage of manpower.

In exile from an academic career, I have had no option but to work towards setting up an institutional environment of my own, and the most essential part of a college or research department is the domestic and caretaking staff for keeping the environment going within which intellectual work may eventually become possible.

So we do express the hope that anyone who comes to visit in order to get to know the situation better will be prepared to lend a hand with whatever work may be going on, and this is likely to be domestic, as it is not possible for people who are new to the situation to contribute constructively to office work or word-processing associated with correspondence or books in preparation.

I spent a long time talking to the two people who came, as one has to do with potential associates, and I talked quite a lot about work we had done in the past and how it was only lack of funding that had prevented us from continuing to develop various things. Also we gave them a meal at the pub and paid for their taxi back, because I do not want potential associates to feel out of pocket after coming to spend time here.

But in fact the washing up was all either of them had done on two visits, the first one quite long, during which I had spent several hours giving them information which they seemed to want to have, mostly about areas of research which I do not like thinking about. I have no interest in empty speculation when the data cannot be increased by actual research. I mean, when I am not being able to do any research — although some fictitious theorising, and fraudulent or rubbishy ‘research’, may be being done by other people with academic status and salaries.

If I did not stipulate that visitors have to be prepared to do a modicum of whatever is necessary, our lives could be totally occupied with entertaining people who are prepared to waste our time. And don’t worry, I never get a good deal out of it, usually I get an even worse one, because most of those who come to visit take care not to stay long enough to do even that much work, or for me to start saying anything I want to say.

In case you think we have a lot of money to spend on garden plants, remember that we are outcast intellectuals, the true underclass of the egalitarian society. We cannot afford holidays, or only the shortest and cheapest, occasionally, so we think it best to make our gardens interesting so we will not suffer too much from staying at home throughout the year. Also this has the effect of enhancing the value of our houses when we come to sell them.

You know I would still be willing to lend you some money and help you make capital gains in a Pillings ISA, if you would ever like that. This is something I am prepared to do for any fairly permanent contact that we can manage to get.

It is very difficult to get people to realise that there could be any advantages in coming to work here because the modern world is anti-capitalist (as well as anti-ability).

In fact, since we are attempting to make academic careers without being able to derive any status or salary from society by giving tutorials and lectures or by doing research, we have to substitute investment for those things as a source of income, and it is a very stressful and time-consuming way of making a living. Also of course we have to pay for many facilities for ourselves which non-exiled academics are provided with. Oxbridge colleges still provide their resident academics with automatic dining hall (which implies washing up) facilities. In addition to which we have to pay for the publication of our own books. When I finished my D.Phil. philosophy thesis, Oxford University Press refused to publish it, which it would have been almost certain to do if I had been a Professor or even held any lesser appointment. My thesis was radically undermining of a large part of what is being produced worldwide by salaried academic philosophers – there are said to be 10,000 of them in America alone.

Therefore, although I got the D.Phil. for the thesis, it was largely ignored, except that its ideas were reproduced by some salaried philosophers, twisting them to produce a quite different conclusion.

Of course, you may say that the reason I do not have a Professorship, or any other statusful and salaried academic appointment, is that it was always clear that I was liable to write theses which would not be found congenial by a majority of modern philosophers.

University gender gap

Men are becoming an endangered species on university campuses, education officials warned yesterday. Latest figures show that women made up a remarkable 57 per cent of all first time graduates in 2006. They are outnumbering men in every subject including engineering and mathematics.

The trend has prompted fears that the men are being left behind as education plays to strengths associated with women such as diligence and attentiveness. Girls outscore boys in GCSEs and A-levels. The Higher Education Funding Council for England, which distributes cash to universities, warns that young men may struggle to get on in the workplace. David Eastwood, the quango’s chief executive, says employers increasingly favour graduates. ‘The wider worry is that if we are not careful we are going to arrive at a position where young lads are alienated, they are underskilled,’ he added.

Professor Alan Smithers, an education expert from Buckingham University, said: ‘The performance of girls has outstripped that of boys, first of all in GCSE, but since 2000, at A-level as well. ‘Boys may do better with the big bang terminal examination approach, whereas girls more often have patience and persistence to put in coursework.’ The proportion of men at university declined steadily throughout the 20th century. By the early 1990s, female graduates were outnumbering males for the first time. (Daily Mail, 31 January 2007)

My comments

It is already the case that boys of school leaving age are alienated. They are often what I would call demoralised criminals, which is what the educational system is aiming at producing. The whole object of the modern ideology is to destroy the individual, which means what I call centralised psychology (see my book Advice to Clever Children). Boys and men were more likely to be associated with some kind of centralised psychology -- albeit expressed in the form of very crude ideals -- so they have been particularly under attack in the modern world.

‘Girls more often have patience and persistence to put in coursework’. Girls were supposed to be interested in social interactions and be less achievement orientated, so it is not too surprising that they are better able to tolerate boring and pointless group activities, and boring and pointless work set by hostile (?) teachers.

If people are forced to undergo periods of supervised preparation for any exam they wish to take to obtain a qualification, it is inevitable, even if not deliberately planned, that the system will discriminate against types of people that school and university teachers dislike, such as those with high IQs and/or a lot of drive of their own, rather than an obsessional interest in other people and in using social structures to gain power over them.

Highly paid GPs

Comments on article entitled ‘Another dose of cash for GPs’ (Daily Mail 30 January 2007)

Highly-paid family doctors are to be offered even more money to start working in the evenings and weekends again. The move comes just three years after the vast majority of GPs stopped out-of-hours work. Since then GPs have seen their pay soar to an average of £118,000 under a new contract which scrapped their responsibility to patients outside normal working hours. Now ministers are prepared to effectively bribe GPs through fresh financial incentives to change their working patterns again after a major patient survey showed growing dissatisfaction with the current service.

My comments

Well of course, the whole object of modern ideology is that those who live by legalised crime (doctors, teachers and social workers) should have constant increases in their immoral earnings, so that the freedom of action of able and intelligent individuals should be constantly reduced by increasing taxation (confiscation of liberty).

And what modern society is aiming at is an ever increasing army of the presumptuous and unprincipled medical, educational and social Mafia. The greatest encouragement is given to those with low IQs and working class backgrounds to join some branch of this Mafia, so that they may have the fun of running and ruining the lives of the former middle and upper class, with above average IQs and possibly some recollection of oldfashioned bourgeois principles of respect for the liberty of other individuals. So that this dwindling and underprivileged class will have its freedom restricted both by having to pay for the immoral oppression, and by having ever increasing areas of their own lives subjected to it.

"The need for balance" and other euphemisms

... in the end there is no substitute for regulators such as the Financial Authority’s Callum McCarthy, a man who knows how to balance the need for intervention against Ronald Reagan’s warning: “Don’t just do something, stand there”. (Irwin Stelzer, The Sunday Times, 21 January 2007.)

My comments

This is what you might call ‘praising interventionism with faint damnation’ and that is as far as any criticism of the modern ideology goes, to the extent it can be found at all.

We at Oxford Forum are the only people attempting to publish the radical criticism that is really needed and so our books and, indeed, our existence, are censored and suppressed. There is no possibility of the downfall of civilisation being averted, reversion to a genuinely free market situation is not possible. Nevertheless we should be able to publish contrarian points of view on a scale more commensurate with the problem.

And I should be able to set up a Department of Philosophy, sub-Department Ethics and Political Theory, to make the world aware of the unexamined assumptions that go into all the pernicious pseudo-philosophy that is currently supposed to constitute the whole of what can be put forward in those areas.

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.

Schools and demoralised criminals

(copy of a letter)

As you know, I always notice when someone indicates agreement with something I have said, and I wonder what they may take me as endorsing when I do not endorse it at all.

You seemed to agree that schools are producing a population of ‘demoralised criminals’, so perhaps that means that you are in favour of ideas that schools, having become more boring and demoralising, and offering ever less scope for aspiration or ambition, should now superimpose on the existing system stricter discipline and regimentation, so that those who are least criminal and demoralised, as well as those who are those things most, will have their lives made even worse.

The modern solution to the consequences of socialism, taxation and intervention, is always more socialism, taxation and intervention.

In just the same way, having flooded the country with terrorists and immigrants, legal or otherwise, there will be ‘justification’ for greater interference with the liberty of the respectable non-criminal middle class by such means as identity cards and databases. Socialists say: ‘Why should they mind if they have nothing to hide, so long as only agents of the collective can access the data?’ But who is to say that agents of the collective will be any more scrupulous and any less spontaneously destructive than the agents of the collective in the educational and university systems who have slandered and persecuted me throughout my life, and my parents until they were dead?

It should not be necessary to discuss what schools ‘should’ be like. Schools are a very dubious concept anyway; that they were ever invented shows how nasty the human race is, and compulsory education is clearly absolutely immoral.

"Morality skills"

Another terrible article about IQ in The Times. I am being prevented from writing and publishing replies to the pernicious ideology that pours out.

Heading of article (18 December 2006):

We are about as smart as we're going to get, says IQ pioneer
- Test results are starting to level out
- Morality skills are the "next step"

My comments

It is only to be expected that the ‘rise’ in IQ consequent on the inception of the Welfare State will level out and eventually turn into a decline.

I do not place any particular reliance on the truthfulness or objectivity of academic research workers, so when I read that rises in IQ were reported, I used to think that they might well be shifting the mean, changing the types of question, or just fudging the results to suit themselves. But in fact there is a plausible way of accounting for any rise in average IQ that has really occurred.

Research in America, as reported in the controversial (i.e. largely suppressed) book Dysgenics (David Lynn, Praeger 1996) indicates that the rise may well have been caused by ironing out the effects on adult IQ of poor nutrition and medically untreated diseases, some of which cause brain damage, in early life. Those with the lowest IQs had suffered most from this double whammy, and the rises in IQ were commensurate with those resulting from the medical treatment of disease in control populations. The rise in IQ occurred only in the lowest strata of the population, although of course this raised the overall average IQ to a lesser extent.

A counteracting negative factor, although less immediately noticeable, arose from the provision of medical treatment in early life. A higher proportion of the least functional populations survived to reproductive age. Estimates have been made of the percentage increase per generation of various disabilities, including mental disabilities, resulting from genetic defects.

What are we supposed to understand by ‘morality skills’? Indoctrination in egalitarian collectivist ideology, one supposes, with its dogmatic but unstated beliefs. It takes a very high IQ, as well as some unusual personality factors, to realise what is behind these beliefs, as they depend on a large number of unexamined assumptions about underlying issues that are never even mentioned.