When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined education, my only concern was how to get back as quickly as possible into an academic career that could lead to a Professorship, so that I could have the sort of life and social identity that I needed to have.
The DPhil which turned into a BLitt which I did with the grant from Trinity College did not lead to any way of re-entering a career. Professor H H Price was, actually, no more on my side than anyone else and made no attempt to help me do the sort of thing that they would have been forced to recognise, nor to suggest any ways in which I could get to be regarded as qualified for appointments in physiology, psychology or philosophy.
It should be observed that I got the Trinity College studentship very early on in my time at the SPR, less than a year after arriving there. Hostility towards me had been building up at the SPR throughout the writing of the thesis, and by the end of it there was little left of the initial reactions in my favour.
At the end of the BLitt thesis Professor Price did not help me to access sources of finance for developing any of the lines of research suggested in the thesis or, of course, any other research in any field which might have led to career advancement. I said to him that if a BLitt was no use for re-entering an academic career, as appeared to be the case, I would need to work towards re-entry by getting further qualifications, so how could I work for a D.Sc. He said that a D.Sc. was not something you worked for, but was given on the basis of your published work. This left me with an impasse. Would it be possible, outside of an academic career, to get one’s work published? I did not even bother to ask him, nor whether he had any suggestions for obtaining funding to do the work that might enable me to re-enter a career.
Rosalind Heywood ensured that all sources of funding, both personal and institutional, were closed against me, and I was soon condemned to doing tedious and futile work with a stroboscope in Oxford in circumstances in which it was impossible to increase my savings, although I strenuously defended my small capital from erosion except by deliberate expenditure on fundraising to discomfort Salter and Sir George. Nor was it possible to regard the work being done as of any use for academic career progression, either my own or that of anyone associated with me.
I had only two aims in life at that grim time, and everything I did was directed towards them; one was academic career progression and the other financial build-up, that also being necessary in working towards restoring myself to tolerable circumstances. Until I could get back into a hotel environment as provided by a residential college, I had to work towards building up money to provide myself with the equivalent of such an environment outside of a residential college.
Rosalind and all concerned were forcing me to enact, in the grimmest way possible, their preferred fiction that I was pursuing what ‘interested’ me instead of money, since they would not accept that I was debarred from the only sort of career I could have, and I could not get money by any sort of paid employment for which I was regarded as eligible. Which, as I have said before, also meant that I could not, and never have been able to, apply for what they call ‘social support’, which would not have gone far towards providing me with adequate living circumstances even if I had been eligible for it.
Unfortunately, my supposed ‘supporters’, Sir George and Salter, knew how much money I had managed to save while I was at the SPR; I don’t suppose they were discreet about it. Most of it went into buying my first small house, and no doubt all and sundry thought that if I was squeezed badly enough, I would get into debt, as other people probably would have done, and be forced to sell the house. Then I would have been totally destitute again, as they wished me to be and thought I should be.
Fabian has noticed people commenting about my blog and website that I have a very grim, or dark, view of life. They might consider that this arises from the fact that I have always been placed in the grimmest and darkest of circumstances that the machinations of other people could devise.
Exceptional ability, as I have said before, arouses hostility, and an exceptionally able person needs commensurate social status and recognition to keep such hostility at bay. It was fatal for me not to take the School Certificate exam at 13, and to go on from there with the rapid acquisition of qualifications which I had planned for myself.
I went to the SPR with the terrible handicap of a total lack of the academic qualifications and appointments which would have been necessary to avert direct hostility and opposition.
23 April 2007
17 April 2007
The usual run of emails
Copy of a note to the person who manages emails to celiagreen.com:
Thank you for the emails you forwarded but they are depressing, as usual. The person with a fairly high IQ in Wigan, who says he can’t get on in modern society, does not, as usual, suggest coming to work, but tries to draw one into correspondence without sending any money, although we have made it clear enough that people can only find out about working here by coming on a provisional basis as voluntary workers. However, we have emailed him an invitation to the seminar and a notice about the seminar.
The CBC Radio Canada thing [wanting me for an interview at very short notice] is very rushed and subject to all sorts of negatives. As usual they want us to talk about lucid dreams when all we have to say is that we are being prevented from working on them, and what is being done by other people is very bad; as it doesn’t say it is live it is probably liable to editing, as was the last thing we did for CBC ages ago, so probably nothing significant we said would survive.
Thank you for the emails you forwarded but they are depressing, as usual. The person with a fairly high IQ in Wigan, who says he can’t get on in modern society, does not, as usual, suggest coming to work, but tries to draw one into correspondence without sending any money, although we have made it clear enough that people can only find out about working here by coming on a provisional basis as voluntary workers. However, we have emailed him an invitation to the seminar and a notice about the seminar.
The CBC Radio Canada thing [wanting me for an interview at very short notice] is very rushed and subject to all sorts of negatives. As usual they want us to talk about lucid dreams when all we have to say is that we are being prevented from working on them, and what is being done by other people is very bad; as it doesn’t say it is live it is probably liable to editing, as was the last thing we did for CBC ages ago, so probably nothing significant we said would survive.
"We are too unusual"
Copy of letter to someone we read about in the Daily Mail. We sometimes write to people in disastrous financial situations, but even they will never come to meet us to discuss a trial arrangement. As a cousin of mine once said to me viciously, "we are too unusual".
Dear Mr X
We have heard that you would be having to sell your house and this might be jeopardising your plans for retirement.
We are a group of academics setting up an independent academic organisation, at present writing and publishing books, hoping later to add other kinds of academic research. At present we live in two small houses and one apartment in a pleasant village near Oxford. There are always jobs of a gardening, DIY and domestic kind for which we try to get ancillary staff and we often point out the advantages that there could be for retired people living nearby and doing a few hours of work a day, or sporadic jobs. We need such people as permanent support for our organisation. Of course they could also earn money doing jobs for other people in the village.
We would aim to help any such associates to build up their capital to become house owners before too long, and have been successful at doing this in the past. When they had worked for us for some time so that we knew them well enough, we might be able to make them loans to facilitate such things as house-buying.
Dear Mr X
We have heard that you would be having to sell your house and this might be jeopardising your plans for retirement.
We are a group of academics setting up an independent academic organisation, at present writing and publishing books, hoping later to add other kinds of academic research. At present we live in two small houses and one apartment in a pleasant village near Oxford. There are always jobs of a gardening, DIY and domestic kind for which we try to get ancillary staff and we often point out the advantages that there could be for retired people living nearby and doing a few hours of work a day, or sporadic jobs. We need such people as permanent support for our organisation. Of course they could also earn money doing jobs for other people in the village.
We would aim to help any such associates to build up their capital to become house owners before too long, and have been successful at doing this in the past. When they had worked for us for some time so that we knew them well enough, we might be able to make them loans to facilitate such things as house-buying.
Genocidal attitude towards baby boomers and pensioners
The ‘baby boom’ generation are being forced to use their wealth to subsidise both their children and their parents, a survey found yesterday. Instead of putting money away to fund their own future, many couples on the threshold of retirement are pouring cash into supplementing their offspring. At the same time they are under increasing pressure to help out pensioner parents facing bills for utilities, council tax, home help and care.
The two-way stretch on people in their late 50s and early 60s was highlighted by a poll carried out for insurer Engage Mutual. ... The survey found that parents close to retirement themselves are paying for their children to buy homes, pay off debts or for childcare for their grandchildren. It found that six out of ten people aged between 55 and 64 are still supporting their children. ... Four out of ten baby boomers are also supporting their own parents, the survey said. ... Engage Mutual spokesman Karl Elliott said: ‘Financial circumstances in Britain have changed considerably over the last fifty years ... with continued increases in costs of living, education and care, the wealth this generation have accumulated will be stretched far further than was the case for their parents.’
(From ‘The baby boomers left paying for their children and parents’ by Stephen Doughty, Daily Mail, 14 April 2007.)
Just a part of the concealed genocide of our time (genocide in the sense of reducing the proportion of the population with high IQs).
The baby boomers are being penalised by having to subsidise both their parents and their offspring. But you can bet that it is the baby boomers with above-average IQs who are being hit the hardest.
Pensioners are more likely than other sections of the population to have above-average IQs, which no doubt is why they are constantly penalised by legislators. Longevity correlates with IQ on account of both genetic factors and of a tendency to lead more functional and forethoughtful lives.
It is up to us to counteract natural selection, as Richard Dawkins would say. Nevertheless, all the attempts to penalise those with above-average IQs by taxing them to provide medical and educational oppression for all, which is particularly oppressive to those with above-average IQs when they are themselves exposed to it, have (I would surmise) still not succeeded in reducing the average IQ of the population of pensioners below the average for the population as a whole. If they have been too thrifty and have too much in the way of savings, their pensions are reduced and they do not qualify for means-tested supplements. ‘We must help those pensioners who are most in need; help must be given preferentially to the poorest’ said government officials when means-testing for pensions was introduced. And pensioners do not attempt to use their voting power to protest, partly because (I guess) the middle class has always been most ‘public-spirited’ and uncomplaining. So the thrifty, who have built up their savings, must reduce them by living off them or be subsidised by their offspring.
And it is the offspring with above-average IQs who are most likely to have delayed starting their adult lives and have debts to pay off, because they felt the need for a professional training, or just to become a graduate so as not to be at a disadvantage, now that degrees have become so common that they are actually meaningless as an indication of ability to do anything.
Gordon Brown has recently committed himself to the idea that ‘education’ should be provided for all the children of the globe, and presumably British taxpayers should be prepared to contribute to this enormous expense.
Could not a taxpayers’ association be set up with enough willingness to protect what remains of civilisation in this country to protest vehemently at overseas expenditure, when internal sources are clearly inadequate to provide for the needs of citizens of this country, and are going to be even more wildly inadequate in the foreseeable future?
In particular, taxpayers’ associations should insist on no further overseas aid being given until recent discrimination against those with above-average IQs are reversed.
It has only of fairly recent years become the case that those with above-average IQs have to pay more for further education than the ‘poorest’, and that pensions (for which pensioners at least nominally paid contributions throughout their working lives) should be means-tested, so that those with above-average IQs would, on average, receive less than the ‘poorest’ — with, on average, lower IQs.
At the least, education and pensions should revert to the former level of ‘fairness’, at which all undergraduates and pensioners received the same. Taxpayers’ associations, and/or high IQ associations, should insist on this happening before any more of taxpayers’ money is drained off overseas.
I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.
16 April 2007
The oppressors becoming the oppressed?
One in three teachers is turning to drink, drugs, smoking and binge-eating to escape the pressure of their jobs, a survey revealed yesterday. Some are even being driven to suicide, the National Union of Teachers was told.
Troubled staff are ... blaming excessive workloads, relentless Government initiatives, the stress of Ofsted inspections, ‘bullying’ heads and rising indiscipline among pupils. ... John Illingworth, a former NUT president ... read from a letter from the wife of a headmaster who became depressed after a critical inspection ... ‘He [the headmaster] was a complete mental mess. I now see he had given up on life altogether. Two months later he ended it.’
(‘Stressed teachers driven to drink, drugs and death’, Daily Mail, 11 April 2007)
An oppressive system in which people are deprived of their freedom of action can only be maintained by ever greater oppression. The oppressors (in this case teachers) are themselves oppressed by the difficulty of imposing their will (or the will of collectivist society) on a resentful population. Therefore, no doubt it will be suggested that the oppressors must be protected by repressive measures directed at the oppressed and the parents of the oppressed.
12 April 2007
Aphorism of the month (April)
The belief in society
It is clear that before any change in human psychology, either individual or collective, could take place, it would be necessary for the belief in the meaningfulness of human society to be abandoned. (The resistance to its abandonment is of course immense.)
It is true that this is only one of the attitudes which is invalidated by the perception of total uncertainty: but psychologically it is the lynchpin of the whole affair. If you never believe that human society, or collective opinion, can confer any meaningfulness upon your actions or attitudes, you can never develop the human psychosis in a permanent form.
from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom
11 April 2007
If you really want to help the gifted ...
The following was left out of my January press release about the proposals to provide gifted children with additional "resources", because it would have made it too long, and because I had no reason to think anyone would take any notice of what I (former gifted child) think would be beneficial, compared to what "trained experts" on the subject of giftedness think. As with all other socially appointed "experts" in the modern world, one may ask "trained in what?" — clearly in what society at large wants to think about the topic in question. This does not necessarily have anything to do with what is really the case, and often appears to be related to it as an inversion designed to suppress an unacceptable reality.
Dr. Green proposes an alternative scheme:
What I would suggest is that children be provided with the possibility of greater real autonomy. Academic exams should be something that can be worked for and taken without dependence on the permission of a school, and wherever possible without dependence on attendance at an institution, although in subjects where there is a genuine need for practical work as part of the course, such as physics or chemistry, there would need to be some method of access to centres where this practical work could be done.
Children should be able to enter themselves for exams without having to seek permission from parents, teachers, doctors or any other adult authority, at least after a certain minimum age which could be on a sliding scale related to performance in a standard IQ test. An average child should be free to enter himself for exams at the age of, say, ten; the equivalent qualifying age for a child with an IQ score of 180 would be five-and-a-half.
How would children know of their opportunities? This should present no insuperable obstacles to a society which is constantly informing citizens of their ‘rights’ to obtain benefits etc. We could not rely on teachers or parents spontaneously to inform children of the examination system, but we could have the address of an information centre prominently displayed in every junior public library and after children’s programmes on the television.
A new association for gifted children could be set up which would pay the examination fees for children whose parents refused to do so, or whose school refused to let the required exam be taken under its auspices. Any child able to score as having an IQ of more than 130 would be entitled to the fees for any six GCSEs and any 3 A-levels at any time. Any exam the child passed would entitle it to the fees for one further exam at the same level. Any child who didn’t qualify for free entrance on the grounds of IQ, or who failed too many to have any further entitlement, could go to earn the necessary money at a special work centre where children could earn money – the same sort of idea as workshops for the disabled where they can earn small amounts by addressing envelopes, making baskets, etc. The rate of pay would not need to be very high as the children would still be being supported at home; they would only need a way to earn money for any exam fees that were not provided for them free.
The new association for gifted children could also make available computerised and correspondence courses of instruction which could be purchased with money earned in this way or obtained from parents or relatives. This would supply learning material for those who did not think the ‘teaching’ which they happened to be receiving at school provided them with what they needed to prepare for a given exam, together with the standard textbooks, and samples of past exam papers.
Dr. Green proposes an alternative scheme:
What I would suggest is that children be provided with the possibility of greater real autonomy. Academic exams should be something that can be worked for and taken without dependence on the permission of a school, and wherever possible without dependence on attendance at an institution, although in subjects where there is a genuine need for practical work as part of the course, such as physics or chemistry, there would need to be some method of access to centres where this practical work could be done.
Children should be able to enter themselves for exams without having to seek permission from parents, teachers, doctors or any other adult authority, at least after a certain minimum age which could be on a sliding scale related to performance in a standard IQ test. An average child should be free to enter himself for exams at the age of, say, ten; the equivalent qualifying age for a child with an IQ score of 180 would be five-and-a-half.
How would children know of their opportunities? This should present no insuperable obstacles to a society which is constantly informing citizens of their ‘rights’ to obtain benefits etc. We could not rely on teachers or parents spontaneously to inform children of the examination system, but we could have the address of an information centre prominently displayed in every junior public library and after children’s programmes on the television.
A new association for gifted children could be set up which would pay the examination fees for children whose parents refused to do so, or whose school refused to let the required exam be taken under its auspices. Any child able to score as having an IQ of more than 130 would be entitled to the fees for any six GCSEs and any 3 A-levels at any time. Any exam the child passed would entitle it to the fees for one further exam at the same level. Any child who didn’t qualify for free entrance on the grounds of IQ, or who failed too many to have any further entitlement, could go to earn the necessary money at a special work centre where children could earn money – the same sort of idea as workshops for the disabled where they can earn small amounts by addressing envelopes, making baskets, etc. The rate of pay would not need to be very high as the children would still be being supported at home; they would only need a way to earn money for any exam fees that were not provided for them free.
The new association for gifted children could also make available computerised and correspondence courses of instruction which could be purchased with money earned in this way or obtained from parents or relatives. This would supply learning material for those who did not think the ‘teaching’ which they happened to be receiving at school provided them with what they needed to prepare for a given exam, together with the standard textbooks, and samples of past exam papers.
09 April 2007
Further light on ancient history
My supervised period of ‘education’ or of acquisition of qualifications had been ruined, and left me with no usable qualifications at all, which I could easily have acquired for myself at an early age without interference.
So I had been cheated out of everything that could make my life worth living and thrown out without a Professorship or an institutional (hotel) environment, with no tolerable way of earning money, nor with any claim on ‘social security’ when I had no money.
I know you have heard it all before, but I have to keep repeating it because no one ever registers it.
So my four years at the SPR were pretty terrible even though I divided my time between London and Oxford and wrote a postgraduate thesis which I hoped would get me back into an academic career, or at least on a track that could lead to a Professorship and a residential college (hotel) environment. I had not counted on that, in view of the great hostility to me which there evidently was, and in view of the uncertainty inherent in all affairs.
So I had been making plans for the setting up of a research institute in Oxford to work on some of the areas which I had come to know about and perceived as areas of potential research. I appeared to have support from Sir George Joy and W.H. Salter in these plans. What was of the greatest importance to me was that it should be set up on a large enough scale to provide the hotel environment from the lack of which I was, after four barren years, suffering severely.
Then, I thought, I would be able to return to life and be able to experience some sense of wellbeing again, even if I did not have a Professorship – yet. I was going to need a Domestic Bursar and a porter-handyman to keep the hotel environment running, as a residential college has. I had discussed this with Sir George and Salter, ostensibly without arousing opposition. After all, they had both spent their lives in adequate hotel environments which ran autonomously, Sir George as a colonial Governor and Salter as an independent gentleman.
This, however, was the crucial goal, not to do nominal ‘research’ while continuing to live in circumstances of painful constriction which would make it impossible for anything to be done except as a chore which drained my energy still further.
The opposition aroused by Rosalind Heywood was, however, aimed at depriving me of precisely what I needed to have. I had made use of the fact that the fields of research were so uncharted that experimental work needed to be done on a certain scale, to show that an institution with considerable laboratory facilities was needed to tackle the problem, not mentioning to anyone but Sir George and Salter my desperate need for a hotel (college) environment.
Rosalind Heywood, however, having aroused universal opposition to me and my plans, forced me into the most painful position possible. I was to have no hotel environment but to be expected to ‘do research’ while struggling to support myself and associates without a salary and without eligibility for income support.
Experimental work is nominally ‘research’ and I was to be forced, not only to live without a salary or any means of career progression, but to do the very smallest and crudest type of experimental work. Even a single multi-channel EEG would be too expensive, a stroboscope provided a crude correlation with one factor that could have been measured with an EEG, so to get a tiny income supplement out of the SPR research committee I would be forced to test one single hypothesis about success at ESP and examine whether, at this level of crude approximation, this hypothesis (of little interest in itself except as justifying work on a much larger scale with as many channels of information as possible) could or could not be confirmed.
Such a type of ‘research’ could only be of interest if done for career progression, and none of our academic consultants attempted to get it accepted as a way of working towards re-entry to an academic career, either for myself or for the one of my associates who actually did the work of taking the readings.
I could not, in such circumstances, and probably not in any circumstances, do that sort of thing myself. (Nor could Professor Eysenck who, however, was in a position to rationalise his aversion to touching experimental equipment, but willingness to supervise the work of several people who were using it to extract information, by saying, ‘I don’t use the equipment myself. I think one should leave that to the experts, and stick to doing what one is good at.’ — I.e. writing the papers drawing conclusions from the experimental information.)
Anyway, I am sure Rosalind Heywood knew very well how cruel she was being. She did not make any attempt to get even the one of my associates who did the work back onto a career track as a psychologist. So in effect this associate was doing pointless and tedious work for a very bad rate of pay from the SPR Research Committee for the sake of being slandered as a person who had deliberately chosen a life of poverty and degradation for the sake of an enthusiastic ‘interest’ in some particular field of research. This also prevented her (the associate) from having any time available to help me with doing anything that might have been a bit less excoriating and futile, such as writing books, or even fragments of writing that could one day be incorporated into a book.
So we were not only deprived of the institutional environment which my research institute had been set up to provide, but forced to spend time doing work of the most futile and wearing kind as if we were ‘free to follow our interests.’
It was in these circumstances that I put as much pressure as possible on Sir George and Salter by spending money on fundraising, and contre toute attente, as the French might say, I did manage to land a small amount of funding from Cecil Harmsworth King.
This was a case of snatching a partial and temporary alleviation of my position from the jaws of defeat.
The prospects had seemed really bad but I had known that I had no option but to go on with this line of approach, even if for the rest of my life. When the King money was signed, sealed and delivered, a post-graduate ‘friend’ said, sado-sympathetically (I mean with a kind of retrospective relish), ‘You were looking really bad, you know, before this turned up.’
The money was not enough to provide for much of a hotel environment, but I spent as much of it as I could on part-time cooks, cleaners, etc., and began to gain experience of the difficulties of getting anyone to do anything useful in the modern world.
Meanwhile the wolves prowled and howled outside my incipient Research Institute cum Residential College, waiting for the money to run out.
So I had been cheated out of everything that could make my life worth living and thrown out without a Professorship or an institutional (hotel) environment, with no tolerable way of earning money, nor with any claim on ‘social security’ when I had no money.
I know you have heard it all before, but I have to keep repeating it because no one ever registers it.
So my four years at the SPR were pretty terrible even though I divided my time between London and Oxford and wrote a postgraduate thesis which I hoped would get me back into an academic career, or at least on a track that could lead to a Professorship and a residential college (hotel) environment. I had not counted on that, in view of the great hostility to me which there evidently was, and in view of the uncertainty inherent in all affairs.
So I had been making plans for the setting up of a research institute in Oxford to work on some of the areas which I had come to know about and perceived as areas of potential research. I appeared to have support from Sir George Joy and W.H. Salter in these plans. What was of the greatest importance to me was that it should be set up on a large enough scale to provide the hotel environment from the lack of which I was, after four barren years, suffering severely.
Then, I thought, I would be able to return to life and be able to experience some sense of wellbeing again, even if I did not have a Professorship – yet. I was going to need a Domestic Bursar and a porter-handyman to keep the hotel environment running, as a residential college has. I had discussed this with Sir George and Salter, ostensibly without arousing opposition. After all, they had both spent their lives in adequate hotel environments which ran autonomously, Sir George as a colonial Governor and Salter as an independent gentleman.
This, however, was the crucial goal, not to do nominal ‘research’ while continuing to live in circumstances of painful constriction which would make it impossible for anything to be done except as a chore which drained my energy still further.
The opposition aroused by Rosalind Heywood was, however, aimed at depriving me of precisely what I needed to have. I had made use of the fact that the fields of research were so uncharted that experimental work needed to be done on a certain scale, to show that an institution with considerable laboratory facilities was needed to tackle the problem, not mentioning to anyone but Sir George and Salter my desperate need for a hotel (college) environment.
Rosalind Heywood, however, having aroused universal opposition to me and my plans, forced me into the most painful position possible. I was to have no hotel environment but to be expected to ‘do research’ while struggling to support myself and associates without a salary and without eligibility for income support.
Experimental work is nominally ‘research’ and I was to be forced, not only to live without a salary or any means of career progression, but to do the very smallest and crudest type of experimental work. Even a single multi-channel EEG would be too expensive, a stroboscope provided a crude correlation with one factor that could have been measured with an EEG, so to get a tiny income supplement out of the SPR research committee I would be forced to test one single hypothesis about success at ESP and examine whether, at this level of crude approximation, this hypothesis (of little interest in itself except as justifying work on a much larger scale with as many channels of information as possible) could or could not be confirmed.
Such a type of ‘research’ could only be of interest if done for career progression, and none of our academic consultants attempted to get it accepted as a way of working towards re-entry to an academic career, either for myself or for the one of my associates who actually did the work of taking the readings.
I could not, in such circumstances, and probably not in any circumstances, do that sort of thing myself. (Nor could Professor Eysenck who, however, was in a position to rationalise his aversion to touching experimental equipment, but willingness to supervise the work of several people who were using it to extract information, by saying, ‘I don’t use the equipment myself. I think one should leave that to the experts, and stick to doing what one is good at.’ — I.e. writing the papers drawing conclusions from the experimental information.)
Anyway, I am sure Rosalind Heywood knew very well how cruel she was being. She did not make any attempt to get even the one of my associates who did the work back onto a career track as a psychologist. So in effect this associate was doing pointless and tedious work for a very bad rate of pay from the SPR Research Committee for the sake of being slandered as a person who had deliberately chosen a life of poverty and degradation for the sake of an enthusiastic ‘interest’ in some particular field of research. This also prevented her (the associate) from having any time available to help me with doing anything that might have been a bit less excoriating and futile, such as writing books, or even fragments of writing that could one day be incorporated into a book.
So we were not only deprived of the institutional environment which my research institute had been set up to provide, but forced to spend time doing work of the most futile and wearing kind as if we were ‘free to follow our interests.’
It was in these circumstances that I put as much pressure as possible on Sir George and Salter by spending money on fundraising, and contre toute attente, as the French might say, I did manage to land a small amount of funding from Cecil Harmsworth King.
This was a case of snatching a partial and temporary alleviation of my position from the jaws of defeat.
The prospects had seemed really bad but I had known that I had no option but to go on with this line of approach, even if for the rest of my life. When the King money was signed, sealed and delivered, a post-graduate ‘friend’ said, sado-sympathetically (I mean with a kind of retrospective relish), ‘You were looking really bad, you know, before this turned up.’
The money was not enough to provide for much of a hotel environment, but I spent as much of it as I could on part-time cooks, cleaners, etc., and began to gain experience of the difficulties of getting anyone to do anything useful in the modern world.
Meanwhile the wolves prowled and howled outside my incipient Research Institute cum Residential College, waiting for the money to run out.
06 April 2007
After a higher level
On a higher level* everything is determined by the presence of the inconceivable significance. Staying on a higher level means not allowing anything to occlude it, and this is very easy, as it is very obvious, and it does not occur to you to want to do anything that would occlude it, although it is possible to see that certain kinds of things would, if they were to present themselves and you identified with them.
It is a lot easier than, say, remaining lucid in a lucid dream, because in a lucid dream you have to remember to keep checking up on whether you are still aware that you are dreaming, and it is quite easy to forget to do this and to become emotionally involved in the storyline of the dream.
Post-higher level one focuses on where the significance would be, if it were there, and one goes on avoiding anything that would be occlusive, so that no resistances get set up to make it more difficult to return to a higher level. This is still fairly easy, as one goes on having a definite sense of direction and it is clear what ways of thinking would not be compatible with the actual presence of the significance.
All psychology is about risk-taking although this is only obvious in higher level psychology, and centralised psychology enables you to act against total opposition, with no support at all, and no expectation of a positive outcome.
This was most obvious when my plans were opposed for setting up a research organisation in Oxford, which I had been making while I worked for a would-be D.Phil., which became a B.Litt. Everyone appeared to find the plan threatening as it approached realisation, and all the promises of support fell through. I had no way back into any sort of academic career, and there was no other way I could support myself. I had, as yet, very little capital saved up, and I would not be able to draw anything from social security, as they like to call it, for reasons already explained. So long as I stayed at the SPR I had at least a miserable pittance of a salary, out of which further savings could be made.
I perceived that the only way of using any leverage I had on the situation, arising from Sir George Joy’s and W.H. Salter’s recent memories of the support they had expressed and the promises that had been made, was to resign quickly and appeal for funding ostentatiously; if I delayed, their memories of promises would dim and they could assume that I had sensibly given up on my plan.
So I resigned, and siege conditions of my research unit in Oxford commenced. It was clearly my only hope of salvaging anything from the SPR situation, but perhaps I had no hope at all; however it did feel right on higher level terms, and any alternative plans to hang around waiting for something better to turn up felt distinctly wrong.
My appeals for money brought in peanuts; everyone knew I was to be given no support. The agony should not be prolonged, as Rosalind Heywood told everyone. Sir George and Salter were a bit uncomfortable but inertial.
So I employed an expensive fundraiser in order to expose them to some semblance of publicity. The fundraiser was hostile as well, and the meetings were evasive. I was throwing money at the problem and did not have much to throw. I certainly would not get into debt. Nevertheless, it did feel like the right thing to do, and in a certain way was unconflicted. The only likely outcome was that I would spend all my tiny capital and be left even worse off struggling to survive under siege conditions.
But, after several gruelling meetings at the fundraiser’s office in London, Sir George vouchsafed the information that Cecil Harmsworth King had approached the SPR, wishing to give money for some research to be done.
I said to Sir George that I would write to Cecil King and say that I would do the research. None of the SPR’s Professors were keen to have anything to do with it, they were well enough financed for squabbling and backbiting.
Maybe Sir George thought that if he let me get an absolute minimum of money from Cecil King, he and Salter would be let off the hook and I would not go on pestering them about making approaches to Coombe-Tennants, Balfours, and other potential supporters who had been mentioned. At a later fundraising meeting Sir George tried to persuade me to apply for a certain amount of money, approximately equivalent to three postgraduate research scholarships, i.e. about enough to support three people in the most constricted way. Sir George happened to know, he said, that this was just the amount of support Cecil King had in mind to give, and it would not be advisable to ask for more. I did not believe him.
So eventually it came off, at least to the extent that I got a very modest amount of money, but more than Sir George had wanted me to have.
It was a very nerve-racking process which depended entirely on my appearing to have senior supporters who would act as Trustees, although Sir George and Salter did their best to scupper everything by their prevarication and lack of enthusiasm. Nevertheless Cecil King signed the seven year covenant before Rosalind Heywood got wind of what was happening. I did not place much reliance on Sir George’s discretion and I was on tenterhooks in case he told Rosalind before the covenant was signed, but he cannot have done, although as soon as the covenant was public knowledge, she got on the phone to Cecil King. He thought she was a wonderful person and I was all washed up with him. However, he had signed the covenant so I did get seven years of very modest financial support from him, but she had put the kybosh on his giving me any more support than that.
Seeing that I could not now be absolutely squeezed into non-existence, at least for seven years, Rosalind set about mobilising Professor Hardy to set up a rival establishment in Oxford, as similar as possible to mine, to deflect any publicity or finance that might otherwise have reached me, in spite of her energetic and efficient networking.
And that is how the Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre came into existence. Initially it was to be an exact replica of mine, but Hardy, who did not really want to do anything anyway, decided that warm and woozy religiosity would be more congenial.
* state of existential awareness
It is a lot easier than, say, remaining lucid in a lucid dream, because in a lucid dream you have to remember to keep checking up on whether you are still aware that you are dreaming, and it is quite easy to forget to do this and to become emotionally involved in the storyline of the dream.
Post-higher level one focuses on where the significance would be, if it were there, and one goes on avoiding anything that would be occlusive, so that no resistances get set up to make it more difficult to return to a higher level. This is still fairly easy, as one goes on having a definite sense of direction and it is clear what ways of thinking would not be compatible with the actual presence of the significance.
All psychology is about risk-taking although this is only obvious in higher level psychology, and centralised psychology enables you to act against total opposition, with no support at all, and no expectation of a positive outcome.
This was most obvious when my plans were opposed for setting up a research organisation in Oxford, which I had been making while I worked for a would-be D.Phil., which became a B.Litt. Everyone appeared to find the plan threatening as it approached realisation, and all the promises of support fell through. I had no way back into any sort of academic career, and there was no other way I could support myself. I had, as yet, very little capital saved up, and I would not be able to draw anything from social security, as they like to call it, for reasons already explained. So long as I stayed at the SPR I had at least a miserable pittance of a salary, out of which further savings could be made.
I perceived that the only way of using any leverage I had on the situation, arising from Sir George Joy’s and W.H. Salter’s recent memories of the support they had expressed and the promises that had been made, was to resign quickly and appeal for funding ostentatiously; if I delayed, their memories of promises would dim and they could assume that I had sensibly given up on my plan.
So I resigned, and siege conditions of my research unit in Oxford commenced. It was clearly my only hope of salvaging anything from the SPR situation, but perhaps I had no hope at all; however it did feel right on higher level terms, and any alternative plans to hang around waiting for something better to turn up felt distinctly wrong.
My appeals for money brought in peanuts; everyone knew I was to be given no support. The agony should not be prolonged, as Rosalind Heywood told everyone. Sir George and Salter were a bit uncomfortable but inertial.
So I employed an expensive fundraiser in order to expose them to some semblance of publicity. The fundraiser was hostile as well, and the meetings were evasive. I was throwing money at the problem and did not have much to throw. I certainly would not get into debt. Nevertheless, it did feel like the right thing to do, and in a certain way was unconflicted. The only likely outcome was that I would spend all my tiny capital and be left even worse off struggling to survive under siege conditions.
But, after several gruelling meetings at the fundraiser’s office in London, Sir George vouchsafed the information that Cecil Harmsworth King had approached the SPR, wishing to give money for some research to be done.
I said to Sir George that I would write to Cecil King and say that I would do the research. None of the SPR’s Professors were keen to have anything to do with it, they were well enough financed for squabbling and backbiting.
Maybe Sir George thought that if he let me get an absolute minimum of money from Cecil King, he and Salter would be let off the hook and I would not go on pestering them about making approaches to Coombe-Tennants, Balfours, and other potential supporters who had been mentioned. At a later fundraising meeting Sir George tried to persuade me to apply for a certain amount of money, approximately equivalent to three postgraduate research scholarships, i.e. about enough to support three people in the most constricted way. Sir George happened to know, he said, that this was just the amount of support Cecil King had in mind to give, and it would not be advisable to ask for more. I did not believe him.
So eventually it came off, at least to the extent that I got a very modest amount of money, but more than Sir George had wanted me to have.
It was a very nerve-racking process which depended entirely on my appearing to have senior supporters who would act as Trustees, although Sir George and Salter did their best to scupper everything by their prevarication and lack of enthusiasm. Nevertheless Cecil King signed the seven year covenant before Rosalind Heywood got wind of what was happening. I did not place much reliance on Sir George’s discretion and I was on tenterhooks in case he told Rosalind before the covenant was signed, but he cannot have done, although as soon as the covenant was public knowledge, she got on the phone to Cecil King. He thought she was a wonderful person and I was all washed up with him. However, he had signed the covenant so I did get seven years of very modest financial support from him, but she had put the kybosh on his giving me any more support than that.
Seeing that I could not now be absolutely squeezed into non-existence, at least for seven years, Rosalind set about mobilising Professor Hardy to set up a rival establishment in Oxford, as similar as possible to mine, to deflect any publicity or finance that might otherwise have reached me, in spite of her energetic and efficient networking.
And that is how the Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre came into existence. Initially it was to be an exact replica of mine, but Hardy, who did not really want to do anything anyway, decided that warm and woozy religiosity would be more congenial.
* state of existential awareness
03 April 2007
My need for a hotel environment
(copy of a letter)
Reviewing what I have written about the stresses that resulted from the retardation of my education, or more to the point, my acquisition of qualifications, so that in the end I was thrown out with no qualification at all, I think I have still underemphasised the importance of my need for a hotel environment. This is such an unacceptable thing to mention that one starts by mentioning other factors first, such as the relative desirability of research in physics rather than maths, and the relative undesirability of a Fellowship or Professorship in maths rather than physics, even if one could get those things.
In fact, the greatest deterrent to feeling motivated to do a degree at the age of 21 for the purpose of spending at least another three years doing a DPhil for the purpose of moving towards a very belated residential Fellowship or Professorship as soon as possible, was that although the Fellowship or Professorship should have provided a hotel environment, the years of doing a DPhil to work towards that outcome would not have done, and this made it very difficult to generate any motivation to work towards another three arduous and unrewarding years, living in circumstances that would rule out any possibility of getting anything out of life, the positive outcome at the end of which was highly dubious, seeing that my past life had been so distorted.
As a DPhil student I would have been living in lodgings, not in college, and with very little access to dining facilities in college. So that was the first horror that I would face on getting a research scholarship to do a DPhil, which of course in the end I did not, being condemned by that failure to the even worse horror of living without a hotel environment and with no academic career track at all along which I could consider myself to be working, however hypothetically, for an appointment accompanied by the hotel environment which was the minimum necessity for a tolerable (not intolerable) life.
If the years since I was prevented from taking the School Certificate at 13 had been less bad I might have found the prospect of continuing to struggle with bad circumstances less daunting. But there came first the additional shock of finding out that I would not even be free to do research (reconstruct physics ad lib) but would have to spend another year taking some ‘qualifying’ exams, solving some other types of problems based on the very dubious theoretical structures of quantum theory as it was. And even then, the additional shock was, that I would not be free to do free-floating research, but that the specific thesis topic I proposed was considered ‘too theoretical’ and I would be faced instead with writing a thesis considered suitable for a mathematician rather than a physicist.
It was very difficult to feel motivated about working for a ‘reward’ so dubious as doing yet another exam in problem-solving followed by a thesis of a tedious nature, in effect much the same kind of thing as solving problems for the sake of proving to other people that one could, all in order to work towards an uncertain and hypothetical reward which might not, even if one could get it, provide the conditions of a hotel environment.
Of course, the alternative was still more horrific, since in total exile from an academic career I would certainly not have the equivalent of a residential college (hotel) environment, nor any tolerable way of earning any money at all, nor any way, tolerable or intolerable, of working towards re-entry to an academic career which was capable, at least potentially, of leading towards what I needed to have.
It was not surprising that I had come to this pass since my education had always been run by people who wanted me not to be able to get anything out of life that I wanted and desperately needed to have. They had not been motivated to let me establish my claim on the sort of career that I needed to have when I was still at an age when doing so could have been a positive rather than a negative experience, and I had had no say in the matter, so it was not really at all surprising that they had succeeded in placing me in this horrifying situation.
However much they liked to ignore the fact, if I was confronted by a situation in which I did not have a hotel environment, the lights of my life went out, and getting an adequate environment became the primary consideration. I did not suppose that the lights could come on again until I had, as a minimum necessity, the minimum requirements of a life that I could get something out of.
I am sorry to have to spell this out at such length, but people have always maintained a blind spot in this, the most crucial area of my life. At least, a blind spot in any positive sense, but great sensitivity in the sense that any move that I might have made to alleviate my position was violently and ingeniously opposed.
Reviewing what I have written about the stresses that resulted from the retardation of my education, or more to the point, my acquisition of qualifications, so that in the end I was thrown out with no qualification at all, I think I have still underemphasised the importance of my need for a hotel environment. This is such an unacceptable thing to mention that one starts by mentioning other factors first, such as the relative desirability of research in physics rather than maths, and the relative undesirability of a Fellowship or Professorship in maths rather than physics, even if one could get those things.
In fact, the greatest deterrent to feeling motivated to do a degree at the age of 21 for the purpose of spending at least another three years doing a DPhil for the purpose of moving towards a very belated residential Fellowship or Professorship as soon as possible, was that although the Fellowship or Professorship should have provided a hotel environment, the years of doing a DPhil to work towards that outcome would not have done, and this made it very difficult to generate any motivation to work towards another three arduous and unrewarding years, living in circumstances that would rule out any possibility of getting anything out of life, the positive outcome at the end of which was highly dubious, seeing that my past life had been so distorted.
As a DPhil student I would have been living in lodgings, not in college, and with very little access to dining facilities in college. So that was the first horror that I would face on getting a research scholarship to do a DPhil, which of course in the end I did not, being condemned by that failure to the even worse horror of living without a hotel environment and with no academic career track at all along which I could consider myself to be working, however hypothetically, for an appointment accompanied by the hotel environment which was the minimum necessity for a tolerable (not intolerable) life.
If the years since I was prevented from taking the School Certificate at 13 had been less bad I might have found the prospect of continuing to struggle with bad circumstances less daunting. But there came first the additional shock of finding out that I would not even be free to do research (reconstruct physics ad lib) but would have to spend another year taking some ‘qualifying’ exams, solving some other types of problems based on the very dubious theoretical structures of quantum theory as it was. And even then, the additional shock was, that I would not be free to do free-floating research, but that the specific thesis topic I proposed was considered ‘too theoretical’ and I would be faced instead with writing a thesis considered suitable for a mathematician rather than a physicist.
It was very difficult to feel motivated about working for a ‘reward’ so dubious as doing yet another exam in problem-solving followed by a thesis of a tedious nature, in effect much the same kind of thing as solving problems for the sake of proving to other people that one could, all in order to work towards an uncertain and hypothetical reward which might not, even if one could get it, provide the conditions of a hotel environment.
Of course, the alternative was still more horrific, since in total exile from an academic career I would certainly not have the equivalent of a residential college (hotel) environment, nor any tolerable way of earning any money at all, nor any way, tolerable or intolerable, of working towards re-entry to an academic career which was capable, at least potentially, of leading towards what I needed to have.
It was not surprising that I had come to this pass since my education had always been run by people who wanted me not to be able to get anything out of life that I wanted and desperately needed to have. They had not been motivated to let me establish my claim on the sort of career that I needed to have when I was still at an age when doing so could have been a positive rather than a negative experience, and I had had no say in the matter, so it was not really at all surprising that they had succeeded in placing me in this horrifying situation.
However much they liked to ignore the fact, if I was confronted by a situation in which I did not have a hotel environment, the lights of my life went out, and getting an adequate environment became the primary consideration. I did not suppose that the lights could come on again until I had, as a minimum necessity, the minimum requirements of a life that I could get something out of.
I am sorry to have to spell this out at such length, but people have always maintained a blind spot in this, the most crucial area of my life. At least, a blind spot in any positive sense, but great sensitivity in the sense that any move that I might have made to alleviate my position was violently and ingeniously opposed.
29 March 2007
The irony of being "free"
Comments on being ‘free’ to do what ‘interests’ me
(copy of a letter)
Let us consider the amazing assertion by a philosopher at Somerville College that if I got a proper full-time salaried academic appointment I would be less free than as an unsalaried, statusless outcast.
What makes her think that I would value ‘freedom’ more than a social identity? I might well choose to sacrifice ‘freedom’, if I had any, for the sake of social status. I never expected, or wanted, to have to live without social status, and I was deeply grieved and shocked to find myself thrown out of society fifty years ago, not only without the Professorial status which I should have acquired at about 15, but without any status at all as an academic on a career track that could ever lead to a Professorship.
If, when I was thrown out 50 years ago, I had had the choice between (a) a Professorship, even with less than ideal residential hotel facilities, and (b) an equivalent salary, perfect hotel environment, and freedom to do whatever I liked within these conditions, but with no hope that what I did could ever secure for me any academic advancement, I would have settled for the Professorship.
Only if there was real hope of my ‘free’ but statusless environment leading to an ever-increasing scale of operations might I have considered it worth sacrificing the social identity of a Professor — which would have made (and still would make) one’s relations with society so much more ‘interesting’, to use that much-abused word. Even an expanding scale of operations as an identity-less freelance individual would have seemed sterile, in a certain way.
The model of the situation in which the ‘freedom’ of being unsalaried and statusless could appear preferable to a salaried Professorial position does not hold water, because if progressive and expanding work were ever possible, it would lead to social recognition and hence to academic reinstatement. So the idea of choosing a permanently exiled life in order to be ‘more free’ is an artificial one, and certainly never occurred to me, even when I hoped to be able to get a decent level of financial support from parapsychological sources.
I never actually considered the work I did manage to do as an outcast as sterile, in the sense of useless for making a return to an academic career, although it turned out to be so. The nostalgic pull towards a social identity was very strong. In practice, any possibility of opportunity for expansion appears to have been ruled out by my lack of identity.
The idea that I could prefer the ‘freedom’ provided by the bad, constricted and hopeless circumstances of the academic outcast to the much better circumstances of even imperfect Professorships is ludicrous and cruel.
I might have felt that the hotel-equivalent circumstances left something to be desired, but the salary would have provided me with enough to pay for at least a parttime housekeeper cum p.a., so I would have had at least the minimum conditions for getting something out of life.
(copy of a letter)
Let us consider the amazing assertion by a philosopher at Somerville College that if I got a proper full-time salaried academic appointment I would be less free than as an unsalaried, statusless outcast.
What makes her think that I would value ‘freedom’ more than a social identity? I might well choose to sacrifice ‘freedom’, if I had any, for the sake of social status. I never expected, or wanted, to have to live without social status, and I was deeply grieved and shocked to find myself thrown out of society fifty years ago, not only without the Professorial status which I should have acquired at about 15, but without any status at all as an academic on a career track that could ever lead to a Professorship.
If, when I was thrown out 50 years ago, I had had the choice between (a) a Professorship, even with less than ideal residential hotel facilities, and (b) an equivalent salary, perfect hotel environment, and freedom to do whatever I liked within these conditions, but with no hope that what I did could ever secure for me any academic advancement, I would have settled for the Professorship.
Only if there was real hope of my ‘free’ but statusless environment leading to an ever-increasing scale of operations might I have considered it worth sacrificing the social identity of a Professor — which would have made (and still would make) one’s relations with society so much more ‘interesting’, to use that much-abused word. Even an expanding scale of operations as an identity-less freelance individual would have seemed sterile, in a certain way.
The model of the situation in which the ‘freedom’ of being unsalaried and statusless could appear preferable to a salaried Professorial position does not hold water, because if progressive and expanding work were ever possible, it would lead to social recognition and hence to academic reinstatement. So the idea of choosing a permanently exiled life in order to be ‘more free’ is an artificial one, and certainly never occurred to me, even when I hoped to be able to get a decent level of financial support from parapsychological sources.
I never actually considered the work I did manage to do as an outcast as sterile, in the sense of useless for making a return to an academic career, although it turned out to be so. The nostalgic pull towards a social identity was very strong. In practice, any possibility of opportunity for expansion appears to have been ruled out by my lack of identity.
The idea that I could prefer the ‘freedom’ provided by the bad, constricted and hopeless circumstances of the academic outcast to the much better circumstances of even imperfect Professorships is ludicrous and cruel.
I might have felt that the hotel-equivalent circumstances left something to be desired, but the salary would have provided me with enough to pay for at least a parttime housekeeper cum p.a., so I would have had at least the minimum conditions for getting something out of life.
28 March 2007
The only real dissent
(copy of a letter)
There are at least two outrageous news stories every day in the Daily Mail and my suppressed Oxford Forum publishing company (supported only by our own money) can’t publish books fast enough.
In fact we are the only voice of real dissent.
Surely you know someone who could give us a million pounds, just for starters, to make our protests a trifle louder?
Other sources of protest are feeble and halfhearted. For example, and typically, today’s horror article in the Mail, entitled “All pupils should be checked for criminal tendencies, says Blair”, contains this feeble and (as usual) concessive piece of faint criticism from the director of Liberty (no less), Shami Chakrabarti. She is quoted as saying,
There are at least two outrageous news stories every day in the Daily Mail and my suppressed Oxford Forum publishing company (supported only by our own money) can’t publish books fast enough.
In fact we are the only voice of real dissent.
Surely you know someone who could give us a million pounds, just for starters, to make our protests a trifle louder?
Other sources of protest are feeble and halfhearted. For example, and typically, today’s horror article in the Mail, entitled “All pupils should be checked for criminal tendencies, says Blair”, contains this feeble and (as usual) concessive piece of faint criticism from the director of Liberty (no less), Shami Chakrabarti. She is quoted as saying,
“Who for example can disagree with the idea of ‘early intervention’? But ...”
Well, I can disagree for one, and so can everyone else at Oxford Forum. All intervention is immoral, and so is the taxation that is used to support it.
It is high time that this was said, even if it can at best only very slightly decelerate the headlong rush to destruction of Western civilisation. And no one is going to say it but us.
27 March 2007
Giving money to beggars
When I say that I could never draw social security however hard up I was, because I had been left without any usable qualifications, I mean not merely hard up relative to the cost of remaining physically alive, but hard up relative to the cost of providing myself with the equivalent of a residential college (hotel) environment and the secretarial and other facilities that might have been provided by the sort of academic career which I should have been having, as well as a Professorial salary.
I felt very hard up indeed, and saved money very hard out of my miserable pittance of a salary at the Society for Psychical Research, although it looked as though it would take thousands of years to reach a level of capital at which I could provide myself with the circumstances I needed to have; unless something completely improbable and unpredictable happened in my favour.
I certainly found it very grim to be in such a situation; I could never have believed that anything so terrible could happen to me, nor that if it did, there would be absolutely nobody who would give me any help in remedying my position. Nevertheless I went on giving money to beggars, in order to remember the higher level perspective and not feel totally shut in to an ostensibly hopeless imprisonment in the ‘normal’ world.
I remember one time when Sir George was visiting me in Oxford where I was doing a post-graduate degree which I hoped would provide me with a way of re-accessing an academic career. In the event it did not, because there was nobody who did not want me to be kept down and out, including my own supervisor, Professor Price, who was under the influence of two sources of hostility against me, the Principal of Somerville and Rosalind Heywood at the SPR.
However, while doing this thesis I was in lodgings near Somerville and Sir George and two other Somervillians were in the room with me. A beggar knocked at the door and asked for money. I got everyone to turn out their loose cash and see what they felt able to contribute. Sir George produced a note, but rather disapprovingly. Admittedly he was having to survive on a totally inadequate pension, so he might just have said he was needing it too badly himself, but what he said was, ‘You shouldn’t give him so much. He will only get drunk on it.’
‘That is entirely beside the point,’ I said. I might have added, but didn’t, ‘Money is what he asked for, so that is what he shall have, and what he does with it is nobody’s business but his own.’
Then I went back to the front door to give him the collection.
I felt very hard up indeed, and saved money very hard out of my miserable pittance of a salary at the Society for Psychical Research, although it looked as though it would take thousands of years to reach a level of capital at which I could provide myself with the circumstances I needed to have; unless something completely improbable and unpredictable happened in my favour.
I certainly found it very grim to be in such a situation; I could never have believed that anything so terrible could happen to me, nor that if it did, there would be absolutely nobody who would give me any help in remedying my position. Nevertheless I went on giving money to beggars, in order to remember the higher level perspective and not feel totally shut in to an ostensibly hopeless imprisonment in the ‘normal’ world.
I remember one time when Sir George was visiting me in Oxford where I was doing a post-graduate degree which I hoped would provide me with a way of re-accessing an academic career. In the event it did not, because there was nobody who did not want me to be kept down and out, including my own supervisor, Professor Price, who was under the influence of two sources of hostility against me, the Principal of Somerville and Rosalind Heywood at the SPR.
However, while doing this thesis I was in lodgings near Somerville and Sir George and two other Somervillians were in the room with me. A beggar knocked at the door and asked for money. I got everyone to turn out their loose cash and see what they felt able to contribute. Sir George produced a note, but rather disapprovingly. Admittedly he was having to survive on a totally inadequate pension, so he might just have said he was needing it too badly himself, but what he said was, ‘You shouldn’t give him so much. He will only get drunk on it.’
‘That is entirely beside the point,’ I said. I might have added, but didn’t, ‘Money is what he asked for, so that is what he shall have, and what he does with it is nobody’s business but his own.’
Then I went back to the front door to give him the collection.
26 March 2007
The evolution of dishonesty
In dealing with external physical reality, it would seem that all the evolutionary forces must be on the side of honesty and realism. It will do a farmer little good to pretend he has not noticed the signs of an approaching storm. But when living beings are dealing with others, even with those of their own species, there are many ways in which it can be useful to mislead other life forms about the true state of affairs, including your disposition and intentions. Transparent plankton could be said to be pretending not to be there, although they are, and by the time one arrives at something so complex as a normal plant, one finds the most elaborate reproductions and imitations being offered in order to induce insects to behave in the way that will best disseminate the plant's pollen.
Simple forms of dishonesty in animal life are well-known; for example, the bird that feigns an injured wing in order to lure a predator away from its nest. But clearly by far the greatest opportunities for dishonesty must be found in the social interactions of human beings, whose social forms are so much more complex and varied than those of other animals. We must suppose that a high degree of social dishonesty can greatly enhance the organism's chance of survival and successful reproduction, to the extent that the evolutionary pressures upon it depend on competition and successful interaction with its own kind rather than on attempts to overcome the difficulties presented by the physical world around it. Such a favourable strategy will probably become, as there is every reason to think it has become, a dominant mode of human behaviour and, like other successful strategies, it is likely to occur in association with a liking for this form of behaviour and a tendency in the direction of using it.
But since other people are aware of this strategy, a high degree of sophistication must be aimed at, and it may be that that will be best achieved if a person contrives to deceive himself concerning his own motives and intentions.
From the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom
Simple forms of dishonesty in animal life are well-known; for example, the bird that feigns an injured wing in order to lure a predator away from its nest. But clearly by far the greatest opportunities for dishonesty must be found in the social interactions of human beings, whose social forms are so much more complex and varied than those of other animals. We must suppose that a high degree of social dishonesty can greatly enhance the organism's chance of survival and successful reproduction, to the extent that the evolutionary pressures upon it depend on competition and successful interaction with its own kind rather than on attempts to overcome the difficulties presented by the physical world around it. Such a favourable strategy will probably become, as there is every reason to think it has become, a dominant mode of human behaviour and, like other successful strategies, it is likely to occur in association with a liking for this form of behaviour and a tendency in the direction of using it.
But since other people are aware of this strategy, a high degree of sophistication must be aimed at, and it may be that that will be best achieved if a person contrives to deceive himself concerning his own motives and intentions.
From the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom
25 March 2007
The choice is: school or prison
Extracts from ‘Fines or prison may be used to keep pupils in class to 18’ (Daily Mail 23 March 2007) with some comments by me in italics.
Terrible things are going on. The appalling proposals for accelerating the breakdown of civilisation pour out faster than I can put even a few comments about them on my inconspicuous and widely ignored blog. Now they propose to deprive everyone of their freedom of action until they are 18. If people had any awareness of the importance of liberty as an abstract principle there would be rioting in the streets.
There seems to be even less outrage at this idea than there was when the school-leaving age was raised from 15 to 16. But at that time most journalists had themselves been educated before the inception of the Welfare State in 1945; nowadays most journalists have themselves been brought up within it.
I believe that when income tax came in at a penny in the pound someone is supposed to have commented, ‘This is the end of civilisation’. For a long time this was quoted as a funny old-fashioned attitude, because everything seemed, in most people’s eyes, to be proceeding in an acceptable way. But I must admit that by now it seems blatantly obvious that if someone said that, he was right, and even if no one said it, it is true. The idea of any supposed benefit being provided by the state, and financed by the reduction of liberty of individuals, can only lead to ever-increasing oppression and persecution.
If you can get a supposed or real benefit only if you can afford to pay for it yourself, you are at least protected from being placed at the mercy of what other people with to impose upon your life instead of what you might, if you could, choose to pay for.
People brought up in the modern world scarcely ever question the unexamined assumptions which are universally made, and which it is taboo to question. It is assumed that education is ‘a good’, so anything that goes under that name is unquestionably ‘a good’, and more of ‘a good’ must be ‘better’ than less of it.
Compulsory education came in at the end of the 19th century, adding to the writing on the wall that resulted from the inception of income tax; then there was female suffrage, then the Welfare State in 1945. Now, sixty years later, we are reaping the whirlwind that has resulted from those events.
Under Alan Johnson's plan children starting secondary school next year will be the first generation expected to stay in education or training until they reach 18. Teenagers face £50 on-the-spot fines and even jail if they refuse to stay in education until they are 18, it has been revealed ...My comments
[Alan Johnson’s] proposals will have massive implications for employers, particularly small firms which rely on low-wage teenagers. Bosses face criminal sanctions if they refuse to release teenagers for training and so do parents who put children aged 16 to 18 to work in the family business without sending them off for training ...
In a green paper titled Raising Expectations, Mr Johnson outlined four options for over-16s - school, college, apprenticeships or work-based learning. [No mention, of course, of correspondence courses which do not expose a person to direct social hostility. The Open University is not open to those under the age of 18.]
Youngsters employed for at least 20 hours a week would need to do part-time study totalling 280 hours a year. ... Schools, colleges and employers providing training would be placed under a duty to report youngsters if they drop out.
Those persistently refusing offers of education and training would be handed 'attendance orders' setting out where, when and how often they should turn up. Like anti-social behaviour orders they would bring criminal sanctions if breached. ... Mr Johnson insisted: 'No youngster would be in the criminal area of the law unless they are very hardcore and we have gone through a very very fulsome process, including counselling.' ["Counselling" — deprivation of liberty so as to have one’s mind exposed to brainwashing.]
Terrible things are going on. The appalling proposals for accelerating the breakdown of civilisation pour out faster than I can put even a few comments about them on my inconspicuous and widely ignored blog. Now they propose to deprive everyone of their freedom of action until they are 18. If people had any awareness of the importance of liberty as an abstract principle there would be rioting in the streets.
There seems to be even less outrage at this idea than there was when the school-leaving age was raised from 15 to 16. But at that time most journalists had themselves been educated before the inception of the Welfare State in 1945; nowadays most journalists have themselves been brought up within it.
I believe that when income tax came in at a penny in the pound someone is supposed to have commented, ‘This is the end of civilisation’. For a long time this was quoted as a funny old-fashioned attitude, because everything seemed, in most people’s eyes, to be proceeding in an acceptable way. But I must admit that by now it seems blatantly obvious that if someone said that, he was right, and even if no one said it, it is true. The idea of any supposed benefit being provided by the state, and financed by the reduction of liberty of individuals, can only lead to ever-increasing oppression and persecution.
If you can get a supposed or real benefit only if you can afford to pay for it yourself, you are at least protected from being placed at the mercy of what other people with to impose upon your life instead of what you might, if you could, choose to pay for.
People brought up in the modern world scarcely ever question the unexamined assumptions which are universally made, and which it is taboo to question. It is assumed that education is ‘a good’, so anything that goes under that name is unquestionably ‘a good’, and more of ‘a good’ must be ‘better’ than less of it.
Compulsory education came in at the end of the 19th century, adding to the writing on the wall that resulted from the inception of income tax; then there was female suffrage, then the Welfare State in 1945. Now, sixty years later, we are reaping the whirlwind that has resulted from those events.
Women in tribes
Let us consider how the characteristics of human psychology may derive from the structure of tribal society.
There is no ‘drive to infinity’, or drive towards any goal outside the tribal group. There is no concerted attempt to increase control of the environment, nor is it possible for any individual to make wholehearted attempts to better his own lot. The object of everything is to reinforce belief in the importance of the tribal customs, so that the people in the tribe can live out their life-cycles according to these patterns, often with little change for centuries or millennia.
There is relatively more scope for the men to assert significance in forms of aggression towards something external to the tribe, since they have from time to time to defend the tribe from the encroachments of other tribes, and probably to kill animals for food. This kind of assertion of significance still takes the form of asserting that they are able to deprive another personality of its life, i.e. that on behalf of the tribal significance they are able to assert their superior potency by depriving of potency. Nevertheless this relatively externalised assertiveness gives male psychology its slight margin of generosity and flexibility.
The women, on the other hand, having no way of asserting themselves outside the tribe, and concerned with the bringing up of children, have no outlet for their drive but in the satisfaction they can obtain from subordinating the children, and no doubt everybody else as well, to the tribal customs. (One can hear the tribal echoes in many common expressions: ‘She must be helped to adapt to a non-academic life’, i.e. ‘She must be brought into subordination to the tribal customs’.)
from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom
There is no ‘drive to infinity’, or drive towards any goal outside the tribal group. There is no concerted attempt to increase control of the environment, nor is it possible for any individual to make wholehearted attempts to better his own lot. The object of everything is to reinforce belief in the importance of the tribal customs, so that the people in the tribe can live out their life-cycles according to these patterns, often with little change for centuries or millennia.
There is relatively more scope for the men to assert significance in forms of aggression towards something external to the tribe, since they have from time to time to defend the tribe from the encroachments of other tribes, and probably to kill animals for food. This kind of assertion of significance still takes the form of asserting that they are able to deprive another personality of its life, i.e. that on behalf of the tribal significance they are able to assert their superior potency by depriving of potency. Nevertheless this relatively externalised assertiveness gives male psychology its slight margin of generosity and flexibility.
The women, on the other hand, having no way of asserting themselves outside the tribe, and concerned with the bringing up of children, have no outlet for their drive but in the satisfaction they can obtain from subordinating the children, and no doubt everybody else as well, to the tribal customs. (One can hear the tribal echoes in many common expressions: ‘She must be helped to adapt to a non-academic life’, i.e. ‘She must be brought into subordination to the tribal customs’.)
from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom
23 March 2007
Higher-level morality and social morality
It may be observed that there appears to be no overlap between higher-level morality and the sort that derives from believing in society or other people.
What I have encountered all my life is universal opposition, justified by a rationalised belief that if I was prevented from getting what I wanted to get, and could easily have been getting, I would stop wanting what I could get something out of, and turn into a different kind of person who did not want it or need it, whether on account of being physically dead or otherwise.
When I was at school I could have been getting everything I wanted with very little help, except with making arrangements for degree level physics and chemistry practicals. All that would have been necessary would have been less interference. Once the harm had been done and I had been thrown out, a bit more active help would have been necessary to reverse the harm that had been done to me so that I could get back my minimum requirements for a tolerable life, which were a hotel environment, as provided by a resident college, and the salary and status of an Oxbridge professor.
On a higher level one acquires a very strong aversion to seeing any apparently conscious being frustrated or suffering, and the idea of anyone putting someone else into a decentralising position is horrific. This is in part because one thinks a consciousness could and should be on a higher level, but so long as it is preoccupied with trying to get things out of other people it can’t be.
Of course, in most cases, you know that superimposing another layer of tantalising opposition is only adding to psychological obstructions that are already quite sufficient to prevent the person from knowing his own mind/getting a higher level. Nevertheless it is horrific to think of that extra layer being instated.
Since the age of 13 (and less obviously before) I have been treated with extraordinary cruelty, and a determination to make me suffer as much as possible, and to make me realise that alleviation of my suffering depended on some help or permission from other people which they would not give.
This was less surprising when I was at school and college where I was surrounded by hostile left-wing people, predominantly not aristocratic, and almost without exception socialists. (Socialism is fundamentally immoral, from a higher level point of view.)
But Rosalind Heywood persuaded everyone at the SPR without exception to oppose what I was clearly trying to get, so as to force me to give up. That is amazingly immoral from a higher level point of view. The SPR population would count as highly principled on normal terms; old-fashioned aristocrats who had been to public schools and held positions of responsibility, pillars of society, many of them Christians.
But it did not occur to any of them that a policy of frustrating someone in order to manipulate them into distorting their psychology was immoral and objectionable.
Nobody ever objected to this policy of paternalistic frustration as immoral. They neither objected to other people doing it nor refused to play ball themselves, but allowed themselves to be drawn in to ‘being cruel to be kind’ as Rosalind Heywood encouraged them to think of it.
So one can only say that socially acceptable morality, however sophisticated and worked out, contains no awareness of the basic moral principle – I mean of what, from a higher level point of view, is the basic moral principle.
Or perhaps you could say that there is an awareness of the basic moral principle but this is expressed only by acting against it, instead of on it, whenever opportunity arises.
What I have encountered all my life is universal opposition, justified by a rationalised belief that if I was prevented from getting what I wanted to get, and could easily have been getting, I would stop wanting what I could get something out of, and turn into a different kind of person who did not want it or need it, whether on account of being physically dead or otherwise.
When I was at school I could have been getting everything I wanted with very little help, except with making arrangements for degree level physics and chemistry practicals. All that would have been necessary would have been less interference. Once the harm had been done and I had been thrown out, a bit more active help would have been necessary to reverse the harm that had been done to me so that I could get back my minimum requirements for a tolerable life, which were a hotel environment, as provided by a resident college, and the salary and status of an Oxbridge professor.
On a higher level one acquires a very strong aversion to seeing any apparently conscious being frustrated or suffering, and the idea of anyone putting someone else into a decentralising position is horrific. This is in part because one thinks a consciousness could and should be on a higher level, but so long as it is preoccupied with trying to get things out of other people it can’t be.
Of course, in most cases, you know that superimposing another layer of tantalising opposition is only adding to psychological obstructions that are already quite sufficient to prevent the person from knowing his own mind/getting a higher level. Nevertheless it is horrific to think of that extra layer being instated.
Since the age of 13 (and less obviously before) I have been treated with extraordinary cruelty, and a determination to make me suffer as much as possible, and to make me realise that alleviation of my suffering depended on some help or permission from other people which they would not give.
This was less surprising when I was at school and college where I was surrounded by hostile left-wing people, predominantly not aristocratic, and almost without exception socialists. (Socialism is fundamentally immoral, from a higher level point of view.)
But Rosalind Heywood persuaded everyone at the SPR without exception to oppose what I was clearly trying to get, so as to force me to give up. That is amazingly immoral from a higher level point of view. The SPR population would count as highly principled on normal terms; old-fashioned aristocrats who had been to public schools and held positions of responsibility, pillars of society, many of them Christians.
But it did not occur to any of them that a policy of frustrating someone in order to manipulate them into distorting their psychology was immoral and objectionable.
Nobody ever objected to this policy of paternalistic frustration as immoral. They neither objected to other people doing it nor refused to play ball themselves, but allowed themselves to be drawn in to ‘being cruel to be kind’ as Rosalind Heywood encouraged them to think of it.
So one can only say that socially acceptable morality, however sophisticated and worked out, contains no awareness of the basic moral principle – I mean of what, from a higher level point of view, is the basic moral principle.
Or perhaps you could say that there is an awareness of the basic moral principle but this is expressed only by acting against it, instead of on it, whenever opportunity arises.
Basic morality and people at the SPR
(copy of a letter)
The years after being thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ were shockingly disillusioning. I did not have much in the way of illusions and I did not expect much of people, but I thought it was not absolutely out of the question that the odd person, here or there, might act in what seemed to me a natural way. However, I did need help very badly, having no means of support and no way of working my way back into an academic career which could lead to a Professorship. I could not, as I have already pointed out, draw Social Security without falsifying my position. I certainly experienced my situation as unbelievably horrifying, so that the universal meanness and opposition was something I could not fail to experience very painfully.
All I hoped of Sir George was that he would not oppose me, even if he would do nothing to help me, which was based on nothing but his mystical flash up a hill in Arabia because, I thought, the basic moral principle is so obvious that quite a short exposure to the higher level situation would give someone a great aversion to frustrating anyone in getting what they wanted in any way, even if they had no resources, financial or motivational, for trying to help them.
I remember saying to Sally, ‘He may not do anything to help me, but at least he won’t actively oppose me’, and she said nothing, perhaps thinking that she understood psychology better than I did. If so, she was right, as before long he was machinating against me and trying to manipulate me as much as anybody.
Rosalind Heywood considered herself a very spiritual person, who could tell whether or not there was a host in situ in a Catholic church in its box on the altar (whatever you call it) by whether or not she could hear a kind of holy singing noise. She got the holy noise in proximity with sacred objects of other religions as well.
She played infallibly on a certain dimension of human psychology and I never knew anyone resist her for long. Sir George did resist her attempts to get him and Salter to oppose my plans on one occasion, but it did not last. This was an unusual experience for her and she looked shaken as she left the office after a confrontational interview, but she was not one to accept defeat. A few weeks later Sir George’s support for me had vanished (how much communication had taken place between them, by telephone or otherwise, I do not know).
Conversion to her point of view was irreversible. I have no doubt that she did sell to all concerned that every particle of support to me should be choked off because it would be kinder to force me to give up on setting up an independent academic establishment. It could not succeed and the sooner I was made to give it up the better. Any support, however tiny, would only be prolonging the agony. This, of course, is head-on violation of the basic moral principle that you do not impose your interpretations and evaluations on somebody else, but give them what they say they want if you can (or if you are able to muster the energy in view of your own problems).
But the idea of frustrating someone, and pretending that you are doing it out of benevolence, is attractive to human psychology, which has a desire to frustrate and to express its power by causing suffering, as fundamental as the higher level drive to do the opposite.
So everybody associated in any way with the SPR and Oxford University joined in trying to squeeze me to death in my own best interests, just as, when I was at school, people had been able to oppose me in everything I wanted on the pretence that they were liberating me from the pressures placed on me by an ambitious father, in both cases no doubt enjoying the opportunity to combine active malevolence with a smug sense of their own compassion and sympathy.
The years after being thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ were shockingly disillusioning. I did not have much in the way of illusions and I did not expect much of people, but I thought it was not absolutely out of the question that the odd person, here or there, might act in what seemed to me a natural way. However, I did need help very badly, having no means of support and no way of working my way back into an academic career which could lead to a Professorship. I could not, as I have already pointed out, draw Social Security without falsifying my position. I certainly experienced my situation as unbelievably horrifying, so that the universal meanness and opposition was something I could not fail to experience very painfully.
All I hoped of Sir George was that he would not oppose me, even if he would do nothing to help me, which was based on nothing but his mystical flash up a hill in Arabia because, I thought, the basic moral principle is so obvious that quite a short exposure to the higher level situation would give someone a great aversion to frustrating anyone in getting what they wanted in any way, even if they had no resources, financial or motivational, for trying to help them.
I remember saying to Sally, ‘He may not do anything to help me, but at least he won’t actively oppose me’, and she said nothing, perhaps thinking that she understood psychology better than I did. If so, she was right, as before long he was machinating against me and trying to manipulate me as much as anybody.
Rosalind Heywood considered herself a very spiritual person, who could tell whether or not there was a host in situ in a Catholic church in its box on the altar (whatever you call it) by whether or not she could hear a kind of holy singing noise. She got the holy noise in proximity with sacred objects of other religions as well.
She played infallibly on a certain dimension of human psychology and I never knew anyone resist her for long. Sir George did resist her attempts to get him and Salter to oppose my plans on one occasion, but it did not last. This was an unusual experience for her and she looked shaken as she left the office after a confrontational interview, but she was not one to accept defeat. A few weeks later Sir George’s support for me had vanished (how much communication had taken place between them, by telephone or otherwise, I do not know).
Conversion to her point of view was irreversible. I have no doubt that she did sell to all concerned that every particle of support to me should be choked off because it would be kinder to force me to give up on setting up an independent academic establishment. It could not succeed and the sooner I was made to give it up the better. Any support, however tiny, would only be prolonging the agony. This, of course, is head-on violation of the basic moral principle that you do not impose your interpretations and evaluations on somebody else, but give them what they say they want if you can (or if you are able to muster the energy in view of your own problems).
But the idea of frustrating someone, and pretending that you are doing it out of benevolence, is attractive to human psychology, which has a desire to frustrate and to express its power by causing suffering, as fundamental as the higher level drive to do the opposite.
So everybody associated in any way with the SPR and Oxford University joined in trying to squeeze me to death in my own best interests, just as, when I was at school, people had been able to oppose me in everything I wanted on the pretence that they were liberating me from the pressures placed on me by an ambitious father, in both cases no doubt enjoying the opportunity to combine active malevolence with a smug sense of their own compassion and sympathy.
19 March 2007
A cruel pretence
(copy of a letter)
There is a very cruel pretence that the outcast professor is not suffering from being deprived of an institutional (hotel) environment and social recognition as a leading intellectual, i.e. as a person with a salaried and prestigious Professorship.
When I was thrown out fifty years ago I accepted that there was a brick wall in front of me and that all I could do was scrape at it, trying to make a tunnel through it. Everyone promoted the cruel fiction that I was being ‘free to follow my interests’. This was the worst possible slander of someone in my terrible position, because it represented me as not needing help (and I don’t mean ‘help’ in the form of counselling) in the form of money and people and support in getting money and people.
How do you suppose it feels, after fifty years of totally unrewarding toil in bad circumstances, trying to work towards an institutional (hotel) environment and an Oxbridge Professorship, to be told by a philosopher at Somerville that if I got back onto a salaried career track that could lead to a Professorship, I would be ‘less free’! The most violent possible rejection of all that constitutes one’s individuality. The most violent insult possible to add to grievous injury. And she, and all at Somerville, have slandered and even libelled me in this terrible way.
There should be recognition of this as a criminal act with a legal penalty. A suitable penalty would be that she should be condemned to come and work in my incipient and downtrodden independent university doing whatever she can most usefully do, probably filling in with the domestic and menial tasks, from the lack of staff to do which I am always suffering grievously. Also she should forfeit all her assets to contribute towards the funding which I need to build up the capital endowment of my university, which is still too painfully squeezed for me to be able to make use of my ability to do anything, let alone to function at an adequate energy level.
There is a very cruel pretence that the outcast professor is not suffering from being deprived of an institutional (hotel) environment and social recognition as a leading intellectual, i.e. as a person with a salaried and prestigious Professorship.
When I was thrown out fifty years ago I accepted that there was a brick wall in front of me and that all I could do was scrape at it, trying to make a tunnel through it. Everyone promoted the cruel fiction that I was being ‘free to follow my interests’. This was the worst possible slander of someone in my terrible position, because it represented me as not needing help (and I don’t mean ‘help’ in the form of counselling) in the form of money and people and support in getting money and people.
How do you suppose it feels, after fifty years of totally unrewarding toil in bad circumstances, trying to work towards an institutional (hotel) environment and an Oxbridge Professorship, to be told by a philosopher at Somerville that if I got back onto a salaried career track that could lead to a Professorship, I would be ‘less free’! The most violent possible rejection of all that constitutes one’s individuality. The most violent insult possible to add to grievous injury. And she, and all at Somerville, have slandered and even libelled me in this terrible way.
There should be recognition of this as a criminal act with a legal penalty. A suitable penalty would be that she should be condemned to come and work in my incipient and downtrodden independent university doing whatever she can most usefully do, probably filling in with the domestic and menial tasks, from the lack of staff to do which I am always suffering grievously. Also she should forfeit all her assets to contribute towards the funding which I need to build up the capital endowment of my university, which is still too painfully squeezed for me to be able to make use of my ability to do anything, let alone to function at an adequate energy level.
18 March 2007
More timewasting for the "gifted"
I see they are going ahead with their absolutely horrific proposals to provide even more expensive interference in the lives of any child with an IQ slightly above average. It is very unlikely that the type of ‘educational’ facilities proposed — lectures, classes, groups, summer schools etc — will actually be advantageous rather than disadvantageous, even for those with the lowest IQs in the top 10% of the population.
This is the time-wasting type of ‘educational’ activity (what they call “stretching not pushing”, and “facilitating not spoon-feeding”) . What is really preventing all and sundry from getting anything out of their ordinary ‘schools’ is not that there is not enough ‘teaching’ but that there is too much (in the modern sense of the word). It is simply designed to demoralise, and extra periods of demoralisation provided at the taxpayers’ expense will be no good for anybody (except in the sense of ‘good’ used in "there is no good injun but a dead injun").
If someone with an IQ of 120 or so manages to get to a timewasting and demoralising university after running the gauntlet of this sort of education at school with extra timewasting specially provided, it will be in spite of, not on account of, this extra handicap.
I hope, at any rate, it will be possible for victims of the scheme, or their parents on their behalf, to refuse to expose themselves to these ‘opportunities’. Cigarettes and investments have to carry risk warnings, and the same principle should be applied to ‘educational opportunities’, invitations to which should be accompanied by a warning, ‘Accepting this invitation may do you (or your child) harm and not good, and may do irrevocable damage to your (or his) prospects in life’.
This is the time-wasting type of ‘educational’ activity (what they call “stretching not pushing”, and “facilitating not spoon-feeding”) . What is really preventing all and sundry from getting anything out of their ordinary ‘schools’ is not that there is not enough ‘teaching’ but that there is too much (in the modern sense of the word). It is simply designed to demoralise, and extra periods of demoralisation provided at the taxpayers’ expense will be no good for anybody (except in the sense of ‘good’ used in "there is no good injun but a dead injun").
If someone with an IQ of 120 or so manages to get to a timewasting and demoralising university after running the gauntlet of this sort of education at school with extra timewasting specially provided, it will be in spite of, not on account of, this extra handicap.
I hope, at any rate, it will be possible for victims of the scheme, or their parents on their behalf, to refuse to expose themselves to these ‘opportunities’. Cigarettes and investments have to carry risk warnings, and the same principle should be applied to ‘educational opportunities’, invitations to which should be accompanied by a warning, ‘Accepting this invitation may do you (or your child) harm and not good, and may do irrevocable damage to your (or his) prospects in life’.
16 March 2007
"Liberal instincts"
Extracts from article
After dinner, Amy popped down to the corner shop. It was 10.30pm. When she returned, she staggered through the front door smeared with mud — and soaked with blood from a dreadful wound in her chest. In the 500 yards between shop and home she had been followed by a youth whose face was concealed by a hood, pushed to the ground, robbed of her bag and stabbed in the ribs with a screwdriver. ...My comments
On our streets today it is the middle-class young people — the products of our liberal homes — who are being targeted. Amy is convinced there is a growing war on London streets between the dispossessed of the graffiti-covered estates and the middle classes: "Trust me, Dad. He wouldn't have gone for one of his own." So is there anybody out there who is accountable? The terrible fact is that, in these well-tended million-pound-plus houses with their state-of-the art security systems, people have long known what's going on in the street outside. But they have closed the blinds and simply turned away. And so have I. ...
We have put our heads in the sand for too long about this problem and have done nothing about the indifference of the authorities to much that is wrong in our society. We certainly backed the wrong policies on education — no one who could possibly avoid it would send a child to a comprehensive school around here. ...
As I, and all the others with Paul Smith suits and briefcases, strode past the addicts shooting up outside the Tube, and the Special Brew drinkers on the kerb, I used to think smugly: "Well, this doesn't touch me." But, the chances always were that it would in the end. And it did, in the worst possible way. (‘The night my daughter was stabbed — and my liberal instincts died’ by Michael Williams, Daily Mail, 5 March 2007.)
The writer of this article, as usual, seems to assume that some expected norm of civilised behaviour can be produced by confiscating freedom (by means of taxation) from the functional and non-criminal members of society. “Educational policy” is implicitly blamed for an increase in crime, and the implied solution must be to take more money away from the “middle class” in order to bestow benefits on those who behave badly.
Of course it is true that the schools are producing an ever-increasing population of demoralised young people. But it is questionable whether any tweaking of the system can produce any beneficial effect, since egalitarian ideology is already rampant throughout modern society — not only within the schools and universities — and pours out of every television screen.
If there has been an increase in criminal behaviour it is not necessarily attributable only to social influences. The modern ideology has favoured the expansion of the lower-IQ population by financial support, medical treatment and support for dysfunctional offspring, or offspring of dysfunctional parents, all at the expense of the taxpaying population, which has therefore tended to delay and curtail its own families.
This favouring of reproductive activity by the “poor” may in itself have increased the incidence of crime, regardless of their educational or social experience, as there may well be — and there is some evidence that there are — genetic factors predisposing to crime.
Some time ago I saw a statistic to the effect that men who had at least one criminal conviction were producing 30 percent more offspring than men who had no criminal record. If there are genetic factors involved, this would not have to continue for many generations to create a noticeable increase in criminal activity.
This is a quotation on this subject from Dysgenics by Richard Lynn:
The high correlations obtained by Tygart (1991) of criminality with number of siblings suggests that genetic deterioration with regard to conscientiousness may be about twice as great as that for intelligence. Our finding that the fertility of criminals in Britain is about 50 percent greater than that of the population as a whole corroborates the conclusion that this is a serious problem. It may well be that dysgenic fertility for conscientiousness and criminality – which has received the least attention from eugenicists, and which has made a significant contribution to rising crime rates in many Western nations in the second half of the twentieth century – is the most serious of the dysgenic problems confronting modern populations. (Praeger, 1996, p.209)
14 March 2007
Aphorism of the month (March)
The concept of a good social structure is a contradiction in terms. A good escape committee in a prison camp is recognised by the speed with which it renders itself unnecessary.
(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)
Fish oils and intelligence
Professor Basant Puri, described as a ‘scientist’, who is a Professor at Imperial College, London and hence, one supposes, paid out of taxpayers’money, i.e. by confiscation of freedom from individual members of society, has just published some ‘research’ which purports to establish that academic performance can be enhanced by feeding children fish-oils, and hence that ‘mass supplementation’ of school children is called for.
That will, of course, if it happens (which it well may), require further confiscation of freedom from all taxable members of the population, including those who, like myself, were left with no way of making a career or even of earning money at the end of the ruinous ‘education’ (which was paid for largely by confiscation of freedom). Nor with any way of drawing income support from the Social Security, as the reasons for their being unable to earn a living were not socially accepted, and they were not prepared to falsify their position and engage in elaborate pretences of seeking work which they would never accept.
Even such people as myself are, on this proposal, to have their liberty even further reduced by taxation, thus reducing their ability to provide themselves with the excellent diet they need to have, both to remain alive long enough to get started on their long-delayed forty-year adult careers, and to keep themselves out of the clutches of the totally unacceptable, immoral and iniquitous medical profession.
Incidentally, another way in which such legislation would damage people such as myself is that it would probably have the effect of making fish-oils more expensive and difficult to obtain, and perhaps eventually almost unobtainable.
I don’t think we need worry too much that even the ‘poorest’ are prevented from getting fish-oils if they want them. Children on the whole appear to have enough pocket-money, and their parents enough social benefits, to become obese and alcoholic.
That will, of course, if it happens (which it well may), require further confiscation of freedom from all taxable members of the population, including those who, like myself, were left with no way of making a career or even of earning money at the end of the ruinous ‘education’ (which was paid for largely by confiscation of freedom). Nor with any way of drawing income support from the Social Security, as the reasons for their being unable to earn a living were not socially accepted, and they were not prepared to falsify their position and engage in elaborate pretences of seeking work which they would never accept.
Even such people as myself are, on this proposal, to have their liberty even further reduced by taxation, thus reducing their ability to provide themselves with the excellent diet they need to have, both to remain alive long enough to get started on their long-delayed forty-year adult careers, and to keep themselves out of the clutches of the totally unacceptable, immoral and iniquitous medical profession.
Incidentally, another way in which such legislation would damage people such as myself is that it would probably have the effect of making fish-oils more expensive and difficult to obtain, and perhaps eventually almost unobtainable.
I don’t think we need worry too much that even the ‘poorest’ are prevented from getting fish-oils if they want them. Children on the whole appear to have enough pocket-money, and their parents enough social benefits, to become obese and alcoholic.
11 March 2007
Are my books ideological anathema?
This is a comment from someone to one of my books, and to the letter written by Fabian which he found in it. This buyer of Advice to Clever Children sent a message via Fabian’s blog.
I recently bought Celia Greens 'Advice for Clever Children' from a dealer on Amazon. In the book I found a letter written by a certain 'Fabian Wadel' adressed to the Librarian of the Institute of Education at the University of London which says;My comments
"We enclose two complimentary copies of books by Dr Celia Green, which we hope you will accept as gifts to your library" and, "We hope the books may be of particular interest to young people of undergraduate age."
This is dated September 17 2004. I have it now in front of me. Is it at least plausible to surmise that the librarian took one look at this book and was so freaked out by the content that it was immediately donated to another book dealer and put up for sale?
Having read the book myself I can tell you that — if what you describe is true — any academic library would rather accept 10 complimentary copies of Mein Kampf than anything by Celia Green — an ideological closed shop after all.
Thank you for sending the information about what happened to our presentation of books to the London University Department of Education. It is no surprise; we are heavily censored and it costs us a lot of money (and of course, effort) to get even a few books out into the world.
As usual, my aims and objects are diametrically opposed to those of society at large, so far as I am concerned. I need my books to reach the widest possible audience because those who might give us any assistance, by work, money or moral support, are clearly extremely few and far between. Society at large, and practically every individual representative of it, wants me to remain as inconspicuous, inactive, and as nearly as possible non-existent at possible.
Asking libraries for our books might be of more use to us than buying them, unless (or perhaps even if) you are a person whose bookshelf is frequently visited by other people. But what motive could anyone have for making the exertion involved in asking for one of our books at a library?
You seem to take a very dim view of the objectivity and openness to criticism of academics; of course you are quite right to do so, but the academic world is supposed to be passionately devoted to freedom of expression, as I read only a few days ago, so shouldn’t you sound a bit surprised, or even shocked?
05 March 2007
Middle classes hit hardest
Extract from ‘Middle classes are hit hardest in the pocket’, Daily Mail 5 March 2007:
Middle earners are bearing the brunt of the highest tax levels for a quarter of a century to prop up failing public services, a report concludes today. … A family with £45,000 a year in disposable income will see 48.7 per cent of it disappear in direct and indirect taxes. ...My comments
A study, from the centre-right think tank Reform, warns ‘Taxes are rising to their highest level for 25 years. … the billions of pounds raked in to increase spending on schools and hospitals have been squandered in a decade of Labour rule. … Its writers say Britain is ‘very poorly placed internationally for the next ten years, with low taxation and excellence in education crucial for future success. … Less than half of children currently achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths.’
The report... warns that on current trends, from 2012 young people can expect to pay high taxes and compulsory payments towards higher education and pensions. The effective tax burden for a typical graduate will be 47.6 per cent, before any other costs of living are added on.
There are constantly being new proposals for increasing the burden of taxation, such as prolonging compulsory education, setting up databases, including fingerprinting for 11-year olds, ID cards for all, monitoring and charging for every mile driven by every motorist, more money to be spent on treating obese or alcoholic children and taking them away from their parents, inspectors to invade houses at any time to see if there have been any improvements which could be used as a justification for raising the Council Tax, which is needed to provide ‘help’ and intervention for the dysfunctional, and so on. But who is complaining? It shouldn’t take my IQ to realise that the object of the exercise is to reduce the most intelligent, functional and independent members of the population to poverty, and dependence on a population of agents of the collective (doctors, teachers, social workers etc) with a low average IQ.
The web does us no good
(copy of a letter)
I am fairly sure that however much attention we may seem to get on the internet, it will never do us any good. It is one of those semi-permeable membranes that can never be broken through. We are just seen to be a different sort of being from socially recognised Professors with academic status and salary. At any rate, it has never yet done us any good.
People have come to work here (a few people — not enough, even if they had all stayed) only as a result of seeing my books on library shelves alongside books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who have the salary and social status of which we have been deprived. The only advantage I can see in our somewhat enlarged presence on the internet is that, if and when we manage to get one of our books (distress flares) onto a library shelf, some people may be familiar enough with my name to borrow it, hence reducing the likelihood that the library in question will quickly relegate it to the cellar or the scrapheap.
The article on lucid dreaming on Wikipedia is very low-grade, so that the association with that subject seems likely to do us harm rather than good. I have never yet been able to obtain academic status and funding to do the research that I saw, myself, as arising out of my initial demonstration that there was, in fact, a potential field of research.
One thing that makes me fairly sure that the internet is unlikely ever to do us any good is that people have always been keen on encouraging us to use it as a means of ‘publication’, getting people to pay for downloading, etc. I have always worried about anything other people encouraged me to do, and been pretty sure that what they most violently opposed was probably the right course to pursue.
I am fairly sure that however much attention we may seem to get on the internet, it will never do us any good. It is one of those semi-permeable membranes that can never be broken through. We are just seen to be a different sort of being from socially recognised Professors with academic status and salary. At any rate, it has never yet done us any good.
People have come to work here (a few people — not enough, even if they had all stayed) only as a result of seeing my books on library shelves alongside books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who have the salary and social status of which we have been deprived. The only advantage I can see in our somewhat enlarged presence on the internet is that, if and when we manage to get one of our books (distress flares) onto a library shelf, some people may be familiar enough with my name to borrow it, hence reducing the likelihood that the library in question will quickly relegate it to the cellar or the scrapheap.
The article on lucid dreaming on Wikipedia is very low-grade, so that the association with that subject seems likely to do us harm rather than good. I have never yet been able to obtain academic status and funding to do the research that I saw, myself, as arising out of my initial demonstration that there was, in fact, a potential field of research.
One thing that makes me fairly sure that the internet is unlikely ever to do us any good is that people have always been keen on encouraging us to use it as a means of ‘publication’, getting people to pay for downloading, etc. I have always worried about anything other people encouraged me to do, and been pretty sure that what they most violently opposed was probably the right course to pursue.
04 March 2007
Home Education
Record numbers of parents are choosing to teach their children at home amid mounting disillusion with state schools, the Government’s own research revealed yesterday. ...The study, commissioned by the Department for Education, suggests the numbers of home-schooled children have almost tripled since 1999 despite the boasts of ministers that state schools have improved. ...
By law, parents who shun the school system must ensure their child receives a ‘suitable’ education according to ‘age, aptitude and ability’. ... Local education authorities are legally required to check on home-educated children who have been taken out of school. Their inspectors can force youngsters back to school if they are not being properly taught.
However, the law also gives parents the right to refuse to ‘present’ their children for monitoring. As a result, they do not have to submit to any checks by the authorities throughout their child’s home schooling.
Most children who do go to school are starting at the age of four — a year earlier than the official beginning of formal education. ... The survey by the Times Educational Supplement prompted warning that increasing numbers of children are starting formal schooling before they are ready — in the rest of Europe it does not happen until the age of six or seven. (From ’150,000 children educated at home’ Daily Mail 24 February 2007.)
My comments
Difficult, if not impossible, to believe that a child can really be got off the hook just by its parents de-registering it with the source of all power and oppression.
What happens about the exam-taking? Can you really get your child accepted at some exam-taking centre without it falling back into the power of the ‘authority’? And practicals, as ever, are a stumbling block. Can you arrange for your child to do the work at a place that can suitably certify it for exam purposes without it becoming the business of the local ‘authority’?
Afterthought
A very good thing that parents educating children at home could do, if they had any sense, would be to come and live nearby and offer voluntary work to my beleaguered academic institution in administrative and other useful capacities. If we were receiving enough such help, it might enable us to provide learning materials for various subjects, including, possibly, classes on investment and other forms of business enterprise.
But the snag is that such parents, like everyone else in modern Britain, have learnt that no help should ever be given to individuals with high IQs, even if it might turn out advantageous to themselves to do so.
No benefits from the Oppressive State
I really do think I should point out that I have not been able to get any benefit at all out of the Welfare (Oppressive) State. The terms on which the medical ‘profession’ operates are too immoral for me to have anything to do with it. I can only proceed with trying to become as rich as possible so that I can go abroad to some country where the restrictions are less prohibitive if I ever have anything so seriously wrong with me that I need something that can only be obtained via the medical Mafia.
Nor have I ever been able to draw ‘Social Security’ even though deprived of any means of earning a living. Since I was thrown out unqualified for the only sort of career I could have, I never drew any benefit. I was not prepared to pretend that I was seeking work and go through the motions of applying for jobs, such as the schoolteaching that everyone wanted to force me into so as to enjoy my suffering and humiliation. I went to the SPR in the first instance, purely for money, because my parents, at the behest of society at large, were trying to force me to ‘earn a living’. I thought, in view of their oppressive attitude, that I would need to collect any pittance that I could get for my return to Oxford in the autumn. At the SPR, I found there was a potential field of research with which I might be able to regain access to an academic career.
But I have never been able to draw benefits, however hard up I was, because I was thrown out at 21 with no usable qualification for the only sort of career I could have and I could not earn money in any other way. I had no income after my brief and intolerable period of employment at the SPR, which was as intolerable as I had known it would be. I had to put an end to it as soon as I could, before the damage being done to me became even harder to reverse.
Although I had no income, the fact that my supervised ‘education’ had left me with no usable qualification at all meant that I could not draw anything from the ‘social security’. If you can do that, when you are unemployed, you get your National Insurance contributions paid for you, so that you still get a basic state pension at the end. I had to pay voluntary contributions myself out of any money that I could make or obtain for myself in any legal way, to reduce the disadvantage at which I would be when I reached retirement age in comparison with someone who had been able to have a salary.
Nor have I ever been able to draw ‘Social Security’ even though deprived of any means of earning a living. Since I was thrown out unqualified for the only sort of career I could have, I never drew any benefit. I was not prepared to pretend that I was seeking work and go through the motions of applying for jobs, such as the schoolteaching that everyone wanted to force me into so as to enjoy my suffering and humiliation. I went to the SPR in the first instance, purely for money, because my parents, at the behest of society at large, were trying to force me to ‘earn a living’. I thought, in view of their oppressive attitude, that I would need to collect any pittance that I could get for my return to Oxford in the autumn. At the SPR, I found there was a potential field of research with which I might be able to regain access to an academic career.
But I have never been able to draw benefits, however hard up I was, because I was thrown out at 21 with no usable qualification for the only sort of career I could have and I could not earn money in any other way. I had no income after my brief and intolerable period of employment at the SPR, which was as intolerable as I had known it would be. I had to put an end to it as soon as I could, before the damage being done to me became even harder to reverse.
Although I had no income, the fact that my supervised ‘education’ had left me with no usable qualification at all meant that I could not draw anything from the ‘social security’. If you can do that, when you are unemployed, you get your National Insurance contributions paid for you, so that you still get a basic state pension at the end. I had to pay voluntary contributions myself out of any money that I could make or obtain for myself in any legal way, to reduce the disadvantage at which I would be when I reached retirement age in comparison with someone who had been able to have a salary.
01 March 2007
"The over-60s are not worth treating"
Recently the Daily Mail reported that 1 in every 2 GPs said that patients (victims) over the age of 60 were not worth diagnosing or treating. Well, of course, what they say has no necessary relationship to what they actually do. Telling the truth is not, even nominally, part of their remit. But in fact we can be pretty sure that what goes on, and has been going on for a long time, is worse than they admit openly.
Some years ago there was a similar article revealing that, in the case of women, 55 was the age at which doctors thought them past bothering with. Taking a short break at Boscombe in a seaside hotel, I was discussing this with someone at the breakfast table, sitting opposite a lady in her fifties. She twice protested at so painful a topic being discussed, so I stopped talking about it. But that clearly illustrates, both how demoralising the immoral power of the medical Mafia is, and why there is no sympathy with those who complain of it.
When this lady went to her doctor she liked, no doubt, to maintain an uneasy fiction that she could trust him, rely on him to exercise his powers in her best interests (as understood by herself) , and believe what he said. She would wish to do this in order to relieve her anxieties about any symptoms she might have, but it would take quite a lot of emotional energy to do so, in view of the available evidence. Taking up emotional energy in this way is essentially decentralising. Recognising that one is alone in a hostile world is, or may be, eventually liberating (although, no doubt, there are plenty of ways of doing it wrong).
This lady, like everyone else, believed in society. On higher level terms, and in view of the basic moral principle, one considers it highly immoral to force people into decentralised positions, and tries to avoid offering people the usual provocations to reactiveness. The psychological social contract is what happens when the individual gives up his own drives to self-fulfilment and becomes the willing slave of social oppression, in return for the possibility of oppressing others, or enjoying the spectacle of their being oppressed by the social forces with which he has thrown in his lot.
Once a society has instigated an oppressive regime, such as the modern Welfare (Oppressive) State, there is no real possibility of reversing it, as an increasing number of people wish to believe in the ‘benefits’ they are deriving from it, including in many cases the opportunity to oppress other people, rather than face up to the terrifying nature of the threats to which they are exposed.
It may also be pointed out that discrimination against persons over a certain age is discrimination against aristocratic genes and high IQs (as certainly as is a chronological-age related exam system) since high IQ is positively correlated with longevity. My parents, with aristocratic genes and high IQs, remained functional with little recourse to medication or hospital treatment until they had reached an age at which they were, in the eyes of the medical Mafia, past their sell-by date. People with worse genes and lower IQs cost the taxpayers (via the NHS) much more over their lifetime than my parents did, even if in a shorter lifetime.
Some years ago there was a similar article revealing that, in the case of women, 55 was the age at which doctors thought them past bothering with. Taking a short break at Boscombe in a seaside hotel, I was discussing this with someone at the breakfast table, sitting opposite a lady in her fifties. She twice protested at so painful a topic being discussed, so I stopped talking about it. But that clearly illustrates, both how demoralising the immoral power of the medical Mafia is, and why there is no sympathy with those who complain of it.
When this lady went to her doctor she liked, no doubt, to maintain an uneasy fiction that she could trust him, rely on him to exercise his powers in her best interests (as understood by herself) , and believe what he said. She would wish to do this in order to relieve her anxieties about any symptoms she might have, but it would take quite a lot of emotional energy to do so, in view of the available evidence. Taking up emotional energy in this way is essentially decentralising. Recognising that one is alone in a hostile world is, or may be, eventually liberating (although, no doubt, there are plenty of ways of doing it wrong).
This lady, like everyone else, believed in society. On higher level terms, and in view of the basic moral principle, one considers it highly immoral to force people into decentralised positions, and tries to avoid offering people the usual provocations to reactiveness. The psychological social contract is what happens when the individual gives up his own drives to self-fulfilment and becomes the willing slave of social oppression, in return for the possibility of oppressing others, or enjoying the spectacle of their being oppressed by the social forces with which he has thrown in his lot.
Once a society has instigated an oppressive regime, such as the modern Welfare (Oppressive) State, there is no real possibility of reversing it, as an increasing number of people wish to believe in the ‘benefits’ they are deriving from it, including in many cases the opportunity to oppress other people, rather than face up to the terrifying nature of the threats to which they are exposed.
It may also be pointed out that discrimination against persons over a certain age is discrimination against aristocratic genes and high IQs (as certainly as is a chronological-age related exam system) since high IQ is positively correlated with longevity. My parents, with aristocratic genes and high IQs, remained functional with little recourse to medication or hospital treatment until they had reached an age at which they were, in the eyes of the medical Mafia, past their sell-by date. People with worse genes and lower IQs cost the taxpayers (via the NHS) much more over their lifetime than my parents did, even if in a shorter lifetime.
27 February 2007
Compulsory screening
Terrifying legislation is constantly proposed and my philosophy department remains unfinanced and hamstrung. Appallingly, it is proposed that, since a high proportion of the population is assured (whether they work or not) of an income at other people’s expense sufficient to enable them to eat and drink themselves into a state of ill-health, which prevents them from making any contribution by way of taxation towards the upkeep of themselves or towards interference with the lives of others, there should therefore be compulsory screening of all for high cholesterol at 5-year intervals and, presumably, enforced ‘treatment’ (torture) by the iniquitous socially appointed ‘medical’ sadists.
Now it is bad enough that access to pharmaceuticals and information is blocked to the extent it is by the totally immoral terms on which the medical Mafia operates, in complete violation of the basic moral principle, but at least a conscientious objector such as myself is able to avoid being forced into an abusive relationship with any doctor by forgoing whatever could only be obtained with its permission. This is bad enough, and one regrets also that one continues to be taxed (have one’s freedom confiscated) so that others who are too unintelligent to object can be subjected to torture and abuse.
But to be forced into an abusive contact with the medical Mafia against one’s will is horrific beyond measure. I have already said that this is no longer a country where it is possible to live except under protest. The protests which should be being expressed by the philosophy department of my crushed and downtrodden independent university are ignored and suppressed, and that should not be so.
Now it is bad enough that access to pharmaceuticals and information is blocked to the extent it is by the totally immoral terms on which the medical Mafia operates, in complete violation of the basic moral principle, but at least a conscientious objector such as myself is able to avoid being forced into an abusive relationship with any doctor by forgoing whatever could only be obtained with its permission. This is bad enough, and one regrets also that one continues to be taxed (have one’s freedom confiscated) so that others who are too unintelligent to object can be subjected to torture and abuse.
But to be forced into an abusive contact with the medical Mafia against one’s will is horrific beyond measure. I have already said that this is no longer a country where it is possible to live except under protest. The protests which should be being expressed by the philosophy department of my crushed and downtrodden independent university are ignored and suppressed, and that should not be so.
22 February 2007
Suppressed drive turns into aggression
As I said recently, children are brought up in such a way that compliance with social demands, and identification with the rewards to be derived from membership of social groups, are seen as good, and any individual drive is bad, since it is likely to lead to social disapproval and punishment.
So the individual represses his individualistic drives and cravings, but this leads to anger and resentment, which is also regarded as bad, and he has to try to pretend he does not have such feelings. But he can sublimate or redirect them into a socially approvable form, by joining with society in its disapproval of those who express their drives in ways considered morally wrong.
E.g. people with high IQs who emerge from their state-funded education as demoralised criminals, and with no way of using their drives to succeed in life, are not angry at the oppressive education which has got them into this position, although they quarrelled with their teachers and committed acts of vandalism on school buildings. Instead they are angry at bank managers and property owners and their minds run on ways of asserting themselves by doing something really painful and damaging to such people, such as putting lighted papers through the letterboxes of those who annoy them in any way, in the hope of burning down their house.
Or they may become agents of the collective, such as teachers, doctors or social workers, and interfere in the lives of other people against their will.
Boys are more likely to suffer from repressed anger and resentment than are girls, who usually cotton on sooner to the possibility of using social position as an aid to oppressing other people, and reconcile themselves from an early age to seeing the restriction of the liberty of other people as the only form of self-assertion to be aimed at.
So the individual represses his individualistic drives and cravings, but this leads to anger and resentment, which is also regarded as bad, and he has to try to pretend he does not have such feelings. But he can sublimate or redirect them into a socially approvable form, by joining with society in its disapproval of those who express their drives in ways considered morally wrong.
E.g. people with high IQs who emerge from their state-funded education as demoralised criminals, and with no way of using their drives to succeed in life, are not angry at the oppressive education which has got them into this position, although they quarrelled with their teachers and committed acts of vandalism on school buildings. Instead they are angry at bank managers and property owners and their minds run on ways of asserting themselves by doing something really painful and damaging to such people, such as putting lighted papers through the letterboxes of those who annoy them in any way, in the hope of burning down their house.
Or they may become agents of the collective, such as teachers, doctors or social workers, and interfere in the lives of other people against their will.
Boys are more likely to suffer from repressed anger and resentment than are girls, who usually cotton on sooner to the possibility of using social position as an aid to oppressing other people, and reconcile themselves from an early age to seeing the restriction of the liberty of other people as the only form of self-assertion to be aimed at.
A form of genocide
Communist/socialist revolutions are always aimed at reducing the presence in the population of ‘upper class’ or high IQ genes. The genocide that is going on in this country now is relatively concealed and results from the inception of the Welfare State, better called the Oppressive State, which at the time was hailed by many as ‘the bloodless revolution’. So considering more open forms of genocide enables one to see more clearly what is really going on here and now.
A high IQ or aristocratic ancestry is correlated with both cultural and intellectual interests and with financial and managerial success; populations that achieved too much freedom of action for themselves were persecuted on both counts. Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China killed landlords and intellectuals. In Cambodia, similarly, the communists killed the ‘middle class’. The French Revolution sent aristocrats to the guillotine. The Nazis (National Socialists) killed Jews, who were commercially successful, had strong family solidarity and, statistically, above-average IQs. That means that although the IQ bell curve for German Jews and German non-Jews overlapped to a large extent in the middle regions, the population of people with remarkably high IQs, say over 160, was likely to contain a considerably higher proportion of Jews than of non-Jews. This corresponded to the social observation that the Jewish representation was conspicuous among such people as successful bankers, leading intellectuals, and scientific inventors.
The Holocaust must have had a significant effect on the IQ bell curve for Germany, shifting it downwards. A similar effect is being produced more gradually in this country by covert long-term policies. It is made more difficult for those at the upper end of the IQ range to achieve tolerable living conditions, so they reproduce more slowly. The ‘highly educated’, as they are euphemistically called, have smaller than average families. At the same time, the dysfunctional are given every inducement to reproduce freely, and every generation increases the population of handicapped people, requiring to be supported and subjected to medical treatment throughout their lives at the expense of functional taxpayers.
How many generations will it take, or has it already taken, for this to produce a downward shift in the IQ bell curve as perceptible as that created by the mass murder of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany? Do not overlook the power of geometric compounding.
A high IQ or aristocratic ancestry is correlated with both cultural and intellectual interests and with financial and managerial success; populations that achieved too much freedom of action for themselves were persecuted on both counts. Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China killed landlords and intellectuals. In Cambodia, similarly, the communists killed the ‘middle class’. The French Revolution sent aristocrats to the guillotine. The Nazis (National Socialists) killed Jews, who were commercially successful, had strong family solidarity and, statistically, above-average IQs. That means that although the IQ bell curve for German Jews and German non-Jews overlapped to a large extent in the middle regions, the population of people with remarkably high IQs, say over 160, was likely to contain a considerably higher proportion of Jews than of non-Jews. This corresponded to the social observation that the Jewish representation was conspicuous among such people as successful bankers, leading intellectuals, and scientific inventors.
The Holocaust must have had a significant effect on the IQ bell curve for Germany, shifting it downwards. A similar effect is being produced more gradually in this country by covert long-term policies. It is made more difficult for those at the upper end of the IQ range to achieve tolerable living conditions, so they reproduce more slowly. The ‘highly educated’, as they are euphemistically called, have smaller than average families. At the same time, the dysfunctional are given every inducement to reproduce freely, and every generation increases the population of handicapped people, requiring to be supported and subjected to medical treatment throughout their lives at the expense of functional taxpayers.
How many generations will it take, or has it already taken, for this to produce a downward shift in the IQ bell curve as perceptible as that created by the mass murder of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany? Do not overlook the power of geometric compounding.
20 February 2007
"Curing" the homeless
Herbert Spencer was a prestigious Victorian philosopher, now out of fashion. According to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ‘Spencer enjoyed immense popularity in his own time, especially in America. ... Sinking in esteem by the century’s end to hitherto unimagined depths, Spencer is today remembered primarily as the enthusiast for extreme laissez-faire or Social Dawinism...’ (from article about Herbert Spencer by Michael Ruse).
Herbert Spencer was opposed to state interventionism and also to female suffrage, on the grounds that women would be too likely to support paternalistic (or interventionist) policies.
Personally, I regard the basic moral principle as being that one should refrain from imposing one’s own evaluations and interpretations on other people, but leave them as free as possible to make their own best guess in view of the existential uncertainty. The modern, and totally different, principle, appears to be that the individual should be willing to sacrifice his own interests in order to contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number of people. I find this horrifying.
An article by John Bird in the Mail on Sunday of 18 February, under the headline ‘Lock up the homeless’, is headed, in large letters, ‘No one knows more about the homeless than the founder of The Big Issue. In a tough and provocative article, he argues that the present policy is useless and the only "cure" for most is compulsory treatment in mental hospitals’.
In the article, the author declares: ‘The way the Government ... "treats" this problem is just plain wrong. The system isn’t curing anything. ... the illness that caused the crisis in the first place is still there, untouched and untreated. What nobody wants to acknowledge is that 90 per cent of people in and around homelessness have drink and drug problems. ... It is addictive behaviour and the only way to tackle it and stand any chance of "curing" the homeless is to treat it as the mental problem it is. Addiction doesn’t fall under the remit of the 1983 Mental Health Act. [An oppressive and intrinsically immoral Act, by the way.] But it should.’
John Bird refers to the cases of two individuals.
Herbert Spencer was opposed to state interventionism and also to female suffrage, on the grounds that women would be too likely to support paternalistic (or interventionist) policies.
Personally, I regard the basic moral principle as being that one should refrain from imposing one’s own evaluations and interpretations on other people, but leave them as free as possible to make their own best guess in view of the existential uncertainty. The modern, and totally different, principle, appears to be that the individual should be willing to sacrifice his own interests in order to contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number of people. I find this horrifying.
An article by John Bird in the Mail on Sunday of 18 February, under the headline ‘Lock up the homeless’, is headed, in large letters, ‘No one knows more about the homeless than the founder of The Big Issue. In a tough and provocative article, he argues that the present policy is useless and the only "cure" for most is compulsory treatment in mental hospitals’.
In the article, the author declares: ‘The way the Government ... "treats" this problem is just plain wrong. The system isn’t curing anything. ... the illness that caused the crisis in the first place is still there, untouched and untreated. What nobody wants to acknowledge is that 90 per cent of people in and around homelessness have drink and drug problems. ... It is addictive behaviour and the only way to tackle it and stand any chance of "curing" the homeless is to treat it as the mental problem it is. Addiction doesn’t fall under the remit of the 1983 Mental Health Act. [An oppressive and intrinsically immoral Act, by the way.] But it should.’
John Bird refers to the cases of two individuals.
Jim was somebody I knew well. He died last year from alcohol abuse, having been slowly rotted by the system that, nominally at least, kept him out of homelessness for 25 years. He teetered on the edge of society, there to be a pain to the hard-working people he lived among. ... The taxpayers paid for Jim to drink himself to death because nobody would accept that his addiction was a state of mental illness.
Bill is in a similar situation. He is a walking disaster. Mentally unstable, a nuisance to himself and others. He has been housed for five years but still lives the life of a homeless person. He simply no longer sleeps rough. His flat is full of last week’s takeaway wrappings. Sometimes he remembers to charge up his electric key. Most times he is in the dark. He lived in a hostel for a while and had to behave. But he was never 'cured'. And so, when he was rehoused, his existence was always going to be that of a sustained victim. He never eats properly or sleeps through the night, is jobless and unemployable. But, as far as some homeless agencies are concerned, he’s been ‘successfully rehoused’. It just shows how much the system masks the problem — to the tune of an estimated £60,000 a year in Bill’s case.
He who pays the piper calls the tune, but the piper is paid with freedom confiscated from taxpayers, thus reducing their ability to build up enough capital to do what they would find most rewarding, which might include having children and educating them. If it costs £60,000 a year to keep a homeless person physically alive, that is about as much as it costs to send six boys to Eton. So the freedom of the taxpaying population is being reduced by that amount for every homeless person it ‘successfully rehouses’.
If the Government had not wished to keep Jim, and others like him, alive at the taxpayers’ expense, these homeless people would have drunk themselves to death more quickly, and the population of drifting homeless would not have become so offensive to the non-homeless population as to justify incarcerating them in the power of the iniquitous medical Mafia, which will not hesitate to deprive them of their mental, as well as physical, liberty by the enforced administration of mind-altering drugs.
‘Colonialism’, the imposition of your own standards on a subject population, is in other contexts disapproved of. You could say that John Bird’s article is expressing 'lifestyle colonialism'. If your subjects do not bring themselves into conformity with your ideas of an approvable lifestyle — however much at variance with their own culture it may be — you consider yourself justified in bringing them into line, by whatever sanctions you see fit.
19 February 2007
Pussyfooting about compulsory education
Exceedingly pussyfooting criticism of compulsory education, from an article by Professor Dennis O’Keefe, published by the Libertarian Alliance:
When, recently, I and my associates were resident in East London, we found that waiting for a train at a railway station exposed one to being the target of rocks thrown by children of primary school age, something that was unheard of when I lived in East London soon after the inception of the Welfare (or Oppressive) State. Although even then the ideology was far enough advanced to be severely damaging to the education of a person of exceptional drive and ability.
If I gave a seminar in Oxford on this topic, nobody would come, because I have no academic position or social status. This results from the damage inflicted on my life by the post-war educational and academic systems.
As elementary education got going in the late nineteenth century, before and after compulsion, and up to the Second World War, the curve of British crime fell. With the huge growth of secondary, tertiary and further education since then, it has all rocketed back to square one. One flinches from drawing mechanistic associations, but the contingent growth of anti-social activity side by side with the parallel expansion of mass schooling raise questions too obvious to be ducked. (from ‘Compulsory Education: An Oxymoron of Modernity’)Why should one ‘flinch from drawing mechanistic associations’? It is clear enough that compulsory education, in this day and age, is aimed at producing demoralised criminals. Nor is it the case that only secondary and tertiary education produce them. As the concepts of compulsory and state education have developed, so also has the ideology that is applied at all levels.
When, recently, I and my associates were resident in East London, we found that waiting for a train at a railway station exposed one to being the target of rocks thrown by children of primary school age, something that was unheard of when I lived in East London soon after the inception of the Welfare (or Oppressive) State. Although even then the ideology was far enough advanced to be severely damaging to the education of a person of exceptional drive and ability.
If I gave a seminar in Oxford on this topic, nobody would come, because I have no academic position or social status. This results from the damage inflicted on my life by the post-war educational and academic systems.
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