More about the punishment of fathers

With further reference to the case of the father jailed for helping his pregnant wife to leave the country:

The sentence of 16 months in prison may seem excessive, but observe how efficiently it fulfils the function of opposing rebellion against the absolute powers of decision and prescription possessed by agents of the collective.

Rebellion (or assertion of independence) against arrangements made by the collective depends on the freedom of action (money) possessed by the individual. The father in this case could afford to transport his wife to the continent. He is described as a ‘businessman’ so presumably he would have been able to send her money to support her. The prison sentence has probably effectively destroyed his livelihood, and it could well be permanently. So perhaps his wife will find herself with no means of support in a foreign country with a very young baby and an 8-year-old child to look after. She might think of seeking part-time work, but she will need a baby-sitter if she does, which might have been fairly easy to arrange if her mother and other relatives and friends were living nearby. But she cannot return to this country without jeopardising her liberty and that of her children.

So everything possible is being done to drive her back into dependence on the British state with the complete loss of liberty and of her children’s liberty which that could entail.

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’, and my plans for acquiring qualifications with which to return to a career in a university were strenuously opposed, I hoped for support and help from my parents, if from no-one else. My father was blamed for any vestige of sympathy towards my plans and, as his health broke down under persecution, he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance. My mother’s life was reduced to that of looking after an invalid.

Destroying my father’s income and health was the best possible means of removing my only likely support in working towards re-entry to a university career. I had hoped to persuade my parents to move to Oxford and to continue living at home with them, which would have provided me with a college/hotel environment within which to carry on with my independent but, at least for the time being, unsalaried academic career.

Society had decreed that I should be classified as a non-academic person, and any help which might be given to me in attempting to return to a suitable university career was rebellion against authority and to be treated as criminal, as I was myself for making such attempts at all.

There is method in the madness of the witch-hunting carried out by modern society in this country, irrational though it may appear to be.

Incidentally, in a subsequent article in the Daily Mail (9 February 2008) about the case of the exiled mother, she is described as ‘an articulate and educated woman from a middle-class professional background’. So this may very well be another example of the way modern ideology facilitates class warfare, and the rule of the working-class or those with lower IQs, in oppression and persecution of those with some admixture of aristocratic genes or above-average IQs.

Punished for caring about your child

A father is in jail and his wife is in hiding abroad with her children after he helped them flee the country to escape social services, it emerged yesterday. The businessman’s wife was heavily pregnant with their first child – and was terrified the baby would be taken at birth by social workers – when he drove his family to Dover, and then on to Paris. She had a second reason for fleeing – she believed her eight-year-old son from a previous marriage was to be adopted against her wishes.

Her 56-year-old husband was arrested on his return to Britain, and later jailed for 16 months for abducting the eight-year-old, known as Child S. [The case] raises further disturbing questions about the secret family courts which only last week were in the spotlight when social workers illegally snatched a newborn baby from its mother.

Such cases are shrouded in the heaviest secrecy – with families threatened with jail if they discuss their fears that their children are being removed unjustly. But the story of the father and his family in hiding can be revealed for the first time because he appealed in a criminal case – which can be reported – begging for his 16-month jail sentence to be reduced. His plea to the High Court was dismissed and the father, who has never seen his baby daughter, was led away in tears. ...

The three appeal judges were told yesterday how Child S’s parents had separated in 2004 after a volatile and violent marriage. The mother claims she was told the boy would be taken into temporary foster care until she ‘sorted her life out’. But when she asked for his return, social services refused. After months of legal battles, a family court judge sided with the council’s plan to put the boy up for enforced adoption. By this time, the mother was pregnant. A friend said; ‘She was led to believe by social services she would have no chance of keeping the child she was carrying, which is outrageous. She was in despair.’ ...

Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Bennett acknowledged the ‘powerful emotions’ involved, but said: ‘Such proceedings taken by a local authority must be respected by parents. Those who act must expect a prison sentence because a real punishment is called for and to deter others who might be subject to the same pressures.’ ...

The father – who has adult children from a previous marriage – is being destroyed by prison, a friend said outside court. (Daily Mail, 7 February 2008.)

The quotation from the judge in the above case reminds me of a remark made last year by Chris Woodhead (former Inspector of Schools): ‘Parents who condone truancy should be punished.’

When the Welfare State (better called the Oppressive State) was introduced in 1945, it was said that education, medicine and helpful benefits of all kind were to be provided free (i.e. out of taxation). At that time I think many people would have been shocked at the idea that someone might be fined and punished with imprisonment for failure to take advantage of the goodies on offer.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if the State makes itself responsible as the ultimate provider (out of taxpayers’ money) of every recognised need, then it also owns its beneficiaries body and soul, and, as the provider of liberty, may take it away or decree how it is to be used, as it sees fit.

Only a capitalist society can provide its citizens with a territory within which they are free to make decisions; these territories vary in size but may be enlarged by individual effort. A communist/socialist society provides its citizens with no freedom. The freedom which they seem to enjoy is illusory, since it may be removed at any time if they fail to comply with the draconian edicts of the State. You are punishable if you fail to force your child to attend school, whether or not it is being bullied, physically or psychologically, by other pupils or by the teachers, and whether or not it is learning anything that will ever be of any use to it. It is not up to you to decide whether your child may live with you, even if you are supporting him or her completely, and receiving no ‘benefits’ from the State.

Incidentally, is not a prison sentence of 16 months excessively harsh in comparison with penalties for actions which are clearly harming their victims, such as grievous bodily harm, arson, burglary, etc? This gentleman had done no more than assist his wife in leaving the country, accompanied by her own child as a willing companion.

All shall have nurses

David Cameron suggests a home nurse for every mother producing a baby, paid for by confiscation of freedom from taxpayers, of course, even those who have been ruined by exposure to social hostility during their ‘education’ and left (as I have been) with no qualification with which to earn money or eligibility for the so-called ‘social support’ when unable to derive an income from society.

How about, ‘Cameron wants a hotel environment for every intellectual’? That would be a lot more original than ‘Cameron wants a home nurse for every mum’ (Daily Mail, 4 February 2008).

Cameron, I gather, is what is called a ‘conservative’, and the proposal is supposed to help ‘middle-class’ parents. But parents with above-average IQs are (as I plausibly surmise) under-represented among those who can tolerate having families in the captivity of modern society.

And of course, getting a nurse into every new mum’s household will enable the nurses to report to the social workers (also paid out of taxation) about which mothers should be regarded as “unfit” and have their babies taken away to be brought up at the taxpayer’s expense. How many mothers will have the sense to realise how dangerous this is and say “No, thank you” to the nurses?

The Conservative leader will today publish a blueprint for changing attitudes to childhood, which calls for a ‘profound cultural change’ in the way Britain treats its children. ... Success in raising rounded children [whatever they are] is not just about intensive supervision, it’s about enabling children to discover the world for themselves. (Ibid.)

Well, you could say that, i.e. children might be allowed to make their own decisions about arrangements for themselves. Abolishing compulsory ‘education’ and incarceration in state schools would be a good start.

My work has no relation to my interests

Copy of a letter to a philosophy professor

While the standard ways of interpreting things in the modern oppressive ideology decree that a person who has been deprived of a career and has no way of earning money or drawing ‘social security’ is not to be regarded as being prevented from using their ability in a productive way, and that anything they may manage to do is supposed to correspond exactly to their most passionate interest, I should like to point out that actually I have never been able to do anything meaningful since being thrown out of Oxford University without a single usable degree fifty years ago.

This is not, realistically, surprising as I have never had even a one-person salary with which to support myself and provide myself with the institutional environment which is absolutely necessary to me.

So why should anything I have managed to squeeze out be regarded as any indication of what I would have been doing if not totally deprived of financial support? Why, without money, should one be expected to be able to do anything at all? That I have produced anything at all is a tribute to my exceptional ability and extreme determination, and should (in a non-oppressive society) be regarded as a reason why I should not continue to be kept absolutely deprived of opportunity by lack of a salary and status.

Everything I have squeezed out, including the DPhil thesis, bore no relation to what I should have liked to be doing but was an application for readmission to the ranks of the salaried and statusful. The choice of material both in psychology and philosophy was determined under duress and the work was carried out in oppressive circumstances.

There is absolutely no way in which I have ever been free to ‘follow my interests’ or derive gratification from expressing my views or ‘sharing my ideas’ in my ignored publications.
The only one of my books that could be regarded as an expression of anything I might want to say just because I thought it was the case, was The Human Evasion and I wrote that only because I was still under extreme duress (six years after being thrown out) and unable to do anything. I had had no intention of writing about my psychological ideas.

I had not intended to use my psychological ideas in any way except that of facilitating my own productivity. I thought that my understanding of centralised psychology would make it possible for me to be very happy and productive as soon as I got back to the circumstances necessary for an academically and intellectually productive life. But in fact the goal of re-entry to a university career at a suitable level of seniority or, indeed, any level, was no nearer, in fact receding; and my energy level was declining in boredom.

So I thought that I should write at least something based on my memories of centralised psychology before they became too inaccessible. I thought that The Human Evasion might get me established as a writer, whose book-sales might make up for my lack of an academic salary and enable me to do research work of some kind that might be regarded as establishing a claim to reinstatement as an academic.

Cape Fear

When I am doing my daily exercise quota on my cross-trainer, I scan the television programmes for moving wallpaper to look at. This has made me aware that modern films are almost universally unpleasant and uninteresting, so far as I am concerned, having a much greater content of explicit sadism than when I was growing up.

If a film is ‘serious’, rather than a ‘comedy’ (I don’t find comedies pleasant either) the storyline is almost certain to depend on some person or persons doing something to other persons which is very nasty and sure to be against the will of those persons. People are tortured, murdered, raped etc. and then may seek revenge against those who maltreated them, whether by retaliatory brutality or by ensuring that they (the perpetrators) are exposed to ‘justice’ in the form of imprisonment or execution.

These films seem to shed a light on a fundamental element in human motivation. There is, it would appear, a drive to assert oneself by making some other consciousness aware of its impotence; you are forcing it to experience something to which it cannot feel reconciled. I see that this could be a displacement of the drive to assert oneself against objective reality which is too powerful and threatening, and which may make you painfully aware of your impotence. But you may be in a position of power relative to some other people, especially if you can get on the right side of the social system in which you find yourself.

The film Cape Fear (1991 – a remake of a 1962 film with the same title) seems to express this rather well, at the same time as placing this drive in its place as an important part of the psychodynamics of socialism.

In this film a well-set-up, respectable lawyer once wronged a serial rapist whom he was defending against a charge of rape. The victim was a girl of 16, and the lawyer was so moved by her injuries that he suppressed a piece of evidence, to the effect that she had been promiscuous, which might have counted in his client’s favour. The client was ‘poor’ and illiterate, and hence an object of sympathy, but it is clear that he was quite likely to do sadistic things, to the point of killing people against whom he had a grievance. This partly accounted for the length of time (14 years) which he had spent in prison, where he brutally killed someone in the course of his confinement.

In asserting yourself to other people, it seems to be very important that they are made unmistakeably aware of the fact that you are able to threaten what is most important to them, and to make them feel out of control and inadequate to defend themselves or other people whom they mind about. (This is more or less the position in which people find themselves vis-à-vis agents of the collective in modern society.)

Near the beginning of this film the released prisoner tells the lawyer that he is going to make him experience loss. Then he sets about devoting his menacing attentions to the lawyer’s wife, girlfriend and daughter, and poisons their pet dog.

It may be noticed that he has no scruples about persecuting people (and an animal) who were not responsible for the imprisonment of which he is so bitterly resentful, but sees this as a valid way of doing things that the lawyer will not be able to avoid minding about.

Towards the end of the film, when he has the lawyer, his wife and his daughter at his mercy on a houseboat, the wife tries to make him believe that she understands what he has suffered, and pleads with him to do whatever he has planned to do to her daughter to herself instead.

The persecutor says he is glad she has made her feelings so plain to him. Now he knows she feels so strongly about it, it will make what he is about to do to her daughter all the more enjoyable.

In this, the later version of the film, the themes of wishing to have a destructive effect on people’s lives and the relationship to socialist ideology are far more clearly brought out. In the earlier version (1962) it is more a case of good guys being persecuted by a bad guy. In the 1991 version, the lawyer is (we are invited to believe) being rightfully punished for a misdeed, and his persecutor is a representative of the wronged class of the ‘poor’ and illiterate. The film is expressing the class warfare underlying modern society, in which well-set-up and successful bourgeois people are seen as natural targets of resentment, and in which the avenging individual, as the member of a wronged class, is ‘beyond good and evil’ and is free to disregard old-fashioned and hypocritical moral restraints.

Organs and 'social justice'

In theory, removing organs on this basis [presumed consent] can be made to sound humane, but remember the law of unintended consequences. Anything promoted by government as life-enhancing can be turned into the opposite by greedy and/or unscrupulous individuals (Peter McKay, Daily Mail, 14 January 2008.)

As usual, reference is made to the risks of ‘greedy and/or unscrupulous individuals’, but not to risks which arise from agents of the socially oppressive system.

‘We must never be denied the right to choose’, says Melanie Phillips weakly, but we already are, if we allow ourselves to be forced into contact with the medical Mafia. Whether or not consent to remove organs after death is presumed unless refused, what is to prevent disapproval of those who refuse being covertly expressed in bad treatment by doctors and nurses? I have seen it suggested that those who refuse to donate their organs should themselves be refused treatment.

If doctors are able to presume consent for organ removal, they will be given even more power to do things against the will of their patients. It is clear that a considerable percentage of the population would not consent to removal, and not all of them will be efficient and initiativeful enough to register their lack of consent in the required way. Even those who do will be at the mercy of the system, and will have to be confident that there will never be any failure to communicate their refusal at the right time to the right doctor. Given what we know of the fallibility of computer systems and of the medical profession in modern society, there is a very obvious and serious uncertainty here.

To be sure that they are not violating the will of their patient, doctors should wish to have an explicit expression of consent.

But, of course, a modern person may say, even if an individual does not consent, they ought to. A person who says this is welcome, so far as I am concerned, to set up a charity financed by like-minded individuals, but not by the state, to convince people that they ought to want to donate their organs.

The issue of the motives, including unconscious ones, of the people implementing the proposed scheme is, as usual, entirely left out of account. This includes those operating the computer systems as well as the doctors. In borderline cases, it may be difficult to determine whether a person is dead or not, or whether it would have been their wish to be resuscitated. In such cases, the motives and preferences of the doctors will inevitably exert some influence. It is assumed that their motives can be only virtuous and disinterested, and that the only risk of abuse could come from outside the system. But in a borderline case, the characteristics of the organ-possessor may be relevant. If they are aged and infirm, there may well be a stronger tendency to give up on them than if they are young and have what the doctors consider to be an adequate quality of life.

Nor, given the way that considerations of ‘social justice’ are entering into medical ‘ethics’ (as well as everything else) these days, is it inconceivable that ideas about ‘fairness’ might influence their decisions at the margin. Might not a ‘privileged’ middle-class individual be more likely to be treated as ‘dead’ than a more ‘deserving’ working-class patient? Might not ‘do not resuscitate’ decisions be affected by whether somebody has a harvestable organ?

In considering the dangers of databases, reference is only made to the risk of abuse by criminal individuals who are not agents of the collective or otherwise authorised users of the data base. An upper-class banker (John Monckton) was murdered in his entrance hall two years ago by someone who used published information to target wealthy people. There was some suggestion that the murderer’s motives may have included resentment of the rich, as well as the usual pecuniary one. What is to prevent a person with similar motives from being among those who have official access to a data-base and using it to seek out people whom he or she regard as too well-off? Or perhaps just using the access to delete their refusal to have their organs harvested after death, as a way of expressing his aggression?

Agents of the collective such as doctors, teachers and social workers are just ordinary people. They are no more immune from the risk of behaving irresponsibly or abusively than anyone else.

Reflection of the month

Beethoven's housekeeper

Beethoven had a housekeeper. She did the cooking and housekeeping while he composed music. I am sure the modern view of the matter is that Beethoven did not need a housekeeper, or, if he did, he should not have done. Plainly, they should both have composed music, and both have cooked their own meals. The fact that Beethoven composed music better than the housekeeper could have done is beside the point. It is the business of society to iron out these unfair advantages of endowment, not to enhance them. Why should the housekeeper not have had just as much chance to practise creative self-fulfilment? It is interesting to observe that the housekeeper could probably have composed music just as well in the intervals of her cooking and housekeeping as she could have done if she had had all day free to devote to thinking about the music. Beethoven, on the other hand, probably could not have composed nearly so well. This proves that the housekeeper had a better social adjustment than Beethoven, and is all the more reason why Beethoven should not have received preferential treatment.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Analysing Britney Spears

Recent events in the life of Britney Spears provide a telling illustration of how far disrespect for the autonomy of the individual has gone in modern society. But these events are supposed to be a reflection on Britney Spears herself, and to “mark a new low” in her “wayward life”.

After effectively holding her two children hostage at her Los Angeles home, she was forcibly taken by police to hospital having been strapped to a stretcher. As the 26-year-old was kept under "involuntary psychiatric hold", a judge suspended her right to see her sons Sean Preston, two, and 15-month-old Jayden James. (Daily Mail)

The Daily Mail asked a panel of experts to write an open letter to the star giving their views, again illustrating that in modern society everyone is supposed to know better than the person themselves what is good for them. One of the contributors to the open letters is Oliver James, a clinical psychologist, writer and TV documentary maker.

James wants to tell Britney Spears that she should not put her difficulties down to youthfulness and the magnitude of her success. “In themselves, these do not drive people crazy.” He does not mention the possibility that being deprived of the freedom to look after, or even see, her young children, and then being incarcerated against her will in a psychiatric ward, so that doctors can decide whether or not they wish to set her free, might in themselves be enough to drive a person crazy.

I do not myself have any opinion about whether there are any grounds for regarding her as “crazy”, but it seems to me that in modern society a failure to accept meekly that you have no control over the most important factors in your own life is sufficient to justify being described in that way.

Oliver James also wishes to inform her that her own opinions about her life are valueless, and that her parents are to blame.

Having interviewed more than 50 famous people for a TV project, I want you to know that only two out of those 50 did not suffer severe maltreatment as children. Again, as adults, only a handful of them did not suffer from symptoms of depression or personality disorder — "me me me" narcissism — compensating for feelings of helplessness and insignificance dating back to childhood.

You told a journalist: "I was never pushed, I never had to be. It all came from me." But I would ask you to think again: because I have never encountered a case where this was actually true. Showbiz prodigies like you often felt invisible to their parents, especially as babies, and they lack identity as a result. Being recognised in the street makes them feel important and noticed. However much you may wish to protect your divorced, devout Baptist parents, they will have made love conditional on success.

Glittering prizes became conflated with love. This is what made you — but not your siblings — vulnerable to the Affluenza virus of placing a high value on money and fame. You were infected with it from before you can remember and, sadly, it has now driven you crazy. But please do not despair. With the right therapy, I am sure your life will come together again.

Oliver James, like the other ‘experts’ quoted in the Daily Mail, pronounces his opinions on the diagnosis of individuals, even those they have never met or communicated with, with remarkably dogmatic assurance. Nearly 60 years ago I was amazed at the presumptuous and unrealistic diagnoses that were made of me, but in those days this sort of thing went on covertly and anonymously. James feels able to assert that 48 people he interviewed received “severe maltreatment” as children — meaning, of course, from parents rather than from agents of the educational or social systems. He also implies that, because this is (supposedly) true of most of the 50 people he interviewed, there is a strong presumption that the same is true of Britney Spears — regardless of the facts of her individual case, including her denial that it is so.

More 'research' on gifted children

Apparently there is a terrible place called "Research Centre for Able Pupils" (RECAP) at Oxford Brookes University. (See article ‘Is your child a genius’ by Sarah Harris, Daily Mail, 5 January 2008.) We are told that someone called Bernadette Tynan, formerly of RECAP, "has toured schools helping identify talented pupils for a Channel Five series, Make Your Child Brilliant, which starts on Thursday."

Before confiscating even more money from taxpayers for ‘research’ to be done by socially appointed oppressors of humanity, they should have devoted at least the same amount of money to restitution and reparation of those who have been deprived of a career, or even an acceptable means of livelihood, by the oppressive school and university system.

They should close this place now, and give me the money which is being spent on supporting it, so that I can set up at least a minimal institutional environment within which I and my associates can at long last have progressive and productive academic careers.

The same applies to the other appalling place, the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth at Warwick University (now taken over by the education department). If both were closed and the money given to me, I could proceed to make some use of my ability on a more adequate scale.

The money that is being spent on ‘helping’ the present generation of gifted children should first of all be spent on undoing the harm that has already been done to the lives of former gifted children, rather than doing ‘research’ on even more effective methods for destroying the lives of those with high IQs.

Usually discussions of whether or not treating gifted children, or any others, in a certain way is good or bad do not start by arguing about what are the correct assumptions to be made about the motivation of those concerned (this is usually assumed to be unquestionably benevolent). Instead the discussion is solely about whether the outcome of their attentions is to be regarded as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, again with plenty of unexamined assumptions about what is good or bad.

It is certainly possible to discuss the matter on these terms, but I know that nobody is likely to agree with my analysis of the psychological driving forces in the situation. So before doing so, let me first say that on what appears to be the basic moral principle, society should interfere as little as possible with the individual's freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit. On these grounds, compulsory education is immoral, and compulsory state education even more so.

But since we live in an oppressive society which has both compulsory education and state education financed by taxation, one would hope that those concerned in the educational system were trying to provide their victims with what the victims would wish to purchase for themselves, with their own money, if they were able to do so, and not to impose the providers’ own evaluations of the priorities of life, in an attempt to manipulate the outlook and behaviour of the victims. However, it is fairly obvious that the providers are often primarily interested in social engineering and ideological manipulation of all kinds.

There is no reason to assume that because teachers and educational experts have nothing to gain financially by frustrating and oppressing their victims, they will refrain from doing so, or will even, as is usually assumed, be motivated to bring about results that are advantageous to the victims.

There is every reason to think that many of those involved in education have ideological axes to grind; and even if they did not, they are in a position of so much power to influence what goes on in the lives of their victims, that it could hardly be expected that their subconscious motives would not have considerable influence on the outcome. Their motives are not necessarily purely ideological; they may simply prefer or dislike one type of person rather than another. In particular, jealousy of exceptional ability, exceeding their own, is likely to be a very influential force in the situation.

It now appears to be widely accepted that it is ‘bad’ for able children to constantly succeed, and that they need to be ‘challenged’.

On a website called ‘Gifted Exchange’, there is an example of this way of thinking.

Charles Murray [in an article called 'Aztecs vs. Greeks'] calls for the gifted to be given a challenging, classical education. He further states that we need to encourage gifted kids not to become just smart but wise. 'The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one’s own intellectual limits and fallibilities – in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today’s education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them.'

The editor of the site, Laura Vanderkam, agrees with this and says:

If anyone reads Aztecs vs. Greeks and decides to push for education that holds gifted kids’ feet to the fire, intellectually, then I’ll be happy.

This is just an incitement to those who are running the lives of gifted children to humiliate and frustrate them. Such people do not need any incitement.

PS
In the Charles Murray quotation he uses vague words, wisdom and humility, with confidence that these attributes (whatever is to be understood by them) can be produced mechanically by paternalistic manipulation, and by subjecting the victim to certain types of experience. What is really meant is that incipient centralisation* is to be opposed, and decentralisation enforced. The demand for gifted children to be ‘challenged’ is really a demand for any rudimentary centralisation to be destroyed. This is now a far more explicit part of the modern ideology than it was when it was so destructively applied to me.

* A state of psychology involving a sense of self-determination and identification with one's life. For more details, see link.

A pattern of interpretation

While watching a programme on the Sci-Fi television channel, I was reminded of the syndrome of slanderous misinterpretation which was applied to me and my parents throughout my ‘education’ and throughout my subsequent life of struggling for survival in the wilderness.

In the programme a beauty queen in her late teens is found dead, and her parents are suspects of having murdered her.

Her parents are middle class and respectable people in a high income bracket, which qualifies them as potential criminals to start with (according to the rules of television drama). My parents were not in a high income bracket, but they were very respectable and responsible middle class people, who played their roles as pillars of the community very well.

A psychic (or psychologically 'knowing') female FBI agent interviews the parents, who are defensive and secretive. Why ever should they not be trusting and open? The mother, however, begins to give some information, but this is of a highly suspicious nature. Her daughter was very precocious, she says, speaking affectionately of her brightness. She had been a successful beauty queen and singer from the age of six. She did not have much time for children of her own age, said the mother, and they had not encouraged her to have too much to do with girls of her own age who would only have been jealous of her. She had had some psychological problems recently, and dropped out on the verge of competing for the greatest prize she had yet competed for, winning which would have been extremely lucrative and set up both herself and her parents.

Later, interviewing a rival beauty queen, the investigator is told that the dead beauty queen had become disaffected and lost interest in what she was doing to prepare for the great contest. You can’t do that in this business, said her rival. You have to be intensely focused on what you are doing all the time.

Her parents did not leave her free to be herself, says the investigator, they wanted to make her into the kind of person they wanted her to be. It was done for them, not for her, says the investigator, wrinkling up her nose.

But she was a beauty queen from the age of six, someone says, inspecting a photograph of a radiantly happy six year old. "But who thinks for themselves at the age of six?" says the investigator. (I can think of some quite long and complicated answers to that, but I will not delay to give them now.)

Before she was murdered, the dropped-out beauty queen was supposed to have found her true self, letting her hair down with a shady boyfriend at a shady and uninhibited night club. She had also taken up piano playing, which you are supposed to think corresponded to something she had really wanted to do all along.

See how relaxed she looks, the investigator says of a photograph taken of her during this drop-out phase. She is really being herself. (This is supposed to be a contrast with the intense and purposeful beauty queen photographs.)

Amazingly enough, this whole scenario of interpretation was applied to me and to my parents both before and after the shocking ruin of all our lives which it produced, and is still producing up until the present day. My own situation differed from that of the dropped-out beauty queen in that my parents had never pushed me into, or supported me in my wish to do, anything competitive or achievement orientated. They had never wanted me to take the School Certificate exam a few years before the usual age, or to become an Oxbridge professor. I am still suffering because I did not take the School Certificate when I was 13 (or, of course, much earlier), and because I do not yet have an Oxbridge Professorship. My aunt in London was still believing (or pretending to believe) that my parents pushed me, and that I really did not want an academic career, in spite of any assertion I could make to the contrary, fifty years after I was thrown out into the wilderness.

"Oh!" she said, with mock surprise, when told that I was still suffering severely from the lack of a Professorship, a salary, a hotel environment and anything else that could make my life worth living. "I thought you got what you wanted."

In my early days at the Society for Psychical Research one of the most horrific features of the situation was that no one I had known in the past approached me to ask how things had gone so badly wrong, and whether they could not help me with re-entering an academic career. My aunt was one of those who did not come near me to enquire.

When my aunt said she thought I got what I wanted, she meant that she liked to think that I did not want to have an academic career and that it must have been my father who was behind the efforts I started to make, immediately after being thrown out, in the direction of finding a way of working towards a Professorship in any area.

Since I had gone to work at the SPR to earn a pittance of money as a degraded dogsbody (to facilitate my return to Oxford as a self-supporting and unofficial DPhil student in theoretical physics), she liked to think that this must mean that ‘parapsychology’ was of overriding interest to me, and that I would deliberately choose to ‘do’ it in poverty rather than do anything else with a salary and status.

This was the way my aunt interpreted the situation. In fact this very distorted interpretation was the only one that was propagated in the local community where I and my aunt had lived in East London, and also within Oxford University. My aunt was hanging onto this way of interpreting my life history and situation, in spite of the fact that I had by that time sent her a number of letters telling her that my parents had never pushed me. I had also told her that I still needed the Professorship (with associated status, salary and hotel environment) that I should have been given over forty years ago. (In fact, more than that, since if I had been left to get on with my education without obstruction and interference, I should have been quite well able to function as a Professor by the age of 15 or so.)

Reflection of the month

The social contract

The power of society depends on the power of the lie. The power of the lie is very great.

The power of the individual depends on the right of possession and the sanctity of facts.

Neither of these is recognised by society. It is only in a capitalist society that there is a recognition of the individual’s right to the facts. He has a right to the facts about his possessions. Consequently facts are themselves regarded as possessing a certain value. In a socialist society no one has any right to the facts. There is no point in facts at all. The power of the state, which is the sole good, is best safeguarded by there being no facts.

People are subjective, but some people are more subjective than others and those who believe in society are the most subjective of all. This is because they have abandoned to society their right to assess facts for themselves in return for the power that society will give them over other men. The high priests of society are social workers, doctors and psychiatrists. Their function is to convince others that they are being subjective when they criticise society.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

The Ten Commandments

One difference between territorial and tribal morality is that, within a territorial system, a certain number of people may freely choose to live according to tribal morality among themselves, but the reverse is not true. You cannot have a small free market society within a communist society, but within a capitalist society it is quite possible for people to set up communes or co-operatives if they wish. Tribal morality depends on making various assumptions, amounting to a belief system, about the psychological motivation of people other than oneself. Territorial morality does not, being almost entirely negative: do not interfere with anyone else’s territory. It is not necessary to have any opinions about the likelihood of people invading one another’s territory with benevolent motives.

Consider how many features of the Ten Commandments are at variance with modern neo-tribal morality. We may suppose that the Commandments represent a fairly primitive form of territorial society, and these principles are enunciated in breaking away from earlier tribal societies, which would not have observed them. A territory is defined within which the individual is not to be interfered with. He owns his life and property; he should not be killed or stolen from.

His property may include oxen and asses, men servants and maid servants, and these are not to be stolen or even coveted. Marriage partners own one another, and they alone have the right to have sex with one another.

Fathers and mothers are to be honoured, presumably to preserve the solidarity of the family unit; in particular, the solidarity of the offspring, that is, with the only two people on whose good will he has any claim. Further, it is immoral to bear false witness against someone else. This falls rather short of the respect for objectivity and contract required for commercial transactions, but perhaps refers to the commonest use of dishonesty in tribal societies. You see how easily, nowadays, fictional slanders of a socially acceptable kind can be used to damage people to whom one feels hostile.

This is only a territory-defining ownership, and falls somewhat short of an abstract recognition of an individual’s right to freedom of decision. Nevertheless, you will see how many features of it are rejected in modern television morality.

(extract from Letters from Exile)

Truant child's mother is fined

From the Oxford Times of 12 October:

A mother has been given a £1,000 fine – the maximum penalty – for not sending her child to primary school in Abingdon ... after her six-year-old child missed almost 50 per cent of classes between February 19 and July 13 this year.

Barry Armstrong, Oxfordshire County Council’s manager for attendance and welfare said: ’This is not the first time we have brought court proceedings against parents who persistently fail to ensure their child attends school. In previous instances the penalty has been a spell in prison. If we are to continue to raise educational standards, we need the children to be at school. It is as simple as that. The law should be obeyed.’ …

Michael Taylor, headteacher of St Edmund’s Primary School – not the school that the six-year-old was attending – said: ‘I do feel we need to make a stand on this. Children’s education is suffering through absence from school. … I think this fine is just and necessary if we are to send out the right message.’

When we were based in North Oxford, we had various part-time voluntary workers, among them the Japanese wife of a Japanese DPhil student. Her daughter was going to a primary school in Oxford. This Japanese lady was a highly intelligent and very efficient person, and was concerned that her daughter learned very little at school. The little girl seemed to spend most of her time painting pictures, watching videos and going swimming. She was not unhappy, her mother said. Her daughter enjoyed doing all these things; it was just that she was not actually learning very much.

The mother had bought some books for home-teaching parents and made sure her daughter did some sums from them every evening, to make up for what she was not doing at school.

The little Japanese girl about whose life at school we were told was a few years older than the girl whose mother has been fined. It seems even less likely that a six-year-old was missing out on anything much in the way of gainful education when she stayed away from school.

Perhaps, for all one knows to the contrary, the girl was slightly precocious and was learning nothing at school on the days she attended, even if anything was being taught, because she was slightly in advance of her age group. In modern schools, a child would not have to be very remarkable to be in this position.

When I reached the school going age of five, the local primary school entreated my parents not to send me. There would be no way, they said, that they could explain to the other parents how it was that I could already do everything.

Detective dramas and centralisation

Centralised psychology is territorial psychology; it depends on having a territory within which you are free to act on your own criteria. Socialism is opposed to centralised psychology, or to what one might call individualism. Ultimately the aim of socialism is to deprive the individual of any area within which he is free to know his own mind.

Recently I saw parts of a couple of detective dramas on the television; normally I avoid all television dramas, but I went on watching in order to see how the ideology expressed itself.

The first drama was relatively old-fashioned, it was ‘Cover Her Face’ by P.D. James, supposedly set in the 60s. It was pure class warfare. That is to say, anyone who had any freedom of action, i.e. aristocrats, people of independent means, statusful professionals, etc., was regarded as discredited and to be treated in decentralising ways by the police.

The second drama, part of the Taggart series, was called ‘Double Exposure’ and supposedly depicted modern life. The hero (Jim Taggart) was a working-class police inspector who clearly enjoyed his role of dominating and tormenting everyone with whom he came in contact, particularly middle-class business people, very much as the more middle-class police inspector in the P.D. James drama had done.

Everybody, of every social class, was more or less on tenterhooks about what other people, be it criminals or the police, might think about them, suspect them of, find out about them, or do to them. People who were trying to make money were automatically villains, and doing voluntary work with no pay was a sign of virtue.

It is scarcely possible to think of anyone in this drama who was free from anxiety of social disapproval; Taggart himself was hauled over the coals by a superior for saying the wrong things in the wrong way to the Press.

Not even the working class were nice to one another; they hung one of their number upside down over a motorway in order to extract a confession from him.

The police, enjoying their power to invade and threaten other people’s lives, were the goodies and the only people who seemed to be getting anything positive out of it.

Reflections on being a philosopher

It is true that few of the best known philosophers had university appointments, but that does not mean that a philosopher (or any other sort of intellectual) can do without one in the modern world. The great revolution has happened, which has virtually destroyed intellectual and cultural activity outside of state-funded universities. All the philosophers I can think of had private incomes of some sort and also had, in effect, a hotel or at least boarding-house environment, which it was then much easier for middle class or upper class people to have regardless of social recognition. (Working class or poor people could be, of course, and occasionally were, supported by the aristocracy.) And, of course, there was not at that time the same social stigma which now leads to the oppression and censorship of those who are having to function outside of socially-recognised academic institutions.

The idea that scientific research and other intellectual activities should be carried out under the auspices of collectivist institutions has arisen along with the idea that what is done in socially-recognised universities should only be done in them. The suppression of scientific and intellectual activities outside of universities has been much more successful than the encouragement of such things within them.

I have been and still am at a great and almost prohibitive disadvantage to those with university appointments in having to finance my own hotel environment from scratch with no means of livelihood. Of course being a woman has made it even harder. Modern ‘feminism’ has not eliminated the advantage which men have of being able to provide themselves with at least a minimal hotel environment by getting a female partner.

* * * * *

Regarding the idea that I am a 'sceptic'. I don’t actually want to advocate philosophical scepticism. If you have been forced into the position of an outsider, as I have, people are always trying to ascribe to you belief systems, whereas in fact you are primarily critical of their belief systems.

Any belief system is occlusive (I mean, it reduces awareness of hard-edged reality). But, of course, if you are trying to get a philosophy DPhil at all you cannot say anything you mean very directly. I would much have preferred to write my thesis as an attack on, say, modern moral philosophy, which is very pernicious and depends on unexamined assumptions that are never questioned. But it would not have got me a DPhil, and even what I did write was too near the bone as an implicit attack on modern philosophy of mind, so that I could very easily not have got the DPhil at all.

So it has got around that I ‘advocate’ philosophical scepticism. It is a bit better than being accused of believing in spiritualism, but not really what I would want to be supposed to be trying to put across.

Anyone working here and having contact with us would become aware of references to the 'existential uncertainty'. Actually this is very integral to my ideas about realism in psychology, but is a little more complicated than simply having a blanket scepticism.

Hindrances to the progress of research (part 2)

continuing from part one:

The pressures discussed previously are at work within medicine. The fact that, on a certain level, much can be achieved by the application of well-established medical knowledge in relatively underdeveloped parts of the world may help to distract attention from areas of neglect in more innovative fields of research. Much that is obviously useful can be achieved by applying to very large populations simple pieces of knowledge resulting from what was once pioneering research. Because of this, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it is new advances in knowledge, the significance of which cannot be assessed in advance, that may have the greatest effect on the potentialities open to the human race.

Actually, the consequences of the present trends appear to be somewhat different from what is usually supposed. A very small fraction of research work done in universities is "useful" in any sense, and the standards of it are quite possibly declining, for two reasons. One of these is that what serves to advance a scientist's career is the number of papers he has published, and scientists are thus under pressure to maximize this number with little regard for their content or quality; and the second is that papers that produce socially acceptable results are likely to meet with more social reward than those that do not, regardless of their technical qualities as pieces of work.

The expectation that things will be done well and effectively if they are done by large numbers of people acting together with a minimum of independence depends on somewhat uncynical assumptions about human motivation. If people are put into positions of social authority, their motivation is unquestionable; they are there to do good. If people are socially authorized scientists they are there to do science, and they are supposed to be additive: several scientists will do more science than one scientist. A statistician once remarked to me, attempting to reconcile me to the tedium of discussing a piece of work with a committee, "Discussion is always a good thing. Many heads are sure to be better than one."

In fact, the state may be disposing of colossal funds and resources for research, and deploying millions of people, but it does not follow that what is being done is necessarily advancing knowledge at a greater rate than would be achieved by even a small number of individuals who had some peculiarity of motivation that made them wish to find things out, and who also happened to dispose of financial resources that, while infinitesimal compared with the totality of those wielded by the state, were still large in relation to the capital which it is at all easy for a single individual to acquire in modern circumstances. Nor does it follow that a committee consisting of a dozen people with an average IQ of 150 will wield an effective IQ of 1,800.

What, in fact, are the motives of professional, state-supported scientists and members of directing committees likely to be, and are such people likely to interact constructively or destructively? It is an easy guess that they will be predominantly interested in their own social advancement; they will want to make decisions that will impress other people as the right kind of decisions, and they will want to do or see done the kind of research that other people will reward with higher degrees and similar marks of social favor. If young scientists are too strongly motivated in any other way — by intellectual curiosity, say, or by a desire to seek out fundamental paradoxes in the nature of things — they may well find themselves unable to stay the educational course that leads to life as a socially accredited and salaried research worker.

Some years ago a course of lectures on scientific research was given in Oxford, intended to provide information and preparation for those who might be considering proceeding to do research in the form of a higher degree. As reported to me at the time, the general tenor of these lectures was as follows: "Young people have an idea that when they start doing scientific research they will be breaking new ground and dealing with issues of burning interest. This is not so; they have to realize that research is not like this. What people do in the course of working for a D.Phil. is of practically no interest to anybody. The average number of people who read a scientific doctoral thesis, other than the author's relatives and supervisor, is estimated to be 1.8."

But even if the greater part of modern research really is uninteresting, in every possible sense, a very great deal of it is being done. As already mentioned, what advances someone's career in social terms is the production of papers. Broad and Wade have observed, "The preoccupation with publications has resulted in a veritable ocean of journals and papers. Today, there are at least 6,000 journals in medicine alone. An additional reason for the number of journals is the tremendous increase in the ranks of scientists themselves. It has been estimated that 90 percent of all scientists who ever lived are alive today." (1)

Estimates have been made of what fraction of the research being done is useful, at least in the sense that it is referred to in papers by other scientists. This is not a very high standard of usefulness, and, of course, work that is of poor quality but is ideologically attractive may well be cited frequently; it, then, will qualify as contributing to progress on this criterion. However, even estimates of this kind show that only a tiny fraction of the research papers produced have any influence on the work of other scientists and can thus be regarded as contributing to progress. According to Broad and Wade, "The available evidence indicates that the great majority of research responsible for the advances of science is produced by a small number of scientists. This small elite depends overwhelmingly on the research of other members of the elite, not on that of the wider majority. The pace of scientific advance would not obviously be slowed if this majority did not exist. It might even be enhanced if pursued by a leaner and fitter community of researchers. Perhaps there are too many scientists. Perhaps basic scientific research would be more appropriately supported by private patrons, as economist Milton Friedman has suggested, instead of by the government" (2).

One line of defence that might well be adopted by a proponent of the modern orthodoxy would be to inquire earnestly what scientific or medical research one thought was being neglected, and to require a statement of exactly what beneficial developments might be forthcoming if things were done differently. But, it is essentially the case that what is being neglected is invisible; all that can be done is to point out the presence of a very strong ideology in a position of dominance. From the requirements of the ideology one can, perhaps, indicate certain areas in which it is unlikely that research of a progressive nature will be done, but it is possible only to adumbrate vaguely some of the potentialities that might begin to emerge if it were.

The modern ideology is certainly operative within medicine — including particularly strong ideas on the nature of human beings and in what relationship they should be to society, and these ideas undoubtedly have their effect on the way medicine regards those to whom it is ministering.

It may appear that little is lost by the non-pursuit of research in some of the neglected areas; the findings, if any, could surely not be of great fundamental significance. But it is characteristic of research that one cannot be sure how interesting or significant the findings may be until one has made them, and any ideological restraint upon the extension of knowledge is a serious matter.

In conclusion, let me point out another consequence of a dominant orthodoxy which may also be overlooked. It is that it inhibits research even if the orthodox opinion is actually correct. Only research that may be expected to support it in the crudest and most obvious way is likely to be encouraged; areas that could lead to heresy must be ignored. Now it might sometimes be that research in "heretical" areas leads to an expansion of knowledge and that once it is obtained, it is observed to be compatible with the desired view of the matter after all. But, in general, there is little tendency for researchers to risk being placed under pressure to refine or develop the ideas accepted as correct, and areas of weakness, incoherence, or paradox are passed over in a discreet silence, rather than regarded as promising fields for enlightening investigation.

1. William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of the Truth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p.53.
2. ibid, pp.222-223.

Two kinds of "help"

In the Daily Mail of 24 October 2007, the downtrodden husband in one of the strip cartoons, who represents the formerly centralised male head of the household, querulous at the changes in modern society, finds his wife entertaining a social worker, and says that his generation had no need of social workers. If neighbours were in difficulties, he was always there to lend a hand himself. His wife protests that he has never helped anybody, and he quotes one occasion when he boiled water for an old lady whose kettle had broken down.

Yes, it is true that people probably did not help one another very much, and probably do so even less now that everyone is supposed to be able to get all they ‘need’ from the State.

But then, how much help of that useful, practical kind that people really want to have is provided by social workers? I am under the impression that this is not what social workers think they are there for. They are paid by money taken from tax-payers (thus reducing the amount of freedom available to individuals) in order to reduce people’s freedom still further by assessing whether they are thinking and acting in accordance with the prevailing ideology. If not, perhaps they should be forced to attend parenting classes, have their children taken away from them, or be put in prison for failing to force them to attend school. These are all ways of reducing the freedom of individuals to do what they think is good for them, or in their interests. Doing something for them that they wanted done, such as housework, would have the opposite effect.

It may be true that people did not do as much as they might have done to help one another in practical ways, but it is certainly not the case that the great proliferation of social workers is filling in the massive deficit that there may have been, and may still be, in help of a really useful kind.

The ‘help’ provided by social workers is a different kind of thing altogether.

Is anger bad?

Copy of a letter to a potential voluntary worker

The reason I queried your saying that anger was something to be worked on to improve yourself (or however you put it) was that anger is regarded as automatically bad and to be eliminated in modern ideological psychology, such as Cognitive Therapy etc. (except when it is anger at capitalists or City fat cats). So that there can be no question of justified resentment of maltreatment by society. So people are liable to point out to me that I sound angry, as if they have noticed a weak point in my position, and this is supposed to invalidate my claims that I need help in securing reparation and reinstatement.

People like to notice the torture and killing carried out in the name of Christianity as if it invalidates the idea of anything with a more extensive worldview (or cosmic view) than that of socialist oppression. But actually exactly the same psychological forces are at work in socialist oppression itself and are causing plenty of torture, killing and generalised suffering, physical as well as psychological.

As in the days of the Catholic inquisitions, harm caused to individuals by the agents of the collective (state or church) is condoned or ignored.

Actually I think — in a theoretical way rather than by direct introspection — that everyone is very angry at the existential situation, but it is frightening to acknowledge this, and it turns into reactiveness or oppressiveness against other people, more or less well wrapped up as knowing better than they do themselves what would be good for them. And so everyone stays wrapped up in a cocoon of social meaningfulness.

I am very used to people telling me that they won’t help me or us, but (or because) they are going to be using all their available time helping some socially acceptable object of compassion, e.g. doing the accounts of a school, so that they wouldn’t have any time for doing ours, who are the victims of the ‘educational’ system, and we ought to be pleased, because we believe in people being helped, don’t we?

The person with a high IQ in modern society is in the position of a heretic in a Christian country with an inquisition. He is guilty of believing in the wrong things and is seen as deserving all that can be done to him.

Hindrances to the progress of research (part 1)

This is the first half of a paper written some years ago for a collection published by Praeger (Medical Science and the Advancement of World Health, ed. Robert Lanza MD). The points made appear to be as applicable now as they were then.

We live at a time when the most fundamental ideal of scientific enquiry is being called into question, and indeed explicitly rejected. This cannot fail to have a profound effect on research in all fields, not only the medical. But the effect of the dominant ideological climate may be particularly distinct in relation to medicine since this concerns the nature of human beings and the extent of their dependence on the society around them; these are matters that carry a particularly strong emotional loading from the viewpoint of the prevailing orthodoxy, and this loading sets up stringent requirements for what shall and shall not be done.

But first let us consider what may be the fundamental ideal of science. The Duke of Kent, in his 1981 presidential address to the British Society for the Advancement of Science, asserted, "I say without any equivocation that I consider it the scientist's first and imperative duty to expand the boundaries of knowledge." Similarly, Hans Eysenck stated, "Personally, I would take my stand with Thomas Jefferson: 'There is no truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world'" (1).

Both these assertions were made in the awareness of, and in explicit opposition to, a climate of opinion in which they are no longer widely accepted. It is old-fashioned and naive to talk of an external truth or reality toward an understanding of which the human race is advancing by successive approximations. There is no criterion of reality other than social agreement. Reverence is due only to what is socially desirable.

A central, maybe the central, determinant of contemporary attitudes in all fields of intellectual activity is the modern drive toward eliminating any sense of tension between socially agreed-upon opinion and external reality. The tension is removed by denial, more or less explicit, that there is any such thing as external reality or that it has any right to numinous status if there is. Why does it matter what is true? What is important is what is good. There is even a school of thought in the modern philosophy of science that teaches explicitly that it is impossible to arrive at objectivity in scientific observations; all observations are made in the context of the received ideology of their time and cannot be separated from it.

So we find ourselves in a situation in which one ideal of science is being, with increasing explicitness, replaced by another. The old-fashioned ideal conceived of science as striving to establish the truth, whatever it might turn out to be, whether at variance or not with what human beings would expect or prefer it to be. The new ideal conceives of science as subservient to the requirements of social desirability. This view of the matter depends on the idea that the outcomes of research can be foreseen, the social consequences of it predicted, and a definite opinion formed whether these consequences are desirable.

In fact, immensely useful, practical consequences have often arisen from the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. The Curies studied radium without foreseeing its medical applications; Sir Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin by chance. It is impossible for the consequences of an increment in human knowledge to be accurately foreseen, even by those most directly concerned with it. Twenty years before the first use of atomic power, Einstein and Rutherford expressed their opinion that no practical harnessing of atomic power would ever be possible.

In general, it is certainly possible to argue that the ostensible modern goal of beneficial effects on society as a whole is more likely to be achieved, and to be achieved more effectively, by an adherence to the old-fashioned principles that knowledge is good in itself and that the extension and dissemination of knowledge of all facts without distinction is intrinsically desirable. Nevertheless, it is a somewhat weak position to defend a principle by demonstrating that it may be defended in terms of another principle, as if admitting that the latter is the really important one, and the former can only be justified in terms of it. As Eysenck observes, "According to the scientific ethos, scientists should fearlessly speak the truth; in theory, truth is the supreme god to whom the scientist bows. The position now is departing rather rapidly from this belief" (2). He quotes Carl Sagan as saying, "In a time of trouble, the tendency of society is to constrict the range of accepted ideas. But just the opposite — diversity, heresy — is what is needed if problems are to be solved."

The qualification "in a time of trouble" is unnecessary. Any society has a strong tendency to foster and favour only activities and intellectual productions that support the received ideology of the time, and the notion that individualistic heretics are good for anything is never likely to be applied with much energy. In a society in which the financing of research is largely, indeed almost exclusively, undertaken by the state or by collective entities which are answerable to the prevailing orthodoxy, there will be little opportunity for heresy to take effect.

The modern ideology produces two kinds of pressure, one practical and one moral. The practical one is that there is a constant transfer of freedom of action (or financial power) from individuals to the state. Individuals are heavily taxed, and their ability to pass on by inheritance even such accumulations as they are able to build up in a heavily taxed lifetime is itself subject to heavy taxation. In addition, there is taxation by inflation, and state control over the supply and value of money held in the hands of individuals. This is confiscation as surely as would be open levies on the assets every citizen, but its effects are indirect. The cost makes it less and less likely that any individual or group of individuals can carry out independent research on an adequate scale; the freedom to set up research establishments and to do independent work has thus effectively been confiscated and transferred to the state.

The moral pressure of the modern ideology is simply towards doing what reinforces it. The fact that the beliefs that actually make up the modern ideology are largely implicit, although all-pervasive, makes it more, and not less, dangerous. You will gain social reward and approval by doing research that has results other people will approve of; you will not gain it by doing research that calls into question some important, even if implicit, belief. Even if this were not supported by the financial censorship already described, it would be a powerful force.

1. Hans J. Eysenck, "The Ethics of Science and the Duties of Scientists," British Association for the Advancement of Science, New Issue, No. 1 (August 1975), reprinted in H. B. Gibson, Hans Eysenck: The Man and His Work (London: Peter Owen, 1981).
2. ibid.

Part two of this can be read here.

Dualistic theories in the modern world

Dualistic theories are extremely unpopular in the modern world. We may remember that dualism, in which the mind may be regarded as to some extent separable from matter, permitted spiritualistic theories and various forms of survivalist religion. Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, they could be interpreted as compatible with a high evaluation of individuality. It was always a problem for theistic religions that it might occur to their members to claim that they had some direct information from God and that they set more store by this than by the authority of the Church. However, in a sense this was not much of a problem, as the Church always seemed willing to wipe out deviancy with the utmost physical cruelty.

This, perhaps, provides us with a clue to the great preference for materialism shown by modern leaders of thought. It has always been by means of the physical that people acting on behalf of the collective have exercised their greatest and most inexorable force on other people as individuals. So, whatever the evidence either way may be said to be, and whether or not anything could be considered as having any real bearing on the question, modern thought rigorously hunts down and rejects any lingering vestiges of dualistic thought.

In one respect this might seem confusing to an outside observer, because it seems clear that the collective wishes individuals to be subordinated to it, and it also wishes to promote egalitarianism. Egalitarianism might seem easier to justify on the assumption that each individual has a non-material component called a soul, and that this is of great importance for reasons which do not depend on social consensus. If you allow for existence of souls, it is perhaps less remarkable that individuals should be regarded as equal in value, without consideration of any other attributes they may have. However, in practice it does not seem to work like that.

Leaders of modern thought are keen on regarding all aspects of the human being as derived from the evolutionary process. This is not surprising, as the theory of evolution is attractive, and it becomes possible to relate the characteristics of living organisms to the coded genetic material with ever-increasing completeness. But justifiable as this concern with evolutionary processes may seem to be, and difficult as it may be to see any justification for entertaining ideas of any non-materialistic elements in the situation, I nevertheless have the impression that the drive towards materialistic explanation is motivated. There is, I think, a positive desire to eliminate any possible remaining vestige of dualism.

Many modern philosophers would not admit that consciousness was a meaningful concept, but among those who do you will easily hear it said that the puzzle of consciousness is: what evolutionary reason can be given for its presence? It would seem that all the functions of a human being could be carried out equally well by a sufficiently complex but unconscious computer. But all features of human beings, it is argued, must have arisen from evolutionary procedures and from nothing else.

Dualists, who may entertain beliefs in a supernaturalist religion, might wish to maintain that consciousness was there because a human being had a soul, or some such thing, but the leaders of modern thought not only reject such ideas, I think one may say that they wish to reject them. A totally materialistic viewpoint is sought after, this being a part of the modern religion.

What is desired to arrive at is a certain psychological, and even political, position which is, however, not quite as much justified by the facts as it is emotionally taken to be. However thoroughly materialistic and reductionist you are, this really tells you nothing about how human beings 'should' conduct their affairs.

No female geniuses

Copy of a letter to a philosopher

The article by A.N. Wilson in the Daily Mail contains the observation that no women of genius have emerged in the last 30 years, i.e. since they have been ‘given a chance’ as they were not in pre-Welfare State times. This is supposed to prove that they are no good at being geniuses, since the social discrimination of earlier centuries has been removed. But, in fact, I have been rigorously deprived of opportunity throughout my life, and I can point out many areas in which I would have been progressively productive if not kept absolutely inactive by financial deprivation and lack of social status. My chances in life were destroyed by the 1945 Education Act and its consequences, in no way created or improved by it.

Neither Charles’s nor Fabian’s comments on A.N. Wilson’s article have been published in the on-line comments or in the Letters to the Editor. [Update: one now has.]

Fabian and I have often offered articles on various topics to the editor, and received no reply.

The only way I could publish a reply to A.N. Wilson’s article would be to pay for half a page of the Daily Mail and publish an article as an advertising feature. This would cost (as I guess from previous enquiries) at least £5000.

Even if I felt able to do this, I would not be at all surprised if my money was turned down when they knew what I proposed to publish. Criticising the sacred assumptions of the modern ideology and breaking the taboo about complaining of the damage done to your life by properly appointed agents of the collective seems to be regarded as even more reprehensible than pornography.

How not to advance understanding of OBEs

This is an article which appeared in the Financial Times magazine. It reminds me of how deplorable it is that we continue to be prevented from making any progress in research on out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs), as well as being unable to publicise our criticisms of tendentious work in several other well-established areas, such as philosophy and education. The point about OBEs is that they may very well shed important light on the processes of normal perception, given that they represent a sort of ‘subversion’ of the ordinary organisation of perceptual data. The would-be paranormal association is a red herring, as far as I am concerned.

People (including academics) say, as a knee-jerk reaction, ‘OBEs are very difficult to work on, aren’t they’ (as a way of writing off the possibility of doing so). This is simply not true (at least it is not true of work that might be done by us), but we have never been able to do any work on them. If we could, I am sure developments would be rapid.

We hoped that Charles’s very constricted supervised work on them for his DPhil might have led to less restrictive opportunities, but of course it never did. Nor, of course, did it lead to any academic career progression for Charles in the direction of a Fellowship or a Professorship. (I wanted Charles and Fabian to get Professorships as soon as possible so that they could support my applications, if for no other reason.)

As regards the experience described in the article, it is typical of a certain type of case in which the person turns around and sees himself lying on the ground, unconscious. This particular case could be described as near-death, since the subject was clinically dead for a short time, but exactly similar experiences have been reported with less serious causes, and not ‘near death’.

Several of Charles’s subjects, when he was working at the Department of Experimental Psychology, had OBEs fairly often, and I am sure it would be possible to find out a lot more about them if we were in a position to do so.

Have some apparatus

Copy of a letter to a philosopher

When I met you I referred to my constant altercations with Rosalind Heywood about the expensiveness of apparatus. People (including journalists before they stopped interviewing us) have always liked to talk about our need for apparatus, as if it was the only thing we were short of, and as if it could be of any use without salaries, a hotel environment and ancillary staff. They apparently liked to think of me being even worse off than I was, actually spending my own impoverished, statusless time taking readings on a piece of experimental equipment! Which is an exceedingly slow way of getting information to process, and I never thought I would be able to do it.

Apparatus was what we were most often offered, either as a gift of other people’s cast-offs or (less often) bought, very cheaply, especially for us, without any offer of even a partial contribution to our running-costs while we used it. I used to call this ‘the treadmill syndrome’.

To go back to the beginning; when I was thrown out at the end of the ruined education, I needed an academic career with professorial status and a hotel environment; I did not want to do experimental work of any kind (i.e. doing work on one piece of equipment myself, in person), although I saw that I might have to do so in working my way back into a university career and, if I had, I would have had to be paid enough (as a minimum) to employ a research assistant.

Being head of a department with several people working with a large number of pieces of apparatus producing several streams of information, in the way Professor Eysenck was, would have been (and still would be) a different matter altogether; that would have been a tolerable possibility, although to make it more than just tolerable, it would need to be on a large enough scale to include residential college (hotel) facilities. That was what I was trying to set up when Rosalind destroyed my hopes of support from Sir George, Salter et al.

Rather than continuing to work as a secretary to Professors nominated by Rosalind, whether in a new organisation under her auspices or at the Society for Psychical Research, I withdrew from the plans for the new organisation, which had now become her organisation with Sir George and Salter dancing to her tune, and resigned from the SPR so that I was clearly dependent on what I could get by appealing for money.

So far as I was concerned, I was not in a position to do anything, but Rosalind put me under pressure to ‘do work’ of a pointless kind, even in such bad circumstances.

I could not point out anything realistic, such as that before I had a hotel environment doing anything would be negative, in no way positive, and my life was bad enough as it was. I knew that whenever I had said anything realistic about what I needed, Rosalind had used it to arouse a storm of hatred and disgust against me. So I confined myself to pointing out that even one of the type of EEG I might use would cost a good deal of money, and that I had nowhere to put it. (I did not say, which was more to the point, that I could not afford a research assistant to work it.) This led to many painful and unrealistic conversations in which Rosalind suggested, for example, that I might put it in my parents’ house in Kidlington (they had moved to Oxford by that time). ‘There is no room large enough’, I said, ‘There is only a box-room’. ‘You could have a smaller model with fewer channels’, she said. ‘It wouldn’t be possible to get it up the stairs’, I said. ‘You could hoist it through a window’, she said. ‘The window isn’t large enough’, I said. ‘You could have an even smaller EEG with fewer channels’, she said. And so on.

I should like to point out that when I was thrown out at the end of the ruined education I had no plans to do research in any field connected with psychical research. I had read Myers’s Human Personality in Somerville Library but at that stage I thought that even if there was anything in any of the supposed phenomena, it was not obvious to me how research on it could be done. I did not feel tempted to repeat the sort of statistical experiment which I had read about, in which some controversial ‘evidence’ for ESP was produced. This did not seem to me to advance matters at all, and doing it would be very labour-intensive.

When I arrived at the SPR I started a plan to set up a research institute of my own, but that was because I needed an institutional and hotel environment. I started doing this before I had any definite views about the likelihood of any of the phenomena being genuine or, if they were, what the best ways of getting to grips with them would be.

My ideas about these things evolved gradually. I was in contact with people who reported various experiences and also had available the past research records of the SPR. Also I had to think how to make the best of the various opportunities which came my way. I would never have thought, myself, of doing a mass ESP experiment, but Cecil King required it and offered access to his publications to do it in. Therefore, to improve the shining hour and make it a bit less futile, I tried to think of a prediction simple enough to be tested in such circumstances and, as it happened, it worked at the level of significance normally required.

Being "spiritual"

Copy of a letter to a philosopher

You said that some Rosicrucian SS men gave some help to a Buddhist who was also a communist, because he, like them, was a spiritual person, and you wondered what I thought of this story. This is quite difficult to answer, so perhaps it is worth trying.

Basically, I am really just agnostic. People are always trying to get me to endorse some element in the modern ideology as desirable or ‘better’, and although I wrote The Human Evasion very carefully to avoid appearing to be advocating some approach to life, I did nevertheless acquire a sort of fan club (none of whom ever came to work here, either to find out more about my ideas or because I advertised our need for help).

According to this fan club I was supposed to be advocating ‘going with the flow’, which I suppose means following the line of least resistance, giving in to all the social pressures. And, I suppose, general hippie-ish dropping-out. What I am putting on my blog and website now provokes vitriolic reactions, and my ‘fans’ appear to feel let down because I have lowered my standards of wisdom and enlightenment.

I do not have any insight to speak of into what might be called spirituality. I never had an outlook like that and could not have seen how to start acquiring one if I had wanted to; I cannot imagine wanting to.

The person at the Society for Psychical Research who expressed the greatest appreciation of spirituality, wherever it might be found, was Rosalind Heywood [see also here, here, here and here]. She also played routinely on the element in human psychology which had appeared to me most incompatible with centralisation — viz. the belief in society as the source of significance.

When she wanted to influence someone, which was usually to the detriment of someone else, whether me or otherwise, she would always start by flattering the person for the significance which a numinous society had conferred upon them. ('You are/were a great Professor / Ambassador / Colonial Governor etc.')

So I think it is the case that all sorts of spirituality are likely to contain a belief in the significance to be derived from other people/society, even if this is not obvious because they consider themselves to be free and uninhibited by repressive bourgeois standards, or by a belief in capitalism or individualism.

A typical Rosalind anecdote:

While waiting in a corridor at Eton to meet her son, whom she was visiting, she had become aware of the presence of a great and infinitely wise (vaguely angelic) Being who brooded over and guided the Etonian goings-on.

You observe that this story gets in the information that her son was at Eton, as well as demonstrating Rosalind’s belief in the sacred numinousness of statusful social institutions. She had a similar story about waiting to meet an MP in the House of Commons, also presided over by a Being of superhuman wisdom.

Aphorism of the month

The object of modern science is to make all aspects of reality equally boring, so that no one will be tempted to think about them.

(from The Decline and Fall of Science)

Tall poppy syndrome

I read an article recently (see below) which purported to demonstrate that there is nowadays in this country a hatred of success. This was done by referring to a game which was played for money. In this game one of the options was to reduce someone else’s winnings, by some sacrifice of your own.

It was found that players often made use of this option. I expect the conclusion that will be drawn from this piece of research is that success should not be permitted because other people dislike it. It has already been stated that research shows that what makes people happy is not what advantages they have themselves, but there being nobody who has more.

(The only form of success to which people have little resistance is that of socially appointed oppressors of humanity, in which case the successful person may enjoy some status and power over others so long as he retains his position, but is unlikely to become rich enough to enjoy any autonomy. He is not going to be free to do anything he wants in any way he could get anything out of, and will always be expected to get his kicks out of frustrating and oppressing other people.)

Actually I have been a victim of the 'tall poppy syndrome' all my life, without having ever been allowed to become a tall poppy. Perceiving that my ability might make it possible for me to become successful, I was scythed down as a precautionary measure. When I was thrown out of the university and started to save money (which I had no tolerable way of earning) to work towards being able to afford the institutional environment which I needed to have, I rapidly became a tall poppy in the eyes of other people, since I became the owner of a small house far more quickly than those who had acceptable careers and salaries, although I was living in it from hand to mouth, with no heating in the winter, since I had no source of income. Hence, I was always perceived as the capitalistic landlord or employer to be fleeced and done down as far as possible.

Similarly, I suppose that the anticipatory tall poppy syndrome has contributed to the fact that funding and career advancement have always been withheld, no matter what efforts I made to demonstrate my ability to make the best possible use of any opportunities or breaks which I might be given. I have always had the impression that the more successful such research as I could do in poverty and exile might be, the more rigorously was withheld any reward which might have permitted me to give any further demonstration of my functionality.

Sometimes, when I have commented on the fact that funding or salaried career advancement (even to carry on work in fields which I had initiated) would preferentially be given, on whatever excuse, to anyone rather than myself, however desperate my need for it might be, people have hastened to ascribe this to cut-throat competition for commercial advantage. There would always be someone who wanted the money or position for themselves. This is in line with the modern idea that the profit motive is the only source of all evil.

However, the tall poppy syndrome (applied in anticipation) provides a much better explanation of the insuperable obstacles to progress which I have encountered in practice. It has certainly appeared to me that people were prepared to exert themselves against me, even though no benefit would accrue to themselves beyond their sadistic enjoyment of my continuing frustration.

(written in 2002)

Extracts from article in Daily Mail, February 13, 2002, written by Tim Utton:

Scientists believe they have proved that we don’t like success and are jealous of self-made millionaires. The researchers discovered that Britons hate ‘winners’ and would happily give up some of their own earnings to damage those who are more successful …Volunteers were tested in an experiment using real cash in which some became richer in a betting game involving choosing numbers at random. Players could anonymously ‘burn away’ the winnings of better-off rivals but forfeited some of their own cash each time they did so. Almost two-thirds destroyed the money of those doing better than them, despite the high cost to their own pocket. Professor Andrew Oswald and colleague Dr Daniel Zizzo, of Oxford University, found that half of all the cash winnings had been deliberately destroyed by envious rivals … “This research shows up for the first time how envious people can be, particularly when they start at an equal level and see others becoming richer.” The research will be seen by some as proof that ‘tall poppy syndrome’ has taken root. The phrase, first coined in Australia in the 1980s, refers to the tendency to scythe down those who are deemed to have got above themselves.

Thinking for oneself

This is a letter I wrote in 1986 about 'individualism'. Since then, the particular version of individualism discussed here has become considerably more prevalent.

In a recent piece of writing I used the expressing ‘thinking for oneself’, and in the letter to you about Nietzsche there was some reference to 'individualism'. Now this is an area where terminology can be very misleading. The tribal ethic is in many ways very authoritarian and anti-individualistic. Above all it is anti-hierarchical (that is to say it will not tolerate any subsidiary hierarchies coming into being which are not actually determined by the tribe). Nevertheless, it will be asserted by upholders of tribal morality that they believe very much in people ‘thinking for themselves’, being allowed to ‘live their own lives’ and ‘doing their own thing’. This area requires very careful consideration because it is perfectly possible for someone to agree with you on the assumption that what you mean by the verbal forms you use is diametrically opposed to what you do mean.

For example, a fairly standard object of social approval at the time of writing is a person who has been in a convent and left [this was a reference to ex-nun Karen Armstrong]. Characteristically, such a person will say that she was expected to be uncritical of authority in the convent, but then she went (let us say) on a university course and was taught to ‘be critical’ and ‘think for herself’. This made returning to the convent unthinkable, and now she has a happy life ‘making her own decisions’. Actually this probably means being critical of certain ideas being promoted in the convent by reference (probably implicit) to widely accepted but unanalysed assumptions.

‘Thinking for oneself’ has a strong tendency to mean ‘identifying with the implicit assumptions which are fashionable at present and rejecting the ideas of any individual or minority which do not reinforce them’.

I saw this illustrated in the contrast between my convent school and the state grammar school I went to — which was far worse than the convent, so far as I was concerned. But on the ideological level (which was not directly related to how they treated me) the difference was between a very explicit set of beliefs, and one vaguely defined but actually equally emotionally loaded ideology. The nuns would give various reasons why you should believe in God and, having done so, why you should believe he was in favour of certain things and so on. I did not find the reasons convincing, but then the nuns admitted that ultimately it was a question of having faith, and they said (which was after all quite true) that you accepted all sorts of other things on faith in normal life. It seems to me that if you found their arguments convincing enough to accept their system, despite the extent to which it was authoritarian, this would be ‘thinking for oneself’ as much as is usually practiced, if not more.

The state school did not explicitly claim to be authoritarian, but one found oneself under enormous implicit pressure to behave in certain ways which would imply certain beliefs about the moral rightness of certain things. However, it was maximally easy for people to conform to these pressures without ever formulating what assumptions they implied. In fact, the indefiniteness of the situation was such that it would require very considerable intellectual powers to make a start on setting out the underlying assumptions with any clarity. The inconsistencies and weaknesses of the nuns’ positions were relatively open to inspection; those of the state school lay protected by the fact that they were not defined at all.

Incidentally, you keep referring to my speculation about the psychodynamics of human nature — viz. that what makes people able to tolerate their own finiteness is positive appreciation of the finiteness of others. Well, it is a speculation. All that is really open to introspection is that interacting with people, or thinking about them, is what makes it hardest to be aware of the shockingness of the existential situation. People derive security and meaningfulness from other people. But the speculation arises, not from introspection, but because one observes that while people ostensibly set great store by other people, they don’t really seem to mind about them much, at least about what happens to them.