Emotional 'management'

Managing emotions will be given the same importance as English and maths in Sir Jim Rose’s primary school education reforms unveiled yesterday. ‘Personal development’, along with the three Rs and computer skills, will form the centrepiece of the plans, which will be introduced in September 2011. Children will learn to take turns and share, prepare healthy meals, manage their feelings, and avoid drug and alcohol abuse ... lessons in managing emotions will encourage pupils to curb anger and jealousy and encourage empathy. (Daily Mail, 1 May 2009)

So, children in primary schools are to have lessons in ‘managing their emotions’, including anger and jealousy. I expect they will learn how to direct the anger they experience at being under duress in a prison environment, not towards the teachers and other adults who keep them oppressed, but towards those of their contemporaries of whom they feel jealous because they seem to be doing too well, and not feeling downtrodden enough. They will learn to gain satisfaction from making them feel more downtrodden and will look forward to the time when, as adults, they can express their anger by interfering in the lives of those of whom they feel jealous, by becoming teachers, doctors, social workers or other ‘experts’

By doing this they may be able to avoid becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol. Nowadays such things are referred to as ‘abuse’. ‘Drug abuse’ refers to making use of a pharmaceutical for your own purposes, whereas having your mind zonked out by a drug prescribed by a ‘medical doctor’ is not referred to in this way.

Avoiding ‘drug abuse’ and ‘alcohol abuse’ is part of what is to be taught in the ‘personal development’ programme for primary schools, which will also teach the ‘management’ of anger and jealousy.

How about providing training in the management of anger and jealousy for teachers; also members of education authorities, university tutors and college Principals, etc.? So that they do not take out the anger and jealousy they feel when confronted by someone cleverer than themselves, by destroying the lives of the most exceptional people who are in any way under their power?

How about training all people with social status and influence to direct their anger against other influential people who have ‘let the side down’ by abusing their power in damaging the lives of those over whom they had power, and to put the energy resulting from such anger into providing reparation for the victims of such abuse?

Chardonnay as a gateway drug

As many as 40,000 drinkers are dying every year because the Government has utterly failed to deal with Britain’s alcohol problem, leading experts said yesterday.
Doctors and academics [i.e. agents and beneficiaries of the oppressive state] lined up to condemn round-the-clock drinking, brought in by Labour, and the availability of cheap alcohol in supermarkets. (Daily Mail, 24 April 2009).

Why should it be the business of the Government to prevent people from killing themselves with alcohol and overeating, if that is what they want to do? The object of taking away liberty from individuals in the form of taxes is to create justifications for taking away even more, so as to create the largest possible population of people in a dysfunctional state, to be supported by the increasingly small population of functional people paying taxes. At the same time, taxpayers will have to pay for supporting the ever-increasing population of doctors (who live off the herds of their dependent victims) and academics (who pontificate ‘expertly’ about the morality of these goings-on).

Professor Tom Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Surgeons ... firmly blamed the Government ... ‘a change in licensing laws ... made it difficult to turn down applications for licences, with no need to take public health into account’. (Ibid.)

It is interesting how alcohol has now apparently, in the minds of the medical profession, become a matter of ‘public health’. This concept used to be applied principally in situations where the health of an individual would impinge directly on that of others, e.g. infectious diseases; providing an excuse for interference on the grounds that one person’s behaviour affected another person’s physical health. Perhaps eating sweets will be the next thing to be classified as a matter of ‘public health’.

Martin Plant, professor of addiction studies at the University of the West of England, said: ‘Supermarkets at the moment are displaying the morality of the crack dealer ...’ Professor Plant warned that alcohol was a ‘gateway drug’ leading to cannabis and cocaine addiction in many teenagers. (Ibid.)

The sort of comment which used to be dismissed as ‘moral hysteria’ is now apparently being made by academics. Will chocolate be the next thing claimed to be a ‘gateway drug’, leading to alcohol consumption, and from there to cannabis, cocaine, heroin, prostitution, burglary, etc.?

‘Working Class Children Betrayed by Labour’

The Daily Mail is not much less obsessed with the ideology than any other newspaper. Today it has a front-page headline ‘Working Class Children Betrayed by Labour’, with the ridiculous first two sentences:

Bright children from poor homes are failing to get into university because of under-performing state schools and not class bias. That is the finding of a major study, covering hundreds of thousands of children, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. (Daily Mail, 21 April 2009)

(And what did the major study cost, I wonder?)

Whatever is the point of getting to ‘university’ anyway, one might ask, if one were allowed to do so. What is it supposed to lead to? And if it does not lead to anything, what advantage is it supposed to be to the individual?

The campaign against people with high IQs and in favour of people with low IQs was well advanced in the 1940s and 1950s when it ruined my life. The only possible remedy is to abolish state education and compulsory education altogether. And I continue to be censored and suppressed by lack of salary and status.

Really bright children are unlikely to be dependent on schools for learning anything. Someone I knew at Somerville was found to be able to read when she went to school at five, although her mother’s hostility to her had led to her concealing this. She learnt Latin and Greek by reading the classics in the public library, outside of school hours.

Exploiting the credit crunch

copy of a letter to an academic

The ‘credit crunch’ (so-called) is really just a further stage of development in the ongoing socialist destruction of civilisation, most central to which is the destruction of the lives of the most able and functional. This is, of course, already far advanced; the school and university system was already geared to ruin someone like me when I was exposed to it sixty years ago.

Naturally the obvious worsening of the situation is blamed on ‘free market capitalism’, thus justifying further reductions of individual liberty, but in reality what is being demonstrated is the destructive success of socialist principles and ideology.

My unrecognised university is being prevented from pointing out how this has really come about, while other people (including a former investment banker in yesterday’s Financial Times) are publicised as saying, ‘Free market capitalism has failed!’ – so now (presumably) we can openly abolish individual liberty completely.

As an influential person with socially conferred status, you should not find it acceptable that expression of our point of view is stifled and suppressed, and you should wish to give us help and support in publicising it.

I do not accept your claim that there are already people in universities expressing our points of view, so there is no ‘need’ for us to be given opportunity or publicity. If there are any such people, they are heavily outnumbered, and are putting the case very feebly. And you should also feel an obligation to work towards redressing the wrongs and injustices which we have suffered at the hands of those with socially conferred status. On that basis, we should now be given status and opportunity even if what we would produce would be no better and no different from the work being produced by other people who already have the status and support which we have been denied.

As you may see from some of the things which I have written recently, ethical standards usually seem to be abandoned by those in authority when dealing with people like us. However, that is no justification for a person with socially conferred status wishing to cover up for the wrongdoings of other such persons, rather than attempting to redress them.

Gordon Brown's 'National Service'

Terrible things appear in the papers practically every day and my unrecognised university is still unable to publish any criticisms of them.

An additional infringement of individual liberty is proposed by Gordon Brown.

‘Every teenager will have to do at least 50 hours of community work before the age of 19, Gordon Brown has announced. The Prime Minister believes youngsters would be less likely to turn to crime if they had a sense of citizenship. The scheme, a form of ‘national service’ for teenagers, will ensure that they spend a minimum of 50 hours working with charities and vulnerable groups such as the elderly or disabled. Forming part of Labour’s next election manifesto, it will be woven into plans to make everyone stay in education or training until the age of 18 by 2011. Mr Brown said: ‘It is my ambition to create a Britain in which there is a clear expectation that all young people will undertake some service to their community, and where community service will become a normal part of growing up in Britain. And, by doing so, the contributions of each of us will build a better society for all of us. ‘ He added: ‘That would mean young people being expected to contribute at least 50 hours of community service by the time they have reached the age of 19.’...

The Prime Minister first proposed the idea of a National Youth Service to channel teenagers into voluntary work last year. It is due to be formally launched in September, and would become compulsory if Labour was re-elected. The scheme – which could include teenagers helping out charities both in Britain and abroad – is likely to become part of the National Curriculum. (Daily Mail, 13 April 2009)

Being forced to spend even more time doing things which they have no motivation to do will actually only make teenagers even more demoralised and decentralised than they already are.

I know two people who had a little experience of what is called ‘community service’ several decades ago, when things were less bad than they are now, and both found it an unpleasant and disappointing experience.

In both cases they were attempting to ‘help’ people who had already forfeited their liberty and had fallen into the clutches of the oppressive society. The first person’s experience was earlier, and voluntary, trying to feed disabled children in a disorganised institutional environment.

The second person’s, over a decade later, was compulsory because it was a school ‘lesson’ and he was forced to attend all ‘lessons’ provided by the school in order to attend the school at all. This is an oppressive, although commonly accepted, state of affairs. As I have pointed out before, children should be free to attend only those lessons which they find relevant to their own purposes.

However, the second person was forced in this way to go to a hospital to ‘cheer up’ old people who had fallen into the power of the medical Mafia, and found himself trying to make conversation with an old lady in a hospital bed who did not seem to find anything he had to say interesting. She may well have found it particularly depressing to be confronted by a bright young person who, ostensibly, still had his life ahead of him.

No doubt most of those who will be subjected to ‘help’ from demoralised young people will already be being abused by those ‘trained’ to help them. You could call Gordon Brown’s plan the ‘Compulsory Community Abuse’ programme.

Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Alf Hitchcock last year suggested jobless teens should be sent on a non-military form of National Service to curb the rising tide of fatal stabbings. (Ibid.)

Now what, I wonder, is there to prevent resentful youths, torn away from their knife gangs, from stabbing the old people and disabled children with whom they are forced to associate?

Bullying

When I was describing to a colleague the goings-on in Somerville, he commented that bullies always attack the weak. I thought: in Somerville that meant the vulnerable. If you have motivation or aspirations you are vulnerable; many of the young women arriving at Somerville were ambitious and maybe needed to make up for past deprivations, so they were vulnerable to Dame Janet’s[1], bullying by threat and intimidation. The only undergraduates safe from being bullied were the people who were not needy in any way, such as ___ (daughter of ___ ) who, even if sent down from Oxford, would have suffered little setback in her pursuit of wealthy upper-class men as suitable husbands.

The ‘bullying’ issue is interesting because I think the psychodynamics that produce bullying are closely related to those that produce the socialist ideology; i.e. a sense of inadequacy and impotence leading to a compensatory reaction against it in the form of a drive to have a strong effect on other people.

[1] Dame Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, 1945-1967.

Easter vac workers

copy of a letter

Easter is upon us. ‘Holiday’ times are always particularly bad for us, as any domestic or other workers which we can get become even less reliable and tend to announce without notice that they are going to absent themselves for a holiday of weeks or months abroad. So if you know anyone who might like to earn some money quickly, let them know. But they probably need to have a car, as we could not arrange accommodation for them at such short notice, and would not do so in any case if they had not worked for us before.

Stepp'd in so far

And betimes I will, to the weird sisters:
More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know,
By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4)

A quotation from Macbeth which expresses the predicament of Western civilisation, determined to go ahead with egalitarian socialism (communism), although by now many must be able to see that its consequences so far have been disastrous.

‘Strange things ... which must be acted’. However crazy things are already, this is no bar – indeed, it is a spur – to the invention of even more crazy egalitarian policies, which those concerned are driven to implement by an apparently irresistible compulsion.

William Sargant and the idea of brainwashing

At my last seminar an Iraqi lady commented that the way we had been treated sounded like what happened in an authoritarian regime, only where she came from they would shoot you for expressing any criticism of the system, not merely suppress you.

Later she asked, ‘What were they threatened by?’ I think the answer is that any respect for individuality per se is a threat to the total power that socialists seek over all minds as well as all physical bodies.

When I first met Mary Adams[1] after being thrown out by Somerville, she was carried away with enthusiasm for a wonderful book by William Sargant entitled Battle for the Mind[2],on the strength of which he was becoming a celebrity and a Great Name.

At the time I did not see the point. The book contained some examples of tribal initiation rituals in which people were made to lose consciousness, and of the techniques of brainwashing and Chinese thought reform. I could make parallels between the brainwashing techniques and the ways I had been treated at school and at Somerville, but this did not seem to me very interesting.

When I started publishing my own books and they did nothing at all for my status or reputation, I thought that I did not see what William Sargant’s book had had that mine had lacked: its content of ideas seemed very small. But there seemed to be an idea that by knocking out people’s minds you could create a tabula rasa which could be programmed like the mind of a newborn baby.

I gradually came to realise that it supported the very important piece of modern ideology that there is nothing in the individual that society cannot wipe out, whereas my books always suggested the possibility of ways in which the individual might become less dependent on the physical and less vulnerable to social influences.

Only recently I came to realise that William Sargant was (from my point of view) a horrifying monster of iniquity. He was a psychiatrist(!) which implies that he was immoral enough to have become a medical doctor first, and he used atrocious ‘therapeutic’ techniques on his victims, drugging them to sleep for weeks and subjecting them to ECT at the same time. This killed some and left others permanently lacking memories for parts of their past lives.

Sargant’s fame was relatively short-lived and other psychiatrists did not espouse his overtly physicalist methods en masse; I think that he was a bit too crudely obvious in applying his methods; but he was expressing a universal underlying motivation to subject individuality to the power of the socially authorised by means of the physical.

One of Sargant’s ideas was that if brainwashing had been around at the time of Christ, it would have been possible to cure Christ of his beliefs, whatever they were, and make him go back to being a carpenter.

[1] A former Head of Television Talks at the BBC.

[2] Battle for the Mind: The Mechanics of Indoctrination, Brainwashing & Thought Control by William Sargant, Pan Books, 1957

Socialist ideology among people of influence

Dame Janet Vaughan[1], like Mary Adams[2], was a Fellow Traveller, as communist sympathisers were then called. In Mary Adams’s environment I picked up on a lot of the basic attitudes of communism. As they came out in communist propaganda, they were blunt and unvarnished, without the justificatory ideology in which modern British socialism has wrapped them.

The hatred of innate ability was very clear, with no complicated suggestions that it was evenly distributed over all social classes. Working class to be promoted, precocious achievement to be prevented.

Mary Adams quoted with approval the Russian prescription that children should not be allowed to read before the age of seven; they should be having social interactions. If you wiped out of my mind all the associations arising from everything I had read before the age of seven, and the conclusions which I drew from it, a very significant part of my mental background would be gone. In fact it would not be possible, as so much of what I thought later depended, implicitly or explicitly, on my early reading.

A belief in socialism implies in practice a wish to deny opportunity to innate ability and independence of mind, particularly in combination. At least, I have always found it to be so.

So it was singularly unfortunate for me to go to Somerville, where Dame Janet was a violent and ruthless implementer of communist ideals. It is not surprising that tutors at Somerville took every opportunity to trip up those with high IQs or aspirations to achieve something in their lives.

Recently there was an article about some ‘gifted children’ in the Daily Mail (25 March 2009), applying to them the system of interpretation already in existence at the time of my education, and applied to me both by the local community in Essex and by Dame Janet.

In this system of interpretation, ‘ambition’ can only be the result of parental influence and is likely to make them ‘abnormal’; taking exams is described as ‘pressure’, getting ahead of other children is likely to isolate them from others (which is regarded as a bad thing), and ‘normality’ and ‘normal social interactions’ are stressed as overridingly important.

From an old-fashioned point of view it might seem strange that a person with strong communist sympathies, implying as they do a hatred of innate ability and personal ambition, should have been considered a suitable person to appoint as Principal of an Oxford college.

[1] Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, 1945-1967.

[2] A former Head of Television Talks at the BBC.

My attempts to get freedom, and reversion to tribalism

My attempts to get any freedom of action in my life have always been strenuously opposed; when I was at school or university, taking exams in my own way and under my own auspices was seen as freedom, and prevented. When I was thrown out as an adult, attempts to get more freedom than none at all made me a criminal and I was a person to be opposed.

The theme of reducing freedom, and increasing intervention and supervision, is dominant in modern society. The object of the modern religion is the complete elimination of freedom from human life. On the face of it, what is aimed at is reversion to tribalism. Presumably in tribal societies there is no possibility of doing anything but to live out one’s life according to the tribal conventions, fulfilling the demands of the tribal lifestyle and with one’s every action under constant scrutiny from other members of the tribe. One would be very vulnerable to slanders, whether founded or not, as one is in modern society, and conforming to the social consensus about what one should do, and precisely how it should be done, would be all-important.

But in modern society the underlying principles are understood and acted upon in a very abstract way. Until I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam at 13, I could have been supposed (at least by a superficial observer) to be doing whatever I did because I was told to do it, not because it was what I wanted to do myself. But then it became clear that I really wanted to get on with taking exams to acquire qualifications by reference to my own internal criteria, and I became a reprobate to be hunted down, as I have been ever since, apart from the very short time when it appeared that some of the most old-fashioned members of the Society for Psychical Research would actually support me in getting funding for an institutional environment of which I would be the Director, i.e. have some unsupervised freedom to do what I saw as needing to be done.

When I was 14, after having been prevented from taking the School Certificate exam, I felt that my cover had been blown, and I resented that. (By cover I mean the ostensible equivalence between what I wanted to do and what other people wanted me to do.) The people supposedly responsible for considering my interests should have been prepared, I thought, to give me cover at least until I had acquired some usable qualifications.

You could see the hatred of freedom in the modern religion as related to the Old Testament Garden of Eden story; the individual must remain obedient to God-Society by having no will of his own; if he eats the apple and starts to act on his own knowledge of good and evil, he is disobedient to God and is to be driven out of organised society as a depraved criminal.

This is more or less the interpretation of the Fall of Man story that occurred in some forms of Gnosticism: the apple (the forbidden fruit) was the gnosis, and in at least one version Jesus was the serpent, encouraging human beings to pick and eat it.

Further reflections on my past history

Sir George Joy and W.H Salter, who at first supported me (at least within normal social parameters) were both relatively cut off from the full impact of the modern ideology.

Once it became known that I aimed to remedy my position by building up capital, aiming at enough capital to provide endowment for at least a small residential college in the first instance (although even that first objective appeared hundreds of years in the future), Rosalind Heywood quickly and effortlessly turned everyone against me. By that time she knew of Somerville’s hostility towards me and that it was the wish of the Principal, Dame Janet Vaughan, that I should be driven away from Oxford. The Principal had socially conferred status and everyone wanted her to have her way. Of course Rosalind might, and probably would, have concluded quite independently that I was the sort of person who, once thrown down, should be kept down, but she would never wish to stand up for an outcast person against a Dame Janet.

So, to prevent my returning to Oxford which would make Dame Janet livid – she had already been made livid by my returning after a fashion with the Perrott Studentship to do a post-graduate degree - the offer that the Coombe-Tennants would buy me a large house in Oxford had to be withdrawn. At the time I did not understand Sir George’s look of shocked apprehension when I said that I could not take any more prevarication and would have to use my own pathetic savings to buy a much smaller house.

In retrospect I do understand it; the breakdown of the Coombe-Tennant house offer was intended to prevent me from returning to Oxford, and if I bought myself a house, however small, I would be living in Oxford against the will of Dame Janet. ‘You can’t do that’, Sir George said, shocked and apprehensive. ‘Well, yes I can’, I said. I did not add, ‘But only just’, because he knew that anyway.

I was forced to sell all my equity investments at a bad time in the markets (none of my ‘supporters’ offered me a bridging loan to enable me to sell at a better time) and it took every penny I had. I had scarcely any income, so everyone devoted themselves to driving me out by starvation.

You may say that the hostility which has always surrounded me (at least after being thrown out) emanated from Somerville as its centre. One of the things I became aware of at the Society for Psychical Research was that it is a small world at the top; all influential people are on the same networks, and all think and act alike. So, as I sometime say, ‘Once one person is against you, everyone is against you’.

The intensity of Professor Sir Alister Hardy’s hostility towards me probably owed something to his wife’s connection to Somerville via her sister, the Bursar, although the flame was constantly fuelled by Rosalind.

When I got some minimal support from Cecil King[1], Mary Adams[2], a little shocked but not too much because she could foresee how soon he could be turned against me, said, ‘It’s a miracle’. And in a way, I suppose it was. Cecil King had plenty of top-level contacts and it could not have been long before he knew of Somerville’s intentions concerning me; but he had approached the SPR out of the blue and I had managed to make use of Sir George’s last remnant of ambivalence towards me to squeeze out an absolute minimum of support. Which immediately made everyone very angry indeed.

[1] Then Chairman of IPC, publishers of the Daily Mirror.
[2] A former Head of Television Talks at the BBC.

'Trained' - to support the ideology

copy of a letter to an academic philosopher

As usual, I was not shortlisted for the Cambridge Professorship in philosophy, which would have given me a small part of the income and social status that I need for my suppressed philosophy department to start publishing its very relevant and much-needed contributions to academic philosophy.

I know it is your opinion that no contributions from me or other members of my department are ‘needed’ because, as you said, ‘Philosophers are criticising one another.’ And I know also that because you have socially conferred status as an academic your opinion is supposed to be authoritative and meaningful, whereas mine is not. However, I do not actually accept that my opinion is of less value than yours, although I do not have the social recognition as an academic which I should have.

It is very definitely my opinion that all areas of philosophy which are perceived as having a bearing on the theory and practice of socialist ideology (which is nearly all of them) are virtually worthless. In fact, their only raison d’etre is to provide tendentious support towards the downfall of Western civilisation and the reversion to a barbaric tribalism.

A ‘trained’ philosopher is one who has learned to take seriously what other ‘philosophers’ say; and to argue about, or write descriptions of, the situation within the parameters which are defined by never questioning certain basic and all-important assumptions. The fact that these assumptions are not questioned usually means that what is written can be readily exposed as incoherent and inconsistent, often even without direct reference to the underlying assumptions that are implicitly being made. However, this is something that socially appointed philosophers do not do – it is what they have been ‘trained’ not to do (nor, even outside the system, is it being done by anyone at present), but it is what we would do.

So I do think that the contributions which my philosophy department has been being prevented from making in the last 50 years should be regarded as being of sufficient value to justify the financial support which would make them possible. Although, of course, my opinion of what is worth doing is socially regarded as automatically discredited compared with, for example, yours, since you have a statusful and salaried academic position, whereas I do not.

Incidentally, all modern philosophers evidently feel justified in rejecting my writings as ‘not proper philosophy’, and hence in believing that it is right and proper for me to be prevented from making any contribution to academic philosophy or any other area by being starved of money and social status. However, nothing I have published has been intended as ‘philosophy’ in the sense of being intended to contribute to academic philosophy or having anything to do with my claims on a salaried and statusful appointment as a philosopher. I have written nothing while holding a salaried appointment as a philosopher, and if I had done, what I would have written would have been quite different and consisted of exposing the weakness and inconsistency of what is produced in great quantities by ‘philosophers’ with salaried appointments.

Crazy crusade

Tendentious stuff continues to pour out of universities based on the unfounded assumption that there is no such thing as innate ability or genetically determined personality characteristics. Or perhaps one should say, founded only on wishful thinking.

The ‘critical obstacle’ to an official crusade to widen the social class mix of students is [state school students’] poor performance compared with private school pupils, it was claimed. In a veiled attack on Labour’s record, [Cambridge University] said it had failed to break the ‘pernicious link between deprivation and educational attainment’...

In an analysis, Dr Geoff Parks and Richard Partington said state schools were ‘unlikely’ to hit the target of accounting for over two-thirds of admissions to leading universities ‘unless their exam performance improves’ ... But, said Dr Parks and Mr Partington, the real barrier to top universities was an ‘uneven’ education playing field and the link between a child’s prospects and their social background.

The research follows a Commons inquiry which found that almost £400 million has been spent on boosting recruitment of working-class students to university with barely any effect. Cambridge’s intervention will rile Universities Secretary John Denham, who believes leading universities should do more to change their social make-up. (Daily Mail, 28 February 2009)

Well, of course there is an uneven educational and academic playing field. Exceptional ability arouses hostility in its egalitarian-minded teachers and tutors, both at school and at university.

It is easy to prevent the exceptional from demonstrating their ability realistically in exam results. It is also possible, though maybe less easy, by methods such as 'dumbing down', to improve the exam results of those with much less aptitude for academic activities, which may well be combined with little natural inclination to pursue them. Both procedures seem to be a standard feature of modern education, though their effects are apparently insufficient to satisfy the expectations of ‘researchers’.

A further £400 million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on making the position of the able in modern society even worse, while even the tiniest support is rigorously withheld from the relevant departments of my suppressed independent university, continuing to prevent it from publishing criticisms of such things as this tendentious report, which has the spurious claim to authoritativeness of coming from Cambridge, socially recognised as a ‘university’ and massively supported with taxpayers’ money.

Even a four-hundredth part of £400 million (0.25%), that is £1 million, if donated to my independent university, would enable it to contribute to current debates by writing and publishing a few books and articles for a period of 2 or 3 years. That would only be a drop in the ocean of what is really needed, but it would be a start and get us out of the deadlocked stasis in which we remain at present.

On being "influential"

I would like to comment on the word ‘influential’ in one of my testimonials, in the phrase ‘influential published work on abnormal perceptual states’. This implies that the ‘research work’ which has been done, and the books and other material which have been written, in areas nominally related to those in which I attempted to start working myself, is in some way meaningful as a consequence of it. It is true that much of it may be regarded as resulting from my initial work in the sense that it is highly unlikely that it would have been done if my work had not been published, but it was no substitute for what my colleagues and I would have done, and would still start to do as soon as not prevented from doing so by lack of financial support.

It has always been a line of academics to taunt and insult me, statusless and unsalaried as I was (and still am), by describing me as ‘free to follow my interests’.

The system of social interpretation to be followed in the oppressive society is universally known and applied. Whenever we meet or interact with potential supporters and associates, which is usually a very brief encounter and generally abortive, they may ask what we have ‘done’ or ‘are doing’, and when they can identify an area of work by name they start to tell us about rubbish that is being ‘done’ in that nominal area. We ask them to stop telling us about this, or sending us provocative and irritating reports, as we are not even in a position to publish our criticisms of it, which we would do if we were adequately rewarded with salary and status for doing so, although being able to criticise other people’s work would still be no substitute for being able to get on with what we would do ourselves if not kept rigorously deprived of opportunity.

Or else they just start to put on a phoney show of ‘fascination’ as if that was meant to ingratiate themselves with us, when they are doing nothing to contribute either money or work to our constricted position, nor to publicise our need for such things among their contacts.

Comments on socialism

As Margaret Thatcher is alleged to have said: ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money’.

But by the time the money runs out, a lot of people will have been empowered by other people’s money to interfere damagingly (and for quite a long time) in other people’s lives, and that is what socialism is all about. So what’s wrong with that?

Attending conferences

Just in case it may ever be used as an excuse for not giving me a Professorship that I do not like attending conferences, may I say that there is all the difference in the world between attending conferences, however boring and rubbishy, if it is part of a job for which one is being rewarded with salary and status, and doing so as an unsalaried and statusless person living in very bad circumstances.

The Society for Psychical Research always held it against me that I spared myself attendance at their conferences, after they had cut off all sources of financial support.

Actually, other things being equal, broadcasting and giving seminars is something for which I have a natural aptitude, and do not mind doing. I even quite enjoy putting things across.

Sitting through other people’s papers and joining in discussions of them is another matter altogether, and would always be fairly negative, although I would always accept it as part of the job if I had a sufficiently statusful and well-rewarded appointment.

Erosion of respect for individual liberty

Respect for individual liberty is protected, if at all, by the market forces of a capitalist society; when that protection is eroded by socialism, anything goes.

A Christian lady has been blamed for allowing a 16-year-old Muslim girl whom she was fostering to convert to Christianity.

As well as showing dislike of Christianity, this demonstrates that the individual is supposed to be entirely the product of social influences. According to those in power, those around the individual should be able to decree his opinions and attitudes. If an unwanted inclination arises, his parents or guardians should be able to eradicate it, and be punished for failing to do so. (This Christian lady has been disqualified from fostering, and the drop in income means she can no longer afford the farm she used to rent to look after vulnerable teenagers.)

From the Daily Mail, 9 February 2009:

A foster mother has been struck off the register for allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity. The woman, who has looked after more than 80 children in the past ten years, is considering suing the council over the decision. Although she is a practicing Anglican, she said she had put no pressure on the girl who was baptised last year at the age of 16. She said social workers had also raised no objections to her own attendance at church.

But officials insist she failed in her duty to preserve the girl’s religion and should have tried to stop the baptism. Last April, they ruled that the girl, now 17, should stay away from church for six months. The foster mother’s removal from the register followed in November.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has launched a legal challenge to the decision with funding from the Christian Institute. Mike Judge, a spokesman for the institute, said:

'All people should be free to change or modify their religious beliefs. That surely must be a core human right in any free society. I cannot imagine that an atheist foster carer would be struck off if a Christian child in her care stopped believing in God ...'

The carer is a single mother of two in her 50s who has worked with young children for much of her life. She has had an unblemished record since becoming a foster parent in the North of England in 1999 ... The move has stripped her of her sole source of income, forcing her to downsize to a one-bedroom flat.

Similar attitudes were shown towards my father, when I was at school, for failing to prevent me from wanting to take more exams than other people, and at an earlier age. The fact that I was known to have a very high IQ was not regarded as any excuse.

It is asserted and implied in many academic productions in the fields of philosophy, education, and psychology that there is no such thing as individuality, as distinct from the results of social influence and interaction.

The relevant departments of my suppressed independent university are still unable to publish criticisms of these tendentious assertions, so censorship continues to prevail.

Lying (from the forthcoming book 'The Corpse and the Kingdom')

I have observed that in my experience the human race seems to like it best if the socially agreed view of the situation not merely distorts but actually inverts one or two of the salient facts.

To this one may add the observation that people tell lies more often than seems necessary to arrive at the (apparently) desired objective, and that they like to engage in manipulating other people's psychology. The less successful the manipulations are being, and the more self-evident it is that the victim of the manipulation is aware of what is going on, the more forcefully and obsessively do they insist on behaving as if he is unaware.

A motivation for this may be postulated. Reality (however much they may insist that it is impossible to define it except by reference to social agreement) is seen as a sort of threat, or potential rival, to social agreement. And there can be no more satisfying way of asserting the supremacy of the latter than by insisting that it is right when it is obviously wrong.

Market forces alone protect the freedom of the individual to act realistically and independently of social agreement. Hence a society in which market forces are weakened is likely to contain a suicidal drive.

I have alluded elsewhere in this book to a story about a tribe of native Americans who sallied forth to battle clad in ‘magic’ shirts which were no protection at all against real lead bullets. This is an acceptable story because it is supposed to illustrate the inferiority of superstition to rationalism, or the foolishness of supposing that there might be more to the situation than met the eye of a materialistic monist.

But there are times when modern society strikes me as being very like that tribe.

Of course this is only a hypothetical suggestion, which cannot be taken too far, at least not on the level of social organisation. No doubt this psychological factor, if present on that level, is modified by many others. How, for example, would one account for the fact that the suicidal drive is not shown by completely communist countries, and to a differential extent even by countries which are not? Part of the answer might be that once market forces have been completely eliminated and the state has assumed full control of what may be thought and expressed, external reality is no longer felt as a threat in the same way, so there is no longer any need to behave suicidally.

Cleverness and success

It is starting to be admitted that a high proportion of the cleverest do not make it, in the sense of becoming members of the immensely expanded ‘university’ population. We suppose that ‘cleverest’ has at least some correlation with ‘having the highest IQs in the old-fashioned sense’. IQ was defined originally as a predictor of academic success in the system that prevailed at the time.

It is not difficult (one might say, it has not been difficult) to devise an ‘educational’ system which favours certain personality types rather than others, and favours specific levels of IQ, which may be far below the highest occurring. But then, of course, the personality types which are discriminated against are to be described as defective in some way; it cannot be that the system has treated them with particular hostility. Bruce Charlton* refers to ‘awkward, abrasive and wildly creative’ individuals, as well as to ‘clever crazies’ and ‘idiot savants’.

I might infer from my own experience that when an obvious anomaly occurs, in that someone with obviously exceptional ability is being cast out, as I was, it is regarded as a justification for slandering them with psychological interpretations of any kind, which do not have to bear any relation to factual reality, except perhaps as an inversion of it.

Nor is it necessary for the various slanders to be consistent with one another. When I was at school I was supposed to be both a reluctant mediocrity driven by an ambitious father, as well as (in other contexts) greedy, selfish and ambitious in wishing to acquire qualifications as fast as possible and much younger than other people, so as to sneer at and score off those who were not able to do so.

On being thrown out of college, I am pretty sure (from what came back to me) that I was widely credited with being both reclusive and wildly creative. Both being reasons for assuming that I did not want to return to an academic career, and that my attempts to do so should be opposed.

In a recent blog piece, Fabian Tassano comments on the possibility that his ideas may have had some influence on what is expressed by some journalists, but always without any acknowledgement which might draw attention to his existence or make his books slightly more saleable.

A journalist may wish to adorn his work with references to Harvard economists or Booker-winning novelists, but what incentive does he have to cite someone with no significant social status? Only a moral one. In other words, none.

Actually I would put the case more strongly. In the case of a statusless person who has been unfairly deprived of their rightful position in society, all and sundry behave as if they had a moral obligation to keep him down and out.

* 'Why are scientists so dull?', Oxford Magazine, Issue 281.

Outliers

Another book (Outliers – The story of success by Malcolm Gladwell) has been published on how there is no such thing as genius or ‘a born scientist’, supposedly proved by the fact that the Beatles put in a lot of time performing and star hockey players practise a lot. This book is receiving a lot of critical attention, far more so than any of our books ever do. Our books are always as far as possible suppressed and ignored.

On a very unpleasant TV police drama series about a serial killer, of which I watched only a few fragments as it was so unpleasant, I saw a father being interviewed about his daughter who had been murdered. The father was saying that his daughter had been ‘very focussed’ on her studies and believed in working hard so as to have no difficulties in later life. This was evidently regarded as indicative of wicked attitudes on the part of the father, and putting him in line to be suspected of murdering her.

I am afraid that when I was at school and until his health broke down, my father played into the hands of my enemies in the local educational community in this sort of way. I was always very angry at him discussing me with people behind my back if I knew about it. I thought that both my father and any educational expert should seek my permission before saying anything that was supposed to be representing my interests, and ascertain that I accepted their views as doing so. In fact I did not trust my father nor anyone he might talk to about me to represent my interests at all. I think my father was wrong to be drawn into discussing me behind my back, or even in my presence, but I blame the wicked agents of the collective far more than I blame him for allowing them to influence him against me.

At a recent seminar I said to a fairly young ‘psychologist’ that there used to be this theory about ambition and a desire to get on in young people being the result of ‘pushy’ parents, and he said this idea was still held and it was certainly true, according to his own observations, of every young person he had ever known.

I do not know of any case in which I would be so confident as that of being able to identify the causes of someone’s attitudes.

In the same police drama, discussing a girl who had been murdered who was said to have taken a cheap method of transport, the investigator asked, ‘Why did she do that?’
‘So as to save money’,
‘Why would she want to save money? She did not have a family.’

When I went to the Society for Psychical Research after being thrown out (thrown out of academia and hence, in fact, out of organised society) I saw that saving money was the only thing I could do to help myself, and I worked on it every day. Could I add a few extra shillings to my capital at the end of the day? From then until now, increasing my capital, however slightly, by saving out of negligible income has remained the centre of my life. Saving money is not acceptable, as I discovered, and no one was prepared to make concessions for the fact that, needing the best sort of university career as badly as I did, and deprived of all normal means of progressing towards a tolerable life, I had to start building up capital towards the cost of setting up an independent university for myself, with at least one residential college with dining facilities, at least one research department, and a university press for publishing books.

Within four years of leaving college I had saved £2,000; I could not conceal this from W.H. Salter and Sir George Joy when they were ostensibly supporting me in making plans for setting up my first mini research department cum residential college in the Coombe-Tennant house. It aroused shock and disapproval, even in Salter, who had lived off a private income all his life, and from then on everyone united in attempts to squeeze me to death and force me to sell the small house in Kingston Road, Oxford, which was the first house I bought.

So when I announced to Sir George that I had bought the freehold of a larger house in Banbury Road, that was the end of decades of building up capital by saving, against opposition which took the form of trying to squeeze me to death.

It was, and still is, very like a siege. No supplies or relief of any kind are allowed to reach the beleaguered garrison.

Academic training

To revert to the question of why everyone has always opposed me. Well, unfortunately, as it seems, I represent a number of things that the modern ideology wants to obliterate.

Socialism (or reversion to tribalism) is aimed at the elimination of individual freedom (= money = territory of decision). Hence, in academic contexts, it leads to a great increase in ‘supervised’ intellectual activity, and allowing/forcing people to do things ‘under supervision’.

In my teens I visited Cambridge with my parents; I remember feeling very miserable at the time. Perhaps this was the visit on which I struggled to obtain physics entrance papers in Heffers when my father had finishing buying maths ones for me.

However that may be, we met a young man out walking a dog and my parents chatted to him after getting directions from him. He was a research student, I was told, living in lodgings in a nearby house. He had taken his degree and that was what he was doing now. I became even more depressed. I had not taken a single degree yet and I was being forced to attend a school against my will.

Actually doing research, or living in any way I could get anything out of, was even further off in a gloomy future.

I think that the concept of a research student became much more dominant in post-war academia; as an undergraduate I was told that a D.Phil had not formerly been regarded as a necessary first stage in an academic career; in many subjects people who got Firsts could proceed straight away to appointments. To have a D.Phil had been an indication that you had probably got a Second, and needed to strengthen your claim by a further qualification.

Professor Richard Oldfield, at that time Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, had allegedly taken a degree in French and then gone along to the Department of Experimental Psychology, said he would like to do research in psychology, and started to do so. However, as with some other people who had been permitted academic status on what would nowadays be regarded as inadequate grounds, it may be observed that his outlook was thoroughly compatible with the modern ideology and in no way out of place in the modern world.

Wittgenstein provides another, even more eminent, example of a person who was allowed to proceed to academic status and distinction without prior ‘training’, as the following extract illustrates. It is highly unlikely that he would nowadays be allowed to do so.

Wittgenstein’s published output was tiny. In his lifetime, he published just one book, one article and one book review ... [The book review] was published in 1913 in a Cambridge undergraduate magazine called the Cambridge Review, and was his very first publication. Wittgenstein was then a student of philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, halfway through his second year of study. In many ways, though, it would be misleading to picture him at this time as an undergraduate student, or, in any case, it would be misleading to think of him as, in any sense, an ‘ordinary’ undergraduate student. For one thing, at twenty-four, he was a few years older than the usual second-year undergraduate, having spent three years before he went to Cambridge as an engineering student in Manchester. For another thing, he was already regarded by two of the most influential philosophers of the day, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, as a significant philosopher in his own right ...

... Wittgenstein was not following a conventional undergraduate course in philosophy ... there is nothing to indicate that he ever seriously considered sitting any examinations. His formal status was that of an undergraduate, but he regarded himself, and, more remarkably, was regarded by others, not as a student of philosophy, but as an original philosopher, attempting to find solutions to problems that were at the very cutting edge of the discipline.

It is possible, I think, that Cambridge is the only university in the world that would have accepted Wittgenstein on these terms. Had he broken off his engineering studies in order to study philosophy at ... any other leading university of the time, he would have fallen at the first hurdle, most likely rejected because of his almost complete ignorance of the works of any philosophers other than Frege and Russell. And, even if he had overcome this hurdle, he would have been obliged to do what, in fact, he never did throughout his entire life, namely study the works of the great philosophers of the past. Only after he had shown some understanding of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, etc. would he have been allowed, as a graduate student, to devote himself to his own research.

At Cambridge, to its great credit, all that was required of Wittgenstein in order to reach this last stage – the stage at which he spent his time trying to solve philosophical problems rather than learning how previous philosophers had tried to solve them – was that he arouse the interest and admiration of Bertrand Russell. (Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, Granta Books 2005, pp5-6.)

Obstructions and machinations

copy of a letter to an academic

You asked why the entire academic population, under the direction of Rosalind Heywood, wanted to ensure that I got no financial support when I set up what was supposed to be my independent academic organisation in Oxford.

Consider the immediately preceding history. When I went to the Society for Psychical Research I at first considered trying to turn it into a productive research organisation, but soon saw that its legal structure and personnel would not permit such a thing to happen, so I started to think in terms of setting up my own academic institution in Oxford, in parallel with making such attempts as I could to get back into a university career in some subject, aimed at a hotel environment and Professorship as soon as possible.

My would-be DPhil, financed by the Perrott Studentship from Trinity College, Cambridge, came to nothing. Or rather, it came to a B.Litt. and no way of re-entering a university career in any subject.

So I turned my attention to the plans for setting up an institutional environment for myself in Oxford, for which the Coombe-Tennants (potential supporters) had allegedly promised a house, bearing in mind the advantages and disadvantages of a constitution similar to that of the SPR. But the more serious my intentions became, the greater the opposition, especially once Rosalind Heywood had found out about the plan and turned Eileen Garrett of the Parapsychology Foundation of New York against it.

W.H. Salter suggested, and tried to get me to agree, that it would be better if the Coombe-Tennants did not buy me a fairly large house in Oxford, but bought it for themselves and allowed me to live and work in it rent-free (until such time as Rosalind Heywood told them not to). I said this was no good and if they would not buy me a house outright, as had been originally proposed, I wanted nothing to do with it.

I had selected suitable Trustees and senior academic Consultants for my proposed Institute, sufficiently non-interfering for whatever reasons to leave me to get on with it. Rosalind proposed that a much larger number of people, including the most pro-active and obstructive members of the SPR Council, should be co-opted, and my status should be that of secretary to these people. They would receive large salaries to encourage them to think about the subject. Clearly, according to Rosalind, what would lead to progress in parapsychology and all related areas, was a number of retired Professors being paid to have ideas about it.

Sir George Joy accepted the role of a father-figure to me, who should have enough influence with me to induce me to accept these arrangements, and became very angry when he found out that he did not actually have such influence.

I said that if they wished to set up an organisation of the kind they proposed, of course they were free to do so, but I would have nothing to do with it.

Naturally nothing more was heard of it, as no one had had any interest in having anything to do with a research institution in Oxford except for the purpose of blocking my way.

So I was left with an acceptable legal constitution for the Institute, and the Trustees I had selected made me Director, an unsalaried Director of an institution with no financial support at all.

Penalising foresight and determination

The state pension is to rise by the (unrealistically low) official rate of inflation. ‘Pension credit’ is also to increase, and the Chancellor said the increase in it was above inflation. However, not every pensioner is eligible for pension credit, which is means-tested.

So this year the percentage difference due to means-testing would appear to increase as between those judged to be poor enough and those who have built up some capital by saving to reduce their dependence on retirement.

In the Daily Mail of 25 November 2008, a retired car worker, Bill Jupp, is quoted as saying that pensioners had got ‘next to nothing’ in the Pre-Budget Report.

Bill Jupp added: ‘I’m also very suspicious of the £60 Christmas bonus. I’m sure they’ll be a cut in pensioner’s fuel allowance or something else to pay for it.

‘We are on fixed incomes but our council tax is going up, our food bills are going up and our energy bills are going up. It’s one long nightmare.’

Joe Harris, of lobby group National Pensioners’ Convention, says: ‘Pensioner inflation is double the official figures because older people spend a higher proportion of their income on those items with the fastest rising prices.’

We have heard suggestions that fuel allowances should be targeted towards ‘the poorest’ pensioners who are on ‘pension credit’, and this may well be another way of increasing the percentage difference due to means-testing.

‘The Premier [promised] to hit the middle classes and target the rich if he wins another term’ (Daily Mail 25 November 2008, front page)

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ with no usable qualification, I was unable to draw income support, and realised that I always would be, unless and until I was able to get back into a proper university career. If I could be recognised as eligible for salaried appointments which it would be possible for me to take up, then I would have been able to draw income support during any hiatus in my career.

But the state pension was supposed to depend on making enough annual payments, even if you were unemployed, so I always paid the annual voluntary contributions for myself and anyone else associated with me, however little income we had.

This, I reckoned, would at least be reducing the disadvantage at which I should be on retirement relative to someone who had been having a proper career as a Professor in physics, philosophy or any other subject.

Soon after reaching normal retirement age I started to hear rumours of pensions ‘withering on the vine’ and a substantial proportion of the annual increases became means-tested, that is, it was allocated to the ‘poorest’ who had spent all their incomes throughout their working lives, which might well have included some who had lived as university professors with full salaries.

In an egalitarian society, it certainly would not do if a person who had shown exceptional foresight and determination in making annual payments, however poor they were, should be able to pat themselves on the back when they reached normal retirement age (although without actually having been able to get started on a salaried career) about an annual inflation-adjusted stipend, however inadequate, rolling in as a reward for all their effort and frugality.

The Oxford media

Copy of a letter sent several weeks ago by my colleague Dr Charles McCreery to a presenter on Radio Oxford, to which he has had no reply.

I understand that you have invited Celia Green and Christine Fulcher to put their names forward for inclusion on the guest list for a launch party for a book you have written.

We invited you to a launching party which we had in Cuddesdon about two years ago for Celia Green’s latest book, Letters From Exile: Observations on a Culture in Decline. To the best of my recollection, we did not receive an acknowledgement of this invitation.

Altogether dozens of invitations were sent out for this function, to which in the end only one guest turned up. A high proportion of all the invitations were to people in the Oxford area, as opposed to London , so that any difficulty in travelling here could not have been an explanation.

Over the last forty years Celia has published nine books, none of which has been reviewed by the Oxford Times.

The last time Celia was invited to be interviewed on Radio Oxford was in connection with a lecture she gave which happened to have the phrase ‘Da Vinci Code’ in the title, so that the station apparently thought it could be assimilated to the then popular interest in a non-scholarly book.

Children and Mill’s Principle of Liberty

As quite a young child I was under the impression that it was a basic principle of accepted morality and legislation that an individual's freedom of action should not be restricted except in so far as his actions might impinge upon the freedom of others.

A century ago this principle was to a large extent respected. Provided you kept the law you could make your own decisions, subject to the resources and opportunities you had, and could try to enlarge your resources and opportunities. The law, it is true, violated the principle by including some moral elements, such as a prohibition of homosexuality, which could scarcely be justified as restraining the infringement of the liberty of others, as between consenting adults. A law of this kind was evidently based on psychological grounds, that people doing things of this kind might generate disapproval in others, and persons should be protected from having to feel such things.

Although the modern world has repealed the penalties for homosexuality between consenting adults, this is scarcely likely to have been out of concern for individual liberty; more likely the repeal was made because sex is the modern opium of the people, it being supposed that if they are encouraged to fill their lives with such harmless distractions they will not notice more serious oppressions.

Nowadays legislation is frequently justified on statistical grounds: that we must bring about a state of affairs in which society as a whole is the way we (that is, the legislators) would like it to be. I first noticed this when a law was brought in prohibiting the taking of what are now called GCSEs before a person's sixteenth birthday. Even at the time, and before I realised how serious the effects of this would be on my own educational prospects, I thought this surprisingly immoral legislation. Surely a person was not doing anyone else any harm by taking an exam younger than the average? The only harm you could be said to be doing was psychological: it might make other people jealous. But then the acquisition of any benefit in life might make other people jealous. If you started to take psychological considerations such as this into account you could plainly justify practically any restriction of individual freedom of action. What other people would like best would be to see you living a dull, unambitious life, enlivened only by such diversions as they permitted themselves, such as the aforementioned opium of the people.

Another way this sort of legislation is justified is by reference to protecting people from themselves. Thus in this case, it may have been represented that children were being preserved from being made to work hard, or to 'cram', as previous legislation had preserved them from being made to climb up inside sooty chimneys in order to sweep them. This, however, leaves out of account all manner of individual differences, and does not allow the child or its parents the freedom to make a decision on the basis of his own abilities and temperament. The amount of effort that goes into preparing for exams is vastly different depending on aptitude and motivation.

Similarly people are supposed to be preserved from choosing the wrong pharmaceuticals for themselves, by being allowed to have only those which the doctor prescribes for them. They are not protected from the mistakes of the doctor, who cannot be supposed to have nearly the same interest in their wellbeing that they have themselves. Nor is the recipient allowed to use his own judgement to assess the likelihood that the doctor's prescription is more harmful than he would choose under his own steam, in the light of the doctor's stupidity, incompetence, sadism, lack of interest, love of power, etc.

The principle that an individual should be free to make his own decisions, subject only to their infringement in obvious ways of the freedom of others has, clearly, always been most vulnerable to abuse in situations of incapacity. There is an age before which an infant cannot make informed decisions for itself and must inevitably depend on its parents to make decisions on its behalf. In a similar way, a person suffering from physical illness may be really incapable of making decisions for himself; in an extreme case, he may be unconscious. There may be no friends or relatives around. The fact that education and medicine deal, in their most limiting cases, with individuals who are not in any realistic sense able to decide things for themselves has, of course, led to extreme abuse. In both state education and medicine (even, though to a marginally lesser extent, in private medicine) there is supposed to be a complete transfer of concern for the 'interests' of the individual to a social authority.

Wittgenstein's Papierkorb

The following fragments have been found in Wittgenstein's wastepaper basket (Papierkorb):

* What does a person mean when he says he is motivated to do something? What is a motive? Have you ever seen one?

* What can anyone mean by saying that they have had experiences they cannot exactly describe? What are you unable to describe? Tell me.

* When I see a man walking across the road, and think, ‘Perhaps that man is an automaton.’ – what is the result of that? I get a strange feeling.

* It is important to realise that there is nothing other than the language game. If there were anything else, what could we say about it?

* What people call thinking is an illness; it is what happens when the language game gets disordered. Philosophy should lay down rules for the language game so that it never gets disordered; then philosophy can stop.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Accidental associations

copy of a letter

The last time I met you, you asked why I went to the Society for Psychical Research if I was not interested in what they did. As I have explained, a contributory factor in the ruin of my ‘education’ was that I knew no one accepted that I would find life without a hotel environment intolerable.

When I was thrown out it was no more tolerable than I had expected, and it was therefore absolutely out of the question that I would be able to find anything ‘interesting’ until I had got myself back into decent living circumstances which would permit of being intellectually productive in a way that I got something out of. ‘Interest’ in doing anything, without a hotel environment to work in, was out of the question.

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ without a usable qualification, I needed to find a job to finance my taking an unofficial DPhil at my own expense in Oxford. I was under pressure from my parents, acting on behalf of society at large, to find a job anyway, so I went to Mary Adams of the BBC, the mother of one of my college friends, to ask her to find me one. She sent me to see Denys Parsons, the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, no doubt in the hope that I would end up doing some very boring job taking measurements for white goods makers, or something like that, and never be seen in Oxford again.

Denys Parsons was also an Honorary Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (as was W.H. Salter at that time). Somehow the subject of research into extrasensory perception came up, and after discussing this for a bit, Denys Parsons mentioned that the secretary at the SPR was in hospital, the post was piling up, and they were desperate. I said that I would take the job of secretary, so Denys Parsons got in touch with Salter immediately, and I went off to Saffron Walden to see Salter. So that is how I got the job as secretary at the SPR.

All I was thinking about at the SPR was how I could find a way of restoring myself to a liveable life, such as might be enjoyed by a Fellow of a residential college with dining facilities. My life was very grim, even with the temporary support of Sir George Joy, which broke down as soon as I got too near to anything that might have provided a realistic alleviation of my position.

I believe that agents of the collective are trained to ignore any statements made by victims which are at variance with the socially approved misinterpretations of the situation, and to reinforce only any statements that might seem to be compatible with the socially approved model.

When I say that I was pleased about the success of my prediction in an ESP experiment, people may hope that I had found it ‘interesting’. Actually my prediction was very much a sighting shot (in a mass experiment that I was doing only because Cecil King wished it done) and I was pleased that it seemed to come off because I was still naive enough to suppose that indications that one might be able to make progress would encourage others, as it encouraged oneself, to envisage developing and elaborating the original ideas on a much larger scale, and that would get me nearer to the hotel environment which I so badly needed.

Soon I learnt that indications that one might be able to make more progress than other people were certain to make people want to keep one even more tightly constricted and inactive.

Mary Adams certainly had no intention of my getting a job at the Society for Psychical Research instead of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. She seemed taken aback and possibly even shocked when told that this had happened. Rationalising as best she could, on normal terms, she said, ‘So you are going to use your typing skills to do a secretarial job.’
I had, of course, told them that I could type quite proficiently. You could see it as ironic that this was the only usable qualification with which an oppressive education had left me, and one for which the system itself could claim no credit. (You could say it was the only advantage of precocity that the system had not been able to prevent from arising.)

When I was about eight my father had bought himself a second-hand typewriter and a typing manual so that he would be able to type letters and notices for his school. When he had finished learning I had taken advantage of the machine and the manual to learn to type as well, and soon I was typing out things for his school. I particularly remember the extracts from educationalists, several copies of which had to be typed to hand round to my father’s teachers. I remember the names of Dewey and Nunn and a few of the dicta, e.g. ‘Children are little workmen waiting for jobs to do,’ and, most ironically, ‘Fit the education to the child, and not the child to the education.’

The Establishment and I

I recently read a definition of Establishment as ‘a group of people who hold power in a society and dominate its institutions’ (Daily Mail, 10 September 2008, article entitled ‘An Establishment Paedophile’ by Charlotte Metcalf.) That has been my problem all my life, that the Establishment has opposed me, taking it in the extended sense of including ‘those who have power in the local community’.

Sir George Joy was Establishment, and the fact that he had been thrown out at the end to fend for himself with a miserable pittance of a pension and ruined health did not, apparently, weaken his allegiance to the Establishment per se. The Establishment was against me, so he was not for me. He was Establishment, Mary Adams (Head of BBC Talks) was Establishment, and that is strong bonding. ‘Oh, he had a reputation once,’ Mrs Adams said, sounding impressed, the first time I mentioned him to her.

Of course, all the information Sir George had given me about hallucinatory phenomena, ESP and PK, and even letting me interview the subjects in the office, although potentially useful, could be regarded as encouraging me in a compensatory ‘interest’, which was an entirely different matter from helping me get financial support to make use of the extensive information I now had to make progress in actual research, with a view to establishing a claim on re-entry to a university career.

All members of the Establishment stick together. The Principal of Somerville could have given me moral, if not financial, support for my plans to stay on in Oxford after my maths degree while working quickly to get a meaningful qualification. She had even mentioned – tantalised me with – some grant which the College could have given me. But she had chosen not to give me support of any kind, and to try to drive me away from Oxford instead. She was Establishment, so Mary Adams and Sir George wanted her to have her way.

Sir George would not move to Oxford to be our resident senior supporter in 1962, which would have made a lot of difference to our position as an independent academic institution. He had originally agreed to come, and even driven round Oxford with his son looking at places he might live, but then changed his mind. There is no knowing who may have influenced him; at this time all the support that had previously seemed to be available was breaking down.

Indeed, even Sir George’s pension, paltry though it was for an ex-Colonial Governor, would have made quite a difference to my position. As it was, I had only the equivalent of a research grant for one person, covenanted for seven years by Admiral Strutt, and no prospects at all beyond that.

Well, I am back in Oxford now. As near to the centre as I want to be, in view of the pollution, and we are quite near enough for people with university appointments to come and work also for this independent university with much higher standards. I know they won’t, because they are Establishment and we are not, but it is not in reality impossible.

Stigmata

Recently I watched a film about the Gospel of Thomas called Stigmata (released in 1999). It was apparently quite successful commercially and its appeal seems to depend on sadism (flashbacks to crucifixion) and sex, the latter associated with implicit attacks on the Catholic church for being repressive and promoting celibacy. The Church is supposed to see the Gospel of Thomas as a threat to its authority. In reality I don’t see why it should, as it has very little explicit content; being vague and allusive on normal terms.

The saying from the Gospel of Thomas that was quoted in the film was ‘the Kingdom of God is inside you and it is all around you’, followed by ‘it is not found in structures made of stone and wood’, which is not in my editions at all. And in the text it is ‘the Kingdom’, not ‘the Kingdom of God’.

However, the piece about ‘The Kingdom is within you and without you’ can be taken to refer to ‘what is in your mind now and the everyday life around you’, or it can be taken to refer to the salient features of some kind of mystical experience, with inconceivable information being present in your mind and also being there to be read off from the surface of everything which is existing around you. This would be, however, entirely outside ‘normal’ experience.

Taking it the first way, as the film probably wished to suggest, leads to the modern outlook of preoccupation with ‘real life’ and the physical world, including plenty of sex.

The expression ‘The Kingdom of God’ used in the film is not used anywhere in Thomas, where, if ‘Kingdom’ is qualified at all, it is in the forms ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ and ‘Kingdom of the Father’. The word God is very rarely used in Thomas, perhaps not at all outside the saying ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, to God the things that are God’s, and to me that which is mine.’ In place of God, the expressions used are ‘the Father’ or ‘the Living One.’

Incidentally, the film claims, inaccurately, that the Gospel of Thomas is in Aramaic, this increasing its claim to authenticity, since it is supposed to have been the language spoken by Christ. In fact the Gospel of Thomas is in Coptic, which was a mixture of Greek and ancient Egyptian. However, it is said that there are signs of a Hebrew or Aramaic linguistic origin, which is a problem for modern Christian scholars who would like to ascribe its divergences from the Synoptics to some non-Christian source.

Note about usage of the word ‘rich’ in various gospels

The concept of ‘rich’ has entirely different connotations in the Gnostic gospels from those it has in the Synoptics.

In Thomas, the word ‘rich’ appears to refer to emotional richness, freedom from conflict, hence freedom from belief in society. ‘Let he who is rich become a king.’

In the Synoptics, ‘richness’ is usually associated with something negative. The way this is normally interpreted is that wealth and trading activities are seen as morally suspect. Hence the supposed wrath in the Jerusalem temple. But perhaps it really refers more broadly to being well set up. How about ‘rich in socially conferred approval or status’? People who have socially conferred status do not seem to feel free to use their own judgement in supporting a victim of social oppression, or in any other way of which society would disapprove. They are committed to having no views independently of the social consensus which has rewarded them.

‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a person with social position to do anything against the will of society.’

A well-known philosopher, who grudgingly conceded I was a ‘genius’, said he could not write a puff for my book Letters From Exile (or, presumably, use his influence to help me to get any reviews for it) because if he did his colleagues would ‘think he had lost his marbles’. But he was retired and his career could hardly have been damaged, whatever they thought.

We appeal for £1m as initial funding for a social science department in my unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish preliminary analyses of areas in the history of ideas that are currently being ignored because they do not fit with the prevailing ideology.

Reflection of the month

Communism and Capitalism

Capitalism depends on certain aspects of the conditions in which we live – on the structure of time and the conservation of matter. The basis of capitalism is that if a tiger rushes towards you, you need a gun. If you acquired a gun at some point in time previous to the tiger's attack, and have it ready to hand, this is useful. If you have not actually got a gun, but know that you could acquire one at some point in the future, this is not so good. The problem is to survive so as to reach that future.

The essence of communism is that nobody may have guns unless everybody has guns, and the only way anybody can get guns is if the Collective-at-Large sees fit to make a universal issue. And you may not have a better gun than the Collective sees fit to issue for everybody. So if the Collective does not actually get round to issuing any guns at all, everybody will be equally liable to be eaten by tigers.

Attitudes to academic appointments

I think that the academics at the Society for Psychical Research were more uninhibited and less rationalised about what went on in connection with academic appointments than they would probably have been even in their own Senior Common Rooms.

For example, it was said that H.H. Price became Wykeham Professor of Logic by being the least brilliant but also the least controversial of three candidates. The other two had definite original opinions which aroused strong opposition from some of the electors. Price had bland and middle-of-the-road views which were offensive to no one; hence he got the Professorship. (*)

They brought in an American ‘professor’ of zoology for the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology at Edinburgh (‘professor’, of course, only means ‘lecturer’ in America ), treating American academic appointments as equivalent to English ones. But when American professors visited the SPR office, it was freely said (although not of course in their hearing) that an American PhD was about the equivalent of a 3rd class Oxbridge degree.

That, of course, was what was being said when I was at the SPR in the late fifties. Since then academic standards have declined apace in this country and, from all I hear, are likely to have declined in America about as fast (on account of their also wishing to apply ‘egalitarian’ principles and to deny the existence of innate ability — as evidenced by their throwing money at Professor Anders Ericsson, the academic whose research purports to show that there is no such thing as innate ability).

So it is possible that the relative rankings have shifted a bit as both American and British degrees are worth a lot less than they used to be.

But of course there is no reason anyway why degree classes should be precisely correlated with ability to fulfil the requirements of an academic position, as was much more realistically recognised, and occasionally acted upon, in the early decades of the last century. (There were anecdotes at Somerville about Professors who had got 4th class degrees but been allowed to proceed with their careers.)

* I have no opinion about the accuracy of this view of Price’s appointment, but I think it illustrates the fact that, before about 1945, there was much more recognition of the disjunction between a person’s merit and ability to fulfil a certain social role, and their possession or otherwise of that socially conferred role. Nowadays there is a stronger and almost dogmatic belief that a person who has been unable to get social status is automatically inferior to those who have it.

State pensions and Trojan Horses

Hundreds of thousands of pensioners are living in poverty because they are not claiming the benefits due to them, official figures suggest. Ministers admitted that 700,000 pensioners would be lifted over the poverty line at a stroke if they simply got all the help to which they are entitled. Opposition MPs say many are put off claiming by the complexity of Gordon Brown’s benefit system, which involves complicated forms and lengthy telephone applications. (Daily Mail, 12 August 2008)

This is all the result of a means-tested pensions system, which should never have been introduced and which should be abolished. The real deterrent to applying for “benefits” is, or should be, not the complexity of the forms and procedures, but simply the fact that it cannot be done without drawing to oneself and one’s circumstances the attention of agents of the collective, who may easily attract the attention of other agents of the collective, who may decide that one should be deprived of one’s liberty. Those who complain of the present system naturally miss the point, because they are themselves in most cases agents of the collective who have nothing against people being deprived of their liberty.

For example, Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman Jenny Willott said: “The system must be simplified to ensure poor pensioners get the cash they so desperately need.”

The charity Age Concern also fails to address the real issue, instead taking seriously the rationalisations given for failing to apply. Research carried out by this charity shows that the reason given by almost 50% of respondents is that they find means-testing too intrusive, and by 40% that they are discouraged by complicated forms.

Opposition MPs do have some objection to means-testing, describing it as “demeaning”, and arguing that means-testing is

expensive to administer and acts as a disincentive to save. Officials trawl through details of people’s pensions, earnings, benefits and savings to work out whether they should receive top-ups. (ibid)

But no one mentions the real and absolute deterrent to applying, which is that in the course of “trawling”, officials may decide that it would be better for a person not to be allowed to go on living where they are living, or in the way they are living, at all.

It is very dangerous to draw the attention of the Oppressive State to your affairs, and probably many who fail to apply realise this, if only vaguely or subconsciously.

Until relatively recent years, pensions were the only “benefit” which was free from this danger. They were paid as a right to those who had made enough contributions, not to those whose “need” would be assessed as greatest by agents of the collective.

Means-testing of pensions should be abolished.

‘The question of ethics with regard to pension policy is one of the issues on which Oxford Forum could be producing fundamental critical analyses if it were provided with adequate funding. We appeal for £2m as initial funding to enable us to write and publish on this and similar issues, which are currently only discussed in the context of pro-collectivist arguments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Plugged into the belief in society

When I say that people at the SPR were only interested in socially conferred status, I mean that they appeared to be there only to participate in certain kinds of social goings-on. There is a tendency these days to identify a field of work with those socially appointed to work in that nominal field. (Physics is to be defined as ‘what physicists do’, philosophy is ‘what philosophers do’, and psychical research is ‘what parapsychologists do’.)

So experiments supposed to prove some particular thing (ESP, PK) would be done by a person with academic status, such as S.G. Soal (maths lecturer at Queen Mary College), or physicist John Taylor (professor at King's College London) who encouraged schoolchildren to do ostensible PK for him, and then decades of active social interaction on an international basis would take place. In the first place, the experiments had to be taken very seriously and hailed as unquestionable proof because they were done by someone with socially conferred status, and then there was the interest of discovering whether a statusful person could be publicly and professionally disgraced.

In my case, the storms which surrounded me arose from the emotional interest of preventing someone who had already been disgraced and outcast from managing to climb back to social salary and status. Preventing someone who has been deprived of it, and thrown out from getting it back, is as good an outlet for emotional drive as is worshipping the productions of socially appointed academics and having controversies about whether they can be deprived of it.

While spiritualism never caught on in my mind, the idea did appear pragmatically useful that people were all somehow plugged into a network of belief in society. So that they were all really expressing a single set of aims and objects, and the attitudes and interpretations expressed by any one of them could be taken as informational about the attitudes that would be held by any other. (Attitudes about everything, actually, but in particular about whether there is anything "paranormal", or whether people like me should ever be permitted to recover from their ruined education.) It does not appear to me impossible that ESP enters into this, although it makes no difference in practice whether or not this is so.

I have certainly found the unanimity of the responses I receive remarkable, over a wide spread of nationalities, genders, social classes and IQ levels. I felt at the time of my ‘education’ that one could not see how the dance of death was so precisely choreographed. Of course a lot of overt social slander does go into it as well, but one finds the same interpretations being produced by people who are ostensibly not on the obvious slander circuits.

It is all rather like the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. More and more of the population is replaced by a zombie replica, and anyone who has not yet been taken over must not give overt evidence of this; if they fail to behave exactly like the others the whole population turns and points at them and pursuit begins.

Iatrogenic drug addiction

A form of torture practised by the medical 'profession', and in many ways the most horrifying, is the infliction of suffering, in the form of 'treatment', against the will of the 'patient' (victim). This includes the compulsory 'medication' of those 'diagnosed' as 'mentally ill', who can in some cases be re-incarcerated for forcible 'treatment' if they fail to present themselves for regular torture when they are 'released into the community'.

Even when 'treatment' is not compulsory, doctors have no scruples about getting 'patients' (victims) hooked without warning on mind-altering drugs which will have severe side-effects if the 'patient' attempts to regain his independence of them. At least, their scruples only appear when it is a question of refusing to let the 'patient' have a form of medication which he wants to have. Doctors then become very sensitive indeed to every possibility, however remote, of any side-effect, and most unwilling to let the 'patient' decide for himself whether the risk of this possibility is one which, in view of his own motivation and knowledge of his own constitution, he wants to take.

Curiously and informatively enough, people appear blind to the horror of people being hooked for life by doctors on drugs which effectively deprive them of the use of their own minds — actually a more horrific deprivation of liberty than the infliction of physical pain against the will of a conscious 'patient' (victim), which would be regarded as torture if the doctor who inflicted it was not a properly trained and qualified person.

The hatred and persecutory fervour of modern society is reserved for those who wish to alter their mental outlook by the use of chemicals of their own choosing, and for those who sell them the chemicals they want to have. Self-inflicted drug dependence is regarded as an 'evil' from which victims (who are not 'patients') should be rescued against their will by the expenditure of massive amounts of taxpayers' money, while the drug dependence so freely created by doctors arouses no such opprobrium, although in many cases its continuity is enforced by compulsory medication. The voluntarily drug-dependent person is still free to decide to break away from the addiction, whereas the involuntary victim of compulsory medication is not. Nevertheless it is the former that is described as 'abuse' of drugs, whereas those who are compulsorily and permanently under prescribed influence, are described as 'users'.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Physiological correlates

copy of a letter to a Professor of Philosophy

When I see you I always worry about things I say which you seem to agree with, because I am afraid you see it as supporting some socially acceptable interpretation which I need to reject.

I said that getting a grant from Trinity College, Cambridge to do a postgraduate degree (meant to be a DPhil) at Oxford was not a solution to my problems (my appalling situation) and you appeared to agree. But I cannot think what you could have been agreeing with, as it seems unlikely that you accept, any more than anyone else did, or does, that I was in absolute and urgent need of (i) an institutional (hotel) environment and (ii) a Professorship, and was suffering severely without either.

Until I had the first of these, and probably also the second, there could be no question of my getting anything out of life or getting any positive feedback (‘interest’) out of anything I did, whatever it was. It was (and still is) just a question of endurance in crossing a desert, and trying not to let my energy level decline too fast. Over the decades things have improved slightly, at least to the extent that I can now beat my head against the wall of hostility by expressing my complaints openly.

I was not in a hotel environment while doing the D.Phil which turned into a B.Litt, and travelling a lot, and in such circumstances it was easier to do something rather dull. Of course people like to imagine that I found anything connected with psychical research ‘interesting’, but although the thesis topic had to be associated with that area, I saw it only as a way of working back towards a university career.

Even if I had succeeded in getting into one, I would still have gone ahead with the plan to set up a research institute, financed by the Coombe-Tennants and other SPR* connections, as a way of amplifying my activities. Organising experimental research on a large scale is something that would make me feel more functional and alive, because it uses more of my channel capacity, as is the giving of seminars and broadcasting.

* * * * *

The academic subjects most closely associated with ‘parapsychology’ seemed to be physiology and psychology. People at the SPR wanted me to do the thesis on ‘spontaneous cases’, discussing them on the same terms as they all did (evidential value, alternative explanations, etc.), but I did not see how that could lead back into an academic career; so I had to aim at psychology and physiology, bitterly regretting that I did not have degrees in either, since my time at school and at Queen Mary College had been, although through no wish of mine, so uselessly misspent.

Neither physiology nor psychology appealed to me as subjects in which to take degrees as they had relatively little informational content, and I would only have taken degrees in them after acquiring degrees in physics and chemistry. However, now I had to scrape the barrel of possibilities and the barrel was bare, although if I had taken degrees in physics and chemistry first, it would probably not have mattered whether or not I had followed that by taking degrees in physiology and psychology as well. But I might have done, as I had basically intended to acquire as many qualifications as possible and then see what were the best career opportunities arising.

Philosophy, of course, would also have been a possibility, but especially by the end of the three years, Professor Price was as much against the idea of my returning to an academic career as everyone else.

So in fact I wrote the thesis on physiological and psychological conditions of states in which ESP was reported to occur, although at the interview at Trinity I had to pretend that I was also going to be analysing spontaneous case material, and only as a side issue considering physiological correlates. There was clearly a great resistance to the idea of anything being done in that area, and the interviewers boggled in the usual way. ‘What could you possibly do about that? What physiological correlates could there be? What do you mean by that?’

* Society for Psychical Research