My ineligibility for social security

It is important to emphasise that it was my ineligibility for so-called social security that placed me so much at the mercy of everyone’s hostility. I couldn’t pretend I was seeking a job because I wasn’t regarded as qualified for any of the many academic careers the requirements of which in reality I could have fulfilled. This certainly seemed to me very terrible. Going to the Society for Psychical Research made me aware that there were neglected areas of potential research, and I hoped to make use of them to work my way back into a university career. As a first step, I would set up a research institute to provide myself with the necessary conditions of a tolerable academic life.

The fact that I could never draw ‘social security’ (although it would have been pretty horrible to do so, even if I could have done) always made me vulnerable to the worst social pressure.

When I had resigned from the SPR, I did not have even a minimum of income to provide the barest physical survival, so I was forced to seek funding from the research committee of the SPR, and Rosalind Heywood used this situation to make me do the most pointless and tedious sort of ‘research’. If I had been able to draw ‘social security’ as an unemployed person, it is easy to imagine I might have preferred even going along to sign on once a week to undertaking the sort of ‘research’ that the SPR was prepared to pay me a pittance for doing.

The story that I had deliberately turned my back on a university career in order to do research which I found ‘interesting’ in poverty and social degradation became dominant and persists to the present day. I suppose that it was initiated by Rosalind and/or Somerville. It has a woman’s touch about it.

I remember a conversation I had with Salter before the plan for the research institute in a house provided by the Coombe-Tennants began to break down.

‘Would you have really wanted to have an academic career?’ he said.

‘Well, of course!’, I thought, but I said, ‘It was the research I really wanted to do anyway, so if this place gets set up it will be as good as I could have got out of a university career.’

‘But you wouldn’t really have wanted to teach, would you? A university career would mean you had to do teaching.’

‘I don’t mind about teaching, actually,’ I said, ‘although I would want to be doing research as predominantly as possible as soon as possible. But I have taught various people in Somerville unofficially in various subjects, and if that is what you have to do to get the academic lifestyle, its OK.’

‘But you were teaching people you chose to teach yourself, and if you had an appointment you would have to teach everybody,’ Salter insisted, as if he was proving that I really could not have wanted a normal academic career.

I wondered why he was making so analytical a distinction, which did not seem characteristic of the way his mind usually worked.

Of course, I had hoped to be able to start higher up the career ladder, and I should have been able to do so.

In retrospect, I could see that Salter, probably already under Rosalind’s influence, was working towards the idea that, since some of the things in an academic career did not appeal to me, I deliberately preferred ‘doing research’ in poverty and social degradation, which I suppose is the standard ‘drop-out’ position. And, of course, if I was doing exactly what I had freely chosen to do, everyone was let off the hook about thinking that I might need any help or support of any kind.

Slandered by academics (part 1)

It is probable that widespread slanders had been spread about me and my incipient research institute from the time I was thrown out in 1957, but one seldom had direct evidence.

However, it happened that one of our Consultants, Graham Weddell, a physiology lecturer at Oxford, rang me a year or more after Charles McCreery had graduated in 1964, at which time he (Charles) had called a halt to communication with his family so as to recover from the run-down state he had got into as a result of his mother’s constant pestering.

Dr Weddell sometimes seemed a somewhat tactless person, who revealed inside information, perhaps to gain the confidence of the person to whom he was talking. On this occasion, he said, ‘They are making an awful lot of fuss about your research assistant.’

I was nonplussed and thought of various part-time workers we had employed whom I had not known very well, and wondered what any of them might have done.

‘Can’t I at least know who it is you are talking about?’

Weddell seemed to hesitate. ‘Well, he has a very important father and his father is beside himself about his drug-taking.’

‘You mean Charles McCreery, son of General McCreery?’ I said, surprised. ‘There is no question of his having ever taken drugs.’

After a bit more reiteration of this, Weddell seemed to accept it and said that it must have arisen from the association of ideas between parapsychology and drug-taking.

I had reservations about this, because when some really damaging slander or piece of hostility against us was revealed, and we gave our side of it, people always found it easy to brush it aside with, ‘Oh, it’s just the subject’ (‘the subject’ being parapsychology). Actually I thought that was a rationalisation, and the reasons for the hostility were more profound. But I went along with the idea on this occasion, partly to show that we did not regard ourselves as part of some ‘parapsychological’ population.

‘I suppose it has not helped that Steve Abrams* has been in the papers recently,’ I said. ‘He has been going to the Home Office to tell them that marijuana ought to be legalised since he claims it is an aid to creativity for writers.’

I asked who had been saying these things about Charles, and Weddell gave me the names of three people whom Charles subsequently proceeded to tax with it by phone: Oliver Van Oss (headmaster of Charterhouse), John Butterworth (Vice-Chancellor of Warwick University) and Sir Folliott Sandford (Registrar of Oxford University).

* an American parapsychologist with a research organisation in Oxford

More about this episode can be read here.

Slandered by aristocrats (part 2)

The situation has always been that I had to reject so many false assumptions, before getting to anything that was really the case, that it has been very hard work to get anywhere near the point, and people have been extremely reluctant to listen to anything that did not reinforce their preconceptions.

My colleague Charles McCreery always had the same problem. The storms which his parents provoked really had the effect of preventing him from getting started on a ‘normal’ career, either in the university or at the Tavistock Clinic in London.

We knew Charles as an undergraduate, and on graduating he started to help us set up an effective fundraising campaign, which we needed to get going.

If this campaign had not been aborted by the terrible storms of hostility, it would have been possible for Charles to combine a normal salaried career with continuing his association with us. It was never my idea that I or any associate should spend their time acting as their own research assistants and secretaries. A primary object of the institute was to get me back into a suitable university career, and the only reason I was not in one myself was that my attempts to return to one had been blocked.

If we had ever managed to get set up, it would have been possible to consider whether it would be better for Charles to work at the Tavistock in London and come to Oxford at weekends, or do a D.Phil. at the Department of Experimental Psychology and make a career as a psychologist in Oxford. As it was, we were forced into so constricted a position that we had to give up on these ideas, as we could only survive at all (even physically) by huddling together as closely as possible. (This made it possible for people to refer to us as a ‘commune’, as if this also was a deliberately chosen way of life.)

So really Charles's parents prevented his career, whatever it might have been, forced him into a breach with them, and forced him to appear as if he had chosen to be an impoverished dropout, out of ‘interest’ in something unusual. (As, in fact, I too had been forced into doing something I could never have wished to do, as if I had deliberately preferred poverty and social degradation on account of ‘interest’.)

Actually Charles had absolutely no previous knowledge of, or interest in, anything that might be regarded as associated with ‘parapsychology’, but only in psychology and psychiatry.

Of course, as soon as his parents made any contact with anyone connected with us, they came under the influence of the tremendous forces of hostility against me, and proceeded to act as the forces would wish: placing Charles under pressure by covert hostility combined with excessive social demands, which could only lead to a breakdown in their relationship with him, as was no doubt (at least subconsciously) intended, although Charles struggled for a long time against this outcome.

Slandered by aristocrats (part 1)

The hostility which I have encountered has always been extraordinary, and I think that it is expressed in a more extreme form in situations where I am involved than is usual. Rosalind Heywood, for example, would apparently stop at nothing to make my life a misery.

Having destroyed my original plan for setting up a research institute, and reduced me to surviving in poverty in Oxford, she managed to make herself into the person who was running the affairs of my institute, and negotiating on our behalf with potential sources of funding, which she was only going to let us have on the most penal terms. Suffice it to say that I was reduced to feeling worn out and hopeless before Cecil King and Charles McCreery arrived on the scene, both providing hope of an adequate level of financial support for some meaningful work to commence.

Storms of hostility and slander immediately arose, and Charles was surprised at the overt hostility he encountered on visiting some of my ostensible ‘supporters’, such as Admiral Strutt.

On the face of it, there seemed no reason why a fundraising campaign could not proceed successfully, Charles’s family connections being what they were. Charles’s father and mother became Patrons. However, his mother used the position openly to act as a saboteur.

Looking back, I am not surprised at the complete negativity of the outcome, as the hostility was not inhibited by any principles of decent behaviour, and the intention was simply that of preventing me from doing anything. Influential and determined people do not fail in achieving their objectives.

'I won’t have that Celia getting her hands on any McCreery money,' Lady McCreery said on at least one occasion. (Like Professor and Lady Hardy, she usually referred to me as 'that Celia'.) If this could only be achieved by slandering and disinheriting her son, so be it.

And so accusations against Charles, as well as me, began to arise. These were wildly implausible to anyone who knew Charles. He was just about the last person to start taking drugs or to become a hippy, and reject the values of aristocratic respectability. Nevertheless, such allegations were made. Decades later, at an upper-class party, another Old Etonian, who knew Charles’s family, sneered at him, 'I am surprised to see you dressing smartly and not having a ring in your nose.'

The result of all this was no doubt as intended. Not only did our fundraising attempts with a professional fundraiser break down, but Charles was cut out of several inheritances which would otherwise have come to him if he had continued to be regarded as an acceptable member of his family.

More about means-testing of pensions

As I was deprived of a means of earning a living, I could not apply for income support (or 'social security'). So I was entirely dependent on building up capital and making gains on it (very hard work) to support myself, and work towards setting up an institutional environment for myself. So on reaching what they like to regard as retirement age, without having been able to start on my real adult career, I have savings built up which reduce my state pension to less than 75% of what it would be if I had sufficiently small savings outside of house ownership.

How could a person who had been deprived of an academic career have avoided this? Well, by accepting the social interpretation of one’s position and allowing them to medicate one into a zombie-like state, as did a certain Somerville graduate, by no means as exceptional as I was, but set on an academic career. (She was certainly no stupider than the average Oxford professor, and was clever enough to have learnt Polish on her own to a useful level.)

When thrown out of Somerville without a research scholarship (in history) she had about twenty jobs, each lasting no more than a fortnight (if I remember rightly). She then invoked the 'aid' of the social services, who diagnosed her, gave her a year’s resident psychiatric treatment, and released her to spend the rest of her life on the streets of Oxford, free from any need to support herself by 'earning a living', but also having surrendered the use of her own mind to the anaesthetising drugs provided by the NHS.

Her pension contributions were automatically paid for her. So she has presumably qualified for the full state pension, and it is unlikely that she had built up any capital, so she would not have lost over a quarter of it as I have done.

So you see one pays for one’s independence, and for even trying to increase it.

Letter to a potential supporter

extract from a letter I sent some time ago

When you were considering the possibility of supporting our work some years ago, and your representative Lord X met our trustee the Hon. Charles Strutt, I was told by Charles Strutt that he was talking a bit about his family's involvement in psychical research and was asked by Lord X whether all academics without exception were in favour of research in this field. I suppose Charles Strutt replied, 'No, not all. But there were some who were.'

In an area so emotionally loaded as this, I am afraid that the exchange of socially acceptable rationalisations is not a way to arrive at what is really the case. All academics without exception, and the psychological forces of modern society as a whole, are against us. The psychological forces against us are those that are destroying Western civilisation, and it is difficult to talk about this because a highly fictitious view of what is going on is universally accepted.The Strutts were among the aristocratic families which, since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, had devoted considerable time and analytical effort, not to mention the expense of employing mediums and private detectives, to what was ostensibly research aimed at proving survival.

This was, and remains, something of a red herring. Because my colleagues and I are prepared to work on, for example, out-of-the-body experiences, we are widely supposed to have spiritualistic beliefs.

In reality, however, tribal/communistic psychology has little against people communing with their deceased ancestors. The work of the SPR was getting close to far more dangerous issues which opened up (or might open up) possibilities for the extension of individual control over the environment. The work of the SPR on Cross-Correspondences from 1900 to 1930 provided persuasive evidence for extra-sensory perception, or the acquisition of information by means independent of sensory channels.

Even more dangerously, two Lords Rayleigh (family name Strutt, as I expect you know), also physicists at Cambridge, were interested in psychokinesis (movement of physical objects at variance with the known laws of physics) and the case for continuing research on this phenomenon would, in normal circumstances, be regarded as more than adequate.

However, anything that increases individual independence is seen as dangerous, and there therefore set in the tremendous communistic/materialistic social and cultural revolution, replacing the aristocracy and middle-class intellectuals, who had enough freedom to work on such things, with ersatz universities within which no research which presents any threat to the ideology can be done.

The leading academics involved in the field of ‘psychical research’ before 1945 (mostly at Cambridge) had been working to establish its acceptance. The tide turned against them, but one or two loopholes remained. That is why I was able to do a B.Litt on a somewhat risky area (nothing to do with mediumship or spiritualism) at Oxford financed by a Research Studentship from Trinity College, Cambridge. But after that my way was blocked.

There is much more which could be said, but I will leave it at this for the time being, if I may.

The human psychosis

Extract from Advice to Clever Children

The human psychosis is extremely simple. Hatred of reality (originally caused, it is to be supposed, by a traumatic experience or experiences of objective impotence) has become displaced onto other human beings. This state of affairs is expressed by attitudes of indifference to reality and of interest in human society. The latter interest is usually rationalised as altruism.

The other day I was talking to a human being. I said: 'No one is interested in reality.' He said, 'Well, reality, what's that? Nothing exciting. That chair, this carpet.' 'There is the uni­verse out there,' I said. 'Well, what's the universe?' he said. 'Some stars. Some of them we know about, some of them we don't. Well, what about it?'

It is instructive to observe that this particularly overt case of the human psychosis was in full agreement with John Robinson* that God was something you found deep down in human relationships.

He (the human being) could also be made to assert that any reality human beings did not know about was unimportant, in fact unreal, because human beings did not know about it.

To complete this cameo of the human psychosis it is only necessary to observe that a study of this person's human relationships would undoubtedly have revealed a continuous indulgence in concealed sadism.

(I use the word 'sadism' for convenience, because there is no other – unless perhaps Schadenfreude – to express a psychological tendency to derive pleasure or gratification from damage done to other people, or suffering experienced by them. I do not, however, mean to imply that I suppose the pleasure or gratification involved to be sexual in origin.)

* author of Honest to God

My aphorisms and the semi-permeable membrane

The following is part of a recent email sent by my colleague Dr Charles McCreery to Nigel Rees, presenter of the Radio 4 programme Quote ... Unquote.

Dear Nigel Rees,

I heard your appeal for listeners to write in with suggestions at the end of yesterday evening's Quote ... Unquote, and would like to suggest some of the aphorisms of the contemporary British philosopher and scientist Celia Green.

Ten of these are included in the Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams (ed. M.J. Cohen). The subject headings below are those under which Cohen lists them.

Boredom: There are two ways of living, one of which leads to astonishment and the other to boredom.

Differences: In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is lucky to escape with his life.

Governments: In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy, a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way

Marriage: People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.

Mind: The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.

Morals: The human race has always been unable to distinguish clearly between metaphysics and morality.

Prejudice: When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that that they are based on prejudices which many other people share.

Right: There are some things that are sure to go wrong as soon as they stop going right.

Science: The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.

Superstition: One of the greatest superstitions of our time is the belief that it has none.

Some others I particularly like myself are:
• The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.
• Only the impossible is worth attempting. In everything else one is sure to fail.
• There is nothing so relaxing as responsibility; nor any relief from strain so great as that of recognising one's own importance.
• What everyone has against Ludwig of Bavaria is not that he ruined Bavaria but that he supported a genius in the process.
• It is superfluous to be humble on one's own behalf; so many people are willing to do it for one.

If you are interested I could suggest more.

The situation about my epigrams (or aphorisms) illustrates the consistency of the semi-permeable membrane, which does not permit me to derive any positive feedback in society from any effort I am able to make.

Ten of the aphorisms are in the Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams, so one might imagine that I was a well-established author. But in fact I am still as unable as ever to publish anything except at my own expense and with great effort – i.e. no publisher would actually accept a book of mine for publication. And even if published, my books are not allowed to be known about in any way that would make them saleable.

All the more ironic when one considers that I started to write books in the hope of generating an income which would at least partially compensate me for not having the income normally derived from the salary of a high-flying academic career.

If I had been having such a career, I had thought I would be able to make a supplementary income by publishing my views as, say, Richard Dawkins does. Why can’t I do that just as well as if I were having the academic career which I should be having? But no, as it turns out, that is not at all the way it is and if I want to publish at all, to draw attention to my presence and need for support, it can only be as an extra drain on my own resources of money and energy.

Child abuse: the alternatives

Another child abuse case, more wringing of hands. The Daily Mail (17 June) headline reads:

Neglectful. Filthy. And living with a paedophile. So why did social workers decide that little Shannon Matthews’s mother was ... Not such a bad parent!

Although this case, involving a fake kidnapping, seems a relatively mild one compared with the horrors of some of the other recent ones, it has nevertheless resulted in the composition, no doubt at great expense, of a 100-page report about whether or not the various trained ‘experts’ involved should have been able to prevent what happened.

Comment on the bigger picture

I do not see you can expect to be able to run a country with the features that this one has acquired. A large number of people who are not supporting themselves by earning money, and never likely to do so. This population of non-earners having children at a high rate, which they seem not even to look after properly, despite being financed to do so. A large population of social workers coming and going, intimately involved in these people’s lives, though this is still not sufficient to prevent the children being badly treated or killed. Other families being broken up, and children’s lives being permanently blighted, because of interference in situations where there is no actual abuse at all. Free education and health care for all involved.

It may be complained that the other alternative, not to have a welfare state, would lead to the suffering and death of many children. What we have at present, however, will inexorably lead to the massive expansion of a class that is highly prone to irresponsible behaviour, including neglect and abuse of children, and to their unsuccessful pursuit by an ever-growing class of state agents with ever greater powers to snoop and interfere; as well as increasing misery for families that are falsely accused. In other words, the suffering and death of even more children. Furthermore, the country is likely to be bankrupted.

Invitation to parents to come and work for us

There are plans to enable groups of parents to set up schools, as mentioned in the Daily Mail of Saturday 19 June.

Extract

Schools Secretary Michael Gove is set to unveil the government's 'free schools' policy today. Disused shops, vacant office blocks, old hospitals and even homes could be used as classrooms under ambitious plans to set up a wave of 'free schools'.

Planning laws will be relaxed in England to make it easier for parents, teachers, charities and other groups to open taxpayer-funded independent schools, the Education Secretary vowed yesterday. ...

Ministers in the Coalition are determined to smash the state monopoly on education by allowing communities to set up schools outside the control of local authorities. ...

A threshold of just 40 or 50 parents-would be needed for a primary-school bid. Groups applying to open a free school fill out a ten-page form setting out their aims and vision, possible sites for classrooms, teaching methods, a curriculum and proof of demand from families.

The first wave of schools are expected to open in September next year.

Invitation to parents

Anyone who has school-age children and is worried about what is wrong with most schools, as they may well be, should think of moving to Cuddesdon. If they were to do some voluntary work (or possibly paid self-employed work) for Oxford Forum, we could give them advice and suggestions based on our extensive experience of what can go wrong in schools and universities.

The ideology which has undermined state education to the point of making it worse than useless is highly pervasive. It is difficult to create an establishment which does not suffer from it, even if in a milder form, without thinking through the underlying issues more analytically than is done by newspapers or in educational 'research'.