The retrospective pensions swindle

I have a book entitled The Great Pensions Swindle* which, 40 years ago, made some useful points about the likely unreliability of state pensions. The following, however, is unrealistic:

The breaking point is not postponable indefinitely. The resistance to periodic increases in ‘social insurance’ contributions will begin all the sooner when the ‘contributors’ realise they are paying not insurance contributions but an income tax. (p.128)

In fact, no significant realisation arose that “National Insurance” contributions were just a form of income tax, which increased the Government’s current spending money. Otherwise the book anticipates very much what has happened. What happens when a future generation decides it prefers to spend its money on what is fashionable at the time (overseas ‘aid’, social workers, ‘universities’, etc.) rather than providing a former generation with the pension it thought it was paying for? The pensions are 'too expensive'; they are suddenly means-tested, and paid at ever later ages.

Not least, let it be clearly understood that ‘right’ (to the pension) and ‘contract’ are two more good words that have been made misnomers. A ‘right’ to a pension that a man acquires by saving for it is unambiguous. The ‘right’ a man has to an income when he can no longer work is of a different kind. The word has been re-defined to mean a moral right or claim on society. But transfers of income from one age-group, or class, or generation, to another represent decisions by one group, or class, or generation, to help another in time of need. No group, or class, or generation has a ‘right’ in any absolute sense. ...

In civilised parlance ‘contract’ means a voluntary agreement between two parties each of whom thinks it will gain. There is no such voluntary agreement between the generations on pensions. Indeed, there can hardly be one since future generations cannot be consulted; and if they could they would hardly agree since the terms are loaded against them. (pp.129-130)

* * *

Retrospective legislation has become increasingly frequent, and by now no one seems to remember that there was ever anything against it. It used to be said that the individual had a right to know what was legally open to him (in taxation, etc.) so that he could plan his affairs to secure the best outcome in view of his own interests and priorities, as he conceived them to be.

The recent changes in the ages at which state pensions become payable is really an egregious example of retrospective legislation, and directly affects people in as bad a position as we are. If a company which offered pension schemes were suddenly to announce that all its pensions were to be paid two years later, those who had been paying into the schemes might well wish to sue it for breach of contract. When the government does the same thing, no legal redress is available. This has happened recently and seems likely to happen more, so that my junior colleagues’ pensions recede as one approaches them. The age at which one of them will start receiving her pension was first shifted from 60 to 62, and then again to 64. Another’s pension was shifted from 65 to 67, and seems likely to be further delayed to the age of 68.

Thus the state has already deprived us, who are trying to build up towards an adequate academic institutional environment, of seven years’ pension money, i.e. £35K at today’s pension rate.

I have previously pointed out how means-testing of pensions retrospectively reduces the benefit received in return for contributions paid. This means nearly two thousand pounds per person per year. The proposed tax of £20K towards the cost of state ‘nursing care’, whether such care is received or not, was first proposed as a tax on estates on death, but is now suggested as a capital levy to be paid by every pensioner on reaching retirement age. If that were made retrospective, so that it applied to myself as well as to my colleagues, that would represent an additional confiscation of £80K.

There are several other examples of abandonment of principles, and I should be able to write about them at length, because they are actually very serious, although no one else appears to recognise this. If Oxford Forum were provided with adequate funding, we could be writing and publishing analyses on this issue which are currently being ignored in favour of the usual pro-collectivist arguments.

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

* Arthur Seldon, The Great Pensions Swindle, Tom Stacey Books, London, 1970.

A Registrar of Oxford and other deflating gas-bags

This is an account of past events which my colleague Charles McCreery has written, and sent to someone who is planning to write a book about his father (the late General Sir Richard McCreery). My account of the same events has already been blogged.

At some later date I may give an account of how relations with my parents came to break down in 1965, about a year after I took my first degree, and how in my opinion this rupture was deliberately brought about by my mother, by her behaviour over a period of about a year, in order to justify the subsequent disinheriting that was carried out by various members of my family.

Meanwhile I wish to give an account of how my parents were responsible for triggering a slander that I was taking drugs.

Some time between the breakdown in relations between us in 1965, and my father’s death in 1967, they went to visit Oliver Van Oss, then headmaster of Charterhouse school, ostensibly to discuss the breakdown in relations, but in my opinion more likely in the hope that he could put pressure on me to resume relations on their terms. He had been my tutor for modern languages at Eton, but I had only seen him once, briefly, in the five years since I had left Eton. He was therefore not in a position to shed any further light to my parents on why I was currently not willing to see them than I had already done in writing myself.

As a result of the natural evasiveness of people caught propagating criminal slander, it was never definitely established who initially invented the slander that I ‘must be taking drugs’, i.e. whether it was my parents themselves, Van Oss, or one of the academics who passed it on, as described below. My own surmise is that it was most likely Van Oss who thought it up during, or prior to, the interview with my parents. Knowing him as I did I could imagine him producing the hypothesis to make up for his lack of insight into the situation, and, by making me responsible for the breakdown in communication, to let them off the hook. (Clearly no one as statusful as my parents could have been responsible for the breach by virtue of reprehensible behavior on their part, so it must have been me.)

However, even if it was Van Oss or one of the other academics who invented the slander, that does not exonerate my parents as they clearly were quite willing to accept the ‘explanation’ and certainly did nothing to prevent it circulating, as it proceeded to do.

The reason for the slander beginning to circulate round Oxford and elsewhere was that Van Oss was too cowardly to approach me directly. Instead, he approached a friend of his, John Butterworth (later made Lord Butterworth of Warwick), the Vice-Chancellor of Warwick University. The ostensible reason for this choice was that Butterworth had been Bursar at New College during my time there as an undergraduate. However, although I had known him by sight through seeing him around the college, to the best of my recollection I had never exchanged two words with him.

Butterworth evidently felt even more lacking in social leverage than Van Oss where I was concerned, and he passed the buck to a friend of his, namely Sir Folliott Sandford, then Registrar of Oxford University, whom I did not know at all and would not even have recognized if I had passed him in the street. Sandford, like his two predecessors, also lacked the moral courage to approach me directly, and instead approached one of our academic Consultants, Dr Graham Weddell, a physiologist at Oxford (later Professor of Anatomy). Even Weddell, whom I had also never met, failed to approach me directly but instead rang up my colleague Celia Green to describe what had been going on.

Following this telephone conversation between Celia Green and Dr Weddell I myself spoke to each of the participants, including Dr Weddell, on the telephone. Their reactions were instructive. I would say that each of them in their various ways sounded ‘caught out’, as if they had not reckoned with being called to account by the object of the slander himself.

None of them attempted to deny their involvement in circulating the slander. Oliver Van Oss’s manner I would describe as sheepish. I had previously, i.e. during my time at Eton, known him as an authority figure, and had never before experienced him in such a subdued and defensive mode in relation to myself. I remember having an image of him, either during the conversation or subsequently and as a result of it, as a sort of deflating gas-bag or balloon.

Sir Folliott Sandford admitted quite abjectly that there was not a shred of evidence for the slander, that it was pure speculation, and that it had been started in order to explain the rift between me and my parents.

The person who came nearest to adopting an aggressive attitude was John Butterworth. After I had repeated my expressions of disgust at the irresponsible way he and the various other academics had propagated this slander, he started to complain that I was disrupting his social arrangements – he was either preparing or conducting a dinner party of his own or due at someone else’s. I pointed out to him that the likelihood of permanent damage to my career and reputation as a result of his and others’ slanderous activities might be accounted of more importance than any temporary inconvenience to his social life.

Snatching winter fu-el

The age at which the elderly can claim winter fuel payments, worth £250 last year for the over-60s and an extra £150 for those over 80, is all but certain to be raised to cut some of the £2.7 billion annual costs. ... The handouts could also be restricted to less well-off pensioners who claim other benefits. (Daily Mail, 18 Aug 2010, from article ‘Bonfire of the middle class benefits’.)

After the state pension had ceased being independent of means-testing, additional payments for specific purposes were introduced from time to time, supposedly to reduce the hardship of those who now received significantly less than those with fewer savings.

But such specific items are vulnerable, and it is now proposed that the winter fuel allowance should be received at a later age than before, and also possibly be paid only to those in receipt of other benefits (i.e. with sufficiently small savings, and receipt of some other benefit to prove it).

Thus the proportion of the pension that is free from means-testing is to be decreased, and the extra percentage which I would receive if my savings were small enough will be increased. At present I would receive 36% more per annum if I were poor enough; if the fuel allowance were made dependent on means-testing, that would increase to about 40%.

As a matter of fact, even if I were eligible for the income supplement I would probably forgo it, and I think that pensioners as a whole should think very seriously before applying for it, since it can only be got by exposing yourself to scrutiny by those who may decide that you are no longer fit to live in independence, but should be incarcerated in a care home for your own good.

Since writing the above

Today, 19 August, I read that it is proposed that winter fuel payments to pensioners should be delayed to the age of 75, which means that those on reduced (means-tested) pensions will have their annual payment cut by about 5%.

There are criticisms that this will cost lives. For those of us who are still trying to get started on our adult careers by building up the capital necessary for an academic institution, it is simply an extra handicap, making an already grim situation just a bit worse.

The sacrifices of sadism are the greater

It may be observed that General McCreery was prepared to spend a good deal of money (Eton fees for five years) to prevent Charles from being at Eton as a scholar, which severely damaged his prospects in life, as well as his well-being throughout those years. If Charles had got a scholarship the fees could have been saved, which was not a negligible consideration even for the McCreerys, to judge from his father’s complaints about the costs of servants, central heating, etc. (*)

In fact, it appears that his parents wished to spend that much money to prevent Charles from getting the advantages out of his ability which he could have done. Cf. my aphorism:

It is supposed that self-sacrifice is the prerogative of altruism. On the contrary; the sacrifices of sadism are the greater.

* It was not a foregone conclusion that scholars did not have to pay fees, and the McCreerys might have wished to pay the fees for the social prestige of being able to pay even if Charles had got a scholarship.

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'.

Tale told by an idiot (Pt. 3)

It should go without saying, but perhaps it is as well to repeat, that there had been no sign of any intention to set up a research project in Oxford or elsewhere, in the area which I was proposing, until it became necessary to block mine. None of the retired professors nominated by Rosalind Heywood had shown any inclination to exert themselves in such a way, and if it had been necessary to go ahead with Rosalind’s plan (i.e. if I had not withdrawn from it), I think she might have found some or all of those named very reluctant to play any part in it. When, later, she wanted to find rivals to lay claim to Cecil King’s money, so that I would not get any more of it, she found this very difficult and it took her some time to persuade John Beloff to do a small piece of research on a hypnotic subject, to support her contention that Cecil King should not continue to give money to my organisation, but should scatter his money widely among people with academic status, although they were actually well enough set up already to have been doing some research if they had wished to do so.

What she could, and did, easily succeed in doing was to generate indignant opposition to the idea of my being so presumptuous as to do anything at all, so that the population of those who had any association with the SPR became energetic in blocking my applications for funding from any source, both by encouraging Professor Hardy to stand firmly in my light, and by running me down to any potential source of funding.

I was amazed and also, in the circumstances of my life, horrified that motivation to obstruct me could be so easily and universally aroused. Lady Faith Culme-Seymour, for example, came to Oxford to visit Hardy and express enthusiasm for his lethargic intentions, and also to attempt to persuade me to do his work for him, for no money. This showed an energy and willingness to exert herself which was rare among SPR members, except when they were opposing me. I wondered why she should feel so strongly that someone who had once been thrown out by the university should never be allowed to do any work which might establish their claim to re-entry to an academic career. It was easier to understand the antagonism to me which was shown by Professor Hardy himself. He had academic status and I did not and, under the influence of Rosalind Heywood, he seemed to regard it as an insult to academic status in general, and hence to his own, that I should attempt to do anything on my own initiative, without having received instructions to do so from on high.

Lady Faith, on the other hand, was an aristocrat with no academic pretensions. Until recently, people of her class had done whatever they could afford to do in the way of research, whenever they felt like it. She might even have regarded me as one of the disadvantaged poor, whose failure to get a research scholarship and an academic career could be ascribed to my having attended low-grade schools. In fact, however, she and everyone else in a similar position hastened to join Rosalind in her energetic campaign to ensure that it was impossible for me to obtain money from any source.

As has already been mentioned, it was not only the case that I had no salary from an academic career, which was the only sort of career I could have, but also I could not even draw income support as my ruined education had left me without a usable qualification, i.e. one that would be regarded as justifying me in applying for any university appointment that I might be able to accept.

I was, and continue to be, very shocked that people who were well set up in life and had no apparent reason for doing me down should evince such obviously destructive motivation towards someone in as bad a position as I was.

Tale told by an idiot (Pt. 2)

This is a continuation of an earlier post about my attempts to set up a research organisation in Oxford.

When I withdrew from the plan for a research institute in which I was to be a secretary with no possible motivation for being so (I was to be offered neither a salary out of which I could have saved money towards my institutional environment of the future, nor any suggestion that what I did would in any way enhance my claims to re-enter an academic career in a university) I did not expect this to cause offence. Surely I had every right not to wish to participate in a project so different from that which I had originally proposed and for which Salter and Sir George had been prepared to seek support.

However, it did lead to offence being taken by Rosalind Heywood, which she broadcast in her inimitable fashion. I can only suppose that she managed to make it sound as though I had turned down an absolutely wonderful proposal which was just what a young and statusless person should have wanted.

In fact, she must have made the proposal expressly so that I would turn it down and it could be regarded as a cause of offence. If she had really hoped I might accept it, she would have incorporated something which might attract me, such as a suggestion (however fictional) that one of the retired professors would be likely to support me in getting a Fellowship at his college, but she did not.

It would seem that my initial proposals for a research institute in Oxford were considered too threatening, in that the Oxford location would make it likely to attract some publicity and hence, perhaps, some financial support which would make me able to do something and make my life less intolerable.

Reacting to this risk, Rosalind superimposed her entirely different proposals on my original ones. When I, foreseeably, would have nothing to do with them, the resulting outrage was sufficient to ensure that all previous plans to seek funding for my plan were aborted. Rosalind was a formidable strategist.

So I was left with my original constitution but no money. The next few years were very bad but I had no alternative but to go ahead, although it now appeared that my hopes of financial support or of re-access to a university career had been definitively destroyed. Everyone joined in the plan to drive me out of Oxford by squeezing me to death.

As an unforeseeable but partial and temporary break, Cecil King came out of the blue and provided a modicum of funding. This, I suppose, re-ignited the original fear that an Oxford location might attract support. Cecil King was quickly turned against us, and the plan for Professor Hardy’s research centre came into being – in Oxford, as similar as possible to my organisation, but with a statusful person at its head, so designed to block any possibility of funding that might otherwise have come to me.

Facebook

To members of the group 'Celia Green and Oxford Forum' on Facebook:*

As you may know, we are aiming at building up Oxford Forum into an independent university with a number of departments, a residential college, and an associated publishing company.

Please bear in mind that the books we have been able to write and publish, and especially the material we put on our blogs, does not represent what we would be doing if we were able to behave like fully financed academics. Because we have so far always been in the position of an embryonic organisation trying to get properly established, our output has been determined by (a) the limitations imposed on us by the absence of support staff and other aspects of infrastructure, and (b) the fact that the output has had to function as a form of advertising. The phrase I often use is “distress flares”.

It is difficult for someone to understand our position unless they are willing to recognise three features of the modern situation. First, notwithstanding any amount of nonsense talked about “gifted children” and so forth, the modern ethos is hostile to high ability, and in particular to the concept of innate ability. Second, the modern ideology states that everything carried on within accredited institutions is good, and anything done outside that system is to be despised. Social approval is everything. Third, to disagree with this, and to assert one’s claim on the resources being provided for academic research, without having received accreditation from a sufficiently large number of people inside the system, is to break a serious taboo. People who assert a need for the conditions of an academic life are (so the logic goes) moral criminals and deserve to be shunned. And shunned is what, to a large extent, we are.

There are a number of things you could do to help us.

1) Borrow our books from your college or public library. This will encourage them to stock them.

2) Buy our books from bookshops or Amazon. This will encourage bookshops and Amazon to stock them.

3) Encourage your friends to borrow or buy our books.

4) Let us know a postal address so we can send you some complimentary copies of our books.

5) Encourage your friends to visit our website and blogs, so they know about us.

6) Visit us in Cuddesdon, an attractive village near Oxford, so we can tell you about our need for workers of all kinds, and for financial and moral support (or encourage your friends to do so).

7) Spend some or all of your vacations with us doing voluntary work, or encourage others to do so.

With regards,
Celia Green

*This refers to the following page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/group.php?gid=22687233093&v=wall

update
the above Facebook page has now been superseded by the following group page:
(unfortunately group pages cannot be accessed unless one is logged into Facebook)
http://www.facebook.com/groups/oxfordforum

Letter to David Cameron

Dear Mr Cameron,

Congratulations on becoming the first Conservative Prime Minister in what seems like a long time.

The material published in our books and on our websites is broadly sympathetic to conservatism, and certainly far more so than the output of mainstream academia and of other parts of the cultural establishment.

Oxford Forum is a research organisation which was set up to oppose declining standards and increasing ideological bias in mainstream academia. Its aim is to expand into an independent college cum university which would generate and publish research in several areas including philosophy, the psychology and physiology of perception, and theoretical physics. We are actively seeking potential patrons to provide funding for its activities.

While we are not tied to any particular outlook or political organisation, we do think that proponents of conservatism and free market and libertarian principles should want to support us, because we represent an unbiased alternative to a severely politicised higher education sector.

One of the areas of research we could be being productive in, if we were financed, is that of education. As currently carried on in academic departments, this subject is a particularly egregious example of how only certain perspectives are permitted.

As a conservative, I hope you would like to know what we, as dissidents who do not agree with the leftist viewpoint adopted by practically all ‘educational researchers’, think about various topics in education.

One key issue concerns discrimination practised in schools, and universities, against those with high IQs, disguised in terms of supposed concern for discrimination against those from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’. This is an issue with which we have considerable personal experience, as well as a theoretical framework capable of making sense of the phenomena observed.

There is now a serious ideological bias at work in academic institutions in this country (and elsewhere) which effectively invalidates more or less all the research being carried out in the social sciences. We call on the Conservative Party to oppose this bias, by supporting our dissident organisation.

Yours sincerely, etc.

An invitation to give a lecture

Copy of a reply to an academic who invited me to give a philosophy lecture

Dear Dr ...

Thank you for your invitation to give a lecture for the cultural season at the ... academy.

However, I am afraid I have to decline the invitation, as I am far too occupied with supporting myself by my own efforts. We are totally unfunded by any organisation or individual, academic or otherwise, and my colleagues and I have to support ourselves and the institutional framework by investment. This takes up most of our time and energy.

My response might be different if the academy were prepared to make a significant donation to Oxford Forum which would go towards covering our ongoing costs.

If, as you say, you admire my opinions, and wish me to be able to express them, I would be very grateful if you would encourage people and organisations to give me financial support. I am currently being prevented from publishing books or taking part in academic events by complete lack of funding.

Thank you again for your invitation.

With kind regards, etc.

Full of sound and fury

Life’s ... a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

When I think of my life in so far as it has been spent on attempting to work towards a situation in which to do research and other things in a tolerable way, which has involved spending a lot of time on hopeless interactions with crazy human beings, the quote from Macbeth is very much the way I feel about it.

I felt very much like that when I found that I had to start quarrelling with Sir George Joy about his determination to turn my proposed research institute into the model proposed by Rosalind Heywood.

My original plan had been that I would be the director, with a panel of academic experts in various fields as consultants, to lend respectability, and perhaps, just conceivably, provide a bit of useful information from time to time. I did not set much store by the latter possibility, as I had gone the rounds of the statusful academics at the Society for Psychical Research and found them to have no ideas at all.

Rosalind’s plan was that four or five retired professors should be paid quite large stipends, as befitted their status, to sit around and share their ideas on how progress could be made. As they had such great minds, this was certain to be the best way of working out how to make some progress in this incredibly difficult and elusive field of research, in which no progress continued to be made.

So far as I was concerned, the only difficulty consisted of the fact that everyone wanted to believe it impossible and to continue to do nothing.

My role in Rosalind’s proposed organisation was to be that of secretary and, presumably, coffee-maker, for these people. There was no suggestion that I would be paid anything at all. I expect Rosalind thought that, if I were, there was a risk that I would add to my tiny capital by saving money.

One can only think that Rosalind, and everyone else, were terrified of my getting to do anything, however small, that was not supervised and prescribed by someone who would only permit futile research to take place.

In many contexts, Sir George had appeared realistic and cynical, so that it was impossible to think that he could consider this a way of making any progress at all, but Rosalind had successfully played on something in him, as she did with everyone else.

I have a particularly vivid memory of my feelings of futility when sitting beside him on the doorstep of the house in Walton Crescent in Oxford to prevent him from returning instantly to London, as I had failed to make the correct responses on being told of Rosalind’s latest proposal. Eventually he defrosted slightly from his catatonic position and came back into the house, but the conversation was no more constructive than it had been before he was threatening to leave.

More about how to do research

What I last wrote about “B” reminded me of another indication of how much less effective in its methods the Hardy Centre was than us.

One day B brought in to the Department* a collection of reports of would-be religious experiences, and asked those present to see whether they could pick out the subjects with a psychiatric history. Only Charles was able to do this; nobody else could do it at all, and it did not appear that B or anyone else at the Hardy Centre would know how to do this.

The first time I told an academic about this some years ago, they said, “How can you tell?” (which ones are psychiatric). And I said it depended on being aware of psychological dimensions which were not recognised in modern psychology.

People often ask questions like this in relation to fields of research which one can see how to make progress in, as if anything one knows about them must be so simple and obvious that it can be explained to them in one sentence. Or, maybe, that it must be so subtle and complicated that nobody could understand it, including myself.

Actually, I had very extensive information about psychological dimensions which might be relevant, which I had acquired by surviving the psychological attacks on me in the course of my ‘education’, by absorbing the past history of the Society for Psychical Research and the life experience of Salter and Sir George, by reading old-fashioned psychology and modern psychiatry, and by interviewing the subjects who came into the SPR office to report experiences, including some who clearly were classifiably psychotic.

What is recognised in the personality tests of modern experimental psychology is very limited, the object being to recognise as the norm the psychology of a decentralised person with an IQ of 100. In order to extend the range of personality factors that could be taken into account, it would be necessary to set up new questionnaires from scratch, which would be very time and labour intensive. Most tests are not standardised for different levels of IQ, although some are standardised for different occupations.

It is not only the case that I had discovered a lot more about psychology than had been known previously, but also that modern experimental psychology had deliberately reduced its range, so that the potentially threatening parts of the most enlightened pre-1945 psychology were excluded. (Hence the name ‘Experimental Psychology’ to distinguish it from old-fashioned ‘Psychology’. )

* Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology

How to do research

What I wrote about Professor Hardy recently reminded me that “B” had said how impressive he had found the books we wrote on the basis of our appeals for cases, showing how much information we had got out of them. Tacitly he admitted that the Hardy Centre had, in contrast, really got next to nothing out of its appeal for cases of religious experiences.

“B“ was another person (with a degree in psychology) who was employed by Professor Hardy as an assistant, to avoid employing either me or Charles, since I had rejected the constant approaches which were made to persuade me to work for Hardy for nothing, and especially to get something out of the cases which lay around in boxes.

So perhaps I ought to explain how remarkable was what I derived from the work that was possible within the very constricted funding provided by Cecil King. Nobody else could have produced anything so constructive even by spending far more money and working in far better circumstances than I was forced to do.

Plenty of people with (at least fairly) high IQs and academic status had known about the phenomena as reported, without recognising the various types into which they could be classified, and how they might be related.

This work should have been seen, and still should be seen, as ample justification for providing me with a professorship and at least one research department within which further research could proceed within the areas that had been opened up.

In fact, the breakthroughs that had been made in defining previously unrecognised areas were acknowledged only in the sense that “research” in those nominal areas was initiated, and carried out by people who already had academic salary and status and who were sufficiently identified with the modern outlook to avoid any sensitive issues. On the other hand, I and my associates were kept statusless, unsalaried and deprived of support in any form.

The risks of consulting a doctor

In Tuesday’s Daily Mail there is an article headed:

Pharmacists are selling more and more drugs over the counter to patients who haven’t consulted their doctor, posing the question ... Is your chemist putting your life at risk?

But no one ever makes the point that any contact with a “doctor", or “socially authorised sadist” as we call them here, is putting more than your life at risk and should be avoided at any cost. The medical “profession” in the oppressive society is totally immoral.

“Medical ethics” is an impossible association of terms, but socially accredited “philosophy” departments of “universities” continue to pour out books and papers on this topic, of which the philosophy department of my suppressed and unrecognised university is being prevented from publishing criticisms, which would analyse the unquestioned assumptions implicitly being made.

Meanwhile intrusions on individual liberty continue to be made at a rate of knots. I remember a time when pharmacists did not consider it their business to interrogate a customer before allowing him to make a purchase. Now they are evidently legally required to do so.

Further comment

The Mail article about “medical ethics” is ostensibly triggered by the deregulation of a medication which is used by middle-aged men, described in the article as “a segment of the population which is notoriously slow in asking for medical help” (or “exposing themselves to medical abuse”, as I would put it).

The current system is clearly discriminating against those who, for whatever reason, avoid exposing themselves to the dangerous and abusive situation of “asking for medical help”. Statistically, men are more disinclined than women to do this (being less tolerant of decentralising situations – i.e. more realistic) so, if the obvious and ascertainable benefits of seeking “help” from a doctor are statistically greater than the harm that results from the lack of those benefits, men are being placed at a disadvantage to women in the oppressive society, because the detrimental psychological aspects of what is on offer are evidently more damaging to men than to women. It is very similar to the way they are discriminated against in the “educational” system, in which girls have become not only as “successful” as boys, but more so.

Reflections on Professor Sir Alister Hardy, founder of the Religious Experiences Research Centre

If you are motivated to believe that innate ability does not exist and all ability is the result of social interaction, then it is important to keep people who have been obviously precocious deprived of opportunity.

When Professor Sir Alister Hardy gave a paid research job to someone with a PhD in law so that he could make something of the boxes of case reports (of religious experiences) which had been received in response to an appeal superficially resembling those which I had previously made, he did not even attempt to contribute suggestions about how they were to be analysed. This was in the early Seventies, a few years after he had founded the Religious Experiences Research Unit (as the Religious Experiences Research Centre was then called) based at Manchester College, Oxford.

The person he employed as paid Research Assistant - without offering the job to either me or Dr Charles McCreery, who had extensive knowledge of all relevant areas as well as previous experience of analysing our own appeals, although not while holding an academic appointment - was a PhD in law, with no relevant knowledge or experience. But no doubt Hardy and his advisors, who included Rosalind Heywood and Dame Janet Vaughan of Somerville, thought no one could criticise him for appointing someone with a PhD instead of me, who had only a BLitt. All that counts is academic status. His qualification was in nothing relevant, and mine was as relevant as possible, although the work I had done in getting it had provided only a small part of the information which I had acquired in areas which were actually relevant.

Although Dr McCreery did not have a research degree at that time, he also was really much better qualified than the PhD in law, since he had a degree in Experimental Psychology (supposedly relevant, although really not much, though certainly more relevant than law) as well as the extra information which he had acquired in working with me on the research I was able to do while partially funded by the King money, including the appeals for cases.

The PhD in law who was hired was just waved at the boxes of cases and left alone to do whatever he could think of. He conceived the idea of running the cases through a computer to analyse the frequency with which certain words occurred, but I never heard that he had any idea which words might be more relevant than any others.

But the object of the exercise was to keep me destitute and inactive, and it succeeded in that.

Reflections on maths and autism

Copy of a letter to an academic

One of the last times I saw you I remember saying that ____ who got a First in maths was very unaware of her social surroundings, calling herself asocial, and that I supposed this was necessary to get a First in maths. You seemed to be indicating agreement with this idea, so I wondered if I had supported an implication which I did not intend. Actually I meant that people needed very specific psychological insulation to do abstract intellectual activities, particularly maths, successfully in the social environment of the modern ‘educational’ system, because that system is so inimical to high IQ. I think, in general, that doing anything in that context of social hostility is by no means the same thing as doing it in other contexts.

I know there is a wish to associate ‘abstract’ intellectual activities requiring a high IQ, such as maths and theoretical physics, with autism and introversion. I have seen this explained as due to a habituated concentration of emotional energy towards abstractions, at the (supposedly unnatural and unhealthy) expense of extraverted social interactions.

It is not that individuals with an exceptional aptitude for high-IQ activities are any more incapable of dealing with other people than anyone else, but that it is difficult (if not impossible) to be sufficiently focused on such activities to be able to do them well, while simultaneously having to maintain awareness of the complex conventions and other intricacies of ‘successful’ social interaction. This, I suspect, is realised by those hostile to high IQ and exploited, both to make life difficult for individuals with a strong drive to do intellectual things, and to belittle them as ‘socially inadequate’ or (in more recent lingo) ‘autistic’.

I saw at the Woodford County High School that the psychological hostility of the teachers and headmistress was directed at all and sundry. Not only at me but at anyone who wished to work harder in order to improve their performance in some area.

Everyone was to be made to feel inadequate, out of control, and at the mercy of the judgements of their ability, which were hinted at critically by the teachers. Apart, that is, from one girl with a moderately high but unthreatening IQ (130-140) who constantly demonstrated her total devotion to doing the right thing on social terms.

There are many similar examples of ideology on which critical analyses could be being published by Oxford Forum if it were provided with adequate funding to do so. Meanwhile, ideas such as the supposed link between high IQ and autism are likely to receive further reinforcement from pseudo-research published by the universities.

A token of good faith

Someone who had contacted us to say they were coming to one of our Tuesday afternoon coffee meetings* emailed us the day before the meeting to ask if she could bring "my friend [X]", without giving any information about X. As X happens to be the name of a well-known American academic blogger, we replied as follows.

Dear __
Yes, please bring the taxi receipt and we will reimburse you.
Yes, it is fine to bring your friend. However, I should mention that where salaried academics are concerned, we are only willing to meet them if they first make a donation of £1,000 (or more). The coffee meetings are intended primarily for people of student age. While we are happy in principle to meet other academics, you will understand that it is potentially invidious and galling for us to meet those who have managed to survive the negative aspects of contemporary academia, whether through luck or through lowering their standards, and who are not giving us any support either by donations or by coming to work here in vacations.
We are in the position of intellectuals unjustly exiled from academia and having to support themselves by their own efforts. It seems reasonable to us to expect fellow intellectuals inside the system who are financially comfortable to make a token contribution to our efforts, if they want to interact with us.

The person in question responded by saying she refused to come without her friend, and so would not come at all.

The policy described is one we have applied for many years, and which we shall continue to apply until such time as we are in a comparable position to salaried academics, of being paid for being intellectually productive rather than having to spend almost all our time maintaining ourselves, and our embryonic organisation, at a minimum subsistence level.

* These are currently being held weekly on Tuesdays at 4.30 pm. For more details, email cgoxfordforum@yahoo.co.uk

Copy of a letter to recent lottery winners

Dear Justine Laycock and Nigel Page,

I read in a recent Daily Mail that you have won £56 million on the lottery.

You may be considering various charities and other causes to donate some of your winnings to. I would like to suggest that you consider us.

You have possibly heard about the ‘Climategate’ scandal, in which it was revealed that the investigation of climate change by British universities is not being carried out with the high standards of objectivity and impartial devotion to truth that one might have hoped for.

Unfortunately, this decline in standards has become a feature of academia in general. Because of government pressure, and an ideology which regards getting the ‘morally correct’ result as more important than whether it is true, much of what the universities produce is now worse than useless. In some fields, such as philosophy or economics, their net contribution is clearly negative.

Modern culture is increasingly being distorted by the large role played by the state. It needs to regain the participation of private patronage, as used to happen in the past.

Oxford Forum is a research organization which was set up to oppose increasing ideological bias in mainstream academia. Its aim is to expand into an independent college cum university which would generate and publish research in several areas including philosophy, the psychology and physiology of perception, and theoretical physics. We are actively seeking potential patrons to provide funding for its activities.

One way in which someone could help our efforts in a way that would also benefit themselves is to purchase properties in the area where we are based, and allow us to use them while they were not actually living in them. The area near us is regarded as a good area for investing in property.

I hope you may consider my suggestions.

Linking precocity to criminality

Hatred of exceptional ability is fundamental to the modern ideology. I just saw a television drama (an Inspector Lynley story, ‘A Traitor to Memory’) which seemed to express this in inverted form.

Any drive to use exceptional ability, or to protect it in another person, is associated with criminal attitudes towards others and willingness to do them the greatest possible harm.

In this episode, a murder happens to someone vaguely associated with a successful violin player. He himself, his parents and his personal assistant are all clearly unsympathetic characters. His personal assistant, formerly a violin player himself, gave up on his own career to become first teacher and then personal assistant to his ‘beloved prodigy’ – as the politically correct working class female detective expresses it sneeringly.

‘I was a good musician but Gideon is a great one’, says the contemptible and criminal PA. ‘A talent such as that occurs once in a century.’

It transpires that the violinist killed his disabled little sister (who had Down’s syndrome) because the strain of supporting both a highly talented offspring and a dysfunctional one was too much for his parents, who had told him they could not afford to pay for him to go to the prestigious school of music.

‘But I had to go there,’ he says. ‘I was born to be a musician.’

Everyone around Gideon then went on treating him (inappropriately, you are evidently supposed to think) like an exception who must be shielded from his own actions. They wished to protect the prodigy, by taking the blame for the murder of his sister themselves, or by bribing an innocent person to do so. Gideon must be protected from knowing about anything that might be painful to him, so one person after another gets killed to prevent them from saying the wrong thing to him.

All this is most implausible, but it does illustrate the fundamental hatred of exceptional ability and of the drive to get into a position to use it to the full, a drive which I had and still have.

Propaganda such is this is evidently very effective at determining people’s attitudes. It is not necessary to say explicitly, ‘People with exceptional ability should be prevented from using it to get into the sort of career to which they are suited and which they need to have.’

If anyone precocious or successful in any way at an early age is always presented as depraved and criminal, as well as anyone who seems to wish to support them in their ambitions, putting across the idea that criminality is associated with any precocious person as well as with anyone who shows sympathy with any precocious person, everyone gets the point and the association of ideas is firmly fixed in their mind. It does not seem to require any particular level of IQ to be influenced by the association of ideas that is intended, although being analytical and critical about it seems to require not only a high IQ but unusual independence of mind.

This association of criminality with precocity and with the support of precocity was apparently well in place at the onset of the Welfare State in 1945, and it makes it easier to understand why I was treated as a criminal, and why my father was as well when he tried to gain acceptance for my proposals for the taking of exams. It would have been a much better strategy for him to leave me alone as quietly as possible to get on with whatever I wanted to do, if he had been cynical enough to adopt it, although no doubt it could not have gone on for long without arousing violent antagonism.

More about home education

Home tuition loophole. Khyra’s mother and stepfather used home education as a cover for her horrific abuse. If parents wish to remove a child from state school to teach them at home, they simply have to notify the head teacher. By law, they must provide a ‘suitable’ education according to the ‘age, aptitude and ability’ of the child. But there is no requirement to follow the national curriculum or to provide a set number of hours of education. Local authorities can make informal inquiries to establish if parents are offering a suitable education. But the law allows parents to refuse to let officials see the education that is taking place. They simply have to show examples of the child’s work – with no need for the youngster to be present. *

The above extract is evidently implying that the degree to which individual liberty survives in the ‘educational’ system is regrettable.When I got the top scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, it was almost entirely on the strength of work which I had done under my own auspices and which the local education authority had not known about. I translated all four languages on the optional translation paper, having become proficient in reading languages by reading them. I had deliberately prepared myself for the General Essay papers by informing myself of the views of major philosophers of the past, and a Somerville don later said to me that my essay papers were the most remarkable she had ever seen. Even the maths, on which my marks would not on their own have got me the top scholarship, owed nothing to tuition from anybody or to the supervised courses which I had been forced to undergo, and which had not even been intended as ‘preparation’ for the specific purpose of taking university entrance exams.

It is a complete fallacy to suppose that ‘teaching’ necessarily has much relevance to outcome, or that conformity to the ‘national curriculum’ or ‘set hours’ of supervised ‘work’ would be a good thing in any individual case.

The contribution of the ‘education authority’ to my education was consistently negative, as it, or individual members of it, discouraged my father (a headmaster) from allowing me to take the School Certificate exams (normally taken at 16) when I was 13, then from supporting me in going to a post-graduate summer school at a French university when I was 15, and finally from supporting me in starting to take external degrees from London University when I was 16. On the other hand, they encouraged him to get me into supervised school and university courses against my will. I did not think they were relevant to my purposes and being forced to attend them was anything but beneficial.

Incidentally, the comments in the Daily Mail refer to the current law ‘allowing’ local authorities to make ‘informal’ enquiries in cases of home education, as though this were somehow less intrusive than ‘formal’ enquiries. I am not quite sure where a line could be drawn between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ enquiries in any case. ‘Informal’ ones can have sufficiently damaging effects on the life of the victim being ‘enquired’ about, as I know to my cost.

* Daily Mail, 26 February 2010.

Home education: a scapegoat for abuse

Yesterday’s Daily Mail reports the case of a girl of seven beaten and starved to death, in spite of the involvement of social services and the Education Department. “Beyond belief ... how 9 officials let a girl of 7 starve to death in a modern British city”*. As usual, instead of concluding that the entire philosophy behind ‘child protection’ is flawed, it is implied that the answer is to have even more intervention.

Because the girl was supposedly being educated at home, the finger is being pointed at the loophole whereby parents may choose to exclude their child from the state education system if they think the child would do better being taught at home.

Just because a child is forced to attend a state school does not mean anyone is going to notice more readily that it is being abused at home. People seem to be very good at ignoring the signs of real abuse, whether they are paid to notice them or not. This, one may think, is because people have no real motivation to prevent suffering, although they may have some to enjoy inflicting it. Paying them money and giving them powers of intrusion into other people’s lives does not affect their underlying motivation, and one may think that this is the real cause of the ineptitude of the collectivist ‘services’. There is no reason to think that providing them with even more money and powers of intrusion and interference will produce any more beneficial results.

Also, there is no reason to think that enforced attendance at a school would assist with the process of preventing real abuse from taking place. The girl did attend school for a while, and some concerns were raised when she was found stealing food from another pupil’s bag, but they did not result in any useful action. No doubt, however, a case such as this will be used as ammunition for eroding still further the liberty of the individual.

*Daily Mail, 26 February 2010.

The murder/suicide of aristocracy

The Duke of Devonshire has announced the death of the aristocracy.

‘The aristocracy is not dying, it’s dead! Coffin’s nailed down, it’s in the ground. It doesn’t exist, except that people have titles.’ *

This is of course true. Aristocracy in theory and practice has been vigorously opposed since the inception of the welfare state. Its wealth has been largely decimated by estate duties, although the Duke himself remains relatively wealthy. After decades of propaganda via television and other media, aristocrats are now generally hated and despised, and their influence has waned to the point of being negligible. A few of them from time to time have provided some resistance to the ideologically-driven changes which have brought this country to its present state, but most have been entirely passive.

The Duke sounds thoroughly modern in his endorsement of the gradual transformation of his class.

‘Look, I’m only here by pure chance, I haven’t earned any of this?'

In 1999 the Labour government got rid of most of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords, and it is now planning to remove the last few so that there will never again be anyone in the House of Lords by virtue of inheritance. The Duke says that if that were to happen, he would give up his title altogether. This seems an unnecessary move, and presumably reveals his lack of sympathy for the idea of aristocracy.

The modern idea is to have all legislation determined by people who have been ‘elected’ – that is to say, chosen by a majority of the people who happen to bother to vote in an election. There is no reason why this process should necessarily produce an outcome satisfactory from any viewpoint (economic, moral, humanitarian), in most or even any cases.

The advantage of having at least some people in power who are unelected is that there is a greater chance of having some genuine diversity of viewpoint. Pure democracy seems to generate a model of politician similar to a second-hand car salesman catering to a market composed of average citizens (i.e. ones with an IQ of 100).

The benefit of having aristocrats in the House of Lords, as in any sphere of influence, was that they were inclined, by upbringing and no doubt by genetic makeup, to value individual independence and territory, and were therefore more likely to promote liberty and other principles that favoured the individual versus the state, such as the rule about double jeopardy, which has now been abolished.

The old House of Lords offered slight resistance to the intrusive legislation that tends to come out of Parliament more or less automatically, because those elected to power will always tend to seek to increase rather than diminish that power. With the removal of the aristocracy from most spheres, a countervailing force to the continual and inexorable expansion of state power and intrusiveness has been removed.

The Duke of Devonshire says that the final removal of all hereditary peers from the House of Lords would be a ‘clear-cut [sign of] what the people wanted’, presumably meaning that it would show that ‘the people’ want to abolish aristocracy. This is absurd. What the House of Commons does has little to do with the wishes of the majority; it is driven primarily by the preferences of the political elite. But even if it were true, it would not necessarily make it a good thing. An important attribute of aristocrats was that they were in the habit of using their own judgement about what is right, regardless of what the majority thinks. The majority might think, for example, that Jews ought to be oppressed, and the majority probably does think that people with high IQs should not be able to derive any advantages by using their ability.

* * *

No members of the aristocracy have given us significant financial support in our efforts to prevent the suppression of unfashionable points of view. Many have known of our existence, but without making any attempt to get accurate information about us by making personal contact. The Duke’s father, so I was informed, was once approached by one of our senior supporters, himself an aristocrat, but with no positive result.

Instead of surrendering to the ideology purely because it purports to be based on ‘what the people want’ or on what is supposed to be ‘good for them’, the Duke of Devonshire should devote some of his wealth to supporting those who might produce genuinely progressive culture. This is a role which the aristocracy used to play, but which they have now given up, presumably on a similar basis, i.e. that the kind of culture the majority wants is already being produced.

If the Duke were to support us, the aristocracy might once again serve a useful function. We appeal to him to do so.

* Sunday Times, 21 February 2010.

Care workers back death tax

Apparently, care workers support bringing in a death tax.

That is to say,

families with assets over a set amount would have to find the money to pay a death duty bill – possibly meaning they have to sell their homes – even if they do not draw on social services care for their ageing relatives ... Ministers released a document insisting that social care experts and charities agreed with their plans for a tax. *

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

What is a ‘care worker’ anyway? People who are agents and beneficiaries of the oppressive society, being paid salaries out of confiscated (public) money to exercise power over people.

One might think, and I do think, that if you have state pensions at all they should not be means-tested and should be adequate to enable a retired person to employ whatever housekeeping and other help they need. But of course there should not be state pensions at all. Deterioration in the direction of total oppression was bound to take place once such a thing had been initiated, even if at the outset there was no suggestion of means-testing, and the possibility of being forced into subjection to ‘aid’ from the NHS did not arise, since there was no NHS.

But now, even if you manage to keep yourself at liberty and do not fall into the clutches of the NHS before you die, it is proposed that your estate should pay a levy on your death as a contribution to the bad and expensive ‘help’ which might have been meted out to you.

* Daily Mail, 20 February 2010 ‘Care workers back death tax, says Burnham'.

Further on nonsense research

In the article referred to in the previous post, we have an ‘academic’ with socially conferred status and salary paid out of taxpayers’ money, informing us that it is in our best interests not to have money which might make us free not to support ourselves by doing ‘jobs’. Evidently we should be overjoyed that the government takes away our money in taxes, so that it can be allocated to the support of salaried academics such as him, and to salaries for other jobs, doing which will give people a sense of purpose and self-esteem.

Who but policy-makers would be interested in such ‘research’ being carried out and published? People with money to spare would scarcely be interested in paying to find this out. Those without money to spare might conceivably like the rich to be told that they should wish to get rid of it by giving it to the poor ... but they would have no money to spare. Would a freelance intellectual, supported by his private income, be likely to find this a stimulating field of enquiry?

The government alone, stuffed as it is with policy-makers, has an interest in encouraging such pronouncements, and plenty of (taxpayers’) money available to do so.

Much academic ‘research’ has the underlying motive of justifying the extension of future confiscatory and interventionist policies. This has been true from a very early stage of the development of egalitarian Britain.

I am reminded of someone I knew, with an IQ little, if at all, above average, who became a lecturer in the new and imaginary subject of sociology at a polytechnic (now, of course, called a university). Sociology, like many new academic subjects, was designed to be accessible to people with low IQs, having little detailed informational content. My acquaintance was keen on Durkheim, whose work had much the same implications as the more modern ‘research’ drawn on by Dr Boyce. What makes people commit suicide, Durkheim said, was not disastrous changes in their objective (including financial) circumstances, but finding themselves isolated from social groups to which they formerly belonged. So, policy-makers, it doesn’t matter a bit if you make people’s circumstances worse, so long as you provide them with plenty of inexpensive group activities.

Mary Adams of the BBC used to expound the inspiring idea, which she had picked up in communist China, that domestic pets should not be allowed because their company prevented the elderly from becoming desperate enough to attend socially provided Day Centres where they could sit around (in a group) with other elderly people.

Tendentious pop psychology financed by taxpayers

The newspapers continue to be full of nonsense stories, some of them generated by the so-called university system. In Wednesday’s Daily Mail we have an expert on happiness, Dr Chris Boyce from Warwick University, described as an 'economic psychologist', telling us why the latest lottery winners are bound to be unhappy. Presumably his assertions are based on years of training, including studying other people’s 'research', which probably cost millions to carry out.

Boyce’s own research generated the conclusion that a course of psychological therapy costing £800 provides the same amount of 'happiness' as a £25,000 windfall.

Or, to put it another way, therapy is 31 times more cost-effective in making people happier than a lottery win. *

If I had done research which produced this apparent result, I would be highly dubious of it, and suspect that there was something flawed in my methodology. In Boyce’s case, he seems to have taken the result at face value.

Boyce has a number of theories about why large amounts of money ought to make people unhappy. It is not clear whether these theories have empirical support, or simply reflect his own prejudices. In any case, research which claims to be investigating 'happiness' is almost certain to be dodgy, because there is no good way of measuring such a thing. You cannot simply go by what people happen to answer on a particular day in response to a question which cannot itself avoid being biased in one way or another.

Boyce’s theories about what ought to make people happy, and what ought not, include the following:

(1) A lottery winner spending his money in a visible way will find that his neighbours will be 'consumed with envy'.

(2) If he moves to better premises, his old friends will be no less jealous, and his new milieu could 'well be less than welcoming'. 'How will he escape the sycophants and money-grubbers?'

(3) He will still be jealous of others with more status or money, even if there are now fewer of them.

(4) Salaried jobs appear to Boyce to be an essential part of every person’s life.

Now we don’t know if they particularly enjoyed those jobs, but we can be certain of this: in leaving them, they will lose yet another component of a joyful life: connection with other people ... Without the discipline and structure provided by their jobs, there is a very real danger than their lives will lack purpose; their sense of self-worth will plummet.

And it goes on in this way.

I have no wish to single out Dr Boyce for this type of inanity. No doubt there are plenty of others like him, who produce tendentious pop psychology built around a tiny nugget of low-grade 'research'. But if you added up all their salaries, and the cost of the associated institutional environment, you would arrive at a rather considerable annual budget. If even a quarter of this was instead used to finance my own research organisation, there could be some hard-edged criticism being produced of the kind of biased folk sociology which nowadays seems to qualify as 'economics'. Now would that not be a far more productive use of resources?

* Daily Mail, 17 February 2010, article ‘Sorry ... but that £56 million won’t make them happy’ by Dr Chris Boyce.

The bloodless revolution

Copy of a letter to a professor of philosophy

As a person with socially conferred status, hence both agent and beneficiary of the ideology of the oppressive society, you should wish to visit us frequently to hear about the realities of modern society as perceived by those who are its victims.

I first said long ago, soon after being thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’, that every feature of modern society can be accounted for by motivation to make life as difficult as possible for someone exactly like me, and hence to ensure that they could not use their ability in any progressive or constructive way.

It amazes me that the revolution in everyone’s ways of thinking and interpreting situations has been so universal. Of course no previous revolution has had the advantages of both universal ‘education’ (indoctrination) and of broadcasting media pumping out propaganda. But is that the only reason for so wholehearted a switch to an oppressive belief system? Independent and critical thought is not impossible, even if not what human psychology is principally programmed to do.

Just after the war, in the late 1940s, what had happened was said to be the "bloodless revolution”. Less physical blood on the streets, but perhaps no less cruelty and sadistically caused suffering, only less obvious to the naked eye.

The true raison d’etre of state education, including at university level, is to destroy people like me. Directly, by preventing them from getting into the sort of career they need to have. Indirectly, by creating a population that will give them no help in any way in recovering from their destitute and outcast position, knowing that they should not give them money, help them get into socially statusful positions, nor do any work for them in any useful way.

Any way, that is, that would “make their lives easier” as a highly-paid fundraising consultant said to me, accounting for why he would only make up applications to support complete cut-price research projects which would place us (already exhausted and overworked) under an obligation to do even more work of an unsuitable and damaging kind, instead of contributing even slightly to the alleviation of our position, so that we might be able to be slightly more intellectually productive in a way that was less painfully damaging, even if in no way permitting a sense of well-being.

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil