29 September 2011

No better way of saying it

Someone recently wrote the following to me:

I guess the fact that you insist that you should have a different social position than the one you actually have makes people more negative towards you. As you have written many times, insisting on this is taboo since it is supposed that society is fair and puts everyone in their appropriate place. Perhaps you could do better if you communicated the issue differently. Of course, this is a tricky question, since it might involve some degree of dishonesty, which is inherently undesirable.

This was my reply:

How to express the discrepancy between my actual and my natural social position is not merely a tricky question but has always been an unavoidable and insoluble one. It is omnipresent so I may as well write more about it, not that this will lead to any acceptance of the realities of my position.

I am afraid that whether or not I make it explicit, hostility is automatically aroused by the discrepancy between my outcast position and the position I need to be in and should be in.

At least, one supposes that it is the violation of the taboo by my being as I am (whether or not I mention it explicitly) that arouses the hostility, since the hostility takes the form – among other things – of actively imposing misinterpretations upon me according to which I am in a suitable and tolerable position and do not need any help in working my way back towards one which is more appropriate and less intolerable.

It may be supposed that my alienated position in society arose in the first place as a result of the more fundamental hostility to my being precocious and likely to break new ground in any area in which I got the opportunity to do anything.

In fact, I was seen as a threat, but I was not aware of it. I did not at that stage have a view of myself as being more likely than other people to question the unexamined assumptions which usually dominate the way everyone thinks.

However, for whatever reason, my education was mismanaged – or from other people’s point of view, very well managed – so as to drive me inexorably to the disaster of exile. Confronting the horrors of life outside of a high-flying university career, I found that no one would even consider letting me remedy my position by taking degrees in other subjects as rapidly as possible and at my own expense so as to have a qualification that might be usable for entering a suitable career. If I had been permitted to do this I would not have been totally ineligible for income support when deprived of an income. If I had had a First in physics or chemistry, or even in a language, I could have been eligible for support as someone applying for university lectureships.

But having achieved their objective of throwing me out with a second-class degree in maths (a subject which I would never myself have considered, although there were many in which I would have considered taking degrees and making university careers) the powers that be were not going to allow me to escape from disaster at one bound.

And no doubt they were horrified that I did find a way of getting a postgraduate grant from Trinity College, Cambridge, although that did not, in itself, make me eligible for university appointments in any subject.

When my way was again blocked at the end of the Trinity College studentship, I was back in the position of ineligibility for support of the most minimal kind from the Welfare State, since I was not (without support from my college or supervisor) qualified for the kinds of jobs I would have been able to do.

I could only have been eligible for unemployment benefit by being dishonest enough to pretend I was applying for jobs as a schoolteacher, as my college wished me to do. No doubt there are many drawing the dole who have no intention of taking up the jobs for which they apply, but I was sure that, however many people do this without comment, I would be likely to be found out and persecuted, and anyway I set too much store by keeping my mind clear of social dishonesties.

You suggest that communicating the difficulties of my position differently might be better. But actually there could be nothing to communicate if I suppressed my need for a university career, since I have no interest in any field of research except for its potentialities for career advancement.

There is no point in saying that there are great potentialities for the advancement of science in a certain area if one cannot actually do anything in that area on account of poverty and social degradation.

There are a few people around who claim to find some aspect of parapsychology ‘interesting’ without doing anything about it, and maybe come up with vague ‘theories’, such as that ESP has been influential in evolution, but I do not understand people who think like that.

16 September 2011

Tunnelling out of prison with a spoon

What was unacceptable to people in my attitude to my situation when I was thrown out at the end of the ruined education is still unacceptable today. So here is how it arose.

When I was thrown out without a paper qualification to enter any suitable academic career, I accepted that my life was ruined and that I had certainly, but for the existential uncertainty, lost my destiny. And that might be expected to lead to the dropout position; you are excluded from the sort of career which you need to have, society offers no ways, so (perhaps) you will give up on trying to get anything out of life and drift around until you are dead. But while on the face of it I had lost my destiny, at the same time I knew that I would pursue it however hopelessly, recognising that I still needed academic status and a hotel environment, and that, unless and until I got them from a university appointment as a Professor or at least a Research Fellow with a high salary, I would aim to make the money with which to buy for myself an institutional environment with ancillary staff.

The fact that I saw myself as working towards what I needed to re-start my life does not, and never did, arouse any sympathy.

I saved half my pay at the Society for Psychical Research (reduced as it was by taxation), which was something like £8 a week. Doing so, I aimed at an independent research establishment with ancillary staff. Eighteen months later I would have grants to support my studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and save half of those as well, but for the first 18 months I was saving half of only my salary.

This aroused no sympathy; no one that I had known in the past came to enquire how I had got into so terrible a position or to offer help of any kind. Even former teachers such as Miss Bookey and the Reverend Mother, who had once supported me in a meaningful way, stayed away and kept silent, implicitly reinforcing the idea that my rejection by the University of Oxford was realistic and not anomalous.

I remember the horror with which I viewed my position; at least, I remember that I did view it with horror, although as my position now is somewhat alleviated I cannot entirely reproduce the feeling at that time. I had never intended to become an outcast without hope of return, but it had happened, and existentially that was what I now was. All I could do to help myself was to save what I could from my permitted cash at the end of each day to add to my capital. Another few shillings towards the cost of at least one residential college and at least one research department. Hopelessly disproportionate, of course, but that was what I was aiming at.

I have never met anyone who reacted in this way towards being thrown out: starting to build up the necessary capital to buy what one might otherwise have got by having the right sort of career in a university. Other people ‘get used’ to the sort of life they can have as dropouts, adopting compensatory ‘interests’ or social life, and expressing philosophical acceptance of their situation. Or else they become drugged zombies, in which case they, too, express philosophical attitudes towards their position.

08 September 2011

Michael Gove and the bear pits

The right every child deserves, to be taught properly, is currently undermined by the twisting of rights by a minority who need to be taught an unambiguous lesson in who’s boss. (Michael Gove, Education Secretary, quoted in Daily Mail, 2 September 2011)

‘Rights’ and ‘duties’ are both fictitious, socially determined concepts, and actually are both forms of oppression. They do not arise from an individual’s own drives, or from the real threats of his physical environment. They arise from a social belief system about the drives an individual should have and how he should react to the threats of both the real physical and the real social environment.

Actually ‘rights’ are typically oppressive because they deprive individuals of the freedom not to take up their supposed rights, as well as depriving other people of freedom (by taxation) in order to pay people to enforce the rights of the individual: doctors to make decisions for him against his will, teachers to supervise the incarcerated multitudes, social workers and psychiatrists to induce the individual to find his ‘rights’ tolerable.

Complying with the rights imposed upon him without complaint is a ‘duty’, and of course a person can be blamed by the society around him for not fulfilling his ‘duties’. This is an artificial moral evaluation.

[Michael Gove] insisted it was clear that Britain’s social malaise had its roots in the breakdown of discipline in the home and the classroom.

No, the social malaise is the malaise of the Oppressive State, it is the inevitable consequence of socialist ideology, in which those who impose ‘rights’, such as teachers, become ‘the boss’.

The right of a child to go to school is now the duty of a parent to send their child to school, possibly against his will, and both the parent and the child are to be punished if this does not happen. This illustrates the absurdity of ‘rights’ in modern society.

A victim of the state education system comments:

‘The state of the education system in this country is rotten. Schools have become bear pits, where the bright and conscientious are held in contempt at best, and more likely to be attacked in numerous ways.

Celia Green’s brief analysis is a minute example of the material that we could publish on this and other subjects, and can be taken as an appeal for funding to allow Oxford Forum to expand as an independent university and challenge the disintegration of standards in this country.

We should be supported by every parent who has the least interest in seeing their children not come to harm, psychological and/or physical, by being in contact with the state education system.’

02 September 2011

Abortion policy: other motives

Women considering a termination could be offered independent counselling as part of the biggest shake-up of abortion laws for 20 years.

The move is designed to give women a breathing space before going ahead, and pro-life campaigners claim it could cut the abortion rate by a third, or 60,000 terminations a year. At present counselling is offered by abortion providers, but there are concerns that the advice may be biased because they are run as businesses.

Under the proposed changes, abortion clinics would be told to offer free access to independent counselling run on separate premises by a group which does not carry out abortions. (Daily Mail, 29th August 2011)
Allegedly, there is a fear that a financial motive might enter into the counselling given by abortion clinics; consequently, women should be given counselling which is ‘free’ (to them, but not to the taxpayer) and which cannot be influenced by any financial motive (of profit to the abortion clinic, or reduction of cost to the taxpayer in the form of child benefit, education etc.).
But, without going into the rights and wrongs of abortion per se, is anyone considering the possible motivation of MPs to increase the rate of growth of the population?
- We may guess that the IQ of the population of women seeking crisis abortions is below that of the population as a whole. Those with above average IQs are more likely to be sufficiently forethoughtful and efficient to avoid unwanted pregnancies.
- We know that MPs are motivated to ensure that legislation achieves a transfer of financial resources (freedom of action) from a population with higher average IQs to one with lower average IQs. This motive is in no way diminished by the fact that the policy has been applied so successfully since the onset of the Welfare State in 1945 that the country is already bankrupt.
- In the eyes of MPs, that is no reason at all for putting a brake on the increasing rate of decline, which can all be conveniently blamed on populations with above-average IQs, such as pensioners and bankers.
- After all, their salaries as MPs depend on their having appealed to the electorate as likely to advocate redistributive policies of this kind, and will depend on it again at the next election.

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.
While it is true that Western civilisation is in general beginning to crumble, the decades of Welfare State culture and its redistributive policies in this country in particular have finally brought it to its knees, with children unable to speak by school age, old people being abused and killed in care homes and hospitals, riots in major cities, and one of the fastest rising national debts in the world.
This state of affairs has been allowed to run free of any criticism or reform from either the academic community or former aristocracy, both of which are by now fully complicit in the wholesale destruction.
This is a plea for funding for our independent university, or at least one active and fully financed research department. We appeal to all universities, corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support, either financial or by working here.
We represent the only possible chance to halt, or at least soften, the impact of the impending crash.

25 August 2011

“I could do you a lot of harm”

extract from Letters from Exile

In some sort of television drama, a wealthy man was represented as saying: ‘I write the rules, I deal out the hands, I decide who wins’.

What is this but Freudian projection? Is this not what goes on in the mind of every socialist agent of the collective, every principal of a college, tutor, educational expert, etc? Never explicitly stated by these persons, but ascribed explicitly to wealthy individuals, who are their most serious threat of opposition.

As cuddly, avuncular, socialist Professor Hardy* put it, ‘I am a very influential man and I could trample your tin-pot organisation underfoot’. Well, he did, pretty well, he and everyone who thought like him. With absolutely no money we were frozen into inactivity. But although we could do nothing, because I had sunk all my savings in a house, they could not force us to leave the house or to leave Oxford.

But they thought that they, as influential agents of the collective, should be able to. When I got my miserable pittance of money from the great and influential socialist Cecil King, Mary Adams of the BBC thought I should be more frightened than I was at receiving even such minimal support from so great a man, and said, ‘He’s very powerful. He could do you a lot of harm if he turns against you. He could get the local council to drive a road through your house.’

* the late Professor Sir Alister Hardy, an eminent zoologist who took to parapsychology in his retirement

12 August 2011

Hopping mad

copy of a letter

You said I was ‘hopping mad’ about the item in the paper about rubbishy ‘research’ on out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) being done by the British Psychological Society and others.

Yes, but you should stop to think why I am infuriated by such things. People would like to think it was because such topics ‘interest’ me in some way that is independent of my financial position. Actually I react strongly to those things and to any reports of money being spent to set up university departments, research centres of various kinds, etc. because money is so important. I know it, and unfortunately the enemy knows it, in the negative sense.

People like to talk as though ‘doing research’ or ‘being interested in some particular subject’ was independent of the circumstances of life, e.g. a hotel environment with caretakers, housekeepers and so forth.

But it certainly is not so in my case and I can’t hope to achieve the energy level that makes life worth living until I have a residential college environment with residential staff. Until I have it, what matters most to me is working towards it, i.e. increasing my capital.

So what infuriates me about people doing rubbishy research on OBEs etc. is that they have at least salaries, and that all my efforts to demonstrate the existence of fields of research in which I might work has resulted only in providing nominal topics for people already provided with salary and status (perhaps not all magnificently, but at any rate more than me).

As I was thrown out of the university system, I know that I need a lot of money to provide myself with an equivalent institutional environment. Perhaps I would not know this if I had not accidentally had a good time at one point in my life which gave me an awareness of what life could and should be. But I only know how good it could be for me, not for anybody else.

Egalitarianism means that a person has no socially recognised right to live in a way determined by his individual characteristics. If I say anything explicit to the effect that my life, and perhaps that of other people with high IQs, was easily ruined because teachers and other social agents could easily override, or be genuinely unaware of, unusual requirements which arose from, or were associated with, unusual ability, I have observed that my interlocutor is moved to noises of active rejection. Usually when I say things implicitly critical of the ideology, people let it wash over them without reply, and one knows the implications will be lost on them. But in this case they seem to have to assert their definite belief that no exceptional requirements could possibly be associated with exceptional ability.

As the headmistress of the terrible state school I briefly attended said, it would be good for me not to be treated as an exception. But, as I thought at the time, how could that be, since I was exceptional?

I am not actually hopping mad about not being able to do research in any particular field; I am hopping mad all the time about not being able to get money.

It is really a terrible waste of my ability that I have to apply it to making enough money merely to keep physically alive without, as yet, having been able to buy for myself the minimal circumstances of a liveable life.

07 August 2011

Standards have declined ... a lot

Standards have declined a lot and in particular there is much less scope for autonomy. I thought of the best sort of university career as absolutely necessary to provide me with living circumstances which would enable me to get something out of any independent research or writing which I would have enough freedom to do in addition to what was required by the salaried university appointment.

Professor Eysenck had the same sort of approach, but in spite of his top position and status he was able to do very little of what he would have done if he had been free to do it.

The concept of research studentships and supervised research have come in increasingly over the last century. It is now exceedingly difficult for the very restricted supervised ‘research’ to lead to any opportunity of anything better, salaried appointment or research grant.

So I think everyone now should seriously question the value of degree-taking; the fact is that the modern ideology is against the able, and there are not really any suitable openings in modern society.

I think people with families who have any recognition of their disadvantaged position should move to be near us, and it might well be the case that their offspring could do better for themselves by making a career in association with us; there are many possibilities and cooperation could be advantageous, but we cannot make specific proposals except in relation to specific individuals whom we know well enough.

Of course many nowadays go to university for the sake of the social life and ‘spending a few years not doing much work’ as a public school leaver said to me. This, of course, implies an attitude of indifference to the debts acquired in those few years, which, if they knew us, they would find was not compatible with our outlook.

Although most of what goes on in universities is now rubbishy, I do still need a top academic position, because without it, especially in the modern world, one has no hope of support for research, or anything but censorship and suppression for one’s books.

I need an academic position because I did (and still do) need to do certain kinds of things, regarded as academic, within an institutional (hotel) environment for myself in the first instance.

I imagined at first that my continuing to work towards such things, in such exceedingly grim circumstances, might be taken as proof of my extreme deprivation in being unable to progress within a normal (high-flying) academic career, and that my doing anything at all in such circumstances might be taken as justification for rewarding my pathetic efforts with a salary or funding for my independent research institute. But (as I found out) not on your life!

My struggling in such painful circumstances was taken as evidence of my enthusiasm for lucid dreams and such; I was regarded as ‘free to follow my interests’, and hence, of course, not needing help of any kind. A university appointment, people wished me to believe, would make me less ‘free’.

My original objective, when I found myself cast out, was to set up an independent university surrounded by a business empire. That still has to be the case, as we appear to be no closer to funding on an adequate scale or even a minuscule scale from any outside source, institutional or individual.

I do not think that most of the able people who find themselves adrift and increasingly squeezed in the modern world realise what they have been deprived of or how to work towards it, and most of them do not have the same highly determined need as I do for academic status. Mine is quite specific to an expansive and multi-channel person, with a lot of drive and a strong sense of purpose.

01 August 2011

If you get it, you should come

Copy of correspondence on Facebook between a reader of one of my books and myself. I continue to get enthusiastic comments from individuals while going on being studiously avoided by the intellectual establishment. My books have been too controversial even to be regarded as controversial; they have just been ignored.

Reader: ‘Great book. Having read this and more of CG's books I am still recovering from the intellectual shock. Forty years as an Anglican priest teaching God is other people – now back to the drawing-board!’

My reply

Dear ...

Do you think that recovering from the intellectual shock is the thing to do? I wrote The Human Evasion as a distress flare, because I could get no opportunity to get on in any way, to indicate that there was a lot more I could be saying.

Only one person picked up on the fact that a genius might be needing help, and came. She is still here.

We are living in the last days of Western civilisation, destroyed by socialism, and desperately need reinforcements, failing which even temporary help of any kind is more than we can get from anybody.

Here we are, desperately in need of help. Could you (should you) not come to find out more about our needs, at the same time finding out about the most fundamental issues in psychology? At least you could then tell other people something realistic about us.

And you might realise that the most important thing you could do would be to retire to Cuddesdon, selling your house if you have one, and buying something near us instead.

At any rate, we do need people to recognise our need for support, and they cannot get to know more without coming, however temporarily.

28 July 2011

Planning for the future

There have been many articles recently about the bad treatment of people of pensionable age who get into care homes. Often the appalling treatment is ascribed to the fact that the home in question is privately run. There is a profit motive and this is not compatible with kindness, it is supposed. The State (I mean the taxpayers) must spend much more money on the care of the elderly.

Of course the private homes are not very private. They are an extension of the State system, and are supposed to be motivated by having a slender margin of profit. Tweaking a collectivist system in this way cannot be expected to improve it significantly. The same is true of the educational system. ‘Free’ schools, and other schemes to give parents ‘power’ within the system, will still have to conform to many requirements which will cripple any possibility of serious improvement.

The fact is that even if conditions within the homes were good instead of bad, and whoever they were run by, they would be in principle unacceptable because their inmates are deprived of their liberty.

This is the hidden snag in social benefits; all must pay for them in taxes and loss of freedom, no one may opt out.

Those who wish to opt out from having a ‘benefit’ imposed on them will be hunted down. Someone I knew, who bought something recently in Boots (pharmacist) for someone else, was asked if he was a carer. It is an infringement of liberty that one should be exposed to this sort of thing, and shops that indulge in it should be boycotted.

Now, in fact, it is impossible to buy any of a wide range of things in pharmacists without being asked, ‘Is it for yourself? Are you on any medication?’ And one is forced to reply to such questions or, I suppose, you will not be allowed to buy what you have asked for. Respect for the autonomy of the individual has declined so far that there is no sign of protest at this state of affairs. Not even mild protest in letters to the Press, let alone riots in the streets.

While there has been no outrage at the retrospective means-testing of state pensions, it is paradoxically (or dishonestly) claimed in Parliament that setting up a new tax, allegedly to pay for the capping of payment out of assets by those who get into care homes, is justified by wishing to enable people to ‘plan for their futures’. It is supposedly more important for people to know that if they are forced into a care home there will be a limit on what they are forced to pay for it, than for people to be able to rely on their pensions bearing some relation to the cost of living and not being means-tested, as for some decades they expected them to be while they contributed to them. (During those decades, I always thought it was rather mean that, after paying contributions for the pension while one was of normal tax-paying age, one should then have to pay income tax on the pension income if it were combined with any other income which one happened to have. Since it was so, one thought that the government was getting its pound of flesh to satisfy its wish to reduce everyone to the same level – which is, ultimately, complete loss of freedom of action for all.)

Planning on the basis of government assurances is impossible; the government may change its mind at any time about what pocket money it can afford to let you have.

22 July 2011

Out-of-the-body experiences

Some recent articles about out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) in the Daily Mail demonstrate the usual confusions about the topic. Research allegedly shows that these experiences are not (A) ‘paranormal’, or evidence for survival, but (B) associated with brain malfunction. This simple dichotomy is supposed to cover all possibilities, and – the presumption seems to be – once we have satisfied ourselves that it is indeed a brain malfunction, by narrowing it down to a particular area of the brain or a particular brain process, we can stop regarding it as a question to be resolved by research, and relegate it to the realm of minor curiosities.

There has always been tremendous resistance to the concept of out-of-the-body experiences, so much so that before Dr Charles McCreery and I started to work on them in 1964, they were not accepted either by the Society of Psychical Research, who were supposedly ‘interested’ in experiences beyond the normal range, nor by the academic world outside of the SPR, which was already firmly reductionist.

It is therefore not surprising that the fear of any progress in the scientific understanding of them continues in the form of attempts to dismiss them as ‘imaginary’ in the sense of by-products of brain malfunction. Before we made our first appeals for cases, senior academics associated with the SPR told us that we should not do so; we would be destroying our academic reputations and branding ourselves as spiritualists. OBEs were, they asserted, imaginary.

Now that our first appeals have been followed up by other appeals, and OBEs have had to be accepted as an acceptable topic for academic theses and for work in laboratories by persons with salaried academic appointments, correlations with neurological events are seen as ways of restoring OBEs to the ‘imaginary’ category, which, as before, means ‘of no interest for further research’.

When my colleagues and I published our pioneering study on OBEs in 1968 (the first scientific examination of the topic) we looked at the detailed phenomenology of the experience, i.e. its subjective features, without trying to correlate it with some set of physical conditions, anomalous or otherwise. This was largely because of lack of funding, and absence of an institutional environment – if we had had both, we certainly would have looked first at the electrophysiological correlates. However anomalous or ‘pathological’ OBEs might be, their interest to us was not in classifying them as ‘pathologies’, but as shedding light on normal processes such as perception and consciousness, which could be done only by considering psychological and physiological correlations.

Four decades on, in spite of much ostensible research into these and other phenomena by people other than ourselves, to which we were prevented from contributing by a rigorous lack of financial support, understanding of neither OBEs, nor the normal processes I have mentioned, has advanced much. Merely being able to point out parts of the brain which may be involved does not get one very far.

Grasping the mechanics of waking vs sleeping consciousness, or of the top-down, hypothesis-forming processes of perception, calls for models of a kind which we are no nearer to having than we were forty years ago. Not surprising, given the continuing obsession with exclusively physicalist methods and explanations: those which refer only to things that can be directly measured with the apparatus of physics and chemistry. (I mean in contrast to explanations that involve analyses of subjective mental states.)

Many researchers have looked at OBEs, since our original study, in the attempt to explain them away. None have been able to provide a conclusive account – such as that they are always caused by lack of oxygen, or by failure of a particular cortical structure. None of them seem to have appreciated the more important feature of the phenomenon, namely their potential role in the elucidation of normal mental processes. It seems likely that this will continue to be the case.

Having placed the phenomenon of OBEs on a scientific footing, we should have been provided with finance to take the work further, leading to the possibility of important advances in our understanding of conscious experience and its relation to brain physiology. As we did not have an institutional environment with residential and laboratory facilities, we need funding to set this up in the first instance. Such funding should still be provided now, even more urgently, to prevent the continuing waste of our abilities which could and should be being used in making significant advances. This would be true even if people other than ourselves had shown any sign of adopting a sufficiently analytical and open-minded approach. In fact they have not. The resistance to the possibilities suggested by the phenomena, which had prevented their being recognised by academia before our book on them was published, continues to restrict and distort the work carried out, and the unsatisfactory conclusions drawn from it.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.