So-called critics of state education

From the archives: A letter to the education correspondent of a national newspaper (1998)

Dear ...

Thank you for your telephone enquiry.

In the information pack which I have already sent you, there is included a copy of a letter to an educational expert. He was one of two, of the sort who pontificate on television, whom I met by being invited as one of the speakers at an undergraduate society meeting about free market education. (He is a proponent of market-based education; I was going to advocate the complete abolition of state education.)

Over dinner with them, I anecdotalised about my education in order to pick up their reactions, which were very interesting. They were soon begging not to hear any more of my stories, became fairly insulting, and left without their puddings. They said to the host as they left that they couldn’t take any more (out of my hearing, but he told me).

I had a friend with me who was a relatively disinterested observer of my interactions with them and found their unveiled hostility surprising. She described them as reacting as if they had had their bluff called. I felt that, in their place, whatever my real feelings, I would have put on a better act of professional interest.

The conversation was mostly about the education of gifted children. I know one is never supposed to believe there is a conspiracy, and in a way I don’t, because I don’t think they had ever conferred together and agreed that such and such a policy would be very good at ruining the life of a precocious child. But asking myself whether they would have reacted any differently if there had been a consciously worked out agreement to damage the chances of precocious children by adopting certain policies and attitudes, I could not think of any difference that I would have expected.

They reminded me of one thing: there is a principle that you never blame schools or local authorities for any harm they have done, or expect them to make any effort to repair the damage to a victim’s life. It is certainly a case of power without responsibility. The educational experts were eager to blame me for my ruined education, or my parents, but showed not the slightest inclination to sound critical of a school or local authority, whatever I told them.

Of recent years some people have got the idea of suing their schools for loss of earnings caused by inadequate reading skills or exam results. Actually it would be very useful to me if I could sue the educational system for a suitable sum (someone at Mensa suggested £500,000 for loss of my own and my father’s earnings, plus something for emotional distress, but I think £1,000,000 would be more nearly adequate, and a more useful sum for setting up a Research Fellowship at a college which, it could be specified, I would hold for life in the first instance, thus overcoming the retirement rule.)

It should be recognised that a second class degree is no degree at all if what you need is to make a career in the academic world, and a person with an IQ of over 180 may actually need what is tendentiously called an 'accelerated' education. Some responsibility should be felt for providing such a person with an education sufficiently suited to his ability to leave him qualified at the end to enter the sort of career to which he is suited.

As my state school headmistress said to me, 'not everyone can take exams young, so it is an unfair advantage if someone is allowed to.' As I did not say to my headmistress, but thought afterwards, 'if you can take exams young, and are not allowed to, that may be a unfair disadvantage.'

Correction: re physics department

When I said that one residential college might do for several departments of my independent university, I was thinking that it might do if only the most senior people lived in the residential college, and there might be some people from outside who evidently accept for themselves that they should be able to live without domestic and other ancillary staff, and apparently expect us to pretend that we can do so as well.

But really all personnel, however junior, should be able to live in a hotel/residential-college/stately-home environment so as to apply its energies as efficiently as possible to the work of the organisation.

I should like to correct what I said before. If we started with one research department, say theoretical physics or neurophysiology, and then added another, we would need to add to or enlarge the residential facilities, fully to cover the needs of all personal.

The value of "friendship"

Report in the Daily Mail of a ‘study’ published by the Journal of Socio-Economics.

They say you can’t put a price on true friendship. But that hasn’t stopped economists having a go. And after all their additions and subtractions, they have calculated exactly how valuable friends and family can be. Seeing them every day is worth the equivalent of an £85,000 pay rise, they say. Even chatting to neighbours frequently makes us as happy as if we had been handed a £37,000 increase. And getting married is the same as an extra £50,000 in the pay packet (and that’s after the cost of the wedding). ... The study took information from 8,000 households across Britain. Those surveyed were asked to rate the level of happiness certain changes in their life would bring, ranging from pay increases to face to face time with friends and loved ones.

‘An increase in the level of social involvements is often worth many tens of thousands of pounds a year extra in terms of life satisfaction,’ said Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee, from the University of London’s Institute of Education, which carried out the research. ‘Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness. One potential explanation is that social activities tend to require our attention while they are being experienced, so that the joy derived from them lasts longer in our memory. ‘Income, on the other hand, is mostly in the background. We don’t normally have to pay so much attention to the fact that we’ll be getting a pay packet at the end of the week or month, so the joy derived from income doesn’t last as long.’ On average, a person earning £10,000 a year who has face to face time with friends and loved ones every day was as happy as one earning £95,000 a year who hardly ever saw their friends and relatives. (‘Why true friendship is as good as an £85,000 rise’, Daily Mail, 1 May 2007.)

This ‘research’ is said to have been carried out by an Institute of the University of London, so it may be presumed that it, and all concerned in it, were supported by money (freedom) confiscated from taxpayers (individuals).

How meaningful is this ‘research’? The measure of ‘happiness’ used is how individuals would rate their ‘happiness’ when asked about it, knowing what the prevailing social views on ‘happiness’ are and what they ought to say. And, even then, it is only statistical. Who but a collective body, or someone with a vested interest in promoting collectivist ideology, would have had enough interest in obtaining this dubious information to pay for it to be done?

These days statistical ‘research’ is taken to justify universal prescriptions, leaving out any possibility of individual differences (or at least, any possibility of respect for individual differences.) ‘Friends’ are supposed to be people who make you feel reconciled to your frustrated position in life, not those who help you in your efforts to improve it.

"Middle-class child neglect"

In an article by India Knight entitled ‘Middle-class child neglect’ the following occurs:

Middle-class mothers ... are likely to raise their children in self-created ghettos of rarefied so-called excellence. (Sunday Times, 29 April 2007, p. 15.)

Maybe she is aware of my usage of the word ‘ghetto’ in calling us ‘the high IQ ghetto’. However I do not mean by that an enclave within which we can use our abilities in highly specialised or very suitable ways. The usage is as in ‘Jewish ghetto’, a place where very able people can struggle for the merest physical survival, surrounded by a hostile society which aims to cut off supplies and support.

We also attempt to work laboriously and tediously towards creating , in the first instance, a more tolerable and adequate environment within which at least a very small use of our abilities may be made.

Knight seems to be among those who are encouraging society to become ever more hostile to the able by instilling guilt in those middle-class mothers (probably themselves with above average IQs) who provide their children with opportunities which are more likely to be needed or enjoyed by those with above-average IQs.

She supports the fallacy that there is an either/or involved. ‘Stimulation’ versus ‘social skills’, as if above average achievement necessarily implied detracting from time spent on social interaction, and with no reference to the possibility of individual differences in IQ or other aptitudes.

When I was five I had already read as much as a fairly bright child might have been expected to get through in the course of its primary education. By ‘fairly bright’ I mean ‘potential university graduate later on’, and at that time that would imply a higher IQ than it does now.

People often suggest that I must have gone short of playing with other children, but in fact I did not. My mother, who was a very experienced teacher, saw to it that I had playmates who were a match for my mental, rather than chronological, age and I have photographs of myself playing with children at the seaside who may have been twice my age and were certainly twice my size.

There was no sense in which I cut down on interactive activities in order to devote myself to my reading matter, but I am sure that I made full use of unoccupied intervals of time. When I was four, I was told, I once travelled from London to Wiltshire on a crowded evacuee train, sitting on a suitcase in the guard’s van with my head in a book the whole way. (My parents were, of course, guilty of having provided me with a ‘stimulating’ book.)

Workers relieving the imprisonment

copy of a letter

Well, to express my own position, I have always found it stressful and somewhat damaging to have to work with people who have some version of the normal worldview, which means they are antagonistic to us, and especially to me, because while other people here also suffer from our very bad social position, it may be less clear to them exactly why.

It has always been very clear to me from the time I was thrown out what I need to have in life and what I was suffering in being deprived of it. When we interact with outsiders we are always having to appear to accept their implicit assertion of social interpretations, i.e. that they only help us at all within social parameters, we are to be treated as less important and less to be worked for than socially set up institutions, etc.

Well, actually, it has been and still is pretty terrible for me. People sometimes say I shouldn’t complain of the ruin inflicted on my life by the ruined ‘education’. I’m still alive, they say.
I suppose imprisonment is a fairly good parallel as a situation in which one stays physically alive but is deprived of all other functions, and there are many examples in history of the imprisoned going out of their minds with the intensity of the claustrophobia and sensory deprivation (cf. A Tale of Two Cities).

Sensory deprivation is known to cause people intense distress and an urgent need to get out of it. On account of my IQ and channel capacity I am really seriously deprived without an extraordinary quantity of intellectual processing. Without it I am forced to remain on a painfully low energy level, although that may not seem out of the way by other people’s standards.

I need to be running at least one research department producing several streams of information so there is enough to think about, and, of course, in the living conditions of a residential college (hotel environment )so that I never have to break off the continuous scanning function. If this were going on, it might not be interrupted by a good many academic activities, such as university teaching, but it is interrupted, very painfully, by interacting with physical objects in ways that require concentration, or with other people, when you have to pay attention to their intractable psychologies, such as teaching in schools or working in offices.

I have a need for uninterrupted continuity when my mind is working at all, and in fact all the channels go on working continuously. People at Somerville commented on the way I would come up with an observation on something that had cropped up some time before, all the intervening conversation having been about other things, and they would realise I had been thinking about it all the time the other conversation had been going on.

Actually it takes me a lot of psychological ingenuity and memories of a higher level to remain reasonably functional and apparently tolerant of my position. It has been a long time since we got a new person and it seems increasingly difficult to get workers, perhaps because it is now much clearer that we are not a bunch of drop-out ‘enthusiasts’ who like living like this.

Now it has been so long since we got anything like a break that I don’t know whether I could, or how well I could, tolerate anyone working here other than full-time, as if they accepted the desperate urgency of our need, even if they don’t.

My only hope in life was to get on with taking exams young before people noticed and could mess it up. I used to say to my mother, ‘You should have made sure I took as many exams as possible as young as possible’, and she would say, ‘Oh, but people would have hated you.’ ‘They hate me anyway,’ I would say, ‘and I would rather be hated for having what I want than hated for still wanting it when I have been deprived of it and need their help in getting it back.’

Patients starved to death

In 1989, there was another life crisis when Marjorie’s mother, then in her 70s, had a series of increasingly severe strokes. ‘The hospital withdrew food and water and I watched her starve to death. My sister felt it was the kindest thing to do but my mother spent a week in agony. I felt utter grief and still haven’t dealt with it.’ (From ‘A troubled mind’ by Moira Petty, Daily Mail, 17 April 2007.)

It is legal for an incapacitated patient to be denied artificial hydration and nutrition — now considered to be medical treatment in law — if doctors consider death to be in their best interest.(From ‘I’ve changed my mind, says woman in right-to-die case’ by Steve Doughty, Daily Mail, 19 April 2007.)

It is legal, but it is still immoral (it is a strong violation of the basic moral principle), for members of the medical Mafia to kill people by starving them to death. This is only making explicit the immorality which was already inherent in the medical profession, operating on the terms it does.

If an individual, or a relative or other person appointed by him, loses the right to decide for himself what is in his interests as he perceives them, the harm that may be inflicted upon him by the decisions made by the criminal doctor to whom he has lost his autonomy, whether by accident or design, may clearly extend to extreme suffering or death.

Mr Cameron highlighted figures showing assaults on NHS staff running at 60,000 a year... (From ‘Rudeness is just as bad as racism, says Cameron’, Daily Mail, 24 April 2007.)

We are unfortunate enough to live in an age of legalised crime. Agents of the collective, such as teachers and doctors, are at risk from the resentment of their victims, who do not realise how thoroughly justified their resentment is. In fact the victims should be opposing the principles of social oppression, not indulging in ‘anti-social’ violence, which is seen as an excuse for ever more oppressive incursions on individual liberty. But the victims have been trained to believe that they would be losing free goodies described as ‘education’ and ‘health care’ which have been paid for with money taken away from other people, so that they are ‘better off’ hanging on to these ostensible handouts, even with the great penalties which are attached to them.

The hypothetical

It is obviously very difficult to define the sort of rejection of society as a source of significance that goes into becoming centralised. You don’t give up on wanting or needing things that society can provide, or on trying to get them, but you do give up on thinking that you ought to be able to prevent anyone from opposing you, or that it is some sort of reflection on you if you can’t.

The hypothetical is very important; you don’t give up on your drive to get things, but you do have to ask yourself whether you would give up on it, or nor act on it, if there should happen to be some consideration of a higher order of significance (that appeared to you to be of a higher order of significance). This is quite independent of a belief in such a thing or even expectation that there might be.

However, the hypothetical precedes anything presenting itself as highly significant, and has more psychodynamic force than might appear; I mean it has an effect on what actually happens.

As I approached the final degree exam at Somerville I found it very difficult to be motivated. Of course this was comprehensible in view of the unappetising vistas of doing pointless things without a hotel environment, but it was very alarming because the idea of being an outcast in the non-academic wasteland outside of a career as a Professor in a university, without a hotel environment, was simply appalling and unthinkable.

So also was the idea of ending my period of supervised education without even one first class degree. I knew that getting a second class degree would entirely destroy my social identity and my relationship to society. I would no longer be able to identify in any way with myself as a member of society. I would never again meet anyone as myself.

But however much I wanted to retain at least the tiny toehold of respectability that a First would provide, the horror of the cancellation of my life that would result from failure made it no easier to be motivated. I could work only mechanically, with deliberate conscious effort, to do something in which I had no subconscious cooperation.

Of course I was on a higher level so there was no doubt that there was an urgency of overriding significance and that I wanted to proceed in whatever would be the best way in terms of it.

That should not be taken to imply that I found myself wanting to do anything different in life from what I had always wanted, which was the best sort of academic career, expansive research projects and so forth. It appeared even more urgent than pre-higher level to get on with this, and even more certain that I would be able to make significant progress in any field in which I was able to work.

On the face of it, the best way of proceeding was by having the most successful sort of academic career, but by now I had fallen foul of the system; years of tedious work in bad circumstances at other people’s behest still lay ahead, with no guarantee that they would lead to the sort of life I needed to have.

But if I did not get a research scholarship, what then? Exile into the non-academic wasteland outside of Oxford University, into a place with which I had nothing to do, which might perhaps contain an opportunity somewhere, but of which I knew nothing good.

The university was at least supposed to be about things that were meaningful to me, even if they were not doing them very well and there was no sympathy or motivation of any kind to which I could appeal.

All ways appeared barred against me, and my sense of urgency produced extreme desperation. I was on a higher level, and that implies that all information was, at least potentially, accessible. I tried, therefore, to find out something useful. Surely there must somewhere be someone who was willing and able to help me. If I could, I thought, get a name and address in Australia I would walk out of the college and catch a plane like a shot.

But nothing came. It seemed I could not get any specific information on this point. I would have to go on with what I was doing; it did not seem right to stop trying to work as hard as I could for the degree, equally it was impossible to have any positive motivation. It remained an uphill struggle to do something rather disgusting, in a rather disgusting situation.

Might it not be better to do badly and get a Second? It might be better to be thrown out and find something in the uncharted wasteland. Of course it seemed preferable to get a First and simply abandon the research scholarship, even if I got it,, but somehow I felt it could not work like that. Obviously one would be very strongly inclined to stick with what seemed like a more secure and obvious way ahead.

So I thought that I had better consider as hard as possible that it might actually be better to get a Second and to go out into the wilderness, if there were anything out there. This seemed wildly improbable, but one always had to be openminded to the improbable. If something improbable was the case, it was a fact.

So I considered this possibility very hard because I did not want my preferences to get in the way of what might, in reality, be the best thing.

After a short time of doing this, and quite suddenly, I stopped being stressed. It was all right, it was all worked out. I hadn’t been able to get information consciously, but my subconscious had all the information that was necessary. Whether I got a First or a Second, all I had to do was to follow my nose, or do whatever seemed obvious.

There would be a way ahead.

And one must admit, in retrospect, that my subconscious did quite well.

Within a couple of months I was being interviewed for a job at the SPR, by two of those who had been most concerned with the Cross-Correspondence scripts. A fortnight later I was meeting Sir George Joy at the SPR office, and before the next academic year started in October I had found out about the Perrott Studentship of Trinity College, Cambridge, and decided not to return to Oxford, as I had intended, but to stay at the SPR to try to get the grant.

On not doing physics

Remembering about my physics research thesis topic that was turned down (I used some bits of the initial material in the philosophy thesis, which I would have expected to develop more extensively in a physics thesis) I realised that that is another department of my independent university that has been kept inactive all this time, and should not have been, in some unusual sense of the word ‘should’.

As the preliminary mathematical developments that would be necessary fully to develop my ideas have been carefully neglected, in much the same way that opportunities to observe psychological/physiological correlates have been, I could easily keep several research assistants fully occupied. Although the mathematical developments have been only very partially made, computer techniques have been developed which could handle them much better than at the time of my rejected thesis topic. Although I could see, 50 years ago, what I would like to do, it would have been very heavy weather at that time, for a single person working without the more recently developed computer techniques, and I could not have got very far in a two-year thesis, even if I had been allowed to do it.

So that, the physics department of my independent university, is another department that could have been being productive all this time, and could start being so any time that anyone should see fit to finance it on an adequate scale – i.e. allowing for a residential college environment with full ancillary staff for at least the senior people working in the department. (One residential college would be adequate for the senior staff of several research departments.)

Further reflections on ancient history

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined education, my only concern was how to get back as quickly as possible into an academic career that could lead to a Professorship, so that I could have the sort of life and social identity that I needed to have.

The DPhil which turned into a BLitt which I did with the grant from Trinity College did not lead to any way of re-entering a career. Professor H H Price was, actually, no more on my side than anyone else and made no attempt to help me do the sort of thing that they would have been forced to recognise, nor to suggest any ways in which I could get to be regarded as qualified for appointments in physiology, psychology or philosophy.

It should be observed that I got the Trinity College studentship very early on in my time at the SPR, less than a year after arriving there. Hostility towards me had been building up at the SPR throughout the writing of the thesis, and by the end of it there was little left of the initial reactions in my favour.

At the end of the BLitt thesis Professor Price did not help me to access sources of finance for developing any of the lines of research suggested in the thesis or, of course, any other research in any field which might have led to career advancement. I said to him that if a BLitt was no use for re-entering an academic career, as appeared to be the case, I would need to work towards re-entry by getting further qualifications, so how could I work for a D.Sc. He said that a D.Sc. was not something you worked for, but was given on the basis of your published work. This left me with an impasse. Would it be possible, outside of an academic career, to get one’s work published? I did not even bother to ask him, nor whether he had any suggestions for obtaining funding to do the work that might enable me to re-enter a career.

Rosalind Heywood ensured that all sources of funding, both personal and institutional, were closed against me, and I was soon condemned to doing tedious and futile work with a stroboscope in Oxford in circumstances in which it was impossible to increase my savings, although I strenuously defended my small capital from erosion except by deliberate expenditure on fundraising to discomfort Salter and Sir George. Nor was it possible to regard the work being done as of any use for academic career progression, either my own or that of anyone associated with me.

I had only two aims in life at that grim time, and everything I did was directed towards them; one was academic career progression and the other financial build-up, that also being necessary in working towards restoring myself to tolerable circumstances. Until I could get back into a hotel environment as provided by a residential college, I had to work towards building up money to provide myself with the equivalent of such an environment outside of a residential college.

Rosalind and all concerned were forcing me to enact, in the grimmest way possible, their preferred fiction that I was pursuing what ‘interested’ me instead of money, since they would not accept that I was debarred from the only sort of career I could have, and I could not get money by any sort of paid employment for which I was regarded as eligible. Which, as I have said before, also meant that I could not, and never have been able to, apply for what they call ‘social support’, which would not have gone far towards providing me with adequate living circumstances even if I had been eligible for it.

Unfortunately, my supposed ‘supporters’, Sir George and Salter, knew how much money I had managed to save while I was at the SPR; I don’t suppose they were discreet about it. Most of it went into buying my first small house, and no doubt all and sundry thought that if I was squeezed badly enough, I would get into debt, as other people probably would have done, and be forced to sell the house. Then I would have been totally destitute again, as they wished me to be and thought I should be.

Fabian has noticed people commenting about my blog and website that I have a very grim, or dark, view of life. They might consider that this arises from the fact that I have always been placed in the grimmest and darkest of circumstances that the machinations of other people could devise.

Exceptional ability, as I have said before, arouses hostility, and an exceptionally able person needs commensurate social status and recognition to keep such hostility at bay. It was fatal for me not to take the School Certificate exam at 13, and to go on from there with the rapid acquisition of qualifications which I had planned for myself.

I went to the SPR with the terrible handicap of a total lack of the academic qualifications and appointments which would have been necessary to avert direct hostility and opposition.

The usual run of emails

Copy of a note to the person who manages emails to celiagreen.com:

Thank you for the emails you forwarded but they are depressing, as usual. The person with a fairly high IQ in Wigan, who says he can’t get on in modern society, does not, as usual, suggest coming to work, but tries to draw one into correspondence without sending any money, although we have made it clear enough that people can only find out about working here by coming on a provisional basis as voluntary workers. However, we have emailed him an invitation to the seminar and a notice about the seminar.

The CBC Radio Canada thing [wanting me for an interview at very short notice] is very rushed and subject to all sorts of negatives. As usual they want us to talk about lucid dreams when all we have to say is that we are being prevented from working on them, and what is being done by other people is very bad; as it doesn’t say it is live it is probably liable to editing, as was the last thing we did for CBC ages ago, so probably nothing significant we said would survive.

"We are too unusual"

Copy of letter to someone we read about in the Daily Mail. We sometimes write to people in disastrous financial situations, but even they will never come to meet us to discuss a trial arrangement. As a cousin of mine once said to me viciously, "we are too unusual".

Dear Mr X

We have heard that you would be having to sell your house and this might be jeopardising your plans for retirement.

We are a group of academics setting up an independent academic organisation, at present writing and publishing books, hoping later to add other kinds of academic research. At present we live in two small houses and one apartment in a pleasant village near Oxford. There are always jobs of a gardening, DIY and domestic kind for which we try to get ancillary staff and we often point out the advantages that there could be for retired people living nearby and doing a few hours of work a day, or sporadic jobs. We need such people as permanent support for our organisation. Of course they could also earn money doing jobs for other people in the village.

We would aim to help any such associates to build up their capital to become house owners before too long, and have been successful at doing this in the past. When they had worked for us for some time so that we knew them well enough, we might be able to make them loans to facilitate such things as house-buying.

Genocidal attitude towards baby boomers and pensioners

The ‘baby boom’ generation are being forced to use their wealth to subsidise both their children and their parents, a survey found yesterday. Instead of putting money away to fund their own future, many couples on the threshold of retirement are pouring cash into supplementing their offspring. At the same time they are under increasing pressure to help out pensioner parents facing bills for utilities, council tax, home help and care.

The two-way stretch on people in their late 50s and early 60s was highlighted by a poll carried out for insurer Engage Mutual. ... The survey found that parents close to retirement themselves are paying for their children to buy homes, pay off debts or for childcare for their grandchildren. It found that six out of ten people aged between 55 and 64 are still supporting their children. ... Four out of ten baby boomers are also supporting their own parents, the survey said. ... Engage Mutual spokesman Karl Elliott said: ‘Financial circumstances in Britain have changed considerably over the last fifty years ... with continued increases in costs of living, education and care, the wealth this generation have accumulated will be stretched far further than was the case for their parents.’

(From ‘The baby boomers left paying for their children and parents’ by Stephen Doughty, Daily Mail, 14 April 2007.)

Just a part of the concealed genocide of our time (genocide in the sense of reducing the proportion of the population with high IQs).

The baby boomers are being penalised by having to subsidise both their parents and their offspring. But you can bet that it is the baby boomers with above-average IQs who are being hit the hardest.

Pensioners are more likely than other sections of the population to have above-average IQs, which no doubt is why they are constantly penalised by legislators. Longevity correlates with IQ on account of both genetic factors and of a tendency to lead more functional and forethoughtful lives.

It is up to us to counteract natural selection, as Richard Dawkins would say. Nevertheless, all the attempts to penalise those with above-average IQs by taxing them to provide medical and educational oppression for all, which is particularly oppressive to those with above-average IQs when they are themselves exposed to it, have (I would surmise) still not succeeded in reducing the average IQ of the population of pensioners below the average for the population as a whole. If they have been too thrifty and have too much in the way of savings, their pensions are reduced and they do not qualify for means-tested supplements. ‘We must help those pensioners who are most in need; help must be given preferentially to the poorest’ said government officials when means-testing for pensions was introduced. And pensioners do not attempt to use their voting power to protest, partly because (I guess) the middle class has always been most ‘public-spirited’ and uncomplaining. So the thrifty, who have built up their savings, must reduce them by living off them or be subsidised by their offspring.

And it is the offspring with above-average IQs who are most likely to have delayed starting their adult lives and have debts to pay off, because they felt the need for a professional training, or just to become a graduate so as not to be at a disadvantage, now that degrees have become so common that they are actually meaningless as an indication of ability to do anything.

Gordon Brown has recently committed himself to the idea that ‘education’ should be provided for all the children of the globe, and presumably British taxpayers should be prepared to contribute to this enormous expense.

Could not a taxpayers’ association be set up with enough willingness to protect what remains of civilisation in this country to protest vehemently at overseas expenditure, when internal sources are clearly inadequate to provide for the needs of citizens of this country, and are going to be even more wildly inadequate in the foreseeable future?

In particular, taxpayers’ associations should insist on no further overseas aid being given until recent discrimination against those with above-average IQs are reversed.

It has only of fairly recent years become the case that those with above-average IQs have to pay more for further education than the ‘poorest’, and that pensions (for which pensioners at least nominally paid contributions throughout their working lives) should be means-tested, so that those with above-average IQs would, on average, receive less than the ‘poorest’ — with, on average, lower IQs.

At the least, education and pensions should revert to the former level of ‘fairness’, at which all undergraduates and pensioners received the same. Taxpayers’ associations, and/or high IQ associations, should insist on this happening before any more of taxpayers’ money is drained off overseas.

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

The oppressors becoming the oppressed?

One in three teachers is turning to drink, drugs, smoking and binge-eating to escape the pressure of their jobs, a survey revealed yesterday. Some are even being driven to suicide, the National Union of Teachers was told.

Troubled staff are ... blaming excessive workloads, relentless Government initiatives, the stress of Ofsted inspections, ‘bullying’ heads and rising indiscipline among pupils. ... John Illingworth, a former NUT president ... read from a letter from the wife of a headmaster who became depressed after a critical inspection ... ‘He [the headmaster] was a complete mental mess. I now see he had given up on life altogether. Two months later he ended it.’

(‘Stressed teachers driven to drink, drugs and death’, Daily Mail, 11 April 2007)

An oppressive system in which people are deprived of their freedom of action can only be maintained by ever greater oppression. The oppressors (in this case teachers) are themselves oppressed by the difficulty of imposing their will (or the will of collectivist society) on a resentful population. Therefore, no doubt it will be suggested that the oppressors must be protected by repressive measures directed at the oppressed and the parents of the oppressed.

Aphorism of the month (April)

The belief in society

It is clear that before any change in human psychology, either individual or collective, could take place, it would be necessary for the belief in the meaningfulness of human society to be abandoned. (The resistance to its abandonment is of course immense.)

It is true that this is only one of the attitudes which is invalidated by the perception of total uncertainty: but psychologically it is the lynchpin of the whole affair. If you never believe that human society, or collective opinion, can confer any meaningfulness upon your actions or attitudes, you can never develop the human psychosis in a permanent form.

from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom

If you really want to help the gifted ...

The following was left out of my January press release about the proposals to provide gifted children with additional "resources", because it would have made it too long, and because I had no reason to think anyone would take any notice of what I (former gifted child) think would be beneficial, compared to what "trained experts" on the subject of giftedness think. As with all other socially appointed "experts" in the modern world, one may ask "trained in what?" — clearly in what society at large wants to think about the topic in question. This does not necessarily have anything to do with what is really the case, and often appears to be related to it as an inversion designed to suppress an unacceptable reality.

Dr. Green proposes an alternative scheme:

What I would suggest is that children be provided with the possibility of greater real autonomy. Academic exams should be something that can be worked for and taken without dependence on the permission of a school, and wherever possible without dependence on attendance at an institution, although in subjects where there is a genuine need for practical work as part of the course, such as physics or chemistry, there would need to be some method of access to centres where this practical work could be done.

Children should be able to enter themselves for exams without having to seek permission from parents, teachers, doctors or any other adult authority, at least after a certain minimum age which could be on a sliding scale related to performance in a standard IQ test. An average child should be free to enter himself for exams at the age of, say, ten; the equivalent qualifying age for a child with an IQ score of 180 would be five-and-a-half.

How would children know of their opportunities? This should present no insuperable obstacles to a society which is constantly informing citizens of their ‘rights’ to obtain benefits etc. We could not rely on teachers or parents spontaneously to inform children of the examination system, but we could have the address of an information centre prominently displayed in every junior public library and after children’s programmes on the television.

A new association for gifted children could be set up which would pay the examination fees for children whose parents refused to do so, or whose school refused to let the required exam be taken under its auspices. Any child able to score as having an IQ of more than 130 would be entitled to the fees for any six GCSEs and any 3 A-levels at any time. Any exam the child passed would entitle it to the fees for one further exam at the same level. Any child who didn’t qualify for free entrance on the grounds of IQ, or who failed too many to have any further entitlement, could go to earn the necessary money at a special work centre where children could earn money – the same sort of idea as workshops for the disabled where they can earn small amounts by addressing envelopes, making baskets, etc. The rate of pay would not need to be very high as the children would still be being supported at home; they would only need a way to earn money for any exam fees that were not provided for them free.

The new association for gifted children could also make available computerised and correspondence courses of instruction which could be purchased with money earned in this way or obtained from parents or relatives. This would supply learning material for those who did not think the ‘teaching’ which they happened to be receiving at school provided them with what they needed to prepare for a given exam, together with the standard textbooks, and samples of past exam papers.

Further light on ancient history

My supervised period of ‘education’ or of acquisition of qualifications had been ruined, and left me with no usable qualifications at all, which I could easily have acquired for myself at an early age without interference.

So I had been cheated out of everything that could make my life worth living and thrown out without a Professorship or an institutional (hotel) environment, with no tolerable way of earning money, nor with any claim on ‘social security’ when I had no money.

I know you have heard it all before, but I have to keep repeating it because no one ever registers it.

So my four years at the SPR were pretty terrible even though I divided my time between London and Oxford and wrote a postgraduate thesis which I hoped would get me back into an academic career, or at least on a track that could lead to a Professorship and a residential college (hotel) environment. I had not counted on that, in view of the great hostility to me which there evidently was, and in view of the uncertainty inherent in all affairs.

So I had been making plans for the setting up of a research institute in Oxford to work on some of the areas which I had come to know about and perceived as areas of potential research. I appeared to have support from Sir George Joy and W.H. Salter in these plans. What was of the greatest importance to me was that it should be set up on a large enough scale to provide the hotel environment from the lack of which I was, after four barren years, suffering severely.

Then, I thought, I would be able to return to life and be able to experience some sense of wellbeing again, even if I did not have a Professorship – yet. I was going to need a Domestic Bursar and a porter-handyman to keep the hotel environment running, as a residential college has. I had discussed this with Sir George and Salter, ostensibly without arousing opposition. After all, they had both spent their lives in adequate hotel environments which ran autonomously, Sir George as a colonial Governor and Salter as an independent gentleman.

This, however, was the crucial goal, not to do nominal ‘research’ while continuing to live in circumstances of painful constriction which would make it impossible for anything to be done except as a chore which drained my energy still further.

The opposition aroused by Rosalind Heywood was, however, aimed at depriving me of precisely what I needed to have. I had made use of the fact that the fields of research were so uncharted that experimental work needed to be done on a certain scale, to show that an institution with considerable laboratory facilities was needed to tackle the problem, not mentioning to anyone but Sir George and Salter my desperate need for a hotel (college) environment.

Rosalind Heywood, however, having aroused universal opposition to me and my plans, forced me into the most painful position possible. I was to have no hotel environment but to be expected to ‘do research’ while struggling to support myself and associates without a salary and without eligibility for income support.

Experimental work is nominally ‘research’ and I was to be forced, not only to live without a salary or any means of career progression, but to do the very smallest and crudest type of experimental work. Even a single multi-channel EEG would be too expensive, a stroboscope provided a crude correlation with one factor that could have been measured with an EEG, so to get a tiny income supplement out of the SPR research committee I would be forced to test one single hypothesis about success at ESP and examine whether, at this level of crude approximation, this hypothesis (of little interest in itself except as justifying work on a much larger scale with as many channels of information as possible) could or could not be confirmed.

Such a type of ‘research’ could only be of interest if done for career progression, and none of our academic consultants attempted to get it accepted as a way of working towards re-entry to an academic career, either for myself or for the one of my associates who actually did the work of taking the readings.

I could not, in such circumstances, and probably not in any circumstances, do that sort of thing myself. (Nor could Professor Eysenck who, however, was in a position to rationalise his aversion to touching experimental equipment, but willingness to supervise the work of several people who were using it to extract information, by saying, ‘I don’t use the equipment myself. I think one should leave that to the experts, and stick to doing what one is good at.’ — I.e. writing the papers drawing conclusions from the experimental information.)

Anyway, I am sure Rosalind Heywood knew very well how cruel she was being. She did not make any attempt to get even the one of my associates who did the work back onto a career track as a psychologist. So in effect this associate was doing pointless and tedious work for a very bad rate of pay from the SPR Research Committee for the sake of being slandered as a person who had deliberately chosen a life of poverty and degradation for the sake of an enthusiastic ‘interest’ in some particular field of research. This also prevented her (the associate) from having any time available to help me with doing anything that might have been a bit less excoriating and futile, such as writing books, or even fragments of writing that could one day be incorporated into a book.

So we were not only deprived of the institutional environment which my research institute had been set up to provide, but forced to spend time doing work of the most futile and wearing kind as if we were ‘free to follow our interests.’

It was in these circumstances that I put as much pressure as possible on Sir George and Salter by spending money on fundraising, and contre toute attente, as the French might say, I did manage to land a small amount of funding from Cecil Harmsworth King.

This was a case of snatching a partial and temporary alleviation of my position from the jaws of defeat.

The prospects had seemed really bad but I had known that I had no option but to go on with this line of approach, even if for the rest of my life. When the King money was signed, sealed and delivered, a post-graduate ‘friend’ said, sado-sympathetically (I mean with a kind of retrospective relish), ‘You were looking really bad, you know, before this turned up.’

The money was not enough to provide for much of a hotel environment, but I spent as much of it as I could on part-time cooks, cleaners, etc., and began to gain experience of the difficulties of getting anyone to do anything useful in the modern world.

Meanwhile the wolves prowled and howled outside my incipient Research Institute cum Residential College, waiting for the money to run out.

After a higher level

On a higher level* everything is determined by the presence of the inconceivable significance. Staying on a higher level means not allowing anything to occlude it, and this is very easy, as it is very obvious, and it does not occur to you to want to do anything that would occlude it, although it is possible to see that certain kinds of things would, if they were to present themselves and you identified with them.

It is a lot easier than, say, remaining lucid in a lucid dream, because in a lucid dream you have to remember to keep checking up on whether you are still aware that you are dreaming, and it is quite easy to forget to do this and to become emotionally involved in the storyline of the dream.

Post-higher level one focuses on where the significance would be, if it were there, and one goes on avoiding anything that would be occlusive, so that no resistances get set up to make it more difficult to return to a higher level. This is still fairly easy, as one goes on having a definite sense of direction and it is clear what ways of thinking would not be compatible with the actual presence of the significance.

All psychology is about risk-taking although this is only obvious in higher level psychology, and centralised psychology enables you to act against total opposition, with no support at all, and no expectation of a positive outcome.

This was most obvious when my plans were opposed for setting up a research organisation in Oxford, which I had been making while I worked for a would-be D.Phil., which became a B.Litt. Everyone appeared to find the plan threatening as it approached realisation, and all the promises of support fell through. I had no way back into any sort of academic career, and there was no other way I could support myself. I had, as yet, very little capital saved up, and I would not be able to draw anything from social security, as they like to call it, for reasons already explained. So long as I stayed at the SPR I had at least a miserable pittance of a salary, out of which further savings could be made.

I perceived that the only way of using any leverage I had on the situation, arising from Sir George Joy’s and W.H. Salter’s recent memories of the support they had expressed and the promises that had been made, was to resign quickly and appeal for funding ostentatiously; if I delayed, their memories of promises would dim and they could assume that I had sensibly given up on my plan.

So I resigned, and siege conditions of my research unit in Oxford commenced. It was clearly my only hope of salvaging anything from the SPR situation, but perhaps I had no hope at all; however it did feel right on higher level terms, and any alternative plans to hang around waiting for something better to turn up felt distinctly wrong.

My appeals for money brought in peanuts; everyone knew I was to be given no support. The agony should not be prolonged, as Rosalind Heywood told everyone. Sir George and Salter were a bit uncomfortable but inertial.

So I employed an expensive fundraiser in order to expose them to some semblance of publicity. The fundraiser was hostile as well, and the meetings were evasive. I was throwing money at the problem and did not have much to throw. I certainly would not get into debt. Nevertheless, it did feel like the right thing to do, and in a certain way was unconflicted. The only likely outcome was that I would spend all my tiny capital and be left even worse off struggling to survive under siege conditions.

But, after several gruelling meetings at the fundraiser’s office in London, Sir George vouchsafed the information that Cecil Harmsworth King had approached the SPR, wishing to give money for some research to be done.

I said to Sir George that I would write to Cecil King and say that I would do the research. None of the SPR’s Professors were keen to have anything to do with it, they were well enough financed for squabbling and backbiting.

Maybe Sir George thought that if he let me get an absolute minimum of money from Cecil King, he and Salter would be let off the hook and I would not go on pestering them about making approaches to Coombe-Tennants, Balfours, and other potential supporters who had been mentioned. At a later fundraising meeting Sir George tried to persuade me to apply for a certain amount of money, approximately equivalent to three postgraduate research scholarships, i.e. about enough to support three people in the most constricted way. Sir George happened to know, he said, that this was just the amount of support Cecil King had in mind to give, and it would not be advisable to ask for more. I did not believe him.

So eventually it came off, at least to the extent that I got a very modest amount of money, but more than Sir George had wanted me to have.

It was a very nerve-racking process which depended entirely on my appearing to have senior supporters who would act as Trustees, although Sir George and Salter did their best to scupper everything by their prevarication and lack of enthusiasm. Nevertheless Cecil King signed the seven year covenant before Rosalind Heywood got wind of what was happening. I did not place much reliance on Sir George’s discretion and I was on tenterhooks in case he told Rosalind before the covenant was signed, but he cannot have done, although as soon as the covenant was public knowledge, she got on the phone to Cecil King. He thought she was a wonderful person and I was all washed up with him. However, he had signed the covenant so I did get seven years of very modest financial support from him, but she had put the kybosh on his giving me any more support than that.

Seeing that I could not now be absolutely squeezed into non-existence, at least for seven years, Rosalind set about mobilising Professor Hardy to set up a rival establishment in Oxford, as similar as possible to mine, to deflect any publicity or finance that might otherwise have reached me, in spite of her energetic and efficient networking.

And that is how the Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre came into existence. Initially it was to be an exact replica of mine, but Hardy, who did not really want to do anything anyway, decided that warm and woozy religiosity would be more congenial.

* state of existential awareness

My need for a hotel environment

(copy of a letter)

Reviewing what I have written about the stresses that resulted from the retardation of my education, or more to the point, my acquisition of qualifications, so that in the end I was thrown out with no qualification at all, I think I have still underemphasised the importance of my need for a hotel environment. This is such an unacceptable thing to mention that one starts by mentioning other factors first, such as the relative desirability of research in physics rather than maths, and the relative undesirability of a Fellowship or Professorship in maths rather than physics, even if one could get those things.

In fact, the greatest deterrent to feeling motivated to do a degree at the age of 21 for the purpose of spending at least another three years doing a DPhil for the purpose of moving towards a very belated residential Fellowship or Professorship as soon as possible, was that although the Fellowship or Professorship should have provided a hotel environment, the years of doing a DPhil to work towards that outcome would not have done, and this made it very difficult to generate any motivation to work towards another three arduous and unrewarding years, living in circumstances that would rule out any possibility of getting anything out of life, the positive outcome at the end of which was highly dubious, seeing that my past life had been so distorted.

As a DPhil student I would have been living in lodgings, not in college, and with very little access to dining facilities in college. So that was the first horror that I would face on getting a research scholarship to do a DPhil, which of course in the end I did not, being condemned by that failure to the even worse horror of living without a hotel environment and with no academic career track at all along which I could consider myself to be working, however hypothetically, for an appointment accompanied by the hotel environment which was the minimum necessity for a tolerable (not intolerable) life.

If the years since I was prevented from taking the School Certificate at 13 had been less bad I might have found the prospect of continuing to struggle with bad circumstances less daunting. But there came first the additional shock of finding out that I would not even be free to do research (reconstruct physics ad lib) but would have to spend another year taking some ‘qualifying’ exams, solving some other types of problems based on the very dubious theoretical structures of quantum theory as it was. And even then, the additional shock was, that I would not be free to do free-floating research, but that the specific thesis topic I proposed was considered ‘too theoretical’ and I would be faced instead with writing a thesis considered suitable for a mathematician rather than a physicist.

It was very difficult to feel motivated about working for a ‘reward’ so dubious as doing yet another exam in problem-solving followed by a thesis of a tedious nature, in effect much the same kind of thing as solving problems for the sake of proving to other people that one could, all in order to work towards an uncertain and hypothetical reward which might not, even if one could get it, provide the conditions of a hotel environment.

Of course, the alternative was still more horrific, since in total exile from an academic career I would certainly not have the equivalent of a residential college (hotel) environment, nor any tolerable way of earning any money at all, nor any way, tolerable or intolerable, of working towards re-entry to an academic career which was capable, at least potentially, of leading towards what I needed to have.

It was not surprising that I had come to this pass since my education had always been run by people who wanted me not to be able to get anything out of life that I wanted and desperately needed to have. They had not been motivated to let me establish my claim on the sort of career that I needed to have when I was still at an age when doing so could have been a positive rather than a negative experience, and I had had no say in the matter, so it was not really at all surprising that they had succeeded in placing me in this horrifying situation.

However much they liked to ignore the fact, if I was confronted by a situation in which I did not have a hotel environment, the lights of my life went out, and getting an adequate environment became the primary consideration. I did not suppose that the lights could come on again until I had, as a minimum necessity, the minimum requirements of a life that I could get something out of.

I am sorry to have to spell this out at such length, but people have always maintained a blind spot in this, the most crucial area of my life. At least, a blind spot in any positive sense, but great sensitivity in the sense that any move that I might have made to alleviate my position was violently and ingeniously opposed.

The irony of being "free"

Comments on being ‘free’ to do what ‘interests’ me

(copy of a letter)

Let us consider the amazing assertion by a philosopher at Somerville College that if I got a proper full-time salaried academic appointment I would be less free than as an unsalaried, statusless outcast.

What makes her think that I would value ‘freedom’ more than a social identity? I might well choose to sacrifice ‘freedom’, if I had any, for the sake of social status. I never expected, or wanted, to have to live without social status, and I was deeply grieved and shocked to find myself thrown out of society fifty years ago, not only without the Professorial status which I should have acquired at about 15, but without any status at all as an academic on a career track that could ever lead to a Professorship.

If, when I was thrown out 50 years ago, I had had the choice between (a) a Professorship, even with less than ideal residential hotel facilities, and (b) an equivalent salary, perfect hotel environment, and freedom to do whatever I liked within these conditions, but with no hope that what I did could ever secure for me any academic advancement, I would have settled for the Professorship.

Only if there was real hope of my ‘free’ but statusless environment leading to an ever-increasing scale of operations might I have considered it worth sacrificing the social identity of a Professor — which would have made (and still would make) one’s relations with society so much more ‘interesting’, to use that much-abused word. Even an expanding scale of operations as an identity-less freelance individual would have seemed sterile, in a certain way.

The model of the situation in which the ‘freedom’ of being unsalaried and statusless could appear preferable to a salaried Professorial position does not hold water, because if progressive and expanding work were ever possible, it would lead to social recognition and hence to academic reinstatement. So the idea of choosing a permanently exiled life in order to be ‘more free’ is an artificial one, and certainly never occurred to me, even when I hoped to be able to get a decent level of financial support from parapsychological sources.

I never actually considered the work I did manage to do as an outcast as sterile, in the sense of useless for making a return to an academic career, although it turned out to be so. The nostalgic pull towards a social identity was very strong. In practice, any possibility of opportunity for expansion appears to have been ruled out by my lack of identity.

The idea that I could prefer the ‘freedom’ provided by the bad, constricted and hopeless circumstances of the academic outcast to the much better circumstances of even imperfect Professorships is ludicrous and cruel.

I might have felt that the hotel-equivalent circumstances left something to be desired, but the salary would have provided me with enough to pay for at least a parttime housekeeper cum p.a., so I would have had at least the minimum conditions for getting something out of life.

The only real dissent

(copy of a letter)

There are at least two outrageous news stories every day in the Daily Mail and my suppressed Oxford Forum publishing company (supported only by our own money) can’t publish books fast enough.

In fact we are the only voice of real dissent.

Surely you know someone who could give us a million pounds, just for starters, to make our protests a trifle louder?

Other sources of protest are feeble and halfhearted. For example, and typically, today’s horror article in the Mail, entitled “All pupils should be checked for criminal tendencies, says Blair”, contains this feeble and (as usual) concessive piece of faint criticism from the director of Liberty (no less), Shami Chakrabarti. She is quoted as saying,

“Who for example can disagree with the idea of ‘early intervention’? But ...”

Well, I can disagree for one, and so can everyone else at Oxford Forum. All intervention is immoral, and so is the taxation that is used to support it.

It is high time that this was said, even if it can at best only very slightly decelerate the headlong rush to destruction of Western civilisation. And no one is going to say it but us.

Giving money to beggars

When I say that I could never draw social security however hard up I was, because I had been left without any usable qualifications, I mean not merely hard up relative to the cost of remaining physically alive, but hard up relative to the cost of providing myself with the equivalent of a residential college (hotel) environment and the secretarial and other facilities that might have been provided by the sort of academic career which I should have been having, as well as a Professorial salary.

I felt very hard up indeed, and saved money very hard out of my miserable pittance of a salary at the Society for Psychical Research, although it looked as though it would take thousands of years to reach a level of capital at which I could provide myself with the circumstances I needed to have; unless something completely improbable and unpredictable happened in my favour.
I certainly found it very grim to be in such a situation; I could never have believed that anything so terrible could happen to me, nor that if it did, there would be absolutely nobody who would give me any help in remedying my position. Nevertheless I went on giving money to beggars, in order to remember the higher level perspective and not feel totally shut in to an ostensibly hopeless imprisonment in the ‘normal’ world.

I remember one time when Sir George was visiting me in Oxford where I was doing a post-graduate degree which I hoped would provide me with a way of re-accessing an academic career. In the event it did not, because there was nobody who did not want me to be kept down and out, including my own supervisor, Professor Price, who was under the influence of two sources of hostility against me, the Principal of Somerville and Rosalind Heywood at the SPR.
However, while doing this thesis I was in lodgings near Somerville and Sir George and two other Somervillians were in the room with me. A beggar knocked at the door and asked for money. I got everyone to turn out their loose cash and see what they felt able to contribute. Sir George produced a note, but rather disapprovingly. Admittedly he was having to survive on a totally inadequate pension, so he might just have said he was needing it too badly himself, but what he said was, ‘You shouldn’t give him so much. He will only get drunk on it.’

‘That is entirely beside the point,’ I said. I might have added, but didn’t, ‘Money is what he asked for, so that is what he shall have, and what he does with it is nobody’s business but his own.’

Then I went back to the front door to give him the collection.

The evolution of dishonesty

In dealing with external physical reality, it would seem that all the evolutionary forces must be on the side of honesty and realism. It will do a farmer little good to pretend he has not noticed the signs of an approaching storm. But when living beings are dealing with others, even with those of their own species, there are many ways in which it can be useful to mislead other life forms about the true state of affairs, including your disposition and intentions. Transparent plankton could be said to be pretending not to be there, although they are, and by the time one arrives at something so complex as a normal plant, one finds the most elaborate reproductions and imitations being offered in order to induce insects to behave in the way that will best disseminate the plant's pollen.

Simple forms of dishonesty in animal life are well-known; for example, the bird that feigns an injured wing in order to lure a predator away from its nest. But clearly by far the greatest opportunities for dishonesty must be found in the social interactions of human beings, whose social forms are so much more complex and varied than those of other animals. We must suppose that a high degree of social dishonesty can greatly enhance the organism's chance of survival and successful reproduction, to the extent that the evolutionary pressures upon it depend on competition and successful interaction with its own kind rather than on attempts to overcome the difficulties presented by the physical world around it. Such a favourable strategy will probably become, as there is every reason to think it has become, a dominant mode of human behaviour and, like other successful strategies, it is likely to occur in association with a liking for this form of behaviour and a tendency in the direction of using it.

But since other people are aware of this strategy, a high degree of sophistication must be aimed at, and it may be that that will be best achieved if a person contrives to deceive himself concerning his own motives and intentions.

From the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom

The choice is: school or prison

Extracts from ‘Fines or prison may be used to keep pupils in class to 18’ (Daily Mail 23 March 2007) with some comments by me in italics.

Under Alan Johnson's plan children starting secondary school next year will be the first generation expected to stay in education or training until they reach 18. Teenagers face £50 on-the-spot fines and even jail if they refuse to stay in education until they are 18, it has been revealed ...

[Alan Johnson’s] proposals will have massive implications for employers, particularly small firms which rely on low-wage teenagers. Bosses face criminal sanctions if they refuse to release teenagers for training and so do parents who put children aged 16 to 18 to work in the family business without sending them off for training ...

In a green paper titled Raising Expectations, Mr Johnson outlined four options for over-16s - school, college, apprenticeships or work-based learning. [No mention, of course, of correspondence courses which do not expose a person to direct social hostility. The Open University is not open to those under the age of 18.]

Youngsters employed for at least 20 hours a week would need to do part-time study totalling 280 hours a year. ... Schools, colleges and employers providing training would be placed under a duty to report youngsters if they drop out.

Those persistently refusing offers of education and training would be handed 'attendance orders' setting out where, when and how often they should turn up. Like anti-social behaviour orders they would bring criminal sanctions if breached. ... Mr Johnson insisted: 'No youngster would be in the criminal area of the law unless they are very hardcore and we have gone through a very very fulsome process, including counselling.' ["Counselling" — deprivation of liberty so as to have one’s mind exposed to brainwashing.]

My comments

Terrible things are going on. The appalling proposals for accelerating the breakdown of civilisation pour out faster than I can put even a few comments about them on my inconspicuous and widely ignored blog. Now they propose to deprive everyone of their freedom of action until they are 18. If people had any awareness of the importance of liberty as an abstract principle there would be rioting in the streets.

There seems to be even less outrage at this idea than there was when the school-leaving age was raised from 15 to 16. But at that time most journalists had themselves been educated before the inception of the Welfare State in 1945; nowadays most journalists have themselves been brought up within it.

I believe that when income tax came in at a penny in the pound someone is supposed to have commented, ‘This is the end of civilisation’. For a long time this was quoted as a funny old-fashioned attitude, because everything seemed, in most people’s eyes, to be proceeding in an acceptable way. But I must admit that by now it seems blatantly obvious that if someone said that, he was right, and even if no one said it, it is true. The idea of any supposed benefit being provided by the state, and financed by the reduction of liberty of individuals, can only lead to ever-increasing oppression and persecution.

If you can get a supposed or real benefit only if you can afford to pay for it yourself, you are at least protected from being placed at the mercy of what other people with to impose upon your life instead of what you might, if you could, choose to pay for.

People brought up in the modern world scarcely ever question the unexamined assumptions which are universally made, and which it is taboo to question. It is assumed that education is ‘a good’, so anything that goes under that name is unquestionably ‘a good’, and more of ‘a good’ must be ‘better’ than less of it.

Compulsory education came in at the end of the 19th century, adding to the writing on the wall that resulted from the inception of income tax; then there was female suffrage, then the Welfare State in 1945. Now, sixty years later, we are reaping the whirlwind that has resulted from those events.

Women in tribes

Let us consider how the characteristics of human psychology may derive from the structure of tribal society.

There is no ‘drive to infinity’, or drive towards any goal outside the tribal group. There is no concerted attempt to increase control of the environment, nor is it possible for any individual to make wholehearted attempts to better his own lot. The object of everything is to reinforce belief in the importance of the tribal customs, so that the people in the tribe can live out their life-cycles according to these patterns, often with little change for centuries or millennia.

There is relatively more scope for the men to assert significance in forms of aggression towards something external to the tribe, since they have from time to time to defend the tribe from the encroachments of other tribes, and probably to kill animals for food. This kind of assertion of significance still takes the form of asserting that they are able to deprive another personality of its life, i.e. that on behalf of the tribal significance they are able to assert their superior potency by depriving of potency. Nevertheless this relatively externalised assertiveness gives male psychology its slight margin of generosity and flexibility.

The women, on the other hand, having no way of asserting themselves outside the tribe, and concerned with the bringing up of children, have no outlet for their drive but in the satisfaction they can obtain from subordinating the children, and no doubt everybody else as well, to the tribal customs. (One can hear the tribal echoes in many common expressions: ‘She must be helped to adapt to a non-academic life’, i.e. ‘She must be brought into subordination to the tribal customs’.)

from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom

Higher-level morality and social morality

It may be observed that there appears to be no overlap between higher-level morality and the sort that derives from believing in society or other people.

What I have encountered all my life is universal opposition, justified by a rationalised belief that if I was prevented from getting what I wanted to get, and could easily have been getting, I would stop wanting what I could get something out of, and turn into a different kind of person who did not want it or need it, whether on account of being physically dead or otherwise.

When I was at school I could have been getting everything I wanted with very little help, except with making arrangements for degree level physics and chemistry practicals. All that would have been necessary would have been less interference. Once the harm had been done and I had been thrown out, a bit more active help would have been necessary to reverse the harm that had been done to me so that I could get back my minimum requirements for a tolerable life, which were a hotel environment, as provided by a resident college, and the salary and status of an Oxbridge professor.

On a higher level one acquires a very strong aversion to seeing any apparently conscious being frustrated or suffering, and the idea of anyone putting someone else into a decentralising position is horrific. This is in part because one thinks a consciousness could and should be on a higher level, but so long as it is preoccupied with trying to get things out of other people it can’t be.

Of course, in most cases, you know that superimposing another layer of tantalising opposition is only adding to psychological obstructions that are already quite sufficient to prevent the person from knowing his own mind/getting a higher level. Nevertheless it is horrific to think of that extra layer being instated.

Since the age of 13 (and less obviously before) I have been treated with extraordinary cruelty, and a determination to make me suffer as much as possible, and to make me realise that alleviation of my suffering depended on some help or permission from other people which they would not give.

This was less surprising when I was at school and college where I was surrounded by hostile left-wing people, predominantly not aristocratic, and almost without exception socialists. (Socialism is fundamentally immoral, from a higher level point of view.)

But Rosalind Heywood persuaded everyone at the SPR without exception to oppose what I was clearly trying to get, so as to force me to give up. That is amazingly immoral from a higher level point of view. The SPR population would count as highly principled on normal terms; old-fashioned aristocrats who had been to public schools and held positions of responsibility, pillars of society, many of them Christians.

But it did not occur to any of them that a policy of frustrating someone in order to manipulate them into distorting their psychology was immoral and objectionable.

Nobody ever objected to this policy of paternalistic frustration as immoral. They neither objected to other people doing it nor refused to play ball themselves, but allowed themselves to be drawn in to ‘being cruel to be kind’ as Rosalind Heywood encouraged them to think of it.

So one can only say that socially acceptable morality, however sophisticated and worked out, contains no awareness of the basic moral principle – I mean of what, from a higher level point of view, is the basic moral principle.

Or perhaps you could say that there is an awareness of the basic moral principle but this is expressed only by acting against it, instead of on it, whenever opportunity arises.

Basic morality and people at the SPR

(copy of a letter)

The years after being thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ were shockingly disillusioning. I did not have much in the way of illusions and I did not expect much of people, but I thought it was not absolutely out of the question that the odd person, here or there, might act in what seemed to me a natural way. However, I did need help very badly, having no means of support and no way of working my way back into an academic career which could lead to a Professorship. I could not, as I have already pointed out, draw Social Security without falsifying my position. I certainly experienced my situation as unbelievably horrifying, so that the universal meanness and opposition was something I could not fail to experience very painfully.

All I hoped of Sir George was that he would not oppose me, even if he would do nothing to help me, which was based on nothing but his mystical flash up a hill in Arabia because, I thought, the basic moral principle is so obvious that quite a short exposure to the higher level situation would give someone a great aversion to frustrating anyone in getting what they wanted in any way, even if they had no resources, financial or motivational, for trying to help them.

I remember saying to Sally, ‘He may not do anything to help me, but at least he won’t actively oppose me’, and she said nothing, perhaps thinking that she understood psychology better than I did. If so, she was right, as before long he was machinating against me and trying to manipulate me as much as anybody.

Rosalind Heywood considered herself a very spiritual person, who could tell whether or not there was a host in situ in a Catholic church in its box on the altar (whatever you call it) by whether or not she could hear a kind of holy singing noise. She got the holy noise in proximity with sacred objects of other religions as well.

She played infallibly on a certain dimension of human psychology and I never knew anyone resist her for long. Sir George did resist her attempts to get him and Salter to oppose my plans on one occasion, but it did not last. This was an unusual experience for her and she looked shaken as she left the office after a confrontational interview, but she was not one to accept defeat. A few weeks later Sir George’s support for me had vanished (how much communication had taken place between them, by telephone or otherwise, I do not know).

Conversion to her point of view was irreversible. I have no doubt that she did sell to all concerned that every particle of support to me should be choked off because it would be kinder to force me to give up on setting up an independent academic establishment. It could not succeed and the sooner I was made to give it up the better. Any support, however tiny, would only be prolonging the agony. This, of course, is head-on violation of the basic moral principle that you do not impose your interpretations and evaluations on somebody else, but give them what they say they want if you can (or if you are able to muster the energy in view of your own problems).

But the idea of frustrating someone, and pretending that you are doing it out of benevolence, is attractive to human psychology, which has a desire to frustrate and to express its power by causing suffering, as fundamental as the higher level drive to do the opposite.

So everybody associated in any way with the SPR and Oxford University joined in trying to squeeze me to death in my own best interests, just as, when I was at school, people had been able to oppose me in everything I wanted on the pretence that they were liberating me from the pressures placed on me by an ambitious father, in both cases no doubt enjoying the opportunity to combine active malevolence with a smug sense of their own compassion and sympathy.

A cruel pretence

(copy of a letter)

There is a very cruel pretence that the outcast professor is not suffering from being deprived of an institutional (hotel) environment and social recognition as a leading intellectual, i.e. as a person with a salaried and prestigious Professorship.

When I was thrown out fifty years ago I accepted that there was a brick wall in front of me and that all I could do was scrape at it, trying to make a tunnel through it. Everyone promoted the cruel fiction that I was being ‘free to follow my interests’. This was the worst possible slander of someone in my terrible position, because it represented me as not needing help (and I don’t mean ‘help’ in the form of counselling) in the form of money and people and support in getting money and people.

How do you suppose it feels, after fifty years of totally unrewarding toil in bad circumstances, trying to work towards an institutional (hotel) environment and an Oxbridge Professorship, to be told by a philosopher at Somerville that if I got back onto a salaried career track that could lead to a Professorship, I would be ‘less free’! The most violent possible rejection of all that constitutes one’s individuality. The most violent insult possible to add to grievous injury. And she, and all at Somerville, have slandered and even libelled me in this terrible way.

There should be recognition of this as a criminal act with a legal penalty. A suitable penalty would be that she should be condemned to come and work in my incipient and downtrodden independent university doing whatever she can most usefully do, probably filling in with the domestic and menial tasks, from the lack of staff to do which I am always suffering grievously. Also she should forfeit all her assets to contribute towards the funding which I need to build up the capital endowment of my university, which is still too painfully squeezed for me to be able to make use of my ability to do anything, let alone to function at an adequate energy level.

More timewasting for the "gifted"

I see they are going ahead with their absolutely horrific proposals to provide even more expensive interference in the lives of any child with an IQ slightly above average. It is very unlikely that the type of ‘educational’ facilities proposed — lectures, classes, groups, summer schools etc — will actually be advantageous rather than disadvantageous, even for those with the lowest IQs in the top 10% of the population.

This is the time-wasting type of ‘educational’ activity (what they call “stretching not pushing”, and “facilitating not spoon-feeding”) . What is really preventing all and sundry from getting anything out of their ordinary ‘schools’ is not that there is not enough ‘teaching’ but that there is too much (in the modern sense of the word). It is simply designed to demoralise, and extra periods of demoralisation provided at the taxpayers’ expense will be no good for anybody (except in the sense of ‘good’ used in "there is no good injun but a dead injun").

If someone with an IQ of 120 or so manages to get to a timewasting and demoralising university after running the gauntlet of this sort of education at school with extra timewasting specially provided, it will be in spite of, not on account of, this extra handicap.

I hope, at any rate, it will be possible for victims of the scheme, or their parents on their behalf, to refuse to expose themselves to these ‘opportunities’. Cigarettes and investments have to carry risk warnings, and the same principle should be applied to ‘educational opportunities’, invitations to which should be accompanied by a warning, ‘Accepting this invitation may do you (or your child) harm and not good, and may do irrevocable damage to your (or his) prospects in life’.

"Liberal instincts"

Extracts from article

After dinner, Amy popped down to the corner shop. It was 10.30pm. When she returned, she staggered through the front door smeared with mud — and soaked with blood from a dreadful wound in her chest. In the 500 yards between shop and home she had been followed by a youth whose face was concealed by a hood, pushed to the ground, robbed of her bag and stabbed in the ribs with a screwdriver. ...

On our streets today it is the middle-class young people — the products of our liberal homes — who are being targeted. Amy is convinced there is a growing war on London streets between the dispossessed of the graffiti-covered estates and the middle classes: "Trust me, Dad. He wouldn't have gone for one of his own." So is there anybody out there who is accountable? The terrible fact is that, in these well-tended million-pound-plus houses with their state-of-the art security systems, people have long known what's going on in the street outside. But they have closed the blinds and simply turned away. And so have I. ...

We have put our heads in the sand for too long about this problem and have done nothing about the indifference of the authorities to much that is wrong in our society. We certainly backed the wrong policies on education — no one who could possibly avoid it would send a child to a comprehensive school around here. ...

As I, and all the others with Paul Smith suits and briefcases, strode past the addicts shooting up outside the Tube, and the Special Brew drinkers on the kerb, I used to think smugly: "Well, this doesn't touch me." But, the chances always were that it would in the end. And it did, in the worst possible way. (‘The night my daughter was stabbed — and my liberal instincts died’ by Michael Williams, Daily Mail, 5 March 2007.)

My comments

The writer of this article, as usual, seems to assume that some expected norm of civilised behaviour can be produced by confiscating freedom (by means of taxation) from the functional and non-criminal members of society. “Educational policy” is implicitly blamed for an increase in crime, and the implied solution must be to take more money away from the “middle class” in order to bestow benefits on those who behave badly.

Of course it is true that the schools are producing an ever-increasing population of demoralised young people. But it is questionable whether any tweaking of the system can produce any beneficial effect, since egalitarian ideology is already rampant throughout modern society — not only within the schools and universities — and pours out of every television screen.

If there has been an increase in criminal behaviour it is not necessarily attributable only to social influences. The modern ideology has favoured the expansion of the lower-IQ population by financial support, medical treatment and support for dysfunctional offspring, or offspring of dysfunctional parents, all at the expense of the taxpaying population, which has therefore tended to delay and curtail its own families.

This favouring of reproductive activity by the “poor” may in itself have increased the incidence of crime, regardless of their educational or social experience, as there may well be — and there is some evidence that there are — genetic factors predisposing to crime.

Some time ago I saw a statistic to the effect that men who had at least one criminal conviction were producing 30 percent more offspring than men who had no criminal record. If there are genetic factors involved, this would not have to continue for many generations to create a noticeable increase in criminal activity.

This is a quotation on this subject from Dysgenics by Richard Lynn:

The high correlations obtained by Tygart (1991) of criminality with number of siblings suggests that genetic deterioration with regard to conscientiousness may be about twice as great as that for intelligence. Our finding that the fertility of criminals in Britain is about 50 percent greater than that of the population as a whole corroborates the conclusion that this is a serious problem. It may well be that dysgenic fertility for conscientiousness and criminality – which has received the least attention from eugenicists, and which has made a significant contribution to rising crime rates in many Western nations in the second half of the twentieth century – is the most serious of the dysgenic problems confronting modern populations. (Praeger, 1996, p.209)

Aphorism of the month (March)

The concept of a good social structure is a contradiction in terms. A good escape committee in a prison camp is recognised by the speed with which it renders itself unnecessary.


(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Fish oils and intelligence

Professor Basant Puri, described as a ‘scientist’, who is a Professor at Imperial College, London and hence, one supposes, paid out of taxpayers’money, i.e. by confiscation of freedom from individual members of society, has just published some ‘research’ which purports to establish that academic performance can be enhanced by feeding children fish-oils, and hence that ‘mass supplementation’ of school children is called for.

That will, of course, if it happens (which it well may), require further confiscation of freedom from all taxable members of the population, including those who, like myself, were left with no way of making a career or even of earning money at the end of the ruinous ‘education’ (which was paid for largely by confiscation of freedom). Nor with any way of drawing income support from the Social Security, as the reasons for their being unable to earn a living were not socially accepted, and they were not prepared to falsify their position and engage in elaborate pretences of seeking work which they would never accept.

Even such people as myself are, on this proposal, to have their liberty even further reduced by taxation, thus reducing their ability to provide themselves with the excellent diet they need to have, both to remain alive long enough to get started on their long-delayed forty-year adult careers, and to keep themselves out of the clutches of the totally unacceptable, immoral and iniquitous medical profession.

Incidentally, another way in which such legislation would damage people such as myself is that it would probably have the effect of making fish-oils more expensive and difficult to obtain, and perhaps eventually almost unobtainable.

I don’t think we need worry too much that even the ‘poorest’ are prevented from getting fish-oils if they want them. Children on the whole appear to have enough pocket-money, and their parents enough social benefits, to become obese and alcoholic.

Are my books ideological anathema?

This is a comment from someone to one of my books, and to the letter written by Fabian which he found in it. This buyer of Advice to Clever Children sent a message via Fabian’s blog.

I recently bought Celia Greens 'Advice for Clever Children' from a dealer on Amazon. In the book I found a letter written by a certain 'Fabian Wadel' adressed to the Librarian of the Institute of Education at the University of London which says;

"We enclose two complimentary copies of books by Dr Celia Green, which we hope you will accept as gifts to your library" and, "We hope the books may be of particular interest to young people of undergraduate age."

This is dated September 17 2004. I have it now in front of me. Is it at least plausible to surmise that the librarian took one look at this book and was so freaked out by the content that it was immediately donated to another book dealer and put up for sale?

Having read the book myself I can tell you that — if what you describe is true — any academic library would rather accept 10 complimentary copies of Mein Kampf than anything by Celia Green — an ideological closed shop after all.

My comments

Thank you for sending the information about what happened to our presentation of books to the London University Department of Education. It is no surprise; we are heavily censored and it costs us a lot of money (and of course, effort) to get even a few books out into the world.

As usual, my aims and objects are diametrically opposed to those of society at large, so far as I am concerned. I need my books to reach the widest possible audience because those who might give us any assistance, by work, money or moral support, are clearly extremely few and far between. Society at large, and practically every individual representative of it, wants me to remain as inconspicuous, inactive, and as nearly as possible non-existent at possible.

Asking libraries for our books might be of more use to us than buying them, unless (or perhaps even if) you are a person whose bookshelf is frequently visited by other people. But what motive could anyone have for making the exertion involved in asking for one of our books at a library?

You seem to take a very dim view of the objectivity and openness to criticism of academics; of course you are quite right to do so, but the academic world is supposed to be passionately devoted to freedom of expression, as I read only a few days ago, so shouldn’t you sound a bit surprised, or even shocked?

Middle classes hit hardest

Extract from ‘Middle classes are hit hardest in the pocket’, Daily Mail 5 March 2007:

Middle earners are bearing the brunt of the highest tax levels for a quarter of a century to prop up failing public services, a report concludes today. … A family with £45,000 a year in disposable income will see 48.7 per cent of it disappear in direct and indirect taxes. ...

A study, from the centre-right think tank Reform, warns ‘Taxes are rising to their highest level for 25 years. … the billions of pounds raked in to increase spending on schools and hospitals have been squandered in a decade of Labour rule. … Its writers say Britain is ‘very poorly placed internationally for the next ten years, with low taxation and excellence in education crucial for future success. … Less than half of children currently achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths.’

The report... warns that on current trends, from 2012 young people can expect to pay high taxes and compulsory payments towards higher education and pensions. The effective tax burden for a typical graduate will be 47.6 per cent, before any other costs of living are added on.

My comments

There are constantly being new proposals for increasing the burden of taxation, such as prolonging compulsory education, setting up databases, including fingerprinting for 11-year olds, ID cards for all, monitoring and charging for every mile driven by every motorist, more money to be spent on treating obese or alcoholic children and taking them away from their parents, inspectors to invade houses at any time to see if there have been any improvements which could be used as a justification for raising the Council Tax, which is needed to provide ‘help’ and intervention for the dysfunctional, and so on. But who is complaining? It shouldn’t take my IQ to realise that the object of the exercise is to reduce the most intelligent, functional and independent members of the population to poverty, and dependence on a population of agents of the collective (doctors, teachers, social workers etc) with a low average IQ.