The Office of "Fair Access"

Apparently there is now an Office of Fair Access (meaning to universities). As usual, ‘fair’ refers to some underlying and unquestionable assumptions, such as that all differences in ability or temperament are the result of environment, and that it is right to try to iron these out, so that equality of outcome is achieved.

How about an ‘Office of Fair Reparation and Reinstatement’ to rectify the positions of those (such as myself) who are left without a qualification with which to enter any career that is possible to them? This is using the word ‘fair’ in a different sense, referring to what is really the case, and not what people who believe in the modern ideology would like to think was the case.

As usual, it is necessary to emphasise what people like to overlook; that a person left without a single usable qualification (that is, of use to them as the sort of person they are) is even debarred from the minimal income that might be derived from so-called ‘social security’. Such a person cannot draw income support because he is not in a position to ‘seek work’ as he is not qualified for any work which he could actually do.

The ‘educational’ system does not admit to any responsibility for providing the individuals subjected to it with qualifications suitable to their career needs, or commensurate with their ability. It cannot do so because innate ability is not supposed to exist, and differences in attainment which arise from, or can be ascribed to, environmental influences are there to be ironed out, in pursuit of equality of outcome.

If differences of ability were admitted, it would not seem too difficult to understand that a person with the most exceptional academic ability might have an absolute need for the most high-flying type of academic career and, in reality, could not have any other.

As it is, this is not understood and it is rigorously excluded from consideration, because the educational system wants to be perfectly free to destroy the prospects in life of the most able.

Translation into Russian does me no good

The Human Evasion has been translated into Russian and now appears on some website. If my ideas are of ‘interest’ to people even to that extent, why don’t they want to come and find out more about them by working here, or send money commensurate with what is needed to write and publish more of what I have to say? As it is, all the use it will be is that I can improve my reading of Russian by reading it; usually I find it very difficult to find anything to read in Russian that is not as boring and rebarbative as most mediocratic writing being produced in all languages at the present time.

And what good will it do one to be able to read Russian better? No good at all, really. Improving my Russian is only a way of patienter (as the French would say).

Russia is not even an EU country, so that if any Russian speakers did want to come and augment our sadly inadequate workforce they couldn’t, and wealthy Russian-speaking businessmen who might (?) want to give us badly-needed money probably speak and read English anyway.

Egalitarianism and the female image

While I think that fundamentally what has been against me all my life has been the modern ideology of egalitarianism, with its hatred of innate ability, precocity, and individual autonomy in every form, it is certainly the case that being female and hence at the mercy of female teachers, tutors, headmistresses, college Principals and (at the SPR) Rosalind Heywood, has always made everything as bad as it could possibly be.

Women on the whole are unsympathetic to drive and ambition, especially in other women, and from the age of 14, if not earlier, I have always had at least one woman — and usually two — networking energetically against me.

A friend was saying recently how much this must have increased the opposition against me. ‘Well’, I said, ‘I thought the way was open. There had been one or two women scientists, Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. I did not realise there was anything against ambition. I had read about the lives of a lot of people and it was not illegal to want to work and use one’s ability to get into the right sort of position in life. If anything, it was approved of.’

‘But all the people in the past who had risen in the world by hard work were men. Were there any other women among the figures of the past that you had read about?’ I had to admit that there were not.

As my friend pointed out, women even more than men are expected to demonstrate uncritical submission to, and acceptance of, social evaluations. Although I did nothing to draw attention to it, I was radically sceptical and open-minded in all contexts, expecting it to be sufficient that I behaved as a respectable person in line to become a pillar of society as my parents were, although I would need to aim at a more prestigious level of society than that in which they had been forced to live out their lives as members of socially displaced high-IQ families.

I had not, at 12 or 13, acquired the belief in society that most people have, and I had never identified with the female image. I read boys’ books predominantly, thinking that reading books for girls was exposing one to becoming identified with pernicious psychological influences, even if it was difficult to work out what they were.

I suppose that my lack of identification with the female image also aroused hostility (as did my precocity and drive) although I do not know how it came across to people. I was wearing the same school uniform as the other girls and got on with doing the required work as well as possible. So what was wrong with that?

Tory tax breaks

Sweeping changes to the tax and benefits system worth more than £3000 a year to some families will be unveiled by the Conservatives today. In a decisive attempt to promote marriage, a transferable tax allowance for married couples would boost incomes by an immediate £1000 a year. This would be topped by additional benefits of up to £2058 for those eligible as part of far-reaching reforms designed to end discrimination against couples in the welfare system. The changes would help both families with children and childless couples caring for elderly relatives. The suggestions come from the Conservative Party’s social justice policy group, chaired by former leader Ian Duncan Smith. (Daily Mail, 10 July 2007)

Where is the justice in that? ('Social justice' = injustice.) The money to benefit couples would have to come from somewhere, so from those who remain single. That would include those who, like me, were left at the end of their ruined education with no usable qualification at all with which to make the sort of career to which they were extremely well suited and needed to have, and so certainly would not have got married until they had built up enough capital to finance an independent academic institution (in my own case) or whatever environment they needed to have in which to lead a functional and fulfilling life (in the case of people with high IQs or otherwise in a similar predicament).

"Standing up for God"

In an article in the Daily Mail (8 July) Peter Lewis, referring to the recent books The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, asks ‘Won’t anyone stand up for God?’

The fact is that modern society does not believe in the individual; it owns him body and soul. ‘Social constructionism’ tells us that the individual is what society sees fit to make him, and he is nothing else whatever. Any sort of God represents competition to society. There might be something else that evaluated things differently and might also exert some influence on the individual mind. Cognitive psychology forbid that such a thing might be!

And so the few remaining remnants of belief in anything outside the current belief system are attacked on grounds that are wildly irrelevant. For example: there cannot be a God of any kind, because a lot of people who said they believed in a God did a lot of torturing and killing of other people. (“Not, mind you, that we have anything against torturing and killing except when it is useful for blaming Christians, capitalists and other sorts of evil people, but in that case we mind about it a lot, especially when the numbers involved are very large. Christians and capitalists have caused a lot of suffering and death to enormous numbers of people.”)

Actually the resistance to the idea of God, or of some external influence with which an individual might make contact, is closely related to the fear of the individual having internal psychological determinants arising from his genetic constitution or, indeed, his early upbringing, unless they are easily overridden by social pressures, counselling, psychiatric ‘help’, etc.

I was always very sceptical from a philosophical point of view, and aware of the uncertainty inherent in all aspects of the existential situation; at the same time I found it quite easy and sensible to regard myself as a respectable bourgeois intellectual and had no inclination to deviate from the behaviour suitable to such a person.

At my Catholic convent school I was regarded as a materialist and atheist, because I did not believe in God, although I think what they really minded about was that I did not believe in society.

At Oxford I was surrounded by atheistic socialists who despised my drives to live purposefully and to do research, on the grounds that they arose from internal psychological determinants which I had not been told to have. So now I was accused of believing in God. ‘I know Celia,’ sneered a female senior executive at the BBC, atheist socialist and friend of the Principal of Somerville, ‘She doesn’t want to do research for any sensible reason, but because she thinks she is divinely suited to it.’

Belief in God became a widespread accusation against me, so much so that when I set up (if you can call it that) my first tiny apology for an academic institution, I was accused of intending to start a new religion, and letters for and against this view went to and fro among influential people. But the most supportive of them only went so far as to defend me against this allegation and neither gave me, nor suggested giving me, any actual help in my grim situation.

Addendum
Actually I had set up my incipient university research department and residential college in desperate response to being thrown out at the end of the ruined education with no research scholarship and no way of entering an academic career that could lead to a Professorship. To do that was to give precedence to my desperate needs as internally determined, even though they had not been recognised by society. So I was paying attention to considerations other than those prescribed by society — which is what it is feared a belief in God might lead to.

Double standards on child abuse

In a recent child abuse case a mother was jailed for standing by while her daughter was raped by members of a paedophile ring.

... it was the ‘grievous breach of trust’ on the part of [the mother] to her child that had stunned the High Court ... (Daily Mail, 23 June 2007)

The judge announced that the mother had had a duty of care, and he said of one of the perpetrators, jailing them as well, ‘You were prepared to take advantage of this young child to satisfy your deviant desires and it is clear from the reports you display no real remorse or understanding of the damage caused to her by your conduct.’

The attitude to abuse perpetrated by agents of the collective is very different. I think that my parents should have considered, and all parents should consider, that they have a duty of care to protect their children from abuse by agents of the collective, most obviously those in the educational system. The educational (including the university) system cannot fail to be abusive, since its agents (official and unofficial) wish to believe that there is no such thing as exceptional ability, so they are necessarily motivated to prevent it from expressing itself.

Of course, I do not wish to blame my parents for failing to protect my interests against an abusive system, since the ideology wishes to blame parents and exonerate the agents of the collective who are the real abusers. I blame the agents of the collective, who should have felt a ‘duty of care’ not to turn my parents against me.

By failing to protect me from the abusive age-limit on taking exams by letting me take the School Certificate when I was 13, my parents exposed me to years of abuse under the auspices of the ‘educational’ system which caused great suffering and the ruin of our lives to three people, i.e. myself and my parents.

None of the agents of the collective (official or unofficial) who contributed to the ruin of our lives has every shown any sign of ‘real remorse or understanding of the damage caused’ by their conduct.

However, people’s attitude to abuse by the educational system is quite different from their attitude to abuse by child rapists.

I arouse hostility if I ‘whinge’ and express my need for help (real help, not ‘help’) to retrieve my position, and there is no tendency at all to wish those who contributed to my ruin to ‘pay for’ their crimes, even by imprisonment let alone by doing anything that would help me work towards alleviation of my position.

Some more notes about pain

Copy of a letter, following on from this.

I think that the pain thing is complicated for most people by the fact that their ‘individualistic’ drives are repressed by their need to derive significance from social approval so that they think they are ‘really’ bad, inadequate, evil and deserving to suffer. I suppose this is one of the things that Christianity plays on. However, it really makes it more necessary to reject the belief in society and its evaluations, while no doubt making it even more difficult to do so (or even to start wanting to do so).

However, I can tell you what I was thinking about before I got the solution to pain, although I had really eliminated the inhibitory belief in society 18 months earlier (and at the time that had been experienced as an appalling and irrevocable loss).

Here you are, existing and threatened from all sides, especially threatened by mortality and the extinction of consciousness, and not knowing anything about anything. This gives you a tremendous drive to react against this claustrophobic situation, and a sense of immediacy and urgency because you could die at any time. This went into my urgency about exam-taking; however young I was, I might die the next day and I had to get on with it. Apart from any considerations about needing to do things at the right age for oneself in terms of one’s mental, rather than chronological, age.

So you have very strong drives to assert yourself against the threatening unknown that surrounds you, but you are afraid of failing and reminding yourself of how puny you are. So you try to find out what you can succeed in doing and to put your drives into things that won’t immediately bring you up against your finiteness.

People play on this and want to make you feel that if you are less good than some other person at doing a certain kind of thing, that is a permanent limitation that you must accept and live within, not think that circumstances might all be different on some other occasion.

So you get a fear of doing something in which you might fail. People who are academically successful usually have techniques for pretending, both to others and themselves, that they are not trying. E.g. Bill Gates playing bridge all day and only working for his degree at night, Kierkegaard putting in an appearance at theatres in the intervals, and then going home to swot up on the classics (or whatever it was he liked to show off about).

But, I had thought, this leaves you with very little of your emotional drive. If you want to try with 51%, and 49% is wanting to preserve itself from failure by not trying, you have 2% of your motivation left. But every failure, of whatever kind, is a horrifying reminder of finiteness and mortality and hence (if you are centralised enough) drives you back onto the point of ricochet and rebounds as the drive to infinity. Because in reality it is not any finite goal that you are aiming at; you want to be omniscient and omnipotent, and it is terrible that you are not. So everything can be made unconflicted if it is turned back into, or recognised as an expression of, the drive to infinity.

And in fact by applying this I had achieved freedom from conflict and certainly had the impression of deploying extremely strong emotional drives, even for someone who had always been uninhibited and regarded as ‘intense’.

But pain presented a serious problem. Any psychological thing, however bad, can be relatively easily ignored. Well, relatively, at least in comparison with pain. As you said, even if they tell you that you have cancer and will die soon, you are still alive. They may be wrong, it may not happen. Anyway, perhaps you can still enjoy yourself.

When Bill’s brother John actually was dying of cancer and Bill took this seriously, John said (as Bill told me), ‘Well, I feel bad about it sometimes, especially when I wake up in the night, but if I do something like going to dinner with your sister, I feel all right again.’ [names changed]

However, pain is difficult to ignore. It is there and you do not want it to be there. It is a proof that your will can be violated (something that you try to overlook as far as possible) and ultimately violated by death. So it is actually a proof of mortality and the ultimate horror of the situation.

It is difficult now to remember how desperate my situation was then. I had to get a solution to pain, if only because I abhorred anaesthetics. And so I set my emotional drive at the problem and determined that my subconscious should forthcome this solution, which I had to have.

This led to the most intolerable existential claustrophobia and nostalgia; I would be driven back onto the point of ricochet and get a violent recoil driving forward again at the problem which had to be solved.

In fact I suppose you can say one was being driven further and further away from any possibility of being related to ‘normal’ life on ‘normal’ terms, past the point of no return. And, of course, it is the great problem with higher level psychology that you lose everything, and lose it irrevocably, before you get everything. It is not a case of giving up on what you have got (or might have) because you see that something else will be better. You give up on it because it is not good enough, although you are still shut in and cannot see how to get anything else.

I have written elsewhere about the despair of finiteness; and it may sound like resignation. But actually it was very complex. I was extremely angry, claustrophobically appalled, and disgusted, that a consciousness should be in such a position, without knowing anything or having any way of finding anything out. It certainly was not resignation in any sense that made the situation tolerable; it made it seem more intolerable than ever, as I reassured myself, wondering whether to go along with it. I had a principle against resignation, which was unrealistic. But a despair so profound as this was dangerous. However, I said to myself, if it arises from a perception of reality that my psychology really reacts in this way to the situation, that is realistic, be the consequences what they may, and so I entertained the despair of finiteness.

Nietzsche, who did not get a higher level, said, ‘If there were God, how could I bear to be no God? Consequently there is no God.’ More precisely, ‘Whether there is God or not, I cannot bear to be no God. Consequently my life in finiteness is worthless and I have no interests worth defending.’

Open Letter to Paris Hilton

Dear Paris,

I read in a newsletter from America that many journalists have expressed pleasure at your being ‘taken down a peg or two’ or ‘getting your come-uppance’ in being imprisoned for driving under the influence of alcohol.

The modern world is dominated by the desire to degrade the successful and it is certainly unwise to break the law, which exposes a person to the hostility of other people. To the extent that there are clear-cut territories within which the individual is free to make his own decisions, he can protect himself from the destructive forces of modern society.

Unfortunately, those who are in a favourable position as a result of the successes of their forebears may be relatively protected from the hostility of the society around them and fail to realise how great it is. The Queen of England is an example of this; she appears to be genuinely uncritical of socialist and egalitarian ideology, and not merely as uncritical as she needs to be for purposes of public relations.

Regrettably, however realistic one’s own outlook may be, one is exposed to other people’s lack of realism at the ‘educational’ stage of one’s life and may not be able to prevent one’s life being ruined. This is what happened to me, at any rate.

We are an independent academic organisation which is as nearly as possible squeezed to death, and kept inactive and inconspicuous, by lack of salaries, status, financial support and even moral support in applying for funding or improving our position in any way. We have been widely slandered and networked against. Nevertheless we are extremely respectable in an old-fashioned bourgeois sense.

Any one supporter could make an immense difference to our ability to publish criticisms of modern academia and society generally (which are desperately in need of expression), perhaps even eventually to make some progress in neglected areas of research.

So although we may not seem to be the sort of people you usually find interesting, we warmly (but not hopefully) invite you, Paris Hilton, to visit us with a view to becoming a Patron and supporter of our enterprise, the last line of defence against anti-individualism.

I say ‘not hopefully’ because there is no indication that even the most right-wing have any sympathy at all with our position. There is apparently no ideal, principle or tradition of defending individuals against society at large.

With best wishes,
Celia Green

The basic moral principle

Modern society has lost sight of the only moral principle of any importance, so that the individual citizen is basically unprotected against unlimited oppression.

Since the ignored principle is never enunciated, it is difficult to express one's horror at what already goes on, and at even worse developments that might go on. If someone says, 'People ought to be heavily taxed in order to pay for state-administered medicine and education', I am shocked and horrified, but inhibited from replying, 'People ought to be taxed as little as possible, and certainly not at all to provide funding for organised crime.'

Usually I do not reply in this way, because I realise that prolonged explanation would be necessary. In reality, at least as much explanation should be required to make plausible the idea that individuals should be taxed to provide for greater oppression of individuals by the collective, but one realises that a high proportion of the population has learnt to proceed smoothly to this conclusion without examination, or even recognition, of the underlying assumptions being made.

If I say that people should be taxed as little as possible and least of all to finance collectively organised oppression, this depends on the basic moral principle that society should interfere as little as possible with the individual's freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit.

The basic moral principle applies between individuals as well, and everyone should respect the right of others to evaluate for themselves the weighting to be placed on the factors which enter into any given situation, since in reality the existential situation is one of total uncertainty.

However, it is only socially appointed agents of the collective, such as doctors, teachers, social workers etc, who are invested with legally conferred powers to impose their valuations on others, and who should be deprived of these (immoral) powers.

In fact, in the presence of the modern ideology, the deplorable practice has arisen of taking into account only factors which appear obvious to a large number of people, and assuming that any others should be ignored.

In place of the basic moral principle enunciated above, an alternative one is implicitly assumed. This is apparently an idea to the effect that what is ethical consists of what the majority of people agree to regard as ethical. Dissenting individuals can and should be forced to submit to the views accepted by the majority of people in their society.

As people are subjected to continuous indoctrination in modern society, from the educational system which increasingly regards indoctrination as a primary objective, and from the continuous stream of propaganda being put out by such media as television and newspapers, it is not surprising that nearly universal tendencies to prefer currently fashionable ways of evaluating things are to be observed.

We may suppose that similar unanimities of evaluation were usually found in primitive tribal societies, but a member of modern society under the influence of the prevailing ideology would regard some of the practices of primitive societies as immoral.

This does not present itself to the modern mind as a problem, since there is an implicit belief that the human race has recently arrived at the best possible way of evaluating things, and the way it thinks now is unquestionably right.

On the basic moral principle that the freedom of the individual to form his own evaluations is supremely important, even if in practice the majority of people will adopt the valuations suggested by the ideology which prevails in the culture of their place and time, the functions of society acting on a collective basis should be as limited as possible. As Herbert Spencer suggests, they should be limited to what is necessary to protect the liberty of individuals from encroachment by other individuals.

Basic moral principle, short form:
It is immoral to impose your interpretations and evaluations on anyone else.

Drinks party

Copy of a letter

Thank you for coming to our drinks party. As you said, it was a funny time of day, but this arose because we usually do such things in the function room at the Mitre, which is being refurbished. The rooms at Infinite Ideas which we hired instead are very suitable rooms, but unfortunately not available for evening times.

Just to amplify some things I said at the party. You seemed to find it difficult to understand what I meant by being ‘squeezed out’ without a single usable qualification at the end of the ruined ‘education’. Actually, I refer to that as being ‘thrown out’, and what I refer to as being ‘squeezed to death’ came later, and is still going on.

The reason I use the terminology in this way is that people like to assume or imply that I am a ‘drop-out’, and that I turned my back on normal careers voluntarily. Actually I was thrown out of an academic career very much against my will, and knew that I could not make a career or even earn money in any other way. I could not get any support for attempting in any way to get back into a university career, even moral support or the barest recognition of the fact that that was what I was trying to do.

And if you speak of my being thrown out (into the wilderness, onto the dungheap) as being squeezed out, that might seem to imply that the squeeze was a one-off thing. Actually the attempt to squeeze me to death was applied as soon as I set up my incipient academic institution in Oxford, within which I hoped to be able to do research with which to reclaim a position in the academic world. I lived more or less literally under siege and have done so ever since.

You asked what 'centralisation' was. It is a lot easier, of course, to say what decentralisation is, which prevents centralisation from arising. All modern psychology (which includes psychology of religion) is about decentralisation. It is promoted by people who are themselves decentralised, so it is not even a realistic account of how unrealistic psychology works.

I have put on my blogspot some comments on the film Sleuth which provides very clear illustrations of people being forced into decentralised positions. Under threat from other people, they have no attention free to consider their own internal psychological criteria or to become aware of the fact that they are in a shocking existential situation which they do not know anything about.

I don’t use words like 'supernatural' or 'transcendent', but I do use the word 'inconceivable' to apply to the qualitatively different mental contents of a higher level. That, however, is not present in any sort of pre-higher level centralised psychology.

Some notes about pain

Copy of a letter

Since I was talking to you about your latest experience at the dentist I thought I should write it down so there is a record of it. I have said it a lot before but not written about it much.

You have to aim through the experience as a reaction against finiteness, so that in effect you are putting your drive into making it happen rather than trying to minimise your awareness of it. Any recoil, trying to get away from it, is actually your worst enemy as the conflict caused by that is what makes a sensation painful, in the sense of hurting.

Doing it is actually, I think, centralising and I think this is why a technique so potentially useful remains unknown. Centralisation provides a point of psychological ricochet; if you perceive that finiteness is intolerable, you get the drive of the animal that turns at bay and fights for its life against hopeless odds. This is an exceedingly strong drive; by the time I did the thing with the teeth, I called it the drive to infinity because clearly no conceivable goal could satisfy it. I did not yet have any idea that there might be an inconceivable goal at which it might arrive.

Anyway, what preceded my getting the thing about pain right was that I had been having a long series of dental appointments doing fillings, the result of my having had so bad a time at Somerville that quarrelling and arguing with my parents, and them shouting me down and asserting the social line, had prevented my mother paying any attention to making appointments for me, and she tended to give me very bad sweets which she liked herself (she had had false teeth for a long time herself).

I had a fairly highly evolved sort of centralisation and I experimented with ways of viewing the pain as abstract sensation, which worked moderately well but clearly had a breakdown point so that I knew I would not be able to apply them to the impending extractions.

I had a solution to most things by then and I found it quite intolerable that my consciousness could be invaded by things to which I could not be reconciled. So I set about trying to make my subconscious forthcome, which led to the despair of finiteness, as I call it, which was really breaking through the final resistance to getting a higher level. But I was not on a higher level yet, and I thought I had failed in getting a solution to pain.

There was a final session of fillings before the extractions and I was using my fairly adequate methods when the dentist suddenly stuck his drill on a nerve. Quite likely he had left the worst filling to last. This presented itself as absolutely intolerable, my system broke down completely, this was just impossible. But quite unpremeditatedly I reacted with a spurt of absolute anger at this intolerable sensation, a sort of, ‘Go on, damn you’, and the sensation became quite neutral.

I realised at once that I had got the solution to pain after all, and that the impending extractions would be a great opportunity to try it out.

Probably the despair of finiteness had provided me with a more absolute sort of centralisation which made the ricochet from intolerable sensation to a head-on drive against it possible.

Even if you are not centralised enough for that to happen, anger is a much better attitude to cultivate than fear or emotional recoil from the situation. Anger and drive are on your side, timidity and apprehension are not, although apprehension may precede anger.

As you know, the extractions worked perfectly and there was no sense of a breakdown point in the system. It seemed as if the pain automatically set up an adequately strong feedback reaction to neutralise it.

One should not lose sight of the fact that although this all seems, and was, very dramatic, the sort of centralisation that made it possible did not arise until I had, in the operative sense, rejected society or other people as a source of significance (which I had done when I was 19, about eighteen months earlier). This, as should always be emphasised, has nothing to do with giving up on having a drive to get out of society all that it should provide in the way of status and opportunity (Professorship, hotel environment, research departments to run, recognition and saleability for one’s books). However difficult society makes it to get any of these things out of it.

Aphorism of the month (June)

The true object of aggression is the unknowability of existence.

Peddling propaganda

Yesterday's report on British education from the independent think-tank Civitas represents a dispatch from the battlefield describing a national catastrophe. It is no surprise that pupils learn so little, say its authors, because so much curriculum time has been hijacked for the peddling of propaganda about racism, gender awareness, environmentalism and suchlike.

The High Master of St Paul's, an outstanding independent school, warns of the "terrifying absence of proper science" in the new GCSE syllabus, which is all that a modern generation of 16-year-olds is deemed capable of learning -and all, indeed, that their teachers are thought capable of teaching. ... During a recent training day for English A-level teachers, a senior examiner asserted that it is necessary to "batter out of students" the idea that there is any "correct" way of speaking English. ...

In the adult world, the gulf between educated and uneducated people is widening relentlessly. As unskilled jobs are outsourced to Asia, the future grows ever bleaker for children of any nationality who lack meaningful qualifications. Yet not only are pupils learning less than they did a generation ago, the educational establishment is also committed to principles, entrenched behind a great wire entanglement of demented ideals, which ensure that things will get worse. ...

University lecturers today demand a boycott of Israel because it oppresses the Palestinians. Yet these same ringmasters of intolerance preside over an educational system close to collapse not for lack of cash, but for lack of sanity. ... The educationalists have committed a form of child abuse all the more pernicious because, though tried and convicted on the evidence of their actions, they will never face a court. Until they can be defeated and expelled from authority and influence over British schools, our children will never begin to learn the things which are indispensable to membership of an educated society. (from ‘Education today is a form of child abuse’ by Max Hastings, Daily Mail, 12 June 2007)

The ‘educational’ system is doing exactly what it is intended to do, destroying the lives of those with above average IQs who might contribute to the advancement of science, culture or individualistic ideals.

There is no point in criticising the state educational system for its failure to impart knowledge or skills. It is reducing the freedom of the more functional and moralised sections of the population by heavy taxation and ensuring that it disgorges a largely unemployable and criminal population to make the position of the former ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ classes still worse, since they will find it almost impossible to employ them as servants in capacities in which they might have been able to operate satisfactorily, while their property and persons are at ever-increasing risk from vandalism and mugging.

It is a complete fallacy to suppose that modern society has less need for ‘unskilled’ workers than in earlier centuries. Little of what was taught in old-fashioned schools was of much relevance to most of their pupils in their adult careers.

It is not that people now need special forms of expertise in order to be employable; this idea has been around for over a century and its real motivation was, and is, to deprive those with high IQs of ancillary support staff within their households. The objective is to provide people with pretentious ‘qualifications’ to that they will consider it beneath them to do anything that is actually useful for anybody else.

They are, of course, heavily indoctrinated with egalitarian and anti-individualistic ideology, which is all that the educational system is really there to impart.

There is no solution but the abolition of state education and of compulsory education altogether.

Sally Clark: a reminder

Sally Clark, the mother who was wrongly jailed for killing her two sons, has died. Her family said in a statement she was found dead at her home Friday morning. The cause of the 42-year-old's death has not been revealed. But relatives said she never recovered from the appalling miscarriage of justice she suffered.

Mrs Clark, was a solicitor from Wilmslow, Cheshire, when she was convicted of smothering 12-week-old Christopher in 1996 and eight-week-old Harry a year later, on the evidence of paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow. He told a court the odds against two cot deaths in the same family were 73million to one. ...

Her three years and three months in jail - she was given two life sentences at Chester Crown Court in October 1999 - saw her reviled and abused as the worst kind of criminal, although many inmates became convinced of her innocence. Her husband Stephen never accepted her guilt and fought tirelessly to clear her. At one point the couple's third son, now eight, was taken into care.

Mrs Clark died in the home at Hatfield Peverel, near Chelmsford, Essex,which her husband bought while she was in a local jail. Her family said they did not know what caused her death but added: 'She never fully recovered from the effects of this appalling miscarriage of justice. 'Sally, a qualified solicitor, was a loving and talented wife, mother, daughter and friend. She will be greatly missed by all who knew her.' Family friend Penny Mellor said: 'It is the most appalling tragedy heaped on other tragedies.’ (Daily Mail, 17 March 2007)

Clearly Sally Clark had an above-average IQ and would have been perceived as privileged, successful and middle-class, which made her a suitable target for hostility.

The principle of ‘innocent until proved guilty’ has been abandoned in modern society. Now you are likely to be considered guilty until proved innocent, or until judged to be innocent by a jury which will consider you thus only if there is what they believe to be convincing evidence for some alternative explanation of the ‘crime’. What is regarded as 'convincing' includes the opinions of doctors, that is, people appointed by society to have the power to make decisions on behalf of other people about things which concern them. Sally Clark was eventually acquitted, so it is possible to say she was innocent, but how many more are convicted and imprisoned on equally unsatisfactory grounds?

A civilised society might be defined as one in which the individual has a clearly defined territory within which he is free to evaluate his priorities for himself, and be free from interference so long as he does not break clearly defined laws of interaction with other individuals and their territories. We are not living in a civilised society. It is now possible for people living in perfectly respectable ways to find that they have quite inadvertently, as a result of some accident, come under suspicion of criminal acts and may be convicted.

Melanie Phillips on the UCU boycott

Anyone not yet convinced that Britain has somehow turned against its own most fundamental values, not to say departed altogether from reality, should look at the decision by the University and College Union (UCU) to urge a boycott of academic institutions in Israel.

This deplorable move destroys the most sacred role of a university - to act as the guardian of free speech and inquiry in order that knowledge, opinion and truth can flourish and grow. (From ‘A deplorable decision which shows that Britain’s academic elite has taken leave of its senses’ by Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, 4 June 2007.)

It is ridiculous to think of a university as having a ‘sacred role’. It is as ridiculous as saying that a doctor becomes a trustworthy person because she is given immoral power over other people by the oppressive socialist society in which we live.

Academics get into their positions by being appointed by other academics, and their prime motivation is to reinforce and promote the modern ideology, which includes the dogmatic belief that academics are experts and authorities on what is true, and on the right way of thinking, and that a person holding an academic appointment is qualitatively different from, and better than, someone who does not. Individuals who might express points of view which do not support or appear immediately to reinforce the modern belief system are viciously and slanderously opposed and suppressed.

Some early photos

In a recent post commenting on India Knight's false dichotomy between "intellectual stimulation" and "social life" I mentioned that I have photographs of myself "playing with children at the seaside who may have been twice my age and were certainly twice my size."

Here they are.



I am on the left in the one above.



Here I am on the right. The twin brother of the boy on the left is in the background.

Modern ideology and A Little Princess

The system of interpretations and evaluations that forms the modern anti-individualistic ideology is now apparently universally understood and applied, so it may be difficult to realise that it is a quite recent development.

I was shocked by it when I first started to encounter it at 13 or 14. There was really no hint of it in what I had read up to that time. ‘Socialist’ writers such as H G Wells and Bernard Shaw took a pretty detached view of the goings-on of human society and suggestions that it might be nice if all people lived in larger, cleaner houses, or lived in a cleaner, healthier and more aesthetic way, did not draw attention to the erosion of liberty that would be necessary even to attempt to bring this about.

My ideas of human society were based primarily on books written in Victorian or Edwardian times, with a bit of influence from such things as cynical Aesop’s Fables. I always took note of ideas about motivation and reflected upon them.

Consider, for example, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The message of this book, to me at any rate, was that no one will do anything for anyone unless they are paid with money for doing so. In the story, Sara is left by her father at a select boarding-school. She is a parlour boarder and treated as a show pupil by the headmistress, who nevertheless resents her cleverness and self-possession, until her father dies and she is left penniless. Then she is made to sleep in an attic, where a scullery-maid also sleeps, and to work for her keep as a drudge and errand runner in all weathers, and assistant teacher of elementary French.

It is only if you have a parent who will pay for things for you that you have them, and what you have will be in accordance with how much the parent has to spend. Otherwise you will be reduced to the state of the servant girls and beggars in the streets.

Of course, people other than parents may give other people things; when Sara was well off she used to buy items of food for one of the scullery maids, and when she is poor she gives some buns to a starving beggar girl. This attracts the attention of the lady who runs the bun-shop, and she (the lady) takes in the beggar girl and feeds and clothes her from then on — in effect, adopts her, but without having to account for what she is doing to any agents of the collective.

In those days there was no compulsory education and adoption was a matter for individuals to undertake if they chose with no need to seek permission.

That was the way the world was; the way people treated you depended entirely on whether you could pay for what you wanted, or needed.

Eventually Sara is found and rescued by a wealthy friend of her father’s, who has been looking for her. While he is looking for her he is made aware of how many children are living in poverty. He is sorry for them, and harrowed to think that Sara may be in a similar state, but his friend tells him that his resources are limited. He could not provide for all the destitute children, but must concentrate on finding and helping Sara, whose father was his friend.

In the world as depicted in the books that I read there was no disapproval of ambition. The respectable bourgeois worked hard and rose in the world if he could; his children lived in well-built houses with a few servants and might have Mary Poppins as a nanny.

My father had been a very poor boy, and the great efforts he had made to rise in the world had not got him very far; he was headmaster of a primary school at the London docks. My parents were respectable but still very far from rich. Nevertheless, their efforts had resulted in their being able to give their child a better start in life than they had had themselves; they had delayed having me until they had saved enough money to be sure that they would be able to pay for a professional training for me.

When I came top of the grammar school scholarship exam at the age of ten, very soon after the 1945 Labour landslide election, egalitarian ideas were bubbling invisibly below the surface, but nothing I had read had prepared me for the idea that I should not want to take exams as fast and as hard as possible, and that I should be prevented from doing so because not everyone could. To take more exams than other people and at an earlier age was apparently viewed as reprehensible; it was an attempt to score off other people. Having social interactions with other people should be one’s sole aim in life. One should not want to do scientific research just because it was what one wanted to do and what would enable one to feel most alive. One should, apparently, only want to spend one’s life doing good to other people, in some shape or form, and interacting with them socially.

These ideas may not seem strange or surprising to a modern reader, but it was the first time I had encountered them and I found that they were being used to obstruct and hinder me.

By the time I was 13 my worldview was essentially formed; none of the books I had read had depicted, or appeared to advocate, an egalitarian society in the modern sense. Practically all societies of the past, as described, had contained some large households which provided a hotel environment for those living in them (sometimes even called ‘hotels’, at least in France and Italy), and it had never been regarded as reprehensible to attempt to rise in the world by any activities regarded as legal.

In retrospect, as a recipient of a grammar school scholarship, I was in the position of Sara in A Little Princess. With my fees not being paid by my father but by the state, I was exposed to the tender mercies of the local education authority and community generally, as Sara was exposed to those of Miss Minchin — who could no longer be bothered to provide her with a formal education, but allowed her to read the schoolbooks in the empty schoolroom when she had run her errands for the day. And she did this, not because she felt any concern for Sara’s need to rise in the world to a position that might suit her, but so that Sara might become useful to Miss Minchin as an inexpensive teacher when she was a few years older.

Similarly, my tormentors did not mind how seriously they blocked my attempts to establish my claim on the sort of university career I needed to have; my acquisition of skills and qualifications was reduced to a snail’s pace, but I was allowed to proceed with heavily handicapped supervised ‘courses’ which might eventually lead to my being useful, not to myself, but to society, in a lowly capacity as a teacher of maths.

Then I was thrown out into a society where all my efforts to recover from a bad position and regain an academic career of a suitable kind were blocked by the continued advance of the modern ideology, according to which, as I found, it is criminal to go on trying to get a career that society has shown it does not want one to have.

Bright student found dead

Edward Field, 20, was missing for ten days before police found his body. His family and friends had searched for the chemistry student at Bristol University and used Internet networking sites to try to find him.
...

Mr Field, whose family live in New Malden, Surrey, is understood to have been worried about his end of term exams, although a spokesman for Bristol University described him as ‘exceptionally’ clever.

Last night a close friend said: ‘Ed was a really bright boy with everything to live for. ‘Exam stress may have played a part in what happened but there are a lot of different pressures in student life and it is impossible to know.’ (from ‘Student worried over exams found hanged in woods’, Daily Mail, 29 May 2007)

Being ‘exceptionally clever’ is certainly no reason why an undergraduate should not be stressed about a university exam. He may have needed to do exceptionally well in order to proceed to the sort of exceptional and rarely obtainable career which he needed to have.

Those who are not exceptionally clever are much more likely to feel that, whatever their exam results, they will be able to get by in whatever sort of life is available to them in modern society.

It has been recognised by authorities other than me that the correlation of academic success with IQ breaks down at the highest levels of IQ. It is also recognised (but as far as I know only by me and other people here) that those with the highest IQs may have the greatest need for careers that can only be obtained by the highest academic success (and not necessarily even then).

It is also recognised (by me) that high IQ arouses hostility and it is easy for teachers and tutors to use their hostility in ways that are very effective in damaging a person’s prospects.

Why was this undergraduate, if really exceptional, at Bristol instead of Oxford or Cambridge, and taking his degree at so late an age? This suggests that his life may already have gone seriously wrong in the same way that mine did, although it is unlikely that he was so extreme a case.

He had been at Bedales public school, and we know that people from public schools are discriminated against. Perhaps that was why he was not at Oxford or Cambridge. And perhaps his tutors wanted to make him feel “challenged” (or, rather, undermined).

The fact that a “close friend” finds it “impossible to know” what he was stressed about is not particularly enlightening either way. My closest “friends” at Somerville had no insight whatever into my position when I was thrown out with a second-class degree. After that had happened their remarks were extremely misleading, if not positively slanderous.

The effects of a collectivist society

Adler said, what a person is motivated to do is shown best by the effects he actually brings about in his life, not by what he says he is aiming at. This may not apply too well to an individual with little control over his own circumstances, but applies a lot better to collectivist societies with massive resources derived from large numbers of individuals by taxation.

Two items in yesterday’s news show the onward march of the hidden agenda of modern society, to penalise and reduce the numbers of the formerly respectable and law-abiding population by favouring and enlarging the criminal population with, on average, lower IQs.

Extract 1

Up to 3,000 foreign criminals will be released from prison on to Britain's streets without any attempt to deport them, Government papers have revealed. A note sent to probation staff says as few as 250 convicts from European countries will face even preliminary deportation proceedings every year. It pins the blame on an EU directive which rules that committing a serious crime is no longer sufficient grounds for removal. … As a result, the vast bulk of the estimated 3,300 European criminals released from British jails each year - including burglars, thieves and muggers - will simply walk free.

The note to probation staff revealed that just "approximately 250-300" offenders will face even an attempt at removal - which could of course be unsuccessful. ... It emerged that Ministers are floundering on a second promise relating to foreign convicts - to send home foreign nationals imprisoned in Britain. Jails are at bursting point - with a record 80,812 inmates on Friday - so Labour is desperately trying to secure agreements to send 11,000 convicts back home to serve their sentences. But it is expected to take years for any significant number to be removed. (Daily Mail 28 May 2007)

Extract 2

Wrongly jailed after a woman cried rape, Warren Blackwell applied for compensation for his three wasted years in prison. Torn from his family and sent to languish in jail as a convicted sex attacker, the innocent father-of-two imagined he was due a hefty sum for the miscarriage of justice. Instead, he was flabbergasted to learn the Home Office now intends to charge him nearly £7,000 for "board and lodging". The money is for the cost of food and accommodation while he was behind bars, and will be deducted from whatever compensation he receives for wrong imprisonment.

Mr Blackwell, 37, said: “They accept they put me in prison wrongly and accept I’m due compensation. Then they say, ‘Thank you for your stay with us, hope you didn't miss your family too much during three years in the clanger, now off you go - oh, and here's your bill.’”

"I was jailed not just for a crime I didn't do, but for one that never even happened in the first place. She made the whole thing up, as was accepted by the High Court." Mr Blackwell's ordeal began when his accuser, now 39, claimed she had been seized with a knife outside a village club early on New Year's Day 1999, taken to an alley and indecently assaulted. She picked him out of an identity parade and a jury found him guilty, even though there was no forensic evidence and he had no previous convictions. ...

Eventually, the case was investigated by the Criminal Cases Review Commission which found his accuser had fabricated at least seven other allegations of sexual and physical assault. She frequently changed her name and police forces did not realise they were dealing with the same woman. (Daily Mail 28 May 2007)

In this case, as in many others, it is now possible to label the victim as innocent because a review board had declared him to be so, since some new evidence has come to light which affects the probabilistic weighting which they give to something being true. But suppose the woman in question had not had previous convictions for dishonesty, or this had not come to light, but she had nevertheless made her accusations against Mr Blackwell? This shows how easy it is for people to be convicted on probabilistic judgements based on purely circumstantial or unsupported evidence.

It is doubtful whether judges or juries take seriously the old-fashioned principle that a person is to be regarded as innocent until he is proved guilty. There appears to be more of an idea these days that a person is to be considered guilty unless and until a socially acceptable alternative explanation can be proposed.

"Making state schools fit for all children"

In the Mail on Sunday (27 May) David Cameron says he will ‘make state schools fit for all children – including mine.’

State schools can never be made fit for any children because it is fundamentally immoral to deprive an individual of the liberty to make his own evaluations of the uncertain existential situation and deploy his own resources to react to it in what seems to him the best way. (Basic Moral Principle.)

Now it is true that state education may appear to be very bad even to a person who takes into account only a few of the crudest principles. But even if on these very crude criteria (literacy, juvenile crime) it appeared to be ‘good’ it would still be morally wrong, and would be having bad consequences which were less quantifiable. Even if it could be ‘proved’ that it had no bad consequences of any kind it would remain morally wrong.

In fact, it is only on superficial and rationalised grounds that it is admitted to be ‘bad’. Actually it is doing precisely what it is really aimed at, making life as difficult as possible for the functional and formerly respectable high IQ individuals.

What could be more appropriate than that such an individual should be forced to pursue the aims of his highly-taxed life among an unemployable and criminal population?

‘We need ... schools ... that deliver the goal of a truly socially mobile society’ says Cameron. And what does that mean? Rapid descent for the high IQs, I suppose. But it has already happened quite a lot, and is still happening fast enough. There is really no need for any further acceleration.

More on the belief in society

copy of a letter

Further to yesterday’s comments about giving up on the belief in society, I should, as usual, insist on the importance of the hypothetical. People have a resistance to accepting the possibility that everyone may be against them, or that their lives may be irrevocably ruined, but it is not a matter of believing that those things are the case, it is only necessary to accept that these thing are possibilities and to stop distorting one’s mind in a decentralised way to avoid noticing the indications that they may, realistically, be the case.

In practice, however, I have certainly found that accepting these things (without giving up) has aroused hostility and opposition.

I had not realised that trying to recover from a bad position, once one has been thrown out by society, makes one a criminal. If you go on trying to do what society has decreed you are to be outcast from, this not only arouses no sympathy (except from the few very exceptional people who are here now) but actually arouses opposition, either covert or overt as vitriolic abuse.

As you know, I was quite identified from an early age with being a respectable and successful middleclass person and I saw no difficulty at all in living within the law and with a fair amount of respect for other people’s territories, physical and psychological. But I found this was not enough to prevent myself from being perceived as a criminal.

And, by the way, perhaps I should repeat that although when I regained my centralisation at the age of 19 I cried for three days for the loss of my destiny, I was not actually giving up and did not actually lose it (as everyone around me would have liked to believe at the time). But, of course, I was not any longer in the market for explaining myself to other people.

Giving up on the belief in society

copy of a letter

Although giving up on the belief in society is very traumatic, it is difficult to see what one is giving up on. One is breaking a taboo which puts one beyond the pale; one can never again feel any sense of supportive solidarity with the human race. They can all be against one; one cannot prevent this if they want to be; they are not under one’s control. One must be identified only with what is under one’s control, and that is very little.

One loses the possibility of glamour; glamour comes from social glorification, and you are stripping society of its power to glorify you. This seems, at the time, like a terrible loss. If you (say) get a Nobel Prize, it will not reinforce your sense of significance. But, you decide, you must give up on the glamour that you wanted to get from it, so that you will not be incapacitated from doing the work that may get you one, if ever you can get into a position to do such work.

And you accept that you have lost your destiny; you will spend your life asserting the significance of what should have been in loss and mourning; but you will never give up. You know that everyone would disapprove of this; ‘move on’, they would say, ‘give up’.

You must accept the discontinuity in your life in order to go on pursuing the same things as before, and mourning for their loss. More usually, people wish to retain an idea that they are still in the same life (I wished it myself); that it is continuous with their previous life, just modified.

Maybe they will get less of what they wanted out of society and in a different form, but they don’t want to think they have given up on it. This means that they will need to keep their minds distorted and decentralised.

It is (paradoxically) only by giving up that you are enabled not to give up, and pretending not to have given up means that you have really lost the essential thing.

You said how was it that, at the SPR, I could feel like a convicted criminal wearing broad arrows and be clearly aware of the implications of all their jibes and taunts, and yet really feel as much a Professor as ever, although not socially recognised as such, and regard those who taunted me, and those whose machinations had placed me in this position, as the real criminals, and as having acted badly by the standards which academics ought to have.

I think the positive part comes out of the centralisation; you don’t decide in advance that this is the position you are going to adopt. Any significantly centralising manoeuvre is, I think, experienced as negative, as loss and dangerous. You don’t know what may come of it, you may never be able to be motivated to try to get anything again. But in practice, if the effect is really centralising, positive and unforeseeable results ensue, and you find that you are confident and sure of yourself in a way that you never were before, even when your life seemed to be most successful and socially rewarded.

As for the risk of losing motivation, I found that I still had very strong motivation to get social recognition as a Professor as soon as possible, and a Nobel Prize. I also had very strong motivation to work on an adequate scale in any area where I had started to see what could be done and confidence that there would be significant progress which I would be able to make in the light of the perceptions which I already had in those areas.

This did not, of course, give me any motivation to fiddle around in those areas inconclusively or ‘theorise’ about them vaguely, as other people did. But there was a very strong drive to get into a position where I could work on them on an adequate scale. Such drives, if they could not be implemented, did not go away. But they would be less tormenting if I could be intellectually active and functional on an adequate scale in any area of work which had some realistic content, and which could be done in a way that was contributing either to my career advancement towards a Professorship or to my build-up of capital.

Superior performance is "due to practice"

It is important, in fact central, to the modern ideology to believe that the individual is infinitely malleable by society. Perhaps this is because the driving force of modern society is its desire to destroy all individuals who are in any way perceived as ‘superior’.

It follows that ‘education’ in the modern world must be antagonistic to able individuals. As I have pointed out before, if you wish to ‘refute the supposition that top achievers possess extraordinary talent or aptitudes that allow them to outpace their less fortunate counterparts’, as the website of Florida State University puts it, then if a person appears likely to provide evidence to the contrary, they must be deprived of opportunity — as I was throughout my ‘education’, continued to be afterwards on account of lack of paper qualifications and any way of earning money, and still am being. My life was ruined at an early stage of the development of the Welfare State, but the ideology was already then clearly present and quite highly developed.

Whenever I was being prevented from doing something that I wanted and badly needed to do, it would be made to depend on my asserting something about my having some specific level of ability, usually ‘being a genius’ (genius undefined) or being ‘better than everybody else in some category of persons’. Opinions of this sort had not entered at all into my considerations about the desirability of doing whatever it was, but it was an effective way of blocking any further presentation of my reasons for wanting to do it — not that any such presentation would have had the slightest hope of success. Thus, to quote the headmistress of the deplorable Woodford High School, which I had wanted to leave at the end of the first day, and not expected to be opposed by my parents in doing so, ‘It would not be fair to treat her as a genius before she has proved that she is one.’

Now, of course, the wish to assert that there is no such thing as exceptional ability is much more explicitly expressed, although it has been influencing everyone in the educational and university systems for over 60 years. Consider the great enthusiasm which is expressed for the views of the well-paid and statusful Professor K Anders Ericsson. (Article here, found via Stumbling & Mumbling blog; my comments in square brackets; italics mine.)

Widely acclaimed as the torchbearer in the Expert Performance Movement, Ericsson's ascent to superlative status is buoyed by his contrarian [?] view. His research refutes the conventional wisdom and everyday supposition [not any longer, surely] that the top achievers among us possess extraordinary talent or aptitudes that allow them to outpace their less fortunate counterparts. Ericsson's work tells the world that, in fact, there is no mysterious genetic hard-wiring for greatness, no intrinsic tendency for talent and no natural high-performance endowments. ...

With the November 2006 release of "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," Ericsson led a team of researchers that produced this first-ever collection of academically reviewed studies of expertise and expert performance. The seminal [?] work received enthusiastic reviews and critical accolades in the academic and mass media alike.

Ericsson’s work purports to prove that there is no such thing as innate ability, and the enthusiasm with which it is greeted demonstrates how fundamental to the modern ideology (the new religion of collectivism) is the destruction of the concept of the individual.

Actually his work does not, and could not, prove any such thing. He has paid a good deal of attention to activities involving motor skills, such as sports and the playing of musical instruments. It certainly does not seem likely that a person will excel at such things without a lot of practice, but that does not prove that anyone could reach the same level. I am, I imagine, below the average in ability to play games, and although I can slowly improve by practice (at playing squash, for example) to something approaching a normal level of performance, I would never expect to be able to perform well. There is some component of aptitude that I do not have, although my mother did. She was a natural athlete, captain of most games at school. She had medals for swimming and, until I was born, played hockey for the county. My father, on the other hand, was unsuited to games. My mother said that people laughed at him when he ran.

In games-playing aptitude I would seem to have inherited more of my father’s genetic endowment than my mother’s.

Even if Professor Ericsson has included leading ‘intellectuals’ or ‘academics’ among his experts, that is a population consisting of those who, like himself, have found it possible to rise to socially-recognised prestigious positions in modern society.

Demonstrating that a good deal of practice and conscientiousness has contributed to their position as recognised experts does not, and cannot, rule out the possibility that other, less quantifiable, factors may be present. (One factor that is very likely to be present, as in Ericsson’s own case, is an ability to tolerate the modern ideology and to bring one’s own thinking in every area into line with it. A predisposition to do this might have genetic determinants.)

No, according to Ericsson, there was no special genetic aptitude present in the case of Mozart. He just put in a lot of practice at an early age.

The type of logic being invoked is rather like the lines of argument unfortunately adopted in many modern court cases. Did someone kill his/her babies/parents? He/she can only claim innocence if medical or psychological ‘experts’ are prepared to agree that there is a more plausible culprit in the form of a recognised medical condition or an alternative murderer with the right sort of personality and motivation. Provided there is a good alternative story (or one considered ‘good’ by socially approved experts) the person may be declared innocent.

Similarly, we can produce an alternative explanation of outstanding achievement in terms of practice. Maybe practice alone is enough to account for it. It is certainly not possible to prove that any other factor is present, and so (thus the modern mind works), since this is the most socially acceptable story, we are justified in asserting that there is no other factor in the situation. To quote Ericsson, ‘With the exception of the influence of height and size in some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body has been shown to constrain an individual from reaching an expert level’.

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, completed his Ph.D. in psychology from University of Stockholm in 1976, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Carnegie-Mellon University. After a 12-year tenure at University of Colorado at Boulder, which included a two-year stint at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin, Ericsson joined the FSU psychology faculty in 1992 as the distinguished Conradi Scholar, the first endowed chair in the College of Arts & Sciences.

"Dr. Ericsson was critical to launching a doctoral degree program in cognitive psychology," says Janet Kistner, FSU department chair, clinical psychology. "His presence enabled us to recruit some outstanding cognitive psychologists to join our faculty, as they were eager to have opportunities to interact with Ericsson and happy to be part of a developing program in expertise."

Lucky Professor Ericsson. How I envy him his status, salary, and expanding opportunities. Just what I need myself, continue to suffer from the lack of, and could make good use of, but have not yet been able to get.

You see the great enthusiasm for endowing academic institutes in which well-paid and socially statusful people can energetically produce work which is of little informational value in itself, but which may appear to an uncritical mind to support the modern drive to destroy individuality.

If the funding being devoted to the development of Dr Ericsson’s programme in expertise were to be deflected to my incipient independent university, which is being kept as inconspicuous and unproductive as possible by financial deprivation, some really progressive research might be done and at the least a few books expressing suppressed points of view could be published.

Functionality, confidence and research

I think that functionality, and what appears as confidence, arise paradoxically from giving up any attempt to have an opinion about it, or to relate to one’s social image. Although, as usual, I have to emphasise that I do not accept, and am in no way reconciled to, the unrealistic and degraded image which society has forced upon me.

To be functional in a given situation depends on what occurs to one; confronted by any field of research I would, as I did when I made contact with psychical research (immediately after being thrown out of Oxford University with a second-class degree) be as openminded as possible in looking at all the data that presented themselves, and allow relationships between them to occur to one’s mind. Gradually, in fact probably quite soon, I would expect to see what appeared to be the best lines to pursue in advancing understanding of the phenomena and relating them to other fields of science.

This happened when I considered the phenomena of psychical research, and I am sure that it would happen again if I had any opportunity to develop any of the areas of research which I began to delineate, or if I were able to work in any other field of research.

An extensive knowledge of what had been done beforehand in the field of psychical research was irrelevant because everyone else’s mind had evidently worked so differently. (This applies also in other fields which present any threat to the modern ideology, such as theoretical physics, philosophy and psychology.)

I had not been at the SPR many months before I had concluded that out-of-the-body experiences would provide an area of research which could lead to revolutionary insights, and would be the best way of starting to develop the field of psychical research, if one were able to work on it on an adequate scale. There were written accounts of people having such experiences, and there were people coming to the office, both as occasional visitors and as permanent personnel, who described having similar experiences, some of them habitually. The experiences often had characteristics in common.

And yet out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) were regarded as the dubious imaginings of people who had spiritualistic belief systems. Any number of academic and supposedly scientifically-minded people would have been able to make the same observations as I did of the occurrence and potential availability for study of such phenomena in the population, but (to the extent that they were ostensibly interested in advancing knowledge of reality at all) their attention had always been elsewhere.

There was much resistance to my appealing to the public at large for actual cases of OBEs, even among our “supporters”. To do this was, apparently, to expose the subject of parapsychology (and, of course, oneself) to charges of unscientific credulity and spiritualistic belief. There is a strange kind of logic here, which I have found even among the most intelligent intellectuals (e.g. philosophy professors). The logic goes something like this, I believe — although it is never actually stated. "It is okay to obtain information about hallucinatory experiences such as OBEs provided the only purpose is to demonstrate that they are not, in fact, supportive of any spiritual or other non-reductionist beliefs. It is not okay to obtain information about them in their own right, however, since that is providing implicit support for spiritualist beliefs." Yes, there is a fundamental inconsistency here, but even philosophy professors seem not to notice it.

Actually, there are plenty of inconsistencies that are not noticed by philosophy professors, and to which the philosophy department of my independent university could be drawing attention, if not kept harmless and inactive by financial deprivation.

Cameron: "we are all to blame"

How do you reduce crime in a socialist society? David Cameron, supposedly a ‘conservative’, has said:

... the police could not be blamed for rising crime. Nor, he added, was it up to officers to mend the ‘broken society’ responsible for increasing lawlessness. ‘We broke our society — all of us, as parents, as citizens, as members of society — and we have a shared responsibility, with Government, for fixing it.’ (Daily Mail 18 May 2007)

No, it was not the individuals who have broken modern society. It was the rise and rise of legislation influenced by socialist ideas. Especially, and crucially, society was broken by the inception of the Welfare State in 1945.

Those responsible for this were middle-class intellectuals who should have known better, such as those who held office in the Attlee government, or supported it, and who planned to use their supposed concern for the numerically large working class in order to destroy territorial individualism.

Extracts from article ‘Dual Britannia’ by David Kynaston (Financial Times Arts & Books 18 May 2007), my comments in square brackets:

“Oh wonderful people of Britain!” exalted Iris Murdoch. ”After all the ballyhoo and eyewash, they’ve had the guts to vote against Winston! I can’t help feeling that to be young is very heaven!” Another Oxford philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, danced a jig at hearing the news that Labour had won the July 1945 election by a landslide, while a precocious public schoolboy in Sussex, the 16-year-old Bernard Levin, was so ecstatic that he hung a red flag out of his window and braved the consequences ...

Put baldly, there existed in 1945, at the apparent birth of a new world, a dichotomy between the expectations of most progressive-minded politicians, planners, public intellectuals and opinion-formers — call them ”activators” — on the one hand and those of the great mass of ”ordinary people” (still some 75 per cent working class) on the other. ... For all the Attlee government’s notable achievements [i.e. for all the appalling and irreversible onslaughts on individual liberty] — above all the creation of the NHS and the modern welfare state — this mismatch was soon apparent. ...

There were many reasons why Old Labour failed to enthuse the electorate, but four areas were particularly telling. [E.g. divergence between the social conservatism of the working class and the progressivism of the "activators".] ... the millions were no more enlightened when it came to education. "The Party are kidding themselves if they think that the comprehensive school has any popular appeal," was how the shrewd, Lancastrian, working-class Minister of Education George Tomlinson put it in early 1951; but by later that year the abolition of the divide between grammars and secondary moderns was official Labour policy, following intensive pressure from the largely middle-class National Association of Labour Teachers. Towards the end of the decade an authoritative survey (by Mark Abrams) of working-class attitudes to education found widespread admiration for grammar schools and almost equally pervasive suspicion of the goals of comprehensive schooling, especially the egalitarian aspect. Yet not all that long after, in 1965, Anthony Crosland (Highgate and Oxford) famously, or infamously, set out to destroy "every fucking grammar school" in England and Wales ...

The working class, like the non-leftwing middle class, were at the time (the 1940s and 50s) largely uninterested in collectivism, planning and intervention. They wanted to identify with their own territories, families, small houses with gardens, and pay packets. The ‘privileged’ middle classes had, on the whole, larger territories and a different range of activities, which included intellectual and cultural activities. In destroying their lives, the ‘activators’ (as Kynaston calls them) severely damaged territorialism and individual liberty throughout the population, leading to the current breakdown of civilisation.

Civilisation, in any of the ways in which I would define it, has already broken down, although this may well continue to become more obvious to the naked eye of even the politically correct observer.

A civilised society may be defined as one in which an individual has a clearly defined territory within which he is free to operate. In a non-territorial, tribal society he must constantly refer to the subjective preferences and pressures of the communal group.

In modern society it has become difficult to be sure of whether one is acting within one’s rights or not, and any form of behavior can be turned into an imprisonable crime if it is made the subject of an ASBO. E.g. ‘You are not allowed to look as if you might be intending to visit your family in such-and-such streets within such-and-such times of day.’

Unfortunately, the word ‘civilised’ is nowadays used to refer to ideals which cannot be achieved, or even aimed at, without unlimited confiscation and reduction of liberty. E.g. ‘In a civilised society no child of school-age should have to spend hours every day attending to the needs of a physically disabled parent.’ This is a goal which recedes into infinite distance as increasing numbers of the genetically dysfunctional are kept alive to reproductive age by the NHS, and as everyone is ideologically indoctrinated by their state-financed ‘education’ with a total aversion to doing anything ‘menial’ (or really useful) for anybody else.

Despairing of society as a source of significance

Once I despaired of society or other people as a source of significance. And once I despaired of all that could be possibly be got out of finite existence. Both times it took very great emotional violence to break the resistance, but the first was the more fundamental, in that it gave me the sort of centralisation that can lead to a higher level, although of course I did not know it at the time.

It is very difficult to write about, because it was essentially a manoeuvre to make it possible not to give up. I knew that it would make me an outsider and I had not expected to have to be that. I was a perfectly respectable middleclass person and until my life was made to go wrong I had been treated as a member of the club by respectable middleclass teachers etc. But now my wish to get back into the same position was being used against me as a decentralising factor.

I could only escape the trap by becoming independent of anyone else’s opinion. I would not stop behaving like a respectable bourgeois and successful academic person, nor would I stop feeling as if I were one, but I would not be a member of the club. Nor did I think that the club, as it was in practice, should be able to exclude me. I retained an image of the way society should be, to which the way it was in practice was irrelevant.

However, I would not ‘belong’ any more. I would be a criminal and outlaw because I was breaking the taboo which decrees that respectable persons do not think of themselves as better than society tells them they are. Of course it was a long time since I had been treated as if I ‘belonged’ anyway. They had set up impossible arrangements, ignoring my protests and complaints, and said that their judgement about me was fixed until further notice. If, and only if, I could succeed on the terms they prescribed after traversing the obstacle course, would they consider accepting me as a person who was good at doing the sort of things that, in the right circumstances, I was superlatively good at doing.

Lessons in magic for gifted pupils

Extract from Daily Mail article:

The brightest 700,000 children in the country will be encouraged to apply for extra holiday lessons at their local university ... Academic high-fliers will be invited to study subjects as diverse as maths, creative writing and magic.

The £3.6 million scheme is part of a Government effort to counter concerns that bright pupils are not being challenged by the state sector. (Daily Mail, 12 May 2007.)

Compulsory education is fundamentally immoral and oppressive.

State education is immoral, oppressive, and a contradiction in terms because the majority of people desire the oppression of the individual.

A 3.6 million pound scheme is proposed so that children designated as ‘gifted and talented’ can be offered demoralising time wasting at summer courses at universities. But never mind how harmful this rubbish is to them. The real point is that it will lead to more money (freedom) being confiscated from taxpayers, including individuals such as myself whose supervised ‘education’ ruined their lives. My drives and needs to acquire usable qualifications were opposed and frustrated so that I was thrown out at the end with no way of making a career or even of ‘earning’ money, nor with any eligibility for social security. I could not say that I was ‘seeking work’ since I had no qualification for anything which I could realistically have done. So I was completely alienated from the oppressive society in which we live.

Those who have been left socially disabled by their ‘education’ should at least be exempt from taxation, and in practice I have paid plenty of it in my struggles to work my way out of the pit into which I was thrown fifty years ago.

I am reminded of John Stuart Mill’s father who did not want his son to go to school (even a private one) so that he would not acquire habits of idleness. Similarly, a realistic parent might not wish their child to go to summer school where they would become (even more) demoralised and acquire habits of purposelessness and woolgathering. But, of course, the main raison d’etre of such goings on is not so much to do harm to the children concerned as to squeeze the taxpayer still further, however disadvantaged he may already be by the harm that was done to his life by his own ‘education’.

Grammars don’t help the poor, claim Tories

Extracts from a Daily Mail article:

The Conservatives distanced themselves further from grammar schools last night, claiming they do not help bright children from poor backgrounds. David Willetts risked infuriating traditionalists on the Tory Right by saying selection in schools widens the gap between rich and poor. ...

Last night Mr Willetts, the Tories' education spokesman, reinforced the message by claiming that a return to grammar schools would widen the gap between rich and poor. He rejected the long-held Tory view that academic selection is the best way to raise standards in schools and vowed the Tories would do more to develop Tony Blair's city academy programme than Gordon Brown.

Mr Willetts told the Confederation of British Industry yesterday: "We must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright poor kids. "We have to recognise overwhelming evidence that such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it. A Conservative agenda for education will not be about just helping a minority of pupils escape a bad education." ...

Left-wing Labour MPs and teachers' unions have urged Mr Brown to dump city academies, which are built with private sponsorship. ... However, Mr Willetts promised to open more if the Tories returned to power. He said Mr Blair's academy model of privately-sponsored independent state schools was "a powerful route to higher standards"... In exchange for up to £2million in sponsorship, private backers from business or faith groups can set up an academy ... The Government pays school running costs and the rest of the expense of opening new buildings — typically about £25 million. (Daily Mail, 16 May 2007)

A return to grammar schools would widen the gap between rich and poor? But doesn’t he really mean the gap between above-average and below-average IQs? Grammar schools would fail to inhibit the academic success of those with above-average IQs so effectively as do the present comprehensives, which are better at preventing the difference between high and low IQs showing up in academic achievement.

‘Such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it.’
I.e. it does not spread it very, very thin like melted butter applied with a palette knife, so that it is no good to anybody.

The Conservative agenda will not, it is said, ‘be about helping just a minority of pupils escape a bad education’. Well, yes, those with high IQs are in a minority, quite a small minority. Fifty years ago, those classified as ‘gifted’, approximately corresponding to potential university graduates, constituted about 3% of the population. And we certainly must not allow the tiny minority with the highest IQs of all, over 150 or 160, say, to escape a bad education. They should have as bad an education as anybody else, in fact they will need to be discriminated against, to ensure (as nearly as possible) equality of outcome.

Not that I advocate grammar schools. I first became aware of the modern hostility to ability at the age of 14, when I was sent to a state grammar school and forced to remain there for a year against my will. What I advocate is, first of all, the abolition of state education altogether, and then of compulsory education.

And I advocate also that instead of encouraging private backers from business or faith groups to apply the resources which they have available for charitable giving to setting up city academies, they should devote them to helping those who have been ruined by their ‘education’ to recover from the damage done to their lives by making donations to my organisation, an incipient independent university supported by a cooperative entrepreneurial empire. [Still kept so small and insignificant by hostility that it can be misrepresented as a group of individuals who are so enthusiastic for particular preoccupations that they have freely chosen to live in poverty and constriction in order to ‘follow their interests.’]

Sleuth

I just saw part of the film Sleuth, with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, and thought how it expresses a (the most?) fundamental motivation of human psychology.

People think they cannot do anything about their position as finite and mortal in relation to physical reality so, to find some way of asserting themselves, they turn to other people as a source of significance, especially as those others seem to be conscious beings like themselves.

So, having accepted that you can’t do anything about your own physical limitations, you can assert yourself best by having a real effect on the consciousness of someone else, and the most powerful way of doing this is by making him have experiences which he does not want to have.

So Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine mislead one another into experiences of fear and anxiety, in which they become decentralised; i.e. they stop referring to their own internal psychological criteria and distort themselves in any way that may placate other people and avert the threat of what other people may do to them.

The fact that this is associated with lying and deception satisfactorily places the person doing the decentralising in a position of superiority to both objective reality and to the decentralised person who is anguished by his uncertainty of the real state of affairs.

This is the fundamental strategy of the modern religion of collectivism.

We may note also the theme of class warfare; one is supposed to sympathise with the ‘ordinary’ Michael Caine as against the ‘superior’, snobbish and elitist Laurence Olivier, who complains of the damage done to the lives of people like him by the modern world.

Conclusion? The objective of modern society is to make everyone decentralised, especially those who formerly had some vestige of centralisation.

Purely for the money

Letter to a philosophy professor

Dear ...

From what I have told you by now about how I found myself at the Society for Psychical Research when I was thrown out into the wilderness, you may be able to see that no belief system entered into it. I went there purely for money, as I remember saying to an undergraduate two or three years later, when I had returned to Oxford to do my would-be D.Phil which turned into a B.Litt (on account of the hostility, actually, because it would have been quite easy to work out what would have constituted an acceptable D.Phil thesis — if anyone had wanted my thesis to be accepted).

The undergraduate to whom I was talking had asked why I had gone to the SPR, and I said, truthfully, ‘Only for money.’ Like many other people in the modern world, he prided himself on never doing anything that was not ‘interesting’ or pretentious, and he said, a bit shocked and contemptuous, ‘I hope I shall never do a job that I am only doing for money.’ Nevertheless, he also prided himself on the money which he expected soon to be paid for doing something pretentious, saying (when I lent him some money, which I never got back, to ease his financial problems) that his problems would soon be over, and in a year’s time he expected to have a four-figure bank balance (which would be the equivalent of a five or six-figure one nowadays).

However, money was my only motive when I went to the SPR, and as I came to know about them, I considered the potential fields of research which might be subsumed under the heading of psychical research in exactly the same way as any other potential field of scientific research. Provided it had any realistic content it would be as good as any other field of science for making a return to an academic career, social status and the circumstances of an adequate life.

It was, however, extremely underdeveloped and would require large scale work with several streams of information coming in from the work of at least one research department before I could hope to establish any intellectual structures that could lead to real progress.

This fitted quite well with the fact that I needed a full-scale academic institution anyway, large and complex enough to incorporate a residential college with full hotel facilities. The best Oxbridge colleges still have these facilities, although the benefit of them is reduced by their residents being more burdened than they used to be with administrative chores and the need to keep producing publishable ‘research’ which sounds as if it is based on, and takes seriously, other ‘research’ which has been published by socially appointed ‘academics’.

When I first went to the SPR I did at first find some motivation to support me on the part of a few people, so I planned to set up a research institute with the all-important associated residential (hotel) college.

However, the hostility that had gone into depriving me of opportunity throughout my supervised ‘education’ soon re-asserted itself. Thereafter I was slandered for decades as a person who was so extremely enthusiastic about this particular field of research that I had freely chosen to ‘do’ it — although I was doing it only in whatever sense it was possible to do anything at all, living in extreme poverty and social degradation.

Yours
Celia