Full of sound and fury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More about how to do research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology

How to do research

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

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

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

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

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

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

The risks of consulting a doctor

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

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

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

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

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

Further comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on maths and autism

Copy of a letter to an academic

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

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

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

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

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

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

A token of good faith

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

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

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

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

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

Copy of a letter to recent lottery winners

Dear Justine Laycock and Nigel Page,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope you may consider my suggestions.

Linking precocity to criminality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More about home education

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

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

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

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

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

* Daily Mail, 26 February 2010.

Home education: a scapegoat for abuse

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

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

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

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

*Daily Mail, 26 February 2010.

The murder/suicide of aristocracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* Sunday Times, 21 February 2010.

Care workers back death tax

Apparently, care workers support bringing in a death tax.

That is to say,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further on nonsense research

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tendentious pop psychology financed by taxpayers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it goes on in this way.

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

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

The bloodless revolution

Copy of a letter to a professor of philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Havelock Ellis on genius

The following is an extract from A Study of British Genius by the psychologist Havelock Ellis, published in 1904.

Every original worker in intellectual fields, every man who makes some new thing, is certain to arouse hostility where he does not meet with indifference [...] It is practically impossible to estimate the amount of persecution to which this group of pre-eminent British persons has been subjected, for it has shown itself in innumerable forms, and varies between a mere passive refusal to have anything whatever to do with them or their work and the active infliction of physical torture and death.*

I, throughout my life, have certainly encountered a great deal of hostility, which I suppose arose from the fact that I was perceived as someone who might do something innovative or unfashionable if I was allowed to do anything.

The hostility and obstruction that is aroused by people with high IQs and/or autonomous motivation not only ruined my education and subsequent life but has played a large part in the deterioration of Western civilisation.

SBG was revised in 1926 but has been largely ignored for at least the last fifty years, as has the particular approach which Ellis took to the topic of genius, a topic which itself has been fairly unfashionable for some time. Bringing Ellis’s work up to date is one of the ways in which we could be helping to keep suppressed points of view alive, particularly by relating it to modern prejudices in the areas in which it deals. We hereby appeal for funding to do so.

* Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, Hurst and Blackett, London 1904, pp. 221-223

Born in captivity

What people have against allowing child prodigies to be successful is that they might be able to get identified with their lives, to be functional in a way that they were getting something out of, and at the same time to get social approval and even applause or admiration for what they were allowed to be functional in doing. As I did, for a very short time. Those with exceptional ability could have quite a good chance of getting a form of centralisation which appears to be compatible with social approval. This is regarded as a terrible threat and is to be prevented at any cost, primarily by ensuring that they never get any money, which equates with opportunity.

People who appear to have more income than is necessary for the barest physical survival, without any servants, are heavily taxed so that resources can be applied to maximising the low-IQ population which has very little chance of ever getting to know its own psychological criteria in an approximately centralised way. This also maximises the population of those born in medical captivity with no chance at all of reaching an age at which they can decide anything for themselves, as they start their lives (and may very likely end them) in the horrifically decentralised position of captive victims of the medical Mafia, dependent on sadistic intervention and supervision to prolong their lives.

So the effect of modern socialist ideology has been to reduce as nearly as possible to zero the population of those with the best chance of living in a centralised way and hence getting something out of life of which other people would be jealous, while also vastly increasing the population of those born into slavery to spend their tormented lives gratifying the sadistic impulses of their torturers. It is difficult to think of anything more psychologically horrific than this. Certainly the lives of these victims of socialism are unlikely to provoke jealousy, although other people may claim that their lives have been enriched by the sweet and loving personalities of the sufferers.

In the psychiatrist's chair

Why are people hostile to us?

It appears that social approval is very important to people. When they see someone aiming to do something without social approval, even something perfectly legal and respectable, because he or she has not given up on what they originally wanted to do, it makes them angry. Why is this? Is it because it reminds them that at some time in their lives they gave up on something important to them, perhaps gave up their original ideals and aspirations, lowered their standards and became uncritical of socially approved goings-on, in order to go with the flow and take advantage of the reduced and rather mouldy pickings that were on offer?

Perhaps so, and perhaps it is so even when people have no conscious awareness of having done this.

We here are trying to build up an institutional environment in order eventually to fulfil the same functions as intellectual writers and researchers (in the sense of heads of research departments) as we should have been able to fulfil within the context of the recognised universities, but found ourselves blocked in working towards doing so.

When people see us doing this it evidently arouses no sympathy or inclination to help us move even a little faster towards our goals. Rather, it arouses anger and energetic opposition. Perhaps this is because it reminds them of the aims and aspirations that they have themselves given up. Probably they have a predominant underlying anger, resentment, and sense of loss; some very obviously so. If people are reminded of what they have given up, the anger is aroused, but it is directed against individuals who have not given up, and practically never against the society that has ruined their lives, or the agents of that society who made things difficult for them at crucial times in their lives.

“Consequently, there are no gods”

The reflections on genetics on my previous post may seem disreputable to the modern mind, as perhaps do many of my other reflections referring to genes. Genetic inheritance has been a highly politicised topic for some time, but this now seems to have expanded to the point where any reflections about the heritability of human characteristics are seen as controversial, and hence to be avoided in any kind of research.

There is clearly a strong motivation to believe there is no such thing as inherited ability. This may be harmless as an opinion held by any one individual. It causes a problem if, as has now happened, the viewpoint becomes dominant and turns into the dogmatic belief of a collective. This belief system, of being unwilling to admit that something may be the case and so in practice asserting that it is not the case, has a distorting effect on judgement and can make a society behave unrealistically.

In particular, a refusal to countenance a phenomenon which is seen to have effects that are regarded as distasteful influences many areas of modern academia, in particular in such subjects as history, education and ethics.

As I, and my colleagues, do not share this (and other) dogmatic beliefs which now severely limit almost everything that comes out of established academia, we potentially have an important role to play in correcting these biases. For this reason, we should be being supported. But also for this reason, it is regarded as important that we should not be supported, but suppressed, to the point of pretending we do not exist.

An example of the kind of logic which tends to be employed in determining the research that gets done was provided to me by an Oxford undergraduate who was a product of the comprehensive school system. Among other things, this undergraduate asserted to me that:

(a) state education cannot be bad, as it had managed to get him to Oxford;

(b) ability cannot be inherited because if it were, society would need to assign top positions to aristocrats, which would be intolerable.

These examples may seem crude, but I believe that they are analogous to the hidden logic that drives a lot of the content of modern academia. There is a reverse causality at work, along the lines of “if A were the case, B would follow, but B is not acceptable, therefore A cannot be true.” (Rather reminiscent of Nietzsche saying “If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.”)

Usually, the reasoning that B necessarily follows A is itself flawed. B is often some policy which people seem to feel would have to be followed if A were true, and which they think they would not like, but of course there is no reason why a policy you do not like has to be implemented, just because a new piece of information could be seen as supporting it. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that an objective finding might have policy implications which conflict with ideological preferences is nowadays taken as a reason to avoid any research which might generate the suggestion that it is true.

The drawbacks of marrying heiresses

Land-ownership in Europe was inherited by eldest sons, which was understandable as it carried military obligations, to raise armies and fight on the side of the king or other superior when required to do so. Females inherited only when there was no male heir.

Marrying an heiress with estates of her own, which was often done (for example) by British aristocrats in the 19th century, was a way of enlarging the estates of the family into which she married. This raises the question: why did the heiress’s family have no male heirs – why was she the heir in the first place? Was there some anti-male factor in their genes? If a family continued to marry into such families, perhaps it was decreasing its ability to produce viable male offspring.

I recall reading in H.G. Wells’s Outline of History that the Habsburgs ‘married their way to world power’. This led ultimately to one of the largest empires of the Middle Ages but also to the prevalence of haemophilia in the royal families of Europe. Haemophilia is genetically determined, carried by females as a recessive gene but more or less rapidly fatal to males who inherit it.

A somewhat similar pattern seems to have been shown by my ancestors the Cleares (then spelt Clere), descendants of the Duke of Clere Monte, who came over with William the Conqueror. For a time they flourished and their coats-of-arms became ever more complicated as they added the insignia of heiresses. They had several manor houses in Tudor England.

Eventually, however, they had no male heir of their own, having produced female triplets. These, presumably, married into various aristocratic families, leaving the name of Cleare (or Clere) to be carried on by their father’s younger brothers and any other male relatives, without estates attached.

There are various indications that, even after losing their estates, people with the name of Cleare were IQ-ful and got into responsible positions. The only people with that name outside my mother’s family of whom I have become aware were a retired bank manager, and someone with a doctorate in chemistry who was on the Board of Directors of Johnson Matthey.

The effect of marrying heiresses on European dynasties is one of the many issues which could be developed by the History Department of my unrecognised independent university for which, once again, I appeal for funding to enable it to contribute to modern debates by drawing attention to suppressed points of view, instead of being stifled and suppressed as it is at present.

Anger management and the Tarot

Extract from a book attempting to apply a system of Tarot card interpretations to psychology

The man who, to become superior like the sphinx, has struggled with his destiny at the tenth level of consciousness of the wheel of fortune has learned a great deal in this conflict ... He had to learn to imagine himself in the place of his opponent, thereby adopting and accepting the standpoint of the other person. Suddenly the whole matter appeared to him in an entirely different light ... As a consequence of this, everyone around him admired him for his imperturbable composure and began to emulate it. People again came to seek his advice in all kinds of matters. [Part of interpretation of card no. 11, entitled ‘Power’] *

It should not be supposed that I find the psychology advocated in books on the Tarot more comprehensible than that advocated in modern society at large. In fact, I quote this extract because of its similarity to what is likely to be heard in "anger management" classes.

In practice I find, and always have found, that my lack of acceptance of my social position, as well as my attempts to work towards remedying it, arouses anger in those to whom I express it, and apparently a wish to reject my own experience of my position. There is certainly no sign of a willingness to imagine themselves in my place, since I am angrily told that I should be able to think and feel about it quite differently from the ways I do.

For my part, I am quite unable to think myself into the position of those who are angry and morally indignant at me, as I cannot imagine myself, at any time in my life, having such reactions towards someone who complained of their position and of the difficulties which they experienced in attempting to ameliorate it.

* Elisabeth Haich, The Wisdom of the Tarot, Unwin, 1975, pp.91-92

The hallucinatory mirror

Copy of a letter to someone who asked for a signed copy of our “Apparitions” book.

Charles said you wanted to have a signed copy of Apparitions (which we wrote, so long ago, as a sighting shot) and this reminded me of an anecdote about one of the more unusual types of hallucinatory experience. These have of course received little attention because they do not fit in with the preferred spiritualist model.

Sometimes a feature of the environment is consistently seen as being there by a certain person, less often by more than one person.

An academically successful Chinese lady, very socialist and materialist in outlook, told me this story as having happened in a high school or college in Korea (I think). One of the girl students told another that whenever she went to the toilet she looked at herself in a mirror which was on the wall, and always saw herself as more beautiful than she really was. The other girl said, "But there is no mirror in that toilet". The girl who had seen it there was too scared ever to go into that toilet again.

It seemed clear enough from our appeals that there is a wide variety of such experiences with consistent characteristics and it was very shocking to find, not only that we would not be allowed to do any kind of research on a more adequate scale, but that we would prevented even from continuing to do appeals of the same kind on the same fairly constricted basis. There was endless scope for such appeals both in the fields in which we had already made them and in others, and we had surely demonstrated our ability to get information out of them which was in advance of anything previous. We could have gone on getting a lot (on normal terms) out of research of this kind, but we were squeezed into total inactivity, although appeals mimicking ours were made by other people in salaried academic positions, without any constructive results and with very tendentious encouragement of misinterpretation.

Hallucinatory experiences shed doubt on the solidity of the physical environment, a belief in which is considered desirable (in fact, in an unanalytical way, essential) to support the ideology of the oppressive society (the oppression of the individual by society). Books by academic ‘philosophers’ on the philosophy of mind may start by stating baldly in their first few pages, "There is an objective physical world which is common to all observers and observer-independent", or else assume this to be the case throughout without explicit mention of the fact that this assumption has been made.

Even the ‘psychical researchers’ of the heyday of Western civilisation were relatively blind to the hallucinatory experiences which occurred, unless the experiences suggested a model of a ‘spirit’ or conscious being with a quasi-spatial body (sometimes called the ‘astral body’) moving around in ‘normal’ physical space.

Two pensioners left to die

News item: two pensioners found dead.

Old, frail and struggling with the bitter weather, it was obvious that Jean and Derek Randall's lives were at risk. As Mr Randall's health failed and he accepted he could no longer look after his wheelchair-bound wife, a neighbour and the couple's MP contacted social services, the NHS and even Age Concern in the search for a care home place. But, despite weeks of phone calls, no help was provided. Last Thursday a concerned neighbour looked through the couple's letterbox and spotted 76-year-old Mr Randall lying dead in the hallway.

... Last night a neighbour declared: 'I believe they died because everyone who is supposed to care for the elderly in our society did not do it. Everyone passed the buck.' (Daily Mail)

Why were they not popped into a "care home", it is asked – in which they would not be paying guests who were free to leave, but incarcerated dependants of the state? Their lives would not necessarily have been prolonged, they might well have been shortened. And they would have been living at the mercy of other people, and in a decentralised state, possibly drugged out of their minds.

What pensioners need is not "care homes" into which they can be shovelled to end their lives in captivity, but pensions which are not means-tested and sufficient to enable them to employ housekeepers etc. so they can continue to live in freedom without invoking the "aid" of the oppressive society.

"Care homes" run by the state should be abolished, as should state-funded "education".

Appeal to lucid dream researchers

As explained in the previous post, my choice of lucid dreams as a research topic was determined by what I thought was most likely to get me reinstated as a salaried academic. Not only did my work on the topic fail to achieve this objective, but I found to my chagrin that it was being used by other people as a basis for developing their careers without this doing me the slightest good.

Many years later I wrote an open letter appealing to all those who had worked on the topic after me, to contribute some of their salary to relieving my position of exile and frustration.

I have now put this appeal on my website.

My "work"

copy of a letter to a recent visitor

You referred to some of the books I have written and forced into publication as part of my "work" when I rejected your previous description of them as part of my "career". So far as I am concerned, what one does in such bad circumstances is quite a different matter from what might be described as "work" in minimally adequate circumstances, such as those which might be provided by a university career.

I would never have worked on lucid dreams except under the duress of finding something which might get me back into a university career and which fell within the remit of the (only partially adequate) funding which I received for a short time from Cecil King.

You could say that it was "work" in the same sense as the chalk drawings of a pavement artist, inadequately clothed and fed and in a position of complete social degradation. If evidence of his ability in these circumstances led to enough coins being thrown down, he might be able to afford food and accommodation, and use his ability to express himself in oil paintings. He might in due course be elected to membership of the Royal Academy, show his paintings at public exhibitions, and eventually make significant amounts of money from selling them. In other words, he might then be able to make an actual career out of painting.

The disadvantaged underclass

copy of a letter to a visitor

We are looking forward to meeting you on Monday. The reason that we are very keen on getting to know people, but seldom can, is that we are in an anomalous and outcast position and want to make known our need for associates, moral and financial supporters, voluntary and paid workers, temporary, occasional, potentially permanent and long term.

But we are the disadvantaged underclass of modern society and no one wants to hear us say this. If we do meet anyone, saying this is usually sufficient to put an end to the acquaintance.

Typical interchange:

"We are badly in need of help and maybe you could tell your group with such and such interests about us, as they are prepared to do voluntary work in other contexts, so some of them might work for us."

Answer:

"You are not in need of help. You are physically alive/you have written some books/you get all the moral support you need out of one another. Goodbye. I need to leave immediately."

There are many elements in our situation which are at variance with, or ruled out of consideration by, the dominant fictitious ideology. We will not be able to put in much background in our meeting on Monday, so I am now writing a few of the most essential and unacceptable things in advance of meeting you.

We do not subscribe to any part of the modern received ideology. I am old enough, and was precocious enough, to have effectively lived in the pre-socialist world for quite a long time, but in 1945 it came in fast enough and hard enough to ruin my education and not only my life, but those of my parents. The forces that had ruined my education were continuously operative in preventing my recovery from my outcast situation when I had been thrown out at the end of the ruined "education" with a second class degree (i.e. no degree at all, only a disqualification), no research scholarship, and with the lives of both my parents ruined by the breakdown of my father's health.

I am still completely alienated from society, in that I still derive no feedback from it in any way for anything I have been able to do; I do not regard this as an acceptable situation and I need help in working towards a situation in which I can remedy it. If people do not give me any help themselves, I hope that they will at least help me by publicising my needs to anyone who might be free to give us some of the help we need and who might even derive some advantage themselves from a long-term (or short-term) association with us.