31 May 2008

Crowding out the opposition

Letter sent to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford

Dear Lord Patten,

I note and deplore your comments on the fund-raising campaign launched by Oxford University, allegedly to ‘give it the freedom to choose whichever students it likes’, and deplore the fund-raising campaign itself, which is only making matters even worse for my genuinely independent, even if socially unrecognised, incipient university which is realistically trying to maintain intellectual standards, or would be doing so if not kept unproductive by a rigorous lack of support.

Removing an overt and explicit pressure from the Government will do nothing to restore Oxford University to freedom from the prevailing anti-individualistic ideology which it has been instrumental in promoting. Nearly all individual academics have been discriminating for decades against genuine ability and in favour of low IQs and politically correct attitudes. I am sure that their doing so will continue, as will the decline in standards, whatever official pronouncements may be made.

Appealing for funding from sources other than the Government will only make the situation even worse for a genuinely independent university, such as ours. There are several areas of potential research in which we have been prevented from operating for several decades, those to whom we applied for funding often saying that they preferred to support work (in that nominal area or otherwise) in a university.

The implication seems to be that you cannot go wrong in supporting a socially recognised institution and, as an implicit corollary, that you should positively avoid permitting work that should be the domain of a ‘proper’ university to be done outside of one.

Why is it regarded as reprehensible to permit such work to be done outside of a ‘proper’ university ? Perhaps there is a fear that if anyone not socially recognised as the right sort of person were allowed to do anything, this might have the effect of making them appear superior to the socially accredited academics (which should not be allowed to become apparent, whether or not it is actually the case).

It is also possible that findings might be made in research which did not appear to be immediately supportive of the prevailing ideology, and work seriously critical of the productions of socially accredited academics might be published.

If more financial contributions than at present were made to Oxford University, those who might give to us to enable us to become productive would have their available resources still further reduced, in the same way that progressive impoverishment of individuals by taxation makes it less possible for them to give any support to us, even if any of them could transcend the modern ideology sufficiently to consider doing so.

Perhaps one should see in this appeal for funding by Oxford University (and perhaps by other universities) another ‘stealth tax’. One knows that the Government is struggling with its ‘need’ to increase public spending by raising taxation, when it is already at a crippling level. Encouraging universities to apply for private funding so that there is less need for Government subsidy may enable the Government, certainly not to reduce taxation, but to spend more of its resources elsewhere.

Yours sincerely, etc.

19 May 2008

Means-testing pensioners

Pensioners, like the middle class in general, are victimised by modern legislation. The modern ideology does not accept innate differences but it does, in practice, discriminate against those with above-average IQs, and against personality characteristics associated with above-average IQs, such as conscientiousness and forethought.

The population of pensioners, whether or not classifiable as ‘middle class’, are likely to have above-average IQs, if only because they have managed to reach pensionable age. They fail to protest at the burdens imposed upon them, perhaps to some extent because, like my own parents, they are inclined to accept legal impositions without complaint.

People over 50 now constitute 43% of the voting population (this proportion is expected to rise to over 50% by 2031) and are in a position to exercise significant pressure on the political parties which wish for their electoral support.

Pensioners and prospective pensioners should never have accepted the means-testing of pensions. The effect of this policy is that those who have been so thrifty and frugal as to acquire savings, as well as making sure that they always paid the requisite annual contributions, whatever their circumstances, are being penalised so that more ‘support’ can be diverted to those who ‘need it most’, i.e. those who have made no attempt to build up independence of the state throughout their working lives.

Many of those who qualify for the supplementary ‘income support’, which would put their pension back up to the level it might be at if not means-tested, fail to claim it. They are exhorted to apply for what they are ‘entitled to’, the only reason usually suggested for their reluctance to do so being ‘pride’. But in fact they can only apply by submitting to ‘assessment’ of their circumstances by agents of the collective, who may quite well decide that it is not ‘in their interests’ to be allowed to live in their own home any longer, and they may be popped into the killing fields of the old people’s ‘homes’ whether they like it or not.

Ultimately, the state has the right to force an elderly person to live in a care home, or even to have them sectioned as a psychiatric patient. They will not be allowed the option of quietly starving or otherwise coming to grief in their own homes, which might very well be a less painful and distressing way of ending their lives than what awaits them in ‘care’.

Pensioners and their associations, such as Age Concern, Help the Aged and the National Pensioners Convention, should not tolerate means-testing. It was not regarded as acceptable in the original Pensions Act of 1911, which proposed that the pensions being set up should be paid for by contributions and would be payable to rich and poor alike.

Now Gordon Brown proposes an extra levy on salaries to ‘pay for care in old age’, in addition to compulsory pension contributions. Again, there is no way of opting out of this by saying that one will never be a drain on the state’s provision of ‘care facilities’ for the elderly, but would rather die in one’s own way in one’s own home.

‘The question of ethics with regard to pension policy is one of the issues on which Oxford Forum could be producing fundamental critical analyses if it were provided with adequate funding. We appeal for £2m as initial funding to enable us to write and publish on this and similar issues, which are currently only discussed in the context of pro-collectivist arguments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

16 May 2008

Leaders are socially constructed

Copy of a letter to someone I got to talk to for a couple of hours (rare occurrence!)

I have not previously encountered this alleged experimental finding which you quoted from anthropology textbooks, that if you put 20 people in a room, one ‘leader’ will always emerge with a couple of sub-leaders. If it is in anthropology textbooks I am sure that tendentious conclusions are expected to be drawn from it.

As, for example, that leadership does not depend on any individual attributes or qualities, genetic or otherwise, but may be imposed or constructed upon any individual by environmental circumstances. It is social constructionism again, depending on a profound underlying belief (or wish to believe) that there are no innate characteristics and that society can turn any sheep into a shepherd if it chooses and, even more delightfully, force any former shepherd into the position of a sheep.

So — the family court business arises, with low-IQ doctors and social workers ruling the lives of high-IQ professional people, and prescribing for how many hours per week they may see their children under supervision, etc.

It is now openly admitted that medical schools exercise positive discrimination in favour of the ‘underprivileged’, which means of course discriminating against people from successful middle-class backgrounds, and that really means discriminating against those with higher IQs and/or aristocratic ancestry.

06 May 2008

What I would do with £10 billion

As I said in a previous piece of writing, 10 billion pounds has been spent, effectively to lower the average IQ of the undergraduate population. I would accept £10 billion without any qualms and would be sure of being able to make good use of it in applying my abilities and those of my associates to contributing to the advancement of science and contributing to the intellectual debates of the present time.

People have often asked me ‘What would I do?’ in a certain field of work and ‘How much would I need for it?’ Well, actually, I would do the best and most progressive things within the resources available, which is what I did when I went to the Society for Psychical Research, within the very restricted resources available and living in appalling circumstances (without a hotel environment). What I did was the best I could do to open up large-scale fields of research. Working on them on an adequate scale would, incidentally, have provided a hotel environment to make my life tolerable rather than intolerable, and permitted me not only to be intellectually productive but to get some sense of wellbeing out of being so.

Working within resources of £10 billion would enable adequate institutional (including hotel) facilities to be set up.

If £10 billion were given to me it would be increasing access to university life for some of those who have been deprived of it by their underprivileged early lives (exposed to the hostility of state education) and subsequent inactivity caused by poverty.

Would it not be making a better use of £10 billion to provide access to opportunity and status for people with high IQs who have been artificially deprived of them, rather than on reducing the proportion of higher IQs in the undergraduate population — and hence subsequently in the academically statusful graduate population? What is the point of spending money on that — one might ask, if one did not already know that the point of the state-financed school and university system is to disadvantage higher IQs, and to disadvantage those with the highest IQs the most.