12 August 2011

Hopping mad

copy of a letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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