Copy of a letter to a potential voluntary worker
The reason I queried your saying that anger was something to be worked on to improve yourself (or however you put it) was that anger is regarded as automatically bad and to be eliminated in modern ideological psychology, such as Cognitive Therapy etc. (except when it is anger at capitalists or City fat cats). So that there can be no question of justified resentment of maltreatment by society. So people are liable to point out to me that I sound angry, as if they have noticed a weak point in my position, and this is supposed to invalidate my claims that I need help in securing reparation and reinstatement.
People like to notice the torture and killing carried out in the name of Christianity as if it invalidates the idea of anything with a more extensive worldview (or cosmic view) than that of socialist oppression. But actually exactly the same psychological forces are at work in socialist oppression itself and are causing plenty of torture, killing and generalised suffering, physical as well as psychological.
As in the days of the Catholic inquisitions, harm caused to individuals by the agents of the collective (state or church) is condoned or ignored.
Actually I think — in a theoretical way rather than by direct introspection — that everyone is very angry at the existential situation, but it is frightening to acknowledge this, and it turns into reactiveness or oppressiveness against other people, more or less well wrapped up as knowing better than they do themselves what would be good for them. And so everyone stays wrapped up in a cocoon of social meaningfulness.
I am very used to people telling me that they won’t help me or us, but (or because) they are going to be using all their available time helping some socially acceptable object of compassion, e.g. doing the accounts of a school, so that they wouldn’t have any time for doing ours, who are the victims of the ‘educational’ system, and we ought to be pleased, because we believe in people being helped, don’t we?
The person with a high IQ in modern society is in the position of a heretic in a Christian country with an inquisition. He is guilty of believing in the wrong things and is seen as deserving all that can be done to him.