Dalziel and Pascoe

Watching modern television while I use my exercise machine is certainly giving me a feeling for the contemporary landscape. It is no wonder that I feel excluded from it, and that there is no sympathy with my position. It is a very closed world, with few ideas, but those implicitly dogmatic. It is, effectively, a new religion.

As in other series, the characters in the police series Dalziel and Pascoe are role models for ‘getting by’ in ‘real’ life. Clearly you never get identified with being purposeful or intense; you fulfil the requirements of your job, which are often unpleasant and inconvenient, but interspersed with frequent breaks for eating, drinking and sex. Such things are the opium of the people, evidently. You do your own household chores, which also helps to ensure that your mind will never have to pay attention to what it is thinking about for very long at a time.

Dalziel is a senior and very experienced policeman, but still has to do his own fetching and carrying. At one stage, he asks his younger assistant Pascoe where some documents are. ‘In the car,’ says Pascoe. Dalziel looks as if he might like them brought in, but Pascoe says, ‘When did your last slave die?’ Dalziel goes and gets his documentation from the car for himself.

This reminds me of the George Damper cartoon in the Daily Mail in which Mrs Damper refuses to get a refill of George’s glass of water after it has been fouled by a bird. ‘If you want a refill, you will have to get it yourself,’ she says.

If any television character shows signs of minding about anything, other characters, maybe including doctors and psychiatrists, ‘help’ him not to think about it. If some specific reminder of the vulnerability of the finite situation affects him psychologically, e.g. being attacked produces agoraphobia, he is told that it is normal to react to such a specific nasty event. He is only reacting ‘normally’ and should not think he is important or different enough for it to matter whether he is suffering from it, and he should not try to find a solution for himself.

Something unquestionably unacceptable is dismissed as ‘part of life’. Put it behind you, don’t let your feelings get to you, and get back to the normal round of filling in the paperwork for the boss, followed by beer and pot noodles.

Doctors, psychiatrists and hospitals are unquestionably ‘helpful’ and never to be feared for the harm they might do you. A ‘friend’ who is a psychiatrist finds it hurtful that her friend with a problem does not rush to tell her all. ‘But I am trained and certificated and thoroughly qualified in every way!’ she says reproachfully.

Binge Britain

Daily Mail 14 February 2008:

Another man has been beaten and left for dead after politely asking a gang to stop urinating into his garden. ... Gareth Avery, 48, suffered a broken jaw and cheekbone and deep cuts after being punched and kicked by at least two men and a woman ... [He] was left for dead outside his home in Weston-super-Mare when he tried to protect his house from a gang.

In the last few days alone, 17-year-old Joe Dinsdale was stabbed to death on an estate plagued by drunken youths and Nick Baty, 48, died after a month in a coma following an assault. ... As the toll grew, a police chief urged Britain to "wake up" to the full horrors of binge-drinking.

Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, hit out at the drinks trade for making profits "on the back of this misery". ... Mr Jones castigated parents who are responsible for handing over alcohol to more than half of underage drinkers, and warned it was time for Britain to "wake up" to the grim realities of the binge-drinking epidemic.

As usual, parents and commercial interests are blamed for the consequences of the Oppressive State, including the oppressive educational system. A headline inside the paper reads ‘The real price of booze’. No, this is the real price of socialism. The parents are to a large extent themselves the victims of an educational system that left them with no purpose in life, and no way of getting a ‘buzz’ out of life other than getting drunk and/or beating somebody up.

People in Russian forced labour camps set great store by knocking their minds out with drinks of highly concentrated tea, and many drunks lying in the streets of communist Russian froze to death. Alcoholism was an inevitable side effect of communism in Russia, as it is of egalitarian socialism in Britain.

Reflection of the month

Compassion

It is alleged that a wicked judge, sentencing a man who had stolen a loaf, replied to his explanation that he had to live, ‘Je n'en vois pas la nécessité.’ More recently, it is alleged that an ex-servant has said that there would be no servant problem if people stopped wanting servants.

Both remarks, if true, demonstrate the psychological verity (which there are, quite independently of these particular remarks, no grounds whatever for doubting) that human beings have no noticeable awareness of one another’s needs. Not, that is to say, any awareness that expresses itself in a tendency to supply those needs. In a certain sense, however, they may be said to have an awareness. If you should ever find yourself hanging from a precipice by your fingertips and a fellow human being happens by, be careful what you say. If he realised your position he might tread on your fingers.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

More about the punishment of fathers

With further reference to the case of the father jailed for helping his pregnant wife to leave the country:

The sentence of 16 months in prison may seem excessive, but observe how efficiently it fulfils the function of opposing rebellion against the absolute powers of decision and prescription possessed by agents of the collective.

Rebellion (or assertion of independence) against arrangements made by the collective depends on the freedom of action (money) possessed by the individual. The father in this case could afford to transport his wife to the continent. He is described as a ‘businessman’ so presumably he would have been able to send her money to support her. The prison sentence has probably effectively destroyed his livelihood, and it could well be permanently. So perhaps his wife will find herself with no means of support in a foreign country with a very young baby and an 8-year-old child to look after. She might think of seeking part-time work, but she will need a baby-sitter if she does, which might have been fairly easy to arrange if her mother and other relatives and friends were living nearby. But she cannot return to this country without jeopardising her liberty and that of her children.

So everything possible is being done to drive her back into dependence on the British state with the complete loss of liberty and of her children’s liberty which that could entail.

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’, and my plans for acquiring qualifications with which to return to a career in a university were strenuously opposed, I hoped for support and help from my parents, if from no-one else. My father was blamed for any vestige of sympathy towards my plans and, as his health broke down under persecution, he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance. My mother’s life was reduced to that of looking after an invalid.

Destroying my father’s income and health was the best possible means of removing my only likely support in working towards re-entry to a university career. I had hoped to persuade my parents to move to Oxford and to continue living at home with them, which would have provided me with a college/hotel environment within which to carry on with my independent but, at least for the time being, unsalaried academic career.

Society had decreed that I should be classified as a non-academic person, and any help which might be given to me in attempting to return to a suitable university career was rebellion against authority and to be treated as criminal, as I was myself for making such attempts at all.

There is method in the madness of the witch-hunting carried out by modern society in this country, irrational though it may appear to be.

Incidentally, in a subsequent article in the Daily Mail (9 February 2008) about the case of the exiled mother, she is described as ‘an articulate and educated woman from a middle-class professional background’. So this may very well be another example of the way modern ideology facilitates class warfare, and the rule of the working-class or those with lower IQs, in oppression and persecution of those with some admixture of aristocratic genes or above-average IQs.

Punished for caring about your child

A father is in jail and his wife is in hiding abroad with her children after he helped them flee the country to escape social services, it emerged yesterday. The businessman’s wife was heavily pregnant with their first child – and was terrified the baby would be taken at birth by social workers – when he drove his family to Dover, and then on to Paris. She had a second reason for fleeing – she believed her eight-year-old son from a previous marriage was to be adopted against her wishes.

Her 56-year-old husband was arrested on his return to Britain, and later jailed for 16 months for abducting the eight-year-old, known as Child S. [The case] raises further disturbing questions about the secret family courts which only last week were in the spotlight when social workers illegally snatched a newborn baby from its mother.

Such cases are shrouded in the heaviest secrecy – with families threatened with jail if they discuss their fears that their children are being removed unjustly. But the story of the father and his family in hiding can be revealed for the first time because he appealed in a criminal case – which can be reported – begging for his 16-month jail sentence to be reduced. His plea to the High Court was dismissed and the father, who has never seen his baby daughter, was led away in tears. ...

The three appeal judges were told yesterday how Child S’s parents had separated in 2004 after a volatile and violent marriage. The mother claims she was told the boy would be taken into temporary foster care until she ‘sorted her life out’. But when she asked for his return, social services refused. After months of legal battles, a family court judge sided with the council’s plan to put the boy up for enforced adoption. By this time, the mother was pregnant. A friend said; ‘She was led to believe by social services she would have no chance of keeping the child she was carrying, which is outrageous. She was in despair.’ ...

Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Bennett acknowledged the ‘powerful emotions’ involved, but said: ‘Such proceedings taken by a local authority must be respected by parents. Those who act must expect a prison sentence because a real punishment is called for and to deter others who might be subject to the same pressures.’ ...

The father – who has adult children from a previous marriage – is being destroyed by prison, a friend said outside court. (Daily Mail, 7 February 2008.)

The quotation from the judge in the above case reminds me of a remark made last year by Chris Woodhead (former Inspector of Schools): ‘Parents who condone truancy should be punished.’

When the Welfare State (better called the Oppressive State) was introduced in 1945, it was said that education, medicine and helpful benefits of all kind were to be provided free (i.e. out of taxation). At that time I think many people would have been shocked at the idea that someone might be fined and punished with imprisonment for failure to take advantage of the goodies on offer.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if the State makes itself responsible as the ultimate provider (out of taxpayers’ money) of every recognised need, then it also owns its beneficiaries body and soul, and, as the provider of liberty, may take it away or decree how it is to be used, as it sees fit.

Only a capitalist society can provide its citizens with a territory within which they are free to make decisions; these territories vary in size but may be enlarged by individual effort. A communist/socialist society provides its citizens with no freedom. The freedom which they seem to enjoy is illusory, since it may be removed at any time if they fail to comply with the draconian edicts of the State. You are punishable if you fail to force your child to attend school, whether or not it is being bullied, physically or psychologically, by other pupils or by the teachers, and whether or not it is learning anything that will ever be of any use to it. It is not up to you to decide whether your child may live with you, even if you are supporting him or her completely, and receiving no ‘benefits’ from the State.

Incidentally, is not a prison sentence of 16 months excessively harsh in comparison with penalties for actions which are clearly harming their victims, such as grievous bodily harm, arson, burglary, etc? This gentleman had done no more than assist his wife in leaving the country, accompanied by her own child as a willing companion.

All shall have nurses

David Cameron suggests a home nurse for every mother producing a baby, paid for by confiscation of freedom from taxpayers, of course, even those who have been ruined by exposure to social hostility during their ‘education’ and left (as I have been) with no qualification with which to earn money or eligibility for the so-called ‘social support’ when unable to derive an income from society.

How about, ‘Cameron wants a hotel environment for every intellectual’? That would be a lot more original than ‘Cameron wants a home nurse for every mum’ (Daily Mail, 4 February 2008).

Cameron, I gather, is what is called a ‘conservative’, and the proposal is supposed to help ‘middle-class’ parents. But parents with above-average IQs are (as I plausibly surmise) under-represented among those who can tolerate having families in the captivity of modern society.

And of course, getting a nurse into every new mum’s household will enable the nurses to report to the social workers (also paid out of taxation) about which mothers should be regarded as “unfit” and have their babies taken away to be brought up at the taxpayer’s expense. How many mothers will have the sense to realise how dangerous this is and say “No, thank you” to the nurses?

The Conservative leader will today publish a blueprint for changing attitudes to childhood, which calls for a ‘profound cultural change’ in the way Britain treats its children. ... Success in raising rounded children [whatever they are] is not just about intensive supervision, it’s about enabling children to discover the world for themselves. (Ibid.)

Well, you could say that, i.e. children might be allowed to make their own decisions about arrangements for themselves. Abolishing compulsory ‘education’ and incarceration in state schools would be a good start.

My work has no relation to my interests

Copy of a letter to a philosophy professor

While the standard ways of interpreting things in the modern oppressive ideology decree that a person who has been deprived of a career and has no way of earning money or drawing ‘social security’ is not to be regarded as being prevented from using their ability in a productive way, and that anything they may manage to do is supposed to correspond exactly to their most passionate interest, I should like to point out that actually I have never been able to do anything meaningful since being thrown out of Oxford University without a single usable degree fifty years ago.

This is not, realistically, surprising as I have never had even a one-person salary with which to support myself and provide myself with the institutional environment which is absolutely necessary to me.

So why should anything I have managed to squeeze out be regarded as any indication of what I would have been doing if not totally deprived of financial support? Why, without money, should one be expected to be able to do anything at all? That I have produced anything at all is a tribute to my exceptional ability and extreme determination, and should (in a non-oppressive society) be regarded as a reason why I should not continue to be kept absolutely deprived of opportunity by lack of a salary and status.

Everything I have squeezed out, including the DPhil thesis, bore no relation to what I should have liked to be doing but was an application for readmission to the ranks of the salaried and statusful. The choice of material both in psychology and philosophy was determined under duress and the work was carried out in oppressive circumstances.

There is absolutely no way in which I have ever been free to ‘follow my interests’ or derive gratification from expressing my views or ‘sharing my ideas’ in my ignored publications.
The only one of my books that could be regarded as an expression of anything I might want to say just because I thought it was the case, was The Human Evasion and I wrote that only because I was still under extreme duress (six years after being thrown out) and unable to do anything. I had had no intention of writing about my psychological ideas.

I had not intended to use my psychological ideas in any way except that of facilitating my own productivity. I thought that my understanding of centralised psychology would make it possible for me to be very happy and productive as soon as I got back to the circumstances necessary for an academically and intellectually productive life. But in fact the goal of re-entry to a university career at a suitable level of seniority or, indeed, any level, was no nearer, in fact receding; and my energy level was declining in boredom.

So I thought that I should write at least something based on my memories of centralised psychology before they became too inaccessible. I thought that The Human Evasion might get me established as a writer, whose book-sales might make up for my lack of an academic salary and enable me to do research work of some kind that might be regarded as establishing a claim to reinstatement as an academic.

Cape Fear

When I am doing my daily exercise quota on my cross-trainer, I scan the television programmes for moving wallpaper to look at. This has made me aware that modern films are almost universally unpleasant and uninteresting, so far as I am concerned, having a much greater content of explicit sadism than when I was growing up.

If a film is ‘serious’, rather than a ‘comedy’ (I don’t find comedies pleasant either) the storyline is almost certain to depend on some person or persons doing something to other persons which is very nasty and sure to be against the will of those persons. People are tortured, murdered, raped etc. and then may seek revenge against those who maltreated them, whether by retaliatory brutality or by ensuring that they (the perpetrators) are exposed to ‘justice’ in the form of imprisonment or execution.

These films seem to shed a light on a fundamental element in human motivation. There is, it would appear, a drive to assert oneself by making some other consciousness aware of its impotence; you are forcing it to experience something to which it cannot feel reconciled. I see that this could be a displacement of the drive to assert oneself against objective reality which is too powerful and threatening, and which may make you painfully aware of your impotence. But you may be in a position of power relative to some other people, especially if you can get on the right side of the social system in which you find yourself.

The film Cape Fear (1991 – a remake of a 1962 film with the same title) seems to express this rather well, at the same time as placing this drive in its place as an important part of the psychodynamics of socialism.

In this film a well-set-up, respectable lawyer once wronged a serial rapist whom he was defending against a charge of rape. The victim was a girl of 16, and the lawyer was so moved by her injuries that he suppressed a piece of evidence, to the effect that she had been promiscuous, which might have counted in his client’s favour. The client was ‘poor’ and illiterate, and hence an object of sympathy, but it is clear that he was quite likely to do sadistic things, to the point of killing people against whom he had a grievance. This partly accounted for the length of time (14 years) which he had spent in prison, where he brutally killed someone in the course of his confinement.

In asserting yourself to other people, it seems to be very important that they are made unmistakeably aware of the fact that you are able to threaten what is most important to them, and to make them feel out of control and inadequate to defend themselves or other people whom they mind about. (This is more or less the position in which people find themselves vis-à-vis agents of the collective in modern society.)

Near the beginning of this film the released prisoner tells the lawyer that he is going to make him experience loss. Then he sets about devoting his menacing attentions to the lawyer’s wife, girlfriend and daughter, and poisons their pet dog.

It may be noticed that he has no scruples about persecuting people (and an animal) who were not responsible for the imprisonment of which he is so bitterly resentful, but sees this as a valid way of doing things that the lawyer will not be able to avoid minding about.

Towards the end of the film, when he has the lawyer, his wife and his daughter at his mercy on a houseboat, the wife tries to make him believe that she understands what he has suffered, and pleads with him to do whatever he has planned to do to her daughter to herself instead.

The persecutor says he is glad she has made her feelings so plain to him. Now he knows she feels so strongly about it, it will make what he is about to do to her daughter all the more enjoyable.

In this, the later version of the film, the themes of wishing to have a destructive effect on people’s lives and the relationship to socialist ideology are far more clearly brought out. In the earlier version (1962) it is more a case of good guys being persecuted by a bad guy. In the 1991 version, the lawyer is (we are invited to believe) being rightfully punished for a misdeed, and his persecutor is a representative of the wronged class of the ‘poor’ and illiterate. The film is expressing the class warfare underlying modern society, in which well-set-up and successful bourgeois people are seen as natural targets of resentment, and in which the avenging individual, as the member of a wronged class, is ‘beyond good and evil’ and is free to disregard old-fashioned and hypocritical moral restraints.

Organs and 'social justice'

In theory, removing organs on this basis [presumed consent] can be made to sound humane, but remember the law of unintended consequences. Anything promoted by government as life-enhancing can be turned into the opposite by greedy and/or unscrupulous individuals (Peter McKay, Daily Mail, 14 January 2008.)

As usual, reference is made to the risks of ‘greedy and/or unscrupulous individuals’, but not to risks which arise from agents of the socially oppressive system.

‘We must never be denied the right to choose’, says Melanie Phillips weakly, but we already are, if we allow ourselves to be forced into contact with the medical Mafia. Whether or not consent to remove organs after death is presumed unless refused, what is to prevent disapproval of those who refuse being covertly expressed in bad treatment by doctors and nurses? I have seen it suggested that those who refuse to donate their organs should themselves be refused treatment.

If doctors are able to presume consent for organ removal, they will be given even more power to do things against the will of their patients. It is clear that a considerable percentage of the population would not consent to removal, and not all of them will be efficient and initiativeful enough to register their lack of consent in the required way. Even those who do will be at the mercy of the system, and will have to be confident that there will never be any failure to communicate their refusal at the right time to the right doctor. Given what we know of the fallibility of computer systems and of the medical profession in modern society, there is a very obvious and serious uncertainty here.

To be sure that they are not violating the will of their patient, doctors should wish to have an explicit expression of consent.

But, of course, a modern person may say, even if an individual does not consent, they ought to. A person who says this is welcome, so far as I am concerned, to set up a charity financed by like-minded individuals, but not by the state, to convince people that they ought to want to donate their organs.

The issue of the motives, including unconscious ones, of the people implementing the proposed scheme is, as usual, entirely left out of account. This includes those operating the computer systems as well as the doctors. In borderline cases, it may be difficult to determine whether a person is dead or not, or whether it would have been their wish to be resuscitated. In such cases, the motives and preferences of the doctors will inevitably exert some influence. It is assumed that their motives can be only virtuous and disinterested, and that the only risk of abuse could come from outside the system. But in a borderline case, the characteristics of the organ-possessor may be relevant. If they are aged and infirm, there may well be a stronger tendency to give up on them than if they are young and have what the doctors consider to be an adequate quality of life.

Nor, given the way that considerations of ‘social justice’ are entering into medical ‘ethics’ (as well as everything else) these days, is it inconceivable that ideas about ‘fairness’ might influence their decisions at the margin. Might not a ‘privileged’ middle-class individual be more likely to be treated as ‘dead’ than a more ‘deserving’ working-class patient? Might not ‘do not resuscitate’ decisions be affected by whether somebody has a harvestable organ?

In considering the dangers of databases, reference is only made to the risk of abuse by criminal individuals who are not agents of the collective or otherwise authorised users of the data base. An upper-class banker (John Monckton) was murdered in his entrance hall two years ago by someone who used published information to target wealthy people. There was some suggestion that the murderer’s motives may have included resentment of the rich, as well as the usual pecuniary one. What is to prevent a person with similar motives from being among those who have official access to a data-base and using it to seek out people whom he or she regard as too well-off? Or perhaps just using the access to delete their refusal to have their organs harvested after death, as a way of expressing his aggression?

Agents of the collective such as doctors, teachers and social workers are just ordinary people. They are no more immune from the risk of behaving irresponsibly or abusively than anyone else.

Reflection of the month

Beethoven's housekeeper

Beethoven had a housekeeper. She did the cooking and housekeeping while he composed music. I am sure the modern view of the matter is that Beethoven did not need a housekeeper, or, if he did, he should not have done. Plainly, they should both have composed music, and both have cooked their own meals. The fact that Beethoven composed music better than the housekeeper could have done is beside the point. It is the business of society to iron out these unfair advantages of endowment, not to enhance them. Why should the housekeeper not have had just as much chance to practise creative self-fulfilment? It is interesting to observe that the housekeeper could probably have composed music just as well in the intervals of her cooking and housekeeping as she could have done if she had had all day free to devote to thinking about the music. Beethoven, on the other hand, probably could not have composed nearly so well. This proves that the housekeeper had a better social adjustment than Beethoven, and is all the more reason why Beethoven should not have received preferential treatment.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)