by Will Self
When we cut down Sid’s medication everything returned to normal. We then went the other way and started introducing minute quantities of LSD into Sid’s diet. The ‘friends’ proliferated. Sid spent all his days in the onion field engaged in a giddy social whirl: cocktail parties, first nights, openings, and house parties. Some of the imaginary friends were even quite well connected. I almost came close to feeling jealous of Sid as he rubbed shoulders with scores of influential – albeit delusory – personages, until my colleagues reprimanded me for my severely unprofessional behaviour.
Needless to say, this part of the experiment was an unqualified success as well. When Sid got madder the communards’ behaviour changed again. They started wandering around the onion field in a distracted fashion. There was no more talk of the imminent arrival of Ceres – instead there was muttering about ‘Going to Lerwick to see about a steady job’. And one or two disconsolate individuals even approached members of the multi-disciplinary team and asked them if they knew anyone who could help them to get into advertising.
We returned to London and conducted a full analysis of our findings. Reducing our calibrated observations and the results of the thousands of psych-profile tests we had conducted on the communards to a series of quotients, we found what we had gone looking for: whatever the fluctuations observed in the behaviour of individuals, the sanity quotient of the group as a whole remained constant.
It became time to publish. Three months later ‘Some Aspects of Sanity Quotient Mechanisms in a Witless Shetland Commune’ appeared in the BJE. There was an uproar. My findings were subject to the most rigorous criticism and swingeing invective. I was accused of ‘mutant social Darwinism’, ‘syphilitic sub-Nietzschean lunacy’ and lots worse.
In the academic press, critic after critic claimed that by proposing that there was only a fixed proportion of sanity to go round in any given society I was opening the floodgates to a new age of prejudice and oppression. Insanity would be rigorously confined to minority and underprivileged groups – the ruling classes would ensure that they remained horrifically well balanced, all the better to foment ‘medication warfare’ against societies with different sanity quotients.
However, the very scale and intensity of the reaction to the theory undercut the possibility of its being ignored. Added to that, my critics became sidetracked by the moral implications of Quantity Theory, rather than by its mathematics. The reasons for this became clear as the debate gathered momentum. No one was in a position to gainsay the findings until our experiments were replicated. And then, of course, they were replicated and replicated and replicated. Until the whole country was buzzing with the audible whirr of pencils ringing letters and digits on multiple-choice forms; and the ker-plunk as capsule after capsule dropped into pointed unputdownable paper beakers: the industry of thought was underway.
That would have been the end of the story. In terms of the naive model of motivation and causation I have set out for you, and then gloriously undermined, I have provided a complete explanation. But we all know what happened next. How the Quantity Theory of Insanity moved from being an original, but for all that academic, contribution to ideas, to being something else altogether. A cult? A body of esoteric knowledge? A political ideology? A religion? A personal philosophy? Who can say. Who can account for the speed with which the bastardised applications of the theory caught on. First of all with the intelligentsia, but then with the population as a whole.
Even if the exact substance of the theory is difficult to define, it’s quite easy to see why the theory appealed to people so strongly. It took that most hallowed of modern places, the within-the-walnut-shell-world of the mind, and stated that what went on inside it was effectively a function of mathematically observable fluctuations across given population groups. You no longer had to go in for difficult and painful therapies in order to palliate your expensive neuroses. Salvation was a matter of social planning.
At least that’s what they said. I never made any claims for the theory in this respect, I was merely describing, not prescribing. It was the members of the group I had assembled to conduct the ground-breaking research who leapt to pseudo-fame on the back of my great innovation. Busner with his absurd ‘Riddle’, and latterly his humiliating game-show appearances, shouting out stupid slogans; Hurst and Sikorski turned out to be incapable of anything but the most violent and irresponsible rending of the fabric of the theory, but that came later. My initial problems were with Harley. Harley the idealist, Harley the kind, Harley the socially acceptable, Harley the therapist.
Some nine months after the revelational paper in the BJE I received a call from Harley who asked me to meet him at his house in Hampstead. I had heard echoes of the kind of work my colleagues had been getting involved in and I had consistently been at pains in my interviews with the press to dissociate myself from whatever it was they were up to. I had my suspicions and I burned with curiosity as I strained on my foldaway bicycle up from the flat I had rented at Child’s Hill to the heights of Hampstead.
The big design fault with these foldaways is that the wheels are too small. Added to that the hinge in the main frame of the machine never achieves sufficient rigidity to prevent the production of a strange undulating motion as one labours to cover ground. I mention this in passing, because I think the state I was in by the time I reached Gayton Road helps to explain my initial passivity in the face of what could only be described as an abomination.
Harley let me in himself. He occupied a large terraced house on Gayton Road. I had known that he was well-off but even so I was surprised by the fact that there was only one bell, with his name on it, set by the shiny front door. He led me into a large room which ran from the front to the back of the house. It was well lit by a wash of watery light from the high sash windows. The walls of the room were stacked with books, most of them paperbacks. The floorboards had been stripped, painted black, and polished to a sheen. Scattered here and there around the floor were rugs with bright, abstract designs woven into them. Thin angled lamps obviously of Italian design stood around casting isolated fields, of yellow light. One stood on the desk – a large, flat serviceable oak table – its bill wavering over the unravelling skein of what I assumed to be Harley’s labours, which spewed from the chattering mouth of a printer attached to his computer.
There were remarkably few objects in the room, just the odd bibelot here and there, a Japenese ivory or an Arawak head carved from pumice and pinioned by a steel rod to a cedarwood block. I felt sick with exertion and slumped down on a leather and aluminium chair. Harley went to the desk and toyed with a pen, doodling with hand outstretched. The whine of the machine filled the room. He semed nervous.
‘You know the Quantity Theory of Insanity …’ he began. I laughed shortly. ‘… Yes, well … Haven’t you always maintained that what is true for societal groups can also be proved for any sub-societal group as well?’
‘Yes, that has been an aspect of the theory. In fact an integral part. After all, how do you define a “society” or a “social group” with any real, lasting rigour? You can’t. So the theory had to apply itself to all possible kinds of people-groupings.’
‘Parent–Teacher Associations?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cub Scout groups?’
‘Yes.’
‘Suburban philatelic societies?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Loose fraternities of rubberwear fetishists?’
‘Why on earth not … my dear man …’
‘How about therapeutic groups set up specifically to exploit the hidden mechanisms that Quantity Theory draws our attention to?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know. Groups of people who band together in order to effect a calculated redistribution of the elements of their particular sanity quotient. Forming an artificial group so that they can trade off a period of mental instability against one of radical stability.’
‘What! You mean a sort of sanity time-shar
e option?’
‘Yeah, that kind of thing.’
I was feigning ignorance, of course. I had foreseen this development, so had my critics, although they hadn’t correctly located where the danger lay. Not with vain and struggling despots who would tranquillise whole ethnic minorities in order to stabilise the majority, but with people like Harley, the educated, the liberal, the early adopters.
‘Well, I don’t know, I suppose in theory …’
‘Have a look at this …’ He swiped a scarf of computer paper from the still chattering printer and handed it to me. I read; and saw at a glance that Harley wasn’t talking about theory at all, he was talking about practice. The printout detailed the latest of what was clearly a series of ongoing and contained trials, which involved the monitoring of the sanity quotients within two groups. There was an ‘active’ and an ‘inactive’ group. The groups were defined entirely arbitrarily. That was all, but it was sufficient. From the quantitative analysis that Harley had undertaken it could be clearly demonstrated that the stability of the two groups differed in an inverse correlation to one another.
‘What is this?’ I demanded. ‘Who are these people and why are you gathering data on them in this fashion?’
‘Shhhh!’ Harley crouched down and waddled towards me across a lurid Mexican rug, his finger rammed hard against his lips. ‘Do keep your voice down, people might hear you.’
‘What people? What people might hear me?’ I expostulated. Harley was still crouching, or rather squatting in front of me. This posture rather suited him. With his sparse ginger beard and semi-pointed head he had always tended towards the garden gnomic.
‘The people who are coming for the meeting – the exclusionist group meeting.’
‘I see, I see. And these?’ I held up the computer paper.
Harley nodded, grinning. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’
Pleased? I was dumbfounded. I sat slumped in my chair for the next hour or so, saying nothing. During this period they trickled in. Quite ordinary upper middle-class types. A mixed bunch, some professionals: lawyers, doctors and academics, all with the questing supercilious air that tends to go with thinking that you’re ‘in on something’. The professionals were mixed in with some wealthy women who trailed an atmopshere of having-had-tea at Browns or Fortnums behind them. All of these people milled around in the large room until they were called to order and the meeting began.
It was a strange affair, this ‘meeting’, solely concerned with procedure and administration. There was no content to it, or perceptible reason why this particular group of people should be gathered together. They discussed the revenue of the group, where they should meet, the provision of refreshments and a group trip to Glyndebourne that was happening in a couple of weeks’ time. At no point did anybody directly refer, or even allude, to what the purpose of the group was.
Eventually the meeting broke up into small groups of people who stood around talking. One of the women I had mentally tagged as ‘wealthy’ came and perched on the chair next to mine. She was middle-aged, svelte and smartly dressed in a suit of vaguely Forties cut. Her face had the clingfilm-stretched-over-cold-chicken look of an ageing woman who kept herself relentlessly in trim.
‘Who are you?’ she asked me, in a very forthright manner. Not at all like an English woman. ‘I haven’t seen you at a meeting before.’
‘Oh, just one of Harley’s colleagues. I came along to see what he was up to.’
‘Adam is a marvellous man. What he has achieved here in just three months deserves to be seen as the triumph that psychotherapy has been waiting for.’
‘Were you in therapy before coming to the group?’
‘Was I in therapy?’ She snorted. ‘Is Kenton a suburb? I have been in therapy of one form or another for the last ten years. I’ve had Freudian analysis, I’ve taken anti-depressants, subjected myself to eclectic psychotherapy, rebirthing. You name it – I’ve tried it. And let me tell you that not one of these things has helped me in the slightest. My neurosis has always managed to resurface, again and again.’
‘What form does this neurosis take?’
‘Any form it chooses. I’ve been bulimic and anorexic, claustrophobic and agoraphobic, alcoholic and hysterical, or just plain unhappy – all until the past three months. Since I joined Adam’s group my symptoms have simply melted away. I can’t even remember what it was that I was so upset about. I can only recall the tortuous self-analysis and introspection that went along with my various therapies as if it were some bad dream. The way I feel now is so completely different to the way I did feel that there is no comparison.’
‘Hmm, hmm. You have a relative I suppose, or a friend of some sort who …’
‘Who belongs to the other group. Yes, of course. My son, John. Well, he’s always been rather unstable, I have no idea in the last analysis whether it was his shitty upbringing, or, as the more chemically-inclined professionals have said, a purely endogenous affair. At any rate John enjoys his little manic phases. He’s inherited a little capital and he likes to sit up for fifty, sixty hours at a stretch watching it ebb and flow on the futures market. He’s quite happy to trade an extended manic phase off against a neurosis-free period for me. I suppose some people might call it perverse. But to me it seems the eventual, loving coming together of mother and son after so much discord …’
I don’t know whether the above is a verbatim recollection of what the woman said, but it certainly captures the substance. I was horrified. Here was the incarnation of all I sought to avoid. The recasting of Quantity Theory as a therapeutic practice designed to palliate the idle sorrows of the moneyed. I left the house without speaking to Harley again. The rest of the sad story is familiar to us all. Harley is here at the conference, along with his disciples. His Exclusionist Therapy Movement has grown in the last five years by leaps and bounds. And Harley has, to my mind, diminished as a person in direct proportion. I don’t know exactly what has happened to him. Perhaps he has simply got the wrong end of his own therapeutic techniques, spent too long in the wrong group. But his affectation of some bizarre tribal costume, his disjointed and facile mutterings – which are taken as gospel by his disciples – these seem to me to be the logical result of his meddling with the natural order of sanity quotients.
Incidentally, I did find out what happened to the awful woman I met at Harley’s house. Her son died of a heart attack, brought on by asthma during one of his manic phases. Needless to say the woman herself is now safely institutionalised.
And as for the rest of them, those tedious souls who I saved from a lifetime of near-obscurity, they all proved unworthy of the gifts conferred upon them by their proximity to genuine theoretical advance. Hurst was at least predictable, even if his actions were in some ways the most odious.
It was about nine months after the afternoon I spent in Hampstead that I first read an item in the newspaper which confirmed my worst suspicions about him. Short and to the point. It said that Phillip Hurst, the noted statistician and psychologist, one of the originators of the Quantity Theory of Insanity, had been appointed by the government to head up a new bureau loosely attached to the Central Office of Statistics, but charged with a novel task – a sanity quotient survey of the whole country. The aim was to develop an effective measure of the quotient so that central government could accurately fix and concentrate its deployment of palliatives, in the form of funds spent on mental health, to create a fair and weighted distribution of aberrant behaviour throughout the realm.
I stopped waiting for more news. I knew it would be bad. I took the first academic job that I could lay my hands on that would take me as far away as possible from the onrush of the demented juggernaut I had spawned. In Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia, I sat and I waited. On Saturday mornings I would climb into my Moke and drive down to the Victoria Mall where the only good newsagent in Darwin kept newspapers, three and four days old, from around the world.
So it was, standing amongst men with elepha
nt-skin crotches of sweated, bunched, denim shorts, that I read, while they scratched at Tatsalotto cards, the plastic shavings falling around their thongs. The news was all of strange theatrical events of extreme violence. The newspaper editors published programme notes, replete with heavy black arrows, and the sort of drawings of men wearing windcheaters and carrying machine pistols you would expect to find on Letraset sheets.
As for the government’s attempts to arrive at an accurate way of measuring the sanity quotient, these were dogged by problems that on the one hand seemed to be purely semantic – and which on the other appeared as worrying, aberrant, unknowable.
First one measure of sanity, then another, and then several more were developed in an effort to arrive at the definitive. The problem was that the straightforward measure S1 was arrived at by a number of calculations – the rate in the increase of schizophrenic diagnoses was indexed against the rate of increase in the population – which were themselves open to different methods of calculation and hence interpretation.
Even when the various warring ‘experts’ (who were these people? Where had they been when I was crouching in bothies in the Western Highlands, or roaming the toilets of central London?) could agree on a given measure, it soon manifested mathematical instabilities which rendered it unworkable, or incalculable, or both.
S9 had quite a vogue. It involved adding together all the doses of Valium, or other related sedative drugs, prescribed in the country over a given period of time. Dividing the sum by a base unit of 5mg and then dividing that figure by the incidence of advertising for stress-relief products on each regional television network. Musselborough, at one time a swingeing and totally unsympathetic critic of my work on job reductivism, did his best to associate himself with S9, which for a while had a considerable following, measuring, its proponents claimed, not only the base sanity quotient, but also assessing the direction and rate of change of that quotient throughout the society. But the figure itself would fluctuate over quite short periods in such an alarming way as to throw serious doubts on the validity of the data being assembled.
