i) If you decrease the number of social class 2 anorexics you necessarily increase the numbers of valium abusers in social class 4.
ii) If you provide efficient medication for manic depressives in the Fens, there are perceptible variations in the numbers of agoraphobics on the South Coast.
iii) If you use behavioural conditioning to stop six pupils at St Botolph’s primary school on Anglesey from bed wetting, the result will be increased outbursts of sociopathic rage among the ten borderline psychotics that attend the school.
And so on.
In one fell swoop I also found myself abandoning all the models of sanity and insanity I had absorbed during my years of study. The key to the abnormal psyche lay not in a juxtaposition between the acquired and the instinctual, nor in a comprehensive model of the workings of the mind, but in an altogether purer, more mathematical direction. Traditional psychology retained the status of being a pseudo-science, its findings unable to bridge the vast gulf between the empirically testable hypotheses of neurophysiology and the incommunicable truths of inner mental states. Just as philosophy, try as it might, cannot bind itself to formal logic. All this would end with Quantity Theory. The individual psyche would be left to discover its own destiny; psychology would be confined to the elaboration of statistical truths.
I make no bones about it, the Quantity Theory was my salvation. No one ever complains if a great artist says that he was driven to create a masterpiece by a hunger for recognition and money. But a scientist? Well, he is meant to be disinterested, pure; his ambition merely to descry the cement of the universe. He isn’t meant to use it to start laying his own patio. I was saved from Bromsgrove, from Aston, from Chelmsford, from the Majestic Hotel, by the Quantity Theory. From its inception I knew that it fulfilled the criteria required by all great scientific theories: 1. It made large-scale predictions. 2. These were testable empirically. 3. The testings would really eat up cash.
That night I paced the Wilton until it smelt of singed nylon. I could not sleep, I was tormented, gripped by the fear that should I make the wrong move, should I fail to do the Quantity Theory justice, then I would be unable to claim all the credit. I knew that as a responsible scholar I should search around for some funding, do some fieldwork and then write up the results for publication in the relevant journal. But a wayward, craven part of me feared instantly that some other, some interloper was perhaps at that very moment stumbling on the same truth and about to make it known to the world — pulverising the credit due to me and me alone. I was tempted to call the national press, arrange a conference of some sort, upstage the academic community and tell the world.
Prudence got the better of me. I knew that I had to effectively gain control of the Quantity Theory. To unleash it on the world half-cocked was to ensure only that the massive industry of thought, research and practice which I could foresee would be within the domain of others. If I wanted to control I would have to plot, scheme, machinate, and above all lay my plans carefully.
Accordingly the next morning I sat down to write letters to my fellow student/analysands from Chelmsford: Sikorski, Hurst, Harley, and of course Zack Busner. (I would have asked Simon Gurney too were it not that he had given up his practice to become a sculptor.) I invited them to come to Birmingham to have dinner with me and discuss an idea which I thought might be of interest to them.
I waited for three days … a week … no word from anyone. The evening of the planned rendezvous arrived and to my surprise so did they. One after another. They had all driven up from London together in Adam Harley’s car. But they had got into an argument at Toddington Services about the culturally relative perception of post-natal depression. Busner took the view that post-natal depression was an entirely patriarchal phenomenon, and that there were tribal societies where the matrilineal took precedence, that were completely free of it. Adam Harley took the view that Busner was a ‘pretentious twerp’ and followed up this criticism by shoving a Leviathan-burger, smothered with salad cream and dripping gobbets of part-grilled, processed shrimp, straight into Busner’s face.
After arriving, I sat them down and made them tea. I wouldn’t even let Busner clean up; I launched without any preamble into a description of my revelation. They were restless and barely prepared to listen, but I only had to hold their attention for a few minutes before the theory bit into them. Of course there was something in my manner that they sensed was different. Something in the way I whiffled towards the ceiling, the way I fellated ballpoint pens, the way I stood with one shoulder far, far higher than the other so that I appeared to be dangling from a meat hook, that held them, cowed them, made them realise that it was I who was to replace Alkan in their affections.
We formed a small multi-disciplinary team. The aim was to develop the Quantity Theory in relation to microsocietal groupings. Alkan’s students were notable for the diversity of the paths they had followed since leaving Chelmsford; within our small group we had all the necessary disciplines represented.
We know already what had happened to Busner. Phillip Hurst, whose father had massively endowed the Chelmsford campus, had moved from pure psychology into psychometrics and statistics. His help in developing the quotient concept was to prove invaluable. Adam Sikorski had moved on from the crude behaviouristic models that he had constructed with such glee when a postgraduate. No longer did he turn rats into alcoholics, heroin addicts and thieves — just to show that he could. Now he turned armadillos into anorexics, narwhals into neurasthenics and shire horses into hopeless, puling, agoraphobics. Sikorski had secured generous government funding for these experiments and his familiarity with the ins and outs of political in-fighting was to prove at the outset of great service to the Quantity Theory. Of course ultimately it alienated him entirely. As for Adam Harley — Harley the campaigner, Harley the idealist, Harley the visionary — he was the ultimate fifth columnist. He was sitting in a cold basement in Maida Vale, abasing himself before the adolescent angst and middle-aged spread of anxiety that his ‘clients’ laid before him. Harley, with his bloodhound eyes which threatened to carry on drooping until they made contact with his roll-neck, persuaded me of his concern, his humanity, his devotion to the very real therapeutic benefits of the Quantity Theory, but all the time …
Our first move was to look around for a suitably small, self-contained societal unit on which we could test the theory. We were fortunate indeed to have my cousin Sid. Sid had never been mentally ill, exactly. However, like other rather introverted children, he had had a number of ‘imaginary friends’. The difference in Sid’s case was that although he abandoned his imaginary friends during pre-puberty, he met them again at university. Where they all pursued a lively social life together.
Sid was now living in a small commune in the Shetland Islands, where he and his fellow communards were dedicated to the growing of implausibly large hydroponic onions. The other members of the commune were eccentric but not quite as unhinged as Sid. They believed that their ability to grow the four-foot legumes was wholly predicated on the orbital cycle of Saturn’s satellite, Ceres.
For a number of reasons this commune represented an almost perfect test bed for our research. It was remote, self-contained, and possessed a readily quantifiable sanity quotient which needed the bare minimum to assess. In addition the area around the commune contained several other examples of experimental living, left on the beach by the receding wave of the previous decade. It would be easy, therefore, to find a suitable control.
The Quantity Theory Multi-disciplinary Team set off for Shetland without further ado. Once there we would measure the quotient and then set about either exacerbating or palliating Sid. We then hoped to observe what effect, if any, this had on the other eight commune members.