It’s now difficult to appreciate the then popularity of this sort of exercise in communal living, and frankly I found it difficult to appreciate at the time. I think in retrospect that all those ‘alternative’ modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development. Sleeping in bags, arguing and hair-pulling. It was really all a sort of giant ‘let’s camp in the garden, Mummy’ session. The onion-growers’ camp was no exception to this rule. A huddle of bothies, caulked, in some places well and with close attention, but in others simply stuffed up with back numbers of the Shetland Times. When the afternoons grew dark and the wind whistled over the tedious landscape, the rain drove out of the well of darkness and shot in distinct drops through the central living area, where pasty-faced lads and lasses squatted, hooking their hair back behind their ears, absorbed in french knitting, macramé, and writing home.
In this context the team were called upon to operate just as much as anthropologists as psychologists. There was no way that the commune was going to accept us for the period of time necessary to complete our experiments if we didn’t, at least superficially, show some sympathy with the ideas they espoused. So it was that I found myself night after night, the dirty denim of my acquired ‘jeans’ slow-burning my bent knees, as one communard or other, their minds stupidly stupefied by marijuana, attempted to discourse on ley lines, shiatsu, or some Tantric rubbish.
Of course we took our own mental profile, our own sanity quotient. Both as a group per se and combined with the communards. We then were able to allow for it in the context of the fluctuations we attempted to engineer. When the experiments were completed and the data collected from the ‘control’ commune, where Phillip Hurst had been conducting his own lonely vigil, we found that the results were far better than we could have hoped for.
The manipulations of the given distribution of sanity within the commune had, by any standards, been crude. When we wanted to palliate Sid’s symptoms: his delusions, his paranoid fantasies, and especially his lively but imaginary social life, we would simply sedate him heavily with Kendal Mint Cake laced with Largactil. He stopped hearing voices, and the world ceased to resolve itself into a hideously complex, Chinese marquetry of interlocking conspiracies. Even his ‘friends’ went away. All but one, that is. An enigmatic welder from Wearside called George Stokes still insisted on manifesting himself.
And the onion-growers? Well, even though we had to wait to quantify the data, we could see with our own eyes that they had started to exhibit quite remarkably baroque behavioural patterns. With Sid palliated they now not only believed in the beneficial agricultural influence of Ceres, they also believed that Ceres was a real person, who would be visiting them to participate in a celebration of the summer solstice. Some of the really enthusiastic communards even sent out to Lerwick for Twiglets and other kinds of exotic cocktail eatables, all the better to entertain their divine guest.
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 whirclass="underline" 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 under way.
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.