ruling class culture as psychological damage…
Back when Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson briefly willed himself to power as some kind of people’s popularist prime minister, Byline News, investigative journalist Iain Overton expresses his unease for the nation’s prospects. Concerned about the emotional damage Johnson’s privileged education might have done, and how this might impact upon his ability to lead the nation.
Overton does this by reflecting upon his childhood. when aged 8 he was packed off to become a man at an expensive English preparatory school. He outlines his experience of being re-socialised away from familial values of love and support, towards a tense sense of individual alienation. This process was shaped by ‘predatory teachers, physical abuse, cold shared baths, iron-hard beds, inedible food’. ‘It was like being made an orphan. But with the added twist that your parents had approved it’.
For Overton the cumulative psychological damage caused by this type of education leads to ‘boarding school syndrome’, a condition that renders the boarding school ‘survivor’ damaged in such a way as they can be emotionally distant and deeply flawed. Like Nasty Nick in the Big Brother house, Boris Johnson is a the product of a repeating pattern of cultural reproduction, survival of the fittest elite, stripped of weakening human compassion.
According to the Sutton Trust Social and the UK Government Mobility Commission 2019 privately educated people are still very much in charge. 39% of the elite group were privately educated, more than five times as many as the population at large, 24% graduated from Oxbridge. Politics, the media, and public service all have large numbers of the privately educated, including 65% of senior judges, 59% of civil service permanent secretaries and 57% of the House of Lords. 39% of the cabinet were independently educated. Rishi Sunak’s 2022 cabinet was 61% privately educated. In the UK Under 7% of pupils are taught privately.
There is a close link between fee paying schools, Oxbridge and getting a top job. About 17% of the most socially and politically powerful jobs are aquired through this historically iterating loop, a figure that rises to 52% of senior judges, and 33% of newspaper columnists. This situation might not matter so much if there was not such a huge divide in the life experiences of the rich people who dominate cultural discourse and define economic reality. Or as Sir Peter Lampl, founder and executive chairman of the Sutton Trust states:
“Britain is an increasingly divided society. Divided by politics, by class, by geography. Social mobility, the potential for those to achieve success regardless of their background, remains low. As our report shows, the most influential people across sport, politics, the media, film and TV, are five times as likely to have attended a fee-paying school.”
Arthur Richard Beard adds to our understanding of this fee-paying school trauma in book Sad Little Men, Private Schools and the Ruin of England writes:
“At the age of 13, after prep school, Cameron and Johnson progressed to Eton. I went on to Radley College near Oxford. The exact school picked out by the parents didn’t really matter, because the experience was designed to produce a shared mindset. They were paying for a similar upbringing with a similar intended result: to establish our credentials for the top jobs in the country. We were being trained for leadership, or if not to lead then to earn. The most convincing reason to go to a private school remains to have gone to a private school, with the prizes that are statistically likely to follow.”
“One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were – in name-taped pyjamas with a single soft toy (also name-taped), blubbing themselves to sleep and wetting their beds.”
For Psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien the symptoms of distress caused by this type of education are : “emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism, compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism. Fine fine fine. We’re all doing fine.” In her book Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privilaged’ Child, Schaverien argues that British colonial tradition of sending ones children to boarding school can lead to problems in later life that
Further concerns for the emotional well being of the British ruling elite that questions their suitability to rule are provided by author Sonia Purnell. In her book, Just Boris: A Tale of Blonde Ambition, Purnell dives deeper into diagnosis of Johnson’s damaged character, revealing how the public figure of Boris Johnson is a performance, conjured up to deal with a difficult past. Devised as coping mechanism made up to survive the bully boy tactics of boarding school high jinks. Boris the nincompoop, floppy haired, funny man, a carefully constructed persona, fit for public consumption and ready for women to become the many mother’s of his diasporic children.
According to author Dr Gabor Mate, childhood adversity plays a significant role in shaping of the way a person come to view the world. In his book When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection children brought up without nurturing adults lead to the unhealthy brain development of children which he argues leads them into becoming bullies. In an interview on the News Outlet Democracy Now Mate argued that childhood is important in that it informs:
“how we see the world, whether the world is a hostile or friendly place, whether we have to always do for ourselves and look after others or whether we can actually expect and receive help from the world, whether or not the world is hostile or friendly, and indeed our stress physiology, is very much shaped by those early experiences. And that’s then what we act out much of our lives.”
Johnson’s short lived, honeymooning period in power was pissed up the wall at illegal pandemic parties. Even those people who’d voted for him in full knowledge of his flaws started to have their fill, loosing nana in the covid 19 care home kill. Whilst millions missed out on human interactions, hope, happiness and joy, high society Johnson and chums couldn’t care less. Protective clothing profits let the dead bodies pile high, pan banging and randy shags against the government’s door, suitcases full of drink delivered to Downing Street, pandemic posh man’s white offy carrier bag. Then an eye test in Barnard Castle, physical metaphor, gas lit optics in the rose garden of the morally corrupt, tens of thousands of excess deaths and millions of quid spaffed at the rich in track and trace scams.
To what extent should we be concerned for the mental capacity of how these culturally replicating forces shape and reinforce the power structures, institutions, economics and politics of contemporary British society? To what extent does the way that the ruling elite are brought up to see the world have an impact on the way that perceive and create it. What if ways of thinking changed the architecture of the mind and encouraged ways of thinking that are rooted in trauma and see the world as a threatening and hostile world, survival of the fittest in the playground meets adult life.
