Eton and all the murder (2019)
johnhiggs.com
johnhiggs.com
Basically, they put you through hell, both institutionally and Lord Of The Flies. Bullying was normal, and vicious, and inescapable (no going home to get away from them). You dealt with it or you persuades your parents to let you leave, or you suicided. In my school of ~400 pupils we had at least one suicide a year, often more.
The thinking was that if you survived all this then you would be sufficiently tough (mentally and physically) to be sent to some colonial outpost far away from everyone and everything that you knew, with no help nearby, and not lose your shit.
It kinda worked as intended for most people - ex-classmates I've met since are confident and charming. But for those like me, who didn't get on with the system so well, it was years of clinical depression and therapy to heal from it.
There's a name for it now: Boarding School Syndrome [0]. It manifests in adulthood as a range of symptoms, but emotional detachment is probably the most prominent. It's not healthy, and realising that almost all of Britain's most prominent politicians suffer from it (and every single British prime minister since Thatcher went to boarding school), it becomes obvious why Britain is such a mess now.
[0] https://caldaclinic.com/boarding-school-syndrome-the-childho...
Edit - never mind, I found it:
He was the product of a proper, British, all-male boarding school. "An interesting form of emotional atrophy," he says today [1993]. "They cripple your mind, and then they send you out to run the country."
Hmm, it doesn't invalidate your overall point but I would guess John Major, Gordon Brown, Teresa May and Liz Truss were probably not at boarding school.
I don’t think Major,May or Truss did - state grammar schools and private schools yes, but I don’t believe they were boarding schools - but I may have missed something.
You read about the motivations of the elite in supporting religious institutions and dedicating their children to the regular and secular clergy, and you think, well, surely that's an arrangement of convenience or mutual advantage, mainly... but no, if you look at the data it really, really wasn't. They genuinely believed the whole eternal-damnation thing and took it super-seriously and contributed to the church in ways that were very much net-negative to them and their families (and that some others avoided doing to no clear disadvantage, so it doesn't seem to be a harm-avoidance measure, at least not in material or social terms). The norm, at least for a good stretch of centuries, was for these transactions to confer less in material or political benefits than they cost (though, sure, some were political power-plays or otherwise highly beneficial).
The thinking seems so alien that it's hard to really put myself in their shoes. Even the vast majority of the modern religious, and certainly the elite religious, at least in the US, don't act as if they truly believe like the barons and dukes of Europe did. The only place you see that kind of self-sacrificial dedication to religion these days is what we'd call cults.
There is reason to believe that during much of the Hellenistic period and before/after, most ancient Greeks saw the Gods as more of a folk tradition, for example. Hence the rise in schools of philosophical thought independent of religion. Likely many other Pagan societies had such ebbs and flows.
Ancient China went through similar periods IIUC.
It’s also hard for me to believe that Renaissance era Italians were really fervent believers given all the corruption involved in the Church (placing rich people as Popes, tons of Popes and priests having affairs and using the church money to live lavishly). Which is likely what led to the Reformation and the wars of religion - basically a return back to taking religion very seriously.
Historically it also seems to vary a lot based on class, with the upper end of society (by class or education) tending to be less religious. For example during the 19th century the average person was still quite religious in much of Europe, but the most educated classes had already become secular and begun to openly express Atheism. Then you look at things like the Wars of Religion following the reformation - most likely, this provided an excellent backdrop to motivate your soldiers with a real cause for fighting, which rulers used to accomplish their more practical goals of expanding their realm.
Right and it _should_ seem so. Faith is a gift, received without any prior claim on it; otherwise those who get it sooner would have a legitimate reason to think themselves more capable than others. The faithfulness that ought to result in active love is going on all over the place, including in the white collar workplace, but it goes on irrespective of other factors, including being seen, let alone being transmitted to history.
"The casualty rates were highest among the subalterns... estimates for the mortality rates range from 65 to 81%. This was, at its lowest estimate, double the rate for enlisted men."
https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/the-slaughter-of-t...
> Literally meaning "subordinate", subaltern is used to describe commissioned officers below the rank of captain and generally comprises the various grades of lieutenant.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaltern_(military)
So since it literally means subordinate, it should not describe commissioned officers, right?
But troops are also subordinate and yet aren't called subordinate :D
That's a lot higher than the overall British death rate of 12.5% of those who served (from https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/oly...).
The village I grew up in has about 57 names for a population of 1000 or so:
This kind of entrenchment is why, even still today, we fight imperialist wars that murder innocent people every twenty minutes.
Eton is a death cult.
I am not trying to defend Eton, it very well be a place to produce sociopaths. I don't have enough information, and the article is really anecdotal evidence by itself.
Yes, as noted (with references) in some of the sibling comments here.
The KLF have long been heroes of mine, but the book covers everything from the meaning of creativity, 60s counterculture, art history, music and much more.
After reading I was directly inspired to cause as much good chaos as possible.
John Higgs (and the KLF) are treasures.
Cash is a liability of the central bank, yep. Destroying it removes a liability from the bank's balance sheet, increasing their equity. As others have noted, destroying cash is equivalent to returning money to an arm of government.
As you say, if people destroyed cash on a regular basis, it would be deflationary: the central bank would respond by lowering interest rates. When the increased equity was eventually booked as profit, it would go back to the government, who would (presumably) spend it.
Both the lower rates and the increased spending are inflationary, so in the long run we might expect that the system would balance itself out.
A lot of people seem angry at them for burning the money instead of giving it to charity. No one would be angry at them for spending it all on something dumb (e.g. a boat), and this way everyone else's money gets worth very slightly more.
Incidentally, Bill Drummond's 45 [2] is a great read too. Especially for the creatively minded person.
There were some crazy nut cases in my comprehensive school in the north of England, but even they seemed to have eventually lived fairly decent lives.
Having been to university with a large number of old Etonians, I can tell you with some confidene that a significant proportion of them believe themselves to be above the law.
I'd love to meet one but I don't think they escape Eton unless such characteristics are deeply inculcated.
There was (surprisingly?) little bullying when I was there. I wasn't in the "cool" group, but still had friends and felt broadly accepted; more so than in my prior boarding school.
Any remaining hierarchy between the older and younger boys was in its final days. One anecdote I remember: where I arrived, younger boys would fill up the older boys' water jugs at lunch on request, but when I left that would have seemed very out-of-place.
Re the murders: the murder surge was happening as the British class system became less relevant, offered fewer privileges for those without competency, and its status outside the UK was disintegrating. I'd be interested to see whether going to Eton increases your chance of being a murderer relative to just being at that place in the British class system. Do Harrow & Radley have a similarly high rate of murders?
I’ve worked and am continuing to work on healing or soothing some of the wounds inflicted in my time at elite boarding schools - but I can’t say the same for the rest of my cohort, who are now generally busy running the U.K. or burning down rainforest for profit or whatever it is this week.
Boarding schools for minors are generally bad, IMO. My parents both went to (and one also taught at) boarding schools in the US. By their accounts, such schools tend to attract perverted or power-hungry maladjusted adults who enjoy the kind of power over others that can only be had at such institutions.
[edit] I went to college at a military-style school and I recall that there was an explicit prohibition against Personal Servitude. We always wondered what happened in the past to make that a rule that everyone knew about.
There’s also a profound difference in what it does to you when you start at six versus sixteen - many of the old etonians cited went through the preparatory school system, as did I.
A UK citizen was kidnapped by a group in the middle east and spent several months in captivity.
After describing how bad the treatment was, he was asked: "How did you make it through?"
His answer: "Well, I went to a British public boarding school so by comparison, the captivity wasn't so bad"
I imagine things were worse in the past though, see e.g. the notorious practice of "fagging" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
I suspect that in the early years, when physical punishment was banned, the psychological stuff amped up a bit.
Even at a state school in the 90s, some things we thought were normal would be shocking and absolutely a child protection issue these days.
"Surprised" because by 1999 I'd been attending a British private school for several years and corporal punishment certainly didn't exist at my school, or at any school I knew about. Apparently it was permitted on paper though. I'm not sure how common it still was, if it existed at all.
In any case, the worst treatment I received at school was never from the staff and always from the other boys. I can definitely think of some behaviour I saw from pupils back in the day that I'm sure wouldn't be tolerated for a second these days.
In the US, I have relatives that were locked in closets by teachers and had their knuckles rapped for using their left hands.
A combination of factors (cameras and modern communications systems being two significant ones) have shone a lot of light into what used to be very dark corners.
Being a bright kid and usually "teachers pet" I didn't get too much abuse directly but I can remember one poor guy who clearly had learning difficulties getting his face smashed repeatedly slammed into the blackboard by a teacher - we were about 6 at the time. :-(
This was a comprehensive school in the north west, working class area.
The corruption ran deep.
When I told my parents they didn’t believe me and said I was exaggerating.
He was a bully who lots of kids hated.
He ended up with cancer and there was a whole fundraiser for him etc which I refused to contribute to which was a bit petty.
And then as Mark Twain didn’t say ‘I’ve never wished death upon someone but I have read some obituaries with more pleasure than others!’
"While we don't believe in its application at this school, it is perfectly legal for us to use corporal punishment if we so choose."
This was to a class of 10 year olds.
Prep school, from 6-12 was a nightmarish place where it was still 1935 - masters from my time there are now in prison with good reason. Corporal punishment was a daily fact of life - a caning was a relief compared to some of the options.
Secondary school - in the shell, we were made to fag, and prefects were permitted to issue corporal punishment, which happened frequently. Nothing testosterone-fuelled about it - cold and calculating. “You will convene at 5am at the oaks in full uniform”, and then whatever horrors they could come up with. Ski squats that would go on for hours. Standing outside at night in soaked clothing. The occasional good old fashioned beating. In my remove year it was decided that shells were too young for the heavy duty of fagging and it could be damaging to them - so the removes did it. In the fifth form they abandoned fagging and replaced it with “fifth form house duties”.
You learned to live under utterly arbitrary rules.
By the time we were in the sixth, duties were phased out and replaced with hired staff, and corporal punishment - in fact any prefect-meted punishment whatsoever - was banned in response to an incident involving cricket bats that resulted in a pupil being hospitalised for quite some time. Well, that and the law finally mandated it.
My kid brother went there, starting a year after I left, and had a markedly different experience. En-suite showers! We had a frigid communal shower for my first two years, never mind en-suite. It’s like we went there a century apart.
That all said, by the time I was at secondary school it was all old hat - there was a marked difference between the boys who started boarding with secondary school and those who had been through prep school - we were the wise old hands, the lifers, the ones who knew the grift. Prep school, I find it hard to talk about.
Turns out there’s a term for this stuff - “Boarding School Syndrome”.
Rah rah.
Its still present ie in modern day russia, from what I read about it still much much worse than elsewhere. IIRC around 500 die there annually, everybody knows it, nobody does anything I guess to 'man-up' when its actually 'fuck-up'. Its sadly a broken place beyond any hope for repair, at least in this century.
My English teacher was a huge arsehole and great anglophile. He would throw the well-known phrases around like "sail a convict ship to Australia with a crew of ten", "the war was won on the playing fields of Eton" & so on.
If i were running such an institution everyone would learn meditation, mindfullness, and would encourage every student and teacher to attend psychological counseling paid by the school with a therapist of their choice.
Maybe real world schools should think along similar lines.
That said, I like your suggestions. There’s altogether too little introspection on what the point of schooling should be. To my mind, better that schools impart the metacognitive skills to be a better learner, a better thinker, a more stable person, than to impart specific knowledge.
Not my intention at all. I'm using the story as a jumping off point to reflect on our reality.
One sad, unloved wizarding student growing up to be an unstable adult is a personal tragedy. When that young adult decides that his problems are the existence of certain others and drums up supporters and starts killing people on a massive scale. That is a societal tragedy now.
Now obviously we don't have wizard lords in our existence. On the other hand we have unstable grown up former victims of Eton. And some might interpret the course of recent British political tragedies as an outward manifestation of their games. Providing a parallel to the story.
No poking holes at all.
This is why there was the german prejudice against the "perfid albion", because well the people who run that empire were deeply twisted and evil. The admiration for similar evil, ala hitler was only natural.
56 per hundred k is higher than _any country on earth_, so this is pretty impressive.
(The absolute numbers are small enough that it could all be fluke, of course. Also I have some vague qualms about comparing murderer rate to murder rate, but I think it _mostly_ works, as most murderers only do one).
That said, one correction. El Salvador had a murder rate in 2017 of 61.7/100,000. This is comparable to Eton.
Let's take your analysis a step farther. If we have 230 * 30 people, each of whom has 1.1 chances in 100,000 of committing murder, the number of expected murderers is 0.0759. And the distribution of number of murders is a Poisson distribution. That means that the probability of k murders is λ^k e^(-λ) / k!.
Therefore our estimates are:
0 murderers = 0.9269088928142737
1 murderers = 0.07035238496460337
2 murderers = 0.0026698730094066973
3 murderers = 6.754778713798945e-05
Therefore, even with a small absolute number, we can be very sure that the true murder rate for graduates of Eton are significantly higher than the UK population.
However Eton does attract people internationally. And the international murder rate in 2017 was 6.1/100,000 per https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-ra.... Using that as a murderer rate, the odds against Eton producing 4 murderers in 30 years improve...to about 1/1000. Which means that Eton's murders are still likely to not be chance.
But looking at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... it looks like the homicide rate already was single gender. Even the peak rate in 2002 (probably skewed upwards by Harold Shipman) is well below the current world average. And UK rates have been low for many decades. 2002 is the peak of a rise in homicides starting around 1960, and it had been low since at least the 1800s.
I dug in a bit farther. Only about 5% of Eton's students are international. So let's lose them, and also lose the older murderer and the international murderer. Even using the highest murder rate from 2002, there is less than a 1% chance that they'd have had 2 or more murderers in a 30 year period.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
Correct it further for the fact that convicted murderers are overwhelmingly male (93% according to your same source) and old Etonians begin to look downright peaceful. But that wouldn't make a good article.
So this correction is not as big as you think.
Murders have been declining, right? I wonder how much of this is due to comparing historical murders with current murder rates?
That said, this doesn’t account for the look-elsewhere effect, so it probably should be scaled by the population size. However, even after scaling by the ~32k public schools in the UK, it still gives a p-value of 0.03, so it’s statistically unlikely that there would exist a single public school among all 32k that would have this high a rate of murderers.
Plenty of locations have rates around that. That's why it's important to compare similar sized areas.
One wonders if the Etonians of earlier decades were hit as hard by lead poisoning as by a misplaced sense of impunity.
Not all of them no, but a small group is. We are not born tabula rasa. If there's any truth to the idea that leader types have more psycho/sociopathic features, then their children will have them more frequently too.
I'm under the impression that "sociopathy" is kind of used synonymously with antisocial personality disorder but has fallen out of favour because of the pop psychology baggage it carries, and "psychopathy" is mostly used in media/criminal justice tropes.
Unless nomenclature changed significantly in past decade or so.
Störung must have an independent history, though. The correct translation of -pathy today would be Leiden, ie. Seelenleiden, which sounds like another euphemism in the euphemism treadmill.
They grow up in a society where they are taught that they are entitled to anything and everything they want and when that doesn’t work out for them on the first pass they resort to crime.
> "Since these schools taught gentlemen not meant to sully their hands with work (perish the thought!), they never learned more practical subjects such as bookkeeping or land management. Those subjects consigned to schools that educated sons of men in trade."
> "Disciplinary measures were expected to be harsh, not only as a way to maintain order but to toughen up the boys so they could perfect that famous English stiff upper lip. Punishments were brutal, often resulting in blood being drawn during caning, belting, birching, and whipping."
> "Evenings and nights, the boys were left to fend for themselves often under the rule of an older boy put in charge. The boys formed a hierarchy that made the reign of terror look tame, as older boys preyed upon younger boys."
https://donnahatch.com/education-and-other-forms-of-child-to...
Apparently these public schools (Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Rugby, Charterhouse and Shrewsbury) were intentionally designed to turn out sociopathic narcissists with a penchant for violence and cruelty - who were the kind of people that the system's architects thought were needed to run the British Empire.
I think it's clear why the British Empire's champions and defenders would push for the latter interpretation. However, the final scene in which the boys are rescued by a British naval officer does seem to point towards the former.
If you dislike that particular source I linked to, note that this view is not uncommon, for example this commentary:
> "Prior to publishing Lord of the Flies, Golding taught at an exclusive all-male boarding school attached to Salisbury Cathedral. I read that he was often distressed by the savage behavior of some of the students. I've yet to find where he ever taught working-class students, so his teaching universe concentrated in the British upper-middle classes."
> "There is well-documented historical disregard for human life in the British aristocracy in their pursuit of riches abroad, e.g., the massacre of unarmed civilians in Amritsar, India; the Boer atrocities; the Opium Wars and two centuries of profiteering from slavery. (The Nazis had to come along to make the Brits look good.) It's not at all inconceivable that some of Golding's pupils were descended from those who committed crimes against humanity."
> "The book's title calls attention to the nobility. Was Golding pointing an oblique finger at the British aristocacy? He was certainly in a unique position to do so."
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1180391-is-lotf-a-criti...
> Of his contemporaries, Cecil Beaton wrote of the piece "It is hilariously funny, but it is exaggerated".[22] Connolly, on reviewing Stansky & Abraham's interpretation, wrote "I was at first enchanted as by anything which recalls one's youth but when I went to verify some references from my old reports and letters I was nearly sick... In the case of St Cyprian's and the Wilkes whom I had so blithely mocked I feel an emotional disturbance... The Wilkeses were true friends and I had caricatured their mannerisms (developed as a kind of ritual square-bashing for dealing with generations of boys) and read mercenary motives into much that was just enthusiasm."[32] Walter Christie and Henry Longhurst went further and wrote their own sympathetic accounts of the school in response to Orwell's and voiced their appreciation for the formidable Mrs Wilkes.[33][34] Robert Pearce, researching the papers of another former pupil,[35] made a comprehensive study from the perspective of the school, investigating school records and other pupils' accounts. While some features were universal features of prep school life, he concluded that Orwell's depiction bore little relation to reality and that Orwell's defamatory allegations were unsupportable.[15] Davison writes "If one is looking for a factual account for life at St Cyprian's, this is not the place to seek it."[36]
On Orwell's claimed state of misery, Jacintha Buddicom, who knew him well at the time, also raised a strong challenge. She wrote "I can guarantee that the 'I' of "Such, Such were the Joys" is quite unrecognisable as Eric as we knew him then", and "He was a philosophical boy, with varied interests and a sense of humour—which he was inclined to indulge when referring to St Cyprian's in the holidays."[23]
My time at a public school (60s) was irredeemably vile, but this statement is utter bollocks. The cruelty was systemic & structural, but unconscious and well intended, "it'll make a man of you - as a 9 year old - to run 15 miles at 4am and be beaten if you're in the last 10". It was a failure of rationalism, evidence and common-sense rather than wickedness. That's not to say I wouldn't now beat my old masters unconcious if I bumped into them in a dark alley all these years later - but I wouldn't ascribe calculated wickedness to them, or a dark desire to further Empire.
This could be a confusion of correlation and causality.
Weird for me to come across a reference to the "Eton Fainting Game" a day after coming across it described as "The American Dream" in Blindboy's newest episode[0]. I will say the one time it worked for me in school I did have the most vivid . . . dream.
[0] https://play.acast.com/s/blindboy/saint-brigid-solvent-buse-...