Psychotic schooling

Yesterday’s post about Bing somehow linking Josef Goebbels with Fiennes (not specific about which one) reminded me of the section in Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, Hitch-22, in which he describes his early educational experiences.

In relating the “mania and ritual” of the boarding school to which he was sent at age eight, Hitchens encapsulates the best depiction of life in a totalitarian state I’ve ever seen. And please do believe me, I’ve seen a lot.

He starts out noting how the students are “robbed of all privacy, encouraged to inform on one another, taught how to fawn upon authority and turn upon the vulnerable outsider, subject at all times to rules which it was not always possible to understand, let alone to obey.”

All of which you’d expect. But it’s the last point, about the rules, that’s crucial. All the fawning and informing in the world really doesn’t buy you anything, because “the rules” keep changing. Hitchens absolutely nailed it:

“The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is ‘systematic.’ The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong. “

In such a regime you are never able to find a path through the crocodile-infested quicksand. If you made it through the swamp yesterday, that route doesn’t work today. What is acceptable—possibly even applauded—right now will be dangerously—possibly fatally—wrong ten minutes from now.

You never know what’s in the minds of the psychopaths in charge and there is no rest for the weary. That covers Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Maoist China and all the others, large and small.

Aside from capturing that reality in one succinct paragraph, this passage got me thinking. Considering that much of Britain’s leadership have cycled through public schools such as the one Hitchens describes, I really wonder what psychoses lurk in their carefully-coiffed crania?