Is there a danger of seeing a lot of this as specific to Johnson; that
he is somehow a special character or case?
In Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England (2021),
Richard Beard refers to the work of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien and
her 2015 volume Boarding School Syndrome. Schaverien describes a condition:
'now sufficiently recognised to merit therapy groups and an emergent
academic literature in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. The
symptoms are wide-ranging but include, engrained from an early age,
emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism,
defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism,
compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional
misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism.'
Musa Okwonga makes a similar case in One of Them (2021), his memoir
about his time as a schoolboy at Eton:
'A few years before I arrived at my school, it was attended by a cluster
of people who now hold political office in Britain: a group who has
driven through some of the most socially regressive policies in recent
memory, and whose leader, the current prime minister, is best known for
his arrogance and dishonesty. … I ask myself whether this was my
school’s ethos: to win at all costs; to be reckless, at best, and
brutal, at worst. I look at its motto again – "May Eton Flourish" – and
I think, yes, many of our politicians have flourished, but to the vast
detriment of others. Maybe we were raised to be the bad guys?'
Gary
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
