I went to an English boarding school in the 70's when it was still part of the system that produced officers for the British Empire.
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.
"They fuck with your mind forever, then send you out to run the country" is how Robyn Hitchcock put it. Or something like that; I'm quoting from memory.
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."
and every single British prime minister since Thatcher went to boarding school
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.
They weren’t, and in the cases of May and Major, it undid them, as plenty of their ministers and MPs did, and it’s hard for someone who hasn’t been through that particular wringer to understand and therefore work with the mindset. Also, people who went through it will invariably look down at people who did not, as those who did not have no idea what it is to suffer, to stand utterly alone — always — and therefore their judgment cannot be trusted, as it is clouded by softness and emotion.
Also you can spot another boarding-school kid almost immediately. I usually know if someone else was sent to boarding school within 5 minutes of meeting them.
Captain Grimes says in Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall, that they put you through perfect hell during a period of your life that is bound to be perfect hell anyway, then watch out for you for the rest of your life.
> (and every single British prime minister since Thatcher went to 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.
On a side note, it is worth paying a visit to Eton to see the number of old boys killed serving their country in WW1 and WW2: the walls of the old building are literally lined with their names in the thousands.
An interesting example of how the old English class system wasn't just about venal entrenched self-advantage. The upper classes of old really did feel a noblesse oblige, and were killed in the trenches at considerably higher rates in the trenches. Young men of high birth were expected to be officers, and to lead by example - a job that came with a life expectancy measured in days during the darkest hours of the first world war. One doubts if the present bearers of class privilege feel a similar sense of duty.
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.
The role and seriousness of religion in society has ebbed and flowed a lot historically.
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.
> 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.
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.
There was always a lot of desperation in second- and later born sons in the landed classes, everywhere. Because usually you wouldn’t inherit the the property, so you could as well gamble your life recklessly, and maybe get lucky. The fertility rate has been suggested as a good proxy to estimate wars and proclivity for terrorism.
Most of the Etonian Oxbridge guys I'm friends with ended up going to the military after graduating (one became a lawyer instead). It's still seen as a great job to begin your career with in those circles. I went to a public school (but not Oxbridge) and did a couple years in the Rifles myself.
lately it probably is entrenched but there's an irony in there. The old system was for gentry and nobles and the new system is for a new bureaucratic class of credentialists who use the old system as a scapegoat but in reality the new system is very self serving for these bureaucrats who would never send themselves to war.
I imagine it's more that they simply had no idea what they were getting into. The first world war was the first time anybody had seen a war with that kind of casualty distribution, not to mention, that kind of omnicidal lethality. Officers in previous wars had very good chances of survival.
With respect to fighting wars? No. The military has a couple stand out statistics, first being that most enlisted are of generational servitude while most officers are from opportunity (college recruitment). That means most people enlisted have a relative that served first. Second is that most enlistments come from the poorer part of the country, specifically the South and Midwest. The diversity of the military largely tracks those geographies. Officers similarly reflect where their volunteer pool comes from. That said, the modern upper echelon of US society have a pretty quiet yet thick disdain for military service. They'd probably never let their kids do it.
That's a funny rewriting of history, because we know that the casualty rate among enlisted (i.e. conscripted, in wwi and wwii) was much higher than for officers. The former were servants, factory labourers, peasants, etc, while the latter was a category reserved for the privileged.
I don't think that's true for the British Army in WW1:
"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."
Ah sorry, I guess yet another case of English people going like "let's take a latin word and change its meaning LOL" :)
> Literally meaning "subordinate", subaltern is used to describe commissioned officers below the rank of captain and generally comprises the various grades of lieutenant.[2]
Commissioned officers are still subordinate to those above them. They just outrank NCOs and warrant officers. In theory, the freshest young ROTC grad can order the Command Sergeant Major of the Army (highest NCO in US Army) to do anything that is legal. In practice, nobody is that dumb. Intelligent lieutenants will give the sergeants under their command orders like "Sergeant, I need you and your troops to take out that enemy emplacement". Minor operational details are left up to the NCOs (who generally have much more combat experience) unless there is a specific reason that the lieutenant needs them to do or avoid some action, and generally those orders would just be the lieutenant following his or her own orders.
There was a big rural/urban divide in upper classes in WWI. Rural upper class would be officers on the front lines and get slaughtered at unthinkable rates, urban upper classes would do things like logistics and strategy and largely made it out okay.
If you 'know' that, you're wrong. Frankly, this is a classist prejudice with no basis in fact.
My boarding school had 700 names on the memorial to WW1. Mostly junior officers: 200 captains and 340 lieutenants. That's out of a cohort of maybe 3500 old boys who were the right age for the front: 20%. Eton itself says 1200 died and 5600 served.
They all volunteered, and the 18 year olds were mostly made second Lieutenants, and the second Lieutenant's job was to climb out of the trench first and shout 'follow me' and to move around the battlefield looking after his men. So they did, and they died in huge numbers.
The BBC says 12% of the British army's non-commissioned soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers.
The actual Prime Minister during the way, Asquith lost a son. Andrew Bonar Law (PM in the 1920s) lost two. Anthony Eden (PM in the 50s) lost two brothers and another brother was badly wounded.
My school wasn't English, or as elitist as Eton, but each year on Remembrance Day they would read the names of every pupil who died in the two world wars. Took quite a while.
This is actually a reason why it's common. The impact was so large and so universally felt that nobody would object to the use of public funds to memorialize it. It merely takes someone to suggest it, and nobody would oppose.
Not sure about that. Certainly after WWI virtually every village raised some kind of memorial (even the Thankful Villages). In that environment I can't imagine a public school not doing the same. Even my comprehensive had a Roll of Honour on the wall (now I'm wondering what happened to it when they demolished that building).
Did they actually die in higher percentages than regular footsoldiers? I seriously doubt it. We have to remember the number of people killed in WW1 and 2. I think it is likely that many other schools simply didn't put pictures up for their fallen. I suspect on exceptional aspect of Eton is the connection to former pupil, which might also explain the murderers thesis in the article. Likely many other schools don't even know what happened with their former students.
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.
John Higgs wrote a brilliant book [1] about the band KLF (who famously burned a million pounds). I highly, highly recommend it - even if you know nothing about the band (or care to), it's an incredible read.
Wholeheartedly second the recommendation for this book.
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.
Hm... Perhaps a bit off topic, but burning a million pounds is sort of a reverse-inflation move, right? Relatively speaking, it makes everyone else's pound that much more valuable?
Right, but the Bank of England has a mandate to keep inflation at a particular level. So they'll just print money to cancel you out (or pull some other lever with the same net effect). The BoE's profits go to the government, so in the end you're just paying the government.
(expanding on what other posters have already said)
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.
There's another book where the KLF discuss burning the money, and that's one of the things mentioned.
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.
Of course, they can just print a million pounds immediately upon learning someone destroyed a million pounds. So unfortunately that argument didn't actually work.
Also, the argument ignores the potential velocity of money - as a million pounds moves through the economy it creates economic activity that otherwise may not happen, even if they just buy a boat.
Did he not also write a book on "how to write a top 10 hit" and the followed the recipe in the book to write that hit? The KLF are definitely a very interesting band no matter if one likes the music or not.
Not really. If my school produced murderers, we'd definitely know about it. It would be a big deal. Like certain notorious schools in inner city London.
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.
And sadly that belief is entirely rational and supported by the facts, the British legal system being designed with the overriding concern of protecting the aristocracy and Establishment.
I went to Eton 2002-2007, very much enjoyed it, and I think it made be a better person. I was very lucky to attend.
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?
It isn’t just Eton - it’s many or most of the old British public schools. I went to one, and the scars run deep - as does the will to power and the desire to hurt others as I was hurt. It was a brutal environment, a panopticon in which you learned to bend systems and people to your will, in which you learned you had to stab your friend in the back before they did the same to you, as the rules of the game mandate it. Discipline was relentless, and was largely enforced through cooption of pupils. You were not a name, you were a number. The purpose was to churn out colonial administrators, who now have no colonies to go and quietly exercise their depravity out of view.
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.
Roald Dahl's childhood biography Boy describes the incredible abuse he went through at Repton and an Old British primary school. Caning was a common punishment, love was never present, and fagging was an evil practice in which older boys were deputized to treat younger boys as slaves. There's a reason Dahl's fictional books so frequently feature kids getting revenge/justice against big bad adults (or giants, in the case of Sofie in The BFG).
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.
Is this still pretty much the case or are you aware of changes? My wife went to a boarding school for the last 3 years of high school (late 90's) and it was an overwhelmingly positive experience for her.
[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.
In the U.K., the final change was around the turn of the millennium - it happened while I was there - we were the “lucky” ones who were brutalised but never permitted to brutalise in our turn. Actually, I am grateful for that as I find it hard enough to live with myself as it is.
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.
Roald Dahl also recounts that he was considered insufficiently brutal by the higher-ups and that that was regrettable, considering his other qualities. He never was advanced to prefect.
Ironically that was one of the aims of public school education. They educated the officers and managers of the Empire who had to fend for themselves among "the natives" with a limited number of men and resources.
How old are you? I went to a posh boarding school in the early 2000s and there were many things wrong with it, but it wasn't nearly as brutal as you describe. Other pupils did unpleasant things to me (and I to them) but it was mostly just testosterone-fueled adolescent stupidity that I'm sure happens at less privileged schools too.
As I understand it, the Childrens Act of 1989 had a huge effect on how these places were run. It took a while for the law to filter out into practice so people who went to private / boarding / posh state schools in the 90s experienced a gradually toned down version.
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.
I was surprised to learn recently that corporal punishment wasn't banned in British state schools until 1987, and in private schools until 1999.
"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.
I went to school from in Scotland about 1970 to 1983 - without much difficulty I can think of quite a few situations that I would hope would result in sacking and criminal charges these days.
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. :-(
40. I had the misfortune of getting the worst of both worlds.
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”.
Mandatory military service did that to whole generation of young men almost everywhere where it was, certainly in eastern europe. 2 years, older were punishing younger, by the time younger were older they were part of the system. From time to time somebody died, lifelong traumas were frequent.
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.
I can agree that there are many similar impacts, but mandatory military service doesn’t start at six years old, whereas the British boarding school process does.
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.
Any time I think about Harry Potter now with an adult mind I find the teachers there highly irresponsible. They give young kids superhero like abilities while completely and utterly neglecting their mental health. It is a small wonder that most of them turn out a-okay and there is only a single dark lord going on murderous rampage per generation.
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.
If you start poking, you find those stories have more holes than a fishing net. Best to suspend disbelief.
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.
> If you start poking, you find those stories have more holes than a fishing net
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.
Now, comes the point of reflection. Imagine, for a moment a whole class of politicians, having grown acustomed to bullying out of sight. Running a global trading empire. What do you think they will do relentlessly to there neighbours and upstart competition. Now imagine how this competition might "over" react, when cut off from vital supplies again and again, when driven into endless proxy wars and similar things, just to keep them "down and fighting".
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.
If anyone is unaware of John Higgs, he's written several of my all time favourite books, especially his KLF book which I loved so much I bought loads of them to give out to friends. Can't recommend it highly enough: https://johnhiggs.com/books/the-klf/
Eton appears to be a 6 year school with a capacity of 1390. So, at most, 230 at year, so at a murder (or murderer, really) rate of 4/30=0.13 per year, that implies a murder rate of (0.13/230)*100000 = 56 murders per hundred thousand. The UK homicide rate (which includes non-murder homicide) is 1.1 per hundred thousand.
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).
The average of one murder per murderer I'd generally agree with, but one of the Eton murderers killed 9 before committing suicide. So you are right to have qualms. But it is an upper bound and so still useful.
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!.
Add those up and the expected probability of 4 or more murderers is only 1.3014245782150269e-06.
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.
the true murder rate should be higher than the general population because its a boys school and men are carrying out more murders than women. but I assume its still higher once you account for that.
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.
The 0.13 murderers per year were Old Etonians, so need to be divided by that population. Assuming alumni live on average another 50 years, the murderer rate per 100,000 would be 1.13, compared with the homicide rate of 1.17 for England and Wales in 2020. [1]
This is the right calculation. It baffles me that there are so many comments assuming the homicides are committed by current students.
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.
Murder rate counts victims not killers, one of these guys killed 9 people. Also, only including people who got caught very likely under reports the numbers.
The murderer rate for young alumni of Eton would be higher, but so would the rate for young people generally. In fact, the correction would be even bigger as Eton is a boys-only school and the homicide rate for the wider population was for both men and women.
For the UK they're declining from a peak in the late 90s, but they were kinda flat before that, and in in any case you're talking about a difference of under 1% either way. There was never a time that the UK's murder rate was anything like 56/100k, at least not in the last century (before the late 19th century, useful stats aren't really available, but some estimates do show _very_ high murder rates in the 19th century).
To remove the problem of small numbers, you could use a Poisson distribution to perform a statistical test on the number of murderer rate. The actual murderer count (4 murderers) as compared to the expected murderer rate (0.07 murderers) gives a p-value of about 1e-6.
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.
An elite school having a similar rate as the bad parts of Mexico would still be shocking. But, Mexico is counting deaths not killers so victim rate is a better point of comparison.
Some US cities have similar rates. Even then, it's not the same as comparing to other schools. And yeah, murder rate vs murderer prevalence would would different things. I don't think there's a lot of data on the latter.
> Of course, you can’t blame the children in all this. They are not born as sociopaths
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.
Though the terms are used interchangeably, it is currently believed that psychopathy generally comes from genetic factors, such as parts of the brain not developing fully, while sociopathy results from an interruption in personality development by abuse or trauma in childhood. Sociopaths have less consistent behavior than psychopaths. Psychopaths are more controlled and charming. Their manipulation is more detached. They plan ahead. Sociopaths experience anxiety and find rage far harder to control, and they have a harder time assimilating. Inconsistencies between their words and their lives are often easier to detect.
Can you cite a source? I'm under the impression that both of these terms are considered outdated, in that modern psychology doesn't really think "sociopathy" or "psychopathy" are good abstractions.
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.
I don't think 'antisocial personality disorder' characterizes as typical sociopaths. It is accepted (and often witnessed also by me) that ie higher management layers in corporations are often inhabited by highly functioning sociopaths, they simply have much wider toolset to reach their goals compared to more 'normal' folks, which at one point leave in disgust those continuous battlefields where sociopaths feel at home.
Unless nomenclature changed significantly in past decade or so.
German uses seelische Störung certainly in legal context and it sounds very much like it was translated from psychopathie. Notably, a life-sentence is curbed at 15 years but psychological conditions may be incorrectable and require permanent security.
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.
The obvious explanation to my mind for all of the murder and crime is simply that the people who go to Eton are incredibly entitled.
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.
"Lord of the Flies" was inspired by the British 'public' schools system (so called because prior to its creation, the children of British aristocrats were taught by private tutors). It sounds like a real horrorshow:
> "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."
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.
Perhaps an American romance novelist is not the most reliable source of information about British public schools. William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, did not attend a public school; he attended the non-residential co-educational state-funded grammar school at which his father was a teacher. The book was actually inspired by his years as a teacher and his direct experience of children's behavior.
There's this debate about Lord of the Flies - did it include a specific criticism of the British Empire and the peculiarities of the public school system that trained the leaders of the Empire, or was it a broad commentary on human nature in general?
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."
I don't think it's like this now (probably far more posh), but the public schools were also famously old and decrepit as buildings. They were incredibly drafty, dank, and probably very dark. Orwell (if his account can be trusted) also described them as incredibly filthy. It was an era when the popular idea was that forcing kids to get through awful conditions made them "stronger and better leaders". As you described, it also made them into quite troubled adults. (This is not to mention to abuse both physical and sexual that also went on in the schools.)
> 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]
Is there any frank account on why this was considered important in the beginning? Once it starts I imagine the tendency to pass on abuse would keep it going regardless. Hazing does have rational roots in that people value things they struggle for more highly than things they are given. And lack of empathy can be a beneficial trait in a leader, both for the leader and the lead, as long as it isn't paired with cruelty and narcissism... Narcissists are inherently easy to manipulate, and make bad leaders because they don't often defer to experts when making decisions, even when they picked them. Cruelty is a poor substitute for rational detachment when being forced to make hard decisions.
"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"
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.
I dunno, I went to a "British-style" prep school in the US and it definitely made me a harder person than I ever needed to be. It took me a couple of decades to remove that armor and be able to connect better with people.
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.
Oh no, it's absolutely by design. It's a factory for producing broken people capable of committing atrocious acts of cruelty for the Empire. Now there is no Empire, they've turned on their own people.
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...