Re: <nettime> The Meaning of Boris Johnson

[Gary Hall <mail@garyhall.info>]

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










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