‘Talking with a limp’ (TWAL)
Meaning: when what you say and how you behave is profoundly influenced by psychological issues from your past – but you are oblivious to how much as your post hoc rationalisation is so effective.
Decades after contracting polio, I sit stress scented at the end of the bed, massaging a withered thigh as yet another bundle of muscle fibres dies. Dying flesh fibres do not go gentle, they scream in their necrosis as post-polio cell-death ends their lives. The side effects have returned to haunt me, increasingly affecting the way I move.
I walk with a limp.
Decades after his boarding school traumas, the boy in my head can still scream in anguish as he clings to the routines he learned to inflict on himself in order to survive his peers. His needs still pull my strings, still affect the way I think and the way I behave.
I talk with a limp.
They called those schools “educational establishments” – that’s educational as in political re-education camps originally designed to manufacture men to manage an empire, men who can order thousands to their deaths without showing internal conflict. Those same public schools that the Nazis took as a model to condition their elite to be Reich rulers1. “I say chaps, after prep, what say we practice what we’ve learnt on the locals, perhaps put much of Europe in hospital to show how we – don’t feel the least connection with humanity?”
Why did they copy those schools?
Because they are effective.
Our Westminster parliamentary culture is modelled on them.
“Talking with a limp” runs particularly deep in Westminster where the unhealthy behaviour of a self-selected population, constantly reinforced by an unhealthy parliamentary culture born of the public (boarding in particular) school ethos, has and is inflicting serious damage on us all.
Many of those that succeed in rising to the top in the Westminster adult boarding school-based system have often been able to do so because they have been conditioned from a very young age to have no empathy for others. As a boy I watched as vicious aversion therapies were used to teach children that “others” are not like us, “others” are not real people, “others” do not matter. Those children are now empathectomised adults who are incapable of truly feeling or caring for anyone (that’s anyone) outside their group. It’s not their fault, they are the products of their upbringing. Some are vasectomised ejaculate, come with no content, glutinous expressions from which the seeds of humanity have been removed. And then there are the men…
The most successful empathotomies created children who could fake empathy without affinity. This confers a huge advantage in political and other institutions where facsimilempathy facilitates the climb to the top. Empathy constrains behaviour.
Exactly the people we should elect to control our lives.
Children like them inflicted open head psychological surgery on me without anaesthetic, using societal blades to cut and scar, to rearrange who I was while I was awake, while I was aware and while I was screaming inside. I have DBT (Deep Brain Thrombosis) as a result.
Like me, many of those who control our lives were badly damaged. So, they make decisions in the interests of the abused children in their heads, not in the interests of the rest of us. I am an example of a scapegoat on whom our politicians honed their skills. Experience what was done to me to know them for what they are, to see their works through the lens of an augmented reality that should forever change how you view our leaders.
We all talk with a limp to a greater or lesser extent, the emotional scar tissue created by our previous psychological experiences and damage twisting our reactions to events and interactions in the direction of least pain. We don’t often notice, it just feels normal due to our honed human ability to post hoc justify our opinions and actions.
Unrealboying…
I didn’t go to boarding school, I was sentenced. An 11-year-old boy walked into the establishment on the first day of term, an intelligent, outgoing, mentally healthy boy with friends and a polio limp. Within months he was thinking, feeling and talking with a crippling limp in order to survive. Whilst I’m a successful 70-year-old high achiever, I’m also a distorted version of who I could have been, who I should have been. I’m still a partial avatar of that 11-year-old boy. He still controls aspects of my behaviour across 50 years through the emotional and psychological controls, callouses and constraints he was forced to put in place to survive.
It was the waterboarding of a child – with the boarding but without the water.
The fact that this is also true of many of our parliamentary denizens explains much.
The complete outsider, I also watched as everyone, from the pinnacle peer group leaders down to the bullied runts, internalised the psychologically damaging habits that we would all carry with us for the rest of our lives.
They fucked us up for life.
But we were so very lucky. Such lucky, lucky, privileged bastards. According to society. Apparently (a-parently: without parents). King Charles on Gordonstoun: “A prison sentence… Colditz in kilts”.
Fitting-in is the most important, perhaps the only, aspiration you are allowed to have. Nothing else matters. Nothing. Else. 24 hours a day, and every day – and every day after that, and the weeks and months after that, and the year after year after that… It’s a boarding school, stupid. That means no respite, no escape and no word of this must ever pass your lips, you privileged, privileged person, you lucky, lucky bastard.
In space, no-one can hear you scream. In boarding school, no-one must hear you scream, or whimper or even cry very softly at night for fear of being cut from the herd and culled. Children are dropped into an alien society, not knowing the rules or even the words. One day, you’re at home with family, friends, warmth, comfort and love, the next you’re living “Lord of the Flies”.
Many of our social shapers, the politicians, the captains of industry, the media moguls went through a similar process or are embedded in places and systems that are based on the same pattern. This applies to a greater or lesser extent across the political systems in many societies. That is why they behave as they do, why they feel such a sense of entitlement and a lack of empathy. Boarding and the public school system has damaged our society and continues to damage our society. Unless you’ve experienced boarding school, you can have no idea of what it is like, even if you strain your imagination, add CGI, 3D glasses and mushrooms.
A politician pronounces. Other people say things, politicians “pronounce” (subtext: listen up proles, my words are too important to be merely a “said”). We hear their justifications for whatever policy or behaviour is pressing on their psychological bladders and think: “What did they just say? Surely they can’t really believe that, it flies in the face of the evidence, it doesn’t make any sense.”
Take a trip inside their heads however, and it makes perfect personal sense. The disconnect we spot, the cognitive dissonance that reverberates around the political chambers is generated by thinking that is strongly influenced by the social waters in which they swim every day, namely the Westminster public school pool. A pool that is far, far removed from the puddles in which the rest of us paddle.
…..
Our incestuous parliamentary culture and ethos is based fundamentally on that of boarding schools across the land and across the decades. Their generic motto (always in Latin to lend a sense of – superiority? exclusivity? culture? what?) paraphrases the Jesuits, “Mitte puerum mecum in VII, et ad vitam fornicabitur eum2” – “Send me a boy at 7, and I’ll fuck him up for life…”
Naturally that’s not a sales pitch that’s widely publicised.
…..
Because it’s a privilege. Because we were so very lucky to have the opportunity to be abused.
It’s a privilege to be sent to a public school, count your blessings, don’t whinge about your lot in life. And in any case: “it never did me any harm: bully, fetish, Sixtus, expenses, leather on buttock, buttock on green leather, she’s only an intern, nothing to see here, all perfectly normal.” So ingrained in the British psyche, so part of the cultural framework, it’s invisible.
Girls too, but the boys have an extra layer of male privilege and entitlement beaten into their young egos with a macho mallet.
…..
Unfortunately, as has been said, “To the privileged, equality can feel like oppression”. Exact. Imagine how oppressed an upper class, white, heterosexual man (as in “most politicians”) must feel when it is pointed out that a significant part of his elevated position in society is probably due to unearned privilege and not to his own inestimable qualities and abilities.
Alternatively, just listen to them: “I’ve earned my place or yours and love my country right or wrong to tell them apart from women who want to be men of standing for values of scroungers on benefits of hard work understanding gay lifestyle choice to be poor people in the neighbourhood watching immigrants taking our jobs for the (old) boys net-worked with some of them are OK to speak my mind is made up to no good at driving change our culture of political correctness gone mad if you think I’m a racist card carrying Caucasian man…”
…..
Apes sit in a cage, rocking and rocking, throwing shit and masturbating. They have been placed in an unnatural and unhealthy environment and comfort themselves by repeating and repeating comforting activities. MPs have been placed in an unnatural and unhealthy environment. So they comfort themselves in similar (but more sophisticated) ways…
Look at where we are, what they do and the way they behave. Others outside their incestuous culture (the rest of the country) have little importance compared with the need to sooth their own tumescent issues. Self-lubricating people-pegs volunteer to be forced into inhuman holes to fit-in, to establish pecking orders and in-groups. 11-year-olds who, deep down, just want their mothers. The analogy is not exact as there are no staff “in charge”, the children are now running the school, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
And we’ve elected them to run the country. What the fuck were we thinking?
Should we give people who react to the needs of the damaged children in their heads such power? The power to decide our futures, the power to decide who and how many will die in a pandemic, the power to decide who will be wealthy (or even wealthier) and from whom will be withheld support and opportunity?
…..
As adult politicians, they still see the boxes. Boxes are useful to render complexity, humanity and any vestiges of potential empathy as psychologically simple objects. Scroungers. Menials. Immigrants. Lefties. Universal Creditists (UCs). Fascists. Environmentalists. Racists. Homosexuals. The poor. Or the PLUS (People Like Us). The boxes aren’t people, they are counters in a game of national monopoly, a game in which they can change the rules on the fly. You have passed GO: is counter PLUS or non-PLUS? PLUS – collect £2 million in bonus; non-PLUS UC – lose £20/week. This is a game to them, a game in which the only outcome that matters is how well it feeds their needs, needs inculcated as children and, like rhubarb, forced by the Westminster environment.
Just the people we need in charge during a pandemic – or a climate disaster, or anything else that involves the welfare of others…
…..
Whilst there are many hard working, conscientious MPs, they don’t necessarily have the time, the public school training or perhaps the inclination to do what is necessary to succeed in the Westminster boarding school. Those that rise to the top tend to be true flag bearers for the effectiveness of public-school indoctrination. They know how to manipulate and to bully with the psychopathological intensity they learned at school.
If you haven’t experienced the all-consuming pressures of an old-fashioned boarding school, the effectiveness of the conditioning over months and years, you may not notice the tell-tale signs in many of these politicians. Even those of them who did not go to boarding school still find themselves embedded in a traditional boarding school culture that twists both mind and intent.
The schools have changed (mostly) beyond recognition over the last couple of decades. But Parliament has not. It is still steeped in those traditions and in a psychologically unhealthy culture. Why have we required boarding schools to change, but have left Parliament untouched, an anachronistic bastion of that culture?
…..
Their head-boy and head-girl needs pollute the public psychological pool, with the now seemingly old-fashioned concept of “public service” becoming a distant memory. They have acquired more and much more effective digital levers to manipulate the media, a media in the hands of willing accomplices, many of whom have similar backgrounds or who can simply be bought.
The current 4 horsemen of the apocalypse (conquest, war, global warming and plague) have been joined by a 5th, social media. The algorithms have hijacked our evolutionary traits to admire success (good at gathering, good at hunting = good at surviving) and to band together to cooperate, using them to create and drive dividing dogmas that feed the powerful.
As the man said (deeper, more meaningful voice): “Never before, in the field of human experience, has so much been owed by so many to so few – and so much been owned by so few…”
So, take a walk in the shoes of a [ma(boy)n] who not only walked with a limp, but who was also forced and conditioned to talk with a limp. Take a tour through the events and forces that shaped and bent him, the same environmental and social forces that have shaped and bent many of our politicians and that are still shaping much of our parliamentary politics.
Take a close look at just one example of the effects of a damaged, manipulative child on a life. Then consider that his damaged inner child is like all those other damaged children that still live in the heads of the powerful adults we have voluntarily imbued with the power to control our lives. Then ask yourself once again:
“What the fuck were we thinking?”
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/nazis-based-their-elite-schools-on-top-british-private-schools?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
- Some of you who know Latin will have looked that up just so you could point out the glaring errors…