[HN Gopher] Eton and all the murder (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Eton and all the murder (2019)
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 125 points
Date : 2023-02-02 22:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (johnhiggs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnhiggs.com)
| tgv wrote:
| > 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.
| Maursault wrote:
| 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.
| cowpig wrote:
| 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| these terms are considered outdated, in that modern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.
| posterboy wrote:
| German uses _seelische Storung_ 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.
|
| _Storung_ 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.
| Maursault wrote:
| They're both ASPD, that's the clinical term you're looking
| for, anti-social personality disorder.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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.
| balsam wrote:
| >He beat the nanny, Sandra Rivett, to death with a lead pipe.
|
| One wonders if the Etonians of earlier decades were hit as hard
| by lead poisoning as by a misplaced sense of impunity.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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/
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Fantastic. Searching around about Eton has lead me to "One of
| Them: An Eton College Memoir" and
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/10/musa-okwonga-b... .
| photochemsyn wrote:
| "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."
|
| https://donnahatch.com/education-and-other-forms-of-child-to...
|
| 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.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| 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.)
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| "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.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| 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.
| Veen wrote:
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1180391-is-lotf-a-
| criti...
| [deleted]
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://caldaclinic.com/boarding-school-syndrome-the-
| childho...
| isitmadeofglass wrote:
| [dead]
| etothepii wrote:
| While it may be the case that Mr Higgs comp in North Wales
| produced no murders it's also the case that no-one is counting.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I can taste the bitter spite of privilege
| onetimeusename wrote:
| also, no idea how long it's been around. Eton has existed for
| centuries. ...bound to be a few murderers
| osrec wrote:
| 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Veen wrote:
| Yes, while some murderers go to Eton, the vast majority go to
| school somewhere else.
| blitzar wrote:
| 99.99999% of UK murderers DID NOT go to Eton.
| jefftk wrote:
| I doubt there have been 10M UK murderers ever.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| It's probably on the order of 1M, extrapolating from the
| current murders/year of somewhere between 500 and 1000
| arsdragonfly wrote:
| [dead]
| globalise83 wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| I think the same would be true of most similarly sized English
| schools, many just didn't bother to record the names.
| BucketsMcG wrote:
| 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.
| flir wrote:
| 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).
| arethuza wrote:
| A lot of public schools in the UK have their own war
| memorials, though the Eton one sounds considerably larger
| than the ones I've seen.
| Retric wrote:
| That seems surprising considering how many UK schools lost
| 10+% of their graduates in WWI + WWII.
| arethuza wrote:
| Fair point - pretty much every village and town in the UK
| has its own war memorials from WW1 and WW2.
|
| The village I grew up in has about 57 names for a
| population of 1000 or so:
|
| https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/8670
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| This is pretty interesting,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thankful_Villages
| tristor wrote:
| 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.
| DC-3 wrote:
| 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.
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| febeling wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Maybe take a look at
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10334679-six-weeks
| arethuza wrote:
| 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."_
|
| https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/the-slaughter-
| of-t...
| adastra22 wrote:
| In the British army in WW1, line-level officers suffered
| higher casualty rates. You can look up the stats yourself.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| 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.
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I assume things are different in the US. Attitudes to the
| military certainly seem different today.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| What gets me is religiosity in past ages.
|
| 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.
| opportune wrote:
| 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.
| jfk13 wrote:
| It looks like the Eton figures for WW1 are 1157 died, out of
| 5660 who served in the war; just over 20%.
|
| That's a lot higher than the overall British death rate of
| 12.5% of those who served (from https://www.parliament.uk/busin
| ess/publications/research/oly...).
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > Did they actually die in higher percentages than regular
| footsoldiers?
|
| Yes, as noted (with references) in some of the sibling
| comments here.
| implements wrote:
| The whole area is a beautiful place to visit on a good spring
| day - and it's a quick and easy train ride from central London
| via Staines.
| louthy wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://johnhiggs.com/books/the-klf/
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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?
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| 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.
| elsjaako wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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.
| e-master wrote:
| 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.
| bitL wrote:
| Not really, those are just paper money and they could have
| gone to BoE and ask for replacement bills anyway.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Yes but it's probably well within the margin of how much the
| pound fluctuates in an hour for other reasons.
| me_again wrote:
| Theoretically yes, but the amount in circulation is in the
| billions so it doesn't make an appreciable difference.
| bitL wrote:
| What time is love?
| mattkevan wrote:
| 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.
|
| John Higgs (and the KLF) are treasures.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > Eton has long had a reputation for producing people who were
| cruel and damaged.
|
| This could be a confusion of correlation and causality.
| tclancy wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://play.acast.com/s/blindboy/saint-brigid-solvent-
| buse-...
| BucketsMcG wrote:
| 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.
| arsdragonfly wrote:
| [dead]
| jinjukn wrote:
| [flagged]
| cafard wrote:
| Eton has been around since before the Reformation, so it has had
| the time to build up a list of murderers, etc.
| dghf wrote:
| Sure, but the article gives four examples that took place over
| the course of thirty years, two of which were within twelve
| months of each other.
| lilordthrowawa wrote:
| The list is not exhaustive.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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).
| hdbsbdjdndn wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/cri
| meand...
| btilly wrote:
| But murder is mostly committed by young men. And 3 out of
| 4 of the Etonian murderers were below 30 at the time of
| the murder.
|
| So this correction is not as big as you think.
| hdbsbdjdndn wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dmurray wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| Thanks for doing the math!
|
| Murders have been declining, right? I wonder how much of
| this is due to comparing historical murders with current
| murder rates?
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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).
| btilly wrote:
| 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 l^k e^(-l) / k!.
|
| Therefore our estimates are: 0 murderers
| = 0.9269088928142737 1 murderers =
| 0.07035238496460337 2 murderers =
| 0.0026698730094066973 3 murderers =
| 6.754778713798945e-05
|
| 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.
| benmmurphy wrote:
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| Good point.
|
| But looking at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IH
| R.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.
| MereInterest wrote:
| 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.
| drpgq wrote:
| Eton is all male and males are far more likely to be
| killers than females. Still a high murder rate for sure.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "56 per hundred k is higher than _any country on earth_, "
|
| Plenty of locations have rates around that. That's why it's
| important to compare similar sized areas.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| Whoa, I just double checked and 3 US cities are over 50
| victims per 100,000.
| reillyse wrote:
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| This was in the late 1960s through late 1970s (so quite a
| while ago), and I don't have any more recent info.
| jefftk wrote:
| And Dahl was one of the luckier ones, a child of relatively
| rich parents. Compare to Orwell's seriously darker experience
| as a scholarship student: https://www.george-
| orwell.org/Such,_Such_Were_The_Joys/0.htm...
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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.
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| I went to a public school and apart from fairly liberal
| detention-giving, it wasn't 'bad' at all
| defrost wrote:
| The documentary _Tomkinson 's Schooldays_ falls short but
| perhaps come closer than any other.
| blackshaw wrote:
| 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.
|
| I imagine things were worse in the past though, see e.g. the
| notorious practice of "fagging"
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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".
| blackshaw wrote:
| Haha, I'm pretty sure I know which school you went to. Not
| many places have year groups called "shell" and "remove".
|
| Rah rah.
| shubb wrote:
| 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.
| arethuza wrote:
| 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. :-(
| jamiek88 wrote:
| My PE teacher locked me in a closet and had the other
| boys beat me because I was bad at cricket. This was in
| around 1990 ish.
|
| This was a comprehensive school in the north west,
| working class area.
|
| The corruption ran deep.
|
| When I told my parents they didn't believe me and said I
| was exaggerating.
|
| He was a bully who lots of kids hated.
|
| He ended up with cancer and there was a whole fundraiser
| for him etc which I refused to contribute to which was a
| bit petty.
|
| And then as Mark Twain didn't say 'I've never wished
| death upon someone but I have read some obituaries with
| more pleasure than others!'
| blackshaw wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| History is shorter than we think.
|
| 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.
| alexpotato wrote:
| I went to a British private school in the late 80s and I
| distinctly remember a teacher saying:
|
| "While we don't believe in its application at this school,
| it is perfectly legal for us to use corporal punishment if
| we so choose."
|
| This was to a class of 10 year olds.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Back in the early 90s there was a famous quote going around
| about British "public" (what in the US we call private
| schools).
|
| A UK citizen was kidnapped by a group in the middle east and
| spent several months in captivity.
|
| After describing how bad the treatment was, he was asked: "How
| did you make it through?"
|
| His answer: "Well, I went to a British public boarding school
| so by comparison, the captivity wasn't so bad"
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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.
| fahadkhan wrote:
| Reminds me of Ender's Game.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Pretty much so, and that's intentional.
|
| 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.
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