hypocrisy and the status of leaders

For a long time now (I can’t really remember for how long, but I reckon at least 9 years), I have held an opinion that now seems as clear to me as day, although when I used to irritatingly and repeatedly spout it to friends and any other unfortunates in my near vicinity, trying to sound clever, I thought it was an amazing piece of thinking, imbued with golden clarity like the first piss of the morning.

The probable reason for coming up with this series of thoughts was having to go to a school which regarded itself as elite and which I both loathed and refused to integrate into. I was always highly attuned to the unspoken happenings of that school, where rumors ran riot and teachers did very naughty things: particular episodes such as the sub-warden of the school being done for child-porn and the head of geography giving blowjobs to a string of leavers at the leavers’ ball, spring to mind. Some of these were probably partly a result of it being a semi-boarding school, but also a result of the usual human misjudgements.

The problem is this: if you are in a position of responsibility where your actions impact greatly on others, you must be responsible.

This is where the hypocrisy comes in, because as you can imagine, at a strict private school, they don’t mince their words when telling their ‘top 2% in the country’ pupils about all of the responsibilities that rest on their shoulders.

You must not bully.
You must not swear.
You must not graff.
You must not steal.
You must not tease.
You must not be aggressive.
You must not be violent.

You must be kind.
You must be considerate.
You must be reasonable.
You must be responsible.
You must treat people with respect.
You must discuss disagreements calmly.
You must try to be moral and ethical.

As you can probably expect, we didn’t stringently follow these guidelines. Firstly, they were imposed on us by the school rulers, which isn’t a good way to get ‘buy-in’. Secondly, the caveat to all of them is that putting on the appearance of following them, in the presence of the school rulers, is as good, if not better, than actually following them all the time (thus, the young boys become very good actors and liars under pressure). But, most importantly, they were insanely hypocritical. We knew all the shit that went on in the school, and we knew the teachers bullied kids in class (generally the weak and unpopular ones). If you argued with teachers they would often default to the “I’m the teacher, shut up.” position of debate, and if you pushed it, would throw a board rubber at you. This worked very well as advertising for how to get ahead in life.

How are you meant to teach children to be good people if you do not lead by example? Humans are very good at seeing what works in a social context, and learn quickly.

The problem is ingrained in our society. The strange thing is that if you swap the pupils for citizens, and the teachers for politicians, you get pretty much the same dynamics. However, if your school is a country, you tend to demonstrate your power over your rival schools not on the football pitch and in the league tables, but with GDP and invasions.