“Outside In #3”, December 2025

Another of last weekend’s works. As the title implies, there’s a bit of a theme emerging with some of these.

I had ambitious plans for this afternoon, work-wise, but after the obligatory Friday morning encounter with my nemesis and a compensatory calorie overload at Burek House, I’m sorely tempted to just lay myself out in the studio easy-chair and read a book.

I enjoyed this essay at Asterisk by a South Korean man about his obligatory stint of national service, and his fairly successful hacking of the military protocols in order to acquire more time with which to read.

Despite my never having done military service, this bit gave me a real shock of recognition:

To put legions of young men on the cusp of manhood together is to create a petri dish of male ego. The military can serve as, to steal a phrase from D. W. Winnicott, a permanent alternative to puberty.

The hierarchy was absolute, based on ranks that were determined strictly by time served. Every six months or so, one’s station was automatically elevated: Private (0–6 months), Private First Class (6–12 months), Corporal (12–18 months), and Sergeant (18+ months).

This oppressive cardinality governed every social interaction. Even within the same rank, your month of enlistment mattered. An August recruit (me) was forever junior to a July recruit of the same year; it was common to call someone by their enlistment month. I was, for a time, simply “August.”

Take away the military-specific labels of rank, and this is exactly how things worked when I was stuck in the lower tiers of the British public school system1. There is a lot of similarity to military traditions, which is likely not accidental: for instance, you are usually referred to exclusively by your surname, by your peers as well as your superiors, and—much as with Han’s account above—your level of status is directly tied to your academic year.

At the institution where I did most of my time, it wasn’t anywhere near the sort of stuff you encounter in, say, Roald Dahl’s accounts of pre-war Repton: physical violence had to be fairly restrained, so as to remain concealable and deniable, and your superiors were not at liberty to use you as something equivalent to a servant. But they were nonetheless your superiors, and you their inferiors—and that relationship was reinforced tirelessly by the structures and rituals of the place.

My relationship to this very literal reading of seniority was particularly difficult, because I was a year younger physically than everyone else in my year, having been started in school a year early for reasons I have never entirely understood. Not only was I inferior to everyone in every year above me, but I was also the default lowest rank within that year—an innate and ineradicable demerit that made me something of a pariah even to those younger than me.

It took me a long time to realise how profoundly this affected my relationships with people long after leaving school, even up to the present day. I guess it’s become easier for me to spot now I’m in middle age, because the instinctive assumption that someone who is in any organisational or social sense my superior must therefore also be older than me starts clashing very hard with the visible facts: dentists, doctors, state officials, people with managerial job titles, they’re more often than not younger than me these days, and often very obviously so. Mixed signals, innit.

The real legacy of being raised in a system like that is a combination of instinctive deference (operant-conditioned by violence and humiliation) and a seething resentment that, with hindsight, shaped my attitudes to society and conformity ever since. Both aspects have long since been sanded down by life outside the heterotopia, but they’re far from fully gone, and I strongly suspect they never will be.

1. Important note for non-British people: as a timeless example of the obscurantism for which that country’s class system is justly renowned, it is important for you to understand that in Britain “public school” is the term used for what is almost everywhere else known as “private school”. What you call “public school”, we call “state school”. Clear as mud? ↩︎