A career in oppression

And she suddenly, facing the ormolu clock and the peacock screen with her eyes upon them as though they might, with their color and decoration help her, had a revelation — dim, misty, vague, and lost almost as soon as it was seen — that it wasn’t really anyone’s fault at all — that it was the system, the place, the tightness and closeness and helplessness that did for everybody; that nobody could escape from it, and that the finest saint, the most noble character, would be crushed and broken in that remorseless mill— “the mills of the gods”? — no, the mills of a rotten, impoverished, antiquated system....

Hugh Walpole - Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1911)

The subject of Walpole’s novel is a fictional boarding school presided over by a furtively sadistic headmaster. The school is the rotten, impoverished, antiquated system which crushes the spirit of its teaching staff and their families.

It also highlights the vexed question of free will and the difficulties we so often face in actually exercising our free will to escape from the system, the place, the tightness and closeness and helplessness that did for everybody. We have free will, that much seems obvious, but do we use it as often as we could? No we don’t. That much seems obvious too.

Yet petty and not so petty forms of oppression are part of life and always have been. Not only that, but today a major middle class function is to operate and expand those remorseless mills on behalf of the governing classes. As it was with Walpole’s fictional headmaster, oppression is a career often suited to those with middle class aspirations but no more than an average dose of talent. Sometimes less. Sometimes none at all.

Today oppression offers a far wider career choice than was the case in Walpole’s day. From the EU to climate change, from petty motoring offences to over-complex taxation, from recycling to official dietary harangues, from misgendering to islamophobia, from sustainability to hate speech, the sheer range of oppressive activity is almost too vast to comprehend. That too, that vastness is also oppressive. It is not difficult to see that in the medium to long term, the scale of modern oppression will evolve into the tightness and closeness and helplessness that did for everybody.

All these myriad modes of oppression are the result of huge numbers of middle class people shaping their own careers and the careers of like-minded professionals. Democracy seems to have no antidote for it. Academics, journalists, politicians, scientists, celebrities and many more all have a vested interest in furthering oppression and their professional role in those remorseless mills which are the inevitable outcome of their professional self-interest.

Almost as if the middle classes of the developed world do not have enough to do. As if modern automation, information systems, monitoring systems, databases and communication systems have largely finished to job of hollowing out traditional middle class careers. As if the impact of the electronic age on traditional employment cannot be offset by new and equally productive forms of middle class employment.

It is as if a career in oppression is all that is open to many would-be middle class people. The governing classes of course, they benefit from oppression as it makes government that much easier and creates a large class of voters and mainstream pundits who need to keep things that way.