On Blame and the Control Freak

Those familiar with the movie Dead Poets Society will no doubt remember the pivotal moment when Neil, a free-thinking student dominated by an intractable martinet of a father, commits suicide. We the audience are horrified by this, and are led by the writer to blame the bullying ways of his parent. The conservative school Establishment naturally takes a different view, preferring to massage the evidence so as to place the blame on Keating, the English master who encouraged Neil’s free-thinking nature. I’m on Keating’s side for my own reasons, of course: I hate any attempt to dominate me and despise any martinet who tries.

But it wasn’t always thus. I was born into a generation – not so very far behind Neil’s – which insinuated into boy children the view that the male is the dominant gender, and that firm, unbending control is the key to personal success and a harmonious society. We were taught that when we reached adulthood it was our right and duty to exercise firm control over women, children, animals, and anything else which moved. And this indoctrination went so deep that the old impulse occasionally comes to the surface in me even now.

I suppose I should be ashamed to admit the fact, and I am to a large extent. But conditioning of that sort is hard to excise completely because it sits at the base of perception, and how many times have I suggested that perception is the whole of the life experience?

You may rest assured that I now recognise the control imperative when it shows its ugly face and take whatever pains are necessary to reason myself away from it. And fortunately, it doesn’t happen often anyway. But it’s still there, and is why I find myself questioning whether responsibility for Neil’s predicament is quite as straightforward as it appears on the surface. And I’m often moved to ask the question: ‘What sort of innate quality do we need to possess in order to rid ourselves completely of unacceptable childhood conditioning.’