Hello, and welcome to The Sacred, a podcast from the think tank Theos, shared in partnership with Comment Magazine. People sometimes ask me how we choose guests on The Sacred, and it’s a range of ways — I’m looking for different perspectives, I want to be challenged, but honestly, one of the key reasons is that quote from Hamilton: I am looking for a mind at work.
Hugo Rifkind was born in Scotland, the son of a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s and then John Major’s government. He also attended a boarding school and has written about his experiences there — a boarding school that went on to be the subject of an inquiry into, frankly, not-so-historic, ongoing pupil-on-pupil abuse. We spoke about how that formed him, the legacy of being around so much violence, frankly, and how he feels a little bit guilty that he doesn’t feel that traumatised by it.
“I’ve been a journalist for 20 years, and it never even occurred to me this was a story. And now I’m reading it as part of a public inquiry into the nature of my birth.”
I really enjoyed digging into his voice and his life and his values. There are some reflections from me, as always, at the end. I hope you enjoy listening.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Hugo, I’m going to dive us straight in with this quirky question that’s trying to get at your deep values. What is sacred to you?
Hugo Rifkind: This question’s really hard. I’ve thought about it quite a lot — yeah, I mean, like, really hard. So I thought about trying to answer this from a kind of work perspective, you know — tell you things about truth and scrutiny and honesty to the reader. Then I thought, no, that’s just work. That’s neither me, nor really what we’re here to talk about.
So I thought about maybe doing it from a non-work perspective — love, friendship, pleasure in kids, and like how much I enjoy getting shit-faced with my friends — these kinds of things that feel like really important parts of me. But I thought, that’s not really what gets me off in the morning either, if I’m honest.
So I think the best approximation, the triangulation of all the things I’ve covered, it’s just — it’s connection, right? It’s the connection you make with another person.
But — important caveat — it’s sacred to me, it’s very important to me, it’s the thing I value the most. But you’ve got to watch yourself, I find, if that’s what you value. Because although I say connection, a lot of the time, if I don’t watch myself, what I actually mean is being seen and being heard, which is a slightly one-way connection. And you’ve got to always ask yourself, why am I getting such validation from this? And I am, and I do, and I’m often quite forgiving of myself for that. But I’m not sure it’s wholly healthy. I’m not sure it’s necessarily a great thing to set so much of yourself into, because one day, of course, it stops. But that’s the thing — if you’re going to ask, that is the thing.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I am so glad that you dug down a couple more layers. And it’s also quite convicting, because that’s also mine — I’ve read a whole book about it, and it’s like the fundamental of my whole philosophy of life: that the really real happens in seeing and being seen by each other. But you’ve got to value the seeing as much as the being seen, which is a challenge.
Yeah, there’s a shadow side there. And I think those of us who are clustered around that — there are probably unhealthy versions on each side, right? Those people who are going too far to try to make other people feel seen, and are not… It’s quite a rare dance to meet someone on a level playing field, to be at the same level of vulnerability and the same level of interest in each other.
Hugo Rifkind: Yeah, I mean — but it’s like, sorry, but it — so it has, um, when I think about it in friendship terms, not just work terms, you know. I’m sort of, if it’s work, I talk — I to some extent perform all the time. In friendship terms, I’m quite — I’m often quite a quiet one in the group, but I’m still seeing and being seen. And again, you kind of think, is that… that feels relaxing, that feels lovely, but is it kind of needy? Is it taking and not giving? I don’t know.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What do you think your friends would say if you asked them?
Hugo Rifkind: They’d say you talk all the time, what are you talking about? They’d say you never shut up — I’m sure, but they’re wrong.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The pull to journalism, in my kind of — maybe self-justifying self-narration — is a curiosity about others, like seeking to understand others. My guess is that’s in the mix for you too.
Hugo Rifkind: It’s in the mix. It came later. I wasn’t supposed to be a journalist — I was supposed to be a best-selling novelist by now. And so I sort of drifted into journalism. What took me into journalism was writing. It wasn’t reporting, it wasn’t analysing, it wasn’t some burning need to share my views. I really just like writing sentences. And that’s still where I get my pleasure, even as an opinion columnist. I mean, you can’t do it unless you have opinions, and you can’t have opinions without caring about your opinions, and so all the other stuff does come — but, no, it’s the sentences I’m into.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, well, it shows. Thank you. Have you done the post-hoc rationalisation, in therapy or otherwise, about why that’s so important to you — why the sentences? No, sorry — why the connection?
Hugo Rifkind: I mean — no. Let’s do it now. No, I honestly don’t know. I think it’s important — I find it important for me to know who I am. Probably a shortcut to knowing who you are is figuring out who other people think you are. And then, if you can shape what other people think you are, your work is done. So I’m sure there’s something there. I’m sure it’s also just to do with reward as well — you know, like, from the first time I realised that I could write things and people liked it and it amused them, which feels a lot like them liking you. And who doesn’t love that?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Let’s dig a bit into your childhood then — you’ve given me full permission. What were the big ideas around, let’s say, primary school age? What was formative — political, philosophical, spiritual, otherwise?
Hugo Rifkind: Oh, strap in, it’s all a bit of a mess. So, background of my childhood: I’m from an Orthodox Jewish family in Edinburgh, which itself is unusual, because there aren’t many Jews in Edinburgh. There are fewer now, but there weren’t even that many back then.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you mind just — some listeners will be very unfamiliar with what that means. Orthodox Jew — what does that mean in practice?
Hugo Rifkind: So you’ve got your two main brands of Jew. In mainstream Judaism, at least in Britain, you’ve got your liberal-slash-reform, and you’ve got your orthodox. Liberal-slash-reform, you’ll have services at least partly in English. You will also have Jewish descent that is not purely matrilineal — so if either of your parents are Jewish, you are Jewish — and a general outward-looking atmosphere. Orthodox Judaism is Hebrew, entirely matrilineal, normally quite traditional and observant.
Edinburgh was a bit unusual in that regard, because it was such a small community. It was an orthodox community that wasn’t that observant, which I didn’t realise was weird at the time, but it is quite weird. So I had a bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen, all in Hebrew, all that kind of stuff.
My dad was very much from that community — he’s descended from Jews who fled Russian-occupied Lithuania during the pogroms of the 1890s, so he’s fourth-generation Scottish on his side. My mum’s family were Holocaust survivors, and my parents were Polish. So they’re very, very different backgrounds there.
You start with all that, you add in the fact that I went to a quite religious Christian boarding school where I went to church twice a week. My dad was a cabinet minister, first in Margaret Thatcher’s and then John Major’s government. So there’s a lot of different things pulling there that make no sense to each other at all — each one on its own would be quite weird.
So, in terms of how that related to the big ideas — I don’t know if we really did big ideas, we didn’t talk about them a lot. Family and friendship were both very important. My parents were big on being the people other people turn to when they’re in trouble. Religion was important, but not in the sense that makes it sound, if you see what I mean — we weren’t religious, we weren’t really observant at home at all. But being part of the community was quite important — although, obviously, not important enough for my parents not to then, you know, shuffle me off to a school which was the exact opposite of that kind of thing.
Elizabeth Oldfield: In my head, if your dad’s a minister — you’re living in Edinburgh?
Hugo Rifkind: Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How much was he able to be present? Presumably that was a very all-consuming job.
Hugo Rifkind: Some of the time — let me get my dates right — from 1986 to 1992, I think, which would be when I was nine until, whatever, nine plus six is fifteen. He was Secretary of State for Scotland. So he was maybe in London three days a week and in Scotland the rest of the time, maybe four days or whatever, roundabout. He was around quite a lot. When I was a younger kid, my parents were very present; when I was an older kid, sort of not so much.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And how much were you aware of the political world in which he was moving?
Hugo Rifkind: Very, very aware — not so much that we talked about it a lot at home. It’s funny, my dad’s still with us — my mum’s not around any more, but I’m very close to my dad, I speak to him a lot, we discuss politics all the time. I would say until the age of maybe twenty-five, we sort of never did. It just didn’t really come up. But I read the papers, I knew what he was doing. As I said, he was Secretary of State for Scotland, and I was living in Scotland. Certainly in my first school, there weren’t a lot of out-and-proud Conservatives there.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So you were very conscious in quite a—
Hugo Rifkind: I used to tell this joke when I speak to Jewish audiences — I’ve been asked if I ever faced any anti-Semitism in Scotland. And the answer is, well, not really, because people hating you for being a Conservative always came first. And I’m not a Conservative now — I wonder if my dad is, that’s an interesting question, but I don’t know, you’d have to ask him.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Were you then?
Hugo Rifkind: I was twelve. Well, what were my politics? I had no parameters in which to even have that thought process.
I do always remember — and I’ve written about this, sorry, a lot of my answers are going to begin with “I’ve written about this,” because I’ve written about everything — but I do remember the ’92 election. It would have been waking up the next morning, and going to an ice rink, which is where I often went in the mornings when I was a teenager, for reasons that are actually discussed in a novel we might talk about. And I bumped into a guy I knew — who I still know, in fact — who skated up to me. It was the morning after the election, and he said, “Last night was amazing.” And I was like, “OK.” And he said, “I never thought we’d win.” And it was the first time someone of my own age had ever said “we,” meaning Conservatives, before — because it had always been a kind of, “my parents hate your dad,” and sometimes said really nicely. People wouldn’t think you can say that nicely, and you can say it nicely, because it’s normally said in the kind of “but you’re okay” sort of way — “we can still be friends,” you know. But I remember that really striking thing. So it was pretty weird being a Conservative in Scotland.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Even from a Conservative family, yeah. And how — I don’t even really know how to frame this question, and I’m aware, because I have some very good Jewish friends, of how much my imagination is Christian-coded, so apologies for this — the language in my tradition we’d use would be about relationship with God. Like, how much was the Jewish tradition, Jewish faith, Jewish religion, something that had an internal aliveness for you, and how much was it a kind of “this is what we do as a family”?
Hugo Rifkind: Well, I mean, it was more “this is what we don’t do as a family, but should.” It wasn’t the first at all. I’m not a scholar, I’m not practising, my wife’s not Jewish, my kids have some Jewish identity, but only to a degree. I’m still close with a lot of my Orthodox family, who I still see a lot. But in my understanding, your question is very Christian-coded. Jews don’t really do faith — faith is not important. In fact, more than that, faith is sort of regarded as a little bit arrogant, as in, what’s God supposed to give a toss what you think, you know what I mean? Judaism is about observance — which we didn’t do, nonetheless it’s about observance.
A cousin of mine once told me a story about an uncle who, during davening — do you know what davening means?
Elizabeth Oldfield: No.
Hugo Rifkind: It’s the sort of rocking and praying for a particular prayer. Just before they’re davening, and they’re talking about God, the other uncle says to him, “Do you actually believe in God?” And then walks away, praying, for twenty minutes.
So, for a lot of people, Judaism is about observance, it’s about family, it’s about three thousand years of history, all that kind of stuff. And the actual kind of, “at night I will close my eyes and talk to God” — I guess I had a bit of that, because all teenagers have a bit of that. But that was probably coming from my Christian hinterland rather than my Jewish one.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. We’re really jumping ahead here, but you wrote a piece in 2014 about having been the only Jewish student at boarding school, and it not feeling particularly like a problem, and not feeling the weight of that identity as something that was kind of heavy or difficult to carry — and then things shifting around 2014, which was kind of right at another moment with Israel and Gaza, and there was lots going on in the Labour Party. It’s too big, and maybe too painful a question, I don’t know — but in the decades since, how have you navigated being someone who is Jewish in public as all these stories swirl, and all these tectonic plates politically are kind of bucking underneath us?
Hugo Rifkind: Oh, it’s been awful. And it’s been awful in all kinds of directions. I’m still, as I said, close to a lot of my more Orthodox family. I’m also close to some extremely secular family who live in Israel — in fact, I was texting one of them today, from his bomb shelter. That being said, I’m a North London liberal, right? And I have views on the conduct of the Israeli government that are not that different from, you know, the next person in Crouch End, probably.
There’s a tension there. There’s been a real upset at the extent to which — as the Jewish community, and I keep saying “I know a lot of people within the Jewish community,” even though I don’t really consider myself to have a right to speak for them any more, because I’ve made different choices — as they have felt more frightened and more beleaguered, and to a huge degree. I mean, I was speaking the other day to a cousin whose kids go to a Jewish school, and most years in the sixth form of that school, out of thirty of them, two or three kids will move to Israel and not come back. And this year they’re expecting twenty-eight. This is a very observant, extremely Jewish-cultured school, but still — if you want to have any future in this country for that religion, I mean, it’s just not possible.
But while this has all been happening, while people were frightened, and people were more frightened by a lot of the language, a lot of the rhetoric, let alone the actual attacks — the people they would have regarded as their traditional allies did not give a shit. And it may have even just been hostile as well. That’s been a really difficult thing to process, particularly because if you try and process it in public, you sort of make it worse.
Yeah, so it’s been no fun. I spoke to a friend of mine called Richard Allen Greene, who is training to be a rabbi, and he was reporting from the CNN bureau over the seventh of October and about a year afterwards. And we kept coming back to this thing about how hard we find it, in general, to hold multiple true things in our heads. But particularly when we are anxious or angry, that ability just completely goes. And that’s very visible in a lot of these situations of radically pulling apart, of tribalism, and our failure to hold multiple identities and believe multiple true things at the same time. But it happens in every direction — I very frequently upset people in the Jewish community because of stuff I write, not just about Israel, but about the motives of people they may regard as anti-Semites on the left. Because I never want to — I hate having enemies, I’m not good at having enemies, I always want to try to understand where someone who regards themselves as my enemy is coming from. Which can, I suppose — I don’t know, I guess that maps onto a lot of the tropes of the self-hating Jew, right? But it is, in all contexts, always what I try to do. And so you can end up being a bit of an apologist for people who hate you, some of the time. But I don’t know, it just seems to be a process that’s always worth getting into, I think.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, I do it too. I think it’s the connection thing. So, how old were you when you were sent to boarding school?
Hugo Rifkind: I was thirteen. “Sent” is a bit harsh — I may have even said “sent” myself earlier. I started at boarding school at thirteen. I was given a choice of whether or not I wanted to go there, and I thought, why not? And I didn’t hate it. I was only there for five years, which is pretty different from people who went to boarding school at six or seven, I think.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, thirteen. I’ve obviously been trying to figure out how much of this is autobiographical.
Hugo Rifkind: Yeah, sure — and clearly some of it. Lots of it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So the fact that you didn’t hate it is interesting to me, because — why don’t you just say a little bit about bed-posting, trunking, and the hanging of people out of windows in pillowcases, which felt so specific. I was guessing you hadn’t entirely made them up.
Hugo Rifkind: I didn’t entirely make them up at all. So, okay — the thing about that book, my novel, Rabbits, it’s available in all good bookshops — it is, how to put it, autobiographical in tone, but not autobiographical in events. There are no characters from real life; I was very careful about that — really, none — and the main character of it is not me. The world is my world, and I wrote, at least, the world I grew up with.
It’s funny, in the context of the conversation we’ve just been having — it’s probably the least Jewish thing I’ve ever written. It’s basically Posh Boy Trainspotting. But I had a real sense that, of the various odd communities I was part of growing up, that one was unexamined. No one had written a book about that world before, about the weird posh Scots of the 1990s. And also that that world was ceasing to be. And I thought, if I don’t write this now, if someone doesn’t write this, no one will ever know it was like that. And one of the most gratifying things since I’ve written it is the number of people from my distant past who’ve been like, “Oh my God, either I’d forgotten all about this, or I thought no one would ever write this down.”
A lot of it centres around a boarding school. While I was writing that book — was it slightly after lockdown, or during lockdown? I forget — either way, in Scotland the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry was going on, which is a look back at various crimes and abuses committed at, mainly, Scottish private schools, mainly Scottish boarding schools, going back into history, but a lot of it based in the ’90s. I was surprised it went up to 2021.
Well, a lot of it is based at this school called Loretto, which is the school I was at. And while this was happening, there was stuff in the papers about that school, which directed me to the inquiry itself, and I was reading testimonies there. And two things struck me really early on. First was, reading the testimony of anyone who was there in the ’90s, they’d be talking about all these shocking things that had happened, and I was like — I remember that, I remember that, I remember that. I know who this anonymous testimony is from, because I recognise these stories so intimately. And then I thought: I’ve been a journalist for twenty years, and it never even occurred to me this was a story. And now I’m reading it as part of a public inquiry into the nature of my birth. That’s messed up.
And so I started writing about it, not just in the book but a little bit in journalism as well. And it’s been so weird, the response there. I shouldn’t name any names here, because it’s not fair, but the first time I wrote about it, I just wrote about the various sorts of bullying I’d witnessed at this school. And a relatively prominent Scottish journalist — background similar to mine, and there’s only about four people this could be, so anyone could figure it out — got in touch with me, who I know quite well, and said, “You think that’s bad, I’ve got a bullet hole where I was shot at school with an air rifle.” And I was like, “Wow, that’s amazing” — it surprised me way less, having read your novel, than it would have done previously. “Oh, you just wait.” And then the next time I wrote about it, I said to him, “Why didn’t you ever write about this?” He said, “Because I didn’t think it was — it was just a thing that happened at school, never really thought about it.” And this is a journalist of at least the sort of experience of me — he could have written about it a thousand times over. The next time I wrote about it and mentioned this, another Scottish journalist got in touch with me and said, “I never told you about the bullet hole” — this had happened to two different people at two different schools. So that’s the routine savagery.
Now, I was not bullied at school. I would like to think I didn’t bully at school — I could tell you self-serving tales about the various people I stood up for. Being realistic, I would have behaved disgracefully at various times, because people do. And in fact, I think it shaped my view of humanity quite profoundly, generally, when you see how people are prepared to behave when everyone else is behaving like that. And there was a lot of that there.
Elizabeth Oldfield: But what did you ask about? Tell me again — bed-posting, trunking, hanging people out of windows in pillowcases.
Hugo Rifkind: Right. So, bed-posting: kids lying in their bed, asleep — you turn the bed onto the head of the bed, the bed is against the wall, the kid is stuck. It’s very funny.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Oh, it’s not — I’m claustrophobic.
Hugo Rifkind: I mean, you can definitely fall out the side. I’ve been bed-posted many times — again, I don’t remember ever bed-posting anyone, but there’s just no chance I spent five years in that school and was not at least involved in a bed-posting. Trunking: put someone in a trunk, push them down the stairs. People do that for fun — teenage boys are mental. Again, less fun if you don’t want it to happen to you. What was the other one?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Oh, the sheet, yeah.
Hugo Rifkind: This I only heard about, never saw done. Kid put in a duvet cover, hung out of a window, jogged up and down — on the third floor. There was all this kind of thing. There were people set on fire, there were fights with darts. I learned a lot of it is just how teenage boys will behave when no one is telling them not to. But the fact that there’s a culture of nobody telling them not to is kind of the interesting thing here, maybe.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I found it so — I mean, it’s a genius trick you pull off, because it’s funny, and then it’s really not funny when you stop to think about it. There’s a bit you wrote — I’m not going to quote whole sections at you — but there’s a bit near the end where you say a small boy slides in a trunk down a staircase, he batters the lid thinking of coffins, and when he gets out at the bottom, maybe he’s become somebody else. And the glorification of war, the way the militaristic — the CCF, the military camps sent by your school, learning to kill a chicken, the marching — didn’t your dad show up at some point to inspect it?
Hugo Rifkind: He did. I was so cross with him.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah — that’s a whole different thing, everyone experiencing their dad as the Secretary of State for Defence showing up to inspect their cadet force. Anyway — this, like, the thing that’s been said many times about the British public schools training the aristocracy to go into war and run the empire — to read it about a school in the ’90s was what was freaking me out.
Hugo Rifkind: But that’s the point, right? Because it’s a hangover. And I kind of know that story from the ’50s and ’60s — for essentially our generation to have gone to school in the ’90s and still be trained like this means that we are not past being led by the generation of people who went through this. It’s about to properly hit. And some people have clearly done some work to figure out how that shaped them.
Elizabeth Oldfield: But you asked this question — where does this all go? When you are trained, when you are deliberately brutalised, deliberately disconnected, trained to fight and win and dominate, and then that world dies, where do you go? I honestly had this — and I’m almost embarrassed because it feels so sort of fluffy and wet — but this deep compassion, and also this question of, what does it take to undo that? What would it take for that level of trauma? And obviously I don’t want to say you are traumatised, but it feels hard not to look at that world, and you’re the person who went to Loretto in the ’90s and wrote about the school, and not see it as a deeply formative set of influences. What helps? How do we—
Hugo Rifkind: Okay, look — various questions. As to whether I’m traumatised, look, I really don’t think I am.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—
Hugo Rifkind: No, no, no, it’s fine. I mean, it’s very possible to be traumatised and not recognise your own trauma. I think, of the various things in my life I’ve got to be traumatised about, weirdly enough that ranks low. But I do have some guilt about not being traumatised.
I remember, while I was writing this book — a lot of my closest friends are now back in Edinburgh, a lot of them people I went to school with, not all of them, but a lot. And I remember being back in Edinburgh, maybe tail end of the pandemic, just when things were opening up, going to the pub with a bunch of friends, four or five of us. And I was trying to talk to them about all this, because I was in the middle of writing about it, and they didn’t really want to talk about it, which is interesting in itself. And then eventually we did start talking about it, and I realised, during the conversation — just before I kind of shut the conversation down — of maybe the four or five of us sitting round the table, three of us were having a funny chat: remember this, remember that, God, that guy was nuts, remember that. Two people were having a very different conversation, because they may not have even had worse things happen to them, but it had meant something different to them. Whereas the rest of us would have been like, “Oh, this was a hassle, and it happens once in a while,” they were like, “This is happening to me every night, and it’s never going to end, and I’ve got nowhere to go, and my parents live perhaps a little further away than everyone else, I’m a little bit less comfortable about being here anyway.” And I realised how blind I was to that.
I don’t know — it was only five years, and I left when I was eighteen, so I was a kid, so you can’t approach these things as I would now, as a forty-whatever-year-old man. I don’t say that to hide my age, I’ve literally forgotten what it is — I’m forty-eight, there we go.
But so, obviously, there is trauma there, as to where it goes and how it affects our society. So part of the reason why I wanted to write this book about Scotland was because I think that kind of brutality left England maybe twenty years earlier — because fagging in the ’90s, I’m sure, was gone from boarding schools in England, but not in Scotland.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Well, there wasn’t official fagging, but—
Hugo Rifkind: There were no rules. There was a school that prided itself on having no rules. And when there was discipline, it was enforced by the prefects, who were themselves encouraged to behave in ways that were, you know, borderline sociopathic. But again, this was something you were encouraged to be proud of — like, “we run ourselves here, we police ourselves.” And I think there were obviously English schools like that, but that ended sooner in England.
Where it all goes is a really interesting question now, because — and it shows how quickly the world has changed — I wrote this book, which was published, what, two years ago, and I wrote it a couple of years before that. The prospect of Britain being at war was very distant. It’s not now. So I don’t know what kind of relationship these schools have with the armed forces now, but it almost makes more sense now than it did in the ’90s, you know? We’re again going to need a generation of people who’ve been trained to kill. I can strip and reassemble an SA80 — once I could do it in twenty-eight seconds.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Could you really march around on moors, shooting birds?
Hugo Rifkind: March around — sorry, I’m trying so hard not to betray my incredulity, and I just let it right out. I’ve killed a lot of stuff, not since I was twenty. I’ve shot a lot of things — grouse moors, sure, I’ve been on formal grouse shoots, I’ve been on rough grouse shoots where you just walk up and shoot them when you see them. I spent a lot of time in farmyards, shooting rabbits and crows and stuff. It’s all in the book — all that stuff’s real.
And you know what, at the time it’s thrilling as well. I mean, again, I live in Crouch End now, I’m a North London liberal — about ten years ago I had to kill one of my goldfish when it was sick, and it sort of traumatised me for ages.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How do you kill a goldfish?
Hugo Rifkind: There’s various techniques. Some people say you just flush it, some people say you batter it. We dosed it with vodka to let it slip — we anaesthetised the goldfish with vodka, which is apparently the ethical thing to do.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You’ve changed so much.
Hugo Rifkind: Well, exactly, yeah — I mean, I’ve literally killed animals with these hands, and now I’m anaesthetising a goldfish with vodka. So something’s flipped there.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, I mean, it does sound fun — I really wanted to be at that rave at the end. It also feels like — so you said it really shaped your view of humanity — I would love you to say more about that, and also particularly about masculinity, because you made the statement, like, it’s just the stuff teenage boys will do if other people aren’t telling them not to. I have quite a big question mark around that, and I’d love you to speak more about it.
Hugo Rifkind: Okay, so — there’s a quote, I think it’s on the front of the paperback, from Tim Minchin. Will you give me a quote for the hardback — is there Tim Minchin on there? “Hugely entertaining.” There we go.
Tim Minchin, the musical comedian, who I don’t know well but interviewed quite a long time ago and we kept in touch — also very funny man. When I sold the book, I basically put something about it on Facebook, and we’re Facebook friends, and he got in touch and said, “I demand you send me a copy of your book.” And I was kind of like, oh, it’s really annoying, because he’s in Australia, and that’s such — it’s going to cost me seventeen pounds to send it to him for the sake of my book. But I sent it to him, and he sent back this amazing quote, which we put on the front of the hardback book, so it was definitely worth doing.
But he also said this really interesting thing — that he’d taken it not even so much as being a novel about the posh, but a novel about teenage boys. He said, roughly, teenage boys are all sociopaths — we pretend they’re not, we live in this sanitised world, but in the past people always knew they were, and that’s why they put them in the army, that’s why they made them into nightclub bouncers, that’s why organised criminals recruited them. There is this latent violence in teenage boys that we’ve done so much work in society to breed out of them, except we still turn to it when we need it. And this is a society that doesn’t stamp it out, that encourages it. And I kind of think that is true.
So much like the character in this book, I moved from a day school in Edinburgh, which was also a private school. But Edinburgh — I don’t know how well you know Edinburgh — is weird, because something like 28% of kids in Edinburgh go to private schools, because it’s extremely high. Nationwide is, what, 3% or something. And there’s a huge amount of various forms of grant-maintained private schools in Edinburgh — Edinburgh’s got this weird, particular culture. I think at some point in their schooling, twenty-whatever percent of kids have been to a private school in Edinburgh. So it’s a very, very broad background — certainly far broader than the state primary my kids went to in North London.
And I moved from there to the school as discussed in the book, more or less. And I was immediately just staggered by — I mean, yes, the bullying, but the particular thing about the bullying was the way it didn’t stop, the way there wasn’t a culture of “someone’s upset now, and now I feel bad.” Seeing people being upset, and the bullying not stopping, seeing people bullied while they were in tears, was not something I’d ever seen before, and I was really quite shocked by it. And that’s what happens when you haven’t grown up in an environment where somebody’s telling you to stop. These are kids whose parents might be in Dubai, or down in England, or just a long way away, who don’t need to go home that night and look at their mother and think about what they did that day. And I do think it gives — I don’t think I can say it creates something dark, I think it gives a passport to something dark.
I’m looking at our production team, because we’ve got — two men, one of whom is the father of a boy, and one who found out today. We might not put this in — I don’t want to be revealing into details, but looking at the men in our production team who might have a vested interest in how you raise healthy men…
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yours will be fine. Do you have a son?
Hugo Rifkind: No, I’ve got two daughters, two teenage daughters, which is wonderful.
Elizabeth Oldfield: If you had a son, how might you have navigated it? If your thesis about the deep ferality of teenage boys is true, what does a healthy society do to neither problematise that in and of itself, which doesn’t help, but also channel it? And maybe the answer is we just put them all in the army, but I’m resisting it, I don’t know why.
Hugo Rifkind: Computer games are part of the answer.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Computer games are part of the answer?
Hugo Rifkind: I think it’s really, really hard. And so — how long ago now, three years ago, four years ago, what year are we in — some time ago, I interviewed Andrew Tate.
Elizabeth Oldfield: In person?
Hugo Rifkind: In person. I went to Romania, to his compound in Romania, and spent an afternoon with him. This is before he had been arrested and charged with sex trafficking. It was — yeah, I wouldn’t do it again in a heartbeat, or perhaps I’d do it differently now. We didn’t get on — well, we got on, but I didn’t. He’s a misogynist, and most of our conversation was me saying you’re a misogynist, and him saying alternately, no I’m not a misogynist, or yes I am and this is why, and you should be too. So there was a lot of alpha-male jousting going on. It was the sort of interview I couldn’t have done for broadcast, because you have to give someone a lot of leeway so they say the things you want them to say, which means you’ve got to behave in a way you don’t want people to see you behaving in.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, you have to have some trust.
Hugo Rifkind: Yeah, otherwise why would they talk to you. He’s an unpleasant man, and it’s not necessarily surprising to see that he ended up being accused of the things he’s been accused of. But the reason why he could be so effective is because no one else speaks like that to boys — no one else says to boys, “you have this thing in you, you have this violence in you.” Of course they do — they’re like kung fu games, they’re like violent films, this isn’t some shocking new thing. But no one else says, embrace that and love it — and I don’t want to say embrace it and love it either, but there’s a power when people do that.
So how I would navigate it with my own son, I really don’t know. I think you’ve got to have a degree of — forgive yourself for this, but also understand where this goes, and that’s what developing a conscience is, I suppose, isn’t it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. How do you channel the things about yourself that aren’t that malleable? You went to Cambridge to study philosophy — did your childhood leave you with a kind of working philosophy of life? Like, it gets shaped, what you think humans are like — how would you describe now what you think living a good life looks like?
Hugo Rifkind: It’s quite instinctive. I don’t want to repeat stuff that some of your recent guests have said — not least because I know them — but I was very informed by… have you ever read Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham? You must have. Oh, you should, you’d love it. It’s about a kid growing up and becoming a man, and he studies a lot of philosophy along the way, and he’s forced to confront whether it makes sense to maintain Christian values without having any faith — very live question right now. And the conclusion he comes to is, maybe not, but it’s the best I’ve got, right?
And so I don’t have any faith. Am I an atheist? I don’t know, I don’t have the certainty to be an atheist. I’m enormously envious of people with faith. I don’t have that certainty about the existence of my own dog, you know what I mean — it’s just what philosophy degrees do to you. It’s amazing to believe in anything enough to believe in it. Like, am I a brain in a vat? I’ve no idea — I think I’m probably not, can’t live as if I am, but I don’t think I am. But, yeah, so faith isn’t a thing.
You try and be kind.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Why do you try and be kind?
Hugo Rifkind: I honestly couldn’t answer that question, except it just feels like the right thing to do. You know when you’re not being kind — I don’t like myself when I’m not being kind. I find it very hard to make an intellectual argument for it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What three words would you love people to be able to say about you at your funeral?
Hugo Rifkind: My funeral? “He’s not here — that’s not him — alright, he’s fine over there.” No, that’s four.
Elizabeth Oldfield: When someone’s giving you a eulogy — if, in some metaphysics you don’t have to share right now, you can overhear someone giving a eulogy — what are the things you’d love them to be able to say? That’s the question.
Hugo Rifkind: I mean, genuinely, I don’t give a shit about making — like, a proper insight into what I actually believe about the world and my existential beliefs? Chuck me in the green bin, I really don’t give a shit. But if I could hear it — alright, on your deathbed, looking back over your life — that’s a really uncomfortable question, for some reason. I mean, “kind” is important.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Kind?
Hugo Rifkind: “Thought-provoking” is two words, if you allow me that with a hyphen — I’d like people to think I was thought-provoking. Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I’d like people to think that I listened, which isn’t necessarily always reflected in my actual behaviour at the moment. So I should maybe work on that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Thank you. I do try to remember to do the mortality question with an incoming trigger warning, and I forgot this time, so I’m sorry about that — thrusting you into the thoughts of your own death without consent. What do you reliably find funny?
Hugo Rifkind: I don’t know — I’ve got a difficult relationship with funny, because I write a lot of funny, and so I spend a lot of time going, “yeah, that’s funny, if you see what I mean — I can see that’s funny, that’s a really funny joke, objectively that is hilarious.” Wordplay — I like wordplay, I like quick wit. I’m not a huge fan of people falling over, slapstick — although there’s that bit in The Big Lebowski where the chief of police throws the mug directly in his face, which is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen — bang, and he goes backwards over the chair. So maybe that’s not true — slapstick, but with violence. Violence is funny.
The first thing I remember really, really making me laugh was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I think has just informed my humour. It’s not evident in the book, but it’s maybe more evident in the stuff I write in the paper.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. What might surprise people about you?
Hugo Rifkind: What surprises me about me at this age — I do a lot of exercise. I never used to be that person; until the age of about thirty-five I did literally no exercise, and now I do a huge amount of exercise, which I find extremely surprising. I would have loathed that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: When do you feel most alive?
Hugo Rifkind: Running.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow, that is a big change.
Hugo Rifkind: Yeah, I mean, it’s because I’m old and I can’t — like, really, when do you feel most alive — I feel most alive stoned on a hillside at the Glastonbury Festival. But I get to do that at best once a year, and not at all this year. And I can go running three times a week. So, you know — running in a breeze, I guess it goes back to the Scottish thing, I like running in bad weather, a bit of rain, going up a hill, feeling it on your face. I’m sure that’s the rugby from school talking — well, I was shit at rugby, but still, I’m sure that’s where it’s from.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And what makes you angry?
Hugo Rifkind: Cats. No — I get angry at being misunderstood. I find it — which is probably a bit of control freakery, maybe — really frustrating, particularly in a work context, when you spend so much time writing something and people just take entirely the wrong thing from it, which does happen. And of course, when it happens, it’s your fault, because you’ve got it wrong. But being misunderstood makes me angry, yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It does surprise me, because I’ve always assumed columnists have to have a reasonably thick skin about that stuff. Do you think you came to column writing a bit later, or?
Hugo Rifkind: No, I’ve been writing a column for twenty-odd years. I do have quite a thick skin — I think, because it makes me angry, but it doesn’t necessarily make me upset, if you see what I mean. I also think the age of columnists having to have an incredibly thick skin has sort of been through the worst, if you see what I mean, because Twitter’s dead now.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right.
Hugo Rifkind: I think there was this period of about ten years where — okay, way more brutalising than the boarding school, my God — anything you’d write, the hate you could get engaged with it. And I did that from a position of relative authority and superiority and professional comfort, as a columnist at The Times. But if you get piled on by a thousand people when you’re just starting out in journalism, it’s just devastating. And I do think that’s slightly past now, so that definitely does harden you up.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, I’m so aware of how earnest I am today, but — do you think it has a vocation? Like, what are you trying to do with your writing? What do you think good journalism, or good satire, or good humour writing, can do — what role can it play in society?
Hugo Rifkind: Well, it doesn’t always have to play a role in society — I mean, a lot of writing is just entertainment, that is fine, and I’d be lying if I said that my first thought when I write something is “what can I change.” I mean, don’t get me wrong, I admire that sort of journalism enormously, but it’s not my first call — I like to join the conversation.
I think there’s a really important conscience role that journalism, particularly columnists, can have, which I never like to be in — I always think, shit’s got pretty bad if you need me to be the nation’s conscience, you know what I mean. And so, once in a while, the pieces I write that have the most impact are ones where — like, the day we’re recording this, I wrote a column about the American — the repulsive rhetoric during this war from Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. Donald Trump, crowing about — he was asked why America sank that Iranian warship rather than taking hostages, and he said, because it’s more fun to sink them. And I compare that, in the book, with an American commander during the Spanish–American War in 1898, who watched a sinking Spanish ship and said, “Don’t cheer, boys — the poor devils are dying.” And you look at the moral collapse from one to the other.
Anyway, I wrote a column based around that. When you write something like that, that’s one of those good days to get social media feedback, because you get people saying, “this is what I’ve been thinking, you put it into words” — which is actually the dream for an opinion columnist. But I’m never comfortable being the person who writes that column — I’m much more comfortable writing a column that you just find funny and a bit whimsical.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, that’s a bit interesting — why do you think that is?
Hugo Rifkind: Partly because I don’t have enough convictions and certainties to do that reliably. The vast majority of my opinions — and I do have opinions — are, you know, 60% opinions rather than 99% opinions. And 60% columns confuse people.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you ever — are there things you look back on and think, I regret writing that?
Hugo Rifkind: Oh, God, yes. Well, yes and no. There are things I look back on and think I got it wrong, and I regret getting it wrong. But I would generally use getting it wrong as an opportunity to get it right the next time — to write it again. Actually, if you’ve got something wrong, that’s kind of great, looking back, because it gives you a reason to write about it again, it gives you a starting point.
Actual shame in stuff I’ve written? No, I mean, it’s almost what I was saying at the beginning about the danger you get into when you fall into the trap of seeing yourself through other people’s eyes. There’s things I’ve written that have been presented in a way I didn’t mean them to be presented, which I am ashamed of being associated with. But actually, if I’m going to be kind to myself, it’s not what I meant, and so it should be fine. But it sort of isn’t. But it should be.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Say a bit more — is it about someone else who shares your opinion who you don’t want to be aligned with?
Hugo Rifkind: Oh, I’ll give you a straight example. When the Gaza war started, I wrote a column about Keir Starmer’s political handling of that — how he wasn’t derailing his politics, how he was playing the Americans on one side and the left of his own party on the other side, and not diving deep into either side. And I started the column — and I think I use this refrain every time — I didn’t write the headline for a column, because I don’t write the headline. Unfortunately, this headline was the first line I’d used in the column, which they just pulled out and used as the headline. So I didn’t write the headline, but I did write those exact words, and those words were, “Keir Starmer is having a good war,” right? Which, in the context of what that phrase means — when you talk about someone in the First or Second War having “a good war,” it means they’re having a successful war, the war is working for them, all that kind of stuff.
Even now, almost whenever I write about anything, there’ll be somebody who’s screenshotted that and is like, “is it still a good war, do you still think it’s a good war, do you still think it’s great that we’re in this war” — it’s like, well, I didn’t say any of those things in the column. So, to go back to what I was saying, yeah, I’m sort of ashamed to be associated with that viewpoint, but I need to remind myself that I didn’t have that viewpoint. That sort of thing happens as often as you let it — so you’ve sometimes got to just not stress about it, but sometimes it does get to you.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. And when you’re writing satire, humour, your fictionalised diary weeks in The Times — what are you really aiming for? When you write one of the very best ones, what is it doing in the world?
Hugo Rifkind: Well, they can do different things. Once in a while I’ll write them really angry — they’re not always necessarily funny when they’re angry. I wrote one about Harvey Weinstein that’s not that funny — it’s all about him getting sexually harassed by people, it’s kind of nasty-funny, but there’s not a lot of lines in it you’d laugh at, as he gets sort of groped by his personal trainer and stuff — blackest possible comedy, really not a “ha-ha.” Sometimes I just love that you can put confusion on the page.
Where they work best, though, is when politicians mean things they’re not saying — politicians think things they’re not saying, which happens a lot. It happened a lot during the period after Brexit, where it was so obvious what the divisions were in Cabinet and what people thought, and no one would say it out loud. And sometimes having the device to do that, where you can literally put into a politician’s mouth the words they are specifically not saying, is just lovely. That’s commentary disguised as satire, if you see what I mean, and those are the ones that really work — those are the ones I’m proud of.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I was thinking, as I was reading your work, about how really good humour can smuggle things. Like, I think if you’d written — and I’m sure some of your columns on it are lovely — but the undergirding thesis of the book, about power, and this dying world, and entitlement, and the training of the aristocracy for war — you could have written a very earnest New Yorker article about it. And you wrote a very entertaining, funny, sort of trainspotting, drug-addled, grouse-shooting romp. And that disquiet with that world I’m left with is, I think, much more effective or impactful, because I’ve lived inside it and felt it make sense internally, and then you step outside it and go, what the hell?
Hugo Rifkind: Well, there’s the writing you do where you’re telling people what they should think, and there’s the writing you can do in which you’re hopefully leading people to think something. And I’ve always been much more comfortable in the second mode — which is why, I’m sure, for some people my op-ed columns can be a little bit frustrating, because it’s like, why are you just not saying this boldly? And it’s like, well, because I don’t want to say it boldly, I want you to think it. I don’t have to tell you to think it — I want to have said things that make you think this, I want you to come to the conclusion by yourself, without my input, which some people just can’t be bothered with. I mean, I fairly frequently get people saying, “I just literally don’t know what you’re talking about,” which, it’s probably on me, let’s be honest. But I don’t really like being stark — “this is my point, I am right, you must listen.” I would like to take people towards a point, which is much easier to do in a novel and in a satirical piece than it is in a straight-up op-ed.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, comedy is the sort of bait.
Hugo Rifkind: Yeah, I think — bait to think.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I want to close with just your life around power, if that’s not too blunt a question. The novel is about a sort of middle-class person who gets catapulted into this crazy world of drugs and violence and killing small animals on moors, and that’s very helpful for the reader who doesn’t know anything about that world, like me. And a lot of your other writing feels to me like someone who is observing the centre of power a step away. And yet your life has been — growing up as a cabinet minister’s son, going to boarding school, and then being in the elite media. I’m sure this isn’t the first time someone’s said this to you, but I wonder if it rings true: how much has being Jewish in those worlds given you that ability to see things with a more outsider eye?
Hugo Rifkind: It may have done — I don’t think it’s about being Jewish, though, I don’t think that’s where that comes from. It’s like — I had a childhood with a father who was in the cabinet, and for a long time — he was in the cabinet from ’86 to ’97 — it’s the whole story of my childhood, there was no point where this wasn’t weird. There was no point where you look at that and go, well, this seems normal, you know what I mean. And so every last mad thing that led from that…
Elizabeth Oldfield: Did you, like, just see Maggie Thatcher around in your childhood?
Hugo Rifkind: I met her once — I had breakfast with her when I was eleven or twelve. She stayed at the grace-and-favour mansion in Scotland.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Did you have a grace-and-favour mansion in Scotland?
Hugo Rifkind: Every weekend — this was lovely. I met her there. I met John Major.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Can I just get you to explain “grace-and-favour” for our international listeners, they won’t know what that is. So when you’re in the cabinet, does everyone get a free house?
Hugo Rifkind: No. The Scottish Secretary used to get a house in Scotland, which is now lived in by the Scottish First Minister — Bute House — which we never lived in, but we stayed in a little bit, particularly at that time.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It was just empty the rest of the time?
Hugo Rifkind: Well, it had two floors that were used for official functions, and there was a flat at the top. In fact, I did a Burns Night — whenever Burns Night was, a month or two ago — and I talked about meeting Maggie Thatcher in Bute House, which was a shock to Nicola Sturgeon, who was there as well, and who used to live in Bute House for a long time as First Minister — she was like, that was the point at which I found out Maggie Thatcher had slept in my bedroom, because she hadn’t known she’d ever been there.
So there was that one. There was a flat in London when my dad was Defence Secretary, which he was for a while. There was the better part of a house in London when he was Foreign Secretary. And a mansion in Kent — Chevening — which we went to a couple of times. All these properties are mainly used for official functions.
I remember when we went to Chevening — this would have been ’95, I’d have been eighteen at this point — and we went there for a weekend, just my mum and my dad and my sister, and this is like a thirty-five-bedroom mansion. And it was as weird for us as it would have been for anybody — that’s the thing, you wander around going, what the hell is this. There were drawing rooms and bedrooms, and I remember it was really hot, and all four of us just ended up sitting on the flagstones in the entrance hall, reading our paperbacks, because the floor was cool, and I guess we were uncomfortable in the huge space.
So we always knew it was odd — it always seemed like this was a life that belonged to other people that we were getting a chance to live.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So I don’t know if everyone would — this is what I’m interested in, in your psychology — I think there are certain formations and educational systems and pathways where some people feel very at home, and they say, of course, this is our life, this is our course. And I’m interested in why I’ve never got that vibe from you.
Hugo Rifkind: I think a lot of it is more Scottish than Jewish. I think, because in the ’80s and ’90s, Scotland was far away — I mean, it was, Scotland was far away from power. And I think — I know, not “maybe” — I know I pass now as a generic media public-school boy.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Did you ever have a strong Scottish accent?
Hugo Rifkind: Oh yeah — my sister doesn’t sound like this, I’ve got no excuse, it went in Cambridge. In fact, I did a podcast with Armando Iannucci last week and I sounded completely different, so it just comes and goes. But yeah, I think a lot of people, if you told them I’d been to one of the big English schools, the Etons, the Harrows, would be like, “yeah, that tracks.” But I didn’t — I was somewhere else, four hundred miles away, at a school that costs half as much. And my parents weren’t from the sort of background that could have afforded anything like that life had they been down here. So I pass for being that thing when I’m not quite that thing, and it does me a lot of favours. But it also means I don’t have any particular loyalty to it, I don’t have contacts made in it. So I get a lot of the aesthetic benefits from being part of that thing, but I don’t — at least I don’t think I am, I don’t identify as it anyway.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Hugo Rifkind, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Hugo Rifkind: What a pleasure — I hope I wasn’t too mad.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Well, first thing to say is how grateful I am for how Hugo showed up. We’d not met, and he was so prepared to go deep, so prepared to be honest and vulnerable and self-reflective. Our producer, who’d seen him a lot on Have I Got News for You and various other comedy panel shows, said she was expecting him to be funnier — and I still found him quite funny, but I think, I know it sounds weird, I take it as a compliment when very funny people are not trying to be funny in a conversation, because it means they’ve let their guard down a little bit, they’re not performing, they’re really thinking.
Yeah, I was quite moved, and I didn’t know what to expect. It always makes for a more humane conversation, I think, when someone shows up that open. And obviously, I love people who say that their sacred value is connection, because, as we know, homophily — people-like-me syndrome — means we love people who agree with us, we love people who remind us of ourselves. And that’s fine and good, just keep an eye on it — the slight distance we feel when someone says something we disagree with is something we need to not lean into too hard, frankly.
But he gave me a new angle, actually, on my deep value of connection — which is: what does it mean when we’re encountering others, and is it coming from a need in us to be known and to be seen, which I think is universal and profound and deep — fundamentally, it’s about being loved. And are we seeking to get that need met, or are we also trying to meet that need in others? Is it a two-way principle or value that we’re trying to live by?
I always find it helpful talking to people from other wisdom traditions, from other faiths — realising how much we project our own language and our own assumptions onto them. And the thing he said about Judaism this time, which I kind of knew intellectually but really felt this time — the idea that faith is seen as a bit arrogant by Jews, like, why does God care what you think — that very Christian-coded assumption I’d been making, something happened internally in me. It’s quite a refreshing, humbling thing, putting the onus back on God rather than on what’s going on with us.
And it’s such a difficult thing to talk about — the deep tensions and deep polarisation happening around Jews, around the Middle East, around all kinds of people-groups and identities — and just how helpful it is to speak to a particular person with all their complexity. To speak to Hugo, and his experience of being Jewish as someone who, in lots of ways, fits within a kind of secular liberal understanding of geopolitics, and who has these people in his life who are Orthodox Jews, and has friends at the school where most of those people are going to move to Israel because they no longer feel at home living in London. All of the nice, easy binary categories that we fall into in our thinking, if we’re not careful, tend to fall apart when we talk to a particular person. I’m thinking of talking to Mehreen Khan, who’s coming up in this series, who’s a Muslim, also works at The Times — however much a category — the category of Muslim in your head, or the category of Jewish person, or any of these other categories we have to work with. Essentially, we need mental shorthands, and they get helpfully and healthily complicated when we hear a real person’s story and experiences, and how that’s such good medicine in these times.
And then, the strangeness of Hugo’s school years — I would recommend his novel, it’s a really good read. He does a great job — actually having met him — of presenting, kind of narratively, how he seems to feel about that experience, which is, I was going to say “objectively” — I don’t know if there’s such a thing as objectively — but his sense that the violence, and I would say the pupil-on-pupil abuse that was condoned by the school structures, was kind of just normal, and his sense that he doesn’t really feel guilty about not being traumatised by that, that was just normal, really comes through in the book, because it’s kind of funny. And then there’s this little reflective turn at the end of: what does this mean for the rest of us? What does this mean for those of us being governed by a class of people who still disproportionately went to these kinds of schools? What does it mean for their ability to have empathy, for their ability to tolerate emotions, for their ability to process something other than that very martial, militaristic, macho way of being in the world?
Yeah, and it got me thinking about normalisation — about how much the human brain really doesn’t like things feeling strange and threatening, and there’s all these studies about how we will just adapt ourselves. I think of it even now — we did it in Covid, and the fact that there’s a huge war going on in Ukraine still, it’s become normal. When that war broke out it was not normal at all, it was outside so many of our categories. And how we need to keep an eye on our brain’s tendency to normalise things, to explain away or justify things that are happening, because it’s less psychologically uncomfortable — it reduces the cognitive dissonance in us.
And this is why I think asking about our values repeatedly, wanting to live intentionally, figuring out regularly what we think a good life is, is so important — because it helps us ask not what is just normal, because it’s what I’m used to, but what do I think my life could be, and what is the kind of world we could be building together?
I really, really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for listening as we reflect out loud. For those of you who stuck around for this reflection, I’m really glad you’re here, and I hope you’ll talk back to us, and talk to each other about what made you think. There’s a really great place to do that on our Substack — we put every episode on Substack, and you can put a comment or start a chat thread about that episode, or any episode you found particularly thought-provoking.
