Ask not for whom the bell tolls; you know it’s thee…
Since last we met in the previous Column, your Director has been assailed with thoughts and indeed images of what I think can best be described by the word, tyranny. King Charles mentioned the very word at a dinner I was fortunate enough not to attend on Wednesday. Thus I feel I am in good company with these particular paltry words.
Now, you do not need your Director to tell you that tyranny comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Sometimes it is vast and terrifying: tanks rolling into cities, voices silenced, or indeed whole populations subjugated. This is the stuff of history books which sadly continue to be written as we speak; the grand and awful narrative of political oppression. I often ask myself how long it will take before we learn the lesson of Shelley’s Ozymandias or indeed, that other stalwart of the GCSE Poetry Anthology, Imtiaz Dharker’s Tissue?
Yet, as we all know, tyranny also appears in forms so small they are faintly ridiculous: the tyranny of the alarm, which insists it knows better than you when morning begins; the tyranny of the inbox, which demands instant obedience to its endless stream of emails; or the tyranny of the marking pile, which multiplies overnight (not infinitely of course…) when the back is turned. Schools are full of minor despotisms: the bell dictating when we eat, the timetable parceling out our thoughts into blocks of fifty minutes, the exam rubric deciding what counts as knowledge today. They are petty things perhaps, when compared with the horrors of history, but they remind us how natural it feels to obey, and sometimes how easily we surrender to the authority of systems.
History’s textbooks are full of the tryrannicals: Caligula, Nero, Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Pinochet. And Shakespeare gets in on the act (no pun intended) (unless you thought it was a good one), dramatising these tyrannous impulses in Richard III for example, exulting in his villainy, or Macbeth, whose vaulting ambition descends into a tyranny of the bloodiest kind. Tyranny is sometimes flamboyant, strutting on stage in crown and sceptre, but as Hannah Arendt observed, it can also be disturbingly banal. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she introduced the concept of the “banality of evil,” arguing that Eichmann was not a fanatical monster but a disturbingly ordinary and “thoughtless” bureaucrat who followed orders and sought career advancement without truly reflecting on the monstrous nature of his actions. Tyranny can be grossly theatrical but it can also look like paperwork.
It’s a persistent thing though, this tyranny business. Why can it be espied practically everywhere and why does it return, in so many guises, across so much time? I suppose fear has a part to play: in moments of anxiety, I have observed over the years, people cling to those who promise control. Insecurity of course is also a factor. Certainly in the tyrants I have met. Many are haunted by their own weakness, shoring up their power through cruelty. But perhaps the deepest cause is a longing for simplicity. As we have discussed, life is complicated, truth elusive, human beings contradictory. Tyranny offers a seductive relief from this. The tyrant says: do not trouble yourself with ambiguity; I will tell you what is true, who is guilty, and what must be done. The attraction of tyranny then, is rarely its cruelty; it is its certainty.
This longing for certainty is often born from a refusal to admit we might be wrong. If I might be permitted something of a digression at this point… I am, it seems, as the years make their inevitable progress, increasingly trying and failing to instill into my students the beauty of being wrong. Most Tiffinians will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid being wrong which ironically is of course entirely the wrong way to go about learning anything. As that great source of quotations on all sorts of things, the author Anon, probably said at one point: Most people would learn from their mistakes if they weren’t so busy denying them.
My dear reader will know how the Director is wrong on a regular basis, so in some ways I have learned to welcome such occasions as I would old friends. But like old friends, being wrong can sting our pride, and our first instinct is often to make excuses, to shift the blame, or to bury the evidence. But for the tyrant, this ordinary human weakness hardens into something far more dangerous. What for us is embarrassment, for them is existential threat. To admit error is to admit vulnerability, and vulnerability is something a tyrant cannot afford. Their rule depends on the illusion of infallibility. And so every critic becomes an enemy, every dissenting voice a danger to be silenced. The dictator who cannot concede that an economic policy has collapsed, or the general who refuses to acknowledge a disastrous campaign, grows ever more ruthless in propping up the fiction of perfection. At that point it is not reality that rules, but reputation; not truth, but the terrified maintenance of a mask that cannot slip.
As I mentioned, and I mention again; there’s a smaller form of this tyranny that sometimes turns up in the classroom. It is the student who cannot bear to be wrong, who sees every slip of the pen or faltering answer as a kind of personal humiliation. They become tyrannical with themselves, demanding a standard of perfection that no one can live up to. But in trying to sustain the image of always being right, they deny themselves the very thing that learning requires: the freedom to get things wrong and to grow from it. In the end, the tyranny of perfection is as self-defeating as any political despotism, because it silences the honest, messy trial and error through which truth actually emerges.
From this perspective, thinking often becomes an offensive act, a direct challenge to the tyrannical state. Whether that’s an internal tyrant who believes there must be a correct answer to the meaning of this poem or the external tyrant trying to control it all. The tyrant’s unwritten rule is simple: “Don’t think. I already know all the answers, and you’re supposed to accept them.” If you find yourself suffering, or your life isn’t going as well as it could, your unhappiness is not a sign of the system’s failure. It is a political crime, an inability to recognise that the utopia has already manifested itself. Your suffering makes you politically suspect.
Literature gives us many examples of this chilling rationality. Orwell saw this logic most clearly in 1984, where the Party did not simply silence dissent but outlawed reality itself. Language was stripped away in Newspeak so that forbidden thoughts could not even be conceived; “doublethink” required citizens to believe contradictions without protest; Winston’s final act of rebellion would have been the insistence that two plus two still makes four. Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, described how dissidents were literally airbrushed from photographs, as though erasing their image could erase their existence. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 imagined a world where books were burned to annihilate memory and imagination. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon laid bare the same strategy in the staged Soviet show trials, where truth became whatever the Party required, and Samuel Beckett, in Endgame, showed tyranny at its bleakest: meaning itself stripped away, with Hamm commanding Clov in endless circles of obedience. Each of these writers reminds us that tyranny’s final act is not merely to ban words or suppress protest, but to erase the very reality those words and protests point to.
Today, new forms of tyranny have emerged, less about political authority and more about the power of technology. Think of the tyranny of the algorithm, which curates our newsfeeds and decides what information we see, reinforcing our biases and creating echo chambers where our certainties are never challenged. It’s a subtle despotism, where we are ruled not by a human being but by a line of code designed to maximize our engagement whilst monetising our attention. It promises to know what we want, and in so doing, it dictates what we get. Or consider the tyranny of the social media mob, where a single misspoken word can lead to a storm of digital condemnation, a swift and brutal form of public shaming that silences dissent through fear. Or even worse. This is not the jackboot of a dictator, but the collective, anonymous force of a crowd, equally effective at compelling conformity. The constant demand for perfection, for an unblemished online presence, creates a kind of self-tyranny, a pressure to perform a perfect, simplified version of ourselves, with no room for contradiction or doubt. We become both the prisoner and the warder.
Augustine described himself as a prisoner of his own will, enslaved not by an emperor but by his desires. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor shows how easily we barter freedom away for the comfort of authority. In our own lives we meet the tyranny of pride, which forbids us to admit we were wrong; the tyranny of perfectionism, which never allows us to rest; the tyranny of stubbornness in family arguments, which silences dialogue. If political tyranny imprisons bodies, personal tyranny imprisons souls.
What then of resistance to these tyrannous beasties? Sometimes tyranny collapses with great drama: revolutions, exiles, the storming of Bastilles and the like. Sometimes it erodes more quietly, as people simply stop believing in it. But on a daily level, the first defence against tyranny is humility; the courage to say, I might be wrong. Tyranny thrives on certainty; freedom flourishes in doubt, dialogue, and imagination. And it is this last point that is so often overlooked. The tyrant seeks to control not just our actions but our very thoughts, to confine our minds within a narrow, pre-approved reality. Even if this tyrant is our very selves. This is why art and imagination are such potent weapons. They allow us to envision alternatives, to think beyond the proscribed boundaries of the system. A novel can show us a world turned upside down; a piece of music can express a feeling of longing that no official decree could ever capture. Imagination is the ultimate act of intellectual defiance.
Humour is another weapon. As we have discussed in Columns past, tyrants fear laughter more than weapons, for laughter punctures the spell of inevitability. Shakespeare’s fools and jesters, allowed to speak truths in jest, are forms of resistance. And above all, relationship counters tyranny. Tyranny isolates: the tyrant fears rivals, and the people fear one another. Freedom connects: it thrives on trust, conversation, and community.
This is why schools matter. A school can, of course, breed its own small despotisms, with rules and regulations that hem us in. But at their best, classrooms are acts of resistance. They are places where uncertainty is not weakness but possibility, where students are free to say I don’t know, I disagree, or I’ve changed my mind. Education, at heart, is about liberating minds, not constraining them. It is about fostering the very qualities that tyranny seeks to extinguish: critical thought, empathy, and the courage to live with doubt.
So yes, tomorrow my alarm clock will ring, and the school bell will herd me down corridors, and the inbox will glower like a minor dictator. These are the small tyrannies we can live with. The real danger is the tyranny that silences, crushes, and forbids us from admitting we might be wrong. The true test of freedom then, is not how loudly we shout our certainties, but how humbly we live with our doubts.
Until next time, Happy reading/Being free!
Fun problems to solve #7
The Tyrant’s Island
A tyrant rules over an island of 100 citizens. Every citizen has either a blue hat or a red hat on their head. They cannot see their own hat, but they can see everyone else’s. The tyrant announces:
At least one of you is wearing a blue hat. Anyone who can figure out their own hat colour must announce it at midnight, or face exile.
The tyrant knows that if even one citizen realises their hat colour, it will start a chain reaction and eventually everyone with a blue hat will announce their colour.
The puzzle:
If 1 citizen has a blue hat, what happens at midnight?
If 2 citizens have blue hats, what happens?
If all 100 citizens have blue hats, what happens?
Hint: Each citizen assumes everyone else is logical and wants to survive.