I’m really pissed off by PSHE classes at my school. These are a compulsory waste of my time. According to one of the internal documents I managed to photograph while a teacher’s back was turned:

Personal, social and health education (PSHE) is the traditional subject title for all aspects of personal development learning, including relationships, health and sex education and citizenship education. Following the DfE announcement (March 2017) that primary relationships and health education and secondary relationships, sex and health education is now statutory, schools must ensure that their policies and programmes comply with the statutory guidance published in February ….

The prescription sounds bad enough. Delivery is worse. Mostly, classes are supervised by bored supply teachers, obviously looking at the clock. Classes then are just about tolerable, as I can get on with something more important. Every so often, though, one of the full-timers takes a class. That’s when those two periods on Friday morning become a drag on my will to live. We are supposed to use the time to express ourselves. The truth is that the time is used for teaching us to comply with whatever falsehoods are presently fashionable with the BBC and Guardian.

Still worse is the written work. The idea is that I’m supposed to have eighty minutes of my life burned off every week in class, and then to burn off a couple of hours more every month on typing out some endorsement of the propaganda I’ve been fed. Well, here is something I wrote last week to one of the more stupid essay titles I’ve been given. Sadly, or perhaps luckily, I showed it to Dr Gabb in one of our Greek lessons. He read the first paragraph, and threatened to drive up and grass me to my parents it I wouldn’t promise not to submit. Though too old, he assured me, to be done over by the social workers, I was still subject to the safeguarding pigs. I might, if someone took sufficient offence, find myself subject to the real pigs.

So, here it is, exclusive to the Libertarian Alliance, though with the more inflammatory passages cut out by Mr Bickley on Dr Gabb’s instruction.

My Advice to the Year Elevens

Even if the Gods weren’t jealous, boasting is in bad taste. I accept that I may suffer some horribly disfiguring accident tomorrow, or I may be struck down by an illness that leaves me a pathetic cripple. This being said, people at school constantly notice how good-looking I am. They look at me as I go past. Some openly admire. Some do more than admire—though may then learn what bodily force I can apply to those whose attentions I do not welcome. Others claim to mock. Those who mock, I have no doubt, use mockery to cover envy.

And what reason haven’t they to envy? The other boys in my year seem, from their earliest age, to have been fed a diet of chips and white bread covered over with margarine. Now they have greater choice in what to put into their mouths, they supplement these with beer and pizzas. The results, if you look at their growing paunches and spotty complexions, are plain. Nor are they just fat and spotty. Many of them smell. This is partly a result of not washing enough, partly the remains of poor toilet training. Mostly, though, it’s a further consequence of the crap they eat. I will stay outside the forbidden zone of noting what kind of people, eating what kinds of food, are most offensive in this regard. I will only say that I am required to attend every weekday at a place filled with the fat, with the spotty, with the smelly. In short, I am surrounded by ugliness.

Now, what is my objection to ugliness? I might say that it’s depressing. This school is bad enough already. Take away anyone else remotely worth looking at, and catching that bus every morning is a right pain. However, I should attempt a more formal argument. This is that, so long as the genetics are not in veto, everyone should think himself under an obligation of beauty. This obligation is a craft, something to be learned with serious intent and serious effort. Genetics are of course important. The basics of beauty are a gift of nature. But nature alone will give at best a transient prettiness—something soon burned away by habits of of a vicious life. Beauty in the real sense—of poise, of symmetry, of an overall appearance from which no one turns willingly away—is an effect of deliberate effort. It’s an effort of exercise, or diet, of grooming, of dress or undress. I won’t go so far as the Greeks, with their notion of the καλὸς κἀγαθός—the close identification of beauty with moral goodness: I suspect I am not particularly good by any definition—but I will say that looking good is a sign of inner balance. It’s a marker of self-respect and discipline. Anyone can put on pretty clothes. Given the right help, anyone can look impressive in them. But that’s an achievement of money. What money can’t buy is the shape of yourself as the best possible version of what you can be. That doesn’t tell people what you have: it tells them what you are.

And that’s why I find it so hard to tolerate those who do nothing to improve their appearance. Unavoidable ugliness is something to be pitied and tolerated, but the deliberate ugliness of certain people in this school deserves only contempt. The fat, the unkempt, those who let their body hair sprout unchecked, the ones who ignore their skin tone and let their complexions become blotchy or blemished—these are people who have abandoned even the most basic principles of self-care. They have no excuse. They could do something about it, but they choose not to, and that choice is disgusting. It is disgusting, and it has wider consequences.

Again, I won’t insist on καλὸς κἀγαθός. But I will make the negative insistence—there is an undeniable correlation between ugliness of form and ugliness of substance. Those who corrupt their bodies also corrupt their minds. To be more specific, the uglier someone is, the more likely he is to believe ruling class lies. Tell me that that beauty isn’t real, that it’s a social construct, that aiming for it is oppressive, that accepting mediocrity is somehow noble: say this, and show at once without wasting your breath that you never question the legitimacy of their our rulers, that you willing comply with whatever malicious nonsense they dictate, whether it’s hatred of our people and history, or belief in the myth of COVID-19 as an apocalyptic plague, or the blind insistence on vaccine safety despite mounting evidence of harm, or the fraudulent Green propaganda that demands we embrace poverty and self-denial in the name of “saving the planet.” I’ll also take it as given that you don’t approve of periodic sentence structure.

The rejection of beauty is not an act of independence but of submission. It is not defiance of the System, but abasement before it. Just as in Old China, the inferior showed their inferiority by making themselves ugly, so in Modern Britain, the willing slaves of the order imposed on us show their own insignificance with every unkempt hair, every excess pound of flesh, every ill-fitting and slovenly garment they wear. They are the perfect subjects of a corrupt and manipulative elite—because only the ugly and weak-willed can be convinced to embrace their own degradation.

So here is my answer to the predictably weak question I have been set. Here is my advice to those who are younger than I am—turn back from the path on which I have no doubt you are already started. Do not allow yourself to grow into a copy of the other youths in this school, or in this post-industrial dump of a town. Instead, begin by stripping yourself naked. Look in the mirror. Tell yourself that whatever grotesque parody of humanity you see isn’t the real you. Form an image of what the real you looks like. Write it down and keep it close. Then begin work to achieve it. Cut out carbohydrates. Swim. Join a gymnasium, and go there. Dump anyone who doesn’t approve. Make new friends. Watch inspirational videos on social media. Buy new clothes. Learn the correct use of a razor, and explore its many alternatives. On your journey, learn to switch off the television news. Learn that everything said by someone in authority is a lie, or a minor truth uttered in support of some greater lie. Learn Greek. As soon as you are able, get out of the North.

Do these things, and you will respect yourself. Do them, and you may in time become as easy on the eye as I know that I am.