The Inner Tyrant

2 Dec

The inner tyrant, a personal history and the long shadow of empire

Introduction

In this essay, the word 'humiliation' has both external and internal meanings. Outwardly, it functions as a shorthand for a broad spectrum of oppression: cruelty, enforced subservience, rigid class and racial hierarchies, bureaucratic dominance, and the many ways societies diminish or control those within them.

Humiliation also occurs internally. Over time, external pressures such as hierarchy and fear become internalised, establishing an internal system of self-monitoring and self-punishment. This is the “inner tyrant,” the mind that pre-emptively shames us, demands perfection, or criticises softness, all in an effort to prevent further harm.

In this context, humiliation is not just a social or political act. It also acts as an internalised framework, a psychological inheritance through which individuals learn to regulate themselves long after the original oppressor has gone.

To speak of humiliation, then, is to refer both to systemic harm and to the echoes of that harm within the self: the external machinery of domination and the internal mechanisms that sustain it.

Humiliation as Governance

Oppression does not arise from a dark inevitability in human nature. It happens when fear, hierarchy, and unprocessed trauma come together. Many cultures have struggled with these forces, though not all have fallen victim to them; some endured through reciprocity, others through domination.

Oppression, then, is not innate to humanity; it is a defensive structure born from wounds. What is learned through fear can, with care, be unlearned through humility.

Humiliation as the Soil I Grew From

Humiliation shaped the emotional landscape I was born into. It existed across previous generations and permeated the atmosphere of my childhood home. It was less a single wound than a climate, an emotional field moulded by fear, class anxiety, and the human struggle to avoid shame. This climate formed the backdrop to my family’s story and the political world that surrounded my early life.

My grandfathers, one English and the other Scottish, grew up privileged yet emotionally guarded. They were gentle, passive men who found it challenging to navigate their marriages. My grandmothers carried their own legacies of fear, social pressure, and emotional resilience. Their strength could be defensive and controlling, creating stability in a world that offered women little safety or voice.

In the emotional climate of their generation, strength often overshadowed softness, and fear manifested itself through control. My grandfathers withdrew; my grandmothers pressed on, not out of choice, but because of the pressures and insecurities that shaped their era. My parents inherited this imbalance, and in response, each cultivated their own form of power, determined not to repeat the vulnerabilities they had witnessed.

My Mother

My mother, raised in South Africa, carried her own history of fear and resilience. As an only child sent to boarding school at a young age, she learnt early to make her school friends her family, creating a sense of belonging based on peers rather than parents. In her youth, she was painfully shy and was attracted to a man who seemed confident and self-assured, someone who appeared to offer the stability she had never fully known.

She soon found herself married to someone whose narcissistic certainty left little room for her inner life. In the absence of being truly seen, she defended herself against depression through painting, her art becoming both refuge and expression. As a boy, I became her confidant, hearing the sorrow of her marriage that she could not share elsewhere. I carried feelings no child should have to bear.

Over time, her confidence slowly increased. After more than twenty years, she finally summoned the courage to leave him and ultimately built a life where her talents could flourish.

My Father

My father’s journey was different. At six, he was sent alone from Scotland to an English preparatory school, travelling by train across the border, waiting at deserted stations in the early hours, and learning to navigate a world filled with adult indifference and childhood cruelty. He was teased for his Scottish accent, ignored by adults who should have protected him, and internalised the silent message that tenderness had no place.

In response, he adapted with notable ingenuity: he turned to sport as both sanctuary and defence. At Uppingham, he gained places in the senior rugby, cricket, and hockey first teams while still quite young, excelling not only through innate talent but also as a means to foster dignity in an environment where achievement was the only reliable way to belong.

He once told me, with deep resentment, that his parents never attended any of his matches until he played for Scottish Schoolboys against England. Achievement, not presence, became the currency of love. As an adult, he went on to lead some of the largest companies in South Africa and the UK, carrying forward the same relentless drive that had once shielded him from humiliation.

To endure the emotional hardship of his early life, he developed aggression, athletic skill, and a deliberate callousness. These were not personal flaws but clever adaptations in a world that punished vulnerability.

Overall, my parents’ histories contributed to the emotional foundation of my childhood. Their unresolved humiliations shaped my environment, influencing my fears, how I adapted, and the parts of myself I chose to conceal.

The Entangled Origins of Apartheid

I grew up in South Africa under the shadow of apartheid. Apartheid did not emerge in isolation, nor from a single colonial power. It developed from the long entanglement between Dutch Calvinist ideology and British imperial bureaucracy, each contributing distinct strands of oppression that ultimately fused into a uniquely South African system.

The Dutch East India Company’s arrival in 1652 introduced a frontier culture rooted in strict religious hierarchy, a belief in predetermined racial differences, and an economy based on pastoral activities reliant on enslaved and coerced labour.

Early segregation practices, such as marriage laws, commando raids, and a theology that depicted Europeans as divinely separate, laid the emotional groundwork for subsequent racial dominance.

When Britain seized the Cape, it strengthened and expanded these foundations through the mechanisms of empire. Victorian racial theories, the pass system, the Masters and Servants Acts, segregated urban planning, and the brutal labour regimes of the mines all played a part. Britain adopted a bureaucratic style of domination that made racial hierarchy a standard part of administration.

While the Dutch provided the cultural rationale for separation, the British supplied the documentation, policing, and punitive infrastructure.

By 1948, apartheid was more a consolidation than an innovation: a blending of Dutch racial theology, British bureaucratic violence, and decades of frontier brutality. It was not an anomaly but a culmination, an intensification of patterns of humiliation and control long practised across Europe and exported throughout its empire.

A Legacy of Violence

Caroline Elkins' ‘Legacy of Violence’ demonstrates, with sharp clarity, that the British Empire was not an accidental drift into oppression. It was a deliberate system centred on bureaucratised humiliation, spanning Kenya, Malaya, India, Ireland, Cyprus, and beyond.

Elkins describes a machinery of domination that relied on detention camps, forced labour, mass beatings and killings, sexual violence, psychological torture, collective punishments, screening, interrogations, and a legal framework designed to demean entire populations.

These were not anomalies; they reflected the prevailing logic. Humiliation served both as a method and a message, asserting total control over the bodies, time, and dignity of the colonised.

The emotional foundation that later drove the British Empire was already well laid before extensive colonisation began. Elizabeth I’s England (1558–1603) was shaped by harsh Poor Laws, public punishments, a strict social hierarchy, and a culture that saw suffering as moral guidance.

These internal systems of humiliation existed before the empire, and within just a few years of Elizabeth’s death, they were exported abroad.

The first permanent English colony was established at Jamestown in 1607, only four years later, indicating that Britain transferred its domestic psychology of domination into its early colonial ventures. Empire did not stem from a sudden desire for expansion; it was the external extension of emotional and disciplinary patterns that had long governed life at home.

As Elkins explains, colonial violence was sustained by the same moral landscape that shaped British life: an emphasis on stoicism, contempt for weakness, and an emotional culture that viewed tenderness as naive or dangerous.

British boarding schools clearly embodied this ethos. As George Orwell describes in Such, Such Were the Joys, cruelty was not incidental; it was a method of teaching. Humiliation was used as a tool to break boys into hierarchical obedience: ridicule, ritual punishments, public shaming, and the strict enforcement of class distinctions.

In 'Shooting an Elephant,' Orwell illustrates how this emotional conditioning influenced the colonial officer. He committed acts of brutality not out of conviction, but out of terror; the fear of appearing weak.

School and empire were not separate; they were twin laboratories of the same experiment. They created individuals who could endure humiliation and, in turn, inflict it. Stoicism, aggression, emotional detachment, and the suppression of empathy were cultivated as virtues across the classroom, on the playing field, and in the colonial outpost.

This is the psychological legacy my family inherited. The humiliations I witnessed and internalised, whether familial, cultural, or political, were not isolated incidents but reflections of a much older civilisational wound.

The emotional silences of my grandparents, the brittleness of my parents, the culture of fear at school, and the violence of apartheid all originated from the same root: a long history of domination masked as discipline, superiority, and order. It is a lineage that has taught generations to resist tenderness, to fear softness, and to associate dignity with dominance.

Humiliation and the Ego

The most common defence against humiliation is the inner tyrant: the internal voice that watches over us before anyone else can, shames us into obedience, and demands perfection to keep us safe. When unconscious, it not only attacks the self but can also manifest as cruelty, impatience, or domination towards others, an effort to prevent the very humiliation it fears.

In this way, what begins as an internal defence develops into a behavioural pattern in relationships, shaping interactions with the same harshness that once affected us. The inner tyrant is not malicious; it is a frightened guardian doing its best to prevent further harm. If left unexamined, it simply repeats the logic of humiliation, both within ourselves and in our surroundings.

“Attack yourself before others do.”

“Attack others before they attack you.”

“Be perfect so you cannot be shamed.”

“Hide your tenderness; it will be used against you.”

We often mistake this voice for truth or discipline. In reality, it is the echo of fear, the voice of parents who felt unsafe, institutions built on hierarchy, and political systems maintained by control. Its protection comes at a cost: it separates us from authenticity, kindness, and connection, the qualities essential for healing.

Collapse as Teacher

The Latin root humus, meaning earth, is shared by humiliation and humility. To be humiliated is to be brought down to the ground. If we resist, we break apart. If we retaliate, we increase our suffering.

What Benoit calls “leaving humiliation alone” is what I have come to regard as wise surrender. Wise surrender is not about giving up; it is about giving way. A deliberate choice to cease fighting the collapse and instead acknowledge the truth beneath it. It is the gentle softening that enables transformation.

When the inner tyrant calms and the body feels the rawness directly, without narrative, blame, or performance, humiliation becomes less overwhelming and more authentic. Rumi captures this beautifully: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

Wise surrender is the willingness to let the wound become a doorway.

My Own Humiliations

Humiliations shaped my life long before I could recognise them. Growing up under apartheid, I absorbed others' humiliation and the moral dissonance of privilege. Boarding school internalised that humiliation more directly; I survived by retreating into silence, watching from the margins, and hiding my sensitivity.

Looking back, I see signs of childhood depression, not sudden sadness but deep confusion and emotional isolation from my own life.

Years later, when my marriage ended, humiliation returned with unexpected force. Beneath the grief, anger, and fear was a deep ache, a collapse that lasted for years. Gradually, through therapy and contemplative practice, I learnt to turn towards the pain instead of away from it. I stopped narrating, stopped resisting, and began to practise wise surrender, accepting, without adornment, the simple fact of being an imperfect Rory.

As the feeling moved through me, something softened. Clarity emerged where self-attack had been, and a steadier presence resurfaced. Humiliation became a teacher, not a destroyer.

The Soft Strength

Humility is often mistaken for modesty or self-denial. Yet, the humility that arises from wise surrender is something different. It is the strength that grows when the ego relaxes. The sense of stability that comes from no longer needing to defend a persona. The quiet honesty that appears when pretence falls away.

The beginning of humility often emerges in simple phrases:

“I don’t know.”
“I can’t keep pretending.”
“I’m tired of holding this armour.”

Pema Chödrön reminds us that in meeting annihilation, we reveal what is truly indestructible. Humility embodies this unbreakable presence, the self that persists when the ego dissolves.

A Politics of Reverence

Humility isn’t only personal; it is political. Systems rooted in domination depend on humiliation to operate. Practising humility, softening, yielding, and allowing vulnerability disrupts the internal logic of empire.

Wise surrender interrupts inherited systems of domination. It restores dignity to the parts of ourselves we once hid in shame. It creates the conditions for tenderness, nuance, and connection.

A culture grounded in humility would evaluate strength by the depth of its presence, not by control. It would dismantle the unseen hierarchies that persist within families, institutions, and nations.

Such a culture begins with small acts: pausing before retaliation; taking a moment to feel before defending; and maintaining the willingness to stay human.

Humility does not signify the end of the self; it means its beginning.

Epilogue

Decolonisation is not just external; it is also internal. The colonial psyche persists in our fear of vulnerability, our respect for achievement, and our suspicion of tenderness.

Humility acts as a decolonising gesture.

In psychotherapy, humility is the meeting of two nervous systems that let go of hierarchy. It is the willingness to be shaped by the encounter rather than to control it. In a decolonising framework, humility encourages us to honour hidden histories, challenge our assumptions, and listen rather than instruct.

Wise surrender transforms into an ethical outlook: not retreat, but courage; not shame, but honesty; not failure, but unity.

Practising humility involves engaging in the ongoing process of healing, personal, relational, and societal. It means moving away from a tradition of domination and embracing a tradition of awakening.

This is simply a snapshot of my story, one thread in a broader tapestry of ancestry, history, fear, tenderness, and healing. It is a work in progress. I offer it not as a conclusion but as an opening. If something here resonates with your own experience of humiliation or softening, may it inspire you to continue exploring your story with honesty and compassion.

Your life holds patterns worth recognising, wounds worth softening, and truths worth reclaiming. Even when spoken quietly, even to yourself, your story can reveal your journey from humiliation to humility and the quiet freedom of wise surrender.

Rory Singer

You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.