Inside The Privileged Man, the support group for men who have it all

‘It’s like that whole #MeToo thing,’ says Esmond Baring, 44, scion of the famous banking family and founder of The Privileged Man, a support group for, er, privileged men. ‘Once you’ve realised you’re not alone, you can ask for help.’

Baring is rakishly handsome and talks with the zeal and articulacy of the true convert. He met co-founder Pete Hunt, 40, in 2011 on the island of Bali after he’d experienced a fairly vigorous nervous breakdown. Ten years later, both having left the corporate world to which they felt ill-suited, they established The Privileged Man.

Baring says his breakdown caused him to participate in a 12-step programme during which he realised almost everything he’d been expensively conditioned to believe – at schools such as Ludgrove and Eton – was wrong. ‘I discovered I was racist, sexist, bigoted and entitled,’ he explains. ‘I had to feel all of the disgust associated with holding those beliefs, that disconnected me from society, and then I grieved. Once I’d come through the disgust and the grief, my heart burst open. I’m no different from any other man. Yes, I may have this particular accent and this colour skin, but I’m the same as every man.’

The Privileged Man is a support community for men who experience guilt as a result of their social status, or who feel damaged by childhoods during which they learned to repress emotions in order to survive being sent to boarding school at a young age, or living in dysfunctional – if outwardly luxurious – homes.

‘I’m speaking from the place of the middle- or upper-class white, privileged man and giving him a voice for mental and emotional health,’ says Baring. ‘What I’ve come to realise is that for most of my life I’ve walked with my head held down in shame by virtue of the privilege I was given in my upbringing.

‘What I’ve experienced from society, and the judgments people have of me by virtue of the label I’ve been given as a privileged man, is envy, hatred, judgment, denigration and rejection. What I’m trying to do is come from a place of truth and give men like myself and Pete, who are privileged and who had this extraordinary education, which actually led to emotional stunting, a voice to speak up and out… We cannot be ashamed of being born.’

The Privileged Man community, which it costs £1,995 annually to be a part of, meets on Zoom once a week for 75 minutes, and holds a weekend retreat every three months where members confront difficult questions about what they want from life and what it is they are hiding from. The most recent took place in Seaview on the Isle of Wight and nine men attended.

Baring and Hunt are aware people will make fun of what they are trying to do, sneering about poor little rich boys, but they’re not put off. ‘We wouldn’t be doing anything of importance if there wasn’t criticism and judgment,’ says Baring.

Although Hunt, who is likeable and softly spoken, says the community has members who didn’t go to boarding school, the significant majority did.

Withdrawn from Bradfield College because he was being bullied and then sent to Charterhouse, Hunt, whose nervous breakdown came in 2015, explains it’s the absence of a mother’s love that really damages little boys who board. ‘The female part of the nurturing process in childhood is basically outsourced by sending boys to boarding school. All of that love that the female can give becomes someone else’s responsibility – someone who’s being paid.’

But it’s not just a lack of connection with their mothers during childhood that causes members of The Privileged Man to suffer. ‘Whether it’s conscious or subconscious, there’s an approval process with Daddy,’ says Hunt. ‘“Well, I had this lifestyle and I’d better not just keep it, but better it, because my dad bettered his.” When that starts to fail or fall apart, there is a real, deep depression that men can feel.’

Baring points out that for children whose fathers were high-achieving 1980s boomer-types, parental love could often feel anything but unconditional. ‘The expectation is “I’m only going to be loved and approved of if I achieve as much as my peers,”’ he says, adding that the result is many men from privileged backgrounds end up leading lives they would never voluntarily choose.

‘So many young men and boys are betraying themselves to follow a path that’s been laid out for them, because that’s the done thing, particularly in this microcosm of society. Many men are living lives they hate and reflecting that hatred back onto themselves, doing something they care nothing for. So the relationship with the self is lost.’

The result in his case, he says, was that the only way he could feel anything ‘was with a line of cocaine, or a lot of alcohol, or sex’ – and that he was by no means alone in his peer group in this need to self-medicate.

He points out that the outlooks of so many privileged men are sufficiently crushed by their upbringing as to make choosing by themselves what to do with their lives nigh-on impossible. ‘Follow your heart? If you’re psychically numb having been raised around emotional dysfunction, then you don’t know what your heart feels in any way to follow.’

Hunt says the men who join The Privileged Man typically feel they have no one to talk to. ‘They’re lonely and they’re isolated and they don’t know where to turn. They might have 200 people come to their 40th birthday party, but internally they’re lonely.’

Isn’t it a bit late to change tack in your forties, when a privileged man is typically married, with kids in private school and a mortgage? Hunt says it’s not. Most wives, he believes, ultimately want a happy husband, and if the cost of that happiness is less material wealth, that’s a trade they’d take.

Besides, perhaps there’s consolation to be found in the fact that privileged men suffering serious midlife anxiety as a result of their upbringing are far from alone. ‘There’s thousands of us,’ says Hunt.