A Discipline class

When my trolley entered the class room, five girls were already waiting. I was quickly untied and joined them. I was the last, and class began.

Our teacher was a woman, but if someone would have said she was a block of concrete, she would also have been right. She wasn’t tall, but very stocky, and all of her weight appeared to be muscles. Her face had the air of a bulldog, and her hair cut was extremely short. In fact, she was the first ugly woman I had seen in the institute.

Her voice matched her looks when she opened her mouth: “OK, so I’m Gerda, your discipline teacher. That means I’m here to teach you girls what discipline is, and how to enhance it in you girls. Does any one of you want to tell me what discipline is? “

Her presence was very intimidating, and no fingers were raised; so after a slight pause, she just pointed at XXXX and said: “You. What is your name?”

“Patty, ma’am.”

“Good. Tell me what discipline is.”

“We need to be able to refrain from an O, even when severely stimulated…?”

Gerda frowned at her, and said: “Jeez, I’ll really have to work hard on you girls. That’s just the thing we’re going to be using it for. But discipline itself is something much bigger than that. It is all about the struggle between the long-term goals which are set by your mind, and the seductions of short-term distractions to the body. Sexual gratification is just one of them; it might also be about laziness, gluttony, embarrassment, fear, and many more. Discipline is a set of tools that can help you win that fight, by strengthening your willpower. When you can control your own mind, shape it to the goals you set out, and get yourself to work to achieve them, you have learned discipline; when you keep getting distracted, indulge in frivolous pleasantries, or give up because you feel your tasks are ‘too hard’, you have faiiled. For don’t make any mistakes: NO task is ‘too hard’. It can only be ‘too hard for now’, and when it is, you must work to overcome the difficulties. Whether you are able to do that determines success. Any questions so far? “

She looked around her class. All the girls were silent, attentively listening to her. I felt a strange mix of excitement and anxiety. It sounded like she was offering a way to overcome problems and weakness, and when I did, the world might be on my feet; but on the other hand, I wasn’t too sure that I would be able to learn it; I had found weaknesses in my own character before, and hadn’t always been able to overcome them. Yet I was willing to try, and eager to work hard to be successful in this place.

Gerda continued: “So if discipline is about willpower, how can you work to strengthen it? There are two components to that. The first is an internal one. It has everything to do with training your mind. When you find yourself yielding to those short-term distractions, you analyze how that happened, and you rewire your own brain to prevent it in the future. You will find that this is a generic rewiring; it doesn’t just work for the exercise at hand, but also for any future goal you’re striving for. Failure is critical in this; if you don’t fail, your task wasn’t hard enough, and you can’t learn from your mistakes. “

She glanced around the class, and met silence again. I think we were all wondering how we could transpose these concepts to practical situations; but I had a dark brown suspicion that we would get to that part real soon.

Gerda continued: “The second component is external; it is about punishments. It really is more of a training aid. In the struggle between long and short term, the human brain tends to give priority to the short term. That makes striving for the long term a hard thing to learn. However, it will be much easier to achieve when yielding to the short term not only has a bearing on that long term goal, but also a negative short-term consequence. Whenever you fail on the path to your goal, you receive an immediate retribution for it, and it will help you to condition yourself to refraining from failure in the future. In our training, we use floggings for that. “

She pointed to a rack on the wall that I had noticed before, but hadn’t registered the contents of. Now that she focused our attention to it, I saw that it contained a wide range of crops, whips, floggers, canes, and other frightening stuff I didn’t know the names of. I shuddered. These would be used as the tools for teaching us discipline?

Gerda directed a wicked smile at us, then continued: “Scary, huh? Well yeah, these will be used on you. Don’t think you will be able to escape them; in fact all your asses will be familiar with some of these before the morning is done. Like I said, failure will be a part of this training; if you don’t fail, you can’t learn, and it simply means your tasks aren’t hard enough. And whenever you do, whenever you stray from the straight and narrow to your goal, I’ll step up to this rack and select an appropriate tool for punishing you. “

She fell silent, and her prying eyes made a round around our faces, measuring the responses of each of us. No one dared speak yet again.

Finally she wrapped up, and said: “Well, that’s a lot of theory, right? Lets get down to it, and put all that those abstract concepts at work… chop, chop, get up from your lazy asses, and get some training done!”