Inequality, injustice, social divisions and Brexit: an expression of Nihilistic rage?

Perhaps one of the cruelest forms of psychological torture is to be educated but poor, living within an unequal and unjust society. Trapped inside a body that instinctively craves for more, requiring intellectual and creative advancement, but is held back by the invisible walls of society, such a person can easily become a burning mass of resentment. Black people know all about this in America, and the historical source of their resentment is well-known.

In England, the historical source of resentment is the injustices carved into the class system. The pride in the British (and in particular, the English) flag that some of the white working class there have feels especially ironic, given that the flag represents the same system of injustice that has existed there for a thousand years. The education system is designed to entrench social divisions within society, with the only way to get an education that is worthy of the name meaning you have to pay for it.

Born into the wrong background, and your intellect is simply wasted; this is the most basic meaning of “injustice”: to have something useful to offer society, but to have your productivity and intellect deliberately repressed by the barriers of the social system. Meanwhile, those whose intellect is objectively inferior and whose nature is less productive, are indulged by a system that rewards the fate of their wealthier parentage; this is the most basic meaning of social immorality and corruption, where the poverty of the poor is exploited by those who fear losing the injustices that keep them in their place. 

“Know Your Place”

Libertarians argue that such injustices would, over time, equal out under a free market; that intellect would naturally balance against any inequalities in the system. But this can only be true in a system where there is equal opportunity; where the rich have an equal opportunity to fail as the poor have to succeed. There is no such system in place in America, let alone in England.

In England, the social system is designed to instill a sense of “knowing your place”; a Westernized and more genteel version of India’s caste system. The historical injustices and prejudices within society were one reason people settled in America in the first place, it should be remembered, and the “American dream” still exists there in people’s hearts regardless of the harsher reality. In England, no-one really pretends that such a “dream” ever existed; only the myths that were projected by its ruling elite, with Churchill being among its most famous polemicists. Even during the days of Empire, the best way for people born there to thrive was to leave Britain itself and seek out a life in one of the overseas “colonies”.

This explains why some people still have nostalgia for the Empire, and see Brexit through the same revisionist lens. The “Empire” was seen as a success because people had somewhere else than Britain where they could make a stab at being successful. This explains why the Scots were among the most resourceful of pioneers and colonists; given the dearth of opportunity (and the ingrained prejudice) at home, they sought a more just chance at success overseas.

So when the empire began to fall apart after the Second World War, and the “homeland” itself became a destination for the “colonials”, the irony (and sense of injustice) was not long in being felt by the “natives”. That same sense of bitter injustice was the root of the racism that greeted those who came from overseas to settle in Britain; not a country with streets paved in gold, but a country with inhabitants that brooded in quiet resentment. Wind the clock on several decades, and that same brooding resentment is felt in many parts of the country; the source of it is the historical injustices mentioned at the very start that were never put right.

Deaths of Despair  

     

Industrialisation led to parts of Britain that had never known prosperity and productivity becoming more prosperous and productive than some towns closer to the capital itself. Added on with the effect of empire and a captive (and advantageous) overseas market, in spite of the still-entrenched inequality, the whole of the country seemed to be thriving.

After the Second World War, the trend that had led to some parts of the country losing their primary purpose of existence began to accelerate. Still trapped in the embrace of a fundamentally unjust social system, post-industrial Britain lacked the dynamism to find a sustainable economic model. Instead, the ruling elite turned to Libertarian morality.

The British economy is, in fact, slowly dying. Britain lacks a sustainable economic model for the 21st century. Creating an economic structure that relies almost entirely on collating power and wealth within the capital, it allows the rest of the country to atrophy; returning Britain to the same structural inequalities that existed prior to Industrialisation. Due to the corrupt injustices of its social structure, those in power lack the intellect to deal with the issues rationally, instead only seeing the issue through the lens of protecting their own interests. They would rather ignore the rest of the country’s suffering and resentment – thus not dealing with the issue rationally – and deal with the consequences of that resentment as and when necessary. This is the archetype of reactionary thinking.

The result of that reactionary thinking has seen towns and cities across the country to slip into a kind of slow-motion social breakdown. These are the “deaths of despair” – of suicide or through the self-abuse of poor diet, over-drinking or drugs – that have seen a growth over the last few decades, and a surge in recent years. These are places that literally have no future; their economy has ceased to have an identifiable function, and the government doesn’t care enough (or lacks the intellect) to do anything about it.

In this sense, the future of post-industrial Britain may well follow the (nihilistic) prediction that the Conservative government made forty years ago: there are places in the country that will simply be allowed to wither and die. Such a sociopathic level of indifference is a damning indictment of Britain’s social structure, and there is a valid question to ask whether this structure’s own future is finite as well. How long will it be before the corruption at the top becomes so entrenched and so reactionary that it either eventually over-reaches or runs out of steam entirely?

Nihilistic Rage

There is a narrative (which has some merits) that the Brexit vote was the result of years of accumulated social frustration at the inequalities that had been allowed to fester within Britain, and England in particular. This is an over-simplification, as the vote would not have been possible without an at least equal sense of spoiled entitlement from the Middle classes of England’s rural heart also choosing to believe in a form of nostalgic revivalism, where a mythical cultural homogeneity could be restored. A more accurate representation would be to see the Brexit vote as reflecting both of these contradictory and opposing ideas;such contradictions only being possible in such an unequal society at Britain.

This social inequality explains the attraction of Brexit to those who feel they have no future. As they were told migration and the EU were responsible for their sense of resentment and despair, they turn to the politics of anger as the only way left that explains how they feel, regardless of who is peddling the message and what agenda might lie behind it. In this way, the "politics of anger" is also a manifestation of the nihilistic sense of having no future. If you have no future, you can easily become indifferent to what happens to everyone else now; as far as those people are concerned, they might well be happy to metaphorically let it all go to hell, if it would allow them at least a moment of grim satisfaction at seeing everyone else brought down to their level. These people seem to have become so nihilistic, they don't even care about their own future well-being: they simply want to have a single moment of feeling in control, even if all they want to do is press the self-destruct button.

This explains why the surge towards Nigel Farage's "Brexit Party" is at its most sudden and most incomprehensible in the parts of the country that would be the worst hit by the kind of "no deal" Brexit he advocates: the deprived post-industrial areas of Britain where there is already little in the way of a sustainable local economy. These areas are simply past caring; when you've already hit what feels like rock-bottom, outsiders telling you things will be terrible just sound as though they lack any ability to see things from your point of view. 

It is this psychological separation that is another manifestation of Britain's social divisions; parts of the country that economically and socially feels as though they are on a different plane of existence, as though "the centre" simply doesn't even know they exist.

This is how Britain has become such an object of morbid fascination to outsiders; hypnotized by the spectacle of self-destructive madness that is taking control of events: the all-consuming "black hole" that everyone seems to be dragged into.

Populism and esoteric thought: reactionary tribalism and historic parallels

There is an argument that can be made that the rise in Populism is a clear reaction against globalisation, social and technological changes and the effects of the financial crisis of 2008. Similarly, a concurrent trend has emerged in popular culture of a growing fascination with esoteric symbolism and fantastical escapism.
It's not only children who want to believe in "unicorns" these days, but some of our politicians, too.

We've been here before.
It seems to be an instinctive human reaction against social and economic change. The sudden growth of industrialisation led to various cultural movements in Europe; most notably the change towards stricter moral values in Victorian Britain and a spurt in romantic historical literature, which occurred as Britain was rapidly changing from an agrarian society to an urban one. Artistic movements like the Pre-Raphaelites can be seen as part of the same narrative. Britain's social change was rapid when seen in its historical context, especially when we consider how, in the 18th century, London's population of half a million was ten times that of Britain's second biggest city (Bristol); in other words, England before industrialisation was essentially a country with a bloated capital and an assortment of modest market towns. Put into this context, the social schizophrenia felt by those living in the middle of such sudden changes is unsurprising.
Meanwhile, in places like Germany (even before the nation itself existed), there was the concurrent romantic movement that had a large effect on art and literature (which, more darkly, saw themes such as underlying Anti-Semitism emerge in folk tales). This can also be seen as a wider expression of identity confusion, resulting in a need to hark to the (imagined) past as a form of social therapy.

The same esoteric themes were self-evident in the rise of the original Populist movement in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century, with the themes of tradition versus technology being played out in varying forms across the most rapidly-transforming places like Germany and Britain, and (to a lesser extent) Russia.
Of these three, both Germany and Russia had their own form of social collapse as a result of their involvement in the First World War. In Russia's case, it led to a complete embrace of technology in its use as enabling the aims of Bolshevism, though Russian nationalism was still strategically exploited later on by Stalin. In Germany, it ultimately led to the opposite, and the rise of the Nazis and Hitler, whose values were both highly nationalistic and ultra-traditional, yet also were in favour of strategically-exploiting technology (e.g. the modern media) when it suited them.
Of course, it was Italy that "broke the mould" in exploiting traditional values in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. In this sense, that global continental conflict can see seen as the ultimate expression of chaotic modern values - technology leading to the destruction of human society in its most primal form. Put in this light, it is no wonder that some traditionalists led a counter-reaction against their experiences and led a political campaign - like the artistic movement a century earlier - to reconnect people with their "humanity".
The irony here, of course, is the reversion to "traditional values" led to even greater inhumanity in the Second World War.


Different versions of reality

In this greater context, then, the rise of Populism is as unsurprising as it was predictable.
The rise in "traditional values" can have many manifestations. Britain has now become a modern "nursery" for Populist strategy, with the rest of Europe and the world looking on in morbid fascination at how a country once looked to as an exemplar of democratic moderation has become transformed into a cauldron of irrationality and "magical thinking". Politicians there have been acting as though "Game Of Thrones" were a practical manual in applied strategy rather than a piece of small-screen fantasy escapism: life imitating art, and all that. They see dragons, and start to imagine that "unicorns" might well exist too.
The tendency to believe that the impossible is possible, and that reality itself can be doubted (or is only a matter of opinion), is a form of esoteric thought that its historic roots in pagan values. This fascination with "natural law" first came to into the popular imagination in the 19th century, with Victorian writers and thinkers in Britain, and romantic writers and musicians in Germany in particular; think of Wagner, for instance. This then leads, in a different interpretation, to the skepticism of Nietzsche. This thinking was later ruthlessly exploited by the Nazis.

Brought to the present-day, skepticism in reality - climate change skeptics, Holocaust deniers, the "flat earth" movement etc. - seems to have grown with how technology has been manipulated in the media for partisan effect. In other words, when the news more and more resembles "propaganda" by people with an agenda, people doubt the truth of what they see and read. This media partisanship has then been exploited by the Populist movement (such as Farage in the UK) to promote its own agenda and to disseminate a narrative that the press are lying about immigration (i.e. under-reporting its negative effects on society). This then gives an excuse for those Populist-leaning media outlets to feed their readers with stories to fuel their own prejudice even further.
The very concept of the "lying press" goes all the way back to the use of the by the Nazis to promote skepticism in mainstream opinion. In this way, by sowing doubt in the "reality" people are seeing on the media, it encourages people to believe in their own "version" of reality. This gives further contextualization of how, when presented with a world that makes no sense, feels constantly unpredictable, and reality itself seems contradictory, people turn to fantasy and science fiction as a form of escapist therapy. This also explains the growth in the far-right and its use of esoteric symbolism to promote its agenda - the whole "red pill" meme, for example. Symbolism that harks back to ancient values - such as a "chivalric" version of the St George's cross used by the EDL - has been increasingly used to provide both memorable imagery and to provoke an emotional impact. The signs are they have not been entirely unsuccessful.

In this sense, the growth in fantasy imagery in the media and the use of reality-skepticism in Populist rhetoric, are inherently linked. When reality itself becomes questionable and simply a matter of opinion, ideas that were once seen as absurd are now taken seriously; when the mainstream media disregard Populist ideas as either fantastical or paranoid, this simply feeds into the Populist narrative. In the Populist narrative, mainstream thought (i.e. that which is promoted by "the elite") is simply an agenda to make people supine and unthinking, accepting of their fate. In the Populist narrative, no conspiracy is too extreme an explanation.
Chaos and unpredictability are two tools used by Populist movements to create a reality-skeptical public and generate popular support for their rhetoric. These are themes that have been used in the past, but technology and the ability to manipulate perception are at a level where it becomes ever easier. This skepticism that becomes ever more prevalent in the public, leads to people becoming both paranoid and more prone to irrational thought.


Welcome to Fantasy-Land

This explains the British movement that has led around a third of its electorate to lend their support to Nigel Farage's "WTO Brexit" and his "Brexit Party".
By all rational analysis, Britain trading with the world on WTO terms alone (i.e. a "no deal Brexit") would be economically-disastrous. But people's sense of reality has become so skewed that the most popular party in the country is one that supports this very scenario. In their "reality", any negative consequences would be the fault of the EU and other co-conspirators within the UK, while any negative consequences would be both "not that bad" and "worth it in the long-run".
In this sense, the supporters of this scenario are able to believe two contradictory ideas at the same time - they believe that their future would be worse but also better. This is why appealing to reason is pointless, and missing the point. What they believe is more important to them than what they experience. Their sense of reality is not what they perceive with their senses, but what they believe exists in their own mind. It is, in a cognitive sense, a separation of the senses from their consciousness.
Without going too deeply into this, what this tells us more generally is that followers of this movement are acting like members of cult: they are brainwashed into believing what they have been told supersedes what they experience with their own senses: their "reality" is literally different from someone outside their group. The obvious danger of this psychology is that it can lead to potentially dangerous behaviour, such as "mob rule" fueled by hysterical rhetoric.

Britain is currently experiencing a form of collective nervous breakdown, where reality itself seems to be under question by its politicians. Goaded by the poisonous rhetoric of "betrayal", the mass of the electorate accumulating around Farage's "personality cult" are leading the country towards a reactionary and self-destructive path. The tribalism of the past has been turned on its head by Brexit, leading to a new form of "primal" tribalism: the tribe of the fantasy-believers.

The UK "Porn Block": ineffective, counter-productive, intrusive…and a microcosm of Theresa May's psychology?

The author some time ago wrote about how Theresa May’s psychology seemed like a microcosm of Britain’s collective neuroses. As a person, her inner thinking is defined by her background. The manner of how she ruled the both the Home Office as Home Secretary and has run the country as Prime Minister can be explained by the self-evident moral rigidity of her upbringing: the only child of a priest, growing up in the whiter-than-white heart of traditional “Middle England”.

There is more than a whiff of poisonously-regressive, moralistic sanctimony to the manner of both May’s idea of society and the social agenda that her government has pursued. It is as though under her watch, she wants to actively encourage the authoritarian moralizing that typified the Victorian era, but implemented with 21st century technology.

Under May’s watch, Britain loses its identity as a progressive Western society, and slides into the authoritarian realm, where people’s private actions are policed, even when what they are doing is entirely legal. These are not even people suspected of being criminals or conspiring in criminal behavior; they are simply doing something that is entirely natural as human beings. This is done in the name of “protecting children”; as all authoritarian actions are done in someone else’s name.

In this way, she is taking the idea of “nudging”public behaviour that was introduced under Cameron’s administration, and applying her own deeply unsubtle, authoritarian methodology: from coaxing people’s inclinations to hammering them into their head.  

The “Porn Block” is merely the logical conclusion to May’s pursuit of a regressive moral agenda that both stigmatizes the private realities of modern life, and removes the right to privacy for those interested in most online sexual content. The consumption of pornography becomes an implicit “thoughtcrime”: while it is “legal”, those who consume it are made to feel stigmatized, with all their online private inclinations stored and recorded. How convenient. The infamous phrase that “people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear” is the exact opposite of the intention of this policy: they have everything to fear.

Of course, the real intention is as “red meat” to the Conservative Party’s geriatric grassroots. Of those people, few of them see the internet as anything else than a corrupting and dangerous influence. Of course, it can be this, but that is the same any form of media.

Then there are the practicalities behind it, which explain how the “Porn Block” is such an utterly stupid idea at various levels. Apart from all the security dangers it poses to users at recording vast quantities of personal data and sexual interests, it is easy to circumvent the age barriers using VPN software in any case, making it largely ineffective to any savvy (underage) internet user. And to those who can’t get around the age block, then the “dark web” will be another unregulated avenue for them to explore. In the same way that banning soft drugs simply means that it sends users to the same dealers of illegal harder drugs (and thus being a counter-productive government act), the “Porn Block” will simply entice more teenagers to the “dark web”, where the most extreme content possible can also be found. So how about that for protecting children from porn?

The fact that this policy is so ineffective, counter-productive and authoritarian and that is also has occurred under the watch of Theresa May cannot be mere coincidence. Apart from being a national leader who is so utterly useless at almost everything she deals with, she then has to distract her ineptitude with authoritarian policies that can only appeal to her party base. Even if the policy is disastrous on so many levels, the fact that her party base would probably love it supersedes all other concerns. This was true of the “hostile environment”, welfare reform, and “austerity”, and is also true of the “Porn Block”.

Another social consequence of the “Porn Block” is that is amplifies the moral gulf between the rulers and the ruled. 21^st century Britain is a "liberal" country, but this is a policy that does not belong in a liberal country. It is a policy that doesn’t even belong in the West at all. But Britain’s ruling elite are a class apart from those below them whose taxes pay for the moralizing of their rulers. The rulers don’t care about the “Porn Block” in practical terms, because they know how to circumvent it already. Many of them already do this in how they “manage” their tax affairs. In this way, the “Porn Block” is simply more evidence of the contempt that the rulers have for the private lives of the ruled. As far as the rulers are concerned, the ruled don’t deserve one; the “Porn Block” is simply confirmation of this.

 

No sex (education), please – we’re British

The “Porn Block”, as the government seems proud to point out, makes Britain a pioneer in online security. As mentioned already before, the “security” aspect is both dangerous and pathetically-easy to circumvent. So all this proves, in the same manner as Brexit, is how hopelessly how out-of-depth and painfully lacking in self-awareness Britain’s government looks to the rest of the world. If the “Porn Block” makes Britain’s government a pioneer, it is only a pioneer in embarrassing ineptitude, under the guise of moral authoritarianism. It makes Britain’s government look like a slapstick version of the “morality police”.

In any case, these actions only underline how abysmal Britain’s sexual education is compared to most other developed nations, and how the government’s first instinct is to prevent people from finding things out or (heaven forbid) enjoying themselves in a way that their rulers find somehow offensive or socially dangerous. British sex education is almost an oxymoron, as governments (especially Conservative ones) are so constrained by their own sexual insecurities they are horrified at the idea of people having an “education” in sex. They simply cannot countenance seriously talking about it.

The alternative to sex education is the situation Britain has had for decades: among the highest rates for teenage pregnancy in the Western world. Government policy that engenders sexual ignorance in society does not reduce the desire for sex; indeed, decades of evidence have shown it produces the exact opposite effect.

One glaringly obvious reason that teenagers watch porn is that – apart from entirely natural hormonal reasons – because they know so little about sex from their schooling or their parents, online pornography becomes the only “resource” they can access to discover more about it. Therefore the most obvious reason that teenagers have such questionable morality about sex is because, lacking any proper guidance from responsible adults, they get their “sex education” from porn. The end result of “porn” being their primary sexual resource, are (male) teenagers with highly questionable ideas of consent, among many other issues of sexual realism.

And now the government wants to prevent teenagers from having any practical knowledge of sex at all until they come of age, in a true moralizing throwback to Victorian prudishness. It is true that before the internet age, pornography was very much limited in its circulation to the general population. 

But is that really a regression that Britain should be making in the 21^st century – back to a time decades ago when pornography was a realm that only “perverts” inhabited? It is telling how pervasive that outdated thinking still seems to be in the socially-regressive mind of Theresa May.

In this way, Britain under Theresa May has become, in regards to sex, one step closer to the moral universe of puritanical absolutism with modern technology: a moral plane that is much closer to the contemporary Muslim regimes of the Middle East and Asia, for example; or to use a fictitious parallel, the logical conclusion of this path is the descent some kind of twisted British version of Gilead.

Not so much “Under His Eye”, but “Under Theresa’s Eye”.

Theresa May's "personality void": her inner psychology and the effect of Brexit

There are two common comments that have been made about Theresa May's personality, by both outside observers and those that have had direct interaction with her: one is her apparent lack of an easily-identifiable personality, and the other is her social awkwardness.

To be fair, there are those - her supporters, for instance - who would dispute these two characterizations, but that's hardly surprising. This simply supports the notion that May is only comfortable around people who she knows like her, or are like her: in other words, when she is in her "comfort zone". To have a fair understanding of someone's personality you need a sense of objectivity to have a have a proper sense of perspective. The vast majority of observations by those outside her loyalist circle have highlighted either one, or both, of the above characteristics.

Dealing with the first of these issues in this article - May's apparent "lack of personality" - is easiest when we look at what we know of her interests and what motivates her.


A personality void

Her motivations seem to stem (unsurprisingly) from how she was brought up. Being raised in the traditional values of "Middle England" of the 1950s as the single child of a vicar (with her mother working as Conservative Party activist), it is not hard to see where she gets her conservative values from. In these highly-specific circumstances of time, place and parentage, it would he hard to be raised in these surroundings and not have conservative values subconsciously instilled in you.
In her interviews, one of the main words May uses to describe her morality is the sense of "service". She has talked in the past of how various people in her family and in past generations have worked in roles that have involved a service element to them, either morally or functionally. In this way, her family background is typical of the ambitions that still embody a traditional English deference to social hierarchy. Due to her family background and history, she has thus been instilled with an innate sense of modesty and self-sacrifice, as well as a sense of duty.

An added element to this which is crucial is how she got involved with the Conservative Party from a young age due to her mother's local connections. This emotional attachment to the party from a young age proves critical to understanding her motivations and well as her interests, because both become fused together in her relationship to the Conservative Party.
Her relationship to the party evolved as she spent time at Oxford University, where she met her husband (again, through their respective connections to the party). Thus it's not hard to an emotional connection to the Conservative Party become even more intertwined from her own mother's initial connections as well as her husband's. In this sense, she might emotionally connect both her parents and her husband with her own ties to the party.
Then, within a few years of her graduating both her parents died in differing circumstances, and by now she worked with the Bank Of England, joining her husband's pursuit in the financial sector. Her steady rise up the Tory ranks followed. Her psychology of "duty" and "service" therefore can be understood in the context of how, after her parents died, the Conservative Party was perhaps the one tangible thing that still kept her emotionally connected to her past. Her motivation was for the service of her party; both as a continuation of the morality of "service" that had been instilled in her from childhood, as well as out of a genuine emotional attachment she may have had for its values. It could be argued then that - in some psychological manner - her interest in the party compensated for the loss of her parents.

In this way, the accusation that Theresa May has no identifiable personality stems from the sense that her devotion to the party is there instead of any identifiable personality. To outsiders, she might seem like a personality void - an empty vessel - because her motivations and interests primarily revolve around her emotional connection to the Conservative Party. This point becomes key to understanding the way she had handled (and politically exploited) Brexit, which we'll look at a little later.

What are her interests, at a personal level? To outside eyes, Theresa May seems insufferably "boring". Her leisure pursuits seem mundane in the extreme: cooking at home and walking in the mountains seem to be the only obvious ones: the kind of things that associated with highly-traditional cultural values. It's hard to think what she and her husband talk about to pass the time, except for issues of politics and values. They appear like a cut-out "Mr and Mrs Middle England"; banal, wholesome, unimaginative and utterly two dimensional. Their personas seem designed to bore you into submission.
It is this lack of depth to both their personalities that feeds the sensation that their personas are masks; psychological "shells" that hide some deeper persona. Can they really, truly be that boring?

From what can be gleaned, the only interest that has been consistent over the years has been Theresa May's consistent interest in the Conservative Party. The "boring" aspect to Theresa May's psychology can be explained by both her stiflingly-orthodox background, and if we see her necessity to emotionally identify with the Conservative Party is because of deeper insecurities.
In this sense, May seems to live and breathe the traditional values of her party; her ideas in that sense may not be seen as her own, but those of her party that she identifies with emotionally for her own reasons. Her party acts as both a kind of emotional "comfort blanket" and as a kind of intellectual "inner voice". Her rhetoric to the party conference is thus her refracting back to the delegates what they want to hear, because what they want to hear is what she wants them to hear, and what she wants to hear herself. Her rhetoric in these "closed spaces" is thus an act of intellectual co-resonance: both her and her party's delegates in a mutual feedback loop. She is to be seen as "one of them" and "they" as part of her.

The understanding that May's core values come from her identification with the Conservative Party is what allowed her to become so popular within the party. Apart from the "Nasty Party" speech early on in her life as a parliamentarian, she has appeared as a living distillation of her party's moral values. The fact that she kept her life private and her thoughts to herself while she was a politician added to an air of mystery, allowing others to distill into her persona the positive attributes that they were looking for in a potential leader.


"The Will Of The People"

Theresa May's evident lack of personality was therefore an advantage when it came to the party leadership election after David Cameron's resignation. Having long instilled a sense that she was, as far as the party members went, "one of them", it was relatively easy to gain the backing of other members of the parliamentary party when the time came.
One of the innate problems of her "personality void" is that she has no natural charisma. Boris Johnson, the other main contender (and favorite) for the leadership, had it in spades; but what he had a surfeit of in charisma he lacked for when it came to willpower and tact. While May lacked charisma, she was able to exude an air of calm competence: she was able to offer the reassuring "comfort blanket" of a Thatcher of the 21st century, seeing in Brexit an act of moral duty to implement the "will of the people". For her, it was not about charisma, but simply one of service to the nation.

In implementing Brexit, Theresa May thus morphed her persona from being simply a servant of her party to being a servant of the country. For a time after her rise to power, her leadership of the country was portrayed as being almost above party politics. Exploiting the personal popularity she had with the electorate (under the same spell her party had been, it seems) her government was now "Theresa May's team". For a time, it didn't matter that she wasn't naturally charismatic or rarely made public appearances; this was excused by the public as she had "more important things to do", and represented a more workmanlike approach to politics that May encouraged. The politics of charisma was over; the politics of duty was back in fashion.
This was how May came to become a kind of Brexit "avatar": in her ideological and moral embrace of the meaning of Brexit, she sought to identify with the motivations and values of those who had supported it. She portrayed her role not really as a "typical" politician, but as someone whose duty was to be the servant of Brexit; through her role as Prime Minister, Brexit's meaning would be done. This explained the seemingly-meaningless semantics of "Brexit means Brexit"; to her, it wasn't meaningless, but perhaps beyond meaning. Brexit's meaning to May was self-evident, and her years of service to the same morality that Brexit represented gave May the self-belief that it gave her some special insight.
While we can only guess at her innermost thinking, it's not hard to imagine that her background made her think she was uniquely-able to meet the challenges of the task, as though Brexit were the task that she had been specially-suited for in life, and that her career had been leading to this moment in time: that a strange kind of fate was at work. At a more human level, even her husband is said to have told her that when it came to the premiership, her years of service to the party demonstrated that she "deserved it". In this sense, her role as leader of Brexit was both an ultimate act of service and the ultimate prize. This contrasting dichotomy of simultaneous great sacrifice with great reward can be seen as a morality whose heart is in the founding ethics of her upbringing.

Prior to the referendum, her support for the EU had been functional if anything; her instincts were in truth as parochial and as culturally-insular as those in Middle England that supported Brexit. Thus, it would have took little effort for her to emotionally identify with the cause, and to want to ensure that she embodied their values. For in reality, Brexit's values were also her own.
The rhetoric she used at the the first party conference as leader demonstrated this, and her determination that Brexit had to be done in a way that was loyal to the vote demonstrated her own psychological desire to continue the same morality that had been with her from a young age: for Theresa May, it wasn't about what she wanted, it was about being loyal to the people; the same morality that is repeated in her loyalty to her party. The referendum could not be ignored; it was her duty to carry out "the will of the people"; she had been chosen as the person with this responsibility; she knew what the people wanted as she was "one of them". These four tenets of belief seem to be the things that are understood like articles of faith by May. Anyone who challenged them would be seen as undermining people's faith in democracy, and by extension, May's own internal belief system. 
That belief system appears to be what is driving her on in the absence of personality.


"I feel sorry for her"

The "personality void" that has been talked about seems to now have been filled by Brexit.

Brexit has become May's raison d'etre. Although when she became leader she talked of her social program, there are few reasons to think that was serious talk; given her record as Home Secretary, more likely this future action was just humanistic "window dressing" to make her seem moderate - part of the "mask" - to hide the empty shell of her persona beneath.
Brexit has consumed May's personality like some kind of esoteric "force of nature". While it acts as a symbolic "talisman" that gives her strange powers of political fortitude and persuasion, its greater chaotic energy is ripping the social fabric of the country apart. Brexit's deeper power is only to corrupt and destroy.

What's more, while Brexit has given Theresa May a kind of political invincibility, it has warped her sense of perspective. Allowing the meaning of Brexit to consume her, all other decisions have to be taken in respect to Brexit. In this way, the government has become the political undead - kept alive by Brexit, but incapable of doing anything else. All the other problems of the country are allowed to deteriorate, leaving the impression of a country slowly falling to pieces, disintegrating socially, as the government is only interested in Brexit.
And even on Brexit itself, because its ultimate meaning is destructive in its nature, it seems to have a strange ability to promote discord among Britain's political masters. As no-one can decide what Brexit means beyond unreal abstractions, the onset of time pushes the country towards the most destructive path of all.
This is the path that could, if continuing discord allows it to happen, ultimately lead to Britain's self-destruction, socially and economically. The horrid irony here is that Theresa May, whose inner psychology is about duty, loyalty and service, will be indirectly responsible for it. It is her personality, and her neurotic loyalty to her party and to Brexit, that is to blame.

Those that see Theresa May on the television have witnessed her physical deterioration over the last two and a half years because of Brexit. It almost seems to sapping the human energy out of her as it yet protects her from her political enemies.

"I feel sorry for her" some have said.
But that sentiment is only a symptom of the wider problem: by choosing to allow the destructive energy of Brexit to guide her, she has abdicated responsibility; she has allowed Brexit to unleash both her inner demons, and the demons that lie within all those seduced by its power.

Brexit's esoteric symbolism: the power of beliefs, and the far-right's "Aryan resurgence" fantasy

It has been blatantly-apparent since the EU referendum that Brexit has opened a "Pandora's Box" of social issues in Britain, that has been exploited by opportunists on both the far left and far right. Furthermore, it has even been promoted by movements outside of Britain to promote a wider, destructive agenda: Brexit Britain has thus become a kind of exemplar, a standard-bearer for other like-minded movements to follow. We'll explore the deeper symbolism of this a little later.

One of the most striking aspects of the EU referendum and how it was won was the use of emotive arguments over factual analysis. It was a case of the heart winning over the head; the power of belief over the power of argument. That has remained the same ever since, with those still determined to leave the EU basing this solely on the force of their beliefs. While the "remain" side used facts to demonstrate the basis of their beliefs, for the "leave" side the most important thing was the power of the beliefs themselves to win others over.
In this very concrete sense, the "remain" side lost the case because they didn't know who or what they were arguing against. In the same way that an atheist can never use rational argument to convince a religious fanatic of the irrationality of their beliefs, the same was true of the EU referendum. You cannot use rational argument against an irrational belief.

The power of belief versus evidence-based analysis is historically the story of how mankind advanced its understanding of science. It is also the main thing that separates traditional, theocratic ideology and concrete materialist thinking.
Put in this deeper perspective, Brexit and the "belief system" that goes along with it follows a trend of conflating globalization, materialism and liberalism with a wider rejection of cultural identity. We could also argue that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was the real turning-point in this trend: both the Brexit movement gained traction in the UK (particularly non-metropolitan England) in the years that followed, while Donald Trump's rapid rise was really following-on and exploiting the rise of the TEA Party movement that was instigated by the Koch brothers in the same time-frame.

Modern far-right movements across Europe, and more widely "Populist" movements in various high-profile countries today, all share the same skepticism of "global" values. It seems to more a collective rejection of the values that led to the GFC, which they have conflated with the materialist and heterogeneous values of social liberalism.
The problem is that we've been here before, following a earlier financial crisis: the Great Depression. Unlike in the 1930s, we don't have strongmen with private armies; with technological advances, we instead have online armies of "trolls" to intimidate virtually (with their anonymity arguably making them just as effective a force of dissuasion). Their ability to guide the direction of discourse and subvert the democratic process is similar to the tactics used by authoritarians in the 1930s; the only difference is how technology has changed their capabilities. While there are gangs of thugs to intimidate people as well (while claiming the right to free speech that their despised liberals so value), much of their real influence and "nudging" is done online, by exploiting the weak controls of social media.

In this way, the rise of Populism and the far-right since the GFC mirrors much the same trajectory of the 1930s, albeit over longer time-frame. If the banks hadn't been bailed out in 2008, the GFC would almost certainly have been a "Second Great Depression", rather than the drawn-out downturn and stagnant economies that have transpired in reality. A "Second Great Depression" would doubtlessly have led to a sudden surge in extremist politics in a very short time; what we have had instead is a "slow-burn" effect of far-right values slowly seeping in to mainstream discourse as people get more and more wearied of the seemingly-endless slog towards an ever-receding sun-lit horizon.


Brexit as an "Aryan Resurgence" fantasy

Relying on the power of beliefs, culture and spirituality is the classic reaction against materialist liberalism. In the eyes of Fascist theorist Julius Evola, this was part of a historical trend where scientific rationalism and materialism had led to a collapse in the moral values of hierarchy and a deeper spiritualism. He saw Fascism as a justifiable reaction against society's moral decay.
We can see many of today's authoritarian leaders using the same kind of rhetoric to justify their actions. In the Anglo-sphere, both Brexit and Trump supporters talk about the morality of their cause, seeing in their movements a deeper meaning: where the potential for chaos is seen as justifiable, and the threat of violence is never far from the surface. To borrow a phrase, Brexit and Trump are both a "Triumph Of The Will", to be enforced through mob rule if necessary.

In the eyes of Evola, Fascist ideology is in a battle for the restoration of ancient civilization i.e. the morality of the warrior. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were, in his eyes, attempts to restore the "natural" racial hierarchy that he believed existed before the rise of Christianity in Europe. Pagan "Warrior races" like the Germans and the Romans had proved their superiority in battle in the ancient battles they had fought to dominate Europe. Bringing this rationale to the 20th century, Evola then used this to justify Germany and Italy's carving up of Europe, with the ultimate expunging of liberal thought and the subjugation of inferior races. When the Nazis applied this to its "logical" conclusion, it was about the elimination of the Jews entirely.
As a matter of record, Hitler wanted an "understanding" with Britain, as he saw Anglo-Saxon culture as a fellow Aryan tribe. Hitler's fantasy was the German domination of the European continent from the Atlantic to the Urals, while leaving the British Empire intact. As we know, Churchill was having none of it, Nazi Germany over-reached with its invasion of the Soviet Union and was defeated.

The following post-war period was one of radical strategic realignment. To Fascist die-hards that lived through the post-war period, the advance of Communist influence across half of Europe, with Germany itself divided, materialist America triumphant and the slow disintegration of the British Empire, meant they had only their fantasies to believe in. The emergence of the EU as a political institution, with its zenith reached with the accession of former Communist Eastern Europe countries might have been seen as the real nadir for the fortunes of the far-right. But things were soon to change.

The GFC was the turning-point for the far-right, as they saw in the economic chaos an opportunity that had eluded them.
The cultural symbolism of English identity was based to an extent on "otherness". Being apart from the continent through their island geography, they felt emotionally detached from European culture, even when they were engaged in it politically. This sentiment was picked up on by Europe itself (most famously by Charles De Gaulle, when he rejected Britain's initial attempts to join the EEC). This meant that when Britain did join the EEC, they spent most of the time complaining about it, even when they had got the best "deal" of all.
In this sense, the more esoteric argument is that the instinctive scepticism that English culture had towards European integration and culture was an inadvertent echo of the same hostility found in historical Fascist circles. By this reasoning, England's "true" cultural identity is not materialist or liberal in the European sense, but more naturally traditional and authoritarian. Following this narrative, England's desire for Brexit was the subconscious desire to "carry the torch" of far-right ideology, first by breaking away from the materialist EU culture and then to encourage other like-minded nations in Europe to do the same. The "Aryan resurgence" fantasy is thus realized by England recognizing its destiny as the liberator of a materialist, liberal Europe, with a grateful Germany finally free from the guilt of the Second World War, and Brexit Britain as the instigator and leader of this supra-national neo-Fascist movement. In this nightmarish fantasy, it is England, using the "dark power" of Brexit, that brings about the collapse of the EU and the eventual "restoration" of Fascist rule across Europe. This would be achieved not through the military might of old, but through economic warfare and social destabilization: using the modern weapons of the 21st century to turn back the clock. The signs are already there this is the path the far-right would like to take.

The primal symbolism of the St George's cross mirrors the ancient heraldry of the black cross of the Teutonic knights that colonized Eastern Europe. "Brexit" is exploited by the Fascist far-right as an opportunity to reconnect people with their "roots", and to identify materialist "Europe" (i.e. the EU) as the enemy of their culture.   
But this strategy has already been used to great effect in Russia. It is no wonder that the Kremlin should be a supporter of Brexit: they would see it as another example of exporting "hybrid warfare" even more effectively (and surreptitiously) than has already been used in Ukraine.

Brexit's esoteric meaning: ideological roots and its wider destructive energy

All the evidence points to the disturbing fact that Brexit's primary power in Britain has been to bring out the worst in human nature.

There are conspiracy theorists who would believe that Brexit is in fact a foreign-backed project designed to destroy Britain (historically, in a similar manner to how Lenin was sneaked into Tsarist Russia by Germany). This blogger has discussed this theory before. Over the pond, some hold fears that Donald Trump is in fact some kind of Russian "agent", so it not surprising that similar theories are expounded about Brexit in the UK.
A more realistic worry is about the effect Brexit has had on the psychology of its people in general and its politicians in particular.

Historically, Brexit was the pet project of right-wing cranks and left-wing anti-capitalist ideologues. The first of these can be further broke down into two hard-right camps: the Libertarian ideologues who saw Brexit as method of economic creative destruction, and the more traditional nationalists who barely disguised the overt racism at the heart of their reactionary conservatism. On the other ideological extreme there were the left-wing anti-capitalists, who back in the original EU referendum in the 1970s, teamed up with the reactionary conservatives to campaign to get the UK out of the EEC. The Libertarians who are among Brexit's most fervent supporters today in the earlier generation originally campaigned with Thatcher to keep Britain in the EEC as they saw it as a free-market opportunity. Their flip to the side of Brexit came after they felt "betrayed" by the EU's (always transparent) longer-term integration and development into a regulatory institution.

What these three ideological groups share is a wider, more esoteric perception of Brexit. Brought to the modern day, these three ideological groups see Brexit as a force that enables wider structural (and even moral) change; Brexit is seen by each of these groups as a "means to an end". In this way, as I talked about in a previous post on this subject, Brexit acts as a kind of "talisman" - a symbol of unusual power and energy.
To be clear, I'm talking about its symbolic power. "Brexit" is an idea that is being used by the three ideological groups - Libertarians, reactionaries and anti-capitalists - to further their own aims. Brexit is their weapon of choice; the "talisman" that can be wielded symbolically to transform Britain (and even the wider world) into a landscape of their choosing.


Britain as an ideological "Ground Zero"

Libertarians ideally want to use Brexit to turn Britain into a kind of free-market laboratory. This is why they are perfectly frank about their willingness to see post-Brexit Britain unilaterally reduce its tariffs to zero; an idea that to anyone with a brain would see as economic insanity.
More widely, their method of "creative destruction" would remove regulations and workers' rights on a mass scale, and would be indifferent to the future of British industries. In their view, Britain's future would lie largely in financial services, with a stripped-out state and a native population left to mainly fend for itself.
Seen like this, Britain would more widely become a strategic threat to the EU, acting as a predator on Europe's doorstep, seeking to implicitly (and more openly) undermine the integrity of the EU, which Libertarian Britain would see as a "project" that ideologically had to be destroyed to prevent any of Britain's own population trying to turn back the clock on the Libertarians' domestic agenda. Indeed, the Libertarian agenda has been about destroying the EU as an institution for decades, as part of its wider aim to promote chaos.
This is the kind of "creative destruction" that is talked about when applied wholesale. Spreading and exploiting economic chaos elsewhere would then become Libertarian Britain's path to economic mastery. It has been done before. Thus, Britain would be seen as an ideological "agent of chaos" to the wider world (much as how Russia is now seen by many in the West): like the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, trying to spread the ideology of their "revolution" far and wide for their own benefit.
In a more symbolic sense, this Libertarian vision of post-Brexit Britain is of an island-nation that would, to the outside world, appear as a centre of global economic instability: a regime whose primary purpose is morally anarchic and economically exploitative. In other words, a "force of darkness" to the world.

Meanwhile, the ultimate aim of the right-wing reactionaries seems to use Brexit to "turn back the clock". In their esoteric perception of Brexit, it is about restoring cultural (and racial) homogeneity. They see Britain as a culturally-superior nation that has lost its identity and sense of self-belief. Brexit becomes a "White Power" fantasy, where Britain regains its exulted status as a "sceptred isle" that has a special role in the world. Intoxicated by their own rhetoric, they believe the British people are destined to reclaim their place, purified from "cosmopolitan" European influence and cleansed of the immigrant stain. When all the more technical reasons are stripped away, for these people it is really just wanting to "Make Britain White Again".

As James O'Brien demonstrates with this clip from the radio show LBC, the only thing that these kind of people really care about is "too many foreigners" in Britain. Brexit, for them, is their method of restoring Britain's cultural identity, with the overt implication that the restoration of Britain's prestige in the world will soon follow. 
The blatant xenophobia comes from seeing Britain as an "island race". Japan had its own period of hateful racism after the Great Depression, and when you hear the way the "gammon" types talk, you do wonder how far down that moral black hole the country could go, if the circumstances turn a particular way. Only the most complacent (or arrogant) individual could think that their particular country is immune from such behaviour; and such complacency and arrogance would in fact make that kind of behaviour more likely to happen, as the government's "hostile environment" has shown. Since the referendum racism has become more brazenly expressed, with many seeming to think that Brexit allows them to indulge their prejudice and hatred on anyone who looks foreign or speaks a foreign language. Racism is an obvious example of how Brexit has brought out the worst in people, with this portending for potentially even worse treatment of the "other" when people look for a scapegoat to blame. Britain could turn into a deeply ugly place to live.
The wider agenda of these reactionaries is "Empire 2.0", but as a thought experiment, how could that pan out hypothetically? If the "gammon" types within the Conservative Party itself gain greater sway after Brexit, it's not hard to see Britain humiliating itself on the world stage, either strategically or - at the more extreme end of things - militarily. Some of the idiotic bluster from recent government personalities has meant that the more extreme scenarios can't be seen as all that far-fetched.
It seems that the "gammon" fantasy is of Britain somehow gaining leverage over the former "white dominions" as well as preferential treatment from its former Asiatic colonies. Closer to home, it's not hard to see reactionaries also fantasizing about "putting Ireland in its place", regardless of its EU membership or close ties to the USA. Britain's military budget would have to be seriously indulged for any of these imperialist schoolboy fantasies to come to fruition.
As said earlier, this can only end in complete humiliation, as all nationalist rhetoric eventually does; which is why the hard-left anti-capitalists are all in favour of it...

The hard-left anti-capitalists see Brexit through the "long game": they want the Tory right to "own" any Brexit that follows, as they see this as their best path to power. If the Libertarians don't destroy Britain from within through their anti-social ideology, then the hard-right reactionaries will make Britain self-destruct through some strategic humiliation; this is the reasoning that the anti-capitalists have.
In these circumstances, the hard-left fantasize their victory in the chaos that follows. Then they will be able to implement "Socialism in one country", and turn Britain into a socialist experiment fit for the 21st century. In a similar manner to the Libertarians' wider ideological agenda, the hard left would seek to undermine the EU's integrity. Quite what the EU would think of Britain at this point (after period of disruptive Libertarian/nationalist scheming) is hard to say. It would, without doubt, become Britain's most disruptive political period since the Civil War. In terms of its wider impact on the world, it could well be even more disruptive than on Britain itself. The EU would have had to deal with two "hostile regimes" in Britain following each other, but from opposite ideological standpoints.
The wider anti-capitalist agenda would be both to disrupt the actions of the EU as well as the USA, while allying with regimes sympathetic to their cause (Russia, say). Heaven knows where that would leave things. The symbolism of this anti-capitalist agenda could also be argued to have global ambitions, where anti-capitalist Britain would act as the primary instigator to bring about wider structural change in the world; exploiting Britain's strategic position to effect a universal social realignment. That is the anti-capitalists' ultimate fantasy.

A case could even be made that, following a "no deal" scenario (which is still likely at this point), all three of the scenarios could occur consecutively. For instance, a "no deal" scenario leads to the Libertarian agenda holding sway; this leads to widespread disruption and poverty; to distract from the government-caused poverty, nationalism is exploited to distract the poor from the government's actions; this leads to nationalist-fueled hysteria and eventual strategic humiliation; the government falls and is replaced by anti-capitalists.


"Its only power is to corrupt and destroy"

Those thought experiments aside, what is clear from the above scenarios is how Brexit is innately destructive. There is no scenario where Brexit does not lead to some form of social disintegration or economic decline. Brexit's only power is to corrupt and destroy.
Those who have been sucked under its influence have destroyed the positive image that Britain had to outsiders. Where once Britain was held up as a paragon of stability and moderation, now Brexit had turned the country into one under the control of ideological fanatics, who have abandoned the moral code that the country once once held up for.
Brexit's fanatics don't care what damage they do to other people's lives. They don't care what damage it does to the British economy. They don't care if people lose their rights, their jobs, or even if it puts people's lives at risk. They only care that their aim is fulfilled, regardless of the cost. In this sense, Brexit has turned its fanatical advocates into virtual sociopaths, indifferent to the suffering they might cause to others.
It is this particular aspect of Brexit that has brought out the worst in human nature: making people not only unmoved by the chaos they might cause, they justify it and even revel in its potential, as this is the only way they can realize their twisted fantasy. It is a moral sickness.

For this reason, it is Brexit's "dark powers" that lend some sympathy to conspiracy theorists' beliefs that it is something that could only have been created by Britain's enemies. Something that has the power to create such chaos in the country could surely only be planned by those who wish to do Britain harm?
Alas, the truth seems to be more disturbing: "Brexit" may well have been an "unnamed monster" that was hiding under the surface of society for a long time, shapeless and invisible, lacking tangible form for its lack of appellation. Brexit is just the instrument of the many seething social demons that were there for decades. For those that had long felt that "something was wrong" with Britain but could never properly articulate it, Brexit provided an answer. Like all forms of chaos, all it needed was the right set of circumstances to emerge.
To its advocates, Brexit's power allows them to believe in irrational fantasies, detached from reality. It encouraged them to believe that they could suspend disbelief and think that both everything could change and nothing would change. Its primary purpose, in this sense, is to drive people mad.

Apart from clouding people's judgement, the Brexit "talisman" sows chaos between people. As a corrupting source of power, it is feeding people with irrational fantasies, leading to persecution paranoia. Libertarians, reactionaries and anti-capitalists all believe that Britain is being "exploited" by the EU, and that each of their own fantasies can be attained by Brexit. Equally, they believe that those who are trying to make them see sense and save the country from harm are trying to "betray" them, leading to even rational people lose their sense of perspective when confronted by such hysteria. In this way, it cleaves society in two, with those corrupted by Brexit's power acting as though under a delirious form of mass hypnosis in an ideological battle with those vainly trying to shake them out of it.
At the same time, Brexit has a "shape-shifting" quality. As it appeals to people with very different ideological motivations, its amorphous ability to offer answers almost regardless of someone's background feels almost diabolical in its appeal. Brexit can mean almost anything; and in the referendum it was clear that Brexit was made to mean whatever you wanted it to mean. Almost anyone could potentially support it, because people could be made to believe that it had an answer to their problems. As it appealed to anyone who felt that there was something "wrong" with Britain, it indulged the fantasies you had about how you wanted Britain to change; and providing a scapegoat in "Europe".


In spite of all this, Brexit is just an idea. Its qualities as a "talisman" were exploited by those who saw in it a method to achieve their aims, such as Theresa May after the referendum, while conversely it confounded those who used conventional (and reasonable) means to frustrate it. Thus its opponents became doubly confounded: after being unable to prevent using conventional means (in the political process), in resorting to more direct methods (such as protests) it made Brexit's opponents look like the irrational side.
For Brexit's other power is to make black seem as white. People wanting to prevent Britain from carrying out economic suicide were branded as "traitors"; people wanting parliament to have a greater say were branded as "undemocratic". Apart from driving Brexit's own supporters mad, Brexit would also drive its opponents mad as well; the only difference was the manner of the madness. Its irrational supporters were made to look rational, while its rational opponents were made to look irrational.

Something very strange has happened in Britain, and its hard to know how (or when) it will end.

Culture, creativity and inequality: how conservative ideology suppresses societal growth

Britain is a place of contradictory tendencies: both the historic home of the Industrial Revolution, and also the home of that most traditional of institutions, the monarchy and the aristocracy.

This contradiction is clear today from how the government, on the one hand, publicly encourages creativity in its many forms, but in practice its policies do everything to stifle it, by depriving channels of funding, and only encouraging channels that perpetuate (and exacerbate) inequality.

Under the Conservatives, the British government's natural bias is thus to see culture and creativity as something that should only be encouraged in "people like us" i.e. the well-off.
Part of this comes from a conservative definition of "culture" in the first place: that "culture" also means "tradition", such as the high arts. This natural bias follows from the belief that only those with the right education can truly appreciate, and therefore benefit from, "culture".

At an anecdotal level, this stratification of the arts in Britain has become apparent in fields such as contemporary music, the film industry and literature.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the music industry in Britain was filled with working-class bands (and from where the "indie" scene sprouted); go back further to the 1960s, and the egalitarian nature of the music industry - that anyone with a guitar who was good enough could "make it" - was clearly evident.
Today, apart from the dynamic and successful black music scene (successful partly because, by a happy coincidence, it is centred on London), there are few obvious routes for talented musicians of limited means to "make it". Again, this goes back to the wider conservative trend that has spread from politics into British culture. A career through creative pursuits is something only really available to those with the means: to most others, it is a pipe-dream. Whereas at one time an enlightened government might find the funds to help talented people with limited means, those days have long passed.
For those without the means, the fact that the most obvious route these days is through a TV talent show says it all - "culture", to the ordinary person, has become even more facile.


Bottom-up and Top-down conservatism

That facile perception of "culture" is perpetuated among the lower class. This is the flip-side to conservatism: bottom-up rather than top-down.
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Working-class conservatism stems from the deep adherence to orthodox thinking.
Partly this may be down to lack of education meaning that they lack the imagination to think of doing things in any other way. As a result, people who think differently are seen with suspicion and thinking ideas "beyond their station"; there are a whole host of other belittling terms that have been used by the conservative working class to describe creative or talented peers. "Get a real job", "fancy Dan", etc. etc.
People from their background who think, act, dress, or talk differently are made fun of, or at worst, stigmatized. Thus "creative" people in these circumstances are encouraged to suppress their inner tendencies out of the need for social acceptance within their peers.

The traditional mindset is that male and female roles in their strata of society are fixed, and the implication is that a "real" man would not waste his time thinking of creative pursuits. Equally, a woman from the same background ought to be thinking of her family and not her selfish day-dreaming.
In this way, creative and talented people from the lower classes of society, without government support, can find it almost impossible to reach their natural potential. Discouraged by the conservatism found among their peers, and by a government that treats them with indifference, the result is a tragic waste of human creative resources. Talent and creativity go to waste by a society that sees little value in their worth. Meanwhile, the human impact on those people directly impacted by this might be immense, resulting in a whole plethora of mental health issues.

It is this combination of both top-down and bottom-up conservatism in a society that suppresses its natural growth, leading to stagnation. It is no coincidence that the most conservative societies are also the most stagnant: societies with no dynamic "culture", other than the narrow definition that suits the accepted orthodoxy. These are societies that are frozen in time: culturally-dead to the outside world.

Britain is one of the most unequal developed societies in the world; a situation that has exacerbated in the last forty years, after previously improving.
The long-term effects of de-industrialization in Britain on the working class have resulted in a class of society that feels emasculated and forgotten, its sense of self-worth lost. In that sense, when many of these areas voted to leave the EU, this was also a forlorn cry of frustration. These are people that have lost their sense of motivation.

As said before, there was a time when Britain was more egalitarian; this was also a time when society was arguably at its most dynamic and creative.
The most obvious reason for this is that egalitarian societies provide an evident motivation to improve and be imaginative; when there is a greater chance that being creative will result in social success, naturally you will try your best to do so. There is a good reason why, to use one example, for a while in the 1960s it seemed that every group of teenagers wanted to be (or tried their hand at being) a band.
The other reason is that egalitarian societies tend to be less conservative; the belief that inequality is somehow "natural" to society is a key tenet of conservative thought. Thus egalitarian societies tend to be more open-minded because society is closer together, both economically and culturally. In an egalitarian society there is less of a social division between (for example) the working-class factory worker and the well-off artist, musician or writer. In this way, there is more engagement between the different strata in society as opposed to social "self-segregation" in more unequal societies. More engagement with other social groups leads to hearing different perspectives and naturally helps to improve someone's creativity, and thus social creativity as a whole.

It is that "self-segregation" in more unequal societies (such as contemporary Britain) that is the cause of the top-down, bottom-up "double lock" on creativity.
The most extreme manifestation might be like this. Those at the top of society see "culture" as something that is wasted on the uneducated lower class, and thus perpetuate the problem through their indifference; they don't want to educate the lower classes in something they wouldn't understand, therefore the lower classes will continue to be uneducated in "culture". Besides, there is also the barely-suppressed historic fear of the lower classes becoming too "cultured", and thus too intelligent: intelligent enough to want to change the social hierarchy completely.
Meanwhile, the lower classes see "culture" as something only connected with "bourgeois" pretensions, and anyone within their strata that affects to be interested in it is a "class traitor". In this way, people from this background who aspire to creative tendencies and an interest in culture are "forgetting their roots" i.e. their traditions and upbringing.
In this way, those at the top and bottom of society segregate themselves from effective contact from each other.

These types already exist, in one form or another, in Britain today.

Westminster, Theresa May and Brexit: rationalism has left the building

There have been a clutch of recent articles that have explained very plainly just how low and how rapidly Britain's moral standing and status has descended in the eyes of the outside world, thanks to Brexit.

An article by Richard Godwin made a sobering historical comparison between how Britain's masters have become consumed with irrationality, and events in Japan after the Great Depression. An equally sobering (and relevant) historic comparison could be made with the seizure of power by the "Young Turks" in Ottoman Turkey in the years prior to the First World War; another example of where a small number of ideologues took control of the levers of state for their own self-destructive ends.

Seen in a more detached light, events in Westminster after the referendum could even be seen as a kind of "quiet coup" by hard-right fanatics in the Conservative Party, where Theresa May's actions have all been about appeasing the wishes of the right-wing, Euro-sceptic ideologues, who really run events behind the scenes. At the very least, all May's key decisions have coincided with their wishes, which can hardly be a coincidence.
At every key decision-point, May has sided with the hard-right in her party, leaving Britain now on the cusp of leaving the EU without a deal, exactly as many of them wished from the very start. What else could explain May's "red lines", and her determination to stick to them, even at the risk of leaving the EU with "no deal"?
It is telling that such a small group of people have been able to control the narrative, given the nature of the political system; it demonstrates the innate weakness in what was thought to be a unbreakable parliamentary system - that a small group of ideological extremists can easily infect the larger parliamentary body once they are on the "inside", sowing chaos and surreptitiously seizing control of events.

In a similar vein to Godwin above, Matthew d'Ancona castigates the Conservative Party for turning in on itself over Brexit, and regressing to ugly nativist rhetoric, barely-repressed racism and prejudice. In this manner, the Conservative Party has effectively become the "Imperialist Party": ruling the country like a fiefdom, and seeing itself as innately superior. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

More generally, Britain since Brexit has turned the mindset of some of its inhabitants into one close to sociopathy, happy to let the rest of society suffer just to make them feel better. Some are so blindly determined to get rid of immigrants that they are happy for the rest of Britain to be poorer as a result. To use a "Marvel Universe" reference, this is an almost "Thanos"-like level of mercilessness.

Turning back to Westminster, meanwhile, we see that the Conservative Party in parliament have simply descended into a second childhood: only being held together by shared self-delusion over a fantasy, as though there is literally no other life outside the Westminster "bubble".
It seems that Conservative MPs have now gone truly mad from "Cabin Fever", utterly detached from reality, seeming to believe that Brussels' pronouncements are nothing but figments of their imagination; that, or that their power as MPs is similar to that of "Thanos", in being able to manipulate space and time at will, and pretend that a signed legal document (the "Withdrawal Agreement") can become unsigned. There is no rational explanation for their actions.


Godwin's article mentioned at the top talked of how Japan after the Great Depression became taken over by irrational fanatics.
This author has talked before about this, and how UKIP was able to exploit the situation in Britain after 2010. There is also an argument that David Cameron, in an effort to distract from the government's "austerity" agenda, played to the lowest denominator by promising to lower immigration to the "tens of thousands". This cynical and dishonest political move simply pandered to fears of immigration, and this prejudice was further fueled by other policies such as the "Go Home" vans. There was also the agenda of the dominant right-wing press, which Cameron was ever-eager to play to, as a distraction from policies that were less popular.

These were the "populist" seeds that were allowed to grow, with little thought to the consequences.

In this way, Britain under Cameron pandered to the right-wing "fanatics" (both in his party and in the press), leaving the country open to manipulation. By the time he promised the EU referendum, the damage had long been done. After berating the EU for years in a craven act of political opportunism, it was hard to then argue that the EU was suddenly worth being involved in.
The result of the referendum was not certain either way, and it needed further clever manipulation to convince enough people to vote to leave. But the same strategy that Cameron had used before - playing on prejudice while making fantastical promises - was used by the "leavers" on him. It was a case of "head" versus "heart", and the heart won.

The referendum result was the first clear sign to the outside world that Britain - and England in particular - was no longer a rational country.
Since then, with Theresa May taking over the helm after Cameron, we have seen prejudice and irrationality become ever more widespread, within Westminster in particular.

David Cameron was guilty of pandering to prejudice; Theresa May at times seems to embody it. As a "dyed-in-the-wool" Conservative, like her husband, she embodies much of the petty prejudices and narrow-minded thinking that typifies provincial England.
As a devout supporter of the Conservative Party from a young age, it has now become clear that she will always put party before country, regardless of any protestations to the contrary. Again, May's supreme loyalty to party must be very deep-seated in order to explain her actions.
Her party loyalty is so deep it is now, quite evidently, irrational. For her pursuit of trying to mollify the hard-liners in the party (i.e. the "Brexiteers") to keep them on-board has led to her going back on the deal she had already signed with the EU.

The Withdrawal Agreement is a legal text, as the EU constantly reminds London. In other words, it has the same legal force as a treaty, if ratified. For this reason, its terms cannot be changed, in the same way that a contract cannot be changed after it has been agreed and signed. And Theresa May signed it. Therefore, it cannot be changed.
So, for Theresa May to say she now wants to change the agreement she had already signed simply tells the EU and everyone else in the outside world that Britain is an untrustworthy nation. In fact, it broadcasts this untrustworthy intent from the rooftops on loudspeakers. Theresa May is willing to damage her own reputation and the reputation of her country for the sake of her party. There can be little clearer sign that these are the actions of someone who has lost their sense of perspective, and their rationality.
That is not self-sacrifice, or "duty": it is irrationality.

There is then her blatant strategy of blaming the EU's "intransigence" if they refuse to change the already-agreed Withdrawal Agreement. Like the other irrational "Brexiteers" in her party, she sees it as the EU's duty to change the treaty to suit her; even though the treaty was already agreed to her terms: her "red lines"!
It's a wonder that the people in Brussels haven't already told her where to go, given that there is no reasoning with her, and there us nothing to keep her from repudiating the terms of the agreement again in the future, if enough in her party wish it. She now has form on this, so why would anyone choose to believe a word she says?
The signs are all there that the EU's patience with May's impossible demands has effectively come to an end. When you are talking to someone in hock to irrational thinking, there is nothing more to talk about.

This all explains how Britain has descended, its political class morally and intellectually bankrupt. All that is left is to await the consequences.