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Comment by realjhol | Hacker News Reader

Well take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA4u17XAF_A

Look at the way these people lived. The way the dressed. The way the carried themselves. The culture. The customs. The traditions.

It was a thriving high-trust society.

The line has gone up orders of magnitude in the past 100 years, but are the people thriving? Is their nation something to be proud of? Do they have any herritage left to pass on to their children? Is there any optimism in the future we have chosen?

I don't think so.

Can we ever return to the past? - no, but the future we have chosen is a bad one.

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The video is mostly of the upper classes and military. Looks nice but I'm pretty certain I'd prefer to live now. I'm actually from n Ireland but live in the Scotland. The class system is definitely a lot more noticeable here than home. I suspect it was way worse back then.

I have some sympathy for your point of view. I'm very much pro union but when I go to England I think I'm glad I don't live there. So crowded. Most of the countryside fenced off. Unlike Scotland were it's possible to escape to the wilderness. Compared to Ireland I think people in England seem depressed.

On the high trust thing, I think part of it may be partly the mass immigration of the 1950s. As an outside observer I think that may have divided the country a bit. To me there doesn't seem to be much integration.

All I'm hoping is that the UK gets over brexit and doesn't stay in terminal decline. The current Tory leadership only seem interested in managing that decline. At least Boris was optimistic and believed Britain was a great place to be.

> The video is mostly of the upper classes and military. Looks nice but I'm pretty certain I'd prefer to live now.

There are plenty of other videos from the 1900s era.

And sure, we are more comfortable now, and it would be hard to go back to those times, but I'm not really focused on their material comforts.

My point is that the English - as a people - were thriving in those days, and most of their thriving has since been destroyed by modernity.

I want to attack the Whig Historiography concept that a bright future will just spontaneously emerge, when all the indicators are that England is in a state of steep decline in comparison to where it was 100 years ago - even though the GDP has never been higher!

It’s kind of funny, we today regard the world wars as being in our somewhat distant past, but if this same trajectory continues I think that in 1000 years we may simply say that the war permanently destroyed Europe. The effects just took several generations to play out. And would it be surprising for such an unprecedentedly massive war to permanently destroy a place?

It always saddens me to see videos like that.

By contrast, the Britain (or the cities and towns around where I live) of today simply looks like everybody has just given up.

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