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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

I’m British, living in Germany now, and one thing that moving here made me realise is that in the UK almost everyone, even young generations, act as if the blitz is still going on. Somehow the British psyche became mortally wounded from WW2 and hasn’t recovered since. Everything is still “keep calm and carry on”. Any attempt at having a political effect is met with dismissal or even total anger

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I’m currently reading a book about the history of the British Empire and I think this temperament is older. When Australian and Kiwi troops were called to support Britain in the first World War, they were baffled by how much shit the Brits were ok with taking from their superiors, while the Brits were surprised how undisciplined and prone to protest their Australian and Kiwi counterparts were. You can look even earlier. While France at the end of the XVIIIth century had a bloody revolution, which did make some people in Britain think about their lot in life, they ended up mostly just talking things over, making some mild reforms and that’s it.

So I don’t think it’s blitz. It’s an older trait of avoiding internal confrontation (which doesn’t seem to extend to the Irish who on a number of occasions throughout British history decided to either leave Britain for greener pastures, or were more willing to be a bit more aggressive).

The First Word War, was a British/European war though. You bet your bottom dollar, Australians are going to protest being sent to fight in Europe (unless they like the hunt, then it's a whole 'nother story).

The Brits do internal confrontation, behind closed doors in private, and in negative inferences/sarcasm/irony in public.

What Brits don't do, is go against the establishment, which is what most foreigners bump into on day one. And brits have the concept of something being 'not the done thing'.

So you end up with a society that agrees on most things and has a fine line of disagreement that is invisibly negotiated...

Good luck!

Mustn't grumble is in my opinion our national motto. We do have dissidence, but is met with contempt and apathy. Look at the national outrage over just stop oil stopping some cars on the a motorway. The rage was baffling, mass psychosis just took over the nation.

Look at how Jeremy Clarkson reacted with anger that Megan had complaints about the royal family. He was absolutely feverish, animalistic

A lot of people did. The whole "how dare you" attitude was taken to an absolute extreme, it was as if she stabbed the queen personally for some people.

Cheeky as it may be to say...

I always preffered Russel Crowe in Master and Commander as the ideal image of Brits, rather than a dressed up car salesman.

Hammond and May are spiffing, but Clarkson too often, only shows up to the job and doesn't follow meaningfully through.

What a world we live in where an Australian actor and director (Peter Weir) in Master and Commander put on a more realistic image for British values, than Clarkson's hundred-million-pound productions...

I agree. Also read chapter 10 of Karl Marx Capital to see what British people were willing to put up with in Victorian times

Interesting take, I was having a conversation the other week where I reused a fun line from the Expeditionary Force books:

“Britain: striving for mediocrity”

People are run down, fed up and have no idea what to do about it because as a nation we have culturally been conditioned (over generations) to accept our lot.

Striving for better (not just individually but societally) is sneered at and things going badly is shrugged at as the norm.

I sometimes feel we have this idea that the the UK is feature complete. Any new infra project is protested, new initiatives to try to improve things are eye rolled at - even talking about new ideas leads to back lash.

I honestly don’t think it’s some top down grand plan for control, I think it’s just incompetence, lack of leadership and fear of the above points.

So yeh, heads down, carry on and hope for the best (well, hope for “not too bad” really).

Britain feels like a giant retirement home, where you are sort-of tolerated and told not to make too much noise.

I a fellow Brit, I note that you still bring up the war! But yeah, this is true.

Honestly, I don't think we get out of this hole until demographic churn (ugly phrase yeah) rebalances the electorate.

If we look at the 1992 election there's a 13% gap in conservative votes between the youngest and oldest brackets [1]. By 2019 that's a 36-46% gap [2].

[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1992 [2] https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/26925-how-britain-vot...

2019 was as much as there could be a single-issue election about brexit. It's an anomaly as such and shouldn't be used to make trends. That said, I don't think it was any different in 2017 and I don't discredit the trend. 2017 was also out of the ordinary as there was an actually left-wing alternative offered.

I would agree but young people seem prone to it almost as much. It isn’t just voting conservatives, it goes deeper than that

Ironically it was the post-war experience where most of Britain's egalitarian institutions got built: state education and the NHS. "Homes for Heroes", a massive housebuilding program to recover from the bombing damage, including social housing owned by councils. People attribute this to the cross-class effects of the war: having a more expensive house in a better postcode wasn't something the Luftwaffe respected.

No, just as people post all those "good thing/bad thing" graphs that diverge in 1971 for the US, the big political scar across the UK is the Winter of Discontent (1978/79) and subsequent Thatcherism. Middle-class voters chose suppression of internal dissent and a retreat from social policy, up to and including effectively abandoning cities that weren't London to their own devices. ("Managed decline" for Liverpool, Glasgow etc)

But remember: the suppression of dissent is a popular policy. Nobody in the marginal voter class wants to think, engage, be challenged, or deal with real problems. They want to retreat into Facebook boomer nostalgia instead.

There's also another breakpoint in how the introduction of student loans and fees in the late 90s means that a large section of the middle class under 40 is much poorer and to the left - permanently, as a cohort effect, not an age effect. Hopefully this will push the pendulum back.

I'm not in Britain, but I was before and honestly I prefer that sense of order and implicit trust. There truly are some things that go without saying and the internet breaks an awful lot of social rules.

I know the narrative is that the Brits are sinking into darkness (or whatever)... but they are a ray of hope for a world that has sane heirarchies and can satisfy consciousness.

IF you value keeping porn out of children's eyes and keeping philosophy managing experience, instead of expereince trying to manage philosophy... you could do worse than a sometimes-sarcastic and ironic, Brit.

Glad that someone gets us a bit.

In the long term we have the superpower of faith in our institutions, education and timeless ideas.

But day-to-day, it's all the more painful to watch everything torn by opportunists, narcissists and criminals who have displaced genuine leaders and decimated our institutions.

We have a lot of rebuilding to do as a nation.

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