British Culture: a Post Mortem

I have recently come to realise how much various aspects of British culture actually kind of really suck, and I have come here to yell about it to the void. Everything is broadly fine in my little bubble of life, but the frayed edges around me are getting harder and harder to ignore. Even the very virtues that used to define British temperament - modesty, humour, the ability to just get on with it - feel like they have warped into a rotten version of themselves. I want to leave, and these are the reasons why.

Tall Poppy Syndrome

British culture has long romanticised modesty, but this once-charming humility has curdled into a widespread suspicion of intellect and aspiration. Cleverness must be masked with humour, and ambition must come with a side of self deprecation in order to be palatable. Any notion of self-betterment through learning something tends to be met with skepticism at best and mockery at worst. You need to keep your head down and stay in the pit with the rest of us.

This plague appears to stem from somewhere in our educational system, where putting your hand up in class or doing well in general was a rapid way to become disliked. Even going to a relatively high-performing school, I found that being openly smart wasn't widely accepted. People who knew answers didn't volunteer them in class, doing well in a test or piece of homework was to be kept to yourself, and there was no drive and little encouragement to pursue any academic interests outside of drilling exam material. The last of these is a symptom of a wider problem with our educational system which is probably outside the scope of this post, but the point stands that you aren't allowed to achieve, at least not openly. I have heard anecdotes that this is only worse in less academic schools. This kind of attitude impacts social mobility on a wider level too, where in some groups aspiring to go to university is seen as going above your station, and derided instead of applauded.

Even outside of schools, though, I find that a milder version of it persists. At this stage the anti-intellectualism is somewhat diluted, though one or two people still exhibit a good deal of derision when they hear anybody talk about anything involving exercise or academic pursuits. Maybe I am somewhat guilty of this myself sometimes, as when people at work start harping on about middle management I wish to blow my brains clean out, but I don't think middle management slop really counts as intellectual. I would love to talk about cool things that other people have learned. I wish education beyond the schooling system was seen as civic enrichment and not elitism.

Got mine

Britain is a hyper-individualist society. That isn't even really much of an opinion, it's kind of just a fact. And it's so awful. It erases any sense of caring about other people, of doing things for the collective good, of daring to expend even a minute of our precious time and effort if we do not personally reap the benefits. This is brutally contrasted with Japan where, for all its cultural flaws, has benefitted greatly from teaching generations of kids that it's a good thing to clean up and help out a bit. It really stung when I came back from a month of no vape clouds in my face, litter on the ground, or shitty people watching videos out loud on public transport, just to get all three of these staring me in the face as soon as I returned. Who cares if you bother other people, right? Using headphones on the train would make your life mildly less convenient, and fuck that, right? Other people are dirt, and your comfort is top priority.

COVID-19 was such a diabolical example of this. People panic buying stockpiles of everything right at the start, followed by people flouting the rules as soon as it inconveniences them. I had a genuinely shocking coversation at a dinner party a few months ago where most people proudly discussed how they didn't care about any of the lockdown rules at uni, and just acted as they saw fit. Honestly wound me up a bit that they saw no consequences for it and will probably forever be proud of their actions. Because fuck any sort of collective effort, you are young and invincible and why should you care?

Hyper-individualism also greatly undermines every form of collective good: unions, civic participation, an open social life. Many people would rather wolf down a sandwich in their car just to go home 30 minutes sooner, rather than dare to interact with their colleagues over a communal lunch (which a company may well subsidise if there was a collective demand). We have this at my job because people take it up and socialise over their lunch hour, and genuinely benefit from it (as does the company when people discuss work), and the company would just as readily take it away if people gave up and started eating alone at their desks because that one hour extra alone in front of the telly is worth so much more than a positive relationship with a colleague. The notion of any kind of union in a white collar job is basically dead, with no signs of life. As a society, we'd rather sit alone and take the crumbs we're given than make any kind of collective effort for wider future rewards such as better work benefits or more friends.

Shelter turned Speculation

Housing is seen in the UK as primarily an asset rather than a form of shelter to make one's own. Prices are expected to rise forever, fuelled by greedy investors and the satan spawn scum commonly known as 'landlords'. Many homeowners are consequently repulsed by any idea of making house prices more accessible, or even building more homes in their own area lest their own house price drops. This definitely ties back to hyper-individualism and our allergy to public good, but also has some deeper cultural roots independent of that.

Homeownership is seen as a moral test, not just a financial goal. You have to get on the ladder at all costs, and we praise people for doing this early, ignoring all downsides like locking yourself into a location early or taking on mounds of debt. Ugly red-brick-green-hedge cookie cutter neighbourhoods spawn all over the place with zero character, because people don't care about any culture or character, as long as they get their hands on something. Owning a house is culturally worshipped at the cost of mobility, creativity, and fairness.

Compare this to Germany and Austria, for example. Renting is normalised, and stable tenancy laws make renting a dignified experience. Cities such as Vienna are rent controlled, and this is praised as a good bit of social welfare, not an assault on our precious investments. Singapore is another positive example, with public housing which is high-quality, affordable, and mixed-income to avoid the kind of segregation that you can sometimes observe in council estates. In countries such as Switzerland, renting isn't fetishised and renting can be a lifelong norm. A combination of factors such as being allowed to actually decorate and DIY a rental, and renting being financially viable in retirement, mean that people don't buy out of desperation but out of genuine love for a location. This in turn naturally breeds more care for that location and environment, and fewer people locking themselves into a regrettable location.

The class war is friendly fire

Britain notices class a lot and acts on it very little in any meaningful way. We did quite well as a society in identifying class as the real social divider, and then tripped on the final hurdle and decided to have a slugging matching between Jimmy Bluecollar and Johnny Whitecollar over who gets which slice of the pie, while James Millionaire is on his sixth pie of the day from his personal pie factory that nobody has bothered to notice. This is heavily reflected in our reactions to social policies, such as the concept of a wealth tax. The educated middle class balk at the notion that their retirement funds might be touched, while the ultra rich whom these policies actually target make twice their returement fund in a day whilst not even working. This is all because the ultra wealthy have played the perfect game of pitting most of us against each other so that we are too busy to notice who's really taking the piss.

I see many examples of working people losing their minds over a next door neighbour getting some sort of benefit without visibly writhing in suffering every minute of the day so that they prove themselves worthy of it. These same people are blind to the fact that tax avoidance and evasion by the ultra rich accounts for so much more lost public wealth than the tiny fraction of benefits claimants who are actually doing it fraudulently. This messed up class system where the top 1% hold more wealth than 70% of normal working people is sustained by the fact that somehow, in some fucked up way, the resentment only ever goes sideways and downwards - never up.

Populist rhetoric plays into this fight by weaponising envy, such as who owns a house the soonest, or who has the nicest car. Equally, who gets the most free money from the government, because god forbid a disabled person doesn't pay for their carer out of pocket (how dare they choose to become disabled!!). But the ultra wealthy are shrouded from this by being elevated by this same culture, and seen as glamorous and successful and aspirational rather than the parasites that they are. You can't make it to a billion and not do anything exploitative in the process, and yet these subhumans are praised for how well they used daddy's loan of 100 million to buy up affordable property and rent it out at a premium.

We need to tax wealth not work, and we need to do it as soon as possible. Maybe when people see how much money there is in this then the fog will clear a bit. Upwards mobility is still alive in much of Europe, and we should try and foster the same.

Imagination is dead

Idealism is childish and hope is cringe here. If you have the audacity to suggest anything ambitious, like better public transport, rent reforms, or better working conditions, you'll get met with "it's not that simple", perhaps with a nice side of a condescending explanation of how it all works at the moment. It's like an allergy to hope. There's this pervasive message that any form of optimism is naïve and believing in anything but the status quo is stupid. This mask of snark and deflection against any nice ideas protects us from vulnerability and ideas not working out, but also ultimately blocks any progress which can't start without ideas. We are turning into a nation of editors rather than creators, where rehashing the same idea into the same predictable mediocre outcome feels better than aspiring for more.

People tend to praise this "getting by", "it'll do", "could be worse" mindset as quintessentially British, but much like the once-positive origin of many traits discussed here, it has calcified into a worse version of itself - a cultural ceiling where ambition and idealism are met with suspicion. And it isn't even really malice; it's just like we've all grown tired of trying to do better. Perhaps we should take notes from France, where revolution is baked into the culture and people actually believe that collective action can make a difference. Ironically, we are the ones surrendering now. Decades of managed decline, austerity, and incremental politics have trained us to think in half-measures, and a lack of action has equated to a lack of pushback against this mindset.

And when something crap like government corruption happens, the public just shrugs. We feel like there are no alternatives, and we move on, and they keep doing it. We grumble but never act, and cynicism replaces accountability. There's a sad resignation in the air that this is it, it's the best we will have, and it isn't even worth trying to do better.

No wonder so many young people feel hopeless. It's what we teach. We outsource the dreaming to Silicon Valley and Scandinavia, because "that'll never work here".

We forgot how to trust

In Japan, you can leave your laptop on a table in a café while you go to the bathroom, and it will still be there. In Scandinavia, people can leave a pram with a baby outside a shop and know that they'll be safe through collective effort. Trust breeds more trust. And wouldn't life be easier if we could do that here? Yet over here, trust is treated as naivety rather than the foundation of social order. We are so scared of being taken for a fool, that we will automatically be a bit more hostile and skeptical of someone's intentions, and in turn encourage this in others. This is, naturally, fuelled by our lack of societal collectivism, and lack of belief that people will be good. That's actually really sad.

Misery is a moral currency

There's always some sort of pissing contest about who has worked the most and slept the least. It's insufferable. You don't get a gold star for regularly getting five hours of sleep a night, you just die early. Despite this, people try to wear suffering like a badge anyway. You must be seen to be Suffering Properly lest you are perceived as lazy and lose all your social credibility as a competent worker. I do welcome the irony in this point in light of my previous blog post, but I intend this sentiment as more of a societal diagnosis than my personal feelings about my life.

This moral economy makes joy feel almost undeserved, and collective joy impossible. And thus we tolerate self-decrepitude and loneliness as the natural moral order, and find yet another reason not to seek to improve something. We have mastered the art of coping and forgotten the joy of thriving.

Cultural narcissism

We are the island the mistook itself for the world. For one, the global ubiquity of English has become a curse of convenience - because everyone adapts to us, we never have to adapt to anyone. And instead of matching our bilingual European peers, we recoil at the idea of self-betterment through learning another language. Because we rarely feel cultural or linguistic dislocation due to how easy it is to be surrounded with only our own media, we never develop the empathy or curiosity for the world that comes with it. Also with monoculturalism comes less of a drive to see the world and learn more about it. Foreign languages are optional in schools, and seen as a pastime best left to the posh and eccentric. Global history is barely taught unless it intersects with Britain in some way. We are indoctrinated into lacking that, in my opinion, natural drive to see what's out there and learn about it.

This is partly due to the legacy of the British Empire and the mark it left on the world. Centuries of global dominance led Britain to see itself as a cultural reference point, and other countries as curiosities rather than equals. The colonies are gone, but the psychology remains. British journalism, even when well-intentioned, often treats "abroad" as a spectacle or catastrophe, not continuity. This leaves people culturally provincial but globally opinionated - confident in ignorance. At most, we have a parochial sense of "the world" where a handful of approved cities like Paris, Tokyo, and New York are allowed within our sphere of imagination, but the more obscure you go, the more invisible it becomes. Safe cultural clichés like Scandi furniture and Italian food are permitted cultural imports, but we can't be pushing that too far. And thus our culture stagnates.

A note of grace

So many people I know don't fit all these boxes, or even any of them. Perhaps this is just a really grumpy cultural observation made at 1am that focuses too hard on all the bad I've seen. Britain certainly isn't unbearable yet either - it's just quietly losing what made it worth enduring. But there's still a tenderness here, if you know where to look. The ordinary grace of this country persists.

And of course, I appreciate that I am a symptom of the problems I'm diagnosing. When the revolution comes I'll be the first in line at the pitchfork shop, but I'm certainly not making any real moves to spur on that revolution. That’s how this culture survives: in the gap between what we feel and what we dare to do. And this is a soft confession, not a self-flagellation. The same things that I criticise live in me, but awareness of what is worth saving is the first step in actually saving it.

I do want to leave and live elsewhere for a bit. Not because I hate this place, but because I really want to experience what's out there, and what we can learn from it, and have the positive elements of the cultures I live in leave with me if I come back. And hey, maybe stepping off the island will help me see it more clearly.