Are you a good person?

Are you kind to fellow humans—and all creatures great and small?

Do you support worthy charities, help those in need, and do good work?

Or do you have a dark side? Is there part of you that wants to lie and cheat and manipulate situations to your advantage? Are you interested in enriching yourself—even if that comes at a cost to others?

The answer is: All of the above. In the fine words of that great philosopher Paul McCartney: There is good and bad in everyone. Humans are capable of astonishing acts of courage and bravery, but under certain circumstances we might be utterly spineless, cruel, greedy or depraved. To deny these things in you—what Carl Jung called the shadow—is to project them unconsciously onto others.

“I’m a good person,” a client said. But all around her—her husband, her children, siblings, parents, neighbours, immigrants, foreigners—were bad. This construction of the world left her lonely and disengaged, holding on only to her sense of superiority. She came to therapy when it came crashing down.

“I’m the bad guy?” says Michael Douglas at the end of the movie Falling Down. Robert Duvall, the cop aiming his pistol at him on the Santa Monia Pier, nods. 
​
“How’d that happen?”
​
A few weeks ago my therapist sent me a link to an extraordinary song that explores these themes. Hi Ren went live on YouTube on December 15 last year. When I first saw it, it had surpassed 5 million views. Today it’s reached 8.2 million and it's rising super fast. Word of mouth: This is the song of our time; a human anthem.

It starts with Ren, wearing a hospital gown, being wheeled into a semi-derelict room by a man with a pig’s head and a bloodied butcher’s apron. Ren is obviously a patient. He too is perhaps feeling derelict and abandoned—and powerless too in the hands of those charged with his care.

He starts playing the guitar.

It’s beautiful. An acoustic guitar. A pleasing melody. The incongruity of the surroundings. But he’s tugging at the nylon strings a bit hard. A bit twangy. Aggressive considering the sweet Flamenco notes that fill the room.

Then Ren opens his mouth and the melody is joined by a wail of wild, high-pitched half notes. It is otherworldly. It is perhaps something like the human mating call before we learned to speak, or the dawn chorus in Hades. We are drawn to this—we willingly enter his beautiful madness.

And then the rapping starts.

In his famous Red Book Jung attempts to commune with his own soul.

“ ‘My soul, where are you? Do you hear me?' he starts. 'I speak, I call you – are you
there?’ ”

In this piece of work, Ren opens with a salutation from his shadow to his ego.

“Hi there, Ren,” he hisses. “It's been a little while, did you miss me?”

This is the opening salvo in a blistering verbal assault from Ren’s inner critical voice.

Replies Ren:
“I’ve been taking some time to be distant,” he explains.
“I've been taking some time to be still.
“I've been taking some time to be by myself since my therapist told me I'm ill.
“And I've been making some progress lately,
“And I've learnt some new coping skills”

The critical voice is extremely skeptical:
“Ren, you sound more insane than I do,” he says.

He mocks Ren for imagining that some standard course of treatment—take another pill, the sound of white noise, a 10-step program—will make any difference, and ridicules his musical ambitions.

The argument hots up until the critical voice thunders his authority. He is the snake in Eden. Lucifer. Antichrist. Mephistopheles. Satan.
“I am you, Ren, you are me.”

Who is Ren actually, this Keats-with-guitar? Where did this guy come from? You could be excused for imagining he just picked up a guitar one day in a psych ward and discovered his madness instinctively knew how to play and had something to say.

Ren Gill was actually a talented musician in his youth. He started out making beats in his bedroom at 13, then went on to Bath Spa University to study music performance. One day in 2009, busking in his hometown of Brighton, he was spotted by a talent scout and snapped up by Sony Records.

The childhood dream swiftly turned into a nightmare however. Ren woke one morning feeling utterly lethargic, drained, and aching all over. He started having panic attacks. He’d stay in bed. He said: “My life changed overnight, I woke up one morning feeling like I'd been spiked—my personality disappeared.”

He entered the mental health system. He was put on antidepressants. Antipsychotics. It's not hard to imagine the kinds of interpretations psychology offered up for his illness—he was probably told for example that he was depressed, suffering from low self-esteem, bipolar, afraid of success, delusional, paranoid, mad. In some cultures he would be considered possessed, in need of an exorcism.

​The truth, discovered many years later, was that he had a longstanding untreated case of Lyme disease, the complications of which still impact him today. Ren’s health problems were perhaps not manifestations of some inner psychic conflict. He was bitten by a tic.

He has struggled. But perhaps the struggle, the suffering, is integral to his genius.

In the final stanza, Ren refuses to back down, and stands to face his demon:
“I go by many names also,
“Some people know me as hope,
“Some people know me as the voice that you hear when you loosen the noose on the rope.”

I’ve watched Hi Ren countless times now, but this passage, this lone shriek in the cold, silent void of a long and desolate night, this absolute guttural refusal to quit, still reverberates. This is courage. And if you going to live, stand in the fire, sing at the top of your lungs! Ferocious, persistent, immortal! 

The Hollywood movies might leave it there. The good guy narrowly defeats the bad guy, the evil forces are vanquished, and the credit roll as a beautiful melody transports us back to our lives.
 
Critical self
I have worked with many clients whose lives are made wretched by an invisible sargeant major who subjects them to a permanent harangue of negativity. It can come as quite a shock to discover that some of the nicest people are often subject to a totalitarian inner form of government—a brutal, relentless inner monologue that is with them 24 hours a day.

Perhaps it is an internalised strict parent, sibling, school bully, racist, sexist, homophobe, ableist. The child who is abused by a parent may conclude that love and abuse are indivisible. Lorna Smith Benjamin describes masochism as a gift of love to the original abuser.

Perhaps you experienced a traumatic event or time in your life, one that was so terrible it couldn’t be processed so was instead dissociated, divided up into images, sensations, stray thoughts and emotions. You bury these fragments in a deep hole at the far end of the garden, but to your great dismay they keep coming back. The past reverberates in the present. Time in itself does not necessarily heal.

I’ve also met people who might have had perfectly idyllic childhoods yet still berate themselves mercilessly for every bone-headed move, bad-hair day or dumb remark. Perhaps your critical voice starts out by alerting you to where you might have room for improvement, acting in your best interests, but over the years it can become domineering and disempowering. 

Incidentally, if “the voice” is more than a thought or a feeling but is experienced as an actual, heard voice, some people might conclude that you must be mad, possessed and probably dangerous. And while such voices may point to the consideration of psychosis, it does not prove it. Many people hear voices at times for a variety of reasons.
​
Therapy might enable a client to develop a greater awareness and understanding of their inner critic. We might imagine it is an actual person—what age, gender? Remind you of anyone you know? The client might have a conversation with their critical voice. It can be useful to think of humans as being made up of multiple “selves,” lots of disparate strands in the tapestry. They all inhabit our being in a loose confederacy. And the client might find some other sentiments in this “community of selves” that can challenge and counter the inner bully.

The shadow
Sometimes, however, therapy attempts to go too far in expunging any negativity or nastiness. Jung argued we not born pure, but whole. We cannot edit ourselves to be merely good. We can never be untethered from our shadow. In Memories, dreams, reflections, Jung called the shadow—“everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge” about themselves (1995: 418).

Pure goodness becomes insipid. Heaven, with no shade, is no place for humans—a place, as David Byrne sung, where “nothing ever happens.”

Anyone who denies their inner propensity for evil as well as good will find that it manifests itself in unanticipated ways.

To make light—to live—is to cast a shadow. This is a chiaroscuro world. 

Artists, poets, writers, musicians, comedians, people who bring light to the world, must also experience darkness. 

And the shadow, by the way, doesn’t always have to be something bad. You might disavow your own brilliance, or talent, or potential for success. The more a person identifies with and invests in one polarity, the greater the opposite polarity grows in the shadow. 

We don't like bad stuff. The child who has not yet learned to tolerate and accept anger will hand it off, screaming at the grown-up: “Why are so angry with me?"

Any emotions, beliefs or characteristics that don't fit with your carefully-crafted, social media-ready self-image are simply projected onto others. Your partner—that's the easiest place to start. Then there are family members—one sibling is often cast as "the bad one"—neighbours, that asshole at work, men, women, black people, white people, those people over there, others.

The targets for projection and scapegoating are plentiful. Twitter is a very shadowy place indeed.

Writes Robert A. Johnson in Owning your own shadow: “Probably the worst damage is done when parents lay their shadow on their children...If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion."  (1991: 34).

So how do you find your shadow? Ask yourself: Who do you judge? Your enemies, the people you dislike the most, have much to teach you. For they are you.

Projecting your shadow isn't just bad for others. It's bad for you too. Continues Johnson: “To refuse the dark side in one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness or unconsciously inspired accidents. We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshipped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us. We must be whole whether we like it or not” (1991: 26).

You want world peace? To start with, stop pointing accusatory fingers every which way, and instead take a look inside.

If we can own our shadow we can develop some conscious control over it, rather than have it unconsciously express itself in disastrous ways. And if we can accept that we are all flawed, vulnerable, insignificant, ignorant, that life is hard but also beautiful, that not one person on this planet knows how or why we are here, then we can perhaps be more empathic, more forgiving, kinder. We can greet each other. The words “human” and “humility” come from the same root, the Latin word “humus,” meaning earth or ground. We are not celestial beings. We return to the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

”No one can escape the dark side of life,” writes Johnson. ”The balance of dark and light is ultimately possible—and bearable” (1991: 15).

Let's dance 
At the end of Hi Ren, this remarkable young man puts the guitar down, looks right into the camera and delivers a powerful soliloquy.

“It wasn't David versus Goliath,” he says, “it was a pendulum eternally swaying from the dark to the light. And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast.
​
“It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance, and like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got. The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled. And so I got older and I learned to relax, and I learned to soften, and that dance got easier. It is this eternal dance that separates human beings from angels, from demons, from gods. And I must not forget, we must not forget, that we are human beings.”

My Dad died recently.

He’d been bedbound for the better part of a year, and he was unhappy about that, and he was suffering a great deal at times. At the age of 98, he’d had enough.

We had a few brief conversations about death. He was driven by fact and reason and was not a religious man — “when you die, that’s the end of it,” he would say. But even without the prospect of being greeted by heavenly cherubs or reunited with my dear old Mum or any kind of afterlife, he so wanted to go. He would wake from a doze and shake his head in disbelief that he was still alive. In a recent Christmas card — his home-made cards, marvels of eccentric design, were legendary — he wrote simply: “Still here. I know not why.”

My Dad’s early life was a combination of great privilege coupled with extraordinary privation. He was born into a world of colonial excess. From 1903 to 1938, his father — described by a colleague as “small, active, rubicund with a choleric eye” — managed a 1,700-acre tea plantation in Assam. The household included a domestic staff of 18 people, and life revolved around golf, tennis, polo, bridge and hunting parties. Pandit Nehru came by for tea. My dad remembers climbing trees to pick lychees and sweet red bananas, sailing on the mighty Brahmaputra, and once, being driven home after dark by his parents, seeing a huge tiger up close, eyes burning bright in the headlights.

But at 6, this princeling life came to an end when he was sent to boarding school in England, as was his sister, Ann, who was just 5. For the rest of their childhood, they didn’t see their parents very much. The hardships of English boarding schools between the wars and too many school holidays and Christmases spent in the company of strangers were never mentioned, though Dad did record in his self-published memoir: “I remember Fellowes who was a bully; I broke a window throwing a shoe at him.” Later, at Wellington College, Dad writes: “I once, in a spirit of rebellion, smoked a cigarette in full view of everyone and was duly beaten with a cane by one of the prefects, called Fraser, who seemed apologetic about the whole affair.” 

A bath at Wellington was to take no more than 3 minutes, including filling and emptying. Occasionally a “double bath” would be permitted: 6 luxurious minutes!

In preparation for World War Two, the pupils were put to work digging trenches and air raid shelters. One October night in 1940, the headmaster was too slow to heed the air raid siren: he was killed by a bomb. Well into old age, the sound of a siren would still send a lurching spasm through Dad’s stomach.

Jungian analyst Joy Schavieren describes “boarding school syndrome” (2011) — the trauma of being sent away comes with the imperative to show no feelings, so these infants learn to cut off their reactions or bury them deep — a kind of emotional circumcision. They can grow into adults who remain wounded by their early broken attachments, divorced from themselves, capable only of superficial relationships. To an extent this is how all boys are raised.

“We create numb, inarticulate loners," I write in “The Humanity Test" (2022). “We idolise flinty, monosyllabic killers played by John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone.

“Men are taught to be tough; to win, not love. We don’t know how we feel. We certainly don’t know how others feel. We are raised to be expendable cogs in a loveless machine."

​Pathological humility
One day in the Prospect of Whitby pub in London’s east end, Dad’s and Mum’s eyes met for the first time across a crowded room; their hearts soon followed. In her he found someone who shared his experience of a childhood starved by parental absence. In 1940, my Mum, aged 10, was evacuated from rural Suffolk to America — Suffolk was the kind of place kids from London were evacuated to — and for the remaining five years of World War Two saw her mother not at all and her father only for one weekend in 1942, when his troop ship docked in New York.

​These early experiences forged in both my parents a curious mixture of confidence and resilience — a kind of superiority even — yet coupled with an almost pathological humility.

They loved babies and dogs and they loved each other; outside of the family, however, any other actual adult humans on the whole were likely to be problematic, and best avoided. Dad believed in thrift, logic, hard work, self-reliance, independence. He was unfailingly polite and considerate. On holiday, whatever the time of day, we children learned to shuffle silently down hotel corridors — still do — because, Dad said, “people might be sleeping.” Once in his late 80s, he tripped over backwards in his yard and gashed the back of his head on a concrete ornament. Later, we asked him how long it took for an ambulance to arrive. “Oh I didn’t bother with that,” he said. “I’m sure there’s someone who would have needed it more.”

There was a time when sons would work alongside their fathers, in the fields, on the farm or in the family business, within a wider community with village elders, mentors, apprenticeship and ritual to help usher young men into adulthood. But the industrial revolution and the wheels of capitalism have spirited our fathers away from us; the village is long gone. The father is absent, or an exhausted ghost-like presence who will not speak and then disappears once more, like Hamlet’s murdered father. 

I don't ever recall discussing a personal problem with my Dad, or getting advice. I never saw him cry. It's obvious he loved his children, but saying it out loud was unthinkable. A hug? No thank you. For much of my life, I never really understood what Dad did for a living. A lot of what I now know about him today comes from a presentation and slide show about his life that he gave to his fellow care home residents, five years ago, when he was 92.

Intergenerational trauma
There may not be many words in the space between fathers and sons, but it is far from empty. Much is communicated; family culture is handed down. Words are the least of it.

There’s a lot of research and theory on the effects of intergenerational trauma and what unparented parents bring to their own children (eg. Julia Samuel, 2022). The day before Dad died, I watched excellent presentations online from Dr Oonagh Walsh and Dr Michael O’Loughlin on the long shadow cast by the Irish potato famine and its effect still today on loss, grief and healing in the Irish diaspora. We inherit a lot of the pain of our ancestors. My Dad had a mother who lost two brothers and a fiancé to World War One, and a third brother to the Russian Civil War in 1921. She carried them with her into old age — she died in 1963, 8 days after I was born. 

None of these stories, or my parents’ childhood separations, were discussed at home or for a long time even known to my siblings and I. It's hard to talk with a stiff upper lip. My Dad was mystified by the idea of therapy. I tried to explain it to him — and why I, his youngest child, followed a meandering career path that wound up with me choosing to become a therapist. “Hmmm," he said one time, “Most peculiar.”

Finding the father within
According to another Jungian, James Hollis, each man “carries a deep longing for his father and for his tribal fathers.” He concludes that healing only comes when men “activate within what they did not receive from without.” We each must be a father to ourselves. Jung said he learned more from his father in death than he ever did in life. Whoever our real father was — or wasn't — the world offers up to all kinds of other father figures, in all kinds of guises. 

I was lucky to have Dad for so long. And if it’s true that we inherit our ancestors’ pain, we must surely inherit their joy, too. Perhaps by way of compensation for all the suffering, or perhaps because the two things go hand in hand, Dad also had a great sense of fun, enjoyment and absurdity. He was really a bon viveur — he loved, food, wine, cars. He loved stuff — Dad was the first person I knew to own a pocket calculator, a videocamera, an email address. He loved to travel, roaming all over Europe by car with friends as a young man — including completing the 1954 Monte Carlo Rally in a Ford Zephyr — and all over the world by plane as a family and in his work as an engineer. On a flight to Tunisia in 1969, the pilot announced that humans had landed on the moon. We looked out of the window of the plane and there it was: A dazzling beautiful full pearl-white moon. A couple of years in the Navy on the Adriatic had given Dad a great, lifelong love of Italy (which I share). His enthusiasm, commitment and belief in his ability to speak Italian never once dimmed for a moment despite his glaring inability to speak Italian. Another thing we both loved but were bad at was golf, and I consider myself so fortunate to have spent so much of my youth with Dad, roaming the finest fairways at home and away, engaging in titanic Oedipal battles, then laughing at ourselves over drinks in the bar afterwards. We disagreed on practically everything — politics, colonialism, Brexit, climate change — but it never seemed to matter. We never really debated these things or allowed them to intrude on our relationship.

I last saw Dad a few days before he died, in his care home in Canterbury. He had a clean shirt on, there were hits from his youth playing on Alexa, and he seemed reasonably content. He wasn’t fully conscious and it wasn’t clear if he knew I was there. When “Walk like a man” came on, I asked him if he remembered it. He started singing — albeit a different song. 

I asked him if he could imagine sitting beside a pool with a glass of chianti on a warm day in the Italian lakes and — almost imperceptibly or perhaps not at all — he nodded and smiled. 

I thanked him for everything he has given us and told him how glad and lucky and grateful I feel that he is my father. 

I don’t know if he heard any of it. But it was nothing he didn't already know.

I wrote in our group family email: “It really feels like he is ready.”

People often call a death like this “a blessing.”

When we were little, Dad used to take us on epic road trips — to see family in Scotland, or sometimes to France and beyond. He'd always want to set off freakishly early; 4am was his preferred starting time. And so it was that at 4am one chilly Friday morning in January, Dad departed this life, alone and without fanfare or fuss, finally freed from his tired, worn-out body. I imagine he was thinking: “About bloody time!” If there were cherubs, the first thing they would have heard from Dad was a strongly-worded complaint.

A blessing.

Still, the news hit hard.

A punch in the face.

Even after all these years, it’s just so shocking how people that you love leave this earth.

Love you Dad.

X
 
References
Barton, J. (2022). The humanity test: Disability, therapy, society. PCCS
Hollis, J. (1994). Under Saturn’s shadow: The wounding and healing of men. Inner City Books
Samuel, J. (2022). Every family has a story: How we inherit love and loss. Penguin Life
Schaverien, J. (2011). Boarding school syndrome: Broken attachments a hidden trauma. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 27(2), 138-155.k here to edit.

One of the tropes of a certain brand of conservative media outlet is that Christmas is under threat. The usual suspects are rounded up: The EU, Muslims, immigrants.

Dame Louise Casey, the government’s “integration tsar,” cited Christmas in a report in September, saying: “I have become convinced that it is only the upholding of our core British laws, cultures, values and traditions that will offer us the route map through the different and complex challenge of creating a cohesive society.”

Laws of the land are one thing; British culture and traditions quite another. For the latter, apparently the “integration tsar” doesn’t believe in integration. Shouldn’t she be called the “assimilation tsar”—or perhaps even the “re-education tsar”?

As Santa Claus might say: Ho ho ho.
• A lot of Christmas traditions, like so much of British culture, came from elsewhere. To name a few: Christmas trees were likely a German idea originally; panto came from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte; mulled wine from the Ancient Greeks. The jolly, rotund image of Santa famously began in a 1931 Coca-Cola ad.
• “British values” are often described as religious, Christian values. But for the majority of Britons, Christmas doesn’t have much or anything to do with Christ any more. People of no religion now outnumber Christians in England and Wales, and this year the number of people attending Church of England services each week for the first time dropped below 1 million, accounting for less than 2 percent of the population. Non-Christian Britons are no less British.
• Having some sort of celebration in the dead of winter has long been appealing to many people whether religious or not. It was something people did long before the idea was co-opted by Christianity—and long before any politician uttered the phrase “British values.”
• One longstanding Christmas “tradition” is that for many, it’s a terrible time of year. If you are not living the soft-focus, pastel-hued fantasy life depicted in department store Christmas ads, you feel guilty, a failure, literally and metaphorically missing out on the party. Instead of this being a time of light, warmth, food, gifts, singing, laughing and good company, for many it is instead one of darkness, cold, hunger, loss, silence, tears and loneliness. Clients complain of the stress and expense of Christmas, and the pressure to be happy. The Samaritans volunteers are especially busy at this time of year.

No.5: REUNIFICATION
 
The new client, United Kingdom, shuffles into the room and slumps down uncomfortably in the chair. There is no eye contact. We sit in silence. Finally there is a cough and a muffled voice, a sort of low growl: “Don’t really need to be here. Just been feeling a bit down lately.” Another silence. A tear rolls down from Scotland and lands somewhere near Darlington.

Yes, if countries were people, the UK might be looking for a therapist right about now.

It has been having a hard time of late. It was a summer of discontent. Before the Brexit referendum, this was a largely peaceful, united land that prided itself on never losing its great sense of humour, come what may—the land of Monty Python, Alan Partridge, the Office, Mr Bean. A nation that believed in fair play. A creative, resilient, quirky place that didn’t just tolerate difference and eccentricity but embraced it. The land of Churchill (half American), fish and chips (brought here by Spanish jews), beer (probably middle Eastern), sliced bread (American), England’s St. George (from Cappadocia, never visited our islands), Morris dancing (originally “Moorish”), the Queen (at least a little but German). The country whose two favourite dishes are chicken tikka masala and Chinese stir fry. The country that fought fascism and won.
We used to be mostly in the middle, proud of our patchwork cultural history, a big-tent bell curve of British decency, tea and sympathy.
Post-referendum, the bell curve has been turned on its head. The centre has been vacated, and you’re either jeering from the terraces on the star-spangled blue side, shouting “You idiots—what have you done to our future?” or you’re on the other side, amid a sea of red-and-white-painted faces, chanting “Get over it, we won.” With added swear words from both sides, obviously.
 
The UK is at war with itself. When a person feels like that, in crisis, the old ways of doing things no longer work, and nothing seems to make sense any more. Time to take stock—with the help of a therapist, ideally—turn the spotlight on you and your life and, fortified by knowledge and love, make some changes.

​With a bit of luck, the breakdown turns into a breakthrough.

The root of the problem
It can be a small thing that triggers such a crisis. Someone inexplicably bursts into tears getting dressed for work, or their boss finds an empty vodka miniature in their desk, or they shout at a little old lady fumbling in the checkout queue, and their world unravels. It of course can be a big thing, too: illness, redundancy, divorce, trauma, bereavement.
The UK’s problem—manifested by the referendum—began as a squabble within the Conservative Party. Since World War Two, there has been a growing chorus of Tory backbenchers—big and small “c” conservatives—who decry the rise of the European Union. They have tended to see Britain in heroic, benighted terms, as a proud, fiercely-independent land, in living memory the supposedly-magnanimous, beating heart of the biggest empire the world has even seen, shining the light of civilisation into the dark corners of the world and teaching them how to play cricket. The idea of being told what to do by the French, or the Germans, was beyond the pale. Who won the war anyhow? These nostalgic, elegiac chords were played at full volume by the likes of Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher and ... Nigel Farage.

When traditional Tory voters began to flee to UKIP, the eurosceptic harrumphs turned into howls.

PM and former PR man David Cameron was facing a mutiny. He hoped to quash it by calling the rebels’ bluff. He called for backup; he took it to the nation, gambling his job, career and the nation’s future.
 
The referendum took on a life of its own. It grew. It turned into a referendum on everything.
• Was it about the EU? Yes, although three recent consecutive eurosceptic Conservative Party leaders, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, failed to gain any traction among voters on the issue. And in the immediate aftermath of the vote, an awful lot of people in the UK Googled “What is the EU?”
• Was it about democracy? Yes, although shouldn’t Brexiteers also therefore be tirelessly campaigning to end the monarchy, abolish the House of Lords, the cronyism of the honours system, the influence of the City on domestic policy, and of Washington DC on foreign policy?
• Was it about immigration? Yes, although overall immigrants are net positive contributors to the British economy, and since the days of the Normans, the Saxons, the Danes and the Hugenots, Britain, British culture and British people have been forged from outside influences.
 
Perhaps what the referendum mostly was about was dissatisfaction with the status quo. As with the unfortunate American embrace of Donald Trump, Brexit was a protest vote against hard times and the struggle of life—exacerbated by a government policy of austerity that crippled poorer parts of the nation—with the finger of blame pointing every whichway: at politicians, the EU, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, “experts,” the Establishment, the media, old people, young people, rich people, poor people.

Let’s hope the sunlit uplands of prosperity that the Brexiteers voted for come to pass. Regrettably, however, it seems more likely that there will instead be much more dissatisfaction to come.

Cameron didn’t expect to lose. There was no plan. More than two months later, there seemingly still isn’t. No one seems to know how or when Brexit will happen or what it will look like. But hey, great news: our passports are going to be blue!
​
The person in charge of implementing Brexit—the unelected pro-Remain Theresa May—has to get on with it now, directing enormous time and resources to extricating the UK from the EU and disentangling decades of legislation, and trying to set up new trade deals around the world with countries for whom the post-Brexit UK is, according to some, something of a laughing stock, and who are in the strong bargaining positioning of knowing, and knowing that we know, they we need them more than they need us. The PM also has to deal with all the domestic fallout: the possible disintegration of the UK, businesses threatening to make their own Brexit and head to the Continent, a tanking pound, the rise of racism.

We might spend years at the side of the road, wiping all the mud off our weary old boots while other countries sprint by in new hi-tech gear that was probably made in China.
​

Consider these points (from an earlier post: Does your government make you happy?):
• The Scandinavian system or “Nordic model” of government features high taxes, a large, well-run welfare state, a high standard of free education and healthcare, and low levels of inequality. The machine works for betterment of the people, not the other way round. (In John Rawls “A Theory of Justice,” he demonstrates through his “original position” experiment that if people don’t know how they will end up in an imaginary society, they will generally opt for a fair, redistributive political and economic system that treats all fairly, maximising the prospects of the least well-off.) The Nordic model is a system that appears to make people happy: Denmark and its close cousin Iceland, plus Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands, are all in the top-8 happiest nations in the world. Why isn’t such a superior form of governance the rule rather than the exception? (“Yes,” people say, “but these are countries with small populations and low immigration”—as though water, sunlight and soil were only good for some trees but not others.)
 
• According to the World Happiness Report: “66% of respondents in the Netherlands and 61% in Sweden answered that most people can be trusted, compared with just 35% in the US and 28% in Russia. Moreover, comparing the extent of trust in the 1981-84 sampling period with the recent period, trust rose in Sweden (from 57 to 61%), while it declined in the United States (from 45 to 35%).”
 
• Scandinavian cities tend to do well in the famous “lost wallet” experiments in which full wallets are left lying around to see how many get returned or handed in.
 
• The happiest nation, Switzerland, meanwhile, is the closest state in the world to a direct democracy. There are referendums on town, city, district and national level. They don’t just scrawl an X on a ballot paper once every 5 years. The Swiss really have a say in how their country is run. They are invested in their government, and vice versa.
 
The times they are a’changing. Donald Trump’s fearmongering, xenophobia, and foghorn declarations about the virtues of greed are like the terminal groans and expirations of a witless dinosaur, ignorant of his impending extinction.
 
Whether you are a Leaver or Remainer, Brexit showed that the British are hungry for democracy. We want to be heard. Brexit was a crack in the walls of the house that was built on the old order of patronage, privilege and politics as usual—a crack that lets in the light.

Primitive societies kill people, then evolve to enslaving them, then to giving them the vote. The next stage is to listen to them.

After a few months of hearing all the differing viewpoints and “standing in the spaces” between them, the client, our dear old friend UK, started to feel much better. The therapy came to a natural end. “It’s all about considering all the different views, and being fair,” said Scotland, speaking for the whole person, who now was sitting tall and proud and relaxed. “The more we listen to all the voices, the better we feel.”

The cure for a sick democracy, it turns out, is more democracy.