The Decline and Fall of Merrie England
“Remember you are an Englishman and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.” — Cecil Rhodes, British imperialist, 1910
“Almost the entire population of Britain looks as though it has let itself go. Where once emotional restraint and self-control were admired, now it is emotional incontinence. It is no surprise that the British are despised around the world.” — Theodore Dalrymple, British author and psychiatrist, 2018
A new dystopia, rising from the ashes of World War II, now rears its ugly head and casts its shadow over England’s no longer “green and pleasant land”.
Merrie England! Was it ever that merry? A beautiful mirage! Maybe such a happy land never existed except in fantasy and in the perceptions of a privileged few blessed with all the felicities of the Good Life. And yet it has always existed in longing, where all utopias and earthly paradises germinate, as in the fevered imagination of William Blake who longed to build ‘Jerusalem’—Civitas Dei, or the City of God—in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. Blake’s thoughts on this subject will be presented at the end of this article in one of the most beautiful and profoundly moving videos you are ever likely to see on the internet.
Meanwhile, let this literary gem by George Orwell on the three main races inhabiting the British Isles—the English, the Scots and the Irish—serve as a light-hearted introduction to this otherwise sombre article. “The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”
The English, by common consensus, are the maddest of the bunch.
Once famous for their stiff-upper lip attitude to life, a characteristic still found among the educated upper classes and a conservative older generation, the British as a whole have undergone a startling change of national character in the last two decades. This is almost certainly due to the toxic influence of television, trashy Hollywood movies, and the mind-destroying excesses of the internet. The Brits have lost their self-confidence, their customary aplomb, their cheerful joie de vivre. Why? Because they have become demoralised. Thoroughly demoralised. “In every face”, to quote William Blake, you now see “marks of weakness, marks of woe”.
The narcissistic younger generation in particular, confident in their own omniscience, bear little resemblance to their parents and grandparents whom they tend to belittle as inferior beings with all the wrong ideas and attitudes. Read more