On Twitter, over email, from friends, from people who recognize me at the cafe and stop me to say hi — I get one question these days. It goes like this: what happened to Britain? There’s a kind of baffled bemusement, swinging towards horrified laughter, from people all over the globe. What’s the deal with Brexit, anyways? Why are they…what is it…how will it…?

Let me try to shed some light on it all (I have to warn you, it’s not going to be pretty), via a little Q&A.

Why do the Brits want to leave the EU?

The answer is: nobody knows. Nobody knows anymore, and nobody ever did know in the first place. I don’t mean that facetiously. I mean it quite literally. But first It’s worth saying that they don’t all want to — just enough of them to keep things deadlocked, stalemated, more or less, at the moment. There are plenty of smart, worried Brits who don’t want to. Now — nobody knows. What does that mean?

You know how “Make America Great!” suddenly became a symbol of a whole group of Americans’ bubbling and boiling frustrations? How it contained within it everything from racism to bigotry to economic despair to greed to hate to egotism to fascism — a whole seething mess of issues, a psychological mega-complex of long-standing anxieties, fears, envies, and resentments? Brexit is like that. It means everything to everyone and anything to anyone. It’s not a rational agenda or plan or even a debate — it’s a totem, a symbol, a rallying cry, a battle scream. It contains huge contradictions and misunderstandings and idiocies and failures within it, just like MAGA did and does — all the same fears of irrelevance and anxieties of decline and dreads of status-loss.

The EU has become a kind of scapegoat, for all of Britan’s anxieties and fears. Of becoming a third rate nation, where once it was an empire. Of being overrun with dirty, filthy foreigners. Of not being respected and feared again. Of not having unquestioned power, by way of cannons and navies. Now, the point is this — all these colliding, strange, antiquated, pent-up fears are being effectively projected at the EU — who is, apparently, Brits are told single-handedly responsible for all of Britain’s problems. Of course, it’s not — but we’ll come to that. The point is: Brexit is a kind of massive, epic projection of a nation’s deep-seated fears at an imaginary enemy (just like MAGA is) — the EU.

So…why do the Brits want to leave the EU? Tell me!

Like MAGA, Brexit is best understood as a kind of collective delusion. You see, if you ask ten people who support Brexit, you’ll get ten different answers. They can mostly be grouped into three broad categories. One, we pay the EU “too much.” Two, the EU is an undemocratic, authoritarian body. Three, we want “control” and “sovereignty” again.

Now, the thing is that each of these three beliefs isn’t just easy to disprove — it’s self-disproving, a kind of oxymoron, a thing that doesn’t exist. Let’s start with the last two. The EU isn’t “undemocratic”, for Pete’s sake — Brits send their citizens to the European Parliament. Britain is still very much a sovereign nation — how else did it decide to join the Iraq war? Bail out its banks? Set its interest rates? Elect its own PM? LOL — you see how absurd this belief is. So let’s tackle the bigger one.

If Britain paid the EU “too much”, then the moment it joined, it would have suffered badly. But Britain’s time in the EU was its most successful economic period in modern history. Remember, in the 80s and 90s, Britain was an economic basketcase, a failure, which didn’t know what to do spark prosperity. Hence, Thatcher taking an axe to huge swathes of its economy. It was only after joining the EU, really, that Britain attained a new level of prosperity — it was able, finally, to afford invest bigger amounts in public goods like the NHS and BBC and so on, every year. That’s because it was part of the most successful political union and market in history — suddenly, Brits had access to the best food, wine, clothing, cars, and so on, and they could sell back finance and insurance and whatnot. The point is that joining the EU was the best decision Britain made in modern history — and leaving it will be its worst, too. That’s objective reality — not opinion. It’s not up for debate.

Brexit is therefore a set of collective delusions. Now, the question is: where did they come from? I’d tell the story something like this: a part of Britain’s elite has always hated Europe, dating way back to the ages of empires and kings. They’ve always been contesting supremacy, in those antiquated terms — property, possession, power. So Britain developed an uneasy relationship with the EU — which was much more a genuinely social democratic project. Seeing this weakness, along came Russia — and carpet-bombed Britain with anti-EU propaganda. Soon enough, people believe what they wanted to believe — that the EU was responsible for all Britain’s problems.

Do you see the analog with MAGA-thinking, with Trumpism? Trumpism blames all of America’s problems — from opioids to violence to joblessness to stagnation — on Mexicans. As if little Mexican babies in diapers are drug dealing capitalist overlords. It does that because Mexicans have no real way to defend themselves — and it builds on centuries of white supremacy, too.

In just the same way, Brexit-thinking scapegoats the EU for all Britain’s problems. Every last one of them. Why are Brits poorer now than in 2008? The EU! Why don’t Brits have decent healthcare anymore? The EU! Why don’t Brits have rising incomes and savings? Why, it’s the EU’s fault! Why doesn’t Britain invest in itself? The EU! And so on. But just like the Mexicans, the EU doesn’t have the power to influence Britain’s domestic governance and policy in the slightest way whatsoever. It is just being scapegoated.

The best evidence that Brexit is a collective delusion is also the simples.t In fact, the EU invested heaviest in precisely those regions which supported Brexit the most heavily. It’s just like the Trumpist working at a factory voting for Trump, who then shut that very factory down. But that didn’t stop the Trumpist, did it?

Brexit is a fiction, a tall tale, a lie — it is an imaginary solution which never existed, to problems which do. In this way, it’s a thing which can be made real — but can never really come to be. The truer it comes, the more disastrous it will be, because it doesn’t solve any of Britain’s problems at all — it only makes them worse.

So what is Brexit, really — just a delusion?

Brexit’s a wall, just like Trump’s wall. It’s not made of steel slats — its made of rules and laws and whatnot. But a wall is a wall, and this is a wall. Now. Dies Trump’s wall solve American unemployment or opioids or stagnation or predatory capitalism? Of course not. Brexit is just like that. A fiction. But sometimes fictions are the easiest things to believe, aren’t they? There — now you know what Brexit really is. It’s a wall. But what it really is is a foolish, pleasing, comfortable lie that people overwhelmed by distress desperately want to believe. Sometimes walls shut out hard truths, too.

Let me give you a concrete example. One of the promises the “Leave” campaign made was that billions saved from EU membership fees would then be available to spend on the NHS. But no one pointed out the obvious: that the NHS was suffering because the government had slashed it budget savagely. And if it needed billions, that wasn’t a problem — they could simply be…given to it. Weren’t they given to banks, after all — not just millions, but trillions? So how could they not be there for the NHS? How could a nation be “broke” when it came to healthcare — but “rich” when it came to banks?

But because no one pointed this out, people came to believe the delusion. Billions would be available for the NHS! Yay!! And then no one pointed out that if the economy was smaller, since there was less trade, since its costs had gone up, thanks to Brexit…wouldn’t that also mean a smaller NHS? You see what I mean?

Hence, delusion reigned. Obvious lies became internalized beliefs. Collective delusion began. And collective delusion is a dangerous place for a country to be, my friends. A people who will fall for anything will…fall for anything. Even kneel before a wall as the answer to all their problems.

So where do Britain’s problems really come from?

Remember when I explained to you that the period just after it joined the EU was Britain’s most prosperous ever — full, stop period? Let’s contrast with today. Life expectancy is falling. Incomes are stagnant. Jobs — especially good ones — are scarce. Social services like the NHS and BBC are failing (though they’re full of good, brave people, let me stress.) Trust in society has imploded, while violence, depression, and suicide are all rising. It’s not a pretty picture.

Britain is a country in profound distress — psychosocial trauma, driven by socioeconomic stagnation. Now, when did all these problems begin? In the 90s, when Britain joined the EU? Of course not. They began after the last financial crisis, the great one of 2008. The truth is that Britain botched the handling of that crisis, in the most incredible and backwards way imaginable. It bailed out the banks — didn’t really reform or fix them — and took the hit on the public balance sheet.

In other words, finance was allowed to socialize its losses, while privatizing its gains. The average Brit was soon enough told their nation was “broke” — and that public services would have to be cut. Now the average Brit is a moral person — and they believed it. The left, too, didn’t really have many good economists or intellectuals to explain this mistake to people. Society wasn’t “broke” — in fact, it was at this precise moment that it needed large scale public investment. Imagine a Green New Deal — to make up for the slowdown caused by the banking crisis. Instead, Brits were told they were broke, and a savage, brutal program of austerity, without parallel, really, among nations at that time, began. Everything that could be demolished and underfunded was — from the NHS to the BBC to closures of public libraries and hospitals and schools.

Remember how society was “broke” when it came healthcare — but “rich” when it came to banks? How could both these things be true? Why didn’t anyone ask?

The result was what it was always going to be — all these closures took jobs with them, at precisely the moment that a crippled financial sector wasn’t around to pump up the economy. Those job losses turned into a lack of demand — people without jobs don’t buy stuff — and so the whole economy began to suffer. Fast forward a decade — and you’ve got the effects of this catastrophic set of events: falling life expectancy, stagnant incomes, falling savings, and so forth.

All that is what the EU’s being scapgegoated for. Britain’s catastrophic mishandling of its own financial crisis. The truth is that the EU had nothing whatsoever to do with Britain’s choice to tell its people it was “broke”, to embark on a ruinous course of austerity at the precise moment it should have been investing in society, or to bail out banks without bailing out the middle class. That was all Britain’s choice.

So why don’t Brits get the EU is being scapegoated for Britain’s own epic failures, after a ruinous financial crisis?

Well, some of them do. Many of them, in fact. But not enough of them. And certainly not enough of them in enough power. After all — if you’d been responsible for those bad decision, if you were a politician — wouldn’t you want to blame the nearest scapegoat, too? You’d hardly want to take responsibility yourself.

You see, when people are as desperate as Brits have become — it’s much easier for them to believe in scapegoats than it is to believe in reality. Because reality finds you at fault, too — and who wants to believe that their mess is of their own making? For Brits to really understand the EU isn’t the cause of their problems would mean many Brexit voters — the most ardent — would have to accept they voted for the wrong people for a decade now. How likely do you think that is to happen?

Think of Trumpists again. They voted for their own ruin, right? You’ve read many stories by now that go something like this — town full of Trump voters shocked at local factory closing, due to tariffs — but still supports Trump! That’s going to be Britain in a few short months — not just the closing, but the “still supports Brexit” part.

Why do those poor fools still support Trump? They’d have to admit they’d been wrong all along, wouldn’t they? They might even have to undo their whole frame of mind, their foundational assumptions — from white supremacy to racism to violence and so on (yes, I’m being unkind to make a point.) You see the lesson. Once you’re dug into folly — it’s ever harder to dig yourself out.

There’s another reason, too. Nobody in Britain discusses any of the above. Nobody. Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposition…supports Brexit. He doesn’t trace the causal chain above. He doesn’t appear to have either the insight or the knowledge to understand it. Britain’s pundits on the left and center — who are mostly Corbyn’s minions, young white men aspiring for future cabinet positions — won’t ever discuss it, for that reason, either. So the average Brit is more or less totally out of touch with reality. Maybe not because they want to be — but because nobody in their public sphere, in their leadership, in their democracy, appears interested in it in any way whatsoever.

Yes, really. Go ahead and google “causes of Brexit.” Not a lot there of substance, is there? How would anyone understand the above when no one really has explained it to them — when they’ve been fed a diet of lies that blossomed into collective delusions?

Wow. So Brexit is a kind of chain reaction?

Exactly. Brexit a chain reaction of nationalism. It’s made of collective delusions, sure. But it’s like a nuclear fusion among them. They fuse into ever more explosive substances, more outlandish and bizarre and damaging delusions — the other day I heard a British MP saying something like: “if you don’t support Brexit, you’re like a soldier not willing to die for your country.” But, my friends, is there a war on? Perhaps you see the point. One delusion leads to another — and soon enough, who remembers reality anymore? Was there such a thing? When? Where?

When a chain reaction of nationalism starts, it is very, very difficult to stop — just like any explosion. Americans should give themselves credit — they are doing a good job so far, even if the country teeters on a knife edge of authoritarianism, the government shut down. At least they are emerging from their delusions. The Brits, on the other hand, are nowhere near that point. The nuclear fusion of delusions reigns — and so the chain reaction of nationalism just goes and on. They become more detached from reality every single day.

But I don’t just mean “chain reaction” in a mental way — I mean it in a razor-sharp empirical way, too. For example, what do you imagine a society would do if it knew that it was going to run out of food and medicine in the next few months? A panic would be triggered, right? Well, that’s exactly what’s already happening in Britain. People are already stockpiling medicines — so now there are already shortages.

And yet nobody much seems to care. Yes, nobody. Not a single person in government so far as I know has brought it up. Not a single column has been written about this obvious chain reaction of self-fulfilling prophecy. Not a single leader appears concerned by the start of this panic hoarding in any way at all. So what do they seem to be?

So how do Brits feel about this mess?

Well, I can’t speak for every single Brit. I can only tell you what my reading of the mood is.

Mostly, the country is in a mindset that is as strange, weird, and grotesque as it is difficult to describe. A state I’d call the pleasure of martyrdom. If anything, many people are pleased by the emergence of catastrophe. We’ll survive! You’ll see! Things like shortages of medicine seem to many to be a test, a trial, a judgment which proves how strong and tough they are.

In that way — to me at least — there is a sense that this nation has genuinely lost its mind. What society, after all, really feels pleased over shortages of medicine? Defiant, stubborn, proud over it — not alarmed and shocked by it? If that’s happening before Brexit — what do you think will happen after it?

Wow. That’s pretty…incredible. So what happens now?

Nobody knows. Nobody can say, really. I’ve always thought that Brexit would end in the most British way possible — at the last moment, realizing how disastrous it was all becoming, they’d call it all off, and then politely pretend like it had never happened. But that’s the person in me. The political economist in me says: when chain reactions of nationalism start — they are almost unstoppable.

See history. Germany, China, Japan, Italy. See today. Poland, Turkey, Hungary.

The Brits are a sad, strange case study in all that. Perhaps like me, you once thought they were one of the world’s gentlest and wisest people. Alas, my friends, we were wrong. Even the gentle and wise are no match for the monsters in their very own minds. When a person comes to believe those monsters are stalking the world around him — he will destroy everything in his way, just to get them first. His home, his family, his happiness.

That is what Brexit really is. It is a spectacular game of social suicide, driven by collective delusion — which is already a catastrophe. But even the catastrophe is met with beckoning smiles, welcoming applause, cheers of anticipation, over the greater one still to come. Nationalism is in this way a form of insanity, my friends.

Let it be a warning to us all.

Umair

January 2019