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No Success Please, We’re British
How the postwar national psyche has embraced perpetual failure
For eleven long and dreary months I’ve been living in the UK; my longest period of habitation here since the late 1980s. Since my arrival I’ve felt depressed, crushed by the perpetually awful weather and the complacent acceptance of mediocrity that is the hallmark of the British mentality. But recently, reflecting on my experience here, I’ve realized more precisely what it is about life in Britain that I loathe so thoroughly: the British don’t just accept failure; they embrace it.
Where other nations struggle with defeat, either attempting to pretend it never happened or agonizing over it for decades, the British regard failure as their greatest triumph. World War II was the turning-point for the British national psyche. Up until then the British could still pretend a crumbling Empire continued to imbue the nation with Great Power status. The British could continue to persuade themselves that they were, if not as dynamic as the USA nor as cultured as the French, nevertheless still worthy of admiration. But the total collapse of the British military when confronted by lightly-armed Japanese soldiers on bicycles across Asia and the hasty retreat of the poorly-equipped British Expeditionary Force in Europe tore away the thin tissue of pretense and revealed…
