Five and more years ago, as Brexit and other issues of the post-2008 crash world gathered an alarming pace, I like others found myself wondering, with some fear, what it was all leading to. It was not uncommon for parallels to be drawn with the eras pre-both world wars when things also seemed to be getting out of control. In a sense, we were right – something was coming – though of a nature that few suspected, and it was certainly something that cannot in its primary causes, be called a political crisis. Nonetheless, a crisis it was, and it certainly had a political dimension.

JB MacKinnon’s new book The Day the World Stops Shopping is part of a growing lexicon discussing what will be the shape of the post-pandemic world. He suggests that there have been several times in history where staring into an abyss was necessary to stimulate a ‘correction’ in the direction of humanity’s travel; maybe this is another. In which case, I suggest we have got off lightly – but I still hope he is right.

The Guardian’s architecture critic, Rowan Moore, has also picked up on beneficial changes that may come from the Flight from the Office. Just maybe, some good will come of this ‘new localism’ for our hitherto madly imbalanced and atomised nation. By way of examples, here are some ways in which we, and our small community in East Anglia have been affected.

Five years ago, health considerations forced me to leave full-time employment. Like many, I had commuted out of our town each day, to work thirty miles away. What I never saw until that point was how deserted the place was during weekdays – populated very largely and scantly by the elderly – and young mothers. When I was on holiday, it was by definition the school holidays, which were, themselves untypical of the normal situation.

Particularly when a local convenience store moved to the edge of the town, the centre which a few years previously had always been if not buzzing, then certainly occupied, became practically deserted for hours on end. Since many people started working from home, this has noticeably changed. The regular Thursday market has never been so popular, with several new stalls appearing in recent months.

The photos (top and below – taken on a rather dull day) show two recent developments.

The greengrocer was doing such good business that he has now occupied a vacant shop, renovated it nicely, and now has a seven-day presence in the town: a good, useful local addition that will hopefully endure. The local travel agent also closed during the pandemic, and has not re-opened. In its place, a group of locals has pooled resources and opened a café which also supplies artificial flower arrangements. They opened just before the latest lockdown – but an outside kitchen window – what became known as the Cake Hole (on the left in the picture) – meant that they were able to serve take-away drinks and cakes throughout, while also renovating their inside seating space. They have single-handedly revived the town centre, with outdoor tables and nearby seating pretty much continually occupied during good weather. Passing groups of walkers and cyclists are also making regular pit-stops, and they have further plans for being even more of a community hub. Our town centre once again is an actively ‘inhabited’ place.

Less tangible, but still noticeable, is the sense that somehow the place is less deserted during the week than it used to be. There are more people visibly working at home and popping out into the streets as they need. The whole place feels a little more lived-in, in the way one senses in more clearly vibrant places often not in the U.K.

Changes have also affected us personally. While I now go out to teach again, just twice a week, my wife changed her employment over the winter, becoming a civil servant. Her new employer is in Nottingham, some 130 miles or two and a half hours away. But it has been agreed that she will work permanently from home, with just the occasional trips to H.Q., thus allowing her to accept a position that would previously either been unviable or have meant an unplanned relocation. Others in her team are in Bristol, Newcastle and South Wales, and our home often echoes to a cocktail of (admittedly disembodied) regional accents…

In my own case, most of my non-classroom activity now takes place at home (as it often did, but not any longer during the evenings and weekends…) and I communicate with my students and colleagues remotely. I wonder whether there is a template here that could help to address the risks of burnout in the teaching profession, that ‘got’ me back in 2016.

I wonder how many times this story will be replayed over the coming years, and it may lead for many to improved job opportunities and greater job satisfaction, yet without the need to relocate. It is potentially very good news for all those small places up and down the country, that have been hollowed out in recent years to become dormitory settlements. My wife is now another person present during the day, while the loss of her commute means a combination of more productive time and more to engage in the community where she actually lives. We also (happily!) spend more time together, not least over morning coffee and lunch most days. And we no longer need to get up at ungodly hours.

Despite the social pressure during the last decade or two to claim that one lived for one’s work, it seems that these changes have revealed the truth: far fewer really relished office life or the long commutes that if often required. Maybe this is the opportunity we needed for a real, substantial improvement in the quality of British life.

In many ways, our work-life balance has improved hugely as a result; it is true that not everyone (including teachers) can work permanently from home – but the shift that has occurred has affected enough people that is has still has brought wider benefits, and may yet bring more, if it can become embedded. (It occurred to me some days ago that before the industrial revolution, many people worked at home, so in a sense, this is just a return to a much older way of doing things). We could go a lot further: MacKinnon’s book concerns much wider ecological actions; perhaps this is just the beginning. With any luck, this is the point at which we can start to appreciate the quality of life, rather than just the quantity, as he argues we need to, in order to become properly sustainable.

 Perhaps we have finally learned that life on the hamster wheel is neither very desirable nor beneficial. In which case, the pandemic will be proved to have a real silver lining.

I’ve seen it said that adult life is U-shaped. Wellbeing that is – which makes one’s fifties, by all accounts, the pits. No doubt this stage in life has always been one of realisation and readjustment – but I think that those of us presently at it are, by the standards of an advanced society, having it more than a bit rough.

People who were born a decade or more earlier than us experienced the full benefits of the new Welfare State and real social mobility through the Sixties and early Seventies; they too, who benefited from uplift in property prices in the following decades. People ten or more years younger than us have yet to realise what awaits them, while still having some of the benefits of a youth passed in Nineties, and perhaps more natural inhabitants of a commercialised age where everything has its price and principles are worth little. They may yet learn.

Those of us born in the Sixties grew up with our parents’ expectations of the welfare-state nation, but also with the decline and strife of the late Seventies, an endless cycle of economic decline and industrial conflict. From it emerged the Neo-Liberalism of the Thatcher years – just as we were entering the workforce. For a while, it really did seem to be creating new optimism; for those willing and able to ride the “greed is good, no such thing as society” mantra, there were rich pickings – and the legacy mindset of ruthless egotism that has dogged this country ever since. The rest spent our working lives in a period when labour laws were rolled back, and the authority of employers strengthened –their ballooning incomes in the deregulated economy simultaneously pushing up the cost of living – read housing – for the rest.

Thirty years on, we are also the first generation to be feeling the consequences: that whose health is beginning to turn, yet whose retirement seems less secure than for several previous generations; who – if the wave of stress-related mental health is anything to go by – are burned out by decades of long hours, long commutes and unremitting pressure in that deregulated workplace – yet who have also found (as I did) that support is all but non-existent. Not all of us were able to make a killing in a decade and retire in our thirties…

What is more, it’s now our turn to be the ones with elderly parents to support. All part of life’s cycle of course – except that the State no longer offers the support it once did; retirement ages are heading upwards, while Care for the elderly has been pared back and privatised. One relative’s life savings went on paying for her last years; there are others possibly heading in the same direction. If you are neither wealthy enough to bear this, nor destitute enough to qualify for meagre state aid, you are in an unenviable position: prudence on modest means is, it seems, penalised. Even the one small silver lining of losing the older generation – the inheritance and security that may follow – now seems less and less likely when such accumulated family wealth as there is, has all been spent on old age care. Not, I hasten to add, that I would for a moment deny those people what they need in their final years.

On top of all that has come major societal upheaval. I was nine when Britain joined what became the EU; during my early adulthood that offered optimism, much of which came to pass. It was the EU that permitted extended travel to other countries, opening eyes to different ways of life; it was the EU that eventually brought a similar material standard of living to this country; it was the EU that brought blue flags to British beaches, that replaced the Highland goat tracks seen on childhood holidays with proper modern roads and regional investment. It was the EU that facilitated the large number of cultural interactions I had with the continent, not least thanks to the mindset of constructive engagement that it created.

But now all that is gone. Sadly, it is precisely this de-insularisation that Brexiters seek to reverse. Those of us who regret it will no doubt try to continue as before, though we are inevitably impacted by changes in travel and trading arrangements. But the mindset of the country is turning inward; there are too many who never experienced those benefits of EU membership or who acquired the resultant mindset, and I expect this country gradually to retreat further into its old, inward-looking ways. And so we are likely, too, to be spending the final third of our lives in a society from whose values we feel increasingly alienated.

Then came the Pandemic, the impact of which on the U.K. I hardly need to describe. Suffice it to say that it mercilessly revealed the weaknesses of every nation – only in our case, there seem to have been many more than most of the population believed. In many ways, it has highlighted a doubt I have harboured for much of my life: that the U.K. is a dated place, ill-equipped to provide most of its people with the benefits of the modern age.

Evidence for this is everywhere to be seen, from the obsession with national “heritage”, to the enduring social snobbery. It is there in the failure to recognise the glaring inequalities of the country as incompatible with civilised modern values, its acceptance of them as some kind of ‘natural order’ and its utter failure to realise that life is not like this everywhere. It is there in the belief that life for the many is an unavoidable grind. Yet it is Britain that is abnormal; it is possible to make far more just societies than this. People in Germany, for instance, do not need to blow their life savings to cope with old age; and they still have a meaningful degree of workplace and social protection from insecurity.

Britain’s worst failure after the War was to fail to move on; all its ruling class wanted to do was to reassert the hegemony of earlier times. Despite the real advances made by the Welfare State, most of life in this country since has been about the reassertion of the ancient privileges of class, inheritance, and wealth that never really went away. Certainly, the message changed: the ruling class realised that its best chance of survival lay in changing the tone, while lying low with the reality. The same elite recognised that the main threat to its existence was the EU and its promotion of real social democracy; the more evident this became, the more strident its opposition did too. Its real achievement – as always – was to steer the national story away from its own negligence and to blame ‘Brussels’ for every national ill.

In hindsight, my own Moment Zero has been coming for several years. My increased involvement in local affairs has revealed the extent to which the old Establishment interests still control even this small part of the country. The views and assumptions, the sheer sense of entitlement I have encountered belonged, as I believed, to another era – but no, they are still going strong. These are the interests that run this country, largely for their own benefit – and still believe they have a divine right to do so.

My teaching of Politics has reinforced an impression of a governmental system whose interest was in hanging onto as much elite power and privilege as it could. The interest it feigned in democracy and social justice was just that: a charade designed to ensure that the nation did not notice how little it was giving away. It is still like it; the experience of both Brexit and the Pandemic have shown the bombastic complacency with which that elite largely behaves. And yet much of the nation just accepts that its elected parliamentarians are deeply unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. It is just how things are…

It is not always intentionally malign: those people too simply found on this planet what they did. But it is embedded beyond help: even those I know, who express democratic concern – seemingly genuinely, seem to fail to recognise the sense of entitlement that underlies the assumptions about their own position in the order of things. Real understanding would make no such assumptions.

The simple fact is, this country is socially, politically and economically outdated, and decrepit beyond repair – and the more obvious this becomes, the more openly those elites act to protect their own positions, be that through blatant cronyism or strident nationalism. The replacement of the EHIC card and ERASMUS educational programmes with UK equivalents is a de facto admission that such (European) things were inherently worth having; but now they need the nationalist coercion of a Union Jack on the cover. That is the whole point: as the cracks widen and the national deception becomes unignorable, the louder will the establishment trumpet the nationalist story that it has always used to sustain it.

I am now more aware than ever that the first half-century of my life has in effect been lived through one enormous national lie: namely that we were living in the pre-eminent, democratic, liberal democracy that had a genuine commitment to equality and opportunity for all. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It has taken time, age and ‘events’ finally to shine a light sufficiently strong to see that Britain’s national story is every bit as fake as those it tends to condemn in what it considers to be lesser countries. The narrative that I could not help but grow up with from 1964 onwards is actually the self-deception of an enduringly feudal society that still consents to the hegemony of a wealthy, hereditary elite which runs the place on a cocktail of aristocratic indolence, neglect, appeals to history and raw self-interest. It has utterly failed to modernise the country as was needed to bring it up to the same social democratic standards as our near neighbours; indeed, it has bolstered its own position by its opposition to this. It has failed to accept that a modern nation’s people exist to be anything more than a dumb work force to be exploited for one’s own enrichment, let alone people who need to be liberally educated, given decent standards and a real say in the running of the nation. But all that sounds, of course, “dangerously socialist” and is publicly condemned as such, by those whose interests oppose it.

Sufficient time has also elapsed to see the real impact of their policies; privatisation, we were told, would drive up standards and lead to more choice for all. In reality, it has made rentier activity more profitable than salaried. It turns out private companies abhor the much-vaunted competition; what they really seek is monopoly – captive markets that can be differentiated and milked for all they are worth – luxury and obsequiousness for those who can pay the premium; barely-concealed disdain and low-cost rubbish for everyone else. This is what we largely got, and it has reinforced social and wealth disparities as a result. Those who benefitted from the resultant massive social injustices were largely those with pre-existing wealth to invest in companies or property – in other words, that self-same establishment. The whole thing was one huge exercise in re-asserting elite establishment power at the expense of everyone else.

They tried to impose it on the continent too – the most fervent advocate of the Single Market was one Margaret Thatcher – but when it failed to dent European social capitalism, they lost interest, and finally took their moment to pull us out…

But the cat is out of the bag. Events of recent years have made the failings all but unignorable, and the level of social debate and disillusionment in the UK seems higher than ever. Even the Establishment’s precious Union is under threat, now that the Scots see the iniquity of the whole thing.

My own parents were no pillars of the Establishment; active socialists in their youth, yet ultimately, they never found the need to ask the profound questions about the nature of the country we lived in, that seem to be happening today. The self-interest of the elite is clearer than it has been for generations, likewise its real attitudes to the rest of us. The wealth disparities are unignorable; so is the physical and constitutional neglect of much of the country – its inability to cope with recent events all too obvious. That backward-looking clique may yet have sowed the seeds of its own destruction by failing to accommodate the needs and mood of a growing (and young) sector of the population.

What’s more, it can’t rely on insularity any more – those of us who have seen the reality of other countries know just how inappropriate the UK’s reality really is, and how much harm it does to the people here, who can’t see for themselves because they have never been allowed to.

When the educated sector of society no longer perceives its interest to lie in the status quo, time is often up for national elites. I feel more disorientated than ever about the place and the time where I have lived; it is hard to know what to believe when more and more of the Panglossian “truth” one grew up with is exposed as a sham. And the peak of this is the utterly British belief that “such things don’t happen here”. Well, maybe…

Those who have lived in Europe in the past 75 years have little to complain about when compared with the previous two millennia, let alone human experience across the wider world; such is the deception of modern comfort. And yet I cannot help but feel that this moment is significant, whether just in my own life or more widely – when the shackles finally fall from one’s eyes and the truth is revealed. Truth that suggests to me that this country needs to start again and rebuild from the ground up, as our neighbours did from the late ‘40s.

This country has had far too much of its fabled security and pragmatism; in tis complacency, it has failed to evolve as it needed to, and recent events have shown that to be an almost incontrovertible truth. It needs its own ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth) from which something much better might emerge. Sadly, the renewed jingoism of the ruling class is hardly a cause for optimism; even less so, the willingness of a significant proportion of the nation to jump on board. But one thing has changed forever: I no longer believe the old myth, that this country is somehow a special, favoured, uniquely honourable place where truly bad things never happen. It might not make life more comfortable, but perhaps it is a necessary insight for the start of life’s upswing.

Walter Mischel first conducted the marshmallow test in 1972. Its significance lay in the correlation between the ability of children to delay their gratification for eating a marshmallow to wait for two later, and a range of later-life outcomes, ranging from career and relationship success to physical health.

I am currently reading a newly-published book, Chatter, by Ethan Kross, who turns out to be one of Mischel’s former students. His own research has been into the impact of people’s inner voices on their functioning, when they get out of control. This is a matter of interest to me after my own ‘adventures’ in mental health over the past few years, and more generally from my work as a teacher. Krall’s proposes that finding ways of mentally distancing oneself from difficulties and viewing them from a wider “zoomed-out” perspective, has the effect of diminishing their immediacy. It is what we do when we replace gut reaction with more objective understanding. It seems plausible.

I could not help myself from applying the idea to other contexts. My own humanities background has always made me interested in what makes places and peoples tick. As a geographer, I have always been fascinated by local behavioural distinctiveness, so I rather instinctively look at the social ‘health’ of whole nations from a similar perspective.

This train of thought was set rolling again recently by a finding that has found that serious drunkenness is significantly more prevalent in the U.K. than almost any other developed country. While there will no doubt be a range of views on the seriousness of this, I take the view that the need of a society to escape from itself may considered a sociopathology and an indicator of less than good societal health. The fact that many in the U.K. may not take this as seriously as I do is perhaps more of a symptom than a cure: no matter what one’s attitudes, the indisputable truth is that alcohol abuse causes multiple negative health outcomes, and that is without considering its wider social and economic costs, or the psychological forces that drive it. I find it easy to conclude that the perceived need of many people in this country to escape from reality quite possibly says something important about the quality of the lives they feel the need to escape from. Such things are not always apparent unless one has a reliable comparator, such as conditions in other countries. We are not talking about a little convivial tipsiness here – though the line between the two is less clear than I suspect many think…

My train of thought took me yet  further, to the ongoing criticisms of the British government for its handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. While I have no wish to excuse possibly the worst bunch of national ‘leaders’ this country has had in generations, I do not think it is reasonable to pile all of the blame at their door. In a country of 68 million people, a handful of politicians can only do so much. Even in my own relatively kindly small community, I have repeatedly witnessed pandemic-related behaviours that I find hard to attribute to anything other than diminished responsibility on the part of their perpetrators.

What’s more, we are daily regaled with reports of the ‘damage’ that the current situation is doing to everything from the nation’s economy to wealth disparities to young people’s mental health. All the time, the tendency is to attribute this to governmental incompetence; what I see is buck-passing on an epic scale: just another sign of a society that was not in good general health even before the pandemic struck.

It struck me that the pandemic is in effect one huge marshmallow test. Whole societies are being asked to put their lives on hold in the biggest test of deferred gratification ever conducted – and just as with the children in the original survey, outcomes differ. It may not be stretching the point too far to suggest that those societies that have coped with the strictures comparatively well are in better collective health than those that have not; the implications for the UK (and perhaps the USA) are obvious.

If there is any substance to this, then we need to look for reasons why it may be so. I do not think they are hard to find: the report on drunkenness perhaps gives the game away. People in the UK subconsciously see routine, everyday life as something they need to escape from; this may speak volumes about those lives, the balance of hardships and rewards within them, the opportunities people feel they have – even the physical environments which they inhabit – all things repeatedly identified as social ills present in the U.K. It may say a great deal about the resultant social attitudes of those people with respect to their own ‘agency’, their sense of personal responsibility, and towards those who govern or otherwise constrain them.

The current problem is not hard to understand: a force of nature that is both highly infectious and quite widely lethal. While one should not disregard the functional conflicts that for instance force people into unsafe workplaces, there have still been very many acts that were arguably nothing more than wanton irresponsibility seen in the light of the Covid facts. They range from large, illicit gatherings to individual acts of low empathy that reflect a simple lack of self-control.

The opinion-pieces in the press bemoaning the loss of the social whirl; the reaction to the intended Christmas relaxation, and its subsequent cancelling – all reflect a reluctance to accept that we cannot do what we want – not what we need. Social contact is certainly important (for some) – but not if you are dead. And the key to surviving the pandemic lies above all in an inner resourcefulness and grit that seems never to have developed in many.

The whole point of learning to defer gratification is the ability to accept that life does not revolve around one’s own immediate urges; that one cannot always have what one wants just when one wants it, even for one’s own good. It means drawing on one’s inner resources to cope with this. This might have been considered an unremarkable point of adult maturity – but it seems that many people struggle with it. It is also a lynchpin for stable societies.

Underpinning deferred gratification is an inability to distance oneself from wider circumstances, particularly when they are adverse. And behind that, in turn, is a need to develop the mental resilience that comes from a fully mature mindset. Similar expressions of this can be found in Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s work on the nature of Flow: the finding that people flourish in conditions where they are challenged sufficiently but not excessively. Having an overly easy life takes you nowhere worthwhile, and leaves you lacking in resourcefulness when times get hard. The chart below explains this:

Part of Flow is recognising the necessity to defer gratification if significant fulfilment is ever to be achieved. This is why athletes and musicians amongst others discipline themselves to train so long and hard. It involves learning to accept short-term setbacks – and even the fact that “success” may never be guaranteed at all. It is also what traditional approaches to education were based on – the need to study long and hard in order to reach a higher state of rational understanding. Its pinnacle may perhaps be seen in the philosophy of the Stoics, which accepted that life can be tragic, and our best salvation lies in learning to accept that fact rather than rage against it. In effect, permanently deferred gratification.

This seems to be an insight that has escaped modern society at large – it is too busy throwing the toys of its indulged lifestyle out of its pram. How else can one understand people complaining about their lost social lives while so many are dying? The inner resourcefulness that might provide a coping mechanism is just not there; though easy, blaming it on others is not the answer.

 It is impossible to separate the various effects of the pandemic’s impact – but it seems to me that a lot of the problems being reported may well be not so much due to unavoidable hardship, but of people not being able to cope with the suspension of things they want rather than need to do. (I suspect those suffering real hardship are largely not shouting at all).

This explains everything from the huge numbers of people on beaches last summer, to the relish with which people surged out after previous lockdowns were eased, to the thousands of small indiscretions where people prove unwilling to alter what they want to do in the light of what they ought to do. No matter that the real risk (infection, as opposed to law-breaking) has not gone away.  It may be easy to pass blame to others, but this is nothing more than evading responsibility for that inability to defer gratification. Likewise, focussing on what is or is not allowed as opposed to what is medically prudent, is a displacement activity used to avoid the need to look at harder truths. To be fair, this does now seem to be sinking in – but did we really have to get to this point for it to do so?

Why has this affected some societies harder than others? I suspect the answer lies in many very long-term factors in the social climate of varying countries.

Much has been made of the stark contrast between the experiences of the UK and Japan, in the context that these two island societies are often quite good comparators. I suspect the reason for Japan’s better experience lies in its culture of scrupulous hygiene, its fabled rituals of social respect and its resultant willingness to comply. Its religious background is close to Buddhism, with associated philosophy of transcendence. These things are all quite different in the UK. The reasons for this lie too far back in this nation’s development to discuss in detail here – but the country’s trajectory over the past few decades has finally been shown to be the pernicious and socially-unhealthy one that it really is.

Prime amongst the culprits is the excessive commercialisation of society. The incursion of the profit motive into almost every aspect of British life has had unremarked impacts on the nation psyche. The often-gratuitous selling on which recreational consumption depends – relies on people doing anything but deferring their gratification. Advertising actively encourages people to yield to their every passing urge, and to do it immediately. It promotes a self-focused, first-person perspective on life, which Kross has correlated with increased risks and impacts of mental anguish. It encourages people not to think hard about what they are doing, or the longer-term consequences. Over time, this – coupled with the infantilising effect that it has on adult mentalities – has greatly damaged the nation’s ability to act defer its collective gratification. Anything that requires it appears a catastrophe in its own right.  The hysteria and outrage that accompany situations where demands are not met is evidence of the depth of the harm being done. The fact that some have started to reflect on their past behaviours is welcome – but is itself evidence that they were perhaps functioning on (commercially-driven) autopilot in the past. Whether new resolve will endure remains to be seen.

It may be argued that the impacts of rampant commerce are not restricted just to a few countries; this is true – but its perniciousness is not the same everywhere, as it interacts with wider social norms and attitudes. Even today, for example, many German shops close on Saturday afternoons, since shopping is simply not seen as the leisure activity that it is in the UK and the USA. It is a functional necessity, but it does not occupy a central place in people’s attention.

I suspect that another factor is the degree of cultural introversion or extroversion in different countries. Those that appear to value extroversion, such as the USA and increasingly the UK, may be finding the loss of interaction harder to cope with than those with more introverted cultures and a higher degree of self-reliance. These are, however, skills and outlooks that can be cultivated, given determination.

My own field of education might have been expected to be the main antidote to this problem. But it too has been re-cast in quasi-commercial terms in recent decades. This has not only affected the obvious marketisation of institutions, but also the culture within them. The emphasis on (marketised) results has narrowed what may be reasonably taught; the need for “consumer” satisfaction has reduced the risks taken by teachers, for example where work needs to be hard, and gratification deferred – in favour of making sessions “fun” – for which read instantly-accessible, undemanding trivia. The more challenging philosophical subjects have been marginalised in favour of those which deliver practical skills and employability – hardly unimportant, but we have created a workforce-society whose emphasis is on the purely functional, and which lacks the mental-philosophical insight or resolve to rise to demanding circumstances.

And above all, it lacks the ability to differentiate between that which might reasonably be blamed on an incompetent government and that which is the failure of individual personal responsibility. Known epidemiological fact suggests to me that it is the latter which has actually been the main reason for the severe impact of Covid in this country: we simply have created a society that lacks the resolve and ability to respond in the required way. We have emphasised personal indulgence at the expense of social cohesion and created a national infrastructure that was configured to operate along quasi-commercial principles and that cannot respond to the current circumstances. Anything that did not, was allowed to wither.

As with individual health, the wellbeing of societies is not a matter of personal opinion: there are behaviours that are more or less healthy, which promote greater or lesser long-term flourishing. The British have a primitive self-understanding in this respect – and attempting to normalise the symptoms, for example by having a light attitude for mass drunkenness, is an expression of the problem, not the solution.

The simple fact is, the British people have collectively proved unable to resist the ‘marshmallow’ even when the risk is widespread death. Some other nations did not. As in the original test, the longer-term consequences are widely significant.