Hamlet and the British National Character

When you lie, you say things you don't mean.

When you tell too many lies, you yourself will no longer know what you really think or mean.

In the end, our own lies drive us mad.

Narcissists deny the truth and avoid logic, especially if doing so would damage their own self-image of goodness and competence. I fear that if Britain were a person, it would be a narcissist, going out of his way to deny the truth about himself, refusing to acknowledge mistakes thereby preventing himself from learning from them.

To understand the national character, we could pretend that the nation is a man. The average age of Britain is 40, so we could pretend Britain is a 40 year old man with the kind of education, job and outlook of the typical 40 year old man.

I imagine this man to be a latter day Hamlet soliloquising:

To be, or not to be? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

Those of you who know the play would know that Hamlet suffers from depression, and his depression deepens when he realises his mother was an adulterous and murderous slut who poisoned his father. He has also been recently bereaved, having been summoned back from Germany to Denmark to attend his father's funeral only to find his mother already married to his Uncle Claudius. The loss of his father could be analogous to this 40 year old Briton's dawning realisation that democracy is dead and Brexit is blocked.

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and the hand that now rules the world is a fornicating slut. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2285670/Most-children-of-British-mothers-born-out-of-wedlock.html That's why everything is going wrong and Trump is about to start WW3 over North Korea because he is having his strings pulled by the Deep State. 

But now that we know the problem, the solution is simple, is it not?

Hamlet can barely bestir himself to avenge his father's murder by his mother's lover his uncle, saying to himself "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".

When he finally decides to act, he kills all the wrong people and ends up dead.

What *is* this quintessence of dust?

What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an Angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals – and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor Woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”  

 Hamlet Act 3, scene 1, 55–87

THE ANSWER:


Once upon a time there was God and His Creation.

But God was BORED.  All he got all the time from his ungrateful Creation were prayers asking for stuff with never quite enough thank you prayers.  His Creation were a very disappointing lot indeed.

Since He was omnipotent and omniscient, He always knew the Future and remembered everything.  Because God was all-wise, nothing ever surprised Him and, boy, was it BORING.

Indeed, one day He got so bored that He thought He would commit suicide.   No one would notice anyway.  The ones who always denied He existed would never have acknowledge His existence whether He lived or died.  The ones who believed in Him would carry on believing in Him whether He was dead or alive.  The ones who were agnostic just wouldn't care either way.  It really made no difference at all.

But fortunately for God, He remembered just in time that He was omnipotent and could think of a way of amusing Himself without quite killing Himself.

And it was this.

He turned Himself into all of His Creation, but, having divided Himself  up into an infinite number of souls and things, He lost the completeness of His former omniscience.  While the knowledge was still there, somewhere, scattered and spread out, it was flickering and blinking and flashing at very irregular intervals rather than shining strong as it used to do when He was completely in charge as a Singularity.

But this was the WHOLE IDEA.  God, by dividing Himself up into all of His Creation remained with His Creation, but kept the element of forgetfulness as to what was around the corner.  When it happened, there were always quite a few people who would say, "I just knew that was going to happen anyway!", and they are sort of right when they say that, for wisdom enables you to foretell the future.

To help Himself remember important things when He really needed to, God would stick helpful notes in places like people suffering from Alzheimer's putting post-it notes around in their home to remind them to do important things, in the form of Holy Books, with various tribes and nations in different parts of the world.  Sadly, there was never enough people who would read them properly, or interpret the messages and commands sensibly and implement His instructions wisely, for long enough, before slipping into cruelty, chaos, forgetfulness and madness.

By turning Himself into humanity God had given Himself the forgetfulness with which to make life seem fresh, full of danger and adventure again, for eternity is a very long time indeed.

What Hamlet was really all about

The whole play was a metaphor for the futility of political action if you do things just for the sake of doing something, because you end up killing everybody.

Fortinbras serves as a foil for Hamlet: While the Danish prince is hesitant and given to making long-winded speeches, the Norwegian is impulsive and hot-headed, determined to avenge his slain father at any cost. In this light, the triumph of Norway over Denmark at the end of the play can be seen as a triumph of firm, decisive action over doubt and prevarication; Hamlet's ambivalence and reluctance to act in the early parts of the play exacerbate the situation within the Danish court and ultimately lead to a massacre which eliminates the entire leadership, ruining any hope the nation has of defending itself against the invasion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortinbras

Politicians, Dustmen, Sewage Workers and Hamlet Explained

Being a politician is a bit like being a dustman or a sewage worker. Someone's got to do it, but you rather despise a person for doing it. A revolution is a bit like a nation having a crap or a spew after a bout of food poisoning and heavy drinking, and it is always politicians who started it and have to clear up afterwards. Politics is therefore a vocation. You do it because you can't help going on and on about those bees in your bonnet. There are many far easier ways of earning money and respect.

The reason why politics is so crap in this country is because you now have a new breed of the cowardly and contemptible who don't like to do the dirty work that comes with being in politics, such as seeking the ugly truth and telling the ugly truth and a dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune when those who don't like the ugly truth want to shoot the messenger who told them the ugly truth.