Heroic Failure by Fintan Otoole

1.

THE PLEASURES OF SELFPITY
‘An Englishman will burn his bed to catch a flea’
– TURKISH PROVERB
Of all the pleasurable emotions, self-pity is the one that most makes us want
to be on our own. Since no one else can fully share it, it is best savoured in
solitude. Only alone can we surrender completely to it and immerse
ourselves in the steaming bath of hurt, outrage and tender regard for our
terribly wronged selves. Brexit therefore makes sense for a nation that feels
sorry for itself. The mystery, though, is how Britain, or more precisely
England, came not just to experience this delightful sentiment but to define
itself through it.
We tend to think of self-pity as being similar to low self-esteem, but it is
in fact a form of self-regard. The great early nineteenth-century English
radical Leigh Hunt, in his commentary on John Keats, picks up on the
phrase ‘flattered to tears’ in the poem ‘Music’: ‘In this word “flattered” is
the whole theory of the secret of tears; which are the tributes, more or less
worthy, of self-pity to self-love. Whenever we shed tears, we take pity on
ourselves; and we feel, if we do not consciously say so, that we deserve to
have the pity taken.’
The more highly we think of ourselves, the sorrier we feel for ourselves
when we do not get what we know we deserve. Herbert Spencer in The
Principles of Psychology puzzled over the emotion he variously called
‘pleasurably-painful sentiment’, ‘the luxury of grief’, and ‘self-pity’:
It seems possible that this sentiment, which makes a sufferer wish to be alone with his
grief, and makes him resist all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the
contrast between his own worth as he estimates it and the treatment he has received… If
he feels he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of
good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the
consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast. One who
contemplates his own affliction as undeserved necessarily contemplates his own
merit… there is an idea of much withheld and a feeling of implied superiority to those
who withhold it.
Self-pity thus combines two things that may seem incompatible: a deep
sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority. It is this doubleness that
makes it so important to the understanding of Brexit, a political
phenomenon that is driven by ideas that would not otherwise combine.
Crudely, passionate nationalism has taken two antagonistic forms. There is
an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to
dominate the world, the other to throw off such dominance. The
incoherence of the new English nationalism that lies behind Brexit is that it
wants to be both simultaneously. On the one hand, Brexit is fuelled by
fantasies of ‘Empire 2.0’, a reconstructed global mercantilist trading empire
in which the old white colonies will be reconnected to the mother country.
On the other, it is an insurgency and therefore needs to imagine that it is a
revolt against intolerable oppression. It therefore requires both a sense of
superiority and a sense of grievance. Self-pity is the only emotion that can
bring them together.
Not for nothing did the most brilliant and popular comic character of the
post-war period in England, Tony Hancock, repeatedly play out three-part
episodes in which his delusions of grandeur led to painful disappointment
and luxurious self-pity. In 1971, around the time of the publication of the
British government’s White Paper proposing entry into what was then the
Common Market, the English writer Colin Wilson wrote:
Over the past twenty-five years, the English have built up a national grudge – perhaps
due to disappointed expectations after winning the War – and now it is so firmly

Heroic Failure by Fintan Otoole