Every myth eventually consumes its maker. The British right built an industry out of resentment, but what it created is not conviction; it is dependence. People who have been fed a diet of grievance for years cannot easily return to reality, because reality feels anaemic compared to the drama they’ve been living in. The problem is not just political; it’s existential. A society that builds its meaning on fear must keep manufacturing it to survive.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor, devoted his life to understanding how people endure the unbearable. In his work Man’s Search for Meaning, he argued that the human drive is not pleasure or power but purpose, the need to find meaning even in suffering. Frankl warned that when meaning is lost, the substitutes become pathological. People cling to anger, addiction, or conformity because it offers them a temporary outline of self. Britain is living through this pathology at scale. The slogans that once felt like purpose, “Take Back Control,” “Stop the Boats,” “Make Britain Great Again”, have decayed into reflexes, empty phrases that still animate because they are all that remains. They function like superstition, rituals performed to keep chaos at bay.
The data show the decline beneath the noise. Frankl’s warning - that people will trade truth for coherence when life no longer makes sense, now plays out in the civic record. Local election turnout has hovered around 33 per cent in recent years, the lowest level since the late 1970s, according to the Electoral Commission (2024). Party membership, once a mark of civic duty, has collapsed to under 2 per cent of the adult population, based on the Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement (2023) and the House of Commons Library’s Political Party Membership Report (2024). The British Social Attitudes Survey (NatCen, 2023) shows unprecedented distrust not only in government but in democracy itself; fewer than half of respondents (45%) now believe that “voting gives ordinary people influence.” he rest either retreat into apathy or escape into fantasy. Both serve the same function; they protect a fragile sense of coherence by refusing to confront complexity.
This hunger for coherence isn’t new; it’s a human reflex as old as despair itself. Fyodor Dostoevsky, the 19th-century Russian novelist and philosopher, devoted his life to exploring the moral psychology of suffering, why people cling to their pain, defend illusions, and destroy themselves rather than face meaninglessness. He described this reflex with painful precision. His characters often prefer suffering to change, clinging to beliefs that make their pain intelligible. To accept that their convictions were false would collapse the fragile moral order they’ve built around themselves.
That’s where many of Britain’s most devout culture warriors now stand: defending illusions they no longer fully believe, because the alternative is emptiness. The loudest polemicists on GB News, the columnists who feed daily outrage into the bloodstream, and the politicians who perform strength while hollowing out the state, all are trapped by their own narratives. They cannot stop dividing because reconciliation would expose their fraud.
But division as a governing principle has diminishing returns. Once you have demonised everyone, there is no one left to blame but the people who believed you. The Conservative collapse after the 2024 general election is one symptom of that exhaustion. The electorate didn’t move left; it moved away from the left towards independents, apathy, and silence. Reform UK, founded on protest rather than policy, now polls ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives in several 2025 surveys — some giving it as much as 34 per cent support. But those numbers flatter a hollow movement. Its surge reflects volatility and protest sentiment more than conviction. Even the pollsters admit the party’s support is broad but paper-thin, a howl, not a mandate. Beneath the noise, nothing resembling a governing philosophy exists. Reform is not rising because it has answers; it is rising because the public has stopped asking questions. You cannot build a nation on rejection alone. The same story repeats across Europe, where outrage parties flare brightly, then die, leaving deeper cynicism in their wake. They prove Frankl’s thesis in political form, meaning that the meaning that comes from resentment cannot sustain life.
Meanwhile, the material drivers of despair continue. In 2025, over 14 million Britons live in poverty. Food insecurity affects one in five households. Real wages remain below pre-crisis levels. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that the poorest 10% of the population will lose 6% of their real income by 2026, even with current support schemes. Yet the airwaves are filled not with economic debate but with moral spectacle. The structure of the economy has become less visible than the theatre of blame.
The danger is not only that these myths distract from reality, but that they remake it. Once politics becomes an identity performance, facts lose the power to correct it. The Home Office can publish data showing that asylum seekers make up less than 1 % of the population; it will not matter, because the “invasion” is emotional, not statistical. The NHS can point out that migrants contribute more in tax than they take in services; it will not matter, because the myth is moral, not fiscal. As Dostoevsky warned, “The secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.” For too many, outrage has become that something.
At some point, the architecture of division turns inward. When an ideology runs out of external enemies, it begins to eat its own. You can already see it everywhere, not just on the populist right, but across the entire spectrum. Reform and Tory hardliners now cannibalise each other through loyalty tests and performative outrage; Farage turns on former allies, while Tory factions trade accusations of betrayal like currency. On the left, the Labour Party purges its moral dissidents while preaching unity; the Greens fracture over ideological purity; the SNP devours itself in the name of independence. The same disease manifests in different costumes; each movement convinces itself of its righteousness while absolving its hypocrisy. The purity spiral is the natural endpoint of a politics that measures identity by exclusion. What began as a rebellion ends as self-consumption.
What Britain faces now is not merely a political crisis but a collective noogenic neurosis, a sickness of meaning. It’s a nation restless, over-informed, and spiritually hollow, mistaking outrage for purpose and identity for truth. Frankl warned that when purpose collapses, people compensate with motion, noise, and belonging. Politics becomes therapy, and therapy becomes war.
People still need purpose, but having lost faith in politics, they search elsewhere. Some retreat into personal consumption, others into conspiracy, some into digital tribalism. The ideological map splinters into hundreds of micro-faiths. This is why the country feels chaotic; even in times of calm, it is a cacophony of private worlds, each sustained by its own algorithmic mythology. Britain is no longer divided into left and right; it is divided into realities.
The irony is that those who engineered this fragmentation believed it would keep them in power. Instead, it has produced a public that no longer believes in anyone; trust has sunk so low that even truth now sounds manipulative. Institutions cannot function when every statement is treated as propaganda. You can see it everywhere: in government departments, agencies, ministers, even the BBC - no one is unscathed. This is the final stage of meaning collapse, when sincerity itself becomes suspicious.
Reconstruction will take more than policy, it will require a cultural and psychological re-education. People must learn again to tolerate ambiguity, to think critically without assuming bad faith, and to live without a permanent enemy. The education system, the press, and civic institutions must rebuild a shared language that allows disagreement without dehumanisation. That’s the core of critical thinking, not cynicism, but the ability to question without annihilating the questioner.
Frankl’s remedy was deceptively simple, meaning is not found, it is made through work, love, and moral responsibility. For a nation, the equivalents are contribution, compassion, and accountability. A government that invests in fair wages, housing, and community repair is not just doing economics; it is doing existential therapy. Dostoevsky would agree: redemption begins when a society faces itself without excuses.
The British experiment in manufactured meaning has reached its limit. The media that built their brand on rage are now cannibalising their audience’s trust. The politicians who thrived on outrage are discovering that anger cannot govern. What remains is a silence filled with exhaustion, a country that has shouted itself hoarse and still feels unheard.
The choice that follows is stark but simple. Britain can continue to chase coherence through division, or it can begin the slow, painful work of building meaning through truth. One path leads to authoritarian fatigue, a nation numbed by its own cynicism. The other leads, however uncertainly, toward renewal, a political culture grounded not in sentimentality or spectacle, but in the hard discipline of reality.
Frankl’s insight that even in suffering, life retains potential meaning still holds. The task now is collective rather than individual to rebuild a society capable of meaning without delusion, pride without prejudice, coherence without lies. Only then can the architects of division lose their power, not because they are defeated, but because their audience has outgrown them.
Next Part 2: Britain’s right-wing media and political class built a moral economy out of grievance. It worked until it emptied the country of trust. This part follows what happens when the myths collapse, and a nation has to rediscover truth after years of division.