England is a concept and a territory. To investigate the England concept philisophically is to investigate it as “Zone.” This “Zone” Absoulte is so powerful that it can deliver you french fries at a McDonalds. Those working at McDonalds really think McDonalds exists more than just as a concept, so much so they produce and deliver french fries in the McDonalds Zone! Those in England think similarly.
Ok, here we go—
In The Zone
A surprising amount of positive self-relatedness is the first thing that stands out to an American. In America, the self-reflective identity of American is a particular thing which means highly different things in various zones. For elites, the positive sense of being an American is enlightenment or progressive ethics, for rural populations it can relate to the Southern geist in that one is a true American if they also, like the elites, have an individualist ethic which is somewhat less forgiving.
In England, there is a more universal concept of what it means to be British or English. To focus on England is to ignore the negative reflection of England which exists in the countries which make up Great Britain, and to delve into the heart of positive self-relatedness which permeates England.
To be British (in England) is to be civilized, which is to be restrained. One builds up their own character in negative space, rather than in the positive discourse. Internal self-relatedness becomes unquestionably the primary place of reality rather than the words themselves. The American, and I would say primarily in the rest of the world, the active interpersonal zone is where things are discovered and understood. But the England zone has a primary quality of hiddenness, civilization which is to be protected by a veil of politeness/falseness in order to not expose the real shining element to the uncivilized outside.
England as Civilization Itself
Civilization is always the double movement of civilization establishing itself against an outside as well as a setting of standards of ideals. The English ideal is still present in Scotland, J.K. Rowling’s anti-Transness can be seen as a protecting of a “real” inside from the masses of the outsideness. This is of course still an a priori concept not what is “real", the interpretation of the concept of sex and gender being inevitably one and the same, but it fits with the English method of protecting the inside against the outside.
Twitter allows the English spirit a terrible negation of its normal hiddenness, the Englishperson can reveal the inner workings of the self in ways which are normally hidden, creating a very vicious presence online or via technology that would not be able to be expressed normally due to the English superego.
This is of course, present in civilization itself, not just in the English spirit, but the repression of what appears and extreme filtering creates a schism which is particularly present for English society. The reliance on hiddenness as communication itself is put into question by mediums which are aligned to pull the inside into appearance towards the outside, towards the social.
What represents civilization is becoming even more brutal. The relation of inside to outside is being revealed, destroying the simpler past function of repression and conversion to what is acceptable by pulling what was normally dirempted from external presentation, internal emotions and speech, to the outside.
England, Themselves, and Everyone Else
Insofar as all of us grapple with power, peace, technology, and society, we are all in the England zone. The England Zone, as it synthesizes with civilization itself and becomes a dialectical relation to what should-be, posits a question to the rest of the world about the future of self-relation. To understand one’s self as substantial is the English charm, the rest of the world is pushed more towards the void of Enlightenment Ethics, where as the Englishperson knows they are worthwhile, but their pain is that their inside pre-edited selves are being pulled to the outsides, which is specifically un-English.
I am of course, wrong, a little bit. England represents a mode via concept, a style of knowing one’s self and emotions as substantial and correct in-themselves, rather than measured against enlightenment ethics. To embody the enlightenment with natural intuitive reason or to discover enlightment is the true antagonism. But perhaps this specific antagonism, as Hegel postulated, is possible more in The England Zone, where the geist itself is dealing with this specific antagonism on a grand scale.