Hacker News is full of people who are anti-Brexit. I see little understanding of the opposing point of view. I am quite happy to see Article 50 finally happen and will sum up why here. Take it or leave it.

18 months ago I was pro EU. Not strongly so, just because it was the status quo, in my mind was vaguely associated with co-operation and so I was for it by default.

Today I am pretty strongly eurosceptic. I think it's important for the UK to leave and if anything I'd like to see it collapse entirely. Europe would be stronger, more prosperous, more cooperative and freer if the EU were to die.

My reasoning goes like this. The EU is not simply a kind of really big working group for finding new ways to cooperate, as I had once tended to assume. It is a quasi-religious ideology with disturbing similarities to a cult. The people who control the EU and many European politicians don't simply see it as a way to foster collaboration and trade but rather as a way to replace existing European countries with a new country, one which would in my estimation be significantly worse than the countries we have now.

Calling the EU a cult may seem extreme, but to me it's not:

The EU and its supporters are not interested in debate on the future of Europe. The future is their intended future, and no other alternative futures are legitimised through recognition.

The EU does not provide any channel for people to reject or modify their plans. Its leaders consistently see referendums or politicians that are not blindly pro-EU as dangerous and if they occur anyway, often due to constitutional obligations, the results are simply ignored if they run counter to what the EU's leadership wants. The so-called Parliament cannot actually change anything about the EU itself (it is not a real Parliament) and is thus stuffed with yes men whose only reason for being there is ideological commitment to the vision itself (there are also a handful of no-men who got themselves voted in purely to try and slow it down, but they can't do anything and have no real power).

Indeed, we can safely assume that the new federal superstate the EU wants to build would not be a democracy. Given the EU's consistent lack of interest in actual, real democratic mechanisms, it is likely that if their plans succeed Europe's future looks pretty grim: something like the USSR of the 1980s. It is the avoidance of this fate that led me to vote out.

In common with many cults the EU deliberately tries to make leaving it as difficult as possible, through a variety of techniques such as insisting that the remaining cult members (who were of course previously supposedly loving friends and allies) shun the traitor and have nothing to do with them. Any sustained connection with members requires complete membership and suggesting it doesn't is an evil attempt to undermine the unity of the group.

The EU routinely abuses language in manipulative ways, for instance using the word "Europe" when they mean "the EU". They do this to plant the idea that any rejection of their plans is actually a rejection of "Europe" and "Europeans", although it isn't. They also like to suggest that any rejection of the EU is dirty backwards looking "nationalism", although the EU has its own civil service, its own "parliament", its own borders, its own currency, its own courts, its own flag, its own national anthem and wants its own army. The reality is that the EU is a country-under-construction and the EU is a fundamentally nationalist project.

Finally, the most disturbing similarity of all is the fact that the modern EU is a project held together by fear. Its leadership happily and openly says so: President Hollande's memorable "there must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price" quote (on the topic of Brexit) being the most extreme example, but even today I read that Juncker is saying that there's no risk to the EU because the British "example" will show others what happens to countries that leave. They frequently imply that the alternative to the EU is World War 3. European leaders talk this way constantly, apparently either not realising or not caring that it makes them sound like some sort of Mafia.

There is no reason European cooperation must take place through such an organisation. Before the EU was formed in the early 1990s there were many parallel integration projects that were improving cooperation independently. The EU eventually absorbed them all, but if it were to collapse, the result would not be World War 3 or a dark age of hatred. It'd be a return to the days when deals and international bodies were set up independently and countries could independently assess which were working well and which were not, instead of an "all or nothing" arrangement that artificially ties trade and cooperation to an irreversible loss of local control.

Edit: -1 within a few minutes. What a surprise. Don't downvote if you disagree, you won't change anything that way. Reply and debate instead.

Second edit: Thanks for the replies. I would like to engage and continue the debate with you guys but HN has throttled me so I can no longer reply. I'll try following up tomorrow and see if the throttle has been lifted. (I'm starting to conclude HN is not a particularly good place to debate political issues for this sort of reason ...)