There's an almost universal consensus in media right now that "Brexit," or Britain's vote to leave the European Union, has been an absolute catastrophe on a global scale. The pound has crashed, as stock markets fall around the world. Britain will now risk isolation from its main trading partner. Scotland is threatening to secede. Why did they make this very economically stupid decision?

"Xenophobia!" you might say. "Stupidity! Ignorance! That's the only excuse for this happening!"

Now wait just a minute. We have a tendency in our society to oversimplify problems and demonize our enemies to an inappropriate degree. It's not appropriate to blame racism and stupidity for every bad decision, even if, yes, that did likely play a major part in tipping the referendum in favor of leaving.

Two nights before the referendum, I decided to see what the population thought, by going onto British video gaming servers and mentioning Brexit. One response I got led me on to the thinking of people who voted leave:

My country has been taxed billions upon billions of pounds [the British currency] to give to countries that screw up knowing the EU will just make us pay for their problems! What do we get back? Trading rights, with countries that honestly don't have anything to give us, so we have to look outside the EU anyway, and a bureaucracy that makes more than half our legislation come from councils that don't care about our country. We need to leave!

I saved the response and fact-checked the man's claims. Other than the bit about European countries having nothing to offer (about half of British trade goes to the EU), it was mostly true. As for the economic woes of the decision, that's in no small part the result of two things: economic analysts panicking about something bad happening (and thus encouraging bad decisions) and global leaders wanting to punish Britain for leaving by denying it trade deals. For those of you saying that "leaving the EU has gone horribly, just look at the consequences," it hasn't left yet! Britain is still technically a member of the European Union, and likely will be for multiple years. All of the economic chaos now is simply a result of global panic.

This is why stocks are "crashing," and admittedly, they have crashed in Japan and Germany. In America, however, it's hard to make the argument for a crash. Stocks declined by about three-percent, which is about the same measure by which they fell after President Barack Obama's re-election, and nobody called that the economic crisis of our time.

Last, but not least, consider this from a British point of view. Imagine, as an American, if we were part of an organization called the American Union, or AU. How enraged would you be if more than half of our laws came from a governing body in, say, Caracas? This pan-American body passes laws against your personal interests and the interests of your fellow Americans -- banning same-sex marriage, banning abortion to match Latin American countries, legalizing some hard drugs due to corrupt interests in the body, and forcing the United States to pay $300 billion in tax money per year to develop other countries, all while pushing Syrian refugees north to America and forcing a bypass of regulations on American borders. In this scenario, America can do nothing. Wouldn't you want to leave, then, regardless of the economic ramifications?

These weren't the issues Britain was facing -- they have their own problems unique to them-but the mindset is similar. This decision, to leave the EU, was a decision, first and foremost, to preserve British sovereignty against an international body that, in the eyes of many, disrespected it. As a nation that fought a literal war over such an issue, we ought to sympathize.