It sounds like a potent liquor, something you fling down your throat on a night of wild excess, only to wake feeling queasy and remorseful.
Certainly the world had a huge hangover on Friday and possibly, as Britons reflect on what they have done, they will be wondering whether they can live with the consequences. But it’s too late for that.
Boris Johnson, former London mayor and a leader of the Leave campaign, tried to sound conciliatory, perhaps realising that, having urged his compatriots to take this step, he will have to take responsibility for the challenges flowing from the result - starting with the UK being split in two.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, asked whether a second referendum on independence for Scotland might lead to the creation of a border with the rest of Britain, would not rule out such an eventuality.
There is a similar conundrum for Northern Ireland, which finds itself headed for an exit from the EU it didn’t want and which could cut it off from free trade and movement from the Republic of Ireland to its south.
Fanatical nationalists across Europe are beating the drums of independence anew.
The feeble European economy is unlikely to withstand the shock of such turmoil and there is a possibility that project Europe is doomed to a messy undoing.
But to blame the Brexiters for all of this would be to deny the ferment that has been brewing since the global financial crisis, in Europe, the US and elsewhere.
The similarities between the emergence of Trumpism in the US and what has happened in Britain are striking and symptomatic of a global malaise that can be summed up in one word: inequality.
It is, according to George Glynos, the chief economist at ECM Analytics, a side-effect of the cheap capital that central bankers pumped into the global economy after the 2008 financial crisis.
Those who could access this capital, the middle and upper classes, have done quite nicely out of the crisis, becoming even richer as government policy leaned in their favour.
“Your average disenfranchised worker, who doesn’t have access to that capital, certainly doesn’t have much say in the way policy is run, but has to live that policy, decided on by the elite - I think they’re starting to push back,” Glynos said.
Casting about for an explanation for their misery - the loss of many of their jobs and erosion of their standard of living - they have seized on the most obvious scapegoat: immigrants willing to work for lower wages.
South Africa has seen the rise of similar chauvinisms, some of it directed at foreigners, some, by increasingly vocal white racists, at black people and evident, in the paroxysm gripping Tshwane, in expressions of tribalism.
All of this, rooted in a heritage of racial division and stirred by political currents, is also an expression of powerlessness and despair.
There is also an echo of Trump and the Brexiters’ slogan “Take back our country” in some of the economic nationalism creeping into political discourse. The problem is not with the concept of sovereignty or economic redress, but with the focus on nationalism for its own sake and in defiance of complementary challenges, like the immediate economic crisis.
Europe and this country should know what happens when extremist nationalism is allowed to trump reason - both have been down that road before.
It is not unusual for an economic crisis to upset the order of things and frequently it is necessary, the crisis itself being an expression of irreconcilable contradictions in society.
Where this crisis of intolerable global inequality will lead will depend on the choices made.
In South Africa it demands an overhaul of the economy to make space for everyone. The starting point, because we will get nowhere without it, will have to be economic growth - at a time when Europe and quite possibly much of the rest of the world may be heading in the opposite direction.
As in Europe, there is a risk that the political and civil society leadership will remain too focused on self-interest to make the sacrifices required.
What happened in Tshwane is one sign of this, but there are others.
While there has been a lull in hostilities in the ANC as elections loom, it is clear confrontation awaits the moment the results are in.
Many of the issues that appear to have been parked - the governance of state-owned enterprises and probe into the influence of the Gupta, among other things - are sure to burst into the open again after August 3.
These are distractions the country can ill afford but which, like the Brexit cocktail in the UK, it seems incapable of doing without.
Political Bureau