“Were not those behavior patterns and collective self- images really the cultural property of an elite, and a small one at that, superimposed on the majority of the population? […].
In the sense that the collective ways of seeing themselves, and the world beyond, that I have classified as habitually Dutch were not a spontaneous generation but a conscious invention, and that the inventors belonged by and large to the educated, propertied nation, the objection is valid. Van Beverwijk, Cats, Grotius and many of the other projectors of the national imagination were not, by any account, men of the common herd. And it was they who gave shape, perspective and meaning to the rush of historical experience with which the Netherlanders were beset. They were, in a sense, the inventors of patriotic inevitability: the notion that a peculiar Dutch destiny lay immanent, locked in the crust of European history, waiting for some preordained eruption to blow it free of its ancient and unnatural containment. This was potent mythology, to be sure. But it would have been ephemeral, had it been just the self-serving fancy of a few humanist intellectuals and grandees. Its robustness, in fact, lay in the spell of self-recognition. To be free and to deserve godly succor, the Dutch were told, they had merely to be themselves and to remain true to themselves.
To a remarkable degree, for its time, Dutch culture was the property of all sorts and social conditions. An Avercamp winterscape with gentlefolk skating alongside rustics and sober burghers is an idyll, no doubt, but not so very far from the truth. It was certainly more than a conspiracy of false consciousness, a series of social fables devised to legitimate a monopoly of social power by the possessing classes. Of course, it didn’t do them any harm, either. But in the acid test of allegiance and sacrifice in a murderous and terrifying war, in the burden of heavy taxes, and in the perennial alarms and anxieties that hung around Dutch diplomacy, their belief in themselves as a common tribe held firm.”

SCHAMA, Simon. The embarrassment of riches: An interpretation of Dutch culture in the golden age. London: Fontana, 1988, p. 566-567, with adaptations.