The age of the fox is ending. What rough beast slouches towards us?
Just in case anybody thought I didn't go in hard enough with last week’s effort
The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett. He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".
The Telegraph, 23/10/2009
So, as a prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he must learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves. Therefore one must be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves.
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
The result is what Matthew Crawford has noted is essentially government by psyop, or what I’ve described as soft managerialism. The ruling elite (Labour and Tory wings alike) would rather try to manage the British public’s whole perception of reality than ever use force to stop illegal immigration, actually police crime, or attempt – in the longer-term – to salvage the cratering popular legitimacy of their regime. Such is the way of the fox.
But this way now seems to be reaching its inevitable failure point. The explosion of violence in the streets is proof enough of that. Pareto and Machiavelli would not be surprised, as this is exactly how just about every other fox-ruled regime in history eventually collapsed. Reality reasserts itself, and the feckless elite leadership class is not up to the challenge.
N.S. Lyons, 11/8/24
I’ve spent much of the past week attempting to gain a deeper insight into the recent rioting in the left-behind parts of Britain. I’ve consumed an unhealthy amount of content – Substacks, podcasts, legacy media reporting – emanating from the Left, Right and Centre. (If there is a Libertarian analysis floating around – perhaps arguing the rioters adore open borders but were abruptly enraged by confiscatory rates of tax – I’ve sadly failed to locate it.)
The most interesting take I’ve come across thus far is this effort from my fellow Substacker, the mysterious but ever-perspicacious N.S. Lyons. (Unherd also published a truncated version of Lyons’ think piece, so it seems like I wasn’t the only one impressed.)
Following Lyons’ argument requires some Machiavelli 101. I’ll cut and paste the basics from Lyon’s cracker article, which those on all points of the political spectrum should find of interest and which I highly recommend reading:
[Machiavelli] identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmanoeuvre his opponents but is “defenceless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and who can scare off wolves but who is “defenceless against traps.” Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities or risk destruction…
Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They seek to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or the manipulation of people, information, narratives, and formal processes [my emphasis]… as states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law, and procedure, this quickly favors the byzantine organizing and scheming of foxes…
But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats, or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenceless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection, manipulation, and attempting to bury or buy off threats rather than confront them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders…
Like the rest of the West, Britain has been ruled for decades now by an effete managerial elite whose system of technocratic control is absolutely characteristic of foxes. There could be no better example of this than how the government has attempted to manage immigration and the ethnic tensions it has brought to unhappily multi-cultural Britain.
For an “effete managerial elite”, you can read the professional-managerial class (PMC), a demographic this humble blog has long claimed ownership of.
Inspired by Antipodean heroine Raygun’s efforts to bring some much-needed diversity to the breakdancing world, I’ll now attempt to bust out some world-class Anglo-Australian sociopolitical analysis.
Hold my beer, N.S. Lyons.
If that’s even your real name.
Controlling the narrative
There’s been rather too much arguing from authority in recent decades (see, especially, 2020 – 2022). But in the almost certainly forlorn hope my PMC brethren might give my arguments a moment’s serious consideration, let me present my credentials.
I have undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Mass Communications. I’ve worked in journalism and PR. And I’ve churned out more content-marketing copy, for both public-sector and private-sector clients, than I care to think about.
In short, I think I can reasonably claim to know a thing or two about clever persuasion.
Vulpine deceit
Having been on the planet for over half a century, I’ve come to the realisation there are two paths individuals/ businesses/government departments/political parties/nations/civilisations facing a serious issue can go by.
They can acknowledge they have an issue, accept that even if the issue isn’t their fault it is their responsibility, and take sensible steps to address the issue.
This is the wise but laborious and uncomfortable approach to problem-solving. Unsurprisingly, it’s not popular and is usually only embraced once a painful crisis descends upon an individual, organisation or nation.
What is popular – and particularly popular among my fellow foxes – is changing the narrative around the serious issue.
I don’t have space to go into the many ways narratives can be shaped. But I’m sure you’re familiar with the classics, dear reader.
You can simply pretend the problem doesn’t exist. (Australia/Canada/New Zealand/the US/the UK/France/Italy/Germany/Spain/Italy/Sweden etc are multicultural success stories whose various ethnic groups live in perfect amity with each other – absolutely nothing to see here!)
You can kinda, sorta acknowledge the problem, but minimise it to the point of ridiculousness. (The bottom four quintiles of the income distribution sure seem to be getting a tad fractious about immigration. But that must be purely due to material factors. If we build a few more houses and a bit more infrastructure they should stop with the xenophobic bleating.)
Or you can acknowledge the problem, but project all the blame for it onto, dare I say, ‘The Other’. In this instance, the working-class whites that university-educated whites now find so deplorable.
(Thank Gaia there are still a handful of enlightened anti-racist philosopher kings/queens such as me and my peers around to override the reactionary wishes of the low-information lower orders. Who, in their characteristically ill-disciplined fashion, have failed to learn to code and have, most deservedly, found themselves locked out of the housing and labour markets and who respond by childishly lashing out at Johnny Foreigner rather than addressing their manifold personal inadequacies.)
When narratives attack
As I’m hardly the first to observe, we’ve entered an ideological interregnum where many long-venerated narratives are spectacularly imploding in the unyielding face of inconvenient facts.
I’d argue that the rot set in with the death of God a century and a half ago. If there’s no God – no transcendental signifier, to use the post-structuralist jargon – it seems to me you’re inevitably on a slippery slope to mushy relativism – not least, cultural relativism.
Like the Buddha, I’ll remain silent about the existence or otherwise of a Supreme Being. But I will note the evidence – collected by agnostic/atheist left-wing sociologists – suggests societies and individuals function better when they believe in a Supreme Being. Or at least some measure of cosmic justice.
This is another inconvenient fact my nominally secular PMC brothers and sisters spend a lot of time studiously ignoring, to their peril. Not least because many of them have chosen to fill the God-shaped hole in their hearts with the Christian heresy of social-justice politics. (The earnest, blue-haired open-borders advocate of 2024 is the granddaughter – metaphorically and sometimes literally – of the pious, curtain-twitching Church Lady of 1964.)
But let’s leave that one to the philosophers and theologians and focus on political economy.
The free movement of labour, capital and goods
From around the late 1970s until at least 2007, a form of economic and social hyperliberalism reigned supreme. Admittedly, neoliberalism was never uncontested; no less a figure than Australia’s current PM was stridently opposed to it back in his left-wing activist youth. Nonetheless, it was pretty much all-conquering for several decades there. Both centre-right and centre-left parties, especially across the Anglosphere, slammed down the social-capital-eroding, inequality-exacerbating, manufacturing-sector-destroying Kool-Aid for many, many years.
Both the Left and Right have now turned against neoliberalism, but in slightly different ways.
Both the mainstream Left and, more hesitantly, the mainstream Right now accept the free movement of capital and goods is over. (The China-led and US-led blocs now coalescing will presumably engage in intra-bloc trading. But the ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China’ Chimerica days are rapidly drawing to a close.)
It’s rethinking the “free movement of labour” part of the neoliberal equation that I fear is going to roil Anglosphere and Western European politics for years to come.
Say what you will about corporate elites, but being subjected to the discipline of the market encourages a certain go-along-to-get-along pragmatism. Judging by reports in the business press, our plutocratic overlords have begrudgingly accepted that the free-market fundamentalist dispensation that served them so well for so long is inevitably drawing to a close. Albeit begrudgingly, they now seem to have settled for mounting a rearguard action to prevent their taxes, company and personal, increasing overly much, or their workforces getting even more uppity.
It’s the cultural elites who really worry me. As the events of the 20th century demonstrated, their self-pleasuring idealism can have truly disastrous consequences.
Sides of history
In stark contrast to the Koch Brothers of the world, cultural elitists are open-borders true believers.
Many members of the (overwhelmingly white) Anglosphere cultural elite cling – cling bitterly, one might even say – to the following narrative:
White people/white people’s countries are uniquely evil and non-white people/non-white people’s countries are uniquely good. Obviously, the only moral stance available to the more enlightened citizens of Anglosphere and Western European nations, regardless of ethnic background, is to welcome anybody who turns up with open arms and pockets. Once the erstwhile ethnic majority accepts its rightful place as just one of many ethnic minorities – miraculously non-competing ethnic minorities – all will be right with the world. Of course, no members of the current ethnic majority have any right to raise any objections to this process unfolding – only ‘Far/Hard’ Right nutjobs could possibly do that. (Even if said ‘nutjobs’ have no other identifiable Far/Hard Right beliefs beyond thinking their politicians should calm the fuck down with the turbocharged immigration intakes for a while.)
Alpha foxes like two-tier Kier and Alistair ‘Douglas Murray is the new Goebbels’ Campbell can spin away to their hearts’ content. But a majority of the British population either never bought into the ‘diversity is our strength’ narrative so beloved of PMC cosmopolitan globalists, or started seriously questioning it several dead children ago.
You can bedazzle people for a long, long time – decades even – with “misdirection, manipulation, and attempting to bury or buy off threats rather than confront them directly”.
But I’m with Machiavelli and Pareto in believing a fox-heavy society will sooner or later start butting up against the sharp edges of harsh realities.
I get the sense many other people – of all backgrounds – also sense, if only half consciously, that Western societies have over-indexed for smooth-talking foxes, thereby encouraging growing predation by ambitious wolves.
To borrow a phrase, the old narratives are dying and the new ones struggle to be born: now is the time for lions.