Britain’s Foxes are Beset by Wolves

Violence in the streets reflects the breakdown of the ruling class’ habitual management strategy

The riots that have recently wracked the streets of the UK reflect decades of pent up public frustration with the country’s governing elite, especially their total refusal to control mass immigration despite vote after vote demanding they do exactly that. The pot has now boiled over. But the ongoing back-and-forth of ethnic violence also represents a signal that the British elite’s whole broader strategy of governing – one based in the fundamental personality of the ruling class itself – may be beginning to break down. And that carries some significant implications.

To understand why, however, we need to take a brief detour back about five centuries to Niccolò Machiavelli. He identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmaneuver his opponents but is “defenseless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and who can scare off wolves but who is “defenseless against traps.” Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities, or risk destruction.

A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilizations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.

Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class – its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or their own enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general – of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.

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. If they have to use physical force they will, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.

As long as peace prevails, civilizations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. And 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. In comparison lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalized and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.

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 defenseless 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. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.

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. It has sought to control public perception of the problem, and indeed has strived mightily to pretend the entire problem simply doesn’t exist.    

It has done so, in classic foxlike fashion, through careful control of media and online information, engaging in an effort to downplay inconvenient facts, obscure the identity of terrorists and violent criminals, memory-hole potentially divisive events, and censor counter-narratives. Those who have continued to speak out on the issue are smeared with reputation-destroying labels like “racist,” “xenophobic,” or “far right” in order to deflect others from listening to them. This reflects foxes’ consistent instinct to turn first and foremost to information warfare and narrative manipulation over direct confrontation. Hence the ruling elite’s immediate reaction to the latest riots: blaming them on “misinformation” and “unregulated social media” – the implication being that nothing at all would be amiss if the information common people had access to could just be better suppressed.

This controlling instinct is also reflected in the UK’s “Neighborhood Policing” model, which, as Aris Roussinos has noted, makes state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict the top priority of the police forces. In practice this means deploying police to swiftly shut down anything that might provoke unsightly public disturbances in minority ethnic communities, such as “openly Jewish” men walking too near pro-Palestine demonstrations, people criticizing Hamas, or Englishmen holding the English flag. Meanwhile inciting rhetoric and open violence committed by the same ethnic communities is met with studious non-confrontation or polite de-escalation in order to avoid upsetting “community relations.”

As Ed West has pointed out, this means British police now operate much less like a conventional crime-solving and deterrent force and far “more like that of a colonial [police] force, charged with preventing community relations from spilling over into violence” while keeping multi-cultural imperial possessions  stable despite the natives’ displeasure.

The British elite’s habitual reliance on these techniques of information control and relationship micromanagement have combined most spectacularly in the Home Office’s “controlled spontaneity” program, which aims to preempt backlash to terrorist attacks and violent crimes by “pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks,” such as candle-lit inter-faith vigils and people handing out flowers “in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support.” Meanwhile politicians and internet campaigners stand ready to jump into action to post online about the need to #TurnToLove and not “look back in anger.” In truth this is all a carefully constructed façade that government “contingency planners” and their “civil society” partners rush to impose in order to, as Roussinos writes, “present an image of depoliticized community solidarity.” This is meant to head off any potential escalation of ethnic tensions and violence. Or as one planner described it, the whole effort is intended to serve as “an anesthetic for the community.”

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.

So, what is likely to happen next in Britain? We should first expect Britain’s foxes to immediately double-down on soft managerialism, including by cracking down even harder on the digital information space, expanding surveillance and financial restrictions, and using the techniques of obfuscation and manipulation to try control dissent – all of which Keir Starmer has already committed to doing.

Of course, his government has also already demonstrated its willingness to lash out with naked force against the disgruntled “far right” natives that it blames for disturbing the peace (doubtless along with the broader political opposition). And we should certainly expect to see more of this moving forward as well. But this flailing response, and the resulting escalation in Britain’s state of anarcho-tyranny (“law and order for thee, but not for them”), will hardly solve the deeper problems driving the nation further and further into chaos.

That would take lions. But the foxes of the Western elite are even more scared of lions than they are of wolves – and perhaps for good reason: again and again in history the oligarchic rule of foxes tends to come to an end when the people finally get fed up enough to turn to a lion to save them from wolves.

A slightly condensed version of this essay also appeared in UnHerd, here.