Across the West, there is a simultaneous sense that life is both more permissively lax and more tightly controlled than it has been in living memory. Not even the British Isles, the proud home of Fortescue and Burke, have managed to avoid this strangest of falls from ordered freedom to anarcho-tyranny.
Coined by the late Sam Francis, a celebrated figure on the dissident Right, ‘anarcho-tyranny’ describes a perverse state of affairs whereby the most basic laws are freely broken by anti-social delinquents while well-behaved citizens, usually in the name of protecting the regime’s accredited victim groups, are forcibly wrapped in an ever-expanding web of dictates, constraints, and speech codes. When these fail to secure conformity, there is even the chance that legal penalties will be doled out to brave souls who transgress against politically correct dogmas.
The evidence is there for all to see. While things are not as bad on this side of the Atlantic as they are in the Democrat-run cities of the United States, there are still unmistakable signs of social decay, reflected in everything from dirtier streets and coarsened public habits to a rising crime rate and the increasingly emboldened nature of Islamist intimidation in both local and national politics.
In Britain, the number of recorded crimes per prisoner has gone from around six in the early 20th century to 114 today. It does not take a Ph.D. in criminology (if anything, it is likely to hinder the effort) to work out from this data point that most criminals are already hardened offenders by the time they see the inside of a cell.
Meanwhile, it took just one display of peaceful dissent for Sam Melia, a right-wing activist, to be arrested and dragged before a jury by the British state. His offence? Distributing ‘racist’ stickers with slogans like ‘We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066’ and ‘Stop mass immigration.’ Just last month, Melia was found guilty of inciting racial hatred and will likely be punished with prison time. This is only the latest in a long list of cases which have seen people pursued by the authorities for crimes of conscience, whether praying silently outside an abortion clinic or posting ‘transphobic’ poems on social media.
It should go without saying that this is all ideological. There are some onlookers—many of them prisoners of whatever passes for wisdom in libertarian think tanks—who loftily dismiss the culture war as a distracting sideshow. Why stoke pointless conflicts, the crude idea runs, when the real imperative is to fight a bracing crusade on behalf of cutting capital gains tax?
It is precisely because politics is downstream of culture, as Andrew Breitbart helpfully put it, that anyone interested in policy must pay attention to the cultural struggles raging all around us. Even if all that matters to a man in life is the implementation of a neo-liberal policy prospectus, what are his chances of getting comprehensive free trade deals and a riotous bonfire of red tape approved by an electorate that has been programmed to despise capitalism as an evil construct of white supremacy? How economically productive are people who, for the price of having their childhood delusions indulged by reckless adults, must now contend with the trauma of having had their genitals sawn off and their healthy bodies pumped with unnatural hormones? Is the market really free if the culture in which CEOs operate produces lawmakers intent on ordering them to hire an army of DEI commissars?
It is impossible to reverse our descent into anarcho-tyranny unless we grasp the ideological motivations of those behind the new insidious state of affairs. In short, they subscribe to a blank-slate view of the human person. Anything undesirable in social life, from armed heists to urine-caked alleyways, is not the mark of a fallen or uncultivated nature in individuals, but the result of unjust systems that have been socially constructed to privilege certain groups and to dominate others. As such, any crime committed by a person who falls into one of the regime’s accredited victim groups is proof only of their embattled oppression.
Once this power dynamic is racialised, as indeed it has been, it becomes morally unthinkable to punish the violent conduct of, say, a black recidivist. To do so would only intensify the oppression that drove him to crime in the first place. Likewise, as part of the urgent revolutionary drive to purify our society that has made a systemic practice of persecuting black men, it becomes an active duty to punish anything that can be accused of perpetuating or reinforcing such injustice.
We are increasingly ruled by self-regarding revolutionaries who view the dynamics of anarcho-tyranny as the necessary if somewhat eccentric means by which their ideological aims can be achieved. This explains the apparent contradiction whereby ‘stop and search’ powers are repealed by the mayor of London (no doubt cheered on by the city’s criminal gangs), while non-violent citizens like Sam Melia face prison for campaigning, not with blades but with stickers, against replacement migration. Disparate crime rates between different ethnic groups may be a regrettable symptom of our society’s ills, but ‘harmful’ opinions and the unjust structures they perpetuate are the intolerable cause. By the lights of a luxury belief class more interested in betting the house on human nature than serving the civilised majority, they therefore warrant greater police attention.
Heather Mac Donald, an American conservative commentator, has aptly described this anti-civilisational phenomenon as “the great inversion” of our time. Governments, she claims, now view their primary mission as catering to the alleged interests and needs of the anti-social, the dysfunctional, and the criminal, while the needs of those who obey the law, work hard, and do more or less everything right increasingly fail to register on the policy-making screen. If anything, taxpayers are treated as ATM machines, convenient only for gathering the funds to subsidise the ever-intensifying “rights revolution.”
The latest figure to offer a defence of this system was the part-time comedian and full-time intellectual heavyweight Jon Stewart. Outraged by Tucker Carlson’s viral video comparing the squeaky-clean subway in Moscow to its decaying equivalents in the United States, he waxed lyrical about the fact that, once viewed through the eyes of a midwit in need of approval, canker, crime, and crackheads can at last be seen for what they truly are: “the literal price of freedom.”
Even if Stewart is decent enough to oppose the ‘tyranny’ part of ‘anarcho-tyranny,’ he does a monumental disservice to freedom by equating it with civilisational collapse. Throughout the history of political thought, there has been an acknowledgement so conventional as to be boring that individual freedom can neither flourish nor enjoy public support without social order. Government with a light touch is only practicable in a high-trust society. There must be a culture in which the virtues are widely prized and the norms necessary for co-operative social existence between strangers are generally observed.
It is very much the habit of modern liberals to neglect these kinds of preconditions, typically on the grounds that such things are intolerably prior to the individual as opposed to freely authored into being by his will. Even worse, some will not only fetishise liberty as an abstract ideal, but actively condemn its vital underpinnings as an unwelcome encroachment on personal autonomy.
The fact remains that a state with heavily circumscribed powers can only be expected to step in to deal with exceptions to civilised behaviour. If incivility becomes the norm and trust across all levels of society consequently breaks down, the state will be incentivised to expand its role from placid night watchman to omnipresent invigilator.
The sinister paradox of anarcho-tyranny is that, while the state is constantly arrogating to itself more powers, it is for the most part not using them to deter the really serious crimes against life, limb, and property. A very new ghost has infiltrated the reassuringly antique machinery of the British state. Our tradition of ordered liberty, based on the understanding that freedom requires civility which in turn requires virtue, has thus been overthrown. We would do well to remember Burke’s resounding defence, made with characteristic coltishness, of this inheritance that our rulers have arrogantly abandoned:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Tucker Carlson put the point a little more trenchantly in his response to Stewart’s defence of public squalor:
You can’t fool me because I’ve lived here [in the United States] for 54 years. I know that it’s not the price of freedom, because I lived in a country that was both free and clean and orderly.
For the sake of preserving liberty, we are not obliged to put up with an epidemic of putrefying filth and malodorous scents. But we shall certainly refuse to do so if the regimes under which we live, armed with spurious utopian pretexts, fail to keep their even grubbier mitts off our souls.
Canker, Crime, and Crackheads: An Odd Price to Pay for Tyranny
Charly Triballeau / AFP
Across the West, there is a simultaneous sense that life is both more permissively lax and more tightly controlled than it has been in living memory. Not even the British Isles, the proud home of Fortescue and Burke, have managed to avoid this strangest of falls from ordered freedom to anarcho-tyranny.
Coined by the late Sam Francis, a celebrated figure on the dissident Right, ‘anarcho-tyranny’ describes a perverse state of affairs whereby the most basic laws are freely broken by anti-social delinquents while well-behaved citizens, usually in the name of protecting the regime’s accredited victim groups, are forcibly wrapped in an ever-expanding web of dictates, constraints, and speech codes. When these fail to secure conformity, there is even the chance that legal penalties will be doled out to brave souls who transgress against politically correct dogmas.
The evidence is there for all to see. While things are not as bad on this side of the Atlantic as they are in the Democrat-run cities of the United States, there are still unmistakable signs of social decay, reflected in everything from dirtier streets and coarsened public habits to a rising crime rate and the increasingly emboldened nature of Islamist intimidation in both local and national politics.
In Britain, the number of recorded crimes per prisoner has gone from around six in the early 20th century to 114 today. It does not take a Ph.D. in criminology (if anything, it is likely to hinder the effort) to work out from this data point that most criminals are already hardened offenders by the time they see the inside of a cell.
Meanwhile, it took just one display of peaceful dissent for Sam Melia, a right-wing activist, to be arrested and dragged before a jury by the British state. His offence? Distributing ‘racist’ stickers with slogans like ‘We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066’ and ‘Stop mass immigration.’ Just last month, Melia was found guilty of inciting racial hatred and will likely be punished with prison time. This is only the latest in a long list of cases which have seen people pursued by the authorities for crimes of conscience, whether praying silently outside an abortion clinic or posting ‘transphobic’ poems on social media.
It should go without saying that this is all ideological. There are some onlookers—many of them prisoners of whatever passes for wisdom in libertarian think tanks—who loftily dismiss the culture war as a distracting sideshow. Why stoke pointless conflicts, the crude idea runs, when the real imperative is to fight a bracing crusade on behalf of cutting capital gains tax?
It is precisely because politics is downstream of culture, as Andrew Breitbart helpfully put it, that anyone interested in policy must pay attention to the cultural struggles raging all around us. Even if all that matters to a man in life is the implementation of a neo-liberal policy prospectus, what are his chances of getting comprehensive free trade deals and a riotous bonfire of red tape approved by an electorate that has been programmed to despise capitalism as an evil construct of white supremacy? How economically productive are people who, for the price of having their childhood delusions indulged by reckless adults, must now contend with the trauma of having had their genitals sawn off and their healthy bodies pumped with unnatural hormones? Is the market really free if the culture in which CEOs operate produces lawmakers intent on ordering them to hire an army of DEI commissars?
It is impossible to reverse our descent into anarcho-tyranny unless we grasp the ideological motivations of those behind the new insidious state of affairs. In short, they subscribe to a blank-slate view of the human person. Anything undesirable in social life, from armed heists to urine-caked alleyways, is not the mark of a fallen or uncultivated nature in individuals, but the result of unjust systems that have been socially constructed to privilege certain groups and to dominate others. As such, any crime committed by a person who falls into one of the regime’s accredited victim groups is proof only of their embattled oppression.
Once this power dynamic is racialised, as indeed it has been, it becomes morally unthinkable to punish the violent conduct of, say, a black recidivist. To do so would only intensify the oppression that drove him to crime in the first place. Likewise, as part of the urgent revolutionary drive to purify our society that has made a systemic practice of persecuting black men, it becomes an active duty to punish anything that can be accused of perpetuating or reinforcing such injustice.
We are increasingly ruled by self-regarding revolutionaries who view the dynamics of anarcho-tyranny as the necessary if somewhat eccentric means by which their ideological aims can be achieved. This explains the apparent contradiction whereby ‘stop and search’ powers are repealed by the mayor of London (no doubt cheered on by the city’s criminal gangs), while non-violent citizens like Sam Melia face prison for campaigning, not with blades but with stickers, against replacement migration. Disparate crime rates between different ethnic groups may be a regrettable symptom of our society’s ills, but ‘harmful’ opinions and the unjust structures they perpetuate are the intolerable cause. By the lights of a luxury belief class more interested in betting the house on human nature than serving the civilised majority, they therefore warrant greater police attention.
Heather Mac Donald, an American conservative commentator, has aptly described this anti-civilisational phenomenon as “the great inversion” of our time. Governments, she claims, now view their primary mission as catering to the alleged interests and needs of the anti-social, the dysfunctional, and the criminal, while the needs of those who obey the law, work hard, and do more or less everything right increasingly fail to register on the policy-making screen. If anything, taxpayers are treated as ATM machines, convenient only for gathering the funds to subsidise the ever-intensifying “rights revolution.”
The latest figure to offer a defence of this system was the part-time comedian and full-time intellectual heavyweight Jon Stewart. Outraged by Tucker Carlson’s viral video comparing the squeaky-clean subway in Moscow to its decaying equivalents in the United States, he waxed lyrical about the fact that, once viewed through the eyes of a midwit in need of approval, canker, crime, and crackheads can at last be seen for what they truly are: “the literal price of freedom.”
Even if Stewart is decent enough to oppose the ‘tyranny’ part of ‘anarcho-tyranny,’ he does a monumental disservice to freedom by equating it with civilisational collapse. Throughout the history of political thought, there has been an acknowledgement so conventional as to be boring that individual freedom can neither flourish nor enjoy public support without social order. Government with a light touch is only practicable in a high-trust society. There must be a culture in which the virtues are widely prized and the norms necessary for co-operative social existence between strangers are generally observed.
It is very much the habit of modern liberals to neglect these kinds of preconditions, typically on the grounds that such things are intolerably prior to the individual as opposed to freely authored into being by his will. Even worse, some will not only fetishise liberty as an abstract ideal, but actively condemn its vital underpinnings as an unwelcome encroachment on personal autonomy.
The fact remains that a state with heavily circumscribed powers can only be expected to step in to deal with exceptions to civilised behaviour. If incivility becomes the norm and trust across all levels of society consequently breaks down, the state will be incentivised to expand its role from placid night watchman to omnipresent invigilator.
The sinister paradox of anarcho-tyranny is that, while the state is constantly arrogating to itself more powers, it is for the most part not using them to deter the really serious crimes against life, limb, and property. A very new ghost has infiltrated the reassuringly antique machinery of the British state. Our tradition of ordered liberty, based on the understanding that freedom requires civility which in turn requires virtue, has thus been overthrown. We would do well to remember Burke’s resounding defence, made with characteristic coltishness, of this inheritance that our rulers have arrogantly abandoned:
Tucker Carlson put the point a little more trenchantly in his response to Stewart’s defence of public squalor:
For the sake of preserving liberty, we are not obliged to put up with an epidemic of putrefying filth and malodorous scents. But we shall certainly refuse to do so if the regimes under which we live, armed with spurious utopian pretexts, fail to keep their even grubbier mitts off our souls.
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