Anybody who can put together a coherent exposition of a major socio-political situation by mashing Machiavelli and Pareto is worth reading!

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/britains-foxes-are-beset-by-wolves?publication_id=330796&post_id=147555144&isFreemail=true&r=bj80t&triedRedirect=true

The conclusion:

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.

One thing about “Brave New World” that got to me was that the characters go to the “feelies” the way that people went to the movies. “Feelies” struck me as a really strange word and concept, but now I realize that for Huxley, “movies” must have been a very strange (and perhaps barbarous) word and concept.

Those who liked “Brave New World” should have a look at Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We.” It must have been an influence on Huxley, who shifted the focus from the dreams of the early Soviet Union to the West of the 20s and 30s. Orwell, who wrote about Zamyatin shifted the setting yet again to the totalitarian and wartime regimes of the 30s and 40s.

FWIW, Bruno Rizzi, an Italian shoe salesman, was an influence on Burnham, and perhaps on Orwell.

“How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

Which seems so apropos as to how we are in the midst of losing our freedoms and slipping into Dictatorship.

Orwell was an interesting man. He remained a Socialist for the rest of his life and flirted with Communism until he volunteered to fight for the Republic in Spain and saw how evil the Communists really were. His biographer also wrote that Orwell although not a genocide supporter, had antisemitic feelings. Even though he wrote plenty about World War II he never (or rarely) mentioned the Holocaust.

Agreed that language can affect how people think but doesn’t determine thought or prevent thinking things for which there are no words.

The left works extremely hard to change language in order to affect perceptions – no more “illegal aliens” but instead “undocumented workers.” No more “homeless” but people who are simply “unhoused.” And of course the emphasis on pronouns. It all helps to move the Overton Window.

Leftists are not dumb in terms of their knowledge about how to influence people.

You are arguing against strong Sapir-Whorf. Not having words for yes/no/run doesn’t rule out using such concepts. Weak Sapir-Whorf argues that it may affect using them.

For instance, there is research showing that Russians who have two separate words for light-blue and dark-blue perceive the difference more quickly than English speakers having only one word, blue.
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What makes this experiment so interesting, then, is that it provides the first evidence that language, independent of other aspects of culture, is directly influencing color perception. It does so by showing that that influence is occurring online, and can thus be reduced or eliminated (reversed, even) by interfering with that influence using a verbal working memory manipulation. Obviously, this is just the first step in conclusively showing that language, independent of other cultural influences, can affect perception, and how it does so, but it’s a much needed first step. For anyone who’s interested (or mildly obsessed, as I am) in linguistic relativity, this is therefore a very exciting study.

https://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/05/07/the-font-color0000ffbluesfont
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Also, dismissing such effects as marketing doesn’t really dismiss them.

Corporations spend billions of dollars on marketing in order to affect consumer behavior. That doesn’t mean everyone seeing a commercial for Coke marches out lockstep to buy a Coke. But enough do buy Coke.

I suspect such efforts are effective to some degree — like weak Sapir-Whorf.