Know Your Enemies and Know Yourself

Survival strategies of the principality and the republic

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperilled in every single battle.

-Sun Tzu

Speaking at an event in Budapest last year, I said that the future for Britain looked bleak. I predicted that things would get worse, and then get much worse, and then get even worse than that - and it would be only then that, finally, there might be a chance they would get better.

I was not being glib. Things are going to get out of hand - fast. And we all know it. We cannot quite see the wall that we are about to plough into at 90 mph, but we all know it’s out there and that we are heading towards it, just as we know that the brakes don’t seem to work no matter how hard we press the metal.

At first glance, our national failings would appear to derive from a lack of a coherent strategy. The British State does lots of things, and does almost all of them badly. But they also appear to be totally uncoordinated - and even to work in opposition to the national interest. We drive energy prices sky-high; we pile up national debt such that merely servicing it is a bigger budget line item than national defence; we allow tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of people to enter the country illegally each year without bothering to discriminate between those who are likely to be positive or negative contributors; we systematically denigrate our own culture and institutions; we give away important strategic assets; we allow our enemies to corrupt our institutions of higher education from within. And there appears to be no rhyme or reason to any of this other than perhaps a Freudian death drive - what on Earth do we think we are doing?

I would like to argue here, however, that this is the wrong way to think about things. It is not that we have become incapable of thinking strategically - by which I mean identifying long-term goals and working to achieve them. The problem is much more philosophical than that. It is that those charged with governing are thinking strategically in the wrong way - their strategy is that of the principality, rather than the republic; it is, to put it another way, the strategy of personal, rather than national, survival.