On Human Rights and Excellent Tyranny

Our main duty is to refrain from loving each other

Despotism, which is of a very timorous nature, is never more secure of continuance than when it can keep men asunder; and all its influence is commonly exerted for that purpose.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II

You may have missed the news last week that Olivier De Schutter, the current UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, has come to visit the UK to check up on us. He already seems to have made his mind up, though: it turns out we need to increase welfare spending. ‘£85 a week [the universal credit payment for a single adult over age 25 in the UK] is too low,’ he said in advance of his arrival. ‘That is what human rights law says.’

De Schutter isn’t able to point to a provision of international law or a court ruling that actually says this, of course. Rather, he can be read as taking part in what is becoming a grand tradition among UN Special Rapporteurs on Extreme Poverty: singling out the UK for special opprobrium. In 2018 his predecessor, Philip Alston, gave a caustic report after his own visit to the country, in which he declared that the government was ‘systematically immiserating people’ and that ‘much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos.’ (He also accused the then-government, which was implementing a project of so-called austerity after the financial crisis of 2007/08, of a ‘commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering’. Naturally, he also managed to find time to condemn Brexit.)

These people are, in short, transparently political. But it is worth paying attention to what they have to say in spite of this. This is because they embody what might be called a political anthropology of government which is of very ancient lineage but which, in our wisdom, we have largely forgotten. And, since it is forgotten, it appears to the modern eye to be startlingly fresh.

Let’s examine, as our point of entry, this notion that ‘the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos’. This statement, as we shall see, is in one sense stunningly wrong. But there is another sense in which it is at least partly right. And analysing it in these terms is what will help us get to the heart of the matter.

Wrongness first, then. The first blush implication of the statement is clear: successive Tory governments have shrunk the welfare state. And this is folk wisdom in polite society in the UK, where it is commonly held that Britain was a socialist paradise in 1978, whereupon it was rapidly transformed into a capitalist hell-hole by Margaret Thatcher and has never quite recovered. De Schutter, and Alston before him, are clearly tapping into that quasi-mythical post-war history of the country, wherein the Tory Party conspired with big finance to grind the poor even further down than they already were in order to boost profits.

On its own terms this argument is, flatly, a fantasy. Statistically speaking, the reality is almost the exact opposite: the UK in 2023 has a welfare state which would have been unfathomably large to anybody looking forward from the standpoint of 1978, let alone the end of the Second World War. Expenditure on benefits for the working age population and children was around £90bn in 1978 in today’s money; it now stands at about £230bn (in 2018, when Alston was speaking, it was about £215bn). In 1995 the disability benefit caseload of the Department for Work and Pensions was about 3 million; it is forecast to hit 7 million in 2027/28. The idea in other words that the welfare state has ‘shrunk’ in meaningful terms over the past 50 years, aside perhaps from a few brief interludes, is complete claptrap. We spend money like we have never spent it before (in the 1920s public sector spending as a proportion of GDP was about 25%; in the mid-1960s it was about 35%; it is now around 45%), and we spend more of it on welfare than ever before, too.

So, if one associates a society with a ‘caring’ ethos as being one in which there is a big welfare state, then we are practically drowning in that ethos, and Alston’s statement was simply nonsense.

But that of course is a big ‘if’. And the truth of the matter is that, while the just-so story concerning evil Tories and the shrinking State is precisely that, there is more than a grain of truth in the observation that our society is harsher and less caring than it once was. We spend a lot more on welfare than we did in 1978. But life as it is lived undoubtedly has the feeling of being colder. In the Britain of the 1980s, life for ordinary people was often a struggle - I grew up in a home on Merseyside in which, at times, we literally did not know where the next meal would come from. But there remained a dense network of communal and social ties between neighbours, religious groups, social clubs and so on that gave people, to use some often-abused words, a sense of solidarity and ‘togetherness’.

This is now almost wholly absent in vast swathes of the country, and people feel it. More importantly, so does the state. There are many reasons why the welfare bill was so much lower in 1978, but a significant one is simply that people looked after each other more in those days. Older people, for example, commonly moved in with their adult children when no longer able to look after themselves. Religious organisations cared for the disabled and unemployed. Neighbours lent each other money when they needed it (a commonplace in the neighbourhood I grew up in) and local shopkeepers extended regular customers lines of credit. People gave each other things - furniture, appliances, and so on - that they no longer needed. The days were not halcyon, and one should not fall into bleary-eyed nostalgia for the past. Life on Merseyside, for example, has materially immeasurably improved since my childhood, for all that there are still big pockets of poverty. But the texture of life was in those days very different; the social sphere was bigger, and in a way that younger people today simply cannot really imagine.

Alston’s formula, in other words, gets things badly wrong, but in an informative way. It is true that the ‘glue’ that ‘held society together’ has largely disappeared in recent decades, but this is not a story of a shrinking welfare state. Rather, it is a story of a shrinking social sphere, with the welfare state expanding accordingly. We spend a great deal of money, now, to do things that previous generations did for themselves. And that is the real story of poverty and social security over the past thirty or so years.

Why don’t people like Olivier De Schutter and Philip Alston recognise this? On reflection, it is not really surprising. It is because they exhibit a feature of rulership which the ancients understood very well. The one universal feature of rulership is that it involves individual human beings arranged into hierarchies. And once human beings are part of a hierarchy, their minimal concern becomes to retain their position, and their ideal wish to move upwards. This incentivises in rulers what Leo Strauss identified as a need to exhibit ‘excellent tyranny’, and what Machiavelli described as the desire to act as a ‘good’ or ‘praiseworthy’ prince. In short, the surest way to retain one’s position of power and to climb the greasy pole is to do nice things for people - to make them happy (or at least plausibly present oneself in that light).

In Xenophon’s Hiero (circa 450 BC), we see the clearest and possibly earliest statement along these lines. In this dialogue, we overhear the poet Simonides giving advice to the tyrant Hieron I of Syracuse. Hieron is bored and unhappy. Tyranny is not going well; it is stressful and unrewarding, and the people hate him. Simonides’ response is simple. To be a happy tyrant, the thing to do is not to make the people fear you, but to make them fearful about the prospect of you falling. You need, in other words, to make the people reliant upon you, and consider you to be necessary. You need to make them love you. Once you do that, your status will be secure, and life will be pleasurable to boot.

That this is the basic logic of rulership is plainly evident to those who have not had their minds befuddled by theory. Rulership has a natural arc, and its arc bends towards absolutism, motivated by self-interest. The more one can do for people, the more necessary one makes oneself appear, and the more one therefore bolsters one’s status and builds upon it. Anyone who wishes to understand modern governance simply needs to begin with that thumbnail sketch in mind: when unconstrained, power tends towards ‘excellent tyranny’, meaning tyranny which has the good of the population in mind as a means to an end of cementing the rule of the tyrant.

The reason why Hiero is so important, and why Strauss insisted upon its importance, is that it opens a window onto a way of looking at the political sphere that was interested in ‘permanent problems’, and was therefore unencumbered by the ‘systemic’ way of understanding the world that is so characteristic of current political philosophy and political science. We tend nowadays to think of things in terms of impersonal structures rather than personal desires. This blinds us to the fact that political structures are always ultimately a product of an aggregate of individual motives, beliefs, ideas, decisions and incentives, and do not have an existence external to those things. And hence this also blinds us to the fact that a governing ‘system’ is really made up of thousands upon thousands of people, all of whose understanding of their role - all else being equal - is to conceive of it along the lines of the ‘excellent tyranny’ I have described. The job of the governor is justified on the basis that it makes its subjects happy. And everybody in a position of power basically acts with that unstated vision in mind, in the absence of some other overriding value or set of incentives.

What this means at the coalface is that the type of people who tend to occupy a given position of power (no matter how petty - this is as true for local government flunkies as it is for Prime Ministers and Presidents) typically tends to be the kind of person who at minimum sees no problem with the basic idea that the State should always do more for people, and who also tends to be the kind of person who thinks that in principle there is no arena of life which should be beyond the State’s purview. Another way of putting this is that the individual men and women who comprise a governing system need that governing system to perpetuate itself, and they therefore have every incentive to think that the population being made ever more reliant on the continued existence of the governing system is a jolly good idea, all things considered.

It follows, as wise thinkers have repeatedly pointed out down the centuries, that it is very important for a governing class to enervate the population. As Strauss puts it, in his analysis of Hiero, ‘the brave and the just are not desirable as subjects of a tyrant’ because the brave and the just have no need of excellent tyranny, or indeed any ruler whatsoever. They can look after themselves, and by extension each other, and to the tyrant there is no greater anathema than a society comprising people who can look after themselves and each other, for reasons which should now be obvious. What the tyrant wants, above all, is a population comprising entirely atomised individuals, who are not merely unwilling to, but are incapable of, supporting one another. What it desires more than anything else, as Tocqueville identified, is for us not to love one another. Because if we love one another, our need for the State retreats.

It would be too simplistic to say that this observation in itself accounts for the dissolution of the ‘social glue’ and the concomitant ‘harshness’ that Alston noticed. Our growing social atomisation is the result of many factors. But the readiness of the State to step in is undoubtedly a significant one of them - and it is certainly not the case that a retreating State, as Alston alleged, is the cause. The position, accurately stated, is that, wherever an argument is made that the State ought to do something, there is no principled opposition, because of the incentives that naturally accompany the occupation of a position of rule. And hence, wherever we look, the pressure upon us not to love one another grows ever stronger and more intense. That is the story of Britain in 2023 - not the daft fiction that Margaret Thatcher had it in her power or motivation to grind down the poor, but government’s arc towards absolutism, or excellent tyranny, in action.

The only thing that remains to be said, in closing, is that since these are the juices in which people like Olivier De Schutter and Philip Alston marinade. As fully paid up members of the governing framework, they naturally carry this mindset into their jobs in global governance. If the incentive of the State is always to expand towards excellent tyranny, then the incentive of global governance is to support that tendency among the State officials who act as global governance’s selectorate. Again, this is not reasoning that is hard to understand, or complicated to apply. The path on which we walk is Tocqueville’s, and the end state is one in which we are sundered from one another entirely so that the perpetuation of the governing framework itself becomes our only concern and our only duty. This is why UN Special Rapporteurs find it so natural and easy to find reasons why the State should do more; it is simply in the way of things for such people to think of excellent tyranny as the only game in town.