On Ruthlessness and Pity

The phenomenology of tyranny in 2024

Pity is the virtue of the law,
And none but tyrants use it cruelly.

-from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Act III, scene 5, line 8.

The capacity to act ruthlessly is a necessary quality in the exercise of leadership. Sometimes, one must of necessity set pity to one side in order to achieve what one sees as a more important objective. Identifying who a leader is ruthless towards, and in what circumstances, therefore helps us to shed light on his or her priorities. And so, too, does a corresponding identification of those to whom the leader displays pity - pity, of course, being simply ruthlessness in the converse.

A phenomenological analysis of the State, then, can be performed through this lens of ruthlessness and pity. Through identifying those to whom the State displays compassion, and those to whom it denies mercy, we can discern its true nature. Join me, then, as I engage in a preliminary such inquiry.

Some recent news stories will help us with this analysis. And what they will demonstrate, I aim to show, is the early formation of a tyranny properly so-called, and as it was described to us in classical sources - a mode of rule which desires the population to be weak and insecure; which therefore does not recognise the right to property of its subjects; which rules through sowing discord between different individuals, groups and classes; which prioritises the needs of the foreign-born over the settled population; and which treats law as a tool or a weapon rather than a constraint. I do not suggest in crude terms that this tyrannical turn is attributable to a single government, nor that it is deliberate. Rather, I simply point to tyrannical contours, as it were, that are taking shape in the way in which we are governed.

Ruthlessness and pity

First, there is the widely reported case of MD (DRC), an appalling one in almost every respect. It concerns a man, MD, who arrived in the UK in 2008 from the Democratic Republic of Congo and claimed asylum. In a familiar story, his claim was rejected but he was allowed to remain in the country anyway on human rights grounds, since, having apparently in the interim got married, deportation would interfere with his right to a family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). He is now a father of four - three natural children and a step-daughter. In 2020, when the step-daughter was only ten years old, MD was convicted of assault, sexual penetration and sexual assault against her and two of her cousins, and sentenced to a three year prison sentence. Since, pursuant to s.32(1) of the UK Borders Act 2007, this makes him a ‘foreign criminal’, and since under that Act foreign criminals are to be deported, he was ordered to be sent back to the DRC on release. But he successfully appealed this decision on the basis that his third child has severe autism and it is important for MD to provide ‘emotional support’ to his wife and other children; deporting him would therefore breach their rights to a family life and he must be given leave to remain. This was despite - take careful note - that the First Tier Tribunal of the Immigration & Asylum Chamber, which made the decision, found that he ‘continues to pose a risk to the community, in particular children’.

It should be added that a lot of the press coverage of the case has been somewhat misleading in suggesting that the final outcome is that MD will not be deported. Actually, in a decision on 3rd September 2024 in the Upper Tribunal of the Immigration & Asylum Chamber, the case was directed to be reheard de novo on various grounds and it may well be that eventually MD is sent home. (This may actually have happened already; the case would have been reheard in the First Tier Tribunal, and there case reports are hard to come by.)

But nonetheless the case has served as something of a lightning rod because we are now so familiar with those of its type. I recently wrote a post, for example, about the case of ZM, the Ugandan participant in a brutal gangland killing who escaped deportation on release from prison on the human rights grounds that being sent back to Uganda would result in a deterioration in his mental health. Following hot on the heels of MD is the decision in the case of Shavon Walker v Secretary of State for the Home Department, in which a Jamaican national who had committed a string of violent and/or drug-related offences, including the exploitation of teenagers in a ‘county lines’ scheme, had his deportation order quashed on the basis of him being ‘socially and culturally integrated in the UK’. It would be easy to go on - these cases, in which foreign nationals, who are often illegally in the country to begin with, and who have committed sometimes heinous crimes, are permitted to escape deportation on generally fairly tendentious grounds - are issued so frequently it is genuinely difficult to keep up with them all.

The clemency on display in these sorts of cases is a curious and perverse one. It is as though the State’s supply of pity is being spent on the people who are almost definitionally the least deserving of it - those who should not be in the country in the first place, who have inflicted misery on those around them, who will almost certainly continue to pose a threat to society in the future (consider, again, that MD, the paedophile from the DRC, was found by the First Tier Tribunal to ‘continue to pose a risk to the community, in particular children’), and who are on the face of it extremely unlikely to become productive contributors to society even in the very long term.

And it is, of course, also combined with a kind of purblind form of cruelty (we have already observed that ruthlessness is really pity’s twin) visited on the victims of these people. What you cannot fail to have observed about the MD case, for instance, is that MD’s stepdaughter, still only fifteen years old, will - if he is in the end allowed to remain in the country - presumably have to put up with his presence around her in perpetuity. To her credit, the judge in the Upper Tribunal, who ordered the case to be reheard, pointed out that the stepdaughter’s safety ought really to be the starting point of the entire inquiry. But the message is nonetheless transmitted clearly, and frequently, in decisions of the Immigration & Asylum Tribunal: if you are a foreign criminal, the State will take a great deal of detailed and compassionate interest in how you are treated, and will do its utmost to find reasons why it is that you should remain in the country after your sentence is served. Your victims, actual and potential, and the taxpayers who will have to foot the bill for your continued presence here (it is probably safe to say that MD, for example, will never be a net contributor to the public purse) - they don’t matter so much.

Yet lest this interesting dynamic of ruthlessness and pity be thought to be a feature only of the immigration and asylum system in the UK, it is worth considering another big news story - really a collection of big news stories - that have been rumbling on ever since the Autumn Budget of 2024, and where again we see the same sort of dynamic playing out. One of the features of that Budget was a double-whammy aimed at what might be called the yeomanry class of farmers and small business owners, who have found themselves losing a chunk of inheritance tax relief - something which previous governments have recognised to be necessary in order to allow families to pass farms and businesses to their children after death. Inheritance tax on a family farm is particularly pernicious, because farmers are typically very cash poor, and will often therefore only be able to pay an inheritance tax bill of any size by selling up. The same is true to a lesser extent of families inheriting small businesses, who will find themselves having to sell significant chunks of equity in family firms in order to fund tax payments. Inheritance tax relief in these circumstances was designed to ensure that the family firm - really the lifeblood of any economy - could continue in existence and indeed flourish from generation to generation.

The ruthlessness of the move to amend inheritance tax relief was subsequently made plain in remarks made by John McTernan - a charming Glaswegian and Labour apparatchik who has been the subject of posts on my Substack before - who on national news trumpeted the death of an industry (‘small farming’) which he was quite clear we could ‘do without’. And it is entirely of a piece with the wider strategic agenda for the current government, which is characterised by acts of naked fiscal aggression towards those who are conceived to be political opponents - the aspirational classes (through taxing private education with a 20% VAT levy introduced halfway through the school year), the elderly (through removing a subsidy given to pensioners to help pay for fuel over the winter), people who live in rural areas (through a huge expansion in building - of homes, prisons, data centres, wind farms, you name it - in the countryside), and so on.

But this also sits alongside - as one now should expect given the preceding account - stunning largesse extended towards those the government perceives to be its friends, i.e., people on the public sector payrolls: a 5.5% pay rise for teachers; the same again for NHS nurses; a 13.2% pay increase for junior doctors; and so on. It also sits alongside tens of extra billions of pounds dedicated towards a range of schemes designed to make Britain a ‘green energy superpower’, which also include big tax incentives for big business.

And it also sits alongside a rapid, uncontrolled expansion in the size of the welfare state which has transcended changes in government and which is, in itself, undoubtedly the most significant political phenomenon of the last century. The numbers here are truly extraordinary - £250 billion spent on benefits alone each year, nearly 6 million people on out-of-work benefits, a disability benefits caseload set to hit 7 million by 2028, 5,890 people per month newly granted long-term disability benefits for anxiety and depression, 9 million people economically inactive, and so on and so forth. And all of this in a society in which national debt is over 100% of GDP, and debt servicing alone costs £89 billion a year.

The message sent by all of this is, again, as clear as day. Who, in respect of tax and spending, is the State ruthless towards? And to whom does it display pity?

And the third of our news stories concerns the Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson and her run-in with Essex Police regarding a so-called Non-Crime Hate Incident (NCHI). NCHIs, you may be aware, are incidents investigated by the police which definitionally are not criminal, but which are nonetheless recorded on the criminal record of the ‘perpetrator’, and which will therefore be flagged in criminal records checks which prospective employers may carry out before considering somebody for a job. These are incidents, to be clear, which are reported to the police by a ‘victim’ (not an ‘accuser’) on the basis merely that he or she has ‘perceived’ it to have been ‘motivated by hostility or prejudice’. And they are frequently laughably trivial and patently vindictive or vexatious - widely reported NCHIs include an instance of an 11-year old boy calling another a ‘leprechaun’, and another of somebody complaining about her neighbours hanging soiled underpants on their washing line.

In Pearson’s case, the NCHI in question concerned a tweet she had sent around 12 months previously, which seems to have been about the large anti-Israel demonstrations taking place around Remembrance Sunday in 2023 - Pearson likely said something derogatory about the marchers. And the irony of her receiving police attention in respect of this tweet will be evident to anybody familiar with the nature of those anti-Israel demonstrations, and the level of anti-semitic bile that tends to be spewed at such events - and also with the light-touch manner in which they are policed.

But this is broadly indicative, of course, of the cherry-picking way in which the criminal justice system in the UK generally functions, the now classic example being the ‘Southport’ rioters of the Summer of 2024 - who undoubtedly, broadly speaking, should have faced the judicial consequences of their criminal conduct where it had taken place, but whose cases were rapidly expedited by a ‘fast track’ process even as trials for serious crimes such as rape face delays of up to four years, and even as judges routinely avoid giving serious criminals - such as those possessing images of child sexual abuse - custodial sentences at all.

The ruthlessness-pity dialectic, as it were, will be abundantly evident here, and abundantly evident in particular in the way in which law is wielded to send political messages and in the interests of political objectives. To repeat, it is instructive to examine the way the criminal justice system operates not at the level of the individual case or trial, but as the way it is experienced, phenomenologically, by those who are subject to it. How indeed is it experienced - at the level of who it seems to punish, and who it seems to show mercy? To whom, once again, does the State show pity? And to whom is it ruthless?

On tyranny

The result of this analysis brings me back once more to the subject of tyranny as it was once understood (see previous posts, for example, here, here, here, here and here). In the classical texts, we gain an understanding of tyranny, as I put it in one of those posts, as:

[A manifestation of] the desire that an illegitimate ruler has to provide justification for his own status. A tyrant quintessentially ascends to the throne through extra-constitutional means, and therefore he cannot point to law (or democratic legitimacy) in order to keep his status. Instead, counter-intuitively, in order to prevent himself being overthrown by the population, he needs to try to make them love and depend upon him. This means that a wise tyrant is driven to come up with reasons as to why his rule is actually more practically beneficial than any alternative.

And the result of this, as we frequently seen in ancient sources, is an understanding of tyranny as possessing certain features which flow from that basic problem of the self-interested ruler trying to retain his position of power and being driven therefore to govern with this objective continually in mind.

The first of these features, and perhaps the central one, is the need to keep the population weak, insecure, and above all dependent on the tyrant - for the simple reason that, the weaker the population is, and the more reliant on the tyrant they become, the less likely they are to overthrow (or just ignore) him.

This manifests itself most obviously in the drive to make the people literally physically reliant on the tyrant’s largesse, so that they have no independent source of wealth. Hence, as Aristotle tells us, the tyrant must ‘impoverish’ the population so as to ‘keep them busy with their daily tasks’, especially through ‘the imposition of taxes’. But he must also be in a position to portray himself as their saviour in this regard - he must (according to Xenophon) ‘make [them] afraid’ for his own ‘well-being’ by constantly presenting himself as serving the ‘common good’, and thereby making the people look up to him in ‘warmth and admiration’.

He must in other words strike a careful balance between subverting or destabilising any source of independent wealth - while at the same time ensuring that everybody has enough to be safe, secure, and absent of basic wants. He must in short ensure that all are kept in a kind of well-fed servitude, while at the same time never being in a position of sufficient security that they feel as though they no longer need the tyrant to exist.

It follows from this that the people should also be in no position to possess private property, or at least should only be allowed to possess property contingently. As Leo Strauss puts it, the skilful tyrant ‘would consider his [entire] fatherland his private property which he would naturally administer according to his own discretion’, because it is in administering and disbursing property that he most effectively undermines the autonomy of the populace. Hence, from Xenophon again, the tyrant must put himself in a position to ‘consider the whole country [his] estate’. And, correspondingly, there must be no property rights as such for the population - it must be the case that at any time the tyrant can be in a position to seize property to give as a gift to some supporter, or to punish some recalcitrant, or to bring down to size some individual who has got too big for his boots.

And it also follows that, to return to Aristotle, the people must be made to hate and fear one another through the tactics of divide and rule. They must be made to ‘adopt a defensive attitude against everything likely to produce…mutual confidence and a high spirit’; they must be made ‘as much of a stranger as possible to [each] other’; they must be driven apart in ‘mutual distrust and…discord’. It must be the case that each of them individually fears the others, while loving the tyrant - the only relationship that matters must be the one-on-one between the subservient individual and the tyrant on which he relies. A society united by familial, cultural, communal, commercial and religious bonds is one which does not need a ruler; a society that is totally atomised and disunited does. The incentive for the tyrant is therefore obvious.

And, as Aristotle puts it, there is an obvious corollary - every subject of the tyrant must be made to lose the desire to ‘speak their minds’ out of fear, by forcing them to live their lives ‘constantly…in public’ and thereby making their every utterance available for scrutiny, criticism, and opprobrium. A population in which people trust one another is one in which they permit one another to express themselves freely, safe in the knowledge that nobody will take undue offence. Correspondingly, a society characterised by mistrust will be one in which people do not speak their minds - and, obviously, this is the social situation which a tyrant should prefer, because it is a circumstance in which the people will be disunited and unable to overthrow him.

This also explains why it is that both Aristotle and Xenophon saw tyrants as preferring to rely on the foreign-born, particularly foreign mercenaries, as companions. Since the tyrant both seeks to enervate the population and also to secure his own rule, it follows that he should desire to bolster his support by relying on foreigners; the citizenry should be thoroughly domesticated and set at odds with one another, as we have seen (so as not to be in a position to challenge the tyrant’s rule), but this necessarily creates a need for the tyrant to rely on imported personnel. A tyrant, Xenophon tells us therefore, prefers a ‘foreign militia’ who will be a ‘more formidable fighting force’ than the locals; Aristotle, meanwhile, warning that a tyrant hates anybody with dignity or independence, describes him as ‘prefer[ring] the company of aliens to that of citizens at table in society’. He keeps the foreign born close because they serve his needs, but also because, having systematically deprived the citizens of their autonomy and wherewithal, he needs competent servants to get his work done.

And finally the essence of tyranny, for Socrates of course, was that it was ‘not controlled by laws’ (as reported in the Memorabilia) - it was power exercised unconstrained. It is important to make clear that this does not mean that it was identical with anarchy exactly; a tyrant, while being himself unconstrained by law, may be perfectly happy to make all manner of rules and regulations to govern the population’s conduct. Rather, it means that the tyrant is in some sense above and beyond law - law is a mere tool for him to achieve his objectives, and is not a source of constitutional restraint on the bounds of his authority. He can use it for his own, political or purely self-interested, ends, while himself transcending it. And it follows of course that he can deploy it as a weapon against those to whom he is disposed to be ruthless, or as a tool of mercy towards those with whom he has pity - and he can ignore it as it suits him in the interests of either such objective, too.

In summary then we see the tyrant emerging as a figure who behaves ruthlessly towards those who are dignified, self-reliant, and autonomous - and particularly those who possess property - while pitying those who are weak and dependent on his own largesse. He is a figure who seeks always to divide and sow discord within the population, mercilessly setting them at odds with on another by forcing their lives to be always disclosed to public scrutiny, such that any who might be disposed to exercise freedom are afraid to speak their minds. He favours foreign militias and ‘aliens’ and is happy to have them ‘at table’ while he keeps the citizens in a position of servile reliance. And he deploys the law as a tool for his own ends, wielding it or ignoring it as he sees fit, and making of it a weapon or a shield as he desires.

The experience of tyranny

We see in this a clear pattern in respect of how ruthlessness and pity will play out in a tyrannical regime. And it will be seen, immediately, that this is a highly suggestive way of conceiving of the activities of the modern State as I have here described them. What better way can there be of ‘impoverishing’ the population and forcing them into a position of dependence than crushing those who are independent with punitive tax rises and encouraging ever-increasing numbers of unfortunate people to rely on the welfare state in the long-term? What better way of reminding the population that their right to property is contingent by taxing inherited farms or businesses? What better way to encourage mutual distrust and societal disharmony than through encouraging the feeling that the criminal justice system plays favourites - that it picks and chooses, that it cannot be trusted, that it appears to say one thing out of one corner of its mouth and another from the other, that it can be wielded as a weapon by one rival against another, that it does not appear to serve the interests of justice properly understood (other than perhaps through permitting the criminal justice system to be used to deliberately target free expression and make people fear to ‘speak their minds’)? What better parallel to Aristotle’s depiction of the tyrant preferring the company of ‘aliens’ at table than the modern spectacle of vast numbers of imported labour filling the job vacancies left by the 9 million working age adults who are economically inactive? What better spectacle of law deployed as a tool than the concept of the NCHI - a means to, literally, police opinion, and conducted in the almost complete absence of due process or substantive constraint?

Cast in this light, then, much of what have observed about the decisions the modern State makes in respect of how it exerts ruthlessness and pity can be mapped on to the contours of tyranny as I have here described them. This is not to say of course that our leaders are tyrants in the classical sense - and nor is it to suggest even that any of what we experience is deliberate. In some cases it is even true that the ‘system’, so to speak, at least on paper, reflects entirely different priorities (s.32(1) of the UK Borders Act 2007, referred to above, being an obvious case in point). But it is nonetheless increasingly how we experience what it is to be governed in 2024, and it is no doubt a picture that readers will intuitively recognise. No matter what politicians say, and no matter what legislation Parliament enacts, it is how government appears to us that is significant - and its appearance is increasingly tyrannical in the terms I have here described it.

The good news, if it can be called that, however, is that this phenomenological presentation does allow us to identify a way forward for a political movement which wants to save us from our current predicament. Since we know what we currently experience and we know, increasingly, that we do not like it, then common sense would dictate doing the opposite (and would also dictate that we will probably like the outcome a lot more).

What we need, then, is a political movement which seeks to allow the population to be strong and self-reliant; which respects and protects private property; which breeds social cohesion and trust by treating everybody alike particularly through the legal system; which prioritises the needs of the settled population over those from overseas; which enshrines civil liberties insofar as it is possible to do so; and which subjects itself to proper constitutional restraint. And this, as I have aimed to show here, requires a fundamental reassessment of the way in which, and to whom, the State displays ruthlessness and pity - in the knowledge that a good leader understands when to exercise both. It seems possible that in some jurisdictions around the world people are waking up to this reality. Britain appears to be a long way off. But we can at least clearly identify the way forward.