Roaring Lions and Smirking Foxes — Alasdair J. Marshall

An Interview with Alasdair Marshall on Pareto’s ‘Liberalism of Sneer’ and its implications for theorising comedy.

One extended answer to the first open-ended question is followed by three brief supplementary questions and answers, which turn more directly to comedy and cruelty and offer some further reading. The interviewee would like to thank Professor Giorgio Baurchello for his very kind invitation to address the questions.

Trigger Warning: The following argument presents democracy as a dynamic tension between liberal and conservative sensibility, and it suggests that both should be allowed their sense of humour. Some readers may consider this position ‘unsafe’.

A philosopher and a teacher: Tell us about yourself and your work.

As Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, “The fool doth think himself wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” As a dedicated Pareto scholar for over thirty years, I have trodden this epistemological pathway, coming to know reason as the slave of the passions. The result has been a paradox of sorts (or I could be kind to myself and call it a creative interplay) – an appreciation of Roger Scruton’s conservatism that offers reasons to resist intellectual system-building, combined with deep self-congratulatory immersion within one of the most conservative intellectual systems of them all: Pareto’s.

Indeed, much of Pareto’s acerbic, truculent and misanthropic humour has rubbed off on me, compelling me to recount my intellectual development accordingly, in a spirit of irony and half-serious amusement as befits those who harbour contradictory views of what intellect can achieve within political life. There is something indeed satisfyingly democratising about this spirited combination of self-debasement and fanfare for the common idiot. I indulge this tendency here for a rather serious purpose: to set the scene for the theoretical orientation towards comedy that I shall explore in the following pages, linking the death of comedy in the 2010s to the contemporary death of democracy.

These are hardly laughing matters in themselves, of course. Yet gallows humour offers a cope. It seems very much time for the doomster pessimists to take to the comedy stage. Or is it? Law is fast strangling freedom of political speech in the UK these days – and who knows what society will look like in just a few years. Will a brutal right-wing government restore freedom of speech? I doubt that – and yet I double doubt if anyone else will. Oh, how Pareto would have loved this world.

Just as McDonald’s is sometimes regarded as a great levelling-down democratiser because no one can eat a burger with dignity, so too does self-effacing humour deflate the pretensions by which we distinguish ourselves from our fellow human beings. By inviting others to look down on us, it exposes the vanity that leads them to presume their own superiority. Yet this exposure is itself a retaliatory strike, deriving its satisfaction from turning the tables on those who take the bait. Such is the biochemical rationality of downward social comparison, and the seemingly inescapable Adlerian oscillation between superiority and inferiority in which every joke implicates us. We are, after all, like crack-cocaine addicts for our own brain opiates – often caring little who we harm (ourselves included) to get our fix.

My point in invoking this Sartrean hell of reciprocal downward social comparison is not merely to indulge in the levelling of distinctions through ridicule, or to wallow in comedy’s tragic entanglement with the drug highs of such comparison. Rather, I want to convey the tragic social realism I derive from Pareto, and why it matters today as a mirror held up to the worst of human nature as routinely expresses through homo politicus.

It is well known that Pareto scoffed at ‘–ists’ and their ‘–isms’. Nonetheless, what I have come to value most about his sociological work is its simplifying ‘informal framework’ within which an uncompromising, full–spectrum realism – encompassing ontological, axiological, epistemological, psychological, ethical, methodological, relational, institutional, economic, historical and political dimensions, alongside international–relations realism and lifeboat realism – becomes possible. All-encompassing, kitchen-sink realism in the Paretian mould offers, I believe, the perfect model for the critical orientation comedy must hone if it is to promote the public good by exposing the true nature of the political – this being a crack house we all frequent daily, where so many of us now go to experience our most intense neuropharmacological highs and lows.

The unifying premise of Paretian realism, as I understand it, is a tragic conception of human nature, characterised by gross perceptual bias and the abuse of power – a reckoning from which I could hardly exempt myself, let alone anyone else. It says to the liberal, your vice is fraud; to the conservative, your vice is force. And so things shall most likely always be, if history is any guide to the future! To understand what this means for our political psychologies, we must first try to sensitive to how ‘fraud’ and ‘force’ can both break down into many facets of both the personal and the political that we might easily feel ashamed of. The next step is to recognise that neither broad set of ‘vices’ belongs exclusively to one political camp, nor are we ourselves immune to either. That is perhaps the hardest truth to bear. To put it bluntly, we are all deeply afflicted by both sets of vices, however readily we discern them in others and excuse them in ourselves. And so we become political by projecting and looking down. Conservatives can direct their anxieties towards the chaotic metropolitan individualism of ‘liberal’ life; liberals, meanwhile, can channel their own authoritarian aggression into calls to bash the ‘fash’ and the ‘haters’ – categories that can encompass almost anyone who fails to conform the post-nationalism that has grown hegemonic in the last few years.

Such is my Paretian liberalism of sneer – and it is readily adaptable to the argument that comedy has a vital social role to play: that of theorising deeply flawed mind behind the veil of elite power, so that neither the liberals nor the conservatives who reside there get too big for their own boots. This outlook has led me to value not only political democracy but also an ideal of ‘full spectrum’ metapolitical pluralism and tolerance extending across all elite institutions (even universities!), without which mature political democracy surely cannot develop. In other words, I have followed Pareto in becoming a committed advocate of what he termed ‘open elites’, recognising the limited but nonetheless worthwhile protection against elite excess and overreach that elite openness may afford us as the elites of the day cycle through hubristic success and fragile, cruel downfall.

In my 2025 book Re-Reading Pareto on Elite Power, I simplify the constructive relationship between liberals and conservatives that can emerge within open-elite environments as follows: imagine a trickster criminal who abhors violence and a violent criminal with no aptitude for tricksterism. Put them together as a team (e.g. in a jailbreak scenario), and they may at least try to combine the best of their respective skills while restraining one another’s worst vices. Such is the benefit, it seems to me, in accommodating full-spectrum liberal-conservative difference across all manner of governing and non-governing institutions (once more, including universities!). Just imagine what a Europe of more ‘open elites’ might have looked like over the past decade or so. Perhaps, had border-security obsessed conservative voices been better represented across all our governing and non-governing elite institutions, we would not be on the verge of deep civil conflict today. And note that I mean real conservative voices – not those of the neo-liberal rakes who have populated all the conservative parties as well as many more of our institutions for at least the last forty-five years or so.

If there is some bildungsroman of intellectual growth to be found in my journey, pushing me ever onwards towards my deep epistemic cynicism as may sound to some as though its proper place is in a Wetherspoons pub shortly before closing time, it would go something like this.

During the 1990s, I was simultaneously a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Politics Department at Glasgow University, a factory worker saving for university fees, and a Scottish Conservative District Councillor serving in a ruling administration (Kyle and Carrick District Council) in the west of Scotland. I quickly found each of these three milieus quite incompatible with the other two, in all sorts of ways – and I am sure you can guess where the best sense of humour and the most commonsense seemed to concentrate. What Berger and Luckmann might call this ‘shock of multiple realities’ probably instilled in me the critical orientation towards all culture that I carry with me to this day – and whose apparent absence, among most academics in their approach to academic culture, continues to depress me.

I had started out writing what I thought would be a political theory PhD, but which in fact turned out to be concerned far more with political psychology. Fascinated by the question of why those around me differed politically, my magna quaestio was whether we might come to understand more about liberal-conservative difference by applying Pareto’s foxes and lions as a psychological model, and likewise his class one and class two ‘residues’ as a cultural model.

This launched me as a voyager of psychometric space: yah boo sucks, liberals are more creative than conservatives at (r = 0.4) and (p < .02); yah boo sucks, conservatives are more conscientious than liberals at (r = .36) and (p < .05). Et cetera. All of this was in the days before political psychology academia began dragging itself, kicking and screaming, towards acknowledging the existence of psychometric Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA). Blair’s redesigned state and the wider ‘great awokening’ of the institutions had not yet happened. Few talked of cancellation for wrongthink, and the death of comedy still seemed inconceivable. Jerry Sadowitz had his own TV show – indicating, above all else, that this was a society where comedy could still push right up to its hard limits of possible traumatisation. It could still feel intuitively right to go with the evidence suggesting that liberals are significantly more tolerant of political ideas they dislike.

I suppose I could call this the ‘political psychology’ phase of my academic life. It eventually arrived at a kind of self-closure. After running my golden thread through the likes of Pareto, Freud, Lasswell and Koestler, it was only a matter of time before intellectual honesty compelled me to confront a profound truth: that when the psychological origins of one’s political beliefs and convictions are laid bare through dedicated scholarship, it becomes hard to do anything other than simply stop – and be left standing in the harsh glare of one’s own spotlight, holding seemingly useless, taxpayer-subsidised luxury beliefs.

Nonetheless I was able to move onto something new by entering business school academia – first of all as a researcher within a Centre for Risk & Governance at Glasgow Caledonian University (2003–2008) and then as a lecturer (and latterly Associate Professor) in Risk Management at University of Southampton Business School (2008–2026).

During this time, I could not let go of Pareto. Looking at the world through the lens of risk and uncertainty created a new set of frames within which his psychologistic sociology seemed useful. His epistemic cynicism now found itself given an epistemic-humility makeover – humility being a professional necessity in risk and uncertainty management given the prevalence of false confidence.

I soon realised that Pareto’s primacy of sentiment over intellect had never really disappeared from academia. It had simply adopted new forms. I discovered that contemporary behavioural finance and economics, just like the thought of Pareto and Machiavelli, relied heavily on ‘animal spirits’ to explain belief and action. I simultaneously encountered a range of affective-intelligence and heuristics-and-biases literatures for the first time – all of which emphasise the profound and inevitable influences of our animal spirits, attributing this to the hard-wired sequencing of ‘system one’ and ‘system two’ within the human brain. And the sociology of emotions had now grown mainstream, seeking to work out the implications of these forces on the grand social scale. I also became particularly interested in corporate psychopathy and broader ‘dark triad’ (psychopathy + narcissism & Machiavellianism) research fields, with their startling empirical claims about the clustering of these traits in the higher echelons of organisations – findings suggesting that Pareto was at least partly right about foxes always staying on top. Overall, I began to feel that Pareto’s view of social action as epistemically self-limiting and continually errant matched the modern world of risk, uncertainty and flux almost exactly: a world in which the gulf between intentions and outcomes is often vast, and in which animal spirits are necessary to fill the gaps with the practical working assuredness that organisations of all kinds require.

Over the last ten years or so, however, something changed. This was when, I would argue, history really burst in upon us all – to borrow de Beauvoir’s term. The ‘migrant crisis’ became a defining political flashpoint from 2015 onwards, and much of the most heated yet insightful commentary was now online. Political thought leadership increasingly took on a dissident character: well-known to vast online audiences while remaining virtually unheard of within academia. YouTube commentators in their twenties, wearing baseball caps, were electrifying audiences of millions with their discussions of the fundamentals of Mill, Marx, Rousseau and Burke, while university politics professors uploaded their podium talks and got maybe five views per year. The former found themselves increasingly vulnerable to demonetisation, shadow-banning, cancellation and ‘doxxing’ by what were now called ‘legacy’ media pile-ons. The latter, meanwhile, continued to enjoy the relative security of institutional tenure and gold–plated public pensions. The contrast seemed to me to expose a serious problem with the idea of a fair marketplace of ideas – at least if we are to take electrification of much-needed public debate as our metric.

By the time of the various Battles of Berkeley in 2017, it was very clear to me that something historically momentous was happening. Myths were forming, online heroes were being made, and political antagonisms were acquiring an increasingly existential quality. Society began to feel like pre-secessionist Virginia in the 1850s. Factional polarisation seemed to be gathering pace – and not just in the United States. The nub of the debate, as I understood it, was unmistakable: the yah boo sucks identity politics of liberal-conservative difference. And did civic nationalism represent the endpoint of a longer degeneration of conservatism, through the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, into something increasingly difficult to distinguish from left-liberal progressivism? I believed it did – and I still do. People were starting to sense that something fundamental was now missing from our politics – and only dissidents were talking about it.

It was around this time that I lost my Glasgow friends in the culture war. I had taken the red pill into a rational distrust of elites and a sense of grim foreboding regarding where their manic mass–immigration project was leading us (a position that, as it turned out, grew near-majoritarian post-Covid) – and I was now discovering some of the most fascinating Paretian phenomena at the bottom of the rabbit hole. I simultaneously became acutely conscious of a rapidly diminishing metapolitical pluralism on the liberal left. University life, too, seemed to be undergoing a metapolitical frog-boiling, moving away from what I considered common sense and towards what its advocates regarded as emancipatory liberal ‘progress’. First came internationalisation, then hyper-internationalisation, then DEI protocols to glue that fragile edifice of post-national elite power in place. Of course, as a Paretian thinker, I felt I knew something about the perils of ‘progress’! When we grow deaf to the great historical pendulum ticking between Pareto’s ‘crystallised’ and ‘individualised’ social forms, we risk becoming entrapped in the political religion of the day. In retrospect I suppose that was my red pill – and on balance it was much more restorative than radicalising. It made me the man I am today: that ‘normal bloke from twenty years ago’ who is proud to feel uncomfortable around our changed institutions.

I retain that Paretian historical consciousness as the root of the democratic pluralism I am presently exploring through my Centre for Civic Concord project (www.civicconcord.org). While others have long referred to similar ‘conservative organicisms’, more recently it seems to have grown fashionable to theorise a similar tendency for conservatives to be more balanced than liberals across the various moral foundations. For me, though, it was always the tick of an old grandfather clock, such as I imagined might have been heard in Pareto’s study. This Paretian faith – perhaps best distinguished as ‘pluralism in temporal depth’– allows no room for the narcissism of believing oneself smarter and better than one’s ancestors. It assumes, rather, that it is always simply a matter of time before ‘normal blokes from decades ago’ return to set the ethical-cultural tone for our institutions. This is ‘just a model’ I have come to use, obviously, but I would say it’s a pretty good one. Anyone who is serious about critiquing cultural power can hardly do without it.

As I slowly began quiet quitting an academia I found increasingly unrecognisable, my focus turned ever more towards the intellectual work I might produce at its margins – or outside it, if necessary. Those ‘luxury beliefs’ I had developed from Pareto twenty years earlier now provided just the framework I needed to make sense of what was happening. History seemed to be bringing the world back to Pareto, forcing itself, with mounting frustration and discontent, into the Paretian mould. Bipolarisation between relatively liberal elites and relatively conservative non-elites – the battle between the Fox and the Lion, in other words – seemed increasingly fundamental to explaining societal conflict, and to the extent of knocking the older divisions between labour and capital out of the ballpark altogether.

And so, when comedy began to die around the mid-2010s, it seemed blindingly obvious to me that this warranted theorisation as a theatre of culture war in the Paretian sense. Evidently, it was not conservatives who were principally cancelling liberals, but rather the reverse. The liberal Fox was gaining the upper hand across legal, political and cultural institutions, reshaping their ideologies, values and norms in ways that seemed to fit neatly with Pareto’s ascendency of the Class I residues. The Lion’s need to express its essential nature through comedy and laughter was coming under direct and sustained attack. In this new digital world, increasingly fit only for Foxes, the Lion could be silenced with greater ease than ever before, and the Overton window was narrowing accordingly. As Jon Ronson argued in ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ (2015), online shaming had acquired the power to destroy reputations and careers. A comedian might offend nobody in the room, yet find their career ruined by a single offended online observer (or by a single political activist pretending to be one) whose grievance was amplified by the online mob. The consequences were clear: the deep belly laughs that came from recognising the stereotypes and boundaries Lions need to enact their natures were now well and truly out; polite, acclamatory clapping to liberal talking points was in. That left just one stereotype that could be mocked with lavish amounts of vicarious aggression: the Lion, of course – caged, ill, downgraded, dependent, weak … yet nonetheless still the predator required to make the case to shift institutionally curated mainstream culture still further to the left by elevating the protected social categories.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour? 

I suppose I have already addressed humour in its political aspect as a phenomenon Paretian realism can help acquaint us with. What seems to tie comedy to culture-war enmity between the liberal and the conservative, and by extension to a great deal of yah boo sucks knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences, is their co-implication in the endless human tragedy of downward social comparison – such as we all know intimately from the ego-maintenance work that gets us through the day.

All such downward social comparison reveals the vulnerabilities and self-deceptions through which we maintain our sense of superiority and cope with existential anxiety. It may further help to recruit Anthony Storr’s idea of ‘divine discontent’ to elaborate what I mean by the perpetual Adlerian toggle between superiority and inferiority, through which we encounter both our own psychological defences and those of others – defences on which we seem to rely heavily as we go about our day, managing our impulses and making our comparisons. It occurs to me that creative sparks arising from all such discontent may often be more salient for the liberal mind than for the conservative mind, owing to its greater ability to intracept and introspect.

During my ‘political psychology’ phase I became particularly interested in the ego-defensive significance of joke-telling in this regard. I familiarised myself with the yah boo sucks psychometric evidence suggesting that the creativity of the joke-teller is indeed more strongly cultivated in the liberal mind – which I regard as an ideology mill requiring continual destruction and creation geared towards advancing liberals within shifting social hierarchies. Indeed, isn’t this also what Pareto’s ‘instinct for combinations’ is all about? As per the Paretian view, this does seem a massively important political-cultural phenomenon, which always finds its level in any given society. Foxes push it. Lions loathe the ontological insecurities it imposes on them. This disruptive view of humour seems very Wildean to me. It strikes me that it will often rely on affective reversal mid-sentence – as per all the Wildean classics such as ‘I have nothing to declare by my genius’ and ‘the only thing worse than being gossiped about is not being gossiped about’. To toggle one’s own system one affect in this way seems to require a certain relativistic detachment from the world that liberals probably tend to possess more than conservatives.

And yet I would not want to reduce this to the claim that liberals are simply funnier than conservatives – for what has more overwhelming psychic power than a Lion’s roar – even when sublimated into a joke about a stereotype! That taps primal forces of identity and belonging. No – what interests me more is the general relationship between political disposition, the forms of humour people cultivate, and the psychological work these perform. The Freudian tradition – extended by Eysenck – remains particularly illuminating for me as a framework for understanding that psychological work. Looking from this perspective, jokes and laughter discharge impulses (Eros and Thanatos) constrained by inhibition, repression and social convention, allowing aggression, hostility and resentment to find expression under the protective cover of humour. One can always claim to have been joking. The pleasure of comedy may therefore lie less in any disinterested appreciation of disruptive incongruity than we care to admit, and more in the gratification of impulses that polite society requires us to keep in check. Hence humour is very much civilizing in the Freudian sense – and it is also a problem-solving activity in the linked Freudian sense. Perhaps, while the strong superego conservative will seek out salacious humour that momentarily allows them to take the lid off the id, liberals will be less amused by the prospect of releasing their own – often already loose – ids than by opportunity to moralise cruelly about the very existence of these in the hidden private life of the conservative.

All of that is well-known. What I tried to add into the mix in my (2025) Re-Reading Pareto text is the idea that the eternal mutual enmity between the conservative Lion and the liberal Fox shapes political life as a kind of congested bi-directional projection superhighway – where both continually project their more unpleasant self-appraisals onto one another. What are liberals and conservatives to one another, after all, if not lists of universal human vices that offer convenient go-to projection targets?

This is also what I find myself attending to in everyday encounters with humour: not simply whether a joke is funny, or whether its ostensible target deserves ridicule, but what the joke allows the teller and the audience to do. Who gets to feel superior, which impulses are granted a moment's licence, and what becomes deniable once it has been said in jest? The everyday joke is a small but revealing site at which the management of status, the policing of social boundaries and the projection of unwanted qualities onto others can all take place at once. The joke becomes political, quite simply whenever the virtues and vices of conservatives and liberals get thrown in as projection targets.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena? 

I regard cruelty as a greatly under-theorised component of ‘liberal elite’ rule, particularly when viewed through Nietzschean eyes and as per the liberalism of fear with its emphasis on the cruelty of the do-gooder. The capacity to inflict suffering is obviously not confined to the overt exercise of physical force. It can also reside in the moralising power to humiliate, stigmatise and deny legitimacy to those whose sentiments and dispositions offend the prevailing orthodoxy. Indeed, such cruelty can be all-the-more effective when exercised in the name of virtue.

This is where I see a distinctly ‘demagogic’ dimension to contemporary liberal elite rule – as per Pareto’s ideas of demagogic plutocracy. Didn’t Pareto claim that elites grow cruel as they enter fragile decline? That gives us much to think about. The demagogic cruelty of liberal elite power (or can we call it late-stage liberal elite power?) can be theorised to lie partly in its resolve to define conservative instincts as morally wholly unacceptable, thereby denying conservative personality its legitimate means of instinctual expression through humour, ridicule and cultural transgression. To deny a person their psychic defences is to destroy them. The resulting suppression is also a form of symbolic cruelty: a politics of moral denunciation that presents the exclusion of certain sentiments as evidence of moral progress. In Paretian terms, this straightforwardly becomes the elite Fox deploying moralised cultural power against the non-elite Lion, whose more elemental dispositions it seeks to wholly extinguish rather than accommodate. And it becomes interesting to theorise the result as caged Lions believing themselves Foxes, thinking and talking like Foxes. This, to me, corresponds disturbingly to our present day political-institutional reality, where almost all the so-called conservatives, and almost all the so-called nationalists, are simply liberals.

That, to me, is the death of democracy.

Democracy = liberals + conservatives.

Meanwhile: liberals ↗ ∞ + conservatives ↘ ∅ = metapolitical totalitarianism.

Simple arithmetic, Oh ye geniuses of political science and ‘liberal’ democracy!

Actually, it has occurred to me in just the last three years or so that far more research into this menticidal aspect of liberal elite demagoguery is warranted. Yet I do not anticipate long queues of academics forming to look into this, given the present metapolitical state of the academy.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend? 

Three works occurred to me when answering these questions.

1. Oliver James, Britain on the Couch (1997)

James's book tried to explain why rising material affluence had failed to deliver a corresponding increase in happiness. He drew attention to the psychological costs of a consumer society in which people feel compelled to continually compare their lives with those of others. The book was also turned into a British television documentary series that brought these issues to a wider public.

By bringing into focus the enormous psychological significance of downward social comparison as a factor in everyday life, the book made an important intervention in public debate about young people's mental health. It observes that like monkeys, humans are naturally driven to compare their social status with others all the time. When we compare ourselves with people who are worse off than we are, it can make us feel better about ourselves and give us a sense of pleasure and reassurance. This entails release of dopamine, which is involved in the brain’s reward system, and serotonin, which helps regulate mood and social behaviour. These feelings reinforce our tendency to make downward comparisons, temporarily boosting our self-esteem and helping us feel more secure about our place in a society which continually makes ‘even winners feel like losers’ as James put it.

Once you read that book or watch the series, comedy and cruelty start to make much more sense. This is why I say we are as crack-cocaine addicts to our own brain opiates.

Reference:
James, O. (1997) Britain on the couch: why we're unhappier compared with 1950 despite being richer: a treatment for the low–serotonin society. London: Century.

2. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996)

Young-Bruehl's study offers a psychologically rich account of prejudice, distinguishing different forms according to the emotional needs and defensive processes they express. What particularly interested me was the possibility that conservatives and liberals may be attracted to different forms of prejudice, reflecting different psychological vulnerabilities and associated defensive strategies. In my reading, obsessional prejudice is especially important because its rigidity, need for control and hostility towards perceived disorder can make it particularly forceful and potentially dangerous. These characteristics of course invite comparison with authoritarian and conservative personality structures – and they offer useful insight into the darker corners of the conservative sense of humour.

Meanwhile, on my reading, liberals don’t get a free pass. Psychological liberals are masters of the subtle put-down. They may often favour humour that ridicules the supposedly ignorant or prejudiced to service their own ego-defensive needs, protecting their self-esteem and reinforcing a sense of moral and intellectual superiority. Such humour may also serve to displace or conceal their own prejudices, projecting intolerance onto others while remaining uncritical of their own assumptions and social judgements, thereby sustaining a flattering self-image and insulating themselves from uncomfortable self-examination.

Reference:
Young-Bruehl, E. (1996) The anatomy of prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

3. Joost A.M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind (1956)

The Dutch psychiatrist Joost Abraham Maurits Meerloo wrote perhaps the most classic account of menticide: the deliberate destruction or subversion of independent thought through psychological coercion. In his examination of thought control, brainwashing, isolation and ideological pressure, he argues that sustained coercion can undermine not just an individual's political beliefs but also the deeper structures and dynamics of personality through which psychological independence is maintained. By weakening established ego defences, confidence in one's own judgement and the capacity to resist external pressure, he argued, the individual becomes increasingly vulnerable to ideological conformity and psychological manipulation.

His theory is not confined to the interrogation and conversion of political prisoners. It also considers how the systematic subversion of independent thought can occur through emotional coercion and the conditioning of public opinion on the grand social scale. Considered at that level of application, the resonances with Pareto's theory of demagogic plutocracy, whereby elites maintain power by manipulating the sentiments of the masses, should be of much interest.

Combining the two provides the necessary framework for my thesis that liberal demagogic plutocracy is presently denying conservative personality its legitimate existence by delegitimising its characteristic humour, thereby depriving conservatives of ego-defensive outlets through which they habitually manage frustration and preserve psychological equilibrium. Three aspects of Meerloo's thesis on menticide seem particularly pertinent to how we can theorise comedy in its political aspect:

 1. The suppression of individuality

Meerloo warns of the psychological constraints imposed by cultural conformity, which can produce what he describes as ‘humourless robots’ even within democratic societies. This seems to resonate quite powerfully with the online right's use of the term NPC (non-player character), alongside the visual meme of the Wojak face, to ridicule those perceived as unthinkingly reproducing mainstream liberal opinion.

 2. Humour as resistance

Ridicule can expose the pretensions of demagogues while preserving some psychological independence from prevailing ideological conventions. Humour may therefore serve as an ego-defensive resource, enabling individuals to manage frustration and resist the internalisation of hostile social judgements that might otherwise inflict a great deal of psychic self-destruction.

 3. The punishment of dissent

Denunciation and fear of social condemnation can encourage self-censorship, delegitimising the humour through which disfavoured personalities express dissent and defend their psychological equilibrium.

 Yet Meerloo has less to say about particular political personality patterns and the societal conflicts in which they become embroiled. Writing long before the present era of factional polarisation between relatively liberal elites and relatively conservative non-elites, he does not develop anything akin to my more specific thesis. My concluding proposition, then, is that contemporary liberal elite demagoguery can indeed be theorised as incorporating menticidal targeting of non-elite conservative personality, and as operating upon its particular ego-defences through law, regulation, entertainment, cultural norms and the policing of comedy. The process, and the cruelty it entails, may be all the more difficult to recognise and potentially more effective precisely because its pressures are diffuse, cumulative and spread across multiple domains of social life. In the final analysis we would need to call this a ‘soft’ form of menticide for which we cannot assign guilt or blame – but a menticide nonetheless, and one that has succeeded in suppressing the conservative aspects of what I like to call ‘political human nature’ in many.

Reference:
Meerloo, J.A.M. (1956) The rape of the mind: the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company.