Lions vs. Scavengers: The Values That Built the West

The West is in a war for its survival.

That war is playing out simultaneously at a civilizational level and in every human heart. It is a war between the lion and the scavenger. 

The lion is the part of each of us that prizes freedom, responsibility, and achievement. It knows that there are rules to success and failure; that we are creative beings with autonomy and power, and that freedom comes with an equal measure of obligation.

The scavenger, by contrast, is the part of us that believes that society — from top to bottom — is rigged, that powerful forces, not individuals, dictate outcomes. That personal failures are a result of a Great Conspiracy. And that rage, including violence, is the only response to this corrupt system. 

We all wake up each morning and must decide: will we be lions, or scavengers? Will we take ownership of our problems and work to solve them, or will we blame others for our failures and wallow in resentment? 

The values of the lion animate Western Civilization, and provide its founding principles: 

(1) free minds, because human beings are made in the image of God, with the power to choose and innovate; 

(2) free markets, because we are autonomous creative beings who fairly earn what our labor produces; 

(3) public virtue, because virtue and duty — and the institutions that support them — give order to the exercise of liberty; and 

(4) equal rights before the law, because otherwise justice is impossible.

America was founded to be a civilization of lions. 

And then there are other civilizations: civilizations rooted in grievance and anger, in conspiratorialism and barbarism. Those civilizations revel in a sense of victimhood; they blame their own failings on Western civilization. They see the world as a zero-sum game, in which they are deprived of their proper share thanks to the abuse of power by the West. 

The scavenger is motivated by envy: what Adam Smith, the great eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, defines as “that passion which views — with malignant dislike — the superiority of those who are really entitled to all the superiority they possess.” 

In modern speak, if your neighbor has a nicer car or house, he didn’t earn it. 

There are many types of scavenger civilizations.

Marxist civilization is a civilization of scavengers, based on the myth that free market prosperity is actually the result of exploitation. Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, called for “unlawful, irregular, unmethodical and unsystematic methods of struggle” to use “force against the oppressors of the people.” In 1918, Lenin told his apparatchiks to “hang…kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.”  

He wasn’t just talking about the Czar and his Court. If you owned any land or even just a cow, you were in this class of people. 

This is scavenger thinking, and it infected the Third World — in fact, it helped to create it. Dozens of impoverished nations across Africa, the Middle East, and South America blamed — and still blame — America and Europe for their failures. Poverty, crime, and corruption, in this worldview, are solely the result of Western colonization, not their own bad decisions. 

This ignores the fact that some former colonies, like Singapore, are thriving. And nations that have modeled themselves after America are among the wealthiest places in human history — South Korea, Chile, and Israel are just a few examples. 

But none of this matters to the scavengers. Radical anti-Western philosopher Franz Fanon, for example, famously wrote, “The colonized man is an envious man…there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place.”

The only way, according to Fanon, for these colonized people to attain justice is to “mock” Western values, “Insult them, and vomit them up.” Naturally, according to Fanon, this would involve violence, or as he put it, “red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.”

Radical Islam, too, is a civilization of scavengers. It is founded on the lie that Western success is a conspiracy designed to deprive Islam of world-spanning power — and that violent overthrow of the West can achieve through force of arms what radical Islam has failed to achieve through merit. Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hasan Al-Banna stated that Western civilization “subjugated the whole world,” and now must be destroyed; with this kind of thinking, chants of “Death to America” make perfect sense. 

The scavenger mentality is not relegated to faraway lands, something “over there.” It’s here. In fact, it’s been here for decades, fostered in our education system, first at the college level and then on down. 

And more recently, through mass migration, we have embraced members of civilizations inherently opposed to us.

We have opened the door to self-hatred and, thus, self-destruction.

So, how can the West survive? By relearning its moral roots; by reclaiming its classrooms; by revitalizing its key institutions; by vigorously defending itself against enemies within and without. In other words, we must regain our confidence in ourselves and our civilization, which has brought so much opportunity to so many. 

The West must roar again. Because if the lions sleep, the scavengers will devour them.

I’m Ben Shapiro, author of Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics), for Prager University.