Lions and Hyenas: A Theory of Modern Power
“Johnny, come on in here. Let’s talk. So when a boy likes a girl….”
Ok, so your name probably isn’t Johnny. And this post isn’t about using metaphorical birds and insects to describe fucking each other (never really got how that works by the way- something with the stinger maybe?). But it is about two animals, and it is about something pretty important. To explain, let’s talk about something incredibly important that happened this past week:
THE FUCKING SURVIVOR SEASON FINALE.
I’ve alluded to my love of the television show Survivor before, and I think I’ve finally found the first time where I can really plug it in a constructive context.
A lot of people like to say that football is the game that most represents life. Well, I hate to tell you (Hint: I don’t) but those people are wrong. Completely. Because Survivor is the game that most represents life. And it’s not close.
Let me give you a run-through for those who don’t nerd out about the show, or even know what it is. Survivor is basically taking a bunch of people (usually 20) from modern civilization, dividing them up into two teams (called tribes), and throwing them into a jungle (usually somewhere in Fiji) for 39 days until one is left standing. There are challenges for rewards such as food and supplies, but the big one is the coveted immunity idol, which guarantees one tribe safe from sending someone home. When a tribe loses, they have to go to Tribal Council, where they vote someone off the tribe.
Later in the game when slightly over half the players are left, the tribes merge and it becomes an individual game for individual immunity and rewards. The game then turns more insular and more cutthroat as there is less space to hide and more scrambling for safety. This trend of voting continues until there is (usually) a Final Three, which is where the biggest twist of all comes in.
The people that are voted out after the merge sit on the Jury, and THEY reward someone in the Final Three with a million bucks and the title of Sole Survivor. There are other things like hidden immunity idols, challenge advantages, spy shacks, the buddy system, and other wrenches that the producers throw into the game, but that’s basically a simplified version of how it works.
If that wasn’t hard enough, just remember- these people are drained in all aspects. They’re sleeping outside completely exposed to the elements, starving, homesick, bitten up by bugs, sleep-deprived, and cuddling with people who most likely want to cut their throats at first opportunity. It shows you people at their most vulnerable they possibly could be in the most extreme possible fashion. The amount that is revealed about human nature through player confessionals and interactions is incredibly interesting to behold- it’s like taking a class in psychology except without the weird dude picking his ass in the back corner of the room. Well, actually that happens more often than you’d think.
Survivor icon Tyson Apostol recently admitted in a Survivor: Winners at War confessional that the game is so taxing that, when people lose, it can take them YEARS to get over it. Jeremy Collins, one of the most adored castaways and Survivor icons of all time, said that he wasn’t right mentally for THREE MONTHS after he got back home. Collins is a firefighter, and he said he even had trouble trusting the people in his Ladder, the men and women that he has to trust with his life. The game fucks you up mentally, and its effects stick.
So, how does one win this complex game? It turns out there’s not an answer. At least not one that’s concrete. There has not been one winner that has looked like the others, and even they’ve had to change their strategy more than once to get to the end. But there is one common element that can make your road to the end a whole lot easier.
Power.
That’s what Survivor is based on. Whoever has the power in the tribe controls the tribe. He who has the gold makes the rules. For the longest time, however, people (including myself) always thought that it was strictly a game of numbers. Let’s say the merged tribe is broken into 12 people. Any number greater than six aligned together should easily dominate the other tribe. Seven beats five, eight beats four, nine beats three, ten beats two, and eleven beats one. Raw numbers suggest a simple accumulation of the most important resource, other tribe members, should be enough to get you pretty far.
But that’s also wrong.
On its face, you must be wondering how that could be. Numbers don’t lie. That is true. But do some numbers matter more than others? You bet your freshly-picked ass they do. Profit matters more than revenue. Number of lives saved matters more than number of lives not saved. The number of people that historically don’t come out in an election but come out to vote matters more than the people that historically do come out and vote. The key is getting the RIGHT numbers. However, it took until the 40th season of Survivor (the most recent one that I’m talking about, Winners at War) for me to realize this. And it came from the guy who won.
Tony Vlachos, a cop from Jersey City, New Jersey, is a modern legend in the world of Survivor. He’s one of only two people (Sandra Diaz-Twine being the other) to win Survivor TWICE. He’s in serious contention for being the Greatest of All Time. He’s also one of the most memorable contestants ever, being classified by Dalton Ross of Entertainment Weekly (the designated Survivor blogger/writer) as the most entertaining player in the show’s illustrious 20-year history.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but the most prominent is that, to those who don’t know him, Vlachos would probably be considered a candidate for the mental institution closest to your home. He runs around the island like a crazy man, digs holes (and sits in bushes and trees) to spy on people, finds hidden advantages like crazy, talks behind backs and through smokescreens to everyone, reads people like children’s books, and literally persuaded his closest alliance member to basically give him the win his first season in Survivor: Cagayan. This reputation has led to a perfect name- The Chaos King.
The key to Vlachos’ success (and failure, in his second season, Survivor: Game Changers), is that he’s the greatest player of instituting controlled chaos I’ve ever seen- and it’s not close. Vlachos knows exactly the right moment to turn his chaos on and off like a light switch, and takes full advantage when he does to further himself in the competition. Even Jeff Probst, the host of the show, called him “incredibly reckless” and compared him to the Tasmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes. He knows all the tricks in the book, and he’s used all of them to great degrees of success.
However, this has also made him something else- one of the most notorious players in the history of Survivor, along with other legends like “Boston” Rob Mariano and Parvati Shallow. He’s a gigantic target, which makes him a prime target for an early elimination. He didn’t realize this in Survivor: Game Changers- he played so hard so early that it was easy to get the tribe together to oust him (led by Diaz-Twine, believe it or not).
The threat level of Vlachos was amplified in the season that ended Wednesday, Winners at War. This season was completely composed of winners from previous seasons, something that the show had never done before. It was basically the NBA All-Star team of Survivor legends. Knowing that he was one of the higher-profile winners, Vlachos recognized early that he was a huge target, and likely would suffer the same fate he had suffered in his second season if he didn’t adjust his gameplay. His adjustment proved to be one of the most insightful commentaries of human nature I’ve ever heard.
His strategy was called Lions and Hyenas. It’s a theory of power, and how players use it to fight for supremacy. But it’s not just applicable in reality television. As soon as he said it, I immediately began to see flashes of it everywhere. It was stunning how relevant it was to so many important things, much more so than I had ever realized previously.
I think it’s an incredibly important thing to learn the dynamics of and how they work together. To do so, we need to talk about the origins and players of this theory, the Fatal Flaw of the theory, and how it applies to life. Grab your spermicidal lube (oh, wait, not birds and the bees) and happy reading.
----------
This theory has a lot of names within its origin- oppressor/oppressed, master/slave, others. However, I don’t think either of these names really fit much anymore. Not necessarily because of the names, but because of the context. Disempowerment in a theory revolving around power is counterintuitive. We all have much more power than we realize- being victims of our own self-righteous sense of victimhood isn’t a proper mindset to hold when discussing things such as this.
The way I recommend thinking about this concept is through the lense of the best (I will hear no argument, so feel free to geddafuq outta hea) and my personal favorite Disney movie ever: The Lion King. It even fits the name perfectly, so I’m pretty sure Vlachos derived it directly from the film, although I have nothing to confirm or deny this. We’ll just say it’s a matter of coincidence.
Instead of oppressor/oppressed and master/slave, the lense I want you to view is highkey versus lowkey. Not lowkey in the sense of being a simp or a wuss, but more of a lowkey person. Someone who doesn’t have as much VISUAL presence as someone else would. I’ll frame this in Survivor terms to give a better understanding.
I said in my intro that Vlachos’ game thrives on controlled chaos. He’s one of the most notorious players to have ever played. Notoriety paints a big target on your back. But, it wasn’t just Vlachos. Apostol, Collins, Diaz-Twine, Mariano, and Shallow all fit this description perfectly as well. As did people like Ben Driebergen, Yul Kwon, Sarah Lacina, and Kim Spradlin-Wolfe.
But that’s just 10 out of the 20. What of the other 10? Well, to put it quite simply, they were more lowkey players. They weren’t that flashy. They won with a balanced diet of cunning, gamesmanship, and stealth over being outrageously dominant in one way or another.
Mariano is widely regarded as the greatest player of Survivor ever- he’s been nicknamed The Godfather because of his incredible mix of brutal and seamless execution of eliminations, organizational mastery, and psychological warfare. Oh, not to mention he met his wife, Amber, on the show (also a fellow winner), married her, and had four children. Shallow is also in the GOAT conversation- her stunning looks and outrageous smarts helped work her way in and out of alliances seamlessly and helped to engineer the Black Widow Brigade in her winning season, an all-female alliance that is widely regarded as the greatest in Survivor history. Diaz-Twine (another potential GOAT) is a master at pitting people against each other in her “as long as it’s not me strategy”- she’s won twice because of it.
Collins and Spradlin-Wolfe are arguably the two most likable and socially dominant players the game has ever seen- Collins swept the vote in his winning season, and Spradlin-Wolfe came damn close, with EW’s Ross calling her win in Survivor: One World the most dominant single-season performance he’d ever seen. Kwon is a Yale Graduate and former McKinsey consultant who somefuckinghow won the game using Game Theory and other economic methods to win the game in arguably the most loaded season of original players the show has ever seen in Survivor: Cook Islands. The others I mentioned followed suit in one way or another.
The other 10 just don’t have the reputation that they do. Sophie Clarke and Michelle Fitzgerald admitted during confessionals that they faced severe insecurity due to the fact that they weren’t viewed as “good winners”. This is, of course, ridiculous- when you win, you win. You outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted everyone else. That should be the end of it. But, to some Survivor fans, it’s not.
Adam Klein also swept the vote to win the million dollars and title of Sole Survivor. However, unlike Collins, he did it in a much different way. He cried every episode for what seemed like a minimum of seven times. But it was for a good reason- he and his Mother successfully auditioned for a season where two family members went on together, called Blood vs. Water, which has been done numerous times on the show.
But tragedy doesn’t care. Mrs. Klein was diagnosed with Stage Four lung cancer right before they were about to depart. Klein wanted to stay and support her, but she asked him to ask the producers to roll over his audition to a future season, citing the circumstances. They agreed, and it worked out beautifully. As soon as Klein landed from the set he ran to the hospital to see his mother. She died one hour after he arrived at the hospital.
Denise Stapley played a quiet game as well; she was the oldest contestant on Winners at War. Nick Wilson and Wendell Holland were two of the most recent winners, who weren’t perceived as outrageously talented at anything- they were more jack of all trades types. The same could be said for others.
So, why tell you my nerdy Survivor trivia? Because it describes the theory that Vlachos proposed perfectly. Let’s get into it.
Lions are the kings of the jungle- no one fucks with them, and everyone knows it. However, other animals want power as well, but they can’t get it because no one can knock the lions off. Hyenas are one of the biggest threats to lions, but if you put a lion against a hyena, the lion wins that battle every time.
So, what hyenas do to combat this is by creating packs of beings of lesser power to combat the bigger singular power. One hyena against one lion can’t do anything, but three hyenas against one lion might. So, what the lion decides to do is combat this and form a group (pride) of higher-powered beings and stick together. Now we have a gridlock- the beings of higher power being stuck at the top, and the beings of lesser power on the outside trying to claw their way in. They’re eternally gridlocked, but each one of them has a way they can be beaten.
The way the hyenas can beat the lions is by singling out the lions one by one, picking them off, and weakening them bit by bit. After a while, the hyenas will overwhelm the lions and become the new dominant species. The way the lions win is by sticking together in solidarity. Sooner or later, the hyenas will get sick of being on the bottom of the food chain and lash out, and the lions will beat them down based on the fact that they’re the more dominant species and they cannot lose in one on one combat.
I liken this hyena-specific strategy of taking down a structure. When you want to take out a building, you don’t just open up on the whole building at once- you go after a specific support structure to weaken one at a time in order to get it to fall. When you want to take out a wall, you don’t attack a little bit of all of the wall at once- you go full swing into one part of the wall. When you want to take out Ralph Maccio in The Karate Kid, you don’t go after him all at once- you buckle your seatbelt and SWEEP THE MUFUCKIN LEG.
Ok, that was a lot. To break it down, let’s bring in the earlier allusion of The Lion King to give y’all a break from my Survivor geekage. The lion pride headed by Mufasa are the kings of the Pridelands; no one fucks with them. They run the show, and everyone acknowledges that fact, even if they don’t like it. Other animals in the Pridelands want power, but they simply can’t access it because the lions always come together to snuff it out. You see this when James Earl Jones, err, Darth Vader, err, Mufasa (“fuck!”) goes to save Simba and Nala in the cave. They don’t stand a chance- he’s just too powerful for them to fight.
Scar, Mufasa’s brother, wants power. However, he knows that he can’t go after his brother directly because he’ll get shredded by the other lions that are loyal to Mufasa. He’s stuck facing an impenetrable shield from his current position. So, where does he go? To the hyenas, of course. Why? Because they have things that can mutually benefit one another- Scar has inside information and resources (food), and the hyenas have much larger numbers than the lions do, even though they are individually inferior.
When Scar proposes the alliance, he doesn’t devise the strategy of directly storming Pride Rock, the center of the Pridelands. What do they do instead? They single out Mufasa, the most powerful lion in the pride, and kill him using their far greater numbers (a stampede of other animals instead of just hyenas). Only when that is done and the biggest lion is taken out can they move in and storm the palace and subvert the lions from their position.
The reason why the hyenas cannot attack directly is because they’re coming from a place of inferior positioning. Having the high ground, bringing a gun to a bazooka fight, and having a juiced up mid-90s baseball team are all similar scenarios. They simply don’t have the firepower to compete directly, so they look for other ways to gain that positioning. If not, the lions will simply overwhelm and crush them.
I now take you back to this past season of Survivor. There’s a reason why I went through descriptions of a bunch of people you probably could care less about. They’re either lions or hyenas, and their descriptions tell you which category they belong to. A big dynamic early in the game was “old school” versus “new school” players- the players that had the most reputation and had played the most were singled out very early in the game and sent packing very quickly.
Vlachos was the only contestant to pick up on this from the jump. Realizing this trend, he imposed a strategy that I call “lion herding”, similar to what I described above. He decided early in the game that he was going to keep giant threats, such as Apostol and Diaz-Twine, around him for as long as possible in order to shield him, while laying low by not playing like a total lunatic early in the game.
The strategy worked. Vlachos lasted until The Merge, outlasting Apostol, Diaz-Twine, Mariano, and Shallow, who couldn’t survive the purge of the players with the most reputation. Post-Merge, Vlachos devised that strategy again, looping in people like his close friend Lacina (who had been aligned with him the whole time), Collins, and Driebergen in order to shield him while creating a massive herd of lions to impose their will over the hyenas that had taken out the rest of the lions I mentioned earlier out. Vlachos had positioned himself in the driver’s seat without making any serious moves.
But, with Vlachos, that didn’t last very long. It couldn’t- he just couldn’t help himself. After the Loved Ones Visit (in which the crew flew out the members of the castaways to see them in the jungle), he didn’t just put the foot on the gas- he ghetto-stomped that motherfucker through the floor. Sensing he was in the position of power, he capitalized on it by executing a tremendous blindside of Clarke, which accelerated his game further. He began to whittle down the hyenas in the game, cutting their throats one by one, as well as any lion that betrayed ranks and crossed his path. Throwing in climbing trees to spy on people, nearly lighting the jungle on fire more than once, and his dutiful partner Lacina helping him along the way, Vlachos found himself in the Final Three once again.
The results were masterful. Vlachos won in a dominating 12-4-0 jury vote over Natalie Anderson and Fitzgerald, all without having a SINGLE vote cast against him during the duration of the game. It was astonishing, and maybe the most dominant single season performance in the history of Survivor.
But, there was a time during the final stretch where I was seriously concerned that Vlachos wouldn’t last and would burn out before he hit the money. And it perfectly exemplifies what I call the Fatal Flaw- the one thing that is an absolute no-no for BOTH lions and hyenas.
----------
Remember when I said it’s not a numbers game when it comes to power, but having the RIGHT numbers? Well, if you don’t, you run into some problems- mostly identifying which people and populations are lions and hyenas. However, there is another venue in which this can become an issue, which culminates in the Fatal Flaw of the lions and hyenas strategy.
Infighting.
There must be absolute solidarity within the two parties as to who is with who and what the goal and mission are, or everything falls apart. Remember, strength in the RIGHT numbers is key.
The reason that it matters for lions is because they cannot be seen as stag or singular. The reason that this is important is two-fold. First, it will make that person an easy target for opportunistic hyenas to pounce. Remember the Mufasa example- a lion cannot stray far from other lions before they eventually get pounced on. Second, it will make that person be doubted in the eyes of other lions. They may start to think that that lion is betraying ranks (like Scar) and going to seek opportunity in the perceived-inferior bunch.
The reason that it matters for hyenas is what I’ve been saying all along- it is impossible to attack people with greater power unless you have the numbers to back it up. One hyena versus one lion loses every time. Several hyenas versus one lion could possibly win. A group of lions can only pull off the direct attack because they have more firepower- the numbers game is absolutely essential for the hyenas to win in order to have a chance at achieving power.
Infighting inherently weakens these two strategies. Lions are naturally inferior in terms of their population- there are definitely more hyenas out there than lions, as seen in my references of both The Lion King and Survivor. Lions need all the numbers they can get to support attacks from opportunistic hyenas, and hyenas need all the numbers they can get in order to have the opportunity to go after loyalistic lions. Anything that goes against this deliberately weakens either population.
An example of the lion version of the Fatal Flaw is evident in the home stretch of the last season of Survivor. In this season when the contestants that still remained reached the Final Five, there was an opportunity from a player to reenter the game that had been previously voted out. The winner of that challenge was Anderson, who had been the first contestant voted out and spent 32 days on what was called the Edge of Extinction, a separate desolate island where she toiled for almost five weeks awaiting a chance to get back in the game.
After Anderson won her way back into the game, she (being the hyena in this scenario) immediately went to the other hyena in the tribe, Fitzgerald, and proposed working together. The lion alliance, consisting of Driebergen, Lacina, and Vlachos, had recently roped in old hyena Stapley, and seemed invincible at that point. Anderson and Fitzerald had other plans.
Anderson had come back into the game with a Hidden Immunity Idol which, if found or obtained by a player, gives them immunity at Tribal Council from being eliminated despite not winning the challenge. It’s the biggest trump card in Survivor, and can be nothing short of devastating when it is either used or not used. Additionally, Fitzgerald won immunity at the challenge, meaning that the two of them were essentially safe from being eliminated, forcing the lions to turn on themselves.
Vlachos, suspecting that Anderson had something, wanted to split the votes 2-2 between their four-person alliance between Anderson and Stapley (with Stapley being left out of the loop) in order to flush the idol out of the game while keeping the core three safe. Lacina, having played a near-flawless game at that point, disagreed. She was assured that Anderson didn’t have anything. Vlachos, having her full trust, agreed to do things her way and throw all four votes on Anderson.
This mistake started a massive domino effect. At Tribal Council, Anderson played her idol, as she should have. The problem was, Driebergen and Vlachos ALSO had Hidden Immunity Idols. Being paranoid of being targeted, they both played them, giving an unprecedented FOUR people immunity and leaving Lacina and Stapley as sitting ducks. Stapley got the short end of the stick, and she was sent packing.
With all of their hidden advantages flushed, the lion alliance was completely vulnerable. Additionally, whenever a Hidden Immunity Idol is played, it immediately is put back into circulation. Vlachos did the whole “setting the island on fire thing” to try to find it, but to no avail. However, one person did find it: Anderson. The worst person that could have found it.
Fortunately for Vlachos, he won immunity at the next challenge. However, Driebergen and Lacina were left totally exposed with nothing to protect them. Also, they had no idea who Anderson was going to play the idol for- meaning that if they chose the wrong person to throw their votes on between her and Fitzgerald, they would be completely at their mercy in terms of who that twosome wanted to send home.
In a completely unprecedented turn of events, Lacina decided to go rogue again. She had recently given an impassioned speech at Tribal Council, where she talked about a perceived gender bias between how men played the game versus how women did, and how it made her feel when the Mob came after her on social media after she won her season. She felt that she was being perceived as playing in Vlachos’ shadow (something that Vlachos, myself, and any sensible fan completely disagreed on), and felt that she needed to do something to break out. So, she did.
Driebergen and Lacina had a heart-to-heart conversation before the vote, in which Driebergen tearfully told Lacina that he was giving her his blessing to vote him out if she felt it was best for her. Driebergen is a former Marine who had suffered traumatic PTSD, and credits his wife, Kelly, with saving him from committing suicide. However, the reason he was perceived as a lion during this season was in the way he won his season before- he repeatedly blew the game up and betrayed people, must like Vlachos.
This reputation followed him into this season. He was disliked by a lot of people, and his social game deteriorated because of that reputation; it was a reason that Vlachos wanted to align with him so closely. Driebergen had constantly confessed in interviews that he wanted to play a different game and leave it feeling better about his integrity, wanting to be an example to his children and wife about how he could be a better man. Driebergen knew he couldn’t win- there was no way he could pull those votes from the jury. So, he viewed that falling on the sword to advance his closest ally, Lacina, was a way to restore his reputation. Shit was like something out of a movie. I was floored.
Lacina took full advantage. She flipped on Vlachos and voted out Driebergen along with Anderson and Fitzgerald in order to pad her resume with one more big move before she potentially got to the end.
I hope you’re seeing the trend here. Because Lacina broke ranks, even for a split-second decision to serve her best interest, she compromised the whole population. Even if she didn’t mean to. I don’t want to bash her whatsoever- in my opinion, she’s a Top 10 player ever, and an absolute monster in all facets of the game. What I DO want to highlight is the prowess of Anderson and Fitzerald, and how opportunistic hyenas can do major damage when they get an opening to do so.
Ultimately, it turned out to be Lacina’s downfall. Anderson won the Final Immunity challenge, and the pair of Lacina and Vlachos were completely at her mercy. The reason for that is when a contestant wins the final immunity challenge, they get to decide two things- what person they want to come with them to the end, and what two contestants she wanted to face off in a fire-making challenge in order to earn their spot in the Final Three. Anderson picked Fitzgerald to come with her, forcing her two biggest threats, Lacina and Vlachos, to make fire against one another.
What followed was #epic. In the closest fire-making challenge the show has ever seen, Vlachos outlasted Lacina by mere seconds in a comeback victory, earning his spot in the Final Three. Even though he was heavily favored to win, Vlachos burst into tears- his best friend in Survivor, and a great friend outside of it, was gone. And he had something to do with it. He began to sob uncontrollably in her arms, repeatedly apologizing for failing to protect her.
The hyenas hadn’t just decimated the lions, they had emotionally broken the biggest one. Because the lions had failed to stick together, opportunistic hyenas were given the opportunity to infiltrate and decimate them. Which they did.
A great example of the hyena version of the Fatal Flaw resides in The Lion King. In the climax of the film, Scar is begging for mercy from his nephew, Simba. He ratted out his (literal) hyena co-conspirators, saying that it was their fault that this had all transpired. Simba didn’t believe him, and (quite anticlimactically) threw him off of Pride Rock, where he basically landed unharmed.
The hyenas recognized this betrayal and, when Scar tried to apologize, they all turned on him and ripped him to shreds. This allowed the lions to reconsolidate and kick the shit out of the hyenas, regaining control of the Pridelands. Remember, a group of lions beats a group of hyenas every time.
Because the hyenas had failed to stick together, they subverted themselves to the lions' will, which allowed them to be crushed by allowing those with more firepower to grab a foothold against them.
Ok, so it’s one thing to see these things in movies and reality television. But there are plenty of real-life examples too.
----------
Contrary to my whole post at this point, there are examples of this EVERYWHERE. I’ve been alluding to it in several posts already, just not in this context.
I’ve talked many times about our society’s Ruling Class, and how they feel threats to their institutional power from people like Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Kanye West. That’s probably the biggest example in modern society where this theory can be observed. But lions and hyenas are in every single element of our society if we look closely enough. Let’s get to some examples.
In my opinion, there are four things you need in order to have a reign of dominance in the NFL- a great quarterback, a great head coach, a great general manager, and a great owner. You need a great captain and leader at the most important position (quarterback) in all of sports. You need a great head coach to be able to lead those players and guide them through the turbulence on and off the field. You need a great general manager in order to pick great players and execute great deals. You need a great owner to spend money to finance all the operations. In other words, a collection of lions. One team in the NFL has consistently fit that bill for about 20 years, up until March of this year- The New England Patriots.
Assembling their collection of lions in Tom Brady (great quarterback), Bill Belichick (great head coach), Nick Caserio (basically their great GM, with massive input from Belichick), and Robert Kraft (their great owner), the Patriots ran roughshod over the NFL for two decades, obliterating nearly every single team in their path en route to nine Super Bowl appearances with six wins, an absolutely astonishing feat.
Were there others that played a part? Absolutely there were. Coaches and coordinators like Reuben Crennel, Brian Flores, Joe Judge, Josh McDaniels, Matt Patricia, and Charlie Weis were instrumental to their success. Players like Patrick Chung, Julian Edelman, Stephon Gilmore, Rob Gronkowski, Dont’a Hightower, Ty Law, Matt Light, Logan Mankins, Devin McCourty, Willie McGinnest, and Mike Vrabel were tremendous assets for the team, all of them contributing to their success.
But a lot of the NFL have talented players. Not a single one had a consistent grouping of that great quarterback/head coach/GM/owners category. The Patriots were the lions of the NFL, and every other team was a hyena.
But it begs the questions- if they were so dominant, why did they not win more than they did? Why did they lose those three Super Bowls? Why didn’t they get out of more AFC Championship Games victorious?
The answer? They found a stag lion, isolated it, and used that foothold to destroy the other lions and momentarily grab power. Let me explain.
The teams that gave the Patriots the most trouble during their dominant two-decade run were the Baltimore Ravens, the Denver Broncos, the Indianapolis Colts, the New York (football!) Giants, and the Philadelphia Eagles. The Giants beat the Patriots in two of their three Super Bowl losses, and the Eagles beat them in their most recent loss. The Ravens are one of the most well-run sports organizations in the world. The specific Broncos and Colts teams I’m talking about were both quarterbacked by Peyton Manning. In case you’re unfamiliar, he was decent at the whole football thing.
But, this really doesn’t have much to do with Peyton Manning at all. Or the teams themselves. It has to deal with the way they isolated and pounced on one specific lion (quite literally, as you’ll soon find out)- Tom Brady.
In football, it’s actually quite easy to isolate lions. Only two (the quarterback and head coach) are on the field at once; the GM and owner sit in the stands. And for those on the field, only one (the quarterback) physically plays. The challenge is then easy, but not so easy- find ways to take out the quarterback.
Tom Brady is what made the Patriots go offensively- he was and is so tremendous at so many things. But Tom Brady has one glaring flaw in his game.
Even by quarterbacks standards, he’s not very athletic- like, at all. Go watch his Combine footage if you want more details. The strategy for all four teams was to make Tom Brady’s job as hard as possible, more specifically in their pass rush. Hit him early, hit him often, and hit him as hard as possible. Do anything and everything to throw him off of his game. Make him miserable.
The teams that I mentioned all succeeded at that task. The pass rushes of the Ravens (led by Elvis Dumervil, Ray Lewis, and Terrell Suggs), Broncos (led by DeMarcus Ware and Von Miller), Colts (led by Dwight Freeney and Robert Mathis), Giants (led by Jason Pierre-Paul, Michael Strahan, and Osi Umenyora), and Eagles (led by Fletcher Cox and Brandon Graham) tormented Brady and, when most successful, were able to successfully isolate the lion, therefore usurping the lions as a collective. The dynasty, at least temporarily, toppled.
The Democratic Party has preached for years that they are the party of the oppressed and trodden-upon- the LGBTQ community and minorities all strongly rally behind them. That makes them the hyenas in terms of a political scenario. In September of 2016, then-candidate Hillary Clinton was campaigning at an LGBTQ rally when she uttered this phrase:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
Oof. Clinton had made the mistake (some would say non-mistake, but that’s neither here nor there) of categorizing a FOURTH of the country’s voting populous (Clinton and Trump split the popular vote almost directly in half) as “deplorable”. As the head hyena, had made the mistake of attacking the lion population directly. She poked the bear. And she paid dearly for it.
The Trump campaign pounced, immediately turning that speech into a highlight reel and blowing it up over his large social media following and television platform. Clinton eventually lost, and that gaffe was cited as a major, if not THE major, reason that she lost. Were there some Trump people that were deplorable? Certainly. There are deplorable people in every political party. But that generalization was clearly inaccurate, unless you’re a more cynical bastard than I am. If you are, I’m proud of you.
You could say the same about President Trump and the Repubican Party he infiltrated. Trump was, in this case, a hyena going into the lion’s den of Ruling Class Republicans. How did he infiltrate? He and his rabid following devoured candidates such as Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, isolating each individual lion until the Party had no choice but to adhere to his wishes.
Similarly (even though he didn’t win), Bernie Sanders had a familiar, and perhaps more devastating, effect on the Democratic side of the aisle. I’ve often alluded to how Sanders and Trump are essentially the same person, just on complete opposite sides of the aisle- this example further adds to the proof. Sanders, the anti-Ruling Class hyena, and his supporters tried to do what Trump did and isolate individual hyenas. The only one he couldn’t have success with was Clinton.
What he did succeed in, however, was cause massive infighting amongst the lions of the Democratic Party, causing a quite noticeable split between the anti-Ruling Class faction and the Ruling Class faction (must like Trump did with the Republican side). With this amount of infighting amongst the lions of both parties, substantially tribal warfare began to occur for another group to announce their dominance over the other.
Following on a somewhat-political note, the lions of the mass media sphere are also undergoing this type of disruption. There is a reason why independent media companies such as Barstool Sports, The Daily Wire, and Morning Brew are becoming more and more popular. It’s not happening by accident.
It’s happening because the mass media is largely dogshit. It’s miraculous that it’s taken some people this long to come around to that fact, myself included. This doesn’t just include the mainstream sources of NEWS such as Fox and MSNBC, but also networks such as ESPN and literally anything produced by Ted Turner. Don’t get it twisted folks- they are all exactly equal to dogshit. (Although I do have a soft spot for Fox Sports- shoutout Cowherd, Jenny, Joy, Nick Wright, Skip, Shannon, and the rest...love y’all.)
Noticing this dogshittery, independent (hyena) media personalities such as Pat McAfee, Alex Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, and others have capitalized by outsourcing these companies number one resource (the talent pool they possess) and have gone rogue, starting their own brands under their own names and creating a whole new blue ocean of market share for themselves.
The results for most large companies have been catastrophic- public opinion and ratings have plummeted, and notable media personalities are branching out, if not fully breaking entirely. Sean Hannity has his own radio show. Colin Cowherd owns the rights to his own show. So does Stephen A. Smith. The Call Her Daddy girls are currently in a fight with Barstool to gain their intellectual property back. Tucker Carlson owns his own media COMPANY, as do Dave Portnoy and Ben Shapiro.
This rapid decentralization is not only evident in the media, but in multiple other industries as well. Remember the lion of the taxi industry? Meet the hyenas Uber and Lyft. People are starting their own businesses on platforms, although indicators of success have been varied at best. Have an idea for a show on a lion television network? Meet the hyenas of YouTube. People like David Dobrik and Brian Rose of London Real and others have started their own businesses there as well, but have to constantly be wary of increased censorship and changing content restrictions. Just ask Rose, he’s going through it right now- he will probably be kicked off of both LinkedIn and YouTube within the span of a month for no specific reason at all.
Odd. But not really.
----------
As we’ve covered, there are examples of this stuff everywhere. But, for the most part, these are kind of big examples with large brands and names attached to them. You might be wondering- how the fuck does this even apply to me?
Well, what I would say to that is the first thing that applies to you is the simple understanding of the concept itself. Your role should be to understand the situations you find yourself in in your life and determine which side of the fence you belong to. Both can work, and both change- frequently.
The other thing- seek power for the RIGHT reasons. Lions and hyenas are just two sides of the same coin- none is inherently good or bad. So, whatever side of the fence in whatever situation you find yourself in, acknowledge it and do your best to work well within the system. Both are needed, and both are important.
And the other other thing- probably don’t use the analogy to explain sex to your kids. I really don’t have a fucking clue how you would spin that shit.
OPEN YOUR MiND,
Sam
Quote of the Week:
“A hero is made by the path he chooses, not by the power he is graced with.”
Tony Stark, as played by Robert Downey Jr. in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Lyric of the Week:
“How many n***** on your payroll?
Rich gangbangers, y’all ain’t even know they make those
Double caseloads, push buttons, I got say-so
When it’s war time, never lay low, y’all play roles”
Nipsey Hussle, as featured with Teyana Taylor on “Rich N**** Lifestyle” by Rick Ross (Port of Miami 2, 2019)