If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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The subject matter of mainstream psychiatry is the mind and its discontents, yet it has no articulated and publicly available theory of mind and no model of mental disorder, nor a theory of personality or a model of personality disorder. Modern psychiatry therefore has no formal basis in science. At best, it is a protoscience; at worst, pseudoscience.

I have repeatedly said this but apparently need to keep saying because nobody with influence in psychiatry is listening. The caring people at Psychiatric Times are “people with influence,” and have just published an article, the first in two, on what used to be called psychopathic personality, so let’s see if they can prove me wrong. The title indicates their approach: Neurobiology of Aggression in Antisocial Behavior, Part 1: Foundations and Early-Life Risk [1]. They start by pointing out that the term “antisocial behaviour” covers a very wide range, from violence to theft, deceitfulness and general rule-breaking. Two types are immediately seen: the impulsive, explosive and violent type, previously known as the aggressive psychopath who typically ends up in prison, and the calm, emotionally-detached type, the creative psychopath who carefully plans crimes and thrives on cheating people. They have in common a disregard for the rules of society, emotional detachment from people, lack of remorse, a reluctance to admit wrong and an intense self-centredness. Traditionally, there was another type known as the inadequate psychopath who was a bit of both mixed with alcohol and drugs but fell to bits when anything went wrong and became a pathetic, weepy mess.

That classification worked well until the DSM-III committee was getting busy in the 1970s. As we know, they hoped to write a theory-free system of classification for psychiatry in which every mental patient could be slotted into a labelled box or category and everybody would know what the label meant. When it came to personality disorders, they ran into a couple of major problems. First, it had long been known that personality disorders don’t fit neatly into boxes, they sprawl untidily across the landscape. Their answer to this was to rephrase all the diagnostic criteria for each category so that they seemed separate and distinct, even though it was crystal clear to everybody that they weren’t. Thus, one group showed a reluctance to become emotionally involved with others while the next group were distant and detached from people. Same thing but it allowed them to get away with the fiction that personality disorders were unique categories [2].

Why would anybody bother, you ask. Indeed, and the answer was another subterfuge, another fudging of the basic idea of psychiatry: they were determined to write a classification that would set the scene for the biologisation of psychiatry. Each distinct surface syndrome would then map down to the genome with a unique genetic error for each mental disorder. In the fullness of time, their friends in the drug industry would then devise a specific drug to rectify that error and Bob’s your uncle, say goodbye to mental disorder. The categorical system of psychiatric diagnoses makes sense if and only if mental disorder is biological in nature. If it isn’t, it doesn’t. I say it isn’t but we’ll come back to that point.

The second big problem for the DSM-III committee came when they looked at the description of the creative psychopath. This was a person, traditionally seen as male although there’s never been a shortage of female psychopaths, who was charming, manipulative, lied as easily as he breathed, who planned crimes and carried them out in such a way that if a scheme failed, somebody else would get the blame. These people are remorseless, utterly self-centred, grandiose in their sense of entitlement and fixated on getting what they want by any means necessary. Other people’s interests or lives mean nothing to them, everything is transactional, as in: “What’s in it for me, what can I get out of this?” If they can win and at the same time humiliate their enemies, that’s even better.

Trouble is, that more or less describes about 90% of the American power elite: politics, finance, industry, military, academia, sport, entertainment and definitely religion, all these fields were colonised by psychopaths who, don’t ever forget, are always pleased to help each other in their machinations. Psychopaths are remarkably good at recognising each other, far better than ordinary people. And don’t think it’s restricted to the US, it’s everywhere although with neoliberal economics, they have perfected a system that selects for and benefits the charming, flint-hearted and remorseless marauder. That was all a bit embarrassing for the committee so they dumped the term psychopath and replaced it with sociopath, defined so as to exclude all their naughty friends. Sociopaths were people who used drugs and got into fights and had been to jail; only bad people from the wrong side of the track ended up in prison, so all the high class scoundrels now known as the Epstein class got a “get out of jail free” card. For life. And for their ghastly children. Anyway, nearly half a century later, psychopathy remains a problem, as the authors acknowledge:

... financial costs associated with the behavioral traits of psychopathic individuals in the United States have been estimated at approximately $400 billion annually, highlighting the urgent need for effective identification, management, and treatment strategies for this challenging population ...

Note that that figure doesn’t include the costs of all the pointless wars started by the psychopaths in government. Putting that aside, the idea of effective “treatment” runs into two major but entirely predictable problems. The first one is that the people doing the real damage aren’t out there in the suburbs causing mayhem or sitting sullenly in prisons waiting for the day they can get out and get even, no, they’re small bickies as we say, they hardly rate. The real psychopaths are the Jeffrey Epsteins and Ghislaine Maxwells and the Bernard Madoffs and the Peter Mandelsons and the Henry Kissingers and Elizabeth Holmes of this world (check that brief video that shows she has learned nothing; she makes my skin crawl and always has), not to overlook all the sharp crooks and dim-witted goons surrounding Trump, especially his son-in-law. These are the people who twist and manipulate entire financial systems, overthrow governments and start wars, just to serve their own purposes. US presidential advisor and ultraneocon Karl Rove put it precisely:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

We do what we like and you just suck it up. That’s as psychopathic as it gets: the idea of history’s actors comes straight from Mein Kampf. So that’s problem No. 1: beware the charming, entirely plausible psychopath in Armani. Problem No. 2 is as the authors state is quite simple: When it comes to psychopathy, we don’t know what we’re doing: “... the underlying etiology and pathophysiology of antisocial behavior remain incompletely understood ...” (my emphasis). That’s a euphemism beloved of academic psychiatrists on the hunt for grants. It means “haven’t got an effing clue.” However, even in the absence of clues, they’re happy to steer research in a particular direction: “While environmental and social factors are influential, growing evidence points to the role of neurobiological contributors in the development and expression of antisocial traits.” In order to come to grips with it, they announce that there are two sorts of aggression, proactive and reactive:

Proactive aggression is deliberate, goal-oriented, and often used as a means to achieve personal gain. It is typically unemotional in nature and associated with low physiological arousal. In contrast, reactive aggression is impulsive and affectively driven, emerging in response to perceived provocation or threat. It is characterized by heightened anger and increased sympathetic nervous system activation ...

What they call proactive is the person calmly making illegal plans to disadvantage another person in order to gain a benefit for himself or his group. It may be one person deciding to cheat or harm another, or it may be two people conspiring together to plan a criminal outcome. Here is a brief but very clear description of soldiers acting in a wholly psychopathic manner without a hint of personal agitation or concern for the other person. It is critically important to understand that these people are not mentally disturbed or disordered in any way whatsoever. They are intelligent and well-educated, in full control, they are not affectively disturbed, with no hallucinations or delusions. The authors of the Psych Times article, however, have decided in advance that such people have biological disturbances of brain function: “Proactive aggression is associated with impairments in goal clarification, accessing appropriate responses, and decision-making...” That’s news to me: my understanding is that they’re very good at making decisions. We just don’t like the decisions they make.

What they call reactive aggression was the defining feature of the aggressive psychopath: Bill Smith is going about his day when something small goes wrong. Immediately, he flies into a rage, shouting and throwing tools and punches, then starts drinking, gets into a fight, jumps in his car and runs into a tree, gets pulled out but wants to fight the police and ambulance officers and so on. If he’s not doing that, he’s dominating his family, controlling them with constant threats and just enough violence to make them know not to step out of line. They drink and use drugs, they gamble, have endless affairs, cheat, steal and tell lies when it suits them and clearly don’t give a damn about the mental welfare of any other person, including their children: “reactive aggression,” say the authors, “is linked to difficulties in cue encoding and interpretation.” They then launch into biological speculation about the role of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in the different types, without once mentioning the defining feature: explosive high arousal.

How does personality disorder come about? Of course they invoke genetic factors even though the evidence is exceedingly weak, and mention other neurobiological factors such as the mother’s health and mental state during pregnancy. Maternal drug and alcohol use always gets a lot of air time and they bring in dietary deficiencies, maternal “stress” and lead poisoning before finally coming to what seems obvious: “... adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have consistently been associated with increased risk of antisocial behaviors.” They point to violence, neglect and sexual abuse as major factors as “Early brain development is particularly sensitive to environmental stressors ...” Brain development? Do we have any proof of that? No, we don’t. So far as we know, the overwhelming majority of people with this personality disorder have absolutely nothing wrong with their brains. Indeed, some of them are very, very clever, so what’s going on? Tucked coyly in the second last paragraph is the clue, suitably disguised under biologisms:

Taken together, chronic exposure to childhood stress may lead to maladaptive neurobiological changes. Specifically, persistent stress may trigger a down-regulation of the stress response system as an adaptive mechanism to avoid chronic arousal, potentially disrupting neurobiological signaling and contributing to long-term pathophysiological outcomes associated with antisocial behavior.

That is, an adverse environment in early life may lead people to learn how to keep calm by ignoring all the madness going on around them. In that state, they quickly realise they can cheat people and get away with it. That is, after all their talk about brain centres, the authors offer a non-biological explanation: the creative psychopath is wholly a psychological phenomenon, a matter of personality but not of genes or neurotransmitters. Similarly, people who have had a violent or abusive childhood grow up hyper-alert to any sign of trouble or conflict. They react violently because that’s how everybody acted around them. They learned early that the world is a cruel and dangerous place, and humans will pounce on you at the drop of a hat so don’t trust them. That is, they never had the opportunity or need to learn otherwise. Treatment isn’t easy because they are deeply suspicious of the world, fully expecting somebody to hurt them every moment of the day, and ready to explode defensively.

Creative psychopaths are almost always the product of emotional deprivation but not of overt abuse. There is no better description than psychologist Mary Trump’s account of her uncle’s quite appalling childhood [3], although being a millionaire at eight probably made up for some of it. Donald Trump was not beaten or screwed until he became a psychopath, he was trained and he does it because he loves it. As were the soldiers mentioned above, who enjoy the killing as it allows them to get in touch with their inner Eichmann.

You cannot have an explanatory model of personality disorder until you have a theory of personality which, in turn, depends on a theory of mind. Thus, a project to explain psychopathy in biological terms ends up invoking psychology to complete the chain of causation. We find this all the time because it could not be otherwise: there are dozens of examples in philosophy where writers had to invent a non-biological “self” to complete their biological account of mind [4]. Why does this elementary mistake keep happening? Because biological psychiatry is not a science of mental disorder, it is an ideology, a belief firmly held and constantly reinforced in an echo chamber by a powerful group who have never done the groundwork of explaining just how mental matters can be explained by physics. If they tried, they would realise it can’t be done but that would be too threatening to their careers so they keep quiet and just keep parroting the party line: “The underlying etiology and pathophysiology of antisocial behavior remain incompletely understood but we’re convinced the answer lies in the neurobiology so we won’t look elsewhere.” This is entirely consistent with an observation by no less than the Lord Lister (1827-1912) from about 1876:

I remember at an early period of my own life showing to a man of high reputation as a teacher some matters which I happened to have observed. And I was very much struck and grieved to find that, while all the facts lay equally clear before him, only those that squared with his previous theories seemed to affect his organs of vision.

Nearly two hundred years ago, the French philosopher and “father” of sociology, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) provided the answer to their dilemma:

If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theories. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part, we could not even perceive them.

Mainstream psychiatry has no theory of personality and no model of personality disorder. Therefore, psychiatrists are unable to see facts when they stand clearly in front of them (I’ll send this to the authors of that article but they won’t respond).

(PS: an excellent article on suicide and antidepressants by Peter Gotzche in this week’s Mad in America. The mainstream gets away with their pseudoscience just because they make sure nobody questions their “biomedical model of mental disorder,” the same one they’ve never written. That’s pretty psychopathic).

References:

1. Neurobiology of Aggression in Antisocial Behavior, Part 1: Foundations and Early-Life Risk.https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/neurobiology-of-aggression-in-antisocial-behavior-part-1-foundations-and-early-life-risk.

2. McLaren N (2007). The categorical system of diagnosis: Personality Disorder. Chapter 8 in Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences.; Ann Arbor, Mi.: Future Psychiatry Press.

3. Trump ML (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. London: Simon and Shuster.

4. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry. See below.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Another week, another couple of reports telling us we’re well down the road to climate collapse. The first comes from that notorious nest of lefties and weirdo greenies, the UK Office of National Security Assessments, with the alarmist title: Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security. Their starting point is: “Nature is a foundation of national security ... Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).” Oh dear, who could have expected this?

After digging through the statistics, they conclude that the UK is at high risk from global ecosystem degradation as it will seriously impact their food supplies. Due to their soggy climate and over-population, the UK can’t feed itself and probably hasn’t done so since about Henry VIII. Mostly, that didn’t bother the English as they simply stole food from the Scots and Irish but that no longer works. Instead, refugees from Africa and West Asia are now looking to Britain for food. They give the example of how climate change in Central America is reducing coffee harvests, which forces people to abandon their farms and try to move to the US. That’s only going to increase and we’re likely to get a rehearsal over the next two years as the consequences of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran play out on a background of major climate impacts from El Niño. Generally speaking, we can cope with one natural disaster, e.g. a single major earthquake or cyclone or floods or bushfires. However, when disasters come one on top of the other, they’re magnified, as Yeats said:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ... (Second Coming)

The centre cannot hold. Over the next 6-12 months, we can expect ... major floods on the west coasts of Nth and Sth America, with loss of food production; continuing drought in the south west of USA with major reduction of water supplies and hydropower; drought in grain producing areas of Sth America, Africa and Australia; drought in Europe with major loss of hydropower and reduction in river transport due to low water levels; near-total loss of Ukrainian and Russian grain exports due to war (they are the two biggest grain exporters in the world); reduction of food production throughout Asia and Africa due to loss of fertiliser exports from Persian Gulf producers; major cost increases in fuel and other inputs for food producers everywhere due to wars, and so on. The centre is under serious strain at present, the question is whether it can hold as things get worse. Which they are going to do.

The other big report comes from UN Environment Program, the one Trump defunded. The UK report is 14 pages; the UNEP one is 10 times bigger and stuffed with stats but it has a neat executive summary starting on page 2 (I wonder about executive summaries: does that mean they can’t read?). This one is titled: Limiting Overshoot: Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return. In two sentences, it says: “The target of a maximum of 1.5C rise in global temperatures will be exceeded shortly. We now have to start planning for what was previously seen as untenable, 1.8C rise.” Some of their major points include:

Pt 7: ... the world must adopt proactive approaches that deploy flexible, multi-level governance, particularly when it comes to adaptation (p5).

Pt 9. Equity and justice must be the core of effective strategies to protect the vulnerable, create a just transition for communities and workforces, and secure a liveable future for coming generations ... (However,) Reversing global warming will be a slow and difficult process. Approximately 220 GtCO₂ of cumulative net-negative emissions are required to lower global temperatures by around 0.1°C (p19).

OK, that’s all fairly clear, clear enough for even Kissinger’s “dumb, stupid animals” in the military to grasp. In the US, the Navy is very well aware of the risks. Their vast base at Norfolk, VA, largest naval base in the world by far, has about 6.5 km of waterfront and 18 km of pier and wharf space sprawling along the edge of the harbour. None of it is more than a metre above sea level, and large parts are built on landfill. Over the last century, sea levels have risen about 450mm (18”) and are expected to continue for the foreseeable future. The real risk is not a slow, steady rise like a lake inundating the huge areas of workshops, storage, admin and living quarters for the 75,000 naval and civilian employees of the base (and their dependents, and the 1.8million who live in the region). Instead, the risk comes from increasingly violent storms driving a storm surge to wash away roads and services such as hospitals, fire brigades, power stations and so on (see recent storms at Long Beach, also a naval base). To counter this very real risk, the Navy decided to start using mixes of biofuels on their ships and their many planes and vehicles but the House Committee of Underhand Ways and Shifty Means blocked that on instructions from Herr Drumpf.

We are teetering on the brink. The unavoidable fact is that the planet simply cannot sustain a population of nearly 9billion. Various models predict that about 2.5billion is the maximum sustainable population, i.e. a quarter of where it will be in 20 years. Four times too many people: how come our politicians and the rest of the power elite can’t see this? I can’t answer that as I’ve never spoken to any of them (and they wouldn’t speak to me anyway), but we can hazard some guesses. It will come down to two things, money and power which, as Trump has shown, are pretty much the same thing. That is, it will come down to matters of individual human psychology, essentially personality: who are the people who get themselves into positions of power and influence, what drives them? Lord Acton said we can’t assume people in high positions are decent just by virtue of their achievements: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control” (1887). Does anybody doubt that today? George Orwell didn’t:

…no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power (1984).

Is this cynical? I don’t believe it is: for a lot of people, power is the only game in town. There is an example in Mary Trump’s biography of her uncle. Her father had already died by the time her grandfather died. Ordinarily, Mary’s father’s share of the huge estate (at least half a billion) would have gone to his children but they got nothing. It all went to the other four siblings who could have agreed to a fairer sharing but they didn’t. Eventually, after much legal brawling and huge animosity, she got about $2.7million, a few percent of what her aunts and uncles got. The rich and powerful always want more, they are never satisfied because the object of wealth is more wealth.

As wealth and power go up, so too does the sense of entitlement. Bezos is worth about $275billion (his huge yacht alone is worth $500million) but he personally sets targets for workers in his warehouses that mean they can’t take toilet breaks and have to pee into a bottle. The rich are all the same, every last one of them, and (with precious few examples) so too are their wives. The wife of Conrad Black, convicted press baron and defrocked peer, said: “My extravagance knows no bounds.” Former prince Andrew we know about; his wife, Sarah Ferguson what was and is again, was just the same, greedy, corrupt and took her daughters to see Epstein after he got out of jail.

All of this is old news; at present, we see two political trends across the world. Last week in Germany, AfD won a state election, their first. In West Australia, One Nation, an equally toxic far right mob, has just snatched a seat from the governing Labor party. In India, Modi’s BJP has just taken control of West Bengal which used to be a marxist stronghold and there are plenty of other examples. What’s going on? On the one hand, we have the clearest evidence that the planet is roaring along a path to cataclysm, and yet everywhere, people are voting for parties and governments that openly say they intend to continue the policies to make it worse. Are people that stupid? Unfortunately, yes, they are. They’re easily fooled by lies, and the elite tell lies so they can gain more power and more money. We are caught in a vortex of lies and corruption in which the power elite tell lies to scare people to vote for them, then they tell more lies to stay in power which attracts more extreme people from out of the woodwork who whip up the fears while looting the treasury behind the scenes. A small example from this weekend illustrates the self-reinforcing nature of the process.

On Saturday, Israel announced that several of their desalination plants had shut down. The country gets about 83% of its fresh water by this process (using natual gas, not solar power). Immediately they blamed Iranian hackers and promised retribution. Turns out it was an algal bloom along their coast caused by all the untreated sewage flowing into the ocean from Gaza after Israel destroyed their sewage treatment plants. Good, pigeons come home to roost. Across the Atlantic, the Trump sons are making hay while their father’s fitful sun is still above the horizon and J Kushner is raking in billions from his voluntary job as negotiator in chief. Why is he volunteering? Because that way, he didn’t need a security clearance. He can have access to practically every secret in the country and use it to make money and nobody except his dementing pa-in-law can stop him.

Why are things so bad, why has this happened? I don’t think things have ever been perfect but it’s getting worse and as part of that, it’s out in the open, they’ve stopped pretending. Trump freely says that companies who pay him $100,000 a month can have early access to his postings on his “Mistruths Social,” meaning they get warnings of his announcements that will move the markets. However, insider trading has been with us forever, that’s how the Rothschilds got their start and they haven’t looked back. A hundred years ago, a retired US Marine General, Smedley Butler, wrote a short outburst titled War is a Racket, in which he showed how the US military was little more than an enforcement racket for Wall Street’s greedy bankers. But it’s rapidly getting worse now, driven by a force bigger than any single political party or hack.

It’s not just naked greed as when the Nazis looked at the USSR or when the zionists looked at Palestine and said: “We want your land and we’re going to take it.” No, it’s a force that rises above mere bourgeois morality. By the simple expedient of declaring itself beyond the reach of such petty considerations as right and wrong, it touts itself as rational, universal and untainted by human lusts and needs. It is, of course, neoliberalism, the doctrine that humans are the servants of something called the market which alone can make the correct decisions on how to allocate and price resources. It says humans are little automatons who go about their business calmly and rationally deciding what they need and what they’re prepared to pay for it. There is no emotion or morality in the theory because those vague mental constructs can’t be pinned down, they get in the way of their equations so they had to go.

If we look at international affairs from the moral point of view, then launching unprovoked attacks on another country is wicked and has to stop immediately. From the neoliberal point of view, however, in the version known as offensive realism, it makes perfect sense to build up a big arms industry to arm large military forces and then use them to subdue the other side before they do the same to you. Once the weapons industries and the military exist, they acquire a life of their own and no politician who wants to get up the ladder will say a word against them – and what pollie doesn’t want to slither higher? When you want to get richer or more powerful, morals get in the way so a doctrine that says morality is foolish sentimentality is made to order.

There is not a direct or linear relationship between some political event today and a social or economic event in 40 or 50 years. Instead, there is a huge swirling mess of social pressures, political forces, economic demands, human drives, and resources both natural and human. Everything is related although we often don’t know how: somebody drops a bomb in the Persian Gulf and a year later, a small child dies of malaria in Eastern Congo because the raw materials for the drug couldn’t get from Qatar to India and then back to Congo for WHO to dispense. The real danger comes when risks summate, as they are doing now, but everybody is too involved in rational wars or rationally making money to be bothered with some matter on the far side of the globe.

The biggest risk is the notion that we can guide human affairs dispassionately, that we don’t need a theory of psychology because we’re so so sensible and we’re above all that sort of thing. As you will recognise, that just is a theory of psychology, but it happens to be a very bad one. All it does is open the door of the treasury to the crooks and scoundrels. The US is now a mafia state. Israel has been one since it began.

We are tied together on a raft in space. The rich and powerful think they’re too clever to be bothered with what happens to the poor, that there are too many of them, anyway. They’re so locked into gathering more money and more power for themselves and hammering their enemies that they don’t think about nonsense like El Niño. By the time somebody like Trump or Albanese or any of the others realise it has to be taken seriously, it’ll be too late. As they say, there’s no Planet B so we’ll just have to have a revolution and chuck all the scoundrels out. Let’s get started.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

A recent brief paper in the Brit J Psychiatry Bulletin by Speyer et al offered a mild and oblique criticism of what are called practice guidelines [1]. These days, every college or professional association issues advice on how each condition should be treated. For the colleges, these are a big deal, with dozens of people meeting regularly for months to churn through the literature and knock up what they agree amounts to best practice. It then has to be reviewed and revised by half a dozen committees before it is adopted. These missives are advisory only but their proud parents tend to forget that there are people, like lawyers and insurance companies and other pond life, who take them as gospel. If it’s in written form, it’s law, which works in general medicine and surgery, but not so well in psychiatry for an obvious reason. However, any psychiatrist who doesn’t follow the guidelines to the letter will be hung out to dry.

As the paper’s authors point out, there’s a world of difference between what we might call the hard sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology, and the squishy human topics including psychiatry. The standard sciences are able to use what is called linear thinking to reach their conclusions. This means they have a clear set of laws (physics, chemistry, etc) that work in one direction only and can have just one outcome: A + B = C and nothing else. Thus, given the starting conditions (of an experiment, a building collapse, a trip to the moon), only one outcome is possible. This rigidity is not an accident. The goal of the doctrine of positivism was to strip all uncertainty from science in order to build a reliable body of scientific knowledge. Everything had to be related in a stepwise manner to what had gone before. There was nothing more uncertain than human emotion, values, wishes, likes and dislikes, so all of it had to go. Science can only be concerned with what can be seen and measured: values are mental constructs; mental constructs can’t be measured; therefore mental constructs have no place in science. QED.

However, as the various sciences developed, it became clear that, very often, equations were far more complex than the simple A + B = C model. Nuclear physicists, then chemists, then biologists, found they were dealing with dozens of factors, all changing and depending on a myriad other factors. These were highly complex but still rational and well-behaved; they just needed far more computing power than even a dozen human brains could provide. Eventually, a theory of complex systems developed that could handle these using immensely powerful supercomputers.

That’s all pretty clear and uncluttered, mainstream science has made enormous progress but what about the “science of mental life”? Psychiatry and psychology are only about mental constructs, so what can we do about them? And it’s not just psychiatry, what about all the other fields where values have to be taken into account, such as social services, town planning, custodial services, budget allocations and so on? How can anybody hope to solve these very complex matters when linear thinking simply fails just because it wasn’t designed for them? As I’ve outlined, psychology tried to convert itself into a “hard science” with behaviorism [2], dispensing with the mind altogether but this failed. For its part, psychiatry has tried convincing itself that the mind is really only the brain, so biology will tell us everything we need to know.

That hasn’t worked well, as this paper points out. Trying to control daily practice by adopting rigid “guidelines” removes the human element entirely. For example, if a patient stops taking the drugs due to side effects, that’s deemed “non-compliance” and the dose is given by injection under duress. If a person wants to believe that lizard people have taken over the government, who are psychiatrists to decide that that means insanity which means brain disease which means disabling treatment for life, which will therefore be shorter? The authors didn’t say it, but the reductionist biological approach to psychiatry automatically puts psychiatrists in a paternal role at best and, at worst, as oppressors. Granted, there are plenty of psychiatrists who feel quite comfortable in that role and aren’t in any hurry to change it but the paper suggests that in opting for compulsory treatment, there are many human considerations that don’t fit in the simple world envisaged by the guidelines. Yes, the drugs may suppress hallucinations making life easier for the patient’s relatives, but if the cost to the patient is loss of sex life, whose interests and values should prevail? In order to answer these difficult questions (which, overwhelmingly, are simply ignored by psychiatrists), the paper offers a suggestion from a totally different field from fifty years ago.

Town planning is very much a hybrid field, with all sorts of complex material and legal questions that can be solved with a computer, but there’s also the human element, which can’t. It may make perfect sense to put a highway straight through a small swamp but that will inflame the swamp-lovers (of whom I’m one). NIMBY, it’s called, “not in my backyard,” and they (we) are the bane of town planners and air traffic controllers and a host of other well-meaning technicians who simply don’t understand that ducks and possums have rights, too. In a paper from 1973, Rittel and Webber, two academic town planners, suggested we should distinguish between “tame problems,” both simple and complex, and what they called “wicked problems” [3]. It’s not a good word but it emphasises that these are profoundly different in that technical issues are deeply entangled with values and judgements: human wishes as distinct from human needs. There is no single solution to a wicked problem, only a balancing of conflicting interests, the matter is resolved rather than solved. For all its braying about being a rational science of mental disorder, psychiatry slots straight into this group. Rittel and Webber saw ten features that distinguish wicked problems from tame:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem; different people will see it from different angles.

2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule, no clear solution, so one can always try to do better.

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad, i.e. it’s all about values so don’t try to kid yourself.

4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem, especially as solutions have unintended consquences.

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.

6. Wicked problems do not have fixed set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.

7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.

8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem (i.e. causes are undefined due to lack of a model).

9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution ... There is no rule or procedure to determine the “correct” explanation or combination of them.

10. The planner has no right to be wrong but will be punished by one group or another who disagree with the outcome.

The last one is important, as they point out: “... the aim is not to find the truth, but to improve some characteristics of the world where people live. Planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate; the effects can matter a great deal to those people that are touched by those actions” [3, p167]. How true this is of psychiatry. For all their efforts to reduce psychiatry to the status of a biological science (psychiatrists as “clinical neuroscientists,” in the words of Thomas Insel), to convert its “wicked problems” of emotions and values into “tame” ones of neurotransmitters, the fundamental question of how to incorporate a sufferer’s values refuses to go away. With its DSM tick-a-box approach, psychiatry tries to reduce depression, for example, to a “chemical imbalance of the brain.” This has been widely deplored as “imperial psychiatry,” converting normal emotions into “diseases,” as Horwitz and Wakefield pointed out 20 years ago in their important but widely ignored study, The Loss of Sadness [4]. More to the daily point, it fails. 15% of the adult population take antidepressants and the suicide rate just keeps climbing, as the ever-polite British psychiatrist, Joanna Moncreiff, points out:

Although the discovery of a specific antidepressant agent in the future cannot be ruled out, it is possible that we misunderstand the nature of depression, and that regarding it as a discrete and universal disorder may have raised false hopes about the chance of a generally applicable ‘cure’ or treatment. The alternative view of depression as part of the spectrum of meaningful human responses to the world suggests that drugs will only dull the experience. In the end, the situation that provoked the negative emotion needs to be addressed. Depression is a signal that change is needed in some aspect of life [5].

In fact, depression is a signal that some important aspect of life has been lost, it is the universal reaction to a loss. Awareness that “change is needed in some aspect of life” causes the universal reaction to a threat, known as the “flight of fight reaction,” aka anxiety. Early in their paper, Speyer and partners [1] opine that clinical guidelines have been very helpful but aren’t perfect:

Although this format works well and has greatly improved quality of care in some situations (p1) ... guidelines developed solely within professional and academic communities embed a particular epistemic standpoint as the authoritative standard ... Addressing complex wickedness therefore requires that service users, carers, clinicians and researchers participate as genuine co-producers. Finally, meaningful deliberation presupposes equal access to knowledge ... a matter of epistemic justice, a prerequisite for ensuring that all stakeholders can engage as informed participants in the decisions that govern their care (p3).

Stripped of the jargon, what psychiatry likes to portray as its professionalism turns out to be dressed-up amateurism. And it’s everywhere. Take the first sentence in that quote: “Although this format works well and has greatly improved quality of care in some situations...” This is false. Clinical guidelines have not “greatly improved care.” Nothing has changed but the statement is a classic motte and bailey defence, which needs a bit of explanation. In feudal times, the local lords and princelings spent their days raiding each other, which the peasants and villagers found somewhat irksome. Farmland, known as the motte, isn’t easy to defend so they often built a fort on a hilltop, the keep or bailey (hence Old Bailey in London) to which they could retreat while the raiders stole their cows and chickens. When the raiding party had gone, the peasants came out and started cleaning up again.

In philosophy, it applies to a person who makes extravagant claims about something but when questioned, retreats to a much smaller, defensible position. Politicians do this all the time, esp. one DJ Trump, who uses the extreme version. Today, he spouts some bit of nonsense but when questioned by reporters tomorrow, he says “I didn’t say that, that’s fake noos.” Has psychiatric care “greatly improved”? If having more people on more drugs for longer is an improvement, possibly, but not if the side effects are taken into account.

Moving on, “... guidelines developed solely within professional and academic communities embed a particular epistemic standpoint as the authoritative standard.” True. You can’t argue with a psychiatrist. While psychiatric committees and tribunals generally have a “consumer representative” these days, they don’t have critics who will poke holes in their “authority” or ask embarrassing questions. My experience is that the lay people who get appointed to these committees and so on are almost always relatives of somebody who died by suicide, and they’re convinced that if there had been more treatment and more incarceration, not less, then Johnny would still be alive. Nobody asks Johnny but he would only give personal opinions anyway, whereas we’re scientists and aren’t moved by personal values (they forget that that statement is itself a personal value, and are deeply offended when this is pointed out). We see this in the concept of “risk management.” It used to mean the relative risk to the patient of treatment vs. no treatment, but now it is only ever taken to mean “risk to the hospital and psychiatrist,” as in: “If we don’t follow the guidelines strictly, can we get into trouble? OK, lock him up and jab him.”

“Addressing complex wickedness therefore requires that service users, carers, clinicians and researchers participate as genuine co-producers.” Forget that. Do you seriously imagine that one of those powerful professors on the guidelines committee is going to listen while some nervous soul stutters that psychiatric drugs have lots of side effects, like massive weight gain and so on? Professors don’t listen to crazy people (even when the patient is a physician, as in this case in MIA), they should just control themselves and stop eating so much.

“Finally, meaningful deliberation presupposes equal access to knowledge...” The whole edifice of modern psychiatry is built on people not knowing the truth behind psychiatry’s extravagant claims. For example, the biopsychosocial model. For 12 years from 2013, the RANZCP had on their website Position Statement No. 80 which stated:

Medical expertise: Psychiatrists apply their medical knowledge, specialist clinical skills and acumen in the provision of person-centred care. They understand the impact of ‘biological’, ‘psychological’ and ‘social’ factors on mental health and the causation of mental illness. This ‘bio-psycho-social’ model is a holistic approach that recognises the impact of social adversity and physical health on mental well-being [6].

This was completely false and after yet another scratchy argument, was quietly removed and not replaced. Psychiatrists are now physicians trained in psychiatry who use their expertise in psychiatry to treat mental disorders. Very enlightening but we’ll keep going.

“... a matter of epistemic justice, a prerequisite for ensuring that all stakeholders can engage as informed participants in the decisions that govern their care.” That sounds impressive but it never happens. Philosopher Amanda Fricker defined epistemic injustice in her 1998 book Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. What happens is that some socially privileged groups are deemed authorities by what they know whereas others are deemed incompetent in comparison, and the powerful group takes control of the process. The inferior group suffer an injustice when what they know is dismissed because of who they are, not what they have to say. A person taking half a dozen psychiatric drugs who complains of being unable to sit or lie still is not regarded as an expert on his or her own body and is simply ordered to take more tablets, even though the drugs are causing the problem (akathisia).

The conflict of interests arises just because psychiatry prides itself on discarding all personal values in order to reduce the cosmic complexity of the human mind to something that can be seen in a scanner. They forgot, or more likely refused to know, that in order to do that, you actually must have a theory of the topic (in this case, the mind) and a model of what you want to study (mental disorder). They don’t have either of those things so rather than admit their failure, they keep issuing “clinical guidelines” that pretend the “wicked” or highly complex, value-laden problems of humanity can be reduced to “tame” problems of biology, suitable for solving with linear thinking (depression + antidepressants = cure). This approach is incapable of dealing with what are called recursive or self-reinforcing problems in life, of which the classic example is anxiety states. A person becomes anxious about an appointment tomorrow. This makes the heart race, which makes them think a heart attack is on its way, so they become more anxious and start to sweat and tremble, which convinces them they need to cancel the appointment, which makes them feel like a failure.

It makes perfect sense but linear thinking can’t deal with this sort of problem. Clinical guidelines only make the problem worse by convincing people that psychiatry’s a pushover, just keep adding drugs until the patient stops complaining. From that point of view, yes, it is easy but somehow, we need to make sure the patient’s voice is heard, even or especially when the psychiatrist doesn’t want to hear it.

References:

1. Speyer H et al (2026) Clinical guidelines addressing complex and ‘wicked’ problems. BJPsych Bulletin doi:10.1192/bjb.2026.10271

2. McLaren N (2024). Behaviorism: Not Sleeping, Just Dead. Chapter 4 in Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

3. Rittel HWJ, Webber MM. Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sci 1973; 4: 155–69.

4. Horwitz AV, Wakefield JC (2007). The Loss of Sadness: how psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into Depressive Disorder. New York: Oxford University Press.

5. Moncrieff J (2018) Against the stream: Antidepressants are not antidepressants – an alternative approach to drug action and implications for the use of antidepressants. BJPsych Bulletin 42, 42–44, doi:10.1192/bjb.2017.11

6. RANZCP (2013). Position Statement No. 80: The role of the psychiatrist in Australia and New Zealand. RANZCP Website. Accessed Nov 3rd 2023, deleted April 2025.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

It has to be remembered that that’s only the direct production of gases, it’s only planes taking off, bombs exploding and all the minor stuff. The real damage is concealed because it’s scattered over practically the entire world. It’s huge mines in the Pilbara region of West Australia digging up iron ore for export through Port Hedland, one of the world’s busiest ports by tonnage, 580million tonnes last financial year. Shipping every one of those tonnes to Asia produces about 2 tonnes of CO₂. It’s ore processed by coal dug up in enormous opencut mines in Queensland and New South Wales (the biggest coal port in the world is Newcastle, NSW). It’s gigantic ships travelling empty from Asia and Europe to faraway Australia to collect vast loads and send it back, belching sulphurous gases every inch of the way. It’s huge railways hauling minerals and chemicals to be processed and then hauled further to be made into bombs and tanks which are then shipped around the world to be blown up.

That’s part of it. The rest is the vast “defence establishment,” the hundreds of millions of people whose entire careers are devoted to burning money. I regularly drive past an army base here in Brisbane. It consists of a hundred or more large buildings sprawled over hundreds of acres with several thousand people and many hundreds of mostly large vehicles, all marching and buzzing around militarily, all achieving precisely nothing. A farmer produces crops and livestock, a fisherman brings in fish, a nurse cares for sick people, a teacher teaches and so on but the military and their swarms of civilian employees and all the millions of industrial workers and transport drivers and people building ships to carry ore to make tanks to be blown up, they consume prodigiously but produce nothing except greenhouse gases and toxic waste. Consume baby consume. They’re parasites on the productive world.

The Stockholm Institute of Peace (SIPRI) estimates the total cash cost of militarism each year, in wages, cost of materials, cost of replacing damaged structures, farmland destroyed and so on, is of the order $19trillion a year or nearly one sixth of world GDP. That’s the direct cost but what is called the opportunity cost of this titanic effort is incalculable. Consider a simple but routine example. There is a house standing on a street with an empty block next door. One morning, a gang of men arrive in a truck laden with building materials which they unload on the empty block and start building another house. It takes a couple of months and we can calculate the total cost in cash and in environmental terms but at the end, we have two houses to show for it. Consider another scenario, same house standing on the street. One day, the same truckload of men arrive, this time dressed in military uniforms with a tank and guns and explosives and they blow it up. End result, no houses and a lot of black smoke. Same energy consumption but one path produces two houses compared with no houses by the other. By diverting productive capacity to militarism, the opportunity to do something constructive is lost as well as the direct losses. That is the opportunity cost of militarism, the cost of foregone production. Every soldier on duty isn’t ploughing a field or building a house or nursing a sick person or teaching a child. Every civilian employed by the Defence Dept. isn’t doing something constructive. It is probably twice the direct cost, giving a total of nearly $60trillion per year, every year, that we pay just to have lots of fireworks and cemetaries.

In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat, a French economist, introduced the idea of opportunity cost in a parable of broken windows. Consider a small village: one day, somebody breaks a window, so the glazier comes to repair it. The glazier is better off as a result, as is the man who brought the glass to the glazier in his wagon, as is the man who makes wagons and so on. Soon, the villagers work out that if they smash all the windows in the village, everybody will be better off. Needless to say, they aren’t as the money could have been spent on constructive things, like repairing the bridge, fixing the school and so on. Nowadays we laugh at people who could make such a simple mistake: destruction and the money spent recovering from destruction is never a net benefit to society. Laugh, but we’re doing it all the time (see here, 9.50).

The effect is very real. China doesn’t spend anywhere near as much on its military as the US so it hasn’t had 80 years of continuously losing wars, and their civil infrastructure is roaring ahead. Since 2008, they have built over 50,000km of high speed rail; the US has lots of bombers and aircraft carriers but no high-speed trains. That is not a coincidence. They talk about building one in California but don’t actually have any agreed plans so if they started today, it would be a minimum of ten years before the first train pulled out. By 2035, China expects to have another 20,000km. This is not trivial as railways are a good investment, they last a very long time. On the other side, the destruction of Gaza has produced many millions of tonnes of rubble, mostly concrete, production of which released perhaps 100million tonnes of greenhouse gases. Currently, the rubble is being removed in diesel powered trucks and the displaced Palestinians will need somewhere to live, which will produce more gases.

On the face of it, this is blind stupidity. These three years 2024-26 are the hottest on record and everything says it’s going to get hotter still. Instead of burning things down, we should be using the same energy (actually a lot less) to build an economy that will last in the long term. In the DDN interview, Abby Martin asks:

Unless we understand why this has happened, who’s responsible and how it needs to stop, how the US military is enforcing this unsustainable, insane fossil fuel infrastructure ... we’re never going to solve the problem (at 4.00).

Later, she talks to senior military officers but is dumbfounded when she realises that they talk about the need for the US to be dominant but have no idea why it should be: “Some of them have never even thought about these things (i.e. that US must be dominant) or questioned their motives...” (8.30). The psychopathic Henry Kissinger said: “Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” What he meant was that if they start asking sensible questions, the whole military thing falls apart. Give them enough wars to keep them busy and they won’t question what they’re doing, as the writer Thomas Pynchon observed: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” As long as they’re asking each other: “What’s the best way to bomb Tehran?” they’re not asking: “Should we really be doing this?” But back to Martin’s question: Why has this happened? Who’s responsible and how are we to stop it?

The core thesis of narcisso-fascism is that humans just are aggressive. People often ask why there are no Neanderthals left, why they died out. My suggestion is that they were killed off by Homo sapiens just because Neanderthals were gentle souls lacking the innate drive to dominate the mob in the next valley. They used their limited aggressive urges hunting mammoths in the snow and couldn’t be bothered picking a quarrel with the neighbours. And then we arrived. Trouble is, as Martin indicates, we don’t even recognise how aggressive we are, it’s second nature and we don’t question it. For us, a person who doesn’t want to be king of the castle is the odd one, probably ASD or something. Kissinger didn’t ask: “Why are we in Vietnam in the first place?” Had he been asked, he would have said: “To stop the communists.” He would not have asked: “What are the conditions in Vietnam that make communism attractive?” because the answer was: Western colonialist capitalism. The last thing he wanted was generals with their eyes wide open, as happened to Marine General Smedley Butler in South America early last century. When he retired, Butler wrote a short book called War is a Racket, in he which he slammed the entire idea:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes (1935, p1).

And a lot of people end up dead. Nothing has changed. Trump kidnaps the Venezuelan president, killing a hundred people in the process, and gloats how he has got his hands on 65billion barrels of their oil, plus billions of dollars in a Qatari bank. They were mismanaging it, he says, so we had to take over, overlooking the fact that their oilfields were built using American machinery to provide the dense oil to US Gulf coast refineries, and when the first “sanctions” were imposed years ago, they couldn’t get spare parts to service or repair the machinery, so their production went down and down. First strangle them, then blame them for not breathing properly.

“Why has this happened?” The answer to Martin’s question is perfectly clear: because Homo sapiens. The urge to dominate is blind to the consequences, it doesn’t want to know about consequences, it thinks only of the next few minutes. The joint US-Israeli urge to dominate the 93million Iranians didn’t consider the possibility that the Iranians might not want to be dominated and might hit back. If anybody were to tell Trump or Netanyahu about the millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases they have released, they’d say: “Piss off and stop wasting my time, I’m got more important things to deal with.”

“Who’s responsible?” We all are. We could blame the 77million Americans who recently voted for a convicted thief and unconvicted child molester who told everybody well in advance that he would be a dictator but don’t forget that the execrable Nigel Farage was just re-elected to Parliament in the UK on a similar program, and the totally PHONy Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party just won a state election in West Australia, same reason. France, Germany, Italy, India, Israel, you name it, the message is: “We’re the best, we should be in charge and we’ll smash anybody who disagrees.”

“How are we to stop it?” Ah well, that’s the more difficult part because the people running the show have set it up so that anybody who disagrees with them is heading for the slammer for a long time. Protestors at an ICE facility in Prairieland, Texas scored up to 100 years inside, including 30 years for moving a pile of books. Same in the UK with the Filton protestors; fortunately, a defendant in Australia won his appeal over so-called terrorism charges. As Gen. Butler saw nearly a century ago, a small group of people make a shitload of money from militarism, so they’ll stop at nothing to keep the party going. And they certainly don’t care who gets killed in the process.

Militarism and global heat catastrophe go hand in hand. Militarism is by far the biggest single contributor to greenhouse gases but it’s hard to calculate as the causes are buried deep inside a million other accounts. The crucial decisions concerning the future of the world are being made by a small coterie of profoundly corrupt people, such as a dementing 80yo man who wants to name the Strait of Hormuz after himself, and a psychopathic politico-religious fanatic surrounded by immeasurably evil people who wants to build his own version of the Third Reich in West Asia (watch the first minute of this video for a late night fright).

If we continue on our present course, the world is finished. We need a total change of leadership, which will only come when the electorate realises that all the talk of “We need to be world leaders” or “The communists/Islamists/terrorists etc. are coming” is a gigantic assemblage of lies and propaganda designed to stop us asking the right questions. They use fear to convince us to hand power to their small group and let them get on with raping the planet. We are not in a clash of civilisations or a battle for freedom or a war for democracy or a crusade for God or any of that claptrap. We are in the grip of a clique of power-hungry idiots who believe they know everything that counts, who refuse to consider that they could be wrong and are more than happy to kill you to prove how right they are.

Unless we get the military parasites off our backs, there’s no chance. That’s all you need to know.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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An acquaintance sent a commentary on free will, with the comment: “This gives me a headache.” He’s not the first. The notion that we humans are responsible for our actions is absolutely fundamental to all known societies. People are rewarded or punished according to their actions and I can’t imagine society otherwise. Even if a society were designed where everybody followed rules all the time (and no, we’re not there yet although they’re working on it), that would still be the result of somebody’s free choice. There are two conflicting definitions involved:

Free will says: Regardless of how I acted one minute ago, I could have acted differently.

Determinism says: Everything that happens now was determined by the state of affairs one minute ago.

While the idea of free will seems consistent with everything we know about ourselves, it runs into enough problems to make people look elsewhere. The problem is the ancient curse of minds, they can’t be pinned down in any scientific way. Whatever I say about my mind may seem completely wrong to you, and crazy to somebody else. As a guide, introspection is totally unreliable which is why people have looked for certainty elsewhere. Determinism is based on the idea either that minds don’t exist or they do but don’t count. For a determinist, everything that exists is the outcome of matter-energy interactions in the time-space universe as governed by physical laws and nothing else, just because there is nothing else. Essentially, what happens today anywhere in the universe was set in motion by the events of the Big Bang, or very shortly thereafter. All events within the universe can occur only in one possible way. If we had a complete knowledge of the physical state of the universe right now and of all the physical laws, we could correctly predict the future. There are no exceptions: even our sense of being in control of our lives is an illusion, governed by events billions of years ago. Determinism has been around for a long time but has always required adjustment to make space for an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent deity. Gods are a bit out of fashion these days so people talk about something called compatibilism, which says that this is a determinist universe but we also have free will. If you want a headache, tracing that tangled history is a good place to start. The reason it’s popular today is just because the idea of minds is so unfashionable, as philosopher Daniel Stoljar said: “We live in an overwhelmingly physicalist age...”

Even though it seems counter-intuitive, determinism’s appeal is that people don’t have to talk about the mind. They can sound terribly scientific and rational and not be led astray by sentiment and other squishy stuff. They talk sternly of humans as marionettes dangling from their strings which, in turn, are connected to some bigger cosmic machinery that hums along blindly. The mind as we experience it reduces to the physical brain with no loose ends and it’s only a matter of time until we clever scientists sort out the last few details. Theirs is a humdrum world with no souls, spirits, ghosts or divine forces floating around that we can’t account for. That’s the idea behind determinism; making sense of it has been a major headache for millennia. Even though physics and neurosciences have made gigantic advances over recent years, I don’t think we are any closer to a remotely plausible account of physical determinism. There are other versions, of course, there always are. Psychiatrists like genetic determination, that we’re simply the products of our genes. Prof. Ian Hickie, of Sydney Brain and Mind Centre, announced a while ago that our genes don’t just control our emotions, they control what we experience in life [1].

That has never made any sense to me. Years ago, I studied 250 military veterans, 200 from World War II who fought in New Guinea, and 50 from Vietnam. The fighting in New Guinea in 1944-45 was generally regarded as among the worst of the entire war, equal to Stalingrad and other horrors, so there were many casualties. The only question that needed an answer was: Does this veteran have a mental disorder or not? (Alzheimer’s disease was excluded, they went elsewhere). I had access to their full service records and verified they were all healthy when they enlisted. The study looked at five factors: Family background; pre-service adjustment (school, work, contact with police, fighting, drinking etc); duration of exposure to combat; perceived stress of combat; and presence of debilitating physical illnesses (malaria, dysentery, hepatitis etc.). A police record of any sort excluded them from service in infantry. The WWII veterans were eighteen when they enlisted (drinking age was 21) and they couldn’t afford to drink anyway. Drugs were not a problem before the Vietnam War.

It was immediately clear that family background and pre-service adjustment were irrelevant to the outcome. There was no difference between those who were given a psychiatric diagnosis and those who weren’t. When it came to psychiatric diagnoses, the other factors were highly significant. The outcome depended on how long the troops had been involved in actual combat, how bad it was for them, and their physical health at the time. The physical conditions in northern New Guinea were appalling. The troops had to crawl through mountains covered with dense jungle, soaking wet and bitten by every imaginable insect, but the Japanese were cut off by the island-hopping US Navy and could not retreat. They were not getting any supplies and were also indoctrinated to die for the emperor, preferably taking an enemy soldier with them. It was known that they were resorting to cannibalism to survive long enough to keep fighting, because surrender was unthinkable.

The veterans I saw had been selected from the available pool of recruits and were highly motivated to get in an infantry unit and stay there. Mostly they were from rural areas, areas I knew well. Needless to say, they had no idea what was going to happen to them. Most of them could put their finger on a particular day when they said everything changed, they “lost it” as people now say, and this was confirmed by their service records. Within a few days of a particularly bad incident, they began getting disciplinary charges which were recorded in red ink. A clear record suddenly started to show patches of red, mostly for trivial incidents but always getting worse. Their outcome had nothing to do with their genetic status and everything to do with what they had experienced. That is, their later mental state was determined by choices and events they experienced as adults, not by physics or genetics or early life experiences, which is what determinist theories claim.

So what has this to do with free will? It says: daily experience tells us that what we choose and what happens to us are major factors in life, so why would anybody think otherwise? The answer is that nobody has been able to devise a theory of psychology that allows free will that isn’t either (a) indistinguishable from magic or (b) doesn’t break the laws of physics. It has always seemed that if we try to escape the clutches of the physicists, we end up mired in magic but any non-magical theory will be pummeled by physics. Impasse: you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The biocognitive model offers a path out of this trap. It says: the mind is real, unlocalised, insubstantial and therefore not subject to the laws of physics. However, it is causally effective in that it can organise to do things in the real world like open the window. On the face of it, that’s a recipe for a magical soul or spirit but it isn’t magical. The mind is a natural phenomenon that arises from brain function in a predictable way. That seems contradictory, how can something be both real and natural but have no substance? In his Consciousness Explained from 1991, the late Daniel Dennett said that the final account of consciousness or mind will be counter-intuitive, just because we’ve tried all the obvious ones. That’s a reasonable comment but I don’t believe Dennett explained anything with that work or with his later output [2, Chap. 8 for details]. After endless twists and turns trying to avoid an insubstantial mind, he invoked something called a “virtual machine” to complete his program, even though he didn’t give any clues as to how it would arise. Sadly for him, a virtual machine just is unlocalised, insubstantial and not subject to the laws of physics, i.e. it meets the “design criteria” of the very thing he was trying to avoid.

This means the biocognitive model is still in the race: the idea of a natural (non-magical) but immaterial mind is sufficiently counter-intuitive to pass his test because those features seem incompatible. In fact, they’re not. The world today is full of natural, insubstantial but effective machines, but we don’t call them that, we call them information. Using its prodigious computational capacity, the brain generates an informational state (aka virtual machine) which does all the things we want a mind to do. That’s why the biocognitive model says the mind is natural: it is utterly dependent on the integrated function of the healthy brain. There is no more magic involved in the emergence of the mind than the emergence of something like an online bank or a service like eBay.

Information is the medium of mind and answers the question of free will: Yes, we have free will but No, determinism is wrong. It is wrong because it is based on the wrong argument. People are only attracted to it because the idea of a functioning, insubstantial mind is so difficult to grasp, so they give up. They say something like: “If a rock or a tree had free will, that would breach the laws of thermodynamics. Therefore if a physical brain has free will, that also breaks those laws.” The error lies in how they look at brains. They just look at the physical thing: if a brain in a pathologist’s bottle had free will, that would clearly break lots of laws. However, only a living brain is in the race to have free will, and living brains are very active things, consuming lots of oxygen and other nutrients to do a job.

If all the neurons in the brain are discharging at their normal leisurely rate but completely randomly, then obviously there would be no coherent mental activity. The owner of the brain would be in a coma, completely inert and unresponsive to the world. When he woke, he would have no memory of that time. On the other hand, if all those neurons were active in the coordinated manner dictated by the brain’s data-processing calculus, he would be awake and going about his daily life normally. That is, there is zero difference in the energy consumption of a non-functioning brain with no free will and one which is fully compos mentis, of sound mind making choices every second. This is crucial: in thermodynamic terms, free will is a free ride. A person in a vegetative state is still alive, that’s not in doubt, and so are trees. A tree consumes energy but, same as our peacefully sleeping subject, it has no data-processing capacity and therefore no free will. Converting our comatose subject to an alert person making decisions requires no further energy. The standard argument against free will, that it breaches the laws of thermodynamics, is wrong. Therefore the most powerful case for determinism falls in a heap, quickly followed by the whole physicalist program.

We live in a dualist universe, one where a material universe governed by the laws of physics exists simultaneously with a universe of information, which is not governed by physics. There is no magic involved at any stage. The mind is not supernatural, i.e. free of any sort of rules, it is very strictly rule-governed, they just are the rules of the brain’s codes or calculus, and nothing to do with gravity. I can think of Uluru, the largest rock in this country, and my head doesn’t get any heavier. In an instant, I can think of some of the spectacular photos of deep space from Hubble, and then flick straight to an image of atoms from an electron microscope, all without jarring my neck. The mind exists, it is real, it is insubstantial, unlocalised and we can choose our paths in life. I believe this argument applies to all creatures with minds, even tiny minds like jumping spiders (fascinating video if you have half an hour), but that would take a bit of elaboration.

I think we can settle the debate now and solve my colleague’s headache: Free will exists with no magic involved. Daniel Dennett could have reached this conclusion but he couldn’t free himself of his physicalist and determinist view of the world: by believing in determinism, he became trapped by it. However, the real counter-intuitive blast comes from trying to grasp the vertiginous idea that we ourselves are just an informational state. Yes, we have a physical body with all that that entails but the big change is to see ourselves as floating in a sea of information, a node that moves around sucking in information, manipulating it and putting it into practice in our movements. Today, one eye is looking at the far reaches of the universe while the other is focussed on subatomic particles. It’s been said we’re positioned halfway between the macro and micro universes, able to conceive of both, which is an interesting way to look at it.

For ourselves, for my Self, as they say, it is just streams of information flowing in from the world to interact with layers upon layers of information, some that I don’t even know exist, to generate our knowledge state including freedom of action. It also generates the vivid, multimodal sensory experience of being a living being, although that may be a mystery too far for us. The emergence of the conscious, aware mind depends on some very, very sophisticated data processing, not on raw computing power. I think it’s likely that we may never know exactly how it’s done. We can easily duplicate decision-making in our information processors but creating the conscious experience as we and many other animals have it may be forever beyond us. Hope this solves your headache.

PS. I’m saying all the physicalist philosophers and determinist psychologists and so on in history got it wrong. American science fiction writer David Brin said:

If an outsider perceives ‘something wrong’ with a core scientific model, the humble and justified response of that curious outsider should be to ask ‘what mistake am I making?’ before assuming 100% of the experts are wrong.

The question now goes to the voting public (that’s you) for a decision. We have free will, we can choose how to act and how to conduct ourselves. This is not academic. Many people have said, and I agree, that we have to act as though this planet is the only place in the known universe where the phenomenon of mind exists. At present, we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire biosphere several hundred times over, and complete idiots with their fingers on the big red button. They are exercising their free will to terrorise the planet, if not push it to oblivion, but we need to exercise our free will to get rid of them damned quick before they do some real damage.

References:

1. Crouse J et al (2024). Patterns of stressful life events and polygenic scores for five mental disorders and neuroticism among adults with depression. Molecular Psychiatry (2024) 29:2765–2773; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02492-x2

2. McLaren N (2024). Dennett’s dysfunctional Functionalism. Chapter 8 in Theories in Psychiatry (see below).

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

A book published a few months ago created quite a stir but now appears to be settling, lost in the general uproar that surrounds the book’s subject, one Donald Trump. Regime Change, subtitled Inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump [1; an interview with DropSite News here] details the machinations that allowed Trump to get back into power and what he has done with it since. The story starts with the 2024 election and continues until Feb. 28^th this year, when Trump announced via his “Truth Social” (which means antisocial lies) that the US and Israel had launched a massive attack on Iran under cover of peace negotiations. That is, the crime of aggressive war was compounded by perfidy, or treachery, the second time in 8 months.

I find the book most unpleasant. There’s nothing new in it and it doesn’t give any background apart from a few thumbnail sketches of some of the more disgusting characters it charts. It is just a catalogue of conversations and plots between a crowd of truly objectionable people, none of whom should ever have been allowed to run a suburban garden club, let alone a nuclear power. Practically every one of the several hundred people mentioned shows a major personality disorder, the great majority seriously paranoid and psychopathic. At the top of the pile, or at the bottom of the pit, sits DJT, the overweight, dementing, incalculably greedy, cruel and dishonest sexual pervert who managed to fool 37% of the population to vote for him. But everybody around him takes their cues from him. The recently departed WH press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, for example, lied as easily as she breathes but was also paranoid to the point of losing touch with reality. The only thing that saved her was her dishonesty: somewhere, she knew she was lying. Trump’s offspring are hugely corrupt but embarrassingly hopeless at concealing it, which isn’t true of his son-in-law. Herr Kushner is even more corrupt than Dumb and Dumber but quite good at concealing it although such is his contempt for the human race that often he doesn’t even bother. If you really feel the need for a gloomy weekend, this is the book for you. But if you want to know what makes Trump tick, the best book is the exposé by his niece, Mary Trump, which gives all the dirt in excrutiating detail.

Mary is now 61, a PhD psychologist and author. She is the daughter of Donald’s older brother, Freddy (1938-1991), who died of heart disease accelerated by alcoholism, smoking and despair when Mary was aged 16. He had been pushed out of the line of inheritance by Donald and their father, Fred Snr. In 2020, Mary published Too Much and Never Enough [2], her detailed account of the family psychopathology, and there’s heaps. Again, it is troubling to read but she writes well, a light touch uncluttered by jargon or moralising. Her grandfather, Fred Snr (1904-1999), was an appalling character, utterly unburdened by any human feelings, who pushed Fred Jr aside and put all his efforts and money into Donald. Mary shows how Donald grew from being an almost uncontrollable child to an adult who feels not the slightest need to control himself as he knows he can lie his way out of any trouble:

Over time, that attitude – that he knew better – would become even more entrenched: as his knowledge base has decreased, (particularly in areas of governing), his claims to know everything have increased in direct proportion to his insecurity, which is where we are now.

Anybody with an interest in psychology or psychiatry should read it as it does two things very well. First, it sets out how characters are formed in the crucible of the family. This should kill forever the widespread idea that siblings have essentially the same environment: they don’t, at all. If they do, it’s luck because the undercurrents are so strong. Second, she shows how to write meaningfully without trying to impress the reader: it’s impressive for that reason.

What’s the point? These two books show how people who are attracted to power are entirely the wrong people to be wielding it. This is also true of money, because money is so effective in buying power although the genuinely wealthy often have little interest in day-to-day politics, partly because they can’t stand rubbing shoulders with commoners but mainly because they know they can get what they want with a phone call. Mary describes how her aunt Maryanne, Donald’s older sister, was promoted to the Federal judiciary by one phone call to the Reagan attorney general from Donald’s evil lawyer, Roy Cohn. How much easier is that than listening to loudmouths in a committee? She also charts how, as people go up the power hierarchy, their sense of power and entitlement grows.

When Trump first moved into the White House in January, 2017, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. They hadn’t expected to win so nothing was ready, and it showed. His appointments were mostly ill-considered (Rex Tillerson, secretary of state, was appointed because he looked the part; he despised Trump and didn’t stay long) and they actually had no plans. Second time round was different. Four years in power showed him all the fun he could have and all the business opportunities lying around, then four years which weren’t fun but which convinced him that revenge is best served flaming hot.

So, after running on a no-war platform, he launches one of the dumbest wars in history, just because he can. Now that it’s clear the US and Israel have been defeated, he lashes out again with an economic “D-Day.” Granted the news of this new economic blockade was announced by the secretary for the Treasury, Scott Bessent, but the grandiosity comes directly from Trump himself: “Nobody can escape our reach, we will punish anybody who doesn’t do as we say blah blah.” That is, “We tell the world to jump and y’all ask How high?”

We often see comments like “They’re sick, they’re all insane.” Anybody who reads these books and watches the news has to ask: Are these people sane or have they all slipped into insanity? They calmly plan and commit major crimes against humanity then violently attack anybody who criticises them. Are they incapable of seeing that what they are doing in so many parts of the world is wrong, criminal, evil and wicked in every sense? No, they’re perfectly capable but they’re happily following Trump’s life script which says: “Take it if you want it. If you get it, crow how smart you are but if you don’t, blame everybody else.”

Didn’t anybody realise this before he was elected? Didn’t they look at his appalling business record and check his social contacts? Some did but the American system allows somebody with piles of money and absolutely no experience of government to elbow his way into the selection process and snatch the prize. Simply by lying and openly appealing to all the worst instincts in the electorate, he pulled off the coup. Second time round, they were much more organised but that raises an important question: why does the electorate have “worst instincts” for him to manipulate so easily? There are two sides to this question, human psychology and American sociology.

From the psychological point of view, there is what is normally called psychobiology and also personality. The biocognitive model says humans are programmed to form social groups then to try to dominate the others in the group and other groups. Our drive to dominate is very powerful but, unlike the need to breathe or eat or drink, it’s not absolute. It’s optional but we like it, being on top is a joy whereas being underfoot becomes unendurable. The worst instinct soon exerts itself: humans form dominance hierarchies and then spend the rest of their time either trying to push themselves higher or pulling others down. This applies on the very small scale, even a few people or a family, as well as on the level of mass psychology. A mass of humans is just lots of people going about their business. If, however, they all agree on the same item of business, they get excited and urge each other on, even to the point of doing stupid things. A person who calls out “No, stop this, it’s stupid,” will quickly be shoved down the hierarchy, to be replaced by somebody who wants to push ahead. People don’t want to go back down the hierarchy so even if they think it’s stupid, mostly they’ll stay quiet and simply go along with the crowd. So who urges the crowd on? The most excitable and least restrained of all. Mob behaviour levels down to the lowest common denominator. The process selects for idiots, and there’s no shortage of them, which brings us to the question of personality.

As psychology, if Mary Trump’s account of her appalling family life does anything, it shows the folly of thinking that all personality is due to genetic factors. The biocognitive model says personality is a set of rules. It is not a lump in your head or a cluster on your genes, it is simply the rules and beliefs you have acquired on your journey through life. A large part of them are soaked up early in life, even preverbally and thus without any words attached to them but they’re still very powerful. They’re not written neatly in your head like the rules of golf, they’re a jumble of explicit and implicit likes and dislikes, trustings and mistrusts. Complicating matters, how you’re feeling on the day often makes different ones rise to the top. If they tend to work together fairly smoothly and harmonise with the larger society, we call that normal personality. If they’re a mess of contradictions and lead to distress and friction with society, we call that personality disorder.

Underneath all these rules is a foundation called “self-esteem,” the basic sense of being a worthwhile person or, all too often, of being no good. Asked “How do you rate yourself as a person?” a lot of people will say: “I’m a piece of shit, a useless oxygen thief. I can’t do anything right and nobody could possibly like me.” This comes directly from early life experiences although it’s easily exaggerated by intense experiences in teenage or young adult years. Donald Trump has a most grotesquely disordered personality but he doesn’t actually hate himself. He is simply lacking any sense of self-worth and has replaced it with the idea that if he has his name on lots of things and is surrounded by lots of fawning people and gold, he must be the greatest. That’s so much better than thinking he doesn’t amount to anything in the world. Take those things away and he wouldn’t fall to bits, he’d simply sit in the corner gazing around vacantly. He also has no regard for any other human being or any animal or any thing unless it comes with power or money. Money, as Mary makes absolutely clear, is all that counts to him. And getting revenge for slights.

Behaviorally, as Mary shows, he learned very early that bluff and bluster usually win, that people want to be fooled and he’s the man to do it. A bold, confident lie usually wins but if all else fails, steal it or blame everybody else. He has no sense of honesty or integrity, words are simply tools to get what he wants and what he wants is to feel he’s the most important and dominant person of all. That fills the empty spaces inside. In order to get further up the ladder, he has attracted and surrounded himself by people of similar nature, flatterers and sycophants who are on the make. There are no decent people in his entire entourage because no decent person could have anything to do with him. That applies to all his cabinet and staff, to all his friends in business and politics, all the people who swarm to Mar-a-Lago and all the hangers-on, urgers, pushers, crooks both petty and grand, everybody. Not even his youngest son escapes. If you want to know what’s wrong with capitalism, it’s this: at age twenty, with no qualifications to his name and no work experience, Barron Trump is worth $150million. Money has been shovelled his way and he accepts it as his due because as people go up the hierarchy, their sense of entitlement grows and grows.

As for American sociology, this very ordinary chap says “We were raised to believe in American exceptionalism” (here, at 2.20). He is most emphatically not alone. Ask any Americans which is the most exceptional nation, and they will all smile and say it’s them. Now exceptionalism can go two ways. It could be read as noblesse oblige, the idea that being exceptional confers exceptional duties and high moral standards, or it could mean “We can do what we like and we’ll destroy anybody who disagrees.” Maybe the Founding Fathers had noble intentions but that hasn’t aged well. It doesn’t matter how high-minded a politician is at the beginning of his career, he has to play to the masses. Since the masses get their little erections over the idea of crushing any and every possible opponent, that’s what the politician tells them, just as Trump tells his dumb supporters at his rallies. People love it. A comforting lie is so much more fun than knowing they don’t count in the world.

Put these two features together, a political system that selects for people who love power and a social system that encourages people to believe that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by a B52, and there’s trouble. Malignant self-regard and the urge to dominate melt and run together in the concept of narcisso-fascism. The inherent impetus is that this must intensify to the point where it has now become a cult. Nobody dares say “Enough, let’s stop this and go home.” There is practically nobody in the US power elite who is prepared to tell Trump to drop dead and no outside forces that can stop the process. It either has to burn itself out, people have to become disgusted by themselves, or it must be crushed by outside forces. There’s no outside force can stop the US so it has to come from within. People have to become immiserated to the extent that they see they’ve been cheated, they allowed themselves to be fooled, and push the extremists out of government.

That’s why it’s good that the farmers who voted for Trump are going broke, that small businesses can’t get workers or supplies, the big manufacturers can’t get the raw materials or equipment they need, schools and hospitals are closing and so on. People in a cult have to hurt before they’ll admit they’re wrong. Because the megawealthy have a megasense of entitlement, they have to hurt very, very much before they’ll take their hands off the workers’ throats. The worse it gets in America, the better it is for the rest of the world – as long as they don’t do a Samson and try to pull the whole shebang down. Would Trump start a nuclear war rather than be pushed out of office? If he can’t get what he wants, would he destroy everything so that nobody else got it? I think that’s a very real risk because once people have sucked on the teats of the beast of fascism, everything else is tasteless. Remember what Marshall Gyorgy Zhukov said as he surveyed the wreckage of Berlin: “We liberated Europe from Fascism and they will never forgive us.”

References:

1. Haberman M, Swan J (2026). Regime Change: inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. New York: Simon and Shuster.

2. Trump ML (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. London: Simon and Shuster.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

There was an unusual incident some years ago at an estate in (I think) France. People arrived for a weekend party and enjoyed the owner’s expansive wine cellars. When it was time to leave, a couple could not be found. People searched everywhere but there was no sign of them. Three days later, they were found in a small room deep in the cellars that nobody had checked, both dead. The door was not locked. It seemed they had snuck in for a quickie but heard the door click shut and thought they were trapped, so they tried digging their way out of the wall, with no luck. Before long, they ran out of oxygen. However, if they had pushed on the door, they could have survived.

This isn’t surprising. If people think something can’t be done, they won’t try. If the larger society says something is impossible, people will actually prevent anybody trying to do it (religions specialise in that). I may have mentioned the eminent British physicist Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) who, in 1895, pronounced that heavier than air flying machines were impossible. I don’t know how he accounted for large birds like swans, which are decidedly heavier than air but remarkably graceful in flight. But before we laugh at such folly, just remember that psychiatry resolutely refuses to push on the door marked “This way to non-biological treatments.” The received view is that all mental disorder is biological, so that’s where all the research money goes and nobody so much as glances behind that door to see what’s going on in the world of mentality.

Just to be clear, I don’t mean that modern psychology equates with the concept of the mind as a mental entity. The entire industry of behaviorist psychology was built on the idea that we can’t talk about minds as such. Burrhus F Skinner, for example, the most influential psychologist of the last century, never quite made up his mind (sic). Sometimes he said minds exist but we can’t talk about them, other times that they exist but are irrelevant to a science of psychology, and the rest he sneered and said they don’t exist.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett was even more contemptuous, scorning mentalist talk as medieval nonsense. “Somehow,” he puffed, “the brain must be the mind.” After about 65 years, his research program completely failed because, to make sense of it, he inserted something called a “virtual machine” that did everything minds do [1, Chap. 8]. Nor do I mean that psychology equals that dumbed-down procedure called “CBT” which treats the complexity of human mentality as a pocket calculator. I mean a theory that says mental troubles have mental causes that have to be uncovered by careful digging. Trouble is, mainstream psychiatry is determined to prove that mental problems have physical causes, so that’s where all the effort goes. A couple of papers this week show that.

The first one is a report on a trial [2] where anxious people were given a single dose of LSD (100mcg, usual party dose is 2-5 times as much) . This produced “... a significant and lasting reduction in anxiety symptoms ... with benefits emerging within days of dosing and holding through the 12-week trial period.” A control group given a placebo didn’t show much change, although it’s not clear how they were supposed not to know they hadn’t been given LSD. The trial has produced great excitement and the drug has been given “... FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation for Generalised Anxiety Disorder.”

I have to say I seriously doubt these results: if LSD reduced anxiety so quickly and effectively, Timothy Leary would have yelled it from the rooftops and not got himself arrested 36 times. We’ll have to wait and see but the real question is: If anxiety is so effectively treated by modern SSRIs and benzos, why are we going back to the 1950s for the latest hot research? Answer is they’re not effective, they don’t work and they’re actually dangerous. There is clear evidence that they can increase the risks of suicide and/or homicide, as well as being seriously unpleasant. There is a major homicide trial in the US at present which, on the face of it, could be drug-induced but it’s definitely not the only issue.

A paper from Finland [3] reported that high and prolonged use of benzos results in higher than expected mortality, meaning a shorter life span. We know that’s true of antipsychotic drugs but benzos? Aren’t they supposed to be harmless? Finnish statistics are very good, they have enviable national data bases and are accomplished number crunchers. They showed a dose-related curve, i.e. the higher the dose, the greater the risk of premature death, including suicides and accidents. Taking more than one benzo or combining them with other drugs greatly increased the risk whereas people taking low doses had little or no added risk of falling off their perches. This is real: in the US and UK, about one adult in eight is taking these drugs, often in the long to very long term, and mostly the more addictive ones such as alprazolam and lorazepam. It’s also true that there’s a huge black market in them, especially among people abusing opiates and amphetamines, all of which increases the risks.

Antidepressants, of course, are widely prescribed for anxiety but they control symptoms, they’re not seen as curative. An anxious person having a bad spell may take them for a while then try to stop them when things improve, only to discover a new problem called drug withdrawal. Drug manufacturers and mainstream psychiatrists prefer to say “discontinuation symptoms” because drug withdrawal smacks of addiction, and nobody wants to mention psych drugs and addiction in the same sentence. However, they meet all criteria for addiction except one: they don’t normally induce euphoria, but then nor does tobacco, one of the most addictive drugs known.

Trouble is, they’re easy to prescribe and take, they don’t interfere with life like regular visits to a psychologist, and they generate vast sums of money. They have a further, powerful benefit in that they allow people to avoid personal responsibility for their mental troubles: “There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just my brain playing up again.” Psychologist Fritz Perls (1893-1970), a big wheel in the gestalt therapy world, used to say that many people didn’t go to therapy in order to change, they just wanted to feel better about their neuroses. This is a fortiori true of taking prescribed psychiatric drugs.

The main problem, of course, is that psychiatry doesn’t have any idea of what anxiety actually is: if it’s abnormal and unpleasant, it’s a mental illness and needs drugs, end of story. That doesn’t explain anything. The proper explanation for anxiety is at the level of psychology, meaning as a function of mental life. Anxiety is a normal human mental function, an emotion of the same order as humour, anger, sadness and so on. It’s perfectly normal to get a bit anxious from time to time. It’s only abnormal if people become anxious too often, too intensely, for too long or over the wrong things. Even the very word “anxiety” implies some sort of deviance. If we give it it’s proper name, the threat response, we can see it for what it is: a normal reaction to life events that has got out of control. People commonly refer to it as an adrenaline rush, because that’s what it is: a sudden blast of the alerting hormone.

Every animal on earth has some sort of threat response. That’s not news, if they didn’t, they’d end up as somebody’s breakfast. We humans are no different, we all react to threats with a stereotyped response: the mental perception of the threat comes first, the reaction is second. In humans, the reaction has two clear parts. First, there is the very obvious physical effect which takes the form of shaking, sweating, pounding heart, shortness of breath, churning stomach, dry mouth, stumbling over speech etc. The mental component consists of racing thoughts, poor concentration and memory, and mental confusion. Together, these are commonly known as the “fight or flight” reaction, meaning the state of heightened arousal that allows somebody to deal with a threat. A threat is always coming at you, it’s always in the future, looming and scary. We can’t be scared of the past. The only way we differ from other animals is that we can anticipate threats long before there is any actual sign of them. We can worry about tomorrow whereas animals don’t have that bother. If, however, the looming threat just is part of the anxiety response, then we’re trapped in a vicious circle, as in:

I have to give a talk tomorrow but I’m scared I’ll shake and sweat and dribble and they’ll think I’m an idiot, and that thought is scaring me right now so I’m starting to shake and sweat and dribble and I think I’d better cancel.

Anticipating a disabling anxiety response is a self-fulfilling prophecy in a normal brain. This is the mechanism of all anxiety states, including phobias and panic states. They are not separate categories of “mental disease,” i.e. distinct, genetically-determined, “chemical imbalances” of the brain, they are simply variations on a common theme. Anxious people are accidentally switching on their threat response and then maintaining it by fearing their response itself. This is a purely mentalist explanation with no basis in physiology at all and tells us how to treat it. However, that door is permanently closed to mainstream psychiatry. They’re all trying to push through the door marked “This way to biology” because wafting out of that door is the enticing aroma of piles of cash.

If that’s all, why not use a drug to calm the shaking and racing heart? One class of drugs, beta-adrenergic blockers, does just that. If you read the standard psychiatric literature, you will be told that the main one, propranolol, has a weak and unpredictable effect on anxiety, including phobias and panic attacks. It is not recommended for anxiety, either by itself or in combination as it has too many side effects, including causing depression. That’s a bit strange because a survey of symphony musicians and other performers found that a quarter of them used propranolol to calm their “stage nerves” before the show. For people with isolated fears, like public speaking, flying and so on, taking one non-sedating, non-addicting tablet an hour before the show transforms their lives. In fact, it’s not strange because beta blockers are off patent, and drug companies have a very powerful vested interest in making sure cheap drugs are never marketed. Moreover, their captive academic psychiatrists work to ensure nobody ever looks behind the door marked “psychology.” Their ideology says all mental disorder is biological so a drug that works via its psychological effect is anathema.

This I know full well as I probably prescribed more beta blockers for anxiety states than anybody else, certainly in this country and possibly in the world. Over about 40years, I would have accumulated well over 5,000 cases, many of whom were almost tearfully grateful. One case was a young policeman whose wife was about 8 months pregnant with their first baby. He was attacked at work and thought he was going to die. During the assault, his only concern was that he wouldn’t live to see their baby born; after, he was left with major post-traumatic anxiety. He was admitted to hospitals twice under renowned professors and was recommended for ECT which, he knew, meant he would be discharged from the police, so he insisted on a third opinion and got me. He was prescribed propranolol at the first interview and after a week, said his life was transformed: “I’ve spent five months in those big hospitals seeing all those bigwig psychiatrists, and one bloke who doesn’t even wear a tie fixed it all with a $10 bottle of pills.”

This is normal. If the patients are selected after a proper assessment, then beta blockers can be almost magical but it must be combined with cognitive psychotherapy. By using these drugs in a veterans’ hospital, we were able to reduce the admission rate and the bed occupancy by about 50%, eventually closing a ward (for which the medical superintendent was also almost tearfully grateful). The drugs are ideal for situational anxiety. The policeman was fine on his rostered days off but got anxious the night before returning to duty and couldn’t sleep, then it was on.

Similarly, a young anaesthetist at my hospital requested a private consultation as he was frightened he would be referred to the medical board for drug addiction (in the old days, that was a real problem with anaesthetists). He had to take several small doses of diazepam per day otherwise he started to “withdraw.” Between operations, operating theatres are quite busy, people rushing about cleaning floors, nurses dropping things or gossiping, trolleys coming in and out. Then the patient is wheeled in and everybody goes quiet and watches the anaesthetist insert the cannulae. He was working in the cardiac unit so there were several complex procedures that only he could do. That was the bit he couldn’t handle: if he made a mistake, everybody would see and laugh at him.

That was a big deal. He was first generation immigrant from a war-torn country and his family had sacrificed a lot to get him to medical school. If he were suspended for drug use, he would lose everything. In fact, it was classic situational anxiety. Public humiliation was a big deal in his culture (and in Australian male culture), so the thought of making a mistake made him anxious and shaky, which greatly increased the risks of making a mess of the various cannulae. He was told he wasn’t addicted as he didn’t take the drugs on weekends or holidays; a week of propranolol convinced him, and so another grateful patient rolled off the production line at a total cost of a few hundred dollars.

I had thousands of such cases which was the reason I prescribed antidepressants in no more than about 2% of new cases. The average in this country is about 60%. Also, I never used ECT and beta blockers were a major factor in that. However, I was never able to get these figures published. As a solo practitioner in remote areas, I didn’t have the resources to organise the sort of research project editors demanded, and never even bothered applying for grants as I knew what would happen. Compounding it, I found that psychiatrists who were losing work to my practice were telling patients and general practitioners that propranolol was ineffective and one was actually saying it was dangerous. What was his evidence? He had none.

They will, however, be happy to see another paper from a few years ago which analysed propranolol in suicides [4]. Of nearly 4,500 suicides in England, Wales and Nthn Ireland, 297 or 6.6% involved propranolol. In most of these it was not the main drug, either something the patient was taking at the time, or something within reach. Typically, a considerable number had not been prescribed the drug. It is common for people who find it effective to give some to their friends who, unsurprisingly, don’t find it as helpful. My experience was that after proper assessment and with carefully supervised brief cognitive therapy, overdoses were not just uncommon but rare, perhaps one person in a thousand, mainly people with a record of impulsive overdoses following minor social upsets. There were no suicides of people taking propranolol, so the answer is: drugs should only be prescribed after careful assessment, and should be followed closely. If beta blockers are given indiscriminately, it won’t work. The old “Take these and come back in a month” story is simply inviting trouble.

What’s the moral of the story? As long as psychiatrists who profit from the “biomedical model” story are running the show, there is no prospect of psychiatry pushing open the door marked “Here for psychology,” to explore its options. General practitioner and historian Robert Youngson summarised it pithily:

The whole history of science, right up to the present, is a story of refusal to accept fundamental new ideas; of determined adherence to the status quo; of the invention of acceptable explanations, however ridiculous, for uncomfortable facts; of older people of scientific eminence dying in confirmed possession of their life-long beliefs; and of painful readjustment of younger people to new concepts [5, p293].

Science progresses, one funeral at a time. We can hope.

References:

1. McLaren N (2024). Dennett’s dysfunctional Functionalism. Chap 8 in Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. See below.

2. Duerr H-A. DT120 (Lysergide) Shows Rapid, Lasting Relief for Generalized Anxiety in Phase 3 Trial. Psychiatric Times, Aug 12^th 2026.

3. Särkilä H et al (2026). Benzodiazepine Use and Mortality Risk: A Nationwide Cohort Study on New Benzodiazepine Users With a 5-Year Follow-Up. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2026; 0:1–10. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acps.70121

4. Gorton HC et al (2024). Involvement of propranolol in suicides: crosssectional study using coroner-reported data. BJPsych Open, 10: e127, 1–7. doi: 10.1192/bjo.2024.714

5. Youngson R (1998). Scientific Blunders. London: Robinson.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Just five years ago, the US abruptly left the scene of its crime of aggressive war in Afghanistan, the longest in its history but with the usual outcome, defeat. Americans attacked this small, backward, landlocked and poverty-stricken country to punish its rulers for harbouring the remnant al Qaeda mob who had “obliterated” New York’s World Trade Centre in September 2001. In fact, the Taliban had offered to find and hand over bin Laden and crew, whom they didn’t like, but their kind offer was rejected in favour of invasion. So, 20 years, $2trillion and 175,000 deaths after invading to remove the Taliban, the US left and the Taliban took over again. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It had nothing to do with finding bin Laden, it was all about getting rid of a government that wouldn’t do as it was told.

An editorial in this week’s The Economist (13.08.2026, paywall) bemoans the “vile” government in Afghanistan, pointing out that they mistreat and repress women, gays and anybody else they don’t like. As a result, but mainly because they defeated the US and its indescribably corrupt puppet “democratic” government, the forlorn country and its ragtag government are under punitive “sanctions” by the usual Western offenders. Afghanistan’s $4.2billion of foreign exchange remains frozen in a Swiss bank, most of its ministers can’t travel outside a few countries, foreign banks and investors can’t deal with them and so on but that hardly bothers the Talib rulers. They believe they don’t need Western approval to run their show, they don’t want swarms of corrupt mining companies stealing their assets and, unlike their predecessors, they have no intention of living it up in the fleshpots of Monaco or Las Vegas. Even by the very high bar of extremist Islamists, the current head of the Taliban is considered humourless, so stalemate. After agreeing that Afghanis are generally better off now than during the past 40 years of war, The Economist suggests a drastic move: “The Taliban are vile. Five years after America’s exit, the Afghan regime is not going anywhere ... So it is time for America and other democracies to hold their collective noses and talk to the Taliban.” That assumes the Taliban would want to talk to the people who devastated their country but there you are.

This region has an ancient and complex history. Modern Afghanistan began in 1919 when one of the local rulers declared an independent state, followed in 1926 when he proclaimed himself king. They muddled along until 1973 when the king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, was overthrown in a coup and a secular, leftist government took over. They forced a rapid modernisation including education for girls, land reform and so on, provoking violent opposition in the rural areas which soon became guerilla warfare, actively funded and supported by the American CIA. Their services included flying in a Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden to organise the extreme right wing religious mujahideen who refused to speak to infidels. OBL soon got them fighting the secular government instead of each other. The government asked the USSR to intervene, which became a major military expedition, leading to war, war and more war.

From the beginning, the American goal was to bog the USSR in an unwinnable war, their “Vietnam” as it was called at the time. This duly happened, the USSR teetered on bankruptcy so they withdrew then fell apart. Financed by sales of drugs which were flown to market by the CIA (see Whitney Webb for details, [1]), the mujahideen launched a vicious civil war against the urban liberal/leftist/Marxists in Kabul who responded in kind. While all this was going on, millions of Afghanis fled across the nearest border for safety until in 1996, a group of seminary students known as Taliban took over, mainly because they were organised and disciplined. A few years later, and unbeknown to the Taliban, Mr bin Laden achieved his dream of attacking The Great Satan, which launched yet another invasion that duly bogged them in an unwinnable war until they too teetered on bankruptcy and withdrew, allowing the Taliban to move back in.

Surely there’s a moral in this? Well, if there is, you won’t get it from reading The Economist. As far as they’re concerned, the West can do no wrong and the rest are never right. Similarly, the experts in international relations in the “offensive realism” school will tell you that the US was right to invade Afghanistan. In their view, international relations are anarchic and chaotic so, to ensure stability, the US had to exert dominance over the wild and unruly Pushtuns (as though nobody else had tried and failed). Except Afghanistan is about as remote from the US as it comes. In 1973, the US did no trade with that tiny, broke country, sold them no weapons or Big Macs, wasn’t trying to convert them from their traditional ways, nothing, so why did it matter to them when a left wing government took over? This is where offensive realism fails. The US did not get involved in that distant country to guarantee stability in Kansas, its goal was to prevent the USSR dominating a chaotic country on its most unstable border. If, the US reasoned, the fanatical mujahideen managed to export their brand of ultra-extremist religion to the Muslim regions in the USSR, so much the better.

It’s all about domination, this is all it’s ever about. The rest is propaganda. In a recent report, Mr Rubio, for example, has recently declared Cuba, a country of 5million impoverished people, to be an “existential threat” to the US, so the larger country has decided to strangle Cuba and force a change of government. Cuba is broke because of nearly 70 years of hostility, including economic and political “sanctions” applied to that tiny country but still the US won’t give up, per the report:

Cuba is the capital of 21^st Century communism, an anti-American espionage empire exporting revolution, committed to overthrowing the US by indoctrinating our youth and fomenting a racial revolution blah blah.

If Rubio believes Cuba can threaten the very existence of the US, he is overtly delusional. In fact, he doesn’t believe a word of it. He knows exactly what goes on there, he is simply lying. Was Iran ever a sufficient threat to the US to justify a preemptive attack? In no way. Was Venezuela ever a sufficient threat to the US to justify kidnapping its president? In no way. Libya? Well, yes, they were a threat in that Muammar Gaddafi had announced a plan to convert their oil sales to a gold-backed currency unit and had invited other oil producers to join, which interested them enough to talk to him. This threatened the petrodollar, which threatened the US bond market, which threatened US supremacy, so Mrs Gaddafi’s little boy had to learn the hard way that everything is connected. And at the core of it is the urge to dominate.

Domination is the name of the greatest human game of all. It is the most powerful game, the game the entire world can play, the most pervasive and persistent because it never wears off, and is the cause of practically all the trouble throughout our woeful history. Every fight is one person or one side trying to dominate the other. Each fight leads to a gleeful winner and a resentful loser, and sets up the next round because the urge to dominate is hard-wired into every one of us; if it loses a battle, it simply slinks back into its cave to glower for a while then, when things look peaceful, it sneaks out again and starts the same old same old: “Don’t let them get away with it, they cheated, you deserve more, they don’t deserve it, don’t let them think they can beat you, they don’t know how to use it, they’re inferior, they’re subhuman, let’s get ‘em!” We saw an example of this last week. Itamar ben Gvir, the Israeli minister for internal security, meaning police, prisons and others, called for the Israeli military to kill 30 to 40 Palestinians every day:

There are people there (Gaza) who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people. I’m doing them a favor by calling them people.

“Not even people.” He wasn’t exaggerating, this is what he believes, as do this zionist lawyer and Netanyuha’s personal rabbi. Ben Gvir believes: “We’re superior, you’re inferior, so we can do what we like but if you resist, we will destroy you.” This is precisely the attitude that is pushing the world to cataclysm. For example, the full production chain required to drop a single 2000lb bomb generates anything up to 100 tons of CO₂ per bomb, plus a heap of other toxic gases and chemicals. Factoring in the greenhouse gases required to build and run the radars, air bases, transport and all the rest is incalculable. Militarism is destroying the planet, and militarism is driven by the entirely optional urge to dominate. It is not a drive like breathing or finding food, it is something we think about and choose, and we are choosing the wrong path. However, Mr Rubio doesn’t stand in front of the microphones and cameras and say this. He twists the narrative so it’s everybody else’s fault, as in the opening sentences of his report:

For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.

There is not a word of truth in any of this, it is pure paranoid fantasy, a complete inversion of the historical record which shows: For nearly seven decades, the American regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against Cuba. The truth is that Rubio is power-hungry and will do or say anything to get votes. He knows perfectly well that Cuba is on its knees and he is determined to kick them as hard and often as he can because this plays well with the Cuban “refugee” community in Florida, which owns him. His parents left Cuba two years before the revolution in 1959. He was born in Florida in 1971, 14 years after they left, and has never been there.

After the revolution, practically the entire wealthy class took their money and left but even after 70 years, they still hate. These people live in a bubble vomiting poison against the poor students and peasants who overthrew the incompetent and corrupt Batista government all those years ago. Rubio got into the Senate on their vote so he tells them whatever they want to hear. There’s nothing so bad that they won’t believe, so he feeds it to them on the State Department letterhead. And it’s all built on hatred, the unquenchable hatred that comes from being turfed out of a high position in the dominance hierarchy and being forced to mix with the poor trash. They were rich and powerful in Cuba but, on landing in Miami, they soon found nobody wanted to know them. They had lost all their status, the ultimate humiliation.

The Cuban revolution, like all revolutions, didn’t happen because some nasty people woke one morning and decided to start chopping heads off. It had causes, all of which centred on poverty for the masses caused by the crime and corruption of the wealthy. Cuba was where the American mafia and all the other gangs parked their black money. Castro stopped the party by nationalising their casinos and hotels, so they will hate him and his party until rigor mortis sets in. Don’t worry that his new government immediately took steps to improve the standard of living for the average Cuban. If they’d been allowed to work on this and not divert so much of their resources to defend themselves (e.g. the opera bouffe Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961), Cuba would now have a standard of living equal to Spain. But the idea that 90 miles off the Florida coast lies a country that refuses to bend the knee drives the American power elite to the brink of insanity.

Is any of this rational? No, not at all, it is entirely biological, the US government functioning at the level of a pack of curs in the street snapping and snarling at each other to see who’s top dog. Let’s say they overthrow the Cuban government, which is entirely possible. How will that benefit the citizens of Great Bend, Kansas? It won’t, they won’t notice but their school wasn’t repaired this year because the money was spent on missiles to bomb Iran and a dozen other places. How will regime change benefit the citizens of Camaguey, Cuba? It won’t. On the track record of American “regime change” operations, life will suddenly get very much worse for most of them.

So where does all this leave us? In a bad place, that’s for sure, and rapidly getting worse because it is all evidence that the empire is crumbling. It has just lost a major war, as distinct from all the minor wars such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and so on, and is on the back foot in Ukraine. Financially, it is in serious trouble as it has had to bail out Japan due to the pressure on the yen caused by the blockade in Strait of Hormuz caused by the war it started with a country that wasn’t threatening it but had promised that if attacked, it would close the Strait ... You get the drift. Everything is connected.

The War Party in the US, meaning the entire political, financial, industrial, military, academic, religious and wealth establishments, have always believed they could do what they liked and there would be no repercussions. True, in the past, there weren’t any repercussions in the US, although there were plenty everywhere else. Now, they’re coming home. Lake Powell, the water supply for some 40million people in the hottest part of the country, is nearly empty as the snowpack on the Rockies is failing due to global warming. Farms are going bankrupt at record rates. Fertilisers aren’t available, so the crops will be down by half. Another ebola outbreak in Africa just when the US has decided it needs to divert its aid money to a $1.5trillion budget for weapons; on and on. All because small groups of people in most countries believe they are superior and should be dominant while the rest of the world should kneel down and accept subjugation (that man is seriously paranoid but very powerful).

The world is chaotic and anarchic just because humans want to dominate each other. It isn’t some metaphysical force driving us to the edge of the abyss, it is the result of a few percent of the population getting together to take control of the political process and push in a direction that excites them. They have no idea, they can’t see beyond the ends of their noses, they are simply greedy, stupid and evil people who get a kick out of crushing other people. If we don’t take control back, things will get worse and worse until we do. But by then it may be too late.

Reference:

1. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

In a recent article, The Economist asked: “Can French nukes protect Europe if Donald Trump walks away?” (paywall). Beside Trump’s petulance, they raise two themes: Gallic haughtiness and swagger, and the glowering threat of Putin’s Russia. On the one hand, being English, the authors can’t pass the chance of mocking their age-old frenemies, the Frogs, including snide shots at de Gaulle’s “cavalry boots to his aquiline nose.” On the other, they sit wetting themselves over the “nightmare scenario haunt(ing) Europe,” a Russian attack during one of Trump’s hissy fits. If Putin’s orc armies suddenly exploded westward while Trump wasn’t talking to anybody, would the relatively small French nuclear arsenal be enough to protect Europe? France has 300 air-and submarine-launched nuclear weapons, compared with Russia’s 1,700 actively deployed (i.e. ready to fire) bombs. That is, France can “credibly threaten massive retaliation” even after a surprise attack: “But should a nuclear war begin, powers the size of France (or Britain), know that there is a good chance they will not survive.” But they’re planning for it, anyway.

This article has to be seen in two contexts, reality and fantasy. Reality is that Europe’s economy is running on empty. Since Biden made good on his promise to blow up the Nordstream II pipeline bringing cheap Russian gas to power Germany’s factories, hundreds of thousands of high quality industrial jobs have been lost as manufacturing rapidly decamps to China, Vietnam and other places. Biden and the rest of his America-First crew were warned that shutting off the supply of Russian gas would devastate the European economy but he shrugged it off: “That’s a price we’re prepared to pay,” he replied sternly. Now it’s happening, just as Trump is in one of “off again” moods about NATO, so the Europeans are panicking: What if the Russians come, who will defend us? OMG we’ll have to do it ourselves. Quick, let’s spend a heap of money to built up our armies over the next ten years. Two trillion euros is the figure being tossed around, which is a very great deal of money for a continent with a floundering economy that can’t get the oil it needs from the Gulf or the gas it needs from its historical enemy to the east. That’s reality and, as Freud said, you can’t fight reality.

The fantasy is that Europe is in danger. The notion that 145million Russians who have 17.6million sqkm of territory and 37,500km of coast to defend are all sitting on their western border, crossbows at the ready, waiting for the word to invade Europe’s 550millions in their pokey little countries, is pure paranoid fantasy. Actually, that’s not quite true. Some of it is a genuine racist hatred and fear of Russians but a large part of it is artfully concocted propaganda designed to funnel squillions to weapons manufacturers and high tech spying and so on. This mixed delusion and deceit washes around with another fanciful theme, that the Russian economy is on its knees and Mr Putin is about to get the bullet. In fact, their economy is doing reasonably well, undergoing a crash conversion away from Europe to Asia, and Putin is secure, with about 50% net approval (Trump’s is about -33% and dropping).

Unlike the US president and the people around him, the Russian president and his advisors are not complete fools. They know that if Europe is about to spend a fortune to bring its collective military to the point where they could defend themselves, then the time to attack is now. You don’t wait until the other side calls out “We’re ready, you can attack now.” But it’s not going to happen. In order to attack somebody, you need three things. You need the means to do it, the track record, and the motive. Russia does not have the means to attack Western Europe. The fighting in Ukraine has now gone on longer than the Great Patriotic War, i.e. World War II, during which time the Red Army pounded 1,800km from Moscow to Berlin on a front about 3,000km long. In 4.5yrs in Ukraine, Russian troops have penetrated about 50km deep, sometimes advancing only a fraction of 1sqkm in a month, while taking heavy casualties due to drones. They simply do not have the means to attack Europe.

Do they have the track record of unprovoked invasions? Some people would say they do, pointing to Ukraine, but that ignores their history. Last century, Russia/USSR was invaded five times in under 40 years producing death and devastation on an unimaginable scale. After beating off the last attack in 1945, they announced: “Nobody will ever threaten us again.” And they meant it. Unfortunately, the US has not stopped threatening them since that day. The current war was to prevent Ukraine joining NATO because that would mean American nuclear weapons stationed directly on their border, ready to launch in moments. That had long warned that this would be “the brightest of red lines” which must not be crossed. Rightly or wrongly, they believed this was about to happen so they invaded to prevent it. This apart, they have largely kept to themselves. The ordinary Russian has no interest in invading other countries, only an interest in making sure others don’t invade them. They’ve been there, done that and didn’t like it.

Last question: Do they have the motive to attack Europe? No, they have made it absolutely clear that they will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, whereas the US refuses to give that assurance. However, they are very aware of the ceaseless flood of hostility directed at them by the US and its vassal states in Europe, as in the article in The Economist: “The Russians are coming, quick, we have to spend ten years arming ourselves.” Naturally enough, when your neighbour starts amassing the heavy duty stuff, you have to take steps to protect yourself. Unfortunately, the neighbour then peers across the fence, sees you are busy building forts and things, and shouts: “There, we told you, look how aggressive those dogs are!”

It all goes back to the twin drives in Homo sapiens: the drive to dominate, and the drive to resist being dominated. That’s it, that’s all it is. Unfortunately, we all have to share the planet with a country that thinks it has the god-given right to dominate the entire world in every respect at all times, and that anybody who resists is implacably hostile/satanic and has to be obliterated, as Trump says. About 20% of the rest of the world are happy to sit in the dirt and lick that country’s boots but the rest are finally getting tired of it and pushing back. So we have the bizarre spectacle of a person elected as the “president of peace” who thought he should have the Nobel peace prize, who has impulsively started a war and has just had his fat arse kicked in. Good. All power to Iran, just don’t make the mistake of thinking Trump and his mates can be trusted. Now it’s over to the US political establishment to turf him out as a danger to the country and the world. Except it’s not going to happen, there are so many people in positions of power who would have to admit defeat and lose their chance of a tilt at the top job that they would rather leave him in power.

The good news is that the War Party in the US and its lickspittle vassals is permanently discredited, especially among the young. Perhaps we can get ourselves out of this mess and set a new course for the future? Not much chance of that yet, things aren’t bad enough. Fascism doesn’t just ride off into the sunset, it has to be burned out of the national psyche. It has to be crushed utterly, as happened in Germany and Japan in 1945, or it has to tear itself apart from inside. In 1984, Orwell was pessimistic that it could ever be defeated. At the end, after his years of imprisonment in the Ministry of Love, Winston Smith is sitting in a cafe when hears of the great victory over the hordes of Eurasia and is won over:

Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, his struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Trump has lost his chance of a place among the immortals, he has completely blown it. In October 2024, I wasn’t much concerned whether he got in or not. If he lost the election and Harris got the nod, then we would have four more years of the same old mayhem. If he won, then there was a good chance he would wreck two things that I want dismantled: NATO and AUKUS. Looks like he’s doing it so we can only keep our fingers crossed. As a bonus, he may in fact be tipping the balance in the US against the neoliberal neoconservatives, aka fascists, but don’t underestimate them. Bertolt Brecht understood that the urge to dominate is in us all and is only waiting for a chance to break out:

Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!

Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,

The bitch that bore him is in heat again (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,1941).

But leave that for the minute. Granted we all have the blood lust in some form or another, maybe just to see our toddlers win the egg and spoon race, can it be controlled? Can relations between Russia and the West ever settle to the point, if not of bosom buddies, at least of civility? The answer is yes, they can, but not with the current crop of political crooks and cranks running the show. What happens at present, and what guarantees failure in negotiations, is that one side or other announces: “This is what you must do.” The move will have to come from the West as, after the perfidious attacks on Iran, nobody trusts Western politicians any more. They’d be fools to trust again, they have to keep their eyes open and their powder dry.

Is there any hope of transition from permanent war to a sort of pacific state? Yes there is but again, we’d need entirely different people in charge as the first step would be for the West to declare: “After thousands of years of war, we wish to live in peace. We are not superior to you and have no ambition to dominate you, so what guarantees do you need from us in order to start the process of disarmament?” There is no way any American politician, or businessman or general or whatever, could say anything like that, partly because they devoutly believe they are superior and couldn’t stand the humiliation of admitting that to a foreigner, and partly because it would be political and every other sort of suicide. But if they did, we know what the other side will say: “What you need to do is stop threatening us,” to which, and entirely without blushing, the collective West would say: “Oh, but we’ve never threatened anybody. We’ve only ever wanted to live in peace, it’s those demonic neighbours, they’re the problem.” So in strangling Cuba today, the US insists it is not being aggressive, it’s only responding to an existential threat from this tiny, bankrupt island.

Are the entire upper echelons of the US political establishment mad? Are they frankly psychotic? No, but they are seriously grandiose, which is a variant of the paranoid state. They’re determined to be the unrestrained world hegemon so they’re allergic to the slightest hint that somebody isn’t going to do as they’re told. Henry Mencken defined puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” In his self-appointed role as Universal Big Brother, Uncle Sam’s haunting fear is that someone, somewhere, is having an independent thought, so he has to find that person and destroy him before the contagion spreads. No matter that in his endless search for dissidents, Sam builds a surveillance state that eclipses Orwell’s dystopia, that he destroys one country after another, impoverishes his own people, pushes the world to the brink of climate catastrophe, none of that matters in the frenzied hunt for heretics (for a truly frightening look at the rapidly growing tendrils of the surveillance state, watch Chris Hedges interview the remarkable Whitney Webb). The paranoid state doesn’t fade away quietly, it reinforces itself.

The world is not safe if one group thinks they can dominate another with no consequences. The paradox of hierarchy is that our urge to dominate is balanced by an even more durable urge to resist oppression. The entire world political and economic structure today is built around the idea that one country can lord it over the rest of the world, but this political program is doomed. It is already failing but rather than admit it, the 1% redouble their efforts, such as the disastrous attack on Iran. Fortunately, the American defeat gives us a chance to dismantle some of the militarist and neoliberal structures that are driving us toward either nuclear or climate catastrophe or both, but the people with all the money and power aren’t going to give up without a fight. As their power grows, so does their sense of entitlement. They are likely to pull a Samson stunt in order to prevent the undeserving poor getting a decent share of the world’s bounty, i.e. to pull the temple down on everybody. In his article The paranoid style in American politics, historian Richard Hofstadter concluded:

In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all (in Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 1964).

That was 60 years ago. It’s much, much worse now. Trump and Co. seem determined to make sure the US empire doesn’t survive much longer. We, the other passengers on Planet Earth, can only wait in trepidation to see if the damage can be restricted. The omens aren’t promising but the important point is that everybody everywhere has to stop seeing the other side as demonic and start to realise that Russians are human, too (and Iranians, and Chinese and Cubans and Venezuelans...).

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Following last week’s post, a reader commented:

(I have) lived most of my life with significant recurring mental health problems (psychosis). In an effort to throw off the cloak of this enigma I have spent quite a lot of time attempting to understand spirituality within and outside of the context of religion.

We can deal briefly with the concept of spirituality as conceived within psychiatry: it doesn’t exist. For mainstream psychiatry, spirituality equals hocus-pocus. Moving on, the reader mentioned the work of the psychologist, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) who proposed that humans have a “hierarchy of needs,” ranging from the basic physiological needs of life, through emotional security to what he called self-actualisation, meaning morality, creativity and acceptance, etc. He had recently read Maslow’s last book, Religions, Values and Peak Experiences (1964) in which the psychologist argued that modern science had become too mechanistic, abandoning to religions the important human concepts of values and meaning [1]. Maslow didn’t like that either as he felt that religions readily degenerated into a rigidly hierarchical, sterile and ritualistic dogma where the business and continuity of the church, temple, etc. became more important than the spiritual development of its members. This became the dominant theme in Maslow’s rather short but productive life. He’s right on both points but I think his solution was wrong.

I hadn’t come across this book but I have now, it’s available for download as a pdf and the actual book itself is only about 60 pages. It was written over 60 years ago and it shows, it’s very much a product of its age, but you can see what he’s trying to deal with. During his training, Maslow was exposed to behaviorists and to Freudian psychoanalysis but didn’t like either school. He felt behaviorism’s antimentalism made it sterile while Freud focussed excessively on the destructive side of human life; neither gave any credit to human creativity, morality, altruisum and other virtues. It’s clear from his last book that he didn’t understand why psychologists and psychiatrists would adopt either of these fairly extreme positions. The answer to that dilemma lies in the philosophy of science.

In the late 19^th Century, sciences such as physics and chemistry were roaring ahead, with biology panting along behind them but psychology wasn’t even in the race. Despite the best efforts of the world’s first psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who tried to adapt the methods of physiology to studying the mind, introspective psychology was going in circles. Nobody could get a grip on the nature of experience or of higher human mental function, or at least no two people could agree. From early in the 20^th Century, a growing number of psychologists decided that trying to understand the mind as such was a waste of time, it could only lead to confusion and contradiction. They dismissed the mind as a misleading mystery that diverts attention from the real causes of our actions, our interaction with the environment. The only way to understand human conduct was to strip mentalism out of the equation, leaving only observable behaviour as the sole reliable scientific datum. Out with values, beliefs, morality, altruism and all that wishy-washy stuff, all that counts is what we can see and measure. That bleak and mechanistic approach fitted perfectly with the gathering revolution in science, now known as positivism, which dug a deep moat between science, meaning what we can see and measure, and all that other stuff [2, Chap. 3; also 8]. John B Watson (1878-1958), the most influential of the early American behaviorists, said:

Mediaeval tradition has kept psychology from becoming a science. Psychology, up to very recent times, has been held so rigidly under the dominance both of traditional religion and of philosophy – the two great bulwarks of mediaevalism – that it has never been able to free itself and become a natural science [3].

At the end of that century, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) thought that we could understand the mind in terms of the dominant science of his youth, hydrodynamics. He and his followers accepted the reality of the mind and constructed a model that functioned more or less like the sewers of a big city. Over the next 60 years or so, psychoanalysis developed, expanded and fractured into a hundred combative schools, just because there was no way it could be tied to an agreed realistic foundation. We think, we experience, we decide, but what are these phenomena? Nobody could agree and it became a matter of who could shout loudest, especially after Freud died [4]. Now they didn’t say that metaphysical matters such as values, art and morality don’t exist, because they were all cultured and civilised people, they just said that while at work, scientists can’t be concerned with such things.

None of these people were trying to be monsters but their self-consciously amoral ideas led to some of humanity’s greatest crimes. Stripped of morality and clothed with scientific virtue, people got the idea that humanity was degenerating just because low class people had lots of children while the upper classes had far fewer. This fused with the notion that there is a hierarchy of races, with a small number of superior races surrounded by swarms of inferior people, all breeding like rabbits, hence eugenics, the idea of controlled breeding to improve the stock. To prevent a new dark age, it was felt necessary to strip away such tender-hearted notions as sympathy, pity and such like and stop the riff-raff from breeding. With nothing to brake it, that leads to genocide. That’s how science came to be mechanistic and dehumanising, which inflamed the widely read and human-centred Maslow. But he was also opposed to the dehumanising influence in institutionalised religion. All too often, religion became a profitable business for a select few, to which the great majority payed lip service on Sundays and ignored it for the rest of the week.

All this is true. Maslow’s solution was that we need a new science which can incorporate values and give a central place to what he called peak experiences. What are peak experiences? I don’t actually know because even though he uses the term something like 140 times in the book, it’s undefined. Essentially, it means what each reader wants it to mean. Thus, Maslow fell into the bear trap that positivism and behaviorism had been trying to avoid: reliability. The early positivists weren’t trying to make science boring and mechanistic because it appealed to their cold and sterile souls, they wanted science to be reliable. If, for example, you consent to an anaesthetic for surgery, you want to know that the process is reliable and you’ll wake up after it. If you get on a plane to travel overseas, you want to know that their systems are reliable and you’ll get off in the right city after an uneventful flight. Reliability is what science is about, that’s all it’s about. As they saw it, the choice was either sticking to what can be seen and measured, or taking a leap of faith but never knowing when you had drifted from “reasonable supposition” to unprovable metaphysics, i.e. to fairy tales, political prejudice or outright lunacy. This, of course, is what Popper’s criterion of falsifiability is about. Religion, morality, fairy tales, madness, politics, art, these things are matters of taste and can’t be falsified: de gustibus, non est disputandam. There’s no arguing over taste. In science, however, what seems like a solid scientific fact today can always be proven wrong tomorrow by new facts. A scientific opinion can be refuted, religious or political opinions can’t.

By failing to define “peak experiences,” Maslow left the door open for all sorts of charlatans to gallop through. For example, what would be a peak experience for one DJ Trump? Probably ripping $50million off somebody and knowing that they know he did it and there’s nothing they can do about it. He’d be in seventh heaven for a week. We’re not going to consider what would be a peak experience for the late J Epstein, or this religious maniac in the West Bank whose only goal in life is to see millions of dead Palestinians because that would be doing God’s will (starts at 0.15; he’s a lawyer but he’s not insane, he’s simply evil). The point is that attempting to describe mental states without some limitations is always going to end in tears. I think Maslow was probably a genuinely nice middle class person and wrote a nice middle class psychology but the simple fact is that most people in power aren’t nice. His “hierarchy of needs” doesn’t give any account of bad people, nor does behaviorism. Psychoanalytic theory was no use, it ended up saying only that bad people are driven by destructive wishes, i.e. it was description masquerading as explanation.

The biocognitive model for psychiatry is very different from any of these. It says: the mind is a real dualist entity that emerges predictably from certain highly specified functions of suitable machines, be they carbon-based or silicon-based (or others). The mind is real because it can act on the real or physical world but it is dualist in that it is not constrained by the laws of the physical world. The process of emergence of mind follows the laws of a dual-valued calculus (i.e. it is not random or miraculous), generating an isolated (private) and unique informational state which is experienced as “me” [see 2, Chap. 4 for definitions of information and computation]. The behaviorists were correct in saying that behaviour is constrained by the external world; we don’t, for example, try to breathe underwater but that’s a boring truth. By using our minds, we can devise ways of remaining underwater for long periods but behaviorism couldn’t explain creativity (Skinner says in BF&D that a creative artist is simply a person skilled at arranging creativity-inducing environments, which is a cringe-inducing definition). The concept of an emergent, dualist mind accounts for free will, in that it can devise new informational states that do not exist in the material world and choose between them, all without breaching the laws of thermodynamics. The emergent mind decides its own future: the physical universe is deterministic but we (and other minded animals) aren’t.

How reliable is the biocognitive model? How well does it fit with our concepts of evolution, of creativity, morality and so on and, of course, of mental disorder? I think it fits very well, certainly far better than any previous model. Consider the question that bothers philosopher David Chalmers: zombies [5]. A zombie is defined as a person who is absolutely normal in every physical and behavioural respect except he (it?) has no inner mental life. A zombie looks at a sunset and says “Oh, look at that lovely shade of lilac” but there is nothing happening behind its eyes. How do I know that you’re not a zombie? As a logician, Chalmers wanted proof at philosophical level, i.e. proof that it could not be otherwise. Naturally enough, proof at that level doesn’t exist, there’s no test but there’s behavioural evidence, that you react to things exactly as I do. That’s Chalmers’ objection: how do we know with philosophical certainty that you have an inner experience? We don’t but two more factors are important. There is a wealth of physiological evidence: even though I haven’t looked inside my head lately nor in yours, all humans are almost identical physiologically. My physiology generates inner experience so I presume yours does, too. If you want to say “That’s unproven,” then don’t go to the hospital next time you get sick. Hospitals are only for people with human physiology.

Finally, there’s the argument from evolution, as in “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Evolution builds on what went before: it is impossible for me to be the first person in history to experience an inner life. Chomsky made this silly mistake when he announced, ex cathedra, that human speech sprang into existence 75,000 years ago following a single small mutation [6, Chap. 7]. So what did Homo sapiens do for the preceding 250,000 years of their existence? And why just then, when all the physical requirements for speech (ears, tongue, teeth, respiratory control etc) were already in place? Doesn’t make any sense at all. The human mind developed from the protohuman mind, which developed from a non-human mind... Behavioral evidence, physiological evidence, evolutionary evidence. That will do.

Nearly a century after the Vienna Circle of positivists announced that science could no longer concern itself with ephemera such as the mind [8], we now have a formal theory of mind that slots it neatly into the prevailing scientific ethos, namely, information theory. People object, saying: “When Freud used the prevailing ethos, you objected.” True, but I’m afraid I can’t slot it into the scientific ethos that will prevail in a hundred years’ time, we’ll have to wait and see what it is. But I don’t think it will be as dramatically different as, say, biology was after Darwin or physics after Einstein. The basics of IT have been around since 1832 when, while walking across a paddock, the 17 year old George Boole (1815-1864) had a flash of inspiration. With a dual-valued logic (now known as Boolean algebra), he realised, he could account for the computational side of human mental life [7]. The biocognitive model simply extends that to cover emotion, sensation and so on but, because it emerges from a physical structure using a strict calculus, it imposes restrictions on what can be seen as reliable.

We can reliably say that all humans have minds, and that minds cause behaviour as an emergent phenomenon. The mind is not the brain and can’t be “reduced” to the brain but what we experience is heavily influenced by biology. We have, as Maslow noted, basic physiological needs (food, water, shelter etc) that must be satisfied; once these are settled, we have a series of drives that are heavily influenced but not controlled by biology. These include the urge to socialise and its counterpart, the fear of strangers, the urge to form dominance hierarchies and its opposite, the urge to resist being oppressed. These are not absolutes but they feel good (“powerfully reinforcing,” as the behaviorists said), so we indulge them within the limits of a set of rules known as morality. Some people keep to the rules and can feel satisfied within them, other people break them. Personality therefore becomes the distinctive set of rules we each adopt which govern our interactions with the social and physical environments.

Other important, genetically-programmed impulses are the response to the perception of a threat and the response to a major loss. Needless to say, if the physical activity of the brain is disturbed in any way, e.g. by infection, drugs, brain damage, sleep deprivation, etc., it’s computational output will be disturbed. That doesn’t say that all disturbance of mental function is necessarily biological because there can be disruptions at the level of the information processing. If the input is wrong (“I’m sure I saw something out there”) or the algorithmic structure (beliefs) is wrong (“I believe people are out to get me”), then the output will be wrong. This applies on a more personal level: “I know from experience that if I try to speak in public, I will shake and sweat and dribble; people will see it and laugh at me; that will be intolerably scary; that thought makes me shake and sweat, therefore I won’t try.” If and when people get trapped in a state of self-sustaining distress, we call that mental disorder but it’s psychological, not biological.

All this is to say that the mind is an informational space generated by the physical brain. This statement is at the level of an established scientific fact. Humans have a unique and private mental life that some like to call spirituality, although I prefer to avoid that word because of its supernatural connotations, e.g. spiritualism, immortality, telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition, mediumship and so on. In the biocognitive model, these things cannot happen just because there is no mechanism for them. There is no way for information from the future to influence my current mental (informational) state because it doesn’t exist. Telepathy, meaning mind-to-mind communication, is impossible as there is no medium by which information can be exchanged between minds, no mental Bluetooth as it were. Telekinesis, same again, the mind’s informational state cannot be communicated to an inert object to make it move without some intervening medium which obeys the laws of physics. Immortality and reincarnation are excluded just because the minute my heart stops beating, the informational state known as my mind will cease to exist, never to be reconstituted. The informational state will be lost forever.

As a philosophical exercise in his “playful” book, Reality + [5] (read ‘stupid’), Chalmers wonders whether the human mind could be “uploaded” to a computer, giving us immortality in a digital universe. If he knew any biology, I don’t think he’d bother with the idea but my feeling is that there are far more important philosophical and practical matters we need to deal with before wasting time on that sort of thing, e.g. the problem of human aggression that flows from the biologically-influenced urge to form dominance hierarchies. But imagine if the technical problems were overcome and we were uploaded to live forever in a virtual universe where Trump, Epstein and the rabid zionist lawyer had managed to take control. Wouldn’t that be jolly: hell, as Sartre said, is other humans. In the book he coauthored with the Nobel laureate neurophysiologist, JC Eccles [8], Karl Popper said:

I don’t look forward to an eternity of survival ... the idea of going on forever seems to me utterly frightening. Anybody who has sufficient imagination to deal with the idea of infinity would, I think, agree... [9, p556] (In the last chapter of the biocognitive book [2, Chap. 11.7: An afterthought on religion], I did allow the possibility that, at the point of death and by some unimaginable technology, the human mind could be uploaded to dark matter, thereby conferring immortality, but it wasn’t meant seriously. Consistent with Popper, it seems to me that the only way we could survive eternity would be if we had no memory).

The human mind is real but not the same sort of real as the wind blowing in the trees outside. It is an emergent informational space, unlocalised, insubstantial (immaterial) and therefore not subject to the physical laws of the material universe, meaning it satisfies the essential criteria for a “spirit.” As such, it is able to act recursively on its physical substrate, the brain, thereby giving us control over our bodies and our future while prohibiting any supernatural actions. All this is true of animals, the only difference being that they don’t waste time talking. Creativity is simply generating optional futures and choosing the best. Yes, it seems to come from nowhere but that’s not magic, that just tells us how fast the mind works. Morality is a set of rules that we all agree should be followed in the interests of peace and sustainability of the environment. The only trouble we face today is that power is highly attractive to some people and, once they get their hands on the controls, they divert the machinery of society to their ends, not yours or mine.

In the biocognitive approach, personality is the set of rules that we each use to produce observable behaviour. Personality just is a set of rules. If they are internally consistent and mesh with the larger society’s set of rules, producing a fairly harmonious state, we call that normal personality. If they are internally inconsistent, producing distress, or conflict with the larger society, we call that personality disorder. There are no “categories” of personality disorder, although one type of rule can dominate, e.g. one person is preoccupied with order, following rules, punctuality, tidiness, etc, while another is dominated by the thought that people are out to hurt him, nobody cares, he can’t trust anybody, offence is the best form of defence and so on. All this relates to early life when these types of rules are extracted from the social environment. For most cases of mental disorder, psychotherapy is the proper path, meaning a process of exploring the person’s set of rules to find what is causing the trouble. Once they are “brought to consciousness,” as it were, they can be amended, which is made much easier by relating today’s rules to yesterday’s traumatic events.

To my knowledge, the biocognitive model is the only theory of mind that does this. I agree with Maslow that behaviorism was sterile but we need to understand what the early theorists had in mind when they decided that antimentalism was the only viable path for science. Their model didn’t work [6, Chap. 4] but it was a genuine attempt. Psychoanalysis was far too early. Given the available technology, there was no way they could write that sort of theory as a valid (reliable, non-magical) scientific theory. Also, Freud put huge emphasis on the darker side of human affairs but that was Freud. It meant that his theory couldn’t translate to creativity or to the larger world. Current mainstream theories in philosophy don’t start with a formal mechanism of emergence of mind so they just wander in circles, describing what the mind does but not explaining how it does it [4, Part II].

There you have it, a valid theory of human mind/spirituality/consciousness which is entirely consistent with modern concepts of science and involves no supernatural elements. To my knowledge, this is the first time in history that anybody has been able to make that claim but time will tell. It generates a system of ethics and morality but does it lead to religion per se? In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says religion serves four purposes: explanation, inspiration, exhortation and consolation. He believes these functions are all better handled in non-religious systems. What we need is an ethical or moral system based in natural principles, not handed down from on high.

The American author Anne Lamott said: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” That’s true beyond any doubt when your god tells you to slaughter a million Palestinians. That is the ancient problem with a supernatural spirituality, there are no natural limits. If the priest or rabbi or pastor says “Hate those people because they are unbelievers and must die,” then who can say he’s wrong? The person who says “That’s wrong, it says ‘Thou shalt not kill’” will be first to get the chop. A natural spirituality without supernatural, wish-fulfulling fantasies is essential if we wish to survive as a species (and all the other minded species whose languages we don’t understand).

References:

1. Maslow AH (1964). Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press.

2. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London: Routledge.

3. Watson JB (1924). Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott.

4. Masson JM (1984). The Assault on Truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Simon and Schuster.

5. Chalmers DJ (2022). Reality+: Virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy. London: Allen Lane.

6. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

7. Boole, G. (1854). An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. Dover Classics of Science and Mathematics. New York: Dover (1958). Now available through Google Books.

8. Hahn H, Neurath O, Carnap R (1929). The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle. Ernst Mach Society, University of Vienna. http://rreece.github.io/philosophy-reading-list/docs/the-scientific-conception-of-the-world-the-vienna-circle.pdf

9. Popper KR, Eccles JC. The Self and its Brain. London: Springer, 1981.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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(for some reason, this isn’t indenting quotes, I’ll try to sort it out)

A couple of questions arrived regarding last week’s post. First one: “You said that in prosperity gospel, the belief is: ‘If you’re rich, it’s a sign that God favours you.’ What’s wrong with that?” There are two things wrong with it. First, it directly contradicts a critical message in Christianity, one which is common to all the major religions, that we all have a duty to care for the poor and broken, e.g.:

Matt.25.40: And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

I John 3.17: But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?

Second fault: it leads directly to corruption, usually on a massive scale. It’s not a fault of the individuals that so many pastors of prosperity type churches are corrupt, corruption is built into the system, e.g. it’s happened that twice in the past few years, I’ve found wallets in the street with several hundred dollars in them, not to mention credit cards etc. Naturally enough, I contacted the owners and gave them back; the blokes who’d lost them were ordinary working people, they were so grateful as in both cases they were on their way to pay their rent. However, as a member of a prosperity church, I could have said: “Oh look, God has put some money in my path, obviously he wants me to have it. And these cards, of course, I’m sure they’re part of my reward for being such a virtuous chap.” To paraphrase Lord Acton, the system corrupts, but the system also attracts the corruptible.

Q2: “You said: ‘Zionism is an heretical, idolatrous, criminal cult but the trouble is, it has found common cause with the christian heresies spreading and financed from the US.’ Isn’t that to their benefit?” Sure it is. The so-called christian zionists send guns and money to the Jewish zionists who then kill to their hearts’ content to get what they believe is their divine inheritance in West Asia, minus its 120million unbelieving inhabitants. Remember that not all Jewish zionists are religious; a lot of them are like Trump, they pretend to be religious but they don’t follow the rules and do essentially what they like. They want to dominate their neighbours to the extent of driving them off their land and/or killing them so they can have the land themselves. They are no different from the European colonists in North and South America, in Africa and Australia. In Asia, the Europeans wanted to push the inhabitants into a form of serfdom, which the British did in their vast Indian empire, forcing the population to work the land or the factories that enriched the British. In particular, the zionist goal in West Asia today is precisely the same political phenomenon as the Nazi plan to invade and occupy the USSR. Nazi ideology said:

“The Nordic races are superior types, the Slavic inferior; by some cruel twist of history, we Germans have ended up with little land in central Europe, boxed in by jealous neighbours yet the Slavs have unlimited land and resources that they can’t use as they don’t know how to; it is a law of nature that the superior should dominate the inferior, not vice versa; ipso facto we are entitled to that land; therefore we should invade the USSR, take their land, kill off half of them and enslave the rest to build a glorious empire that will last a thousand years and will take humanity to new heights of achievement.”

That was their reason for World War. It was not a war to wipe out the Jews, they were a clean-up job to sort out behind the lines because they were diluting the pure Aryan racial stock and spreading transnational, Bolshevik ideas. Hitler did not attack France to snatch its Jews, the intent was to neutralise France, to prevent them and Britain launching a war to his rear while he was busy in the East, i.e. a war on two fronts which had been Germany’s downfall in the Great War. Similarly, zionism says:

Deut. 28:1. Now it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all His commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee high above all nations of the earth (added emphasis).

That means: “We are chosen by God to be superior to all nations of the earth; God has promised us all the land from the east bank of the Nile to the west bank of the Euphrates (Genesis 15. 18-21); we were driven off it 2000 years ago but it is our unassailable religious duty to take it back from the unbelievers who have stolen it; by doing so, we are doing God’s duty; if the unbelievers resist, they will feel God’s fiery wrath upon their heads; then we will build a mighty empire that will usher in the coming of the messiah and an age of universal peace under Jewish leadership” (or something, that bit isn’t entirely clear).

Nazism and zionism are the same political phenomenon: a group feel they are hard done by and covet their neighbours’ lands, so they decide to even the balance by any means necessary so they can preside over a glorious future. That’s Jewish zionism. Christian zionism agrees that Jews have to be gathered into their promised land, then the Christian messiah can come except that in the end, the Jews will get the chop and be sent to the big cooker downstairs. In a Monty Python twist, Jewish zionists and so-called christian zionists are actually cooperating for contradictory ends, which only goes to show that if it made sense, it wouldn’t be religion.

Is it fair to say of Jewish zionism that they have an attitude of superiority, at least to the indigenous inhabitants of modern Palestine? Yes, it is fair. Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who refounded the very influential Chabad movement in New York, made it quite clear that Palestinians were inferior beings. We see this attitude in the “settlers,” the extremists who are paid to move to houses built for them in the West Bank. In this video, one of them freely tells the interviewer that one Jewish life is worth ten million Palestinian lives (from start to 0.45). Two points to note. First, this is not exceptional. This is normal for the 750,000 settlers who now occupy the West Bank, and there are thousands more on the way as the Israeli government pours money into building new ones, bulldozing Palestinian houses in the process. For a government whose economy is on the brink of collapse from war, where does all the money come from? From supporters in the US, who hold equally noxious Jewish supremacist views.

Second point: this attitude is not new. It did not spring into existence following Oct 7^th, or in 1948, or 1885, it goes back forever. The only difference is that normally, people who believe it don’t say it on camera but now they don’t care, they think they’re winning and can say what they like. For the record, this is fascism. It is not a nationalist fascism, as per Mussolini, Nazis, Japan or imperial Britain; or a socialist fascism, as per Stalin and Mao; or a capitalist fascism, as is growing in the US today; it is a religious or clericalist fascism, of which there have been hundreds of examples throughout history. Fascism is not itself a form of government. It is a technology which can be used by any group anywhere to gain and hold power. It relies on the innate human urge to dominate, employing a wide variety of techniques to excite people and license them to act in a brutal manner toward their neighbours which, ordinarily, most of them wouldn’t do. The urge to dominate is built in; normally, it is quiescent but it just needs the right triggers to erupt forth, and fascism provides them. Fascism is as fascism does, and the “settler” in that video is doing it.

But it raises an important question: if it’s fine for the zionists to kill hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for killing Israelis on October 7^th, how come the Israeli government ordered the Hannibal doctrine on that day, to kill Israelis (military and civilian) to prevent them being captured by Hamas? That too goes back a very long way, to the medieval concept of the informer. Any Jew who gives any information to the goyim that in any way allows one Jew or many to suffer in any way is a traitor to the religion and must be punished grievously. As Shahak and Mezvinsky explain, a rabbinical court decides who is guilty of informing and appoints a “pursuer” to carry out its sentence:

“In chapter 10, rule 1 of Laws of Idolatry, Maimonides (the great Spanish-born Talmudic scholar, d. 1204) , after explaining the extermination of the ancient Canaanites and again asserting that no Jews should be killed, said: “All this applies to the seven [Canaanite] nations, but Jewish informers and heretics should be exterminated by one’s own hand and put into hell, because they cause trouble to Jews by removing their hearts from being true to the Lord, like Tzadok, and Beitos [the alleged founders of the Sadducean sect] and their pupils. Let the name of the wicked perish” [1, Chap. 7]

That is, anybody who causes trouble to Jews must die. Israelis taken prisoner by Hamas will cause trouble to Jews. Therefore they must die, and at least 600 Israelis were killed by the Israeli military on that day (this was also the justification for the assassination of former PM Yitzhak Rabin by religious fanatics, same as happened to Gandhi and for the same reason, i.e. betraying the religion).

We live in dangerous times but the trouble lies with the people at the controls. Three years ago, there was a terrible bus accident in the Hunter Valley, NSW. A bus carrying a group coming home from a wedding party rolled over, killing 10 people. At the trial, the driver admitted taking a large dose of tramadol, an opiate, and driving too fast. Several passengers had told him to slow down but apparently, he said he would show them what the bus could do and rolled it on a corner. He was sentenced to 32 years. It’s an allegory for the world we live in. The passengers on planet earth bus are frightened and telling the drivers to slow down, we’re travelling too fast, using too much, causing too much damage but the drivers scoff, telling us we’re communists or softcocks or traitors, they know what they’re doing, it’s all the enemy’s fault, we’re blameless, god’s on our side, he’s given us nuclear weapons to subdue them, on and on. Three days after Hiroshima, speaking on a national radio broadcast, US president Harry S Truman said: “We thank God that it (the atomic bomb) has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” Americans are impervious to irony, and that persists today in a new YouTube channel.

John Mearsheimer (b 1947), professor of political science at Chicago University, has long had a presence on the internet but has now started his own channel. The first two talks are available but it’s easier to skim through the transcript than sit through his plodding style. Mearsheimer propounds the notion of “offensive realism” in international relations (OR in IR). Very briefly, this says that the reality of the international scene is anarchic. Any nation that wants to maintain peace within its borders must take steps to protect itself from the anarchy spilling inwards. It therefore needs to exert control over its neighbours to make sure they don’t get any funny ideas about invading. This doctrine is widely taken as licence to act aggressively as a preemptive measure. Gaining local hegemony is the only way a nation can guarantee a peaceful life for its citizenry. For a big and powerful country, its hegemony must extend as far as it feels it needs to feel safe; for the US, this means global hegemony or, as they say, full spectrum dominance. This is the idea of the Pax Romanorum, the peace Rome was able to impose throughout its empire, with gibbets regularly spaced along their roads to remind the proles of their place in the imperial order.

In his first talk, Mearsheimer describes three strategies for conventional war: blitzkrieg, or lightning war; a war of attrition; and a war with limited aims, e.g. conquering and holding part of the enemy’s territory. The first two are directed at strategic victory. Blitzkrieg implies a sudden attack intended to overwhelm the defenders by massive force and rapid movement so they are unable to mount a counter-offensive. A war of attrition is launched where the opposing forces are more evenly balanced and “decapitation” is clearly not going to be possible but the attacking force expects to be able to wear the other side down over time. The last one, with limited aims, may succeed at first but it will soon turn into a defensive war as the enemy will not accept losing its territory and will settle down to recovering it by one means or another. At 13.50, he says: “By definition, you don’t think about launching an attack against an adversary unless you think there is a strong set of political reasons for doing so.”

The second lecture talks about the five possible strategies an attacking force can use: discriminate air war (i.e. bombing restricted to military targets); indiscriminate air war (“bombing them back to stone age”); “tit-for-tat” bombing; naval blockade; and land war. This talk is repetitious and again, skimming the transcript is the way to go. He uses the example of the illegal Trump-Netanyahu war of aggression against Iran to argue that Trump should have settled for very limited aims months ago. Now, he is caught in a trap of his own making. He needed a distraction from Epstein so he launched a war; now he needs a distraction from losing his war (I added that bit). The trap is that he has been defeated but Americans never admit defeat, especially just before an election when the people are unhappy, and he can’t find a way of convincing the Iranians that he decides who wins, not them.

To me, and bearing in mind that this is only about 75minutes of his stuff, there is a glaring fault in Mearsheimer’s presentation: he doesn’t say WHY humans want to keep attacking each other. He doesn’t say WHY Trump and the zionists are obsessed with attacking Iran, or all the other places they’ve destroyed over the past 80 years. This means that his “theory of IR” is actually back to front. Mearsheimer says: International relations are anarchic, therefore nations must dominate their neighbours. I say: Wrong. Nations are constantly trying to dominate their neighbours just because humans, and that creates international anarchy. His explanation stops at the level of the observations, he doesn’t attempt to reduce it. A reductionist explanation says that the behaviour and properties of a higher order entity (such as a nation or alliance of nations) are determined by the behaviour and properties of the lower order entities of which it is composed.

In the case of nations, the lower order entities are individual humans. Individual humans have an innate, biologically-mediated urge to dominate each other, and this translates into nations trying to dominate each other. As a matter of simple logic, if interpersonal relations take the form of dominance hierarchies, then that will apply a fortiori to nations unless there is something to prevent it. This drive is not absolute: with training from an early age, it can be moderated or switched off as required but most people don’t learn that lesson very well. With very, very few excepstions, our “leaders” didn’t learn to keep their hands to themselves. Like the bus driver who wanted to show what his powerful bus could do and ended up killing his passengers, they’re determined to show what their armies can do, how they can crush their enemies into the dirt, regardless of the risks they’re running. Like Trump, most of them are convinced they’re so smart and so powerful and so superior that they can just flick their fingers and their enemies will melt away.

The UN was set up to prevent a repetition of World War II but it was promptly neutered by the US and other Western countries so it hasn’t been very effective. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and UN Human Rights Commissioner recently visited the West Bank again. In a brief report, she said:

“I arrived at a clear conclusion: the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aims to make Palestine disappear physically, economically, culturally and politically.”

That is, genocide. Netanyahu’s illegal and inhuman conduct, and that of his government and the 92% of Israelis who support his war, flows directly from the notion that Group A can dominate Group B just because they feel like it. This has nothing to do with what they believe god told them, as former Israeli PM David ben Gurion agreed:

“If I was an Arab leader, I would not sign an agreement with Israel. It’s natural. We took their land. I mean yes, god promised it to us, but our god is not their god. Why would they accept? Why would that mean anything? Yes, there was antisemitism, Nazis, the Jews, Auschwitz, but why would they pay for it? We are coming here to take their land and they should not accept it” (from this list).

The US has conducted aggressive war since its inception, since that’s what countries blessed by god do. Since before its inception, Israel has conducted a war of attrition against its neighbours, constantly nibbling at their borders and taking each step forward not, as they say, as the end point of their ambitions but as the starting point of the next set of goals. Both countries are gripped by a sense of superiority which they believe is divinely ordained. What they don’t realise, and what they don’t want to be told, is that it’s just hormones raging in the dark. They also don’t get the paradox of hierarchy, that yes, it feels good to dominate but that means it feels bad to be oppressed, and the oppressed will inevitably fight back because humans. Anybody who believes that one life from his tribe is worth ten million of the other tribe will inevitably find out the hard way. On that day, the settlers will learn what it means to cry for help and nobody comes. Better still, before they crash the bus we’re all travelling on, maybe they should negotiate an end to the fighting. For that, we’ll need an entirely new set of leaders.

Reference:

Shahak I, Mezvinsky N (1999). The Religious Background of Rabin’s Assassination. Chap. 7 in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press: London.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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A paper published a few months ago tell us: “Crystallized and fluid cognitive abilities have different genetic associations with neuropsychiatric disorders”[1]. As soon as you see the words ‘genetic’ and ‘psychiatry’ in a title, you know what you’ll be getting: an impenetrable mix of genetic jargon and mind-numbing statistics that proves, at great public expense, just what the authors wanted to find. True to form, the authors use a variety of genetic databases where the subjects have completed different psychological tests to see if there is a link between how people perform on those tests and their psychiatric diagnoses, although they admitted they weren’t sure what they had found.

In fact, almost from the time the first tests were developed by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911) in the 1860s, psychiatrists have been fascinated by the idea that mental disorder and intellect are related. Galton’s starting point, heavily influenced by Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), is that practically everything important about humans is genetic. His interest was almost at the level of an obsession and he studied everything available at the time, such as height, facial appearance and, of course intelligence. This quickly led him to the idea that it would be possible to breed better humans than were generally available at the time, a concept he named as ‘eugenics.’ Very quickly, upper class and educated people throughout Europe and America adopted this as an article of faith: by selective breeding, unfavourable traits could be eliminated from the population. This meant “controlled breeding,” which sequed smoothly to the next step, “elimination of defective humans from the population to build a superior human race.” They used themselves as the model of “superior human beings.”

These days, the idea of eugenics is seen as completely distasteful, fit only for cranks and monsters, but that’s recent as everybody tries to distance themselves from the Nazi application of eugenics. A hundred years ago, eugenics was absolutely mainstream thinking among the intelligentsia, especially in the US where several states had eugenic laws. However, most of the actual research on hereditary illness was done in Germany, even before the Nazis came to power in 1933, because German science was generally seen as the best in the world. Anybody who wanted to study any aspect of human genetics had to go to Germany, and many did. After 1933, floods of money were provided for Nazi Rassenhygiene or “race science” to “prove” that the Aryan (Nordic) races were superior. The corollary, of course, was that everybody else was inferior and psychiatry was right at the centre of it. The virulently antisemitic Henry Ford strongly supported eugenics, including donations to the Nazi race science centre, and in 1938 was awarded Nazi Germany’s Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a medal given to foreigners sympathetic to Nazism

Prior to the outbreak of war, numbers of young psychiatrists travelled to study under the director of the psychiatric laboratories, Ernst Rüdin. One of Rüdin’s most prominent students was a Dr Eliot Slater, from Britain, who served as editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry from 1961-72 and reoriented it toward a strict biological and genetic approach. Rüdin later began the program to sterilise or murder psychiatric patients. Initially, they used injections but this was slow and unpleasant for the staff so they quickly settled on carbon monoxide gassing. This became the basis of the vast industrialised murder of millions on “eugenic principles,” including Jewish people, the Romany, Slavs, criminals, homosexuals and anybody else they didn’t like. Of course, nobody talks about that history these days, modern psychiatry is concerned with the dispassionate application of scientific principles to discovering the cause of mental disorder, as long as it’s genetic. This paper is a perfect example of how genetic research in psychiatry is never wrong. Until somebody tries to replicate it, of course, then it’s quickly forgotten. The point is that as long as people are determined to prove that all mental disorder is biological, genetics is a fundamental part of their campaign, so its history has to be whitewashed.

Back to the paper: what do they mean, crystallised and fluid intelligence? Isn’t there only one kind, the smart kind? This is an ancient argument, familiar to Galton 150yrs ago, and to every culture on earth. It’s clear that some people are good at some things and not so good at others, that education gives people more to work with, that some problem-solving abilities improve with age and some decline, and that people with mental troubles don’t do very well on testing. Crystallised and fluid intelligence refer to different aspects of intellect, not to totally different concepts. Fluid means the ability to solve problems in the here and now, such as matching pictures, completing sequences and so on. Crystallised refers to problem solving that relies on old learned material, be it education, culture, life experience etc. To me, these terms are a distinction without a difference, about as important as the physiological difference between lifting a bag of cement and lifting an egg: the difference tells us nothing about the actual neuromuscular machinery involved.

The paper looks at cognitive differences between five conditions, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (AUT), Alzheimer’s disease (ALZ), bipolar disorder (BIP), and schizophrenia (SCZ). I have no idea why they consider Alzheimer’s a psychiatric condition but the weasel prefix “neuro-” fixes that to their satisfaction. Their goal was to try to explain the enigma of mental disorder in evolutionary terms: because it’s genetic and detrimental to survival and breeding, why does mental disorder persist in the population? Surely it should die out naturally? There are different approaches to take. Huntington’s disease, for example, normally doesn’t become manifest until the early 40s, by which time the sufferers have already had their children and thus passed it on. However, that’s been known as a genetic disease forever as it matches the Mendelian model of genetic transmission. Most emphatically, mental disorder does not, but geneticists have an answer for that, which we’ll come to. After pages of tangled syntax and jargon, the authors announced:

An additional set of SNPs is in an intergenic region on chromosome 11, between genes RPL12P46 and LINC02698, previously only associated with heel bone mineral density... A study of rare protein-coding variation in relation to verbal-numerical reasoning in the UKB also identified a genetic locus (KDM5B) with pleiotropic associations with bone mineral density, and KDM5B mutant mice showed both cognitive deficits and skeletal abnormalities [1, p4; ‘pleiotropic’ means a single gene or defect affects a range of traits, leading to a complex clinical picture].

Bone mineral density. Mutant mice. Human intelligence. Right. True to form, they continue:

The candidate SNP rs35225412, mapped to the intergenic region between the genes C2orf73 and SPTBN1 on chromosome 2, has not been associated with any trait previously, whereas the SNPs found in the intergenic region 7:114337615-114428727, near the FOXP2 gene, have been associated previously with body mass index, Crohn’s disease, antisocial behavior and general risk tolerance [1, p4].

As an aside, the FOXP2 gene was previously thought to be “the language gene,” which it isn’t, and appears to have misled Chomsky to make his absurd claim that human language evolved abruptly 75,000 years ago after a single minor mutation, for which he provided exactly zero evidence: see [2, Chap. 7; Homo sapiens appeared about 300,000 years ago]. Another gene that caught their attention was C2orf73, of which a recent review commented: “– none of these reports provide functional insights into the role of the gene C2orf73 ... the biological function of C2orf73 remains uncharacterized in this body of literature.” That is, we don’t have a clue. As expected, the study authors were undeterred by this pessimism: “Further functional studies will be necessary to clarify whether C2orf73 has a role in any of these pathological processes or represents a disease‐irrelevant locus” [1, p4, added emphasis; it is a given in genetics that all papers must end with a call for more research]. You get the message.

Genetic research in mental disorder is ancient, it has always been there; it has a truly horrendous history which mainstream psychiatry ignores. As an example, the current editor of Psychological Medicine is a Prof. Kenneth Kendler of Virginia Commonwealth University, a geneticist and one of the most widely cited psychiatrists in the world. He was closely associated with Eliot Slater and many other British geneticists; in the 1990s, he teamed up with Ernst Rüdin’s daughter, Edith, herself a psychiatric geneticist, to try to rehabilitate her father’s name but it didn’t end well. Rüdin vater was up to his ears in mass murder so, amazingly, she takes over his trade (I’m not making this up: see Wiki entry on Rüdin above, last paragraph).

Second point: there is absolutely no justification anywhere in the psychiatric literature, or psychological, or neurosciences, or philosophy, that allows anybody to state that mental disorder is genetic in origin [2, Chap.2]. It is today wholly an ideology as it was in the Nazis’ day. They believed in a hierarchy of races and decided to put their belief into practice. They believed that intellect is inherited, that some forms are better than others, so the idea that mental disorders are in some sense an offshoot of different forms of intellect is a direct descendent of that idea. But just as the ideal of a superior race has led us to genocide, so the idea of “genetic mental disorders” has led us to believe that pills are the answer for everything. Yesterday, a colleague sent around a link to a study which gave the drug mebufotenin to ten women with post-partum depression. This is inhaled for a few minutes each day for a week, after which they were reported as improved. Bufotenin is cane toad toxin. There was no exploration of the possible psychological or other reasons (e.g. family or money worries, sleep deprivation etc) that contribute to distress after delivery and no indication of whether the “improvement” was sustained. Being told “It’s all chemical imbalances, dear,” disempowers people from dealing with real problems in their lives.

Third point goes back to the fact that mental disorder doesn’t match any known genetic models, but geneticists have an answer for that. Whenever a new study comes up empty-handed, meaning all the time, they simply do what philosopher of science Karl Popper called “immunising their theory against refutation.” First, they tried to show mental disorder flowed through affected families. Another of Rüdin’s students was a German psychiatrist, Franz Kallman, who, because he was Jewish, went to the US where he immediately began the same sort of program on the genetics of mental disorder. He continued publishing on genetics long after it was clear that his former teachers had been convicted for what they did in Germany. He convinced a lot of people that schizophrenia followed a simple genetic model, since completely debunked. Then they moved to the polygenic or multifactorial “model,” the idea that lots of genes contribute to the clinical picture.

That has become immeasurably complicated and has gone nowhere. Pleiotropy is just the latest cab off the rank, the idea that a single genetic defect can have far-reaching effects throughout the body. The usual model is Marfan’s syndrome, in which a defect in connective tissue affects the heart and aorta, eyes, bones, joints and so on. Another is Kartagener’s syndrome, a rare condition in which the body’s cilia, the tiny hair-like coverings of certain cells, are unable to beat properly. This affects the respiratory tract and other organs, including the little tails on sperm, so affected males are sterile. One defect produces a host of complications, eventually fatal. For psychiatry, this has gone nowhere but, as the paper above shows, they’re undeterred. There are lots of genes and even more “junk DNA” (it probably isn’t) so they should be able to extract decades of research money from this idea. Question remains: Why bother?

There’s an important principle in philosophy of science called Occam’s razor, one version of which says that the simplest model that does the job is to be preferred. Despite the blizzards of publicity given to the idea that all mental disorder is biological, this remains an opinion, nothing more. The alternative is that mental disorder is psychological in nature, that what we believe and experience can push us over the edge. If that happens, some people manage to get back on the level while others get trapped in self-sustaining, destructive mental loops. The biological people say that we are not to talk about mental stuff because it’s dualism, meaning unreal or fantasy or just plain nonsense, indistinguishable from talk about witches and magic spells.

The biological opinion, that mental problems have physical causes, goes back a long way, probably as long as there have been humans. Its most common form is the idea that there is something you can add to or subtract from the diet that will cure all manner of ailments and woes. The modern, antidualist version simply builds on that tradition but it has no more basis in fact than the Romans buying herbs and poultices in the market to cure their miseries over the fall of the empire. Today’s antipathy comes from misreading the doctrine of positivism, which says that if we can’t see it or measure it, science can’t talk about it. We can’t see or measure the mind, therefore science can’t talk about it. That’s all it says. It does NOT say that if we can’t see it or measure it, it doesn’t exist, which is what biological psychiatry assumes.

The psychological model says mental problems have mental causes but, because so much time and energy and money is committed to the biological side, psychological approaches have been starved of resources to the point where there is practically no significant research being done. There’s no field research because there’s no model, and there’s no model because “they” (the psychiatrists who control the flow of money) say it’s impossible to talk about the mind. Impasse. But let’s look at it objectively. The idea that our genes can somehow determine what we feel or believe goes nowhere. Yes, our capacity for speech is genetic but the language we speak and what we will say or believe in that language has no basis in biology: what’s the possible mechanism? We’re not talking about defects in fibrillin in connective tissue that can be assayed and seen under an electron microscope. Same goes for our emotions: the capacity to become panicky on perceiving a threat or to become low and miserable after experiencing a loss are genetic, but what we experience and when it happens is psychological. After a tortuous journey through some arcane statistics, the paper concluded:

The heterogeneous associations between cognitive factors and neuropsychiatric disorders may further help illuminate the evolutionary paradox of why common genetic variants that increase risk for psychiatric disorders persist in human populations despite negative selection (p10) ... In conclusion, our multidimensional approach to cognitive function and its genetic underpinnings provides nuanced insights into the shared genetic architecture between cognitive abilities and neuropsychiatric disorders. Results underscore that cognitive function is a multidimensional system of traits (p12).

In other words, we haven’t moved the needle one little bit, it’s all too complicated but please send more money and we’ll see how we can spend it. One example of why they made no progress is the post-partum depression paper: women who become weepy and miserable after childbirth are not biologically ill, even though there are lots of biological things going on for the first week or two. They’re reacting to a major event within the constraints of their family, their culture and their personal expectations. This has to be explored carefully to tease out the different contributing factors rather than just blowing powdered toads up their noses, as the colleague commented:

How ridiculous, is this going to help women with postnatal depression which would be caused by suddenly being stuck at home with a small creature which cries a lot, day and night, with very little social support, and sudden dramatic drop in social status if previously in workplace.... never mind any relationship issues, if the mother even has a partner...?

I couldn’t agree more. Compared with the mental gymnastics of the biological “model,” the idea that mental events have mental causes is simplicity itself, and leads directly to a form of treatment:

“So you feel you’re not coping as a mother, and all your friends are telling you to pull yourself together and stop pampering the baby but you’re scared you’ll ruin him for life like your cousin was ruined...? Can you talk about that?”

I can tell you now which version Bishop William of Ockham, from the 14^th Century, would have chosen. But let’s go back to the genetics paper, which asked why mental disorders persist against evolutionary pressure. Because it’s not genetic, dumbo, it’s psychological, and psychology has nothing to do with genetics.

References:

1. Londono-Correa D et al (2026) Crystallized and fluid cognitive abilities have different genetic associations with neuropsychiatric disorders. Nature Communications online 30.04.2026. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72477-7.

2. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

Also look at Peter Gotzsche’s recent book: Is psychiatry a crime against humanity?

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

In a truly bizarre incident in Queensland a few years ago, an 8yo diabetic child died after her parents withheld her insulin. They were members of a small religious group who believed in divine intervention, that she didn’t need the drug as she would be healed by faith and prayer. For days as the child sickened and finally died, they sang and prayed around her, even refusing to call police or ambulance when she had been dead for 24hrs as she wasn’t dead, just sleeping. All 14 adults have since been convicted of manslaughter. The leader of the group, whom the judge described as “a dangerous, highly manipulative individual” was sentenced to 13 yrs in prison while her parents, who made the decision to stop the insulin, got 14yrs. All the other members who were accomplices to her death were given between six and nine years to think about it.

Fortunately, this sort of thing is fairly rare in this country but not so in the US. Given its long history as a refuge for European heretics, it has a rich tradition of spawning cults of various sorts. Indeed, what’s a cult? There are various definitions but mostly they focus on the idea of a small group of people, usually following a charismatic leader who demands absolute loyalty to his ideas (most are men), be they original or his interpretations of standard texts. Members of the group are tightly bound to the leader and to each other and are mostly required to make considerable sacrifices, such as withdrawing from the larger society and from their families, giving up wordly pleasures and handing over large sums of money or property to the leader. Often, they wear distinctive clothes or have unusual haircuts or beards and use a jargon or cant that outsiders struggle to follow. People can join cults themselves or be born into them but typically, leaving is made as difficult as possible.

Given all this, why would anybody bother joining? Why give up the comforts of suburbia, such as a beer while watching the footy on TV or a day at the beach ogling the bikini-clad belles, just to stand around with a group of weird-looking people singing hymns and yelling “Praise be with you, brother”? The answer is that people only do anything because they expect a pay-off. It may be that they expect a reward of some sort in their crappy lives or they fear punishment but hoping for a benefit of some form keeps them on the hook.

Typically, cult-like religious revivals and radical political movements are the product of unhappy people in unstable times; people are dissatisfied and are inclined to follow anybody who confidently spouts that he has the answer to all their questions and the solution to their discontents. The 20^th Century saw several of the biggest political cults of all time, Stalinism in the USSR, fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan, and Maoism in China. They were totalitarian, meaning total control over every aspect of life for the whole population at all times. They had the power of the state behind them: anybody who questioned The Party or The Leader was likely to get the chop.

These days, religious cults can’t quite match that although ISIS tried. In the main, they rely on people choosing to join and stay so they have to keep the excitement flowing in order to keep the punters but a big part of their spiel is fear of leaving, fear of the ever-alert enemy waiting to pounce. For mainstream religions, cultish offshoots are heresies that need to be opposed. In the old days, that led to bitter wars that dragged on and on. Where possible, heretics were crushed and burned although if they took control, they did the same to the remnants of the old orthodoxy. Fortunately, in the West, we have moved beyond internecine religious wars although we’re still quite partial to fighting other religions when the chance presents.

As everybody will know, the West is experiencing a resurgence of religiosity which, depending on where you stand, is either a return to the True Religion or a slide into heresy. As usual, the epicentre is the US, spreading rapidly around the world but this illustrates an important point: religious revivals start with a panicky populace but they spread and develop according to the money. In the US, the conventional or mainstream churches are loaded but this is mainly property that they picked up 100 years ago or comes via deceased estates. The new, megachurches rely much more on donations, and that is a large part of their appeal.

Firstly, they are mostly based on an electrifying personality rather than a novel interpretation of the scriptures, and second, they are in the business of marketing prosperity. The message is: “Come to hear Pastor X, you’ll feel better, and stay to get rich.” Instead of the old Christian notion of helping the poor, the modern version is prosperity gospel, as in the old “God ’elps them wot ’elps ’emselves.” If you’re rich, it’s a sign that God favours you; if you want to get rich, donate to the pastor and you’ll get your money back seven times” (seven is the magic number). Behind it all looms the ever-present temptor, Satan himself; if the promise of riches isn’t enough to keep them in line, the fear of the devil will. As a result, the pastors become exceedingly wealthy and use that as a drawcard: “I believe and look how rich I’ve become. You can do it too, just drop your money in this pot.” This idea isn’t restricted to the fringes of Christianity, it’s actually quite common in a lot of religions, especially among poor people. And the priests and pastors take advantage of it, and the more narcissistic and psychopathic they are, the worse it gets. This means there are some very wealthy churches in the US which send money overseas to poor countries to build their empires. It also means there are lots of preachers who believe they’re above the law and take advantage of it.

The same thing happens in Islam, where the fundamentalist Saudi sect, the Wahabists, have access to rivers of money which they use to build religious schools or madrassahs in poor countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. Very often, parents don’t know what they’re agreeing to when they let their sons (only boys) enter them, they think they’re normal schools but they definitely aren’t. Once the boys are in, they’re indoctrinated in an intolerant and socially-regressive form of Islam, but they get very little actual education so it is extremely difficult for them to leave. Practically the only job available to them is as an imam in a dirt poor community where they spread the harsh gospel they’ve been taught, because they don’t know any better. They are definitely not taught to question their teachers (sounds a bit like psychiatry, doesn’t it).

Anyway, more or less since 1945, there has been a widespread religious revival in the US, coupled with a growing secularisation of the mainstream. However, nobody who wants to get ahead in any field dares question the often twisted religiosity as that would invite a massive pile-on from the hard core fanatics. Even Herr Drumpf, who doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, pretends to be on their side. None of this is encouraging as the religious hard right and the crackpot hard right are very much in bed together. We saw this at the January 6^th debacle in Washington when QAnon flags were mixed with signs proclaiming “Jesus is my saviour.” How can this be? Simple: they are united in their hatred of the same enemies. But, you protest, Christians aren’t supposed to hate anybody, turn the other cheek, love your enemies and all that, isn’t that the message? Perhaps it is, in the mainstream, but we’re not talking mainstream. We’re talking of what happened when Hollywood met Madison Avenue in a disused church and got a brilliant idea for making money: new christianity (note it loses its capital). Instead of having little old ladies quavering through monotonous hymns in draughty churches, they realised that the market for hip churches was wide open. Crank it up, get rid of the candles and bring in the strobes, out with the organ and in with electric guitars, make Sunday Funday and the money will come.

In the process, the message morphed. The idea of Christianity as a religion of peace and care was quietly led out the back and strangled, to be replaced by the bloodthirsty and vengeful god of the old testament, the hellfire and brimstone, tear-your-enemies’-heads-off and enslave their children version. The Sermon on the Mount was dumped and the Book of Revelation pushed to centre-stage, complete with its hallucinated monsters and lambs with seven horns and seven eyes (the magic seven again), its battles with demons and plagues and damnation. What is called evangelical, pentecostal or charismatic christianity is a heresy from beginning to end, but the good news is that it has probably peaked. The figures don’t show this: worldwide, charismatic churches are growing rapidly but this is by recruiting people in poor countries, especially by luring them away from the mainstream. In the West, the average age of congregations is rising rapidly as young people refuse to enter, or those born into it leave, sorely aware that the hyped up promise behind the spectacle was hollow.

Meantime, another revival has gone off the rails. The political doctrine of zionism was developed in the 1880s and 90s as a solution to the problem of Jewish people living in Europe being exposed to violence from their neighbours. Note that this was Europe: Jews living in North Africa and West Asia didn’t have an antisemitic problem (even today, there are 15,000 Jews living in Iran, with their own seat in the Majlis). It was decided that the only way they could be safe was to have their own country, subject to their own laws and protected by their own police.

To begin with, they looked at different countries including Argentina and Uganda and apparently also Tasmania, then decided that the Ottoman province of Palestine would be best as that would bring in the religious crowd (with all their money). Orthodox Jews were well-organised and disciplined; without them, the zionist project probably wouldn’t get off the ground. Aided by wealthy Jews like Baron Edmond de Rothschild in France, they started buying land in Palestine but soon ran into difficulties as the locals resented groups of white people who had no intention of assimilating (e.g. learning Arabic) moving in and trying to take over. That soon led to fighting, the uprising in 1936, World War II intervened and, in 1948, the Jewish population, by then 32% of the region, were awarded 56% of the land by the UN and declared their own state. Then the serious ethnic cleansing started, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced off their land, thousands were murdered, and hundreds of villages demolished without trace. As we see, this process of grabbing more and more land has never stopped.

It has to be remembered that, like most groups, the world’s Jewish community represents a wide range of opinions. There is a significant Orthodox movement that says Israel’s existence is a heresy and they will never go there. There are large numbers of secular Jews who are horrified by the actions of the Jewish State and will never set foot there, let alone give them money to buy more weapons. These and others have very little influence as the great bulk of Israeli Jews and probably most in the diaspora have embraced a hybrid religious, political and racist movement called zionism. This has the form of a cult. As it stands today, zionism is a project directed at expanding the borders of the Jewish state to the limits described in their mythology:

Deut. 28:1. Now it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all His commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee high above all nations of the earth. 2 And all these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.

That’s all pretty clear, except for two points. First, there’s no written or reliable record of this, it’s just what they believe. Modern zionists resolutely believe that they are on a mission from God to recover the lands from the Nile to the Euphrates and to clear it of all defilement, meaning unbelievers. The corollary is that they can’t stop trying to expand and drive the indigenous people off their ancient lands. They also believe that withdrawing from any conquered land or handing it back represents the most grievous of all sins, rejecting God. So they will not hand it back. This matches perfectly with the inherent human drive to dominate others at any cost. But here comes the second point: yes, their mythology says they had a contract with God which would give them all this land but a contract is a contract, it goes both ways:

Deut. 28: 15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: 16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field ... (rest of the curses here)

That is what is called the consideration in the contract: I will do this for you but, in consideration, you will do this for me; if you don’t, here’s the penalty. This particular contract, known as a covenant but it’s the same thing, therefore becomes: “All this I will give to you if you obey my law.” That is the consideration the Jews must pay. Now obviously the modern zionists have jumped for joy at this but then some party pooper looked at the laws and found there are 613 of them, including the well-known Ten Commandments (of which Henry Mencken said: “Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you can’t beat the fact that there were only ten of them”). That’s a lot to remember, and they’re pretty onerous. In fact, they’re so onerous that it’s quite possible that no living Jew today keeps to all of them. Certainly, zionists don’t because one of the rules says “Thou shalt not kill.” Another says adulterers should be stoned to death but Messrs Weinstein and Epstein somehow escaped that fate, perhaps because they were rich.

So it has happened that the zionists pick the bits from their Bible that suit them, ignore lots of others (“Thou shalt not destroy fruit trees,” a favourite hobby of settlers on their cowardly pogroms), and have work-arounds for the rest. How do they slip out of killing a quarter of a million Palestinians in Gaza? Simple: Palestinians are not actually human. They’re animals in human form so they can be killed as easily as we kill a rat. Jewish souls come from heaven, goyim (unbelievers) come from the satanic sphere so they’re fair game for Hellfire missiles. How do they account for the Hannibal doctrine, that killed hundreds of Jews on October 7^th? I haven’t seen a justification for this but I’m sure a rabbi could be found who would devise one. By this means, the original religion of Judaism has been dumped in favour of a heretical version of it.

Another rule says “No idols” but the land has assumed the role of an idol. Similarly, the general thrust of many of the rules is against anything that would constitute criminal behaviour, e.g. theft. However, driving people off their land and annexing it, as in Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, is theft, as is looting by Israeli troops in Lebanon. Because the goal of zionism is to take other people’s land, zionism is a criminal enterprise. It is an heretical, idolatrous, criminal cult but the trouble is, it has found common cause with the christian heresies spreading and financed from the US. There are now millions of people who call themselves “christian zionists,” a contradiction of terms, who actively support genocide and other crimes against humanity. As Blaise Pascal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Even though they don’t pull the triggers or drop the bombs that incinerate children, zoinist gpyim support it and pay for it, so they’re as guilty as though they were doing it themselves. In the process, they have forgotten that Christianity started as a revulsion against Judaism, which had become degenerate. So has Christianity. Granted, there is a lot of argument about just what happened 2000 years ago [1] but there’s no argument over the central message of the Nazarene:

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God (Matt.5:9).

The good news is that all cults eventually either die out or moderate. The bad news is that they kill a lot of people in the process.

****

1. Zuesse Eric (2012). Christ’s Ventriloquists: the event that created Christianity. Hancock, MI: Hyacinth Books.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Another week, another lengthy report, this time from World Health on dementia [1]. Sure, there are plenty of people who would say this is neurology or geriatrics and not actually psychiatry but there’s a big overlap. This is not a report on how common it is, who should manage it or drugs and so on but the rather unusual topic of preventing dementia. That’s a bit unexpected because we tend to think of dementia as both unpredictable and inevitable: we have no idea who it will affect but once it’s started, there’s only one possible outcome. After careful consideration, they say that 45% of the burden of dementia can be prevented by dealing with contributing factors.

The first point to note about this report is that it is the product of many thousands of hours of consultations and research by hundreds of people from a hundred countries around the world. The chances of it being biased by a small group of fanatical people or by private companies or an individual country or doctrine are about zero. Moreover, they did most of it without American money since DJT withdrew the US from WHO because, he said, they were too much influenced by China, it was too expensive and they mishandled the pandemic. He didn’t mishandle the pandemic, of course.

Moving on, despite major research programs, classic dementias like Alzheimer’s Disease or Pick’s Disease (now called fronto-temporal dementia) remain mysteries, so that specific treatment of the disease process is not available. However, there are dozens of other factors that add to the risk and contribute to the progress of the disorder, many of which can be modified. This is important because with ageing populations in so many countries, health services could be overwhelmed by the rapidly rising numbers of impaired old people. The report gives lists of conditions and lifestyle choices that add to the individual’s risk of developing dementia. By implementing these, they suggest it should be possible to delay the onset of dementia and reduce its total incidence by 45%, which adds up to a very significant impact. The bad news is that preventative programs should start early and generally involve sweating while giving up all the fun things.

Research over many years in hundreds of places shows that it’s never too late for lifestyle interventions: eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow, you can sweat it off, but for best results, start young. A healthy, balanced diet is essential, meaning high fibre with low levels of processed food, red meat, saturated fats, salt, sugar. Instead, we need to move to one of the low-carb diets, of which there are many. One from Australia’s CSIRO is popular here, but diabetic groups are also strong on diet. These are not difficult diets to follow, it just involves shopping in a different aisle with weekly trips to the fish market. Regular steady exercise should be part of everybody’s life from puberty at the latest; if there isn’t time, make it because it’s far better to lose a few hours work and TV time now in order to keep out of the dementia wing later. Keep your brain active with reading, puzzles and any sort of intellectual challenge but balance it with a social life. Mixing with people is important but, to my surprise, this report says nothing about the very real value of mixing with animals. Most of the research has been done on pets and “companion animals” but also being involved in studying wild animals, even just the birds in your suburb, is valuable.

Major lifestyle choices include reducing alcohol to safe levels, avoiding tobacco and illegal drugs altogether, and keeping to a healthy weight. Obesity is a significant risk factor for dementia, along with each of its complications: hypertension, diabetes, high blood lipids, poor sleep, respiratory problems and so on. One factor that doesn’t get much attention is the cumulative effect of minor head injuries, now called traumatic brain injury (TBI). Boxing has long been recognised as a cause of early dementia (“punch drunk”) but there are lots of other lifestyles that do it. I don’t know of any research but riding motocross bikes, horse-riding at the rough end of the scale, anything that results in repeated blows to the head, needs to be considered. However, the biggest cause of TBI today is one that nobody wants to deal with: wars. Most of the US troops evacuated from the fighting in the Middle East have a diagnosis of TBI, caused by the concussion of the massive explosions of missiles. We presume the children of Gaza who are regularly exposed to the blasts of 2000lb bombs will also be affected, and their parents, of course. Air pollution is another very avoidable risk factor but governments will rarely do anything about it if it involves spending money to improve the lives of poor people.

Anybody in the health sector who deals with adults needs to be very aware of early dementia as it sneaks up and presents in some strange ways. If there was the slightest doubt in any patient, I got them to complete a brief cognitive test. I don’t mean the mini-mental state examination, that was too crude and didn’t pick up the subtle changes. If screening showed anything, they were referred to a psychologist for assessment before a scan, just because psychometry is more sensitive than scans.

All this is important and needs to be ingrained in people early in life but it doesn’t have to cost a lot. As an example, the Men’s Shed movement, which started in South Australia about 30years ago, is an outstanding success. It’s a charitable movement that provides a venue for retired men to keep their minds and hands busy working in groups of the same vintage. Mostly, they use donated facilities such as an empty shed on an industrial property, stocked with equipment companies no longer need or the members provide themselves. There are about 1,300 sheds serving 50,000 people in this country, and probably the same number in a dozen countries overseas. It provides occupation and socialisation: one of their mottoes is: “Women like to talk face to face but men like to talk shoulder to shoulder.” That’s true. They are locally-managed – some actually have women members – and largely self-sufficient. According to their website, they get about $24million in government subsidies a year. If it delays the onset of dementia in just 10% of their members for even a couple of years, that’s an enormous saving, not to mention making life easier for the sufferers and families.

Unfortunately, this sort of simple, community-based measure won’t get anything like the money that will be spent on research on drugs, but they are also easily captured by commercial interests. Australia privatised the health services sector on the basis that private enterprise is always more efficient than public, but costs have gone through the roof while standards have dropped. Mr Smith had been on disability pension for 20 yrs when he decided he would like a small dog. He mentioned this to his “service providers” who promptly arranged for him to see a psychologist to assess his “need for a companion animal.” This could only be done by a particular psychologist on Saturday morning about 20km across the city. He didn’t own a car so the social worker drove him to the appointment, waited and then drove him home. She didn’t meet the psychologist. Total cost for the morning: about $2000 but when he learned he would have to go to special training for the dog, he pulled out. I told him to go to the local RSPCA and tell them what he wanted, they would find him a suitable dog. However, because it wasn’t an “approved dog,” he wasn’t eligible for a food subsidy or vet fees. Approved dogs, if you’re interested, cost about $8000 each, which is easy money for dog trainers.

At 54, with numerous painful physical problems and mental trouble, Mr Jones was not in a good way. He had no living relatives and practically no social life, so he decided a dog would a good idea. When he heard what the training involved, he withdrew his application but was offered a course with horses. It didn’t involve riding or heavy lifting, so he agreed. For five days, he stayed at an expensive resort and spent the days with two staff and two other men, grooming, walking and feeding horses. That was it, about $4000 and he didn’t get to keep the horse.

And so to the world’s most famous dementia patient. Before you read on, look at this link to understand why this is important. I’ve been saying for at least six years that Trump is dementing but he started from such a low base that it misleads people (here’s a report from March 2024). Disinhibition and loss of social awareness and sensitivity and are among the first signs but these are quite subtle. Sometimes only the family realise that dad isn’t quite his normal self, or granny is getting a bit silly in her old age. The personality becomes, less refined, less aware of the consequences of actions, especially their own. In Trump’s case, he has only ever had the social awareness, sensitivity and inhibitions of an old bull in mating season. He has only had three ambitions in life: money, sex and revenge. The first two drives were designed to conceal his total lack of self-esteem while the last has come to the fore as he has gained power.

Another important early sign is that the person makes more and more mistakes. To start with, they recognise them and can correct them, then they recognise them but can’t correct them, then they don’t recognise them. Just recently, in an interview, Trump referred to the “Islamic republic of Japan.” He didn’t recognise it and just carried on carrying on. Rambling, turgid and over-inclusive speech, only tangentially related to the topic is a give-away, as in all his speeches. His talk always goes back to himself, which is a personality factor but much worse now. He recently talked for two hours in front of a military audience; by the end, they were laughing at him (short version, 75mins here). At the FIFA grand final, he had to be led away so they could take photos of the team (who mocked his silly little wooden “dance”). It’s all about ME, it’s always been all about ME but now it’s worse: “I think I’ll wipe out Iran’s civilisation tonight, or maybe not, we’ll see how I feel.”

As for the sex, he’s too old and too fat. A late night and a hard woman would kill him but, as everybody knows, testosterone is the gift that keeps on giving. Long after the hardware has given up the ghost (due to insensitivity of the pelvic nerves), a surge of testosterone still produces the little thrills that are so exciting, except the only way to get them is by dominating people. So that’s what he does. He orders the military to snatch a head of state which, by some bizarre subterfuge, they manage so Trump waddles around for weeks telling everybody how “We got ‘im, we showed ‘em who’s boss around here.” Every speech is a festering mass of threats, demands, whines and more threats because this produces a buzz. However, due to his accelerating lack of self-awareness (again, from an exceedingly low start), he doesn’t realise he’s making a fool of himself. All he knows is “Hey, threatening to bomb people feels good, I think I’ll do it again, and then I’ll threaten the people who say I shouldn’t threaten people.”

As for the money, the book Regime Change: Trump’s imperial presidency is more or less a catalogue of graft and corruption. There just is no end to it. He’s like grandpa who keeps going back for the icecream even though it’s bad for his diabetes, then lies about it. Any inhibitions on greed have long since dissolved but he is completely surrounded by the most appalling bunch of slime and grubs since the Borgia popes who are only there for what they can get. Finally, the revenge. For Trump, the greatest crime anybody can commit is to make him look like an ignorant, dim-witted and uneducated petty crook from Queens who doesn’t know which fork to use and would grope the waitress as she’s trying to serve. Which, of course, is what he is. His only goal in getting a second run at the job was to get even with everybody, in which he is aided and abetted by a very capable crew of seriously paranoid and seriously corrupt operators, as the book shows in repellant detail.

Now, of course, he’s in serious trouble. First day of reckoning is the brutal and absurd attacks on Iran urged on him by the equally dishonest but far smarter and more devious Benny Meliekowsky, aka Netanyahu, meaning “god has given” (presumable Ares, the Greek god of war, violence and chaos). This self-imposed disaster will keep generations of scholars busy as they untangle all the lies and deceit that have led the world to the edge of a dozen cliffs. Trump got himself into this mess but has no idea how to get out of it, he simply doesn’t have the brain power. In the past, as a personality factor, he would simply walk away from his many messes, blaming other people but this time, he can’t. He’s it, he’s the one in the big room with the gold gewgaws everywhere and the big desk, and sitting in the middle of the desk is a gold plate with a huge turd sandwich called “Surrender and pay reparations,” but he is simply incapable of admitting he is wrong, he would rather incinerate the world than do that. Second wall coming at high speed is the mid-term elections in November. If Trump loses the Senate, he’s going to prison for a very long time, and his ghastly children and all the parasites will be down the corridor from him.

We certainly live in troubled times. There have been demented kings in the past and quite a few dictators who were losing their grey matter but I don’t think there has ever been a elected head of state who was clearly losing his marbles before the election. Because people live longer these days, we’re approaching the point where elderly candidates for high office should be compelled to undergo proper psychometry and scans if necessary, with the results reviewed independently. Or all candidates, I don’t mind. Personality assessment would be valuable but, unlike formal cognitive testing (say WAIS-R or similar), which can’t be cheated, clever scoundrels can lie their way through personality profiles (faking good, as they call it). For example, former premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, was widely thought to be very decent but it turned out she was corrupt. I’d say hers was the corruption of stupidity rather than cupidity but the end result is the same.

Dementia is real and coming to your street. Start now to head it off: cut out the booze and smokes, the coke and burgers, exercise regularly, lose weight, join some clubs, do the crosswords and sudoku, early to bed and early to rise, blah blah. Oh, and there is no evidence depression causes dementia [1, p68], which is not what psychiatrists tell tribunals when they want an order for involuntary ECT.

1. Risk Reduction of Cognitive Decline and Dementia. WHO guidelines, 2^nd edition. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2026. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. At: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240123557

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Three weeks ago, I reported on the UN report on the state of children in Gaza, beginning with: “What follows is utterly repugnant.” Another week, another report, this time from the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) and Progressive International, titled: A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians (available on the PFC site). Be warned: What it contains in its nearly 200 pages is beyond repugnant, far beyond merely “bestial” or “subhuman” depravity, because no animals on earth behave in the way this report describes is routine for members of the Israeli state apparatus.

Starting with background in the Nakba of 1948 and dealing with each decade since, it shows that the most extreme forms of sexualised violence and torture, expressly designed to crush, isolate and humiliate the victims, is neither rare nor the sporadic actions of a few bad actors. Instead, it is institutionalised and protected within the entire structure of the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) including the military, spy agencies, civil police, judicial services, prisons system and, crucially, the brutal civil militias commonly called settlers:

... sexualized violence is a systemic Israeli practice that has accelerated in frequency and scale of brutality since October 7, 2023. We conclude that Israeli sexualized violence is a central method of political, psychological, and physical warfare intentionally deployed to cause mass bodily and mental harm and injury. We further conclude that sexualized violence is intentionally deployed to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part and therefore must be regarded as a genocidal act (p60, emphasis added).

Since the October 7^th rebellion by Hamas, matters have become much worse, with regular reports of rape by trained dogs of male and female prisoners, most of whom are never charged because they are civilians who have no connection with any armed forces. It’s not just Palestinians. After she was abducted from the Sumud Flotilla, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg reported deliberate sexual harrassment and emotional abuse:

If Israel, with the eyes of the world on it, can treat a well‑known white person with a Swedish passport like this, imagine what they do to Palestinians in secret (p108).

The report exposes what they do in secret. We’re constantly told we have to support Israel as an island of democracy and Judeo-Christian liberalism in a sea of barbarians, that Israelis are the world victims who have to be favoured in every respect as victims can do no wrong, and that opposing the Jewish State’s activities in any way or likening them to Nazis amounts to the grievous crime of antisemitism and will be punished for life. I haven’t read the whole of this report and don’t plan to as it’s truly horrifying but the case against Israel is crystal clear. For nearly a hundred years, it has planned and implemented the enforced expulsion of the indigenous population of Palestine, using lethal violence and grotesque humiliation as weapons of genocide. The question is: how does this come about? How can people who suffered grievously within living memory turn into depraved monsters who actually train dogs to rape humans? That would take a lot of effort, it doesn’t come naturally to dogs, which says the dog trainers and the handlers knew exactly what they were doing at all times.

The simple answer would be: that’s what Europeans do, they colonise other people’s lands and treat the indigenous population either as slave labour or as vermin to be eradicated. Look at Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US, where the native people were cheated of their land and driven to the brink, or Australia where the same thing happened. There were about 300,000 Aboriginal people when the British colony was established in Sydney in 1788. Within a few years, smallpox had swept through the Sydney tribes, leaving the land more or less bare for the colonists to seize. This pattern repeated throughout the country, albeit as the product of different diseases. Within ten years of whites arriving in an area, 90% of the Aboriginal population would be dead. 80% of those deaths were due to diseases such as influenza, chickenpox, measles, whooping cough and so on. 10% were usually due to direct white violence and the remainder due to Aboriginal violence, which was standard British policy: set the tribes against each other and move in when they were worn down. More recently, there are the examples of the British opium wars against China, the unspeakable violence of Belgium in Congo and France in Algeria and other parts of North Africa. We are not taught this history, and that’s not an accident. It is simply not mentioned. At school, we learned about the Black Hole of Calcutta (with capitals); we were not told of the Amritsar massacre of 1919 or the Bengal famine of 1943, when 3.5million people died because Britain took the crops they grew for its armies.

That’s one possibility, that white people are incapable of treating people of colour as their equals and will always try to wipe them out. However, that was mostly a couple of hundred years ago, we’re supposed to be more civilised now. We have the example of the Nazi genocide which gave us a body of international law, we have treaties and obligations, so how come Israel is able to act in such a depraved manner? There are a lot of factors involved but one part we can call the curse of zionism although it should really be called the curse of superiority.

The core of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism is humanity’s biological urge to dominate everything in sight. This is largely a male activity and is common to all species studied although women certainly aren’t immune (“Let them eat cake”). This reaches right throughout our existence as social animals. Practically everything we do is built around the idea of dominance hierarchies, starting in infancy and continuing after death when the rich and powerful have grandiose headstones in the cemetary and the poor get just a number on a post. The basis of any dominance hierarchy is the belief that I have rights you don’t have, and I can do whatever is necessary to exercise my rights. What did the British believe that justified their merciless treatment of the indigenes? I don’t know for sure but probably much as Churchill said of the King-Emperor’s unwilling Indian subjects: “A beastly people with a beastly religion.” It would be something like: “We are cultured and civilised people with the true religion while you are ignorant pagans and savages with all this land that you don’t know how to use. We’ll take over and impose our religion on you and teach you our superior language and how to wear shoes, plus we’ve got the guns,” as Hilaire Belloc put it in his satiric poem The Modern Traveller, (1898):

Whatever happens, we have got

the Maxim gun and they have not..

Trouble is, an attitude of superiority is cursed from the beginning as it has no natural end. It feeds on itself and encourages people to become more and more extreme, rewarding militancy and penalising moderation. Within any movement, there is a moderate branch and an extreme branch. The moderates are motivated by the desire to do the right thing, to be fair and reasonable. Extremists, on the other hand, are driven by the urge to get to the top, to get bigger and more powerful, to crush anybody who stands in their way just because they only feel good when they have their boot on somebody’s throat. Which explains why moderates are always done in by the extremists. If in about 1850, a British politician had said in parliament: “Look, chaps, we’ve probably painted enough of the world red, why don’t we sit back and enjoy it, let other people have some?” he would have been thrown in the putrid River Thames. American politicians were rewarded for crushing the plains tribes into reserves so settlers could take their land. Australians after Federation in 1901 didn’t worry too much about the “native problem” as they were fully expected to die out before long, but also the idea that mere black people could “own” land was too absurd to think about. God gave us “... dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26-30), but He gave it to us true believers, not to them pagans. As Churchill, then Secretary of State for Colonies, said after the 1937 Peel Report on the Palestinian uprising:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

“I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people.” I rest my case. It is the nature of the fanaticism of superiority that it intensifies, it ratchets up but it never ratchets down. By late 1941, the Nazi government realised nobody in the world wanted to help solve their “Jewish problem” by taking millions of Jews from their growing empire. They could have said: “Oh well, looks like we’re stuck with them. Maybe we should just ignore them, or send them to Khazakhstan and they can have their own rotten country,” but they didn’t. The momentum of their own propaganda was such that nobody could back down. After twenty years of yelling that Jews were a mortal threat to the nation and the race, it was impossible for them to choose a moderate path. Anybody who had said “Let’s be reasonable” would have been shouted down, would have lost status, probably demoted and sent to the Russian Front so nobody did. The fear of appearing weak, of losing status in the hierarchy was enough to silence dissent so, at a conference at Wannsee in January 1942, they opted for the unthinkable, extermination. We’ve all done it, we’ve all had a time when we knew we should have spoken up but the gang of rowdy, aggressive people would have turned on us, or they had worn us down, or everybody else kept their heads down so we kept quiet and the extremists won. This is the curse of superiority, and zionism has a very bad case of it.

Is the political movement known as zionism based in the idea that one group has superior rights to another, and is entitled to exercise them? Absolutely, but that’s not how it started. It began in the 1880s and 90s as the notion that Jews could not be safe in Europe as they were always outsiders, always resented by the natives (after 2,000 years, why were they still outsiders? That’s another question). The only way they could be safe would be in their own country, except all of Europe was taken, so they looked further afield. Argentina, Patagonia, Uganda, even Tasmania were considered, then they settled on the Ottoman province of Palestine. That would kill two birds with one stone, as they say, it would appeal to the many Jewish socialists who could set up their idea of egalitarian paradise, and to the religious who had always toasted each other: “Next year in the Promised Land.” Yes, there were about 700,000 Palestinians already there but they could be dealt with by one means or another, as outlined in Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall from 1923, which is headed: “Colonisation of Palestine. Agreement with Arabs Impossible at present. Zionism Must Go Forward.” First, they had to get the support of the Western democracies, for which the Great War provided a golden opportunity, quite literally. Britain’s totally illegal “Balfour Declaration” was simply a ploy to get money.

Gradually, this morphed into a religious crusade of recovery of the “Promised Land” from the defiling unbelievers. The older moderates, such as Nahum Goldmann, died out and extremists like Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Kahane, Schneerson, Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and so many others took over. Conquering the land of Greater Israel (from the Nile to the Euphrates) became a combined religious and national imperative, such that failing to do so was either an unforgivable sin against God’s plan or a cowardly humiliation and betrayal of the Holocaust in the face of the mocking Arabs, or both according to the direction of the wind, and nobody dared say “Enough is enough.” Actively aided by the West, meaning the US, UK and France with Germany paying the bills, Israel has continued its relentless, murderous expansion but any morality behind it, like providing a safe haven for Jews who wanted to move there, has long since been lost in the uproar. Now, the religious atmosphere has become near-delusional, with many of the hard core religious fanatics convinced the normal laws don’t apply to them: see here for an account of widespread, institutionalised sexual abuse of children within extremist religious communities; the channel is trustworthy. If this is what they do to their own children, no wonder Epstein thought he could get away with a bit of hanky-panky with the goyim. And it is all now based on the logical progression of the idea of a “Chosen People taking God’s Promised Land,” that anybody who opposes them is satanic and must be destroyed with gratuitous violence. The violence is both cleansing and sanctifying in and of itself.

Each time, the demands increase. From 1937 on, Britain trained and armed the merciless Jewish militias which became the Israeli army, becoming more merciless in the process, as well as disarming and weakening the Palestinian opposition. Israel’s so-called “war of independence” of 1948 was actually a concerted ethnic cleansing operation which the Arab Legion tried to stop with their ramshackle armies. Many of the Arab trucks that entered the territory were unarmed as they were meant to help shift the hundreds of thousands of displaced people but were attacked and destroyed by the well-armed, well-trained and utterly merciless Israeli military on their “mission from God.” Out of that, the zionist leaders decided they needed tanks and jets, all of which were supplied and then used against Egypt in 1956, and then nuclear weapons, with the reactor provided by France, paid by the US and all the scientists trained within the top secret US nuclear establishment.

It just goes on and on, gets worse and worse because extremists accept no limits on their ambitions. If they achieve one goal, they immediately look ahead and select another. Anybody in the movement who objects is dismissed as weak and expelled, or a traitor and locked up or has an accident while checking the view from a 20^th floor window. The other side of it dehumanising the enemy. In elevating myself, there comes a point where I force him off the hierarchy of humans, he becomes a “human animal.” That is the nature of extremism. Extremism has only one end, either its many enemies combine to crush it or it burns itself out from within. That is the curse of superiority.

Zionism exists only because a group of people believe they have the divine seal of approval to do what they like to their neighbours. They are very willing prisoners of the curse of superiority. Because this is historically so significant in the world today, we can rename it the Curse of Zionism and, in a hundred years’ time, people will know just what that means. The end-stage depravity of the moral crime of superiority.

PS See this article. Somebody should point this out to the US, they should get off the escalator before the curse of superiority takes control of them. Or has it already?

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

It was my birthday recently so the family gave me a book they knew I didn’t have: Regime Change – inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haverman and Jonathon Swan. There was a reason I hadn’t bought it but it’s the thought that counts. Gritting my teeth, I am working slowly through it. So far, nothing new but it raises a point: every single person named in that book is not normal. What’s normal, you ask, because almost by definition, anybody who pushes hard enough to get a seat in the White House lies outside the bounds of normality. That’s the point: they’re not normal but, with one exception, they’re not “mentally ill” in any sense of the term. The only exception is the emperor himself who could possibly plead mental incompetence due to early dementia but the rest of them are just being their normal selves. That is, what we see is their personalities, all horrible, and at this point, we take off our psychiatric hats because psychiatry has no theory of personality and therefore no model of personality disorder.

The biocognitive model of psychiatry says personality is critically important, that it’s impossible to deal with people without a solid idea of what it means. Remarkably, DSM-5 doesn’t offer any definition or description of personality per se but launches straight into descriptions of personality disorders – on p.645, which tells you how they rate it. Personality disorder is an “enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture.” The disturbances affect emotion, interpersonal functioning, impulse control and cognition, meaning “ways of perceiving and interpreting self, other people and events.” It is pervasive across the individual’s life and causes “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of function.” All good, but what is it? Just what is personality, how does it fit in the mental economy? Crickets.

They recognise eleven distinct categories of personality disorder but practically every study ever done says the categories are artificial. The word category says that the features of one group are distinct from the other groups with no overlap. Sheep and goats look alike but they’re different categories with no overlap. Human personality fails that test as normal blurs imperceptibly across to abnormal, with no natural cut off point. This is also true of each and every personality disorder. That is, categories of personality are not natural kinds, they’re wholly an artefact. The categories listed in DSM-5 are “separate and distinct” only by virtue of artful manipulation of the wording of each feature for each one (see [1, Chap 8] for more detail on this important point; essentially, it says the entire concept of categories of personality disorder is wilfully deceptive).

Psychologists have been aware of these objections for over a hundred years. They too don’t have an actual theory of personality or model of personality disorder, just because they don’t have a theory of mind, but they have a much finer sense of how it all works. They divide the totality of human behaviour into different classes or themes, and then give each person a grade on all of them. There can be a sociability theme, and an orderliness theme, a trust/mistrust theme and so on, where everybody gets a score from 0-100, and 50 is average. That is, personality is distributed along dimensions so that personality disorder is a matter of distance from the midpoint rather than islands of categorical abnormality. Most people cluster loosely around the middle on all the dimensions. People who are far from the middle on one dimension are also likely to be way out on many of the others, which is why psychiatry keeps finding people who meet criteria for two or more disorders (known by the meaningless term ‘comorbidity’).

How many dimensions are there? That depends on who you ask. One of the most influential personality theorists, Hans Eysenck (1916-1997) said there are three, extraversion, introversion and psychoticism. All human behaviour can be listed on one or other of these dimensions which, he believed, were genetic. He was determined to prove this but after his death, it became clear that he had been manipulating his research data to get the results he wanted. It was also shown that he had accepted the sum of £500,000 (about $5million) from the tobacco companies to “prove” that addiction to tobacco was due to personality defect, not to the addictive properties of tobacco (this is all part of the tobacco playbook, now being used by fossil fuel companies to discredit the notion of global warming). Like so many of the Big Names in this type of field, his reputation was kept aloft by his own efforts. The day he died, it crashed.

Much of Eysenck’s career was spent bickering with the biggest and most influential of the personality questionaires, the MMPI, which was first launched in 1943 and has been revised a number of times. The latest version asks the subject to respond to about 500 questions with true or false, as in “I am normally a social person” or “I rarely forgive people if they upset me,” etc. This has a strong statistical basis; analysis yields ten factors which give a more finely grained picture than Eysenck’s lonely three factors. Another widely used questionnaire, known as Raymond Cattell’s aptrly-named 16PF, puts the number of distinct personality factors at sixteen. I liked it but it suffered from some rather idiosyncratic names for the different factors. These tests all came from the 1940s or 50s; these days, we are enjoined to use five factors, known as OCEAN, or Big Five Personality Factors, which measure openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. How do these relate to our general understanding of personality and to mental disorder? Not very well, which is probably why it hasn’t caught on outside the research community.

But back to the White House which has one of the most remarkable collections of personality disorder (PD in modern talk) ever assembled in one room: how would they rate on any of these tests? The answer is we’ll never know because they would all refuse to do the tests as it would be too revealing. They may have severely disturbed personalities but, with the exception of the PD-in-Chief, they’re not totally lacking in insight. Trump himself shows an important feature: as dementia proceeds, it strips away the self-control and inhibitions until all that’s left is the raw personality disorder, exposed for all to see. His greed and dishonesty and grandiosity and intolerance just become more and more obvious until it’s embarrassing to the country. Like his stupid reflection pool disaster. He said somebody cut a big gash in the liner. Actually, he did it himself. When the pool was empty, he insisted on his motorcade driving down the centre of the pool. The “gash” is exactly where his 8 ton monstrosity of a car drove. But he never takes responsibility, it’s always somebody else’s fault.

More important is to understand what personality is so we can recognise disorder when we see it as they are very good at concealing it (see [2, Chap.8.2] for more detail). We start with the broadest possible definition: personality is the sum total of interactions between the individual and the environment throughout adulthood.That’s not very practical. First, it isn’t complete until the person snuffs it, which rather defeats the purpose of talking about personality: we want to know what he’s likely to do in the future. Second, it would be encyclopaedic, a vast list of events with no order. Yesterday, he was all sweetness and light but today, nasty and vengeful. How do we tie these together? Oh, seems he got on the booze last night and has a hangover.

So why do pleasant, obliging people drink when they know it will cause trouble? Because his cheerful and cooperative front is all front, which is what persona originally meant: the mask worn by actors in Greek dramas. Underneath his obliging exterior, he is quite seriously anxious, constantly worrying in case he makes a mistake or people criticise him. Periodically, the anxiety builds up so he turns to alcohol because it relieves anxiety and he feels so much better. So does he have an alcoholic personality type, an anxious personality disorder or a mental illness called GAD? Good question because the answer to it determines what treatment he gets. Except psychiatry can’t answer it. It has no idea because it has no theory of personality. In order to come to grips with the notion, we need to hone it down somewhat from the encyclopaedic version. We want to include the subject’s typical conduct and exclude the atypical, such as during illness or under psychological pressure, to read: Personality is the set of habitual patterns of interaction between the individual and the environment. Is she late to work today because something unexpected happened, or is she always late? We tighten it a bit further to read: the habitual patterns of interaction between the healthy, sober individual and the environment, in the stable, adult mode of behaviour.

That raises the important question of when we can consider the person has reached “stable, adult mode.” Most people will avoid making a personality diagnosis under 18, even though it may be clear that the teenager is on a bad path in life. Another important question is: can personality change in adulthood? The answer is yes, but that needs clarification. Moving on, the point of talking about personality is to distinguish between individuals, to emphasise their differences rather than similarities. For example, in a culture where people are pressured to drink on Fridays and fights erupt, are they all disordered personalities? How does religion fit with the definition? Language? We want to exclude common, culturally-determined elements, so the definition has to focus on the uniquely distinguishing elements of a healthy, sober person’s stable, adult mode of behaviour. That’s a good description, so how do we turn it into an explanation? This is what the DSM system doesn’t do, because they don’t know what generates behaviour, they have no model of mind. Because we’re talking about habitual modes of behaviour, there has to be something generating them, and in the biocognitive model, that something is a set of rules:

Personality is the total set of explicit and implicit mental rules (including attitudes, beliefs, etc) that generates the uniquely distinguishing habitual patterns of interaction between the healthy, sober individual and the environment, in the stable adult mode of behaviour [2, p110].

Personality is not a specific place in your brain or a hidden gremlin magically pulling your levers, it is simply a set of rules. We all have rules, lots of them, such as language and sport and cooking, but most of our personal rules are barely conscious as we learned them long ago, even preverbally. A good rule is: “The world is a pleasant place where I can get ahead if I work hard and treat people fairly.” Another common rule, often learned very early, is something like: “The world is a cruel hard place that will crush me if I step out of line and nobody will help. I can only survive by my wits so I must never let anybody know what I’m doing.” That’s one path to criminality but often well-concealed. Even more common is a rule like: “I’m a useless individual, I can’t do anything right, whatever I try will go bad and people will laugh so I’d better stay home and avoid any contact.” That’s often the primary rule in the life of the young adults, mostly men, who stay up all night playing computer games and sleep all day. Trouble is, they will often try to conceal this. If you ask people: “Are you anxious?” they will mostly say No, but if you come at it slowly, asking about specific fears, that will commonly open the floodgates.

Mostly, however, when we’re trying to assess personality, we just look at the behaviour and ask: “What are the possible rules that could generate this constellation of behaviour?” Look at one DJ Trump, who lies constantly, says one thing and does another, cheats on everybody and so on: his primary rule is “I can do anything I like because I’m so smart that I can fool everybody into believing whatever I say at the time. Anybody who tries to stop me is bad and deserves to be crushed. I don’t have to worry about consistency or honesty or any of that mimsy stuff” (see Garrison Keillor: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”). In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt said: “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.” Because he was very wealthy (a millionaire at eight), Trump learned he didn’t even have to be consistent. Instead, he learned what has been known since ancient times: “Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.” The world wants to be deceived, therefore give it to ‘em good and hard.

That apart, Trump has no personality. He cheats at golf, he cheats on his wives, he cheats the taxman and in business because for him, being Number One is the only game in town. Being Number One is his motivation, cheating and lying are his stock in trade, his modus operandi, because how he gets to No. 1 is irrelevant. That’s why he puts his name on everything, comes up with stupid ideas then denies them, evades responsibility, surrounds himself with wealthy people, loves gold and so on. His niece, Mary Trump, a PhD psychologist, says of him: “I don’t care what his cult says, I know him personally. And here’s the truth: My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.” How did he get to where he is? Lying, cheating and stealing, and telling all the other rich people that, under him, there’d be lots of opportunities for lying cheating and stealing so they’d better fund his campaign.

We could go through the rest of his crew but the simple fact is this: They would not have got a seat at the cabinet table if they were decent, honest people. There were a few decent people in Trump’s first cabinet but they didn’t last long. Scoundrels can sniff each other out, they’re much better at smelling other crooks than ordinary people are. Some of them are open, such as the human Clostridium, Stephen Miller, who is obsessed with power and domination:

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power…These are the iron laws of the world.

Personality is everything. It’s everything in politics, it’s everything in business, in family life, sport, entertainment, you name it. It is a sad fact of life that people who obey rules (the great majority) are easily fooled by people who are prepared to break them. That brings up the ancient question: how does a reasonable person deal with unreasonable people without becoming unreasonable in the process? The answer to that is: Set limits and stick to them. Overwhelmingly, people with disordered personalities will back down if they see their opposition is firm. This is the mistake the world is making with Trump. They should tell him: No, and no means no. He’ll squeal but he’ll back down.

Personality is also everything in psychiatry but has never been given its proper place. Psychiatry is about mental “illness,” about physical “diseases of the brain” but personality disorder isn’t an “illness” in any sense of the word; therefore drugs don’t work; therefore psychiatrists aren’t interested. I’ve outlined a case to say psychiatry is doing its best to rediagnose all cases of personality disorder as “mental illness” and put them on drugs, especially labels like bipolar, bipolar II, ADHD, ASD and a dozen others. The only valid treatment for personality problems is to discover all the rules that are operating in the background and bring them to light. This requires the person’s active cooperation but it isn’t easy as, very often, the rules are humiliating or embarrassing or just painful, but it works. People have to want to change but often, their rules are designed to conceal a deep sense of self-loathing.

At the core of personality resides the self-esteem, the sense of personal worth or, all too often, dislike of self. Self-esteem isn’t inherited, we’re not born with it any more than we’re born with a language already programmed in our little brains. It has to be learned, the result of life experiences. If early life experiences are painful, children have to draw whatever conclusions they can in order to survive. Very often, they’re negative conclusions that get buried deep inside but they do their daily quota of damage for decades. Generally, people don’t want to think about it until life hurts, but by then it may be too late. There is zero reason to believe drugs can ever change the rules of personality, any more than they can change, say, the rules of language. But psychiatrists don’t want to hear that, all too often, their self-esteem is built on dominating all the broken people. For the clown show in the White House, 30 months to go although who knows what damage they’ll do by then. As for the book, don’t bother, it reads like a gossip column.

References:

1. McLaren N (2007). The categorical system of diagnosis: Personality Disorder. Chapter 8 in Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences. Ann Arbor, Mi.: Future Psychiatry Press.

2. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London: Routledge.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

The US Secretary of State (= foreign minister), Mr Marco Rubio, has recently announced that the US intends to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague as “the global tribunal was interfering with US military and law enforcement operations at the risk of American sovereignty.” His concern was that ICE agents posted to the US border to repel immigrants could be arrested and taken for trial before non-American judges. In fact, he’s lying as he knows perfectly well the US is not a member of the ICC so it has no jurisdiction over events in the US. It can, however, take action against US citizens if they commit war crimes in other countries that are members, and that’s what he doesn’t want. The US has already imposed crippling financial “sanctions” on some members of the ICC, including the chief prosecutor, British barrister Karim Khan after is issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others for crimes in Gaza.

While a few US senators praised him for taking on the “corrupt” ICC, criticism was immediate and widespread. Some commentators have been wringing their hands over the “death of the international rules-based order” (IRBO) which the US was largely responsible for establishing after World War II. People point to the UN and its many agencies, the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals, the ICJ, the World Bank and IMF which flowed from the Bretton Woods agreement that set the US$ as the world’s reserve currency, GATT (1947), NATO, IAEA, IATA and a host of other bodies. As a result, there have been no major wars and trade and commerce have mostly flourished, to the benefit of all. If the US hadn’t pushed for these after 1945, which generally meant funding them and often providing offices, then chaos would have reigned. But if Narco Rubio (so-called because of his brother in law’s involvement in drugs) has his way, say the hand-wringers, the IRBO will collapse. Now that’s a bit strange because I thought it had been strangled at birth, 80 years ago.

The idea behind an IRBO is fairly clear: everybody agrees on a set of rules for all, then everybody works to apply them themselves and to make sure everybody else sticks to them. Trouble is, there was never any intention of having a single set of rules to apply to all: what about the exceptional nations? Surely they can’t be expected to get down there with the common herd so that their voices were lost in the lowing of cattle and the mewling of frightened pussies? No, the leaders of the world had to be heard, and heard clearly so everything was set up to make sure they remained the unchallenged leaders. In fact, there was only one such country and it made sure from the very beginning that it would run the show the way it thought it ought to be run. So the US awarded the victors of World War II permanent seats on the UN Security Council and the power of veto, including the brutal and egregiously corrupt Nationalist regime in China. Through an arrangement with the ramshackle Saudi autocracy, it arranged for all oil sales to be in USD, which meant that any country that wanted to buy Saudi oil first had to get USD. This led to the “exorbitant privilege” where the US could spy on practically all international commercial and financial transactions, to its great benefit. And because it had lots of weapons for sale, it was then able to offer unlimited credit for arms sales to all its friends, provided they bought American.

While all this was going on, the “war against communism” was in full flight, mostly behind the scenes as in Guatamala in 1954 or Indonesia in 1958 but occasionally reaching the front pages, as in Korea. The principle driving this crusade was very simple: “Unspeakably evil godless communism is trying to take control of your country, we’ll help you fight them. And yes, you do want our help, don’t you.” It was always and only ever a case of diabolical outsiders trying to subvert the innocent peasants and turn the country into a concentration camp, so the kindly US of A would step in to save them. However, what was dressed up as benevolence concealed two points. The first was that communism was almost always home-grown. Peasants suffering under feudal oppression didn’t need outsiders telling them they had to free themselves from the plutocratic yoke, they had eyes, they knew the UN Charter promised self-determination to all people so that’s what they wanted. And if they wanted a socialist government, then they were prepared to fight for it.

Which brings up the second point: the sole goal of successive US governments was for untrammeled access to each and every market by their corporations; the only way this could achieved was through total world domination, and the socialists were getting in the way. Therefore, as in Iran in 1953 and so many other countries, they had to go. Why were corporations so important to the various US governments? Money. Seats on their boards. Connections, influence. And the “international rules-based order” was a major part of it. As the funder-in-chief of the IMF and World Bank, the US was able to decide who got what at what rates. With a few phone calls, they could make or break governments but if the peasants didn’t take hints and clearly didn’t know what was good for them, well, overthrow the government. So simple. Take Cuba, for example. In 1958, home-grown revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro overthrew the ineffably corrupt Batista government and promptly nationalised a heap of American assets, many of which were owned by the US mafia or otherwise stolen. Humiliated, the US imposed a blockade on Cuba which remains in force to this day: 65 years of penury, just because they refused to grovel to Uncle Sam. Two years later, the CIA engineered an “invasion” of Cuba by a bunch of pirates, drunks and crooks that ended in disaster. All of these are examples of how the “IRBO” existed in name only and entirely at the whim of the US government.

There was much the same disaster in the Congo after Belgium limped out in 1960. With the very active support of the US and of Belgium which feared losing its ill-gotten assets, the mildly socialist government under Patrice Lumumba was overthrown by General Mobutu whose unrivalled kleptocracy held power for 35 years. In 1961, the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, was killed in an air crash as they were negotiating a settlement; everything says his plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary although you and I will never know the truth. The fighting has never stopped. In the chaos of the war in Eastern Congo in the late 1990s, about 3 million people died, and many more since them. Where were the internationa rules then? And where are they now when the US and Israel freely attack neighbouring countries just because it suits them? Aggressive war is the supreme international crime, that’s all there is to that, yet Trump freely and cheerfully threatens to “obliterate” Iran, to bomb it back to the stone age and wipe out their culture, but there are no repercussions. Genocide is forbidden by every statute and every moral system known yet Israel freely repeats its intention to force the Palestinians out or destroy them (see here for a record of events).

The ‘golden rule’ has always been “He who has the gold makes the rules.” We can supplement that with “... and he who has the guns enforces them.” In threatening to dismantle the ICC, the US is doing nothing that it hasn’t been doing for the last 80 years. It chooses whatever will be to its benefit, it enforces it and the rest of the world can plait its shit. Take the arch-psychopath Henry Kissinger on ovverthrowing the Allende government in Chile:

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves (June 1970).

In fact, there was never any risk of a Soviet government in Chile but tens of thousands of people died under Kissinger’s and Thatcher’s good friend, Gen. Pinochet. The problem was that the Allende government had nationalised the gigantic copper mines owned by the US companies Anaconda Copper and Kennecott, among others. Kissinger never bothered to hide his soulless cynicism, e.g.: “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one” (Washington Post, Mar 5 2014).

The list of countries the US has actually attacked or invaded since January 1946 is truly frightening. Add to that the coups it has staged, the elections in which it has interfered, the totally corrupt and/or evil dictators it has supported and it becomes clear: the “international rules-based order” is a charade. The rules exist when it suits the US to impose them, and they are ignored when it doesn’t. Nobody, however, should think that this is exclusively an American hobby, everything they know they learned from the British imperialists, and the French and Spanish and so on. The urge to dominate is human. We see it in full force in the Persian Gulf today. Iran is not and never has been a threat to the US. Every time Trump, Biden, Rubio and all the others say it is, they’re lying, for the explicit purpose of gaining control over the entire region for Wall St and for their equally corrupt friends in Tel Aviv. To paraphrase Kissinger: “For the West, the demonization of Iran is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” The only threat Iran presents is to the American ego and to the demonic plans of the zionists to reduce every one of its neighbours to rubble.

Is there anything new in any of this? No, unless you still see the world through the monochromatic lens of “Us goodies and them baddies.” The important message is: Stand back, strip away all the propaganda and look objectively at what is happening. In particular, stop giving the benefit of the doubt to people, companies, groups, countries, religions, political parties and so on. The presumption must always be that they’re in it for themselves. If you have time, watch this video by the British rapper Lowkey. I have no idea where this chap gets his information from, he can practically tell you what a politician ate for lunch one day eight years ago. Similarly, Australia likes to present itself as everybody’s good mate, the cheerful helpful kid over the road but corruption is deeply entrenched in this country. Jack Waterford was the leading political reporter in Canberra for decades; he knows everybody and how they got to where they got. This article on systemic corruption in NSW is worth reading; corruption in this country is not quite so much paper bags stuffed full of cash but is the corruption of influence, of jobs for the boys and a few selected girls. The running sore of the $380billion AUKUS submarines has been corrupt from the very moment the idea was spawned by the disgusting serial liar and former PM, Morrisson and his equally febrile evangelical mate, Mike Pompeo.

Another example came to light a week or so ago. The Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Authority (AHPRA) recently adopted the definition of antisemitism pushed by something called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This is a little unexpected. Quite apart from the fact that there was no public discussion that I saw, it is an overtly political decision by a professional regulator. Apparently, we all have to comply with it even though the first sentence on the IHRA website says: “Read the full text of the IHRA’s non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism ...” (my emphasis). It seems this came from a meeting between the CEO of AHPRA, a Mr Untermeyer, and the woman who is anointed Australia’s “envoy on antisemitism,” an exceedingly well-paid job given to a die-hard zionist by appointment. For myself, I don’t see any point in this sort of thing, we already have perfectly adequate laws prohibiting discrimination of all sorts but apparently health practitioners are likely to slide back unless pulled up sharply. As far as I can see, this is a good example (or bad) of the corruption of influence: one group gains or seeks to gain an advantage by back room manipulation. Let’s not worry about that, though, it’s business as usual but it forced me to look at this definition. One example of what may constitute antisemitism caught my eye:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

That’s a bit strange. Even when declared and instituted Israeli policy precisely mirrors material in, say, Mein Kampf, we’re not allowed to say so? But I do that all the time, I show parallels between one group’s statements or actions and the statements or actions of their enemies. In fact, it was only a week ago that I used Mein Kamp (Chap. 15) to show how Nazi policy toward the USSR mirrored that of the British in building their empire. Similarly, the Nuremberg race laws of 1936 were actually based on the race laws of Kentucky and Tennessee, which had been in place long before Adolf was born and, Auschwitz notwithstanding, survived until the 1950s. As for Israel, there are probably thousands of quotes by a dozens of prime ministers and cabinet ministers, not to overlook extreme racist rabbis like Kahane, Kook Jr and Schneerson, that are identical to what became Nazi state policy, e.g. the little book Zionism Decoded in 101 quotes by Canadian historian, Prof. Yakob Rabkin. A few days after Kristallnacht in 1938, a Russian Jew named David Grün declared:

If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel (p37).

That is historical fact. Grün, renamed Ben Gurion, became the first prime minister of Israel. The idea of slaughtering half a million Jewish children worried him not one jot nor a tittle, and this was before the war. One of the most important of the architects of Israel, the cultured Nahum Goldmann, said of Ben Gurion:

… a very able and cunning diplomat and politician, really one of the best I have ever come across. A promise from him was quite worthless. He did not hesitate to promise one thing and then do the opposite. He was absolutely unscrupulous… he never had his fill of power… he only wanted to dominate [1, p94].

So I don’t think AHPRA need bother too much about the very rare antisemitic comments from Australia’s million or so health practitioners, the zionists do it themselves. Another item on the IHRA definition caught my eye:

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Let’s look at this more closely. Firstly, Israel is not a democratic nation: by its own constitution and laws, it is a “Jewish” state. It has two sets of laws, one for its Jewish citizens and one for everybody else. For example, foreign Jews who have never set foot there have the “right of return” whereas the millions of Palestinians, many of whom were born in Israel proper, have no such right. But the point here is not that people require Israel to behave as a sort of enclave of saints, all we want is that it should adhere to the huge body of international humanitarian law and stop killing children [2]. We don’t demand a higher standard from Israel, we’re just sick of it getting away with subhuman behaviour. So in view of the overtly political nature of AHPRA’s decision, and because I don’t support the idea of “regulation by litigation,” it would be helpful if the Agency could give some clarification where Israel’s conduct seems to fall well below acceptable international standards, i.e. using double standards to excuse them. For example:

1. Is it “antisemitic” to expect Israel to adhere to the minimum humanitarian standards expected of any other wealthy country, e.g. not dropping 2000lb bombs on tents crowded with refugees who have no air defences, or refraining from dropping white phosphorous explosives on clearly-marked hospitals?

2. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to and quote the UN OHRC report, cited above, as established fact?

3. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to and quote the many Israeli government ministers who openly advocate total ethnic cleansing and/or genocide of the ethnic Palestinian populations of Gaza, of the West Bank, of South Lebanon, the annexed Golan Heights, and of Israel itself?

4. Is it “antisemitic” to describe as pogroms the constant attacks on indigenous Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank by heavily armed gangs of Zionist “settlers,” aided and abetted by the Israeli police and military, which, over the past 30 months, have resulted in hundreds of deaths including many children?

5. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to the fact that Israel meets the definition of an apartheid state, specifically that laws applicable to Jewish citizens do not apply to non-Jewish citizens, and vice versa, e.g. the recent law imposing a mandatory death penalty on non-Jews for convictions that, if the accused were Jewish, would not apply?

6. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to the fact that the current prime minister of Israel and other senior Israeli officials are the subject of arrest warrants by the ICC for the crime of genocide in Gaza?

7. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to Israel’s recent military action against Iran as “unprovoked, illegal and immoral” in that it meets the standard of “aggressive war” as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunals?

8. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the behaviour of Israeli military and prison guards toward illegally-detained Palestinian men, women and children, including sexual assault by trained dogs, amounts to torture? [1].

9. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Israeli government and military command structure are fully aware that unconvicted and often uncharged Palestinian prisoners are routinely subject to torture and, in the case of several MKs and the minister for internal security, are strongly in favour of it, and that perpetrators of the torture are not penalised?

10. Is it “antisemitic” to express the view that if anybody treated Jewish detainees in the brutal manner described in numerous reports, that the Israeli government would react with incendiary rage, i.e. that it applies double standards in its daily activities?

11. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Israeli government enacted its “Hannibal doctrine” on October 7^th, 2023, thereby deliberately causing the death of hundreds of Israeli and other citizens?

12. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Dahiya doctrine is a crime against humanity?

13. Is it “antisemitic” to say that mobs of Israelis regularly rampage through Palestinian areas in their cities screaming “Death to the Arabs” and damaging Palestinian property while the Israeli police stand by?

14. Is it “antisemitic” to show the clear parallels between the freely expressed plans of the current prime minister of Israel regarding his vision of a “Greater Israel,” e.g. standing before the UN General Assembly with a map showing Israel occupying ethnically-cleansed territory from the Nile to the Euphrates, and the Nazi vision of an ethnically-cleansed “Gross Deutschland” extending across to the Urals, as outlined in Mein Kampf (Chap. 14, pp398-408), especially as both plans are expressly based in the idea of a hierarchy of races?

15. Is it “antisemitic” to say that one looks forward to the day when somebody does to Israel what Israel is doing in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran and other places, i.e. attacking and illegally occupying other countries’ territory and, as part of the plan, destroying the civilian infrastructure, especially water and sewerage facilities, schools, hospitals, energy sources, agriculture, etc., leaving the remaining civilian population huddled and starving in rat-infested rubble?

Hmm. Seems you can’t contact AHPRA, and nobody is allowed to go to their offices. Oh well, no doubt they’ll come for me. I asked a friend to cosign this to send to AHPRA. She agreed, then had to change her mind: “I asked a colleague about the letter, and they said this would likely mean I would not be renewed this year for my academic appointment, although that would not be explicitly acknowledged. It has become such a pernicious issue. I am sorry but I will have to decline to be a signatory, I don’t want to lose my academic position.”

I agree, she’s more use in her post than out, but when you have to legislate what people must believe, you know you’re losing the war.

References:

1. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

2. UN Human Rights Council Report: The essence of childhood has been destroyed. June 18^th 2026, document A/HRC/62/CRP.2.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Many years ago when I arrived in the Kimberley region of West Australia as their first psychiatrist, there was no internet. Before I left Perth, I signed to join the journal circulation list for half a dozen psychiatric journals. The first bundle arrived 18 months later, along with a letter saying that due to increased costs, journals would no longer be sent around (predictably, they had been sent to the “executive suite” of MHS first for them to read during office hours; I was on the end of a long list). That meant that if I wanted a journal article, I had to wait for one of my irregular trips to Perth and then spend as much time in the medical library as possible, photocopying anything that might be of interest (I had to pay myself as the librarian didn’t think philosophy or anthropology were necessary for psychiatrists). BTW, the first fax machine was installed in the hospital the week I arrived but it was kept under lock and key by the hospital manager.

How times have changed. These days, the problem isn’t insufficient information, it’s a case of too much. A large part of the deluge is junk, especially advertising disguised as “valuable learning experiences.” What are called medical newsletters are simply marketing arms of the drug industry. They’re mostly disguised as teaching material that allow people to get their brownie points to keep the medical board happy but don’t require any intellectual effort. There are dozens of them, mostly from the US, and the psychiatric weeklies push a rigidly biological line. However, they’re all facing a common problem: they don’t have anything new to say. Psychiatric Times is based in Boston and churns out articles bursting with the sense that psychiatry is teetering on the brink of major breakthroughs, but they’re always the same old same old with occasional novelties, e.g. psychedelic drugs as the latest fad to brighten the otherwise dull landscape.

This week, in an interview, the editor of PT, a Dr John Miller, talked about something that bothers him, tribalism in psychiatry (it starts at 2.45). Tribes, he said, are very much part of the human scene, there’s always been this sense of them and us: “That dynamic,” he says, “seems to have to exist in all cultures.” He uses the example of sport, how people get fanatical about their teams: “We want to win and (want the other team) to lose, that’s tribalism in its essence.” After 40 years, he feels psychiatrists are becoming walled off from each other. At the beginning of his career, he quickly became involved in giving lectures and seminars for the drug companies which were very well integrated into academic psychiatry and organisations such as the NIMH. He thought this helped spread knowledge and improve patient care and it was all very exciting (an lucrative, he didn’t say).

Here, the interviewer interrupted to say she too had been involved with representing drug companies and it gave her the sense of being at the cutting edge of science and up to date, which made her a better clinician. She was able to tell patients something good was coming so they should hang on and gradually they got better. Dr Miller added that knowing innovation was “always there” also helped keep psychiatrists well (7.00): “When I started, we had very limited tools, you could learn psychopharmacology in a week.” He began his career as a biochemist and was intrigued to see how “innovative molecules” (i.e. new drugs) were developed and released to great benefit (there is in fact only one). These days, however, prescribers are so flooded by paperwork and administrative demands that there’s no time for self-education (9.30). Clinicians don’t know about all the advances but there’s the additional problem that they don’t want to be compromised by conflicts of interest, so they keep away from drug companies. This has led to the system becoming fragmented (12.20):

Every decade, we have these paradigm enhancers that are helping us understand circuitry and systems and the integration of neurotransmitters ... the drug companies and NIMH and prescribers, we all need to be in the same tribe, working together to move the pendulum forward ...

Despite huge numbers of prescribers, not everybody is following the same script which means the epidemic of untreated mental illness (16.50) isn’t being addressed efficiently. It would be much better if everybody in the field, academics, researchers, funding agencies, clinicians, etc. worked together. “Wow,” said the interviewer, ending the session (17.45), “these are such great points. We could do five more sessions like this. Thank you for your insights. And for the viewers, if you have something on your mind, email us and we’ll get back to you.”

Mercifully, this wasn’t one of the sessions that counts as “education,” clearly just a word from the sponsors. First, as editor-in-chief, Miller is aged 66 and started psychiatry in 1986, i.e. well after the ideological convulsion that dumped psychiatry in the biological “stream,” discarding the notion that one’s life has anything to do with mental trouble. At the time, technology was racing ahead on a dozen fronts: scanners, genetics, viral research, neurotransmitters. Everything seemed so clear and exciting, just study the brain and, with a bit of money and time, all will be revealed. As a biochemist who then studied medicine, Miller was thrilled by this febrile atmosphere but, what at first seemed a stream limpid and clear has turned dark and run into the sand.

Thirty years ago, he says, everybody was pushing the same barrow, kindly provided by the drug companies and funded by the US taxpayer. Now, people object to drug company ties but it’s what he didn’t say is most revealing. He didn’t mention how the “genomics revolution” hasn’t delivered a single benefit to psychiatry. He didn’t mention how drug companies have largely given up on psychiatry, with no new “tailor-made chemicals” in the pipeline to fiddle with people’s neurotransmitters. He certainly didn’t say a word about the destruction of research wrought by the wierdo Secretary of Health, Mr RFK Jr, or the loss of Medicare and Medicaid cover for poor people pushed by the Trumpists, meaning they can’t afford treatment, and he didn’t show any suggestion that he needed to ask WHY there is “an epidemic of untreated mental illness...” (16.50). That would seem to be fairly basic. The only thing that concerned him was that everybody involved in mental health should start to sing from the same hymn book, the one that says “Drugs, glorious drugs, don’t care what they do.” The whole talk was just boilerplate drug company propaganda. The introduction said:

Both (the interviewer) and Miller advocate for a more integrated and supportive system among all health care professionals to address the epidemic of untreated mental illness ... The psychiatric field needs to work together more cohesively, Miller emphasized, sharing that we need a unified approach among psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and physician assistants to address the mental health crisis effectively.

First point to note: for all his academic appointments and so on, Miller doesn’t know what tribes are. If he did, he wouldn’t use it because “tribes” are always in some sense ideological and never rational (as scientific) or even anti-rational. Most tribes are self-appointed (political parties, religions and their myriad sects, sporting teams, languages and so on). Even when the tribe is race-based, it’s still a matter of ideology, as in “We’re superior to them.” Miller is right to say that tribalism is a fundamental part of human nature (it’s actually higher primate nature) but it’s a bad part, based in our innate xenophobia: without fear of The Other, there would be no urge to cluster among familiar faces. Whereas in the good old days, he says, everybody involved in mental health was happily riding together on the biological train, these days, they want to sit in separate carriages. For example, nobody wants to be seen sitting in the same compartment with the drug companies. He simply doesn’t get how people could object to them, they’re so helpful in producing all these amazing chemicals for prescribers to spread around, what’s wrong with drug companies, after all? Heavens to Betsy, they gave him lots of speaker’s fees and free airline tickets to travel around and spread the word, why are people today so anti drug companies? Why has the field of mental health split into tribes that don’t talk to each other? Part of it, as he pointed out, is the flood of paperwork and the pressure to push patients through to meet “productivity measures” but for the rest? No idea.

Compounding his error, he thinks the solution to tribalism is for everybody to join his tribe, then there’d be no arguing. That’s true, and there are heaps of historical examples of how different political or religious groups settled the arguments with their neighbours by forced conversion. But they can do that because their differences are ideological, not rational. Miller simply doesn’t grasp the concept of science as a process of rational enquiry, where differences are brought into the open, discussed and resolved. Certainly, the question of mainstream psychiatry’s relationship with drug companies has to be examined closely but that’s a matter of scientific ethics, i.e. metaphysics, and not one of empirical or evidence-based science. In fact, all the evidence says that psychiatrists, even at the highest levels, are easily seduced by the rivers of money flowing from drug companies, as the sleazy Joseph Biederman showed. The only way to resolve that is to keep drug companies well and truly locked in a separate carriage.

Miller is correct in saying there are separate tribes in psychiatry, but they’re not what he thinks they are. There are two major tribes, labelled according to their ideological positions on the question of the causation of mental disorder. The dominant tribe today is the biological tribe, whose card Miller carries and treasures. They say “Mental disorder is brain disorder; a full understanding of the brain will tell us everything we need to know about mental disorder.” From this unproven and openly ideological stance flows the belief that physical treatments (drugs, ECT and so on) are both necessary and sufficient, i.e. physical treatment is necessary for recovery, and physical treatment alone will guarantee recovery. That, however, is wholly a matter of opinion, not of science. You either believe it or you don’t but don’t waste your time looking for their justification because they haven’t got around to it yet.

Opposing them is the tribe that says mental disorder is a primary psychological phenomenon, that there is nothing wrong with the brain and that drugs are only going to conceal the true nature of the problem and create further physical problems of their own. That’s much more difficult to prove as psychiatry doesn’t have a theory of mind on which to base their opinion. The biocognitive model for psychiatry is intended to fill this gap but is meeting a bit of buyer resistance. Turns out psychiatrists would rather stick to their three-word non-models than try a new one, especially as it fills an entire book.

The major point is that the mere existence of ideologically-based tribes announces to the world that psychiatry is in a pre-scientific position. That’s the charitable conclusion; I say modern psychiatry is a pseudoscience, meaning it has the trappings of science (journals, professors, conferences, expensive studies and so on) but it lacks the substance (an agreed ontological position that entails a research program and treatment modalities) and that, at some level, the institution is aware of this but keeps it quiet. The reason psychiatry is splitting into tribes, and the tribes into subtribes is crystal clear: there’s nothing to stop them. There is nothing to hold them together, no central theory or doctrine or dogma that says “This is what you must believe and everything else is verboten.” Even their so-called bible, the DSM, is revised regularly as the various warring parties force their latest hair-splitting diagnoses on the mainstream. Of course psychiatrists will split into bickering tribes, all humans have an urge to get to the top by forcing everybody else to accept their views, and everybody else has an urge to resist. That’s what humans do, and psychiatrists are no different. Would it help if they all had to undergo psychotherapy? It didn’t stop the Freudians from tearing themselves to bits.

The interview with the eminent Dr Miller is a good example of how the pseudoscience of psychiatry is perpetuated. A senior member of the fraternity delivers a talk which, superficially, is full of interesting points and good sense, but closer inspection shows it’s essentially cliche-riddled drivel. The interviewer closed with the usual fawning stuff, adding: “And for the viewers, if you have something on your mind, email us and we’ll get back to you.” I’ll email them but I know they only like complimentary emails. Their attitude is that critics should shut up and learn the correct script that will let them join the dominant tribe. Their script, of course. In politics or religion, this sort of thing is called brainwashing.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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At the NATO conference in Ankara this week, it was announced that European countries would collaborate on building an entirely new, highly accurate, long-distance missile system for $50billion. Britain, meantime, has announced that it must reduce social security and NHS payments in order to pay for a new fighter jet, four new nuclear missile submarines and the AUKUS attack nuclear submarines. The first of these are due for delivery in about 8 years although design work hasn’t even started. Germany will boost its military budget massively and the US (i.e. Trump) has threatened a trade embargo against Spain as it has announced it will not be increasing its military budget. That’s in between him suddenly firing 81 accusations of “communism” against people he doesn’t like, such as the Democratic Socialists (DSA), of which Mamdami is a member (see Robert Reich’s rejoinder). That says Trump is losing his grip.

All this is despite the very obvious failure of conventional warfare in the Persian Gulf this past few months, but they say that generals are always ready to fight the last war. So what’s going on? Actually, it’s nothing new, just another attempt to rerun the Crimean War against everybody’s favourite monster, Mother Russia. At 17million sqkm, Russia is far and away the largest country in the world and immeasurably wealthy in natural resources, as well as having major advantages in its huge coastline (37,600km) and borders. For people who like conquest and colonisation, Russia is and always has been the prize of all prizes. Trouble is, the Russians don’t particularly like conquest and colonisation directed against them and refuse to cooperate in the Great Game.

Their history is long and fascinating but the overwhelming theme is one of endless destruction. As long as there have been records, invading armies from east and west have swept across the limitless steppes, back and forth, just because there was nothing to stop them. For hundreds of years, Russia has steadily expanded its territory, down to the Caucasus and especially east, across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. The hostility of Western Europeans to their eastern Slavic brethren goes back forever but took its modern form when Napoleon was chased out of Russia, allowing the Czar’s armies direct entry to Europe and to the settlement conferences. For the West, the problem was clear: they wanted to dominate the world themselves, and were well on the way to doing it, but then this gigantic empire of oafs suddenly thrust themselves into the party and threatened to spoil it for the countries that thought they had the right to dispose the world. Panic, which spilled into war in Crimea and various other places in 1853-56. This was the first true modern war, fought under appalling conditions, and Russia’s defeat forced it to modernise, e.g. emancipation of serfs (aka slaves) in 1861, modernisation of education, the military and so on.

In the first half of the 20^th Century, Russia and USSR were attacked or invaded six times. During the Great War, about 3.5million Russians died but nobody really knows the number. In the Civil War after the Revolution, from 7-12million citizens died; in Stalin’s Terror and the Holodomor, another 20million; during the Nazi invasion, at least 25million more. The country suffered unbelievably during each of these disasters. In 1945, the Soviet leadership swore: Never again. Nobody ever will threaten us again. This was a bit of a problem as Marxist theory said that as long as there are capitalists, they will try to destroy socialism. The US promptly obliged by surrounding the USSR and later China with some 850 foreign military bases, all aimed at the Eurasian heartland. Accordingly, the Soviet leadership pushed to develop nuclear weapons as a defensive measure and felt it had to match the West bomb for bomb. In the West, this was broadcast as “Soviet aggression”: “Look at those dreadful commies, they want to destroy us, quick, they’ve opened a missile gap, we have to beat them.” Truman thought that the US would be able to keep the peace with 200 nuclear bombs. At its peak, it had about 15,000 and still has about 7,000, of which 1,700 are actively deployed (China has 640, with 34 deployed).

We know why Russians fear and mistrust the West, there are tens of millions of skulls buried in the rich dark earth as proof. Trump’s perfidy is simply the icing on a bitter cake. They believe that the West helped the Nazis to gain power, helped them stay in power and did heaps to encourage them to invade the USSR. Trouble is, they’re right. There is a book called Conjuring Hitler, by Guido Preparata (2005, available online), which argues that the British MI6 and other spy agencies chose Hitler as their man in the early 1920s when he was still in Munich and fostered his career thereafter. I think that wildly overstates the case but it is beyond question that, given the instability in Germany from 1919 to about 1936 or 37, every politician in the West saw the choice as “anybody but the Bolsheviks.” They were delighted when the Nazis took power and immediately began throwing communists and socialists into the new KonzentrationLager. They knew Hitler’s hold on power was very weak but they also knew that if they made any sort of move against him, he would be toppled and the Reds would take over. And that was the nightmare in their nightmares: a Bolshevik alliance stretching from the Ardennes to Bering Strait. True, Churchill warned against Hitler but it was only because he threatened the British Empire, not because of all the Slavs he had earlier announced he wanted to kill (Mein Kampf, Chap 15).

Accounts in the West of World War II more or less ignore the fact that the European war was essentially a land war in the East. All the rest was a sideshow. 85% of German casualties were on the Eastern Front, 90% of their tanks left the factories and headed east, and so on, but we never hear this. It’s all a mixture of plucky Britain and Hogan’s heroes (which I’ve never seen) interspersed with the Final Solution, quite forgetting that Germany’s goal in the USSR was 30million Slavs exterminated in the first year of the invasion. They tried, but didn’t quite make it. From the time of the invasion in June 1941 to the end of that year, 3.25million Soviet troops were captured. 97% of them were dead by the end of December, 20,000 a day, the greatest single slaughter of humans in our ghastly history. I could say “All this is ignored” but it’s not ignored, it’s actually carefully suppressed. We are told the Nazi war was a war to exterminate Jews in Europe but it wasn’t, it was a war to colonise the USSR in the same way Britain had colonised India and North America, France in North and West Africa or Belgium in the Congo. Do our esteemed leaders in the West tell little fibs? Most emphatically they do. The recent American War on Everybody, Chapter 386 (Persian Gulf rerun) was on the basis the Iranian government was hanging on by its fingernails and just needed a push to fall over. Lies, lies, lies, from beginning to end. See this report from Patrick Henningsen who is currently in Iran for the Ayatollah’s funeral.

At present in Europe, there are two themes trending. The first is terrified shrieks echoing through the media: “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, get more guns.” The second is: “Russia is on the verge of collapse, they’re incompetent barbarians and we just need to push a bit and they’ll fall over.” Unstated: “... and then we can loot them to our heart’s content.”

If indeed the Russians have any military designs on Western Europe, which I seriously doubt, there are a couple of points to remember. First, all things being equal, at their present rate of advance in Ukraine, fighting a much smaller and less industrialised country, it would take them about 2,600 years to reach the Portuguese coast. Fighting a combined population and industrial production many times larger than their own, on a front about twenty times larger, we could expect to see the Tovariches jump into the surf at Nazare in about 28,700 years.

Second, all things aren’t equal. As Iran and Hezbollah have shown, the days of conventional war, where more tanks and bombers and troops means more victories, are well and truly over. In a few months, Hezbollah has destroyed over 400 Israeli Merkava tanks, costing about $5million each, using $300 home-made drones. Iran took out two high end American radar systems costing $1billion each with a couple of indigenous cruise missiles costing about $100,000 each. Once they were blinded, the Iranians launched hundreds of Shahed drones at its attackers, costing about $20,000 each, forcing their opponents to fire Patriot missile defences at $4million a pop. Iran shot down about 34 American drones, costing $30million each although the most expensive, Triton drones, cost up to $200million each. Their cheap drones destroyed air fuelling tankers costing $200million each and forced the $8billion aircraft carriers to rush to safety. The USS Gerald Ford (which cost $13billion to build and $7million a day to run) suffered major damage from a fire starting in a laundry and will be out of action for a year at a cost of a mere $25million (I don’t believe that figure, that’s a rounding error in the Pentagon).

Is there a message in this? I think so but I also think our politicians and generals are incapable of seeing it. First message: we can no longer afford militarism. We can’t afford the $19trillion (with a T) that military activity costs each year, in direct costs to build the weapons, pay for the fuel, pay the troops and so on, plus the destruction of civilian infrastructure, plus the myriad deaths and injuries and pensions and so on, plus the “opportunity cost.” That is, if we spend $1 on a bullet, that’s $1 we didn’t spend on some tomato plants to grow food. If we put one young person in uniform, that’s one industrial or nursing or farming or building or mothering job unfilled, so no production. If we buy one nuclear submarine, that’s about 800,000 public housing units we don’t build and so the ranks of the homeless swell steadily, meaning more people to look after them or put them in prison or mental hospitals. Crucial point: militarism consumes the country exponentially. If you double the size of the military, it consumes not twice as much but four times as much through the opportunity cost.

Second, and despite the overlooked fact that aggressive war is a crime against humanity, the advantage has always been with the defenders, except now that’s magnified a hundred fold. In a few hours, kids can build a drone to destroy a tank and its four crew. Iran’s marine drones, both surface and subsurface, are a match for any $2billion destroyer in the Western navies, and its home-grown missiles will deal with the really big ships. Britain was very wise not to send its navy to “assist” in the Persian Gulf. While the Iranians may have hesitated over sinking an American ship, they would have fought each other for the chance to sink HMS Dogspoop. And Trump wouldn’t have lifted a finger.

Third, we can no longer afford to pretend that Russia is a danger but global warming isn’t. So far, the war in the Persian Gulf has dumped something like 350million tonnes of CO₂ in the atmosphere. The devastation in Gaza and South Lebanon would easily double that. Every jet taking off, every missile fired, every bomb dropped or rifle fired injects poison into the air. Every military jet produced, every tank, every pair of military boots, every meal delivered to a soldier in the field, every operation to remove shrapnel, every element of this industry of death is quietly pouring deadly gases and chemicals into the biosphere and, above all, diverting attention from the looming disaster from climate change. Europe and the US have had several weeks of heat wave and they don’t like it. Good. I hope it hurts because until it really hurts, all the Trumps and Netanyuhas and Kushners and Epsteins who have the world’s steering wheel in a death grip won’t take their eyes off their bank balances to do something about it. Better still, we should throw all of them in the dumpster and lock the lid.

Final message: Who wants war? When Hitler marched to occupy Czechoslovakia, he expected ecstatic crowds to line the streets but they stayed home and wept. The troops marched through dark and silent roads as the population did not want war, even though they got it later. EU president Ursula von der Leyen and various other pollies are running around telling everybody they have to get ready for war with Russia within five years but it’s an uphill battle for the poor dears. Most Germans do not see Russia as a threat (23% although 35% see the US as the major threat to world peace). How many citizens actually think war is a good idea? None. If so, how are they convinced to pay for the military and send their sons to be killed? Simple: they are told over and over again that the bad people over there, the sinister Other, are evil subhumans who are secretly plotting to attack in the middle of the night, so we goodies need to arm ourselves to the teeth and conduct lots of military exercises which consist of sending heavily armed fighters straight at the enemy’s borders then pulling them back at the last second. The West does this all the time then wonders why the other side gets angry.

Even though the overwhelming majority of people want to live in peace, this ploy works because the fear of subjugation is so strong in humans that they can be led to do stupid things by clever operators manipulating their emotions from behind the scenes. And it has to stop. But it won’t stop until the common people rise up and take power from the 1% of unmitigated scoundrels who are running the show to suit themselves. The won’t give up power easily.

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Further evidence of the deliberate targeting of children in Gaza.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.