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.

****

Last week, I did an interview with Pascal Lottaz on his channel Neutrality Studies, available here. Pascal is from Switzerland but now works at Kyoto University where he seems to have the dream job of talking to interesting people around the world. He posts 3 or 4 fairly long interviews each week, worth watching as you will not get that sort of information from the mainstream.

****

The massive “No Kings” marches in the US and elsewhere came and went but it doesn’t seem as though much has changed. Herr Drumpf is still king, still camped in what’s left of the White House; American and Israeli forces continue their unprovoked and illegal attacks on Iran; Cuba is facing death by strangulation and half a dozen other countries are under threat. Meantime, the Epstein saga rolls along with no end in sight; Wall St is up and down depending on the king’s mood but it now appears that lots of his courtiers are cleaning up to the tune of hundreds of millions; allies are enlisted and dumped willy-nilly; and life is about to get much worse for half the people on the planet, the poor half who can’t do anything to defend themselves. In the US, inflation is up, employment is down, costs are up, farms are going broke, health care is unattainable, hundreds of smaller rural hospitals will be forced to close, travel largely paralysed … all in all, not a good place to be. All this from the wannabe-king who was elected to stop inflation and the Ukraine war on Day 1, bring back jobs, make everybody a winner and launch no more foreign wars. As a result, his approval rate is the lowest ever recorded for a president, but 33% still support him. What would he have to do for them to turn against him? Who knows, we’d rather not find out.

Politicians usually make at least an attempt to do what they promised in their campaigns but Trump hasn’t, quite likely because he doesn’t remember what he promised in 2024. Other politicians declare what they’re going to do and do it, but everybody is outraged because nobody believed them. One such honest fellow was Frau Schicklgruber’s little boy, Adolf, better known by his stepfather’s name, Herr Alois Hitler. In November, 1923, believing that the Bavarian state government was likely to secede from Germany and unite with Austria, forming a large Catholic state in central Europe, Hitler and his group attempted a putsch. This quickly collapsed and he was sentenced to five years in prison but served only about a year. During this time, he began dictating what became the two volumes of Mein Kampf [1]. This was published in 1925-26 and sold well, especially after he became Reichskanzler in 1933. There were a few pirated English translations but they didn’t sell. The authorised version, translated by James Murphy, wasn’t finished when war broke out, meaning very few British politicians read it until the bombers were overhead. That was a problem because in it, the author had set out in considerable detail his plans to build the Thousand Year Reich.

Most of those who had read it were very supportive of everything he had said, especially the tirades against Bolshevism and the USSR. And Jews, of course, because the English upper classes were fierce racists themselves. In Vol. I, he expanded on his version of race science, the core of which was the idea that there is a hierarchy of races, with northern Europeans at the top and all the rest down below. The Aryan races, he believed, had given humanity everything worthwhile; the other races would never amount to anything and were useful only as labourers. They had to be kept in their place and definitely not allowed to interbreed with the higher races as that would lead to racial dilution and thence to social collapse. His racial views meshed neatly with his nationalism, that each country had to be racially pure otherwise it would decline and he wanted Germany to be at the top. This led to his particular hostility for Jews as he believed they formed Bolshevism in order to dissolve nations into a single world state that they would govern for their benefit, all the while polluting the gene pool with their inferior blood. Because of what has happened since, that sounds bad today but at the time, this sort of talk was pretty standard throughout Western Europe, North America and the former British colonies such as Australia, Canada, South Africa etc.

If this were all, the rest of the world could have lived with it but he had economic ideas as well. Germany was a great nation but it was kept from its rightful place at the top of the hierarchy by not having enough land. Britain and France, the other great nations, were also quite small but they had their huge overseas empires which allowed them to become wealthy and thus to bestride the world. By contrast, the German-speaking peoples were stuck in a narrow strip of land and unable to expand. Without more land, they must decline; there were no decent territories overseas; therefore Germany must look east, to the vast tracts of Eurasia occupied by the second rate Slavic nations. In order to fulfil her destiny, Germany must take control of the under-utilised Slavic territories, thin out the excess population and keep the rest as labourers for the farms, mines and factories that German ingenuity alone could build. As Darwin said, life is a struggle in which only the fit survive which Hitler took to mean that anybody who wasn’t prepared to fight for his race didn’t deserve to survive, much less to breed and spread his defective blood. What we would call defective genes, such as criminality, mental disorder, addictions, uncontrolled violence, homosexuality, prostitution, etc, along with other defective races, had to be eliminated for the good of the nation.

That’s it, there’s his plan, set out in Chap.14 of Vol II of Mein Kampf. There were no apologies because none were needed. What he planned was simply reenacting the spread of the British and French overseas empires according to standard eugenic principles, the only difference being that he would be colonising white people. The few Englishmen of influence who had read it were generally supportive because their loathing of Bolshevism was at least as intense as his. They would support anybody who opposed the Reds, as Churchill said after meeting Mussolini in 1927:

If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been wholeheartedly from start to finish with Fascismo’s triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism … I could not help being charmed, as so many other people have been, by his gentle, simple bearing and his calm, detached poise, despite so many burdens and dangers. Any one could see he thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understood it, of the Italian people …

Churchill also believed in eugenics, including sterilisation of the ‘feeble-minded’ as part of a program to improve the English race. In these respects, Churchill was not an extremist. He became the prime minister, dear friend and confidant of kings and queens, the beatified hero of the 20^th Century but when it came to racial hierarchies, Churchill and Hitler were on the same page, as they say. People may object that Churchill was a minor player in the race game but he wasn’t: in 1942, he called Indians “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” In 1943, for the purpose of feeding its armies, Britain engineered a famine in Bengal that killed 3.5million people and left untold millions of children damaged for life. Churchill knew exactly what the British policies would do and pressed ahead with it.

The Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 began with the largest army ever assembled in human history. Over the next four years, between 25-35million Soviet citizens died, including deliberate genocidal programs in the occupied areas. The unspeakable horror of that period is burned into the Russian soul but most people in the West know next to nothing about it. They don’t know that 80% of German casualties were on the OstFront, the Eastern War. Post-war, the Soviet leadership swore: “Never again. Nobody will ever threaten us again,” a vow the US and NATO have completely ignored (the period is captured in the book Khatyn by Ales Adamovich, and the film Come and See, based on the book, also on YouTube; anybody who hasn’t seen it needs to but be warned). It came about entirely because one group of humans decided they were superior beings who had the right to dominate another group, slaughtering them and taking their land for their own glory. Needless to say, the people deemed “inferior” decided otherwise. At the Nuremberg trials, it was agreed that aggressive war is not permissible under any circumstances, that the Nazi leaders who committed that offence were guilty of the gravest crimes and had surrendered their right to live.

The urge to dominate and its equal and opposite urge for freedom are built into us but they are not biological absolutes. Dominating other people feels great but we don’t have to give in to that urge. If we choose, we can resist it and still lead perfectly satisfying lives. The very idea that one group is superior to another and has rights and privileges denied to others is not compatible with a peaceful world. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, and with the ever-growing threat of global warming, we could go further and say that the very idea of superiority is an unacceptable danger to the safety of the planet.

Unfortunately, the twin ideas of racial superiority and racial inferiority live on and have pushed the world into another war. Eighty years after the last great racial war, a group of humans has decided they are superior beings who have the right to dominate another group, slaughtering them and taking their land for their own glory. Once again, the aggressive group has openly declared their intention to invade other nations, to slaughter their people or drive them out while enslaving enough to provide labour, in order to build a glorious empire in which they will reign supreme. Starting in 1896 with the publication of the pamphlet Der Judenstaat, the group known as Zionists have broadcast their belief that, as the “Chosen People,” they are superior to other human beings and thereby have an right inalienable right to the lands and livelihoods of the indigenous people of the Levant. Their starting point is some writings they regard as divinely inspired in which their tribal deity promised them all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18–21). Atheistic Zionists, of whom there are plenty, rely on what they call “historical reasons” to claim the territory although they never specify what legal basis that provides. It has no basis, of course. There are plenty of very wealthy Jewish people in Australia. Imagine that tonight, a group of Aboriginal people knocked on a Jewish door and said: “Hey man, this is our land, you mob stole it from us. We got a real strong historical claim on this land so you lot can just go an’ camp on the street, we’re takin’ over this place.” I doubt very much the occupants would want to move.

Putting that aside, after an absence of 2,000 years, the Zionists decided to occupy what they say is their promised land. Particularly since 1948 when the UN granted them a sizeable part of the region, they have constantly engaged in aggressive activity intended to drive the indigenous population out and/or wipe them out. Because they have managed to gain the unqualified support of the ruling class in the US, they have been able to pursue their goal without let or hindrance and now feel sufficiently encouraged to attack a distant country, Iran, which was never part of the supposed “birthright.” That this takes us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe is dismissed by the Zionist clique and their fanatical supporters in the US as somehow “antisemitic.”

Lost in the noise is the point that, even by their own bloodthirsty standards, the Zionists are acting duplicitously. The covenant or contract between the Judaic tribes and their deity is repeated at different points in their holy book but the core message is crystal clear: “I will give you this land if you keep my law” (e.g. Deuteronomy 28:63). There were something like 613 laws in their book, one of which explicitly states: “Thou shalt not kill.” However, as we watch the world’s first genocide broadcast in real time, it is equally clear that the very people professing to be observant of their religion are committing mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and thoroughly enjoying it. How do they sleep at night? The answer is very simple: by a process of verbal trickery, they have convinced themselves that the indigenous Palestinians are not actually human, so they can be killed as we kill rats and cockroaches. That is, they have adopted the very belief system that allowed the Nazi SS to commit the defining crimes of the 20^th Century, and are now working hard on the defining crimes of the 21^st Century. They believe: “We are superior beings, you are inferior. We therefore have the right to invade your land, to conquer you, to drive you out or slaughter you, and to take your land in order to build a glorious empire.” That is precisely what the Nazis said in 1925, and acted on in 1941. In fact, Netanyahu has openly stated that his plan is that Israel will become a global superpower, potentially dominating the world.

Evil is as evil does. If this was a crime against humanity in 1945, it remains a crime against humanity in 2026. In fact, more so as Israelis are far better educated than the barely-literate German farm boys who followed the swastika to a brutal death on the steppes. The justifications offered by the very sophisticated Zionist propaganda machine are irrelevant. If the death of Anne Frank was a grievous crime, then so too was the death of Hind Rajab. It doesn’t matter how many Jews were killed in Europe so many years ago, the Palestinians were not involved, as the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion admitted in 1956:

Why should the Arabs make peace ? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them ? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them ? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that ? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out [1, p99-100].

Goldmann was clear: “…Ben Gurion is the man principally responsible for the anti-Arab policy … He had no consideration for anyone, friend or foe.”

The urge to dominate is human, it is in all of us. However, the notion that one group of humans is superior to another and therefore has privileges not available to the other and has the right to act on them without restraint leads to atrocities. The US believes it is a nation of superior humans with rights and entitlements not available to others, including the right to attack other nations when it chooses to do so. That supremacist national ethos is not compatible with the safety of the planet. Zionism is a supremacist belief system which is equally destructive of human rights. Combined, these two countries threaten the future of every living thing on earth, and it all comes about because their leaders lack the insight that while dominating others feels wonderful for them, it does not feel good for the oppressed people who must eventually fight back.

1. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

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

****

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.

****

“Trump seems increasingly incoherent. Is he on the edge of mental collapse?”

Since Trump has the power to end life on the planet, the fact that a professor of politics asks that question implies we are in the most serious trouble. The Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds from catastrophe. Does everybody understand what that means? Do the people making the big decisions understand? No, they don’t, and they don’t care. They have more important things on their minds, like smashing their enemies. Two questions arise: Is Trump losing it, and how did we get here?

Q1: Is Trump losing it? Yes, most assuredly. He is 79, in poor general health, with frequent signs there is some health problem requiring regular IV therapy (e.g. lecanemab, for Alzheimer’s Disease). He hardly sleeps, gets practically no exercise, eats junk and can’t start his day before midday then runs out of steam by 5.00pm. This is in the setting of a person of mediocre intellect amd poor education, who struggles to read and knows very little about the real world. As a personality, he is psychopathic and narcissistic, meaning he is incapable of seeing things from another person’s point of view and unable to form emotional bonds. People are simply objects to him, he plays with them for a while then throws them away. He always was and still is totally corrupt and dishonest with no concept of truth: for him, truth is whatever yields a profit for him. At his best, he was jealous, suspicious, vengeful and remorseless in settling scores but his best days are long gone. All his life, he has been impulsive, disorganised, lazy, demanding, scheming, manipulative, full of prejudices and thoroughly unpleasant. Like a toddler, if something catches his eye, he reaches for it (“I want Greenland, I want the Canal…”) but has no idea why and quickly loses interest. Oh, and he has no sense of humour at all (see this one). Now, he is dementing at an accelerating rate.

If he were not very wealthy and the only person who can pull in the votes for the even more wealthy people who own the Republican party, if he were just a suburban grandfather, he probably wouldn’t be in a nursing home yet. A person at this stage of dementia would be at home but wouldn’t be allowed to go out by himself but he probably wouldn’t want to. As long as he had a TV and a regular supply of KFC, he’d be manageable, or maybe throw in a phone that isn’t connected so he could tweet away, happy with the idea the world is listening (much as they did with his father, Fred, when he was dementing; he was put in an office with a phone and a secretary who brought in piles of papers for him to sign). Mary Trump, Donald’s niece by his older brother, Fred Jr, is a astute PhD psychologist with an excellent YouTube channel. She says her uncle now shows the signs that her grandfather showed in his dotage. She’s talking about the person with the Big Red Button on his desk who has just launched an unprovoked, illegal and immoral war of aggression under cover of perfidy and nobody’s doing anything about it. Perhaps they’re waiting for the first nuclear bombs to fall just in case this one isn’t serious.

So we can be satisfied that this malignant buffoon is dementing but it’s actually worse than that. He’s half way, his memory is still relatively intact so he can fool people but his judgement, such as it ever was, is shot. Judgement is probably the highest intellectual function of all, and therefore first to go. It’s not an all-or-none phenomenon, he will have good days and bad, and mornings are usually better than evenings. If he sticks to routine, he can rely on old learned material but if he has to make a decision based on half a dozen conflicting demands, he will just go for the most salient, which is usually: “What’s in this for me?” or “How can I hit my enemies?” He would never consider: “How will this impact other people, will it make life worse for people with limited resources?” That will never come up because it never has once in his life. So we’re told that the decision to invade Iran was pushed on him by Netanyahu who told him that the two spurious “assassination” attempts in late 2024 were organised by Iranians and will have another go so Trump should get in first. That was enough. He never considered things like … Strait of Hormuz; Gulf country refineries and gas plants; body bags of US troops; impact on poor countries, and so on, because those things mean absolutely nothing to him, even if he had heard of them. He doesn’t care about dead US troops, he wriggled out of Vietnam and said soldiers who got killed were suckers. He certainly doesn’t care about dead Iranian children. The reason he fell for Netanyahu’s ploy is partly personality, partly dementia but also he can’t cope intellectually with all the demands and is increasingly agitated and unable to focus. Even a healthy person would be struggling with all the trouble he’s stirred up. That’s why he doesn’t make many appearances and his speech is slurred during them. I’d say he’s being kept upright by drugs. Same thing happened to Hitler after the July 1944 plot and explosion. His physician, Dr Theodore Morell, who was a total scoundrel, was pumping him full of a cocktail of amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, home-made vitamins and so on.

So is Trump on the edge of mental collapse? Yes. He should be removed from office immediately, but his “loyal” minions are all too scared to make the first move because they fear everybody will turn on them and they’ll be finished. Mainly, lèse-majesté is just too, too scary for the poor dears as most of them are useless, grasping psychopaths themselves.

That’s the immediate question, and so to the second: How did we get here? Again, it splits in two parts. The first relates to the way we humans form our governments, and the second asks what it is about the American system of government that allows such a disastrously unqualified person to swoop in and snatch the prize. We’d like to say that governments exist to get the job done, to make people’s lives better and smoother, to help those who need help and provide opportunities for those who will use them to benefit the community but that’s not true. Governments exist because some people are obsessed by power and work diligently and mostly dishonestly to build a hierarchy to elevate themselves so they can dominate everybody else, just because dominating feels so much better than being dominated. There is a strong biological basis for this based in the testosterone economy [1].

As a result, and whenever they can, humans will build a far-reaching dominance heirarchy that gives enormous power to a few people at the peak, and none for those at the bottom, such that the privileged can loot the community to their hearts’ content, bestowing vast wealth and luxury on themselves while those at the bottom of the pile live in holes in rubbish dumps and eat what they can forage. As people ascend the hierarchy, their sense of privilege and entitlement grows and expands to consume all the resources in reach. It’s a bit like Parkinson’s Law, which says that the amount of work to be done expands to fill the time available and to consume all the labour (see Oscar Wilde’s comment: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.” The modern version: The police state is expanding to arrest all the people dissatisfied with the expanding police state). As people go up the heirarchy, their sense of privilege and entitlement grows to satisfy their sense of their exalted status. This applies equally to men and women, as in “Let them eat cake.” Throughout most of history, kings lived in unbelievable luxury while the poor starved in freezing hovels or slaves died of malaria in muddy swamps (compare a small example, Brighton’s Royal Pavilion with the picture of poverty from early Victorian England in Friedrich Engel’s account [2]).

There’s nothing actually wrong with the idea of hierarchies, if you want a job done, generally it improves efficiency but their execution fails on two points. First, the ever-expanding sense of privilege of the few. The wealthy have no sense that there should be a limit to their greed: the wife of newspaper magnate and convicted felon, Conrad Black, allegedly said: “My extravance knows no bounds.” She wasn’t joking. It never occurs to them that enough is enough, that the extra they take means less for somebody else. And they don’t care. They genuinely believe they deserve it and the poor don’t. Elena Ceaucescu, wife of the Romanian dictator, apparently said just that. There had been a birthday party for one of her grandchildren at one of their country estates. The guests ate one or two pieces of the enormous cake, then it was sent back to the kitchen. The staff knew it would be thrown out so they started to cut some for themselves. Elena came into the kitchen, saw what was happening and grabbed all the cake, throwing it in the bin. “You don’t deserve that,” she snapped, and stalked out. A year or two later, she was shot.

Second problem is the quality of the people attracted to power hierarchies. They draw people who are intrigued, fascinated, beguiled and turned on by power but the process is self-winnowing. For anybody in a government or political party or business or club or church of any sort, there will come a day when they have to make a decision: choose between principled conduct that leads to loss of status, and unprincipled that opens the door to the corridors of power. Most people will choose integrity and accept a lower status but some don’t want that. For them, scruples are a handicap on the golden road to glory, so they ditch them and scramble eagerly up the slope, pausing only to kick clods of dirt on anybody coming behind them. This applies across the board and has done since Homo sapiens first appeared.

With very few exceptions, the political process throughout the world favours the self-interested and unscrupulous. People may start with noble ideas but they don’t last long. They soon realise that fortune favours the malleable so they mould themselves to the prevailing winds. The current prime minister of Australia, one Anthony Albanese, used to be strongly supportive of the Palestinian cause but no longer. These days, he and his government are 110% behind the US-Israel axis now and have no problem with US bases in this country playing major roles in the current war of aggression against Iran. For example, the instructions to sink the unarmed Iranian frigate IRIS Dena and leave the sailors to drown were received at Pine Gap station and relayed through NW Cape submarine station.

Worldwide, in every walk of life, political processes have evolved that select for the self-interested, the greedy and unscrupulous, the hypocritical (yes, Mr Scott Morrison, former PM of Oz and loud member of the scandalous Hillsong Prosperity Gospel Church, we’re most definitely talking about you), the brutal and the contemptuous, for deluded religious fanatics, messiahs, mass murderers, political saviours and all the rest of our political masters. We think we’re going to get liberation and democracy but we end up with kakistrocracy, government by the worst (apparently from Greek κακά, meaning poo).

That’s the generic fault in political systems, but the American system is much worse than most because it concentrates so much power in the presidency. What in other countries is a gradual pyramid of power in the US is a pillar rising high with the president seated alone on top. The president is executive head and appoints the cabinet who are beholden to him. Unlike the Westminster parliamentary system, and beyond a perfunctory screening by the Senate, US cabinet members are not responsible to the electorate. In fair electoral systems, cabinet ministers and even prime ministers can and do lose their seats. However, if the US Senate is controlled by the presidency, as this one is, then they simply wave through whomever the president pushes forward, with predictably disastrous results. Add to that the pervasive influence of dark money and hidden lobbies, and the system is set up for autocracy, as has happened. The Supreme Court has been stacked with corrupt and partisan sycophants; the military hasn’t so much as blinked in launching an illegal war of aggression (yet again); the Dept of Justice is run by a seriously paranoid woman who sees her job as hounding Trump’s opponents; the cowed House of Representatives is terrified of being “primaried” by a Trump wannabe; the Secretary for Health thinks he knows everything about health (as does Donald “drink bleach” Trump); police and immigration services are morphing into a Sturmabteilung; regulatory bodies hamstrung; on and on.

We could easily write a computer program for this sort of government, and it would end up with a fascist dictatorship just because the lust for power only ever ratchets up, it never ratchets down. This is humanity’s fatal flaw. The only saving feature is that the lust for power that resides in each of us is balanced by a slower but more determined drive to resist being oppressed. When the domination becames unbearable, when people feel they are about to lose the most important thing in their lives, they will rise and fight for freedom. The great revolutions of the past 200 years, France, Russia, China, didn’t come from nothing. They were created and crafted by the blind lust for power by a small minority who decided they were appointed by breeding or history or God to rule, and who found out the hard way that not everybody shared their opinion of their majesty. Any group on earth who feels superior to their neighbours and who decides to push them around is going to face a day of reckoning.

The power elite in the US in particular feel they have the moral and historical right to boss the rest of the world around and they have the bombers to do it, so they do. Israel is driven by the Zionist notion that they are special people who have the right to shove their neighbours aside, or kill them, in order to steal their land. That is exactly what Hitler set out in his vision for Germany [3]: the Germans, he said, are superior people, the Slavs inferior; Germany doesn’t have much land and can never achieve its predestined greatness while the Slavs have vast areas and will never amount to much; therefore according to the laws of nature, the Germans are entitled to invade the Slavic lands, conquer them, eliminate half their population and enslave the rest as farm and industrial labourers so Germany can build a glorious empire that will last a thousand years. This is precisely the program of the fanatic Zionist government in Israel with their plan for Greater Israel. It didn’t end well, either for Germany or the 25million Slavs they killed. Trump started this war late on Friday night, thinking it would all be over by the time the stock markets opened on Monday morning but it isn’t running to plan. Truly. That is how our world is being run.

This dumb war will not end well for the US either but, in the process of wrecking their own country, they may well end everybody else’s, too. It’s essential that the rest of the world work out where their interests lie, and form an immovable bloc to resist the US-Israel axis. The notion that two countries with 3% of the world’s population can hold the 97% to ransom just be creating havoc is beyond absurd. It’s time to ditch NATO, dump the USD as reserve currency, leave SWIFT, reform the WTO, IMF and World Bank without the US, swap to sustainable energy, reduce globalisation, dump neoliberal economics and so on. The US and Israel can live in their own little bubble, thinking of Raptures and Messiahs, while the real world gets on with business. Every crisis is an opportunity and we need to grasp this one. Either our politicians grow a pair or get shoved aside.

That’s possibly a gloomy view of humanity but I believe we’re well and truly past the point where we can kid ourselves our governments are good and they know what they’re doing. They aren’t, and they don’t. Practically every country in the West is governed by self-interested trash and if we don’t do something about it very soon, we as a species and possibly the entire biosphere may not have a future.

References:

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

2. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive, at marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

3. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Germany’s policy in Eastern Europe. Chap 14 in Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda 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.

****

Fresh from the joy of blowing up a huge oil depot on the outskirts of the enormous city of Tehran (about 20million) and poisoning the air, soil, water and 20million lungs for years (here, at 8.25), the US-Israeli axis have now started their usual trick of destroying hospitals and health centres. This is itself a crime but it is in the setting of an undeclared and unprovoked aggressive war, the “supreme international crime,” which was launched under cover of “negotiations to prevent war.” That is, the US and its Zionist overlords are also guilty of perfidy, the crime of treachery of the most despicable kind. What they have done is actually worse than infiltrating your troops dressed in the other side’s uniforms. When a German unit led by Otto Skorzeny did this in the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944, the disguised troops were rounded up and summarily shot by the US Army. In practice, if not in law, perfidy is punishable by death. Res ipso loquitur: Trump and Netanyahu are guilty of perfidy.

How did we get to this stage? There was a time when the noble, benevolent and God-fearing countries of the West stood shoulder to shoulder to protect the poor and downtrodden of the world against the relentless spread of godless communism in its crusade to crush the flame of freedom with its vast, robotic hordes of brainwashed troops. Now the position has been reversed. The poor and downtrodden of the world need protection from the West, as novelist John Updike warned:

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible (Rabbit Redux, 1971).

Trump won office promising never to get involved in foreign “forever” wars again. In barely 14 months, the US has bombed seven countries, each attack without provocation on essentially defenceless countries. The USSR never did that, China has never done that; Iran hasn’t attacked another country for 300 years. Add to that the six countries Israel has bombed in the past year using American planes, bombs and missiles, provided free and fueled by the US, and then look at the rest of the world: outside Ukraine, also provoked by the West, hardly a single bomb or even an apple core has fallen on foreign heads: Malum est sicut malum facit. Evil is as evil does. How did we get to this stage? How did we turn into the villains? (NB: Pakistan and Afghanistan are the exceptions).

The short answer is that nothing has changed, it’s just that now we see we’ve all been fooled. We’ve been led up the garden path by experts in duplicity, by people unburdened by the mimsy morality of the mumbling middleclass muttonheads who voted for them. Trump promised to end the Ukraine war on Day 1: 423 days later, it’s still going. He promised to reduce inflation. It’s going back up. To bring back jobs. The US lost 92,000 non-farm jobs in February alone. The only promise he’s kept is to deport foreigners but that’s having a terrible effect on farming and construction. And people still support him.

There’s nothing new or uniquely American about this. The headline in today’s Economist newsletter (paywall) screams: “Iran strikes Qatar’s main energy hub.” Right at the bottom, it says this is in retaliation for Israel attacking Iran’s main gas field after it had been warned not to. 90% of readers don’t get to the end of the article. They know that. Go back in history. Everybody knows the remarkable story of the British East India Company, how it brought industry and civilisation to India and made heaps in the process. Some may have heard of the Opium Wars, when Britain’s Royal Navy attacked China for trying to prohibit imports of opium, which was having a devastating effect on the country. Unheard is where the opium came from: from vast plantations built on peasants’ farmland in India by the East India Co., which forced the peasants off their land then employed them for next to nothing to grow the opium. When China objected by burning the bales of opium, the saintly Queen Victoria, whose Royal Estate held great parcels of East India Co. shares, lent them the Navy to blow the Chinese resistance away. When Britain first went to India, the standard of living in India was actually higher than in Britain. When it left, 250 years and $43trillion (modern money) later, India was devastated and will probably never recover.

The story has always been: “We’re good, they’re bad, it’s our duty to blow them away.” There’s no truth in this. For 500 years, Europeans have looted the planet, attacking, plundering, slaughtering with let or hindrance. Any opposition has immediately brought the most vicious response the invaders could muster. Look at the African region of Congo which was left out of the “Scramble for Africa” because it was impenetrable. In the 19^th Century, the market in rubber was exploding, fortunes were being made overnight. Belgium didn’t have an overseas empire so the king, Leopold II, decided he would take the Congo as his personal estate and force the locals to grow rubber for him. The savagery of the occupation was legendary: “The brutality of King Leopold II in his former colony of the Congo Free State was well documented; up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died between 1885 and 1908” (Wikipedia; see the photos). Nobody cared. The slaves were black, there were plenty more where they came from.

This was not exceptional. When the British colonists arrived in Australia in 1788, the Aboriginal population has been estimated at 300,000. Within ten years of whites arriving in any area, up to 90% of the Aboriginal population had died. They had no resistance to Western diseases. Smallpox devastated the tribes around Sydney while in the Kimberley, in the far north west where I worked, measles and whooping cough had the same effect. Aboriginals who resisted were met with gunfire, from whites and from the Aboriginal police brought in from other areas according to the standard British policy developed in India and other colonies.

Making hay off poor people has never gone out of fashion. Former UK Labour prime minister Tony Blair has been busy since he was booted out. Starting from nothing, his personal fortune has grown to £60-75million, and that’s only the money he has declared. Like all other wealthy people, he will have at least the same amount hidden in offshore tax havens. This is the “Epstein class,” the new name for the UHNWIs, the ultra-high net worth individuals who, with a few pretentious exceptions, travel silently and ceaselessly around the world, arranging deals, buying, selling, trading in everything licit and illicit, moving money from one tax haven to another, hiding assets, swapping favours and links, wheeling, dealing and stealing. Author and journalist Oliver Bullough wrote about them a few years ago in Moneyland: why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to take it back. It seems we didn’t take it back and they’ve been having a great time at our expense. The slowly unfolding Epstein business is showing what the wealthy and powerful get up to when they think nobody’s watching, but what we’ve seen so far is barely scratching the surface. The sex trafficking is actually a diversion, a tiny part of the oceans of corruption that take place out of our sight.

It’s like Trump’s “war against narco-terrorists.” With no authorisation, he stages “interdictions” of alleged drug traffickers, using the US Navy as a set of bath toys to kill people on the high seas. This is properly known as murder and piracy but that’s ignored. At a cost of at least $10million per boat, he keeps his dimwitted followers happy, thinking he is doing something about the drug problem. The whole thing is performative, a show for the evening news: all he’s doing is diverting attention from the movements of vast sums of drug money, at least $500billion a year, all of which is readily tracked if they want to. He has no intention of interfering with that, it would bankrupt a lot of banks. However, it seems we now stand at a crossroads. This whole empire thing is on the verge of coming unstuck. Urged on by the evil Benzion Mileikowsky (aka Netanyahu), Trump has launched what must be the most brainless, unplanned, disorganised stuff-up of a war in history.

This monstrous mess has been 73 years in the making, since 1953 when Britain’s MI6 and the fledgeling CIA engineered a coup to overthrow the legitimately elected, mildly socialist and nationalist Iranian government because they wanted to nationalise the oil industry. This time, after at least 25years of grim warnings that they intended to attack Iran, the US and Israel have finally done so. After at least 24years of grim warnings from Iran that, if attacked, they would immediately close the Strait of Hormuz, thus strangling 25% of the world’s seaborne trade in oil and gas, the bombs started falling. Undeterred and with no plan, the US and Israel, its partner in this and many other crimes, have attacked Iran. To the collective astonishment and indignation of the West, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, thus blocking 25% of the world’s seaborne trade in oil and gas, thereby threatening global recession, not to overlook farming failure as 30% of the world’s production of the essential fertiliser, urea, also comes out through the Strait, as well as a lot of food and machinery and chemicals going the other way.

Who could possibly have expected this? Who could possibly have understood the labyrinthine complexity of the universal conditional, foisted on us by those wily Greeks (and the Indians, and the Chinese and Arabs and everybody with half a brain): If A, then B. If A happens, then B will inevitably follow as a law of nature. If you pull the cat’s tail, she will scratch you. If you touch the stove, it will burn you. If you drink and drive, you will go to prison. If you attack Iran, she will immediately disrupt the world economy for as long as it takes.

The blinding stupidity of the people ruling the world today is far, far beyond breathtaking, it’s genuinely frightening. Their braindead war has already started a huge economic meltdown, with the most vulnerable countries suffering first: indebted African and Asian countries that need ships to export their products so they can buy food, and so on. The Gulf countries, who have been very willing partners in this business since 1979, hosting American bases and enabling the attacks, are in the shit. Their economies are totally dependent on exporting hydrocarbons and associated petrochemicals, including urea, and importing food by ship. With the boundless flow of petrodollars, their populations have grown far beyond sustainable levels. The huge cities that didn’t exist even 40 years ago, Dubai, Doha, Manaman and all the rest of the steel and glass towers poking out of the desert, they’re uninhabitable without vast inputs of energy and money. 90% of their water comes from desalination which is powered by fossil fuels, not the sun. What are they going to do when they can’t flush their turds? They don’t have food reserves, it’s all JIT, just in time delivery, so maybe if they don’t eat, they won’t have any turds.

Everything comes and goes by ship. Through the Strait of Hormuz. Which is closed. Because the fuckwits in DC and TA thought they were so clever that they could suspend the universal constant, that they could attack Iran and the Strait of Hormuz would miraculously remain open to traffic. So very soon, all those millions of people in the Gulf states will start to get hungry and hot and thirsty but they can’t get out by ship because the Strait is closed and their airports and highways are within missile range. Needless to say, the ten million labourers and domestics from the Subcontinent and other places will be first to suffer but nobody worries about them, certainly not the Epstein class.

Who could possibly have expected any of this? Damned Iranians, they’re just so unfair, don’t they know their role in our 73 year drama of psychopathic grandiosity is to roll over and play dead?

Two huge questions arise. They say you get the government you deserve but I don’t believe the 97% of the world who live outside those two countries have done anything so bad as to deserve what is happening now. That’s not quite true. Through inertia and just wanting a quiet life, we have negligently allowed the political arena to become a playground for the corrupt, the amoral, the self-interested and the utterly heartless – for psychopaths, in other words. I don’t think it’s ever been any different, see the example of the East India Company’s drug dealing, but this time it’s pushed us to the brink of nuclear war. Trump was stupid enough to ignore all the advice he was given (see here for a very knowledgeable disccussion of how he was fooled into this disaster). Given he launched the war with practically no objectives or plans, he’s stupid enough to think that if he’s losing, which he is now, he could pull off a victory with a few nuclear bombs on Tehran. I doubt that any of the junior psychopaths around him would have the courage to say: “No. You’re not going to do that.”

Netanyahu has declared he has waited 40 years to attack Iran, no reason given; if he is about to lose, I think he’s sufficiently evil to say “If I’m going down, I’m going to pull them down with me.” The Samson Option, as it happens. His goal has always been to bring about Greater Israel; that way, he can go down in history as the greatest Jewish leader since Noah. He doesn’t believe all this messiah crap but the rest of his deluded fascist coalition do, and they won’t let him back down. Pushed into a corner, the one he has just made for himself, I think he would do it.

In the interests of sleeping at night, let’s assume that doesn’t happen. Let’s assume the Trump-Netanyahu clown car bumbles along and doesn’t fall off the road. Europe’s economy starts to collapse as they have refused to buy Russian gas in the past so now, when they need it, Mr Putin simply laughs and reminds them he has reliable customers to his east. Japan and South Korea, which get 90% of their oil and gas from the Middle East, start to sink very quickly. India is allowed to get some fuel so they’ll struggle along. Australia gets all its jet fuel and other chemicals from the Gulf so we’ll soon feel the pinch.

In the Gulf, refineries are already shutting down but they’re not like the aircon in your house, you can turn them off today and back on tomorrow. Oh no, once closed, a refinery takes a minimum of months to restart but oil wells have to be capped. That’s a huge job in itself but they don’t restart just be taking the cap off, lots of them will collapse. The large aluminium refinery in Qatar, source of 30% of the world’s aluminium (Russia and China make much of the rest), has already closed and will take six months or more to restart. Their huge gas train has stopped production due to damage and no ships to load; they’re a bit easier to restart but will still need months of very expensive repairs, assuming they can get the parts through the Strait of Hormuz. This was all totally predictable. Trump is now saying he wasn’t warned this would happen but he’s lying, of course.

Assuming the whole place isn’t incinerated in a nuclear war, what’s likely to happen? It’s a bit hard to tell, our “leaders” are not rational people. Their only interest in life is domination. They are true narcisso-fascists. The Iranians are obviously very rational, they’ve been organising for this for decades. After the debacle of two attacks under cover of negotiations, they’re not going to fall for that again. I think they will hold out until they get what they want: the US out of the Middle East and Israel unable to launch any more attacks, meaning no air force and, above all, their nuclear bombs removed. However, if that happens, and it seems likely, both the US and Israel will be at serious risk of falling apart. Start with the US.

Empires don’t unravel cleanly. Sometimes they collapse in a firestorm, such as after both World Wars, and sometimes they just crumble like the car in Blues Brothers (Britain, for example). Can the American empire, which has been built on “full spectrum domination,” survive being cut off at the knees? The narcissistic hurt to the US would destroy their ruling class. The whole point of empire is not to shoot all the peons, they’re needed to work the mines and plantations, but to keep them all terrified. If they stop fearing, the empire is exposed as a gigantic con job. If the US fails on its promise to keep the Gulf states safe, which it has, what does that mean to its military colony down here? Australia is a huge aircraft carrier for the empire. Pine Gap is the most important US spy base outside Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA.

Having American bases hasn’t made the Gulf states safe, it’s pulled them into the shooting range and painted a target on their foreheads. The world will see this and everybody will be having second thoughts. I hope so. The Americans should get out of the Middle East, the Islamic world can sort itself out without Americans constantly interfering and playing one off against the other. OK, then why stop at West Asia? What about Europe? Isn’t it time they stopped playing tough guys and realised they need to make peace with their large neighbour to the East? All the Russians want is to stop being threatened, and to be treated with respect. The nation of Tolstoy and Pushkin and Tschaikovsky and Shostakovich is tired of being treated like a mixture between Genghis Khan and Uncle Tom. If the oh so clever and cultured West Europeans can’t sort that out, they’re not trying.

But what about the empire itself? Could it survive without constantly beating its chest about how wonderful and powerful it is and blowing up fishermen on the high seas? I don’t think so. John Updike also said: “America is a vast conspiracy to keep you happy.” The ordinary people of the US are kept in line by a ceaseless stream of lies and propaganda about how lucky they are to live in the Land of the Free and the World Policeman and The Most Powerful Nation in History blah blah, when the reality is they can’t afford to go to hospital and their schools are falling apart and their trains and subways are rat-infested pissoirs and their politicians are all totally corrupt and screwing children. If the peons start to suspect the truth, the propaganda machine switches to the old faithful, “Look out, drug dealers and child molesters are swarming across the border to murder you in your sleep,” i.e. make them scared. Drop Site Daily reported this morning:

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is set to walk away with an $887 million compensation package after the Trump administration facilitated a monopolistic merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. As the agreement is being finalized, thousands of workers are simultaneously set to lose their jobs.

It is impossible to get that sort of money honestly. All it took was a donation to Trump’s PAC. Meanwhile, young Kushner J, Trump’s incomparably venal son-in-law and peripatetic Chabad Zionist, has been busy raking in billions of Arab money while doubling as a “negotiator,” a job for which he has zero qualifications, was not elected and didn’t get Congressional approval. That is, he got it by nepotism and promising to give some of the loot to Uncle Donny. When the common people in Coldwater, Kansas (pop. 687), realise they’ve been cheated by experts, they won’t stop with shaking their fingers at the rich. Once the façade starts to fall away, their rage will continue until the tumbrils are rolling. That’s what happens to empires.

And Israel? Their position is much more precarious. Israel meets all the criteria for a clericalist-fascist state [1, pp3-34, 165-171]. It’s held together by two things. First, the single idea that it is surrounded by crazed and satanic enemies who dream of nothing more than cutting off every Jewish head and drinking the blood. Hatred of their neighbours is the only thing that the different factions of Israeli society have in common, it stops them tearing each other apart. A fascist state can’t say “Hooray, all our enemies are vanquished, we can relax and enjoy the view.” The minute it does that, all the previously repressed tensions explode and it flies apart:

As is well known in Israel, hatred between secular Jews cannot match in intensity the mutual hatred between diverse groups of religious Jews… internecine hatred between religious Jews, and especially between Haredi rabbis, is often virulent [2, Chap. 3].

Second, American money, weapons and technology keeps them together. Financially, Israel has been on life support since before it began. Without the billions of “aid” and “donations” (including $100billion from Germany which everybody forgets) and free weapons and nuclear industry and IT and surveillance industry, its economy would collapse. Yes, they have some gas now but that’s all, the rest of their economy is entirely artificial. There are more mines and more farms within 100km of my house than there are in the whole of Israel. They have no productive base. Half their water comes from desalination and that could be blown up before you read this because Trump very foolishly had an Iranian desalination plant bombed. Great way to conduct a war, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing but that’s what happens when you give halfwits and psychopaths nuclear weapons.

So if the Americans aren’t there to foment trouble and protect Israel from the universal conditional (“If you kill Palestinians and steal their land, their relatives will come after you”), and the Muslim countries of West Asia and North Africa make their long-delayed peace, the days of the nuclear-armed, incurably aggressive Zionist-apartheid state will be numbered. That would be the best possible outcome. The worst is too scary to think about.

References:

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

2. Shahak I, Mezvinsky N (1999). Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press: London.

****

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.

****

I’ve been told I’m not to use the expressions “the Epstein class,” or “Operation Epstein fury” because the very powerful US-Zionist lobby, the Anti-Defamation League, has ruled that those term are “antisemitic.” Their reasoning isn’t clear but meantime, I’m still allowed to call the present war of aggression launched by Israel and the US “Operation Epic F*ck-Up.” Because it is. Even bearing in mind that the US has started and lost a dozen wars since 1945, this stands head and shoulders below the rest.

Kevin Walmsley is an American engineer who lives in Kunming, China. A couple of times a week, he posts brief reports on Substack and YouTube as Inside China / Business. Each time, he takes some claim made by US or Western commentators about China’s industry or economics etc. and shows with a few graphs that they’re talking rubbish. This week, he’s looked at the economics of attempting to defend against missile and drone attacks, and the effects of the fighting in the Gulf on international air travel. Bearing in mind that an Iranian Shahed drone costs from $25-50,000, depending on its configuration, and they can make 100 a month, and that each Patriot or Iron Dome ground-to-air defence missile costs from $0.5-4million but they can only make ten a month, and at least half of them miss their target, then the economics of the war Trump and Netanyahu started are not looking good. No way. Moreover, Western airlines have taken a massive hit because they have to divert away from Iranian airspace but they’re not allowed to fly over Russia, and jet fuel has doubled in price in a week and will get much, much higher as it can’t be shipped, but nobody wants to fly anyway, so he expects major airlines to start going broke before long. Add to that the effect of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, which it has long threatened to do if attacked, which upset Herr Drumpf:

If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far. Additionally, we will take out easily destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again — Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them

That is, he is threatening genocide. However, Iran was attacked so they have closed the Strait and no oil can get out, nor chemicals, nor fertilisers, nor plastics; and none of the food that the Gulf countries import (80% of their consumption) or machines can get in; and Europe is seriously dependent on Gulf oil since Biden and Co. blew up the Russian Nord Stream II gas pipeline; and Ukraine won’t allow Russian gas or oil over its territory, all of which adds up to Europe teetering on the brink of collapse. Add to that the news that Gulf oil and gas producers have had to cease production, which means their refineries and gas plants have to be emptied and put on maintenance and it takes a minimum of a month to get them going again; and the world doesn’t have a month’s supply of oil and gas in reserve, then you really have to ask: “Who are the clowns who started this monstrous cock up? What were they thinking? What was their goal? How did they think they’d achieve it?”

One thing is clear: for 40 years, Netanyahu has dreamed of destroying Iran. He says so (it’s actually 47 years, since the Revolution in 1979; see Gantz, fmr defence minister here, starting at 0.55). US presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden resisted; Trump gave in. I don’t think we need to bother explaining that, he’s a dementing fool who is easily manipulated by promises of making lots of money and is terrified of the Epstein files leaking. What we would like to know is: What happened to the chiefs of staff and the National Budget Office and the CIA economics section who are supposed to understand things like the fact that 20million barrels of oil passes through Hormuz each day, 20% of world seaborne oil trade, and Europe and Japan and Korea are totally dependent on it? Didn’t they understand that airlines actually need fuel to keep flying, that they’re not huge gliders? That ships don’t move without bunkers? Where are the adults in the US who are supposed to rein in the pirates and gungho adventurers?

We can’t rely on Trump’s cabinet because he chose them on the basis of their fanatical loyalty to him. Hegseth, the so-called secretary of war is no use, he’s a fanatical christian nationalist (read: fascist) who just loves the idea of killing people. He approved the attack on the Iranian frigate that was returning from the regatta in India; he knew it was unarmed and was carrying a heap of dignitaries who’d gone for the ride; and he knew the submarine that sank it would not stop to rescue survivors, as it is required to do and as its captain knew it was required to do. So we can write him off. We can write off another important person, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, because she is seriously paranoid. Her performance before the Congressional committee a week or two ago was bizarre. Every time she was asked a question, she launched a vicious personal attack on the member who was interrogating her. She saw everything as a direct personal attack on her and her saint, D Trump. That’s paranoid, but not psychotic like Trump’s “White House director of faith matters,” one Paula White, who is completely off her head. Rubio, the secretary of state, better known as Narco Rubio because of his family connections, spilled the beans when he said they launched the attack because they knew Israel was going to attack Iran and if they did, then the Iranians would target American “assets” (radar, bases, etc) in the Gulf so they thought they’d better get in first, which is a crime (here, at 4.00). The rest of them are a bunch of liars, crooks and carpetbaggers, none worse than Trump’s nauseating son-in-law who is making a fortune out of all this, so we can’t expect any sense from them.

I don’t get this at all. Most of these people have university degrees so they’re not lacking intelligence. They have worked in and around major corporations and public service for decades, so they have some sort of experience. They were born into the closed world of wealth, power and privilege; they know exactly what goes on. They know everybody who’s anybody, and they know precisely who’s doing what with whom, where and for how much. They know that if you attack somebody, that person is going to get you back because that’s exactly what they do themselves. Before any attack, the military and CIA run these elaborate and very expensive “war games” where they start with what they want to achieve and then have to work out what the other side will do in response. Surely they can work out that if they attack Iran, it will retaliate with missiles, and that the Israeli missile defence system (Iron Dome, etc) gets its tracking info from the very high-powered and expensive US radar bases in the Gulf countries, so the first action the Iranians would have to take would be to destroy the American forward radar bases. Which is exactly what happened. I knew they would do that and the reason I knew they would do that’s because that is exactly what I would do (there is a fairly long account of it here by Richard Medhurst, a UK based reporter who was born in Syria to a Syrian mother and UK father, who speaks fluent Arabic and gets along in Hebrew; his bleached hair is recent).

I can’t answer why the Americans allowed themselves to be drawn into another “forever war,” especially as their president promised there would be no more; hubris, I expect, plus his fear of going to prison. As for the Israelis, the world needs to know that their plan for the past 80 years has been the total destruction of the entire Islamic Middle East. Not just Gaza, not just Lebanon, but the lot: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, now Iran, and their next target is Turkey, with Egypt and the rest of the Gulf to follow. This is all set out in their eschatology. There will be a mighty war in the Middle East; the Jews will triumph and build their Third Temple, their messiah will arrive, Jews will rule the world then be taken up to heaven while the rest of humanity goes to burn in hell because that’s where they came from.

Watch this video from beginning to end, especially the two rabbis at 2.55 and 11.35. The producers are reputable (I’ve checked). The videos are now quite old, perhaps 25 years or so. At the time, the belief system they propound was considered fairly extreme but these people and their millions of followers are now mainstream right wing, in Israel and in the diaspora, which more or less means the US. They are supported by the fanatical christian nationalists (they don’t get a capital C because it’s a heresy) who echo that view with the small exception that all Jews will also be sent to the deep fryer for eternity. The second speaker, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (1902-1994) was leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect and hugely influential. He described the difference between Jewish and gentile souls in this way:

The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species … An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness … A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity. It is written, ‘And the strangers shall stand and feed your flocks’ [Isaiah 61:5]. The entire creation (of non-Jews) exists only for the sake of the Jews.

This is the driving principle behind the attack on Iran. It is amplified by Netanyahu’s urgent desire to satisfy the ultra-fanatics who voted for him to bring on the war that will lead to what they believe will be Zionism’s triumph.

We live in exceedingly dangerous times. A very large part of the world is being run by a coalition of religious and political extremists working hand in hand with the deeply corrupt business and political Epstein class, although it’s hard to tell them apart, not one of whom has the sense to look ahead and try to work out the consequences of their actions. Everybody knows that since the MH-17 disaster over Ukraine in 2014, in the event of a war, planes are not allowed to fly anywhere near it. If they can’t go the direct route, it costs them a heap more. Everybody knows that if the Strait of Hormuz closes for any reason, Europe and half the world are caught in the squirrel grip. Why can these people not think ahead? And if they can’t think 24 hours ahead, can we trust them to think decades ahead on something like global warming? No, we can’t. If so-called christian nationalists think that literally setting the world on fire is a good thing, can we trust them to make proper decisions about firing Tomahawk missiles (at $5million each) at a girls’ school? No, we can’t, they’re not Christians at all, they’re an apocalyptic heresy. If we said to Hegseth and all his mates “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matt.5.9), they would fall over, shrieking with laughter.

We’re in trouble, ladies and gentlemen. The world is being run by fanatics and fockwits who get their rocks off by dominating everybody else for their own advantage. They believe they can do no wrong, that everybody who disagrees with them is satanic and must be destroyed, and that violence is purifying. Remember that these people are not mad, any more than the Nazis or the British imperialists were mad. I could say this is turbo-charged narcisso-fascism but it’s worse than that. It’s truly messianic (see here for a good account of this mind-set; check the photo parody of the Last Supper, that’s Ms White in white channeling God).

Kevin Walmsley always finishes his videos and posts with two words: Be good. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

I was interviewed for a podcast in Switzerland; the interviewer is a physics graduate interested in psychology:

The Nexus

The Nexus Pod | Jock (Niall) McLaren - The Rule of Narcissism | Podcast #15

Dr. McLaren is a retired Australian psychiatrist, critic and author with decades of clinical experience. Trained in medicine and the philosophy of science, Niall takes the exotic approach of applying these psychological insights in geopolitics. He has published several book, including the most fascinating Narcisso-Fascism. My article mentioned in the cl…

Listen now

a month ago · 1 like · Mark Solar

****

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.

****

Where do we start? After the Trump regime kidnapped the head of state of Venezuela, I said that if he gets away with it, he’ll try something bigger. I was right. He and his mate Netanyahu just murdered the spiritual head of some 250million Shia Muslims.

It’s tempting to say something like “Madness is engulfing the world,” except it’s not madness. There isn’t the slightest hint of insanity in the action of the US-Israel axis in attacking Iran. In clear consciousness, they have planned this for months, fully aware that in launching an aggressive war, they are committing the “supreme international crime,” illegal both in international law and under US law. They know precisely what they’re doing. With great precision, they positioned troops and weapons of fearsome power exactly where they wanted them in order to produce maximum damage to civil and military sites in Iran. Moreover, every member of ther armed forces knows exactly that in engaging in an unprovoked attack, they are committing a major crime.

Once again, the US pretended to engage in negotiations with Iran and then attacked without warning, this time in the holy month of Ramadan after the meals to break the fast when everybody goes to bed early as they have to be up early. Within a few hours, they had blown up a girls’ primary school, killing at least 175 people, mostly children, and injuring many more. Since then and following Israel’s plan in Gaza, they have selectively bombed at least ten hospitals as well as important civil infrastructure, which is itself a war crime. Even as the news of those crimes was being broadcast, Australia’s prime minister was first to issue a statement supporting what are, in law, criminal acts:

Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression. For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation.

Iran directed at least two attacks on Australian soil in 2024. These appalling acts targeting Australia’s Jewish community were intended to create fear, divide our society and challenge our sovereignty. In response, Australia took the unprecedented steps of expelling Iran’s Ambassador, suspending operations at our embassy in Tehran, and listing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a state sponsor of terrorism. Our Government has sanctioned more than 200 Iranian-linked individuals, including more than 100 linked to the IRGC.

With international partners, including the United States and the G7, we have called for the Iranian regime to uphold the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Iran’s citizens. These calls have gone unheeded. Instead, the regime has instigated a brutal crackdown on its own people leaving thousands of Iranian civilians dead. A regime that relies on the repression and murder of its own people to retain power is without legitimacy.

It has long been recognised that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to global peace and security. The international community has been clear that the Iranian regime can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. The United Nations Security Council has reimposed sanctions on Iran for failing to comply with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the International Atomic Energy Agency Board has formally declared Iran in non-compliance with its non-proliferation safeguards obligations.

We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.

This bit of drivel is stuffed full of the most blatant and hypocritical lies imaginable. The oppression suffered by Iranians started in 1953, when the US CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered a coup to overthrow the mildly socialist and secular, elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. Because he wanted the profits for Iranians, Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry which Britain had been plundering for decades without paying royalties. Enraged, the whities threw him out and installed the protofascist regime of the so-called Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi who was addicted to grandiose pseudo-military uniforms. He allowed the US and Britain to take what they wanted while he ruled with his singularly brutal secret police, Savak. In due course, Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamist revolution and the West declared economic war on Iran. A few years later, they pushed their then good friend, Saddam Hussein, to attack Iran on the promise he could have their coastal oil fields. Iran would have smashed Saddam in a few months but with the most active assistance from the US and UK, including espionage, money and weapons, the war dragged on for eight years.

Throughout that terrible war and since, driven by the US, Western countries have imposed the most severe economic blockade on Iran, devastating the economy and producing unrest among the 90million Iranians. It used to be the case that an economic blockade was casus belli, a formal ground for war but today, the rule is Macht hat Recht: the powerful do what they want and the poor suffer what they must. In 2003, the Ayatollah Khameini declared that nuclear weapons are haram, forbidden under Islamic law, and cancelled Iran’s small nuclear weapons program, leaving only a civil program in place. Constantly prodded by Israel, the US and other NATO countries have insisted that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, that it is a week away from having The Bomb, leading to ever-more restrictive sanctions, and constant sabotage and assassinations by Israel. Eventually, during Obama’s time, the JCPOA was signed, allow intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the IAEA. By all accounts, this treaty was doing its job but, in 2018 in one of his regular anti-Obama tantrums, Trump tore it up. Iran continued to comply with it but that wasn’t good enough so last year, the US and Israel bombed their facilities.

For over seventy years, Iranians have been oppressed by the West. Naturally enough, their government has reacted in much the same way the Australian and British and US and German and other governments have acted over the past few years, by restricting civil rights, building intrusive domestic spying agencies, penalising dissent, etc. And all the time, the Iranian economy has been sinking lower and lower. If the West hadn’t overthrown the Mossadegh government all those years ago, the Iranian economy would now be about twice the size of Italy’s, with an equivalent standard of living. Iran would be a major industrial power, more so even than Germany, with a huge research and development program, far bigger than Britain has ever had. And that’s what it’s all about. The West can’t stand competition. They want to dominate. End of story. In particular, they want to dominate anybody and everybody who is not of white western European ancestry. They will stop at absolutely nothing in their mania to strangle all competition, especially as they have now lost the struggle to dominate China. And, despite their best efforts, Russia is still there, it hasn’t broken up as they confidently forecast, so they turn to Iran.

But let’s continue with Albanese’s slop: “For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force…” Fomenting coups and wars, invading sovereign nations, economic strangulation, that hasn’t been destabilising, has it? No, of course not, that’s just normal neoliberal business practice for dealing with wogs. “…and nuclear programs.” The one that ended in 2003, you mean? The same one the IAEA says doesn’t exist, the one you obliterated in June 2025? This is the old Iraqi WMD lie recycled. There were no WMD in Iraq and there was no nuclear weapons program in Iran. Netanyahu has been predicting for 30 years that Iran is a week away from having nuclear weapons but he lies easier than he breathes. Israel, let’s not forget, has up to 200 nuclear warheads and the bombers to deliver them but is not a member of any international treaties to restrict them. “…brutal acts of violence and intimidation…” Like the 1,800+ acts of terror and hundreds of murders committed by Zionist “settlers” against the Palestinians of the West bank last year, you mean?

“Iran directed at least two attacks on Australian soil in 2024.” The information that led to that conclusion came from Mossad. There is no evidence that Iran gives a shit about Australia. “… intended to create fear, divide our society” even though the overwhelming majority of Australians are opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other places. “…and challenge our sovereignty.” 47 years of economic sanctions and blockade, assassinations, sabotage and bombings is not a challenge to Iran’s sovereignty? “In response, Australia took the unprecedented steps of expelling Iran’s Ambassador…” but it hasn’t uttered so much as a whimper against Israel’s monstrous genocide in Gaza, supplying weapons and allowing US bases in Australia to function as a vital part of the espionage and control of bombers. “Our Government has sanctioned more than 200 Iranian-linked individuals…” It has sanctioned precisely zero Israelis, including those charged with genocide by the ICC, and even allowed one of its main architects to come here a few weeks ago. “…we have called for the Iranian regime to uphold the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Iran’s citizens.” They have said not one word about upholding the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Gaza’s sorely tormented surviving citizens.

“…the regime has instigated a brutal crackdown on its own people.” There is ample evidence from people on site at the time that the recent violence was instigated and carried out by people acting on instructions from the CIA and Mossad. Prior to the violence, at least 10,000 Starlink terminals and automatic weapons were smuggled into Iran and distributed to groups opposed to the government. These were used to coordinate the violence. The Iranian intelligence services worked out how to jam them, and the violence stopped immediately. “A regime that relies on the repression and murder of its own people to retain power is without legitimacy.” A bit like the Saudis killing Jamal Khashoggi, you could say. Like the US ICE killing people on the streets? Like the spreading chain of prisons run by ICE in the US? “Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to global peace and security.” Bullshit. It doesn’t exist because it was stopped in 2003 and was “obliterated” a few months ago. “…the Iranian regime can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.” Well, after all this, they’ll probably be looking at North Korea and wondering how they have survived for so long against such hostility. Something to do with their nuclear weapons, maybe?

“… Iran for failing to comply with the JCPOA..” That treaty ceased to exist when Trump tore it up but Iran largely complied with it. The IAEA report says: “…inspectors have been unable to determine whether Iran’s nuclear programme was ‘exclusively peaceful.’” That was because they no longer had the right to unrestricted access to any and all sites after Trump trashed the JCPOA. The suggestion that Iran had stockpiled 400kg of highly enriched uranium was not based on any evidence that came from within Iran. Mossad, the Israeli spy and sabotage agency, are unrivalled in their ability to spin and spread lies, that’s their stock in trade.

Finally, “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.” He forgot to mention Israel’s nuclear bombs, of course, he is always fastidiously careful not to upset the Zionist lobby, and that Israel had just killed the person who issued the fatwa against Iran developing nuclear weapons. As for threats to international peace and security, since 1945, the US has bombed 29 sovereign countries, including no less than ten since the “president of peace” wormed his way back into the White House not 14 months ago. Iran has not attacked another country for over 300 years.

Lies, lies, lies. His whole statement is a tissue of lies resting on a foundation of hypocrisy that makes my skin crawl. The Prime Minister of Australia is either a shameless liar or a nauseating hypocrite and spineless coward who repeats lies without daring to check their veracity. He is unfit for office. His proper station in life is as branch secretary of the cleaners’ and sanitary workers’ union in a small country town but it also seems these people are competing to see who can be the most disgusting. Tomorrow morning at 6.00am in Adelaide, Australian foreign minister Sen. Penny Wong will host a breakfast for International Women’s Day. I wonder if they’ll hold a minute’s silence for the 165 little girls murdered in their school in Minab on Saturday?

The most appalling part is that all this death and destruction is because Trump is flailing around creating distractions so he doesn’t have to face the Epstein stuff but nobody in the US has the courage to call him out. Not even the generals who know full well they are committing crimes, but nemesis is coming, that much is inevitable. He will lose the mid-term elections and the last 3million files will be released. Assuming he is still compos mentis, he will then go to prison. Netanyahu has a prison cell with his name on it waiting for the day he can’t plead “national security” to avoid his corruption trials but he’s having a great time just now. He has been trying to destroy Iran for, as he says, 40 years (at 6.55). Same in Britain. The egregiously dishonest Starmer, former chief Crown Prosecutor, is a dead man walking mainly because of his supine loyalty to the Zionist lobby.

None of this is madness. This is wickedness simpliciter. We have handed our governments to the Epstein Coalition.

*****

Why is hypocrisy so infuriating? Somebody says to you: “Come back, you mustn’t walk on the grass.” “Oh dear,” you reply, “I’ll have to go the long way around instead.” Somewhat peeved and a little humiliated for not knowing the rules, you set off but before you get to your goal, you see the same person walking across the grass. Why is that so annoying? I see it as a matter of dominance: you allowed that person to dominate you. In the interests of civility and doing the right thing, you gave in, only to see it was by deceit, not by honest competition. That’s humiliating, you know the other person is looking down on you and we don’t like that at all: “I allowed you to dominate me, you think you’re so smart and I don’t forgive that.” We may not spend all our time fighting to be top dog, but we don’t like being fooled into being the poodle. Going up the hierarchy is joyous but going down stings. We remember stings long after we have forgotten the fun bits.

****

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.

****

We’re all familiar with Orwell’s description of the total state in 1984, how it maintained power by controlling what people were told. Winston Smith’s job in the archives meant constantly revising and rewriting history so that people could only know what the Party wanted them to know:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture repainted, every statue and every street and every building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right … Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

I regard Orwell as the greatest writer of the 20^th Century, right up there with Shakespeare in the pantheon, because he was able to pick the important points and put them in clear and unforgetable prose. It’s just over 76 years since he died: what would he make of the present? I think he would look at today’s headlines from London and say: “Didn’t I tell you?”

Britain on ‘collision course’ with Russia, head of Army warns. General Sir Roly Walker says Putin is on a war footing and it is imperative UK continues to rearm (Telegraph, Feb 24).

Britain almost on WWIII ‘frontline’ says Armed Forces Minister. UK is already ‘battling’ frontlines against Russia as the world looks terrifyingly similar to pre-WWII global war build-up, warns Armed Forces Minister and war veteran (Mirror, Feb 24).

Chief of the General Staff warns UK is on a ‘collision course with Russia’. Four years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Britain’s top soldier has issued one of the starkest warnings yet about the future of European security (London Business News, Feb 24).

Russian invasion of Ukraine shares ‘similarities’ with run-up to Second World War, armed forces minister says. Al Carns, a former special forces colonel in the Royal Marines, said Ukraine is on the frontline of Europe’s defences as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale onslaught enters its fifth year (Sky News Feb 24)..

NATO chief warns of ‘inevitable’ war with Russia as ‘relentless’ troop deployment looms (Daily Express US Feb.24).

That’s pretty scary: according to the experts, war with Russia is “inevitable” so should everybody start digging trenches in their gardens and dust off their gasmasks? That same day, we see a report in the Guardian mocking Russia’s military in Ukraine:

Four years into Ukraine invasion, Russia’s gains are small, while Kyiv remains resilient. With the Russian military performing poorly, Ukraine is clarifying strategy and pushing back with modest success … Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth grim year, has already gone on longer than the entire fight on the eastern front in the second world war. The Soviets marched from the gates of Leningrad to Berlin in a little over 15 months in 1944-45; today the Russian rate of gain in Pokrovsk in Ukraine is 70 metres a day, in Kupiansk, 23 metres … The gains are trivial, given Ukraine’s size, amounting to 1,865 sq miles 4,800km2 during 2025 (about 0.8% of the country) …The diplomatic misdirection demonstrates how poorly Russia’s military is performing.

Two totally contradictory stories. One shrieks “TheRussiansarecomingTheRussians arecoming, quick, get more guns and bombers and nuclear subs…” while the other says (equally unrealistically) “The Russians are totally useless and about to fall apart.” Meantime, over in Godzone, the self-appointed “president of peace” and claimant on the Nobel Peace Prize has amassed a “mighty armada, the biggest and most beautiful armada the world has ever seen” and is making noises like “Looks like we’ll have to invade Iran to stop them getting the bomb” because they’re “a week away from getting the bomb” even though (a) Trump tore up the JCPOA to prevent it in 2018, (b) their (tiny) civil nuclear program was “totally obliterated” in the unprovoked and illegal bombing raids last June, (c) the Ayatollah has repeatedly said nuclear weapons are a crime in Islam and they will never pursue them, and (d) they’ve been a week away from a bomb for nearly 25 years. Everything faded into mist, the lie became truth.

In 1945, Orwell published Notes on Nationalism, an essay exploring what he saw as widespread but very dangerous political drives. Writing just as the war against fascism was ending, he saw common elements in Nazism and Stalinism, in religious extremism and in atheism, pacifism and aggressive nationalism, Zionism and in racism. These elements he called ‘nationalism,’ although he was aware it wasn’t a good term. In particular, he saw the struggle to get to the top, to dominate and crush the opposition as a universal human drive which we have to recognise and deal with if we wish to avoid catastophe:

A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige … Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Replace his word ‘nationalism’ with ‘Narcisso-Fascism’ and we’re talking the same language. He knew his opinions would be unpopular but that never bothered him much. He wasn’t so much concerned with the recently vanquished European brand of fascism as with what we would now call Little England Fascism, of both right and left wings:

As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort … But you can at least recognise that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes.

Le fasciste, c’est moi. The drive to dominate is universal but why? As Orwell recognised, political theory can’t answer this question. In order to explain our urge to be No. 1, we have to leave politics and move to a more fundamental level. We now know the drive is genetically hard-wired into us, working at the hormonal level to control our behaviour in ways which are so much part of us that most of the time, we don’t even recognise them. Because being on top feels so much better than being pushed down the ladder, we automatically form ourselves into dominance hierarchies. This training starts very early and never lets up. Kindergarten and school, business, sport, religion, police and military, entertainment and above all, politics, are all about competing to get to the top by all possible means. We may say to our children “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, just play the game,” but we don’t mean it. Our child wins a ribbon at sport and we jump up and down and tell everybody. Our team wins the competition and we dance around cheering and laughing. Our party wins the election and we celebrate for days. Winning is ecstasy, everybody loves a winner and wants to join in. It’s exactly the same process in humans, in baboons, in dogs in the street, elephant seals, lizards, birds, you name it, we’re all hooked on the same cocktail of hormones.

Trouble is, winning may be ecstasy but on the other side of the coin, defeat, is misery. For every cheering winner, there’s a sullen and resentful loser plotting vengeance. Just as we will compete strenuously to beat the other side because winning feels so good, so we will also resist because losing feels so bad. In fact, losing and being oppressed feels so bad that, very often, people will put their lives on the line to resist. It’s called war, and it is at this point that politics has to give way to psychology. Readers will be aware that I believe the economic ideology called “neoliberalism” is utter rubbish as it is based on a false model of human psychology. It’s simply a plan to transfer as much wealth as possible from the 99% to the 1% and, from their point of view, it’s been a staggering success. We see the same flaw in mainstream political theories, e.g. Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism and Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamics. While these describe what goes on between nations, they can’t explain it because they are not built on a theory of psychology.

To explain international aggression, we have to drop from the national or macro level, to the individual or micro level. Why are nations aggressively trying to dominate each other, e.g. the US and Israel launching yet another unprovoked attack on Iran? Because individuals like to be dominant, it’s immensely exciting to be Top Dog. Why don’t the Iranians roll over and say “Come on in, take what you want, we’ll manage with the leftovers”? Same reason as you wouldn’t allow a group of strangers to move into your home and shove you out the back. Mearsheimer says: “International relations are anarchic, therefore nations must struggle to gain local hegemony to safeguard their interests.” Unfortunately, because Mearsheimer and all the other “experts” put so much emphasis on nations trying to exert “hegemony,” they fail to see that international relations are anarchic because nations are trying to dominate each other. The drive to dominate comes first, the chaos and anarchy is secondary. His view licenses the anarchy, he justifies it. Well, maybe he doesn’t personally but people grab his ideas and shout: “Look, the expert says it’s all chaos out there so we’d better arm ourselves and get in first.”

Just to complete the story, Turchin says that warfare has turned humans into cooperators. His book Ultra Society from 2015 is subtitled: How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators on earth [1]. Really? We’re cooperating on preventing global warming? Cooperating on restricting arms sales to civil wars? Cooperating on preventing sexual trafficking of women and children? Eliminating the vast drug industry? What crap. We don’t cooperate at all, we just form bigger and more powerful dominance hierarchies and start attacking (I’ve just submitted a paper to Turchin’s journal pointing out the errors in his approach but expect it won’t get far).

All of this counts. In Britain, the government is trying to scare people to stop spending money on their failing social services in order to buy hugely expensive weapons that will never be used but will inevitably provoke an equal and opposite response from this week’s enemy. Similarly, Trump and his busload of clowns are talking themselves into yet another catastrophic war; and Israel announces that it intends to take almost the entire Middle East for itself. Oh, you didn’t see that? Yes, in a carefully stage-managed “slip,” the US ambassador to Israel, the Christian nationalist (racist) and ultraZionist (fascist), Mike Huckabee, gave notice that Israel is dead set on implementing its plan for “Greater Israel,” i.e. to steal any land where, according to their mythology, a Jewish foot may once have trod. This includes most of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, all of Kuwait and Jordan, one third of Saudi Arabia and over half of Egypt. The original Zionist plan for Palestine, from the 1890s, was to force at least half the indigenous population out and keep the rest as agricultural and industrial labourers. As recently as 2010, Rabbi Ovadia Yosel (1920-2013), former chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party said:

Goyim (gentiles) were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world, only to serve the People of Israel … Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.

Great life if you can get it but this time, their plans are a bit bigger. The population of those countries is somewhere about 250million in all; they are supposed to sit passively by while a gang of 7million Europeans takes their prime agricultural land, their oil fields and industries and many of their ancient cities and … and what? The plan, it seems, is to bulldoze all the Islamic monuments and build some sort of theocratic state according to classic Judaism, there to await their messiah. In some branches of ultra-extremist Judaism, when the Messiah arrives, Jews will rule the world for a while, then they will go to heaven and the rest of us will burn in hell for eternity. That’s their plan.

You have to understand that, even though he is a total idiot and therefore very dangerous (Idiot: a person who, coming across evidence that contradicts his beliefs, discards the evidence and keeps his beliefs), Huckabee didn’t make this up. This plan has been around a long time, I probably first heard of it in 1982, in the aftermath of the Israeli-engineered slaughters in the Palestinian refugee camps in Shatila and Sabra. Huckabee is as one with both the Zionist lobby in the US and with his Israeli hosts, and the more extreme they are, the more he likes them. He did not speak out of turn, he simply repeated what he has been hearing for years, possibly decades.

Under the influence of their fanatical religious mania, the extremists in Israel think they can forcibly displace perhaps 150million people and all will be well. The “Arabs” will simply take their donkeys and camels and kids and off they’ll go, because, as the current Israeli minister for national security, one Itamar Ben Gvir, says, “Jews are above the law.” This truly despicable human being is of much the same character as Reinhard Heydrich and must not be dismissed as the buffoon he usually seems to be. He has at least 8 convictions for terrorist activities and is closely allied with Kahane Chai, the only declared Jewish terrorist group in the US. However, he is immensely powerful in Israel and has millions of fanatical followers in Israel and in the diaspora. He meets regularly with Huckabee, who is very close to Trump (not a friend, Trump doesn’t do friends).

If the ultraZionists think the other 850million Muslims in the world, in North Africa, Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in Iran, the Gulf countries, Indonesia, etc. will sit quietly by while this plan is enacted, they are completely off their heads. They should have listened to their first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who said:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That’s natural: we’ve taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? [2, p99]

Ben Gurion loathed Palestinians: “Arabs are barbarians ... (they) only understand force.” Nahum Goldmann, one of the prime architects of the modern Israeli state, said of him:

(He was) 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 [2, p94].

He only wanted to dominate. Precisely. That is the central thesis of Narcisso-Fascism: we love to dominate because it feels so damned good. Sure, we dress it up in high-sounding words, we say God is leading us or the light of democracy or history, or Our race deserves to lead, or We are the exceptional nation, but that’s only window-dressing to make the old ladies at home feel good while their sons and grandsons are being blown to bits on some far distant shore, because the reality of domination is clear. As Orwell said: Ich bin der Faschist. I am the fascist. The fascist is in me. In Hebrew, אני הפשיסט, ani hafshist.

The idea of Greater Israel has been bouncing around in Zionist circles for probably a hundred years but Huckabee has been used to float it in public to see what sort of response it gets. If it provokes fury, they’ll shelve it for perhaps another hundred years but if nobody says much, they’ll press ahead with it. The first step will be to reduce Iran to rubble before moving on to the major Sunni powers, Egypt and Turkey. So far, only the Muslim world has reacted badly, which is progress because they’ve long been enablers of the Zionist project (e.g. encouraging the US to attack Iran, selling oil to Israel, sabotaging resistance groups, financing ISIS, etc). As a group, the West has reacted to this truly insane idea much as they reacted to Hitler’s plan [3, Chap. 14, esp. pp396-98], first published in Mein Kampf in 1925, to invade the USSR and reduce the Slavic populations to helotry: “Ho hum,” they yawned, “there’s too many of them anyway. Do be darling and pass me another cucumber sandwich.” But it won’t work. The Zionists may defeat the Palestinians and Arab armies, they may succeed in driving huge numbers of people off their traditional lands and so on but they’re only setting up trouble for themselves.

It’s usually said that women are more affected by hormonal swings than men but there’s no truth in that. The hormonal drive to dominate is much stronger in males than females; conversely, males are much more affected by defeat than females. If they’re beaten at tennis or cricket, they drop their balls and slink off. But where women don’t usually fight so insanely to get themselves to the top, they have another impetus to resist oppression, called children. Women may not be so obsessed with their football team winning (“Oh for heaven’s sake, calm down, it’s only a game.” “Are you mad, woman? This is the bloody grand final and we’re down”) but they never get over oppression. They’re not so much worried about being oppressed themselves, they tend to find ways of coping but on one point they are implacable: they want their children to reach their full potential. Quietly and without a fuss they will fight any system that prevents that. If you startle a lone female bear, she’ll run off but if you threaten her cubs, look out.

In Gaza today, mothers know that just a few kilometres to the north, happy healthy children wake after a good night’s sleep, have a solid breakfast, dress in clean clothes and walk safely to a free school with sports fields, free lunches, free health care and so on. Then they look at their own children sitting under a torn and flapping tent, their bare feet caked in mud contaminated with raw sewage, whimpering miserably because they had no sleep due to gunfire and bombs dropping nearby, cold and hungry, bitten by insects and weakened by worms, with no schooling for years and no schools left standing, no health care, knowing that even searching for a few sticks for a fire to cook some porridge will attract the snipers, and they will not forget. Maybe they would forgive losing their home, their own health and their future, even their parents and husbands but they will not forgive somebody doing it to their children. Why should they?

So the women of the Muslim world, and the women of the true Christian world (not the dupes in the heresies), and Hindu and Buddhist and everything else, have to come together and speak as one: This madness has to stop. The world can no longer be held to ransom by a few religious maniacs and their vile, corrupt, child-abusing friends in the West who are obsessed with the hormonal rush that comes from crushing people underfoot. Today, there is no place for supremacism. The entire political process in the West has to be turned around but change will not come from the people who think only in terms of competing and fighting to get to the top at any cost. Change will not come from the Trumps and Starmers and Albaneses and Sisis and Putins and Netanyahus and the royals and bankers and industrialists and all the rest of the Epstein class. They’ve been steeped in the idea of competition since infancy, they can’t think in non-competitive terms so they’re a lost cause. As for all the men who feel guilty that they’re not higher up the ladder, there’s hope still but real change will be generational. It will start early in life by teaching children that they can be happy and productive without being on top. The program to flatten dominance hierarchies starts early: get rid of all the competitions in schools, stop pushing children into sport and music competitions, just let them learn to play the game or the piano for enjoyment, without having to win.

Today’s evil and corrupt ruling class, the Trumps and Mandelsons and Epsteins and so many others, have to be shoved aside and replaced by people who believe that humans can live peaceably and profitably together without somebody standing over them with a gun. Be warned: they won’t go voluntarily. Yes, it will require changes in the way we run our lives but if we don’t start this process very soon, we’re finished. If Israel thinks it can push 200million people into the desert so it can fulfill its grandiose mythological fantasies, it needs to be shown in the clearest of terms that it can’t. There is no room in the world today for supremacism, including Zionist supremacism. And if that’s antisemitic, I wear the badge with pride.

References:

1. Turchin, P. 2025. Ultrasociety. How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators o earth. Beresta Books.

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

3. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda 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.

****

At the recent Munich Security Conference, the Australian deputy prime minister and minister for defence, Richard Marles, stood in front of the large audience of international bigwigs and announced that the current military expansion in China is the biggest seen in the world since World War II. In a commentary, Brisbane Prof. Warwick Powell provided detailed figures showing that everything Marles said is completely wrong. Since 1945, the US has been engaged in a vast military build-up that, at times, exceeded the total military outlays of the rest of the world combined. Now was Marles lying, or is he a fool? Answer: Probably not, and Yes. I would say he was engaged, as he usually is, not in lying but in what the late philosopher, Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023) of Princeton called “bullshitting” [1].

Frankfurt was an epistemologist, he studied what we can know, how we can know it, how to tell truth from falsity and other vital questions. The liar, he said, knows exactly what he is doing (and yes, there are female liars but we’ll stick to his terms). The liar knows the truth, he knows that his audience doesn’t know the truth but he doesn’t want them to know it so he feeds them some false information and does what he can to make sure they never learn the truth:

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship...

I like that, it points to the precision required to be an effective liar. Bernard Madoff was an effective liar until the GFC overtook his lies. Trump is an ineffective liar but he meets criteria for Frankfurt’s other category, Bullshit. As Frankfurt said, not everybody who utters falseties is lying. A lot of people, especially politicians, are trying to influence the audience emotionally, so they simply fill the air with words without caring whether they’re true or false. Bullshit is “...more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.” Now in giving his speech, Marles had clearly not looked at any figures on military expenditure because he would have known that even today, the US is by far the biggest spender, eclipsing China, Russia and a few others combined. But Marles wasn’t interested in figures. His only concern was to sway the audience to believe that China is a real and present danger and we need to spend heaps on eye-wateringly expensive weapons so we can repel the latest version of Australia’s perennial fear, the “Yellow Peril.” Except now they’re Reds as well, which probably makes them orange.

Marles didn’t look at any figures because he doesn’t want them: his mind is made up and figures just get in the way. So he is a foolish bullshitter and, in my view, ipso facto unfit for government but that’s up to his electorate. Anyway, if we kicked out all the fools and bullshitters, there’d be very few people left in government. Have a look at Prof Powell’s article, it’s very good but in respect of American militarism, it raises a critically important question which he doesn’t address: WHY? Why does the US spend so much more on weapons than anybody else? What do they think it will get them, what’s their payoff? Right now, the US is positioning itself to attack Iran. Jeremy Scahill at DropSite News released a truly frightening article: “‘This is Not a Dress Rehearsal’: U.S. Engaged in Massive Military Buildup as Threat To Bomb Iran Grows” (scroll down below the large picture of ships at sea). Aggressive war is deemed the supreme international crime yet here we have the “president of peace” directing the world’s policeman to an unprovoked attack on a foreign country. WHY? WTF do these nuclear clowns think they’re doing? Well we know what they’re doing, same as they did in Venezuela and Iraq and Syria and Libya and so on: destroying the country so they can take its oil and sell the victims lots of expensive stuff and keep their weapons industry in business. Except Iran is perfectly happy to sell its oil at the going price, meaning about 2% of the cost of an invasion, so what’s their game?

The game is the same as Powell’s figures outlined: total world domination for no other reason than it feels so good being the colossus astride the world, laughing at every other country quaking in fear and lining up to kiss the American ass (it means kiss their arse, not their donkey). That is why the US is running its infrastructure into the ground while it maintains about twenty times as many foreign military bases as the rest of the world put together. It suits the power elite to terrorise small countries (Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Denmark and so many others) and push everybody else around even when it is clearly working against American interests, just because domination feels good. Power is its own reward. The question is: Should the world be run by what is essentially a national neurosis taking the form of a mafia standover racket? Obviously it shouldn’t, it should be run according to a set of mutually agreed rules but the one half-hearted attempt to do that after 1945 failed when the “rules-based international order” got in the way of the world’s hegemon. We are now careering* along with essentially no rules in place, where “The rich and powerful do what they will and the poor suffer what they must.”

Was it ever different? No, not really but there was a pretence where a ceasefire meant the stopping the shooting and not just fitting a silencer and keep firing. Now, Trump says out loud what the others did quietly, behind the scenes. Bush and Blair said it was essential to invade Iraq to destroy their “weapons of mass destruction” which could reach London in 45 minutes. There were no WMD and they knew it (in the years since as some sort of grand panjandrum of the Levant, Tony Blair has amassed a fortune of between £60-75million. Pounds. And that’s only what people can track, it doesn’t include what he has hidden offshore). Trump doesn’t bother with that, he just says “We want Greenland so we’ll either get it the easy way or the hard way but we’re going to have it.” Needless to say, this blasé attitude is causing waves of panic around the world.

As the Munich Conference showed (the latest one, as well as 1938), Europe is in disarray. At home, their industry is collapsing after the US blew up the Nordstream II pipeline, cutting off the cheap and reliable Russian natural gas that had powered their factories, forcing them to buy American gas at twice the price. To their north, Trump is threatening to invade Greenland, which is part of a European country. Out east, the US pushed Europe into war over Ukraine and is now threatening to walk away, leaving the European damsel alone in the house with an enraged Russian bear. Meantime, down on the southern flank, Israel is conducting its usual mayhem while refugees fleeing the chaos stream across the seas. So far, there’s no threat from the Azores to Europe’s west but it could come, it could come. Britain’s slow post-imperial collapse is gathering speed as they neglect social services in order to build new nuclear submarines to counter the “Russian threat.” France is France while the rest of the place is slowly congealing into a state of panicky paralytic inertia. Poor things, maybe the Indians will form a West Europe Company and take over, forcing Europeans to grow drugs to sell to the US in a reversal of Britain’s role in Asia (growing drugs in India to sell to China). Or maybe Europe could do something truly radical, like declare peace and end the stalemate.

Since birth, we’ve been raised on a diet of “Us Goodies vs Them Baddies,” but the core thesis of Narcisso-Fascism is that this is a curtain of bullshit held aloft by a scaffold of lies. The proper way to see human affairs is as a ceaseless ferment of one individual/ group/ nation or alliance trying to dominate another, thereby producing permanent instability with frequent dips into anarchy. As long as there have been humans, there has been a frenzy of humans trying to dominate and oppress other humans. This isn’t recent, it’s as old as Homo sapiens. Ötzi, the Neolithic man found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps from 5,300 years ago had an arrow head buried in his back. There is ample archaeological evidence going much further back to say that humans have always fought each other. Marx got it wrong: humans don’t fight to control resources so they can have a higher standard of living, they are happy to impoverish themselves by fighting just so they can dominate other humans. That’s all we need to know.

The foundational lie beneath the endless and hugely expensive politico-military drama of the past 80 years is that we, the noble and far-sighted, generous and caring West, stand firm in the face of the barbaric Red and Yellow hordes who, if we didn’t hold them back, would erupt from the Eurasian land mass and swarm over the civilised world, raping, murdering and pillaging all the way because barbaric Eurasian hordes. Decade after decade, we’ve had this view pumped at us without a moment’s break, that without the Pax Americana, we would all be in the gulag. That’s why the US has nearly 850 overseas military bases, to “contain” the communist/Russian/Chinese aggression and threat … but there isn’t a word of truth in it. The only reason the “baddies” are heavily armed is because they feel threatened. Right now, Iran is under direct threat of a massive bombing campaign intended to destroy their infrastructure and render this hot, dry country of 85million people ungovernable, if not uninhabitable. Questions on how Europe would cope with 40million destitute refugees have been left to another day.

Why is this happening? Why is nobody freaking out about it? We’re talking of war, people getting killed for nothing. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again but expecting a different result. Invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Syria and a dozen others have been catastrophes so why will this be different? Or is the US locked in some sort of collective insanity? We can answer that. This time will be different only in the sense that an invasion of Iran will be ten times worse than all the previous invasions put together. And yes, the US is indeed locked in some form of insanity, an unquestioned urge to dominate all other people at any cost. China is NOT a threat to Australia, we do not need nuclear submarines to defend ourselves against them as they are our biggest trading partner. The moment there is any sort of shooting with China, this country will be bankrupted and ruined, immediately, totally and irremediably.

Does Deputy Dog Richard Marles know this? No, I don’t think he does. He’s too stupid, he believes whatever bullshit the spy agencies put on his desk, the stuff that they collect from the Washington fax each morning and hand to him unread. The real cause is that the US is in high alarm that China is about to overtake them, so they’re forcing everybody to enlist in their “China Containment Policy” bullshit. And the world drifts mindlessly toward catastrophic war, as though nobody is at the controls. Well, they’re not. Nobody with any brains, that is. They’re locked in a self-reinforcing group think bubble where nobody asks: “Hey, do we actually need to dominate everybody? Can we be happy without being king dick? The Kiwis are happy without being Number One, so why can’t we?” That’s not going to happen, nobody is going to be the little boy who says the emperor is wearing no clothes. Nobody in the Washington Bubble, that is, so it has to come from elsewhere. What about Europe, home to democracy and civilised tea parties and all that? Why can’t the Europeans get together and announce:

Rightio, everybody, party’s over. Pick up your toys and go home, close your bases and stop threatening everybody while we sort out how to live in peace. We’ll bring Russia into the EU, as they wanted decades ago and Washington said No. You can leave Iran alone, they’re our neighbours so we’ll sort out any problems, you outsiders who don’t know history are only screwing things up. Stop arming Israel, put any war criminals behind bars and let the Middle East develop as it will.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. We are not given any evidence that China is a threat, we are only told that it is a mortal danger to us and we must not question this or we’re China dupes. We are not told why we must support Israel come what may, only that if we don’t, we are “antisemitic” and will lose our jobs, if not be sent to jail. We are not told how Russia is a threat to Europe, only that it is and must be resisted at all costs, up to and including nuclear war. Nobody has explained what Mr Putin would do with Europe if he overran it. In Ukraine, fighting a ramshackle and totally corrupt country that is being propped up by outsiders, Russia is advancing at about seventy metres a day, at huge cost in men and material. At this rate, it would take them a thousand years to reach the Atlantic, and 500 million Europeans are supposed to be scared of them? And what would Putin do if he woke up and found he was suddenly in charge of 60 million Italians? You can’t do that to him, he’s not a young man, the bloody Italians can’t even govern themselves let alone follow orders from Moscow. All this talk of “threats” is cloud cuckoo land, the self-deluded fever dreams of fanatics, religious cranks and racist crackpots who think they can’t have a life as Number Two in anything.

Today, Europe is in serious danger of economic and political collapse just because it has allowed itself to be pushed into constant confrontation with Russia. And China. And the Muslim world, and everybody else. The simple fact is that if Europe made peace with Russia and built a super-economy extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok by way of the Stans, even including Pyongyang, something like 900 million people would instantly be immeasurably better off. Combining European brains with Russian talent and resources would be unbeatable … and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what it’s all about. That idea just is the stuff of American nightmares. For the power elite in the US, facing a Eurasian superpower would be like staring down into the sulphorous pits of hell. For a hundred years, Europe has been kept at daggers drawn with Russia, to prevent them forming a pan-European economy and dislodging the US from its perch. Can there be a Eurasian Union? Yes, it’s very easy. The Europeans have to stand in public and say:

We are not interested in fighting or confrontation. We want to live in peace. There are urgent problems we all need to deal with but we cannot do it while we are fighting each other. For all the wrongs we have done you, we apologise. We will never threaten you again and to prove it, we will start the process of disarmament. For the first time in your history, you do not have to look over your shoulder to the west. We’re on your side.

I can even tell them where to give this speech: right here, at the foot of this memorial in Volgograd, commemorating the 30million Soviet citizens who died in the 20^th Century’s fifth invasion of Russia, including four by the West. I think the nation of Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy would accept that; all they want is to be treated with respect and not forced into a position of subjugation. Because as much as the Americans and their toadies in the West are turned on by the thought of dominating the Slavic people, the Slavs (their very name means ‘slaves’) are absolutely determined not to be forced to kiss the American arse. They will fight every attempt to make them, and I’m on their side.

Right now, February 19^th, with two nuclear-armed aircraft carriers and a thousand planes cruising just outside Iranian waters, the world is teetering on the brink. All because of one dementing old man and 10,000 psychopathic sycophants who think they can get ahead by agreeing with him.

War is not a human necessity. Conflict is a political choice. If we don’t do better, we don’t have a future.

Reference:

1. Frankfurt H (1986). On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 6 (2): 81–100. (Fall 1986). https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAOB

****

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 when you think it couldn’t get worse, it does. In the US, Sen. Adam Schiff refers to the highest levels of the current administration as “All a pack of liars” (at 0.20). If, as seems likely, the UK prime minister is pushed out, his replacement will be the seventh in ten years. However, the most likely candidate, Wes Streeting, has just admitted that in providing Israel with arms, Britain is breaking its own laws although people aren’t paying attention as they’re transfixed by scandals in the royal family. France has had three PMs in two years and is barely able to pass the budget. Australia’s Labor prime minister is widely despised as weak and indecisive but the right wing opposition is too busy tearing itself to bits to do any decent opposing. Germany is floundering; Belgium goes two years without a government; the Netherlands has more holes in its dykes than it has fingers; Norway’s crown princess is likely to be turfed out, taking the monarchy with her; on and on it goes. All this when the standard of living in the Western world is high; stock markets are peaking; science and medical science are powering ahead; the usual wars are somewhere else, so what’s going on? If we’ve never had it so good, why is everything so bad and getting worse?

The standard answer is and always has been: “It’s not our fault, it’s Them. They’re wrecking things so we need to deal with Them severely.” In the past, that has usually meant another war but these days, the West’s economies are creaking and would probably fall apart under the strain but I disagree with that diagnosis. I would say that the entirety of the West’s current problems, and most of everybody else’s, rest on one point: the truly abysmal quality of the people who push themselves into positions of power. What we’re seeing in the Epstein files is a pervasive pattern of profound and institutionalised corruption at the highest levels, reaching around the world. What I say next, you have to take my word for it but the proof will come. Well, I hope it does, I hope the corrupt people aren’t able to conceal it, and it’s this: What we’re seeing with the Epstein files is just the tip of the iceberg. The corruption extends far, far further than just a bunch of ridiculous old men cavorting around with no clothes on, even including their crimes that deserve decades in prison. Fact is, the corruption touches practically every aspect of modern life.

Today, corruption affects government at all levels, national, state and local; it reaches into industry and finance, communications (especially communications), health, the military, academia, entertainment, agriculture and fishing, construction, everything, and there’s a reason. Actually, it’s several reasons, synergising to produce a tornado of corruption, sucking wealth from the lower levels of society and funneling it to the upper, where it is used to finance further corruption in a self-sustaining cycle.

The first reason is what we see every day in the news: with few exceptions, people at the highest levels of society are of psychopathic character, some less so but mostly full-blown psychopaths, meaning totally self-centred, totally lacking in any empathy for other humans, remorseless in their pursuit of power and wealth and prepared to stop at nothing in order to get it. It’s important to remember that most psychopaths have never been convicted, they’re too clever for that and can generally arrange for other people to carry the can or even to have an unfortunate accident with some cement overshoes while fishing in the river. Bernard Madoff is the classic example of the suave, charming and utterly ruthless psychopath who fooled everybody. He was convicted only after a lifetime of honours, adulation, cheating, lying and stealing. He was Jewish, and he used that fact to steal from Jewish victims of the Holocaust, including the saintly Eli Wiesel. It really doesn’t get much more heartless than that.

There are two major factors involved in causing this state of affairs. First, our political system selects for the ruthlessly determined, the scheming and manipulative, the suave and seductive liars and cheats who are fascinated, beguiled and themselves seduced by power. As I show in Narcisso-Fascism, power and sexuality are intimately intertwined, especially in men although there’s no shortage of psychopathic women, albeit mostly a little more discreet. However, the drive to dominate, the lust for power precedes sexual expression. Getting to the top unleashes the sexual urge. Low down in the hierarchy, most people keep their sexual urges out of sight, they can generally manage to keep their pants on but once they get to the top, they let it all hang out, as they say. More importantly, the sexual urge fades with age (fortunately) but the lust for power? Never. The decrepit elderly can be truly vicious as they fight to hang on to power, long after they’ve sent their enemies to meet the headsman.

The second factor is that power and great wealth produce psychopathy. Now hang on sunshine, people object, are you saying that people’s personalities change just because they go up the golden staircase? You can’t say that, everybody knows that personality is inherited, psychology has proven it’s all in the DNA. Psychologists like Hans Eysenck and Robert Plomin spent their lives on vast studies to show it’s genetic and now genome assay is confirming it. To which I reply: Rubbish. They started with the idea that personality is genetic and shaped their research to “prove” it. Psychologist Jay Joseph, of UC Davis, has devoted his career to showing where they went wrong [1,2]; in particular, twin studies, he concludes, are so flawed as to be meaningless. The very definition of personality says that the influence of heredity on personality, if any, is so slight as to be lost in the noise:

Personality is the total set of explicit and implicit mental rules (including attitudes, beliefs, etc) that, in the stable adult mode of behaviour, generates the uniquely distinguishing habitual patterns of interaction between the healthy, sober individual and the environment [3, Chap 8].

Rules are cognitive elements, part of the informational space that constitutes the mind, and are acquired by life experience; DNA codes for proteins, not for ideas and beliefs. As with all such cognitive elements, our rules can be changed at will and commonly are. The clearest example is the group of post-traumatic mental disorders, where a person’s belief in the world as a pleasant, predictable place and the self as capable and reliable changes after bad experiences to seeing the world as a dangerous, unpredictable place and the self as weak and useless. That’s sudden, that’s obvious. These changes are wholly psychological, nothing to do with biology, a programming error, if you like.

On the other hand, changes due to coming into great wealth or great power can be just as extensive, but they’re subtle, they occur over years rather than minutes and others generally don’t see it, not least because people are able to conceal it. It’s not like the explosive anxiety of PTSD, as it’s called, which morphs into rage in a split second and can’t possibly be concealed. The truly psychopathic personality is (mostly) not anxious, they don’t have anything but bad behaviour to conceal so they aren’t driven to drink or get into fights and so on. They’re calm and in full control while they plan bad things so they can take the time to hide the evidence, to set up decoys or bury the bodies far away. The mechanism of the change in personality is that when a person comes into money or power, his sense of entitlement and privilege expands accordingly: “I worked hard for what I’ve got, not like all those people I’m carrying so I deserve a little bit extra.” But that little bit extra soon becomes quite a lot extra, and then a great deal extra and they don’t stop. They move from the small house to the big house then to the mansion, then add a beach house and a mountain house; the little car becomes a big car, then two huge cars, then they need a new house with a much bigger garage to house the daughter’s Mercedes and the son’s Lambo (the one he later smashes doing burnouts); then the husband needs a glamorous girlfriend or two and the daughter marries into oil money and whole new vistas of wealth open up.

A sense of privilege is simply the sense that “I am exempt from the normal rules of life, they don’t apply to me because I’m special and I can do what I like. And if anybody doesn’t like it, fuggem or maybe arrange an accident for them.” The principal is as Lord Acton didn’t quite say 150 years ago:

Money and power attract the corruptible, and the corruptible are quickly corrupted by money and power.

This is not genetic. This are personality changes for the worse induced by life experiences because they are rewarding. These people have a choice: they can either remain honest and not get immensely rich, or they can adopt new, self-centred rules and turn into monsters. As far as I can see, they all choose the latter so we need to ask: What is it about the societies we have built that rewards psychopathy? It’s not new, of course, the rich and powerful have always believed the ordinary rules don’t apply to them, as in droit du seigneur, etc, but it’s rapidly getting worse. The reason is that the vast fortunes people can build today are far beyond stratospheric; several of them have actually ridden into space on their fortunes and one of them thinks he can reach Mars. As the fortune grows, so grows the sense of entitlement: “I have all this money, it’s mine so I can do what I like with it but if you don’t like it, tough shit.” So is that all it is, just people making different decisions? Yes, that’s all it is. The value of an information-based theory of mind [3] is that it allows new information to be incorporated as quickly or slowly as conditions dictate. A “genetic theory of personality” can’t account for this.

Now we’ve identified the problem, we need some solutions. First step is to flatten the power hierarchies. Concentrations of power, such as the near-absolute power of a sitting US president, should be avoided at all costs. There is not a person on earth who doesn’t know that Trump is both seriously corrupt and dementing, yet nobody is able to touch him. Compare that with the Westminster system in Britain where, on less evidence of wrongdoing, an hereditary prince has been defenestrated, one of the most influential politicians of the past 50years has been expelled from Lords and is looking at prison, and the prime minister himself is dangling by a thread. Same in Norway: the shenanigans of a wayward crown princess and her psychopathic but incredibly stupid son could easily cause the fall of the House of Glücksburg (the short name of their monarchy). Don’t forget the two Norwegian politicians who negotiated the Oslo Accords in 1993: they can feel the hot breath of the police dogs on their ankles since it was revealed Epstein left their children $5million each in his will. Meantime, across the Atlantic under the Trump imperium, first son in law Kushner pockets billions from the Saudis and everybody claps and cheers his business acumen. Not to mention the “gift” of the $400million 747 with the gold-plated crapper for “dad.” The oleaginous Howard Lutnick lies through his back teeth on TV but later dismisses it as nothing to get hot about. They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong but the real issue is that nobody can do anything about them without the regal nod. That won’t be forthcoming because the only nodding the old man is doing is off to sleep. The problem is that the power hierarchy in the US is too steep, unless it is flattened, there will be further trouble.

Second step to reduce the risk of psychopathic behaviour among the rich and powerful is to prevent people getting too rich in the first place. Is there such a thing as “too rich”? If you ask the rich, they would say “Don’t be ridiculous, too rich is a contradiction of terms.” However, that claim is based on the faulty concept of economics known as neoliberalism. This says that governments must not interfere with the smooth functioning of the market. The market already knows everything needed to make proper decisions on allocation of investment, setting prices and deciding rewards and punishments. Bureaucrats can never have enough information to make a proper decision. If they try, they’ll end up creating an inefficient market and all will suffer. This is accepted as gospel. If the market produces vast wealth for a few, so be it, they must have earned it otherwise it wouldn’t have happened because markets are never wrong. It’s said that 85% of economists in the world today accept the principles of neoliberalism; all they’re doing in their journals is arguing over the seating plan at the Nobel ceremony.

My view is that this is completely fallacious. There is a real thing called “too rich.” It is the point at which people abandon the rules of normal behaviour society imposes on them and start making up their own. Neoliberalism is built on a phony model of human psychology in which people are mindless little robots, buying and selling entirely dispassionately according to what makes economic sense. It’s a system designed by some decidedly psychopathic economists, sold to cunning politicians who sensed in it the chance to make truckloads of money, and foisted on a befuddled public who had no choice but to accept that what they were told was a “scientific system designed by experts.” It is nothing of the sort. Neoliberalism is a system intended to make a small part of the population very wealthy while leaving the rest behind. How do we know? Because if it hadn’t produced vast wealth for the few, allowing them to subvert the political system to their advantage, if it had paid relatively more to workers than to the wealthy, it wouldn’t have lasted one election cycle. That didn’t happen. It worked perfectly as planned, making the rich richer and, crucially, giving them excess funds that have allowed them to buy the political process.

There are other arguments against neoliberalism, for example, if all economic activity is driven by rational self-interest, how come there are wars? How does it make economic sense for somebody to be blown up or, what is often worse, left severely injured and unable to work, in pain and mentally disturbed for life? It doesn’t. There is something else going on to produce wars. Sure, some people make vast profits from constant warfare but the phenomenon itself is driven by factors that neoliberalism pretends don’t exist, specifically the irresistible urge to dominate. Another case for neoliberals to answer is precisely what we see being uncovered by the Trump files: corruption. Corruption is, of course, the rational self-interest of greed in purest form, untempered by emotion or any sense of fair play. Given the “light touch” neoliberal economic system, where regulation and supervision are seen as evil, people will take advantage of it. They’ll see the opportunity and they’ll take it, making them wealthy enough to bribe politicians and so they can get even wealthier. When it comes to inequity fueled by corruption, neoliberalism is a self-reinforcing system. And it needs to be dismantled before it destroys us, as economist Karl Polanyi predicted back in 1944 [4].

Today, we have the technology to track all money transfers; we have the precedent of taxation as a means of reducing inequality; and we have tried and tested models of social welfare that lift all boats, as it were, leaving nobody stranded. All we lack is the political will. Trouble is, the people who have the political power to enact these types of changes are themselves wannabe millionaires who are standing drooling in line, waiting for their turn to start shovelling money into their tax haven accounts. If we do nothing, things will get worse, because power and great wealth produce psychopathic personality changes.

****

As an example of capture of state administrative machinery by corporate interests, consider two sovereign wealth funds, Norway and Australia. In 1990, Norway, popn. 5million, established a fund to collect all the royalties on its newly-discovered oil and gas reserves. Their fund now stands at about $1.9trillion, or $340,000 per person. Per capita, Australia is quite likely the biggest combined mineral and energy exporter in the world. Australia does not have a sovereign wealth fund. Between them, the Commonwealth and state governments collect a pittance in royalties so all the money goes to the miners. The last decent attempt to correct this, Kevin Rudd’s Mineral Resource Rental Tax in about 2012, was defeated by the mining companies spending huge amounts to influence politicians. Most of the big companies channel their wealth through obscure shell companies in offshore tax havens so they pay little or no tax. Britain made the same mistake with its “North Sea gas and oil bonanza,” paying their royalties into the current account. Now the oil has run out but the money was spent on high living, not socked away for a rainy day, and they’re being pissed on.

All this is justified under the doctrine called neoliberalism. The economic doctrine known as neoliberalism is a political choice, not a law of nature. There are laws of nature that profoundly influence the economy, chief among which is the urge to form dominance hierarchies. It is not, however, a law as in “law of gravity” or the need to eat and breathe, but an inclination to respond in certain ways to the environment. We can influence the outcomes by changing the rewards and punishments the environment dishes out. That’s a matter of politics and is well within reach.

Great wealth produces psychopathy in a self-reinforcing loop. Trouble is, the people now holding the money and power will fight to the death (your death) to prevent you prising their fingers off the honey pot. If we do nothing, we will remain stuck in a doom loop.

References:

1. Joseph J. 2004. The Gene Illusion. New York: Algora Press.

2. Joseph J (2014) The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. New York: Routledge.

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

4. Polanyi K (1944). The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon Press (available online).

****

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 loose assembly of nations known as “The West” has long claimed to be bound by a “rules-based international order” based in a welter of international treaties and institutions, of which the UN is the most important. Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter states:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state …

Wars of actual defence are permitted (not preemptive) but other than that, only the UN Security Council can authorise an armed attack on another state. Everything else is deemed aggressive war. The Nuremberg Principles state:

Aggressive war … is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole …

This could not be clearer yet time and time again since the Charter was signed in 1945, nations have launched wars of aggression. To date, only one, Russia, has been penalised, following its attack on Ukraine 4 years ago. On its side, Russia asserts its “special military operation” is entirely defensive, to prevent Ukraine joining NATO as it would mean Western nuclear weapons could be stored in Ukraine for immediate use against Russia. Moreover, for decades, civil wars have raged which the international community either can’t or won’t control, but civil wars tend to stay in their boundaries and most of them don’t have access to high-grade weapons systems. They can still do a lot of damage, e.g. with machetes in Ruanda, but the many aggressive wars by “Western” countries have carried no consequences, so they’ve kept doing it. Now, their impunity has brought us to the point where we face an existential risk from nuclear-armed states starting something they can’t control.

The unprovoked Israeli-US attacks on Iran in June last year are a classic example of such folly: two nuclear-armed states using the very latest in high tech spyware, satellite surveillance, stealth fighters and bombers launched an unprovoked and undeclared “war” on a state whose defences have been seriously degraded by decades of “sanctions” and illegal attacks. The ostensible reason for this act of aggressive war was to prevent Iran gaining nuclear weapons, even though there was an effective treaty until, in 2018, in a fit of jealous pique, Trump tore it up. Iran has repeatedly stated it is not developing nuclear weapons, which is confirmed by the IAEA (GOV/2025/38). The real risk here is that China gains about 80% of its sea-borne oil from Iran and anything that threatens that supply is seen by them as potentially an act of war, which could conceivably lead to a response in kind. As I recently said would happen, if Trump got away with his attack on Venezuela, he would immediately start looking around for another target and he did. He and his dear friend in Tel Aviv decided they would attack Iran again and moved a massive fleet to the Gulf, along with EWACS planes and others but, a few days ago, they abruptly lost interest. What changed their minds was how, in a massive airlift, China sent its most advanced air defence systems, including radar and missile systems that can take out any Western aircraft or ships currently in service and survive the attack intact. Whoops. Forget it, just kidding, we weren’t interested anyway, their oil stinks.

This is the level of international relations today. We are in the grip of people who function at the level of playground bullies looking for the smallest or weakest kid they can pound, just to make themselves feel bigger. You may ask: What the hell is going on? If we take John Mearsheimer’s approach, the US and Israel have to dominate Iran to maintain hegemony as this is the only way they can feel secure. But that makes no sense as the US is once again threatening a massive blockade on Cuba. By Mearsheimer’s analysis, would only happen because the US feels threatened by Cuba, which is beyond ridiculous. The US population is about 35 times larger than Cuba’s, and their GDP about 500 times larger. The idea that the US feels “threatened” by this miniscule, bankrupt opéra bouffe island is the stuff of delusion. Well, it would be a delusion except none of the people, such as Trump, Vance, Rubio, Gabbard and all the rest who are putting this story around believe a word of it. Their sense of “threat” is not a delusion, they are simply lying. Which means Mearsheimer’s completely wrong so we can forget him.

The Trumpists also don’t believe that Iran is a threat, or Venezuela, or North Korea, or Columbia. Russia and China, yes, they see them as a threat but not a military threat. With the minnows, there is only one possible explanation for “The West’s” consistently aggressive stance: these countries won’t grovel when they’re told to. They can’t be dominated, they won’t kiss Trump’s “ass” as he boasted, and that drives Americans insane. That’s all. There is nothing complex about it, you do not need to be an emeritus professor to realise that the whole international drama is the human urge to dominate writ large. Of course, the other side of the domination coin is that humans resent being dominated, as in “the irresistible force meets the immovable object,” and will fight to the death for their freedom. Why is this self-evident truth so difficult to grasp? If everybody stays within their borders, life is quiet but trouble arises when one group of people get the idea they’re superior, that they’re entitled to be dominant, and they act on it. As it happens, Americans believe they have a god-given right to dominate the entire planet in every respect for all time (“full spectrum dominance”) and this is drummed into them from infancy. Don’t believe it? Have a look at this photo of the “school room” in a prison for five year old children (it’s called an immigration detention centre but don’t be fooled).

On the wall is a huge American flag, with a large sign saying telling the pint-sized detainees they are in the “Land of the free, Home of the brave.” The Orwellian irony of this is totally lost on the many “adults” involved since, from birth, they are themselves completely brainwashed by this sort of nonsense (thank heavens we don’t have that shit in Australia, I would have been in serious trouble). They don’t see anything wrong with saying to the weeping children: “Hey kids, be happy, you’re in the Land of the Free. Those large, heavily-armed men in masks who snatched you on the way to school are your Brave Defenders.” The children know they’re not free, so why can’t adults see this? Because they don’t want to, they like to believe this pseudo-patriotic drivel. Looking at that flag fluttering bravely in the breeze gives them a thrill because it means power and domination, it means people in every corner of the globe bowing and scraping and “kissing ass” as Uncle Sam passes by, and they can share it. For the nobodies running that prison, the power flows through them too, it lifts them above the foreign riffraff they’re guarding, lightens their step and gives them better erections. This is what humans want. We all need to feel worthwhile and if we have no inner sense of self-worth, as Trump has none, the easiest way to boost yourself is by putting your knee on other people’s necks.

The entire American sense of self-worth is now inextricably tied to being “leader of the free world, the greatest and most powerful nation in human history, Number One in every respect, either revered or feared by all because we’re so powerful and benevolent.” No. No. No. Bullies are not respected. If there is a person who feels good from being dominant, ipso facto there is also a person who feels bad from being dominated. That’s a law of human nature (it’s actually primate nature but we’re just naked primates). Bullies may be feared but the downtrodden are not mindless, they’re storing grievances and waiting for the chance to push back. And they will, because their self-esteem depends on it.

Two things flow from looking at the international scene as simply the wanton expression of the urge to be most powerful. The first comes from the dump last week of half of the 6 million Epstein files that were supposed to be released in December (a lengthy review here, which includes part of this shorter review; both are by garrulous “lefties” as there has been a notable silence from the evangelical and right wing camps; they are both reliable). What it shows is the endless webs of institutionalised depravity and corruption at the highest levels of society. At one point in the longer video, the speaker asks: “What happens when people become billionaires, does it rot their morals?” You got it, sunshine, that’s exactly what happens. Great wealth increases the sense of privilege and entitlement. As the sense of entitlement expands, the sense of any need for moral restraint contracts to make room for it because they’re incompatible. Regardless of how they got their pelf, the truly wealthy genuinely believe they’re different, that the ordinary rules of life and the universe do not apply to them. Morality is flipped on its head: for them, it’s not a case of ‘How I need to act toward you’ but ‘What you need to do for me.’ Thus, the rich become enraged when somebody tries to stop them doing what they want to do, which mainly means getting more money to spend on themselves while humiliating the untermenschen, like darling Andrew crouching over a barely pubertal girl.

This is why they take not the slightest notice of warnings about global warming, the impending extinction crisis or even nuclear war: the poor may be wiped out in their billions but the wealthy couldn’t give a shit. They have no doubt that, in their bunkers deep in the mountains or on their island hideaways, they’ll survive the apocalypse, that life will actually be better after the smoke has cleared because there won’t be so many cars on the freeways and they’ll be able to drive their Bugatti Veyrons at full speed. And no pesky highway police, of course, only their private militias to keep the peons in line. It’s hard for ordinary people to believe this but the wealthy really, genuinely, do not care about anybody or anything but themselves. And their kind, of course, they stick together. This is why great wealth has to be eliminated: it is an existential threat to the planet. Wealth and power poison the mind.

The second point is the danger of people who genuinely believe in a hierarchy of humanity, with one group at the top and all the others lined up in order beneath. This is precisely what the Nazis believed: Deutschland über alles, the Aryan master race at the top giving all the orders with the rest working the fields or factories or dug in as fertiliser. We all know where that went but the idea of racial superiority is still with us, it didn’t vanish in 1945. There has never been the slightest question in any European mind that they are superior to the coloured races, and other races often thought the same of each other. The Japanese thought they were superior to Chinese who deserved to be colonised; the paler northern Indians built a religion on racial intolerance of the darker southerners; the ethnic Arabic people of northern Sudan despised the Africans to the south and tried to drive them out, a slaughter that continues today.

These days, well, we’re a bit chary about mentioning racial superiority in public but people don’t have any such qualms about the concept of national superiority: “Panama hasn’t looked after the Canal, we should take it back. Canada should be our 51^st state. We want Greenland. We’ll redevelop Gaza as a riviera (bizarre picture at 1.04). We should just take Venezuela’s oil. We want regime change in Cuba and Iran,” and so on. There is no sense, no awareness of the concept that laws actually apply to all, only Macht hat Recht, that right grows from might. Ominously, there is practically no pushback within the US to this sort of talk.

People who believe they are superior to others will act on it, that’s inevitable. It doesn’t matter how they justify it, either Manifest Destiny or religion or genes or Darwinism, it will cause trouble. We see this in the Middle East where one state believes it has a right to other people’s territory and is hell-bent on driving them out. Their religion says “We are the Chosen People, God gave us all this. In taking it back we’re fulfilling God’s plan so if you oppose us, you are Satanic and our ordained duty is to destroy you, man, woman, child and donkey, because in so doing, we become beloved in God’s eyes.” That’s what extremist Zionists believe. At the funeral of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin roared: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” He believed it and so did his huge audience; hardly anybody in Israel complained. In The Jewish Paradox [1], Nahum Goldmann, one of the most important architects of the modern Zionist state and a person of great culture, put it clearly:

The Jews are the most separatist people in the world. Their belief in the notion of the chosen people is the basis of their entire religion. All down the centuries the Jews have intensified their separation from the non-Jewish world; they have rejected, and still do reject, mixed marriages; they have put up one wall after another to protect their existence as a people apart, and have built their ghettos with their own hands, from the shtetl of Eastern Europe to the mellah of Morocco (p8) … the Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race… Every Jew felt ten or a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil: he was cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud— in other words he knew that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates (p12-13) … the worst of these encounters (oppression) was with the Christians, not with the Muslims, and also to stress that the ghetto is historically a Jewish invention. It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves from other societies. When the Christians defined the ghetto limits, Jews lived there already (p66).

A sense of innate superiority creates a sense of entitlement and privilege which grows as it has no inherent bounds: feeling more powerful feels better than less, so people always try to gain more power and wealth (Herr Musk is now worth $852billion, and wants more). It’s called sequential targeting: last year’s goal becomes this year’s starting point. A sense of superiority also breeds intense resentment among those regarded as “inferior races… illiterates.” That builds up until, one fine day, it explodes. Why? Because anybody who believes they’re special actually wants the world to know it, they want to be treated differently, they don’t want anybody calling out: “Hey, you there, wait your turn like everybody else.” So they tell people in subtle ways: “I’m a superior type so you lesser beings better know your place.” This infuriates the lesser beings until one day, they start greasing the tumbrils.

As long as there are people who believe in a hierarchy of races or nations or religions or wealth or whatever and are prepared to enforce it, the world is not safe. Your children are not safe. Goldmann understood this: “Characteristic of this attitude is Prime Minister Begin’s statement that Israel does not require Arab acceptance because its existence is the affirmation of God’s promise and Jewish tradition.” Tell that to the Palestinians. Simply holding that attitude causes people to act in a repressive manner toward their neighbours who, in turn, will react, violently if necessary, to preserve their sense of self-worth. That’s elementary. It’s called psychology.

The idea that for any reason, one group is superior to another is not compatible with the peace of the world. The notion that one’s sense of superiority is authorised by god or history or race or power is a falsehood invented to justify what humans want to do anyway: crush other people in order to feel good. The drive to dominate comes first, the justification is second. These days, when an aggressive, nuclear-armed state feels entitled to take what it likes, the continued existence of the planet is at grave risk. Regardless of its justification, be it god, race or destiny, that idea has to go. But, you ask, if Americans and Zionists are as clever as they seem to think they are, how come they can’t see this elementary truth? I’ll tell you: they don’t want to see it because they think they’re winning. That blinds them. One day, it will all come crashing down and then their eyes will be opened. Too late.

Reference:

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

****

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.

****

For those who are interested: The Doomsday Clock in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moved one second closer to midnight, now 85 seconds from annihilation. “The Doomsday Clock is about global risks, and what we have seen is a global failure in leadership,” said the Bulletin’s president.

****

It’s easy to be shocked into silence by the corruption, brutality and squalor of the Trumpian regime, its constant threats of war, of people being shot on the streets and corruption reaching to every corner of the state but it’s important not to miss the broader view of what’s actually going on. What is going on is that none of this is new. There hasn’t been a day of peace for the past 125 years; nobody knows how many people are shot by US police because the government doesn’t keep a record but it’s well in excess of 1,200 a year; and as the Epstein saga shows [1], corruption at the highest levels of the transnational plutocracy is not just so normal as to be banal, but de rigueur: that’s how they got there.

None of this mayhem makes sense. The mean standard of living in the world has been rising steadily for decades; standards of health are higher and life span is much longer; levels of education are far higher than ever before; the sum total of human knowledge is doubling every few years; yet morally, we are no better than the most corrupt, the most wantonly violent and decadent of the late imperial Roman courts. Wars abound yet on practically every parameter, we are hurtling toward climate catastrophe, lulled by the blizzard of platitudes on sustainability streaming from our leaders’ mouths and other orifices. We need to keep asking: How did this come about? Where is it heading and, above all, how will it end? What will make our leaders come to their senses? These are critically important questions; to answer them, let’s have a look at a major but underrated influence in everything going on in the US today, one Stephen Miller.

Miller, born in 1985 and now 40, is deputy chief of staff in the White House, meaning he was not elected and doesn’t need Congressional approval to get his key to the gold-plated crappers. He comes from an upper middle class family (mother a social worker, father a lawyer) in the wealthy suburb of Santa Monica in LA; as a child, he was considered “contrarian,” given to racial taunts and self-publicity. There are videos of him at age 17 showing signs of the nasty person he was shaping himself to be (a longer history here). He has a basic university degree but has never worked in the real world, only ever in politics. He is a total political animal, obsessed with power and domination, who prefers working behind the scenes, possibly because he knows he couldn’t win election as council dog catcher (one of the dogs would surely beat him). His political stance is ultra-right wing/fascist, nativist and xenophobic/racist, and he has duly taken control of the administration’s immigration policy, which he dictates in minute detail. Miller is fully responsible for the swarms of thuggish enforcement officers (ICE) terrorising people on the streets and in their homes, and the vast, expanding network of “detention centres,” aka concentration camps, springing up around the country. He plays a major part in actions like blowing up boats in the Caribbean and would have been up to his ears in the Maduro kidnapping. His role in the US today is evocative of Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. Müller, said the historian Richard Evans, was:

… a stickler for duty and discipline, and approached the tasks he was set as if they were military commands. A true workaholic who never took a vacation, Müller was determined to serve the German state, irrespective of what political form it took, and believed it was everyone’s duty, including his own, to obey its dictates without question.

In his role, and through choice, he was a major figure in planning and implementing the Final Solution, the program to exterminate Jews and other populations. Even though he has the same surname, it’s unlikely Miller has anything like Müller’s self-discipline. Note that Stephen Miller is a Jew, confirming the opinion of Nobel Prize-winning neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek that Hitler was a fool for alienating the Jews as many of them would have been totally supportive of his policies:

We should never forget that the anti-semitism of Hitler has driven from his country, or turned into his enemies, many people who in every respect are confirmed totalitarians of the German type [2, p189-90; most of them went to then-Palestine or the US].

Miller is commonly described as reptilian but that’s insulting to reptiles. You only have to look at his photo and you can see him in an SS uniform. To me, he embodies precisely the core concepts of Narcisso-Fascism: the lascivious lust for unbridled power to dominate and control people; the hatred that flows toward anybody who dares oppose that lust; misogyny and overt homoeroticism; the grandiosity and contempt for lesser humans; a ferocious hostility toward any rules or customs that stand in his way; contemptuous anti-intellectualism; intense narcissism and self-indulgence … People of this type are inherently dangerous, as these quotes show:

1. ...the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.

2. The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical... Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit — i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand — a manifestation of their vitality.

3. 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 that have existed since the beginning of time.

(Quote 1, Mein Kampf, p182; Quote 2 Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism; Quote 3 Stephen Miller interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5, 2026).

We are forced to ask: how did such an egregiously vile person gain such power over people’s lives? The short answer is that’s what power-hungry people do. They are drawn to power like flies to a sewage works to make themselves feel better: every one of those features conceals an inner void, a black hole in the psyche that holding power over others promises to fill. The fact that Miller is a Jew confirms that history does not automatically protect any human against holding the most extreme and odious fascist views. The fact that historically, people he identifies with were grievously mistreated has not inclined him to favour the underdog. He identifies with the persecutors, not with their victims.

Fascism is a form of political movement, not a form of government as capitalism or socialism are. Naturally enough, it is influenced by social and political factors but individually, it is a reaction to personal psychopathology, not a product of one’s historical background. The people who thrust themselves into leadership roles are normally at once capable, disciplined, determined and seriously discommoded in their lives (Trump is not the last of those but he’s just a figurehead for the fascists who are propping him up). It breeds in dissatisfaction but it only becomes a movement, a political force, when enough people in the community are disenchanted with the status quo. If you have a comfortable citizenry who feel well-supplied and well-supported, who do not feel threatened, then fascism doesn’t get off the ground. Hitler and Mussolini didn’t appeal to the comfortable middle class; in turn, they loathed him. Somewhere, I have a photo of a street poster from the 1933 election shrieking: Wer kann uns von Hitler retten? Nur Hindenburg. Who can save us from Hitler? Only General Hindenburg, the then-president. The middle classes knew what Hitler was about but, as they found out, Hindenburg did nothing to save them.

The critical factor in a fascist takeover is not the presence of a few malevolent individuals because by themselves, they’re nothing, just malcontents yelling into the wind. They become dangerous only in the setting of but widespread and serious discontent. When the fascists in Italy and Germany took control, their countries were basket cases, their economies broken, under threat from godless Bolshevism and in danger of splintering. The fascist agitators built on this until they could take control but, on the face of it, nobody would say that the US is in anything like that sort of state. Conditions were far, far worse during the Great Depression – just look at Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath from 1939 – but, in politics, perceptions count, not mere facts. One of the most important factors in any fascist movement is the perception that the nation is under threat, from without and, crucially, from within. If nothing is done, the country will implode, demonic forces will take control and the people will be plunged into a living hell roughly modelled on Stalinist Russia. Somehow, somebody has managed to convince enough voters that the US is a whisker away from damnation for them to vote for a convicted cheat, philanderer, liar and quite possibly paedophile. Oh, and bumbling, dementing fool as well. Why? Because he said: “Trust me, I’ll save you.” Save them from what? Now that’s a very good question: who or what is threatening the US to the extent that they should hand power to a person who said he would be a dictator? This is where the plot thickens, because a plot it is, a fifty year plot to change the entire social and economic structure of this enormous but seriously flawed country.

The 1950s and 60s in the US were a golden age for the ordinary Joe (as long as he wasn’t Black Joe, that wasn’t real flash). There was plenty of work, housing was cheap, education was cheap, health care was cheap, taxes on the rich were high, managers earned about 20 times as much as their median worker, technology was racing ahead and the US dominated the world in practically every field. Sure, there were idiots like the alcoholic Sen. Joe McCarthy screeching his tits off about the communist menace but in the main, that happened somewhere far, far away. Ordinary people had very comfortable lives, especially compared with their parents who had survived the Depression, Starting in the late 1960s, a small group of very wealthy people decided this wasn’t good enough, that the direction of the country was down and to the left. Too many young people in tertiary education were getting dangerously radical ideas, threatening the status quo of home, country, religion and prosperity. Where would it end, they asked but they had an answer to that: in the gulag.

To them, you were either 110% in favour of God, Starsnstripes, motherhood, apple pie and Pat Boone or you were Trosky in disguise. No half measures. Godless monolithic international communism was poised and waiting, ever on the brink of hurling its robotic masses across the oceans to rape and strangle America’s mothers and daughters in their beds. Or something, it was never quite clear. The only defence was to give more power to the corporations that were building America’s vast military industries. More military meant raising more tax, which could only come from having more people in work but raising taxes on workers usually doesn’t guarantee reelection. Enter the small group of marginalised and rather eccentric economists called neoliberals centred around the Austrian theorists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and others at the University of Chicago, aka the Austrian school. Government was the problem, they warned, government is inherently inefficient and repressive; the only way society can race ahead is to move capital and responsibility from government to the community. They advocated lowering taxes, severely restricting government, and allowing the market to decide where and how capital should be invested. Lowering taxes? As rates of taxation had been high to very high since World War II, ears pricked and chops were licked all round.

For the wealthy, this doctrine (because that’s what it is) had immediate appeal but first, it was necessary to convince legislators that they had it all wrong, that “tax and spend” had to be replaced by something entirely new called “trickle-down economics.” In this bold vision, low taxes on the wealthy would allow them to accumulate capital which then had to be reinvested, creating jobs and building a virtuous circle of expanding work for more employees paying more tax to make up for the lowered taxes on the wealthy. Everybody is a winner, they preached, but first they needed a few influential pollies on side so, armed with bottomless pockets, they began spreading their message around to sympathetic members of Congress. At the same time, they began financing “think tanks” to develop and spread the new gospel of neoliberalism, to influence editors and TV presenters and, above all, universities.

This was not random, they were working to a script known as the Powell Memo, written in 1971 by a lawyer named Lewis Powell (he was rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court). Powell named the danger (squishy godless young lefties egged on by academic ideologues having an easy life at the taxpayer’s expense while spreading their poison in cahoots with said monolithic international communism blah blah) and the antidote. Powell’s remedy has been followed to this day. Insidiously, right wing capital took over the US and controls it to this day but the masses are getting restive. One of the central principles of neoliberalism, “trickle-down economics,” hasn’t quite worked out the way they said it would. It began with “trickle-up economics,” so yes, starting with the ever-pliable Reagan, there were massive reductions of taxation for the wealthy, to the point where many now pay hardly any tax at all. Yes, the wealthy became wealthy beyond any level of sanity and, crucially, gained political power to match, so yes, they had to reinvest their loot. Sorry, their hard-earned rewards. And yes, acting strictly according to the neoliberal rulebook, they looked around for the best returns on their money. Where was that? Well, it certainly wasn’t where the newly poor workers thought it would be, in their existing factories or down the road at a new site. It was, of course, precisely where neoliberalism dictated profits were greatest: overseas. So the jobs just disappeared and, Trump notwithstanding, will never come back. But you can’t blame neoliberalism, after all, it’s a rational doctrine, a science free of wishy-washy moral stuff like workers’ rights and fair play and a level playing field and all that shit. Hidden under the measured and dispassionate academic language of Hayek and Co. is the crudest social Darwinism of all: get it while you can and screw the effing underdog.

A skilled worker who, 25yrs ago, worked as a machinist earning about $28 an hour plus health insurance now works sealing basements for $10 an hour in debased modern money – if he’s lucky. You can drive through what were the great industrial cities of the north and see enormous swathes of weed-infested ground where factories once stood, or devastated housing tracts which the city council can’t even afford to wreck. While the owners of capital are toasting each other in their yachts in the offshore tax havens, the steel belt became the rust belt whose workers are dying of “diseases of despair,” alcohol, drugs, suicide – the despair belt, you could say. Over 900,000 Americans have died of opiate overdoses in the cruelly misnamed opioid epidemic but its architects, the filthy rich Sackler family, are untouchable (for them, $7.4billion over 15yrs is chickenfeed). Not for nothing the US has the largest prison population in the world but only for the poor, mind you. Suicide is at an all-time high, people die of preventable diseases, on and on, because neoliberal capitalism. Needless to say, people see the inequality and they are angry. Very angry. They see their jobs disappearing, their schools collapsing, their hospitals closing but they can’t afford health care anyway. Once-free education now costs a fortune and cripples them for life; aged care is prohibitive; and even dying costs more than many can afford.

But instead of putting the blame where it should be, squarely on the heads of the wealthy and their neoliberal academic toadies who, through giant corporations bleeding the treasury and endless webs of Epsteinian corruption and decadence, have deliberately engineered Byzantine levels of inequality, the poor and dispossessed are told by State Propaganda Services such as Fox, Murdoch, Bezos and Co. that it’s all due to them immigrants. And Moslems, and foreigners and Russians and Chinese who are undermining the country and destroying it from within, so get ‘em. Round ‘em up and expel ‘em and then there’ll be jobs for all and we will Make America Great Again, perchance to start the whole cycle over again. Except it won’t be. Greatness is like the beauty of youth. It fades, and once it’s gone, there’s no coming back, as old Omar knew:

The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on:

not all thy piety nor wit

shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

nor all thy tears erase a word of it.

The jobs have gone forever. Also according to neoliberal doctrine, the bit they didn’t tell anybody, American wages must drop to the level of overseas workers before capitalists will reinvest in factories down the road. Trump thinks he can reverse the flow by ordering companies to relocate to the US but he’s a fool, King Donald Canute. He’s doing it not for economic reasons but because he hates the idea of foreigners doing things better than Americans (and he just hates foreigners anyway). Which of course they do as they’re desperate. This is the neoliberal ploy: keep the workers desperate, fighting each other for jobs and don’t let anybody draw attention to the real cause of their immiseration, neoliberal capitalism. And when the anger threatens to spill over, divert attention, yell “Look, there’s a wog sneaking over our border, get him!” Once that mood takes hold, people like Stephen Miller and the execrable Steve Bannon slither out of the woodwork and soon take control, carefully stage-managing the anger to their advantage while eliminating their enemies. So the slide into autocracy accelerates but, as the Greeks knew, the most important point of all is that Fascism. Never Does. Make. Anybody. Great Again. It has to end in Ekpyrosis, the cleansing fire that burns wickedness and greed out of the soul of the nation, like Germany in 1945. But, as Miller and all the other fascist Zionists show, the same old cycle of domination starts again. It’s human, you see. The cure for fascism starts with a long look in the mirror.

****

Just so you understand the extent to which State Propaganda Services are deliberately misleading the public, please read this article by Craig Murray, it doesn’t take long. He has just been to Venezuela to see for himself what is going on. Craig is a former British diplomat who works tirelessly for human rights, and for nothing. I believe his work is beyond reproach, e.g. he was a very effective supporter of Julian Assange throughout his trials.

****

References:

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.

2. Hayek FA von (1944). The Road to Serfdom. 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.

****

Fresh from his criminal act of kidnapping the president of Venezuela and his wife, Trump’s windsock-type attention has swung north, to Greenland. “We need Greenland for national security,” he spouts but, of course, nobody believes him. The US signed a treaty with Denmark in 1951 that allowed them to establish military bases more or less as they saw fit, and to get mining permits. At the peak, the US had eight (8) fully functioning bases in Greenland, including Thule (now Pituffik or something), their most important forward radar base. Seven of them have since been closed and no mining applications have ever been lodged, not least because anything worth mining is secure under about a kilometre of ice.

Here, “national security” is just another bit of Trumpian bullshit, another lie from somebody who has never seen the difference between what he wants to be true, and what is actually true. Most children have a clear grasp of that concept by the time they start school but he missed out, mainly because his father didn’t have much idea of truth and honesty himself, and partly because, for the whole of his life, Trump has been surrounded by an echo chamber of people on the take. These days, he yells: “Don’t tell me what I said yesterday, tell me what I want to hear today,” and they fall over themselves to satisfy him, knowing that the more accurately they guess his moods and suck up, the

closer they get to sticking their greedy fingers in the rivers of black money flowing around him.

In between Venezuela and Greenland, we had the ludicrous and (for sensible US citizens) humiliating experience of The Nobel Peace Prize That Wasn’t. I have long had the gravest doubts about the sense of the Norwegian committee that administers it, going back to the travesty of Kisssinger, the architect of total war on North Vietnam, picking it up but Maria Machado is right down there with the worst. She is a member of one of the immensely wealthy white families who spent decades plundering Venezuela while the vast majority, especially the indigenous people, lived in festering slums. She wants Trump to invade her country so her family and friends can get back the key to the national treasury to pick up their party where Chavez had ended it. She doesn’t have a democratic bone in her body, she is a plutocrat through and through and she couldn’t give a shit about the poor. How many readers recall that young women from Venezuela have won dozens of titles like Miss Universe, Miss International, etc? They had a production line for the blond, pale-skinned daughters of the wealthy, which fed them through a machine and spat them out as ideals for the person who owned Miss Universe, one Donald J Trump. Small world, isn’t it. That meant the brown-skinned, dark-haired indigenous girls from the barrios or the provinces didn’t get a look in, they had to work in the fields while the wealthy practised in their bikinis and stilettos.

But where was I? Oh yes, that prize. She handed it to him and he fell for it. Partly that was his infinitely greedy personality but a lot of it was his dementia: he simply is not capable of comprehending that it isn’t like a building, something you can buy and then you own it. He wants that prize; she gave him hers (stupid woman, 200gm of gold but what does she care, that’s chicken feed for her); it sits on his wall, so therefore it’s his and everybody has to bow down. And now he’s told the Norwegian prime minister that his threats to invade Greenland are largely motivated by not getting that prize. This is the age we live in, this is the world we will hand to our children and grandchildren. However, it may well be that this time, Trump has bitten off more than he can chew. This time, and unlike his attacks on Iran and Venezuela and Nigeria and Somalia and Yemen and Syria and a few others, Europe isn’t applauding.

The Europeans, pathetic bunch of squibs that they are, have rattled around in the cupboard out the back and found an old spine they put there 80 years ago, and are trying it on to see whether it fits any of them but it’s too big. Spines can be scary, you know, but so far they haven’t had a total panic. They’ve sent a few dozen troops and a dog sled to Greenland and told Herr Drumpf that he can’t have it. He, of course, is apoplectic: Nobody, but nobody, tells DJ Trump what he can or cannot have, they’re off script!!!! Tariffs all round, he shrieks on Twitter or whatever it is, anybody who opposes me will wear 25% tariffs. That’s in addition to the 25% for anybody who trades with Iran in any way. International diplomacy reduced to the level of a child throwing a tantrum, hurling things from his play pen, except this over-sized child has his fat little fingers hovering over the Big Red Button that follows him wherever he goes: “We need Greenland for national security so we can either get it the easy way or the hard way but we’re going to get it.”

Meantime in the US, crickets. Nobody, not a single person in the US, is whispering in his ear, “Donny, you can’t actually do things like that, they’re our NATO allies.” What does he care about NATO? He hates NATO, he believes they’ve had a free ride on Uncle Sam’s coat tails and either they start to pay up or it’s all over. Trouble is, they can’t pay up. Their prosperity was built on cheap Russian natural gas but Biden blew up the Nordstream II pipeline so now their economies are grinding to a halt (The Economist this week: “Germany’s economy is so bad even sausage factories are closing”). Also, there’s actually nothing they can do to stop the US landing a couple of divisions and hoisting their flag, as they’ve done so many times before. Unless The Don changes his mind or loses it completely, it looks as though Denmark is going to shrink. Would that be so bad? Probably not good for the Greenlanders who would lose their health service and old age pensions and free education and so on, but what about Europe? Could they remain in bed with somebody who has just stolen their apples? Probably, they’ve had long practice at adjusting their morals to satisfy their greed: Europeans have spent the past 600 years landing in other people’s countries, having a look around and saying: “This is nice, we’ll have it.” Now that it’s being done to them, they don’t like it but they can’t expect their protests to be taken too seriously in their former colonies. However, the real question for Europe is this: Do they need to remain in a subservient role to the US, or has the very idea of a NATO reached its use-by date? That’s a good question: What in fact is the idea of NATO?

NATO, as they say, was intended to keep the Soviets/Russians out, the Germans down and the Americans in. From the very beginning, NATO was an American invention, built and paid for by them for their purpose “containing” the USSR (now Russia) because communism. The selling point was that without a permanent American military presence, the fanatical Soviet hordes would pour across to the Atlantic, crushing the nice, harmless people in Western Europe under their snowy boots. That’s what they said and still say, but there’s no truth in it. In 1945, Stalin wanted a united, neutral and disarmed Germany straddling the centre of Europe. That way, he reasoned, nobody could invade from the West again, freeing them to get on with the serious business of rebuilding after the Nazi invasion. That didn’t happen. The US rearmed West Germany and incorporated it in NATO, manifestly a hostile alliance directed at the USSR, who retaliated with the rickety Warsaw Pact.

Marx, according to the savants in the West, said monolithic communism was determined to destroy capitalism, hence the unremitting hostility of the West toward anything red. That’s not actually true. Marx said that capitalists hated socialists (true) and would always do whatever they could to destroy socialism (also true) so socialists had to be ready to defend their revolutions otherwise the capitalists would pounce (which they have done many times). Classic Marxism said capitalism would eventually destroy itself due to its internal contradictions; socialists had to be ready to take over but he did not say communism had to attack capitalism. In fact, Stalin’s official doctrine was called “Socialism in One Country,” meaning the USSR. This meant he did not support the Chinese Communist Party, which led to decades of hostility, including fighting on the Ussuri River in 1969. There was no such thing as “monolithic communism,” that was simply propaganda to justify Western hatred of the socialist movement.

You would think that when the USSR fell apart and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, all the threats to Western Europe had disappeared, so NATO could have faded away. Not so: it was rejuvenated and spread to the East, to counter the dire Russian threat. This is such utter nonsense: in the 1990s, Russia was a basket case, unable to pay its own army let alone mount an invasion of the West. There was fighting in different parts of the country; the president, Boris Yeltsin, was a totally corrupt and hopeless drunk; the entire state assets were being purloined by a small group (the “oligarchs”); industry crashed; there was mass unemployment; massive inflation and devastation of the working and middle classes … In short, post-Soviet Russia was a tableau from heaven for the vulture capitalists of the West who were slobbering in their sleep over the uncountable wealth they had almost within their hands, but a threat it was not. But then somebody threw a spanner in their plans. In his last days, Yeltsin appointed a young KGB operative as prime minister who agreed not to pursue the Yeltsin clan for their corruption but who then turned on the oligarchs and started to claw back the state assets [1].

To cut it short, Putin spoiled Wall Street’s wet dream of dismembering and looting Russia’s vast natural wealth, that’s why they hate him. He snatched the treasure from under their noses, for which they will hate him for eternity. It has nothing to do with human rights or democracy or any of that tosh (the wealthy hate human rights and democracy as well). The whole thing is money and power, nothing else. The only thing about Trump is that, in his rapidly advancing senile decay, he says out loud what the Western imperialist capitalists have been saying for half a millenium: “Either you let us prey on your country and take what we like, or we will destroy you and then take what we like.”

Also, Trump is threatening white people whereas the rules of civilised imperialism are that you can only do that to what Churchill deemed “lower grade races.”

But back to NATO: the whole thing is a lie. Western Europe is not and never has been in danger of invasion from the East. The purpose of NATO was and still is to keep the barbarians to the East constantly feeling threatened so they spend too much on arms and bankrupt themselves, as happened in 1990. NATO should be dissolved as a threat to international peace. The US should close its bases and go back to its side of the Atlantic. Europe should get rid of its current crop of deadbeat politicians and come to an agreement to work with Russia to build a Eurasian Economic Community with its own reserve currency, and maybe, maybe, we could start to escape what has been called the Hobbesian Trap.

English polymath Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) had a very gloomy view of humans. Unless they are kept on a tight leash, he said, humans turn into the very worst of animals. They need a strong central government (the “Leviathan”) otherwise society collapses into chaos:

… (without strong central authority) there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Leviathan, 1651, Ch 13).

The Hobbesian Trap says that, by nature, a state of mutual distrust exists between neighbours in which each fears the other may be about to attack; therefore, a pre-emptive attack makes perfect sense. This notion has been very influential in the relations of the US and USSR, and now the US and China and Russia, leading to the nuclear arms race, Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) and a hundred wars and bloody revolutions, Ukraine merely being the latest.

Without having read everything Hobbes wrote (a lot), I’d say he left one crucial point unanswered: Why do humans mistrust each other? There are two reasons. The first is an innate fear of the unknown, either of places or of strangers, better known as xenophobia. In that, we’re no different from practically every other animal on the planet, and clever people amuse themselves making up evolutionary arguments to “explain” it. The solution to xenophobia is to get to know people, and this is easily done within a formal social structure that assumes each party’s good intentions. That, however, is where it breaks down: what happens if the other side don’t have good intentions, if they are lying and concealing their true, evil motives? Discretion says “Don’t trust until you are certain, and even then you can get it wrong,” for which strict rules of engagement are necessary. But why should we doubt their bona fides? They could be lying. Why do we assume that? Because we lie ourselves and we assume other people will do the same. In psychology, that’s called projection, to attribute to another person one’s secret or forbidden motives or emotions. In psychology, projection is unconscious and is seen as a sign of fairly severe personality disturbance. Lying, however, is not projection as lying is fully conscious. It is the insertion of a falsehood at a particular point in a discourse in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth (Harry Frankfurt).

When it comes to politics, Side A is right to assume Side B is lying because Side A lies all the time. Trump says: “We need Greenland for national security.” That’s a lie, he just wants it. “Venezuela is running drugs into the US.” That’s a lie, they just wanted the oil. “Israel has a right to defend itself.” That’s a lie. Under international law, the Gazans had a right of armed resistance but, as the occupying power, Israel is prohibited from any form of reprisal. “Accusing Israel of genocide is antisemitism.” That’s definitely a lie, the state of Israel is not a race that can be vilified, and so on. It’s difficult to trust when the air is thick with flying lies but it doesn’t have to be. Just because humans have always lied doesn’t mean they should continue, especially when the stakes are now so high. Rules of engagement, known as confidence-building measures, are easy to formulate. They are, however, difficult to implement when one side lies habitually. As we now see the West does.

This brings us to the second reason humans mistrust each other. Side A fears Side B wants to dominate them because they want to dominate Side B themselves, and Side A knows Side B will resist because Side A hate being dominated themselves. This is the paradox of domination: in one and the same person at exactly the same time, we have two countervailing urges, to dominate others, and to resist being dominated. This is basic to human life: it is biology, universal among humans and most other animals, but it causes constant chaos because even though dominating is such fun, being oppressed is living death. However, if we choose, we can control our urge to dominate. It’s not like breathing or eating or sleeping, it doesn’t have to be. Before the impulse gets out of control, we have the ability to say: “No, stealing their land is stupid, if everybody steals all the time, where are we? We can’t live in a lawless society.” In fact, we can but lawless life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Trump, however, is different. He sees dominating people as a sign that he’s smarter than everybody else. Remember what he said about paying taxes? He doesn’t pay any, which means he’s smarter than all the people who do. If he can get his name on things, that means he’s superior to people who don’t have their names on things. If he has lots of gold around the place, that says he’s better than the common herd who can’t afford gold. If he could get lots of women, that meant he was better than men who had only one wife. All this is because he has no self-esteem, he is a hollow person. Every time he gets something new or bigger or more expensive, he feels a thrill and he does his silly little wooden marionette dance. Trouble is, the thrill quickly wears off, as thrills do. Then the emptiness creeps in and he can’t stand that, so he has to keep moving, keep reaching for more, keep clambering over people just so he can say: “Look at me, I’m the greatest.” That’s why he stays up all night texting threats to people (33 in 45 minutes at Davos on Tuesday) because inside, he knows he’s not; also, he has no idea how stupid it makes him look.

The age of the flimsy “rules-based international order” is well and truly dead, shot down after it got in their way by the very people who touted it. NATO has been an important part of the deception that we (meaning rich white countries) are the goodies and anybody who opposes us is bad and has to be crushed. We say it is defensive but necessarily, the other side see it as a mortal threat and are compelled to respond. The sooner it is gone, the better. We are only a hair’s breadth from Hobbesian anarchy, where the powerful crush the weak because they enjoy it and nobody can stop them.

Trouble is, our politicians don’t understand any of this, they think they’re doing God’s will or spreading democracy or bringing peace when all they’re doing is spreading chaos through trying to get more and more. Without NATO giving them Dutch courage, Europe would be forced to make its peace with the Slavic nations to their east, whom they have sorely abused for millenia – the very word “slave” comes from Latin sclavus, meaning Slavs, because so many of them were captured and enslaved. This was before Europe’s merchants realised African slaves were easier to transport across the Atlantic.

The real history of the West is endless violence, cruelty, theft and betrayal, all of which is driven by the unquenchable Western urge to dominate the world. Mrs Drumpf’s little boy is only in that job while he delivers for the plutocracy. We should, however, be thankful for one thing: as long as he gets the prize, he doesn’t give a shit who knows he’s a monster. Of course, if he gets away with Greenland, he’ll move on to something bigger. That’s what psychopaths do. Only a united front stops them, and the best united front would be Europe, Russia and China. So keep at it, Donny boy, keep shaking NATO until it falls apart, then people will have to think for a change instead of being told what to do. It’s time to turn.

Reference:

Belton C (2020). Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West. London: Harper Collins.

****

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.

The reality is that Trump is totally delusional about his plans for Venezuela, and especially his reliance on its defunct oil industry. … Once again Trump is demonstrating why his delusions and refusal to face the facts make him such an unreliable ally.

That last sentence is the real core of his article: Dump Trump before he shits on us. I have full sympathy for this political view but my real concern is the suggestion that he is mentally ill. Let’s be clear: If and when Trump is ever held to account before a court, he will not be able to plead not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He is not under the control of delusional beliefs. That doesn’t say he’s the full quid or that all his cylinders are firing because he’s not and they’re not. The reality of this professionally bizarre individual is a little more complex. Let’s start with a definition:

A delusion is a fixed, false belief, out of context with the person’s intellectual, educational and cultural background.

Some people add “held with a morbid intensity,” but that’s what “fixed” means: unable to be budged. A belief is false when the great majority of citizens would say it’s false and there’s no evidence to rebut them. That means truth is relative: last year’s received belief can become this year’s crackpot notion but we’re used to that. As for intellect, in general, the word ‘delusion’ should not be applied to people with intellectual disability, which in this country means somebody with an IQ score below 70. Often they will seem to believe strange things but there is usually some reality basis to it, like a mistaken identity or such like; the ideas tend to come and go; and they can usually be distracted and may forget about it for months on end. The educational background is important. Poorly educated people tend to fix on simple answers to complex questions, which means they’re at risk of people taking advantage of them. We would like to think that educated people are able to sift evidence and come to the correct conclusion but, all too often, that’s not the case. There are plenty of people with a string of degrees who hold one or two whacky ideas, and we’ll come back to them.

The idea that our beliefs are shaped by our cultural background causes the most difficulty. In general, people can believe anything they like as long as everybody in the street or their football club believes it. People tend to believe what they’re told, especially if it’s repeated over and over, even when it’s cruel and patently false, but what about fringe religions? Cults? Cult-like political groups? They’re the clue: perfectly sane people believe what they want to believe. They will believe something that suits their purposes, or gets them what they want, or makes life easier, or makes them popular and so on. The only difference is that they can change their minds. A genuinely deluded person can’t.

Thus we have the screwball movement in the US called Q-Anon. Q is supposed to be some high-placed government official who leaks vital information in the form of cryptic messages on the internet. His/her/its followers are told, and willingly believe, that there is a secret cabal of very influential people in the US and/or world who are Satanists, paedophiles, child murderers and/or cannibals, who may or may not be shape-shifting lizards and/or aliens and are trying to take over the world but one DJ Trump has been sent by God to thwart them. Q-Anon supporters were prominent on the January 6^th insurrection but seem to have faded a bit since it has become clear that their hero could well be one of them paedowhatsits himself or is protecting them. And that most of them are Republicans as well. Some of the Q-Anon mob are frankly delusional but the most are dupes who simply want to believe bad of their political opponents. The more they hate, the more likely they are to believe nonsense but even their hatred is a sign of unbalance, mostly personal insecurity and poor self-esteem.

Apart from the ringleaders of these cult-like groups, and nobody actually knows who they are in Q-Anon [1], most of their followers can be talked around, especially when they realise they’ve been cheated. They appear to believe nonsense but it’s tied to their group and they can drop the beliefs and the group when they choose. One of the most powerful factors here is believing you know better than anybody else, that they mustn’t argue as you can’t be wrong. Clever or educated people often latch on to a screwy idea and try to shove it down everybody’s throat because it becomes a test of dominance. The incorrigible Andrew Wakefield, who started the “autism is due to vaccination” push, is one of these. He got an idea in his head that seemed so smart and outwitted everybody, and he wouldn’t give it up. Regardless of the evidence against him, he could always go through it and find a possible weakness. As Garrison Keillor said, “Intelligence is like a four wheel drive wagon; it lets you get stuck in more interesting places.”

So back to Herr Drumpf: is he deluded? The short answer is no, he doesn’t believe anything long enough or strong enough to qualify as a delusion. Trump is a person of limited intellect; of generally poor education; who doesn’t read; who believes he knows better than everybody else; that he only has to look at some issue to get the answer that will make all the experts look foolish; and everybody has to agree with him or he’ll send the men with the violin cases to break their arms, or worse, as he said of the interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she’s going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” He is totally lacking in any sense of discipline. He does whatever he thinks will feel good at the time. He says any bit of nonsense that comes into his head if it humiliates his many enemies or boosts himself; if it gets a cheer, he repeats it but if people don’t like it, he drops it and then says he never said it anyway, it’s all “fake news.” It seems as though he’s lying all the time but liars know what they’re doing, they have a plan and stick to it. He doesn’t have any plan, never has had, he just spouts whatever makes him look good with his audience because he knows he can always get away with it. He’s just an idiot (defined as a person who never lets facts spoil his opinion).

The only idea that could pass as a delusion is the belief that he won the 2020 election, but if he were faced with going to prison or recanting, he’d immediately say: “I never said that, it’s all fake noos.” Does he believe what he says? No, the word belief doesn’t apply to him. Words are just little noises he sprays around to manipulate people. This is the clue to what people call his “political genius.” In fact, he’s not a genius at anything. He simply lets out his prejudices which happen to be much the same as poorly educated people who resent what the world is doing to them. Because he is himself a poorly educated person full of resentment at the upper class world that despises him.

These, however, are all personality factors, designed to conceal his almost total lack of self-esteem and his lack of any feeling for other human beings. He’s always been like that, as his niece, Mary Trump, a PhD psychologist, tells us. Now, however, the picture is becoming more complicated as he is dementing. It’s still fairly early but seems to be advancing quite rapidly. He is forgetful and quickly loses the thread, reverting to stereotyped abuse of his many enemies or talking up himself or his projects. His talk is rambling and often incoherent. During the important meeting with oil executives after the coup in Venezuela, he abruptly stood up, wandered to the window and began rabbiting on about his “big, beautiful ballroom.” He often perseverates on B but mostly on ideas, such as threatening people or wanting to build something, and on fragments of speech. The frequent and large bruises on his hands are consistent with injections of lecanemab, a monoclonal antibody specific for Alzheimers. They are not consistent with “frequently shaking hands,” as his press mouthpiece says, especially those on his left hand.

However, the most telling sign of dementia is his loss of social awareness. Granted he has never had much, as his “Grab them by the pussy” remarks say, but now he is completely unaware of the impact of his statements and actions on others. Now, he blurts out: “We want Greenland for national security, we should have it, they’re not doing enough with it.” False: the US has had 80 years to worry about national security and have done nothing for decades, although Thule base was important during the Cold War. He wants it because it offends him to see a European flag on an island that is clearly part of the Western Hemisphere, as in: “You go away, you’re not allowed to play in our sandpit.” He says the same of the Panama Canal, of Canada, Gaza, Cuba, Columbia, Mexico, Iran, there’s no limit. Granted, all US presidents have always simply taken what they wanted but they tried to make up some vaguely plausible lies to conceal what they were doing, such as the WMD in Iraq, the communists in Grenada, etc. Trump just says it out loud because he has no self-control: If I want it, we’ll take it (in Detroit this week, he stuck his finger up at a worker who yelled something; here, 2.50). He wrecked the White House without asking anybody; he puts his name on things, causing enormous offence; he lies and lies and lies. And guess what? It’s going to get worse.

For what it’s worth, my opinion is that he’s unfit for any public position and he should be removed from office now, but nobody in his dysfunctional court is prepared to make the first move. That’s because they know he’ll use what he can to attack them, and they all want to be in the room after he goes so they can lever themselves up the pole. And, of course, when he does go, the real cat fight for power will start among his undisciplined and unqualified minions. I believe he’s on course to do something really bad that will force Congress to remove him. Our only hope is that it doesn’t involve nuclear weapons. Would he use them to keep himself in power? He probably would, he isn’t capable of seeing the damage it would do but then, why would he care? In about February 1945, when the Red Army was surrounding Berlin and the Allies were pounding it from the air, Hitler ordered Albert Speer, his minister of armaments and one of the few people he trusted, to destroy the entire infrastructure in Germany. The German people had failed him, he said, therefore they didn’t deserve anything. Speer reported back to him that the destruction was underway but fortunately, he didn’t act on it. Same for Trump: if people forced him out of the White House, he would happily wreck the world through spite: “If I can’t have it, nobody can have it.” That’s what dementing, personality disordered people do. Hang on to your hats, it’s going to get bumpy.

Reference:

1 Bloom M, Moskalenko S (2021). Pastels and Pedophiles. Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford, CA: Redwood Press.

****

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.

****

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Arnold J Toynbee (1889-1975, British historian. From A Study of History)

George Orwell dismissed the autobiography of the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, as “a striptease conducted in pink limelight.” He was so lucky. For decades, we’ve been treated to a long, slow striptease, an elaborate Dance of the Seven Veils conducted in full technicolour under glaring floodlights to the soundtrack of screaming jets and exploding bombs. Now, the dance has reached its inevitable end, the Seventh Veil lies torn, scuffed and crumpled on the floor, and all the pretence and suspense is over. Standing stark naked on the world stage is Uncle Sam, in the unlovely form of his president, one DJ Trump, bulges, warts, trusses and all. When asked if she was scared while giving evidence against Trump, the porn actress Stormy Daniels replied: “Not at all. I’ve seen Donald Trump naked. After that, nothing is scary.” Seeing the US stripped of all its lies and pretence shouldn’t be scary but a lot of people around the world seem to be having trouble getting used to it.

The idea that the US could invade Venezuela, a sovereign country, kill 82 people and kidnap its president and his wife scares a lot of people to the point where they have to tell each other: “Maduro has been captured.” That makes it sound, not like the major international crime that it is, but like a Hollywood goodies vs baddies tale where the brave and noble goodies have finally run the evil one to ground and now he’s trussed up in the van and going to the place he deserves. Except there’s no truth in it. First point: a head of state has absolute immunity, just as Trump has managed to winkle out of his tame Supreme Court. Second: no American court has jurisdiction outside its borders. Third: even if it did, no evidence of drug trafficking has been presented because, as the US DEA has said, there isn’t any. Four: only the UN Security Council can authorise an invasion of a sovereign state, and they haven’t and wouldn’t. Five: the US recently ignored the international arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of crimes against humanity, including murdering and torturing children. Six: Trump and various minions have made it perfectly clear that the whole thing is about oil. And seven: If he gets away with this, he’ll try it again and again.

Starting with the genocide in Gaza and now with the attack on Venezuela, the final veil has dropped. The whole world sees the idea of an American designed and led “rules-based international order” as a total fraud, smoke and mirrors intended to keep the hoi-polloi quiet while the US got on with its manifest destiny of looting the planet. In fact, there have been so many veils of obfuscation, deceit and treachery that it’s always been hard to keep up with them. An early and important example was the idea of “national self-determination” written into the UN Charter. Sounds great, but it quickly got in the way and was pushed aside. The European countries wanted to keep their empires; they needed American support and money to recover them; if they didn’t get them, they would have drifted into neutrality so the US helped them reoccupy their colonies.

In South-East Asia, France faced formidable opposition from the nationalist movement, led by the resourceful Marxist known as Ho Chi Minh. The French were supplied with American money, arms and aircraft but it wasn’t enough. At Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they were defeated by a guerilla army, creeping through the jungle with bits of car tyres tied to their feet for sandals, so the US pushed the French aside and took over. A conference in Geneva in 1954 promised a national election for 1956 but when it became clear the communist Viet Minh would win, the Americans cancelled it and started another war which they duly lost, setting the trend for the next fifty years. But the veil of deceit drawn over this dreadful episode is that the US was fighting monolithic international communism for Vietnamese freedom and democracy, all of which was false. They were fighting for the power to dominate South East Asia and isolate and weaken Maoist China. Even the casus belli, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was a fabrication from beginning to end. There have been so many cases like this. The Wikipedia page on American Regime Change operations since 1945 names 45 countries, but there were more. For example, it doesn’t include the CIA-MI6 operation in Australia in 1975 to topple the Whitlam Labor government, which was thinking of not renewing the lease on Pine Gap CIA station in Central Australia (after Langley, VA, this is the most important US spy base in the world).

The problem facing us today is that the entire Western world, and much of the rest, has been raised on a relentless diet of “We’re in the right, anybody who opposes us is evil and must be crushed.” Most people believe it, partly because it requires no intellectual effort but mainly because a lie endlessly repeated will eventually be accepted as truth, especially if it’s a Big Lie. For 45years, the enemy was “monolithic international communism” which was also used to taint anything remotely socialist. However, it was never “monolithic” but a range of more or less nationalist, anti-imperialist socialist governments of various flavours. In fact, with his policy of “Socialism in One Country,” Stalin declared this himself. He wanted to build the USSR; other countries could look after themselves, which led to the split with Mao’s China because Stalin wouldn’t help them. There were doctrinal reasons as well but the antagonism was mainly nationalistic. Vietnam was a clear example: their revolution was primarily nationalist and anti-imperialist; the Marxists took control because they had a ready-made doctrine that seemed to answer complex questions, and they were the hard men who could unite the country to fight the foreign invaders. But they were never Chinese or Soviet poodles, as we have since seen. The American slogan of “toppling dominoes” was pure propaganda.

At all times and in all respects, the problem was always the insane American urge to dominate and control the world. Full spectrum dominance, they call it: total domination of the entire world in every conceivable respect, political, military, social, financial, cultural, communications, everything. And religion, if they get their way. This has been the policy since 1945 but we were never told this. It was always “We’re the goodies, they’re the baddies, let’s get ‘em.” For example, the Korean peninsula was divided as a result of the agreement reached at the Yalta conference in February 1945. In the South, the US installed a vicious proto-fascist president named Syngman Rhee; he soon sent his military to slaughter anybody of leftist tendencies in a series of brutal massacres but this was all kept quiet. In addition, he kept up probing attacks across the border, to which the North eventually responded in kind, but it was always labelled an “invasion by North Korea.”

Same in Congo. After 70 years of unspeakable cruelty and exploitation, Belgium was forced to give independence to the Congo. However, so that the Belgian mining company Union Miniere could keep control of its very lucrative businesses and, with major American assistance, they encouraged the minerals-rich province of Katanga to secede under Moise Tshombe. The elected socialist prime minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was forced out, kidnapped and murdered by Belgian mercenaries flown around in American military planes. In his place, the US installed one Joseph Mobutu, for whom the term “kleptocrat” was coined; Congo descended into chaos from which it has never emerged. Somewhere in all of that, the plane carrying the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, was shot down, killing all on board. In the past thirty years, about 5 million people have been killed in the endless wars in East Congo. While Trump babbles on about imposing a peace deal on a place he couldn’t find on a map, none of it would have started without American weapons and support.

Almost since its inception, but certainly since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the US has been a classic capitalist-imperialist power. Bill Clinton made this clear in an address to Congress in 1993, repeated at the UN:

…the United States is entitled to resort to the unilateral use of military power … (to ensure) … uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources (27^th Sept. 1993).

This didn’t come from nowhere, he was simply echoing what he had imbibed with his mother’s milk but it was highly contagious. His Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, who arrived in the US in 1948, aged 11, echoed his view: “If we have to use force it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Novelist John Updike commented on the irony of conquest as foreign policy:

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

Under Herr Drumpf, however, all gloves are off, all pretence is dropped: We are the rulers of the world, the most powerful country in history so all you foreigners and poor and other riff-raff can bow down before our majesty. Since January 20^th last year, US warplanes directed by the “president of peace” have bombed at least nine countries, now including Nigeria and Venezuela, neither of which is remotely a threat to the US. There have probably been more but we don’t know about them yet. He has laid claim to Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, Gaza and now Venezuela. The problem is just this: what he shows is the classic psychopathic ploy. He floats an idea, apparently in passing. If people boo and hiss, he drops it and moves on to the next bit of crap that drifts into his head. If nobody objects too strongly, he repeats it several times then, convinced he can get away with it, he does it.

The attacks on so-called “narco-terrorist boats” in the Caribbean is textbook psychopathia. He talked about it, nobody said anything, so he tried it. Nobody complained, so he did it again and again, then added boats in the Pacific. Then he blockaded Venezuela’s ports, then he snatched some tankers and unloaded their fuel in Texas, saying they would keep it, then he bombed a remote port in Venezuela, then they attacked and kidnapped the president (which had been months in the planning and involved massive bribes to Venezuelan air force commanders not to shoot the helicopters down). Then he gloated briefly until, bored, his fickle fancy turned to Greenland again. If nobody pushes back, he will send a contingent of troops to the base at Pituffik, northern Greenland, formerly Thule base. They will grab more territory, saying they need it for “national security,” then he will land troops in the towns (both of them) to “maintain peace and security,” and that will be that. Greenland will be ingested by the giant, grasping amoeba called the USA and slowly digested.

That’s how psychopaths and naughty children do it: they test the limits to see what they can get away with. If nothing happens, they push further, then further until they get what they want; if the adults impose firm limits, they pretend they were never interested and go on to something else. Moreover, they never take on everybody in a fair fight. They isolate targets and pick them off one by one, as Martin Niemöller described: “First, they came for the communists…” Trump does this intuitively all the time. Problem is, people let him get away with it. Same as has been happening in Gaza and the rest of the Middle East for the past 80 years: push push, nibble nibble, lunge and grab, move on. Psychopaths have to be reined in right at the beginning, otherwise they think they can rule the world.

However, all the politicians in Europe are pissing themselves at present. They know they can’t stop an American invasion of Greenland by military means, especially as the Wolf of Moscow is baying at their door in Ukraine. They know perfectly well that if Trump gets away with Greenland, all the little Caribbean countries will be next, including Cuba and anybody else he doesn’t like, then he will move on to the next bauble to attract his covetous eye: the rest of Diego Garcia, and what about the Falklands? And South Georgia? Oh yes, one in the eye for those bloody Limeys whom he loathes and envies in equal measure. Then Gaza, and what about Qatar? They don’t need all that gas, do they? And then, maybe, a bit of northern Australia to control China, they’ve got heaps of land and don’t do anything with it, they wouldn’t miss the tip of Cape York. Or Tasmania, very pretty, we could do a lot with it.

The sense of entitlement and privilege grows hand in hand with the sense of power and knows no bounds. Trump wants to go down as the greatest real estate mogul in American history: Long Island, the Louisiana Purchase, California, the Alaska Purchase, Texas, and now Greenland, meaning he would get the prize. Of course, all his minions have got the bug. In an “unhinged rant,” the reptilian Stephen Miller announced that the US has the “right” to take over any country it likes for its resources. Miller is far too devious to say anything he knows Trump wouldn’t like; more likely he was testing the water for his dementing boss.

Remember that Trump is only in power as the agent of the wealthy class. In a speech to the oil lobby early in 2024, he promised them that if they gave him $1billion, he would make all their dreams come true. As the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela was long their collective wet dream. Before the attack on Caracas, and even before notifying Congress, Trump told the oil companies what he was doing. Until it is blackened, his covetous eye will wander across the globe as once it wandered greedily across all the contestants in the dressing rooms of his beauty shows. There’s no difference, it’s the same psychological phenomenon writ larger: Gimme gimme gimme. The US is now a mafia state.

How can the US be given a black eye? Very simple: bankrupt them. The US needs to roll over $8-10trillion in loans this year. If 96% of the world’s population say to the 4% who live in Godzone: “Sorry, kiddo, party’s over. We’re not playing that game any more. The world doesn’t need an exceptional nation,” if they say that, it’s all over. If all those smelly foreigners from their shithole countries don’t buy its bonds, the US is stuffed. Their economy will crash, the country will grind to a halt, the foreign military bases, all 850 of them, will be abandoned, and the world will enter a new era. To reinforce the message, the world should ditch the USD as the reserve currency and isolate the US by cutting it out of the entire trading system. They’re no longer needed, everything the world needs is produced elsewhere and without them constantly jumping on the dinner table and kicking the plates around, we’ll all enjoy a much more pleasant and sociable meal. And profitable. The adjustment away from the US-centric economy won’t be comfortable, probably not worse than anything we’ve been through since 1945, but it will be better than allowing him to keep nibbling.

So that’s the message: The way to deal with psychopaths, be they individuals or nations, is this: cut out all their rewards. Act as a united front to isolate them, set limits on behaviour and enforce them. Giving in only encourages them to greater excesses. Didn’t we learn that in the 1930s?

Correction:

A number of times, I’ve said the urge to dominate and the urge to resist are equal and opposite, hence the paradox of hierarchy. Actually, that’s not quite true. The urge to resist is stronger in that it lasts longer, it doesn’t wear off. People at the peak of power and privilege and entitlement become fat and lazy because power and privilege lead to self-indulgence, which has no limit. They just get greedier and greedier, they squeeze the underlings more and more until they reach the point where they have nothing to lose, then they push back. That’s inevitable. Arnold Toynbee said that empires aren’t murdered by outsiders, they commit suicide. As we see happening to the latest empire.

****

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 year ago, after Trump had managed to get the prize, I wasn’t as fussed as some. I was well aware he was likely to wreck things domestically but my hope was that, while swinging his wrecker’s ball at his domestic enemies, he would manage to take out both NATO and AUKUS. This week, the White House issued their latest National Security Strategy (NSS), a 29 page document that sets out in broadest terms what it sees as the national goals and how the US should go about shaping the world to advance its ends. After reading it, it seems I may yet get my wish. The last NSS was from Biden’s office in 2022, of 43 pages, and there was one in 2017 (57 pages), from Trump 1.0. This sort of document is so broad and general that you may wonder why they bother but it’s seen as important in the bureaucracy so a large committee spends a lot of time fashioning it.

They start with a letter from the president. This year’s is brief and tells everybody how the US has made “extraordinary strides” in stopping eight wars and bringing peace and prosperity to the world. Starting on p1, it sets out the Strategy’s prime objective, the protection of core national interests, which it says previous administrations hadn’t done. They “badly miscalculated” a number of goals and abilities, such as thinking that “that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country” (p1). Thus, the US tried to do too much and was led astray, e.g. by “hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.” Other countries took advantage of US generosity and failed to look after themselves or helped themselves to US industrial and educational resources without offering anything in return. Worse, some countries “sucked” the US into wars or into international institutions that had nothing to do with core US interests. World domination was a “fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal” but Trump would fix that by focusing on more restricted targets.

Page 3 asks: “What should the US want?” followed by a list of “wants,” all phrased in superlatives: to be the most powerful, strongest, richest, most advanced, dynamic, productive, inventive respectful generous spiritual cultural and revered country with lots of healthy children in strong traditional families (truly; btm p4). Page 5 asks: “What do we want In and From the world?” First, a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (from 1823) that will keep foreign influences out of the Western Hemisphere so American business can thrive, and the US military can straighten up errant governments and crush drug cartels. Internationally, the plan is to foil bad countries in order to avoid “forever wars,” to keep nasty people like drug dealing immigrants away and to stop Europe sliding into decadence. Domestically, all this will be achieved by tax cuts and getting rid of DEI and regulations and bringing back industries in order to maintain “military dominance for future generations.”

How will this be achieved? Starting on p 8 is a long list of moves that “The President of Peace” (with capitals) considers necessary, including Peace Through Strength, i.e. massive military forces; reforming international organisations so they advance rather than retard US interests; making sure no other country becomes dominant; eliminating trade imbalances; reviving the industrial base; mining coal and oil and rejecting “disastrous climate change,” etc. To this end, they propose reducing their foreign military presence to focus on the Americas, even to “the use of lethal force” to get their way. Asia gets a lot of space, meaning China and how to contain it and stop their predatory trade practices, drug exports, industrial espionage, IP theft and all the terrible things Chinese do to weaken the US. This will involve military alliances, trade treaties and lots more but there will be changes: “We have made clear to our allies that America’s current account deficit is unsustainable.”

Europe, of course, is a problem because they have coasted along on Uncle Sam’s coat tails for years and have declined, financially, militarily, morally and, crucially, racially, but that is all about to change. The US wants to be free of the burden of Ukraine and Europe will have to take this over as NATO cannot expand indefinitely. The US will “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” (i.e. favour certain political parties) so that Europe can “stand on its own feet” as well as opening European markets to American goods and services by eliminating their “hostile economic practices.”

The Middle East has long been a source of conflict and instability but now that the US is a major energy exporter, their interest will decline. Since Iran was defanged earlier this year and Pres. Trump united the Arab world “in pursuit of peace and normalization,” Israel’s position is secure so the Middle East is “emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment,” all of which will shape US involvement. Africa gets a mention on the last page as a likely place to do business with “capable, reliable states committed to opening their markets to U.S. goods and services.” And that’s it. Trump didn’t write this thing and there are no pictures in it so we know he didn’t read it.

The Biden NSS from 2022 was longer and woolier, classic boilerplate from an entirely colourless man who spent most of his life in politics without achieving anything noteworthy. He didn’t write it, of course, he probably didn’t write the 2 page letter that opened it but it was full of high-minded aspirations that have nothing to do with the reality of his term in office.

Trump’s version from 2017 is much longer, clearly written by a committee of diplomats, and gets right into it from page 1: “This National Security Strategy puts America first.” It was strong on the Constitution, the institutions of democracy, of protecting rights and dignity through respect for law and tradition, “because the rule of law is the shield that protects the individual from government corruption and abuse of power, allows families to live without fear …” (pp1-2). All that, of course, was well before January 6^th, 2021. Post 1945, the US built the rules-based international order and the range of international institutions but then neglectfully stood by while malign actors subverted it. Internationally, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are constantly plotting to do America in while drug cartels and Islamists are doing their bit to sneak in and destroy the US from within. At home, excessive regulation and burdensome taxes crushed American enterprise. The real interest, however, is the jarring contrast between what they said in Trump’s first year compared with what they have done since:

• (p9): We will work with other countries to detect and mitigate outbreaks early to prevent the spread of disease (p9) (Covid was an American disaster, made worse by blaming China and everybody else).

• (p13): We will promote cybersecurity (DOGE eliminated many such programs).

• (p14): Promote US resilience to disasters (Trump and DOGE broke the emergency programs at FEMA).

• (p20): Promote research and innovation (In fact, it was Trump who declared war on “woke” universities and cancelled billions of dollars of research projects).

• (p25): Peace through Strength: Russia seeks to … establish spheres of influence near its borders … (Actually, all powers do. Just ask Cuba and Venezuela).

• (p42): ­ The United States will continue to lead the world in humanitarian assistance (As in, for example, withdrawing from WHO, UNRWA, HIV programs and so on).

It continues in this vein and gets pretty boring. Under Trump, everything good flows from the high-minded spirit of the US while everything bad in the world is somebody else’s fault. In truth, we can’t blame Trump for that, it’s an old American line. For example, the crippling trade imbalances are because other countries take advantage of US generosity and cheat and lie and steal, not because the US lives beyond its means. There is so much trouble in the Middle East and Caucasus but it’s not Uncle Sam’s fault: “With its invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, Russia demonstrated its willingness to violate the sovereignty of states in the region. Russia continues to intimidate its neighbors with threatening behavior …” (p47). Afghanistan? Iraq? Cuba? Venezuela? Libya? Somalia? Yemen? Iran? No, not us, our motives are pure.

These documents are already compressed so it’s difficult to summarise them. The 2025 NSS isn’t long and is widely spaced with few big words so readers should check it to see that my comments are fair. In my opinion, the US NSS is just juvenile propaganda, the sort of thing that’s waved at foreigners and opponents in Congress to silence them. Do the authors seriously expect anybody to believe it? Apparently they do. Regardless, the latest one is revealing. Time and time again it says Trump is the greatest, most far-sighted, beneficial and generally all-round wonderful guy to have graciously accepted the title of Leader of the World, and we are all so much better off for his deigning to occupy the Oval Office. That’s rubbish, of course, just the bureaucrats pandering to Trump’s narcissism so they can be noticed. The US itself is the world’s only divinely-favoured, far-sighted, generous, innovative and amazing country full of inspired and inspirational people, built on enviable principles and governed by noble spirits, which can do no wrong but, unfortunately, it’s surrounded by an axis of evil, by cheats, thieves and drug dealers, and layabouts in moral decline so in order to reverse all this, the US must remain the most powerful country in history, unrestrained by pettifogging human rights treaties, ready to use lethal force when necessary. And isn’t that all the time?

While the Strategy starts with the position that any and all conflict in the world is generated by bad people, that’s outright deception. Morality doesn’t get a look in. On every page, every paragraph, we find the same message: “Yes, we have declined but it’s not our fault, it’s those bad people. We have the moral right and duty to impose our system on them so they stop being bad.” For example, p51 of NSS 2017, re Western Hemisphere: “We will isolate governments that refuse to act as responsible partners in advancing hemispheric peace and prosperity.” That means: “If you don’t do exactly as we say, we’ll strangle you.” Every page drips with contradictions and schoolboy howlers but we needn’t worry too much, the US will continue its profit-driven, impulsive and generally rudderless course until it hits a rock, especially as its captain is now a dementing old fool who, as the woman who knows him better than most avers, believes he can do what he likes and can do no wrong. So make sure your seatbelt is tightly fastened.

The whole of this Strategy thing should be read, not as an exercise in morality (as in “Us Goodies vs Them Baddies”) but from the point of view of its authors who have an agenda which reads “We’re wonderful, you’re shit so we’re going to take what we want,” i.e. fascism. It is precisely the principles outlined in the concept of Narcisso-Fascism: that, as hierarchical animals, humans have an unquenchable drive to dominate and will stop at nothing to get to the top. This drive is, however, coupled with an equally unquenchable but opposite drive to resist domination such that people will fight to death to preserve their freedom. This is the paradox of hierarchy. These drives are universal, genetically programmed and implemented biologically by hormonal systems common to most living creatures. By having two equal, opposite and intensely self-reinforcing drives in each and every human, we are potentially set up for permanent conflict. The conjoined twin urges to dominate and to resist are by far the most frequent and most powerful cause of conflict in the world. However, unlike bull elephant seals fighting over their harem, we humans are intellectually capable of resolving our differences and living in peace. Trouble is, the people who get power are emotionally incapable of doing this. As Thucydides said, their leitmotif is: “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.”

The paradox of the US, as this Strategy makes crystal clear, is that the country that once fought tyranny for its freedom is now determined to impose its own version of tyranny on the rest of the world. Entirely predictably, their urge to dominate provokes resistance from their targets, which is then blamed on the victim, as we see in the ceaseless provocations the US launches against Venezuela. Granted the current regime in Venezuela is not very nice but it started as a revolutionary program to take back control of their oil wealth and use it for the benefit of the people instead of all the profits going to multinationals. From the beginning, the US has done everything it could to throttle their revolution, using the same plan as Iran in 1953. However, those wicked Venezuelans haven’t cooperated with Uncle Sam so now they’re being set up for attack for reasons everybody can see are a pack of lies.

How is it that the apparently intelligent and educated people charged with writing this thing are so insightless as to its real intent? We can dismiss them pretty quickly: they’re unwavering sycophants and opportunists who are using this opportunity to get themselves up the greased ladder of the Trumpian White House before they upset somebody and get kicked out. Most of them don’t have much real influence but were representing the various squabbling factions in Trump’s terminally dysfunctional court –internationalists, mercantilists, the MAGAts and America-Firsters, nativists, Zionists and other religious primitives, and militarists, not to overlook his implausibly corrupt family. There are about 5,000 people in the US power elite who can actually get their plans and policies implemented. They divide in three groups:

1. The insightless, who believe their own propaganda just because it feels so much better than accepting the truth of their country, that it is a violent, venal swamp (their word) that causes most of the trouble in the world;

2. The venal who, as long as they get rich, don’t give a damn about anybody else including the unborn generations who will curse our names as their world slowly cooks;

3. The Machiavellian (aka evil), who are only interested in gaining power for power’s sake and don’t care who they have to crush in the process; indeed, they will enjoy crushing them because standing over people is its own reward.

There may be a few genuine people in Congress or with access to power but they’re not going anywhere. They’ll be elbowed aside by the hogs stampeding to the troughs.

The goals and policies set out in the Trump National Security Strategy have practically nothing to do with the country’s security, and that’s even if Trump can focus his blowfly level of attention on them long enough to get them implemented. It is a program for world domination by another name. We can predict with 100% certainty that some countries will resist, for which the US plan is to assault them by various means until they submit. American violence only ever ratchets up, not down, because the power elite are incapable of admitting they lost. The attitudes written into this Strategy are a recipe for continuing international instability, the direct cause of the great majority of trouble in the world today, up to and including the risk of nuclear war. There is no prospect for a peaceful world while one country assumes the right to dominate everybody else in any way it sees fit, by any means at its disposal. While this applies to the US on the world stage, it also applies to any country that adopts similar attitudes in its local area.

The greater part of human history has simply been the record of people fighting against oppression for their freedom to set their own course. Humans just don’t want to be oppressed. Is that so difficult to understand?

****

I probably won’t post these over Christmas-New Year but have a good one anyway.

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.

****

Danny Haiphong is an author and journalist who runs a popular channel on YouTube in which he interviews mainly leftist writers and activists. Mercifully, he lets his guests talk without trying to impose his views on them. Recently, he interviewed a Prof. Jiang Xueqin but I can’t find much on him apart from he was in Canada for years and is now back in China as deputy principal of Tsinghua University High School. Is he now a professor? I don’t know, but he was asked about the huge US naval force hovering menacingly off the coast of Venezuela. He thought it was pretty stupid, if the US wants their oil, it’s much cheaper to buy it. Also, a direct invasion à la Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq would be much, much worse for the US than even those disasters.

At 3.45, after running through and discounting possible reasons for the US to attack Venezuela, he concluded: “Attacking Venezuela doesn’t really make any sense, it’s not going to get you anything …” That’s correct. It doesn’t make any sense, but who said sense has anything to do with it? If it made sense, it wouldn’t be politics because the people running the show don’t have an ounce of sense between them. In particular, they don’t have any sense of right or wrong, any morality because, and despite anything they will tell you, morality has nothing to do with invasions. For example, in 2001, an article in the NY Times in 2001 argued that Saddam Hussein was driven by “hatred intensified by a tribal culture of the blood feud,” and that the US had a moral duty to attack Iraq to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction. There was no threat, it was all a lie; it was actually about oil, maintaining the petrodollar and keeping the Zionist lobby happy. Instead of sense or morality, what our politicians have is either an insatiable urge to dominate everybody and everything in sight, or an irresistible lust to get rich, or both because they’re not so different.

With Venezuela, the excuse is illegal drugs, even though everybody in the world knows that Venezuela has practically nothing to do with the rivers of drugs flowing into the US. The “Cartel de los Soles,” supposedly a huge international drug gang headed by Venezuelan president Maduro, is entirely a figment of Trump’s palsied imagination. His policy of blowing up speedboats in international waters far from the US is nothing other than piracy and murder intended to whip up domestic support for an invasion. But why invade yet another country when all the other invasions have failed? Firstly, “This time is different,” he says, “so don’t believe your senses, believe me.” Second: oil. Venezuela sits on the world’s largest reserves of oil, specifically sour heavy oil, rich in sulphur, precisely the sort that all the refineries along the US Gulf coast were designed to process. At present, the US has to buy it from Canada, which is expensive; but they could buy it cheaper from Maduro himself if they lifted their sanctions, so why go to all the fuss and bother of an invasion? Third, because Venezuela is an associate of BRICS and is starting to sell oil to those countries outside the dollar system which, for the US, is a mortal threat. That’s why the US seized a Venezuelan tanker this week (aka piracy). The country that has the world reserve currency is sitting pretty in so many ways but if they lose that status, they’re cactus. Just ask Britain.

That’s why the talk of invading Venezuela. Not for the oil itself, although that would be nice, but to maintain status as the Numero Uno in the world. It’s all about domination and always has been. Now, it’s starting to crumble but there’s no way a US politician is going to say: “We need to stop all this World Policeman business and accept that we’re no better than everybody else. We should drop the reserve currency, stop all these wars. Remember Matthew 7: 3-5, all you supposed Christians, and let’s clean up our own mess.” If one did say that and put up some figures, I’m fairly sure that two thirds of the population would nod and agree, and he would be dumped at the next election. The bizarre brand of money politics in the US would see to that. This points to the preeminent question in modern life: Who gets power? Alternatively, why are all the people with money and power such complete shits?

Looking at the last 80 years since WWII, if we take any statistic or measurable parameter and project it forward another 80 or 100 years, what is the picture that emerges? In 1964, the world population was about 3.2billion; 60 years later, it’s nearly three times that. That level of growth and the consumption it entails is unsustainable. It cannot get to 30billion, the very thought is madness. Project forward the destruction of forests, fishing grounds and aquatic populations, loss of wetlands, loss of prime agricultural land, of insect species and other pollinators, of potable water, or the accumulation of plastic waste, toxic industrial wastes, greenhouse gases, nuclear waste, anything, it doesn’t matter. All we have to do is get the graph for the past 80 years and work out where it will be when our great grandchildren are running the show, and ask ourselves what they will think of the job we’ve left them. I don’t think they’ll be happy at all. If we can’t perform this simple test, if we can’t work out where our actions are heading, then we shouldn’t be doing whatever we’re doing. Be sure of one thing: Donald Trump does not have the intellectual capacity to project a graph forward, or the emotional capacity to do what is better for everbody else and not himself, yet he is making most of the big decisions. If that doesn’t keep you awake at night, it should.

Whatever you do, don’t shrug and say “She’ll be right, he’s not going to live much longer,” because there are fifty or a hundred wannabes in DC right now who are plotting to inherit his grubby mantle. But they’re not the ones you have to worry about. When it comes to politics, it’s like what fishermen say about crocodiles in the North of this country: “Don’t worry about the crocs you can see, worry about the one you can’t see” (estuarine crocodiles are the supreme stealth hunters). Same goes for the wealthy. Don’t worry about the stuff you see on TV because, as the Epstein business shows, the real worry is what they’re doing when they think nobody’s watching. Dropsite News is running a series on the cache of previously hidden Epstein emails that show how the real corruption is hidden behind layers of foundations, offshore accounts and connections that nobody even suspects. The most recent (long) report shows how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been moved here, there and everywhere, carefully avoiding scrutiny by tax authorities, banks, police and so on – many of whom were bribed anyway.

This is just one leak about one individual: there are millions of similar set-ups around the world. We are talking of almost cosmic levels of adroitly concealed corruption and criminality, often hiding in plain sight, which, unfortunately, you and I will never know about. But then if we did, what could we do about it when the people charged with overseeing our affairs are greedily feeding at the same trough themselves? A week or so ago, I mentioned a local politician called Graham Richardson who had finally flapped his wings and begun the long glide downstairs. They buried him yesterday, a state funeral in fact, and the prime minister who, even on his sternest days, makes jellyfish look stiff and unbending, gave the eulogy. “A man of many facets,” Albanese called Richardson, which is politician-speak for ‘a prick of the first order,’ because he was.

How could anybody so deceitful and self-interested get anywhere near the heart of the state? Well, that’s just it. That’s who gets close to power, and that’s how they get there. They are drawn to power because it’s oxygen to them, they need it to survive. They don’t need squishy things like affection and doing the right thing, those things don’t even rate. Once they have slithered through the door, they protect each other and, most importantly, they make sure nobody gets through the door who can’t be corrupted. The political process is a self-selecting and self-reinforcing process that sorts newcomers into “one of us” and “one of them, get rid of him/her.” Nearly thirty years ago, there was a huge Royal Commission into police corruption in New South Wales (the Wood commission). A reporter close to the action published Confessions of a Crooked Cop, an insider account that showed how new recruits to the police force were tested to see if they could be bent. Those who could were given favoured posts and advanced rapidly; those who couldn’t were sent to the bush. That system writ large is exactly what we have built and fine-tuned over the years. It sorts the sheep from the goats, sends the sheep to the abattoir and lets the goats loose in the vegie garden. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

One of the sleazebags exposed by the Epstein emails is the very well-known politician and economist, Larry Summers, who was born in 1954. According to a recent article based on the emails, in the mid-1990s, Summers was worth about $400,000 in all. Today, he is reputedly worth about $45million although he has worked almost entirely in government, education and administration. His family background was one of immense privilege and connections; he has never sweated in his life and has never gone without. In 1982, for example, aged 28, he was appointed to Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was later chief economist at the World Bank, Clinton’s treasury chief, president of Harvard, a key advisor to Obama during the GFC, on and on. He is an ardent neoliberal and bitterly criticised Biden’s recovery plans following the Covid economic slump. In 2005, he remarried and spent his honeymoon on a Caribbean island called Little St James, which has been in the news lately. A month ago, he was forced to resign most of his many posts following exposure of his long-time links to the late owner of the island, one Jeffrey Epstein.

I’m sure Summers never shot at another human or dropped a bomb on a tent full of refugees but those events don’t take place in a vacuum and it doesn’t excuse his culpability. There are no wars without enablers such as bankers, industrialists, oil majors, miners, secret lobbyists, and young Larry was right there in the thick of it. It will take years, if ever, for the full extent of his corruption to emerge but the damage he has done to economic systems around the world has been enormous and in full view. He got lots of medals and honours for it, of course. The GFC itself was very much the result of policy changes he convinced Clinton to enact. The World Bank’s brutal “austerity policies” for debtor nations have his thumb prints all over them. He opposed policies to prevent climate change. He supported arms sales to Israel and other countries, knowing they would be used illegally and immorally. How did he get to be in such a position? No doubt he was clever and could talk his way out of a death sentence, he was born into connections which he worked non-stop, but mainly he was able to sell the idea of “trickle-down” economics to people who stood to benefit from it. Without the neoliberal doctrine of “free market, small government, austerity for the poor and beneficience to the wealthy,” he wouldn’t have gone very far.

Half a world away, the political movement Epstein and Summers supported so diligently is hard at work building a brutal apartheid state. Their latest move is to mandate the death penalty for certain race-based offences, in a country that has only used it just once in 80 years, when a special law was passed to execute Adolf Eichmann in 1962. During the debate, in case anybody misunderstood their intent, supporters of the move led by the National Security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, wore gold lapel badges in the shape of a noose. Ben Gvir is a depraved human being but don’t let anybody mislead you: he is most emphatically not mentally ill. He simply wants to kill or otherwise remove from the landscape up to ten million people who, for thousands of years, have lived where he and his followers want to live in a repressive and patriarchal, race-based theocracy. He doesn’t hear voices, he is not manic-depressive, he is just full of hate for the “human animals” who won’t do as he tells them. If they fight back, as humans do when faced with brutal repression, he wants them labelled as “terrorists” and put to death. He suggested a noose but he isn’t fussy, lethal injections will do. When he announced this, his office phone ran hot with doctors wanting to press the plunger. That the whole thing, from A to Z, is illegal under international law bothers him and his followers not one iota. God’s on their side, who is this damned UN to tell them otherwise?

How did he get there? He is a seriously unlovely character in every respect. When a gang of Israeli troops were arrested earlier this year after they were videoed raping a Palestinian prisoner, Ben Gvir led a mob to the army base where they were being held to force their release. That’s just one of hundreds of similar incidents in his career. He is now banned from entering Australia and half a dozen other countries, so how did he get there? It’s very simple: like Summers, he sells the politics of domination to people who want to hear it. The reason he is so successful is because of the passion with which he broadcasts it. He is passionate because he believes it body and soul, because he needs to dominate in order to feel good. Granted, he sells it dressed as religion but the message is the same: We are going to drive them out and if they resist, we will kill them all, men, women and children. This is as old as humans because the urge to dominate is coded into our DNA, as is the drive to resist. All primates show it, we’re no different from baboons on the veldt, or even dogs in the street. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Baboons can’t say: “Well, in the interests of a peaceful life, I’m going to ignore those silly apes from the next tribe.” If they don’t resist, they get pushed out and they will die.

Domination and resistance are opposite sides of the same coin. We can make the decision to live peacefully but we rarely do. Ben Gvir and his evil mates could negotiate a settlement with the indigenous people if they chose. They could say: “Hmm, if we keep pushing this Promised Land for the Chosen People stuff, everybody else is going to despise us so we’d better pull our heads in and try to live peaceably.” They could say that but, because the political process selects for inflammatory extremists, people Prof. Eva Illouz called “Jewish fascists,” they would rather cut their legs off with a rusty saw than back down. Backing down would force them down the dominance hierarchy, which they experience as humiliation. Since they have welded their self-esteem to being on top, they will resist. This is the paradox of hierarchy. On one side, we have people who tell each other that God gave them the land so if they don’t clear it of non-believers, they are going against God’s will and will suffer eternal punishment. On the other, we have people who, as Ben Gurion said, don’t worship the same God but, by virtue of the same DNA, will fight to death for their rights.

The issue at present, the question that will determine whether humanity continues in recognisable form or is reduced to struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, is how we manage our common urge to dominate. Do we give in and let the very worst people take control, people who would sooner destroy the world than stand back and let everybody have a share, or do we push back? Remember that with very, very few exceptions, people who hold power do so for the wrong reasons. As we are seeing every day, they are terrible people. If they’re not entirely terrible themselves, they’re certainly happy rubbing shoulders and taking favours from people who are. The corruption is everywhere.

If you would like a little more on the unspeakable grubs who worm their way into power, watch this and read this, they’re not long. And now I’ve run out of space but we haven’t even started on the Trump mafia. Oh well, watch this short clip instead.

****

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 reader sent a link to Robert Reich’s Substack, in which he had posted an open letter from a senior Federal judge in the US who retired so he could speak out against what the Trumpists are doing to the Justice Dept and the rule of law in the US. If you can access it, it’s an important commentary on the state of that nation. The reader added:

I find it unbelievable that democracy & the rule of a just law in a country once admired for both, could have fallen so far into a cesspit. I recognise that no country is beyond reproach, but not just Trump but so many of his corrupt administration & many before, have pushed the boundaries to places one would never have believed possible.

With respect, I don’t find it unbelievable that this should be happening. I find it entirely predictable to the extent that it was not so much whether the US would slide into overt fascism but when. Behind the scenes, a lot of people have been working strenuously for this, more or less since independence but especially since the notorious Powell Memo of 1970. Granted, there have been times when they seemed to recede for a while, and they’re not quite there yet but, as the judge’s heartfelt letter shows, they can smell victory and it’s going to their little heads. Is Trump the cause? No, definitely not. He was a small child when Joe McCarthy was on the rampage; the vile racist film Birth of a Nation was made in 1915, and black people were being lynched in their thousands before Trump’s father, Fred, was born in 1905. There were anti-immigrant riots in Boston and New York in the 1880s, often taking the form of “anti-Red” pogroms. Slavery and slaughter of indigenous people, of course, we know all about. The theme of self-righteous racist violence goes right back, as Howard Zinn has documented.

Trump is, however, the most effective lightning rod for the intense and destructive pressures that exist in that country, not because he knows what he’s doing sufficient to plan it but because his normal, selfish, hate-filled and disgusting behaviour has caught the mood of a major part of the country. By indulging all his prejudices openly, he licenses people to get in touch with their inner goons and spray it around. However, he’s only part of it. He has surrounded himself with possibly the worst collection of incompetents, misfits, crooks, predators and crackpots ever assembled in one government. Part of it is that Trump doesn’t like competition but mostly it’s the quality of people who are breaking their necks to get close to power. Half his cabinet had previously said how much they despise him; as soon as he was back in the White House, they were knifing each other in the rush to kiss his ring. Is that just America? No, it’s everywhere. Is it just men? Emphatically not, after a reign of corruption, former Bangladesh PM Sheihk Hasina Wazed was recently sentenced to death for ordering troops to shoot demonstraters.

We look at the world today and we have to think: “There’s something seriously wrong going on.” The world we will hand to our children and grandchildren is not the world we inherited. Granted, the 1950s and 60s were pretty scary but there was always the thought that we could actually make things better. I don’t think that exists any more. It seems the younger generation have very largely given up. People at demonstrations are a lot older than they used to be; conservationists are all getting on. In every country, the political impetus seems to have moved from the young and idealistic to the older, marginalised and angry. That’s dangerous, it’s exactly what happened in Italy, Germany and Spain during the 1920s and 30s. The problem is the people who are taking advantage of the discontent are using it to advance themselves, not to advance a doctrine. They are using the widespread and growing sense of resentment, focussing it as the politics of hate, away from those who actually have control of the society on to outsiders such as gay and lesbian groups, of different religions, of strangers and immigrants.

In the UK, the boozy Nigel Farage, serial leader of fringe parties, is typical of the wave of “angry right wingers” that dominate the scene. It seems every photo of him shows him with a beer in one hand and his mouth stretched wide in some sort of exultant guffaw. His policies don’t seem to run much further than getting out of the EU, banning immigrants and blaming Muslims for everything wrong in Britain today. There’s a lot wrong, and most of it goes back to Thatcher’s brand of neoliberalism but he ignores that. So who is he? His family background was disturbed by his father’s alcoholism but they weren’t short of money, and young Nigel went to expensive private schools. His peers remember him as loud, objectionable, racist, manipulative and always wanting to be centre of attention. Nothing has changed, it seems, and he now has a good chance of becoming prime minister. People should pay attention to the personality and not the theatrics. Boris Johnson was severely criticised in the recent Covid enquiry but one of his schoolteachers fingered him decades ago:

Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. [He] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the school for the next half). I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.

That attitude, of privilege and entitlement combined with disregard for the normal constraints, should be a disqualifier for any political position. Caroline Kennedy describes it in her cousin, RFK Jr., whom she has known all her life. Mary Trump, PhD psychologist and niece of Donald says “My uncle is the only person I’ve ever met who has no redeeming qualities. Not a single one.” She is definitely worth following on Substack and YouTube.

These people have accumulated immense power and yet they’re truly awful individuals. Why do they think they’ve got what it takes to run something as big and important as a modern nation? Well, the answer is they don’t think that, that’s not what they’re there for. They were drawn to the world of power because it fascinates them and seems to offer something they lack: approval, the ability to push people around in order to feel good about themselves by dominating everybody else. They’re not a new phenomenon, they’ve always been around; a chap called Shakespeare made a career out of writing about them. They’re more prominent now as there weren’t the same openings for complete pricks half a century ago. Where politicians once had to compete on offering visions of a glowing future in between kissing babies and old ladies, now they spew sulphurous fantasies of dark forces trying to batter our walls down. Where immigrants were once welcomed as “New Australians” helping to build the country, now they’re demonised. The politics of promise has degenerated into the politics of fear, envy and outrage.

The reason these people are rising in the polls is because they’ve realised there is a steadily growing wave of discontent, resentment and uncertainty for the future, just waiting for clever politicians to take control and channel it to their advantage. And that’s what’s happening. Clearly, the way to clip the wings of the various wannabe Duce’s is to deal with the resentment. There is, however, a problem with that plan. The people who are causing the resentment don’t want anybody to know about their role, and are funding the various right wing pollies to keep public attention over there, on immigrants stealing jobs, and not here, on how neoliberal capitalism is exporting the jobs. There are so many aspects to this, it’s impossible to keep up, especially as the people making all the money are very good at keeping secrets. Fortunately, the Epstein business has opened a large door into their subterranean world but what we’ve seen so far has only been depraved parties, not the real business of plunder.

Some of it is starting to leak, e.g. Epstein’s close relationship with former Israeli general and prime minister, Ehud Barak, but that’s still a small part of the vast, hidden networks of corruption they ran. The other point to remember is that, as a successful criminal, Epstein was only one of many thousands of equally vile human beings scurrying around behind the scenes, each with thousands of contacts reaching to every corner of the world, into every boardroom and every parliament. The worrying part of the whole deal is that if he hadn’t gone after children, if he’d simply stayed in the background trafficking in illegal weapons, spyware, women, drugs, gambling and other joys, nobody would have worried about him. His downfall was that he was indiscreet. Which, if you have a private island and a private 727 jet and half a dozen mansions, is very, very silly. The most successful crooks stay in the background, out of range of the paparazzi and, quietly cultivating their contacts and amassing their billions.

Question then arises: where does it all end? This is not fascism à la 1930s, where people joined movements that were bigger than themselves with the goal of rebuilding their countries. Hitler was considered ascetic; he was working for the greater glory of the German nation, not for himself. The Reich was to last a thousand years so their building program had to reflect that. But he didn’t get personally rich; his relatives were kept out of sight and he disapproved of how Göring was getting fat. Instead, what we are now seeing is an unholy mix of grotesque psychopathy and the narcissistic elements of fascism. As a political system, it is inherently unstable. There is no foundational doctrine like Marx’s Communist Manifesto or even Mein Kampf. Today’s neofascism is built on personalities who are adept at whipping up rage, smashing things and making themselves rich but not much else.

How, then, is all this going to end? The short answer is that it won’t end well. As a movement, fascism has only one direction, it rachets up but never down again. It is sustained only by a constant threat of enemies, forcing the people to give up more and more of their freedom, sacrificing more of their sons and daughters, burning more and more of the national wealth on militarism. The enemies are not just external but, crucially, internal as well, and that’s where it all falls apart. Eventually, if the regime isn’t overthrown by a war it has started, it turns on itself. The US is well down this path. The titular head of Trumpism is 79, overweight and manifestly dementing. Some months ago, he had a medical assessment and let slip that he’d had an MRI. Everybody wanted to know the results but he refused to release them. Eventually, he had to but all they revealed was his heart and abdominal cavity. Excuse us, what about his head? That was what the scan was for. Even in America, you don’t scan bellies and so on unless you’re actually looking for something.

My clear impression, having worked with many hundreds of dementing veterans, is that he’s now in early-moderate dementia and progressing fairly fast. I don’t expect he will still be in office by end of next year. He will not go voluntarily but go he will. Vance will move up a notch and then the fun will start as all the misfits and wannabes and shysters in his cabinet get out their knives in the rush to be appointed vice-president. Don’t forget the Trump sons, of course, they have a most powerful interest in keeping one of theirs in the White House to keep the FBI and IRS and SEC off their collective backs. Kushner? No, he’s too clever. He knows he has the voting appeal of an old toilet brush but he doesn’t care. He has enough money and contacts scattered around to leave the country and never look back. But what a cat fight it will be. We ordinary mortals can only sit back with the popcorn and wait for the heads to roll. The battle to succeed Mao will be nothing compared with this. But what will happen then? Vance won’t be able to control his troops, they won’t stand quietly behind him while he raves on.

At this stage, the Republican party is facing devastation in the mid-term elections due in just under a year. They can expect a hammering similar to the Tories in the UK last year, possibly worse, but it’s only what they deserve. Trump is incapable of coexisting with a hostile Congress and would probably try to rule by executive order, which the public won’t stand, so that may be the trigger for him to be wheeled out. Regardless, the last two years of this so-called administration will be chaotic, with a dozen or more princelings all fighting each other for the prize of winning the nomination in 2028. The rudderless carnage known as their foreign policy will swerve off in fifty directions at once and eventually run aground somewhere as the public realise that financing “America the Greatest” is bankrupting them. If you can’t afford the rent or to get your mother treated or feed the kids, who gives a bugger about whatever the Venezuelans are doing? How many Americans even know where it is?

Anyway, all this is speculation. We lesser mortals have to wait and see what emerges. It’s possible that as Trump declines, the different factions will come to some agreement to keep him alive and propped up at his desk rather than allow a free-for-all. However, that would require a degree of political maturity and selflessness that none of them have ever displayed in their lives. The crucial point is that once it is unleashed, fascism has only one direction: up, and up, and up, until it runs out of air, then it crashes. Fascists don’t wake up one day and say to each other: “Looks as though we’ve failed. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. What about a nice round of golf?” If they fail, somebody is to blame, somebody did it to them because in their eyes, they’re perfect, they can’t possibly be wrong. Whoever did the dirty on them has to be uncovered and dealt with, and so the bloodletting, literal or figurative, starts another cycle.

And there’s a further point to consider. Just as the USSR fell apart into fifteen countries, the same might happen to the US because it isn’t actually one country at all. It’s at least three distinct countries. Trouble is, they’re all spread across much the same area. They aren’t geographic isolates as were, say, Belarus and Ukraine, the three Baltic states or the five Stans of Central Asia, which made for a relatively clean parting of ways. It’s possible they could hold the country together, we have to wait and see, but one thing is clear: All this is going to get worse before it gets any better. Once the demons of hate are on the loose, they don’t willingly go back on their chains. Americans may yet learn the hard way why the Chinese fear chaos.

****

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.

****

Graham Richardson died two weeks ago. Good. In a commentary, Jack Waterford, formerly the long-standing senior member of the Canberra press gallery, described him as “self-interested, a corrupt old villain, a bad man, a ruthless bastard and distinctly short on redeeming virtues.” Strong words, but justified. Despite coming from a poor background and with no qualifications, Richardson became the youngest and most powerful state secretary of the NSW Labor Party. You don’t get that by being shy and retiring. A few years later, aged 33, he slithered into the Senate where he eventually held a number of ministerial posts. Post-parliament, he became a political commentator and lobbyist, and died a wealthy man. A true swamp denizen, he spent his entire life involved in union and party politics, wheeling and dealing, trading favours, money-grubbing, hanging out with gamblers and prostitutes and forever barely within the law. Waterford said his grave should be “extra deep” but it should also be very big as he represents the archetype of the “very modern politician” from anywhere in the world. A lot of them should be buried with him in anticipation of their deaths.

Richardson’s demise was a small diversion from the interminable Trump-Epstein freak show as it winds and weaves through the political sewers of half a dozen major Western countries. So far, only half a dozen and all Western but its radioactive slime could well have tracked over half the world. Anybody who wants to know more should read Whitney Webb’s two volume work, One Nation Under Blackmail. This details the history and the extent of corruption at the confluence of three major industries: finance, espionage and surveillance, and organised crime, and how they work together to influence national and international politics. This is the netherworld Epstein and his myriad contacts staked out as their own, to the extent that Epstein and friends were able to photograph themselves in the throne room of Buckingham Palace, the very heart of the British state. I don’t know how Webb managed to gather all this information and tie it together but she has done us a considerable service, and every citizen should read it. I also don’t know how she managed to force herself to dive into this vast cesspool day after day while she wrote it – even reading it made my skin crawl.

Was Richardson in the same class as Epstein, Trump, Andrew whatsisname, Mandelson, Bannon, Barak and all the others? Not quite but it wasn’t because he lacked their character. This raises an important point: how come so many of the political, financial, social, academic and other elites of today are corrupt to the eyeballs? Is it just a matter of power corrupting, as Lord Acton said 150 years ago, that the mere process of holding power dissolves morals from the inside, leaving just a skin of probity draped over a skeleton of self-interest? This matters because if it’s true, then we need to make some major changes to our entire political and social systems. We’ve always relied on good people putting themselves forward to take the extra responsibility of governance, and once there, to continue selflessly doing the right thing by the community. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, if it ever did, that no longer works. For example, with the release of Britain’s enquiry into the Covid pandemic, Boris the Unspeakable is back in the news, exposed as a duplicitous, self-interested and corrupt clown whose inaction led to at least 23,000 unnecessary deaths. That’s a lot of lives to have on your conscience but I’m sure he hasn’t lost any sleep over it.

Meantime, and perhaps worried that he’s not been getting all the attention he likes, US Secretary of Health, Mr RFK Jr has shoved himself back into the headlines with yet another affair. This time, it’s a political reporter 39yrs younger than his august 71 years of age, but a leaked “poem” he texted her indicates it’s 71 going on 17. You can read it but it’s seriously off and I quickly stopped. You have to ask: “Who is this person? How did such an idiot get such an important job? How come nobody paid any attention to his cousin’s letter to the Senate appointments committee?” Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK and former ambassador to Australia, wrote them a stinking letter describing him as a drug dealer and addict, a predator, serial liar and cheat who is addicted to attention, crackpottery, money and power, and totally unsuitable for the job. She pointed out that she had known him all her life, they grew up together, and she stood to gain nothing from revealing this stuff, and they ignored her. Turns out she was right, leopards don’t change their spots but we also have to ask: What’s his paramour’s game? Why is this apparently intelligent and attractive young woman hanging around with this fully paid up creep grandfather? Answer: access to the White House and all the money, power and excitement that goes with it. She knows what she’s doing, and if she drops off his visiting list, she’ll soon find another one to pay her bills.

And finally, a joke. In fact, a senator from Queensland who got her quota of air time this week by strolling into the Senate wearing a burqa. Pauline Hanson, leader of the Pauline Hanson One Nation Party, abbreviated to PHON, meaning her followers are Phonies, tried this stunt in 2017 but this time it got her kicked out for a week. You’d think she’d learn. It’s not that long since she was fined and had a huge legal bill for making some racist comment about another member, but keeping her face in the news is more important than actually having a formal political program – or any sense of decency. She represents the loopy right whose policies don’t extend much beyond deporting immigrants. Last month, she turned up at Herr Drumpf’s halloween party in the company of Australia’s richest person and 11^th richest woman in the world, Gina Rinehart. This month, aged 71 going on 13, she reprises some crude teenage crap and pretends to be offended when people don’t like it.

Is this the best we can do? How come all our “leaders” are such dreadful people? With Trump, RFK, Richardson, Johnson and all the others, plus the vast cast of sleazebags in the Epstein caravan, everybody knew what they were like before they got the nod, so why do we end up with politicians and businessmen whose only interest is advancing themselves? Of all the forms of government available, we have arrived at kakistocracy, government by the worst or most unscrupulous people (from Greek, kakistos, worst; also kaki, poop). It becomes more obvious if we compare the general state of government in the West today with how it was 75 or 80 years ago. Post-war, meaning World War II because we’ve never been “post war” in our entire gruesome history, governments were consciously building states to improve people’s lives.

Partly this was because so much had been destroyed, partly because of the enormous debt people felt toward the troops who had defended them, and partly a sense that they could not allow a repeat of the Great Depression and all that it had brought, but it was a deliberate attempt to get out of the endless cycle of war and collapse. Britain built its NHS, the US built its enormous interstate highway system, Australia the Snowy River hydro scheme, Germany and Japan rebuilt everything but, crucially, for the first time in history, workers were properly paid. In the US, CEOs were paid about 18-20 times the pay of their average workers. In the UK, the top rate of taxation, mainly on inherited income was 90%, down from a rather punitive 99.5% during the War. The US lagged somewhat, 90% from 1945-63, having fallen from 94%, but this was necessary to pay down the national debt from the war and finance what is now seen as a “golden age” for workers. Were politicians any better in those days? They certainly weren’t without fault but they also weren’t so openly awful, so contemptuous of the voters as today’s lot.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing by any means. Politically, the world was split between right and left, between freedom-loving, God-fearing capitalism and godless, repressive communism, locked in an existential battle. Internationally, there hasn’t been a moment of peace since 1945, culminating in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when, we now know, the world was just a few seconds away from nuclear annihilation. After that scare, the politicians backed down a bit and began the process of writing arms control agreements that lowered temperatures all round – apart from all the usual conventional wars, of course. On the home front, the same squabbles acted out, between benevolent, paternal capitalism on the one hand, and ruthless, repressive socialism on the other – or so we were told. In fact, and despite the theatrics, the right and left wings of political life were much closer than they had ever been.

It could have continued like that indefinitely but around the world, the old order was crumbling. Colonialism had had its day; bankrupt European empires were falling apart as colonies pushed for independence; repressed minorities were demanding equal rights; while universal education had produced, not universal peace but an entire generation who argued with their elders, as well as listening to terrible music. To the horror of the wealthy elite, it seemed the world was heading toward ever-greater equality. They saw no prospect of a return to their golden age of pre-World War I when the rich were very rich and the poor knew their place. Gradually, the wealthy got their act together and organised a program to push back against galloping equality. This took the form of a lengthy memo written in 1971 by a renowned lawyer, Lewis F Powell, later appointed to the Supreme Court. The Powell memo, entitled The attack on the American free enterprise system, argued that leftist elements were using the universities to indoctrinate the rising generation against the capitalist system that had Made America Great. Powell proposed that private capital should combine forces to oppose this, by taking control of the narrative through the media, Hollywood, university curricula, the arts and sciences, the courts and, of course, politicians. He saw this as a long term project but essential if the country wasn’t to slide into socialist totalitarianism. Since then, this agenda has been followed word for word. In late 1971, Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. He served 15 years and was instrumental in many of its pro-business, anti-welfare decisions.

At the same time, the neoliberal economic program was gathering strength until it took control in two major countries, the Thatcher government in the UK in 1979 and Reagan administration in 1981. Their explicit goal was to force their economies to realign, away from supporting labour and social welfare, to explicitly favouring capital. The rationale was that jobs were created by capital, not by governments or unions, so if the wealthy were given more money, they would invest it in productive enterprises, creating jobs and thereby lifting the standard of living of the working class. Governments had to be slimmed down; regulation of business and finance reduced to the minimum to allow room for capital to grow; state-owned enterprises sold off so capital could make them efficient; people had to pay for what they needed, such as education and health, otherwise they’d waste it; red tape such as environmental and planning rules were cut away to clear the deck for hearty investment, on and on.

This doctrine, known as “trickle-down economics,” has since been taken up in one form or another by most Western governments. So far, it has been partially successful in that it has resulted in a massive expansion of the wealth of the privileged classes, generally known as the 1%. We are, however, still waiting for the second half of the program to take effect, expanding the available jobs and lifting the 99%. There is no indication when this is likely to happen. In fact, everything says the working and middle classes are now considerably worse off than they were in 1971. All the usual distractions and sideshows such as pornography, gambling, wars, drugs and so on can’t conceal the plain fact that where in the 1960s, skilled workers could support their families, pay for a house and car and educate their children, by the 2010s, the skilled jobs had gone, education costs were crippling a generation, health costs out of control, housing unaffordable and so on. The usual boogyman of “creeping socialism” was no longer working; the lower classes, it seemed, were all in favour of it, and voters were getting increasingly angry about their lot, especially as the wealthy have proven incapable of discreetly hiding their piles of loot and insist on shoving it down everybody’s throats.

After a bit of frantic head-scratching, the 1% found a new enemy for everybody to hate: immigrants. Immigrants are sneaking in, stealing your jobs, selling drugs to your sons, raping your daughters, taking too much housing, burdening our hospitals and prisons, spreading their evil genes, on and on. If it’s bad, they do it, so hate them. Hate them heart and soul and here’s some space in our newspapers and on TV and the internet where you can share your hate and get sooo excited about it. That way, you’ll forget to look behind the façade where we’re busy looting the nation and hiding the proceeds in offshore tax havens. With great foresight, artifice, stealth and their unlimited money, the 1% have diverted the narrative from the gangster capitalism they have imposed, thereby subverting the one thing they fear more than the sulphurous pits of hades, class warfare.

But what’s this got to do with greedy, corrupt politicians everywhere you look? Plenty. If you announce “Greed is good, get it while you can,” then the greedy feel empowered and will reach for more and more, because that’s what greed means. Power corrupts, but it does so by attracting the corruptible. For people whose lives lack some essential spark, the thrill of power offers the chance to fill the gap, to complete what nature left incomplete, by making people take notice and stand aside respectfully. Once they get a toe in the door, they realise how easy it is to cheat and lie a little bit; when they get away with it once, they try it again, then again and one fine day, they turn into full-blown cheats and liars. Here’s one peripheral example that arrived a few moments ago, a case of one small person against a massive multinational. After five years of legalised persecution, the rich people lost. And another one: how come he had a spare $5mln to pay what he owed to the tax office? Insider trading, that’s how.

In the early post-war period, the nations set up a legal international order but that was too restricting so it was watered down to a “rules-based international order.” Over the past few years, it has become clear that this was never any more than smoke and mirrors but now, buried under the rubble of Gaza and the devastated Sudanese city of Al Fashar, even that pretence has gone. We can now proclaim a new, Reality-Based International Order, in which the rich and powerful do what they like and the poor get what’s left, if anything. All thi is because humans like dominating each other. Any social, political or economic system that facilitates that process will attract lots of supporters but they will be the very people who should be kept in the back paddock, far from the seat of power. It will attract people who get a kick out of lording it over everybody, who are fascinated and beguiled by wealth and the sensual pleasures it brings, meaning it will attract narcissists and psychopaths. Over time, competent and fair-minded administrators and legislators will be replaced by the incompetent, the greedy, the delusional and the bloodthirsty. As it has been doing since time immemorial but now turbo-charged by the neoliberal doctrine, devided by the rich and powerful that favours the rich and powerful. Banditry reigns, and the devil take the hindmost.

Power attracts the corruptible so we shouldn’t have built a system that gives them what they want. These days, technology allows us to put in some safeguards. For example, we could set up a system that records every word uttered or heard, or read, typed or transmitted, by every politician 24/7, every phone call, the entire computer log, and every physical or electronic contact with any person. That’s easy. In fact, most of that infrastructure is already in place, it just isn’t aimed at politicians. They’ve aimed it at us to facilitate their gaining more power and wealth. But the first step toward changing anything is to recognise that we are being fooled by experts.

****

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.

****

Like most countries in the world, Australia has committed to the 2015 Paris Agreement target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a policy with wide community support. In the election in May this year, the opposition Liberal Party was pummeled in large part because of its climate skepticism/denial. This week, however, and apparently preferring oblivion to mere wilderness, they removed the net zero goal from their policies. We haven’t been told why this is necessary but it seems they think there are more votes on the far right fringes than in the centre. Politically, that won’t fly but, as a matter of statistics, they’re on safe ground: we’re not going to reach net zero anyway, so why go to all the trouble and expense of trying? Even though greenhouse gas emissions in China and India are starting to decline, they’re continuing to rise in the US and Europe, as well as Canada and Australia. People can tut tut and say we all ought to install solar panels, buy an EV and turn off our phone chargers, but those moves are mere window dressing. The biggest single cause of greenhouse gas emissions, and the one nobody wants to talk about, is militarism.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2024, total military budgets amounted to $2.75trillion, or about 2.5% of gross world product (GWP). That’s a lot of money but it’s only part of what is spent on the military. Add to that all the spying agencies, all the research that goes into building bigger and faster weapons, the costs of supporting ever-expanding veteran populations, and all the other money hidden in a myriad clever ways. That probably doubles it to about $5.5trillion, but even that’s only part of the total cost of the war business. We need to include the direct cost of all the deaths and injuries, and the destruction of homes, factories, infrastructure (road and rail, schools, hospitals etc), and agriculture. Finally, there’s the opportunity cost of having huge numbers of perfectly healthy, intelligent and disciplined people who need to be fed, housed, clothed, trained etc, spending their careers blowing things up when they could be working constructively. The grand total is somewhere between $17-19trillion a year, meaning about 15% of GWP. That’s a very great deal of money, and it doesn’t include a cash value on grief.

The important point is that the untold millions of people involved in this industry of death, from presidents and prime ministers down to the lowliest private or cleaner in a factory, couldn’t give a rat’s arse about global warming. They simply don’t care. It’s not that none of them believe it, because obviously some do, it’s that they don’t care. It doesn’t get more than a brief flicker of their attention once or twice a year because they have much more important things to think about, like working out how to destroy anybody who disagrees with them. For them, there is no greater pleasure than roaring around the place in trucks or tanks, ships or jets, or watching the pretty explosions or smoke billowing from burning cities. They truly love the smell of napalm in the morning. Compared with the exquisite delight of fighting today, worrying about floods in slums in Jakarta in 25 years time seems pretty insipid.

Maybe we shouldn’t expect troops or lowly factory workers to look that far ahead but we pay our politicians to think ahead, except they don’t do it. Have the US and Israeli governments given any thought to all the CO₂ that will be released by producing enough concrete to rehouse the 2million survivors of Gaza? We can be sure that thought hasn’t entered their heads. In fact, like all governments, they’re very good at diverting attention away from military greenhouse gas production. It isn’t widely known, for example, that the US military alone consumes 4% of the world’s liquid fuels each year. The costs of producing weapons are hidden in “industry,” of moving armies and navies around the world goes under “transport,” all the research on autonomous vehicles actually comes from military budgets for drones and mechanical dogs, the original internet was funded by DARPA, and so on. Nobody knows how far militarism is pushing us toward climate catastrophe, and that’s exactly how our lords and masters want to keep it. As long as we’re concerned with methane from landfill or light pollution dazzling migrating birds, and we’re not poking around their privates, they’re happy.

At this stage, my view is that we’re going to hell on a hang glider. While governments argue back and forth at their COP conferences, the reality is that, without bringing militarism under control, there is zero chance of preventing climate catastrophe. That doesn’t even start on their nuclear weapons, which are back in the news. Herr Drumpf saw something on TV about Russia successfully testing a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Having heard the words ‘nuclear’ and ‘test’ in the same sentence, he promptly announced that the US would resume nuclear testing because that’s what dementing people do, they misunderstand and react at a reflex level. Fortunately, the people who know about nuclear tests are letting it die quietly but it reminds us that these things haven’t gone away, that idiots have still got the controls. And if climate change doesn’t get us slowly, they’ve got a back-up plan called nuclear winter. Bearing in mind that the people with all the money and the guns are convinced they’re right, and will fight anybody to prove it, it’s definitely not encouraging. So what do they believe? That’s where it gets confusing.

I’ve mentioned before that until the 1930s, the great majority of the educated and wealthy elite in the West firmly believed there is a hierarchy of races, and that the superior races were both entitled and duty-bound to rule the rest. Needless to say, the same educated and wealthy elite firmly believed that the white races were the pinnacle of creation, that males were intended to dominate females, and that they themselves were the crème de la crème and should have all the power. These ideas took a hammering after the horrors of World War II but they definitely haven’t gone away. Most people aren’t quite so open about it now but they still believe in the notion of inherent superiority. It’s no longer overtly racist but comes dressed in soothing, self-justifying language, such as appeals to freedom and democracy, opposing terror and repression, or searching for weapons of mass destruction and such like. The slogans may change but the message remains the same: We want to dominate you. Naturally enough, the people on the receiving end have other ideas. While one group tries to dominate another, there will be no peace and the world will continue on its accelerating slide to climate catastrophe. Which group tries hardest to be dominant? The wealthy, white, Western elite, that’s who.

We see this daily in Trump’s disinhibited threats and rants. If somebody doesn’t do as he says, he immediately says “We’ll put tariffs on you,” followed by escalating threats of violence. Now, for no reason other than he can, he has moved major forces to the Caribbean to threaten Venezuela, as though the world needs another forever war. However, the only difference between Trump and his predecessors is that he says out loud what they mostly kept to themselves. Sometimes, they blurt it out, as former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said: “If we have to use force, it’s because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” When challenged over the deaths of half a million Iraqi children following the American sanctions, she said she believed the price was worth it. This is the attitude driving the political agenda today, more commonly known as Orientalism. The term comes from Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American author and literary critic, who published a major work by the same name in 1978. Stripped of all pretence, this pervasive notion means something like:

Orientals (everybody east of Greece, or maybe even east of the Danube) are inherently lazy, dishonest and aggressive. They are acultural savages with a bloodthirsty religion who can only be tamed with a whip, and who, because of ancient rivalries and hatreds, are incapable of cooperating with each other or with outsiders who try to help. Because of religious repression and the hot climate, they’re sex-mad and therefore even less trustworthy.

Agreed, Edward Said did not put it that way but that’s the attitude driving Albright’s insouciant line about half a million dead children: Hmm, yeah, we can live with that. Also, implied but not stated is the notion that Orientals are only lazy, dishonest, aggressive etc. by comparison with some other group. By default, that’s the wealthy, white, Western elite who rate themselves as diligent, responsible, stable, sophisticated, liberal, progressive, rational/scientific (not swayed by religion) and (ask Mme Albright) far-sighted. Essentially, we whites are the adults while them coloured folks are just children.

Two things flow from this. First is the belief that, given those characteristics, oil is dangerous for Orientals, like letting children loose in a sweet shop or giving eleven year olds fully functioning sexual organs. Inevitably, oil causes massive corruption and instability, inflaming their ancestral tribal hostilities, so it must be controlled by the West for the good order and peace of the world. It’s actually a charitable act by the West but it isn’t easy as Orientals are intensely jealous of the cultured, sophisticated, intellectually advanced West, and they always resist progress. This takes the form of anti-white and antisemitic racism which spills into terrorism and therefore, reluctantly, has to be contained forcibly. After the World Trade Centre attack in 2001, George Bush went to Congress for permission to invade Afghanistan. I’m sure he believed exactly what he told the House:

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber – a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

In fact, they hate being treated as second rate human beings while their national assets are stripped and sold for a pittance so the West can enjoy a high standard of living. Their anticolonial rage is reframed as insane jealousy and blood lust which has to be smashed down time and time again as they don’t learn – “mowing the grass,” as the Israelis put it. Their resistance is not seen as a legitimate response to Western actions: this week, The Economist turned history on its head when it talked about “… America’s engagement in wars and regime change in response to terrorism …” Sorry, America’s wars and coups create the terrorism. There was no terrorism in West Asia until Europeans arrived, they brought it, but these are the entrenched attitudes of the Western narrative known as Orientalism. It is all about domination, the primitive human urge to subjugate anybody within reach just because it feels better. This produces militarism, and militarism is driving the world to thermal destruction – if the nuclear bombs don’t get us first.

We are now entering a vicious circle, a “doom loop,” as they say, where militarism is accelerating climate change, which causes wars over water and resources and produces flows of refugees, all of which have to be resisted by … more militarism. Pace Homer Simpson: militarism it the cause of all the world’s problems but it isn’t the solution. Arnold Toynbee nailed it: “Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.” In fact, militarism makes all the arts of peace impossible. There is no question that civilisation as we know it is heading for the cliff, just because humans in power are addicted to the thrill of domination and always want more, while those underfoothave no choice but to fight for their freedom.

What can we ordinary mortals do about this? First step is to recognise that this is what is going on, to move beyond the infantile notion of “Us rational and caring Westerners trying to control the irrational Orientals,” i.e. the old Good vs Bad notion drummed into us from infancy. This has to be replaced with an unbiased view. How do we get this? Simple. Just reverse the settings and players and see how you would like it. In 1942, as Imperial Japan was sweeping down through SE Asia, Australians got very twitchy about the idea of being colonised by “Asiatics.” They didn’t like that idea one little bit and still don’t: daily, we are fed the notion that we have to arm ourselves against the Chinese threat, discreetly overlooking the fact that we are now a vassal state of the US of A. If we don’t want to be dominated by foreigners, is there any reason why Iranians would? I don’t think so. Second step is to try to impress this on other people, especially those in power. They won’t want to listen, of course, they’re having too much fun to want to change but that’s no reason to give up because until we get sensible people in power, we’re heading for the S-bend at speed. A while ago, a British ambassador reported:

I have the impression that the people directing the policy of this government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.

No, it wasn’t the country you’re thinking of. It was Sir Horace Rumbold, reporting in June 1933, from Berlin. And look where they took it.

****

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.

****

“That’s not fair.” This, as every parent knows, is one of the earliest sentences a child learns and, ideally, it stays with us for the rest of our lives. A sense of justice or fair play, of right and wrong, is fundamental to human social life: without people acting fairly according to a consistent set of rules, a society won’t last, it must soon be brought down by its own contradictions. A standard definition of fairness is: “Impartial and just treatment or behaviour without favouritism or discrimination.” If that were applied rigidly, it would mean everybody on earth would have the same assets and facilities, the same rights, duties and opportunities, and all would be quiet and peaceful. Would that it were true, but it ain’t, never has been and, almost certainly, never will be: who would enforce equality, and who would watch over the enforcers? Straight away, that would seem to imply some unfairness in the power structure. So what’s fairness, and why are we so concerned about it?

First point is that although children seem to have some innate sense of fairness, it generally doesn’t survive intact to adulthood. Human societies have always been grossly inequitable, with the poor, if not actually enslaved, living precariously at the whim of their masters. In Calcutta, I’ve seen people, mostly young men from rural areas looking for work, who live on the pavements and own just the worn and dirty clothes they stood in, a few rags to keep warm at night and a couple of battered plastic containers for the food and water they may or may not get that day. Perhaps they have $1.00 in total value. On the other hand, Bro. Musk is now worth about $400billion and has just signed a contract that may give him $1trillion. Royals continue to live like kings (and behave like them) while the international 1% are doing everything they can to gouge more and more money from the 99% just so they can buy more yachts and politicians.

Everything seems to be heading in the direction of greater and greater inequality, and we all know where that ends. As the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions showed, the concept of fairness has real significance, but in order to forestall such mighty explosions of rage, it has to be agreed, codified and then enforced, better known as the law. Over centuries, the world’s states have built up hugely complex systems of laws. The US Tax Code, for example, is a portly 6,871 pages, with more added each year. For legal systems, the ideal is to satisfy the majority’s wishes while protecting the rights and interests of the minority, i.e. to treat citizens fairly, although there are plenty of states in which that isn’t true.

Law is a moral system, based on “This is what you ought to do,” meaning it makes no claim on being true. Truth and fairness occupy separate realms of discourse, which people often forget. They are, however, linked in that each realm consists of sets of beliefs, as in “I believe it is true that Antarctica is the driest continent,” and “I believe everybody should help keep national parks clean.” These aren’t quite the same but that’s good enough for discussion. In philosophy, sets of beliefs come under the heading of epistemology, usually defined as “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.” That sounds fairly high powered but it’s important in daily life, as people constantly mix up fact and opinion, or can’t tell the difference between truth and falsity – often with terrible consequences. Nazi race science, for example, was based on the idea that there is a hierarchy of races, with the superior Aryans destine to rule over the inferior others. This was accepted as scientific truth, completely beyond dispute, and led to the mass slaughters of different races in Europe. They did not see that it was in fact an opinion, just prejudice bolstered by poor quality science, but they weren’t alone. At the time, every member of the Western elite believed it. Similarly, the Imperial Japanese were totally convinced they were a superior race who were entitled to enslave the Chinese and anybody else they fancied. Beliefs count, and we need to understand them.

The philosopher, Donald Davidson (1917-2003), is widely regarded as one of the most influential American authors of the second half of the last century. His 1970 paper Mental Events [1], has been praised as “... arguably the most debated paper in twentieth century Philosophy of Mind...” I think that’s a bit over the top but we take the point. Unfortunately, his style was convoluted to the point of opacity, as even his friends and admirers admitted. He was very widely read, including Freudian psychoanalysis, but always came back to concepts of true belief: what is truth, how is it established, how does it relate to belief, etc? He firmly believed three things: that there are mental events; that some mental events can cause physical events and vice versa; but if so, there has to be a strict causal law relating them; but if there is such a law, then free will is impossible. Philosophy, he argued, has to reconcile these apparently contradictory facts.

His solution was what he called coherentism, that beliefs are rendered true just because they’re coherent or consistent with all the other beliefs that surround them. Each belief is joined to and justified by the beliefs that preceded it and those that follow it, rather like a string of sausages. He did not allow independent facts to get in the way: “… nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief. Its partisan rejects as unintelligible the request for a ground or source of justification of another ilk.” [2, p141]. I see a lot of problems with this stance, like how do beliefs start, how do people end up with self-contradictory beliefs, and why do some people believe nonsense? However, his approach can’t be dismissed as I believe it provides a very good account of paranoid states, certainly better than the trite “chemical imbalance of the brain” trope [3]. It says that a paranoid person’s brain is normal, not defective in any way; that intelligent people can weave more complex and plausible paranoid systems that can then convince waverers; and, above all, that the paranoid state is self-reinforcing. Oh dear, does that mean we’ll all end up under the paranoid spell? Well, we already are, we all have to be a little bit paranoid to survive, but we have to learn how to keep it under control.

But back to the question of how beliefs start, in particular, how does the belief in fairness start? How do we get the notion itself? A lot of people would say it’s innate, an instinctual urge for justice, but that doesn’t survive its first brush with reality. Moreover, even quite small children are very good at telling when something isn’t fair – for them. They’re not good when the tables are turned. They have to be taught to be fair, to share and so on. When our daughter was barely three, I wanted her to share something: “Come on,” I reminded her, “sharing is caring.” “No!” she replied very firmly. “Sharing is screaming.” The little darlings have a much better sense when something is unfair for them than when they need to be fair to others. I suggest this relates to two of our fundamental drives, territoriality and the urge to be dominant.

Territoriality relates to places and things: This is my place, these are my things so nick off and don’t touch. That is, “In this place and over these things, I have total control; I am dominant and I will resist intrusions to the end.” Fairness becomes a matter of finding a balance that safeguards my wishes and reduces your need to try to take over my stuff. It’s an intellectual exercise but it’s intimately related to the sense of well-being that comes from having a secure area, and to the sense of outrage that boils up when that area is threatened in any way. All things lead back to the dominance drive, the urge to get to the top of the hierarchy in order to lord it over everybody else just because it feels so good. Coupled to that is the even stronger urge to resist being dominated and shoved down the hierarchy. The slave may smile and bob a bow and say “Yessir master, right away,” but inside, he isn’t smiling. He’s saying “One day, boss man, I’m gonna get you and then you’ll find out what it’s like to be crushed underfoot and humiliated.” That’s inevitable. While the desire to dominate is strong and people love to indulge it, the urge to resist is stronger and never wears off. Resistance to domination is absolutely predictable.

The child’s sense of fairness, then, is just the urge to resist being dominated in action. This much is intuitive: all animals have the same sense, i.e. show the same behavioral constellation. Its biological basis in the testosterone economy is well-known; it amounts to an inclination to act in a certain way but, unlike the need to breathe or eat, it’s not a fixed law. We can turn it on or off and, to a large extent, socialisation is just the process of learning when to be firm and decisive and when to be polite and yielding. Trouble is, we have largely built our societies around the concept of dominance hierarchies without understanding its significance. We are taught from infancy that competing is the natural order of things, winning is wonderful, everybody loves a winner, don’t be a loser and so on. Competition has been elevated to the level of a semi-divine moral imperative, quite forgetting that the very concept of winning drags in its wake the concept of losing. There can’t be winners without losers, and losers don’t like it, they get angry and want to retaliate. Resistance is totally predictable, a biologically-determined rule of nature. We ignore that rule at our peril but one clever way we ignore it is by turning it from a matter of DNA to a matter of morality.

Fairness says only this: Don’t try to be dominant all the time, let other people have a go otherwise they’ll get angry and hit back and then you could lose everything. On this bit of common sense we have built a vast superstructure of laws and rules intended to stop people taking more than they’re entitled to just because, without those rules, society will fracture and fall apart. Granted, the rules aren’t perfect, they often leave loopholes that clever lawyers hired by the wealthy can exploit or that governments can use to keep the population down but, ultimately, nature will prevail, it has to prevail. One fine day, the downtrodden will reach the point where they have nothing left to lose, and then the heads will roll. Are there any lessons in this for today’s world? What a dumb question.

The world today is in a state of intense instability. That we are surviving is a matter of luck, not because our “leaders” are doing a good job of keeping us on the road. For an explanation of the chaos, we could ask our leaders but we know what they’ll say: “It’s all those bad people. They hate us and they’re trying to bring us down.” GW Bush said this after the attack in New York. Addressing Congress, he said, apparently without bursting out laughing:

How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am -- like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.

If he wanted to know, he should have read Bin Laden’s letter to America, in which he set out his group’s complaints against rapacious western colonialism. In a few words, they hated the US because it tries to dominate everybody, everywhere, all the time, in every conceivable respect and to make the oppressed pay for the pleasure. That’s it. It doesn’t matter what its motives are, how much money the US says it gives away, whether Coke is the Real Thing or what, all that counts is that people don’t like being dominated and. They. Will. React. So simple. International politics in one sentence. What we see today is a number of countries who are sick of Washington’s attempts to dominate and control them and, to Uncle Sam’s great indignation, are pushing back. Even more embarrassing, they’re winning. We lesser mortals, whose opinions are never solicited, can only sit back and watch how it pans out. This time, though, it seems the US has bitten off far more than it can chew.

Meantime, the Middle East is on fire again. Still. Armed and paid by the US, Israel is back at its long term project of building Greater Israel in the heartland of the Arab-Muslim world. Even though they weren’t so open about it in the past, anybody with a few minutes to spare and a skeptical attitude has known of their plan to take control of a vast area, easily ten times the area allocated to them in the UN partition of plan of 1947. Turns out, according to Mr Netanyahu, it’s more like a hundred times bigger, and they want it free of all the usurpers and interlopers who have the effrontery to claim that because their people have been there for thousands of years, they have some sort of claim on the territory.

Greater Israel will include the whole of Lebanon, the southern half of Syria (including the Arabic city of Damascus), Iraq across to the Euphrates and down to the Gulf coast, all of Kuwait and the northern third of Saudi Arabia and its fertile Red Sea coast, the whole of the Sinai peninsula and the eastern half of Egypt across to the Nile. What will happen to its 100million indigenous inhabitants isn’t spelled out but it doesn’t sound promising. Just what 7million Israelis will do with it also isn’t clear but what is clear is that the indigenes are not going to take it lying down. We can put aside all historical claims and counterclaims, all mythical figures and religious texts, all practical issues about who can manage it better, all questions of whose side God or history or righteousness are on, because all that counts is that the locals will fight back. That’s genetic. To every act of oppression there is an opposite reaction for liberation, as Newton might have said. The Jewish population of the Warsaw ghetto did it in 1943 and the Palestinians are doing it now. Of course they are, and if I were in either of their positions, so would I. The more you oppress people, the harder they will try to turn the tables.

There will be no peace in the world until humans stop trying to dominate each other. Unfortunately, a quick glance at our history as a species says this isn’t going to happen soon. Even Ötzi, the paleolithic man frozen in an Alpine glacier, died 5,000 years ago with somebody’s arrow buried in his back (more details of ancient human aggression in [4]). Also, an even quicker glance at our “leaders” shows that none of them has the wherewithal to make a determined stand against this madness. We can all live satisfying, comfortable, productive lives without having to grind our neighbours underfoot. In fact, if we stop wasting the $19trillion a year that militarism costs, we can all live very much better lives. Who knows, some of it may go to Mr Musk and he could live his fantasy of being a trillionaire. God alone knows why he would want to, there are far better things to do than count money, but whatever turns him on. As long as it doesn’t involve putting other people down, because they don’t like it, and they will inevitably resist.

References:

1. Davidson D (1970) Mental Events. Reprinted in Essays on Action and Events (2001). https://doi.org/10.1093/0199246270.003.0011

2. Davidson D. (1983) A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge Chap. 10 in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective: Philosophical Essays, Vol. 3. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198237537.001.0001

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

4. Spindler K (1994). The Man in the Ice. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

****

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 couple of weeks ago, I commented on how people get themselves up the power hierarchy:

… when people are trying to get a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, they’re not going to tell everybody: “I’m only in this for myself, I just love the thrill of being able to push people around.” That wouldn’t get them very far, so they know intuitively what to say and, more important, what not to say.

A reader referred me to the American biographer, Robert Caro (who turned 90 last week), author of the monumental account of Lyndon Johnson’s life, who said:

But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary (from Vol IV, The Passage of Power, 2012).

He’s right, but the other part of the story is who selects themselves for an apprenticeship in power. With power comes responsibility. There are plenty of people who are attracted by the thought of getting to the top of the ladder but, along the way, they realise it’s a lot more work than they expected, it doesn’t leave enough time for fishing, so they stop striving to get higher. Others simply don’t have the brains to get higher so they sit where they are, avoiding any trouble but also carefully picking off any competition coming up through the ranks. This is the basis of the Peter Principle, that people are promoted to one level above their competence: not smart or industrious enough to get higher, but smart enough to know that they’ll never get another job as good as this, so there they stay. Universities are full of them, as are other rigid hierarchies. Well, they used to be. Professors now tend to be on contract, which means they have to be productive, so the chair-warmers have moved into administration. There they can fill their days going to meetings and conferences and retreats, fooling everybody into thinking their frantic activity means they’re doing something.

Anyway. It used to be said that high-status people should be accorded great respect, that their positions mean they have earned them, but that’s been known to be untrue for a long time. Lord Acton’s quote about power corrupting continues:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.... And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control.

That was about 140 years ago; since then, as the slowly unfolding Epstein saga shows, it’s got worse. Last week, it claimed another high profile British scalp, the Andrew formerly known as Prince. This was a few weeks after another notorious grub, Lord Peter Mandelson, lost his job as UK ambassador to the US. With luck, he’ll lose his peerage as well but there’s plenty more who deserve the chop. What’s becoming clear from this is the pervasive corruption of very large parts of the Western ruling class, if not the whole lot. We’re used to the idea of Oriental or African or even Latin American despots robbing their countries blind but we’ve comforted ourselves with the idea that we’re not like that. But we are. Graft is not an Oriental or African or Latin problem, it’s human, and it stems from our inherent tendency to form dominance hierarchies. Two problems arise: (1) the nature of the people who actively shove themselves forward to climb the ladder, i.e. the self-selecting political process, and (2) what happens to them once they get a foot on the rungs, how they change. Further down the road is another question, what to do about it.

It would be very helpful if we could get accurate psychological profiles on every would-be politician but it would never work, they’d all lie their way to ideal scores. In fact, they’d all be so perfect that we would know straight away they’re lying. Do all politicians lie? Indeed they do. Dick Cheney died in his bed this week, co-author of the infamous Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” lie that resulted in millions of deaths and the devastation of the country. No doubt he was comfortable to the end, surrounded by family and friends, getting the best treatment money could buy and totally untroubled by his monstrous perfidy. Current British prime minister, Keir Starmer, told everybody he was best friends with Jeremy Corbyn, his predecessor as Labour leader then, as soon as he got power, expelled him from the party. Former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, began a 5yr prison sentence this week for corruption. Australian PM Anthony Albanese used to support Palestine but once in office, he forgot that. And Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor? A disgusting little worm who thought the world owed him a living.

The wrong people thrust themselves forward to get up the political staircase. Overwhelmingly, they are intrigued and beguiled by power, it thrills them as nothing else does and they can’t keep away. That’s how they can put up with the early stages of a political career, the endless meetings listening to boring people, the pointless jobs and so on. For ordinary people, the idea of a weekend conference with no time at the beach is a torture, and they won’t do it. That means the only people at the conference are those who can endure the drivel because they know it’s getting them closer to what they want, to what they need: the delight of being close to the powerful and, with luck, becoming powerful themselves. Why do they need it? Personality. Or should I say, personality defects.

The actual reasons would vary from one person to the next. Some are convinced beyond any questioning that they and they alone know what’s right, that the rest of the world are fools who can’t understand the genius standing in front of them. Margaret Thatcher springs to mind. Of course, some determination is essential otherwise nothing would get done. A politician has to push an idea against opposition but if they give up too easily, they’re out. This process automatically selects for people who hold an idea with almost delusional intensity. Neville Chamberlain, for example, was incapable of believing that he couldn’t swing the dictators around to see his point of view. Tim Bouverie’s very readable book, Appeasing Hitler [1], makes this absolutely clear. Trouble is, this self-conviction blurs across to outright paranoia, such as Stalin, Mao Zedung, Idi Amin and so many other monsters, and nobody can tell where sanity gives way to insanity. The problem is compounded by the fact that ordinary, reasonable people have doubts but are prepared to vote for somebody who reduces problems to simple, black-and-white terms that they can understand. Which, of course, means the arrogant, the self-satisfied and the frankly dishonest.

There are others who want power just so they can settle with all their enemies. They’re not interested in the job, they don’t actually do the work but leave it to their underlings and never bother to check what they’re doing. Trump is the perfect example. In 2015, he had absolutely no knowledge of how government worked, and even less interest. He didn’t care about how it worked, he had always had people to handle the dirty work and didn’t ever doubt that he could continue this in the White House. He was sure the job was easy just because he didn’t have a clue what was involved but he didn’t care. He just wanted to get even with the establishedment who looked down on him because he liked KFC. He didn’t win by having policies, he got in because his prejudices meshed neatly with the great mass of people who were angry over how badly their lives were going. Trump told them it was due to immigrants and he would build a wall to keep them out; they believed him because it was easier than working out that it was in fact the neoliberal economic system that was doing them over. Second time round, Trump had no plan other than getting even with everybody who had upset him. The people who rode on his train, such as the reptilian Stephen Miller, who makes Himmler look warm and cuddly, are either unprincipled opportunists or equally full of hate. The numbers in his cabinet who previously despised him is astounding – Rubio, Patel, Bongino, RFK Jr, etc. You would think he wouldn’t want them around but no, he loves watching them grovel. They, in turn, are delighted to grovel because it gets them closer to power. And, yes, this is no way to run a government but that’s what the system does.

Are there any principled politicians? A few, Jeremy Corbyn was one but like most of them, he got the chop. But, you object, they can’t all be scoundrels from the beginning, they must have some sense of decency, and you’re right, but it doesn’t last. All too often, as they gain power, so too grows their sense of entitlement, the sense that they deserve more than the common herd because they need to be seen to be powerful. The power isn’t enough, people have to know it. Why, for example, are university vice-chancellors or presidents paid so much? The job isn’t that complicated, it’s not like neurosurgery, for example, which requires considerable skill and diligence; all they have to do is swan around and make sure everybody is doing their job. They spend fortunes on lavish offices, first class travel here and there, expensive cars, credit cards and so on, and they feel justified. Trump is a bad example but last week, the night before the SNAP benefits (food stamps) for 42million people were about to expire because of his government shutdown, he held a wildly extravagant party at his pub with the theme “Great Gatsby.” If anybody had said “Is this appropriate?” he would have looked at them blankly and replied: “Why not? It’s a beautiful party, lovely people, I like it.” Trump is masterclass on why no single person should have substantial power in a state because, as he is showing, the state can then be dismantled piecemeal from the inside and taken over. As the Nazis did.

His niece, Mary Trump, a PhD psychologist, says of him: “I don’t care what his cult says. I know him personally. My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.” He even cheats at golf but he’s not alone, the sense of entitlement grows in lockstep with the sense of power over people and opens the door to corruption. This is universal. We have to be trained from very early not to take the last piece of cake, to let the small children have a ride or offer out seat to the pregnant lady, trained until it becomes part of the self. That’s the ultimate way to get corruption out of government.

Another quicker way is to flatten the pyramid, to reduce the levels of hierarchy by pushing responsibility and decisions as far down the chain as possible. Rather than allowing monopolies of power and wealth, we need competing power structures such as unions and cooperatives to stand against monopoly capitalism. In brief, we need to start to think about a new form of government where power is deliberately diluted, not concentrated. Instead of one general lording it over an entire army, we set up dozens of smaller units cooperating but not bound together. People complain “Oh, but that’s so inefficient, how could they coordinate an attack?” Correct. That’s precisely the point, they wouldn’t be able to. Militarism costs humanity about $19trillion a year, how efficient is that?

Similarly, instead of paying millions to a university vice-chancellor or president while the lecturers who actually do the work get a pittance, spread the money and responsibility down the chain. All of this is basic management stuff but we don’t do it in politics, we can’t get away from the idea that there has to be just one leader with all the power. That is the most inefficient idea of all as it plays straight into our very worst qualities, our greed and lust for power. Of course, the people with the power all firmly believe that rigid, stratified hierarchy is the best of all possible systems. When it breaks down, as the Epstein business is showing, they dismiss that as an aberration, the result of a few bad apples sneaking into the bin. No, that’s not true. It’s the bin that’s at fault, it’s contaminated, it makes good apples go bad. We ignore this at our peril.

Reference:

1. Bouverie T (2019). Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War. London: Vintage.

****

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.