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

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About 20 years ago, I met a Polish chap who, naturally enough, was keen to talk politics. Of the opening days of World War II, he said: “The Poles aren’t the only people who used cavalry to attack tanks. However, they were surely the only ones who thought they could win” (it turns out that was a myth). However, the one lesson we learn from history is that nobody ever learns from history: it seems the Europeans have decided there isn’t enough chaos in the world today and are getting ready for another bout of tilting at tanks. In a recent interview on Pascal Lottaz’s excellent channel, Neutrality Studies, Norwegian professor Glenn Diesen described what at first glance is a bad attack of war fever spreading across the continent. However, it now seems to be little more than panic among the power elite of the EU that they’ve been exposed as chumps. As Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour makes the previously unthinkable idea of an American withdrawal from Europe seem very thinkable, the von der Leyen clique that controls the EU is running around saying war with Russia is inevitable within five years. Diesen reports that the insufferable Jacob Rees Mogg has even said that Britons need to prepare themselves for the chance to die for Britain (at 09.25):

... but now something has happened. (the European leaders) have taken it over completely. They are in full ownership of this warmongering. Even now that the US pulling back (from confronting Russia, the) Europeans are quite eager to continue. So what has happened to them? I think some of it’s just human nature, when humans going to war, some basic impulse kicks in... 04.32.

He repeats this several times: “... the problem is that there’s an instinct also in human nature which is when you face an external threat, you seek internal solidarity.” At about 22.00 (paraphrased): “If enough people are chanting Let’s go to war, go to war, they will eventually internalize this and they will begin to pursue it. It’s human nature ... it’s incredibly dangerous. ... I don’t even think they can control the narrative anymore.”

The question then arises: Why? What’s going on? Wasn’t the EU formed to make reruns of the World Wars impossible? Yet here they are pushing the (very unwilling) populace into accepting the idea that a gigantic and ultra-high tech war with a vast and immensely wealthy, nuclear-armed country that has all the resources to conduct war that Europe doesn’t have is not just necessary but inevitable and, above all, joyously exciting. Are the Europeans completely mad? Despite the mind-bending risks, and for all his undoubted scholarship, Dr Diesen doesn’t have an answer beyond “Well, that’s human nature.” Financially, Europe is in deep trouble. Since the US blew up the Nordstream II gas pipeline providing cheap Russian natural gas to power Europe’s energy-hungry industrial base, the problems have multiplied.

It was also the US that forced Europe to stop using the cheap and extremely good IT and telecoms technology supplied by China’s Huawei and others, replacing it with American products that favour the American tech giants and their branches in the CIA; and the US that attacked Iran who closed the vital Strait of Hormuz that supplied 60% of Europe’s liquid fuels; and the US-, Israeli- and UK-backed Saudi regime that attacked Yemen’s Ansar Allah who promptly closed the Red Sea which provided most of the rest, forcing Europe to buy US natural gas and oil at grossly inflated prices ... With friends like America, you would wonder why Europe thinks they need to make an enemy of Russia, the same Russia that offered peace if Europe stopped trying to integrate Ukraine into NATO because, as everybody knew, that meant NATO nuclear-armed bombers on permanent high alert sitting on runways a few km from the Russian border. Unfortunately, Dr Diesen can only shrug and say “Well, that’s human nature.”

If that’s not enough trouble, the well-known commentator, Prof. John Mearsheimer of Chicago University reports that a similar game is playing out on the other side of the planet. The rise of China from broken-down third world country to global super-power in barely 45 years is truly remarkable. It totally eclipses Germany’s post-WWII Wirtschaftswunder, its economic miracle that has since run into the sand. While 90% of the world’s population are enormously impressed with China’s example, it hasn’t gone down well with the American power elite. Dr Mearsheimer reports that, in 2017, the US under Trump began to implement a policy of containment, to prevent China reaching equal or even superior status to the US in any respect. To this end, maintaining support for Taiwan as a separate political entity became paramount: without Taiwan, he says, containment of China would be impossible (here, at 26.45). He continues:

As I tried to make clear, the United States is a mortal enemy of China. Since 2017, an intense security competition has set in between the United States and China (28:34) ... When the Trump administration decided to adopt the policy of containment in 2017 (31:22) ... and the United States is a mortal enemy of China (33.20).

This has immediate significance in Today’s Fantabulous Theme, the AI explosion: “The United States is working overtime to see if they can gain an advantage over the Chinese in terms of developing AI” (35:06). Even though he has the technological sophistication of a five year old, Trump himself is 110% behind the AI drive, totally ignoring dire warnings from insiders that AI has the ability to destroy all human life within ten years, or even five years. No, says Herr Drumpf, the AI industry can supervise themselves. Unlike those terrible non-violent demonstrators in the streets, our wonderful Tech Bros don’t need government restrictions, do you Elon? Of course not. How come? Because China. The crafty tech bros have whispered in Trump’s right ear (the same one that doesn’t show any evidence of a bullet hole) that if China gets ahead in the AI race, then it’s goodnight America, those godless commie Chinks will use it to isolate and crush and deindustrialise God-fearing America. So the pleasantries of Pres. Xi’s recent trip to DC notwithstanding, Mearsheimer says, the US actually sees itself locked in an existential war with China:

As we move forward, what is likely to happen is that President Trump’s relationship with the Chinese, with Xi Xinping, and the American relationship with China, if anything, is likely to deteriorate over time ... where the United States and President Trump in particular, have friendly relations with the Chinese on the surface, is going to be seen as an anomaly ... and the present situation where the rhetoric is quite friendly, certainly on the American side, that’s likely to disappear (52:37).

This is not encouraging. The significance, as he says, is that despite the very real risks, there is no will to cooperate on restraining AI development. In international relations, Prof. Mearsheimer is probably the leading theoretician in the school of “offensive realism” so we have to listen to what he says, even as gloomy as this. However, when we look for explanation, it isn’t forthcoming. Why, for example, does the US regard China as its “mortal enemy”? Mearsheimer’s thesis is that international relations are anarchic, therefore nations have to struggle to exert local hegemony in order to protect their interests. The current dispute with China is just another example of the same concept playing out, a case of dominate or be dominated.

Now technical optimists may be inclined to dismiss Mearsheimer’s concerns, saying “We went through all this angst with nuclear weapons in the Cold War and we survived, AI is just another version of worrying about the end of the world.” There is an element of truth in that, just enough for the cavaliers to grab hold of and think it’s enough to let them swim against the tide but the nuclear arms race and the AI race are not in the same class. The crucial difference is that nuclear weapons couldn’t switch themselves on one night, change their programming and decide to launch themselves on a defenceless city just to watch the fireworks. AI can do exactly that. It is technically feasible for an AI program to take control of a biological laboratory, develop a lethal virus against which humans could have no defence, and release it. That’s not science fiction. That’s why AI has to be brought under control immediately, but the people who are running it, the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Bezos’ and Altmans and Thiels and all the other emotionally palsied psychopathic misfits, can only smell money and power. Despite anything they say, AI is not being developed for the betterment of you and me.

AI exists for military and surveillance purposes, and for cyberwarfare; that’s where the money comes from and that’s where the trillions will be made. Any talk of AI being useful for spotty schoolboys to write their essays is to deflect attention. Autonomous vehicles aren’t being developed to make cheaper taxis and delivery trucks and so on, the technology exists for the battlefield and aerial and marine drones; all the talk of a robotic taxi that will come to your door is pure PR. When it comes for an explanation of this, the eminent theoretician, Dr Mearsheimer has nothing to say. He correctly notes that international relations are anarchic but he doesn’t say WHY. His concept of offensive realism is therefore not a theory. It is pure description with no explanatory value at all (strictly speaking, that probably means he isn’t a theoretician but we’ll leave that to the academics to fight over). To turn it into a formal theory, he needs something like Dr Diesen’s dream of “human nature,” the one he regularly invokes but for which he offers nothing beyond “Boys will be boys.” That is, two of the most widely-regarded authorities in international relations are unable to offer an explanation of humanity’s self-destructive folly.

All of the swirling madness and wickedness they describe can be explained by a single human factor, the drive to dominate, coupled with its counterpart, the urge to avoid being dominated. Those twin urges are hardwired into each and every human being but some people never learn to control them, do they, Donald? All the international problems today, and many national problems, come down to this point alone: one group is trying to dominate another, and the other side is resisting. That’s it. So simple. So the correct explanation of Prof. Mearsheimer’s doctrine of offensive realism is the reverse of what he says: international relations are anarchic just because nations keep struggling to exert hegemony over their neighbours, and the neighbours aren’t having a bar of it. The US and Israel had no grounds whatsoever to attack Iran. Moreover, they haven’t offered any; all talk of an Iranian nuclear weapons program is total bullshit, as the US Director of National Security and everybody else said. The attack was just because Iran stood between them and total domination of West Asia. And don’t doubt for one moment that if Iran had been broken apart as Libya and Syria and Iraq were, Egypt and Türkiye were next on the list.

Trump says this over and over again: “We have to be Number One.” It’s called full spectrum dominance and that is what they mean: total control of all humans and their activities at all times in all places forever. China is not the mortal enemy of the US. Chinese as a whole are quite sympathetic to the US because of the assistance they were given in the war against Japan. Likewise, the average Joe Bloggs in the US doesn’t hold any resentment against China or Chinese, just keep those excellent TV screens coming. No, all talk of “mortal enemies” is simply the power elite in the US, the political-military-industrial-financial-academic and fascist religious elite, who can’t stomach the idea that Good Ol’ Uncle Sam has had his day and needs to step aside.

Similarly, the gaping hole that Prof. Diesen identifies in the explanation of world affairs, the bit he leaves blank as “Human Nature,” is fully explained by the principles behind the concept of Narcisso-Fascism: like every other animal studied – birds, mammals, reptiles and even fish – human group behaviour is controlled by the hormonally-determined drive to dominate and avoid domination. In evolutionary terms, this started as a breeding strategy: testosterone induces dominance behaviour, and the dominant male gets to leave more offspring than the submissive, but what was once a routine biological fact now has human behaviour in its grip. Crucially, the people who are doing it don’t know this. They, all the immensely clever and rich and powerful people in the cabinet rooms and board rooms and war rooms and research labs, they think they’re being just sooo rational and aware and up to the minute when they’re acting like a pack of dogs in the street, leading the world to destruction. They say AI has 10% chance of ending human life in ten years? Did you hear that? These people are out of their minds, except they’re not, they’re very sane and dangerous idiots. An idiot is a person who, confronted by evidence that contradicts his opinion, discards the evidence and keeps his opinion. When the big tech clowns are faced with the choice of coming second in the AI race or a 10% chance letting an agent loose that can develop lethal viruses, they say “Bugger the risk, full greed ahead to make sure those slippery little Chinks don’t beat us.” Yes, it oozes racism but racism is just one variant of the dominance drive.

It all goes back to biology, to the universal testosterone economy. Mearsheimer doesn’t know this, Diesen doesn’t know it, Musk would laugh and say “All power to my dick,” Trump is too stupid, Albanese couldn’t spell ‘testosterone,’ and Netanyahu would say “Of course, God has told us we’re meant to be Number One so we’re killing all these Arab vermin to do His will.” I think Xi Xinping would be concerned to know about this, all he can see is that America wants to throttle his country whereas he thinks China is entitled to its natural role in the world. Putin would understand it, he knows all about foreigners trying to invade and crush his country and, having issued a thousand warnings, isn’t going to stand for it.

So why is Europe pushing the idea of War, Glorious War? I think they’re caught in a trap of their own making. The US hates Russia as a competitor and because Russia won’t allow them to pillage the country as they do everywhere else; therefore, Russia had to be lured into a war in Ukraine to bankrupt it; Europe wanted to convince the US they were loyal vassals so they beat the drums and sent lots of money and weapons to Ukraine; then the US did the dirty on them, as it does on everybody (just ask the Kurds) and lost interest so, instead of admitting they were fooled by Obama and Trump and Biden and the rest of the Potomac Chorus, to prove they’re adults who need to be taken seriously and not just a pack of pampered poodles snarling from a fat American lap, they announced they’re going to take over and wallop those subhuman Russians.

What these clowns hope to achieve is nowhere stated, let alone how they think they’ll achieve it. The fantasied delight of forcing the Russians to a grovelling surrender drowns any questions about how they can do it, what it will cost and, above all, what happens when the Tovariches send them packing, as they have done to so many invaders. If Afghanistan was the Great Imperial Game, invading Russia is the Great Western Delusion. No doubt Europe’s leaders are now down at the barrack stables, quivering with excitement as they watch the cavalry being led out by troops in their finery. “This time,” they pant to each other as they gulp their champers, “mark our words, this time we’ll send those Russian tanks straight back across their border. They’ll be sorry.”

No, we’ll be sorry. The rich will escape to their mountain or island retreats but the poor pick up the bits, as with this 23yo Yemeni man who sent a brief video to a Greek journalist (start watching at 26.00minutes for a bit of background). All this noble young man is saying is: Leave us alone. That’s not just humanitarian, that’s biological, that’s why he will not be defeated, and all power to him. Unfortunately, our so-called leaders and experts just don’t get that vital point.

If any of the things that we value are to survive, the problem must be solved. How it can be solved is clear; the difficulty is to persuade the human race to acquiesce in its own survival. I cannot believe that this task is impossible (Bertrand Russell, The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War, in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Oct 1946; emphasis added).

For a rather bitter laugh, watch this 10min video: Lords of War: Meet America’s War Profiteers.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

(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 https://bookshop.org/

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

.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 https://bookshop.org/

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

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

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In Shenzhen, China, Hui Ka Yan, 67, the former chairman of Evergrande, a bankrupt property company and, having once had $43billion to his name, briefly the richest man in Asia, was sentenced to life in prison and confiscation of his entire assets for massive corruption. In China, corrupt businessmen get life; in the US, they get the keys to the White House where they launch criminal and hopelessly incompetent wars of aggression. Meantime, in Germany, after two recent state elections, the political scene is in turmoil. In Saxony-Anhalt, formerly in East Germany, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came first with 44% of the vote while in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern it took 38%. AfD is strongly anti-gay but still manages to be led by a lesbian mother of two who doesn’t even live in Germany. The right wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has ruled Germany for 53 of the past 77 years, was wiped out, joining the Social Democrats in electoral oblivion and allowing Die Linke, the far-left heirs of communism, to prosper. Votes for the extremes are coming from people under 35; their parents are still voting for the old parties of their youth.

In France, the far-right Marine le Pen is close to winning next year’s presidential election, same as Brazil where the son of imprisoned insurrectionist and former president Jair Bolsonario is neck and neck with the elderly socialist, Lula da Silva. Javier Milei, far-right neoliberal president of Argentina, is doing what he can to move the balance using the implausibly corrupt Fernando Cerimedo (a detailed video from Ben Norton here, definitely worth watching). In Pakistan, the brutal and corrupt military dictatorship has taken to arresting women in their 70s as “threats to stability.”

Are these incidents connected? Yes, I believe they are, and it’s important to understand just how they’re connected, otherwise we get overwhelmed by the chaos and are tempted to join one or other extremist strongman (or woman) who promises to sort out the mess by kicking out foreigners. Unfortunately, the topic is vast and people tend to work on bits of it rather than tackle what is a very complex “big picture.” Can a mere shrink throw some light on the scene? Let’s see. We’ll start in France in 1798 where a child was born in the tumult of the late Revolution and grew up obsessed with the idea of putting society on a stable footing. By the time he died in 1857, Auguste Comte had built a formidable reputation as a scholar and curmudgeon as the founder of sociology and of an atheistic world religion.

Driven by its quest for truth, society, Comte said, evolves through recognisable stages. The first is the theological, where society is structured around God as the source of authority and revelation as the source of knowledge. The inhabitants, most of whom are little better than slaves, live in a universe of magic and believe whatever they’re told by the divinely-appointed king and his ever-alert enforcers, the priesthood. Life is strictly ordered in hierarchies such that power flows from the palace, through the priestly and secular aristocracies and down to the unfortunates at the bottom of the pile who end up with just enough to prevent them thinking about causing trouble.

In time, this type of society develops and becomes richer, eventually giving way to what he called the metaphysical stage in which divine power seeps away, replaced by the power of thought. With wealth and stability, centres of learning become more important, the ancient ways are questioned and authority starts to vest in reasoned arguments rather than the headsman’s axe. The concept of human rights, above and beyond those granted by church or state, grows and takes hold of the increasingly sophisticated and wealthy urban middle classes. Education is readily available; people have the time, the money and, importantly, the technology to travel; and books are much cheaper so ideas can spread more easily. None of this is absolute: there were great centres of learning in some theocratic societies, and the wealth of many metaphysical societies was built on slavery and extractive colonisation; as they say “Nobody’s perfect.”

Finally, society matures into a rational or scientific stage where reason and research prevail over myth reinforced by naked power or high-sounding bromides. Scientific societies are able to isolate their own problems and devise solutions that suit themselves, using positively-established proofs rather than relying on magical or metaphysical speculation, hence the term ‘positivism.’ Philosophy and science are to be stripped of all irrational or unprovable metaphysical elements, leaving only a spare but reality-based system of knowledge advancing toward some ideal future. The universe is seen as a real, rule-governed place which, by diligent application of our intellect, we can understand and work on to satisfy our needs. In particular, all proof rests on observation: if something can’t be seen and measured, then it’s either irrelevant or meaningless. While these ideas may sound a little grandiose today, Comte has had a singularly profound impact on life today: modern science just is positivist science. However, there is also a direct connection between his utopian ideals and the spreading chaos today, although he would certainly be horrified at the paths societies have taken since his death.

While there were many streams to the development of positivist thought, they were all focussed on one element: eliminating fanciful thinking and replacing it with reality-based observation. Science and society had to be built on proven, established facts, not on whimsical daydreams such as religion or “forces of nature” and so on. Reliable knowledge can only come from direct observations through our senses, not from studying ancient texts in a turret or gazing at the stars while stoned on mushrooms. This approach is known as empiricism, the notion that we cannot know anything about the world unless we have seen it and measured it. While this idea had been gaining strength throughout the 19^th Century, it was given an enormous boost by the horrors of the Great War of 1914-19. What value was religion if it couldn’t prevent untold millions of deaths and vast destruction? Romantic dreams of imperial glory died in the mud. Humans had to do better, and the proper path was to discard sentiment and other mushy notions, replacing them with rational ideas only.

Starting early in the 1920s, a group of economists centred in Vienna proposed that economics had to be seen as a science in its own right, to be studied empirically like any other mainstream science. All metaphysical notions such as value, sympathy, welfare and so on had to be discarded in favour of seeing the market as a dispassionate, self-correcting means of creating and distributing wealth. The market, they believed, is a mechanism for encouraging efficient distribution of resources and discouraging waste and inefficiency. Only a free market can do this as it alone has all the information needed to function smoothly. Mere humans, working either alone or as a group, cannot possibly know enough to tell the market what to do, therefore any form of government regulation or interference was anathema to them. Government’s role was to pass laws on crime and corruption and to guard the borders but, that apart, the only good government was a very small one sitting on its hands while facing away from the economy.

This group of economists didn’t get much air time over the next few decades. The Great Depresssion threw the world into chaos, for which direct government intervention was seen as the only chance of survival. Fascism developed and grew and, in 20 short years, the world was at war again. After 1945, governments continued their involvement in economies, setting up huge social welfare systems, directing research and investment, and using taxes to redistribute national wealth so everybody had a fair go. This was the golden age for workers as company CEOs earned about twenty times the median worker’s salary. In the scornful words of Harold MacMillan, Britain’s multimillionaire prime minister, the workers had never had it so good. Yes, it was good, far better than the misery of the depression or the brutality of the laissez faire capitalism that Friedrich Engels described in 1843 [1]. In fact, it was so good that the CEOs and the rich shareholders wondered why they couldn’t have a little bit more icing on their share of the national cake.

After a bit of casting around, they came across the ageing Vienna economists and their students, who were working on what they called neoliberal economics. They were delighted: it was everything a grasping capitalist could ask for, all neatly wrapped up in technical jargon that most of them didn’t bother to read because the intros said it all: Get rid of unprovable fantasies such as social justice, equality, social value, community, and mutual interdependence, give everything a cash value, let the dogs loose to eat each other and may the best dog win. That and that alone will stimulate the market to produce real wealth which will come first to the owners of capital and then trickle down to benefit the workers. As the owners and managers accumulate more wealth, they will have to reinvest it which will create more jobs and thus a bigger economy which will benefit everybody. Whoopee, they said, bring it on, get rid of the tender-hearted socialist free-loaders, cut the government out of it and soon we will all arrive at capitalist paradise. And as their reward for making life so much better for everybody, the owners of capital should get a bigger share, thank you. Yes, even when CEOs get over 300 times the median worker’s salary, that’s not overdoing it because without capitalists and managers, there would be no jobs at all (if Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg and the other tech oligarchs are included, it’s nearly 400 times as much).

Politicians didn’t need much pushing to join the gravy train; in no time, the capitalists had their men and women elected to power, Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US, and many others. The idea that society existed for the benefit of all its members was swept away, replaced with the idea that only people who worked hard and contributed had any rights. Social projects were measured on a cost-benefit balance and dumped if they didn’t generate enough revenue. Education had to be directed at what paid, not what was good for society since, as Thatcher screeched, “There is no such thing as society.” What we thought was society is in fact just a collection of detached and unemotional inviduals going about their business of rationally weighing costs and making economic decisions in their own interest, unaffected by sentiment and false notions such as good and evil. If it paid, it was ipso facto good, if it didn’t, out with the garbage.

In no time, even before neoliberalism’s full implications became clear, the economic basis of most Western countries and many others was turned upside down. In practice, neoliberalism is a social program masquerading as a science of economics, which licenses and rewards greed above all other human attributes. It says it removes values and other metaphysics from the equation but it can’t eliminate greed and dishonesty and, above all, doesn’t try. There’s no limit: anybody who stops to help a sick or troubled person by the roadside loses his place in the stampede. In an echo of Dickensian workhouses, people have to be encouraged to work by making unemployment so shameful and so unpleasant that they have no choice but to take any job on offer, at the price the employer chooses:

Positivist science says: “If we can’t see it and measure it, it isn’t the province of science.” This soon morphed to “If we can’t see it and measure it, it doesn’t exist and anybody who says it does is an idiot and will be ignored and preferably lose funding.”

Neoliberal economics says: “Only the market knows the cash value of anything; if the market doesn’t assign a cash value to it, it doesn’t exist and anybody who says it does is an idiot and will be ignored and preferably lose funding.”

It’s the same principle applied to different fields: eliminate all emotion and pretend that objectivity will explain everything we need to know. Psychiatry says: “We can’t measure feelings so we’ll ignore them and talk only about neurotransmitters and genes and drugs, with a side of ECT.” Games theorists apply this to nuclear war, quite forgetting that war is very destructive but the people who make all the money from it are the same people who make the decisions about launching wars and who won’t be doing the fighting. Economists pretend that if global warming is real, the market will price it in. Yes, the market may put a carbon price on fossil fuels but by then it will be too late: markets are mindless, remember? They can’t look ahead and say: “Hmm, I wonder what’s best for my great grandchildren and the koalas? OK, even if it costs me, that’s what we’ll do.”

This was forecast in 1944 by a Hungarian economist called Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), the same year that one of the most influential of neolibs, Friedrich Hayek, published a widely-quoted polemic, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek argued that any form of central planning would inevitably lead to economic inefficiency, with loss of freedom and, in due course, reduction of workers to serfs: socialism, he said, necessarily leads to Nazism (he also said Hitler was a fool for alienating and expelling Germany’s Jews because many of them were confirmed totalitarians in the German mould – as we see in Israel today). Polanyi disagreed. He believed the entire notion of the self-regulating market was false as it was built on false assumptions, while assigning a cash value to everything would inevitably lead to the destruction of the very society the market was supposed to serve:

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting (i.e. free) market implied a stark Utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness (p3) ... It is all too easily assumed by economic liberals that economic rulers tend to be beneficial, while political rulers do not (p165).

The most dangerous false assumption in neoliberalism comes directly from its positivist roots: that if we can’t see and measure human psychology, we can safely ignore it and let the market sort it out. Neoliberalism is a theory of human behaviour, specifically measurable human economic behaviour. However, it’s not built on a theory of mind, it simply hangs from a skyhook called “observable behaviour,” unsupported by any concept of what goes on in human heads that generates the observable behaviour. It doesn’t ask why, for example, people support charities. Instead, it works out how much people will give each year, and deducts that from the tax bill that the rich have to pay – to the delight of the rich, of course, as GBS noted: “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” Where there should be a foundation for neoliberalism derived from a theory of mind, there is simply a black hole.

Neolibs assumed that people would automatically follow the rules, that they would be on their best behaviour and not try to take the last bit of bread from the widows and orphans. The part of their theory that should have said “Play fair, no biting, kneeing or thieving” was left blank, a void, just because it was moral and moral values have no cash value. Into that void galloped all the cheats, liars, thieves, scoundrels, political and religious fanatics and assorted rapists, paedophiles and mass murderers who had been kept at arm’s length by the welfare state. Now they could loot to their black hearts’ content, there was nothing to stop them because the more people have, the more they feel they’re entitled to, as Nobel winner Paul Krugman commented:

With great wealth comes both great power and a separation from the concerns of ordinary citizens. What the very rich want, they often get; but what they want is often harmful to the rest of the nation.

So we see that the grandmotherly Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has just been exposed as being the centre of a ring of corruption involving government contracts. No doubt her defence will be “It wasn’t actually illegal and everybody else was doing it, so why not?” Chris Hedges gives a very brief summary of Trump’s endless corruption, with the warning that he is well on the way to bankrupting the US just as he cheated and bankrupted his casinos. Trump, Hedges says, is a typical mafia extortionist. How did he get the keys to the White House? Because there was nothing in neoliberalism to stop him. Its architects saw to that: “Strip away the morality, assign everything cash value and we will soon reach economic nirvana.” No, not so. It’s as Lord Acton said 150 years ago: “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’s not quite right: Trump doesn’t have the mentality of a gangster, he is a gangster, and always has been [2]. He lied to get the job and then threw the doors to the treasury open to all his evil Epstein mates. Trump is not an aberration, he is the logical conclusion of the neoliberal experiment.

The world today is lumbering into new territory, it will never be the same. I’m not suggesting it has always been nice for all its occupants but it’s certainly getting worse by the day and we have no idea where this ends. For this, we can thank the neoliberal economists who took their cues from positivist scientists, who were following the dictates of Auguste Comte. What a pity they didn’t finish with Comte’s concept of a universal, atheistic religion, but then religion has no cash value, does it? Well, it does, it can be very profitable but only if the central message is ignored:

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24).

Boring, forget that bit. Pass me the caviar, James, and could you tell those hungry people outside to stop making all that fuss? If the market wants them to eat, it will provide food.

Be careful, lady, there may come a day when they eat the rich.

****

References:

1. 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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

With anthropogenic climate change accelerating daily, how will the biosphere collapse? Slowly, then suddenly. Collapse is like a ship capsizing: once it starts, the process becomes self-sustaining and can’t be stopped. A paper published recently looks at a critically important environmental question, the natural limits of human population. The international group of authors compare two vitally important but oft-blurred statistics for any organism in any environment: the maximum carrying capacity and the maximum sustainable carrying capacity. They’re different, as we see regularly in agriculture. People come across some new land so they let their animals loose, which breed happily, the flocks grow and everybody’s happy. With time, the land starts to deteriorate. The flocks thin, the productivity of wool or milk or meat declines and misery stalks the land. Maximum carrying capacity is always far beyond the natural limits the land can bear. The title of this paper leaves no doubt that has happened to H. sapiens: Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity [1; a short article here]. After a fairly dense statistical analysis, they conclude:

... it is clear that Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources ... The tragedy is that human endeavor has short-circuited the ultimately inevitable corrective feedback loops carrying capacity imposes, without replacing them with humane and environmentally friendly corrective feedbacks.

Current world population is about 8.3billion, rising by 0.83% pa and on track to reach about 12billion by 2070. That’s well within the lifespan of many of our readers; all that remains to decide is the quality of life that the majority would experience. On our present course, of consuming far more than the world can provide in the long term and dumping the waste in the air, water and land, only the very wealthy would think they had a good deal. The other 11.9billion (99%) would not be happy with their lot, and for good reason: there simply isn’t enough to go around. Certainly, in countries like the US and Australia, the average level of consumption and waste production is far above sustainability. The authors cite various studies that indicate the maximum sustainable human population of the planet at a reasonable standard of living is about 2.5billion, or about 70% less than today. In order to achieve that by the end of the century, the great majority of people alive today would not be able to have children. That’s pretty frightening but I can’t see anything wrong with their figures (unlike psychiatry, where the figures are always suspect). I have no problem with the idea that if we continue on our present course, we’re headed for disaster. Two questions immediately arise:

What are the forces keeping us on our present course?

What would a sustainable lifestyle be like?

The forces keeping us on our present course are wholly political. They are not forces of nature or of metaphysics, indeed, they aren’t even forces at all. Our current trajectory is determined by small groups of powerful people who are convinced that they and they alone should make the big decisions, and their decision is “Full greed ahead.” Anybody who tries to interfere with this will be neutralised in one way or another. Are the power elite smart enough to understand the worrying message in that paper? Yes, they most certainly are. Even where a leader arises who is too stupid to understand it himself, he has immediate access to very clever and well-educated people who can answer any dumb question he asks or counter any of his braindead objections. All the power elite have to do is ask, but they don’t. The reason they don’t ask is because they don’t want to hear the answers. The answer is crystal clear: What you people are doing is taking us to hell on a hang glider, so we want change, now.

If the power elite are smart enough to drive a car (note that Trump can’t drive), then they are smart enough to understand that elementary point, so why don’t they do something about it? The answer is that they are not driven by their cognitive capacities, they are driven by something far more primitive than that: hormones. Their intelligence is the servant of their hormones, not the other way around. The urge to dominate is built into every human being. For many people, probably the majority, early life experiences push the domination drive into a small box where it remains for the rest of their lives. Very early, they learn to keep quiet, don’t rock the boat, don’t stand out or the world will come down on them, hard. Their aims are limited, their horizons narrow and they try to build a life with few goals that other people can frustrate. Others aren’t so restricted, they can exert themselves and get ahead but again, they’re happy with what fortune throws at them. They can get their dominance kicks in the local football club (bad pun), at home, in a government job or as a teacher or prison officer (they were much the same when I went to school).

However, a small group have big ideas that get bigger and bigger as they push their way up the hierarchy. They want to be on top and they want everybody to know it. Very quickly, they forget that they’re supposed to be looking after everybody lower in the pile and they fix their eyes on the competition, the people over the border who are busy building an even bigger pile. Then the race is on. They stop competing against the other people in their town, business, country or whatever and compete against each other. We see this on full, open display among the Tech Bros, the bunch of grossly narcissistic, utterly selfish and profoundly psychopathic people who dominate the world of high tech. They are all caught in a mad rush to be the first to develop superintelligent AI, regardless of the risks involved. Why do they want to? Because Homo sapiens, that’s what humans do. As they scramble up the ladder, their sense of entitlement grows and grows, as does their rage at anybody who tries to stop them. Anybody who tugs at their sleeve and ventures: “Is this wise?” will be shoved aside, if not dumped in the river, as French economist, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), noted 180 years ago:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it (Economic Sophisms).

Insiders are saying that there is at least 10% risk that a rogue AI program could lead to human extinction within ten years but they are being ignored from the top. Trump himself has said that the US will not put restrictions on AI development because all it needs is a “high IQ president.” Where he will find one isn’t clear but in fact, he is deliberately enabling the intramural race among the Tech Bros, cheering them on in the hope they can beat China. Why do they have to beat China? He hasn’ got to that bit yet but for a truly chilling account of this race to destruction, read this post from the very sober and well-connected Jonathon Cook. They’re like a dog chasing a bus: if he caught it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it.

What we are seeing is the summation of a number of socio-political trends. The first is the mad rush to be Tech Bro. No. 1, with the usual dangerously bizarre runners: Musk, Bezos, Altman, Karp, Thiel, Huang, Zuckerberg and the rest of the gang of super heroes lolloping along. Close behind and urging them on is the finance industry which can smell the wealth of Croesus coming down the highway. Beside them and egging each other on are the politicians whose goal is to crush China, to make sure that the US remains dominant come what may, with the arms industry and the military handing them water and stimulants as they all run madly along a track whose end point is hidden behind a small hill. When challenged, they angrily exclaim: “What are you complaining about? We haven’t stumbled yet.” Governments govern with the consent of the governed. That assumes we know what they’re doing, which explains why they lie so much.

AI dominance is needed to maintain world dominance. In West Asia, the goal of the US, in conjunction with or subservience to the zionists, is to reduce Iran to the sort of failed state they managed in Libya, in Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Iraq. Once that’s done, the US will turn its full attention to China and Russia, the goal being to topple their uncooperative governments, to turn them into smoking ruins that can be looted at leisure. Is this declared or even undeclared policy? No, they don’t say that, they just say things like the Speaker of the House, the gleefully devious Mike Johnson, who said: “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American.” A real and present threat to Joe Bloggs of Great Bend, Kansas? That’s not delusional, that’s acculturation, commonly known as brain-washing (although in Johnson’s case, a light rinse would have sufficed). The 1% and their lackeys don’t actually have to talk about this, they’re all in agreement. They’re like a pack of dogs in the street sorting themselves into a hierarchy: none of them say anything but they get all the information they need from sniffing each other’s bums. No offence to dogs, of course, and apparently nobody needs to sniff Trump’s, they can smell it across the room. On that note, we turn to the next point:

Question 2: What would a sustainable life be like? It would be different in many respects and much the same in others. The first major difference is that there would be no military forces, no arms industries and no wars. As far as anybody can work out, militarism costs us about $19trillion a year. Direct costs are something like $2.8trillion but they don’t include all the deaths, injuries, damage or destruction of infrastructure and farmland, and loss of production which make up the other $16trillion. That’s a lot of money, equivalent to about $2,250 pa for every living human, which is far more than about half the world lives on now. That money is enough to provide food, water, housing and infrastructure for every person within about ten years but instead, it’s burned and blown away by armies. Without them, there would be a lot of unemployed people looking for jobs as builders, teachers, farmers and so on, but they wouldn’t be out of work long as the money would be available. At this stage, that’s a dream only.

What else? The gigantic tourism industry would more or less come to a halt: “Tourism contributed US$11.6 trillion to global GDP in 2025, representing roughly 9.8% of the world economy.” It supports something like 370million jobs or one job in nine across the globe. Amazing, I had no idea it’s that big. I’m not sure if that includes two notorious rackets, professional and business conferences, probably not. However, the distribution of consumption of the tourism trade follows a very typical power curve: at most, 20% of the world’s population consume at least 80% of the product, while 50% of people get next to nothing, maybe a crowded train trip every now and then. The idea that we can jump on a plane in Melbourne to go to a cousin’s wedding in the UK or swan around the Adriatic on a $500million private yacht (today’s version of “let them eat cake”) has to go. One way around it would be to issue everybody on earth with a limited number of carbon credits for non-essential travel. Rich people who want to jet about the place would have to buy them at auction from poor people, reducing travel and transferring money from rich to poor. There’s not much chance of getting the US to agree to that due to their abhorrence of “world government,” unless they’re doing the governing. Can we live without buzzing around the world all the time? People used to, they might have had one Grand Tour in their lives but that apart, it was where they could get on a horse or a sailboat. I can cope. Maybe airships would come back, they’re cheap and clean.

Commercial sport. Yes, a monumental waste of resources and only ever causes trouble so we’ll give that the flick as well. They say the EU has 1.8million people employed full-time in sport and such like, 0.9% of the work force and increasing by 8% pa. I’d say it’s higher than that, I don’t think they’ve included all the people who work on golf courses, race tracks, betting shops and so on. The Olympics and World Cup we definitely don’t need, they’re now just badly-disguised nationalism. F1 racing would be among the first to go, total waste of money and fuel. In fact, if we got rid of the idea that sport is something ordinary people watch professionals doing, that would be a good start. Sport and exercise are for everybody but the rot starts early. From primary school, sports teachers push the idea that only the elite should try, the rest of the herd are just there to clap and cheer (we had a teacher who scornfully referred to kids who kept dropping the ball or falling on the hurdles as “motor morons”). Every person should exercise every day, outside and in company when possible, but as exercise, not as competition. It should be as normal as cleaning your teeth.

Hospitals. Get rid of hospitals? Are you crazy? No, but they need to be brought under control. Hospitals are prodigiously wasteful of resources, including staff, plastics, power, water, laundry, chemicals, sterilisation and so on. We can dramatically reduce health costs by a proper national health service set up to detect and remedy illness before it gets out of control. If we provide accessible outreach services coupled with regular free screening, levels of illness and disability in the community quickly fall. I don’t mean screening as where schools give every child a questionnaire to diagnose “ADHD” and send them for “the tablets.” That’s a separate matter but it points to the destructive effect of private practice on the health industry, especially my pet hate, private psychiatric hospitals, which are just a racket. And, of course, a total ban on tobacco (New Zealand had the right idea, they were going to ban it for people born after 2010 or something but the right wing nobbled that plan).

There are so many other areas that need change, e.g. fuel is too cheap, allowing people to roar around in their souped-up cars making nuisances of themselves or drive to the shops for just one item. Alcohol is a major social problem but the younger generations aren’t drinking as much so that may solve itself. Meantime, vast amounts of prime agricultural land are devoted to growing the feedstock of the various booze industries. If we reduce that wastage and start growing food, we reduce the pressure to clear native forests. But if we restrict alcohol, doesn’t that just push people toward illegal drugs? To an extent it does, so management of addictive drugs has to become a priority and not just a political football to be dragged out for elections. Similarly, we need to make serious efforts to look at how people get on a criminal career path in life because once they’re on it, it’s very difficult for them to get off.

A sustainable life would be just as fulfilling and a lot less worrying but behind all of these matters stands the glowering façade of the neoliberal state, the one that says “As long as I can make more money, I don’t care whether you starve.” All of this is part of the same fundamental human drive, the urge to dominate others regardless of the cost to them. Dominating feels so good that we don’t stop to think what the downtrodden feel about it. This is why the US plan for “full spectrum dominance” is doomed to failure. The other 97% of the world’s population don’t want to be dominated. They don’t like it and will eventually fight back. In time, the US will go the way of the Romanovs and so many others who thought they were so important and so far-seeing that other people would welcome the chance to play second fiddle to them for ever. It doesn’t work like that.

We’re going to hell on a hang glider and already, its fabric is smoking. If we don’t soon have a total change of the power elite, the Epstein class, it will be too late.

Reference:

1. Bradshaw CJ et al (2026). Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity. Environ. Res. Lett. 21 064023. DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ae51aa. At: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae51aa.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference:

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference:

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever happens, we have got

the Maxim gun and they have not..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

Further evidence of the deliberate targeting of children in Gaza.

****

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.

****

What follows is utterly repugnant.

On June 26^th, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (ICI), submitted another report to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHR) which “examines Israeli violations and crimes against Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as their short- to long-term impact on children, between 7 October 2023 and 31 March 2026.” The 94 page report, titled “The essence of childhood has been destroyed,” is available at UNHQ online, click this code: A/HRC/62/CRP.2.

In language rendered all the more damning by the lack of emotion, it provides forensic detail of the carefully planned and executed attacks on Palestinian children, mainly in Gaza but also the Occupied West Bank, by members of the Israeli military. The Commission chairman, Mr Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, of India, also gave an interview on RT India in which he described how Israeli troops deliberately target babies, to the extent of shooting them through the head while they are being breastfed without injuring the mother. This requires considerable skill and determination. Mr Muralidhar said:

When you shoot a 10-day-old baby breastfeeding on his mother… through his head, you can by no means label such a baby as an enemy of the State of Israel and justify these kinds of attacks.

Their systematic, genocidal cruelty is one side of the matter. For the tens of thousands of murdered children, their families will never see them grow up, a monstrous crime in its own right. The other side is the destruction of the surviving children’s lives. They have had no schooling for three years and their schools and universities have been deliberately destroyed, even bulldozed. They live in a demolition zone, deprived of all but the barest essentials of life, unable to play, unable to see their relatives or friends. Their families are devastated, their health blighted, even their teeth ruined, and there is no recovering. Mentally, they will suffer to the same extent that Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide suffered, although we could hope their communities are more forgiving than Israelis were of survivors of the Holocaust.

This report cannot be dismissed as a case of rogue troops defying orders, or of antisemitic propaganda. It proves at the level of criminal responsibility that these appalling crimes are the direct result of deliberately-formulated and freely-broadcast Israeli government policy. Time and time again, senior Israeli officials including cabinet officers state that the destruction of the Palestinian people is their life’s ambition, and part of that is eliminating every Palestinian child since they will grow up to hate Israel, they can’t help themselves. This stems from the pervasive Zionist fantasy that all gentiles hate Jews as an innate compulsion, and disregards the twin facts of ceaseless brutal Israeli aggression and that the great majority of gentiles around the world who do not hate Jews. These include large numbers of very powerful people in the West, such as the leaders of the US, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, so-called Christian Zionists and many others, who are actively aiding and abetting the ceaseless Israeli wars against the Muslim nations of West Asia. The US and other countries are not sending weapons to Israel and funding their military because they are in the grip of an uncontrollable hatred of Jews. That is a lie. If anything, their barely-concealed racism is directed against the indigenous populations of West Asia.

Every fair-minded person should be familiar with this report, although not everybody will be able to read it. It is the latest of many issued by ICI in the face of frenzied opposition from the Israeli government and their powerful supporters in the West. For example, ICC prosecutor Mr Karim Khan, who issued the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others, has recently revealed threats that were made against him if he did so. He went ahead anyway. But when the “essence of childhood is destroyed,” what does it tell us about the whole “Greater Israel” project, as implemented by the “most moral army in the world”? We are told that the reason Israel is constantly pushing beyond its borders, driving millions of people from their ancestral homes and destroying everything so they can’t return is that Zionists are fulfilling God’s plan for them. That’s all very well but as Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion said as early as 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? [1, p99].

Nobody should ever doubt that ethnic cleansing is and always has been their plan, to take the “promised land” back again and to clear it of any “defilement.” Once they take control of it, they will not return it. Recovering the land is a divine mission but ipso facto, the idea of handing it back again is inconceivable as it would be the most grievous sin, a denial of the divine plan. That’s interesting, they’re certainly not the first people on earth to believe they had a stronger claim on land than its indigenous population. All the European countries in their many colonies, the US expanding into native tribal territories, the Nazis pushing into the USSR, Japan invading China, on and on. They all had a reason based on the idea of a hierarchy of races, religions, etc., in which their tribe was on top and all the others down below. Humans do this, the joy of dominating others is hard-wired into us and, without strong social restraints, it takes control just because being on top is so exhilerating. This is so fundamental that hierarchies are built into practically every aspect of every human society that has ever been. In addition, Israel is the only country in the world that has not defined either its borders, so they can keep expanding them, or its citizens, so it can deprive non-Jews of civil rights. By this means, domination is covertly written into their constitution.

Israel’s drive to dominate is perhaps a little different from say Nazi Germany as they say: “We’re special because God appointed us to be, he made a covenant with our ancestors and we have to fulfill it. By expelling our neighbours, we are actually doing good works.” However, on the ground in the rubble of Gaza and for the people being expelled, that’s no different from Hitler’s view that unless Germany could reach its proper place as leader of the world, humanity was likely to slide into a new dark age. However, we’ll put that aside and focus on the Covenant, which said: “I will give you this land if you keep my law” (Deuteronomy 11:8-32 among others; emphasis added).

If you keep my law. For a devout Jew, this isn’t quite the cakewalk it seems to be. Turns out it’s a covenant with a catch as there are 613 laws they must observe, 248 positive (Thou shalts) and 365 negative (Thou shalt nots). Since the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70AD, a lot of them have fallen into abeyance, also burnt offerings and stonings seem to have gone out of fashion. However, that still leaves an awful lot of very strict laws. Negative rule No. 57, for example, from Deuteronomy 20:19 says “Do not destroy fruit trees.” Regardless, the first thing the marauding bands of “settlers” do on their regular, carefully planned and state-protected pogroms do is destroy the olive and orange groves in Palestinian villages. Similarly:

Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour’s wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour’s (Deuteronomy 5:21).

Coveting just is the essence of Zionism, that’s what it’s about: remove the coveting of the neighbour’s land and there is no Zionism. Above all, Deuteronomy 5:17 states simply “Thou shalt not kill.” There doesn’t seem to be much wriggle room in that, so when the Israeli army rock up to a Palestinian village and announce, “Hi folks, we’re God’s little helpers and he says you gotta F off but just to prove the point, we’ll shoot a few of you and set fire to your houses and farms,” there would appear to be a bit of cognitive dissonance. Except they don’t show it. In all the videos the troops post of themselves blowing up schools and hospitals, they seem to be having a whale of a time, laughing and joking with no sign of upset at all. In the UN OCHR report, troops even report that they are commended for shooting children. How does this happen? 92% of Israeli Jews fully support their government in its genocidal activities, and plenty think they should do more. How can they say, on the one hand, “By destroying Gaza and Lebanon and Iran, we’re doing God’s will,” and on the other, break every known divine law, including sex with animals (Leviticus 18:23)?

There is an answer but it isn’t widely known among gentiles: in simple terms, non-Jews aren’t actually human. According to the Kabala, Jews come from the divine sphere but goyim come from the Satanic sphere so, by wiping them out, Jewish troops are simply cleaning out pollution and paving the way for their messiah. Among many others, historians Shahak and Mezvinsky mention the enormously influential American Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (1902-1994), leader of the Chabad sect (of which J Kushner is a powerful member) and mentor of one Binyamin Mileikowsky (aka Netanyahu):

The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies (of Jews and non-Jews) 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 [2, Chap 4].

That’s pretty clear but it’s not isolated: they quote the Rabbis Kook (father and son) who believed:

… the Lurianic doctrine that non-Jews have satanic souls: ‘Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere. For this reason souls of non-Jews are called evil, not good, and are created without [divine] knowledge’ [2, Chap 4].

When Zionists say that all goyim hate Jews as a natural phenomenon, it is what the Freudians call a projection: attributing to another person motives or beliefs which one holds oneself but which are in some sense forbidden or prohibited. The proof of the projection is that if all gentiles hate Jews in their DNA, there would be no Christian Zionists. End of story. Speaking of DNA, Shahak and Mezvinsky continue:

Rabbi Ginsberg, supporter of Chabad Hassids and Goldstein, ‘… speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based, spiritual superiority over non-Jews. It is a superiority that he asserts invests Jewish life with greater value in the eyes of the Torah ... If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA … There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.’ (Baruch Goldstein was the fanatical Jewish American physician who murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in 1994. He is widely revered as a great Jewish hero in Israel and in the diaspora and people make pilgrimages to his grave).

This is the mental set that encourages perfectly healthy, sane, intelligent, educated young men (and quite a few women) to use children for target practice. The troops have been raised in the atmosphere that constantly denigrates and debases their neighbours as subhuman, animals in human form, satanic, defilers of the divine plan and so on, as described by educator and professor, Nurit Peled Elhanan (sister of Miko Peled). This sort of brainwashing, this abomination of one’s neighbours is human. This is what humans do. It has absolutely nothing to do with race, religion, intelligence, education, nationality, tribe, wealth, size, you name it. Humans are hierarchical animals, we love to dominate but at the same time, we will fight to the end for freedom from domination. If the Zionists think they can pound their neighbours hard enough, they will give in and either accept a form of slavery or disappear quietly, they’re completely wrong. The Palestinians will not accept it, any more than you or I would accept it. Moreover, worldwide, a generation is now coming of age who have seen that the entire Zionist project is a crime from beginning to end. The self-styled “most moral army in the world” turns out to be a bunch of cowardly murderers.

Zionism is a political movement. It is not a religion, it is not a race, so it is subject to the same criticism as any other political movement (see this recent decision by an Australian court that antizionism is not racism). Zionism is heretical as it purports to use their Torah (first five books of the Christian bible) as the justification of their expansion yet they ignore the most basic rules: “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t open to interpretation. That is, they pick and choose the bits that suit their innate drive to dominate, and laugh at the rest. Zionism is idolatrous, in that it elevates the land previously known as Palestine to the level of an idol, the pursuit of which is more important than following the vast majority of rules of the religion, thereby overriding the main message of Judaism, which is a religion of peace and contemplation. Zionism is a criminal endeavour, in that it deliberately sets out to steal other people’s land and to kill them if they resist. These are crimes as defined in the UN Charter and in many other points in international humanitarian law. Israel is a member of the UN and has signed the Charter but routinely breaks it: expansion was written into the Zionist plan from the very beginning and has been elaborated a million times since.

Everybody should have a copy of the ICI report on the destruction of childhood in Gaza and the occupied territories by Israel. Not everybody will want to or be able to read it but when your grandchildren ask: “What did you do for the children of Gaza?” what will you tell them?

PS. If you can face it, here is an interview that sets out part of the endless corruption of the Kushner/Trump branch of the Epstein class. It is completely insane. I’ll correct that. The insanity is that these people don’t see anything wrong with what they’re doing and fully expect to be able to keep getting away with it. The day of reckoning is approaching.

References:

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

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

(Both of these works are available as pdf on line. And yes, I am aware of the controversy surrounding Shahak, most of which was hasbara).

****

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.

****

Fascism is not a political doctrine in the sense that democracy, aristocracy, autocracy, theocracy or kakistocracy (government by the worst) are doctrines dictating how a government is to be organised and acquitted. It is not an economic doctrine, as socialism and capitalism are. It is essentially a technology for gaining and maintaining power, based on the innate, hormonally-driven human urge to dominate others, to gain more and more power, territory and possessions, even at the expense of others – or deliberately at their expense, to subjugate them. A sense of power and domination is its own reward: it feels good but, at the same time, being forced down the dominance hierarchy or out of the tribe feels bad in and of itself. This is the paradox of hierarchy: essentially equal and opposite urges operate in each and every member of Homo sapiens but if one person’s urge to dominate is satisfied, then a hundred miss out.

Fascist technology is any technique or action that increases or encourages the urge to gain power or amplifies the rewards of being dominant. The technology can be applied to any group of people organised according to a dominance hierarchy: politics of course but also armies, religions, big companies, academia, and definitely football clubs. Because the urge to dominate is based in the hormone testosterone, it is strongly male-oriented but women are quickly swept up and form an important part of the background of any fascist movement. Crucially, the technology is directed at building and expanding the hierarchy; the drive to dominate is easily switched on but, apart from defeat, there is no off-switch. We have in us a lust for more and more but no innate mechanism to say “Enough is enough, I’ll leave some for others.” That’s a learned, moral matter but it is not innate and most people who want to go up the ladder slept through that lesson.

In practical politics, this means that fascism is a self-amplifying movement, powered by ever-increasing excitement, driven more and more to extremes, to want more territory, to see more enemies to crush. Because it is based in the idea “We are the greatest,” no member is allowed to say: “Actually, it’s not that important. Let’s be satisfied with what we’ve got” or “Really, we’re no different from everybody else.” The winning team of last year’s grand final doesn’t choose to spend this year surfing, no way, they’re straight back into the fray to prove who’s top dog. Politically, any fascist group is locked into a one way path: To the extreme and beyond, to paraphrase Toy Story. There’s an up escalator, but no down; it ratchets up but there is no rappell rope to come down again. Moderates are replaced by extremists, reasonable demands by unreasonable, realistic plans by unrealistic and so on until ... until what? Once under way, how does a fascist movement end? To answer that, we have to look to history but in the main, the answers are not pretty, a Götterdämmerung imposed from without or exploding within.

It is extremely rare for people to give up power voluntarily. Even very old people tenaciously hang on to their offices or wealth, long after they are able to do anything beyond look at it. It doesn’t make any difference whether they built the empire themselves or inherited it, their gnarled old hands have to be prised off the treasure or the throne, even their dead hands. Politically, people with serious power – or wealth, it’s the same thing – would rather die than give it up, especially to their enemies. They’re certainly keen for other people to die so they can hang on. But as a system that rewards the in group or the leader above all others, there are always lots of people who want to take top spot themselves. Fascism is inherently unstable but Orwell foretold a grim stability, a balance of terror between huge and massively-armed states:

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity [1, p26].

In this essay, You and the Atom Bomb, from late 1945, and presaging his 1984, he coined the term “cold war” to describe the state of unwavering hostility, a “peace that is no peace” that had split the wartime anti-fascist allies, essentially the US and USSR as Britain was prostrate. This is important, because one way fascism ends is when the external enemies it has created overcome their differences to form an alliance to defeat it. The alliance to defeat Napoleon was another example. On the large scale, those days are probably gone because nuclear weapons are great levellers, but smaller examples still happen from time to time, e.g. when Vietnam invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge.

More commonly, fascism tears itself apart from within. This might be when the founders die and the new generation fight over who is going to rule, or they can’t agree on a single course, or when the ultra-extremist group decides to eliminate a more moderate group or vice versa, resulting in civil war. This happened in the USSR in 1989, leading to its collapse. In China, when Mao died in September 1976, his wife and a small group (the “gang of four”) attempted to seize power but were thwarted by moderates led by Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiopeng and others.

Today, we see this playing out in two important far-right states, the US and Israel, both of which have largely turned the world against them. As bad as they are, I don’t think anybody is yet thinking of invading two dangerously unstable nuclear states. Everybody is hoping nature will take its course and they implode from within. In the US, Trump regained power by an artful alliance of frustrated nativists and working class people, his MAGAts who provided the votes he needed, and money invested by mainly Zionist billionaires (note invested, not donated). These groups are not natural allies. The American right wing is traditionally antisemitic, ranging from indifference to outright hostility. In the 1930s, the US had strict quotas on immigration of Jews. Thomas Szasz recounts the trouble his family had in migrating from Hungary, and how, despite having excellent marks, he struggled to enter medical school. At that time, many states had strict race-based laws, mainly directed against African-Americans but easily stretched to cover Asians or Jews as the fancy took them. This was normal then but the reality is, vulgar racism has never really gone away, it has simply hidden itself in Smalltown, USA.

So Trump’s political machine, such as it is, had wheels going in opposite directions and, to nobody’s surprise, the wheels are falling off. By trying to satisfy the Zionists with a war on Iran, he has infuriated his nativist, America-First base, the “deplorables” who actually vote for him. By signing a capitulation with Iran, he is haemorrhaging support from the billionaire Zionists such as the bizarre Miriam Adelson who gave Trump $250million and is now shitty he isn’t doing what Israel wants. With one supremely stupid war, he has managed to alienate both bases and he is now in serious political trouble. When he was elected, I predicted he would be pushed out by the end of 2026; that’s still looking very likely but we’ll see how much more damage he can do before then.

All this is proceeding according to Fascist script 101: take advantage of the sense of decline and immiseration to gain power; appoint external enemies (Muslims, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and China) and internal enemies (immigrants, antifa, lefties of various shapes and colours) and then start pogroms to neutralise them; build a sense of national crisis; appoint yourself as the saviour of the nation and its moral heritage and so on. This is textbook stuff, straight from Mein Kampf per courtesy of the reptilian Stephen Miller (and yes, unfair to snakes). Where Trump has failed is his corruption. Ordinary people don’t like corruption. They don’t like the sense that their superiors in the national hierarchy are using their power and influence to enrich themselves in ways ordinary people can’t and wouldn’t.

Overwhelmingly, people appointed as treasurer of the local church or golf club wouldn’t dream of stealing money or giving advantages to their friends or relatives, and this is the standard they demand of their leaders. For the German people, one of Hitler’s electoral strengths was that he was decidedly ascetic with no interest in accumulating wealth for himself; also, he was not promiscuous and was always courteous to women. The contrast with the Trump crime family just couldn’t be greater (see Kevin Walmsley today re the Trump sons’ investment in a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan which has just been given $1.6bln in Federal grants; interesting article; we won’t start on the loathsome Kushner’s diabolical plans for Albania but if you really want to ruin your day, watch Patrick Henningsen here). Another reason Trump is on the slide is his erratic behaviour, which comes from trying to bignote himself all the time while stealing the family silver and handing it to his rich friends and making sure nobody ever sees the paedophilic dirt in the Epstein files. That’s too many balls for a dementing man to juggle.

Fortunately, there is something called the midterm elections due in November. At this stage, Trump is heading for a shattering defeat but nobody should underestimate the capacity of the wealthy to swing things in their favour. He knows that if he loses control of the Senate, he’ll be heading straight to a federal prison for a long time. There are still four months to go; trapped rats are the most dangerous. He could easily pull some stunt out of his hat that normal people wouldn’t think of and, because of the imperial American political system, he could impose it. Politically, the US is an anachronism, a hangover from the French Revolution that modelled the Republic on the Ancien Regime, and the US simply copied it (Ben Franklin had been ambassador to France for nearly 10 years, and Thomas Paine was strongly aligned with the revolution). It’s not at all like the Westminster system, where Britain has just defenestrated yet another prime minister for being a bit aimless. In the US, the presidency holds immense power and is not so much the pinnacle of a pyramid as the peak of an extremely high pillar, with the rest of the country milling around its base, following orders as they drift down from on high. If Trump were PM in the UK or Australia, he would have been out on his fat arse in his first term. It would be easy to say “That’s their problem” but it’s also our problem. All we can do is watch but there will be more trouble. Let’s hope it doesn’t spread our way.

Meantime, Israel is no longer drifting toward fascism, it’s a full gallop. In Narcisso-Fascism, I listed the features of a fascist movement (pp30-34) and how Israel meets them (pp165-171). Remember that was written in 2023, before the current ultra-fanatical government took office. There are 22 criteria. We can give each country, political party or social movement a score on each feature, where 0 = not at all, 1 = a bit, 2 = quite a lot and 3 = a great deal. Israel is right up there at the top, a bit below North Korea and Nazi Germany. Even though they have fairly open borders and tolerate opposition newspapers, what pushes them up the scale is the overtly genocidal nature of their political program. North Korea doesn’t plan on killing all the South Koreans. Israel makes no secret of its genocidal intentions; au contraire, they boast about it and then get enraged when anybody objects and try to smear them as “antisemitic.” Truly amazing that apparently intelligent and educated people could be so far out of touch with socio-political reality without actually being psychotic.

In any event, their show is falling apart. They are seriously isolated in the world with, as Vance says, only one friend, DJ Trump, who has one foot in prison and the other on a banana skin. Israel’s secret alliances, e.g. with the UAE and Albania, are falling apart (see the Henningsen interview above); their allies in the West are being pushed out (Starmer and his gang) and so on but, above all, their unitary state is cracking. Most readers will know that religious students in Israel are exempt from military service (nobody else is, it is the most militarised state in the world). The army is running short of troops so they want to conscript the ultra-orthodox who are objecting violently, thereby splitting Netanyahu’s entire base of support. If he persists with this plan, and he has little choice if he wants to hold all the stolen territory, then he will lose the clerical-fascist parties in his coalition. He will lose office and the public prosecutor is waiting around the corner to nab him on charges of corruption. No wonder he seems to be losing weight. Either way, we can all sit back to watch as the plot twists and turns but I don’t think we are going to see a moderate, sane government take over. The different pretenders to the throne all hate each other violently (Israel Shahak: “The hatred of the gentiles for the Jews is as nothing compared with the hatred of Jews for each other”). Their only policy difference is how much land they steal and how quickly they wipe out the Palestinians, not whether they should withdraw to their own borders and start to be sensible.

We live in interesting times, unfortunately. I don’t think anybody can predict what will happen over the next twelve months. If the US political class had any brains, they would remove Trump and the trumpists, settle with Iran, tell the Israelis to STFU and F Off, and quietly sort out their financial mess before it engulfs them. But collectively, they don’t have any brains. They are obsessed with the idea of a hierarchy of nations, which is the logical development of their earlier and still current obsession with hierarchies of races and religions. It is now written into the national charter that they have to be Numero Uno in every respect, “full spectrum dominance,” they call it: see that word? Domination. It’s all to do with testosterone. Trump’s rantings about being the most powerful nation on earth is the same psychobiological phenomenon as bull elephant seals fighting on a beach.

Israel, I believe, is a lost cause. An interesting question: In giving Israel carte blanche for 75yrs, has the West done it any favours or simply encouraged the growth of clerical-fascist regime where 80% of the population support actual genocide? Is it the product of a benign neglect coming from crude self-interest? 50% of Republicans under 40 are now opposed to Israel, and everywhere else it’s worse for them. The US will have to cut them off financially because the working class are being forced to choose between supporting the Zionist wars or Medicare For All. That’s a no-brainer but never underestimate the capacity of the American power elite to convince the average Joe and Josephine Voter to vote against their interests (Aneurin Bevan, architect of the British NHS: “The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power”).

If and when the torrents of US$ stop flowing to Israel, it will collapse in a heap. The remaining intelligentsia will pack up and leave; the secular Jews in the military will wonder why they’re being blown up to keep the religious fanatics chanting safely in their schools; the wealthy will take their money and run to their mansions in Monaco and Manhattan; the Epstein-Kushner class will slide out of sight in the murk and just keep on doing what they do best; and the rest will have to realise the party’s over, the Chosen People will have to choose peace – or oblivion. We live in interesting times although I never had any problem with boredom.

1. Orwell G (1945) You and the Atom Bomb, in Collected Essays Vol 4, In Front of Your Nose. London: Penguin. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/

****

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 has declared victory in his illegal war of aggression on Iran and is now walking back to his golf cart, waving graciously to the crowds who never wanted another forever war. To celebrate, I will coin a new term: “A Trumpian Victory.” This differs from a pyrrhic victory (“One more victory like that and we are undone”) in that he was defeated but is telling everybody he won and is generously accepting the vanquished Iranians’ terms. In other words, he is lying (Henry Mencken: “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars”). Overlooked in the applause is the crucial point that, in glaring contrast to the blood-stained Americans and Israelis, Iran won their chapter of The Great American War on Everybody by non-lethal means. This will keep historians and sociologists in jobs for decades: in defeating the obscene coupling of “the most powerful country in history” and “the most moral army in the world,” Iran did not incinerate 100,000 civilians, or even a dozen. As promised if they were attacked, they simply took the world in a squirrel grip and squeezed. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, they exerted the only sort of power that governments understand, the power of economics.

Trump, as he makes crystal clear, has no comprehension of morality but money always makes his nose and other organs twitch. Netanyahu, Trump’s BFF, is ably filling the role of nuclear-armed mad dog from hell doing his best to sabotage everything but even he has his fatal weakness: that Israel, as Trump finally blurted out, exists wholly and solely because the US pays for it to exist:

If it weren’t for the United States of America, with me … Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth, one hundred percent — and every smart person in Israel knows that.

Since Day 1 of the Israeli state in 1948, every smart person in the world who watches these things has known that. Israel exists just because, every year for nearly 80 years, it receives from US government and private sources, as well as the German government and many other Europeans, a flood of money, about $10billion a year and often far more. Without that loot, the Zionist state would be on the same economic footing as Jordan, meaning on its knees. Instead, and on their perpetual life support of foreign lucre, Jewish Israelis live like kings, with free education, free health care, full pensions and a myriad other benefits, subsidies and grants, none of which are available to ordinary Americans. How come?

The details of these arrangements we don’t know and probably never will but we can summarise them with one word: corruption. Corruption and criminality at a truly cosmic level reach deep into every government in the world (even puritanical China), into every bank and every major company, into armies and spy services, all the big universities, many churches and religious foundations and so on. But it’s certainly not just Israel, it’s a mesh of interlocking criminal enterprises with no defining division between the good and the bad. Israel is simply a node, albeit a centrally placed one, in a vast subterranean network of corruption. Granted, Trump and Netanyahu are fairly extreme examples but they have shaken hands with, sat next to, eaten and partied with, laughed and plotted with, and taken money from many of the century’s most accomplished and enterprising criminals.Tellingly, where they lead, everybody else follows.

To her credit, Whitney Webb has lifted a couple of manholes on the vast, interconnected sewers of illegal money and influence that ceaselessly pulse and flow beneath our unwitting feet [1]. Her story goes back about a hundred years to the beginnings of organised crime but we are then forced to ask: Was it ever thus? Was there always this huge hidden economy of vice sucking at the vitals of ordinary people? I think there was but for most of human history, it wasn’t the underworld at all, it was right out in the open: the Atlantic slave trade; Britain’s vast drug trade, moving shiploads of opium from forced labour plantations in India to poison the Chinese population; Leopold II’s monstrous criminality in the rubber trade in Congo; invasion and annexation of native lands in North America, Africa and Oceania; genocide in a dozen places, on and on.

Western wealth was built on wickedness, lauded either as the civilising influence of Christendom or the nobility of Western arms subduing the unruly savages. Stealing somebody else’s land or enslaving their children wasn’t crime as it was out in the open and everybody was doing it. The British occupation of the Subcontinent (now seven countries) lasted 250 years. In that time, the Poms extracted some $45trillion (modern value), caused the premature deaths of 145million people and reduced their standard of living from among the highest in the world to the lowest, from which they will probably never recover. And they still won’t hand back the Kohinoor diamond.

I doubt that the conduct today of the wealthy and powerful is any better or worse than it ever was. They’ve always believed in droit de seigneur, their right to have whatever they want when they want it, e.g. the comically disgusting behaviour of one Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as exposed by historian and author Andrew Lownie. The only differences these days are the extent and reach of crime enabled by the prodigiously complex, computerised, neoliberal economic system, which means it’s all hidden. Anybody who tries to expose it gets either a sentence for spying (e.g. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden) or a bullet in the back of the neck (see [1] for examples). You and me, we’re fools. We work hard for our living, we pay our taxes and bills, we help with charities, we clean up our mess, and we get nowhere. Meantime, Herr Musk is now the world’s first private trillionaire even though his DOGE closed a quarantine and veterinary surveillance service in the Agriculture Dept. to save $15million, and the US now has an outbreak of the dreaded screwworm that will cost at least $1billion to eradicate and will push up the price of beef. As though the rich care or even know how much food costs. Suggestions that Musk should pay the $1billion have been laughed off. How does such inequality exist, and what is its likely effect? Consider this:

Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens.

That was written in 1912, well before the Russian Revolution, by the French-British author, poet and politician, Hilaire Belloc [2, p62]; nothing has changed. We should not, however, complain too loudly as, according to neoliberal doctrine, massively unequal individual wealth is a necessary precondition to a general rise in living standards. As ourlined by economists such as von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Friedman, only private citizens know enough about their needs and resources to make the crucial decisions that lead to successful businesses. By the simple expedient of reducing government regulations and red tape to a minimum, individuals should be allowed and, indeed, encouraged to amass personal wealth because, once they have made their pile, they then have to invest it. This will produce jobs for the working classes whose standard of living will therefore rise (“the rising tide lifts all boats”) and all will be well. It sounds wonderful, so why isn’t it working? Two reasons, the first explained in another of the revealing posts by China-based American businessman, Kevin Walmsley.

In his latest post, Mr Walmsley looks at the impending birth of 6G telephone systems. This will be thousands of times faster than today’s 5G, too fast for household and personal use, as he notes: “To download a 21 terabyte-sized file will take 5 hours on a 5G network, and just 18 seconds on a 6G.” That, however, is ideal for industry, science and, unfortunately, spying agencies and the military. However, almost the entire development is taking place in China because China alone has the supplies of gallium nitride needed to manufacture the ultrafast chips 6G relies on. The wily Chinese will have the rest of the world in the ultimate squirrel grip, as China produces 99% of the entire world’s supply of gallium, just because neoliberalism. Gallium is almost entirely a by-product of aluminium smelting, which is dominated by China, Russia and, until a few weeks ago, the Gulf petrostates.

Decades ago, western businessmen decided it was cheaper to import gallium than mine the stuff so, strictly in keeping with the clever economists mentioned above, that’s just what they did. It would take the West at least a dozen years to get to the stage of producing enough gallium of their own to bring their 6G systems to where China is today, by which time China will be a dozen years ahead of them anyway and will have set the standards itself. And to add insult to injury, gallium is essential for the precise radars used by the F-35s that bombed the girls’ school at Minab, and by the billion dollar radars recently destroyed by Iran’s cheap drones (read Kevin’s article; he shows a picture of the ballast now being installed in F-35s in place of the radars to stop them flipping over). The US now needs to build lots of missiles to replace the expensive gear they fired in their recent war but China holds the essential ingredient to make them work. And it is not releasing it.

So that’s one reason why we shouldn’t have trillionaires, or even billionaires: they will adjust the world economy to make themselves richer and more powerful while leaving us to sort out the consequences, because that’s what the rich and powerful do. We have strong, biologically-determined inclinations to gain property, power and status. We switch these drives on because they’re incredibly exciting but the off-switch takes all the fun out of life so, unless we’re compelled to, we rarely choose to “do the right thing” and stop trying to grab all the cake. As the example of gallium shows, neoliberalism is producing and reinforcing inequality but this time, and unlike the imperial examples mentioned above (slaves, opium etc), this time, it’s the West that’s getting its nuts squeezed, and they don’t like it. Tough shit, sunshine, pigeons come home to roost.

The second reason untrammelled wealth and power aren’t a good idea is seen in a quote from Trump’s immensely powerful deputy chief of staff, the man who was recently likened to a rectal polyp, Mrs Miller’s little boy, Stevie (check the picture; a reader suggested the polyp looked benign). In an interview soon after Trump 2.0 was let out of its dungeon, he said:

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

Unlike his boss, who can’t read, I’d say Miller has read Mein Kampf, which says:

...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 [3, p182].

The whole thrust of neoliberalism has been to let the Stephen Millers, Trumps and Epsteins of the world loose, to remove any legal or, above all, moral shackles from them and license them to pillage the planet until they are forced to say “No more, I’ve got enough.” Except they never do. Neoliberalism justifies “more, more, more for me.” It authorises cruel disdain and contempt for those who are stuck in the mud and can’t escape just because the wealthy and powerful have recast the economic and legal systems to suit themselves. Over the past 35 years, the US has lost at least 18 million well-paying industrial jobs. The great majority of these have gone to China where the standards of living for the common people are fast approaching those of the US. A reader of Kevin’s Substack commented:

China has a socialist free market economy where the government builds the infrastructure and businesses must learn to survive under intense market competition. The USA has a corporate welfare economy, where corporations feed a price-is-no-object government demand, and corporations deemed “too-big-to-fail” are continually bailed out by the government.

I think it’s time to declare the neoliberal experiment a failure and go back to the idea of fairness, which Hilaire Belloc championed as the “distributive state” [2]. The reason neoliberalism failed is as clear as daylight: the economists who wrote it, known as the Austrian School because most of them came from Vienna, had no idea about humans. Not a clue. That’s a bit strange as several of them had served in the Great War so they must have had some notion that humans aren’t the nicest creatures around. In particular, their model of human psychology was palsied as they assumed people are ordered little robots who go through life checking prices and demands and making calm, rational decisions as to what they should produce, buy or sell. They thought that what they called “rational self-interest” was enough to explain human economic behaviour and, critically, to keep it in line with human interests. They forgot about war. That parody of psychology is the entire basis of the economic policies directly or indirectly running most of the world today.

They didn’t think that, once given the green light, businessmen would look to invest their wealth where it produced the greatest returns, not the greatest benefit. That is, they would immediately look overseas to poor countries with low-paid workers, lax environmental and commercial regulations, and easily-bribed police. As long as they made money, they didn’t care that it impoverished their own working classes. They certainly didn’t think far enough to realise that shifting critical supply chains overseas exposed their country to the ultimate squirrel grip. And as the Austrian economists were probably quite decent bourgeoisie themselves, they had no idea what arseholes the wealthy and powerful actually are. They didn’t understand that, blessed with minimal regulations and oversight, crooks like Trump, Kushner, Epstein, Netanyahu, MBS, MBZ, Boris J and so many others would move in and quickly reshape the legal and financial systems to suit themselves, because crooks. They should have listened to Lord Acton, who said: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control” (1887). The old boy was absolutely right. Power attracts people who are hungry for power, and people who hunger for power will never willingly switch off their hunger, they’re incapable of saying “Enough’s enough.”

This is the heart of the problem: war is about domination and domination is the most pointless and destructive game in town. Only when we view war with the same intuitive abhorrence as we look upon bestiality, incest or paedophilia will we start to bring it under control.

Just a suggestion: Can we leave the neolibs in control for a bit longer, until they’ve completely wrecked the American and zionist capacity to launch aggressive wars?

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. Belloc H (1912). The Servile State. London: TN Foulis.

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.

****

In 1987, I left the comforts of Perth, the most isolated capital city in the world, to travel to West Australia’s remote Kimberley region to set up an isolated psychiatric service. Isolated meant “no staff and no facilities” as the nearest psychiatric unit was 2,200km away. It also turned out to mean no support, no assistance and, above all, no interest of any sort from the Health Dept or the college of psychiatrists. In fact, I spent the next six years as the world’s most isolated psychiatrist covering an area of 425,000sqkm, or 165,000 sqm, nearly twice the size of the state of Victoria. The population was then about 25,000, about half white and half Aboriginal people, most of whom were still living more or less according to their traditions. The older people, especially woman, generally couldn’t speak English and young people spoke their own languages at home. My role was to stop Aboriginals being sent to the mental hospital in Perth, a bit less than the distance from London to Moscow but, for them, a much greater climatic and cultural leap. To prepare myself, I worked through a pile of textbooks of Aboriginal anthopology, which is a big topic as there was considerable interest in preliterate cultures in the 19^th Century, especially from Germany. With academic papers and so on, I eventually slogged through about 3,000 pages of material.

Aboriginal society was an ancient, preliterate culture whose people had lived for 50,000 years in one of the harshest climates on earth, with no metals or technology other than they could make with stones and wood. It was and largely still is a patriarchal gerontocracy, where the old men hold power due to their control of religious matters. After long practice, they survived; most authorities estimate there were about 300,000 Aboriginals when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788. However, western diseases quickly devastated them. As the land is totemic, people are tied to the land of their birth so, by staying within their own boundaries, there would normally be no conflict. It also meant they couldn’t leave if they get into trouble, so they had to keep on good terms with the old men, who controlled the most valuable asset of all, the marriage market.

However, my reading soon showed something strange. I had long been interested in anthropology, having previously worked in Southern Thailand, and in ethology, the study of animal behaviour, for what it tells us about human behaviour. In those fields, one of the biggest topics is aggression, both intra- and interspecific. Normally, for humans and for other animals, the index to any textbook will contain a hundred or more references to aggression or similar topics but, when it came to Aboriginal anthropology, there were hardly any. A number of researchers I spoke to said that this was because human conflict is directed at gaining control of the primary source of wealth, meaning land. However, because it was totemic, Aboriginals couldn’t steal another tribe’s land as it would reject them, so they lived in peace within their own boundaries.

This seemed odd since a few days in the casualty department of any local hospital shows one of the striking features of Aboriginal life today is fighting. Ah, I was told, that’s due to government policy of forcing them off their land so that different tribes are mixed in the same small area, and the traditional power structures run by the old men had broken down. Also, alcohol had made everything a hundred times worse. If they were able to go back to their precontact state, i.e. as hunter-gatherers in their own, remote areas, they would be fine. That didn’t seem very realistic, as they also said they would need the flying doctor and other health services.

It seems the reason behind this omission was that early researchers and their modern counterparts wanted to believe that pre-contact Aboriginals lived in a state of Rousseauesque bliss, so they simply overlooked aggression. The clues were there, however. One eminent researcher at University of WA wrote that when they were travelling, women routinely carried all their domestic goods and the children because men had to carry their spears and be ready to use them. Hang on, use them against what? There are no large predators in Australia; crocodiles are easy to avoid, just keep out of the water, and spears are useless against them anyway. Snakes were quickly despatched by the women and ended up on the fire for supper. The only conceivable threat was other humans, and this turned out to be true. Missionary reports from the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, which were not in the academic literature, reported periodic flare-ups that involved all the men in a couple of adjoining tribes meeting on their borders in highly-ritualised “battles,” with more shouting and waving of spears than actual fighting.

There was, however, more or less constant low-grade fighting from stealing the most valuable asset of all: young women. The old men liked to keep a few young women for themselves, which meant there were always a few young men who missed out, so they snuck across to an adjoining tribe’s land to steal wives for themselves. However, that provoked payback raids so the fighting would rarely resolve. A tribe on the move was at risk of being attacked so the men had to be ready, which meant the women did all the heavy work. But before anybody says “Oh, how dreadfully primitive, they obviously needed to be pacified and taught to wear clothes,” just remember that nothing has changed. Anywhere. We terribly superior, gifted and cultured Westerners are still doing exactly the same thing, constantly invading other people’s land to steal their assets and turn them into slaves of one sort or another. In the old days, that meant physical slaves but now it means wage and monetary slaves. Much the same thing except that the modern slave driver doesn’t worry if his slave sickens and dies, he just gets another one from the queues of desperate people milling around his gate. Does it have to be this way? Definitely not.

In 1989, the financial contradictions within the USSR meant that it lost control of its satellites in Eastern Europe, and soon after of itself as the various republics snatched their independence. By 1991, “monolithic international communism” had proven to be anything but. The entire Western power elite were beside themselves with joy: “We won the Cold War,” they crowed. “We’ve proven our superiority.” Political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed: “This is the end of history, the end of social evolution. Liberal democracy is triumphant and humanity will forever owe us a debt of gratitude for our clear-sighted fortitude.” The project to develop and implement neoliberal economics went into overdrive. There was even talk of a “peace dividend,” that because the foreign threat had gone, the military budget could be diverted to good works at home.

It didn’t happen, of course, the arms manufacturers weren’t inclined to close up shop. Within a year or two, in its role as guardian of freedom and democracy, the US had pivoted to face two new “mortal enemies,” rabid jihadist Islamism and fanatical Chinese communist autocracy. A few weeks ago, Trump announced that this year’s budget for the aptly-renamed Department of War will be $1.5trillion, 50% more than last year, to meet the threat. What threat? The same threat that WJ Clinton identified in his speech to the UN General Assembly, 27^th Sept. 1993, in which he reiterated his earlier statement to Congress re the looming threat that the US would be forced to follow the same rules as everybody else:

… 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.

In other words, we have the right to bomb you in order to maintain “full spectrum dominance,” absolute domination of the entire world in all possible respects, economic, military, financial, cultural, sporting, and so on. The threat for the US, the only threat, is of not being Number One. What right? The right called “might.” Macht hat Recht, as Adolf used to say. We have the power, therefore we will use it. The question then arises: Why? Why is it necessary to exert total dominance of the world for all time? If you ask this of an American with any sort of power, they just look at you blankly:

“What do you mean, why? Isnt it obvious? We’re the most powerful, smartest, most generous, most democratic and generally most amazing people in history, it is our destiny to lead the world to the sunny uplands and your role to be grateful.”

But, you object, what if we don’t want to be led? What if we’re happy down here on ground level? That gets you nowhere. Once offered the prize of la liberation americaine, there is no refusing: “This is for your benefit. Do as you’re told or we’ll bomb you.” You may then be tempted to ask: “If we can’t see the benefit, then what’s in it for you?” This brings us back to the Clinton Doctrine. Reality is, full spectrum dominance by Uncle Sam is not for the benefit of the world, it’s strictly for the benefit of the US. In particular, it’s for the entrenched power elite of that country and their dear friends in other countries, commonly known as the Epstein Class. British journalist Jonathon Cook nailed it:

Fukayama forgot that capitalism isn’t socialism. It doesn’t seek the best for everyone. It doesn’t want to share the wealth. It doesn’t prioritise dignity over profit. Its lifeblood is exploitation – of individuals and of entire peoples. He forgot that there would be resistance (Substack, 10.06.2026; emphasis added).

This is the crucial point: neoliberal capitalism isn’t in the business of looking after the people who aren’t in a position to take advantage of it. That’s not its purpose. It isn’t about catching the people who fall through the cracks, it’s about helping the front-runners get further ahead by eliminating any possible handicaps in their race to be dominant. Why be dominant? Because human nature. The urge to dominate is hard-wired into us but in such a way that we don’t see it as odd or out of place, we never question it. Dominating is fun, it feels great and we always want more. We never pause to ask how the people we’re dominating feel about it. Britain occupied the entire Subcontinent, now seven different countries, for 250 years, and when Churchill was advised India wanted independence, he got shitty: “”I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire” (Nov. 10^th 1942). This is normal. This is human, but it is not thereby desirable or rational. Invariably, the downtrodden must come to want their freedom, and to fight for it.

Insight is being able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and imagine how they feel. Political maturity is not deceiving yourself over your motives. People talk about the post-war period being a “pax Americana” due to the liberal rules-based international order (the IMF, World Bank, UN agencies, WTO, etc) but it wasn’t. It was peaceful and ordered for the people who used it to rake in lots of money but chaotic for everybody else. There hasn’t been a day of peace in the world since 1945 and the US was always in the thick of the fighting, telling everybody else how they should live for the benefit of international capital. The North Koreans realised this a long time ago, as historian Alfred McCoy commented recently:

And mindful that nuclear-armed North Korea remains safe while Iran has been ravaged, even medium-sized states will undoubtedly be seeking the security of nuclear arms... (Common Dreams June 10^th, well worth reading)

A similar thing is playing out in West Asia at present. Israel’s plan for “Greater Israel” involves displacing something like 100million people from their traditional lands, to be replaced by 10million Zionist Israelis. Somewhere along the line, what started as a socialist dream of a safe national home for Europe’s Jews mated with Kabalistic Judaism to produce an endlessly expansionist clericalist-fascist state. How they expect to hold this vast area isn’t clear. Swedish-Iranian political scientist Trita Parsi said: “Israel believes that the only way it can be secure is for everybody else not to be secure.” That way lies madness as there can be no security in a landscape filled with people who hate you. Do Netanyahu and Ben Gvir and Smotrich and all the rest know this? No, they have managed to convince themselves that they can do to Palestinians what they hated when the Nazis did it to their grandparents, and that there will be no repercussions because God and the US are on their side, backed up by The Bomb. Macht hat Recht noch einmal. Might is right recycled. All this is human, none of it has anything to do with the rights or wrongs of any political or economic system, or of any religion or the superiority of any race or such like.

Now we can look at the state of Aboriginal society 200 years ago, with the population of a small modern city scattered thinly across a vast continent, and smile indulgently at their pointless squabbles and posturing “wars.” However, they had one thing that we just can’t seem to get our heads around: everybody had enough to survive but nobody had enough to dominate the neighbouring tribes. Their totemic structure forced the tribes to stay apart, to stay in their land and not try to take over the neighbour’s place. Yes, the old men were a bit greedy but don’t overlook the modern habit of old white men taking young “trophy wives.” Trump, of course, took three wives from a different tribe as well as hundreds of more or less forced dalliances on the side.

Neoliberal economics, meaning monopoly private capitalism, and the collapsing “rules based international order” were specifically designed to create inequality and cement it in place. Monopoly state capitalism, aka Stalinist socialism, does the same. There is a median path, the distributive state, that equalises opportunity while allowing a few to climb a few rungs higher in the hierarchy. Aboriginals managed it, so there’s no reason apart from greed and hubris that we can’t. That, however, is a hard sell to people who can only think in terms of domination as the be-all and end-all of human existence. We need to start before it’s too late.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

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Last week’s post ended ominously: “The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they hear the squeaks and rumbles of the approaching tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine.” A reader asked:

Your conclusion about the guillotine is probably meant metaphorically, and I would like you to answer plainly: how do you think the plutocracy can be defeated? There was a time when the ruling class needed the serfs for their labour, so that was a power the people had, but that will not be the case for much longer. The middle class had their place too in administrative work, again, that is not going to last. In those terms, how can the people overthrow the 1%?

This is a huge concept, we can only start on it today but I will answer plainly: I was not speaking metaphorically. It was intended literally. The 1% will not be displaced voluntarily or politely, as the inestimable Chris Hedges noted in another of his superlative essays this week:

Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.

Mao Zedung knew this too well:

Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

The core of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism, which is the entire modus operandi of the rich, is that Homo sapiens form dominance hierarchies just because the rewards of being dominant are so thrilling. Paradoxically, because the pain of oppression knows no end, each of us has two strong innate drives, one to dominate and one to resist domination. For those who, by one means or another, get to the top, the thought of going back down the ladder is intolerable. They simply cannot conceive of life “down among the riffraff,” so they will do anything open to them to resist a drop in status. That means anything, without limit, just to protect their status. Very often, they would rather die; better still, they send other people to die in their place. In the competition between their status and other people’s right, their status wins. Always. We see this in West Asia at present: with the full-blooded support of the great majority of its citizens, Israel is using genocide to cement its position as the dominant power in the entire region (for a truly disgusting display of the ecstatic joy humans get from crushing their conspecifics underfoot, see this video, starts at 0.40; that is not random, it is now institutionalised in the culture).

Purely as mammals, the thrill of defeating other people, of dominating them and making them look small so that we can feel big, is hard-wired into us. We all have it. Each and every healthy human infant comes equipped with the hardware to want to rise up the hierarchy. If we have to push somebody else down in order to do it, that is what we will do unless it is trained out of us in childhood. The urge to dominate is not a conscious thing, as in “I’ll plant a tree and watch it grow so other people can enjoy it.” It is the excitement small children display when they win a race, and the even greater excitement their parents show when their little darling wins a race. It is the pride of parents when their child graduates, ranging up to the ecstasy of fifty thousand football fans linking arms and singing as their team wins, the thunderous roars of delight from the stadium when one country gets gold at the Olympics, the drunken rampaging after a football match or an election that soon turns into violence. The urge to dominate is built into our culture but, because the joy of winning is readily amplified by bashing the other side, violence is never far away.

When it comes to the wealthy and powerful, there are two groups, inherited wealth and the self-made. Those who inherit wealth and status haven’t had to struggle to get anywhere so they believe being on top is their natural right. Being dominant becomes the basis of their sense of self-esteem, from which they believe they have rights and abilities other people don’t have. We need no better examples than Trump DJ and the Andrew formerly known as Prince. Trump was a millionaire at age eight as his father secretly transferred money to him without paying tax. Now, he boasts that by hardly ever paying tax, he proves he is smarter than those who do. When he is deposed and the investigations start, it will take decades to sort out the webs of corruption he has woven around the world. He does this because he believes he is a higher sort of person who deserves more than the common herd. Similarly, by all accounts, Andrew MBW is a selfish, dishonest and abusive little shit. His ex-wife, who seems to have disappeared into an exclusive wellness chalet in the Austrian Alps at thousands a day, was apparently no better. Fitzgerald nailed it a hundred years ago:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different (The Rich Boy, 1926).

As for the self-made, most weren’t. They had head starts you and I never knew existed. As a teenager, one William Gates, for example, had money, advantages and, above all, connections to people in the growing world of IT. Yes, he made the most of it but he remains the same person who constantly tried to nobble the competition and was intimately involved with Epstein. The self-made rich are ultracompetitive and terrible people because for them, getting ahead is the only thing that counts. Nothing else matters, certainly not relationships or other people’s rights. They fight dirty to get to the top and will fight with all their resources and dirt to stay on top. Again, look no further than Trump. For him, the idea that he could get into the White House took hold gradually. As soon as he got there, his first moves have been to disable any opposition and take revenge on anybody who opposed him in any way. These people are not called the Epstein class for nothing.

The important point is this: the 1%, and in particular, the 0.01%, do not think like ordinary human beings. They are utterly self-involved, obsessed to the point of mania with getting to the top and staying there, and determined to crush by any means necessary anybody who gets in the way. As they rise up the ladder, so their sense of entitlement grows and expands, as does their sense of grievance for long-forgotten slights and insults, and their determination to pound their perceived enemies. Trump, for example, is obsessed with Obama and Biden. They didn’t actually do anything wrong, they just beat him in a race and he is incapable of getting over the narcissistic hurt. He doesn’t see elections as a fair decision by the majority unless he wins, when it’s a case of “I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” The only thing is, he’s not joking because, like so many of these people, Trump is devoid of a sense of humour. They only laugh when they’re winning and somebody else is getting hurt, as in that vile video (above) of the evil Itamar Ben Gvir.

That’s at the individual level but crucially, humans gain a sense of status by identifying with a larger, more powerful group. This is true of male humans, and especially so of adolescents and young adults. They bond just because being part of a group feels more powerful and more exciting than being a suburban nobody. They leave the family of birth and latch on to a larger group, maybe sporting, or politics, or religion or, above all, the military, and by that means, they feel stronger and more confident. That’s why they wear uniforms or club regalia, it identifies them as “one of the powerful.” They swagger around, thrilled by the buzz of power they get from people looking at them but also from seeing their mates and themselves. It’s homoerotic without necessarily being sexual, and it is very, very exciting. If for any reason, people are pushed out of the group, they fall in a hole for a long time, as seen in peacetime soldiers who are injured and discharged medically unfit. Troops injured during fighting don’t feel so bad as they know they’re seen as honourable and still part of the gang. Women can always gain self-esteem and prestige by being mothers but the important point is this: nobody willingly gives up high status to mix with the slobs down there, to become one of them.

It’s true that every group, from small tribes or gatherings to the national level, wants to feel superior to the rest but when the idea of superiority is woven into the national psyche, we’re in trouble. This was crystal clear in Nazi Germany’s concept of die Herrenvolk, the master race. At that time, the idea of a hierarchy of nations or races was accepted by everybody who had any influence, not just Germans, and avidly soaked up by everybody else who wanted to feel more powerful than they were, such as workers. The concept of social Darwinism was normal, that people who got to the top deserved to be there while those who didn’t make it had earned their fates. The upper classes genuinely believed they were a better class of humans; conversely, the poor were substandard who, if they didn’t work harder and behave better, really didn’t deserve to live. Eugenics was seen as progressive, not as distasteful and certainly not as evil.

Since the Third Reich and the horrors of World War II, people are much less likely to talk about this in public but they still believe it. Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia who recently escaped from his mausoleum for a second run at power, liked to talk about “lifters and leaners.” Lifters are the hard workers (like him) who run things and pay their taxes while leaners are the morally feckless who choose to parasitise the welfare state and be carried through life by the industrious. For the wealthy and powerful, success is seen in moral terms: “I earned my status and my wealth by hard work and self-denial. I went without to get ahead and everybody else can, too, if they make the right moral choices.” In social Darwinism, success is seen as proof of moral superiority, not genetic. Most definitely, it is never seen as structural, the result of social conditions over which people have no control, and never as luck. This is at its worst in the military, where injuries are always and only seen as moral failings. They even say it: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” If you’re a soldier who gets a back injury, don’t even bother reporting it.

Today, once more, the world is convulsed by the idea that certain nations have rights that others don’t have, that they are superior beings just by virtue of birth. Americans freely proclaim this, that they are the Leaders of the Free World, World Policeman, the Shining City on the Hill, Fount of Democracy, Most Favoured Nation, Most Powerful in History, and. They. Can. Do. What. They. Like. To anybody, anywhere, for any reason that suits them at the time. Thus, they can strangle Cuba for 67 years then tell the Cubans their government can’t provide for them and must be overthrown, preferably by invasion. Trump’s military has murdered over 200 people by blowing up boats in the Caribbean yet they indict former President Raoul Castro because in 1996, he ordered his military to shoot down some planes that, despite repeated warnings from Cuba and the US authorities to stop, kept flying over Cuba from Florida to drop leaflets. The US has over 850 military bases around the world, threatening everybody who doesn’t toe the line, yet are driven mad by Russian and Chinese listening posts in Cuba. Their hypocrisy is overwhelming but, for them, this is not hypocrisy. Their double standards come directly from believing the old, old lie: We’re better than everybody else so we can do what we like but you have to do as we tell you. As a rule, any nation that has more guns and flags than people is a menace but the cracks in Uncle Sam’s foundations are growing rapidly. International dollar-based finance, their “exorbitant privilege,” is on the way out. Their economy, carefully deindustrialised by neoliberals, is in serious trouble. More significantly, Trump and his gang of halfwits, crooks and predators are splitting the country apart. Expect more trouble as the cost of being world hegemon exceeds any possible benefits, even the wondrous benefit of thinking you’re Number One in the world.

When we come to Israel, we see the concepts behind Narcisso-Fascism at their worst. From infancy, it is drummed into Israeli children that they are special, they are chosen, God favours them and has promised them a land like no other but it was stolen by outsiders and unbelievers, so it is their proud and unwavering duty to fight to recover their divine birthright. This is the ultimate racism, there is no step beyond believing that your enemies are satanic so you can do what you like just because everything you do is already blessed by God, and any lenience toward them is defiling God’s work. So, as we see in that video above and in so many others, that is what they do. This is no accident. Israeli educator and researcher, Nurit Peled Elhanan (b. 1949) is the granddaughter of one of the signatories of their declaration of statehood; the daughter of a revered general; and elder sister of Miko, a noted peace activist and author.

Over her long lifetime, her research has shown that Israeli children are exposed to non-stop ideological indoctrination which, if it occurs in Russia or China, is known as brain-washing. Her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, from 2012, sets this out in detail but she has (very bravely) written hundreds of articles and lectures on this topic (podcast of a recent interview here, transcript here). The gist is that “Arabs” (they never use the word Palestinians) are subhuman interlopers who must be expelled by any means possible, as leaving the Promised Land in their vile hands is an unforgivable sin against God. This means that, in reclaiming Greater Israel, Jews are unable to sin because they are doing God’s will. Therefore rape, torture and genocide are not bad, and anybody who says they are is acting as an agent of the satanic sphere. This is, of course, precisely the racist dogma of the Nazis, but with God replacing the Aryan race.

Naturally enough, when anybody accuses Israelis of crimes such as sodomising the crews of the Sumud Flotilla, there is a chorus of screeches from the president down that this is just another example of the “blood libel” from the medieval era. They’re lying, of course, they know exactly what goes on in their prisons. Israel isn’t Germany during World War II. The Nazi government went to considerable lengths to keep their death camps secret because they knew the civilian population wouldn’t stand for it [1]. Yet in Israel today, e.g. “Israel Day,” May 15^th, gangs of flag-draped youths routinely rampage through Palestinian areas screaming “Death to the Arabs.” During the pogroms in the West Bank, police and military stand by to make sure Palestinians offer no resistance. This is the direct result, she says of a state-coordinated program that turns young Israelis into:

... murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olive [orchards], and poisoners of wells . . . who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. [These] children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger, to always fear the neighbors, the gentiles, children who were brought up in the fear of Islam – a fear that prepares them to be brutal soldiers and disciples of mass murderers [2].

Her point is perfectly clear: these people will not willingly give up their power to crush their neighbours. They will keep trying to expand to fill the borders of their self-appointed “homeland” of Greater Israel, all 2million sqkm of it, until somebody does something to stop them. That may come from within, when enough voters are disgusted by what their government is doing to turf them out but don’t bet on it: 82% support expelling all Gazans by any means. More likely, it will come from the world turning against Israel and turning off their life support. Israel has essentially no natural resources. Without many hundreds of billions of dollars of support, mainly from the US and Germany, and preferential treatment in a myriad ways, their economy would collapse overnight to the level of Jordan or Lebanon. For example, at the beginning of the current round of fighting, Israel had about 1,700 combat-ready Merkava tanks, costing about $5million each (I think that’s an understatement; a new Abrams battle tank costs about $24million), plus dozens of F-35s and so on. Who paid for that? Not Israel, that’s for sure. However, the capital cost of weapons is only part of it; maintaining and arming them more than doubles the price. You don’t get that sort of weaponry by exporting oranges. People say “But Israel exports lots of software and arms.” True, but that’s all developed by American money.

Israel’s folly is that it is engaged in an imperialist, racist project that relies totally on the goodwill of foreign supporters. If that support evaporates, and it is doing so rapidly, then they’re finished. But its architects will not give up easily, their entire self-esteem and raison d’être are built on the idea that God loves them above all other people and wants them to clean all the second-class humans from His Promised Land. Take that away and they’re nobodies. It’s the same in the US. The white population of the South slept easily on the idea that they were superior to the nigras working in their fields to keep them in lives of ease. Even dirt-poor whites in the Delta could look at a black labourer and say “I may be poor but at least I’m not a nigger.” The Civil War notwithstanding, they never gave that up. That same attitude of racial/national superiority has since seeped throughout the whole country but its focus shifted, to foreigners. Even poor Americans feel superior to the rest of the world, for example, many of them believe American health services are the best in the world. Truly amazing what you can do with propaganda.

There is a point worth making. Around the world, we see a headlong Drang nach rechts, a drive to the extreme right. In the UK and in Australia, extremist right wing parties have suddenly surged to the front. In the US, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, you name it, the neonazis are out in force. I think there are two forces operating. First, as mentioned many times, is the malign influence of neoliberal economics causing explosive increases in inequality, deindustrialisation, commercialisation of education and health, lowering public standards, ever-more oppressive surveillance of workers coupled with pervasive corruption at the highest levels of society, and so on. Workers are aware something is seriously wrong with their lives, they’re just not sure what it is.

The second comes directly from Israel, which has normalised far rightist/protofascist conduct just because nobody is allowed to criticise Israel: “Anything Israel does is right and proper. Nobody is allowed to criticise us as that’s antisemitism and blood libel which are worse crimes than genocide.” Israel has colonised the extreme right wing with impunity, giving it an ersatz respectability. What Israel gets away with, the neonazis quickly copy mit größter Freude, with the greatest of delight. The huge, militarised D8 bulldozers Israel uses to flatten Gaza and south Lebanon, without a squeak of protest from the West, are also building a gigantic autobahn to a right wing hell on earth, down which are stampeding Republicans in the US, Reform in the UK, Alternatif fur Deutschland, Italy’s League, Bolsonarists in Brazil, BJP in India, One Nation in Australia and so many others. Where Israel leads, the lunatic fringe follows. As they say in QAnon: Where we go one, we go all.

That’s this week’s limit but to summarise, an attitude of superiority is not compatible with peace on the planet. However, people won’t give it up willingly. How do we force them to do that? Slowly, at the ballot box where possible, and by constant activism. But the most important thing is to know how extremists work: by terrifying normal people. The key point is to stop fearing them. We will talk more.

****

One point to show you how the 1% think, or don’t think. After all the hooha about Epstein Island, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, each the offspring of convicted felons, have hit upon a fantabulous idea to invest all the money they got from Middle East potentates: they’re going to build a super-resort for the wealthy in Albania with no riffraff allowed. Very expensive and very exclusive, the wealthy will be able to let their hair down without the risk of paparazzi snapping them. Where in Albania? In a wildlife refuge. On an island. Yes folks, in a mind-numbing display of insightlessness spawned by their congenital contempt for public opinion, they plan to build another bigger, more secure Epstein Island. Don’t you just love it? We can be sure they’ll have queues of rich people dropping by for lunch, à la the lying Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary.

Fortunately, the Albanian people have worked out their prime minister has corruptly approved the development, so they threw molotov cocktails into his house. As I said, “The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they hear the squeaks and rumbles of the approaching tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine.” All power to the Albanians.

References:

1. Johnson E, Reuband K-H (2005) What we knew: terror, mass murder and everyday life in Nazi Germany. London: John Murray/Hodder Headline.

2. This is referenced to: Svirsky, Gila. “Address at the 20th anniversary of Women in Black, Jerusalem, 28 December 2007”. Gila Svirsky: A Personal Website. The link has recently disappeared.

****

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 Mr Eli Groner, former director general of the office of the prime minister in Israel under Netanyahu, and intimately connected to every major endeavour by that government in the past 15 years, with a list of connections throughout the Middle East and the US and Europe and elsewhere that would fill a sizeable book, is not happy with the current state of affairs vis a vis their surprise attack on Iran, as he tweeted this week:

Many will say that Iran emerged stronger from the war. They will point to more extreme leadership, to the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are now the centre of gravity and to the fact that the US is blinking in the face of them. All of this is true. But there is something far more serious: Iran has proven that it is capable of instilling fear in the global economy and order through the threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s critical energy arteries. And the moment the world begins to treat iran’s ability to close Hormuz as a veto that policy must be managed around, the implication is that Iran is no longer just threatening the Middle East. It is actually influencing the rules of the global game.

This is a strategic victory far deeper than any point specific military achievement.

Disaster (here, at 1.30).

There’s a little rule that Master Groaner obviously failed to learn in kindergarten: Be careful what you wish for. When the illegal, immoral and unprovoked US-Israeli war of aggression was launched, Netanyahu gloated: “I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.” Well, sunshine, you’ve got it. You’ve got it good and hard and I hope it’s as painful for you as it is for all the Palestinians who are raped in your prisons – about which you know everything, by the way, and laugh about it with your mates in the lunatic fringe parties. Let’s just look at Groaner’s points in light of Narcisso-Fascism to see what they add up to:

“Many will say that Iran emerged stronger from the war.” I’d say about 99.5% of the world’s population agree with that, and every one of them is delighted. The sight of the Exceptional Nation and God’s Chosen People being demoted in the hierarchy by your actual coloured people is a delight that most of us never imagined.

“More extreme leadership.” Well, if you murder about 50 of the experienced and highly qualified people in a country, including the revered leader of their religion which venerates martyrdom, then the survivors are not going to overlook it, especially the new supreme leader who was injured in the same attack that killed his father, mother, wife and sister (see this article which calls him a “hardliner” about 20 times and only mentions the deaths of his womenfolk in the last line). What do you people expect? If somebody blew away half of Groaner’s family, would that make him more moderate? I’ll tell you what they expected. Against all the advice of professionals in the military, the diplomatic corps and academia, not to mention the more level heads in the international community, Trump and Co. expected Iranians to fall on their knees and throw flowers and kisses at their “liberators.” Truly. Now that it hasn’t happened, the militants are genuinely put out and have no idea what to do, no Plan B.

“The IRGC are now the centre of gravity.” In wartime, the people who are charged with the actual defence of the nation do tend to drift to the centre of things, yes, that’s absolutely right. Clever boys, Donny and Benny, go to the top of the class. What a pity you didn’t think about this before you unleashed the poodles of war but there you are. If the people at the top of the hierarchy are short-sighted idiots, then obviously the processes they used to get there are corrupted.

“The US is blinking in the face of them.” Can we let you in on a little secret? If you start a war, you’re actually supposed to have something called “war aims.” This is a bit more complicated than aiming at a urinal, it involves something called “planning” and even “anticipated outcome.” Yes, I know, all these big words, it’s a strain, but if you say to the bombers “Go over there and start bombing,” you’re actually supposed to know WHY, you’re supposed to have an excuse for breaking the law. A bummer indeed but the Nuremberg tribunals sorted that out 80years ago and you’ve had long enough to study it. So we ask again: WHY is the US-Zionist axis bombing a country that has not attacked another country in 300years and that poses no conceivable threat to either of them? No idea. Groaner is right: the US is indeed blinking, but it’s as in: “WTF do we do now?” They really, genuinely, don’t know what to do. All these incredibly clever, educated, self-confident, self-important and pompous people only have one way of dealing with stroppy foreigners, bomb them. Like in Afghanistan, 20 years and a few hundred thousand deaths and environmental devastation and $2trillion, all to get rid of the Taliban but the day the Yanks pulled out, the Taliban took over again. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

“Iran is showing it can frighten the world by squeezing its throat.” Cause and effect, dear fellow, your mother would have told you: “If you pull pussy’s tail, she’ll scratch you.” For 25 years, Iran has trumpeted to anybody who would listen that if they were attacked again, they would close the Strait of Hormuz. For 25 years they stood holding up a map and pointing to the choke point saying: “If you attack us, we will choke you right here. So don’t attack us.” Nobody believed them, nobody listened; they were attacked so they closed the Strait. QED. Actually, they didn’t. Lloyds of London closed it by cancelling all the insurance policies for the ships. So don’t any of you clever people say you weren’t warned, because you were. Don’t say you didn’t expect it, as Trump said, because only a person living in a fantasy land could fail to see that attacking another country will invite retaliation. Oh, Trump, yes well he does live in fantasy land. One Benjamin Netanhooha has provided the furniture while Eli Groaner was the delivery driver. It seems that the entire US-Zio axis had convinced themselves that the Strait could only be closed by laying thousands of sea mines, and the US Navy could prevent that. How dumb are these people? How indescribably stupid and arrogantly short-sighted? The entire Yankee-Zio military and political establishment didn’t know that missiles don’t actually have to be fired to stop ships moving, that the threat is enough to scare insurers? Jesus wept, there is seriously no hope for the human race.

“One of the world’s critical energy arteries.” Probably a good idea to look at a map before you launch a war, then check what goes where. I admit I wasn’t aware of just how much of the world’s fertilisers come from the Persian Gulf but I knew it was a lot and I knew it would have an effect on the northern growing season, and that the Arab Spring came from rising bread prices. Et cetera.

“If the world treats Iran’s ability to close Hormuz as a veto to be managed...” Welcome to the new reality, junior. The people who have had guns pointed at their heads for the last few hundred years have realised they’ve got a few guns of their own. The world has had enough of Exceptional Nations and Chosen People wrecking the place. Also, if you’re all so clever and exceptional, what about you turn your minds to working out how to live in peace for a change? The US has been at war for all but eight of its 250 years of existence, and Zionism was built on the notion that the indigenous people of Palestine would never accept being pushed off their traditional lands, so war was the only option, as Gen. Moshe Dayan admitted:

The Israeli army is called a “defense force” but it is not a defensive army. … The Sinai campaign (1956), the reprisal acts and the raids across the border were purely offensive operations, and were of decisive value. … Not only the actions which were actually carried out but also the IDF’s prevailing conception is offensive … the IDF is a characteristically offensive army as regards theory, planning and execution, in body and spirit … Israel must be like a mad dog. Too dangerous to bother.

Compare that with Iran which, remarkably, has won this war by non-lethal means. What we’re seeing is the colllapse of the unipolar world, dominated by the US and its vassal states (including Australia), and the emergence of a multipolar world where various power centres have to negotiate on equal terms to balance their interests. Simply issuing diktats, punitive financial “sanctions” or sending gunboats has had its day. The US-Zionist-British-French imperialist buccaneers have finally driven the rest of the world to create a new world order, where a relatively unitary Eurasian land mass acts as a counter-balance to the peripheral empires of the US, UK, France, Japan and so on.

“Iran is actually influencing the rules of the global game.” They’re what? How dare they? It would be easy to mock this brazenly inane comment but the matter is too serious – the voiceless dead of Gaza plead for recognition. This is an admission by a person who is connected to everybody who is anybody in the world of international power politics, finance and the high crimes that flow from them, that their old game has run out of steam. The old game, the one developed by Spain in the Inca empires, France in North and West Africa and SE Asia, the Netherlands in Indonesia, Portugal here and there, and Britain and the US everywhere, is at an end. Party’s over, boys. Time to pick up your guns and your booze and drugs, your suitcases full of cash and your high class prostitutes and head home, where life just won’t be quite as much fun as it used to be. Look at seedy Britain, slowly sinking into the mud; their Victorian splendour was kept aloft by the breathtaking fortunes they were extracting from their colonies. Now that the colonies have closed the door, Britain is looking for a comfortable old people’s home. Get used to it because the world’s poor people have realised they have power and will not be giving it up again.

Groaner is right: there’s a new game in town. The old one was called “The rules-based international order,” which everybody knew meant “We make the rules and you obey the orders.” It was a racket from beginning to end, in which the gun and the shackles of slavery were replaced with the IMF loan and the tied grants and the preferential trade deals that benefited the West. This kept the darkies in their place in the bush where they could dig and quarry and harvest but they could never escape the shackles of monetary slavery and the omnipresent threat of “Step out of line, nigra, an’ we’ll stage a coup. An’ send you the bill.” So what else has Herr Groaner had to say?

“This is a strategic victory.” Insight dawns! Yessir, you’re absolutely right. You have indeed been dealt a humiliating defeat. You’ve lost the battle but you’ve also lost the far more important war for public sympathy. Finally, neoliberals and zionists stand exposed for what they are, greedy, brutal and utterly callous colonists who are intent on spreading chaos through a large part of the world just for their own enrichment, as WJ Clinton told the UN GA:

…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; various references).

Essentially, he meant “We clever Westerners have the guns to do what we like and you coloureds can’t stop us.” In fact, the whole Zionist idea is just a plan to get people’s land without paying for it, but Iran just said: “No you can’t, and here’s proof.” We, the innocent but interested bystanders in all this mayhem can only hope the message sinks in but Trump being Trump and his puppet master in Tel Aviv being who he is, I suspect they will need a further pummeling before they really understand what “NO” means.

“Disaster.” So were the ludicrously-named Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and a dozen others. The only success the US has achieved since World War II (and bear in mind it was actually the USSR that won that war) has been in stringing out wars indefinitely at great profit to the arms manufacturers and their good friends in Wall St. Other than that, disaster all round. Will they learn? Probably not, because the entire political process in the West has been suborned by neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is a socio-economic doctrine specifically designed to favour the power elite, to amplify their wealth so they can then invest it and create jobs for the hoi polloi. This is called “trickle down” economics and, so far, it has been staggeringly successful in its first part, sucking money out of the working and middle classes and handing it to the 1%. We’re waiting for them to invest it in creative jobs, except we now find all the jobs and all the money have gone offshore (see figures here from Robert Reich) .

Politics used to be about service; generally people had a career and then entered politics after they had been watched for decades and were then judged fit to roam the corridors of power. Now, it’s a career, in fact an impassioned vocation, which usually starts in high school and then only gets worse. Every young aspiring pollie needs a sponsor, and sponsors aren’t doing it out of love. Sponsors are investing, and they expect a return. They expect favourable laws and access to contracts and tax benefits, and that’s what they get. Everything is tilted in their favour. For example, the US is using its fleet of B2 bombers against Iran. The original plan was to build 160 of these but it stopped in 1996 after producing 21 as they were too expensive to build and run. Total cost then was $44.7 billion (equivalent to $92 billion in 2025), an average cost of $2.13 billion per plane (equivalent to $4.37billion in 2025), plus about $15million each per year to maintain. Meantime, Trump says the US can’t afford day care for children as it has wars to run. Wars that kill foreign children are more important than caring for your own.

Societies are inherently hierarchical but neoliberalism drives the process to extremes. It rewards political manipulation to the extent that conspiracy trumps policy (conspiracy is where two or more people meet in secret to organise something they could not achieve if it were known to the public). Neoliberalism favours the interests of one billionaire over a billion children’s interests, that’s what it’s intended to do and that’s what it does. But with this unbelievably stupid, unplanned, unauthorised, illegal, immoral and downright evil, unprovoked war of aggression, it seems the target has found a way to hit back. Good. Let’s hope it’s painful and causes governments to topple. Trouble is, the first people to feel the pain are the poor in India who can’t get cooking gas and the peasant farmers in Thailand who can’t fertilise their rice and the poor of Egypt who can’t afford bread. Poverty exists not because we can’t provide for the poor. It exists because it’s impossible to satisfy the rich. The doctrine behind Narcisso-Fascism says the wealthy and powerful never willingly surrender their wealth and power. The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they can hear the rumbling tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine. Bring it on.

****

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 neoliberal economic ideology says that individual freedom is a virtue and government interference a vice. As rational creatures, it continues, humans know what is best for them and should therefore be left to their own devices as the free market will provide efficiently for all. If this produces inequities of wealth, so be it as the market is self-correcting in that it rewards industry and punishes sloth; ergo poverty equals sloth. Accumulations of wealth are not bad as they must be invested which will produce jobs for all except the lazy, thereby lifting the community’s standards of living. Governments should stand back and let this happen; any interference must reduce economic efficiency to the detriment of all. The ideal government is therefore the smallest government that is needed to look after the jobs that nobody wants or can manage, but if nobody wants them, why bother with them? In essence, more money for rich encourages them to work harder, whereas more money for the poor encourages them to sit down and expect to be kept by the state.

The concepts behind Narcisso-Fascism say this is all wrong: humans are not invariably rational. A very large part of human behaviour is driven by the irrational urge to dominate others in any way possible, just because domination is biologically self-reinforcing. While most people are mostly motivated by a sense of fair play and constrained by a sense of decency, there are plenty of ratbags who see the opportunities for self-enrichment provided by neoliberalism and take over. Neoliberalism licenses this. It provides intellectual and moral cover for scoundrels whose arguments are deliberately at the level of: “If you oppose the free market, you oppose personal freedom and you therefore want a Stalinist dictatorship.” This tends to leave their (decent) opponents speechless so scoundrels of various degrees have taken over most of the world’s governments. That doesn’t say there weren’t scoundrels before the rise of neoliberalism, there have always been crooks but they have never been able to wield an economic argument justifying greed.

Neoliberalism started with a small group of economists in Vienna but soon transplanted to the US where it appealed to people who had a lot of money and wanted more. They were able to influence generations of economists although the Depression also left its mark. In turn, the economists influenced politicians to turn away from the post-war welfare state consensus, with its powerful unions, stringent regulation, high taxation and widespread government involvement in business and public services. Starting with Thatcher and Reagan, governments began divesting of their many and varied commercial enterprises such as airlines, railways, water and power utilities, etc. In practice, this meant selling them at knock-down prices to their mates and then getting a job on the board post-retirement. Unions were essentially broken, restrictive regulations shoved aside, welfare programs curtailed and so on. The goal was to free the market to work its magic on the economy. People were free to participate or not as they saw fit, but they couldn’t expect the government to pick them up if they sat and moaned about their lot. If they chose to starve or die of preventable diseases, well, whose fault was that?

The US was ground zero for the neoliberal experiment, although neoliberals object bitterly to that label. “Look at all the scientific research,” they bluster. “There has never been such a carefully controlled application of science to the economy.” Yes, there are indeed terabytes of data produced each day telling us how wonderful things are and how we should apply for another credit card and sit back to enjoy the ride. But data aren’t information, information isn’t knowledge, knowledge isn’t wisdom and wisdom isn’t painless.

I mentioned last week how neoliberal ideology is based on a false human psychology, essentially no psychology at all. When we look at the people involved, it starts to become clear that they weren’t exploring economics dispassionately. All too often, they started with a particular social-psychological viewpoint and then spent their careers trying to prove it right. We see the same thing in psychiatry, of course. Too many shrinks start their careers convinced mental disorder is biological and then shape their research to prove this point rather than let the results tell them what to believe. For economists, who like to think of themselves as sober, rational sorts, an economics without a psychology means they’re not at risk of being exposed as weirdos or ideologues: just sit there crunching the numbers and don’t take any notice of all those poor people in the street. They’re poor because they chose to be or they’re inferior beings who will be culled by the great Darwinian scythe. Buried under the prejudices economists bring to their research, we find the paradox of hierarchy, the fact that built into all of us is an urge to dominate and an opposite drive to avoid being dominated.

For neoliberal capitalists, the urge to dominate others prevails; for their tame ideologues, beavering away in their ivory towers, * the drive to avoid being dominated is the stronger and has coloured their entire output. Two different facets of the same biological phenomenon supporting the same political agenda: “I want to be free to dominate you so I can be richer,” and “Being free of oppression is more important than being free to screw the poor.” In their expression, these are personality factors which come from early life experiences (and not from genes): we can choose to dominate or we can choose to be fair; we can choose to submit or choose to resist. But these two drives can come together on the same side of the political divide as both groups firmly believe that individual freedom is the primary sociopolitical virtue. They just want it for different reasons.

Three figures, all larger than life, should be mentioned but we can only talk about two today: Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), Milton Friedman (1912-2006; Nobel Prize 1976) while the third, the Russian-American author, Ayn Rand (1905-1982, pronounced “yne”), was not an economist herself but influenced some very powerful figures in the profession. Friedman was such a prolific author that his writings have their own entry in Wikipedia. He more or less dominated American economics for decades but we’ll leave him for another day. Before we say anything, we need to talk about -isms, because there are a lot.

We’re accustomed to think of politics in terms of right wing and left, where the right is conservative and capitalist, and the left is radical and socialist. This is not a good classification. For example, ask anybody where fascism sits on this spectrum and they will point to the far right. That’s not correct. Fascism is a technology of gaining and holding power, and is freely used by left (Stalin, North Korea) and right (Hitler, modern Israel). A better analogy is of a political smorgasbord, where a large array of choices is on offer and politicians can mix and match as the fancy takes them. The political buffet has different forms of government (hereditary autocracy, democracy, theocracy, etc); different economic systems (individualist or monopoly private capitalism, collectivist or monopoly state capitalism, social welfare, dirigist etc); different doctrines (religious, secular, nationalist, racist, militarist, etc); different power structures (tolerant, authoritarian/totalitarian, centralised, dispersed, anarchist), and so on. Even that short list gives several hundred combinations of dishes rom the buffet; no wonder countries with apparently similar political structures often end up arguing.

Complicating this is the fact that politically-minded individuals will chop and change throughout their lives, picking up one doctrine for a while then later swapping to something else, even its opposite. Within and between groups, alliances form, deform, reform and dissolve; ideas move from one side to the other and back again, the only constant being that the people involved are all convinced they’re right and their opponents need to be smacked down. Generally, people start their political careers on the progressive-social welfare-egalitarian-internationalist-tolerant side of things and drift to the other side as they age, i.e. toward intolerant, conservative, nationalist, hierarchical opinions. Murray Rothbard didn’t. He started life almost as a caricature of the hardline, intolerant, arrogant far right wing teenager and didn’t so much as drift to the extreme or libertarian wing as gallop headlong. His early life took him through the Depression and World War II but as a comfortable middle-class New Yorker, he had a pretty easy time of it. At Columbia University in the 1940s and 50s, as one of the very few Republican supporters in the entire school, he swam against the “tide of extreme leftists” (essentially normal students), emerging as a “libertarian.”

Libertarianism is an extreme version of classic liberalism, which developed during the Enlightenment as a reaction against the theocracies and hereditary autocracies of Europe. Liberalism says the free individual is supreme; it values freedom of thought, assembly, religion, movement, commerce, etc. Liberaliasm is secular, rational, progressive, with its eyes firmly fixed on the future. Taken to extreme, libertarians oppose any form of external control by governments etc; they generally oppose taxation for any purpose other than police and military; oppose social safety nets or public services on the basis that anything the government touches is necessarily inefficient and oppressive, and so on. The ultimate form is what are called “sovereign individuals,” a motley bunch who insist that nobody is allowed to tell them what to do under any circumstances. This is actually a variant of the paranoid personality disorder but there is no dividing line between hard-line but sane libertarians and these ultra-extremists, whose pathological hatred of authority periodically erupts into gunfights with police. While Rothbard was never violent or advocated it, they are all drenched in the same ideology, all talking the same language of domination: “Don’t tread on me because I will fight back.”

On graduating, Rothbard started teaching but was soon picked up by a fund that promoted right wing ideologies. He was supported by them to write a textbook which emerged in 1962 as Man, Economy and State, a 1460 page doorstopper (I have no plans to read it). Later, he was supported by the Koch brothers (pronounced ‘coke,’ which is appropriate), billionaire sons of Fred Koch, one of the founders of the protofascist John Birch Society and a major investor in refining in Nazi Germany. Rothbard’s work was directed at providing intellectual cover for a rapacious, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Although he spent his entire life in and around universities and the rapidly growing far right think tanks, he was always regarded as fringe and was never accepted by the mainstream. Nonetheless, whatever standing he lacked in academia, he made up in the febrile, fractious and often bizarre world of far right politics. At different times, he was close friends with Sen. Joe McCarthy; with David Duke, the scurrilous former grand wizard of the KKK; and a variety of holocaust deniers. It is a measure of his internal contradictions that he often referred to Jews as “kikes” even though he was himself Jewish. This meant he was on a collision course with the Jewish state as he was a lifelong opponent of wars and colonialism.

In a short piece from 1967, decrying the cancer of socialism in America (truly) [1], he mocked government and taxes as misdirected and wasteful in that they encourage people to think they can get a free ride. Conservatives moaned that the country was being brought to its knees by “liberal intellectuals, aided and abetted by trade unions and farmers,” but they neglected to mention that the real danger was actually big business working behind the scenes, that “war, culminating in the present garrison state and military-industrial economy, has been the royal road to aggravated statism in America.” The welfare state was allegedly built to serve the poor but the poor were actually the overweaning state’s victims, through being conscripted to fight in foreign wars, to work as wage slaves while being hit hardest by the mortal sin of income tax, and so on. In other places, he attacked egalitianism, women’s rights, civil rights and the welfare state as the products of men dominated by their mothers and wives, of Jewish women and lesbian spinsters “whose busybody inclinations are not fettered by the responsibilities of home and hearth.” Nobody escaped his acid tongue, which suited his avaricious paymasters to the ground.

Rothbard argued with everybody, starting, joining and leaving groups or making and breaking friendships with abandon. Even though he was never an establishment figure, he knew everybody: during his childhood, his family’s neighbour and close friend was Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1970-78. Burns helped introduce him to many powerful people, which brings to mind a comment by Rachel Ball of the Human Rights Law Centre: “It’s easy to stand atop a mountain of privilege, and tell those at the bottom of the mountain that privilege is irrelevant.” One of Rothbard’s on-again, off-again friendships was with the author, self-styled philosopher and enfant terrible, Ayn Rand. This quite bizarre woman’s reputation rested mainly on two epic novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). When I was 16, a friend at school lent me Fountainhead, saying it was the greatest thing he had ever read. I thought it was odd, I couldn’t understand why people could be so selfish but, of course, selfishness just was her philosophy. Of Atlas, John Rogers said:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I tried to read it once but soon gave up, bored by the cardboard characters and what I now see as its narcissism. Nonetheless, she had a major influence in the US, for example, she was close friends with Alan Greenspan, the longest serving chairman of the US Federal Reserve (1987-2006) who famously failed to see the GFC coming as he thought the free market would act rationally to preserve itself (he also said: “Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said,” 1987). Rand’s philosophy, called “Objectivism,” is summed up by a well-known passage in Atlas:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

This quote, her leitmotif, is taken as gospel by millions. In reality, it says: “The unrestrained individual is the highest social good. My happiness is my only moral justification. If I want something, I get it but I am not responsible for how you feel about it. How you live, or even if you live or die, is no concern of mine.” It directly licences the wanton selfishness and disregard of the Epstein class. Ayn Rand was a psychopath, no question about that. She was domineering, almost grotesquely narcissistic, paranoid and argued with everybody. She never gained any sort of academic or literary approval during her life time which offended her greatly. These days, as the high priestess of egotism, she is widely read by incels, the alt-right, QAnon followers, neonazis and deniers of all sizes, shapes and inclinations, as well as by right wing politicians of all stripes, capitalists, libertarians, sovereign citizens and various other whizzbangs, religious fanatics and fruitcakes. There is no psychology as such in her work, just her opinions.

Rothbard was greatly offended by the welfare state as he believed it was an enormous fraud imposed on society by a small power elite for their benefit:

In sum, the most important fact about (Lyndon Johnson’s) Great Society under which we live is the enormous disparity between rhetoric and content. In rhetoric, America is the land of the free and the generous, enjoying the fused blessings of a free market tempered by and joined to accelerating social welfare, bountifully distributing its unstinting largesse to the less fortunate in the world. In actual practice, the free economy is virtually gone, replaced by an imperial corporate state Leviathan that organizes, commands, exploits the rest of society and, indeed, the rest of the world, for its own power and pelf. We have experienced, as Garet Garrett keenly pointed out over a decade ago, a “revolution within the form.” The old limited republic (of the Constitution) has been replaced by Empire, within and without our borders [1].

True. Couldn’t agree more. Watching what the US has become and what it is doing to itself and the world, Rothbard is surely turning in his grave even though he is responsible at least in part for the looming catastophe. He, Rand and so many others are fascist enablers, and it’s all because their “neoliberalism” is an ideology of human behaviour with no basis in a formal theory of psychology. It assumes that, bound by a minimum set of rules, people will act rationally. They do: they make as much money as they can by throttling everybody else. What was missing was something to make them act decently. As a result, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and Netanyahu and all the gang came along, found the myriad loopholes where people are expected to do the right thing, and leapt right in. These people are not aberrations, they are the products of neoliberalism, a psychopathic sociopolitical system that has no means of stopping them. And the world suffers.

* If you want to know, the expression comes from Song of Solomon 7:4. “Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus.” Doesn’t seem very romantic to me.

Reference:

1. Rothbard, M (1967). The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique. First published in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, edited by Marvin E. Gettleman and David Mermelstein (New York: Vintage, 1967). Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20150618045339/http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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