2: Explaining International Relations as Anarchy.

This series of posts looks at international relations through the lens of the biocognitive model. Each post is a single essay, although they may sometimes be too long for the platform and will be published as two posts, on the same day or a week apart, depending on how energetic I feel. Each essay will build on what has gone before so it will be better to start at the beginning and work forward. The goal is to show that, if we want to make sense of the world scene, we have to look at it from the right perspective. At different times, people have suggested that the correct perspective is hedonism, that, as Orwell put it, “human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.” A few minutes watching the evening news leaves no doubt that this can’t be true, that we enjoy nothing better than inflicting pain on each other and will happily endure agony in the hope of beating our neighbours.

The central idea behind Narcisso-Fascism is that humans have an innate, biological drive to try to dominate each other, and an opposite but equally powerful drive to resist domination. At both the micro- or dyadic level and the macro- or international scale, human relations are very largely determined by this conflict. Domination is the only political force for which we have a non-circular explanation, as distinct from description. The difference between explanation and description is important and will become clearer as we progress. That does not, however, mean this is an exercise in biological reductionism. It means that, under the influence of biology, what we think are rational decisions are actually seriously biased to the point of being self-destructive. While our social organisation is very largely shaped by this biological imperative, human society has now outgrown our heritage and needs a new orientation.

Comments are welcome. If there is somebody whose work I haven’t panned, please let me know, I’d hate any of our puffed-up academics and politicians to miss out.

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The original impetus for the biocognitive model [1] was to give a mentalist account of mental disorder for psychiatry. However, an effective model of mental disorder depends on a prior theory of mind, so what started as a project within psychiatry soon expanded to become a general theory of mind. The result is a natural dualist theory, i.e. it says the ontologically distinct and causally effective mind emerges from the brain by rational processes that we may one day be able to duplicate. The biocognitive model confirms that we have free will but it also shows how, in many areas of life, our decisions are influenced by cryptic biological factors. The stronger we feel about an issue, the more likely it is to be driven by biological imperatives about which the overwhelming majority of people know nothing. Actually, less than nothing: all too often, what we feel is a rational decision reached freely after due consideration has been heavily influenced by biology, but which we then try to justify post hoc.

It is the predictability of our behaviour that amounts to a human nature, one which happens to be common to most higher primates. The old idea that we are halfway between angels and animals is false. In many of our most consequential decisions, we are firmly in the grip of our higher primate nature, essentially just clever apes with opposed thumbs. Just like our simian cousins, once we satisfy our elementary survival needs – air, food, water, shelter –our most obvious drive is that we are social animals. We automatically gravitate toward other humans to form families, tribes, clans and ultimately nations. Isolated humans experience a variable level of anxiety and distress which is abolished by the company of other humans: our mental stability depends on physical and emotional contact with familiar humans. That’s why, after the death penalty, the most severe punishments are solitary confinement or exile.

Invariably, after forming groups, our next move is to sort ourselves into dominance hierarchies, firstly within the group and then between groups. The reason is wholly biological and has nothing to do with efficient communication or other high-minded ideas. It is common to all species studied, from birds to fish to reptiles and, of course, all other mammals. Dominance hierarchies are the direct result of that troublesome but vital hormone, testosterone, and are therefore normal throughout nature. Testosterone is a powerful anabolic hormone, almost universally distributed in nature, and has a wide range of effects throughout the body. Beside its obvious metabolic effects, it is a “feel good” hormone, with the immediate effect of making us feel strong and confident – and we love it. For just this reason, we are strongly inclined to favour activities that boosts our circulating levels while actively avoiding anything that lower it. Of course, we don’t know why we do these things as we don’t know anything about our hormone levels. All we know is that this feels good, so we do it, and that feels bad so we avoid it.

Needless to say, the sexual urge is the strongest stimulus for testosterone secretion but, obviously (and fortunately), it doesn’t last very long. As a powerful, long-term stimulus to testosterone secretion, dominating other people has no equal. That is, due to its effect on our hormonal economy, winning creates its own reward. Similarly, being dominated or losing status in any way is powerfully inhibitory of the hormone. It is because of abrupt changes in their testosterone levels that winners feel exultant and losers slink away to hide and lick their wounds. This is as true of bulls in a paddock or dogs in the street as it is of humans. However, it is also because of testosterone that people interpret neutral events in the environment as challenges and are driven to respond aggressively to them, in a self-reinforcing cycle. As a rough approximation, testosterone is the paranoid hormone: it alerts us to threats and gets us ready to deal with them, but it also makes us see too many and, crucially, refuse to back down. It is the “Stand your ground” hormone.

Within the chaos of international relations, the testosterone system is the “unseen mechanism that links the observations in a causal sense.” Given the observations on which John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism is based (see Substack December 5^th 2024), testosterone is the specific mechanism that converts mere description of chaos into an explanation of chaos. Hormonal effects are real but, for the individual, the chemicals themselves are unseen and almost entirely unknown (testosterone was first isolated in the early 1930s). Its effects, such as the urge to win, to dominate, to crush the opposition, are true of all animals, including the human animal, and, naturally enough, are strongest in males. Indeed, domination is so much part of us that mostly, we don’t even recognise its influence. We accept the idea of competition and struggling to win as a natural part of life. There is no such thing as enough: seeing somebody who has more drives us mad: not being on top whips us to a frenzy. In that state, and regardless of any common sense reasons to keep a low profile or to ignore the challenge, we do insane things like attack our neighbours (more detailed accounts of this phenomenon, known as the Challenge Hypothesis, are found in [1, 2]).

At all times and in all ways, the hormonally-driven urge to dominate the human and the natural environment controls our thinking. For us, dominating The Other is second nature and we never question it. It’s so basic that we’ve even written it into our religions: Genesis 1:26-28, dominion over all the earth… Hardly anybody ever asks: “But why do we need to win? Who cares?” Everything we do is designed to take us to the top and keep us there. Above all, people who get to the top are exactly the people who are least likely to examine their motives. To them, fighting to get to the top and keeping everybody else down is the natural order of things; anybody who disagrees must be silenced before the seditious idea spreads to the other underlings. Of course, fighting to get to the top is just half the story; the other half is that, just as we all love to win and dominate, so we all hate losing and being dominated. This leads to what we can call the paradox of hierarchy: dominating others feels good, being dominated by others feels bad. Therefore, no human relationship can satisfy all parties at once.

This is the core of all instability in human affairs: necessarily, inevitably, everybody will fight to be dominant but, with equal force, everybody will fight to avoid being conquered and forced into submission. It’s not like the sexual drive, where individuals are mutually attracted and everybody can win, the good news being that it doesn’t last. In the dominance drive, we see one person wanting to prove who’s boss and the other resisting, and this doesn’t stop. As soon as we wake in the morning, it starts again. The drive to dominate automatically leads to instability. Even people who don’t want to fight are forced to do so in order to avoid being enslaved or slaughtered. The paradox of hierarchy is real, it is solidly based in biology and, like the very noses on our faces, it is so central to our existence that it’s unseen. With it, we can explain the anarchy of international relations as well as most of the ceaseless brawling that we call history. It is the basis of the struggle between the sexes, between young and old, white and black, rich and poor, healthy and ailing – everything bad about human society.

Lacking a theory of mind, this is the point that Mearsheimer and all the other IR experts have missed. He says international relations are anarchic so, in order to avoid being crushed, nations must build their military strength and exert hegemony over their neighbours. That’s actually back to front: international relations are chaotic just because nations build their strength in order to dominate their neighbours since that’s what humans do. States try to dominate each other just because their constituent elements, their citizens, do it. As primates, we are genetically equipped with this drive to dominate. We never question it, we love it, we wouldn’t stop it even if we could, and we abhor the opposite, being dominated. We cheerfully send our youth to be killed while bankrupting our nations (in fact, it only kills and bankrupts the poor) in order to force our neighbours to submit. This is why, for the US, the thought of having to share equal top place with China drives them completely mad. Just as we now ignore Hitler’s claim that, by virtue of their innate superiority, the German races had a right to Slavic lands, we can now ignore America’s endless pious posturing. Their platitudes are window dressing, mere justification for what our hormones are telling us to do, except they’ve got more weapons.

In his “offensive realism,” Mearsheimer saw only half the issue, the chaos between nations, but thought that by identifying it and describing it, he had completed his task. This is incorrect as he offered only the preliminaries to an explanation. Ominously, less educated and less subtle people than the professor (meaning all politicians, businessmen, generals, etc) will read what he has to say and assume he has said it all. International relations are irredeemably anarchic, they read, therefore get in first. “Oh boy,” they tell each other, “that’s what we always wanted to do. Offence is the only form of defence, the winner takes all and the poor get crumbs because that’s the nature of international affairs. Who are we to question it?” By failing to provide an explanation for the anarchy, he defaults to chaos as the natural state of affairs between nations. Essentially, he justifies aggression and arms races, brutal commercial exploitation and ruthless self-interest as the only valid stance between nations. In essence, Mearsheimer licenses fascism in the pursuit of imperialism.

All this is because the thrill of power is its own reward. The drive to dominate is what drives politics, and business, and sport, and academia, and the arts, and religion (especially religion), and relations between men and women, and between men and men and between women and women, and adults and children, and the rich and poor, and office politics and the local tennis club - pretty well everything we do. Because winning is everything, the concept of ‘enough’ is self-contradictory. Just ask Mr Musk or Mr Trump.

The view today.

With this in mind, let’s look at international relations today, December 10^th 2024. Wherever you look, it’s chaos and getting worse by the hour. Currently, we are suffering under the dead hands of what must be the worst crop of politicians in world history. In view of the jobs they are charged with, they, with very few exceptions, are not just useless mediocrities but are actively destructive of their nations and of the world. Even those who are actually trying to do the right thing (Pres. Lula of Brazil comes to mind) are barely able to achieve anything because everybody else is trying to destroy them and take control themselves. But that’s just an opinion. What counts is the evidence we see: utter disaster in Darfur; genocide in Gaza; mayhem in Ukraine; brutal patriarchy in Afghanistan; Syria falling apart; fighting here, there and everywhere. Every one of these is caused by one group trying to dominate and control their neighbours, if not wipe them out. They’re not fighting because they don’t have enough to survive, as world production is more than enough for everybody to have a good standard of living. They fight because their thinking is totally controlled by their hormones such that not fighting, not dominating, equals submission, and submission equals living death. And looming over today’s political chaos is the ultimate catastrophe, global warming.

Do not doubt that the people who think trying to destroy their neighbours is a worthy, even holy ambition have zero concern for what their actions are doing to the natural environment. The people who send bombers to flatten cities or drop cluster bombs on farmland have absolutely no interest in or concern for the long term effects of their actions. The fate of the planet doesn’t enter their individual or collective consciousness just because their minds are fixated on winning. On the micro scale of driving a small animal to extinction, or on the macro scale of driving everything to extinction, nothing concerns them except winning here and now. Winning is all they think about because, for them, not winning is inconceivable. That’s how they came to be in the positions they’re in. In fact, if they thought you didn’t like their actions because of the effect on, say, a small bird in a patch of forest, they would probably have the forest napalmed to rub your nose in their power, just to humiliate you. Among human pleasures and joys, the delirium of power stands alone. Power is the aphrodisiac that gives a life-long climax.

Using the biocognitive model, we can look at four examples and see if we can make some sort of sense of them. The first is the growing conflict between the US and China, the second the festering war in Ukraine, the third the spreading catastrophe in the Middle East and the last - and least - the so-called AUKUS pact between Australia, the US and the UK. There’ll be others along the way.

China

According to the US, China is an aggressively expansionist power that must be contained. As a result, trade and financial sanctions have been imposed, along with restrictions on educational and scientific activities, even in third countries that have no complaints against China. Having won the presidency, Trump seems determined to double and redouble these hostile acts. Objectively, this is very strange. On the face of it, the US and China have a great deal to gain from cooperation in trade and finance, research, international governance, the arts and so on, yet the US is hell-bent on isolating China and crippling its industries. This is especially true of the high-tech industries which the US has long regarded as its own. In reality, however, there is no financial, security or other rational reason for the US to fear China: China is not a threat to the US, and that’s all there is to that. The reason for this surge of war-like activity is clear, and it is totally irrational. American politicians, officials, businessmen and military, meaning the 1-2% of Americans who actually have a say in the country’s policies, are mortally offended by the idea that they may have to stand on the same step as, or, horror or horrors, one rung below, a foreign nation, especially Asian. After nearly a century of believing that their country is the Exceptional Nation, the Shining Light of Democracy, the Beacon on the Hill and all that, second place is simply unthinkable. The thought dumbfounds them, it is utterly beyond their comprehension. They would rather gouge their eyes out than open them and see Chinese standing on the top rung.

The “China threat” is wholly a matter of the US wanting to remain Number One in the world in all respects. The slogan “China is a threat to the US” says much more about the US than it does about China. “Full spectrum dominance” they call it, where ‘dominance’ is the operative word. This means in every field – military, political, financial, scientific, industrial, agricultural, sport, entertainment, you name it – America just has to be Número uno. But the word ‘spectrum’ must not be overlooked. In the 19^th Century, Britain dominated all those fields but since then, a new universe has opened. This is the world of digital information, in which we are all totally immersed, but with about the same level of awareness as fish have of the water that supports them.

The goal of the US National Security Agency is total control of all electronic transfers or stores of information from all points of the globe for all people, living and dead, now and forever. Every conceivable communication is collected, scanned, classified and stored for them to pick over at their leisure. If they want some dirt on you from 15 years ago, they’ve got it. It’s all there, everything, phones, internet, every package delivered to your home, everything you look at, browse, send to a friend, every penny you spend on your card, where you spend it, every place your phone goes and who you talk to, the lot. To this end, the US has built a gigantic repository in Utah which will never run out of space to store your stuff. Never. They can just keep adding memory until the end of time, and their scanning programs are getting better every day. So when they say “full spectrum dominance,” that is precisely what they mean: they want total control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, knowledge of all possible fields of human activity, for all time. Why do they want this? So they can dominate everybody, as they frequently say:

William J Clinton, addressing the UN, Sept. 27^th 1993: “…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.” (see that? Entitled. He believed it)

Madeleine Albright (interview, Feb 19^th 1998) “If we have to use force it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

Joseph Biden, campaigning, 2020: “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake. The most powerful nation in the history of the world.”

William F. Buckley, 1957: “The white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically” (this principle, known as Macht hat Recht, has long been applied internationally).

We therefore need to ask: Is this actually mad, a vast, collective paranoid psychosis gripping the American psyche? We’ll come back to this point but first, all this stuff about “the Exceptional Nation, the Shining Light of Democracy, the Beacon on the Hill and all that,” that’s secondary. That’s the rationale that was dreamed up after the event of wanting to be No. 1. At the first sign of a threat, and with no more than perfunctory justification, all the high-sounding talk of self-determination and free trade and rule of law, etc., goes out the window. By abruptly imposing sanctions on anybody they choose, dumping all the “principles” they have patchily imposed on the world since 1945, they have exposed the entire “rules-based international order” to be nothing more than rules written largely by Americans for lesser people to obey unquestioningly, but not for the US itself. In other words, it’s all a gigantic fraud set up by, and for the benefit of, Uncle Sam.

It could have been different. The West, meaning the US, could have spent the last eighty years building a viable and effective system of international rules and institutions but they didn’t. It would have handicapped them too much. Instead, we have the World Trade Organisation hobbled because the US refuses to allow appeals judges to be appointed to the Appellate Body. The International Criminal Court is hamstrung as the US is not a member and has made it clear that if any American or Israeli is arrested, it will invade the Netherlands and rescue them. It is not a member of the UN Convention of the Law on the Sea. It uses its status as issuer of the world’s reserve currency to conduct economic warfare on any nation that fails to bow down obsequiously. It imposes sanctions and blockades by the thousand, even though these have always been regarded as acts of war. It interferes ceaselessly in other countries’ governments, promoting coups and assassinating leaders at its pleasure. If the US can’t get what it wants, it bombs and invades countries without a second thought, leaving unspeakable chaos in its wake.

Needless to say, ordinary Americans are never asked whether they support this psychopathic behaviour. For Mrs Alice Average in Albuquerque or Mr Mike Median in Mobile, who know nothing about the rest of the world and care even less, their country’s conduct overseas never enters their minds. This is partly educational, in that they know nothing about the larger world, partly because what happens in the Good Ol’ US of A occupies all their time but mostly because of what they are fed in their media. If, or rather when, China is Number One and the US Number Two, their lives will not be altered one iota, except the new toaster, made in Shenzhen, will be better and cheaper than the old one made in Cleveland. US foreign policy, however, is not decided by average voters. They vote for any party which promises that nobody will ever kick sand in Uncle Sam’s face, then they go back to sleep for four years while the 1-2% get on with plundering the world. But China is not, never has been and never will be, a threat to any aspect of the US apart from its fragile self-esteem. All the world’s 1.4billion Chinese are saying is: “Don’t threaten us. We are not coolies to be ordered around, we are a great and proud nation, so treat us with the respect you demand for yourselves.”

The American obsession with keeping China underfoot has no basis in reality. The whole thing is conceit, a last flurry of testosterone pumping around withered veins in old men who are incapable of saying “Enough is enough, we don’t need more. Let’s work together.” And for this, the US is getting ready to pull down the temple of international trade.

References:

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

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