Addled by Power

Humanity’s lust to dominate

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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Jonathan Cook, now aged about 60, is a British journalist and author with dual Israeli citizenship (via his Palestinian-Israeli wife) who lived in Nazareth for some years. He has written extensively about the endless Zionist-Palestinian conflict and is widely regarded as one of the most informed and objective commentators in the field of Middle East/West Asia studies. His Substack file is here. In a post earlier this week, he reported how the current leader of Britain’s Conservative opposition party blurted out that Britain is “fighting a proxy war via Israel,” which must have made their entire military/spying/financial/industrial establishment gag on their Pimm’s (it seems Microsoft doesn’t recognise Pimm’s, so here it is. Ghastly stuff). A reader asked:

What goes on in the power-addled brains of these mass-murdering politicians? How do they sleep?

The answer to that is: Apart from worrying about their accounts in the Bahamas or whether their mistress needs an abortion, they mostly sleep very well. Are their brains addled? No, except for over-indulging in the free Moet and unless their name is Trump, in the main, their brains are not addled at all. In fact, many of them are at the sharp end of the scale and enjoy using their talents to find ever-more creative ways of doing their opponents in in order to sneak another few steps up the great stairway of power. They sleep with the assurance of people who feel they are rising in the power structure, winning in life’s eternal battle to slide up the dominance hierarchy and avoid being pushed down again. But it’s not just politicians. They are, after all, human, and the obsession with winning is one of the defining features of Homo sapiens, as a recent poll in Israel revealed (MEE report here; Owen Jones here; I can’t find the original English version on the Haaretz site).

The poll is reliable. It showed that 82% of Jewish Israeli respondents supported the expulsion of all Palestinian residents from Gaza. They were not asked where the Gazans should go, nor whether they were supporting a crime against humanity, only whether they should be pushed out. 56% supported the expulsion of all Arab citizens of Israel, regardless of how long they had lived there, which is also a crime. When asked the next question, 47% replied “Yes”:

Do you support the claim that the [Israeli army] in conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, i.e. to kill all its inhabitants?

Do you support the mass and indiscriminate murder of civilians, women and men, young and old, able and disabled, just because we want their land? 47% said Yes, and we can be fairly sure that quite a few of the “Not sure” group would have replied Yes if they weren’t embarrassed. What’s going on? How come apparently civilised and religious people can shrug off genocide with a sniff? How come the leader of HM loyal opposition in the UK can freely and cheerfully bray that her country is actively participating in the defining crime of this century, and laugh about it? How come the newly-elected government in Australia can continue to sit on its hands and refuse to join other countries in condemning the starvation of Gaza? The answer is: That’s what humans do, that’s what humans are. It’s not just a few wicked men who manage to get power, it’s us. Bad men don’t get power and hang on unless “We the people” approve.

The fact is, we humans are not nice creatures. Our biology is tilted in a particular direction, one which may once have had survival value but is now driving us headlong to destruction. It needs to be trained out of us, starting very early, but that isn’t happening. What, then, is going on in the power-addled brains of these mass-murdering politicians? Precisely that, the lust for power and domination takes over and what used to seem murderous now seems like civil duty or just plain good fun. Remember that troops roaring around in tanks or flying an F-35 fighter-bomber are having a great time, they love every second of it.

The biology of human domination is well understood, not least because it’s practically the same as the biology of every other animal studied, mammals, reptiles, birds and even fish [1, 2]. Dominant animals feel better than those pushed to the ground; the powerful strut around, shoving the weaklings aside and grabbing the best of everything for themselves. Going up the dominance hierarchy feels good; going down again feels bad; being at the bottom is the worst. That’s nature, that’s how powerful genes are transmitted, but it’s not just males, females are also into power in a big way, even if a bit more discreet. Some aren’t so shy, however.

While the Israeli military (which has a lot of female members) keep themselves busy shooting children in Gaza, a quiet pogrom is taking place in the occupied West Bank, where the “settler movement” is actively engaged in its long term project of removing all Palestinians from their traditional lands, replacing them with Jewish civilians. In this project, Israeli citizens who have illegally occupied Palestinian land are actively supported and armed by the police and army, who protect them from any consequences of what are, under Israeli law, major crimes. One of the main leaders of the settler movement is a woman, Daniella Weiss, born in the former Mandated Palestine in 1945 (80 this year). She openly advocates the removal of all non-Jews from the area designated “Greater Israel,” meaning Israel proper plus large parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and West Bank, northern Sinai (Egypt) and even chunks of Saudi Arabia.

Weiss has been politically active most of her life and has a police record for petty violence and urging illegal acts. From about age 25, she was involved with an ultra-extremist religious/nationalist movement called Gush Emunim, since dissolved but highly influential in driving Israeli politics to the hard right (Nahum Goldmann describes the origin and impact of this and similar movements in [3]). Weiss knows everybody and has the most extensive international contacts, especially with the enormously wealthy ultra-Zionist movement in the US who have funded most of the illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories (Israel recently approved another 22 such settlements, which involve driving the Palestinians from their homes and farms at gunpoint). There are people who try to excuse her as “fringe” or even “crackpot” but people she has mentored over many years now sit in the Israeli cabinet in key ministries. In the ultra-nationalist extreme right, she is as mainstream as it gets.

There is not the slightest shadow of doubt in Weiss’ mind: starting with Gaza and moving later to the West Bank, all evidence of indigenous Palestinian occupation of their traditional lands must be obliterated and replaced with Jewish settlements. This continues long-standing Israeli policy of bulldozing Palestinian villages and overplanting them with tree plantations so no trace of them remains. Daniella Weiss knows every bit of this history back to front. We’re not talking about somebody in Sydney trying to keep up with what goes on in Perth, 3,500 km away, we’re talking about places within a few minutes drive of the Knesset, or parliament. She eagerly gives interviews where she sets out her “vision” of Israel Eretz, fully aware that it is illegal and immoral in every conceivable sense. She wants to dominate, and will stop at nothing in her goal. Is she a freak? Is she certifiably insane? No, that is precisely what humans do. All that changes is how open the person is about it, and the degree of savagery s/he is prepared to use to dominate other people. And hers is savage, although she normally gets other people to do it.

Crucially, she is fully aware at all times precisely what she is doing. She is not in any way mentally-disordered. Evil, but not crazy, which raises a central point in understanding human violence. The original Zionist movement was purely political, to provide a national home for Jews where they would be safe from persecution. The first organisers thought of going to Argentina, or Uganda, and apparently the British even toyed with the idea of giving them Tasmania. Soon, they settled on returning to Palestine, even though there is a significant religious group that says such a move is forbidden. It was sold to Jews as “God promised us this land,” and to the gentiles as “A people without land for a land without people,” even though everybody knew there were at least 1.2million Muslim, Christian and Jewish Palestinians living there at the time.

The divine promise was part of a covenant between Jews and their god, Yahweh, whom, they believe, told them: “I will give you this land…” This belief led to the first recorded episodes of ethnic cleansing in history, which brings up the contradiction in Weiss’ politics: there are 613 commandments (mitzvot) in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament (full list here). Prominent among them are the Mosaic laws known as the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 3-17):

Thou shalt have no other gods before me (Ex.20:3).

Thou shalt not kill (Ex.20:13).

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house … nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s (Ex.20:17).

The laws go much, much further and specify all sorts of restrictions and dire punishments for transgressors. One little known law even says: Do not destroy fruit trees (Deut. 20:19-20). It is, however, widely forgotten that the word covenant means an agreement that goes both ways: “I will do this for you but you must do that for me under threat of penalty.” This is significant because the Covenant actually says: “I will give you this land if you follow my law.” If not …

… for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments (Ex. 20:5-6; emphasis added).

“Keep my commandments.” As far as contracts go, it seems pretty clear: Do as you’re told and you’ll get rewards but play up and down comes the chopper. Let’s see how the modern generation measure up. As far as not coveting thy neighbour’s property goes, that didn’t even get a look in. It was known from the beginning of the Zionist project that the indigenous population of Palestine went back to pre-Biblical times and would not take kindly to being pushed out by an influx of European colonists. Writing to his son in 1937, David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, said: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…” A year later he said in a speech, “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. …” Goldmann quoted him from 1956, just before the invasion of Egypt [3]:

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 the beginning, there was never any doubt that the Jewish state coveted the entirety of their neighbours’ land and property, and intended to expel all Muslim Palestinians to get it. In 2006, Jonathan Cook wrote:

Israel is beginning a long, slow process of ethnic cleansing both of Palestinian non-citizens from parts of the occupied territories that it has long coveted for its expanded Jewish state, and of Palestinian citizens from inside its internationally recognized borders [4].

In fact, that process had begun nearly a century before (for more quotes of Ben-Gurion’s self-declared intent, see here). Moving on, “Thou shalt not kill.” With anything up to a quarter of a million dead civilians in Gaza, plus all the others, it would appear that Ms Weiss has some explaining to do. Just a week ago, an Israeli bomber dropped a large bomb on the family home of Dr Alaa al Najjar, killing nine of her ten children. Her husband, also a doctor, died a few days later. The Israeli intent was to kill him, as they have selectively targeted medical and nursing staff throughout; the children were known to be there but whether they died was of no concern to the Israelis.

As for having no other gods, the land formerly known as Palestine seems to have become a god in its own right, or certainly an idol to kill for. Dropping a bomb on a civilian’s home would seem to be an act of supreme cowardice but it is justified by the idea that the Palestinians have to be driven off the sacred soil of Israel Eretz. That, in any terms, is idolatry, and deserving of severe punishment. As for destroying fruit trees, one of the first things the “settlers” do when forcing Palestinians off their land is destroy their centuries-old olive trees and vineyards.

On the face of it, there appears to be no effort or intent to obey the laws dictated by their god. Where is their sacred covenant? Well, if you ask the people doing the killing and burning, they have a watertight excuse: Palestinians aren’t “people” in the sense the Commandments dictate. They’re “human animals” and therefore can be eradicated as anybody else eradicates rats and cockroaches. That’s all there is to it. Just as the Germans did in the 1930s and 40s, as the US did for hundreds of years regarding its indigenous and slave populations, as Britain did across its world-spanning empire, including in Australia … in fact, just as practically every race has done throughout history, The Others are denied their humanity. As humans, we want to dominate; The Other gets in the way, so we reclassify The Other as an animal and that turns all the ensuing crimes into mere acts of sanitation: “Mowing the lawn,” as the Israelis called their regular bombing raids on the defenceless Gaza Strip. That is what Daniella Weiss does, and all her good friends in the Israeli government and the Israeli military and their wealthy friends and supporters in the US and UK and Germany and Australia and everywhere else.

The point is this: If a people who barely survived a genocide can, within a few years, turn into genocidaires themselves, then it can happen to anybody. Humanity’s insane drive to dominate is in action all the time, everywhere, non-stop: internationally, in your country, in your town and workplace and school and home, on your TV and sports fields and in every competition, because that is how we have come to define ourselves. The Americans can’t conceive of being No. 2 to China, but China is saying: “No more, the centuries of shame and humiliation are over,” so the US is rocking the boat furiously when cooperation would yield far greater benefits. In 1948, the white South Africans set up their Apartheid state to keep the African population down but if they’d educated and encouraged 25million very energetic and intelligent people, they would all have been far better off now (the Apartheid government spent 11 times as much on each white child’s education as on African children). That same year, Israel could have created a genuinely democratic state but they were determined to press ahead with their own version of apartheid, and the fighting is still going on. As Goldmann predicted.

So to go back to the question at the beginning, “What goes on in the power-addled brains of these mass-murdering politicians? How do they sleep?” In fact, their brains are fine, nothing wrong with them. The problem lies in their minds, which are power-addled, meaning the lust for power is now in the driver’s seat and driving madly across the landscape, crushing everybody and everything in its way. That’s the definition of evil: a person who knowingly puts his or her interests and ambitions in front of everybody else’s interests and ambitions. Daniella Weiss is evil. The fact that the Palestinians have been in that land thousands of years and have nowhere else to go, especially if their property is stolen and they’re destitute, that doesn’t bother her. She wants that land regardless of their interests and doesn’t care how many children are killed in the process. Her ambition has nothing to do with religion, her hatred of Palestinians does not come from Judaism. It is the human drive to dominate simpliciter.

What she doesn’t realise is that winning isn’t everything. People who try to grab everything for themselves very often end up with nothing. Look what happened to the Germans and Japanese in 1945.

References:

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

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

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

4. Cook J (2006) Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State. Pluto Press: London.

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