Announcing....

After many delays, this has just been published.

NARCISSO-FASCISM

There wasn't room on the cover for the subtitle, which reads: "The psychopathology of right-wing extremism." In fact, it's any extremism. As will become clear in the book, there's only one sort of extremist, the type that wants to control you.

This started life as a sort of exercise to test the Biocognitive Model (published December 2021). It's important to know if it can be applied generally or whether it's restricted to the field of mental disorder. The original plan was for a 6,000 word essay but the introduction quickly gobbled that up as it became clear the model had very broad applicability. By the end, it was about 75,000 words although by including more historical examples, it could have been much longer.

There are three parts to the book. The first looks at the concept of narcissism, the involvement in self. Some degree of self-involvement is essential just for survival but too much is destructive. There are different facets to self-involvement, for example, that seen in chronic pain or disability, which can take control of a person's life. Another variant is the self-involvement by default of somebody who struggles to relate to the rest of the world due to anxiety. This is much more common than people realise; most of the teenage nerds sitting in their bedrooms playing Game of Thrones all night fit the bill. But the most important and most dangerous is that driven by poor self-esteem, where the person needs to be adored to make up for lack of self-regard. This quickly spins out of control when the person gets into politics.

The second theme is central to the Biocognitive Model, the concept of the Challenge Hypothesis. This says that when humans are challenged in any way, they respond at the hormonal level to get ready to meet the challenge. However, it's not just humans, it's all animals - mammals, birds, reptiles, and even some types of fish. But this is destabilising as the subject can quickly enter a self-sustaining cycle of seeing more and more challenges until it spins out of control. This concept is seriously underestimated in human affairs. A very large part of what is seen as ordinary politics, or commerce, or sport, etc, is driven by the urge to be on top regardless of the cost.

Finally, there is the concept of fascism, which is dominance by another name. This is a particular form of social organisation, and not just of government, which is UNIVERSAL. Fascists are not "Those ghastly foreigners causing trouble again," Fascism is us. That's my case. In fact, that could have been the title of the book but I don't think many people would have picked it up.

It will be available on Amazon shortly, we've kept the price down as much as possible. I get about 50c royalty per book, so please urge all your friends and relatives to buy it, and especially all the domineering people you don't like. It’s about them. When I work out how, I'll organise a second thread on Substack to talk about the ideas it covers and how they relate to the state of the world today. BTW, if you find any mistakes, let me know. I just found one but it's too late for this edition.

While on publishing, the volume to replace the theoretical chapters scattered through the earlier books has now been completed. Again, it grew and grew but having all the theory between one pair of covers will be much easier.

Enjoy. Except it's not light-hearted at all.