Another Arms Race

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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The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy (Wilde).

Around the world today, each nation’s arms budgets are increasing to counter the threat of opposing nations’ increasing arms budgets. In other words, just 35 years or a generation after we managed to wriggle out of the last, really dangerous arms race, we’re back in another one. After the nuclear arms race lost some of its steam, there was supposed to be something called a “peace dividend” but it didn’t last long. The powers-that-be quickly launched another war, the “global war on terror” or GWOT, and gwot on with spending our birthright on their toys. But that’s to be expected: violence is humanity’s defining characteristic. Agreed, we are curious and playful and creative and can be altruistic at times but those features aren’t central and, all too often, are enlisted to subsidise our violent urges. What’s the point of being creative if we use our creativity to build nuclear weapons which end life on the planet? We can actually land a hydrogen bomb on the other side of the planet within a few metres of its target; we just haven’t worked out whether we ought to be doing this or whether there are better uses for our remarkable creativity. The trouble is, with very, very few exceptions, the people who are making these decisions are total idiots who have never read their Oscar Wilde, who observed:

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. (from The critic as Artist, 1891).

Sean Flynn, Errol’s son, who met a sticky end when he tried to interview the Khmer Rouge, said: “They’ll never stop wars, it’s too sexy.” Clearly, there are two sides to any arms race, but there are also two parties to each side, giving four parties in all. Country A is at loggerheads with Country B and, very soon, they are locked in an arms race. Each country has an elite party, or what Eisenhower called their military-industrial complex, now expanded to read: Military-spying-industrial-financial-parliamentary-academic complex. These are the well-placed, well-connected, clever, generally wealthy and highly influential men who decide who will be the enemy, how much money to allocate to the coming war and who will get the profits. In the main, they operate in the shadows, avoiding publicity unless, like politicians, it’s part of the job and they need it like oxygen. Most of the time, ordinary citizens don’t know what these people are doing, only what they’re told. Beneath them are the common party, the people who slog around in mud and dirt and get blown up. There is probably no better statement of the twin roles than given by Reichsmarschall Herman Göring during the Nuremberg Trials:

Why, of course, the people don't want war... Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Göring was smart, there was never any question about that, and he put his finger on two important points. As mentioned, the first is the role of the “elite” in deciding whether there will be war, who to fight and how it will be financed. The second is that, without pulling in all the dumb slobs and farm boys, there won’t be a war but, as he pointed out, that’s the easy bit. Just wave a flag, beat a drum and they come running: “It works the same way in any country.” That was the picture on the outbreak of World War I, recruiting offices were overrun by hundreds of thousands of young men bursting to enlist in case it was over by Christmas. They wanted to fight. For a lot of them, of course, it was indeed all over by Christmas but we now understand what it was all about: testosterone. I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense as we now have a very good understanding of the role of the testosterone economy in driving the human response to challenges. And it’s not just humans, it’s all animals.

The hormone testosterone and its close analogues is widely distributed in nature, from fish to reptiles to birds to mammals. It is a powerful anabolic hormone which directly affects practically the whole of the body, almost from the moment of conception. It has important effects on the foetal brain and later during adolescence it controls primary and secondary sexual development. However, what counts here is that it is also a “feel good” hormone with powerful physical and mental effects. In particular, it is intimately tied to the sense of self-esteem. A testosterone rush is exciting, people like it so they do all sorts of things to stimulate it. Sometimes they do sensible things like join a debating club or a sporting team but mostly people get their kicks by tagging along with something bigger and more powerful, like a political movement, a football club or a religion.

That’s where the trouble comes. If people just burned off their excess energy running around a muddy field on Saturday afternoon then sat around with their friends talking and laughing, all would be fine but they don’t. Instead of actually playing sport themselves, they dress in silly hats and scarves, get a belly full of beer then get charged up as though they are themselves going to fight. They use their team to get their own testosterone charge but, unlike the players on the field, they don’t burn it off. After the match, it’s all sloshing around in their bloodstream, churning them up so they get into fights or get sexually aggressive otherwise they can’t sleep. This is not rocket science but despite anything the Murdoch press screech about, the common herd aren’t the ones we have to worry about. They’re harmless, they hurt themselves as much as they hurt others and their damage doesn’t spread very far. The ones we have to watch are the elite, who are very careful to ensure they don’t get hurt, that they profit out of other people getting hurt, and that nobody understands their role in stirring trouble from which they stand to benefit. Let’s look at some current events.

This week, as everybody knows, Israel launched a massive, unprovoked attack on Iran, killing and injuring many hundreds of civilians in the process. Entirely predictably, Iran has retaliated and now Mr Trump feels he may as well get involved although he hasn’t made up his mind: “I may do it, I may not do it. I mean nobody knows what I’m going to do.” I think that’s true, he certainly doesn’t as he’s still waiting for all the bids to come in. The justification for all these attacks is that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Bear in mind a number of points. First, Iran has been on the verge of developing nuclear weapons for 30 years that I can recall, probably longer but, two, the program ceased over 20 years ago when the Ayatollah issued a fatwa saying that nuclear weapons are profoundly immoral and against the law of God. Point three: everybody knows this. Point four: Israel has at least 90 and probably up to 200 nuclear weapons which only have to be screwed together, plus the latest bombers equipped to carry them long distances. Point five: everybody knows this. Point six: nonetheless, pressure on Iran continued until in 2015, Mr Obama and various others signed a management plan (JCPOA) to prohibit what Iran wasn't going to do anyway. Iran complied. Point seven: Trump tore it up and reinstituted the “sanctions” in order to damage Iran’s economy and, ideally, lead to the overthrow of the government as in 1953. Point eight: the sanctions are hurting so negotiations have been going on for some time to provide further IAEA oversight. Point nine: the negotiations were suspended when Israel attacked.

This is dangerous, so what’s it all about? We know the answer to that, it’s all about domination. It’s not about religion: religion may be the excuse Israel uses to drive the Palestinians from their homelands but it isn’t the reason. Their religion specifically says: “Thou shalt not kill.” That’s it. There are large numbers of devoutly religious Jewish people in Israel and around the world who believe this is an absolute prohibition with no exceptions, but the people running the show in Israel apply it selectively, to suit their agenda of domination. Granted, some of them get around it by calling their enemies “human animals,” and therefore eligible to be killed but I suspect most of the people doing the planning and implementing and actual killing don’t care. They don’t care because they’re in the grip of a testosterone rush. Crushing their appointed enemies is all that counts, that’s more important than any stories from the mythical past. If that doesn’t work, then they can point to all the slaughters and genocides and ethnic cleansing their God urged on them as evidence that killing can be justified.

This is just one example, there are a dozen others going on around the world, but it illustrates the important point that Göring made: war is not in the interest of the common people. It is something imposed on them by the power structure in the society for their private benefit, not for the benefit and improvement of the common people. However, the elite don’t ever want to do any fighting themselves, they don’t actually like mud on their Armanis or sleeping without clean sheets, so they whip up a story about some terrible thing the appointed enemy are doing to get the hoi polloi excited and let them rip. In pre-war Germany, as Hitler made clear, the plan was to tell the German people they were being strangled by not having an empire like the British, French, Dutch and even the Portuguese, so they needed to push all the inferior people out of the lands to their east and hey presto, a great empire that would last a thousand years. It was built on the idea of racial superiority, which goes to the very heart of the concept of domination. Hitler and all his supporters believed this because in the 1930s, racism was part of normal life more or less throughout the world. It would be fair to say that racism’s bad name came from World War II. Before that, nobody worried about it.

Post-war, everything American officials have said or done oozes their sense of superiority and drive to dominate. Henry Kissinger, for example, left no doubt but was just a little less circumspect than most politicians, as he never had to stand for election. Speaking of the Allende socialist government in Chile in early 1973, shortly before the coup, he said:

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.

That is, we superior people know what’s best for you peons. On the other hand, most ordinary Americans have little knowledge of and even less interest in foreign countries. Very few of the white population speak a second language, most will never travel overseas and if they want something foreign, like Scotch or German sports cars, they buy it. However, also since WWII, American forces have killed something in excess of 20million people, overwhelmingly civilians in their own countries, and delivered industrial scale devastation on a dozen or more countries (North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, etc). The contradiction comes precisely from what Göring said: the powerful decide on a course of action, bring out the drums and flags, yell that the nation is in danger and sit back as ordinary people rush to do the right thing by enlisting. This is universal, so what can we do about it?

One solution would be to put testosterone blockers in the water supply: if the perception of a threat and the response are mediated by this hormone, blocking it should dampen the aggressive urge. However, that wouldn’t be very popular. Perhaps we could have a world government that would outlaw fighting and attempts to dominate others but it would be almost impossible to organise. We started to get one after World War II but Washington didn’t like it so they sabotaged it. Anyway, today’s Americans would never agree (unless they were the government) and it would be remote and therefore unbelievably inefficient – and probably corrupt as well. No, the only solution is education. Every person has to be taught that there is such a thing as too much competition because, until now, that has never been part of our education. We’ve all been told to compete, to struggle, to win but a little bit goes a long way. We can lead happy and fulfilled lives without worrying what the neighbours are doing, so don’t bother them, don’t threaten them and don’t interfere. That’s a hard sell as we’ve always been taught to mistrust The Other. Xenophobia, or fear of strangers, is as deep-seated as our need to socialise but we are all somebody else’s Other.

These days, with 9 billion people and 10,000 nuclear weapons on the planet and climate change looming, the need for dramatic change has never been more pressing. It won’t come from the top of the power structure: has a powerful person ever volunteered to lose power? Has a dominant person ever said “That’s enough for me, somebody else can have a go”? Change has to come but it must come from underneath, with an inbuilt mechanism to ensure that nobody can grab too much power or stay too long. That’s not too difficult to organise. If we can land a hydrogen bomb on the other side of the planet within a few metres of its target, we can organise a self-levelling form of government. To start the process, we all have to call out the lies that are used to keep the powerful in power. As an example, have a look at this:

Trump says 'we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran'

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters on Capitol Hill this afternoon that Trump is "perfectly within his authority" in the steps he has taken to deal with Iran. Asked by NBC News whether he’d allow a war powers resolution to come to the floor for a vote, Thune said that if the conflict between Iran and Israel extends "for some period of time, there could be a more fulsome discussion about what the role of Congress should be and whether or not we need to take action." "But I think, right now, let’s hope and pray for the best outcome, the best solution," he said. "And in my view, that would be Iran coming to the negotiating table and agreeing to end their nuclear program.”

Iran does not have a nuclear program, and was at the negotiating table when the bombs started to fall. Trump knew all about the planned attacks since February. All he wanted was control and domination. It’s important to remember, however, that he’s only a figurehead. The power structure under him is the dangerous bit, a serial fantasist supported by unrepentant fanatics. Granted there have been utopian calls in the past, quite a few in fact, but this time we have science on our side. We now know the precise biological reason why people (essentially meaning men) fight their way to the top and do their worst to stay there. This isn’t a question of morality, of being nice for niceness sake, not a Sermon on the Mount (Matt.5:3-11), it is a matter of planetary survival being threatened by the same biological urge that forces all animals to dominate their peers. However, we’re not forced to compete like, say, bull elephant seals, we can make the choice. That message has to be spread around but the first step is to recognise our own drive to dominate. If that’s out of control, then we’re heading straight down the path to a new variety of fascism.

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