Back on the Brink

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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At the recent Munich Security Conference, the Australian deputy prime minister and minister for defence, Richard Marles, stood in front of the large audience of international bigwigs and announced that the current military expansion in China is the biggest seen in the world since World War II. In a commentary, Brisbane Prof. Warwick Powell provided detailed figures showing that everything Marles said is completely wrong. Since 1945, the US has been engaged in a vast military build-up that, at times, exceeded the total military outlays of the rest of the world combined. Now was Marles lying, or is he a fool? Answer: Probably not, and Yes. I would say he was engaged, as he usually is, not in lying but in what the late philosopher, Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023) of Princeton called “bullshitting” [1].

Frankfurt was an epistemologist, he studied what we can know, how we can know it, how to tell truth from falsity and other vital questions. The liar, he said, knows exactly what he is doing (and yes, there are female liars but we’ll stick to his terms). The liar knows the truth, he knows that his audience doesn’t know the truth but he doesn’t want them to know it so he feeds them some false information and does what he can to make sure they never learn the truth:

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship...

I like that, it points to the precision required to be an effective liar. Bernard Madoff was an effective liar until the GFC overtook his lies. Trump is an ineffective liar but he meets criteria for Frankfurt’s other category, Bullshit. As Frankfurt said, not everybody who utters falseties is lying. A lot of people, especially politicians, are trying to influence the audience emotionally, so they simply fill the air with words without caring whether they’re true or false. Bullshit is “...more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.” Now in giving his speech, Marles had clearly not looked at any figures on military expenditure because he would have known that even today, the US is by far the biggest spender, eclipsing China, Russia and a few others combined. But Marles wasn’t interested in figures. His only concern was to sway the audience to believe that China is a real and present danger and we need to spend heaps on eye-wateringly expensive weapons so we can repel the latest version of Australia’s perennial fear, the “Yellow Peril.” Except now they’re Reds as well, which probably makes them orange.

Marles didn’t look at any figures because he doesn’t want them: his mind is made up and figures just get in the way. So he is a foolish bullshitter and, in my view, ipso facto unfit for government but that’s up to his electorate. Anyway, if we kicked out all the fools and bullshitters, there’d be very few people left in government. Have a look at Prof Powell’s article, it’s very good but in respect of American militarism, it raises a critically important question which he doesn’t address: WHY? Why does the US spend so much more on weapons than anybody else? What do they think it will get them, what’s their payoff? Right now, the US is positioning itself to attack Iran. Jeremy Scahill at DropSite News released a truly frightening article: “‘This is Not a Dress Rehearsal’: U.S. Engaged in Massive Military Buildup as Threat To Bomb Iran Grows” (scroll down below the large picture of ships at sea). Aggressive war is deemed the supreme international crime yet here we have the “president of peace” directing the world’s policeman to an unprovoked attack on a foreign country. WHY? WTF do these nuclear clowns think they’re doing? Well we know what they’re doing, same as they did in Venezuela and Iraq and Syria and Libya and so on: destroying the country so they can take its oil and sell the victims lots of expensive stuff and keep their weapons industry in business. Except Iran is perfectly happy to sell its oil at the going price, meaning about 2% of the cost of an invasion, so what’s their game?

The game is the same as Powell’s figures outlined: total world domination for no other reason than it feels so good being the colossus astride the world, laughing at every other country quaking in fear and lining up to kiss the American ass (it means kiss their arse, not their donkey). That is why the US is running its infrastructure into the ground while it maintains about twenty times as many foreign military bases as the rest of the world put together. It suits the power elite to terrorise small countries (Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Denmark and so many others) and push everybody else around even when it is clearly working against American interests, just because domination feels good. Power is its own reward. The question is: Should the world be run by what is essentially a national neurosis taking the form of a mafia standover racket? Obviously it shouldn’t, it should be run according to a set of mutually agreed rules but the one half-hearted attempt to do that after 1945 failed when the “rules-based international order” got in the way of the world’s hegemon. We are now careering* along with essentially no rules in place, where “The rich and powerful do what they will and the poor suffer what they must.”

Was it ever different? No, not really but there was a pretence where a ceasefire meant the stopping the shooting and not just fitting a silencer and keep firing. Now, Trump says out loud what the others did quietly, behind the scenes. Bush and Blair said it was essential to invade Iraq to destroy their “weapons of mass destruction” which could reach London in 45 minutes. There were no WMD and they knew it (in the years since as some sort of grand panjandrum of the Levant, Tony Blair has amassed a fortune of between £60-75million. Pounds. And that’s only what people can track, it doesn’t include what he has hidden offshore). Trump doesn’t bother with that, he just says “We want Greenland so we’ll either get it the easy way or the hard way but we’re going to have it.” Needless to say, this blasé attitude is causing waves of panic around the world.

As the Munich Conference showed (the latest one, as well as 1938), Europe is in disarray. At home, their industry is collapsing after the US blew up the Nordstream II pipeline, cutting off the cheap and reliable Russian natural gas that had powered their factories, forcing them to buy American gas at twice the price. To their north, Trump is threatening to invade Greenland, which is part of a European country. Out east, the US pushed Europe into war over Ukraine and is now threatening to walk away, leaving the European damsel alone in the house with an enraged Russian bear. Meantime, down on the southern flank, Israel is conducting its usual mayhem while refugees fleeing the chaos stream across the seas. So far, there’s no threat from the Azores to Europe’s west but it could come, it could come. Britain’s slow post-imperial collapse is gathering speed as they neglect social services in order to build new nuclear submarines to counter the “Russian threat.” France is France while the rest of the place is slowly congealing into a state of panicky paralytic inertia. Poor things, maybe the Indians will form a West Europe Company and take over, forcing Europeans to grow drugs to sell to the US in a reversal of Britain’s role in Asia (growing drugs in India to sell to China). Or maybe Europe could do something truly radical, like declare peace and end the stalemate.

Since birth, we’ve been raised on a diet of “Us Goodies vs Them Baddies,” but the core thesis of Narcisso-Fascism is that this is a curtain of bullshit held aloft by a scaffold of lies. The proper way to see human affairs is as a ceaseless ferment of one individual/ group/ nation or alliance trying to dominate another, thereby producing permanent instability with frequent dips into anarchy. As long as there have been humans, there has been a frenzy of humans trying to dominate and oppress other humans. This isn’t recent, it’s as old as Homo sapiens. Ötzi, the Neolithic man found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps from 5,300 years ago had an arrow head buried in his back. There is ample archaeological evidence going much further back to say that humans have always fought each other. Marx got it wrong: humans don’t fight to control resources so they can have a higher standard of living, they are happy to impoverish themselves by fighting just so they can dominate other humans. That’s all we need to know.

The foundational lie beneath the endless and hugely expensive politico-military drama of the past 80 years is that we, the noble and far-sighted, generous and caring West, stand firm in the face of the barbaric Red and Yellow hordes who, if we didn’t hold them back, would erupt from the Eurasian land mass and swarm over the civilised world, raping, murdering and pillaging all the way because barbaric Eurasian hordes. Decade after decade, we’ve had this view pumped at us without a moment’s break, that without the Pax Americana, we would all be in the gulag. That’s why the US has nearly 850 overseas military bases, to “contain” the communist/Russian/Chinese aggression and threat … but there isn’t a word of truth in it. The only reason the “baddies” are heavily armed is because they feel threatened. Right now, Iran is under direct threat of a massive bombing campaign intended to destroy their infrastructure and render this hot, dry country of 85million people ungovernable, if not uninhabitable. Questions on how Europe would cope with 40million destitute refugees have been left to another day.

Why is this happening? Why is nobody freaking out about it? We’re talking of war, people getting killed for nothing. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again but expecting a different result. Invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Syria and a dozen others have been catastrophes so why will this be different? Or is the US locked in some sort of collective insanity? We can answer that. This time will be different only in the sense that an invasion of Iran will be ten times worse than all the previous invasions put together. And yes, the US is indeed locked in some form of insanity, an unquestioned urge to dominate all other people at any cost. China is NOT a threat to Australia, we do not need nuclear submarines to defend ourselves against them as they are our biggest trading partner. The moment there is any sort of shooting with China, this country will be bankrupted and ruined, immediately, totally and irremediably.

Does Deputy Dog Richard Marles know this? No, I don’t think he does. He’s too stupid, he believes whatever bullshit the spy agencies put on his desk, the stuff that they collect from the Washington fax each morning and hand to him unread. The real cause is that the US is in high alarm that China is about to overtake them, so they’re forcing everybody to enlist in their “China Containment Policy” bullshit. And the world drifts mindlessly toward catastrophic war, as though nobody is at the controls. Well, they’re not. Nobody with any brains, that is. They’re locked in a self-reinforcing group think bubble where nobody asks: “Hey, do we actually need to dominate everybody? Can we be happy without being king dick? The Kiwis are happy without being Number One, so why can’t we?” That’s not going to happen, nobody is going to be the little boy who says the emperor is wearing no clothes. Nobody in the Washington Bubble, that is, so it has to come from elsewhere. What about Europe, home to democracy and civilised tea parties and all that? Why can’t the Europeans get together and announce:

Rightio, everybody, party’s over. Pick up your toys and go home, close your bases and stop threatening everybody while we sort out how to live in peace. We’ll bring Russia into the EU, as they wanted decades ago and Washington said No. You can leave Iran alone, they’re our neighbours so we’ll sort out any problems, you outsiders who don’t know history are only screwing things up. Stop arming Israel, put any war criminals behind bars and let the Middle East develop as it will.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. We are not given any evidence that China is a threat, we are only told that it is a mortal danger to us and we must not question this or we’re China dupes. We are not told why we must support Israel come what may, only that if we don’t, we are “antisemitic” and will lose our jobs, if not be sent to jail. We are not told how Russia is a threat to Europe, only that it is and must be resisted at all costs, up to and including nuclear war. Nobody has explained what Mr Putin would do with Europe if he overran it. In Ukraine, fighting a ramshackle and totally corrupt country that is being propped up by outsiders, Russia is advancing at about seventy metres a day, at huge cost in men and material. At this rate, it would take them a thousand years to reach the Atlantic, and 500 million Europeans are supposed to be scared of them? And what would Putin do if he woke up and found he was suddenly in charge of 60 million Italians? You can’t do that to him, he’s not a young man, the bloody Italians can’t even govern themselves let alone follow orders from Moscow. All this talk of “threats” is cloud cuckoo land, the self-deluded fever dreams of fanatics, religious cranks and racist crackpots who think they can’t have a life as Number Two in anything.

Today, Europe is in serious danger of economic and political collapse just because it has allowed itself to be pushed into constant confrontation with Russia. And China. And the Muslim world, and everybody else. The simple fact is that if Europe made peace with Russia and built a super-economy extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok by way of the Stans, even including Pyongyang, something like 900 million people would instantly be immeasurably better off. Combining European brains with Russian talent and resources would be unbeatable … and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what it’s all about. That idea just is the stuff of American nightmares. For the power elite in the US, facing a Eurasian superpower would be like staring down into the sulphorous pits of hell. For a hundred years, Europe has been kept at daggers drawn with Russia, to prevent them forming a pan-European economy and dislodging the US from its perch. Can there be a Eurasian Union? Yes, it’s very easy. The Europeans have to stand in public and say:

We are not interested in fighting or confrontation. We want to live in peace. There are urgent problems we all need to deal with but we cannot do it while we are fighting each other. For all the wrongs we have done you, we apologise. We will never threaten you again and to prove it, we will start the process of disarmament. For the first time in your history, you do not have to look over your shoulder to the west. We’re on your side.

I can even tell them where to give this speech: right here, at the foot of this memorial in Volgograd, commemorating the 30million Soviet citizens who died in the 20^th Century’s fifth invasion of Russia, including four by the West. I think the nation of Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy would accept that; all they want is to be treated with respect and not forced into a position of subjugation. Because as much as the Americans and their toadies in the West are turned on by the thought of dominating the Slavic people, the Slavs (their very name means ‘slaves’) are absolutely determined not to be forced to kiss the American arse. They will fight every attempt to make them, and I’m on their side.

Right now, February 19^th, with two nuclear-armed aircraft carriers and a thousand planes cruising just outside Iranian waters, the world is teetering on the brink. All because of one dementing old man and 10,000 psychopathic sycophants who think they can get ahead by agreeing with him.

War is not a human necessity. Conflict is a political choice. If we don’t do better, we don’t have a future.

Reference:

1. Frankfurt H (1986). On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 6 (2): 81–100. (Fall 1986). https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAOB

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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.