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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“Trump seems increasingly incoherent. Is he on the edge of mental collapse?”
Since Trump has the power to end life on the planet, the fact that a professor of politics asks that question implies we are in the most serious trouble. The Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds from catastrophe. Does everybody understand what that means? Do the people making the big decisions understand? No, they don’t, and they don’t care. They have more important things on their minds, like smashing their enemies. Two questions arise: Is Trump losing it, and how did we get here?
Q1: Is Trump losing it? Yes, most assuredly. He is 79, in poor general health, with frequent signs there is some health problem requiring regular IV therapy (e.g. lecanemab, for Alzheimer’s Disease). He hardly sleeps, gets practically no exercise, eats junk and can’t start his day before midday then runs out of steam by 5.00pm. This is in the setting of a person of mediocre intellect amd poor education, who struggles to read and knows very little about the real world. As a personality, he is psychopathic and narcissistic, meaning he is incapable of seeing things from another person’s point of view and unable to form emotional bonds. People are simply objects to him, he plays with them for a while then throws them away. He always was and still is totally corrupt and dishonest with no concept of truth: for him, truth is whatever yields a profit for him. At his best, he was jealous, suspicious, vengeful and remorseless in settling scores but his best days are long gone. All his life, he has been impulsive, disorganised, lazy, demanding, scheming, manipulative, full of prejudices and thoroughly unpleasant. Like a toddler, if something catches his eye, he reaches for it (“I want Greenland, I want the Canal…”) but has no idea why and quickly loses interest. Oh, and he has no sense of humour at all (see this one). Now, he is dementing at an accelerating rate.
If he were not very wealthy and the only person who can pull in the votes for the even more wealthy people who own the Republican party, if he were just a suburban grandfather, he probably wouldn’t be in a nursing home yet. A person at this stage of dementia would be at home but wouldn’t be allowed to go out by himself but he probably wouldn’t want to. As long as he had a TV and a regular supply of KFC, he’d be manageable, or maybe throw in a phone that isn’t connected so he could tweet away, happy with the idea the world is listening (much as they did with his father, Fred, when he was dementing; he was put in an office with a phone and a secretary who brought in piles of papers for him to sign). Mary Trump, Donald’s niece by his older brother, Fred Jr, is a astute PhD psychologist with an excellent YouTube channel. She says her uncle now shows the signs that her grandfather showed in his dotage. She’s talking about the person with the Big Red Button on his desk who has just launched an unprovoked, illegal and immoral war of aggression under cover of perfidy and nobody’s doing anything about it. Perhaps they’re waiting for the first nuclear bombs to fall just in case this one isn’t serious.
So we can be satisfied that this malignant buffoon is dementing but it’s actually worse than that. He’s half way, his memory is still relatively intact so he can fool people but his judgement, such as it ever was, is shot. Judgement is probably the highest intellectual function of all, and therefore first to go. It’s not an all-or-none phenomenon, he will have good days and bad, and mornings are usually better than evenings. If he sticks to routine, he can rely on old learned material but if he has to make a decision based on half a dozen conflicting demands, he will just go for the most salient, which is usually: “What’s in this for me?” or “How can I hit my enemies?” He would never consider: “How will this impact other people, will it make life worse for people with limited resources?” That will never come up because it never has once in his life. So we’re told that the decision to invade Iran was pushed on him by Netanyahu who told him that the two spurious “assassination” attempts in late 2024 were organised by Iranians and will have another go so Trump should get in first. That was enough. He never considered things like … Strait of Hormuz; Gulf country refineries and gas plants; body bags of US troops; impact on poor countries, and so on, because those things mean absolutely nothing to him, even if he had heard of them. He doesn’t care about dead US troops, he wriggled out of Vietnam and said soldiers who got killed were suckers. He certainly doesn’t care about dead Iranian children. The reason he fell for Netanyahu’s ploy is partly personality, partly dementia but also he can’t cope intellectually with all the demands and is increasingly agitated and unable to focus. Even a healthy person would be struggling with all the trouble he’s stirred up. That’s why he doesn’t make many appearances and his speech is slurred during them. I’d say he’s being kept upright by drugs. Same thing happened to Hitler after the July 1944 plot and explosion. His physician, Dr Theodore Morell, who was a total scoundrel, was pumping him full of a cocktail of amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, home-made vitamins and so on.
So is Trump on the edge of mental collapse? Yes. He should be removed from office immediately, but his “loyal” minions are all too scared to make the first move because they fear everybody will turn on them and they’ll be finished. Mainly, lèse-majesté is just too, too scary for the poor dears as most of them are useless, grasping psychopaths themselves.
That’s the immediate question, and so to the second: How did we get here? Again, it splits in two parts. The first relates to the way we humans form our governments, and the second asks what it is about the American system of government that allows such a disastrously unqualified person to swoop in and snatch the prize. We’d like to say that governments exist to get the job done, to make people’s lives better and smoother, to help those who need help and provide opportunities for those who will use them to benefit the community but that’s not true. Governments exist because some people are obsessed by power and work diligently and mostly dishonestly to build a hierarchy to elevate themselves so they can dominate everybody else, just because dominating feels so much better than being dominated. There is a strong biological basis for this based in the testosterone economy [1].
As a result, and whenever they can, humans will build a far-reaching dominance heirarchy that gives enormous power to a few people at the peak, and none for those at the bottom, such that the privileged can loot the community to their hearts’ content, bestowing vast wealth and luxury on themselves while those at the bottom of the pile live in holes in rubbish dumps and eat what they can forage. As people ascend the hierarchy, their sense of privilege and entitlement grows and expands to consume all the resources in reach. It’s a bit like Parkinson’s Law, which says that the amount of work to be done expands to fill the time available and to consume all the labour (see Oscar Wilde’s comment: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.” The modern version: The police state is expanding to arrest all the people dissatisfied with the expanding police state). As people go up the heirarchy, their sense of privilege and entitlement grows to satisfy their sense of their exalted status. This applies equally to men and women, as in “Let them eat cake.” Throughout most of history, kings lived in unbelievable luxury while the poor starved in freezing hovels or slaves died of malaria in muddy swamps (compare a small example, Brighton’s Royal Pavilion with the picture of poverty from early Victorian England in Friedrich Engel’s account [2]).
There’s nothing actually wrong with the idea of hierarchies, if you want a job done, generally it improves efficiency but their execution fails on two points. First, the ever-expanding sense of privilege of the few. The wealthy have no sense that there should be a limit to their greed: the wife of newspaper magnate and convicted felon, Conrad Black, allegedly said: “My extravance knows no bounds.” She wasn’t joking. It never occurs to them that enough is enough, that the extra they take means less for somebody else. And they don’t care. They genuinely believe they deserve it and the poor don’t. Elena Ceaucescu, wife of the Romanian dictator, apparently said just that. There had been a birthday party for one of her grandchildren at one of their country estates. The guests ate one or two pieces of the enormous cake, then it was sent back to the kitchen. The staff knew it would be thrown out so they started to cut some for themselves. Elena came into the kitchen, saw what was happening and grabbed all the cake, throwing it in the bin. “You don’t deserve that,” she snapped, and stalked out. A year or two later, she was shot.
Second problem is the quality of the people attracted to power hierarchies. They draw people who are intrigued, fascinated, beguiled and turned on by power but the process is self-winnowing. For anybody in a government or political party or business or club or church of any sort, there will come a day when they have to make a decision: choose between principled conduct that leads to loss of status, and unprincipled that opens the door to the corridors of power. Most people will choose integrity and accept a lower status but some don’t want that. For them, scruples are a handicap on the golden road to glory, so they ditch them and scramble eagerly up the slope, pausing only to kick clods of dirt on anybody coming behind them. This applies across the board and has done since Homo sapiens first appeared.
With very few exceptions, the political process throughout the world favours the self-interested and unscrupulous. People may start with noble ideas but they don’t last long. They soon realise that fortune favours the malleable so they mould themselves to the prevailing winds. The current prime minister of Australia, one Anthony Albanese, used to be strongly supportive of the Palestinian cause but no longer. These days, he and his government are 110% behind the US-Israel axis now and have no problem with US bases in this country playing major roles in the current war of aggression against Iran. For example, the instructions to sink the unarmed Iranian frigate IRIS Dena and leave the sailors to drown were received at Pine Gap station and relayed through NW Cape submarine station.
Worldwide, in every walk of life, political processes have evolved that select for the self-interested, the greedy and unscrupulous, the hypocritical (yes, Mr Scott Morrison, former PM of Oz and loud member of the scandalous Hillsong Prosperity Gospel Church, we’re most definitely talking about you), the brutal and the contemptuous, for deluded religious fanatics, messiahs, mass murderers, political saviours and all the rest of our political masters. We think we’re going to get liberation and democracy but we end up with kakistrocracy, government by the worst (apparently from Greek κακά, meaning poo).
That’s the generic fault in political systems, but the American system is much worse than most because it concentrates so much power in the presidency. What in other countries is a gradual pyramid of power in the US is a pillar rising high with the president seated alone on top. The president is executive head and appoints the cabinet who are beholden to him. Unlike the Westminster parliamentary system, and beyond a perfunctory screening by the Senate, US cabinet members are not responsible to the electorate. In fair electoral systems, cabinet ministers and even prime ministers can and do lose their seats. However, if the US Senate is controlled by the presidency, as this one is, then they simply wave through whomever the president pushes forward, with predictably disastrous results. Add to that the pervasive influence of dark money and hidden lobbies, and the system is set up for autocracy, as has happened. The Supreme Court has been stacked with corrupt and partisan sycophants; the military hasn’t so much as blinked in launching an illegal war of aggression (yet again); the Dept of Justice is run by a seriously paranoid woman who sees her job as hounding Trump’s opponents; the cowed House of Representatives is terrified of being “primaried” by a Trump wannabe; the Secretary for Health thinks he knows everything about health (as does Donald “drink bleach” Trump); police and immigration services are morphing into a Sturmabteilung; regulatory bodies hamstrung; on and on.
We could easily write a computer program for this sort of government, and it would end up with a fascist dictatorship just because the lust for power only ever ratchets up, it never ratchets down. This is humanity’s fatal flaw. The only saving feature is that the lust for power that resides in each of us is balanced by a slower but more determined drive to resist being oppressed. When the domination becames unbearable, when people feel they are about to lose the most important thing in their lives, they will rise and fight for freedom. The great revolutions of the past 200 years, France, Russia, China, didn’t come from nothing. They were created and crafted by the blind lust for power by a small minority who decided they were appointed by breeding or history or God to rule, and who found out the hard way that not everybody shared their opinion of their majesty. Any group on earth who feels superior to their neighbours and who decides to push them around is going to face a day of reckoning.
The power elite in the US in particular feel they have the moral and historical right to boss the rest of the world around and they have the bombers to do it, so they do. Israel is driven by the Zionist notion that they are special people who have the right to shove their neighbours aside, or kill them, in order to steal their land. That is exactly what Hitler set out in his vision for Germany [3]: the Germans, he said, are superior people, the Slavs inferior; Germany doesn’t have much land and can never achieve its predestined greatness while the Slavs have vast areas and will never amount to much; therefore according to the laws of nature, the Germans are entitled to invade the Slavic lands, conquer them, eliminate half their population and enslave the rest as farm and industrial labourers so Germany can build a glorious empire that will last a thousand years. This is precisely the program of the fanatic Zionist government in Israel with their plan for Greater Israel. It didn’t end well, either for Germany or the 25million Slavs they killed. Trump started this war late on Friday night, thinking it would all be over by the time the stock markets opened on Monday morning but it isn’t running to plan. Truly. That is how our world is being run.
This dumb war will not end well for the US either but, in the process of wrecking their own country, they may well end everybody else’s, too. It’s essential that the rest of the world work out where their interests lie, and form an immovable bloc to resist the US-Israel axis. The notion that two countries with 3% of the world’s population can hold the 97% to ransom just be creating havoc is beyond absurd. It’s time to ditch NATO, dump the USD as reserve currency, leave SWIFT, reform the WTO, IMF and World Bank without the US, swap to sustainable energy, reduce globalisation, dump neoliberal economics and so on. The US and Israel can live in their own little bubble, thinking of Raptures and Messiahs, while the real world gets on with business. Every crisis is an opportunity and we need to grasp this one. Either our politicians grow a pair or get shoved aside.
That’s possibly a gloomy view of humanity but I believe we’re well and truly past the point where we can kid ourselves our governments are good and they know what they’re doing. They aren’t, and they don’t. Practically every country in the West is governed by self-interested trash and if we don’t do something about it very soon, we as a species and possibly the entire biosphere may not have a future.
References:
1. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.
2. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive, at marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf
3. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Germany’s policy in Eastern Europe. Chap 14 in Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.
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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.
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