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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Last week’s post ended ominously: “The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they hear the squeaks and rumbles of the approaching tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine.” A reader asked:
Your conclusion about the guillotine is probably meant metaphorically, and I would like you to answer plainly: how do you think the plutocracy can be defeated? There was a time when the ruling class needed the serfs for their labour, so that was a power the people had, but that will not be the case for much longer. The middle class had their place too in administrative work, again, that is not going to last. In those terms, how can the people overthrow the 1%?
This is a huge concept, we can only start on it today but I will answer plainly: I was not speaking metaphorically. It was intended literally. The 1% will not be displaced voluntarily or politely, as the inestimable Chris Hedges noted in another of his superlative essays this week:
Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.
Mao Zedung knew this too well:
Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
The core of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism, which is the entire modus operandi of the rich, is that Homo sapiens form dominance hierarchies just because the rewards of being dominant are so thrilling. Paradoxically, because the pain of oppression knows no end, each of us has two strong innate drives, one to dominate and one to resist domination. For those who, by one means or another, get to the top, the thought of going back down the ladder is intolerable. They simply cannot conceive of life “down among the riffraff,” so they will do anything open to them to resist a drop in status. That means anything, without limit, just to protect their status. Very often, they would rather die; better still, they send other people to die in their place. In the competition between their status and other people’s right, their status wins. Always. We see this in West Asia at present: with the full-blooded support of the great majority of its citizens, Israel is using genocide to cement its position as the dominant power in the entire region (for a truly disgusting display of the ecstatic joy humans get from crushing their conspecifics underfoot, see this video, starts at 0.40; that is not random, it is now institutionalised in the culture).
Purely as mammals, the thrill of defeating other people, of dominating them and making them look small so that we can feel big, is hard-wired into us. We all have it. Each and every healthy human infant comes equipped with the hardware to want to rise up the hierarchy. If we have to push somebody else down in order to do it, that is what we will do unless it is trained out of us in childhood. The urge to dominate is not a conscious thing, as in “I’ll plant a tree and watch it grow so other people can enjoy it.” It is the excitement small children display when they win a race, and the even greater excitement their parents show when their little darling wins a race. It is the pride of parents when their child graduates, ranging up to the ecstasy of fifty thousand football fans linking arms and singing as their team wins, the thunderous roars of delight from the stadium when one country gets gold at the Olympics, the drunken rampaging after a football match or an election that soon turns into violence. The urge to dominate is built into our culture but, because the joy of winning is readily amplified by bashing the other side, violence is never far away.
When it comes to the wealthy and powerful, there are two groups, inherited wealth and the self-made. Those who inherit wealth and status haven’t had to struggle to get anywhere so they believe being on top is their natural right. Being dominant becomes the basis of their sense of self-esteem, from which they believe they have rights and abilities other people don’t have. We need no better examples than Trump DJ and the Andrew formerly known as Prince. Trump was a millionaire at age eight as his father secretly transferred money to him without paying tax. Now, he boasts that by hardly ever paying tax, he proves he is smarter than those who do. When he is deposed and the investigations start, it will take decades to sort out the webs of corruption he has woven around the world. He does this because he believes he is a higher sort of person who deserves more than the common herd. Similarly, by all accounts, Andrew MBW is a selfish, dishonest and abusive little shit. His ex-wife, who seems to have disappeared into an exclusive wellness chalet in the Austrian Alps at thousands a day, was apparently no better. Fitzgerald nailed it a hundred years ago:
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different (The Rich Boy, 1926).
As for the self-made, most weren’t. They had head starts you and I never knew existed. As a teenager, one William Gates, for example, had money, advantages and, above all, connections to people in the growing world of IT. Yes, he made the most of it but he remains the same person who constantly tried to nobble the competition and was intimately involved with Epstein. The self-made rich are ultracompetitive and terrible people because for them, getting ahead is the only thing that counts. Nothing else matters, certainly not relationships or other people’s rights. They fight dirty to get to the top and will fight with all their resources and dirt to stay on top. Again, look no further than Trump. For him, the idea that he could get into the White House took hold gradually. As soon as he got there, his first moves have been to disable any opposition and take revenge on anybody who opposed him in any way. These people are not called the Epstein class for nothing.
The important point is this: the 1%, and in particular, the 0.01%, do not think like ordinary human beings. They are utterly self-involved, obsessed to the point of mania with getting to the top and staying there, and determined to crush by any means necessary anybody who gets in the way. As they rise up the ladder, so their sense of entitlement grows and expands, as does their sense of grievance for long-forgotten slights and insults, and their determination to pound their perceived enemies. Trump, for example, is obsessed with Obama and Biden. They didn’t actually do anything wrong, they just beat him in a race and he is incapable of getting over the narcissistic hurt. He doesn’t see elections as a fair decision by the majority unless he wins, when it’s a case of “I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” The only thing is, he’s not joking because, like so many of these people, Trump is devoid of a sense of humour. They only laugh when they’re winning and somebody else is getting hurt, as in that vile video (above) of the evil Itamar Ben Gvir.
That’s at the individual level but crucially, humans gain a sense of status by identifying with a larger, more powerful group. This is true of male humans, and especially so of adolescents and young adults. They bond just because being part of a group feels more powerful and more exciting than being a suburban nobody. They leave the family of birth and latch on to a larger group, maybe sporting, or politics, or religion or, above all, the military, and by that means, they feel stronger and more confident. That’s why they wear uniforms or club regalia, it identifies them as “one of the powerful.” They swagger around, thrilled by the buzz of power they get from people looking at them but also from seeing their mates and themselves. It’s homoerotic without necessarily being sexual, and it is very, very exciting. If for any reason, people are pushed out of the group, they fall in a hole for a long time, as seen in peacetime soldiers who are injured and discharged medically unfit. Troops injured during fighting don’t feel so bad as they know they’re seen as honourable and still part of the gang. Women can always gain self-esteem and prestige by being mothers but the important point is this: nobody willingly gives up high status to mix with the slobs down there, to become one of them.
It’s true that every group, from small tribes or gatherings to the national level, wants to feel superior to the rest but when the idea of superiority is woven into the national psyche, we’re in trouble. This was crystal clear in Nazi Germany’s concept of die Herrenvolk, the master race. At that time, the idea of a hierarchy of nations or races was accepted by everybody who had any influence, not just Germans, and avidly soaked up by everybody else who wanted to feel more powerful than they were, such as workers. The concept of social Darwinism was normal, that people who got to the top deserved to be there while those who didn’t make it had earned their fates. The upper classes genuinely believed they were a better class of humans; conversely, the poor were substandard who, if they didn’t work harder and behave better, really didn’t deserve to live. Eugenics was seen as progressive, not as distasteful and certainly not as evil.
Since the Third Reich and the horrors of World War II, people are much less likely to talk about this in public but they still believe it. Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia who recently escaped from his mausoleum for a second run at power, liked to talk about “lifters and leaners.” Lifters are the hard workers (like him) who run things and pay their taxes while leaners are the morally feckless who choose to parasitise the welfare state and be carried through life by the industrious. For the wealthy and powerful, success is seen in moral terms: “I earned my status and my wealth by hard work and self-denial. I went without to get ahead and everybody else can, too, if they make the right moral choices.” In social Darwinism, success is seen as proof of moral superiority, not genetic. Most definitely, it is never seen as structural, the result of social conditions over which people have no control, and never as luck. This is at its worst in the military, where injuries are always and only seen as moral failings. They even say it: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” If you’re a soldier who gets a back injury, don’t even bother reporting it.
Today, once more, the world is convulsed by the idea that certain nations have rights that others don’t have, that they are superior beings just by virtue of birth. Americans freely proclaim this, that they are the Leaders of the Free World, World Policeman, the Shining City on the Hill, Fount of Democracy, Most Favoured Nation, Most Powerful in History, and. They. Can. Do. What. They. Like. To anybody, anywhere, for any reason that suits them at the time. Thus, they can strangle Cuba for 67 years then tell the Cubans their government can’t provide for them and must be overthrown, preferably by invasion. Trump’s military has murdered over 200 people by blowing up boats in the Caribbean yet they indict former President Raoul Castro because in 1996, he ordered his military to shoot down some planes that, despite repeated warnings from Cuba and the US authorities to stop, kept flying over Cuba from Florida to drop leaflets. The US has over 850 military bases around the world, threatening everybody who doesn’t toe the line, yet are driven mad by Russian and Chinese listening posts in Cuba. Their hypocrisy is overwhelming but, for them, this is not hypocrisy. Their double standards come directly from believing the old, old lie: We’re better than everybody else so we can do what we like but you have to do as we tell you. As a rule, any nation that has more guns and flags than people is a menace but the cracks in Uncle Sam’s foundations are growing rapidly. International dollar-based finance, their “exorbitant privilege,” is on the way out. Their economy, carefully deindustrialised by neoliberals, is in serious trouble. More significantly, Trump and his gang of halfwits, crooks and predators are splitting the country apart. Expect more trouble as the cost of being world hegemon exceeds any possible benefits, even the wondrous benefit of thinking you’re Number One in the world.
When we come to Israel, we see the concepts behind Narcisso-Fascism at their worst. From infancy, it is drummed into Israeli children that they are special, they are chosen, God favours them and has promised them a land like no other but it was stolen by outsiders and unbelievers, so it is their proud and unwavering duty to fight to recover their divine birthright. This is the ultimate racism, there is no step beyond believing that your enemies are satanic so you can do what you like just because everything you do is already blessed by God, and any lenience toward them is defiling God’s work. So, as we see in that video above and in so many others, that is what they do. This is no accident. Israeli educator and researcher, Nurit Peled Elhanan (b. 1949) is the granddaughter of one of the signatories of their declaration of statehood; the daughter of a revered general; and elder sister of Miko, a noted peace activist and author.
Over her long lifetime, her research has shown that Israeli children are exposed to non-stop ideological indoctrination which, if it occurs in Russia or China, is known as brain-washing. Her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, from 2012, sets this out in detail but she has (very bravely) written hundreds of articles and lectures on this topic (podcast of a recent interview here, transcript here). The gist is that “Arabs” (they never use the word Palestinians) are subhuman interlopers who must be expelled by any means possible, as leaving the Promised Land in their vile hands is an unforgivable sin against God. This means that, in reclaiming Greater Israel, Jews are unable to sin because they are doing God’s will. Therefore rape, torture and genocide are not bad, and anybody who says they are is acting as an agent of the satanic sphere. This is, of course, precisely the racist dogma of the Nazis, but with God replacing the Aryan race.
Naturally enough, when anybody accuses Israelis of crimes such as sodomising the crews of the Sumud Flotilla, there is a chorus of screeches from the president down that this is just another example of the “blood libel” from the medieval era. They’re lying, of course, they know exactly what goes on in their prisons. Israel isn’t Germany during World War II. The Nazi government went to considerable lengths to keep their death camps secret because they knew the civilian population wouldn’t stand for it [1]. Yet in Israel today, e.g. “Israel Day,” May 15th, gangs of flag-draped youths routinely rampage through Palestinian areas screaming “Death to the Arabs.” During the pogroms in the West Bank, police and military stand by to make sure Palestinians offer no resistance. This is the direct result, she says of a state-coordinated program that turns young Israelis into:
... murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olive [orchards], and poisoners of wells . . . who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. [These] children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger, to always fear the neighbors, the gentiles, children who were brought up in the fear of Islam – a fear that prepares them to be brutal soldiers and disciples of mass murderers [2].
Her point is perfectly clear: these people will not willingly give up their power to crush their neighbours. They will keep trying to expand to fill the borders of their self-appointed “homeland” of Greater Israel, all 2million sqkm of it, until somebody does something to stop them. That may come from within, when enough voters are disgusted by what their government is doing to turf them out but don’t bet on it: 82% support expelling all Gazans by any means. More likely, it will come from the world turning against Israel and turning off their life support. Israel has essentially no natural resources. Without many hundreds of billions of dollars of support, mainly from the US and Germany, and preferential treatment in a myriad ways, their economy would collapse overnight to the level of Jordan or Lebanon. For example, at the beginning of the current round of fighting, Israel had about 1,700 combat-ready Merkava tanks, costing about $5million each (I think that’s an understatement; a new Abrams battle tank costs about $24million), plus dozens of F-35s and so on. Who paid for that? Not Israel, that’s for sure. However, the capital cost of weapons is only part of it; maintaining and arming them more than doubles the price. You don’t get that sort of weaponry by exporting oranges. People say “But Israel exports lots of software and arms.” True, but that’s all developed by American money.
Israel’s folly is that it is engaged in an imperialist, racist project that relies totally on the goodwill of foreign supporters. If that support evaporates, and it is doing so rapidly, then they’re finished. But its architects will not give up easily, their entire self-esteem and raison d’être are built on the idea that God loves them above all other people and wants them to clean all the second-class humans from His Promised Land. Take that away and they’re nobodies. It’s the same in the US. The white population of the South slept easily on the idea that they were superior to the nigras working in their fields to keep them in lives of ease. Even dirt-poor whites in the Delta could look at a black labourer and say “I may be poor but at least I’m not a nigger.” The Civil War notwithstanding, they never gave that up. That same attitude of racial/national superiority has since seeped throughout the whole country but its focus shifted, to foreigners. Even poor Americans feel superior to the rest of the world, for example, many of them believe American health services are the best in the world. Truly amazing what you can do with propaganda.
There is a point worth making. Around the world, we see a headlong Drang nach rechts, a drive to the extreme right. In the UK and in Australia, extremist right wing parties have suddenly surged to the front. In the US, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, you name it, the neonazis are out in force. I think there are two forces operating. First, as mentioned many times, is the malign influence of neoliberal economics causing explosive increases in inequality, deindustrialisation, commercialisation of education and health, lowering public standards, ever-more oppressive surveillance of workers coupled with pervasive corruption at the highest levels of society, and so on. Workers are aware something is seriously wrong with their lives, they’re just not sure what it is.
The second comes directly from Israel, which has normalised far rightist/protofascist conduct just because nobody is allowed to criticise Israel: “Anything Israel does is right and proper. Nobody is allowed to criticise us as that’s antisemitism and blood libel which are worse crimes than genocide.” Israel has colonised the extreme right wing with impunity, giving it an ersatz respectability. What Israel gets away with, the neonazis quickly copy mit größter Freude, with the greatest of delight. The huge, militarised D8 bulldozers Israel uses to flatten Gaza and south Lebanon, without a squeak of protest from the West, are also building a gigantic autobahn to a right wing hell on earth, down which are stampeding Republicans in the US, Reform in the UK, Alternatif fur Deutschland, Italy’s League, Bolsonarists in Brazil, BJP in India, One Nation in Australia and so many others. Where Israel leads, the lunatic fringe follows. As they say in QAnon: Where we go one, we go all.
That’s this week’s limit but to summarise, an attitude of superiority is not compatible with peace on the planet. However, people won’t give it up willingly. How do we force them to do that? Slowly, at the ballot box where possible, and by constant activism. But the most important thing is to know how extremists work: by terrifying normal people. The key point is to stop fearing them. We will talk more.
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One point to show you how the 1% think, or don’t think. After all the hooha about Epstein Island, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, each the offspring of convicted felons, have hit upon a fantabulous idea to invest all the money they got from Middle East potentates: they’re going to build a super-resort for the wealthy in Albania with no riffraff allowed. Very expensive and very exclusive, the wealthy will be able to let their hair down without the risk of paparazzi snapping them. Where in Albania? In a wildlife refuge. On an island. Yes folks, in a mind-numbing display of insightlessness spawned by their congenital contempt for public opinion, they plan to build another bigger, more secure Epstein Island. Don’t you just love it? We can be sure they’ll have queues of rich people dropping by for lunch, à la the lying Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary.
Fortunately, the Albanian people have worked out their prime minister has corruptly approved the development, so they threw molotov cocktails into his house. As I said, “The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they hear the squeaks and rumbles of the approaching tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine.” All power to the Albanians.
References:
1. Johnson E, Reuband K-H (2005) What we knew: terror, mass murder and everyday life in Nazi Germany. London: John Murray/Hodder Headline.
2. This is referenced to: Svirsky, Gila. “Address at the 20th anniversary of Women in Black, Jerusalem, 28 December 2007”. Gila Svirsky: A Personal Website. The link has recently disappeared.
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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.