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 neoliberal economic ideology says that individual freedom is a virtue and government interference a vice. As rational creatures, it continues, humans know what is best for them and should therefore be left to their own devices as the free market will provide efficiently for all. If this produces inequities of wealth, so be it as the market is self-correcting in that it rewards industry and punishes sloth; ergo poverty equals sloth. Accumulations of wealth are not bad as they must be invested which will produce jobs for all except the lazy, thereby lifting the community’s standards of living. Governments should stand back and let this happen; any interference must reduce economic efficiency to the detriment of all. The ideal government is therefore the smallest government that is needed to look after the jobs that nobody wants or can manage, but if nobody wants them, why bother with them? In essence, more money for rich encourages them to work harder, whereas more money for the poor encourages them to sit down and expect to be kept by the state.
The concepts behind Narcisso-Fascism say this is all wrong: humans are not invariably rational. A very large part of human behaviour is driven by the irrational urge to dominate others in any way possible, just because domination is biologically self-reinforcing. While most people are mostly motivated by a sense of fair play and constrained by a sense of decency, there are plenty of ratbags who see the opportunities for self-enrichment provided by neoliberalism and take over. Neoliberalism licenses this. It provides intellectual and moral cover for scoundrels whose arguments are deliberately at the level of: “If you oppose the free market, you oppose personal freedom and you therefore want a Stalinist dictatorship.” This tends to leave their (decent) opponents speechless so scoundrels of various degrees have taken over most of the world’s governments. That doesn’t say there weren’t scoundrels before the rise of neoliberalism, there have always been crooks but they have never been able to wield an economic argument justifying greed.
Neoliberalism started with a small group of economists in Vienna but soon transplanted to the US where it appealed to people who had a lot of money and wanted more. They were able to influence generations of economists although the Depression also left its mark. In turn, the economists influenced politicians to turn away from the post-war welfare state consensus, with its powerful unions, stringent regulation, high taxation and widespread government involvement in business and public services. Starting with Thatcher and Reagan, governments began divesting of their many and varied commercial enterprises such as airlines, railways, water and power utilities, etc. In practice, this meant selling them at knock-down prices to their mates and then getting a job on the board post-retirement. Unions were essentially broken, restrictive regulations shoved aside, welfare programs curtailed and so on. The goal was to free the market to work its magic on the economy. People were free to participate or not as they saw fit, but they couldn’t expect the government to pick them up if they sat and moaned about their lot. If they chose to starve or die of preventable diseases, well, whose fault was that?
The US was ground zero for the neoliberal experiment, although neoliberals object bitterly to that label. “Look at all the scientific research,” they bluster. “There has never been such a carefully controlled application of science to the economy.” Yes, there are indeed terabytes of data produced each day telling us how wonderful things are and how we should apply for another credit card and sit back to enjoy the ride. But data aren’t information, information isn’t knowledge, knowledge isn’t wisdom and wisdom isn’t painless.
I mentioned last week how neoliberal ideology is based on a false human psychology, essentially no psychology at all. When we look at the people involved, it starts to become clear that they weren’t exploring economics dispassionately. All too often, they started with a particular social-psychological viewpoint and then spent their careers trying to prove it right. We see the same thing in psychiatry, of course. Too many shrinks start their careers convinced mental disorder is biological and then shape their research to prove this point rather than let the results tell them what to believe. For economists, who like to think of themselves as sober, rational sorts, an economics without a psychology means they’re not at risk of being exposed as weirdos or ideologues: just sit there crunching the numbers and don’t take any notice of all those poor people in the street. They’re poor because they chose to be or they’re inferior beings who will be culled by the great Darwinian scythe. Buried under the prejudices economists bring to their research, we find the paradox of hierarchy, the fact that built into all of us is an urge to dominate and an opposite drive to avoid being dominated.
For neoliberal capitalists, the urge to dominate others prevails; for their tame ideologues, beavering away in their ivory towers, * the drive to avoid being dominated is the stronger and has coloured their entire output. Two different facets of the same biological phenomenon supporting the same political agenda: “I want to be free to dominate you so I can be richer,” and “Being free of oppression is more important than being free to screw the poor.” In their expression, these are personality factors which come from early life experiences (and not from genes): we can choose to dominate or we can choose to be fair; we can choose to submit or choose to resist. But these two drives can come together on the same side of the political divide as both groups firmly believe that individual freedom is the primary sociopolitical virtue. They just want it for different reasons.
Three figures, all larger than life, should be mentioned but we can only talk about two today: Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), Milton Friedman (1912-2006; Nobel Prize 1976) while the third, the Russian-American author, Ayn Rand (1905-1982, pronounced “yne”), was not an economist herself but influenced some very powerful figures in the profession. Friedman was such a prolific author that his writings have their own entry in Wikipedia. He more or less dominated American economics for decades but we’ll leave him for another day. Before we say anything, we need to talk about -isms, because there are a lot.
We’re accustomed to think of politics in terms of right wing and left, where the right is conservative and capitalist, and the left is radical and socialist. This is not a good classification. For example, ask anybody where fascism sits on this spectrum and they will point to the far right. That’s not correct. Fascism is a technology of gaining and holding power, and is freely used by left (Stalin, North Korea) and right (Hitler, modern Israel). A better analogy is of a political smorgasbord, where a large array of choices is on offer and politicians can mix and match as the fancy takes them. The political buffet has different forms of government (hereditary autocracy, democracy, theocracy, etc); different economic systems (individualist or monopoly private capitalism, collectivist or monopoly state capitalism, social welfare, dirigist etc); different doctrines (religious, secular, nationalist, racist, militarist, etc); different power structures (tolerant, authoritarian/totalitarian, centralised, dispersed, anarchist), and so on. Even that short list gives several hundred combinations of dishes rom the buffet; no wonder countries with apparently similar political structures often end up arguing.
Complicating this is the fact that politically-minded individuals will chop and change throughout their lives, picking up one doctrine for a while then later swapping to something else, even its opposite. Within and between groups, alliances form, deform, reform and dissolve; ideas move from one side to the other and back again, the only constant being that the people involved are all convinced they’re right and their opponents need to be smacked down. Generally, people start their political careers on the progressive-social welfare-egalitarian-internationalist-tolerant side of things and drift to the other side as they age, i.e. toward intolerant, conservative, nationalist, hierarchical opinions. Murray Rothbard didn’t. He started life almost as a caricature of the hardline, intolerant, arrogant far right wing teenager and didn’t so much as drift to the extreme or libertarian wing as gallop headlong. His early life took him through the Depression and World War II but as a comfortable middle-class New Yorker, he had a pretty easy time of it. At Columbia University in the 1940s and 50s, as one of the very few Republican supporters in the entire school, he swam against the “tide of extreme leftists” (essentially normal students), emerging as a “libertarian.”
Libertarianism is an extreme version of classic liberalism, which developed during the Enlightenment as a reaction against the theocracies and hereditary autocracies of Europe. Liberalism says the free individual is supreme; it values freedom of thought, assembly, religion, movement, commerce, etc. Liberaliasm is secular, rational, progressive, with its eyes firmly fixed on the future. Taken to extreme, libertarians oppose any form of external control by governments etc; they generally oppose taxation for any purpose other than police and military; oppose social safety nets or public services on the basis that anything the government touches is necessarily inefficient and oppressive, and so on. The ultimate form is what are called “sovereign individuals,” a motley bunch who insist that nobody is allowed to tell them what to do under any circumstances. This is actually a variant of the paranoid personality disorder but there is no dividing line between hard-line but sane libertarians and these ultra-extremists, whose pathological hatred of authority periodically erupts into gunfights with police. While Rothbard was never violent or advocated it, they are all drenched in the same ideology, all talking the same language of domination: “Don’t tread on me because I will fight back.”
On graduating, Rothbard started teaching but was soon picked up by a fund that promoted right wing ideologies. He was supported by them to write a textbook which emerged in 1962 as Man, Economy and State, a 1460 page doorstopper (I have no plans to read it). Later, he was supported by the Koch brothers (pronounced ‘coke,’ which is appropriate), billionaire sons of Fred Koch, one of the founders of the protofascist John Birch Society and a major investor in refining in Nazi Germany. Rothbard’s work was directed at providing intellectual cover for a rapacious, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Although he spent his entire life in and around universities and the rapidly growing far right think tanks, he was always regarded as fringe and was never accepted by the mainstream. Nonetheless, whatever standing he lacked in academia, he made up in the febrile, fractious and often bizarre world of far right politics. At different times, he was close friends with Sen. Joe McCarthy; with David Duke, the scurrilous former grand wizard of the KKK; and a variety of holocaust deniers. It is a measure of his internal contradictions that he often referred to Jews as “kikes” even though he was himself Jewish. This meant he was on a collision course with the Jewish state as he was a lifelong opponent of wars and colonialism.
In a short piece from 1967, decrying the cancer of socialism in America (truly) [1], he mocked government and taxes as misdirected and wasteful in that they encourage people to think they can get a free ride. Conservatives moaned that the country was being brought to its knees by “liberal intellectuals, aided and abetted by trade unions and farmers,” but they neglected to mention that the real danger was actually big business working behind the scenes, that “war, culminating in the present garrison state and military-industrial economy, has been the royal road to aggravated statism in America.” The welfare state was allegedly built to serve the poor but the poor were actually the overweaning state’s victims, through being conscripted to fight in foreign wars, to work as wage slaves while being hit hardest by the mortal sin of income tax, and so on. In other places, he attacked egalitianism, women’s rights, civil rights and the welfare state as the products of men dominated by their mothers and wives, of Jewish women and lesbian spinsters “whose busybody inclinations are not fettered by the responsibilities of home and hearth.” Nobody escaped his acid tongue, which suited his avaricious paymasters to the ground.
Rothbard argued with everybody, starting, joining and leaving groups or making and breaking friendships with abandon. Even though he was never an establishment figure, he knew everybody: during his childhood, his family’s neighbour and close friend was Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1970-78. Burns helped introduce him to many powerful people, which brings to mind a comment by Rachel Ball of the Human Rights Law Centre: “It’s easy to stand atop a mountain of privilege, and tell those at the bottom of the mountain that privilege is irrelevant.” One of Rothbard’s on-again, off-again friendships was with the author, self-styled philosopher and enfant terrible, Ayn Rand. This quite bizarre woman’s reputation rested mainly on two epic novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). When I was 16, a friend at school lent me Fountainhead, saying it was the greatest thing he had ever read. I thought it was odd, I couldn’t understand why people could be so selfish but, of course, selfishness just was her philosophy. Of Atlas, John Rogers said:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
I tried to read it once but soon gave up, bored by the cardboard characters and what I now see as its narcissism. Nonetheless, she had a major influence in the US, for example, she was close friends with Alan Greenspan, the longest serving chairman of the US Federal Reserve (1987-2006) who famously failed to see the GFC coming as he thought the free market would act rationally to preserve itself (he also said: “Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said,” 1987). Rand’s philosophy, called “Objectivism,” is summed up by a well-known passage in Atlas:
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
This quote, her leitmotif, is taken as gospel by millions. In reality, it says: “The unrestrained individual is the highest social good. My happiness is my only moral justification. If I want something, I get it but I am not responsible for how you feel about it. How you live, or even if you live or die, is no concern of mine.” It directly licences the wanton selfishness and disregard of the Epstein class. Ayn Rand was a psychopath, no question about that. She was domineering, almost grotesquely narcissistic, paranoid and argued with everybody. She never gained any sort of academic or literary approval during her life time which offended her greatly. These days, as the high priestess of egotism, she is widely read by incels, the alt-right, QAnon followers, neonazis and deniers of all sizes, shapes and inclinations, as well as by right wing politicians of all stripes, capitalists, libertarians, sovereign citizens and various other whizzbangs, religious fanatics and fruitcakes. There is no psychology as such in her work, just her opinions.
Rothbard was greatly offended by the welfare state as he believed it was an enormous fraud imposed on society by a small power elite for their benefit:
In sum, the most important fact about (Lyndon Johnson’s) Great Society under which we live is the enormous disparity between rhetoric and content. In rhetoric, America is the land of the free and the generous, enjoying the fused blessings of a free market tempered by and joined to accelerating social welfare, bountifully distributing its unstinting largesse to the less fortunate in the world. In actual practice, the free economy is virtually gone, replaced by an imperial corporate state Leviathan that organizes, commands, exploits the rest of society and, indeed, the rest of the world, for its own power and pelf. We have experienced, as Garet Garrett keenly pointed out over a decade ago, a “revolution within the form.” The old limited republic (of the Constitution) has been replaced by Empire, within and without our borders [1].
True. Couldn’t agree more. Watching what the US has become and what it is doing to itself and the world, Rothbard is surely turning in his grave even though he is responsible at least in part for the looming catastophe. He, Rand and so many others are fascist enablers, and it’s all because their “neoliberalism” is an ideology of human behaviour with no basis in a formal theory of psychology. It assumes that, bound by a minimum set of rules, people will act rationally. They do: they make as much money as they can by throttling everybody else. What was missing was something to make them act decently. As a result, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and Netanyahu and all the gang came along, found the myriad loopholes where people are expected to do the right thing, and leapt right in. These people are not aberrations, they are the products of neoliberalism, a psychopathic sociopolitical system that has no means of stopping them. And the world suffers.
* If you want to know, the expression comes from Song of Solomon 7:4. “Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus.” Doesn’t seem very romantic to me.
Reference:
1. Rothbard, M (1967). The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique. First published in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, edited by Marvin E. Gettleman and David Mermelstein (New York: Vintage, 1967). Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20150618045339/http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html
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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.
‘But data aren’t information, information isn’t knowledge, knowledge isn’t wisdom and wisdom isn’t painless’…love this! So much great writing. Hard to keep up! Great resource. Your book was very timely.
Trump was very rational.
He avoided paying taxes and commented that therefore he was smart (no reference to morality)