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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In Shenzhen, China, Hui Ka Yan, 67, the former chairman of Evergrande, a bankrupt property company and, having once had $43billion to his name, briefly the richest man in Asia, was sentenced to life in prison and confiscation of his entire assets for massive corruption. In China, corrupt businessmen get life; in the US, they get the keys to the White House where they launch criminal and hopelessly incompetent wars of aggression. Meantime, in Germany, after two recent state elections, the political scene is in turmoil. In Saxony-Anhalt, formerly in East Germany, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came first with 44% of the vote while in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern it took 38%. AfD is strongly anti-gay but still manages to be led by a lesbian mother of two who doesn’t even live in Germany. The right wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has ruled Germany for 53 of the past 77 years, was wiped out, joining the Social Democrats in electoral oblivion and allowing Die Linke, the far-left heirs of communism, to prosper. Votes for the extremes are coming from people under 35; their parents are still voting for the old parties of their youth.
In France, the far-right Marine le Pen is close to winning next year’s presidential election, same as Brazil where the son of imprisoned insurrectionist and former president Jair Bolsonario is neck and neck with the elderly socialist, Lula da Silva. Javier Milei, far-right neoliberal president of Argentina, is doing what he can to move the balance using the implausibly corrupt Fernando Cerimedo (a detailed video from Ben Norton here, definitely worth watching). In Pakistan, the brutal and corrupt military dictatorship has taken to arresting women in their 70s as “threats to stability.”
Are these incidents connected? Yes, I believe they are, and it’s important to understand just how they’re connected, otherwise we get overwhelmed by the chaos and are tempted to join one or other extremist strongman (or woman) who promises to sort out the mess by kicking out foreigners. Unfortunately, the topic is vast and people tend to work on bits of it rather than tackle what is a very complex “big picture.” Can a mere shrink throw some light on the scene? Let’s see. We’ll start in France in 1798 where a child was born in the tumult of the late Revolution and grew up obsessed with the idea of putting society on a stable footing. By the time he died in 1857, Auguste Comte had built a formidable reputation as a scholar and curmudgeon as the founder of sociology and of an atheistic world religion.
Driven by its quest for truth, society, Comte said, evolves through recognisable stages. The first is the theological, where society is structured around God as the source of authority and revelation as the source of knowledge. The inhabitants, most of whom are little better than slaves, live in a universe of magic and believe whatever they’re told by the divinely-appointed king and his ever-alert enforcers, the priesthood. Life is strictly ordered in hierarchies such that power flows from the palace, through the priestly and secular aristocracies and down to the unfortunates at the bottom of the pile who end up with just enough to prevent them thinking about causing trouble.
In time, this type of society develops and becomes richer, eventually giving way to what he called the metaphysical stage in which divine power seeps away, replaced by the power of thought. With wealth and stability, centres of learning become more important, the ancient ways are questioned and authority starts to vest in reasoned arguments rather than the headsman’s axe. The concept of human rights, above and beyond those granted by church or state, grows and takes hold of the increasingly sophisticated and wealthy urban middle classes. Education is readily available; people have the time, the money and, importantly, the technology to travel; and books are much cheaper so ideas can spread more easily. None of this is absolute: there were great centres of learning in some theocratic societies, and the wealth of many metaphysical societies was built on slavery and extractive colonisation; as they say “Nobody’s perfect.”
Finally, society matures into a rational or scientific stage where reason and research prevail over myth reinforced by naked power or high-sounding bromides. Scientific societies are able to isolate their own problems and devise solutions that suit themselves, using positively-established proofs rather than relying on magical or metaphysical speculation, hence the term ‘positivism.’ Philosophy and science are to be stripped of all irrational or unprovable metaphysical elements, leaving only a spare but reality-based system of knowledge advancing toward some ideal future. The universe is seen as a real, rule-governed place which, by diligent application of our intellect, we can understand and work on to satisfy our needs. In particular, all proof rests on observation: if something can’t be seen and measured, then it’s either irrelevant or meaningless. While these ideas may sound a little grandiose today, Comte has had a singularly profound impact on life today: modern science just is positivist science. However, there is also a direct connection between his utopian ideals and the spreading chaos today, although he would certainly be horrified at the paths societies have taken since his death.
While there were many streams to the development of positivist thought, they were all focussed on one element: eliminating fanciful thinking and replacing it with reality-based observation. Science and society had to be built on proven, established facts, not on whimsical daydreams such as religion or “forces of nature” and so on. Reliable knowledge can only come from direct observations through our senses, not from studying ancient texts in a turret or gazing at the stars while stoned on mushrooms. This approach is known as empiricism, the notion that we cannot know anything about the world unless we have seen it and measured it. While this idea had been gaining strength throughout the 19th Century, it was given an enormous boost by the horrors of the Great War of 1914-19. What value was religion if it couldn’t prevent untold millions of deaths and vast destruction? Romantic dreams of imperial glory died in the mud. Humans had to do better, and the proper path was to discard sentiment and other mushy notions, replacing them with rational ideas only.
Starting early in the 1920s, a group of economists centred in Vienna proposed that economics had to be seen as a science in its own right, to be studied empirically like any other mainstream science. All metaphysical notions such as value, sympathy, welfare and so on had to be discarded in favour of seeing the market as a dispassionate, self-correcting means of creating and distributing wealth. The market, they believed, is a mechanism for encouraging efficient distribution of resources and discouraging waste and inefficiency. Only a free market can do this as it alone has all the information needed to function smoothly. Mere humans, working either alone or as a group, cannot possibly know enough to tell the market what to do, therefore any form of government regulation or interference was anathema to them. Government’s role was to pass laws on crime and corruption and to guard the borders but, that apart, the only good government was a very small one sitting on its hands while facing away from the economy.
This group of economists didn’t get much air time over the next few decades. The Great Depresssion threw the world into chaos, for which direct government intervention was seen as the only chance of survival. Fascism developed and grew and, in 20 short years, the world was at war again. After 1945, governments continued their involvement in economies, setting up huge social welfare systems, directing research and investment, and using taxes to redistribute national wealth so everybody had a fair go. This was the golden age for workers as company CEOs earned about twenty times the median worker’s salary. In the scornful words of Harold MacMillan, Britain’s multimillionaire prime minister, the workers had never had it so good. Yes, it was good, far better than the misery of the depression or the brutality of the laissez faire capitalism that Friedrich Engels described in 1843 [1]. In fact, it was so good that the CEOs and the rich shareholders wondered why they couldn’t have a little bit more icing on their share of the national cake.
After a bit of casting around, they came across the ageing Vienna economists and their students, who were working on what they called neoliberal economics. They were delighted: it was everything a grasping capitalist could ask for, all neatly wrapped up in technical jargon that most of them didn’t bother to read because the intros said it all: Get rid of unprovable fantasies such as social justice, equality, social value, community, and mutual interdependence, give everything a cash value, let the dogs loose to eat each other and may the best dog win. That and that alone will stimulate the market to produce real wealth which will come first to the owners of capital and then trickle down to benefit the workers. As the owners and managers accumulate more wealth, they will have to reinvest it which will create more jobs and thus a bigger economy which will benefit everybody. Whoopee, they said, bring it on, get rid of the tender-hearted socialist free-loaders, cut the government out of it and soon we will all arrive at capitalist paradise. And as their reward for making life so much better for everybody, the owners of capital should get a bigger share, thank you. Yes, even when CEOs get over 300 times the median worker’s salary, that’s not overdoing it because without capitalists and managers, there would be no jobs at all (if Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg and the other tech oligarchs are included, it’s nearly 400 times as much).
Politicians didn’t need much pushing to join the gravy train; in no time, the capitalists had their men and women elected to power, Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US, and many others. The idea that society existed for the benefit of all its members was swept away, replaced with the idea that only people who worked hard and contributed had any rights. Social projects were measured on a cost-benefit balance and dumped if they didn’t generate enough revenue. Education had to be directed at what paid, not what was good for society since, as Thatcher screeched, “There is no such thing as society.” What we thought was society is in fact just a collection of detached and unemotional inviduals going about their business of rationally weighing costs and making economic decisions in their own interest, unaffected by sentiment and false notions such as good and evil. If it paid, it was ipso facto good, if it didn’t, out with the garbage.
In no time, even before neoliberalism’s full implications became clear, the economic basis of most Western countries and many others was turned upside down. In practice, neoliberalism is a social program masquerading as a science of economics, which licenses and rewards greed above all other human attributes. It says it removes values and other metaphysics from the equation but it can’t eliminate greed and dishonesty and, above all, doesn’t try. There’s no limit: anybody who stops to help a sick or troubled person by the roadside loses his place in the stampede. In an echo of Dickensian workhouses, people have to be encouraged to work by making unemployment so shameful and so unpleasant that they have no choice but to take any job on offer, at the price the employer chooses:
Positivist science says: “If we can’t see it and measure it, it isn’t the province of science.” This soon morphed to “If we can’t see it and measure it, it doesn’t exist and anybody who says it does is an idiot and will be ignored and preferably lose funding.”
Neoliberal economics says: “Only the market knows the cash value of anything; if the market doesn’t assign a cash value to it, it doesn’t exist and anybody who says it does is an idiot and will be ignored and preferably lose funding.”
It’s the same principle applied to different fields: eliminate all emotion and pretend that objectivity will explain everything we need to know. Psychiatry says: “We can’t measure feelings so we’ll ignore them and talk only about neurotransmitters and genes and drugs, with a side of ECT.” Games theorists apply this to nuclear war, quite forgetting that war is very destructive but the people who make all the money from it are the same people who make the decisions about launching wars and who won’t be doing the fighting. Economists pretend that if global warming is real, the market will price it in. Yes, the market may put a carbon price on fossil fuels but by then it will be too late: markets are mindless, remember? They can’t look ahead and say: “Hmm, I wonder what’s best for my great grandchildren and the koalas? OK, even if it costs me, that’s what we’ll do.”
This was forecast in 1944 by a Hungarian economist called Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), the same year that one of the most influential of neolibs, Friedrich Hayek, published a widely-quoted polemic, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek argued that any form of central planning would inevitably lead to economic inefficiency, with loss of freedom and, in due course, reduction of workers to serfs: socialism, he said, necessarily leads to Nazism (he also said Hitler was a fool for alienating and expelling Germany’s Jews because many of them were confirmed totalitarians in the German mould – as we see in Israel today). Polanyi disagreed. He believed the entire notion of the self-regulating market was false as it was built on false assumptions, while assigning a cash value to everything would inevitably lead to the destruction of the very society the market was supposed to serve:
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting (i.e. free) market implied a stark Utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness (p3) ... It is all too easily assumed by economic liberals that economic rulers tend to be beneficial, while political rulers do not (p165).
The most dangerous false assumption in neoliberalism comes directly from its positivist roots: that if we can’t see and measure human psychology, we can safely ignore it and let the market sort it out. Neoliberalism is a theory of human behaviour, specifically measurable human economic behaviour. However, it’s not built on a theory of mind, it simply hangs from a skyhook called “observable behaviour,” unsupported by any concept of what goes on in human heads that generates the observable behaviour. It doesn’t ask why, for example, people support charities. Instead, it works out how much people will give each year, and deducts that from the tax bill that the rich have to pay – to the delight of the rich, of course, as GBS noted: “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” Where there should be a foundation for neoliberalism derived from a theory of mind, there is simply a black hole.
Neolibs assumed that people would automatically follow the rules, that they would be on their best behaviour and not try to take the last bit of bread from the widows and orphans. The part of their theory that should have said “Play fair, no biting, kneeing or thieving” was left blank, a void, just because it was moral and moral values have no cash value. Into that void galloped all the cheats, liars, thieves, scoundrels, political and religious fanatics and assorted rapists, paedophiles and mass murderers who had been kept at arm’s length by the welfare state. Now they could loot to their black hearts’ content, there was nothing to stop them because the more people have, the more they feel they’re entitled to, as Nobel winner Paul Krugman commented:
With great wealth comes both great power and a separation from the concerns of ordinary citizens. What the very rich want, they often get; but what they want is often harmful to the rest of the nation.
So we see that the grandmotherly Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has just been exposed as being the centre of a ring of corruption involving government contracts. No doubt her defence will be “It wasn’t actually illegal and everybody else was doing it, so why not?” Chris Hedges gives a very brief summary of Trump’s endless corruption, with the warning that he is well on the way to bankrupting the US just as he cheated and bankrupted his casinos. Trump, Hedges says, is a typical mafia extortionist. How did he get the keys to the White House? Because there was nothing in neoliberalism to stop him. Its architects saw to that: “Strip away the morality, assign everything cash value and we will soon reach economic nirvana.” No, not so. It’s as Lord Acton said 150 years ago: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control.” That’s not quite right: Trump doesn’t have the mentality of a gangster, he is a gangster, and always has been [2]. He lied to get the job and then threw the doors to the treasury open to all his evil Epstein mates. Trump is not an aberration, he is the logical conclusion of the neoliberal experiment.
The world today is lumbering into new territory, it will never be the same. I’m not suggesting it has always been nice for all its occupants but it’s certainly getting worse by the day and we have no idea where this ends. For this, we can thank the neoliberal economists who took their cues from positivist scientists, who were following the dictates of Auguste Comte. What a pity they didn’t finish with Comte’s concept of a universal, atheistic religion, but then religion has no cash value, does it? Well, it does, it can be very profitable but only if the central message is ignored:
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24).
Boring, forget that bit. Pass me the caviar, James, and could you tell those hungry people outside to stop making all that fuss? If the market wants them to eat, it will provide food.
Be careful, lady, there may come a day when they eat the rich.
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References:
1. 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
2. Trump ML (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. London: Simon and Shuster.
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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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Interesting article. Thank you. Please provide an other online bookstore like bookshop.org - instead of getting Amazon more costomers. 🌸