God and the Paradox of Hierarchy

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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Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority … And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control (John Dahlberg-Acton, 1^st Baron, 1887).

For most of the world today, World War II is distant history, an explosion by the irrepressibly aggressive Germans against the civilised Western democracies and a war to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population. In fact, it was neither of these things. As was made crystal clear in Mein Kampf, it was a war to build a vast new empire in the Slavic lands, an empire of heroic Germans intended to last a thousand years. At the same time, they intended to clean out the racial pollution at home, because that’s how racists think. The war against the Low Countries, France and Britain was to clear the deck, to make sure Germany wouldn’t be caught in a war on two fronts again. The real war began with the titanic invasion of the USSR on June 22^nd, 1941, using the largest military force ever assembled. The goal was to conquer the territory lying west of the Ural ranges, stretching from the Arctic down to the Black and Caspian seas, then to reduce the indigenous Slavic population by half to two thirds, with the survivors labouring for the master race as agricultural or industrial serfs.

Hitler’s idea was that by transplanting racially suitable Germans, they could grow to a population of 250million in a hundred years. By virtue of their superior intellect, industry and morality, the Reich would dominate the world in a way never before seen. That didn’t happen, of course, as the Soviets refused to play their part. Instead of rolling over like inferior beings, they fought back with unexpected valour and sacrifice, eventually crushing the Nazi invasion and taking control of the eastern half of Europe. As revealed by his rambling monologues in the last months of the war, Hitler was seriously put out by this and complained that the German people had let him down [1].

The standard narrative in the West is that this all came about because Germans. However, it’s not true that Hitler woke one morning and decided Germany needed a new Reich. Instead, he used a fully-functioning example from history as his model. This was not Rome, even though a lot of Nazi regalia was copied from them, but the British Empire. In particular, the bit that fascinated the Nazis was what was known as the crown jewel of the British Empire, their vast colonies in the Subcontinent, comprising modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar (formerly Burma).

Even today, children in the West are taught that Britain was a benevolent coloniser, bringing the benefits of modern industrial, cultural and political life to the backward coolies out East. Again, there is absolutely no truth in any of this. In a careful analysis, journalist and author Ben Norton shows that 250 years of colonisation reduced India from one of the wealthiest countries in the world to one of the poorest, directly causing the deaths of perhaps 150million inhabitants in the process. In modern terms, Britain extracted something of the order of $43trillion from its Indian colonies, from which they have not recovered and most likely never will. Moreover, in the 75 years since losing the phenomenal cash transfusions purloined from its unwilling colonies, Britain has sunk lower and lower and will never again see its former glory.

In their goal of building an empire in the east, the Germans were simply doing what the British had done. They, in turn, were doing what the French, and Spanish and Dutch and Portuguese and Belgians and everybody else had long been doing, marching in to somebody else’s lands and taking over at gunpoint. It was an age of imperialism but despite World War II being “The War to make the World Safe for Democracy,” it hasn’t stopped. Granted, the Europeans had to give up their distant colonies but their former colony, the US, has smoothly slipped into the role and history keeps repeating. That’s not how it’s presented on the nightly news, of course, but when looking at the West’s role as colonisers, it’s essential to remember that all we ever hear is the West’s version of events. However we look at the history of the last few hundred years, and regardless of the location and the players, the narrative always reduces to a single recurring theme: a case of Us Enlightened Goodies vs. Them Barbaric Baddies. As the goodies in this pleasingly binary world, we can do no wrong while our many and ever-changing opponents are invariably plotting wickedness and have to be hammered until they shuffle into their place at the back of the queue. Trouble is, it doesn’t seem to be working.

In 1989, the USSR lost control of its eastern European satellites (note that only baddies have satellites; Canada and Australia are allies of the US, not satellites). A few years later, the Union itself dissolved just as China abruptly abandoned its socialist legacy and trod the capitalist road. Suddenly, we were in a unipolar world where history had ended with the triumph of Western liberal democratic capitalism. No more commies trying to bring us down, the future was clear, everybody could relax and get on with life. Except a few years later, a different bunch of baddies stuck their evil, grinning heads over the parapet and it was on again. With a sigh, the West rolled up its collective sleeves and got back to the job of teaching the wicked ones their manners in a Global War on Terror (GWOT). However, while preoccupied with beating Iraq and Libya and Somalia and Syria and other benighted places into a richly-deserved pulp, the age-old Baddies of Russia and China burst out of hibernation and suddenly, here we are marching down the Road to War. If it happens, this will definitely be The War to End All Wars. There’ll be nothing left for the survivors to fight over.

What’s wrong with us? We have a lovely planet, certainly much more welcoming than Mercury or Neptune, yet we can’t take time off from fighting to enjoy it and look after it before we do irreparable damage. The standard answer, Them against Us, hasn’t done anything to produce peace. In fact, it only seems to make things worse. The US, for example, has been at war for all but seven years of its 250 years of existence. In the 80 years since World War II, in the process of invading about 25 countries, fomenting dozens of coups and fostering a hundred rebellions, their military have killed about 20million people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians in their own countries, either defending their homes or peacefully going about their business. That is simply not compatible with the notion that “We’re always the goodies and they’re the baddies, so let’s get ‘em.”

The question immediately arises: Why get them? Why not get on with building our lives here and leave them to do whatever bad things they like over there? If our way of life is so superior, then surely they must eventually see the light and give up their bad ways in favour of ours? It doesn’t work like that, our leaders say, bad means bad. Bad people are always trying to attack us because that’s what bad people do, that’s their nature. They can no more will themselves to stop being bad than we could choose to do bad ourselves. We have to stay perpetually armed and ready to fight because if we take our eyes off them, they will sneak up on us and then it will be too late. That’s how it’s put to us.

On the other hand, do the baddies actually know they’re bad? Do the average Russian and the average Chinese and Iranians and all the other demonic races huddle together at night, plotting how to take us down? I don’t think they do. I think they just want to be left alone because when we say “We must be armed and ever-ready to fight to defend ourselves against their aggression,” they hear and see: “The West is armed and ready to attack us, and it has a track record of aggression.” To clear up any doubt, Bill Clinton told the UN General Assembly: “…the United States is entitled to resort to the unilateral use of military power … (to ensure) uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources” (Sept. 27^th 1993). What does he mean “entitled”? Who said they are? And why is their commercial success worth more than our freedom to deal with our resources the way we want? That’s straight out mafia tactics: We’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse.

The short answer to these and so many similar questions is that, in international relations, morality doesn’t get a walk-on part. Clinton said “entitled” but he meant “sufficiently powerful to take what we want.” Of course, it’s all presented as Good Western Civilisation vs Bad Everybody Else, but that’s only window dressing. The reality is that humans like to dominate each other, they like to set up dominance hierarchies just because it feels good, but… and it is a very big but, at the same time, humans also don’t like to be dominated. If being on top feels good, then being crushed underfoot feels bad. Faced with the threat of domination, it is normal for humans to resist, even to death. Precisely as the US feels “entitled” to use force just because it gives them a buzz, so the other side is not just entitled to resist but will predictably do so. That’s not morality, that’s nature. This is the paradox of hierarchy, a perfectly normal reaction which has been twisted into a false narrative of Good vs Bad: “We’re good so if you resist us, that proves you’re bad and we’re entitled to use more force to crush you otherwise, being bad, you’ll attack us in our sleep.” This self-fulfilling prophecy is the level at which our “leaders” think. If you can call it thinking, they’re actually functioning at the level of baboons on the veldt (no offence to baboons).

So who ends up wielding power in our respective societies? Naturally enough, it’s people who are attracted to it, who are excited by power and get their kicks from walking around with their chests puffed out or kicking sand in other people’s faces. In a prescient commentary written in 1943, George Orwell denounced the openly fascist sympathies of the Irish poet and dramatist, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939):

Yeats, the poet, sees at a glance that Fascism means injustice, and acclaims if for that very reason. But at the same time he fails to see that the new authoritarian civilisation, if it arrives, will not be aristocratic, or what he means by aristocratic. It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyck faces, but by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering gangsters.

He was almost right. It’s now run by anonymous billionaires working through their hired “men with the mentality of gangsters,” smooth-talking politicians and bureaucrats, with the actual murderers and enforcers lurking just off stage. And it was ever thus. The marauding British adventurers who gradually conquered India didn’t give a damn what happened to the natives, there were plenty more where they came from. They were no different from the Nazis, they just took longer to get to the same goal.

In Ukraine today, the West, in the form of NATO, is fighting a proxy war for the “right” to station nuclear-armed missiles and supersonic bombers right on the Russian border. After five invasions in less than 40 years last century, Russians are a little neuralgic on the prospect of another attack so they’ve pushed back but, of course, it’s all their fault. Sorry, it’s not them, it’s Him. It’s all Putin’s invasion and Putin’s war and Putin’s missiles and Putin’s thuggish troops… The war is personalised as the right-thinking West standing firm against the resurgent Slavic Antichrist. Our friends at The Economist showed this recently when they announced “Putin’s men are due to meet American diplomats in Riyadh…” Excuse me? Don’t you mean “Russian diplomats are due to meet Trump’s men in Riyadh”? No, they didn’t, as that wouldn’t convey the impression of perfidy they wanted to convey.

Anyway, if there was any doubt that the US Government, and the UK Government and quite a few others are run by “anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering gangsters,” that’s all been dispelled, courtesy of our valiant co-sponsors of the Judaeo-Christian ethic (whatever that is). We are invited to believe that the history of the Middle East began on October 7^th 2023 when a band of evil Islamic terrorists from Gaza attacked their peace-loving Jewish neighbours, killing about 1200 citizens and kidnapping 250 others. We are not told that at least half of the deaths were the result of massive Israeli bombardment by tanks and Hellfire missiles fired from American-built helicopters; nor that many of the deaths were police and military and therefore legitimate targets; nor that, after 75 years of dispossession and brutal repression, the Palestinians were legally entitled to armed resistance; nor that, in international law, the Israelis are forbidden from taking reprisals, on and on. Now, having enforced a total blockade of the terrified and defenceless survivors in Gaza, nuclear-armed Israel is gleefully and openly starving them to death so that they can eliminate all trace of the ancient Palestinian population and annex the territory to their vision of “Greater Israel,” as their God is said to have promised them.

It's said that truth is the first casualty in war but that’s no longer right. Today, the first casualty in war is international law, or what’s left of it. I’ve mentioned before that the Zionist claim on Palestinian lands is based in a covenant they had with Yahweh, their god. It said: “I will give you this land if you keep my law.” One of the laws is: “Thou shalt not kill.” Stripped of excess verbiage, this means: No killing. Do not kill anybody, anywhere, for any reason. That should be the end of the story, except that the government of Israel is totally controlled by billionaires, many anonymous, some not, by power-mad politicians served by militarised and brainwashed bureaucrats and a very liberal sprinkling of gangsters, plenty in Israel but most not. The question of whether the Palestinian breakout on October 7^th was moral is irrelevant. All that counts is whether it was predictable. The biocognitive model says it was perfectly predictable. Therefore, whatever the Israelis were doing before that date that made it predictable was short-sighted at least, if not immoral.

While the original founders of the Zionist movement fully intended to drive out the indigenous population of Palestine [2], much as the British imperialists felt the need to clear out excess Indians and Australian Aboriginals, I doubt that most of them would have been happy for their sort-of humanitarian project to descend into the state of proto-fascist barbarism that it has become. Men like Shamir and Begin, with not just the mentality of gangsters but a background in gratuitous brutality, finally got control of the Israeli polity. They drove the Palestinians into a huge open air prison, forced them to submit to a life of deprivation and misery, and were surprised when the oppressed got sick of it and decided to fight back. Really? You people are that stupid? Remember we’re not falling for the old “Goodies vs Baddies” lie, we’re looking at the reality of the human condition: that humans don’t like being oppressed and will eventually hit back at their oppressors.

The Paradox of Hierarchy is a law of nature which has nothing to do with any supposed God-given laws (that everybody ignores except when it suits them). We ignore it at our peril.

References:

1. Hitler, Adolf (1945/1961). The Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler-Bormann documents. Ed: Genoud, F. Cassell: London.

2. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

1. 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:

2. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

3. McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

4. 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.