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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A somewhat shorter post this week, I’ve been very busy with different projects, including new solar panels and batteries on our house.
An interview with Mohsen Abdelmoumen, an Algerian reporter based in Brussels, has just been published. The English version is here, French here (and no, I can’t speak French at that level, he translated it). Also that photo must be a dozen years old.
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This week marks the 31st COP on climate change, the “conference of parties.” Opening the conference in Turkiye, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, reminded the tens of thousands of delegates that the original target of a maximum of 1.5C rise in temperatures is now history. He pointed out that in the September quarter, the world’s nine largest oil companies made $95billion profit, largely from profiteering due to the closure of the Persian Gulf. At the same time, the fund to help poor countries adjust to climate change received just $600million, i.e. barely 14 hours profit for the fuel companies. It doesn’t take much brain power to work out where the world is heading. All we have to do is find a dozen or so graphs and project them forward.
Graph 1: World population. Currently 8.3billion, growing by about 63million a year or about 0.85%.The idea that it will just grow and grow indefinitely is absurd. It has to stop and then start to shrink again, rapidly. Due to Mao’s One Child Policy, China’s population has stopped and will soon start to shrink. India’s is growing apace, as are many African countries, but they can’t provide as China has done. Australia’s has gone from 10million in March 1959 to about 27million now but we are running out of water. Australian agriculture is efficient and we remain a major food exporter but that’s only because labour has been replaced by machines, which are heavily dependent on liquid fuels, which we don’t produce.
Greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, methane and artificial chemicals, rise inexorably, greatly helped along by militarism, e.g. the US military alone consumes something like 4% of the world’s liquid fuels, and that doesn’t include the costs of production of all the hugely expensive equipment they use and blow up. Dropping one bomb produces about four times its weight in CO2 and other gases but that doesn’t include the cost of mining the chemicals and metal, manufacturing it, transporting it around the world, loading it on a jet fighter, flying and then the plane getting home again.
Clean water. A huge part of the world’s population is utterly dependent on rivers coming from glaciers high in mountains far out of sight. They’re now melting and will not recover, which means major rivers like in China, India and Pakistan, South East Asia, Russia and Central Asia and so on will simply stop flowing. Billions of people will lose their livelihoods, not to mention drinking water, hydropower and so on. The good news is that the South West of USA is in dire hydrological trouble. Desert cities like Phoenix AZ exist only because of meltwater from the Rockies, and it’s drying up. Something like 30million people have no other source of water. Maybe that will start to focus attention in the swamp in Washington.
Oceans: pollution and overfishing.
Fossil fuels: Australia has approved 31 major coal and gas projects since the present government took over four years ago.
Destruction of native forests. Australia is a world leader, doing its best to catch up to Brazil and Indonesia. Due to droughts, large parts of Indonesia are on fire, which sets fire to the drying peat bogs, which produce the worst smoke pollution of all and also sterilise the soil so the jungle can’t grow back.
You get the message: every measure of damage to the biosphere is heading in the wrong direction. What has this to do with a column on fascism? Heaps. For all the UN Secretary General’s good intentions, none of the people who make the big decisions have travelled to the conference because none of them give a shit about climate change. We can start with Donald Trump, whose niece Mary said he has “...a carefully cultivated but delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority.” He loathes experts and is driven mad by what he sees as people trying to stop him and his billionaire friends making money by wrecking the planet. Under him, thousands of environmental rules and regulations have been cancelled or weakened. Australia’s prime minister went to a climate conference in the Pacific last week (repeated in Turkiye), on an island nation that will soon disappear under the waves, but somehow forgot to mention how his government keeps approving gigantic coal and gas projects.
Fact is, we’re in trouble, it’s going to get worse and the idea that the planet’s life supports could suddenly collapse is no longer science fiction. However, the people who can make the decisions have no interest in climate change, they’re only interested in two closely related things, power and money. Politics has always attracted people who are fascinated by power but once they get a foot in the door, the lust for power takes over. Being close to the centres of power is immensely exciting. The urge to get higher up the dominance hierarchy, to get more and more power, is intensely self-reinforcing so, in order to get ahead, they dump whatever scruples they may once have had and commit to the rat race. Overwhelmingly, they have no idea why they’re chasing power or what they’ll do if and when they get it. They’re like a dog chasing a bus: what’s he going to do with it if he catches one? All they know is that being on the ladder feels good so getting higher will feel better.
That’s always been the case but it’s probably worse now as the entire economic system in most parts of the world has been turned around to make it easier for small numbers of people to get very, very rich. There have always been lords and peasants, billionaires and paupers but after the Great Depression and World War II, things had changed. In the 1930s, influenced by the British economist, JM Keynes, governments realised that the only viable path out of the Depression was to get the common herd working and earning, then the money could work its way back up the ladder. The Depression ended when governments embarked on massive remilitarisation programs, which culminated in the World War. They could equally have spent the money on schools and roads but preferred war. Post-War, the public-spending programs continued which resulted in a golden age for workers, the first (and last) in their miserable history. In the US, CEO’s took home 18-20 times the salary of their median worker.
In the UK, PM Harold MacMillan said the working classes “had never had it so good,” which was true but reflected more on how miserable they had been even twenty years before. George Orwell documented the misery of the working classes in the 1930s in two classic works, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier. By the mid-1950s, a couple who had married in their twenties in the early 1930s lived in entirely different worlds. National health services proliferated, full employment, cheap modern housing with indoor plumbing, cheap little cars, scholarships for continuing education, travel became cheap for people to enjoy their new holidays, communications improved, on and on. It could have lasted, but it didn’t. The rich could see there was money out there, and they wanted more. After a bit of casting around, they found a ready-made economic doctrine to suit them. Neoliberal economics was based on the idea that efficiency was more important than such waffly notions as welfare, equality, job satisfaction and so on. What’s efficiency in economic terms? Of that I’m not sure. A Google search brings up this:
Economic efficiency is a state in which every resource in an economy is allocated and used in the most optimal way possible to maximize total benefit and minimize waste. When an economy is economically efficient, it is impossible to make any single person or entity better off without making someone else worse off
Manifestly, that’s meaningless. Who gets the benefit? How do we define waste? Does it imply equality? What happens when people can’t work, and so on? Neoliberal economics had ready-made answers to this sort of question: Only the market knows. The amount of information needed to make even a simple decision is beyond any single person or group of experts. The information is out there, floating around in the market, so the proper thing is for governments to step back and let the market make the decisions on what to produce and where to sell it. If people want a product or service, then somebody will move in to satisfy the demand. People will weigh up the costs against the benefit they expect from it and make a decision based in self-interest. Consumers will look after their own interests, nobody else has to be involved. If something can’t be bought, then that means people don’t really need it otherwise somebody would provide it. In this model, humans are little rational operators, calmly going through life making decisions in their best interest so that the whole economy settles down to its most efficient level and governments can shrink until they hardly exist. As a result, the average CEO in the US now takes home about 400 times the salary of his median worker. This was not an accident.
Neoliberalism said governments should not make investment decisions, that should be left to “the market.” People should be allowed to make as much money as they like. The money would first have to trickle up the system, then it would trickle down again as the rich will have to reinvest it, which will create jobs for the workers and everybody will be happy. Naturally enough, the wealthy classes thought this was a fantastic idea and started pressuring politicians to put it in place. Get rid of the inefficient welfare state which simply encouraged people to be lazy and replace it with a rational, scientific economy. Which, they didn’t mention, would be much easier to cheat, and that’s what they’ve done. If the free market is efficient and works for people’s interests, why are there so many wars? But what counts now is: if the market is efficient, why is it driving us toward planetary apocalypse? The answer is simple: the market doesn’t look ahead. It has no eyes and no brains so it can’t take account of what’s around the corner. If it’s in the interest of the oil companies to extract every last barrel, then that’s what they’ll do rather than leave it as a “trapped asset.”
Thus, we have ended up with an unholy alliance between big capital and politics. One side wants more money and will do anything to get it, the other wants more power and will do anything to get it, so they’ve joined forces and We The People are completely ignored. In the UK, Burnham came to power promising change but he is pressing ahead to prosecute people who protest against genocide while arming, financing and protecting the genocidaires because he knows that if he opposes them, he will be booted out of power like Jeremy Corbyn was (for lengthy expert commentaries on the ban on Palestine Action, see former British diplomat Craig Murray).
If the world climate collapses, that’s not very efficient. There is no prospect of preventing major climate catastrophe while the present crop of politicians is in power, supported by the people making all the money. Former UK PM Tony Blair left politics and is now worth something like $140million. The Clintons have made bigger fortunes, Obama somewhat less. Neoliberalism is the enemy: the union of money and power is driving us to destruction. All the pious talk at conferences will achieve nothing without major political change. The matter is now urgent, the time for courtesy has well and truly gone. Change can’t come from places like Africa or the slums of Asia, it definitely won’t come from the wealthy or the political class, they will fight to retain what they believe to be their entitlements, so it falls on the educated middle classes. Let’s get cracking. Cracking heads, because that’s the only language the rich and powerful understand.
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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. (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
Clinical application of the biocognitive model:
McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.
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.
The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.
Didn’t quite understand how the explosion of billionaires took place, probably starting in the 90s with greed is good