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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Fascism is not a political doctrine in the sense that democracy, aristocracy, autocracy, theocracy or kakistocracy (government by the worst) are doctrines dictating how a government is to be organised and acquitted. It is not an economic doctrine, as socialism and capitalism are. It is essentially a technology for gaining and maintaining power, based on the innate, hormonally-driven human urge to dominate others, to gain more and more power, territory and possessions, even at the expense of others – or deliberately at their expense, to subjugate them. A sense of power and domination is its own reward: it feels good but, at the same time, being forced down the dominance hierarchy or out of the tribe feels bad in and of itself. This is the paradox of hierarchy: essentially equal and opposite urges operate in each and every member of Homo sapiens but if one person’s urge to dominate is satisfied, then a hundred miss out.
Fascist technology is any technique or action that increases or encourages the urge to gain power or amplifies the rewards of being dominant. The technology can be applied to any group of people organised according to a dominance hierarchy: politics of course but also armies, religions, big companies, academia, and definitely football clubs. Because the urge to dominate is based in the hormone testosterone, it is strongly male-oriented but women are quickly swept up and form an important part of the background of any fascist movement. Crucially, the technology is directed at building and expanding the hierarchy; the drive to dominate is easily switched on but, apart from defeat, there is no off-switch. We have in us a lust for more and more but no innate mechanism to say “Enough is enough, I’ll leave some for others.” That’s a learned, moral matter but it is not innate and most people who want to go up the ladder slept through that lesson.
In practical politics, this means that fascism is a self-amplifying movement, powered by ever-increasing excitement, driven more and more to extremes, to want more territory, to see more enemies to crush. Because it is based in the idea “We are the greatest,” no member is allowed to say: “Actually, it’s not that important. Let’s be satisfied with what we’ve got” or “Really, we’re no different from everybody else.” The winning team of last year’s grand final doesn’t choose to spend this year surfing, no way, they’re straight back into the fray to prove who’s top dog. Politically, any fascist group is locked into a one way path: To the extreme and beyond, to paraphrase Toy Story. There’s an up escalator, but no down; it ratchets up but there is no rappell rope to come down again. Moderates are replaced by extremists, reasonable demands by unreasonable, realistic plans by unrealistic and so on until ... until what? Once under way, how does a fascist movement end? To answer that, we have to look to history but in the main, the answers are not pretty, a Götterdämmerung imposed from without or exploding within.
It is extremely rare for people to give up power voluntarily. Even very old people tenaciously hang on to their offices or wealth, long after they are able to do anything beyond look at it. It doesn’t make any difference whether they built the empire themselves or inherited it, their gnarled old hands have to be prised off the treasure or the throne, even their dead hands. Politically, people with serious power – or wealth, it’s the same thing – would rather die than give it up, especially to their enemies. They’re certainly keen for other people to die so they can hang on. But as a system that rewards the in group or the leader above all others, there are always lots of people who want to take top spot themselves. Fascism is inherently unstable but Orwell foretold a grim stability, a balance of terror between huge and massively-armed states:
Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity [1, p26].
In this essay, You and the Atom Bomb, from late 1945, and presaging his 1984, he coined the term “cold war” to describe the state of unwavering hostility, a “peace that is no peace” that had split the wartime anti-fascist allies, essentially the US and USSR as Britain was prostrate. This is important, because one way fascism ends is when the external enemies it has created overcome their differences to form an alliance to defeat it. The alliance to defeat Napoleon was another example. On the large scale, those days are probably gone because nuclear weapons are great levellers, but smaller examples still happen from time to time, e.g. when Vietnam invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge.
More commonly, fascism tears itself apart from within. This might be when the founders die and the new generation fight over who is going to rule, or they can’t agree on a single course, or when the ultra-extremist group decides to eliminate a more moderate group or vice versa, resulting in civil war. This happened in the USSR in 1989, leading to its collapse. In China, when Mao died in September 1976, his wife and a small group (the “gang of four”) attempted to seize power but were thwarted by moderates led by Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiopeng and others.
Today, we see this playing out in two important far-right states, the US and Israel, both of which have largely turned the world against them. As bad as they are, I don’t think anybody is yet thinking of invading two dangerously unstable nuclear states. Everybody is hoping nature will take its course and they implode from within. In the US, Trump regained power by an artful alliance of frustrated nativists and working class people, his MAGAts who provided the votes he needed, and money invested by mainly Zionist billionaires (note invested, not donated). These groups are not natural allies. The American right wing is traditionally antisemitic, ranging from indifference to outright hostility. In the 1930s, the US had strict quotas on immigration of Jews. Thomas Szasz recounts the trouble his family had in migrating from Hungary, and how, despite having excellent marks, he struggled to enter medical school. At that time, many states had strict race-based laws, mainly directed against African-Americans but easily stretched to cover Asians or Jews as the fancy took them. This was normal then but the reality is, vulgar racism has never really gone away, it has simply hidden itself in Smalltown, USA.
So Trump’s political machine, such as it is, had wheels going in opposite directions and, to nobody’s surprise, the wheels are falling off. By trying to satisfy the Zionists with a war on Iran, he has infuriated his nativist, America-First base, the “deplorables” who actually vote for him. By signing a capitulation with Iran, he is haemorrhaging support from the billionaire Zionists such as the bizarre Miriam Adelson who gave Trump $250million and is now shitty he isn’t doing what Israel wants. With one supremely stupid war, he has managed to alienate both bases and he is now in serious political trouble. When he was elected, I predicted he would be pushed out by the end of 2026; that’s still looking very likely but we’ll see how much more damage he can do before then.
All this is proceeding according to Fascist script 101: take advantage of the sense of decline and immiseration to gain power; appoint external enemies (Muslims, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and China) and internal enemies (immigrants, antifa, lefties of various shapes and colours) and then start pogroms to neutralise them; build a sense of national crisis; appoint yourself as the saviour of the nation and its moral heritage and so on. This is textbook stuff, straight from Mein Kampf per courtesy of the reptilian Stephen Miller (and yes, unfair to snakes). Where Trump has failed is his corruption. Ordinary people don’t like corruption. They don’t like the sense that their superiors in the national hierarchy are using their power and influence to enrich themselves in ways ordinary people can’t and wouldn’t.
Overwhelmingly, people appointed as treasurer of the local church or golf club wouldn’t dream of stealing money or giving advantages to their friends or relatives, and this is the standard they demand of their leaders. For the German people, one of Hitler’s electoral strengths was that he was decidedly ascetic with no interest in accumulating wealth for himself; also, he was not promiscuous and was always courteous to women. The contrast with the Trump crime family just couldn’t be greater (see Kevin Walmsley today re the Trump sons’ investment in a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan which has just been given $1.6bln in Federal grants; interesting article; we won’t start on the loathsome Kushner’s diabolical plans for Albania but if you really want to ruin your day, watch Patrick Henningsen here). Another reason Trump is on the slide is his erratic behaviour, which comes from trying to bignote himself all the time while stealing the family silver and handing it to his rich friends and making sure nobody ever sees the paedophilic dirt in the Epstein files. That’s too many balls for a dementing man to juggle.
Fortunately, there is something called the midterm elections due in November. At this stage, Trump is heading for a shattering defeat but nobody should underestimate the capacity of the wealthy to swing things in their favour. He knows that if he loses control of the Senate, he’ll be heading straight to a federal prison for a long time. There are still four months to go; trapped rats are the most dangerous. He could easily pull some stunt out of his hat that normal people wouldn’t think of and, because of the imperial American political system, he could impose it. Politically, the US is an anachronism, a hangover from the French Revolution that modelled the Republic on the Ancien Regime, and the US simply copied it (Ben Franklin had been ambassador to France for nearly 10 years, and Thomas Paine was strongly aligned with the revolution). It’s not at all like the Westminster system, where Britain has just defenestrated yet another prime minister for being a bit aimless. In the US, the presidency holds immense power and is not so much the pinnacle of a pyramid as the peak of an extremely high pillar, with the rest of the country milling around its base, following orders as they drift down from on high. If Trump were PM in the UK or Australia, he would have been out on his fat arse in his first term. It would be easy to say “That’s their problem” but it’s also our problem. All we can do is watch but there will be more trouble. Let’s hope it doesn’t spread our way.
Meantime, Israel is no longer drifting toward fascism, it’s a full gallop. In Narcisso-Fascism, I listed the features of a fascist movement (pp30-34) and how Israel meets them (pp165-171). Remember that was written in 2023, before the current ultra-fanatical government took office. There are 22 criteria. We can give each country, political party or social movement a score on each feature, where 0 = not at all, 1 = a bit, 2 = quite a lot and 3 = a great deal. Israel is right up there at the top, a bit below North Korea and Nazi Germany. Even though they have fairly open borders and tolerate opposition newspapers, what pushes them up the scale is the overtly genocidal nature of their political program. North Korea doesn’t plan on killing all the South Koreans. Israel makes no secret of its genocidal intentions; au contraire, they boast about it and then get enraged when anybody objects and try to smear them as “antisemitic.” Truly amazing that apparently intelligent and educated people could be so far out of touch with socio-political reality without actually being psychotic.
In any event, their show is falling apart. They are seriously isolated in the world with, as Vance says, only one friend, DJ Trump, who has one foot in prison and the other on a banana skin. Israel’s secret alliances, e.g. with the UAE and Albania, are falling apart (see the Henningsen interview above); their allies in the West are being pushed out (Starmer and his gang) and so on but, above all, their unitary state is cracking. Most readers will know that religious students in Israel are exempt from military service (nobody else is, it is the most militarised state in the world). The army is running short of troops so they want to conscript the ultra-orthodox who are objecting violently, thereby splitting Netanyahu’s entire base of support. If he persists with this plan, and he has little choice if he wants to hold all the stolen territory, then he will lose the clerical-fascist parties in his coalition. He will lose office and the public prosecutor is waiting around the corner to nab him on charges of corruption. No wonder he seems to be losing weight. Either way, we can all sit back to watch as the plot twists and turns but I don’t think we are going to see a moderate, sane government take over. The different pretenders to the throne all hate each other violently (Israel Shahak: “The hatred of the gentiles for the Jews is as nothing compared with the hatred of Jews for each other”). Their only policy difference is how much land they steal and how quickly they wipe out the Palestinians, not whether they should withdraw to their own borders and start to be sensible.
We live in interesting times, unfortunately. I don’t think anybody can predict what will happen over the next twelve months. If the US political class had any brains, they would remove Trump and the trumpists, settle with Iran, tell the Israelis to STFU and F Off, and quietly sort out their financial mess before it engulfs them. But collectively, they don’t have any brains. They are obsessed with the idea of a hierarchy of nations, which is the logical development of their earlier and still current obsession with hierarchies of races and religions. It is now written into the national charter that they have to be Numero Uno in every respect, “full spectrum dominance,” they call it: see that word? Domination. It’s all to do with testosterone. Trump’s rantings about being the most powerful nation on earth is the same psychobiological phenomenon as bull elephant seals fighting on a beach.
Israel, I believe, is a lost cause. An interesting question: In giving Israel carte blanche for 75yrs, has the West done it any favours or simply encouraged the growth of clerical-fascist regime where 80% of the population support actual genocide? Is it the product of a benign neglect coming from crude self-interest? 50% of Republicans under 40 are now opposed to Israel, and everywhere else it’s worse for them. The US will have to cut them off financially because the working class are being forced to choose between supporting the Zionist wars or Medicare For All. That’s a no-brainer but never underestimate the capacity of the American power elite to convince the average Joe and Josephine Voter to vote against their interests (Aneurin Bevan, architect of the British NHS: “The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power”).
If and when the torrents of US$ stop flowing to Israel, it will collapse in a heap. The remaining intelligentsia will pack up and leave; the secular Jews in the military will wonder why they’re being blown up to keep the religious fanatics chanting safely in their schools; the wealthy will take their money and run to their mansions in Monaco and Manhattan; the Epstein-Kushner class will slide out of sight in the murk and just keep on doing what they do best; and the rest will have to realise the party’s over, the Chosen People will have to choose peace – or oblivion. We live in interesting times although I never had any problem with boredom.
1. Orwell G (1945) You and the Atom Bomb, in Collected Essays Vol 4, In Front of Your Nose. London: Penguin. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/
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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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