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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Another week, another couple of reports telling us we’re well down the road to climate collapse. The first comes from that notorious nest of lefties and weirdo greenies, the UK Office of National Security Assessments, with the alarmist title: Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security. Their starting point is: “Nature is a foundation of national security ... Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).” Oh dear, who could have expected this?
After digging through the statistics, they conclude that the UK is at high risk from global ecosystem degradation as it will seriously impact their food supplies. Due to their soggy climate and over-population, the UK can’t feed itself and probably hasn’t done so since about Henry VIII. Mostly, that didn’t bother the English as they simply stole food from the Scots and Irish but that no longer works. Instead, refugees from Africa and West Asia are now looking to Britain for food. They give the example of how climate change in Central America is reducing coffee harvests, which forces people to abandon their farms and try to move to the US. That’s only going to increase and we’re likely to get a rehearsal over the next two years as the consequences of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran play out on a background of major climate impacts from El Niño. Generally speaking, we can cope with one natural disaster, e.g. a single major earthquake or cyclone or floods or bushfires. However, when disasters come one on top of the other, they’re magnified, as Yeats said:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ... (Second Coming)
The centre cannot hold. Over the next 6-12 months, we can expect ... major floods on the west coasts of Nth and Sth America, with loss of food production; continuing drought in the south west of USA with major reduction of water supplies and hydropower; drought in grain producing areas of Sth America, Africa and Australia; drought in Europe with major loss of hydropower and reduction in river transport due to low water levels; near-total loss of Ukrainian and Russian grain exports due to war (they are the two biggest grain exporters in the world); reduction of food production throughout Asia and Africa due to loss of fertiliser exports from Persian Gulf producers; major cost increases in fuel and other inputs for food producers everywhere due to wars, and so on. The centre is under serious strain at present, the question is whether it can hold as things get worse. Which they are going to do.
The other big report comes from UN Environment Program, the one Trump defunded. The UK report is 14 pages; the UNEP one is 10 times bigger and stuffed with stats but it has a neat executive summary starting on page 2 (I wonder about executive summaries: does that mean they can’t read?). This one is titled: Limiting Overshoot: Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return. In two sentences, it says: “The target of a maximum of 1.5C rise in global temperatures will be exceeded shortly. We now have to start planning for what was previously seen as untenable, 1.8C rise.” Some of their major points include:
Pt 7: ... the world must adopt proactive approaches that deploy flexible, multi-level governance, particularly when it comes to adaptation (p5).
Pt 9. Equity and justice must be the core of effective strategies to protect the vulnerable, create a just transition for communities and workforces, and secure a liveable future for coming generations ... (However,) Reversing global warming will be a slow and difficult process. Approximately 220 GtCO₂ of cumulative net-negative emissions are required to lower global temperatures by around 0.1°C (p19).
OK, that’s all fairly clear, clear enough for even Kissinger’s “dumb, stupid animals” in the military to grasp. In the US, the Navy is very well aware of the risks. Their vast base at Norfolk, VA, largest naval base in the world by far, has about 6.5 km of waterfront and 18 km of pier and wharf space sprawling along the edge of the harbour. None of it is more than a metre above sea level, and large parts are built on landfill. Over the last century, sea levels have risen about 450mm (18”) and are expected to continue for the foreseeable future. The real risk is not a slow, steady rise like a lake inundating the huge areas of workshops, storage, admin and living quarters for the 75,000 naval and civilian employees of the base (and their dependents, and the 1.8million who live in the region). Instead, the risk comes from increasingly violent storms driving a storm surge to wash away roads and services such as hospitals, fire brigades, power stations and so on (see recent storms at Long Beach, also a naval base). To counter this very real risk, the Navy decided to start using mixes of biofuels on their ships and their many planes and vehicles but the House Committee of Underhand Ways and Shifty Means blocked that on instructions from Herr Drumpf.
We are teetering on the brink. The unavoidable fact is that the planet simply cannot sustain a population of nearly 9billion. Various models predict that about 2.5billion is the maximum sustainable population, i.e. a quarter of where it will be in 20 years. Four times too many people: how come our politicians and the rest of the power elite can’t see this? I can’t answer that as I’ve never spoken to any of them (and they wouldn’t speak to me anyway), but we can hazard some guesses. It will come down to two things, money and power which, as Trump has shown, are pretty much the same thing. That is, it will come down to matters of individual human psychology, essentially personality: who are the people who get themselves into positions of power and influence, what drives them? Lord Acton said we can’t assume people in high positions are decent just by virtue of their achievements: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control” (1887). Does anybody doubt that today? George Orwell didn’t:
…no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power (1984).
Is this cynical? I don’t believe it is: for a lot of people, power is the only game in town. There is an example in Mary Trump’s biography of her uncle. Her father had already died by the time her grandfather died. Ordinarily, Mary’s father’s share of the huge estate (at least half a billion) would have gone to his children but they got nothing. It all went to the other four siblings who could have agreed to a fairer sharing but they didn’t. Eventually, after much legal brawling and huge animosity, she got about $2.7million, a few percent of what her aunts and uncles got. The rich and powerful always want more, they are never satisfied because the object of wealth is more wealth.
As wealth and power go up, so too does the sense of entitlement. Bezos is worth about $275billion (his huge yacht alone is worth $500million) but he personally sets targets for workers in his warehouses that mean they can’t take toilet breaks and have to pee into a bottle. The rich are all the same, every last one of them, and (with precious few examples) so too are their wives. The wife of Conrad Black, convicted press baron and defrocked peer, said: “My extravagance knows no bounds.” Former prince Andrew we know about; his wife, Sarah Ferguson what was and is again, was just the same, greedy, corrupt and took her daughters to see Epstein after he got out of jail.
All of this is old news; at present, we see two political trends across the world. Last week in Germany, AfD won a state election, their first. In West Australia, One Nation, an equally toxic far right mob, has just snatched a seat from the governing Labor party. In India, Modi’s BJP has just taken control of West Bengal which used to be a marxist stronghold and there are plenty of other examples. What’s going on? On the one hand, we have the clearest evidence that the planet is roaring along a path to cataclysm, and yet everywhere, people are voting for parties and governments that openly say they intend to continue the policies to make it worse. Are people that stupid? Unfortunately, yes, they are. They’re easily fooled by lies, and the elite tell lies so they can gain more power and more money. We are caught in a vortex of lies and corruption in which the power elite tell lies to scare people to vote for them, then they tell more lies to stay in power which attracts more extreme people from out of the woodwork who whip up the fears while looting the treasury behind the scenes. A small example from this weekend illustrates the self-reinforcing nature of the process.
On Saturday, Israel announced that several of their desalination plants had shut down. The country gets about 83% of its fresh water by this process (using natual gas, not solar power). Immediately they blamed Iranian hackers and promised retribution. Turns out it was an algal bloom along their coast caused by all the untreated sewage flowing into the ocean from Gaza after Israel destroyed their sewage treatment plants. Good, pigeons come home to roost. Across the Atlantic, the Trump sons are making hay while their father’s fitful sun is still above the horizon and J Kushner is raking in billions from his voluntary job as negotiator in chief. Why is he volunteering? Because that way, he didn’t need a security clearance. He can have access to practically every secret in the country and use it to make money and nobody except his dementing pa-in-law can stop him.
Why are things so bad, why has this happened? I don’t think things have ever been perfect but it’s getting worse and as part of that, it’s out in the open, they’ve stopped pretending. Trump freely says that companies who pay him $100,000 a month can have early access to his postings on his “Mistruths Social,” meaning they get warnings of his announcements that will move the markets. However, insider trading has been with us forever, that’s how the Rothschilds got their start and they haven’t looked back. A hundred years ago, a retired US Marine General, Smedley Butler, wrote a short outburst titled War is a Racket, in which he showed how the US military was little more than an enforcement racket for Wall Street’s greedy bankers. But it’s rapidly getting worse now, driven by a force bigger than any single political party or hack.
It’s not just naked greed as when the Nazis looked at the USSR or when the zionists looked at Palestine and said: “We want your land and we’re going to take it.” No, it’s a force that rises above mere bourgeois morality. By the simple expedient of declaring itself beyond the reach of such petty considerations as right and wrong, it touts itself as rational, universal and untainted by human lusts and needs. It is, of course, neoliberalism, the doctrine that humans are the servants of something called the market which alone can make the correct decisions on how to allocate and price resources. It says humans are little automatons who go about their business calmly and rationally deciding what they need and what they’re prepared to pay for it. There is no emotion or morality in the theory because those vague mental constructs can’t be pinned down, they get in the way of their equations so they had to go.
If we look at international affairs from the moral point of view, then launching unprovoked attacks on another country is wicked and has to stop immediately. From the neoliberal point of view, however, in the version known as offensive realism, it makes perfect sense to build up a big arms industry to arm large military forces and then use them to subdue the other side before they do the same to you. Once the weapons industries and the military exist, they acquire a life of their own and no politician who wants to get up the ladder will say a word against them – and what pollie doesn’t want to slither higher? When you want to get richer or more powerful, morals get in the way so a doctrine that says morality is foolish sentimentality is made to order.
There is not a direct or linear relationship between some political event today and a social or economic event in 40 or 50 years. Instead, there is a huge swirling mess of social pressures, political forces, economic demands, human drives, and resources both natural and human. Everything is related although we often don’t know how: somebody drops a bomb in the Persian Gulf and a year later, a small child dies of malaria in Eastern Congo because the raw materials for the drug couldn’t get from Qatar to India and then back to Congo for WHO to dispense. The real danger comes when risks summate, as they are doing now, but everybody is too involved in rational wars or rationally making money to be bothered with some matter on the far side of the globe.
The biggest risk is the notion that we can guide human affairs dispassionately, that we don’t need a theory of psychology because we’re so so sensible and we’re above all that sort of thing. As you will recognise, that just is a theory of psychology, but it happens to be a very bad one. All it does is open the door of the treasury to the crooks and scoundrels. The US is now a mafia state. Israel has been one since it began.
We are tied together on a raft in space. The rich and powerful think they’re too clever to be bothered with what happens to the poor, that there are too many of them, anyway. They’re so locked into gathering more money and more power for themselves and hammering their enemies that they don’t think about nonsense like El Niño. By the time somebody like Trump or Albanese or any of the others realise it has to be taken seriously, it’ll be too late. As they say, there’s no Planet B so we’ll just have to have a revolution and chuck all the scoundrels out. Let’s get started.
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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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