Life at the Top

Why the wrong people get power

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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Last Saturday (Oct. 18^th), the largest demonstrations in American history took place in over 2,800 cities, towns and villages, and even along highways. Some 7million people came together to announce to one and all: NO KINGS. There were similar demonstrations in another 28 countries as sympathetic locals joined with US expatriates to send the message. Overwhelmingly, the demonstrations were peaceful as the crowds were determined to have a good time with their home-made placards, costumes, kids, dogs and bands (see Michael Moore’s Substack for some great pictures). But the message was serious: no autocracy, no corruption, no thuggish ICE brownshirts terrorising people going about their business. They believe their country is in danger, which means the rest of the world is living in the shadow of trouble.

So did Trump get the message to back off? No, not at all. He was apparently infuriated by the flood of news of the demonstrations and retaliated with an AI video of himself, wearing a crown and flying a jet to dump shit on demonstrators in New York (recall that Trump can’t even drive a car). That says he realises the demonstrations are serious. As his minions know, for every person who goes to a demo, there are 20 or 30 who totally agree but who stay at home. Trump needs to listen, but he won’t, he is incapable of listening. And the video? That’s truly bizarre. Also, earlier this week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met Trump, accompanied by the Australian ambassador to US, Kevin Rudd, himself a former PM. Trump told Rudd he doesn’t like him and “probably never will.” Again, verging on bizarre: regardless of what they think, heads of state don’t tell ambassadors they don’t like them. These are the sorts of things you’d expect from seven year old children but not from presidents with the power to launch 7,000 nuclear bombs, sufficient to erase all life on the planet. This raises a huge question that has intrigued me for a long time: how do we voters work out who is suitable for high office and who isn’t? It’s a very big topic, and very important, so we can only make a start today.

Essentially, what are the personality characteristics which should disqualify a person from holding power over other people? Now we have to be careful here because we all hold some sort of power over some people, even if very small: the lady driving the delivery van desperately needs the job so if we complain she knocked too loudly, she’s in trouble. The reason is that dominance hierarchies are quite literally coded into our DNA, and are thence foundational to the societies we build. So much of what we do is based on the principle that one person will be giving the orders and the rest will follow them. It’s everywhere, it’s natural, we can always justify it; it’s built into the family, it’s kick-started in kindergarten, roars ahead in school and never stops. Everything is competition, striving to get to the top, wanting to be boss, to be dominant because being Number One is such fun. The downside is that there’s only one Number One so for the people at the bottom of the pile, life can get pretty tasteless. Also, it’s too easy for the bloke at the top to forget he’s human and start to think he can do what he likes; as Trump shows, the temptation is irresistible, which is why all the major religions have injunctions against the abuse of power:

Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me (Matt 25:34-36).

Care for the sick, the poor and the weak. Most people understand this but there are also plenty of people who are beguiled and bewitched by the thrill of power, who want it and need it and will do anything to get it: power, as Kissinger said, is the ultimate aphrodisiac, the ultimate delight. These are the dangerous ones who should never be allowed anywhere near the controls because they’re incapable of restraining themselves from abusing it. For them, there’s no such thing as the abuse of power, it is its own justification. As Nixon said, “If the president does it, it isn’t illegal.” Perhaps they would see not exerting some power over other people as an abuse but that’s about all.

However, when people are trying to get a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, they’re not going to tell everybody: “I’m only in this for myself, I just love the thrill of being able to push people around.” That wouldn’t get them very far, so they know intuitively what to say and, more important, what not to say. Our job is to try to sort them out before they get their hands on the big wheel, to keep the dangerous, the cranks, the selfish and the just plain cuckoo far away in the back paddock where they can’t do any damage. That’s not easy because our societies don’t have any proper mechanism for that, we rely on people’s good will. That, however, is the core of the problem because those who hunger for power aren’t going to let any silly ethical rules get in their way. For them, power is oxygen, it’s the point of being alive, the be-all and end-all of existence: “If I can’t be Number One, I’m nothing.” Driven by that morbid fear, they are more than willing to crush anybody who stands between them and the golden throne.

All this is a question of psychology. There’s a sizeable literature on the psychology of power but I’m not aware of any that link it directly to biology, as in Narcisso-Fascism (if anybody does know, please put it in comments). Most studies are descriptive, with no explanatory scope. Narcisso-fascism says that humans like being dominant because it stimulates the feel-good hormone, testosterone (and others, but we won’t worry about them). Being on top produces a surge of testosterone, which feels great, while being pushed down the hierarchy inhibits it, causing misery and resentment. People are attracted to power for the same reason they are attracted to feeling warm or sleeping on a soft bed: it’s not essential for life but it sure feels good.

OK, so why do we have societies, why isn’t the entire world just one boiling morass of people struggling with each other for dominance? Er, have you watched the evening news lately? Apart from car accidents and dogs lost on mountains, it’s all about a small group of people fighting for dominance while the rest of the world tries to get on with life. Most people aren’t that interested in power, they have other ways of having a good time; if they’re pushed to take a position of authority, they’ll do it but, for them, the job is more important than the status it brings. They probably sleep better without the worry of being held responsible when something goes wrong, and when the time comes, they’re happy to hand over to somebody else. It all comes down to this mysterious entity called personality. The biocognitive model defines personality as a set of rules:

Personality is the total set of explicit and implicit mental rules (including attitudes, beliefs, etc) that generates the uniquely distinguishing habitual patterns of interaction between the healthy, sober individual and her environment, in the stable adult mode of behaviour [1, Chap. 8.2].

More to the point, these are the rules that give us control over our immediate emotional reactions to events around us. Something happens, I feel a surge of anger but I take control of it and don’t start throwing things. Doesn’t matter how bad it is, I have a rule that says screaming and breaking things is prohibited. If the cause was really bad, society provides proper avenues to rectify it, so I must follow them. I can be fully aware of my rules, such as “Don’t move somebody else’s things without good reason,” or they can be implicit, like the rules governing our sense of humour. We don’t know what they are, but they’re strong. In fact, humour is a case in point: we laugh when somebody else is made to look stupid, and the higher their status and the further they fall, the more we laugh. Being laughed at hurts because it lowers our status.

Underneath the rules of personality but intimately associated is the concept called self-esteem. Just as I can like or dislike another person, so too I can like or dislike myself. If you ask a normal person: “How do you rate yourself as a person?” most will answer something like:

I’m fine, I get things done, I do the job. I’m helpful, I get on well with most people but if somebody’s being stupid or dangerous, I’ll pull him up. I don’t have any problem with rules but if I think a rule’s stupid, I’ll say so. I don’t have any trouble with bosses, they’re happy with me. I help the young ones at work who are still learning, and the old ones who get a bit tired and want a break. I can have a good time but I know when to stop. Yeah, I’m OK. Tell you what, if everybody was like me, it’d be a pretty boring world but a lot quieter and safer. And fairer, I’ll say that.

Then there are people who say something like:

Rate myself? Shit. I’m a piece of shit. I’m ugly and stupid and I can never do anything right. I dunno why anybody bothers with me, I’m just a waste of space.

There’s also a small group who will tell you they should be running the show, some because they’re fantastic and amazing and brilliant and only a malicious dimwit would think otherwise, and others who think it’s their right, they’re entitled to be first in the queue or to take whatever they fancy, and people should be honoured to give up their seats for them. Or, in the case of some super-privileged individuals, their daughters. And to complicate matters, humans lie. People can believe one thing inside but behave in such a way as to give a completely different impression.

Just as it would be very unpleasant to work in an isolated lighthouse or be locked in a prison cell with somebody you didn’t like, living with a person you don’t like, from whom there is no escape, meaning yourself, can be intolerable. People have to do something to conceal it so they can get through the day. Some get on the grog or drugs; some get into arguments so they can feel they’re right and everybody else is wrong. Some run marathons; some collect stamps so they don’t have to deal with people or, in today’s version, put on a VR headset and battle aliens alone in their rooms. Some join the army as the uniform makes them feel better about themselves, a sort of exoskeletal spine, you could say. Some become compulsive helpers; others join a religion; some bright ones become academic researchers so they can write brilliant papers but not have to deal with people; some become promiscuous; some eat; some get tattoos or studs; some press steel in gyms; some steal and cheat to prove they’re smarter than the cops or, in a certain NY property developer’s case, they’re smarter than all the dumbos who follow the rules and don’t become billionaires … there’s no limit.

If people can find something that distracts them from their inner distress and gets everybody off their backs, that’s what they’ll do. And some, unfortunately, find that if they get up the human hierarchy to where they can start ordering people around, they feel great. For the first time in their miserable lives, they feel strong and powerful and, most important, interesting, even attractive. People look at them with approval, people want their advice, people want them to take charge, so they do. Very quickly, they realise that if ordering a few people around makes them feel good, then ordering a whole lot more around will feel heaps better; which it does, so they decide that, come what may, they’re going up that ladder and to hell with anybody who gets in the way. Lack of talent, lack of charm, lack of honesty or integrity or care doesn’t stop them. All they want is to be Number One so they can put on a crown and dump shit on everybody from a plane. Unfortunately for the rest of us, all too often their quest for supreme power is like dogs chasing a bus: when they catch it, they don’t know what to do with it.

In Trump 1.0, he’d caught the Really Big Bus but didn’t have the faintest clue what to do with it. He surrounded himself by people who had a few ideas but they wouldn’t do as he told them so he kept sacking them. This time round, he has filled the White House with toadies and sycophants who anticipate his every whim, and he does know what he wants to do with his power: crush his enemies. Crush them underfoot like cockroaches and grind them into the dirt until there’s no trace of them and everybody is in awe of his power and majesty. Oh, and reward his friends of course, they can have a seat in the new ballroom they’re paying for where they can glow in the radiance that streams from his brow and chorus how wonderful he is. Robert Reich, formerly Clinton’s Labor Secretary, has drawn a witty map of the power in the White House. Witty but definitely not funny. Apart from that, Trump doesn’t have any idea why he bothered with all this stuff, it isn’t half the fun he thought it would be. Sometimes he thinks he may as well just pack up and go back to Florida but then the thought of his enemies laughing behind his back pops up and that’s it, the rage and hatred boils and he wants to start killing so he’ll start on some Arabs and Latinos, nobody likes them anyway.

Trump has no self-esteem, none at all. Secretly, he probably hates himself but he would rather drop nuclear bombs on cities than admit it. Most people won’t admit to poor self-esteem because admitting it hurts, it makes them feel even more stupid and automatically gives other people power over them. They have to be feeling pretty bad and broken before they say “I’m a piece of shit.” Those sad people won’t be seeking power anyway but the people who are concealing poor self-esteem will, which is a problem because Rule No. 1 is this: People with poor self-esteem should not be allowed to have positions of authority without first sorting it out. People may say “Oh, that’s terribly unfair, maybe if they had power, they’d feel good about themselves. Sort of Power Therapy, you could call it.” Yes, indeed they do feel better when they’re pushing people around but it doesn’t stop, they have to have more and more to get the same buzz. Abuse is guaranteed, just ask Heinrich Himmler. People aren’t born monsters, they grow into the role. Hitler said it himself. At high school in Linz, there was only one Jewish boy who was a bit odd so they didn’t have much to do with him. As far as the teenage Adolf knew, Jews were just Germans with a “strange religion” but otherwise they …

…were so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as Germans… As I thought that they were persecuted on account of their Faith, my aversion to hearing remarks against them grew almost into a feeling of abhorrence. I did not in the least suspect that there could be such a thing as a systematic anti-Semitism. Then I came to Vienna [2, pp41-2].

Stalin was exactly the same. His monstrous cruelty grew and grew. Lenin himself understood Stalin’s brooding, paranoid personality but if other people had been aware, they would have got rid of him so Stalin made sure they didn’t see Lenin’s political testament. And that brings us to Rule No. 2: No paranoid people. Explaining this will require a bit of a diversion.

The DSM description of the paranoid personality is hobbled by the fact that they don’t have a theory of personality or a model of personality disorder, so it’s purely descriptive. As such, it picks out the blindingly obvious and leaves the great bulk of true paranoid personality hidden, free to do all their damage unsuspected. It is based on the false notion that all mental disorder is biological, due to specific gene defects, and each category of mental disorder will be shown to map down on to the genome, which will allow specific drugs for each unique disorder. It’s unproven, of course, in my view nothing more than pseudoscience but that’s what we have to deal with. Their paranoid personality is characterised by “A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness (they mean suspicion) of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent” [3, p649]. All true, but that’s only the obvious ones. People can see them coming and generally give them a wide berth; it’s the ones we don’t see that we have to look out for (in the north of Australia, they say: “Don’t worry about the crocodile you can see, worry about the croc you can’t see”). As mentioned, the younger Stalin kept his suspicions to himself and noone realised how dangerous he was.

Classically, there were five elements to the paranoid mode of thinking:

An intense and pervasive mistrust of people’s motives

An intense preoccupation with conspiracies

An intense preoccupation with justice and matters of right and wrong

An intense preoccupation with the supernatural

Intense jealousy.

These all knit together. The connecting element in these apparently disparate elements is that the person sees him/herself as the centre of things, the smartest person around who can instantly see through everybody else’s lies, the only one who knows the truth and who has the moral strength to push through the fog of disinformation to reveal the true facts. Intense means intense, i.e. to the exclusion of balanced thought, incapable of yielding to reason. It doesn’t mean “A fair bit” or “More than me.” The word ‘paranoid’ is an adjective describing a way of thinking, or the person’s mental set on the world. It is an urge to find hidden links connecting events because, to the paranoid person, it’s a dangerous, malevolent world so there are no random events, it’s all deliberate. What seem like random events are actually causally related but in a way only the paranoid is smart enough to see. This is pareidolia, the tendency to see patterns in random events, a bit like looking at the stars. Also, the paranoid is never wrong. Everybody else is so they have to fall into line and believe what they’re told. Sorting out who’s reasonable and who’s frankly paranoid requires a fair bit of judgement but there are some helpful tests.

First one, as mentioned, is that the paranoid is never wrong. Take somebody who says “Climate change is a hoax.” The test is to ask them: “What happens if you’re wrong?” A reasonable person will give a reasonable answer but the genuinely paranoid dismiss it: “I’m not wrong, it’s all a hoax.” You try again: “I didn’t ask whether you believe you’re right because obviously you do. I asked what will you do if you’re wrong?” It will go nowhere because, for the paranoid, there is no conceivable chance of being wrong. The paranoid personality KNOWS with rock-solid certainty. This is not delusion as they use their intellect to find fault in your own position. For them, being told they may be wrong is deeply insulting and they will usually walk away in disgust. Or attack you to try to silence you which, because of social media, is becoming far easier and, ominously, socially acceptable.

Second, a person who sees one conspiracy is likely to see more, and more, until they dominate life. Now this is not saying there are no conspiracies because obviously there are, heaps and heaps of them. But not everything is a conspiracy. Never mistake incompetence for malice; laziness and stupidity are more common than malevolence; coincidence more common than conspiracy; and knowing when to walk away from a legal matter is more important than fighting to the bitter end so “The Truth can Come Out.” Trouble is, we still have to sort out the paranoid goats from the gullible sheep who believe everything they’re told, which isn’t easy as the truly paranoid personality is suspicious enough to conceal it.

That leaves us with two big questions: How do we tell when somebody is genuine compared with somebody who is acting to conceal poor self-esteem, and how do we tell if somebody is a well-concealed paranoid? The short answer is that they’ll tell you, they can’t not tell you, but we’ll have to leave that for another week.

References:

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

2. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

3. American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition. Washington DC: APA Publishing.

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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.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.