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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Q: “How much money has Elon Musk donated to the Republican party this election cycle?”
AI answer: “Elon Musk has contributed a total of roughly $366 million to federal Republican political committees and super PACs for the 2025–26 election cycle, including more than $276 million since July alone, according to Federal Election Commission filings.”
According to a report in Common Dreams, this includes the breath-taking sum of $158million to the Republican candidate for the Senate in Texas, former Texan attorney general and reputedly corrupt politician, Ken Paxton. His opponent, the buoyant 37yo James Talarico, said: “Elon Musk wants our land, he wants our water, he wants his very own personal United States senator. He is trying to buy Texas.” Across the Atlantic, riots have erupted in Albania over the prime minister’s plan to lease an island, part of an important national park, to the Kushners so they can build a huge and exclusive resort. Apparently, they were sailing up the Adriatic coast on Nat (now Lord) Rothchild’s superyacht when they saw it and Ivanka said it was so beautiful, she just had to have it. As you do. The fishermen who had lived there for centuries could always find another bay to anchor their miserable little boats. Meanwhile, the UN agencies providing aid to children in Gaza have had to halve their already seriously reduced services as the US refuses to support them and other countries are either marching to the Trump drum or feeling the pinch from the Trump wars.
Madam K’s performance over the island puts the ass in crass, it’s up there with “Let them eat cake.” She didn’t appear to have the slightest awareness that stealing a people’s livelihood by bribing the prime minister lacked savoir faire, nor that, post-Epstein, the idea of a luxury island where the rich and powerful can cavort far from the paparazzi might be a bit on the nose. But why should she? Isn’t social awareness just sooo middle class, so very ordinary, that the 1% simply don’t need to bother with it, or that by being even slightly aware, they might betray their own middle class origins? We’re not talking etiquette here, we’re talking about the fact that with greed at this level, the social fabric in practically every country in the world is being stretched to breaking point.
Next question: what’s greed? What motivates it, what drives it? It seems to be very much a human trait as very, very few animals show it. Many animals are territorial, they need exclusive control of a patch of land or water to survive and to breed but they only take what they can defend. Animals don’t have paid armies at their beck and call, only humans do that because the urge to dominate is written in our DNA. Greed is part of that urge but it knows no end because the drive to dominate has an on-switch but there are only two ways it can be turned off: death or total defeat.
If you look at history, all you see is groups of people trying to dominate and subdue their neighbours. This is what empire is, just a case of “Gimme gimme gimme” backed by artillery and mustard gas. It has nothing to do with bringing democracy or enlightenment or religion to the primitives, and everything to do with stripping their land and wealth from them. During its occupation of the Subcontinent, Britain extracted the equivalent of $43trillion and killed about 145million people in the process. Britannia ruled the waves but Indians (and Africans and West and East Asians and Australians) were footing the bill. Since they lost the colonies, Britain has sunk lower and lower, and there is every reason to expect that decline will continue.
The whole colonial process was simply the individual urge to dominate writ large, and greed is an integral part of it: If I have more than you, that means I’m better than you, ha ha. Britain had the money to build a powerful navy and army because the landed elite had built fortunes by pushing the peasants off the land and raising meat and wool. There were several enclosure movements but the end result was a small group of people with lots of money and a large landless class jammed into the cities who were desperate for work. Work duly arrived in the form of the industrial revolution; Britain wasn’t bothered by endless religious wars or adventurers like Napoleon stampeding over the place; the poor were kept in absolute destitution [1] and the rich got richer, so they looked overseas for further investments. All this is fairly standard economic history, the difference now is that the wealthy have written for themselves a doctrine, neoliberal economics, that justifies their greed, that removes any trace of guilt or shame from the idea of stealing somebody else’s island.
In this week’s Critical Psychiatry post, we looked at how mainstream psychiatry is slowly waking up the fact that you can’t exclude all notion of humans as creatures with minds and still make sense of mental disorder. Philosopher David Chalmers [2] pointed out that there are two problems to solve in explaining mentality, an easy problem and a hard one. The easy one is what desk calculators do all day, take an item of information and manipulate it according to a program to get a conclusion. This applies to practically everything we do as physical creatures, and to animals, including insects. Science as we know it is designed to cope with the easy problem, which it does with ease. We see something, we assess it and we calculate a response. I want to sit down; there is no spare chair; so I go to the next room and get one. The hard problem is trying to explain sensation, emotion, values, hopes and fears. Science can’t cope with things it can’t measure; all mental properties are unmeasurable; therefore the mind as such is a closed book to science. That’s why psychiatry decided to translate all mental properties into brain properties – and ran into the sand.
Economics is a bit different. It’s all about money; money is countable; therefore we can have a science of economics. Trouble is, money is inherently about values and values are forbidden territory, so economics had to come up with a way out of this dilemma. Neoliberal economics, which started in the early 1920s, said we should expel all concepts like emotions, values, hopes and so on, leaving a bare but manageable “science” (commonly known as “the dismal science” because it took all the fun out of things). Their solution was to look at humans as little rational calculators, calmly going about their business of making a living by weighing up costs and benefits and making a decision about what is best for them. This meant that everything had to be given a cash value otherwise it couldn’t be included in the calculation.
If one person got ahead, that was because he worked hard and invested wisely; virtue is rewarded by the market. Similarly, people who didn’t get ahead were obviously lazy wastrels who deserved their fate and should endure it without complaining. There was nothing wrong with people becoming wealthy, it was their just reward but it didn’t matter in the long run because they would have to invest their excess wealth, which would create jobs and the workers would be better off. Money would trickle up, then trickle down, to everybody’s benefit. The market is self-regulating; governments should not interfere with the workings of the economy because no government can know enough about people’s needs or plans to make the right decision. In linear thinking, this becomes: great wealth is a virtue and nobody is allowed to interfere with it because that interferes with the job market and will make people worse off. That means government efforts to relieve poverty and so on are misguided and will always fail. Necessarily, the best form of government is the smallest.
It’s said that 85% of economists these days are neoliberals, actively pushing the idea that the rich should be allowed to get richer because that’s the necessary preliminary step before the rich can invest their money to create jobs. Naturally enough, the rich thought this was a fantastic idea and have managed to put it in practice over most of the world. Anybody who opposes neoliberalism is mocked as a sentimental fool or a blood-thirsty socialist/communist who hates the wealthy and wants to start a class war. And as we see, things are getting worse, rapidly, everywhere including in poor, backward Albania.
The problem with neoliberalism is that humans are not calm and ordered, rational machines, anything but. Humans are essentially controlled by emotions; pretending they’re not is simply licensing the emotions to run the show. Yes, there are virtuous people but they’re not in charge they’re not causing the trouble that has forced sensible people to predict catastrophe if we don’t lift out game. The political system selects for people who want power for power’s sake. The financial system selects for people who want money for money’s sake. When the two groups get together, they quickly agree that more power and more money is not just desirable but imperative otherwise somebody may come along and knock them off their perch so, even though neoliberal economics says taxation is inherently bad, they raise taxes so they can build an army that will allow them to get more money and more power. When they look across their borders, they see their neighbours doing the same thing, so they raise the taxes to pay for a bigger army, which provokes the neighbours into doing the same, commonly known as an arms race.
All this is elementary. The fatal mistake lies in thinking that humans are rational: if humans are so rational and only ever work to better themselves, how come there are wars? How is the average American’s life improved by bombing Iran? Of course it isn’t, but the finances of the people who make the bombs and planes are greatly improved by lots of wars, and they’re the same ones who think they got to their exalted places in society by virtue of their superior moral equipment, so they don’t take any notice of the groaning poor: “Get a job!” is their scornful answer. And so things are getting worse. It used to be that things were getting worse by the year but now it’s almost by the day, just because the neoliberal system ratchets up but it can never ratchet down. The rich cannot say “We’ve got enough, let’s give our workers better pay.” That doesn’t happen because the 1% all know with delusional certainty that poor people are poor because of their character defects, and giving them more will make them lazy. Giving more to the rich, of course, rewards them for working hard so they will therefore work harder (that’s another thing about the rich, they all believe the ordinary human laws don’t apply to them).
It will be clear that the goal of building a values-free economy is doomed from the outset, because that goal is itself a value. The idea of an “efficient market” as the supreme economic good is itself value-laden: if an efficient market means poor people starve to death in the streets, then what right have the 1% to impose it on the rest of society? None, and that’s why we have revolutions, because the urge to dominate, which the 1% make no effort to control, is balanced by an equal and opposite urge to be free in the oppressed. Even poor people don’t like being treated as trash, which Mrs Kushner is finding out in Albania.
All of this was predicted by economists, forty years before Thatcherism and Reaganomics raised their ugly, slavering heads. In 1944, a Hungarian economist, Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), published a fairly short book, The Great Transformation [3], in which he argued that economics cannot be seen as separate from the people and the society that brought it about. The so-called free market is not inevitable; there are other sorts of economies, all of which have their good parts and their bad, but the neoliberal market differs from the others in that it contains within itself the seeds of its destruction. If we give everything a cash value, we will eventually destroy everything valuable, both in human society and in the natural world. Some things have an intrinsic value which cannot be reduced to money, e.g. a national park may contain valuable minerals or water or grazing rights, but the value to the people of the views and tranquility and to the natural environment itself must be taken into account when deciding whether to let miners and farmers in. I doubt he had ever heard of the concept of global warming but he was very aware of what is called the tragedy of the commons. This says that if nobody owns a property or resource, then it is in people’s interest to get as much of it as they can before everybody else. Therefore, it quickly runs out, as we see with fishing grounds, etc. We do not put a cash value on clean air; because nobody owns the atmosphere or natural environment, it is in the rational self-interest of industrialists to dump their waste in the air and water, leading to pollution and climate change. Only a government can stop them, but neoliberal governments don’t want to restrict profits in any way, so they do nothing.
Polanyi’s work had an immediate effect; a paper published in 1943 by a Polish Marxist economist working with the Ministry of Supply in Britain was initially not so lucky. Michal Kalecki (1899-1970) was equally critical of the idea of an unregulated free market economy (I’m not sure whether the term neoliberalism was used then). His brief paper entitled Political Aspects of Full Employment asked the question: Why do capitalists hate full employment? His answer: Because it weakens their power over workers. His concern, as with Polanyi, was fascism. He noted that fascism began in Germany and Italy in the setting of mass unemployment and poverty. This led people to vote for anybody who promised radical change. However, once in power, the early fascist parties ran into the problem that the wealthy, who had bankrolled them, didn’t want the state to waste its assets on the poor; they wanted the national wealth to be wasted on them. They opposed welfare services but were very happy with a rearmament program that created jobs out of nothing, because they were able to cream off the profits: “The fundamentals of capitalist ethics require that ‘you shall earn your bread in sweat’ — unless you happen to have private means.” That was the short term; in the long term, an armaments economy must lead to war. Another advantage of the arms industry is that industrialists are able to ban strikes on the basis of “national security.”
Neoliberal economics is based in the notion that people will act rationally in their self-interest and should be allowed to do so without government interference. It pretends that emotion and values can be ignored when we know that a very large part of what people do is driven wholly by blind emotion. One of the most powerful of these is the urge to dominate, which takes many forms, such as greed, the urge to gain more property as a means of lording it over the common herd.
We’ve tried the neoliberal experiment now for nearly fifty years. All it’s brought us is grief and pollution so how come we don’t have proper social programs? How is it that the very word “socialist” is anathema? The capitalists don’t want social programs because that means taxes and a workforce that isn’t scared of them, so they have managed to equate “socialism” with “Stalinism.” Stalin was the best advertisement neoliberals could have asked for. By scaring the working classes, it means they can get on with guaranteeing their profits through building gigantic arms industries and armies, all of which are inherently socialist. As Kalecki said, “In a democracy, one does not know what the next government will be like. Under fascism there is no next government.” We are reaching that stage now. Time to change, but don’t expect the 1% to hand over their power peacefully.
References:
1. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive, at marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf
2. Chalmers DJ (1996). The Conscious Mind: in search of a fundamental theory. Oxford: University Press.
3. Polanyi K (1944). The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon Press.
4. Kalecki Michal (1943). Political Aspects of Full Employment. Political Quarterly. At: https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-employment/
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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. At https://bookshop.org/ (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 https://bookshop.org/
Clinical application of the biocognitive model:
McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/
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 https://bookshop.org/
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From one who's been skeptical about the genetic determination of behavior, I'm surprised about this sentence "Animals don’t have paid armies at their beck and call, only humans do that because the urge to dominate is written in our DNA".
So the "urge to dominate" is genetically determined.
-Do you know on which chromosome(s)?