More on the Distributive State

It’s not fantasy.

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. If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers.

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Following last week’s post on the notion of the “distributive state” proposed by the poet and politician, Hilaire Belloc, as a solution to the problems inherent in neoliberal capitalism and in Marxist-type (collectivist) socialism, a reader commented:

Belloc, like Karl Marx, believed that all the ills of mankind stemmed from capitalism. Back in the allegedly happy days prior to Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, relationships were rooted in land and loyalty instead of the cold and calculated cash nexus based on the sordid exchange of money. Belloc's solution was breathtakingly simple: Make capitalism go away, and we'll all be as happy as clams! That approach was tried extensively during much of the 20th century, and unfortunately, it didn't work out well. Got a better idea, Niall?

I responded thus: Belloc didn't say abolish capital or private property, he said distribute it evenly. The massive accumulation of wealth and power leads to disempowerment of the working class and eventually their subjugation in a state akin to slavery. He specifically said that socialism, meaning collectivism, will lead to the same terrible state as unrestrained capitalism because it also establishes a monopoly on power and wealth. This is exactly what happened in the USSR and in Mao's China. Neoliberalism leads to the situation in US where private health insurers make $80billion profit a year and pay their CEOs $20million a year to find ever more ingenious ways of not paying on claims, while tens of millions of people have no insurance, can't afford their tablets as they need to feed their children, and millions a year are bankrupted by medical bills. You may say “Hey, fantastic, that's private enterprise at its creative best.” I don't think like that. I don't believe Maoism was any good and I don't believe neoliberalism is any good as they are both monopolistic systems. The concentration of power and wealth in a few hands INEVITABLY leads to repression and corruption as that is the nature of the human animal qua primate. Proof? Look at Trump: "Do as I say or we'll crush you," or the Zionists: "We want your land so get out or we'll kill you." The human animal lusts for power and dominance. That's what nuclear weapons are all about. If we terribly clever creatures can't find a political/economic system of keeping this urge under control, we're in serious trouble.

Shortly, the reader replied:

It's a curious thing, but inequality seems to be hardwired into the human condition. Back in the 19th century, Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, found that 20% of the population owned 80% of the wealth. His 20:80 rule has been confirmed many times over in different countries and at different periods. Not only that, when wealth is plotted versus population, the data falls on a straight line distribution on a log-log curve. So there appears to be little point in wringing one's hands about the fact that some people have more or less money than others. Some mountains are tall and some hills are small, and Mercury is smaller then Jupiter. Their relative sizes are governed by universal scaling laws. It may be emotionally gratifying to blame wealth and poverty on shadowy groups of evil conspirators, but that's not the way the world works.

There are some specific points to address in these responses, and some general rules. We’ll start with the points. As I said, Hilaire Belloc did not suggest “making capitalism go away” or abolishing capital or anything of the sort. He was quite clear: it is the maldistribution of capital that produces social ills. In his time, Belloc was a very influential writer, he lived and breathed books. I don’t recall from his biography that he had read Engels Condition of the Working Class in England but, as a widely-read critic of collectivist socialism, it seems highly unlikely that he had not. It doesn’t really matter, he had read his Dickens and sat in Parliament with both rabid capitalists and imperialists and with the first Labour MPs, so it seems most likely that he was familiar with their doctrines. Bearing in mind that he was a devout Catholic, he believed that for ordinary people, life prior to Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries was better than under 19^th Century “capitalism red in tooth and claw.” The Black Death aside, he was probably right but at no stage did he advocate a return to late medieval feudalism. He believed that monopolies on power and wealth would inevitably lead to repression and rebellion, and are therefore wrong. He doesn’t say it but I’m sure he understood it well: civil strife falls more heavily on the poor and landless. A few aristrocrats may lose their heads but in the main, their estates remain intact and their sons and grandsons keep all their brutal traditions alive and thriving.

Next point: “That approach was tried extensively during much of the 20th century, and unfortunately, it didn't work out well.” Er, sorry to be a spoilsport but, apart from a few crackpot “back to naturists,” nobody in history has ever tried making capitalism go away, just because it’s impossible. Capital is any resource not immediately consumed, or any artefact that can be used to produce further wealth. Seed collected today to grind tomorrow is capital; an axe is capital; a pile of firewood to swap for meat is capital; knowing how to dry the meat for storage is capital, and so on. Capitalism is any activity based on capital, essentially any human activity starting a grade above living on locusts and wild honey and drinking from streams. Een knowing where and how to collect the wild honey is capitalism (Matthew 3:4; the Baptist was a capitalist).

The Bolshevik program wasn’t directed at getting rid of capital, it was directed at getting rid of the incredibly selfish and arrogant aristocrats and industrialists who believed they had a God-given right to lives of pharaonic luxury while workers and peasants lived on bread and potatoes in freezing hovels. Remember that the Tsarist aristocracy didn’t even speak Russian, that’s how far removed from reality they were. The naïve Bolshevik program said “Take back the capital, vest it in the people and all will be well.” That program ended up as Stalinism, Maoism or the Khmer Rouge so obviously there was something wrong with it, some inherent error. Five years before the October Revolution, Belloc had nailed that error. As he didn’t quite say: “Monopoly state capitalism will end up just as brutally repressive and unequal as monopoly private capitalism, because monopoly.” The problem lies in monopoly, not in capital per se. As for being as happy as clams, never heard that expression but I suppose that if they’re not being cooked, clams are reasonably content in their quiet bivalvular way.

Moving on: “… inequality seems to be hardwired into the human condition.” Well yes, funny you should mention that, I’ve actually written a book about it (link below). It’s also the topic of this Substack file so I’m grateful some readers have noticed it. It’s true, we humans are not egalitarian by nature. Yes, we have an unseen biological (hardwired, genetic) mechanism that pushes us to try to dominate each other, to establish by any means dominance hierarchies in which the top dogs lord it over the mutts at the bottom of the pile. See that verb? It’s even built into the language: lording it over the yobboes, acting like a lord. But back to the theme: Yes, our urge to dominate is based in the testosterone system and yes, it is common to all vertebrate species studied so, by indulging it, we’re not doing anything that dogs in the street or bull elephant seals aren’t doing.

The bad news is that it doesn’t come without a catch. In the genealogy of human affairs, it probably rates as Catch No. 1 (damn you, Heller) but I call it the Paradox of Hierarchy because that’s what it is, a dirty trick nature plays on us just to keep us from getting too big for our boots. It’s this: for every person who thinks he deserves to be Number One and is prepared to fight to prove it, there’s a hundred who think he doesn’t and are prepared to fight to resist domination. Actually, the whole thing is quite diabolical. The paradox of hierarchy means that, without a strict set of rules objectively enforced, we humans are likely to tear themselves to bits. Oh, we’re already doing that? Well, we can’t fight nature, can we, which brings us to the energetic reader’s next objection, the Pareto principle.

Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) was an Italian polymath who made significant contributions in a number of fields, including economics and sociology. First in Italy and later elsewhere, he worked out that 20% of the population owned 80% of the wealth. The 80/20 rule applies widely in nature and is an example of a power law. Pareto was pessimistic about democracy, believing that a ruling class will always emerge that then uses its power to entrench and enrich itself but, confusingly, he thought that governments shouldn’t interfere in the market economy. That seems to be the view of the reader, who said:

So there appears to be little point in wringing one's hands about the fact that some people have more or less money than others. Some mountains are tall and some hills are small, and Mercury is smaller then Jupiter. Their relative sizes are governed by universal scaling laws.

Without spending too much time on it, this is an enthymeme, a fallacious argument where the conclusion is reached by discreetly omitting some vital premises. Take an example: there are a hundred people and a hundred apples. Common sense says one each will produce the greatest benefit and the least friction but, under the Pareto principle, we could expect an unfettered economy to give 80 apples to 20 rich people (4 each) and the remaining 20 apples to be divided among the 80 poor folks, or a quarter each. Edach of the rich has 1,500% more apple than the poor, a recipe for trouble. Using houses as the example, 20 rich families have four houses each while the poor must cram together, four families in each house. Quickly seeing an opportunity, the rich then rent their spare houses to the poor, thereby getting even richer (see Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, from 1937, i.e. nearly a century after Engels’ work). Now our reader says that this inequitable process is of the same order of nature as mountains being worn down or planets orbiting, but his hidden premise is the positivist mantra, that we can build a science of human affairs without mentioning the mind, that we are essentially mindless. To that, I say Rubbish. The grotesque inequities of wealth are driven by human greed, which has nothing to do with gravity.

The biocognitive theory of mind puts the informational state of the human mind on the same order as any informational state, it just takes a bit of artistry to sort it out because we don’t have the codes. Bear in mind that the Pareto principle conceals as much as it reveals. It conceals the fact that the graph of distribution of wealth in a community is a curve ranging from zero to infinity. It isn’t a fact that 80 apples are evenly distributed among 20 people, as one person will have 30, another has 20, another 15 and the remainder go to the remainder, with many poor people going hungry. That’s true, isn’t it, Mr Musk. Of the 20 rich people, 15 will have inherited their piles, 4 will have stolen it, and maybe one or two genuine people actually worked very hard and had really good luck, like they weren’t run over by a truck (I’ve met a couple of wealthy people like that but most of the rich I’ve met were arseholes through and through). Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that inequality produces social disorder, up to and including mayhem such as Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, to name but a few.

Now because we’re supposed to be clever creatures with control over our affairs, not biological automata controlled by the same physical laws as hills and planets, the critical question our reader chose to overlook is of a different order of being. It’s the moral question: Ought we just accept inequality and all its ills, or should we do something to correct it? Of course the wealthy will smile and shake their heads: “Law of nature, honey bunch, so don’t argue. There’ll always be poor, it’s in the Bible, nothin’ anybody can do about that” (Mark 14.7) In fact, it’s much worse than that. The richest 100 people in the US are worth $3.86 trillion. Capital T, meaning more than the poorest 300million. As reported in this morning’s Economist World in Brief newesletter (Wed Sept 11^th 2025; paywall):

Larry Ellison became the world’s richest person. The founder of Oracle saw his personal fortune rise to $393bn as the software giant’s stock jumped following surprisingly good quarterly earnings. The $101bn increase was the biggest ever recorded in a single day by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Mr Ellison unseated Elon Musk, a fellow tech titan worth $385bn, from the top spot.

Imagine that, gaining $100billion in a day. That’s a power curve with a vengeance, and that’s what the Pareto principle conceals. Of course, the wealthy cast around to find some form of justification for being greedy shits, that’s what the wealthy do. They have plenty of time to do it as they don’t have to stand in queues in government offices or clean their own mess, and they have swarms of struggling academics breaking their little necks to write papers justifying obscene wealth so they too can slide up the ladder and swan around with the 20% (it’s said that 85% of the world’s economists are now neoliberals).

My view is that if we don’t do something about the endlessly growing disparities of wealth in the world, including all the Chosen People currently doing their worst to steal their neighbour’s country, then we don’t have a future. That, of course, is a moral question, and neoliberal economists don’t want anybody to mention moral questions as they mess with their nice equations. They want you to believe that there is only one conceivable rational economic system, theirs; that it is governed by impersonal laws of the same order of nature as planetary orbits; that it is, above all, rational, meaning anybody who questions it is irrational and emotional and can be ignored. This, of course, is arrant bullshit just because their system has no basis in human psychology and is therefore non-scientific. Neoliberalism is an economic system written to justify inequality, to stop people questioning it, and to make people simply shrug their shoulders and tramp off to work in the factory like good little robots. The whole thing is pretence but it’s a pretence that greatly profits the rich and powerful so they won’t be changing it any time soon.

His final point: “It may be emotionally gratifying to blame wealth and poverty on shadowy groups of evil conspirators, but that's not the way the world works.” Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, sunshine, but you put your finger right on it. That is precisely how the world works. For a brief summary, like two volumes, of just some of the webs of corruption behind the scenes, see Whitney Webb’s impressive exposé of just some of the vile skulduggery of the wealthy [1; also see her website for more of the same; I have no idea how she churns this stuff out, simply reading it makes me feel sick]. Follow it up with a quick look at the Russian mafia in action (it’s also called a government, [2]) and Oliver Bullough on how black money is moved around the world [3]. We can be sure that Ms Webb only scratched the surface. If she had really let the cat out of the bag, she would have fallen out of a 30^th floor window somewhere.

In brief, I find the reader’s objections to Belloc’s idea of the distributive state typical of the artfully obfuscating self-justification of neoliberalism. The one thing neoliberals don’t want you to do is look under their airy theories to examine their motives, because it’s all due to the urge to dominate. At any cost. As long as they have their 40 room mansions, their private jets and their superyachts, they don’t care how many people starve (see Chuck Collins at inequality.org for weekly reports on how the rich are screwing us).

So back to what I said were some general rules arising from the reader’s objections. First one: Always read what’s written, don’t pick an argument over something that doesn’t exist. Belloc never said anything like “Make capitalism go away.” That’s actually an absurdity, on a par with saying “Make land go away,” and I’m sure Belloc would have known that. He was a capitalist himself, he wrote to earn money to live and provide for his family. His talent was his capital, he would never have thrown it away. Remember what Ernest Hemingway said after he was given ECT:

It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient. What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business?

Two days later, he committed suicide. Next: beware of hidden or omitted premises in any argument. The reader’s case rests on omitting moral considerations, which is classic, bloody-minded neoliberalism. Yes, the world is inequitable, all that remains is to decide whether it ought to be. Neoliberalism’s phony “rational consumer” can’t answer that, only creatures with moral capacity can grasp the verb “ought.”

Finally, don’t be too clever. The mocking “Got a better idea, Niall?” shows that the reader’s motive isn’t seeking clarity but only to have the last word, to exert dominance over anybody silly enough to disagree with him. The urge to dominate is everywhere but, by trying to prove he’s the smartest bloke in the room, it ends up as smart-aleckry. I don’t claim to be the smartest person around, I’ve certainly met smarter people including some who were in mental hospitals. But I do work hard, I fuss over details and I have a fine nose for bullshit, especially the academic variety. That’s good enough for me.

References:

1. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

2. Belton C (2020). Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West. London: Harper Collins.

3. Bullough, O (2018). Moneyland. Why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to take it back. London: Profile.

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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.