Narcisso-Fascism: How not to be dominant

This series of posts looks at international relations through the lens of the biocognitive model. Each essay will build on what has gone before so it will be better to start at the beginning and work forward. The goal is to show that, if we want to make sense of the world scene, we have to look at it from the right perspective. At different times, people have suggested that the correct perspective is hedonism, that, as Orwell put it, “human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.” A few minutes watching the evening news leaves no doubt that this can’t be true, that we enjoy nothing better than inflicting pain on each other and will happily endure agony in pursuing some cause or other.

The central idea behind Narcisso-Fascism is that humans have an innate, biological drive to try to dominate each other, and an opposite but equally powerful drive to resist domination. These violent and opposing drives, the paradox of hierarchy, are central to understanding human behaviour. At both the micro- or dyadic level and the macro- or international scale, human relations are very largely determined by this conflict. Domination is the only political force for which we have a non-circular explanation, as distinct from description. The difference between explanation and description is important and will become clearer as we progress. That does not, however, mean this is an exercise in biological reductionism. It means that, under the influence of biology, what we think are rational decisions are actually seriously biased to the point of being self-destructive. While our social organisation is very largely shaped by this biological imperative, human society has now outgrown our heritage and needs a new orientation.

Comments are welcome. If there is somebody whose work I haven’t panned, please let me know, I’d hate any of our puffed-up academics and politicians to miss out.

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In the annals of government stupidity and incompetence, not to overlook greed and corruption, the name of AUKUS will ring down through the ages as the epitome of how to mismanage a contract. Australia, for the geographically-challenged, is a large European island which, due to the weight of its iron ore, gradually slid down the globe until it ran aground off the coast of south-east Asia. Since Europeans discovered where it had gone, they have done all they can to shove it back to its rightful place near the Irish Sea, but to no avail. Stubbornly, it remains firmly stuck on the wrong side of the planet, so its inhabitants have to pretend to be Europeans as best they can. One way they pretend is by involving themselves in the interminable wars of the European continent and its breakaway province, the US of A. Even though this causes immense hostility among the brown, yellow and black races who reside between Australia and its preferred position on the globe, hope springs eternal in the Antipodean breast that some day, somebody, anybody, will notice their military efforts and give them a bone. So far, also to no avail.

It is an article of faith among the key opinion leaders in this country that the, er, coloured races to the north never cease gazing upon our riches with greed and envious eyes, and if we so much as blink, they will leap in their canoes and paddle down here to drive us out, or rape us or enslave us or murder us in our beds, or all of the above, nobody’s quite sure. In fact, its more than an article of faith, it is the foundation upon which their faith is built, the ultimate justification for their collective idiocy. That Indonesians don’t actually like deserts, that Japanese much prefer the rice growing on their cool mountains to the wheat on our arid plains, that Indians don’t eat beef, and that Chinese know we will sell them anything they want, dirt cheap and with free gift wrapping, none of this registers with Australia’s ruling class, even though they’re fully aware that our much-fanned fear of the Yellow Peril is simply racism recycled.

Instead of educating the nation to relate to our neighbours on a basis of equality and mutual respect, our politicians feel they have to play the game of maintaining our Europeanness by joining military alliances directed at the billions of people up north who, if they think nobody’s listening, they call the wogs and little yellow johnnies. From about 1952, there was an alliance called SEATO but that drowned in the mud of Vietnam’s tortured rice fields; there is another called ANZUS but that has more in common with the dog that didn’t bark as it had no teeth and everybody wishes it would crawl off and die; and to the intense chagrin of our political classes, when they looked at a map a few weeks ago, they realized we don’t actually have an Atlantic coast so we’re not eligible to join NATO. That was a great pity as it would have meant lots of junkets to pointless meetings and conflabs in elegant resorts, the only downside being that periodically, we would have to host war games involving crowds of people who don’t actually speak English (although their officers do since they all want to burnish their CVs with a term or two at the various American military schools as it greatly assists their post-service careers in the boardrooms of arms manufacturers). Because the Australian ruling class are terrified of having to stand on their own two feet, they had to invent another alliance to make themselves feel wanted and important.

Anyway, the latest iteration of this eternal hope is an ugly acronym called AUKUS, of which the only thing uglier is its reality. Fortunately, so far, the reality goes no further than Australia shoveling billions of our easily-earned dollars (from digging up rocks and selling them to the much despised but diligently industrious wogs and little yellow johnnies up north) sending money to, surprise surprise, the Yanks and Poms for nothing in return except the warm feeling that now, at last, they will be our friends and treat us with something other than their usual contempt. Clearly, our leaders haven’t read Lord Palmer, who said: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual” but, as Pope reminds us, hope springs eternal. The deal is an alliance between Australia, the UK and the US that the US will lend us some of their precious Virginia class nuclear submarines to practice on while we and the Poms go into a huddle to design and build a completely new nuclear sub, the last of which should be launched in about 2055. As I said, in the annals of government stupidity and incompetence, not to overlook greed and corruption, this cock up will tower above all others.

You’d think we would learn from the disasters of Gallipoli (1915), Singapore (1942), Vietnam (forever) and Afghanistan (ditto), not to mention the dozens of others along the way but no, we don’t, we never learn that great powers don’t have friends, they have interests. So let’s ask the people eagerly beating the drums of war: Why do we need submarines? We got our first in about 1915, which disobligingly sank soon after and there were others along the way although they never actually did anything except cost money. The latest is the Collins class sub, built here, which has been an unmitigated disaster since Day One. They have done nothing but cost money for no return. But, you ask, what do we do with them? Well, we, er, like, sail them around – when the weather is good and the engines work and we have enough fuel - and enough sailors. Don’t forget the sailors. But what are they for? Oh, that? Well, they blockade people, that’s what they do. Also, subs are very good for stealthily inserting spies in various nasty places up north. The subs can sneak in at night and drop them on the beach and be gone before anybody knows they’re there. I see, has that ever happened? No, but it could. I see, and how are tall white Australian spies expected to mingle unseen among the swarming masses of short brown people, all of whom know everything that happens in their villages, especially the flocks of delighted small boys who will dance around the unobtrusive spies calling out “Hey mi’ter, you wan’ tuk-tuk, you wanna beer, you wan’ ganja, you wanna clean girl?” And what could spies tell us that we can’t get from the internet anyway? No answer to that one. OK, let’s deal with the blockades.

First, who are we going to blockade? Well, we can blockade anybody who’s nasty to us. So who has been nasty to us in the last hundred years? The Japs, they were going to invade us. This is still widely believed but the fact is that in World War II, the Japanese never planned to invade Australia, they knew it would take far too many of their limited resources away from their main objective, their war of conquest in China. They simply wanted to deny Australian ports to US naval forces; if we had been neutral during that war, they would have left us alone. If we hadn’t wasted so much of our precious military stocks and personnel on a European war which had nothing to do with us, we would have been too prickly for the Japanese to invade. That’s well-known but widely ignored. OK, maybe not Japan but China then, they’re aggressive. I see. There are 57 Chinese for every Australian. Apart from when they want to buy something, 56.9 of each of the 57 would not think of Australia from one decade to the next. They have no interest in attacking this country, plus they don’t have the means or experience in major sea-borne assaults. As with the Japanese 80 years ago, their only concern is that we allow ourselves to be occupied by Americans who, unquestionably, are trying to surround and “contain” China, to keep them underfoot while the Americans get on with controlling and extracting as much money from Asia as they can. From the Chinese point of view, that turns us into hostile neighbours and converts us into nuclear targets. Does that surprise you to learn that the Chinese actually have a point of view, and a valid one, at that?

So the Americans think that, at some stage, they may want to impose an actual naval blockade on China, perchance to bring the country to its knees and then the US will reign supreme over the entire world, except for places like Russia that won’t let them in. I see. There we are sailing around in the subs we haven’t seen, crewed by all the sailors with PhDs in nuclear physics that we don’t have, and bearing in mind our woeful track record of actually keeping subs at sea, and the Yanks ring up and yell “Blockade China! Now!” Yessir, three bags full, we’re on our way. The moment that happens, what happens to the country that takes 40% of our exports? They stop buying. Within ten minutes, the Australian dollar is wiped out, it’s worth as much as the peso. Our miners are bankrupted, our farmers can’t harvest their crops or sell their wool or meat, our transport companies go broke, there are no more Chinese tourists so even the casinos collapse. In just 24 hours, the country falls apart. But there’s more. Our hospitals suddenly find they can’t get drugs or supplies, because most of it comes from China. We don’t manufacture Xray machines or scanners or ECG machines or make any surgical instruments or dressings or anything like that. Bizarrely, a recent shortage showed that we hardly make any IV fluids now. We used to, but the economic rationalists decided it was cheaper to buy it overseas. We don’t make cars or planes or tractors or trucks or engines or turbines or, for that matter, anything that a modern country needs to run, and especially, to run a war. We don’t even make petrol (gasoline) as our last refineries, obligingly sited right on the coast where a single sub-launched cruise missile could take them out, are about to close with no plans to build more.

This country would be devastated within a day of the American empire provoking war with China, not that the Yanks would care, it would make it easier for them to sneak nuclear weapons in. And that’s without a single Chinese bullet landing on our sun-drenched shores.

The whole AUKUS thing is delusional. It was dreamed up one weekend in September 2021 by the equal worst prime minister this country has ever had, in cahoots with both of his friends in parliament and one of the most aggressive and paranoid secretaries of state in US history (and that’s saying something), who, like the PM, just happened to be a crackpot small-c-christian; dreamed up with the express purpose of pushing the opposition into a hole before the election, due in June 2022, which the Liberal-National (sort of conservative) government was on course to lose. His intent was, as they say, to “wedge” the Labor, sort of lefty, opposition, between the rock of appearing to be firm in our non-existent “alliance” with the US in the face of the unseen Chinese “aggression,” and the hard and scary place of admitting that all this war-mongering was silly and we need to be mature. The Labor opposition fell for it. They were apparently given a few hours notice that this thing was to be announced and they had to decide whether, as good Europeans, to support it or to give in spinelessly to the yellow peril up north. They could have said: “Go to hell with your schemes and daydreams, we won’t support anything this big until we’ve seen the Defence analysis, and the Foreign Affairs analysis, and the Treasury analysis, and the Science and Technology analysis, the Labor and Employment analysis, and the letters of guarantee from the US and UK governments that they will actually transfer the technology, and the surveys to show that Australians actually think that spending $360billion on these things in order to strangle our biggest trading partner is a good idea.” Of course, the brain-dead Liberal-National government didn’t have any of those studies and still doesn’t, but the Labor opposition, a flock of turkeys led by donkeys, fell quivering and dribbling into line and whimpered, Yessir, we’ll support it, of course we don’t need any details so please don’t shout at us or we’ll cry. When they duly won the election, the new PM, one Anthony Albanese, whose natural level in life would be about the principal of a country high school, rushed to the US to fawn and pander over the senile fellow in the White House, who couldn’t remember the PM’s name, and so it was stitched up.

There’s a heap more but this would be the single most ridiculous move in this country’s long, sorry and sordid history of military fuckups. Assuming China’s vast coastline can be blockaded by two submarines that they can track all the way from Sydney to the South China Sea (and, in 30 years, they will have the technology to remotely disable them), how could it possibly benefit us? Remember that a blockade on China is also a blockade on Australia, it goes both ways because while their stuff won’t be able to get out, the ships carrying our stuff also won’t be able to get in. This is more than “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” this is like a man applying an elastrator ring to himself just to prove to his domineering friend how tough he is. And all because Australian politicians don’t like the idea that they don’t actually count on the world scene, because they want to think they’re important and people actually look up to them. Now that Britain is finally and mercifully disappearing beneath the waves, our politicians are sucking up to the biggest, toughest kid on the block, Uncle Sam, thinking that if they do what he wants, we too can strut around the place and kick sand in the faces of all the wogs and little yellow johnnies. Grinning like labrador puppies, our prime ministers regularly say to American presidents “Yes, we’ve been loyal friends with shared ideals for a long time,” hoping they will be remembered after they’ve got back on the plane.

What they don’t realise is that America doesn’t have friends, it doesn’t do loyalty or cooperation. The US has prostitutes, it has victims, and it has enemies waiting in line to be converted into victims, but nothing else. It certainly doesn’t help other nations, it only helps itself because that’s what empire IS. You don’t build an empire to encourage other nations to grow and prosper to become competitors, as China is now, the empire exists to crush them and squeeze them dry. The US doesn’t need or want any other relationships because they don’t think they’ve got equals. It has reached the point where it can’t even conceive of a relationship of equality. They are the Exceptional Nation, the Shining City on the Hill, the Beacon of Freedom and Democracy, richest and most powerful nation in history, the world-bestriding colossus to which all other nations must bow and pay homage or be smashed into the ground. After a century of believing their own propaganda, the idea that they could treat with other nations on a basis of disinterested but mutual benefit is simply beyond them.

We will never see these submarines. The US and UK will take our money and then default (it’s actually written into the contract that if they can’t spare the subs at the time, we don’t get them and there is no redress or recourse) and that doesn’t even take into account Britain’s truly atrocious record of failure in major projects (see TSR-2, water privatization, HS2, Hinkley Point, Dreadnought submarines, etc.). And don’t they know that Donald Trump never pays his bills? Well, he’s only one of many.

Default is guaranteed. We will be left trying to explain to our neighbours and trading partners why we’ve been so rude and supercilious. The reason is that, as a matter of biology, every man alive wants to be dominant. In particular, white Australian men don’t want to be seen as subservient to Asians but, driven by adolescent dreams of grandiosity, they end up subservient to other white men. We can offer ourselves to be sodomised excuse me, colonised by Uncle Sam and he will cheerfully oblige, but he will never let our fools of politicians get their hands on his nuclear submarines.

The name of the game is domination. Until humans learn this is what is driving our very worst moves and control it, there is no hope at all for the future.