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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Just when you think it couldn’t get worse, it does. In the US, Sen. Adam Schiff refers to the highest levels of the current administration as “All a pack of liars” (at 0.20). If, as seems likely, the UK prime minister is pushed out, his replacement will be the seventh in ten years. However, the most likely candidate, Wes Streeting, has just admitted that in providing Israel with arms, Britain is breaking its own laws although people aren’t paying attention as they’re transfixed by scandals in the royal family. France has had three PMs in two years and is barely able to pass the budget. Australia’s Labor prime minister is widely despised as weak and indecisive but the right wing opposition is too busy tearing itself to bits to do any decent opposing. Germany is floundering; Belgium goes two years without a government; the Netherlands has more holes in its dykes than it has fingers; Norway’s crown princess is likely to be turfed out, taking the monarchy with her; on and on it goes. All this when the standard of living in the Western world is high; stock markets are peaking; science and medical science are powering ahead; the usual wars are somewhere else, so what’s going on? If we’ve never had it so good, why is everything so bad and getting worse?
The standard answer is and always has been: “It’s not our fault, it’s Them. They’re wrecking things so we need to deal with Them severely.” In the past, that has usually meant another war but these days, the West’s economies are creaking and would probably fall apart under the strain but I disagree with that diagnosis. I would say that the entirety of the West’s current problems, and most of everybody else’s, rest on one point: the truly abysmal quality of the people who push themselves into positions of power. What we’re seeing in the Epstein files is a pervasive pattern of profound and institutionalised corruption at the highest levels, reaching around the world. What I say next, you have to take my word for it but the proof will come. Well, I hope it does, I hope the corrupt people aren’t able to conceal it, and it’s this: What we’re seeing with the Epstein files is just the tip of the iceberg. The corruption extends far, far further than just a bunch of ridiculous old men cavorting around with no clothes on, even including their crimes that deserve decades in prison. Fact is, the corruption touches practically every aspect of modern life.
Today, corruption affects government at all levels, national, state and local; it reaches into industry and finance, communications (especially communications), health, the military, academia, entertainment, agriculture and fishing, construction, everything, and there’s a reason. Actually, it’s several reasons, synergising to produce a tornado of corruption, sucking wealth from the lower levels of society and funneling it to the upper, where it is used to finance further corruption in a self-sustaining cycle.
The first reason is what we see every day in the news: with few exceptions, people at the highest levels of society are of psychopathic character, some less so but mostly full-blown psychopaths, meaning totally self-centred, totally lacking in any empathy for other humans, remorseless in their pursuit of power and wealth and prepared to stop at nothing in order to get it. It’s important to remember that most psychopaths have never been convicted, they’re too clever for that and can generally arrange for other people to carry the can or even to have an unfortunate accident with some cement overshoes while fishing in the river. Bernard Madoff is the classic example of the suave, charming and utterly ruthless psychopath who fooled everybody. He was convicted only after a lifetime of honours, adulation, cheating, lying and stealing. He was Jewish, and he used that fact to steal from Jewish victims of the Holocaust, including the saintly Eli Wiesel. It really doesn’t get much more heartless than that.
There are two major factors involved in causing this state of affairs. First, our political system selects for the ruthlessly determined, the scheming and manipulative, the suave and seductive liars and cheats who are fascinated, beguiled and themselves seduced by power. As I show in Narcisso-Fascism, power and sexuality are intimately intertwined, especially in men although there’s no shortage of psychopathic women, albeit mostly a little more discreet. However, the drive to dominate, the lust for power precedes sexual expression. Getting to the top unleashes the sexual urge. Low down in the hierarchy, most people keep their sexual urges out of sight, they can generally manage to keep their pants on but once they get to the top, they let it all hang out, as they say. More importantly, the sexual urge fades with age (fortunately) but the lust for power? Never. The decrepit elderly can be truly vicious as they fight to hang on to power, long after they’ve sent their enemies to meet the headsman.
The second factor is that power and great wealth produce psychopathy. Now hang on sunshine, people object, are you saying that people’s personalities change just because they go up the golden staircase? You can’t say that, everybody knows that personality is inherited, psychology has proven it’s all in the DNA. Psychologists like Hans Eysenck and Robert Plomin spent their lives on vast studies to show it’s genetic and now genome assay is confirming it. To which I reply: Rubbish. They started with the idea that personality is genetic and shaped their research to “prove” it. Psychologist Jay Joseph, of UC Davis, has devoted his career to showing where they went wrong [1,2]; in particular, twin studies, he concludes, are so flawed as to be meaningless. The very definition of personality says that the influence of heredity on personality, if any, is so slight as to be lost in the noise:
Personality is the total set of explicit and implicit mental rules (including attitudes, beliefs, etc) that, in the stable adult mode of behaviour, generates the uniquely distinguishing habitual patterns of interaction between the healthy, sober individual and the environment [3, Chap 8].
Rules are cognitive elements, part of the informational space that constitutes the mind, and are acquired by life experience; DNA codes for proteins, not for ideas and beliefs. As with all such cognitive elements, our rules can be changed at will and commonly are. The clearest example is the group of post-traumatic mental disorders, where a person’s belief in the world as a pleasant, predictable place and the self as capable and reliable changes after bad experiences to seeing the world as a dangerous, unpredictable place and the self as weak and useless. That’s sudden, that’s obvious. These changes are wholly psychological, nothing to do with biology, a programming error, if you like.
On the other hand, changes due to coming into great wealth or great power can be just as extensive, but they’re subtle, they occur over years rather than minutes and others generally don’t see it, not least because people are able to conceal it. It’s not like the explosive anxiety of PTSD, as it’s called, which morphs into rage in a split second and can’t possibly be concealed. The truly psychopathic personality is (mostly) not anxious, they don’t have anything but bad behaviour to conceal so they aren’t driven to drink or get into fights and so on. They’re calm and in full control while they plan bad things so they can take the time to hide the evidence, to set up decoys or bury the bodies far away. The mechanism of the change in personality is that when a person comes into money or power, his sense of entitlement and privilege expands accordingly: “I worked hard for what I’ve got, not like all those people I’m carrying so I deserve a little bit extra.” But that little bit extra soon becomes quite a lot extra, and then a great deal extra and they don’t stop. They move from the small house to the big house then to the mansion, then add a beach house and a mountain house; the little car becomes a big car, then two huge cars, then they need a new house with a much bigger garage to house the daughter’s Mercedes and the son’s Lambo (the one he later smashes doing burnouts); then the husband needs a glamorous girlfriend or two and the daughter marries into oil money and whole new vistas of wealth open up.
A sense of privilege is simply the sense that “I am exempt from the normal rules of life, they don’t apply to me because I’m special and I can do what I like. And if anybody doesn’t like it, fuggem or maybe arrange an accident for them.” The principal is as Lord Acton didn’t quite say 150 years ago:
Money and power attract the corruptible, and the corruptible are quickly corrupted by money and power.
This is not genetic. This are personality changes for the worse induced by life experiences because they are rewarding. These people have a choice: they can either remain honest and not get immensely rich, or they can adopt new, self-centred rules and turn into monsters. As far as I can see, they all choose the latter so we need to ask: What is it about the societies we have built that rewards psychopathy? It’s not new, of course, the rich and powerful have always believed the ordinary rules don’t apply to them, as in droit du seigneur, etc, but it’s rapidly getting worse. The reason is that the vast fortunes people can build today are far beyond stratospheric; several of them have actually ridden into space on their fortunes and one of them thinks he can reach Mars. As the fortune grows, so grows the sense of entitlement: “I have all this money, it’s mine so I can do what I like with it but if you don’t like it, tough shit.” So is that all it is, just people making different decisions? Yes, that’s all it is. The value of an information-based theory of mind [3] is that it allows new information to be incorporated as quickly or slowly as conditions dictate. A “genetic theory of personality” can’t account for this.
Now we’ve identified the problem, we need some solutions. First step is to flatten the power hierarchies. Concentrations of power, such as the near-absolute power of a sitting US president, should be avoided at all costs. There is not a person on earth who doesn’t know that Trump is both seriously corrupt and dementing, yet nobody is able to touch him. Compare that with the Westminster system in Britain where, on less evidence of wrongdoing, an hereditary prince has been defenestrated, one of the most influential politicians of the past 50years has been expelled from Lords and is looking at prison, and the prime minister himself is dangling by a thread. Same in Norway: the shenanigans of a wayward crown princess and her psychopathic but incredibly stupid son could easily cause the fall of the House of Glücksburg (the short name of their monarchy). Don’t forget the two Norwegian politicians who negotiated the Oslo Accords in 1993: they can feel the hot breath of the police dogs on their ankles since it was revealed Epstein left their children $5million each in his will. Meantime, across the Atlantic under the Trump imperium, first son in law Kushner pockets billions from the Saudis and everybody claps and cheers his business acumen. Not to mention the “gift” of the $400million 747 with the gold-plated crapper for “dad.” The oleaginous Howard Lutnick lies through his back teeth on TV but later dismisses it as nothing to get hot about. They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong but the real issue is that nobody can do anything about them without the regal nod. That won’t be forthcoming because the only nodding the old man is doing is off to sleep. The problem is that the power hierarchy in the US is too steep, unless it is flattened, there will be further trouble.
Second step to reduce the risk of psychopathic behaviour among the rich and powerful is to prevent people getting too rich in the first place. Is there such a thing as “too rich”? If you ask the rich, they would say “Don’t be ridiculous, too rich is a contradiction of terms.” However, that claim is based on the faulty concept of economics known as neoliberalism. This says that governments must not interfere with the smooth functioning of the market. The market already knows everything needed to make proper decisions on allocation of investment, setting prices and deciding rewards and punishments. Bureaucrats can never have enough information to make a proper decision. If they try, they’ll end up creating an inefficient market and all will suffer. This is accepted as gospel. If the market produces vast wealth for a few, so be it, they must have earned it otherwise it wouldn’t have happened because markets are never wrong. It’s said that 85% of economists in the world today accept the principles of neoliberalism; all they’re doing in their journals is arguing over the seating plan at the Nobel ceremony.
My view is that this is completely fallacious. There is a real thing called “too rich.” It is the point at which people abandon the rules of normal behaviour society imposes on them and start making up their own. Neoliberalism is built on a phony model of human psychology in which people are mindless little robots, buying and selling entirely dispassionately according to what makes economic sense. It’s a system designed by some decidedly psychopathic economists, sold to cunning politicians who sensed in it the chance to make truckloads of money, and foisted on a befuddled public who had no choice but to accept that what they were told was a “scientific system designed by experts.” It is nothing of the sort. Neoliberalism is a system intended to make a small part of the population very wealthy while leaving the rest behind. How do we know? Because if it hadn’t produced vast wealth for the few, allowing them to subvert the political system to their advantage, if it had paid relatively more to workers than to the wealthy, it wouldn’t have lasted one election cycle. That didn’t happen. It worked perfectly as planned, making the rich richer and, crucially, giving them excess funds that have allowed them to buy the political process.
There are other arguments against neoliberalism, for example, if all economic activity is driven by rational self-interest, how come there are wars? How does it make economic sense for somebody to be blown up or, what is often worse, left severely injured and unable to work, in pain and mentally disturbed for life? It doesn’t. There is something else going on to produce wars. Sure, some people make vast profits from constant warfare but the phenomenon itself is driven by factors that neoliberalism pretends don’t exist, specifically the irresistible urge to dominate. Another case for neoliberals to answer is precisely what we see being uncovered by the Trump files: corruption. Corruption is, of course, the rational self-interest of greed in purest form, untempered by emotion or any sense of fair play. Given the “light touch” neoliberal economic system, where regulation and supervision are seen as evil, people will take advantage of it. They’ll see the opportunity and they’ll take it, making them wealthy enough to bribe politicians and so they can get even wealthier. When it comes to inequity fueled by corruption, neoliberalism is a self-reinforcing system. And it needs to be dismantled before it destroys us, as economist Karl Polanyi predicted back in 1944 [4].
Today, we have the technology to track all money transfers; we have the precedent of taxation as a means of reducing inequality; and we have tried and tested models of social welfare that lift all boats, as it were, leaving nobody stranded. All we lack is the political will. Trouble is, the people who have the political power to enact these types of changes are themselves wannabe millionaires who are standing drooling in line, waiting for their turn to start shovelling money into their tax haven accounts. If we do nothing, things will get worse, because power and great wealth produce psychopathic personality changes.
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As an example of capture of state administrative machinery by corporate interests, consider two sovereign wealth funds, Norway and Australia. In 1990, Norway, popn. 5million, established a fund to collect all the royalties on its newly-discovered oil and gas reserves. Their fund now stands at about $1.9trillion, or $340,000 per person. Per capita, Australia is quite likely the biggest combined mineral and energy exporter in the world. Australia does not have a sovereign wealth fund. Between them, the Commonwealth and state governments collect a pittance in royalties so all the money goes to the miners. The last decent attempt to correct this, Kevin Rudd’s Mineral Resource Rental Tax in about 2012, was defeated by the mining companies spending huge amounts to influence politicians. Most of the big companies channel their wealth through obscure shell companies in offshore tax havens so they pay little or no tax. Britain made the same mistake with its “North Sea gas and oil bonanza,” paying their royalties into the current account. Now the oil has run out but the money was spent on high living, not socked away for a rainy day, and they’re being pissed on.
All this is justified under the doctrine called neoliberalism. The economic doctrine known as neoliberalism is a political choice, not a law of nature. There are laws of nature that profoundly influence the economy, chief among which is the urge to form dominance hierarchies. It is not, however, a law as in “law of gravity” or the need to eat and breathe, but an inclination to respond in certain ways to the environment. We can influence the outcomes by changing the rewards and punishments the environment dishes out. That’s a matter of politics and is well within reach.
Great wealth produces psychopathy in a self-reinforcing loop. Trouble is, the people now holding the money and power will fight to the death (your death) to prevent you prising their fingers off the honey pot. If we do nothing, we will remain stuck in a doom loop.
References:
1. Joseph J. 2004. The Gene Illusion. New York: Algora Press.
2. Joseph J (2014) The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. New York: Routledge.
3. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London: Routledge. Amazon
4. Polanyi K (1944). The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon Press (available online).
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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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