Oligarchy Rules, OK?

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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A recent headline in The Economist screamed: “France’s top general says Russia could attack in five years.” Gen. Thierry Burkhard said: “Russia will possess the means once again to pose a military threat to Western countries, and European countries in particular …” (31.07.25; paywall). A further article this week says Germany will massively increase its military budget, spending €670billion over the next five years, just when its economy is crumbling and social spending is rising due to ageing and negative population growth. Not to be outdone, Britain will nearly double its military expenditure in five years even though their economy is also creaking and groaning. Australia, of course, has hocked its future on a bunch of nuclear submarines that we will never see.

So what’s going on? Is the threat of a major war in Western Europe so great that these G7 economic powers have to leap into yet another arms race? The article on France gives some clues. It talks about all sorts of things such as Russia’s military production, France’s nuclear forces, its submarines and missiles, new alliances to deter Russian aggression now that the US is starting to withdraw from Europe, and so on. “France cannot fight alone against Russia,” pants the general, as though Russians are banging on his door. However, in the panic, everybody seems to have overlooked some important points, the first being the actual logistics of the feared Russian onslaught. First point: France is a long way from Russia. How are they going to move the tovariches some 2,500km from Moscow to the French border with all their gear, and keep them out of the vineyards long enough to mount an attack? It doesn’t gel. A sea-borne invasion? That’s even further and much slower, assuming they had the ships, which they don’t.

We could go on, but the most important point is one word in “Russia could attack in five years.” Could. Not “will,” or even “is likely to,” just “may have the means to.” Again, they take leave from reality. For the past 42 months, Russia has been grinding away at a much smaller and grossly corrupt country right on its border, and it measures its progress in kilometres per week. Next, we are constantly told the Russian economy is teetering on the brink, kept upright only by money printing and other shady measures, yet a nuclear-armed G7 ecconomy thousands of kilometres away is supposed to be in danger? None of this is real but the most important factor missing in all this paranoid alarmism is… a motive. What on earth would Russia want to attack France for? The wine? No, they grow their own around the Black Sea. French bullet trains? No, they can buy them, the French government will actually finance the sales but Chinese trains are cheaper and better. More land? They already have 17million km² of land so a bit more at the far end of Europe wouldn’t be much use to them.

Clearly, the worthy general is living in cloud cuckoo land (“metaphor; a person who thinks that completely impossible things might happen, rather than understanding how things really are; also the person referred to is naive, unaware of realities or deranged in holding such an unrealistic belief”). A deranged general? That’d be a change but perhaps he should exercise his fairly obvious intellect and look at it from another point of view which, generally speaking, paranoid fantasists are not very good at (although the French are much better than their traditional enemies across the Channel). Who knows, maybe he could even try the little exercise of looking at it from the point of view of, say, a Russian general or a politician, or even of Ivan Krapinsky of Khabarovsk.

Assume that in five years, the Russian economy is roaring ahead and they’ve got over losing hundreds of thousands of young men in Ukraine. They’ve rebuilt their arsenals and their economy is humming along nicely: what would convince them that they have to launch some sort of attack on France? Bearing in mind that a ground invasion is out of the question, it would have to be a missile attack, delivered by ICBMs, submarines and long-range bombers but what for? What possible motive would drive such folly? We could go through the possibilities but there’s only one reason why Russia would attack France: if and only if the French are threatening Russia with another invasion. Which, absent Napoleon, they can’t. And don’t want to. And aren’t interested. That is, we could quickly reach the point where each side says to the other: “We won’t invade you if you don’t invade us, but we’re not interested anyway.”

This move, commonly known as a non-aggression pact, doesn’t have a good track record but it’s already written into the UN Charter. Clearly, the French aren’t satisfied with that and want further guarantees. They could try this: “We won’t threaten you if you don’t threaten us.” Mr Putin, his generals and even Mr Krapinsky would snort in derision: “But you are threatening us. NATO have been threatening us for 80 years and you never stop so, just in case you’re serious, we have to protect ourselves. That’s in addition to Napoleon in 1812 and Crimea in 1853, and again in 1917, not to mention your part in installing Hitler. Do you think we’re stupid?” Yes, they do. The entire Western political/military/financial/industrial class believes Russians (and Chinese and Iranians and a few others) are rendered incapable of rational thought because of their aggressive natures, that these ancient peoples have only one motive in life, gouging their neighbours’ eyes out. Aggression is in their blood, we are told, they can never be trusted, they’ll attack us if we take our eyes off them, therefore we have to rearm (and stop bleating that we can’t afford it). This belief system leads the politicians and generals to warn “…that Russia’s combat experience, huge mass and capacity for endurance make it dangerous (to the West),” meaning the West has no option but to get ready for the inevitable onslaught. That’s their story, except I don’t believe a word of it.

It's the same in many countries today. In London over the weekend, 466 people were arrested because they were quietly sitting on the ground near Parliament holding placards saying “I support Palestine Action.” Palestine Action is a non-violent group who sprayed red paint on aircraft used to spy on Palestine and feed the information to Israel to help their genocide in Gaza. As a result, PA have been declared a “terrorist organisation,” along with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, so supporting them is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. The reasoning behind the law is this: “Supporting Palestinians is to oppose Israel; opposing Israel is antisemitic; antisemitism is far and away the worst and most grievous crime imaginable; therefore anybody who supports Palestine must be locked up forever.” That’s the story, except I don’t believe it.

In the US, after one minor mugging of a self-declared idiot in Washington, Trump has given himself the power to take control of the city government and put troops on the streets to prevent “disorder.” That’s his story, I don’t believe a word of it.

There are thousands of examples like this but they all add up to one message being beamed at us day and night through every possible medium: We civilised people in the West are under grave, imminent threat by barbarians so we have to give up our social services to buy guns, and restrict civil rights to stop fifth columnists and spies spreading defeatist lies to weaken our brave resolve. I don’t believe a word of that, either. What I believe is that the chaos we are living through today is the predictable outcome of fifty years of neoliberalism.

That’s a fairly bold statement and perhaps a bit cryptic so a bit of background will help. Starting on April 10^th this year, I posted a series of four columns in this file outlining what neoliberal economics means, and what I see as its failings (if they can’t be accessed, let me know, I can repost them). Neoliberalism means new liberalism, i.e. going back to the original concept of a liberal economy, in which the consumer is king. It was launched in about 1920 but started to take over when Thatcher became UK PM in 1979 and Reagan in the US in 1981. Its core thesis is that the market economy is a finely-balanced, rational machine for allocating prices to products and services which needs no outside interference to produce the best possible outcome for both buyers and sellers.

In particular, government interference produces damaging market distortions and must be kept to an absolute minimum, essentially providing nothing more than a level playing where rational self-interest will work efficiently to allocate resources. Governments need provide only a few essential services; the market will provide the rest at the cheapest possible price and most efficient outcome. That’s the theory. As part of this, neoliberals abhor anything that smacks of socialism, which more or less means any government spending programs based on taxing the rich and spending on the poor that they don’t like, i.e. that doesn’t profit them. BTW, the seven largest private health insurers in the US made $71billion profit last year, paying their CEOs an average of just over $20million each. Meanwhile, tens of millions of citizens in the world’s biggest economy have either no or completely inadequate health insurance. But what’s the connection between black Louisianans dying young of preventable diseases and police arresting a blind man in a wheelchair in London? That takes a bit of explaining.

After World War II, and apart from a bit of background noise like wars in Korea or Congo or Vietnam, etc., most people were better off than they had ever been. In 1957, British PM Harold MacMillan told the whining English just that: “You’ve never had it so good.” Compared with the Depression and post-war rationing, it was probably true. In the US, the average CEO made twenty times the salary of his median worker. Eisenhower’s massive interstate highway program employed huge numbers of people for good wages, factories worked flat out, Britain’s revolutionary NHS changed the lives of tens of millions, education was cheap, prices were stable, people could afford cars and holidays, and so on. Compared with what had gone before, it really was a golden age for workers and their families, but it didn’t last.

But, as MacMillan also said, the “winds of change” were blowing through the world. In particular, the great European empires were falling apart as their (unwilling) colonies demanded or fought for independence. Now, for the wealthy of Britain, France and the US, that was a total pain in the bum. For centuries, they had bled their captive colonies white, living high on the proceeds and generally acting like drunk lords, but now it seemed the party was about to end. Overseas, the locals were getting restive and pushing the imperialists out while at home, bolshie workers were demanding and getting a larger share of their production. In Britain, supertaxes of 19/- in the pound (95%) took the gloss off the family fortune and many a fine country house went under the hammer – figuratively and literally, as they were too expensive to maintain. Pity the poor plutocrats, down to their last townhouse in Belgravia.

Throughout the 1960s, things steadily got worse. The US economy buckled under the strain of running its war in Vietnam while trying to build a “Great Society” at home. Through Labour and Conservative governments, Britain’s post-colonial plight steadily got worse. France teetered on the brink of civil war over its colonies. The few remaining Dutch were turfed out of Indonesia. With its totally corrupt and incompetent, revolving-door governments, Italy remained a mafia-ridden basket case. Finally, the wealthy could stand it no longer. Workers were the problem, they shrieked, workers who expected holidays and sick pay and full health insurance and compensation for injuries and affordable homes and pensions and the dole and university education for their ill-mannered children, it was workers who were ruining the wonderful party they’d had for hundreds of years.

Early in the 1970s realisation hardened into resolve: workers had to be put back in their place. Governments that were nannying and protecting them had to be smacked until they got their fingers out of the guts of private enterprise – you can’t play billiards with somebody tugging at your elbow, and you can’t run a business with government inspectors checking every workbench for safety measures or leafing through your bank accounts. Then somebody realised that there was a ready-made solution waiting to be slotted into place. An obscure group of obstreperous economists based around Chicago University had the perfect scheme: get government out of the market place, stop pampering workers, let them feel the lash of fiscal reality; let people make as much as they like and the economy would automatically grow. To begin with, the profits would go to the people doing all the work and taking all the risks, meaning the capitalist class and their managers, but then they would need somewhere to invest their loot, I mean hard-earned wealth, so they would invest it back in the economy, creating jobs and opportunities, and so the newly-generated wealth would “trickle down” to the workers and everybody would be better off.

This they called “neoliberal economics” and, at first, it was a bit of a hard sell. Governments were suspicious of anything that funnelled money away from the voters, sorry, workers, back up to the wealthy but, as government finances deteriorated, events took over. In Britain, successive Labour governments presided over industrial and social decline while in the US, New York city was forced to the brink of bankruptcy. All this was blamed on soft, squishy government policies when what was needed was the bracing blast of industrial and fiscal discipline. Government, as Reagan read from his script, government was not the solution, it was the problem. The neoliberal answer was to shrink government to its smallest possible size and allow free enterprise to flourish in the space thus created.

Accordingly, dozens of governments around the world unleashed an orgy of “privatisation,” meaning selling national assets to well-connected investors for knock-down prices. Ports and airports, railways, highways and bridges, power stations and water supplies, hospitals, airlines and bus services, anything that generated a cash flow was bundled up and sold to investors who made squillions. Australia’s Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, which had started by making anti-venenes for snake bites and graduated to vaccines such as polio, was sold for an adjusted price of 76c per share, now worth about $270 per share, or 36,000% gain (its head office in Melbourne is said to be worth more than the original price of the company). In Britain, water supplies were privatised and have become a national scandal as companies borrowed money to pay dividends to shareholders but failed to maintain the plant, and are now facing bankruptcy, meaning a government bailout. But, unlike the sewage in Britain, which floods into their rivers, none of this pelf trickles down. Despite the rosy predictions of generations of neoliberal academics, the money flows up … and then it disappears. CEOs in the US now earn 285 times the median worker’s income which has stagnated for the past fifty years. Freed from statist control, factories have closed and production moved to cheaper countries. Shareholders and managers make ever-bigger profits while workers are pushed out onto the street with no benefits. But it doesn’t stop. The more the wealthy have, the more of the workers’ diminishing share they feel they’re entitled to, so they go for that, too. Greed is good – for the greedy.

All of this produces anger, and angry working classes are a problem. If nothing is done about them, the hoi polloi can start demanding that companies and the wealthy actually pay tax, or they can even vote in governments who will reverse the whole process, so they have to be distracted. There’s no limit to the distractions available – food, clothes, music, cars, TV, gambling, alcohol, drugs, internet pornography, you name it, anything that will make workers feel happy for a while. However, preventing anger wears off and the great unwashed start to get restive again, especially when they’re losing their houses, or can’t afford treatment as they get older, or there are no jobs for their children, or they see foreign children being starved or blown to bits. Then the people with the money move to the next level, which is not to prevent anger but to harness it and divert it, away from their greedy selves on to targets that everybody secretly likes to hate. Immigrant workers. Gays and trannies. Other races and other religions. Tree huggers.

In Stage Two of Keeping the Riff-Raff Passive, the innate human mistrust of The Other is harnessed, given an enemy to hate, whipped to a frenzy, and let loose: “Those foreigners are trying to move in and take over, they want to lord it over you so you have to fight back, don’t let them take away our precious Christian lifestyle.” The human urge to resist domination is very real, it's close to the surface and it doesn’t take much to stir it into action. Once the urge to resist is up and running, all reason goes out the window. By chasing immigrants down the street, people get the sense that they’re doing something to improve their miserable lives when in fact they’re facing the wrong enemy.

The safest enemy to hate is a long way away, even on the other side of the planet, such as Russia or China. That way, everybody can scream and rage and nothing much comes from it. It also means the wealthy can make lots of money from building vastly expensive weapons that nobody is allowed to oppose for fear of being labelled a traitor. If, however, the enemy is within, that can get very messy but it’s still preferable to having workers realise that the wealthy are ripping their arms off, and doing something about it, as in Russia, 1917 or China, 1948.

The point is quite clear: the neoliberal economic system in force today was constructed for the exclusive benefit of a small part of the community. It was sold to voters as something that would benefit everybody but this is an outright deception, as Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s NHS pointed out: “The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power.” Today, people are realising that things aren’t getting better and they’re getting angry. The old ploys of distraction and diversion aren’t working. People aren’t reflexly hating Muslims, in fact, when they see Muslim children being burned to death, they’re taking their side. People are no longer intrigued and amused by the antics of the rich and powerful, such as Trump, Epstein and prince Andrew, in fact, when they realise what’s going on, they’re disgusted. A new car or an overseas holiday every year isn’t a good idea if it ends up boiling the planet. Instead, the power elite are turning to Stage Three, repression: “You must believe what we say otherwise we’ll let our militarised police loose and you’ll soon learn your place.” The good news is that there comes a time, however, when even that fails; the bad news is that things will get worse before they get better. Much worse.

Common sense tells us, and history confirms, that people who trade their liberty today for a promise of prosperity sometime in the future are in a very bad position if the other side reneges on the deal. In the US, the UK, in Germany, Australia, and so many other countries, people are losing their liberty to think independently or protest at injustice, but what is being offered in place? How does it benefit the average person in Sheffield or Glasgow or Liverpool to be told they cannot support Palestine Action? How are they better off? Clearly, they’re not. They’re worse off. Only the elite benefit in some form but we will never be told the details. All we’ll get is more lies.

What has happened is that, around the world, elites realised that under a genuine democracy, they couldn’t get as rich as they liked. Starting in the early 1970s, under cover of neoliberalism, they have taken control of governments and imposed an oligarchy to replace the democracy that didn’t suit their megalomaniac ambitions. It’s now clear that the experiment in neoliberal economics has been an abject failure. The normal response to failed experiments, especially social, is to say “We didn’t try hard enough. We need more neoliberalism, not less,” but that’s a lie. It’s time to turn things around, to dump neoliberalism and all its disciples, and build a genuine democracy. But be assured: the elites won’t like it and will fight you for your last dollar. Why do they bother, why do they always want more? Because humans don’t know when to say “Enough.” That’s all humans, so democracy must include lots of restraints. We can talk about that another day.

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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.