On Being Second Best

It’s actually quite pleasant

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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After World War II, the world was in shock. The violence, the destruction, the cost in human lives and capital, the losses of heritage, all these combined to force the survivors to work out what sort of world they wanted. In Britain, Churchill’s Conservatives were dumped in favour of a Labour government that was determined to build a new type of state where the welfare of the citizens came first. Whole industries were nationalised, the NHS was built from scratch, education reformed etc, all financed by punitive taxes on the wealthy. Germany, Italy and Japan were determined to make a new start and copied large parts of the British experiment, while the rest of Europe followed suit to a greater or lesser extent. In Australia, massive immigration was actively encouraged to the point of providing heavily subsidised fares for migrants. Once here, they found plenty of work building government housing and infrastructure, the enormous Snowy River hydroelectric and irrigation scheme and other projects.

In the US, with tens of millions of demobilised veterans, there was the clearest awareness that they could not go back to the policies that had produced the Great Depression, otherwise a socialist/Marxist rebellion was likely. Fortunately, the world was desperate for American farm produce so there was full employment in the important rural regions, in transport industries, shipbuilding, aircraft, etc. One of the most important moves was the GI Bill of 1944, which provided generous benefits for veterans, including education and training, low interest mortgage and business loans, health insurance, etc. This quickly lifted the average educational level of the country, providing much-needed workers for many industries that would have struggled without them. Labour unions expanded, huge housing tracts developed, car industries flourished and the “American dream” of a secure job, a home, schools for the children, and freedom to travel started to come true. Employers provided health insurance as lack of health care had been a major destabilising factor during the 1920s-30s. Companies were profitable, the government was paying down its debts from the War, state and city governments were rebuilding, including the massive interstate highway system that provided well-paid jobs in isolated areas. In the 1950s, the average pay of a CEO was about 18-20 times that of the median worker. Ordinary workers had never had it so good, truly a golden age for workers.

It was too good to last. The long-suppressed black population started to ask why their boats weren’t rising with the rising tide; many of them indeed were being swamped. Foreign wars were taking more and more of the national budget, and companies were starting to feel the pinch from the extra taxes. Imports from rapidly industrialising foreign countries were starting to undercut domestic industries, bills were piling up and to cap it off, the younger generation weren’t happy with the ordered lives that had satisfied their parents. Even though capitalism had delivered benefits that no other people in history had enjoyed, the youth of the nation were complaining, turning away from tried and tested policies and standards such as patriotism, even from religion, the bedrock of the nation. Instead of discipline, diligence and self-denial, they were embracing drugs, mysticism, self-indulgence and awful music performed by hirsute degenerates. In the final insult, they were even attacking the very capitalism that had provided them with such envious lives. Ralph Nader’s expose of the motor industry, showing how it put profits before safety, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, on the gathering environmental disasters, were seen as direct threats to free enterprise, the freedom to make money at the community’s expense.

It seemed to many of the most influential people (i.e. the wealthiest) that the country was on a path to damnation, that this could only end in disaster, so they decided to do something about it. What emerged was a blueprint to stop the country’s slide into a socialist/hedonist quagmire, the Powell Memorandum, of 1971. Lewis Powell (1907-98) was a corporate lawyer who later served on the Supreme Court. His clients included the Tobacco Institute, which was fighting to deny that smoking caused cancer (he was on the board of Phillip Morris), fossil fuel companies, car companies and so on. In his memo, entitled Attack on the American Free Enterprise System, Powell argued that socialists/communists (nobody saw a difference), atheists and various other anti-American influences were trying to snatch control of the country. They had to be resisted at all levels but especially in their breeding grounds, the country’s leftist universities. He set out a program whereby conservatives (read: moneyed interests) could infiltrate educational centres to turn the prevailing narrative to pro-business, anti-socialist, neoliberal, pro-religion and patriotic themes.

It would take volumes to tease out the many ideas that have woven back and forth over the past 50 years or so but the result is what is sometimes called the drift to the right (it’s actually been a stampede). This is essentially the neoliberal playbook in action: reduce the size and scope of the state by reducing taxation; deregulate capital and capitalists; demonise social programs and state-owned services and industries; privatise anything that can be sold and run down the rest; reduce the ability of the working classes to influence government, partly by wrecking labour unions and partly by allowing Big Money to take control of the legislature; reshape education toward satisfying the needs of industry and capital; take control of the media and mass entertainment; and commercialise everything else, including religion. Powell could never have foreseen how successful his project would be.

To be sure, the elderly always feel that their lives were better but this time, we’re right. Things today are generally much more dangerous and much worse in so many senses than they used to be. Worse still, the direction is now clear: after decades of dithering, we’re heading straight toward the S-bend, the point of no return. Where once we had broadly equal societies providing essential services for the majority, now we have breath-taking inequality financed by the steady erosion of services and the diversion of the national income to the pockets of the wealthy. Just a single example: in the US, the average CEO earns about 285 times the income of the median worker. Does this matter? Yes, as children suffer directly from unequal distribution of services and the effects echo down the generations.

That’s on the financial side. Politically, as everybody can see, left-wing parties have either been decimated or sidelined (Labour in Israel, SPD in Germany), or have hurled themselves far to the right (Labour in UK, Labor in Australia, Socialists in Japan). Meantime, mainstream centre-right parties are either splintering (Conservatives in UK, Liberals in Australia) or are either galloping to the right to head off challenges from what would once have been seen as ultra-extremist or even protofascist (AfD in Germany, National Front in France, Reform UK in Britain), or have already lost power to the far right (Italy, Israel, Hungary, Turkey, India, Argentina, etc). Meantime, far right dictatorships are fungating the world over: Egypt, Thailand, Rwanda, Uganda, Arabia, etc. Worldwide, internationalist policies are being dumped, immigration savagely cut back, trade once again used as a weapon, while at home, freedom of expression and association are under attack in ways not seen since the 1930s. Just this week, for example, Herr Drumpf has declared “war” on the vague movement called Antifa:

It should be clear to all Americans we have a very serious left-wing terror threat in our country … They’ve threatened people, but we will be far more threatening to them than they ever were with us, including the people who fund them.”

Hitler repeatedly used just that trope. So far in the 21^st Century, two big themes dominate the scene. Internationally, there hasn’t been a day of peace within living memory. Cooperation has been dropped in favour of overt domination and blackmail: “Do as we say or we’ll sanction you and put tariffs on you. Small countries better be careful or you’ll be invaded.” Domestically, neoliberalism holds all the cards. For the first time in hundreds of years, young people today are politically impotent and cannot expect to have better lives than their parents. Is this coincidence or are these developments related? I believe they are so closely related that we really can’t see them as separate, the right hand and the left hand of the beast called domination.

The human drive to establish dominance hierarchies is central to our existence as social animals. It has an irresistably strong biological basis and pervades practically every aspect of life. Even people who aren’t interested in getting up the ladder have to spend an awful lot of their time resisting people who are trying to use the innocents as a means of levering themselves up the hierarchy. Throughout most of our history, international relations have been driven by the doctrine Macht hat Recht, Might is Right, as Hilaire Belloc noted:

Whatever happens, we have got

the Maxim gun and they have not.

After World War II, it was agreed to set up a system of international laws to govern state-state relations, but that didn’t survive its first contact with the people with all the guns. It was quickly replaced with a fictional “rules-based international order,” as in “We make the rules and you follow the orders” but, following the events in Gaza, even that has finally been flushed. Anarchy reigns, as Yeats grimly foretold:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned … (The Second Coming).

There are people who say international relations are based in self-interest, that each country should pursue goals that are best for it and the rest have to live with it. This is known as Realism. On the face of it, that’s reasonable but it quickly degenerates into a zero-sum game, the idea that if we’re not winning, we’re losing. Mutually beneficial relations are seen as an impossibly naïve dream, an adolescent fantasy that falls apart the moment two countries try to work out a modus vivandi. For example, beneath the seas separating East Timor and Australia lie huge fields of natural gas. When E Timor (now Timor Leste) gained independence, they had to negotiate with Australia where to put the maritime boundary. Common sense would have said the Timorese were desperately poor in an unstable region, so it would have been in Australia’s interest to give them the resources to develop themselves, meaning draw the boundary in their favour. That didn’t happen.

Led by then Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, Australia’s spy agency bugged the Timorese PM’s office in order to outmanoeuvre them. This was a despicable act by despicable people but it’s just one of a myriad similar incidents, when politicians (usually in the pockets of big companies or wealthy people) take a short-term view (Downer later became an advisor to Woodside Petroleum, a major beneficiary of the treaty). Australia’s interests were patently best served by a peaceful, prosperous Timor Leste because then they could buy our farm produce and everybody would be better off. Not for the Howards and Downers of the world, who can only see self-interest in terms of greed and domination. To them, and their ilk around the world, self-interest means “Pushing myself up by pushing everybody else down.”

A brief glance at recent history shows that there is something seriously wrong with the bromide that nations are best served by self-interest. Where was the self-interest in the US pulverising Vietnam and killing 2 million of their people? How is the US better off for having set fire to seven countries in the Middle East and North Africa? Surely if they’d been allowed to develop, their economies would now be level with, say, Italy or Spain? They would be buying high quality food from overseas, buying cars and machinery, high technology equipment for their hospitals and universities… In Ukraine, how are the interests of the US properly served by incorporating Ukraine into the aggressive alliance NATO, thereby provoking Russia into forestalling the risk of yet another invasion? They aren’t. It’s all lies. Same goes for the US relationship with China: the entire country would be far better off with China rising to its natural level as the equal of anybody in the West, with free trade and communication in goods, capital and people. Instead, the US provokes trade wars (that it will lose), creates hostile military alliances and threatens actual war against the People’s Republic.

As for what is happening in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and everywhere else, the current Israeli government hardly even makes a pretence of acting in self-interest. Manifestly, they would be better off in a peaceful, prosperous Levant rather than their self-chosen state of perpetual war. Instead, they openly proclaim their intention to take all the land they want and use massive military force to drive the population out, if not kill them all in the process. There’s no self-interest in that, it’s all lies.

The term “self-interest” seems pretty benign. It’s the sort of thing you don’t want to argue with because it makes such solid sense: “Yes, we look after our interests because who doesn’t?” But the problem is, where does self-interest stop and frank domination begin? Or how do we tell when self-interest has become piracy, as in Australia’s underhand dealings with Timor Leste? The US had no self-interest in Vietnam or in Ukraine, and it certainly wasn’t acting in the interest of those unfortunate counties. It was acting purely to dominate the region and stop another power exerting its legitimate rights to security, to hobble the other powers and keep them down. That’s what happens when you get the idea that self-interest and domination are one and the same thing, that life as Number Two is necessarily a mocking emptiness. Or what happens when you use the term “self-interest” to deflect attention from your real motive, to crush everybody within reach. The message is “I don’t have to be Number One in order to feel good about myself.” However, no politician is going to say that to the voters, not least because the voters expect to be told they’re the best.

The eminent political scientist, John Mearsheimer, believes that international relations are anarchic so, in order to be secure, nations must strive to exert local hegemony. His doctrine, Offensive Realism, says the anarchy comes first, the battles and repression are second. In fact, he has it back to front. International relations are anarchic just because nations are constantly striving for hegemony, that when everybody is fighting for dominance or to survive, nobody wins. Why are they so stupid? Why can’t they see that cooperation is preferable to fighting? Because Homo sapiens. Individually and collectively, we like to be on top and we are prepared to fight anybody to get there. Trouble is, we also don’t like to be dominated and we’re prepared to fight to the death to prevent anybody oppressing us. This point, the paradox of hierarchy, is wholly a matter of biology, with no moral basis. Morality only gets a look in when we say “Oops, perhaps we shouldn’t act like this.” There is no “ought” in biology, only humans have that concept. Perhaps we ought to start to implement it, by giving up the urge to dominate in favour of mutually-beneficial cooperation. In fact, we don’t have any choice. Unless we abruptly change course, we’re cactus.

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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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