On Hierarchies.

Good apples and bad.

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 couple of weeks ago, I commented on how people get themselves up the power hierarchy:

… when people are trying to get a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, they’re not going to tell everybody: “I’m only in this for myself, I just love the thrill of being able to push people around.” That wouldn’t get them very far, so they know intuitively what to say and, more important, what not to say.

A reader referred me to the American biographer, Robert Caro (who turned 90 last week), author of the monumental account of Lyndon Johnson’s life, who said:

But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary (from Vol IV, The Passage of Power, 2012).

He’s right, but the other part of the story is who selects themselves for an apprenticeship in power. With power comes responsibility. There are plenty of people who are attracted by the thought of getting to the top of the ladder but, along the way, they realise it’s a lot more work than they expected, it doesn’t leave enough time for fishing, so they stop striving to get higher. Others simply don’t have the brains to get higher so they sit where they are, avoiding any trouble but also carefully picking off any competition coming up through the ranks. This is the basis of the Peter Principle, that people are promoted to one level above their competence: not smart or industrious enough to get higher, but smart enough to know that they’ll never get another job as good as this, so there they stay. Universities are full of them, as are other rigid hierarchies. Well, they used to be. Professors now tend to be on contract, which means they have to be productive, so the chair-warmers have moved into administration. There they can fill their days going to meetings and conferences and retreats, fooling everybody into thinking their frantic activity means they’re doing something.

Anyway. It used to be said that high-status people should be accorded great respect, that their positions mean they have earned them, but that’s been known to be untrue for a long time. Lord Acton’s quote about power corrupting continues:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.... And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control.

That was about 140 years ago; since then, as the slowly unfolding Epstein saga shows, it’s got worse. Last week, it claimed another high profile British scalp, the Andrew formerly known as Prince. This was a few weeks after another notorious grub, Lord Peter Mandelson, lost his job as UK ambassador to the US. With luck, he’ll lose his peerage as well but there’s plenty more who deserve the chop. What’s becoming clear from this is the pervasive corruption of very large parts of the Western ruling class, if not the whole lot. We’re used to the idea of Oriental or African or even Latin American despots robbing their countries blind but we’ve comforted ourselves with the idea that we’re not like that. But we are. Graft is not an Oriental or African or Latin problem, it’s human, and it stems from our inherent tendency to form dominance hierarchies. Two problems arise: (1) the nature of the people who actively shove themselves forward to climb the ladder, i.e. the self-selecting political process, and (2) what happens to them once they get a foot on the rungs, how they change. Further down the road is another question, what to do about it.

It would be very helpful if we could get accurate psychological profiles on every would-be politician but it would never work, they’d all lie their way to ideal scores. In fact, they’d all be so perfect that we would know straight away they’re lying. Do all politicians lie? Indeed they do. Dick Cheney died in his bed this week, co-author of the infamous Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” lie that resulted in millions of deaths and the devastation of the country. No doubt he was comfortable to the end, surrounded by family and friends, getting the best treatment money could buy and totally untroubled by his monstrous perfidy. Current British prime minister, Keir Starmer, told everybody he was best friends with Jeremy Corbyn, his predecessor as Labour leader then, as soon as he got power, expelled him from the party. Former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, began a 5yr prison sentence this week for corruption. Australian PM Anthony Albanese used to support Palestine but once in office, he forgot that. And Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor? A disgusting little worm who thought the world owed him a living.

The wrong people thrust themselves forward to get up the political staircase. Overwhelmingly, they are intrigued and beguiled by power, it thrills them as nothing else does and they can’t keep away. That’s how they can put up with the early stages of a political career, the endless meetings listening to boring people, the pointless jobs and so on. For ordinary people, the idea of a weekend conference with no time at the beach is a torture, and they won’t do it. That means the only people at the conference are those who can endure the drivel because they know it’s getting them closer to what they want, to what they need: the delight of being close to the powerful and, with luck, becoming powerful themselves. Why do they need it? Personality. Or should I say, personality defects.

The actual reasons would vary from one person to the next. Some are convinced beyond any questioning that they and they alone know what’s right, that the rest of the world are fools who can’t understand the genius standing in front of them. Margaret Thatcher springs to mind. Of course, some determination is essential otherwise nothing would get done. A politician has to push an idea against opposition but if they give up too easily, they’re out. This process automatically selects for people who hold an idea with almost delusional intensity. Neville Chamberlain, for example, was incapable of believing that he couldn’t swing the dictators around to see his point of view. Tim Bouverie’s very readable book, Appeasing Hitler [1], makes this absolutely clear. Trouble is, this self-conviction blurs across to outright paranoia, such as Stalin, Mao Zedung, Idi Amin and so many other monsters, and nobody can tell where sanity gives way to insanity. The problem is compounded by the fact that ordinary, reasonable people have doubts but are prepared to vote for somebody who reduces problems to simple, black-and-white terms that they can understand. Which, of course, means the arrogant, the self-satisfied and the frankly dishonest.

There are others who want power just so they can settle with all their enemies. They’re not interested in the job, they don’t actually do the work but leave it to their underlings and never bother to check what they’re doing. Trump is the perfect example. In 2015, he had absolutely no knowledge of how government worked, and even less interest. He didn’t care about how it worked, he had always had people to handle the dirty work and didn’t ever doubt that he could continue this in the White House. He was sure the job was easy just because he didn’t have a clue what was involved but he didn’t care. He just wanted to get even with the establishedment who looked down on him because he liked KFC. He didn’t win by having policies, he got in because his prejudices meshed neatly with the great mass of people who were angry over how badly their lives were going. Trump told them it was due to immigrants and he would build a wall to keep them out; they believed him because it was easier than working out that it was in fact the neoliberal economic system that was doing them over. Second time round, Trump had no plan other than getting even with everybody who had upset him. The people who rode on his train, such as the reptilian Stephen Miller, who makes Himmler look warm and cuddly, are either unprincipled opportunists or equally full of hate. The numbers in his cabinet who previously despised him is astounding – Rubio, Patel, Bongino, RFK Jr, etc. You would think he wouldn’t want them around but no, he loves watching them grovel. They, in turn, are delighted to grovel because it gets them closer to power. And, yes, this is no way to run a government but that’s what the system does.

Are there any principled politicians? A few, Jeremy Corbyn was one but like most of them, he got the chop. But, you object, they can’t all be scoundrels from the beginning, they must have some sense of decency, and you’re right, but it doesn’t last. All too often, as they gain power, so too grows their sense of entitlement, the sense that they deserve more than the common herd because they need to be seen to be powerful. The power isn’t enough, people have to know it. Why, for example, are university vice-chancellors or presidents paid so much? The job isn’t that complicated, it’s not like neurosurgery, for example, which requires considerable skill and diligence; all they have to do is swan around and make sure everybody is doing their job. They spend fortunes on lavish offices, first class travel here and there, expensive cars, credit cards and so on, and they feel justified. Trump is a bad example but last week, the night before the SNAP benefits (food stamps) for 42million people were about to expire because of his government shutdown, he held a wildly extravagant party at his pub with the theme “Great Gatsby.” If anybody had said “Is this appropriate?” he would have looked at them blankly and replied: “Why not? It’s a beautiful party, lovely people, I like it.” Trump is masterclass on why no single person should have substantial power in a state because, as he is showing, the state can then be dismantled piecemeal from the inside and taken over. As the Nazis did.

His niece, Mary Trump, a PhD psychologist, says of him: “I don’t care what his cult says. I know him personally. My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.” He even cheats at golf but he’s not alone, the sense of entitlement grows in lockstep with the sense of power over people and opens the door to corruption. This is universal. We have to be trained from very early not to take the last piece of cake, to let the small children have a ride or offer out seat to the pregnant lady, trained until it becomes part of the self. That’s the ultimate way to get corruption out of government.

Another quicker way is to flatten the pyramid, to reduce the levels of hierarchy by pushing responsibility and decisions as far down the chain as possible. Rather than allowing monopolies of power and wealth, we need competing power structures such as unions and cooperatives to stand against monopoly capitalism. In brief, we need to start to think about a new form of government where power is deliberately diluted, not concentrated. Instead of one general lording it over an entire army, we set up dozens of smaller units cooperating but not bound together. People complain “Oh, but that’s so inefficient, how could they coordinate an attack?” Correct. That’s precisely the point, they wouldn’t be able to. Militarism costs humanity about $19trillion a year, how efficient is that?

Similarly, instead of paying millions to a university vice-chancellor or president while the lecturers who actually do the work get a pittance, spread the money and responsibility down the chain. All of this is basic management stuff but we don’t do it in politics, we can’t get away from the idea that there has to be just one leader with all the power. That is the most inefficient idea of all as it plays straight into our very worst qualities, our greed and lust for power. Of course, the people with the power all firmly believe that rigid, stratified hierarchy is the best of all possible systems. When it breaks down, as the Epstein business is showing, they dismiss that as an aberration, the result of a few bad apples sneaking into the bin. No, that’s not true. It’s the bin that’s at fault, it’s contaminated, it makes good apples go bad. We ignore this at our peril.

Reference:

1. Bouverie T (2019). Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War. London: Vintage.

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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.