On Superior Beings.

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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The loose assembly of nations known as “The West” has long claimed to be bound by a “rules-based international order” based in a welter of international treaties and institutions, of which the UN is the most important. Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter states:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state …

Wars of actual defence are permitted (not preemptive) but other than that, only the UN Security Council can authorise an armed attack on another state. Everything else is deemed aggressive war. The Nuremberg Principles state:

Aggressive war … is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole …

This could not be clearer yet time and time again since the Charter was signed in 1945, nations have launched wars of aggression. To date, only one, Russia, has been penalised, following its attack on Ukraine 4 years ago. On its side, Russia asserts its “special military operation” is entirely defensive, to prevent Ukraine joining NATO as it would mean Western nuclear weapons could be stored in Ukraine for immediate use against Russia. Moreover, for decades, civil wars have raged which the international community either can’t or won’t control, but civil wars tend to stay in their boundaries and most of them don’t have access to high-grade weapons systems. They can still do a lot of damage, e.g. with machetes in Ruanda, but the many aggressive wars by “Western” countries have carried no consequences, so they’ve kept doing it. Now, their impunity has brought us to the point where we face an existential risk from nuclear-armed states starting something they can’t control.

The unprovoked Israeli-US attacks on Iran in June last year are a classic example of such folly: two nuclear-armed states using the very latest in high tech spyware, satellite surveillance, stealth fighters and bombers launched an unprovoked and undeclared “war” on a state whose defences have been seriously degraded by decades of “sanctions” and illegal attacks. The ostensible reason for this act of aggressive war was to prevent Iran gaining nuclear weapons, even though there was an effective treaty until, in 2018, in a fit of jealous pique, Trump tore it up. Iran has repeatedly stated it is not developing nuclear weapons, which is confirmed by the IAEA (GOV/2025/38). The real risk here is that China gains about 80% of its sea-borne oil from Iran and anything that threatens that supply is seen by them as potentially an act of war, which could conceivably lead to a response in kind. As I recently said would happen, if Trump got away with his attack on Venezuela, he would immediately start looking around for another target and he did. He and his dear friend in Tel Aviv decided they would attack Iran again and moved a massive fleet to the Gulf, along with EWACS planes and others but, a few days ago, they abruptly lost interest. What changed their minds was how, in a massive airlift, China sent its most advanced air defence systems, including radar and missile systems that can take out any Western aircraft or ships currently in service and survive the attack intact. Whoops. Forget it, just kidding, we weren’t interested anyway, their oil stinks.

This is the level of international relations today. We are in the grip of people who function at the level of playground bullies looking for the smallest or weakest kid they can pound, just to make themselves feel bigger. You may ask: What the hell is going on? If we take John Mearsheimer’s approach, the US and Israel have to dominate Iran to maintain hegemony as this is the only way they can feel secure. But that makes no sense as the US is once again threatening a massive blockade on Cuba. By Mearsheimer’s analysis, would only happen because the US feels threatened by Cuba, which is beyond ridiculous. The US population is about 35 times larger than Cuba’s, and their GDP about 500 times larger. The idea that the US feels “threatened” by this miniscule, bankrupt opéra bouffe island is the stuff of delusion. Well, it would be a delusion except none of the people, such as Trump, Vance, Rubio, Gabbard and all the rest who are putting this story around believe a word of it. Their sense of “threat” is not a delusion, they are simply lying. Which means Mearsheimer’s completely wrong so we can forget him.

The Trumpists also don’t believe that Iran is a threat, or Venezuela, or North Korea, or Columbia. Russia and China, yes, they see them as a threat but not a military threat. With the minnows, there is only one possible explanation for “The West’s” consistently aggressive stance: these countries won’t grovel when they’re told to. They can’t be dominated, they won’t kiss Trump’s “ass” as he boasted, and that drives Americans insane. That’s all. There is nothing complex about it, you do not need to be an emeritus professor to realise that the whole international drama is the human urge to dominate writ large. Of course, the other side of the domination coin is that humans resent being dominated, as in “the irresistible force meets the immovable object,” and will fight to the death for their freedom. Why is this self-evident truth so difficult to grasp? If everybody stays within their borders, life is quiet but trouble arises when one group of people get the idea they’re superior, that they’re entitled to be dominant, and they act on it. As it happens, Americans believe they have a god-given right to dominate the entire planet in every respect for all time (“full spectrum dominance”) and this is drummed into them from infancy. Don’t believe it? Have a look at this photo of the “school room” in a prison for five year old children (it’s called an immigration detention centre but don’t be fooled).

On the wall is a huge American flag, with a large sign saying telling the pint-sized detainees they are in the “Land of the free, Home of the brave.” The Orwellian irony of this is totally lost on the many “adults” involved since, from birth, they are themselves completely brainwashed by this sort of nonsense (thank heavens we don’t have that shit in Australia, I would have been in serious trouble). They don’t see anything wrong with saying to the weeping children: “Hey kids, be happy, you’re in the Land of the Free. Those large, heavily-armed men in masks who snatched you on the way to school are your Brave Defenders.” The children know they’re not free, so why can’t adults see this? Because they don’t want to, they like to believe this pseudo-patriotic drivel. Looking at that flag fluttering bravely in the breeze gives them a thrill because it means power and domination, it means people in every corner of the globe bowing and scraping and “kissing ass” as Uncle Sam passes by, and they can share it. For the nobodies running that prison, the power flows through them too, it lifts them above the foreign riffraff they’re guarding, lightens their step and gives them better erections. This is what humans want. We all need to feel worthwhile and if we have no inner sense of self-worth, as Trump has none, the easiest way to boost yourself is by putting your knee on other people’s necks.

The entire American sense of self-worth is now inextricably tied to being “leader of the free world, the greatest and most powerful nation in human history, Number One in every respect, either revered or feared by all because we’re so powerful and benevolent.” No. No. No. Bullies are not respected. If there is a person who feels good from being dominant, ipso facto there is also a person who feels bad from being dominated. That’s a law of human nature (it’s actually primate nature but we’re just naked primates). Bullies may be feared but the downtrodden are not mindless, they’re storing grievances and waiting for the chance to push back. And they will, because their self-esteem depends on it.

Two things flow from looking at the international scene as simply the wanton expression of the urge to be most powerful. The first comes from the dump last week of half of the 6 million Epstein files that were supposed to be released in December (a lengthy review here, which includes part of this shorter review; both are by garrulous “lefties” as there has been a notable silence from the evangelical and right wing camps; they are both reliable). What it shows is the endless webs of institutionalised depravity and corruption at the highest levels of society. At one point in the longer video, the speaker asks: “What happens when people become billionaires, does it rot their morals?” You got it, sunshine, that’s exactly what happens. Great wealth increases the sense of privilege and entitlement. As the sense of entitlement expands, the sense of any need for moral restraint contracts to make room for it because they’re incompatible. Regardless of how they got their pelf, the truly wealthy genuinely believe they’re different, that the ordinary rules of life and the universe do not apply to them. Morality is flipped on its head: for them, it’s not a case of ‘How I need to act toward you’ but ‘What you need to do for me.’ Thus, the rich become enraged when somebody tries to stop them doing what they want to do, which mainly means getting more money to spend on themselves while humiliating the untermenschen, like darling Andrew crouching over a barely pubertal girl.

This is why they take not the slightest notice of warnings about global warming, the impending extinction crisis or even nuclear war: the poor may be wiped out in their billions but the wealthy couldn’t give a shit. They have no doubt that, in their bunkers deep in the mountains or on their island hideaways, they’ll survive the apocalypse, that life will actually be better after the smoke has cleared because there won’t be so many cars on the freeways and they’ll be able to drive their Bugatti Veyrons at full speed. And no pesky highway police, of course, only their private militias to keep the peons in line. It’s hard for ordinary people to believe this but the wealthy really, genuinely, do not care about anybody or anything but themselves. And their kind, of course, they stick together. This is why great wealth has to be eliminated: it is an existential threat to the planet. Wealth and power poison the mind.

The second point is the danger of people who genuinely believe in a hierarchy of humanity, with one group at the top and all the others lined up in order beneath. This is precisely what the Nazis believed: Deutschland über alles, the Aryan master race at the top giving all the orders with the rest working the fields or factories or dug in as fertiliser. We all know where that went but the idea of racial superiority is still with us, it didn’t vanish in 1945. There has never been the slightest question in any European mind that they are superior to the coloured races, and other races often thought the same of each other. The Japanese thought they were superior to Chinese who deserved to be colonised; the paler northern Indians built a religion on racial intolerance of the darker southerners; the ethnic Arabic people of northern Sudan despised the Africans to the south and tried to drive them out, a slaughter that continues today.

These days, well, we’re a bit chary about mentioning racial superiority in public but people don’t have any such qualms about the concept of national superiority: “Panama hasn’t looked after the Canal, we should take it back. Canada should be our 51^st state. We want Greenland. We’ll redevelop Gaza as a riviera (bizarre picture at 1.04). We should just take Venezuela’s oil. We want regime change in Cuba and Iran,” and so on. There is no sense, no awareness of the concept that laws actually apply to all, only Macht hat Recht, that right grows from might. Ominously, there is practically no pushback within the US to this sort of talk.

People who believe they are superior to others will act on it, that’s inevitable. It doesn’t matter how they justify it, either Manifest Destiny or religion or genes or Darwinism, it will cause trouble. We see this in the Middle East where one state believes it has a right to other people’s territory and is hell-bent on driving them out. Their religion says “We are the Chosen People, God gave us all this. In taking it back we’re fulfilling God’s plan so if you oppose us, you are Satanic and our ordained duty is to destroy you, man, woman, child and donkey, because in so doing, we become beloved in God’s eyes.” That’s what extremist Zionists believe. At the funeral of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin roared: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” He believed it and so did his huge audience; hardly anybody in Israel complained. In The Jewish Paradox [1], Nahum Goldmann, one of the most important architects of the modern Zionist state and a person of great culture, put it clearly:

The Jews are the most separatist people in the world. Their belief in the notion of the chosen people is the basis of their entire religion. All down the centuries the Jews have intensified their separation from the non-Jewish world; they have rejected, and still do reject, mixed marriages; they have put up one wall after another to protect their existence as a people apart, and have built their ghettos with their own hands, from the shtetl of Eastern Europe to the mellah of Morocco (p8) … the Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race… Every Jew felt ten or a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil: he was cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud— in other words he knew that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates (p12-13) … the worst of these encounters (oppression) was with the Christians, not with the Muslims, and also to stress that the ghetto is historically a Jewish invention. It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves from other societies. When the Christians defined the ghetto limits, Jews lived there already (p66).

A sense of innate superiority creates a sense of entitlement and privilege which grows as it has no inherent bounds: feeling more powerful feels better than less, so people always try to gain more power and wealth (Herr Musk is now worth $852billion, and wants more). It’s called sequential targeting: last year’s goal becomes this year’s starting point. A sense of superiority also breeds intense resentment among those regarded as “inferior races… illiterates.” That builds up until, one fine day, it explodes. Why? Because anybody who believes they’re special actually wants the world to know it, they want to be treated differently, they don’t want anybody calling out: “Hey, you there, wait your turn like everybody else.” So they tell people in subtle ways: “I’m a superior type so you lesser beings better know your place.” This infuriates the lesser beings until one day, they start greasing the tumbrils.

As long as there are people who believe in a hierarchy of races or nations or religions or wealth or whatever and are prepared to enforce it, the world is not safe. Your children are not safe. Goldmann understood this: “Characteristic of this attitude is Prime Minister Begin’s statement that Israel does not require Arab acceptance because its existence is the affirmation of God’s promise and Jewish tradition.” Tell that to the Palestinians. Simply holding that attitude causes people to act in a repressive manner toward their neighbours who, in turn, will react, violently if necessary, to preserve their sense of self-worth. That’s elementary. It’s called psychology.

The idea that for any reason, one group is superior to another is not compatible with the peace of the world. The notion that one’s sense of superiority is authorised by god or history or race or power is a falsehood invented to justify what humans want to do anyway: crush other people in order to feel good. The drive to dominate comes first, the justification is second. These days, when an aggressive, nuclear-armed state feels entitled to take what it likes, the continued existence of the planet is at grave risk. Regardless of its justification, be it god, race or destiny, that idea has to go. But, you ask, if Americans and Zionists are as clever as they seem to think they are, how come they can’t see this elementary truth? I’ll tell you: they don’t want to see it because they think they’re winning. That blinds them. One day, it will all come crashing down and then their eyes will be opened. Too late.

Reference:

1. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

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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.