Opposing Dominance

The opposite of dominance is not submission

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 twentieth century will always be known for two great economic experiments, neoliberal monopoly private capitalism, and monopoly state capitalism, aka socialism/communism. The latter failed spectacularly and only North Korea seems to bother with it now but neoliberalism is still on its feet. My thesis is that they both fail, not for economic reasons but for psychological, just because neither system takes human psychology into account. Each of them pretends there is no such thing, that humans don’t have minds, populating its theories instead with fantasy “rational human beings.” That’s cosmic level nonsense: the behaviour of human groups, meaning politics, just is individual psychology writ large. If humans were in fact rational, if we could be satisfied with sufficient, then there’d be no problem. Regardless of the economic system, we could all live quietly and peacefully, take the kids to their football or dancing practice, mow the lawns, and everyone would be happy. But we don’t. We’re not satisfied, we’re never satisfied, we always want more, even to the extent of destroying everything important rather than say “Enough is enough.” This is hard-wired into us and pretending otherwise can only lead to trouble. As it does.

The problem lies in monopoly, in the relentless accumulation of power, wealth and influence, overt and covert, just because nobody knows when to stop. The urge to get to the top is easily switched on but it doesn’t have an off-button that we can reach. Only another person can do that, by defeating us. That switches it off – for a while. After a bit of time spent licking our wounds and cleaning up the mess, we look around and… yes, let’s start another battle to get to the top. Now this isn’t exactly a novel insight, it’s been known for a long time. Entire religions have been built on the idea of living peacefully and fairly, of helping the less fortunate and putting fallen birds back in their nests but, as history shows, religions themselves are easily turned into yet another means of domination.

As a result of this mournful parade of iniquitous inequity, various people over the centuries have tried to devise a socioeconomic system that prevents the untrammelled accumulation of power. Checks and balances, that’s what we need; no kings, the people are sovereign with universal suffrage and nobody above the law. It sounds great, so why doesn’t it work? The short answer is: We don’t want it to work. We like dominance hierarchies, they’re too exciting. We’re not comfortable without them, we look around, thinking something’s missing. Two may be company but three’s a hierarchy and then it’s on again. There’s no point saying “Let’s keep this small,” that’s the little boy’s lament, as in “But daddy, why can’t I keep him? He’s such a small puppy.” Inevitably, dogs and hierarchies follow their nature and grow and grow. Should we therefore just give in and let the neolibs do what they like? I don’t think so. They’re such fools they’re likely to destroy the planet but I suggest this tells us where things have gone wrong.

The US government was set up strictly in line with the finest Enlightenment principles. That’s why they have no king but a president held in check by the legislature and the judiciary, and a central government balanced by fifty state governments. However, the best laid plans of men and mice etc. We didn’t have to wait for Trump to realise their system is seriously flawed, and the flaw is money. You can flatten the political pyramid but so long as people are allowed to accumulate property and therefore wealth to their hearts’ content, they will use it to subvert the ship of state to their advantage. Which is precisely what they’ve done, and now, with pandemonium on the bridge and chaos in the engine room, we wait for the first iceberg to appear. In fact, that’s not such a good analogy as the Titanic wasn’t actually chasing the iceberg.

Impasse. Regardless of any restrictions on the accumulation of power, unrestrained accumulation of private wealth inevitably perverts the political structure, away from serving the masses to serving the oligarchy: “We get rich, then we use our wealth to attain our larger goal, which is to gain even greater wealth so we can crush you further.” This is the theme of a largely unknown work by one of Victorian England’s best known authors, now almost entirely forgotten. Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was born in France of a French father and English mother, but his father was bankrupted and died when Hilaire was an infant, so his widow took her young family back to England. Hilaire had a fairly tumultuous early life but graduated from Oxford, after serving as president of the Oxford Union or debating society. He was devoutly Catholic, bilingual and very loud. He was a prolific and popular author, a renowned poet and a ferocious debater (HG Wells apparently said: “Debating Mr. Belloc is like arguing with a hailstorm”). One of his exploits was walking across the US to see his intended in California, then walking back when she turned him down and briefly entered a convent. That didn’t work so they were married and had five children before she died of cancer at age 45. One of his sons was later killed in the Great War. Apart from a few years as a Liberal MP, he lived on his royalties which were never enough for the genteel lifestyle he preferred. If anybody knows of him today, it is from his poem Tarantella, which still features in school poetry books.

In 1912, just after leaving Parliament, he published a small volume entitled The Servile State, in which he put his case against both socialism and capitalism [1]. Unlike his popular works, this is rather turgid and pedantic, which probably explains why nobody has heard of it. A servile state is any political system in which a small minority of the population control the entire means of production and distribution while the majority are reduced to a state akin to slavery. All production depends on three commodities, land, labour and capital. The only commodity available to the working class is their labour but in fully developed socialist or capitalist states, they have no control over it: one of the first acts of any such governments is to dissolve unions and to outlaw strikes. Both socialism and unrestrained capitalism (now called neoliberalism) will result in a tiny oligarchy standing over the disempowered proletariat or working class who, if they don’t do the work they’re given, will starve. Remember this was years before the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the formation of the USSR; what he predicted came to pass within two decades.

Belloc’s solution to this was what he called the distributive state for which he used the historical example of Britain prior to the dissolution of the monasteries in about 1540. He saw the late medieval era as one of great stability and steady progress. Ownership of all arable land and pasture vested in the aristocracy and the Church, but peasant farmers and townsfolk had traditional rights to their cottages, their plots of land and to the commons, including rivers. In return, they paid the lord of the demesne or the bishop in kind and in labour, including providing troops for the lord’s garrison. Everybody was happy, everybody had a place and a role and nobody went without because nobody had a monopoly on land, labour or capital. Then, or so the devout Belloc believed, Henry VIII mucked it up by his war on the Roman Church.

Overlooking the many justified complaints against corruption in the Church, Belloc saw only the destruction of an ancient scholarship and the social upheaval that followed. His biggest complaint was that Henry and his sickly son, Edward VI, who died at age 15 with no children, allowed the landed aristocracy to take control of the great bulk of the Church’s properties, which gave them an extra quarter of England’s productive capacity. The only unclaimed land was essentially worthless. The aristocracy became hugely wealthy and powerful while the central state lurched along the edge of bankruptcy. Eventually, landowners realised they could make more money by enclosing the commons, forcing the peasants off their properties and farming the land for themselves using hired labour. It’s not as if they were struggling to get by, they lived like lords, you could say, so why did they do this? Because they could. The thought of having more defeated the opposite thought, that others were entitled to something, too.

Initially, enclosure was informal but starting in 1604, individual Acts of Parliament authorised it. Over the next 300 years, there were more than 5,000 separate Acts covering one fifth of the area of England, mainly centred on the best agricultural land. Thus freed of the burden of swarms of peasants getting fat on their land, the aristocracy raised wheat, sheep for wool and cattle for meat for the towns which, swollen by displaced peasants, were growing rapidly.

By the end of the 17^th Century, England and parts of Scotland had been transformed: the aristocracy were sitting on vast piles of wealth, some of which they invested in England’s growing stock of overseas colonies, while the cities were crammed full of underemployed and hungry, landless labourers. The scene was set, in Belloc’s view, for the industrial revolution, which followed in due course. That made things very much worse. Enclosures in Ireland and Scotland and the Irish famine of the 1840s allowed the wealthy to throttle the proletariat, which they duly did, all recorded by Friedrich Engels in 1845 [2]. Tbroughout that century, the rich became fabulously rich while the poor lived in hovels, subsisting on oat porridge, potatoes and coarse bread only. Even where small farmers had managed to retain parcels of land, the aristocracy had the right to storm over it chasing foxes, with no right of compensation for damage.

Writing in about 1910, Belloc saw society as heading for the gradual imposition of a state akin to slavery where the landless had no property, no capital and no rights, even to their only commodity, their labour. They were owned entirely by the plutocracy, except if they were sick or injured, that was their problem, they were simply “let go” and other desperate workers slotted into their places at the workbench. They were in fact worse off than slaves, who were the slave-owners capital and thus he had an interest in keeping them alive. Belloc saw this as totally opposed to the Christian ethic and proposed a solution, the distributive state, which needed to be implemented before the workers revolted. Reducing his book to a couple of sentences, society had to eliminate great wealth and the power that naturally attaches to it just because it will always be abused. Indeed, once the grotesque inequities typical of “robber capitalism” were in place, abuse was inevitable as the entire system constituted an abuse. This was well before there was ever any talk of human rights.

Marxists saw private capital as the problem and believed that by abolishing it, they could rid society of all the problems it generated. Belloc, however, argued that monopoly is the destructive feature of capitalism. His solution was that instead of allowing capital to divide society into upper, middle and lower classes, wealth needs to be distributed so that everybody is middle class. The total productive capacity of society is more than enough to guarantee work for everybody, a roof over every head, a coat on every back and a meal in every belly. However, the socialist or collectivist solution proposed by Marx and Engels, meaning the abolition of private property and state ownership of all means of production and distribution, does no more than change one set of remote and imperious managers for another. Necessarily, it would lead to slavery by another route. Different road, same destination: the servile state.

If we can boast “We’re all middle class now,” where everybody has a small amount of property to look after and a secure job guaranteed by legislation and the right to strike, then society would enter a new period of stability. This was not utopian in the Marxist sense of the workers’ paradise, as everybody had to work but what we would now call human rights were built into the social system. Granted, there are many details to sort out but the biggest handicap in any such system would be convincing the wealthy that they didn’t need four houses, two yachts and a private jet as there are perfectly good flats and adequate public transport systems for their use. They shriek: “You’re depriving me of my basic human right to get as wealthy as I like and leave it to my children.” Society responds: “Enough is enough. Your excessive wealth comes at the cost of deprivng a very large number of people of their fundamental rights, and if your children have any talent or drive, they’ll get ahead anyway.”

A point Belloc didn’t elaborate was that excessive private wealth leads to militarism and to the destruction of wars. At present, militarism consumes something of the order of $19trillion a year, or about a third of the world’s production. That doesn’t include the opportunity costs, the losses incurred by diverting productive labour and agricultural and industrial capacity to destructive ends. China, for example, has two million citizens in its armed forces. They consume, but they aren’t doing anything productive. All the gorgeous uniforms and impressive hardware, all the effort that goes into training to march just so, is totally wasted. Militarism is Frederic Bastiat’s parable of the glaziers on a titanic scale. The important point is that the accumulation of excessive wealth by individuals leads them to want more and more, and they never stop. Before long, they want to control their national governments to make them richer, as in tax breaks for the rich, then their covetous eyes look across their borders and they decide they want their neighbours’ plot, as we see in Gaza today. That’s what dominance hierarchies do, that’s what humans do.

Most of us are satisfied with sufficient but there are just enough people who are never satisfied, who want more and more until they manage to take control of the government. Then they whip the crowds to a frenzy about the terrible people next door who need to be taught a lesson. How are ordinary people brought to boiling point? By appealing to their innate urge to dominate others. It’s there, it’s in everybody and we’re already far down the path where it will destroy us. Belloc’s proposal would keep the urge under control but the power-hungry would sooner kill you than allow you to take one of their yachts off them. The opposite of dominance is not submission, as they believe, but equality. And they hate the idea.

Reference:

1. Belloc H (1912). The Servile State. London: TN Foulis

2. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive, at marxists.org:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

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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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