Paranoid States

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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In a recent article, The Economist asked: “Can French nukes protect Europe if Donald Trump walks away?” (paywall). Beside Trump’s petulance, they raise two themes: Gallic haughtiness and swagger, and the glowering threat of Putin’s Russia. On the one hand, being English, the authors can’t pass the chance of mocking their age-old frenemies, the Frogs, including snide shots at de Gaulle’s “cavalry boots to his aquiline nose.” On the other, they sit wetting themselves over the “nightmare scenario haunt(ing) Europe,” a Russian attack during one of Trump’s hissy fits. If Putin’s orc armies suddenly exploded westward while Trump wasn’t talking to anybody, would the relatively small French nuclear arsenal be enough to protect Europe? France has 300 air-and submarine-launched nuclear weapons, compared with Russia’s 1,700 actively deployed (i.e. ready to fire) bombs. That is, France can “credibly threaten massive retaliation” even after a surprise attack: “But should a nuclear war begin, powers the size of France (or Britain), know that there is a good chance they will not survive.” But they’re planning for it, anyway.

This article has to be seen in two contexts, reality and fantasy. Reality is that Europe’s economy is running on empty. Since Biden made good on his promise to blow up the Nordstream II pipeline bringing cheap Russian gas to power Germany’s factories, hundreds of thousands of high quality industrial jobs have been lost as manufacturing rapidly decamps to China, Vietnam and other places. Biden and the rest of his America-First crew were warned that shutting off the supply of Russian gas would devastate the European economy but he shrugged it off: “That’s a price we’re prepared to pay,” he replied sternly. Now it’s happening, just as Trump is in one of “off again” moods about NATO, so the Europeans are panicking: What if the Russians come, who will defend us? OMG we’ll have to do it ourselves. Quick, let’s spend a heap of money to built up our armies over the next ten years. Two trillion euros is the figure being tossed around, which is a very great deal of money for a continent with a floundering economy that can’t get the oil it needs from the Gulf or the gas it needs from its historical enemy to the east. That’s reality and, as Freud said, you can’t fight reality.

The fantasy is that Europe is in danger. The notion that 145million Russians who have 17.6million sqkm of territory and 37,500km of coast to defend are all sitting on their western border, crossbows at the ready, waiting for the word to invade Europe’s 550millions in their pokey little countries, is pure paranoid fantasy. Actually, that’s not quite true. Some of it is a genuine racist hatred and fear of Russians but a large part of it is artfully concocted propaganda designed to funnel squillions to weapons manufacturers and high tech spying and so on. This mixed delusion and deceit washes around with another fanciful theme, that the Russian economy is on its knees and Mr Putin is about to get the bullet. In fact, their economy is doing reasonably well, undergoing a crash conversion away from Europe to Asia, and Putin is secure, with about 50% net approval (Trump’s is about -33% and dropping).

Unlike the US president and the people around him, the Russian president and his advisors are not complete fools. They know that if Europe is about to spend a fortune to bring its collective military to the point where they could defend themselves, then the time to attack is now. You don’t wait until the other side calls out “We’re ready, you can attack now.” But it’s not going to happen. In order to attack somebody, you need three things. You need the means to do it, the track record, and the motive. Russia does not have the means to attack Western Europe. The fighting in Ukraine has now gone on longer than the Great Patriotic War, i.e. World War II, during which time the Red Army pounded 1,800km from Moscow to Berlin on a front about 3,000km long. In 4.5yrs in Ukraine, Russian troops have penetrated about 50km deep, sometimes advancing only a fraction of 1sqkm in a month, while taking heavy casualties due to drones. They simply do not have the means to attack Europe.

Do they have the track record of unprovoked invasions? Some people would say they do, pointing to Ukraine, but that ignores their history. Last century, Russia/USSR was invaded five times in under 40 years producing death and devastation on an unimaginable scale. After beating off the last attack in 1945, they announced: “Nobody will ever threaten us again.” And they meant it. Unfortunately, the US has not stopped threatening them since that day. The current war was to prevent Ukraine joining NATO because that would mean American nuclear weapons stationed directly on their border, ready to launch in moments. That had long warned that this would be “the brightest of red lines” which must not be crossed. Rightly or wrongly, they believed this was about to happen so they invaded to prevent it. This apart, they have largely kept to themselves. The ordinary Russian has no interest in invading other countries, only an interest in making sure others don’t invade them. They’ve been there, done that and didn’t like it.

Last question: Do they have the motive to attack Europe? No, they have made it absolutely clear that they will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, whereas the US refuses to give that assurance. However, they are very aware of the ceaseless flood of hostility directed at them by the US and its vassal states in Europe, as in the article in The Economist: “The Russians are coming, quick, we have to spend ten years arming ourselves.” Naturally enough, when your neighbour starts amassing the heavy duty stuff, you have to take steps to protect yourself. Unfortunately, the neighbour then peers across the fence, sees you are busy building forts and things, and shouts: “There, we told you, look how aggressive those dogs are!”

It all goes back to the twin drives in Homo sapiens: the drive to dominate, and the drive to resist being dominated. That’s it, that’s all it is. Unfortunately, we all have to share the planet with a country that thinks it has the god-given right to dominate the entire world in every respect at all times, and that anybody who resists is implacably hostile/satanic and has to be obliterated, as Trump says. About 20% of the rest of the world are happy to sit in the dirt and lick that country’s boots but the rest are finally getting tired of it and pushing back. So we have the bizarre spectacle of a person elected as the “president of peace” who thought he should have the Nobel peace prize, who has impulsively started a war and has just had his fat arse kicked in. Good. All power to Iran, just don’t make the mistake of thinking Trump and his mates can be trusted. Now it’s over to the US political establishment to turf him out as a danger to the country and the world. Except it’s not going to happen, there are so many people in positions of power who would have to admit defeat and lose their chance of a tilt at the top job that they would rather leave him in power.

The good news is that the War Party in the US and its lickspittle vassals is permanently discredited, especially among the young. Perhaps we can get ourselves out of this mess and set a new course for the future? Not much chance of that yet, things aren’t bad enough. Fascism doesn’t just ride off into the sunset, it has to be burned out of the national psyche. It has to be crushed utterly, as happened in Germany and Japan in 1945, or it has to tear itself apart from inside. In 1984, Orwell was pessimistic that it could ever be defeated. At the end, after his years of imprisonment in the Ministry of Love, Winston Smith is sitting in a cafe when hears of the great victory over the hordes of Eurasia and is won over:

Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, his struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Trump has lost his chance of a place among the immortals, he has completely blown it. In October 2024, I wasn’t much concerned whether he got in or not. If he lost the election and Harris got the nod, then we would have four more years of the same old mayhem. If he won, then there was a good chance he would wreck two things that I want dismantled: NATO and AUKUS. Looks like he’s doing it so we can only keep our fingers crossed. As a bonus, he may in fact be tipping the balance in the US against the neoliberal neoconservatives, aka fascists, but don’t underestimate them. Bertolt Brecht understood that the urge to dominate is in us all and is only waiting for a chance to break out:

Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!

Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,

The bitch that bore him is in heat again (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,1941).

But leave that for the minute. Granted we all have the blood lust in some form or another, maybe just to see our toddlers win the egg and spoon race, can it be controlled? Can relations between Russia and the West ever settle to the point, if not of bosom buddies, at least of civility? The answer is yes, they can, but not with the current crop of political crooks and cranks running the show. What happens at present, and what guarantees failure in negotiations, is that one side or other announces: “This is what you must do.” The move will have to come from the West as, after the perfidious attacks on Iran, nobody trusts Western politicians any more. They’d be fools to trust again, they have to keep their eyes open and their powder dry.

Is there any hope of transition from permanent war to a sort of pacific state? Yes there is but again, we’d need entirely different people in charge as the first step would be for the West to declare: “After thousands of years of war, we wish to live in peace. We are not superior to you and have no ambition to dominate you, so what guarantees do you need from us in order to start the process of disarmament?” There is no way any American politician, or businessman or general or whatever, could say anything like that, partly because they devoutly believe they are superior and couldn’t stand the humiliation of admitting that to a foreigner, and partly because it would be political and every other sort of suicide. But if they did, we know what the other side will say: “What you need to do is stop threatening us,” to which, and entirely without blushing, the collective West would say: “Oh, but we’ve never threatened anybody. We’ve only ever wanted to live in peace, it’s those demonic neighbours, they’re the problem.” So in strangling Cuba today, the US insists it is not being aggressive, it’s only responding to an existential threat from this tiny, bankrupt island.

Are the entire upper echelons of the US political establishment mad? Are they frankly psychotic? No, but they are seriously grandiose, which is a variant of the paranoid state. They’re determined to be the unrestrained world hegemon so they’re allergic to the slightest hint that somebody isn’t going to do as they’re told. Henry Mencken defined puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” In his self-appointed role as Universal Big Brother, Uncle Sam’s haunting fear is that someone, somewhere, is having an independent thought, so he has to find that person and destroy him before the contagion spreads. No matter that in his endless search for dissidents, Sam builds a surveillance state that eclipses Orwell’s dystopia, that he destroys one country after another, impoverishes his own people, pushes the world to the brink of climate catastrophe, none of that matters in the frenzied hunt for heretics (for a truly frightening look at the rapidly growing tendrils of the surveillance state, watch Chris Hedges interview the remarkable Whitney Webb). The paranoid state doesn’t fade away quietly, it reinforces itself.

The world is not safe if one group thinks they can dominate another with no consequences. The paradox of hierarchy is that our urge to dominate is balanced by an even more durable urge to resist oppression. The entire world political and economic structure today is built around the idea that one country can lord it over the rest of the world, but this political program is doomed. It is already failing but rather than admit it, the 1% redouble their efforts, such as the disastrous attack on Iran. Fortunately, the American defeat gives us a chance to dismantle some of the militarist and neoliberal structures that are driving us toward either nuclear or climate catastrophe or both, but the people with all the money and power aren’t going to give up without a fight. As their power grows, so does their sense of entitlement. They are likely to pull a Samson stunt in order to prevent the undeserving poor getting a decent share of the world’s bounty, i.e. to pull the temple down on everybody. In his article The paranoid style in American politics, historian Richard Hofstadter concluded:

In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all (in Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 1964).

That was 60 years ago. It’s much, much worse now. Trump and Co. seem determined to make sure the US empire doesn’t survive much longer. We, the other passengers on Planet Earth, can only wait in trepidation to see if the damage can be restricted. The omens aren’t promising but the important point is that everybody everywhere has to stop seeing the other side as demonic and start to realise that Russians are human, too (and Iranians, and Chinese and Cubans and Venezuelans...).

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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.