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. If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.
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Everybody knows there’s a war going on in West Asia (actually one of about six around the world), that the Strait of Hormuz is blockaded (by both sides, in fact) so practically no oil or LNG can get through. That’s part of it, because a heap of important chemicals are also unable to move, including urea fertiliser, sulphur, aluminium and nickel from refineries, and a huge array of feedstocks for the plastics and chemical industries. Equally, the huge quantities of food the Gulf states normally import, as they don’t grow their own, is stuck in ships or on wharves overseas. I expect that most people reading this haven’t noticed much change yet but reserves of fuels and chemicals such as jet fuel will soon start to run out. That, however, is the predictable bit. The people who started this war apparently had convinced themselves it would be over in a few days and nobody would notice, so they didn’t do anything to prepare for a siege, which is what it now is. They were so confident that they did nothing. BAU, business as usual, they said, except this time it isn’t BAU. After the Iranians had spent 25 years issuing the clearest of warnings, that if attacked, they would close the Strait, somebody attacked them so now it’s closed. “Unfair!!!” shriek the people who attacked them, “you didn’t warn us!” But they did warn, and now it’s happened so stop pretending because very soon, the consequences will start to flow. The first consequence is that fuel prices around the world have risen sharply. DropSite News reports this morning:
EU Energy Commissioner warns war will affect prices for years: European Union Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen said Wednesday the Iran war was costing Europe around 500 million euros (approx. $585 million) each day and would affect prices for years to come. “This is not a short-term, small increase in prices. This is a crisis that is probably as serious as the 1973 and the 2022 crises combined,” he said… (I strongly recommend DropSite News as independent media).
That’s inconvenient for the West but, in many parts of the world, it’s very serious. Thai farmers can’t afford fuel for their little tractors to plant rice, so they have to do it by hand; that grows enough for the family and a bit for sale but none for export. Oh dear, we didn’t think of that. But even if they can plant enough rice, there won’t be any fertiliser for it during the growing season, so the harvest will be down another 20% or so. Thailand is a major rice exporter, to Africa and the Middle East as it happens, but the ships can’t get through to deliver it anyway. Golly gosh, who could possibly have expected this? Oh well, if they can’t have rice, let them eat bread, there’s lots of wheat, isn’t there. Er, no, there’s not.
One of the world’s major wheat exporters, Ukraine, is having a spot of bother and its exports of wheat are down by about 50%. Its neighbour, also a major exporter, is also in trouble as they keep bombing each other’s railways and ports and threatening ships that try to come through the Black Sea. Well, don’t worry, there’s always the US of A, they grow a lot of wheat. True, they do, normally, but these aren’t normal times. Large numbers of American farms are facing bankruptcy because tariffs imposed (illegally) by the politician they voted for have disrupted international trade in their major crop, soybeans. As a result, they don’t actually have the money to plant wheat as their alternative crop. It takes very big machinery and a lot of money to seed 2,000 acres of wheat, you certainly can’t do that by hand. Even if they had money, which they don’t, there’s a severe shortage of diesel and, in the free market economy they all champion, that means the price has doubled and will soon double again when the summer demand hits. Then there’s the fertiliser they can’t get, partly because Chinese fertilisers are under heavy tariffs, partly because there’s none coming from the Persian Gulf, which normally supplies about 33% of their needs. Oh dear, looks like the American food bowl of the world is going to be a bit empty this year. OK, put them aside, there’s always Australia, a major wheat exporter.
When I was a student, I used to work on the wheat bins, always had a great time standing knee deep on mountains of wheat but this year, guess what? That’s right, El Niño. Now I can guarantee that not one of the “very stable geniuses” in Washington and Tel Aviv (DC/TA to the incrowd) who planned this shitshow of a war has ever heard of this, and even if they had, they would neither understand nor care about it. It’s the oscillation of cool and hot water across the Pacific which governs rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere. This year, as predicted, it’s indicating a drought in Australia, which is not good for growing wheat, and floods in South America, ditto. It gets worse. Australian soil is light and deficient in minerals so it requires specialised fertiliser. The main one is superphosphate, which is manufactured by mixing rock phosphate and sulphuric acid H2SO4, which comes from sulphur, which is a by-product of refining heavy sulphur oil, which comes from … the Persian Gulf.
A major, world-wide food crisis is now firmly booked, starting in a few months, although the rich don’t care, they’ll still be able to afford their caviar and their bubbly. That’s not true for the 20million or so expatriate workers in the Gulf, from poorer countries in South and South-East Asia. Their remittances are often key to their families’ survival. In 2025, remittances comprised some 6.5% of Bangladesh’s GDP. That’s big money when you don’t have much else. Suddenly, business in the Gulf isn’t looking so good and millions are being sent home.
It all goes to prove that old saw, “Be careful what you wish for.” The President of Peace and his God-fearing sidekick in Israel have long wished for a war with Iran; now they’ve started it but before long, there will be a lot of people wishing they hadn’t. In the good old days, kings and prime ministers who stuffed up found their heads on a pike by the city gate. Ah, the good old days….
All of this was entirely predictable. Iran had warned for a quarter of a century about closure of the Strait; everybody knew exactly what products went through it, how much went each way each day and where; they knew that farmers in four of the biggest grain exporters, US, Ukraine, Russia and Australia, were struggling and couldn’t take another body blow; and they know what happened in 2011, last time grain prices leapt: Arab Spring, governments falling left right and centre. This time, it’s worse, there are more countries on the brink; more people living hand to mouth; more health services broken by war; more guns floating around; more bombers and, of course, the poor man’s bombers, drones, yet these clowns still couldn’t put their political ambitions aside and sort out their differences without killing heaps of the vulnerable and pushing the world economy to the brink. The only silver lining is that lots of people are now swapping to electric cars. What’s wrong with us? Talking of the atomic bomb in 1946, Bertrand Russell said:
If any of the things that we value are to survive, the problem must be solved. How it can be solved is clear; the difficulty is to persuade the human race to acquiesce in its own survival.
If things were bad in 1946, they’re worse now. In the past eighty years, we’ve gone backwards. At least in those days, the trouble was all due to a clash of doctrines; today, it’s just vastly-inflated egos and religious cranks slogging it out to see who can be king of the castle and looter-in-chief. Polling figures indicate that, at most, 10million people in the world think the fighting in the Gulf is a good idea (half of them live on the opposite side of the world so it hardly affects them). That’s about 0.12% of the world in favour, 99.88% against. So much for democracy.
It seems that in his dozen trips to the US over the past year, Netanyahu has been working on Trump to launch a war. They had a half-hearted one in June last year; in February this year, Netanyahu was taken into the White House Situation Room, the ultra-top secret room buried deep underground where no foreigner has ever been, especially one without a security clearance, and was seated at the head of the table in the president’s chair, to spin his spiel. Of the twenty members of the US cabinet present, 18 thought it was brainless (even Rubio said it was BS); Trump and Hegseth were in favour so, under cover of peace negotiations, they attacked on February 28th.
Of the 29,452 days since the end of World War II, there has not been a single one that the Exceptional Nation has not been actively involved in one war or another. Not one day, not an hour, not even a minute of peace. That’s pretty exceptional. Yet the crucial point is this: It is always somebody else’s fault. For forty years, it was the commies (remember that word? Nixon liked it), driven by their urge to destroy capitalism. That’s what we were told, but it wasn’t true. Marxist doctrine said that so as long as there were capitalists, they would always try to crush socialism. Especially in late stage capitalism, socialist countries would be under attack and would have to defend themselves. History shows the truth in that. However, Marx also said that the march of history is inevitable, capitalism must eventually fail and socialism would triumph, as Khruschev said: “We will bury you.” People laughed at him, called him an ignorant Ukrainian peasant but he didn’t see the real problem, that capitalism may bury all of us.
What’s wrong with us? We can be sure that if they had been given true information before being polled, 90% or more of American citizens would have voted against war. In every other country except one, it would be even more. Only in Israel do a majority (85-90%) favour continuing the fight but remember that large numbers of people have already left the country and are unlikely to return. In the US, “The majority of American Jews (60%) oppose the US war with Iran, viewing it as a reckless escalation without a clear mission or exit strategy.” It is being run entirely at the behest of a minuscule group of the world’s population, for the benefit of … whom? Cui bono, as they say? At his trial in Nuremberg in 1946, former Reichsmarschall Herman Göring was in no doubt:
People don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America nor, for that matter, in Germany. That is understood. But, after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
This gives us an idea of what’s wrong with us. Like all primates, humans have a series of fundamental, biologically-based drives that essentially define us. We are social animals, meaning we like to be surrounded by our kind, but we are also xenophobic, meaning we fear The Other and don’t trust strangers. We are intensely territorial, which covers not just land but physical possessions, including the most valuable of all, sexual partners. Last and definitely not least, we are hierarchical animals, we form dominance hierarchies where the top dog feels great lording it over the rest, and the rest simmer resentfully and plot revenge. Given just these four characteristics, the basis of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism, tribes form themselves with a leader and a heap of followers who will aggressively try to steal the neighbouring tribes’ territory and goods because they don’t like their faces. Or just kill and rape them for fun.
That’s humans in a nutshell. Don’t remind me of altruism, the people who get to the top couldn’t give a rat’s arse about altruism, they’re in it for Number One. As Göring said, the leaders and their financiers are driven by the urge to conquer and gain territory and power, while the troops are told they must defend family and territory against the ruthless enemy, which they believe and will altruistically do, even at terrible cost. Different stories for different classes. So who is winning from this brutal war? It’s not, as Göring said, the poor slobs who get blown to bits, often they’re better off. I have interviewed at depth thousands of veterans, very often listening to stories that they have kept secret all their lives. I never once met a veteran who considered the sacrifice worthwhile. Sure, many of them from World War II felt they had no choice but to defend the country but the many “wars of choice” this country has engaged in since are different. They were all “somebody else’s war,” which makes the injuries, mental and physical, so much worse. Listen to Mohaddeseh Fallahat, a mother who spoke to the UN Human Rights Council this month after her daughter was killed in the US airstrike at Minab school on Day 1 of the US-Israeli war on Iran:
As they walked out the door, they simply said, Mum, come pick us up after school. That simple sentence now repeats in my mind a thousand times. Each time my heart burns with pain. No mother ever thinks she will send her child off to school with a smile, only to be met with silence. (from Eugene Doyle, NZ)
The stupidity of our “leaders” beggars the imagination. What do they think they’re up to? Where is the cost-benefit analysis they should have done? Who’s winning? Cui bono? I write the Israelis off. They are now totally brainwashed by a clericalist-fascist fantasy that they can push a hundred million people off their traditional lands to satisfy some ancient myth and the world will sit back and applaud. As I’ve said before, the Zionist plan to colonise vast areas in West Asia is precisely the same program the Nazis had planned for the USSR in 1941: invade, conquer, wipe out half the population and keep the rest as slave labour in order to build an eternal empire for the greater glory of us. “Master Race,” “Exceptional Nation,” “Chosen People,” these are all the same lie, just expressions of the primeval urge to dominate other humans as subhumans. As long as any group on earth believes these stories, there will be no peace.
If the Zionists were on their own, none of this would happen but they have the Americans in tow, like a child leading a piglet along by a string tied around its nuts. Perhaps 30million Americans are also in the grip of an apocalyptic fantasy, that if all the Jews go back to Israel, there will be a huge war of Good vs Bad, the Goodies (American evangelicals) will prevail, their messiah will return, the Jews will all be sent to hell and there will be a glorious empire for a thousand years before 144,000 “true believers” are wafted up to heaven while the rest go down to the furnaces. They call themselves Christians but they ignore all the squishy stuff about “Thou shalt not kill” or “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” Instead, they salivate and masturbate to the gory bits about killing every man, woman, child and donkey (1 Samuel 15:3).
These are the people who elected Donald Trump, who then overrode 18 members of his cabinet and 80% of the population to launch a war that, in his occasional lucid moments, even he now realises was a monumental screw up, certainly the worst in that country’s history. Not the worst thing they’ve ever done, but the worst outcome for them because this will upend the balance of power that has prevailed for the past few hundred years. We stand at the end of the “rules-based international order” where the dollar reigns supreme. Good. Bring it on, but just keep the nuclear weapons out of it, can you? Despite anything you self-defined Godly people have been told, defeat is endurable, but nuclear winter is not.
Last word to Bertrand Russell: “The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
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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.
The business of America is business...and that business is war! Now to the bitter diner of consequences, at a galop, on the 4 horses of the apocalypse...so glad you refer to Marx. Don't forget Lenin who predicted it even better in his small pamphlet "Imperialism the last stage of capitalism" 1917, so much d'actualité.