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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I belong to a group called the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, IPAN, which exists to work toward just that goal: a country that is friend and trader to all and enemy to none, which does not entangle itself in foreign wars and works cooperatively to keep our region peaceful. People may ask why it’s necessary to spell this out, surely that should be everybody’s goal? No, it never has been. Since Federation, 1901, the goal of this country has been to tie itself to foreign imperialists and get involved in all their wars as though they were ours. The reason given is that we’re too small, too weak and too isolated to defend ourselves, so we have to bind ourselves to a Great Power to build up a debt of gratitude which we can cash in if and when some nasties come knocking on our doors.
That has been the over-arching goal of our foreign policy but two questions spring to mind: (1) Has it been justified by events, has it done us any good? and (2) Should it continue? I believe it has been completely wrong, it has done us inestimable damage and it should be dumped immediately. First, a bit of history. As most will know, Australia was established in 1788 as a British penal colony, to replace the American colonies after they had ungratefully gone their own way. It was run in their usual brutal fashion by the Royal Marines. The early history of the various colonies is given in Robert Hughes’ epic The Fatal Shore [1]. It should be read in conjunction with Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England, from 1843 [2]; the subhuman cruelty of the English ruling class toward darker races and toward their own working class needs to be more widely known.
Anyway, there were about 4million white people in this country at Federation, but their fear of being swamped by foreigners goes right back. In 1827, Britain started a colony at King George Sound, now Albany, West Australia (where I went to school) after it was realised French explorers had been sniffing around (actually it was La Perouse, 40 years before). In about 1839, two American warships entered Sydney Harbour so the Marine governor ordered a couple of guns placed on a rocky islet known as Pinchgut. In 1855, fearing a Russian attack during the Crimean War, this was converted into a fort known as Fort Denison, now a national park. In about 1898, fear of a German attack led the colonial government to build the Princess Royal Fort in Albany, where I spent a couple of years of school due to the baby boom. In about 1939, fear of a Japanese attack on Darwin resulted in several enormous naval guns to protect the harbout but the attack, when it came, was from the air and the guns were useless. They were eventually sold unused to a Japanese scrap dealer in about 1959 in what was clearly a crooked deal.
The French had a revolution and never came; the Americans decided to have a civil war instead; the Russians didn’t know Australia existed; the Germans weren’t interested and the Japanese waved as they flew overhead. The sky still hasn’t fallen. The enemy changes from decade to decade but the fear remains the same: the fear of The Other that grips our politicians’ vitals at election time. The latest iteration of Australia’s permanent fear is … (drum roll) … China. Of course. When everybody else lets you down by not invading, there’s always China. So a body called the National Security College (NSC, even the initials are a giveaway) at the Australian National University in Canberra are conducting an enquiry into Australia’s security needs. We know the answer already: tie ourselves to a Great Power, buy lots of their weapons and do their bidding in their far-distant wars in the hope that when that dreadful enemy that must not be named finally attacks, the Great Power will come to our rescue. Faint hope. I sent my submission based on the principles in Narcisso-Fascism, fairly sure that it will go straight in the bin. Whatever.
Now that the spurious “rules-based international order” touted but not practised by the US of A has finally been buried in the ruins of Gaza, international relations have openly reverted to the primitive state called anarchy. In this sense, anarchy means no laws except the law of the jungle, Macht hat Recht, or Might is Right. It doesn’t mean a peaceful state of voluntary cooperation without hierarchical government. In fact, it means the exact opposite of that, a violently lawless state where the only hierarchy is dominance, where political power, as Mao said, grows out of the barrel of a gun. The central point is that we humans love the sense of power, it is a wild intoxicant, the ultimate aphrodisiac but it wears off and we need more and more. But it comes at a price, that for every person who is getting off on being top dog, there are others who are filled with resentment at being oppressed and are longing to hit back. This is the paradox of hierarchy, that without some form of control, human relations are inherently unstable.
At present, we don’t have any international control, it’s a dog eat dog world and it’s getting worse by the day. Wherever you look, you see one group or nation trying to dominate their neighbours, and the neighbours getting angry and pushing back. The starting point is always an attempt to dominate somebody else, just because it feels good. Of course, it isn’t sold to the taxpayers and voters as “Why don’t we go and smash those cheeky Ruritanians just for a laugh?” That wouldn’t work because ordinary people aren’t that interested in fighting, a lot of them actually think it’s stupid. They don’t feel any particular need to be the most powerful country with the biggest army, that’s a waste of money and lives. So they have to be worked up to a fighting frenzy by their government, a self-selected group of people who are fascinated and intrigued by power. Governments are made of people who do like fighting, who are thrilled to the core by the thought of being biggest and toughest, and are enraged by the thought that somebody, somewhere, is sneering at them.
So they have to sell the idea of war, and the oldest and most effective way is to paint ourselves white with gold touches, and our enemies coal black. The world is composed of Us and Them, we’re the goodies and they’re rotten to the core and it’s our duty to stamp on them. It’s Australia’s bad luck that it finds itself in a neighbourhood with lots of Others but we’re not strong enough to stamp on them; in fact, our traditional fear is that they’re very likely to stamp on us, therefore we need powerful friends who will scare The Others away. First it was Britain, but they fell in a large hole many years ago and have yet to emerge, so now it’s the great and noble US of A. We buy lots of weapons from them at truly frightening cost. When they point to some corner of the globe and say “At ‘em, boy,” we grab our weapons and rush off to wherever it is, even though most of us couldn’t point to it on a map. We have allowed the US to build at least eight major bases here, including Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, their most important spy base outside Langley, Virginia (home of the CIA). Generations of servile politicians have made Australia into the most important American forward operating base in the world.
That’s all very good, we have clearly paid our dues to Uncle Sam and can look forward to him swooping in to help if and when Papua-New Guinea decides to invade – or those sneaky Kiwis, never turn your back on a Kiwi. If that were all, we could just get on with life but it isn’t all. There’s more to it. By binding ourselves to the US, we become part of their war machine. All our weapon systems are “interoperable,” meaning they are totally integrated with the Pentagon and, most important, can’t function without their direct approval. They have kill switches built into every weapon such as the prohibitively expensive (and useless) F-35s, the gigantic tanks which would sink in Asia’s paddy fields, and so on. In addition, they can turn off the GPS without which every modern weapon and soldier is blind. So we’re at their mercy. Is this smart? Should we be worried? I think so, because the other side of being tied into an alliance is counter-party risk, that if the other party does something stupid, we’re a target.
This is a serious risk because the US is absolutely determined to “contain” China, i.e. hobble it and prevent it gaining parity in any sphere (even though they’ve already managed that in many respects). This has no basis in common sense, it’s purely the American national neurosis/psychosis that they have to be Number One in the world and everybody else has to kneel and accept it. It has now reached the point where the US openly talks of the possibility of war with China. For example, long-abandoned WWII air bases on Pacific islands are being rebuilt to take heavy bombers. There is only one conceivable target for this very expensive activity, and that’s China. At this stage, the risk of China launching an attack on the US is zero. It doesn’t have the record of aggression, the means or the motive. According to the US, the chances of needing to attack China to “deter its aggression” are “high.” Alone in the world, the US has the means of launching major, trans-ocean attacks; it has the record of attacking any country that annoys it, and it has the motive. It wants to be Number One in the world for no other reason than being No. 1 feels so much better than eating humble pie and accepting second place. More likely, of course, is war resulting from a mistake by some of the dimshit politicians in Washington, a mistake that wouldn’t have happened it the US had stayed on its side of the Pacific.
The trouble is that Australia is absolutely crucial to the declared American policy of holding China down. Without having this country as an enormous footstool and supply base in the western Pacific region, the US could not contemplate any form of hostility with China; the enterprising Chinese would continue their rise and Uncle Sam would have to come down from his throne and let somebody else sit in it. That, for the American power and financial and industrial elite, is anathema. But for us? War with China, our major trading partner, would be devastating, not to overlook their very accurate hypersonic missiles against which there is no defence. We therefore need to look at the cost-benefit-risk profile of staying on board the rudderless carnage the Americans laughingly call their foreign policy, or jumping off. It’s fairly simple. I see three options:
1. Remain a critical part of the American war machine;
2. Leave the American alliance and ally ourselves with China and probably BRICS;
3. Adopt a policy of neutrality.
Each of these has costs, benefits and risks. For option (1), Remain in the American war machine, the costs are enormous. There is the direct cost of the hugely expensive weapon systems that we are forced to buy to maintain “interoperability,” weapons we can only use when and where told; there is the loss of sovereignty of having numerous very important extraterritorial American bases here (i.e. we have no control over them); there has been the huge cost in lives and material of joining in distant wars that had nothing to do with us, which we didn’t influence, and which gave us no benefit; and the incalculable cost of being seen by the majority of the world as a vassal state, a supine and untrustworthy dog of a country that leaps to do its master’s bidding without a moment’s independent thought. The supposed benefit of the alliance is that if somebody ever attacks us, the US will come to our assistance. That’s risky in itself as we can be sure the US wouldn’t lift a finger if it didn’t suit them (further counter-party risk). The major risk, however, is that this alliance will drag us into a war with our major trading partner, which will immediately bankrupt us and convert us into a target. Since stated US policy is to “contain” China by all means necessary, which apparently includes nuclear bombers, that risk is enormous.
Option (2), ally ourselves with China and probably BRICS, is not so far-fetched as it seems. China’s record of aggression is far better than ours, they’re our major trading partner and a huge industrial power; and their only interest in this country is that we continue to sell them the stuff they need without allowing ourselves to join forces in another country’s endless crusade for world domination.
Option (3), armed neutrality, isn’t such a bad idea. The principle is to be so prickly as to make it too expensive for anybody to bother invading. We’re a long way from anybody; the country is vast, flat, hot and dry, so invasion isn’t going to be easy; it’s cheaper to buy our stuff than invade to take control of it; and if we stopped wasting money on vastly expensive weapons like F-35s and nuclear submarines, we could develop our own defensive systems at a fraction of the cost, as Turkey and Iran have done. If, 15 years ago, we had joined with the great archipelagic states, Indonesia and Philippines, to develop cheap maritime reconnaissance drones, we would now have a major industry and loads of goodwill from these countries, instead of being seen as devious and untrustworthy. The risk is that the US would be incensed at the loss of its forward bases and would do a Venezuela on us, bankrupt us by currency manipulation and trade blockades. However, that probably wouldn’t work for more than a few weeks as Australia is a net food and energy exporter with multiple trade partnerships.
The point is clear: there are always options to endless fighting. I use Australia as an example but Europe is in exactly the same position. By allying ourselves to the most aggressive nation on earth, we create risks that would not otherwise exist, and those risks are far greater than the risks of being independent. The first step on the long process of dismantling the huge war machines we have built is to stop seeing ourselves as virtuous and the other side as demonic. That’s simply not true. China, for example, has never done anything as bad as Israel and the US are now doing in Gaza. Every country has rights, and the most important of these is the right not to be threatened. However, when one country decides it’s going to be policeman of the world, everybody else is automatically threatened, and they react accordingly. That’s human.
References:
1. Hughes R (1987). The Fatal Shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Australia, 1787-1868. London: Collins/Pan.
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
3. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.
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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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