Shattering the Illusion

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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A reader circulated this rather gloomy email:

“….This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper (from TS Eliot The Hollow Men, 1925).

“Please excuse my feeling of depression, but are we seeing the destruction, not only of the US, but of a civilised world? What is going to change for the better as Trump is just only one of many carbuncles to be excised!”

The British historian, Arnold J Toynbee (1889-1975), wrote: “Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.” Sixty years ago, people thought he was being alarmist but now ordinary citizens are asking the same question. Notably, Toynbee also said:

We are not doomed to make history repeat itself; it is open to us, through our own efforts, to give history, in our case, some new and unprecedented turn. As human beings, we are endowed with this freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us (Civilization on Trial, 1948).

Even them, his views were considered old fashioned as determinism was all the go. The biocognitive model of mind goes against the modern flow by arguing that humans do indeed have free will, as in: Regardless of how I acted one minute ago, I could have acted differently. What happens to us is of our own doing, and we can always do better. Two questions arise: Is society doomed, and can we do anything about it? I’d be the last to say we’re not in trouble, I’ve been saying for years that the world is in more danger now than at any stage in my (rather long) life. That’s all based on a principle I use, one I believe a lot more people should use. Of anything we do or plan to do, we should always ask: If I continue doing this indefinitely, what good will come from it? On a social level, we should ask: If this town/this society/this country/the world continues doing this indefinitely, what will be the result?

In the early 1970s, for example, a group of petroleum engineers at Exxon got together and asked: “If we continue mining and burning fossil fuels at the same accelerating rate as the last 20 years, what will happen? OMG, we’ll cook the planet. Panic, everybody.” They immediately told their executives who arranged for CO₂ sensors to be installed on the bows of their enormous tankers so they could get pure samples of air from mid-ocean as they sailed. In a few years, they knew that CO₂ levels were rising, much faster than anybody had predicted, so they did what every serious-minded capitalist would do: they ripped out the detectors, buried the results and threatened their scientists with early painful death if they blabbed. That was their considered choice. They didn’t want to get stuck with a stranded asset, which confirms another of Toynbee’s observations: “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

So are we as a civilisation on the path to mass suicide? It’s not a trivial question. It brings to mind a quote from Ernest Hemingway, one of whose characters was asked: “How did you go bankrupt?” The answer was: “Slowly, then suddenly.” That is, there are tipping points. Any stable complex system can absorb a lot of punishment but there comes a point where the stability gives way. It’s like a ferry where everybody rushes to one side. For a time, it can manage the maldistributed weight but then one more person crosses the midline and that’s it, she slowly starts to turn turtle. Once it starts to capsize, it can’t be stopped. That’s the correct model for how our civilisation will commit collective suicide, although at least two thirds of the world’s population won’t have any say in it. They’ll just sit in their huts or herd their goats while the really big decisions are taken worlds away. Even though they haven’t caused it, when the earth tips over, the poor will still die. In fact they’ll be the first to die, the rich will make sure of that.

The question is: Bearing in mind that most people are more concerned with where their goats are or whether they can afford to take a sick child to hospital, or whether their company will make new records this year, who is paying attention to “the big picture?” Fortunately, there are people who watch trends; unfortunately, nobody in power takes any notice of them. In a brief comment titled ‘Died of a delusion’ – the fate of modern civilisation? science writer Julian Cribb said: “The collapse of modern human civilisation is inevitable. Anyone who doesn’t accept that knows no history.” That’s not very comforting because we know beyond the slightest shadow of doubt that most of our “leaders” don’t know any history or, in the case of Trump, even how to spell the word.

We know from the Carlson interview that Vladimir Putin knows quite a lot of history although it’s mainly Russocentric. Xi Xinping’s early life was fairly grim and he is very aware of what can go wrong, but the rest seem to be a bunch of self-interested dolts. With very few exceptions, they simply don’t have what it takes to strain their eyes beyond the next election or their next ill-gotten million. They believe fervently that the ferry will keep sailing serenely to its destination, that tomorrow will be like today; that the earth’s resources are limitless; that someone will always come up with a technical cure; and that anybody who says otherwise is an enemy of capital and must be crushed.

Cribb identified ten of what he called “megarisks” or potentially catastrophic threats: nuclear war; global warming; over-population; resource depletion (especially fresh water, topsoil, fish, forests, etc., which will impact the Global South first); food insecurity; destruction of the earth’s ecological support systems; further pandemics; cumulative poisoning of the environment by chemicals; uncontrolled technologies such as drone and robotic warfare, spyware, etc.: and, finally, what he calls mass delusion, meaning disinformation, lies and propaganda deliberately spread by politicians, corporations, religious groups (e.g. the recent “Rapture” nonsense), crackpots (QAnon) and malicious or even just mischievous individuals (did QAnon start with a group of undergrads at a boozy party?). To Cribb’s gloomy list, I would add one more item: the institutionalised, systematic, pervasive and all-embracing corruption of the so-called ruling classes of the world [1].

That’s quite a list but the problem is that the downfall of civilisation won’t come from the one that we can see coming, or two, or even half a dozen. It will be the slow, synergistic interaction of all of them, and more that we haven’t predicted, each of them potentiating the others, that gradually push us to the tipping point. And suddenly, it will be too late. Once the ship starts to capsize, it can’t be stopped. So back to the reader’s question: “Are we seeing the destruction of the civilised world?” If we take Toynbee’s cyclical view, the answer is self-evidently “Yes, because no civilisation lasts forever.” It’s the same for all of us: we’re all dying from the day we’re born. If we take the technological point of view, it’s still Yes. If we continue indefinitely as we are today, the world is on a direct path to catastrophe (note that this data is no longer being updated as, to satisfy his fossil fuel donors, Trump has defunded the NOAA). This is not conjecture; given the present course of our consumerist/militarist “civilisation,” it is not a question of whether disaster will overtake us but when. As Kenneth Boulding said, “Anybody who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Second question: Can we do anything about it? The short answer is No, not without a revolution, which brings us back to the reader’s question: Is this the end of civilisation? To that, I say: No, because “civilisation” has always been an illusion, and before we can do anything about the real problems, we have to get rid of the illusion. There are people who don’t like hearing that our civilisation is an illusion although Ghandi had no doubts: when asked what he thought of European civilisation, he replied that it would be a very good idea. Trouble is, the illusion is built and maintained by the corrupt wealthy for their benefit. Just as the US and its vassal EU are fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, the corrupt will fight to the last poor person to maintain the illusion.

If you look at the history of Europe, it’s just wars. Granted there were pockets of intellectual and artistic brilliance but they were fragile islands adrift in foetid swamps of squalor, brutality, inequality, corruption, ignorance, superstition, exploitation, sexual abuse and every other crime you can imagine. We only hear the good bits, we aren’t told the reality. Just a tiny example: in Year 4 of school, we learned about the Black Hole of Calcutta of 1857. We were not told why Indians were trying to throw out the foreign invaders, only that they were unreasonable, and we never heard a word about the Amritsar Massacre of 1919. We heard of the enormous scientific, industrial and artistic progress of the Industrial Revolution in Britain; nobody talked about the unspeakable squalor in which the workers lived [2]. For at least 95% of the population, civilisation was a cruel joke, a hollow illusion. Look at the cruelty of the British ruling classes toward their underlings in the penal colonies in Australia. If you haven’t read Robert Hughes’ Fatal Shore [3], do so and let the scales fall from your eyes. And remember this: if this is how the cultured British Establishment treated their own, just imagine how they treated the indigenous population here, whom they regarded as barely human. All of this violence was normal, it was institutionalised but nobody talked about it.

While Britain had the largest empire, it certainly wasn’t the only one. By force, Spain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and even Belgium took huge overseas “possessions” for the express purpose of exploitation. That was their goal and their reason, they were not there to be nice to the locals. In the 250 years of its gigantic Indian empire, Britain extracted something like $43trillion in modern terms, thereby reducing Indians from among the wealthiest people in the world to absolute destitution. From 1880 to independence, it is estimated Britain caused the deaths of 145 million Indians. Even as late as 1943, the artificial “Bengal famine” caused over 3 million deaths, and the British didn’t give a shit. That was their “civilisation”: civilised at home, monstrous overseas. Don’t look at the great novels, art or music of the Victorian era, the science, the railroads or factories producing fine china, look at the people who died producing them.

But it wasn’t just Britain, the brutality of the Belgians in their so-called Congo Free State was legendary. France in Algeria; Italy bombing and gassing Ethiopian villages; the casual exploitation of the Philippines by the US; German genocide against the Herrero people in Namibia, on and on. Western civilisation is and always has been an illusion, a heroic myth carefully sculpted and maintained by the ruling classes to keep their workers quiet while they got on with raping and pillaging everybody they could reach. The myth concealed an institutionalised corruption. Martin Luther wasn’t just being an objectionable German turd when he started his revolt against the Church, he had seen the filth and corruption and decided to do something about it. And remember this: his 95 theses say nothing about priests buggering children. Why else did he say priests should be allowed to marry?

Today, in Gaza, our illusion of civilisation has been shattered. The poor victims of the brutal Nazis have themselves turned into monsters. Early this morning, Israeli gunboats intercepted the Sumud Flotilla and we wait to see what horrors they will inflict, but it will be as nothing compared with what they’re doing every minute in Gaza itself, and in the West Bank, and in Lebanon, and in Syria and anywhere their free American bombers can reach. And who is supporting them, who are aiding and abetting them? We are. You, me, all of us, the governments we put in place are actively complicit in the crimes of the Zionist state and, like the medieval Church, are forcibly preventing anybody from exposing their corruption.

Breaking down the illusion of civilisation, the pleasant lies we tell ourselves while our companies get on with looting the world and our armies blow up what they can’t loot, that is the first step toward preventing global catastrophe. The wealthy are totally corrupt, that’s how they got rich and how they stay that way (watch this and be appalled, and it’s just a tiny corner of it). Like the medieval popes, the 1% don’t want change. They’re on top of the pile and that’s where they want to stay. In order to balance its budget, France is proposing a 2% wealth tax on people with fortunes over 100million (USD178million). The wealthy are incensed and will fight to destroy it and anybody who supports it. Why will they? Why are American legislators passing tax laws to enrich the already rich and make life worse for everybody else? Why has the so-called Labor government in Australia licensed dozens of fossil fuel mines and plants when the country and its neighbours are already suffering climate change? The short answer is Because Homo sapiens but it’s actually a facet of humans, the drive to dominate and look down on everybody else. The Congolese people suffered cruelly under their Belgian overlords and finally gained independence. What happened then? After a period of fighting and instability, the brutal kleptocrat Mobutu was put in control and continued merrily looting the country. Same with the bizarre “Emperor Bokassa” in CAE, Zuma in South Africa, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Idi Amin in Uganda, Trump in the US, Putin in Russia, on and on.

To dominate is human and, in order to make it easier to dominate at home, the 1% spin a vast web of lies and propaganda to make us think everything is fine, we can just keep on with what we’re doing, nothing to worry about, pay no attention to those troublemakers with the messy placards, just switch on the TV or your Playstation, snap open a beer or snort your coke, turn on, tune in and go to sleep like a good prole. Believe what we tell you (“Rules-based International Order,” “Ukraine’s right to join NATO,” “Land of the Free,” “A land without people for a people without a land,” “Our civilising mission,” etc) and don’t argue or we’ll crush you. And if that doesn’t stop you, we’ll kill you. Simple, because the people on top regard those underneath them as expendable human animals, always have and always will. That’s human, we all get a buzz from being on top but some people just don’t want to stop, they have to keep fighting for more and more to try to fill the emptiness inside. It doesn’t work but that doesn’t stop them.

Let’s go back to the beginning: Is “civilisation” on a path to destruction? Sure, that’s not in question. We cannot continue indefinitely consuming and despoiling the planet as we are doing without consequences. Change is necessary but the winners from the present neoliberal economy won’t surrender without a fight. Don’t expect them to risk their lives on a battlefield, they’ll stir up some imaginary enemy and let the gimps be killed. The rich survive, that’s their goal, but that has to stop. However, it can’t stop while the masses in the West lie inert before their TV screens or are having a great time in their new gas-guzzlers or pigging out on Maccas. The illusion of civilisation has to be shattered, and that’s happening. Right now, in Gaza and a dozen other places, children and their mothers are being shot by snipers or blown up by American-made 2000lb bombs dropped from American bombers guided by the American GPS and all watched over by America’s Palantir spies, and every dying child and every weeping mother is another crack in the illusion of civilisation. Every time a child dies, another pretty tile falls off the wall showing the rusting steel and concrete underneath.

So yes, Bibi and Donny, you just keep sending those bombers across because every child screaming from napalm burns wakes up 10,000 sleepers in the West. Not in the South, their eyes are already wide open, it’s ours that have been glued shut. As Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.” It’s time to wake up from the illusion, before it’s too late. Remember: catastrophe comes slowly, then suddenly, and there’s no going back.

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This is extra: Quoting from Drop Site Daily Oct 1^st 2025

Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth addressed an unusual gathering on Tuesday of some 800 top military generals and admirals flown into Quantico, Virginia from around the world. Trump opened the meeting with a pointed warning: “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before … Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose.”

Does anybody need a clearer example of the sheer joy a human gets from dominating others? It’s straight out NY gangster talk. Donny, the piss-weak draft-dodger extraordinaire, the petty crook from Queens, finally getting his own back by shoving it up an auditorium full of 800 flag officers. He’s more interested in getting even with his enemies (half the world) or with people who make him feel insecure (the other half) than he is in governing. In fact, he doesn’t know how to govern and has zero interest in learning.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Don’t think he’s exceptional, he’s not. Trump is emblematic of the moral quality of the 1% and their eager servants in parliaments and armies around the world. The only difference is that he’s dementing so he spouts in public what they all say in private. And he’s an arsehole to start off with, he learned 75 years ago how to threaten people but leave himself some wriggle room in case they want to punch him out.

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References:

1. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

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. Hughes R (1987) The Fatal Shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Australia 1787-1868. London: Collins Harvill.

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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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