Sustainability.

When less is more.

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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“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

With anthropogenic climate change accelerating daily, how will the biosphere collapse? Slowly, then suddenly. Collapse is like a ship capsizing: once it starts, the process becomes self-sustaining and can’t be stopped. A paper published recently looks at a critically important environmental question, the natural limits of human population. The international group of authors compare two vitally important but oft-blurred statistics for any organism in any environment: the maximum carrying capacity and the maximum sustainable carrying capacity. They’re different, as we see regularly in agriculture. People come across some new land so they let their animals loose, which breed happily, the flocks grow and everybody’s happy. With time, the land starts to deteriorate. The flocks thin, the productivity of wool or milk or meat declines and misery stalks the land. Maximum carrying capacity is always far beyond the natural limits the land can bear. The title of this paper leaves no doubt that has happened to H. sapiens: Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity [1; a short article here]. After a fairly dense statistical analysis, they conclude:

... it is clear that Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources ... The tragedy is that human endeavor has short-circuited the ultimately inevitable corrective feedback loops carrying capacity imposes, without replacing them with humane and environmentally friendly corrective feedbacks.

Current world population is about 8.3billion, rising by 0.83% pa and on track to reach about 12billion by 2070. That’s well within the lifespan of many of our readers; all that remains to decide is the quality of life that the majority would experience. On our present course, of consuming far more than the world can provide in the long term and dumping the waste in the air, water and land, only the very wealthy would think they had a good deal. The other 11.9billion (99%) would not be happy with their lot, and for good reason: there simply isn’t enough to go around. Certainly, in countries like the US and Australia, the average level of consumption and waste production is far above sustainability. The authors cite various studies that indicate the maximum sustainable human population of the planet at a reasonable standard of living is about 2.5billion, or about 70% less than today. In order to achieve that by the end of the century, the great majority of people alive today would not be able to have children. That’s pretty frightening but I can’t see anything wrong with their figures (unlike psychiatry, where the figures are always suspect). I have no problem with the idea that if we continue on our present course, we’re headed for disaster. Two questions immediately arise:

What are the forces keeping us on our present course?

What would a sustainable lifestyle be like?

The forces keeping us on our present course are wholly political. They are not forces of nature or of metaphysics, indeed, they aren’t even forces at all. Our current trajectory is determined by small groups of powerful people who are convinced that they and they alone should make the big decisions, and their decision is “Full greed ahead.” Anybody who tries to interfere with this will be neutralised in one way or another. Are the power elite smart enough to understand the worrying message in that paper? Yes, they most certainly are. Even where a leader arises who is too stupid to understand it himself, he has immediate access to very clever and well-educated people who can answer any dumb question he asks or counter any of his braindead objections. All the power elite have to do is ask, but they don’t. The reason they don’t ask is because they don’t want to hear the answers. The answer is crystal clear: What you people are doing is taking us to hell on a hang glider, so we want change, now.

If the power elite are smart enough to drive a car (note that Trump can’t drive), then they are smart enough to understand that elementary point, so why don’t they do something about it? The answer is that they are not driven by their cognitive capacities, they are driven by something far more primitive than that: hormones. Their intelligence is the servant of their hormones, not the other way around. The urge to dominate is built into every human being. For many people, probably the majority, early life experiences push the domination drive into a small box where it remains for the rest of their lives. Very early, they learn to keep quiet, don’t rock the boat, don’t stand out or the world will come down on them, hard. Their aims are limited, their horizons narrow and they try to build a life with few goals that other people can frustrate. Others aren’t so restricted, they can exert themselves and get ahead but again, they’re happy with what fortune throws at them. They can get their dominance kicks in the local football club (bad pun), at home, in a government job or as a teacher or prison officer (they were much the same when I went to school).

However, a small group have big ideas that get bigger and bigger as they push their way up the hierarchy. They want to be on top and they want everybody to know it. Very quickly, they forget that they’re supposed to be looking after everybody lower in the pile and they fix their eyes on the competition, the people over the border who are busy building an even bigger pile. Then the race is on. They stop competing against the other people in their town, business, country or whatever and compete against each other. We see this on full, open display among the Tech Bros, the bunch of grossly narcissistic, utterly selfish and profoundly psychopathic people who dominate the world of high tech. They are all caught in a mad rush to be the first to develop superintelligent AI, regardless of the risks involved. Why do they want to? Because Homo sapiens, that’s what humans do. As they scramble up the ladder, their sense of entitlement grows and grows, as does their rage at anybody who tries to stop them. Anybody who tugs at their sleeve and ventures: “Is this wise?” will be shoved aside, if not dumped in the river, as French economist, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), noted 180 years ago:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it (Economic Sophisms).

Insiders are saying that there is at least 10% risk that a rogue AI program could lead to human extinction within ten years but they are being ignored from the top. Trump himself has said that the US will not put restrictions on AI development because all it needs is a “high IQ president.” Where he will find one isn’t clear but in fact, he is deliberately enabling the intramural race among the Tech Bros, cheering them on in the hope they can beat China. Why do they have to beat China? He hasn’ got to that bit yet but for a truly chilling account of this race to destruction, read this post from the very sober and well-connected Jonathon Cook. They’re like a dog chasing a bus: if he caught it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it.

What we are seeing is the summation of a number of socio-political trends. The first is the mad rush to be Tech Bro. No. 1, with the usual dangerously bizarre runners: Musk, Bezos, Altman, Karp, Thiel, Huang, Zuckerberg and the rest of the gang of super heroes lolloping along. Close behind and urging them on is the finance industry which can smell the wealth of Croesus coming down the highway. Beside them and egging each other on are the politicians whose goal is to crush China, to make sure that the US remains dominant come what may, with the arms industry and the military handing them water and stimulants as they all run madly along a track whose end point is hidden behind a small hill. When challenged, they angrily exclaim: “What are you complaining about? We haven’t stumbled yet.” Governments govern with the consent of the governed. That assumes we know what they’re doing, which explains why they lie so much.

AI dominance is needed to maintain world dominance. In West Asia, the goal of the US, in conjunction with or subservience to the zionists, is to reduce Iran to the sort of failed state they managed in Libya, in Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Iraq. Once that’s done, the US will turn its full attention to China and Russia, the goal being to topple their uncooperative governments, to turn them into smoking ruins that can be looted at leisure. Is this declared or even undeclared policy? No, they don’t say that, they just say things like the Speaker of the House, the gleefully devious Mike Johnson, who said: “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American.” A real and present threat to Joe Bloggs of Great Bend, Kansas? That’s not delusional, that’s acculturation, commonly known as brain-washing (although in Johnson’s case, a light rinse would have sufficed). The 1% and their lackeys don’t actually have to talk about this, they’re all in agreement. They’re like a pack of dogs in the street sorting themselves into a hierarchy: none of them say anything but they get all the information they need from sniffing each other’s bums. No offence to dogs, of course, and apparently nobody needs to sniff Trump’s, they can smell it across the room. On that note, we turn to the next point:

Question 2: What would a sustainable life be like? It would be different in many respects and much the same in others. The first major difference is that there would be no military forces, no arms industries and no wars. As far as anybody can work out, militarism costs us about $19trillion a year. Direct costs are something like $2.8trillion but they don’t include all the deaths, injuries, damage or destruction of infrastructure and farmland, and loss of production which make up the other $16trillion. That’s a lot of money, equivalent to about $2,250 pa for every living human, which is far more than about half the world lives on now. That money is enough to provide food, water, housing and infrastructure for every person within about ten years but instead, it’s burned and blown away by armies. Without them, there would be a lot of unemployed people looking for jobs as builders, teachers, farmers and so on, but they wouldn’t be out of work long as the money would be available. At this stage, that’s a dream only.

What else? The gigantic tourism industry would more or less come to a halt: “Tourism contributed US$11.6 trillion to global GDP in 2025, representing roughly 9.8% of the world economy.” It supports something like 370million jobs or one job in nine across the globe. Amazing, I had no idea it’s that big. I’m not sure if that includes two notorious rackets, professional and business conferences, probably not. However, the distribution of consumption of the tourism trade follows a very typical power curve: at most, 20% of the world’s population consume at least 80% of the product, while 50% of people get next to nothing, maybe a crowded train trip every now and then. The idea that we can jump on a plane in Melbourne to go to a cousin’s wedding in the UK or swan around the Adriatic on a $500million private yacht (today’s version of “let them eat cake”) has to go. One way around it would be to issue everybody on earth with a limited number of carbon credits for non-essential travel. Rich people who want to jet about the place would have to buy them at auction from poor people, reducing travel and transferring money from rich to poor. There’s not much chance of getting the US to agree to that due to their abhorrence of “world government,” unless they’re doing the governing. Can we live without buzzing around the world all the time? People used to, they might have had one Grand Tour in their lives but that apart, it was where they could get on a horse or a sailboat. I can cope. Maybe airships would come back, they’re cheap and clean.

Commercial sport. Yes, a monumental waste of resources and only ever causes trouble so we’ll give that the flick as well. They say the EU has 1.8million people employed full-time in sport and such like, 0.9% of the work force and increasing by 8% pa. I’d say it’s higher than that, I don’t think they’ve included all the people who work on golf courses, race tracks, betting shops and so on. The Olympics and World Cup we definitely don’t need, they’re now just badly-disguised nationalism. F1 racing would be among the first to go, total waste of money and fuel. In fact, if we got rid of the idea that sport is something ordinary people watch professionals doing, that would be a good start. Sport and exercise are for everybody but the rot starts early. From primary school, sports teachers push the idea that only the elite should try, the rest of the herd are just there to clap and cheer (we had a teacher who scornfully referred to kids who kept dropping the ball or falling on the hurdles as “motor morons”). Every person should exercise every day, outside and in company when possible, but as exercise, not as competition. It should be as normal as cleaning your teeth.

Hospitals. Get rid of hospitals? Are you crazy? No, but they need to be brought under control. Hospitals are prodigiously wasteful of resources, including staff, plastics, power, water, laundry, chemicals, sterilisation and so on. We can dramatically reduce health costs by a proper national health service set up to detect and remedy illness before it gets out of control. If we provide accessible outreach services coupled with regular free screening, levels of illness and disability in the community quickly fall. I don’t mean screening as where schools give every child a questionnaire to diagnose “ADHD” and send them for “the tablets.” That’s a separate matter but it points to the destructive effect of private practice on the health industry, especially my pet hate, private psychiatric hospitals, which are just a racket. And, of course, a total ban on tobacco (New Zealand had the right idea, they were going to ban it for people born after 2010 or something but the right wing nobbled that plan).

There are so many other areas that need change, e.g. fuel is too cheap, allowing people to roar around in their souped-up cars making nuisances of themselves or drive to the shops for just one item. Alcohol is a major social problem but the younger generations aren’t drinking as much so that may solve itself. Meantime, vast amounts of prime agricultural land are devoted to growing the feedstock of the various booze industries. If we reduce that wastage and start growing food, we reduce the pressure to clear native forests. But if we restrict alcohol, doesn’t that just push people toward illegal drugs? To an extent it does, so management of addictive drugs has to become a priority and not just a political football to be dragged out for elections. Similarly, we need to make serious efforts to look at how people get on a criminal career path in life because once they’re on it, it’s very difficult for them to get off.

A sustainable life would be just as fulfilling and a lot less worrying but behind all of these matters stands the glowering façade of the neoliberal state, the one that says “As long as I can make more money, I don’t care whether you starve.” All of this is part of the same fundamental human drive, the urge to dominate others regardless of the cost to them. Dominating feels so good that we don’t stop to think what the downtrodden feel about it. This is why the US plan for “full spectrum dominance” is doomed to failure. The other 97% of the world’s population don’t want to be dominated. They don’t like it and will eventually fight back. In time, the US will go the way of the Romanovs and so many others who thought they were so important and so far-seeing that other people would welcome the chance to play second fiddle to them for ever. It doesn’t work like that.

We’re going to hell on a hang glider and already, its fabric is smoking. If we don’t soon have a total change of the power elite, the Epstein class, it will be too late.

Reference:

1. Bradshaw CJ et al (2026). Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity. Environ. Res. Lett. 21 064023. DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ae51aa. At: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae51aa.

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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.