Synergy: Neoliberalism and Neofascism.

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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Graham Richardson died two weeks ago. Good. In a commentary, Jack Waterford, formerly the long-standing senior member of the Canberra press gallery, described him as “self-interested, a corrupt old villain, a bad man, a ruthless bastard and distinctly short on redeeming virtues.” Strong words, but justified. Despite coming from a poor background and with no qualifications, Richardson became the youngest and most powerful state secretary of the NSW Labor Party. You don’t get that by being shy and retiring. A few years later, aged 33, he slithered into the Senate where he eventually held a number of ministerial posts. Post-parliament, he became a political commentator and lobbyist, and died a wealthy man. A true swamp denizen, he spent his entire life involved in union and party politics, wheeling and dealing, trading favours, money-grubbing, hanging out with gamblers and prostitutes and forever barely within the law. Waterford said his grave should be “extra deep” but it should also be very big as he represents the archetype of the “very modern politician” from anywhere in the world. A lot of them should be buried with him in anticipation of their deaths.

Richardson’s demise was a small diversion from the interminable Trump-Epstein freak show as it winds and weaves through the political sewers of half a dozen major Western countries. So far, only half a dozen and all Western but its radioactive slime could well have tracked over half the world. Anybody who wants to know more should read Whitney Webb’s two volume work, One Nation Under Blackmail. This details the history and the extent of corruption at the confluence of three major industries: finance, espionage and surveillance, and organised crime, and how they work together to influence national and international politics. This is the netherworld Epstein and his myriad contacts staked out as their own, to the extent that Epstein and friends were able to photograph themselves in the throne room of Buckingham Palace, the very heart of the British state. I don’t know how Webb managed to gather all this information and tie it together but she has done us a considerable service, and every citizen should read it. I also don’t know how she managed to force herself to dive into this vast cesspool day after day while she wrote it – even reading it made my skin crawl.

Was Richardson in the same class as Epstein, Trump, Andrew whatsisname, Mandelson, Bannon, Barak and all the others? Not quite but it wasn’t because he lacked their character. This raises an important point: how come so many of the political, financial, social, academic and other elites of today are corrupt to the eyeballs? Is it just a matter of power corrupting, as Lord Acton said 150 years ago, that the mere process of holding power dissolves morals from the inside, leaving just a skin of probity draped over a skeleton of self-interest? This matters because if it’s true, then we need to make some major changes to our entire political and social systems. We’ve always relied on good people putting themselves forward to take the extra responsibility of governance, and once there, to continue selflessly doing the right thing by the community. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, if it ever did, that no longer works. For example, with the release of Britain’s enquiry into the Covid pandemic, Boris the Unspeakable is back in the news, exposed as a duplicitous, self-interested and corrupt clown whose inaction led to at least 23,000 unnecessary deaths. That’s a lot of lives to have on your conscience but I’m sure he hasn’t lost any sleep over it.

Meantime, and perhaps worried that he’s not been getting all the attention he likes, US Secretary of Health, Mr RFK Jr has shoved himself back into the headlines with yet another affair. This time, it’s a political reporter 39yrs younger than his august 71 years of age, but a leaked “poem” he texted her indicates it’s 71 going on 17. You can read it but it’s seriously off and I quickly stopped. You have to ask: “Who is this person? How did such an idiot get such an important job? How come nobody paid any attention to his cousin’s letter to the Senate appointments committee?” Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK and former ambassador to Australia, wrote them a stinking letter describing him as a drug dealer and addict, a predator, serial liar and cheat who is addicted to attention, crackpottery, money and power, and totally unsuitable for the job. She pointed out that she had known him all her life, they grew up together, and she stood to gain nothing from revealing this stuff, and they ignored her. Turns out she was right, leopards don’t change their spots but we also have to ask: What’s his paramour’s game? Why is this apparently intelligent and attractive young woman hanging around with this fully paid up creep grandfather? Answer: access to the White House and all the money, power and excitement that goes with it. She knows what she’s doing, and if she drops off his visiting list, she’ll soon find another one to pay her bills.

And finally, a joke. In fact, a senator from Queensland who got her quota of air time this week by strolling into the Senate wearing a burqa. Pauline Hanson, leader of the Pauline Hanson One Nation Party, abbreviated to PHON, meaning her followers are Phonies, tried this stunt in 2017 but this time it got her kicked out for a week. You’d think she’d learn. It’s not that long since she was fined and had a huge legal bill for making some racist comment about another member, but keeping her face in the news is more important than actually having a formal political program – or any sense of decency. She represents the loopy right whose policies don’t extend much beyond deporting immigrants. Last month, she turned up at Herr Drumpf’s halloween party in the company of Australia’s richest person and 11^th richest woman in the world, Gina Rinehart. This month, aged 71 going on 13, she reprises some crude teenage crap and pretends to be offended when people don’t like it.

Is this the best we can do? How come all our “leaders” are such dreadful people? With Trump, RFK, Richardson, Johnson and all the others, plus the vast cast of sleazebags in the Epstein caravan, everybody knew what they were like before they got the nod, so why do we end up with politicians and businessmen whose only interest is advancing themselves? Of all the forms of government available, we have arrived at kakistocracy, government by the worst or most unscrupulous people (from Greek, kakistos, worst; also kaki, poop). It becomes more obvious if we compare the general state of government in the West today with how it was 75 or 80 years ago. Post-war, meaning World War II because we’ve never been “post war” in our entire gruesome history, governments were consciously building states to improve people’s lives.

Partly this was because so much had been destroyed, partly because of the enormous debt people felt toward the troops who had defended them, and partly a sense that they could not allow a repeat of the Great Depression and all that it had brought, but it was a deliberate attempt to get out of the endless cycle of war and collapse. Britain built its NHS, the US built its enormous interstate highway system, Australia the Snowy River hydro scheme, Germany and Japan rebuilt everything but, crucially, for the first time in history, workers were properly paid. In the US, CEOs were paid about 18-20 times the pay of their average workers. In the UK, the top rate of taxation, mainly on inherited income was 90%, down from a rather punitive 99.5% during the War. The US lagged somewhat, 90% from 1945-63, having fallen from 94%, but this was necessary to pay down the national debt from the war and finance what is now seen as a “golden age” for workers. Were politicians any better in those days? They certainly weren’t without fault but they also weren’t so openly awful, so contemptuous of the voters as today’s lot.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing by any means. Politically, the world was split between right and left, between freedom-loving, God-fearing capitalism and godless, repressive communism, locked in an existential battle. Internationally, there hasn’t been a moment of peace since 1945, culminating in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when, we now know, the world was just a few seconds away from nuclear annihilation. After that scare, the politicians backed down a bit and began the process of writing arms control agreements that lowered temperatures all round – apart from all the usual conventional wars, of course. On the home front, the same squabbles acted out, between benevolent, paternal capitalism on the one hand, and ruthless, repressive socialism on the other – or so we were told. In fact, and despite the theatrics, the right and left wings of political life were much closer than they had ever been.

It could have continued like that indefinitely but around the world, the old order was crumbling. Colonialism had had its day; bankrupt European empires were falling apart as colonies pushed for independence; repressed minorities were demanding equal rights; while universal education had produced, not universal peace but an entire generation who argued with their elders, as well as listening to terrible music. To the horror of the wealthy elite, it seemed the world was heading toward ever-greater equality. They saw no prospect of a return to their golden age of pre-World War I when the rich were very rich and the poor knew their place. Gradually, the wealthy got their act together and organised a program to push back against galloping equality. This took the form of a lengthy memo written in 1971 by a renowned lawyer, Lewis F Powell, later appointed to the Supreme Court. The Powell memo, entitled The attack on the American free enterprise system, argued that leftist elements were using the universities to indoctrinate the rising generation against the capitalist system that had Made America Great. Powell proposed that private capital should combine forces to oppose this, by taking control of the narrative through the media, Hollywood, university curricula, the arts and sciences, the courts and, of course, politicians. He saw this as a long term project but essential if the country wasn’t to slide into socialist totalitarianism. Since then, this agenda has been followed word for word. In late 1971, Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. He served 15 years and was instrumental in many of its pro-business, anti-welfare decisions.

At the same time, the neoliberal economic program was gathering strength until it took control in two major countries, the Thatcher government in the UK in 1979 and Reagan administration in 1981. Their explicit goal was to force their economies to realign, away from supporting labour and social welfare, to explicitly favouring capital. The rationale was that jobs were created by capital, not by governments or unions, so if the wealthy were given more money, they would invest it in productive enterprises, creating jobs and thereby lifting the standard of living of the working class. Governments had to be slimmed down; regulation of business and finance reduced to the minimum to allow room for capital to grow; state-owned enterprises sold off so capital could make them efficient; people had to pay for what they needed, such as education and health, otherwise they’d waste it; red tape such as environmental and planning rules were cut away to clear the deck for hearty investment, on and on.

This doctrine, known as “trickle-down economics,” has since been taken up in one form or another by most Western governments. So far, it has been partially successful in that it has resulted in a massive expansion of the wealth of the privileged classes, generally known as the 1%. We are, however, still waiting for the second half of the program to take effect, expanding the available jobs and lifting the 99%. There is no indication when this is likely to happen. In fact, everything says the working and middle classes are now considerably worse off than they were in 1971. All the usual distractions and sideshows such as pornography, gambling, wars, drugs and so on can’t conceal the plain fact that where in the 1960s, skilled workers could support their families, pay for a house and car and educate their children, by the 2010s, the skilled jobs had gone, education costs were crippling a generation, health costs out of control, housing unaffordable and so on. The usual boogyman of “creeping socialism” was no longer working; the lower classes, it seemed, were all in favour of it, and voters were getting increasingly angry about their lot, especially as the wealthy have proven incapable of discreetly hiding their piles of loot and insist on shoving it down everybody’s throats.

After a bit of frantic head-scratching, the 1% found a new enemy for everybody to hate: immigrants. Immigrants are sneaking in, stealing your jobs, selling drugs to your sons, raping your daughters, taking too much housing, burdening our hospitals and prisons, spreading their evil genes, on and on. If it’s bad, they do it, so hate them. Hate them heart and soul and here’s some space in our newspapers and on TV and the internet where you can share your hate and get sooo excited about it. That way, you’ll forget to look behind the façade where we’re busy looting the nation and hiding the proceeds in offshore tax havens. With great foresight, artifice, stealth and their unlimited money, the 1% have diverted the narrative from the gangster capitalism they have imposed, thereby subverting the one thing they fear more than the sulphurous pits of hades, class warfare.

But what’s this got to do with greedy, corrupt politicians everywhere you look? Plenty. If you announce “Greed is good, get it while you can,” then the greedy feel empowered and will reach for more and more, because that’s what greed means. Power corrupts, but it does so by attracting the corruptible. For people whose lives lack some essential spark, the thrill of power offers the chance to fill the gap, to complete what nature left incomplete, by making people take notice and stand aside respectfully. Once they get a toe in the door, they realise how easy it is to cheat and lie a little bit; when they get away with it once, they try it again, then again and one fine day, they turn into full-blown cheats and liars. Here’s one peripheral example that arrived a few moments ago, a case of one small person against a massive multinational. After five years of legalised persecution, the rich people lost. And another one: how come he had a spare $5mln to pay what he owed to the tax office? Insider trading, that’s how.

In the early post-war period, the nations set up a legal international order but that was too restricting so it was watered down to a “rules-based international order.” Over the past few years, it has become clear that this was never any more than smoke and mirrors but now, buried under the rubble of Gaza and the devastated Sudanese city of Al Fashar, even that pretence has gone. We can now proclaim a new, Reality-Based International Order, in which the rich and powerful do what they like and the poor get what’s left, if anything. All thi is because humans like dominating each other. Any social, political or economic system that facilitates that process will attract lots of supporters but they will be the very people who should be kept in the back paddock, far from the seat of power. It will attract people who get a kick out of lording it over everybody, who are fascinated and beguiled by wealth and the sensual pleasures it brings, meaning it will attract narcissists and psychopaths. Over time, competent and fair-minded administrators and legislators will be replaced by the incompetent, the greedy, the delusional and the bloodthirsty. As it has been doing since time immemorial but now turbo-charged by the neoliberal doctrine, devided by the rich and powerful that favours the rich and powerful. Banditry reigns, and the devil take the hindmost.

Power attracts the corruptible so we shouldn’t have built a system that gives them what they want. These days, technology allows us to put in some safeguards. For example, we could set up a system that records every word uttered or heard, or read, typed or transmitted, by every politician 24/7, every phone call, the entire computer log, and every physical or electronic contact with any person. That’s easy. In fact, most of that infrastructure is already in place, it just isn’t aimed at politicians. They’ve aimed it at us to facilitate their gaining more power and wealth. But the first step toward changing anything is to recognise that we are being fooled by experts.

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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.