Talking About Good People

They exist, you know.

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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After last week’s post, God and the Paradox of Hierarchy, a reader replied:

Another nail through my heart in my belief that the world is not all bad…

That wasn’t the intention so we’ll have to dig into psychology a bit more. The biocognitive model sees humans (and most other animals) through the cognitive or computational model. We think, we experience, our thoughts count and, as a result, we have free will. That’s one level, the rational, calculating view of humans. It’s the level on which are built major theories such as neoliberal economics and offensive realism in international relations. However, it’s only half a psychology as we also have biological levels, where things aren’t so clear. Starting at the beginning, and in common with all other animals, we have the basic survival drives such as breathing, eating, drinking and shelter. This is very much under genetic control; anybody born with a defect in one of them won’t last long.

A level above this we have much more complex but still biological drives, urges and impulses that, while important, differ in that they’re optional, we can indulge them or ignore them as we choose. These are very powerful, standard urges solidly based in biology, including the social drive to associate with familiar humans and its converse, fear of strangers; territoriality; our emotions, such as fear, grief, anger, humour, disgust; and, of course, the sexual drive and, closely related, the drive to dominate. The biology of these two phenomena depends on the hormone testosterone. In fact, the three of them, the social drive, the sexual urge and domination are closely related and interactive. Territoriality is simply the knowledge that “In this bit of the world, I can act dominant but in that bit, I have to keep my head down.” Territoriality may, of course, extend to other human beings, especially to sexual relations.

The highest level of mental life is the pure computational or cognitive realm where we look at the world and work out what we need to do in order to be comfortable. A critically important part of this is the unique and very large set of rules that govern how we control our basic biology and other drives, and thence how we relate to other humans and to the world. This set of rules or “personality” is entirely learned with no genetic component of its own. The genetic influences are at lower levels; personality’s role is to control those influences so we can interact with the natural and human environments to our advantage. Thus, as every parent knows, two small children are looking at one piece of cake. Typically the bigger child will use his size to push the smaller child aside and take it all himself. That’s innate, that’s what children do and the little darlings need to be trained out of it without turning them into robots. They need to learn the rule “I can share the cake and still feel good. I’ll know the little child feels good about me too, and that’s better in the long run.” Most of this is intuitive or implicit learning, not explicit, although parents certainly do their best.

When people reach adulthood with an internally consistent rules that mesh smoothly with those of the larger society, we say they have a normal or ordered personality. Normal personality is, of course, a very large range, not a point on a graph. Two people can be quite opposite in most respects but still qualify as normal. If an adult’s unique set of rules is internally inconsistent such that it causes inner distress and/or it leads to conflict with the world, we call that personality disorder. All it means is that, in earlier stages of life, that person has not learned how to control his non-cognitive drives or impulses (emotions, sexuality etc) in ways that are both constructive for him and socially acceptable. A very common example of an abnormal personality is the anxious personality which, of course, mainstream psychiatry doesn’t recognise but it’s real (they want to see it as a “disease” so they can throw their drugs around). The internal machinery of the threat or anxiety response is genetically determined and wholly biological, but the specific triggers to each anxiety event are purely cognitive. An anxious person is simply reacting to neutral events in the (internal and external) environment as though they were a threat. There is no “chemical imbalance” at all; the body is correctly obeying the instructions sent from a higher level, except the instructions are wrong: “Aargh, a frog. Danger, have to get away!”

With the drive to dominate each other, we run into real problems because society simply does not understand it in a way that encourages self-control. It doesn’t matter where you look, society is set up as an endless series of competitions where the winner is feted and the loser is scorned. From infancy, children are taught to compete, that winning is everything and nobody likes a loser. It’s everywhere, in everything, from waking in the morning to collapsing into bed at night – and then the dreams start. That could possibly work except there are plenty of people who didn’t learn the right rule about themselves when they were little. It’s important for children to be taught: “I’m fine, I don’t need to win to be worthwhile, people will like me for who I am,” but all too often, that doesn’t happen. A lot of people learn: “I’m no good, I’m ugly and stupid and nobody could like me, but if I have enough money or I’m strong enough, people won’t look down on me and I’ll feel better.” That’s a direct path to trouble.

Trouble happens just because we are social and hierarchical animals, as in: “I need to mix with other humans but I also need to feel good around them, except I can’t feel good if they’re looking down on me.” Being low in the hierarchy is not just biologically unrewarding, it’s actually a threat to life. Unfortunately, a lot of intelligent people are learning the wrong rules as they go through life, things like:

They look down on me because of my accent, they think I’m stupid so I’ll show them, I’ll cheat and steal from them and I’ll feel better because it means I’m smarter than them, or

I’m small and skinny but if I punch that woman, she’ll give me what I want and then I can boast about it to the other blokes, or

I’m nothing to look at and dumb to boot but if I give the men what they want, they’ll like me and I’ll feel better, or

I’m a worthless piece of shit but if I have a couple of beers, I feel better and I can talk to people…

Probably most people are brought up to feel “I’m fine, if I do the right thing, everybody will be happy with me.” They’re happy with what they’ve got and happy to share or help others but far too many people reach adulthood with poor self-esteem. Their options are either to find a niche and a bottle of booze and stay there, or to start acting in a way to conceal it. If they accumulate enough cash or influence, they may actually be able to convince themselves they’re worthwhile: “Hey, people are looking up to me. So they should, and if I have more power, they’ll really look up to me. Better still, if they’re scared of me, that would prove I’m a winner.” They build their sense of self-esteem on dominating other people but once they start this process, they can’t stop. Somebody only has to glance at them scornfully and they have to hit back to conceal their sense of inferiority.

It’s also true that some people grow up believing: “I’m a remarkable human being, God’s gift to humanity, and I deserve anything that catches my eye so anybody who tries to stop me has to be crushed.” This is common among the rich and privileged. Still others, even normal people, get a whiff of power, the biologically-determined delight that comes from dominating people, and it feels so good that they have to have more. And more, except as they gain power, so too their sense of entitlement grows. Powerful people don’t lie awake at night thinking: “I don’t deserve all this, I’m getting too big for my boots.” No way, they go to sleep feeling fully justified in what they’ve got as it makes them feel good, and sure that if they have more, they’ll feel better, so that’s what they go after. But they don’t know when to stop. The more they get, the more they want, stuck on an endless treadmill of struggling to get up the hierarchy as the thought of slipping down again is too scary. We can be fairly sure that the great majority of people who are trying to push their way into positions of power are doing it for entirely selfish reasons. I’ve met a few decent politicians but most are in it for Number One and the devil take the hindmost.

Does this mean there aren’t any decent human beings anywhere? No, definitely not. There are plenty of good people around, probably ten times as many as bad, but they generally fall victim to the old gambler’s advice: “Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It'll be the only one trying.” Decent people aren’t interested in power for power’s sake, they aren’t gripped by the need to be first in line or to have the biggest office or the most medals or most nubile girlfriend. They’re more interested in doing the job than taking the glory, so they get squeezed out by all the people driven by self-interest. I believe the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Dr Francesca Albanese, is a very good person, a rare and noble person. I don’t know how she does it, she gets calumny and death threats all the time and the pay is only average but somehow she keeps going. And in the ultimate insult to her integrity, people are talking of nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. When the supremely psychopathic Henry Kissinger was awarded that prize in 1973, satirist Tom Lehrer (who died last week) said: “Political satire is now impossible.”

The drive for great power or great wealth is a full-time job. In the race for power, good people either can’t be bothered with all the crap, or they stop to help somebody and lose their place in the scrum. Musk wasn’t joking when he said 80 hours a week minimum. Everything has to be sacrificed otherwise somebody else will push ahead and snatch the prize. Family, friends, morality, decency, all get chucked aside in the frantic race to the top. If perchance a decent person does manage to hang on long enough to get close to the top, they will either be pressured or blackmailed to keep quiet, or stabbed in the back like Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn. However, they’re exceptions: the fact that a politician survives and gets close to the top is a very good indication that he or she is an accomplished games player, driven by self-interest and unburdened by scruples. If we gave all the politicians we can think of a score on a decency scale, most of them would barely rate. In fact, many are such monsters they would get a negative score. Simply by their living, the rest of the human race is worse off. Are they born monsters? No, but they soon grow into the role and, by twisting facts to justify their actions, are unable or refuse to comprehend the damage they do.

In the main, the larger society can generally cope with a few isolated monsters even though their families or local groups may suffer. The trouble starts when they form gangs and take control of part or all of the society (either as criminal gangs, such as in Haiti now, or as brutal political parties). Once a nucleus forms, they convince other, more normal (or less abnormal) people that they should join the gang/party and brighten their lives by acting like monsters too. So it spreads. Recruits are encouraged to be a bit naughty, then very naughty, and soon they’re being monstrous. Humanity needs very little urging to drop its veneer of civilisation and hand control to its primitive urges.

There is a difference between an individual’s personality and the cultural norms s/he has absorbed during early years but the borderlands are not as clear as we would like. People pick and choose the cultural norms that suit them. When the culture says “Our country is the greatest, and we’re better than everybody else just by being born here,” and enough people incorporate it into their self-esteem, then trouble looms. During the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, the British “elite” of hereditary privilege and capital firmly believed they were better than their labouring classes, and treated them like animals to be worked to death. The young Friedrich Engels recorded all this in brutal detail in 1845 [1] but, as he made clear, that attitude didn’t stop at England’s coastline. Not at all, the imperialists took it wherever they went and treated the native peoples either as mindless workers with no rights (India), or subhumans to be pushed to the edge of extinction (Australia) or both (Africa). From infancy, the wealthy were taught, in word and deed, and they believed because it felt so good, that Britannia had the right and duty to rule wherever her cannon could reach. The culture of privilege to which the upper classes were exposed matched perfectly with their innate desire to dominate other people and take their territory.

We see the same in the US today. Almost from birth, Americans are taught, and they believe, that the US is the greatest thing in human history and they’re better than anybody else just by virtue of being born there. This is relentlessly hammered into them at school, at church, at sport, at fun, in every setting and in every respect, and they believe it. It’s one thing to believe they’re the pinnacle of creation but it doesn’t stop there: any foreigner who doesn’t believe it, who refuses to bend the knee when Uncle Sam passes, is necessarily evil and must be punished. There is a good example in a recent interview where the renowned Chicago University professor of political science, John Mearsheimer, was asked about US-Russian relations. In the first few minutes, he evinces difficulty in seeing the US as aggressor and Russia as justified. At about 2.10, he says:

Ukraine will be defeated, NATO will be defeated, we (Americans) will be defeated but how will we accept that? We will double down. We will not accept defeat… (at 3.30) Given that we’re not going to accept defeat and we’re going to keep looking for opportunities to poke at the Russians, to take advantage of them … but they’re not going to sit idly by.

That is, the US is acting in its typical role as international bully without equal, and the long-suffering Russians are reacting in the predictable human manner of refusing to accept a subordinate role. The US national psyche is so tied to the idea of their innate superiority that they can’t comprehend that, in their insensate drive to dominate the world (“full spectrum dominance”), they have pushed Russia into a war they didn’t want. If, as Mearsheimer expects, Ukraine is crushed in the process, the American power elite will refuse to accept defeat and will try again, and again and again, even to the point where something really bad happens (this week, when Russia didn’t bend the knee over something, Trump threatened them by despatching two nuclear-armed submarines). This is all because a very influential group of people with a wildly exaggerated sense of power and entitlement have snatched control of the richest country on earth and, having convinced the ordinary Joe and Sally Blow in Scott City, Kansas, that if the US doesn’t smash a country Mr and Mrs B have never heard of, they will be humiliated beyond endurance because America.

The whole Captain America thing, of America First, America the Brave, Stars and Stripes forever, is unmitigated, gold-plated Grade AAA+ bullshit, from beginning to end. Even though the country is falling apart and people can’t afford to get their sick children treated, the power elite have cunningly manipulated the national self-esteem such that it hangs on one hook only: dominance. Full spectrum dominance, as they say, meaning dominance of all people and of everything, everywhere, in every conceivable respect, for all time. And the world is the worse for it, even sliding toward nuclear catastrophe.

But let’s leave Godzone and head to the Middle East, or what America’s wars have left of it, for an even worse example of dominance in action. Israel. Oh yes, Israel, the self-appointed Home of God’s Chosen People who are busy expelling the Arab riffraff so they can fulfill their fantasy of ethno-religious supremacy over a vast area spread over six countries which they think the current population should hand to them and leave without a fuss. Where the indigenes will go and who will pay, Israel’s religious crackpots and paranoiacs and the corrupt and power-mad politicians using them don’t know and don’t care.

As far as national self-delusions go, this one is up there with the Nazi Herrenrasse, the Master Race. In Mein Kampf, Hitler was perfectly explicit: Everything good in human history has come from the Aryan (German-Nordic) race (e.g. MK p183: “… the true founders of culture on this earth, namely the Aryans themselves”). If ever the Aryans are swamped by inferior races, then humanity will enter a new Dark Age from which it may never recover. Therefore Greater Germany is entitled to carve an empire out of the fertile lands to the east, reducing the inherently inferior Slavic races to peonage in perpetuity. That’s what Hitler told the German people and enough of them believed it to make a start, thereby bringing down on their heads the greatest catastrophe in their glittering history. The same process is happening in Israel today although it’s early days yet, their tragedy in ten acts has a long way to run.

The entire Zionist agenda since Day 1, Theodore Herzl’s publication of Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896, has been the belief that a group of Europeans are entitled to walk in to lands none of them had seen and boot out/slaughter the original inhabitants. It sounds bad now but for that day and age, it was absolutely normal, that’s how Europeans thought (and lots of them, on both sides of the Atlantic, still do). They did it in every continent on earth except Antarctica, but only because there was nobody there to slaughter. Israel was, of course, built on a lie (“A land without people for a people without a land”) and is maintained by a flood of lies (“An outpost of democracy in a sea of barbarism,” “There is no such place as Palestine and no Palestinians,” “The vicious and unprovoked Hamas attack on October 7^th,” “Israel’s right of self-defence,” etc).

All of this is designed to conceal a farrago of ethno-religious hatred which has now openly taken over the national self-esteem, although it has actually been there soto voce since the beginning. According to a recent survey, 82% of Israelis want the Palestinians of Gaza expelled, while no less than 47% want all Palestinians killed. Respondents to the survey were fully aware that both aims are crimes against humanity. Even children regularly rampage through the streets of Israel, waving flags and screaming “Death to the Arabs” (their equivalent of ‘niggers’). British journalist Owen Jones has a post on Israeli rabbis saying that all children in Gaza deserve to starve to death, while another rabbi talks of killing Palestinian children. Nahum Goldmann said Jews feel superior to other humans because they know they are going to heaven and gentiles to hell [2, p13]. There are thousands of examples of these profoundly racist beliefs:

One Rabbi who eulogized American-born Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians killed and 150 others injured who were praying in Hebron’s al-Ibrahimi Mosque, declared “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail” (Ralph Nader).

Crucially, none of this is new. These appalling attitudes did not spring into existence after October 7^th 2023. They have been present from the beginning, as Goldmann makes absolutely clear. As detailed by Nurit Peled-Elhanan (professor of linguistics and sister of Miko, here 2013, here 2025), these inhuman views have been drip-fed into the population of Israel via scrupulously-contrived, government-controlled indoctrination of Jewish children and teenagers from Israel and, significantly, from abroad (Taglit Birthright trip). The Zionist state rewards extremism, extremism feeds on itself and ethno-religious extremism caused the Hamas breakout and the destruction of Gaza.

Now, however, these attitudes are so deeply entrenched in the population that the government doesn’t even bother to conceal it. Certainly no Israeli or Jew anywhere has ever been prosecuted for inciting genocide of the Palestinian population. It has to be understood that this is deliberate. As Nurit Peled-Elhanan shows, there is nothing accidental about printing textbooks for six year old children. The entire national ethos is now built on the mythic notion that Jews are superior people who are entitled to take whatever steps they like to build their nation where they like while anybody who criticises is acting under satanic influence. Or is just plain evil and has to be destroyed. But as Nahum Goldmann makes clear [2], they’ve always believed in their superiority although in the past, surrounded by resentful nationals, they tended to keep quiet about it.

Either within one particular group or society or between nations or cultures, a sense of superiority is inherently destabilising of human society. It leads directly to brutality and genocide: there is no genocide if people feel equal. Everybody knows this but the problem is that we humans like to feel superior to other people, we like to look down on our neighbours and scoff at their peculiar faces, their accents, their food and clothes, their culture and religion. We like it because believing we are higher on the social scale feels better than being at the bottom. OK, you say, if you want to walk around with your nose in the air, do so but keep it to yourself. Trouble is, you can’t keep that sort of attitude to yourself. It seeps through, it taints your speech and behaviour; people can sense this and they don’t like it. And, above all, it must get worse. A sense of superiority ratchets up, it never ratchets down unless at gunpoint. Eventually, other people get sick of being treated as second-rate, they react angrily, hurl abuse or stones, and so you decide to teach them a lesson about their place in the world. You push them around, maybe shoot a few pour encourager les autres, and maybe they fall back, but it won’t last. They’ll resent being dominated and will eventually fight back, à la Gaza October 7^th, à la Warsaw Ghetto October 1943, à la ten million other places and times, and now it’s on again.

There is no prospect for world peace if one gang or party or nation or religion thinks it is born superior and everybody else must fall into line or be wiped out. The belief itself produces hatred, and hatred produces catastrophe. The UN Declaration of Human Rights begins:

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people …

Equal and inalienable rights. No group, class, nation, culture, race or religion is inherently superior to any other. The belief in superiority by birthright inevitably contains within itself the seeds of humanity’s most monstrous crimes, perhaps even the ultimate crime of destroying the planet as we know it. And yes, there are good people but if the good people sit on their hands or stand wringing their hands as the tanks roll by, nothing will change. Be encouraged. Don’t think you’re weird because you don’t like fighting and destruction, because you’re satisfied with enough. The people who always want more are the misfits. We need to keep them in their place.

References:

1. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

2. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

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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.