The Age of Fraud

The greatest fraud of all.

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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We live in an era of fraud. Historically, the world was changed by the unbelievable fraud of the age of empires (especially Britain, France, Belgium and so many others), not to overlook the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and the “Polish attacks” on Germany in late August, 1939. Today, we have heaps of ordinary commercial frauds such as Enron, WorldCom, WireCard, Volkswagen, the “opioid epidemic,” what is shaping up to be the “antidepressant fraud” and so many others. Then we have all the modern political frauds including the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the invasion of Iraq, the “Reds under the bed” and “Yellow Peril” frauds, the ludicrous Q-Anon and now, spare us, all of Trump’s stupid lies. But there is one fraud that is so big, so powerful, so omnipresent, that most people don’t actually see it. In this respect, reader Tom C, also from UK, who works in eating disorders, asks:

Regarding geopolitics I have great respect for your philosophy but less for your anthropology. You seem to be working with a unitary model of human behaviour and motivation, we are all greedy and selfish and willing to hurt each other because that is our nature. I paraphrase, I hope you don't feel unfairly. I don't believe in this view of humanity, and regard the behaviour you discuss in a different light, as social programming in the interests of elites. I am thinking of the life long interest in comparison, grading, competition, sport and adversarial culture in all its forms that seems natural to us in the anglosphere but is not a given, but actually a powerful ideological apparatus we are taught to see as natural. I hope that makes sense, and would value your thoughts about it, if you can spare the time,

We’re actually on much the same page, as they say. Going back 400 years, Descartes, who was an accomplished anatomist, said it is perfectly clear that we are biological machines with biological imperatives. He proposed that we have a pure biological state, including our need to breathe, drink, eat and shelter from the environment, which is exactly the same as animals. Our biology also determines healing after a simple laceration (e.g. surgical incision); the inflammatory response to an insect bite; digesting an apple; the process of pregnancy; onset of malignancy, and so on. These systems are totally biological in that they all work perfectly well even when people are in profound coma. In order to understand the biological machine, researchers apply the reductive methodology, with astounding success (e.g. the development of Covid immunisation in record time). The whole of this is genetic.

In addition to our biology, as he said, we also have a pure psychological state which arises from certain very precisely constrained properties of the CNS [1]. David Chalmers proposed what he called Laws of Supervenience, by which the mind naturally supervenes upon the brain’s structure and function [2]. This is an emergent and thus rule-governed process, such that any entity duplicating those rules will also show emergent mental properties. However, Chalmers didn’t offer any suggestions as to the nature of those laws. My view is that they are what, in 1847, George Boole defined as the “Laws of Thought,” meaning the rules governing dual-valued calculus [3]. Boole’s very solidly grounded rules neatly bridge the gap Chalmers left.

For humans, wholly psychological events would include memorising a telephone number (if anybody does such things these days, my offspring certainly don’t); understanding Pythagoras’ theorem; understanding how GLP-1 RAs work in the body; working out how to make a nuclear reactor safe and so on. These are straightforward computational matters for which Boole’s laws give a full account. However, we need to be clear what is genetic and what isn’t. The physical brain structure and mechanisms from which our mental lives emerge are wholly genetic but the mental contents are not. Genetics confers on us the capacity to develop and communicate by language; DNA says nothing about what language we will use or what we will say or believe in that language.

In between the purely physical and the purely mental, we have what are probably best called “psychobiological states,” in which biology influences but does not determine psychology, and probably vice versa. These are usually called drives or instincts as they appear in all humans at fairly standard times, and also in many other animals. In adults, they are the social drive, i.e. the impetus to keep contact with other H sapiens as it induces a sense of comfort, probably mediated by oxytocin; conversely, there is xenophobia, the deep-seated fear of strange faces; the sexual drive; territoriality; the threat response; and the one that is most likely to destroy us, the drive to dominate, coupled with its converse, the drive to avoid being dominated (aka the paradox of hierarchy). There are others that are generally overlooked as they don’t cause much trouble: our sense of play, our urge to decorate ourselves and our surroundings, curiosity coupled with a fear of, and need to explain, the unknown (I haven’t talked about this much but it’s important). I’m sure there are more. The important point is that these are common to most other higher animals at least. Dogs can recognise a threat; cats like to play; birds can be fiercely territorial; most animals are fearful if separated from their kind and reassured by contact with conspecifics; most animals are hierarchical, etc.

Of the three, the purely biological, the purely psychological and the psychobiological, we have no choice about the biological imperatives. Our psychological states can be changed if we know what they are (not guaranteed) and if we choose. The last group, our “psychobiological impulses,” are half-way, behavioural options in that we can yield to them or we can resist. They are inclinations to act in a certain way in certain circumstances, not obligatory yet certainly not wholly an unbiased choice. Some of them are much more powerful and pervasive than others, and they just happen to be the dangerous ones. We can easily make up a nice “just so” story about evolutionary advantages in them, but they are not essential to the individual life, e.g. a person can ignore the sexual drive or can make strangers welcome. They are hormonally mediated, triggered by a perception of the environment, and anxiety plays a big part in them. The absence of familiar faces produces anxiety, at its peak in infants but fading only slowly thereafter. Crucially, society has built itself around these human traits, which makes sense as fighting them is exhausting; it is much easier and generally more fun to give in and let them run their course.

Of all these optional drives or instincts, the urge to dominate others is nearly universal and is both intense and pervasive throughout daily life. As described in refs. [1] and [4], it is mediated by the testosterone economy. Left to their own devices (à la Golding’s Lord of the Flies), children and other animals quickly sort themselves into a dominance hierarchy. The little darlings have to be trained out of it: “Don’t take all the cake, leave some for others. You can share your toys, they’re not going to damage them. Let the little ones in first, don’t push in front of them. Wait your turn …” And it’s not just children: Egalitarianism is not our natural biological state. It is reflected in the adversarial culture which is so deeply embedded in human societies that most people don’t even notice it. If we didn’t come equipped with a drive to dominate each other, then we wouldn’t have religions telling us to be nice to the less fortunate, to turn the other cheek, bless the peacemakers, make strangers feel welcome and all that gushy stuff that everybody ignores.

The simple fact is that, from the very beginning and in so many different ways, society is organised to reward higher status. Who organised it? People of higher status, strength, brains, etc. Societies are set up to take advantage of the biological urge to dominate, particularly where people can profit from the competition. Overtly or covertly, groups pick up the idea and amplify it by joyously appealing to the worst human instincts and actively suppressing any information they don’t like. What we call politics is simply one group trying to get support to help them be dominant, to give them power to organise the society in ways that will benefit themselves and their supporters. This is so much part of us that we struggle to envisage a non-hierarchical society. It has reached the stage where very thing and every idea is sold by appealing to the innate drive to be the top, to be the best, to have the newest, the biggest, fastest, most expensive and thus to be the most popular. Every group is organised along lines of a leader and followers, winning is everything, don’t be a loser, on and on. Reader Tom sees this as “social programming in the interests of elites” which is quite true, but the elite are simply taking advantage by amplifying and reinforcing our innate inclinations. If they tried to fight our nature, they wouldn’t be elite for very long.

Insofar as personality consists of a set of acquired rules, genetics do not influence personality. Of course, while personality factors exaggerate the drive to dominate, they are supplementary, not primary. While we may think of behavioural factors such as dominance/controlling etc as a personality factor, strictly speaking, they aren’t.

While society is organised to take advantage of the innate impulse to dominate, it can’t magnify something that isn’t already there. Why do societies the world over take this form? Because that is the form of the individual humans who comprise the society. Groups in society, and the society itself, are successful in amplifying the dominance drive because that’s what humans like to do, we don’t need much urging to be unpleasant to each other. We have less success reinforcing the social and altruistic drives to treat each other fairly just because they aren’t major factors in our nature, and are easily swamped by an impulse either to dominate or, more to the point, to resist being dominated. You could say the drive to dominate has stronger survival value than the altruistic drive and I can’t argue.

I see the drive to dominate as both the primary organising principle underpinning the structure of human society as it is today and as far back as we can see, and as the single factor most likely to lead to our downfall. People just will not stop. We have an On-switch for dominance but no Off-switch. However, and despite the propaganda, humans can function perfectly well without being in control of their surroundings. There can still be life without constantly needing to get higher and higher. People can play sport without becoming football hooligans or going to the plutocratic excesses of the Olympic Games. When the urge to dominate is combined with territoriality and self-indulgence, we end up with the toxic mix of modern consumerism. Now given the horrors of human history, why do people still do this? Why haven’t we learned? That’s where the fraud comes in and, for some background, we’ll turn to Mr Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector for the IAEA and now commentator and author (and yes, I know of his history).

Ritter posts a brief daily video on his Substack file, called “Ritter’s Rants,” on international politics. Today, he was concerned about Germany’s rapidly growing and overt belligerence toward Russia, in particular, the spreading influence of ultra-right activists in government and military, people he called “Nazis.” At about 8.00, he says there are people in Germany today who don’t feel ashamed by what happened during the Third Reich other than the fact that they lost, meaning they “lost their war for territory in Russia,” as set out explicitly at so many points in Mein Kampf. Ritter is of the scary view that very powerful people in Germany would like another go. Toward the end, he said: “Scratch a German and you’ll find a Nazi.” In that, he’s both right and wrong. He’s right in the sense that, in each living German, there exists the neurological machinery that serves the psychobiological drive to dominate others. He’s wrong in the sense that he implies it’s Germans. No. On that point, he is absolutely and totally wrong and, worse still, misleading.

The drive to dominate has nothing to do with where you were born, it’s human. Scratch anybody from any country, any race, any religion, and you’ll find the urge to be dominant, just because being on top feels better than being underfoot. It is a reproductive strategy and, because of its survival value, it is universal (and that’s from somebody who doesn’t like evolutionary “explanations”). While we all have the twin drives to dominate and to avoid domination, their expression is a matter of individual psychology. Here, the overwhelming influences are early life experiences and culture. Some people learn very early to try to dominate, others learn to keep a low profile but the point is, nobody has to be dominant. We can choose but, for many people, it has been trained out of them or beaten out of them. I’m very well aware that mainstream psychiatry and a large chunk of academic psychology believe that the full range of adult personality is genetically-determined. However, their evidence is both carefully cherry-picked and has never moved beyond observation as there is no suggestion of a mechanism by which genes influence personality (a plausible genetic influence on anxiety would help fill the gap, as per the biocognitive model).

This isn’t the place for a lengthy discussion of the effects of early life on adult personality, but they are nonetheless real. They also don’t stop at early life: once launched, the personality continues along much the same trajectory through life, in the sense of being exaggerated by circumstances. It can also go the other way due to massive adult trauma, commonly known as PTSD, but more important are the systematic influences known as culture. These can be on a large scale or much smaller, called subcultural influences. The culture is designed to train bad things out of us and replace them with good things and yes, the elite get to choose what’s good and what’s bad. Unsurprisingly, they choose what suits them.

Things go bad when people are told over and over again that they’re superior and, as a result, they have special entitlements and privileges. This may be the elite telling each other they’re fantastic and their farts don’t stink, or they may tell it to the nation to get them to hate the neighbours. This appeals to people who start life at the bottom of the hierarchy: if somebody comes along and says “You’re better than those people because of your skin colour or your country or your race or because god chose you,” then the have-nots will grab that and make it part of them. Race is a very obvious reason to feel superior but religion, nationality, social class, intelligence, physical appearance and strength, are all regularly used to justify a hierarchy of humans. Our tendency to assemble hierarchies of humans is leading us to destruction.

What Scott Ritter was talking about in Germany was the mix of racial and cultural superiority which reached its peak in the Third Reich. Very explicitly, the European war was a war for territory in the east so the Germans could build a mighty empire with a population of 250million and totally dominate Europe from Lisbon to the Urals. However, as I’ve said often enough before, there was nothing explicitly German about this: Hitler was only trying to build the sort of empire that Britain, France and even miserable Portugal had. Certainly in the Western political elite of the time, a deep-seated sense of racial superiority was absolutely normal. All the big western countries had their eugenics societies, aimed at spreading awareness of the risks of “racial pollution” by foreigners and “inferior types.” Many US states had openly racist eugenics laws. None of this has gone away, it’s just that people don’t talk about it so much now. Racism is the primitive, psychobiological fear of the stranger which exists hand in hand with the need to mix with familiar faces. These two drives are inseparable, as long as people are comforted by the familiar, they will be anxious and resentful strangers. However, when racism is combined with the urge to dominate, then it gets very, very dangerous.

Since the Nazi genocides in World War II (there were several), the very notion of racial superiority is considered, well, distasteful. Today, most talk of racial superiority has been replaced by that old stand-by, national superiority, except ordinary citizens are more concerned about the cost of living than with international rankings. Most people don’t know much about foreign countries and see no reason to bother themselves learning. They like their country but don’t wet themselves over seeing a flag or burst into tears on hearing the national anthem; indeed, politicians struggle to whip up enthusiasm among the masses. The worst thing for a politician is people saying: “We don’t care, that’s not important.” As a result, the message has to be jammed home from birth: “Our country is the greatest, we’re better than those gimps over the border so they’d better mind their manners if they know what’s good for them.” The reason is that when the politicians decide they want to wallop the gimps over the border to take control of their territory, they need to have lots of men and quite a few women rush to the recruiting offices otherwise there won’t be a war. Imagine if they put on a war and nobody came.

When it comes to the US of A, the message is relentless: “We’re the natural leaders of all nations, we’re superior, better, fairer, brighter etc. than all other countries and they should bow down to us and kiss our collective arse or we’ll drop sanctions, tariffs and very big bombs on them.” This is drummed into children from birth and leads to an exaggerated sense of entitlement and privilege, on full display when one WJ Clinton addressed the UN General Assembly:

…the United States is entitled to resort to the unilateral use of military power (to ensure) …uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources (27^th Sept. 1993).

There are thousands of other examples but it has produced a nation that firmly believes it is entitled to top spot on the dais and everybody should, as Trump demands, go on bended knees to pay homage. Remember that Trump simply says in public what the rest of the "elite” say in private. And the rest of the world is either saying “Yessir, three bags full” or “Get stuffed.” Then the trouble starts. But it can’t start unless and until the population have been trained to believe that their lives will be a mocking emptiness until all the unprintable people who aren’t on their knees have been smashed into submission. Did Mr and Mrs Elvin Snodgobbler and their three sprogs, of Sawmills, NC, give a shit about Sadam Hussein, or ISIS, or whether China resumes Taiwan? No, they don’t. They don’t know where those places are or who the people are and their lives aren’t affected so, as Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring said, they have to be whipped up to a frenzy before they will grab their rifles and pour across the border to teach them uppity whatevers a lesson they won’t forget.

And that is the fraud. The biggest, most durable, most pervasive, most expensive, most destructive fraud in human history: that there is no life unless you’re Number One, so grab this gun and get ready to lay down your life in our service. There are lots of ways people can be whipped to a state where they willingly put themselves in the path of cannon shells or bombs or happily wave their sons and daughters to their deaths, and together, those ways amount to a political technology called fascism. People think fascism is modern but it isn’t, it’s ancient. The Romans and Greeks and Persians and Chinese and Australian Aboriginals and everybody knew all about it. Contrary to the self-serving myth, it didn’t die in the rubble of Berlin, it’s alive and thriving in Washington, London, Berlin, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Santiago, Tokyo, Beijing, Canberra … everywhere there are humans. It’s everywhere because Ich bin der Faschist. I am the fascist, the fascist is in me, and my duty is to keep the monster under control. Trouble is, there are a lot of people who think they can gain by getting everybody to get in touch with their inner fascist and let it rip. If they do, we don’t have a future.

For a truly frightening account of how the sense of privilege grows and takes control, see Chris Hedges’ interview with author Nick Bryant on the Epstein spiderweb.

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References:

1. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

2. Chalmers DJ (1996). The Conscious Mind: in search of a fundamental theory. Oxford: University Press.

3. Boole, G. (1854). An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. Dover Classics of Science and Mathematics. New York: Dover (1958). Now available through Google Books.

4. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

1. 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:

2. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

3. McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

4. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

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