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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Trump has declared victory in his illegal war of aggression on Iran and is now walking back to his golf cart, waving graciously to the crowds who never wanted another forever war. To celebrate, I will coin a new term: “A Trumpian Victory.” This differs from a pyrrhic victory (“One more victory like that and we are undone”) in that he was defeated but is telling everybody he won and is generously accepting the vanquished Iranians’ terms. In other words, he is lying (Henry Mencken: “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars”). Overlooked in the applause is the crucial point that, in glaring contrast to the blood-stained Americans and Israelis, Iran won their chapter of The Great American War on Everybody by non-lethal means. This will keep historians and sociologists in jobs for decades: in defeating the obscene coupling of “the most powerful country in history” and “the most moral army in the world,” Iran did not incinerate 100,000 civilians, or even a dozen. As promised if they were attacked, they simply took the world in a squirrel grip and squeezed. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, they exerted the only sort of power that governments understand, the power of economics.
Trump, as he makes crystal clear, has no comprehension of morality but money always makes his nose and other organs twitch. Netanyahu, Trump’s BFF, is ably filling the role of nuclear-armed mad dog from hell doing his best to sabotage everything but even he has his fatal weakness: that Israel, as Trump finally blurted out, exists wholly and solely because the US pays for it to exist:
If it weren’t for the United States of America, with me … Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth, one hundred percent — and every smart person in Israel knows that.
Since Day 1 of the Israeli state in 1948, every smart person in the world who watches these things has known that. Israel exists just because, every year for nearly 80 years, it receives from US government and private sources, as well as the German government and many other Europeans, a flood of money, about $10billion a year and often far more. Without that loot, the Zionist state would be on the same economic footing as Jordan, meaning on its knees. Instead, and on their perpetual life support of foreign lucre, Jewish Israelis live like kings, with free education, free health care, full pensions and a myriad other benefits, subsidies and grants, none of which are available to ordinary Americans. How come?
The details of these arrangements we don’t know and probably never will but we can summarise them with one word: corruption. Corruption and criminality at a truly cosmic level reach deep into every government in the world (even puritanical China), into every bank and every major company, into armies and spy services, all the big universities, many churches and religious foundations and so on. But it’s certainly not just Israel, it’s a mesh of interlocking criminal enterprises with no defining division between the good and the bad. Israel is simply a node, albeit a centrally placed one, in a vast subterranean network of corruption. Granted, Trump and Netanyahu are fairly extreme examples but they have shaken hands with, sat next to, eaten and partied with, laughed and plotted with, and taken money from many of the century’s most accomplished and enterprising criminals.Tellingly, where they lead, everybody else follows.
To her credit, Whitney Webb has lifted a couple of manholes on the vast, interconnected sewers of illegal money and influence that ceaselessly pulse and flow beneath our unwitting feet [1]. Her story goes back about a hundred years to the beginnings of organised crime but we are then forced to ask: Was it ever thus? Was there always this huge hidden economy of vice sucking at the vitals of ordinary people? I think there was but for most of human history, it wasn’t the underworld at all, it was right out in the open: the Atlantic slave trade; Britain’s vast drug trade, moving shiploads of opium from forced labour plantations in India to poison the Chinese population; Leopold II’s monstrous criminality in the rubber trade in Congo; invasion and annexation of native lands in North America, Africa and Oceania; genocide in a dozen places, on and on.
Western wealth was built on wickedness, lauded either as the civilising influence of Christendom or the nobility of Western arms subduing the unruly savages. Stealing somebody else’s land or enslaving their children wasn’t crime as it was out in the open and everybody was doing it. The British occupation of the Subcontinent (now seven countries) lasted 250 years. In that time, the Poms extracted some $45trillion (modern value), caused the premature deaths of 145million people and reduced their standard of living from among the highest in the world to the lowest, from which they will probably never recover. And they still won’t hand back the Kohinoor diamond.
I doubt that the conduct today of the wealthy and powerful is any better or worse than it ever was. They’ve always believed in droit de seigneur, their right to have whatever they want when they want it, e.g. the comically disgusting behaviour of one Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as exposed by historian and author Andrew Lownie. The only differences these days are the extent and reach of crime enabled by the prodigiously complex, computerised, neoliberal economic system, which means it’s all hidden. Anybody who tries to expose it gets either a sentence for spying (e.g. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden) or a bullet in the back of the neck (see [1] for examples). You and me, we’re fools. We work hard for our living, we pay our taxes and bills, we help with charities, we clean up our mess, and we get nowhere. Meantime, Herr Musk is now the world’s first private trillionaire even though his DOGE closed a quarantine and veterinary surveillance service in the Agriculture Dept. to save $15million, and the US now has an outbreak of the dreaded screwworm that will cost at least $1billion to eradicate and will push up the price of beef. As though the rich care or even know how much food costs. Suggestions that Musk should pay the $1billion have been laughed off. How does such inequality exist, and what is its likely effect? Consider this:
Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens.
That was written in 1912, well before the Russian Revolution, by the French-British author, poet and politician, Hilaire Belloc [2, p62]; nothing has changed. We should not, however, complain too loudly as, according to neoliberal doctrine, massively unequal individual wealth is a necessary precondition to a general rise in living standards. As ourlined by economists such as von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Friedman, only private citizens know enough about their needs and resources to make the crucial decisions that lead to successful businesses. By the simple expedient of reducing government regulations and red tape to a minimum, individuals should be allowed and, indeed, encouraged to amass personal wealth because, once they have made their pile, they then have to invest it. This will produce jobs for the working classes whose standard of living will therefore rise (“the rising tide lifts all boats”) and all will be well. It sounds wonderful, so why isn’t it working? Two reasons, the first explained in another of the revealing posts by China-based American businessman, Kevin Walmsley.
In his latest post, Mr Walmsley looks at the impending birth of 6G telephone systems. This will be thousands of times faster than today’s 5G, too fast for household and personal use, as he notes: “To download a 21 terabyte-sized file will take 5 hours on a 5G network, and just 18 seconds on a 6G.” That, however, is ideal for industry, science and, unfortunately, spying agencies and the military. However, almost the entire development is taking place in China because China alone has the supplies of gallium nitride needed to manufacture the ultrafast chips 6G relies on. The wily Chinese will have the rest of the world in the ultimate squirrel grip, as China produces 99% of the entire world’s supply of gallium, just because neoliberalism. Gallium is almost entirely a by-product of aluminium smelting, which is dominated by China, Russia and, until a few weeks ago, the Gulf petrostates.
Decades ago, western businessmen decided it was cheaper to import gallium than mine the stuff so, strictly in keeping with the clever economists mentioned above, that’s just what they did. It would take the West at least a dozen years to get to the stage of producing enough gallium of their own to bring their 6G systems to where China is today, by which time China will be a dozen years ahead of them anyway and will have set the standards itself. And to add insult to injury, gallium is essential for the precise radars used by the F-35s that bombed the girls’ school at Minab, and by the billion dollar radars recently destroyed by Iran’s cheap drones (read Kevin’s article; he shows a picture of the ballast now being installed in F-35s in place of the radars to stop them flipping over). The US now needs to build lots of missiles to replace the expensive gear they fired in their recent war but China holds the essential ingredient to make them work. And it is not releasing it.
So that’s one reason why we shouldn’t have trillionaires, or even billionaires: they will adjust the world economy to make themselves richer and more powerful while leaving us to sort out the consequences, because that’s what the rich and powerful do. We have strong, biologically-determined inclinations to gain property, power and status. We switch these drives on because they’re incredibly exciting but the off-switch takes all the fun out of life so, unless we’re compelled to, we rarely choose to “do the right thing” and stop trying to grab all the cake. As the example of gallium shows, neoliberalism is producing and reinforcing inequality but this time, and unlike the imperial examples mentioned above (slaves, opium etc), this time, it’s the West that’s getting its nuts squeezed, and they don’t like it. Tough shit, sunshine, pigeons come home to roost.
The second reason untrammelled wealth and power aren’t a good idea is seen in a quote from Trump’s immensely powerful deputy chief of staff, the man who was recently likened to a rectal polyp, Mrs Miller’s little boy, Stevie (check the picture; a reader suggested the polyp looked benign). In an interview soon after Trump 2.0 was let out of its dungeon, he said:
We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower ... We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power…These are the iron laws of the world.
Unlike his boss, who can’t read, I’d say Miller has read Mein Kampf, which says:
...the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist [3, p182].
The whole thrust of neoliberalism has been to let the Stephen Millers, Trumps and Epsteins of the world loose, to remove any legal or, above all, moral shackles from them and license them to pillage the planet until they are forced to say “No more, I’ve got enough.” Except they never do. Neoliberalism justifies “more, more, more for me.” It authorises cruel disdain and contempt for those who are stuck in the mud and can’t escape just because the wealthy and powerful have recast the economic and legal systems to suit themselves. Over the past 35 years, the US has lost at least 18 million well-paying industrial jobs. The great majority of these have gone to China where the standards of living for the common people are fast approaching those of the US. A reader of Kevin’s Substack commented:
China has a socialist free market economy where the government builds the infrastructure and businesses must learn to survive under intense market competition. The USA has a corporate welfare economy, where corporations feed a price-is-no-object government demand, and corporations deemed “too-big-to-fail” are continually bailed out by the government.
I think it’s time to declare the neoliberal experiment a failure and go back to the idea of fairness, which Hilaire Belloc championed as the “distributive state” [2]. The reason neoliberalism failed is as clear as daylight: the economists who wrote it, known as the Austrian School because most of them came from Vienna, had no idea about humans. Not a clue. That’s a bit strange as several of them had served in the Great War so they must have had some notion that humans aren’t the nicest creatures around. In particular, their model of human psychology was palsied as they assumed people are ordered little robots who go through life checking prices and demands and making calm, rational decisions as to what they should produce, buy or sell. They thought that what they called “rational self-interest” was enough to explain human economic behaviour and, critically, to keep it in line with human interests. They forgot about war. That parody of psychology is the entire basis of the economic policies directly or indirectly running most of the world today.
They didn’t think that, once given the green light, businessmen would look to invest their wealth where it produced the greatest returns, not the greatest benefit. That is, they would immediately look overseas to poor countries with low-paid workers, lax environmental and commercial regulations, and easily-bribed police. As long as they made money, they didn’t care that it impoverished their own working classes. They certainly didn’t think far enough to realise that shifting critical supply chains overseas exposed their country to the ultimate squirrel grip. And as the Austrian economists were probably quite decent bourgeoisie themselves, they had no idea what arseholes the wealthy and powerful actually are. They didn’t understand that, blessed with minimal regulations and oversight, crooks like Trump, Kushner, Epstein, Netanyahu, MBS, MBZ, Boris J and so many others would move in and quickly reshape the legal and financial systems to suit themselves, because crooks. They should have listened to Lord Acton, who said: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control” (1887). The old boy was absolutely right. Power attracts people who are hungry for power, and people who hunger for power will never willingly switch off their hunger, they’re incapable of saying “Enough’s enough.”
This is the heart of the problem: war is about domination and domination is the most pointless and destructive game in town. Only when we view war with the same intuitive abhorrence as we look upon bestiality, incest or paedophilia will we start to bring it under control.
Just a suggestion: Can we leave the neolibs in control for a bit longer, until they’ve completely wrecked the American and zionist capacity to launch aggressive wars?
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. Belloc H (1912). The Servile State. London: TN Foulis.
3. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.
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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.