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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In 1987, I left the comforts of Perth, the most isolated capital city in the world, to travel to West Australia’s remote Kimberley region to set up an isolated psychiatric service. Isolated meant “no staff and no facilities” as the nearest psychiatric unit was 2,200km away. It also turned out to mean no support, no assistance and, above all, no interest of any sort from the Health Dept or the college of psychiatrists. In fact, I spent the next six years as the world’s most isolated psychiatrist covering an area of 425,000sqkm, or 165,000 sqm, nearly twice the size of the state of Victoria. The population was then about 25,000, about half white and half Aboriginal people, most of whom were still living more or less according to their traditions. The older people, especially woman, generally couldn’t speak English and young people spoke their own languages at home. My role was to stop Aboriginals being sent to the mental hospital in Perth, a bit less than the distance from London to Moscow but, for them, a much greater climatic and cultural leap. To prepare myself, I worked through a pile of textbooks of Aboriginal anthopology, which is a big topic as there was considerable interest in preliterate cultures in the 19th Century, especially from Germany. With academic papers and so on, I eventually slogged through about 3,000 pages of material.
Aboriginal society was an ancient, preliterate culture whose people had lived for 50,000 years in one of the harshest climates on earth, with no metals or technology other than they could make with stones and wood. It was and largely still is a patriarchal gerontocracy, where the old men hold power due to their control of religious matters. After long practice, they survived; most authorities estimate there were about 300,000 Aboriginals when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788. However, western diseases quickly devastated them. As the land is totemic, people are tied to the land of their birth so, by staying within their own boundaries, there would normally be no conflict. It also meant they couldn’t leave if they get into trouble, so they had to keep on good terms with the old men, who controlled the most valuable asset of all, the marriage market.
However, my reading soon showed something strange. I had long been interested in anthropology, having previously worked in Southern Thailand, and in ethology, the study of animal behaviour, for what it tells us about human behaviour. In those fields, one of the biggest topics is aggression, both intra- and interspecific. Normally, for humans and for other animals, the index to any textbook will contain a hundred or more references to aggression or similar topics but, when it came to Aboriginal anthropology, there were hardly any. A number of researchers I spoke to said that this was because human conflict is directed at gaining control of the primary source of wealth, meaning land. However, because it was totemic, Aboriginals couldn’t steal another tribe’s land as it would reject them, so they lived in peace within their own boundaries.
This seemed odd since a few days in the casualty department of any local hospital shows one of the striking features of Aboriginal life today is fighting. Ah, I was told, that’s due to government policy of forcing them off their land so that different tribes are mixed in the same small area, and the traditional power structures run by the old men had broken down. Also, alcohol had made everything a hundred times worse. If they were able to go back to their precontact state, i.e. as hunter-gatherers in their own, remote areas, they would be fine. That didn’t seem very realistic, as they also said they would need the flying doctor and other health services.
It seems the reason behind this omission was that early researchers and their modern counterparts wanted to believe that pre-contact Aboriginals lived in a state of Rousseauesque bliss, so they simply overlooked aggression. The clues were there, however. One eminent researcher at University of WA wrote that when they were travelling, women routinely carried all their domestic goods and the children because men had to carry their spears and be ready to use them. Hang on, use them against what? There are no large predators in Australia; crocodiles are easy to avoid, just keep out of the water, and spears are useless against them anyway. Snakes were quickly despatched by the women and ended up on the fire for supper. The only conceivable threat was other humans, and this turned out to be true. Missionary reports from the 19th and early 20th Centuries, which were not in the academic literature, reported periodic flare-ups that involved all the men in a couple of adjoining tribes meeting on their borders in highly-ritualised “battles,” with more shouting and waving of spears than actual fighting.
There was, however, more or less constant low-grade fighting from stealing the most valuable asset of all: young women. The old men liked to keep a few young women for themselves, which meant there were always a few young men who missed out, so they snuck across to an adjoining tribe’s land to steal wives for themselves. However, that provoked payback raids so the fighting would rarely resolve. A tribe on the move was at risk of being attacked so the men had to be ready, which meant the women did all the heavy work. But before anybody says “Oh, how dreadfully primitive, they obviously needed to be pacified and taught to wear clothes,” just remember that nothing has changed. Anywhere. We terribly superior, gifted and cultured Westerners are still doing exactly the same thing, constantly invading other people’s land to steal their assets and turn them into slaves of one sort or another. In the old days, that meant physical slaves but now it means wage and monetary slaves. Much the same thing except that the modern slave driver doesn’t worry if his slave sickens and dies, he just gets another one from the queues of desperate people milling around his gate. Does it have to be this way? Definitely not.
In 1989, the financial contradictions within the USSR meant that it lost control of its satellites in Eastern Europe, and soon after of itself as the various republics snatched their independence. By 1991, “monolithic international communism” had proven to be anything but. The entire Western power elite were beside themselves with joy: “We won the Cold War,” they crowed. “We’ve proven our superiority.” Political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed: “This is the end of history, the end of social evolution. Liberal democracy is triumphant and humanity will forever owe us a debt of gratitude for our clear-sighted fortitude.” The project to develop and implement neoliberal economics went into overdrive. There was even talk of a “peace dividend,” that because the foreign threat had gone, the military budget could be diverted to good works at home.
It didn’t happen, of course, the arms manufacturers weren’t inclined to close up shop. Within a year or two, in its role as guardian of freedom and democracy, the US had pivoted to face two new “mortal enemies,” rabid jihadist Islamism and fanatical Chinese communist autocracy. A few weeks ago, Trump announced that this year’s budget for the aptly-renamed Department of War will be $1.5trillion, 50% more than last year, to meet the threat. What threat? The same threat that WJ Clinton identified in his speech to the UN General Assembly, 27th Sept. 1993, in which he reiterated his earlier statement to Congress re the looming threat that the US would be forced to follow the same rules as everybody else:
… 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.
In other words, we have the right to bomb you in order to maintain “full spectrum dominance,” absolute domination of the entire world in all possible respects, economic, military, financial, cultural, sporting, and so on. The threat for the US, the only threat, is of not being Number One. What right? The right called “might.” Macht hat Recht, as Adolf used to say. We have the power, therefore we will use it. The question then arises: Why? Why is it necessary to exert total dominance of the world for all time? If you ask this of an American with any sort of power, they just look at you blankly:
“What do you mean, why? Isnt it obvious? We’re the most powerful, smartest, most generous, most democratic and generally most amazing people in history, it is our destiny to lead the world to the sunny uplands and your role to be grateful.”
But, you object, what if we don’t want to be led? What if we’re happy down here on ground level? That gets you nowhere. Once offered the prize of la liberation americaine, there is no refusing: “This is for your benefit. Do as you’re told or we’ll bomb you.” You may then be tempted to ask: “If we can’t see the benefit, then what’s in it for you?” This brings us back to the Clinton Doctrine. Reality is, full spectrum dominance by Uncle Sam is not for the benefit of the world, it’s strictly for the benefit of the US. In particular, it’s for the entrenched power elite of that country and their dear friends in other countries, commonly known as the Epstein Class. British journalist Jonathon Cook nailed it:
Fukayama forgot that capitalism isn’t socialism. It doesn’t seek the best for everyone. It doesn’t want to share the wealth. It doesn’t prioritise dignity over profit. Its lifeblood is exploitation – of individuals and of entire peoples. He forgot that there would be resistance (Substack, 10.06.2026; emphasis added).
This is the crucial point: neoliberal capitalism isn’t in the business of looking after the people who aren’t in a position to take advantage of it. That’s not its purpose. It isn’t about catching the people who fall through the cracks, it’s about helping the front-runners get further ahead by eliminating any possible handicaps in their race to be dominant. Why be dominant? Because human nature. The urge to dominate is hard-wired into us but in such a way that we don’t see it as odd or out of place, we never question it. Dominating is fun, it feels great and we always want more. We never pause to ask how the people we’re dominating feel about it. Britain occupied the entire Subcontinent, now seven different countries, for 250 years, and when Churchill was advised India wanted independence, he got shitty: “”I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire” (Nov. 10th 1942). This is normal. This is human, but it is not thereby desirable or rational. Invariably, the downtrodden must come to want their freedom, and to fight for it.
Insight is being able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and imagine how they feel. Political maturity is not deceiving yourself over your motives. People talk about the post-war period being a “pax Americana” due to the liberal rules-based international order (the IMF, World Bank, UN agencies, WTO, etc) but it wasn’t. It was peaceful and ordered for the people who used it to rake in lots of money but chaotic for everybody else. There hasn’t been a day of peace in the world since 1945 and the US was always in the thick of the fighting, telling everybody else how they should live for the benefit of international capital. The North Koreans realised this a long time ago, as historian Alfred McCoy commented recently:
And mindful that nuclear-armed North Korea remains safe while Iran has been ravaged, even medium-sized states will undoubtedly be seeking the security of nuclear arms... (Common Dreams June 10th, well worth reading)
A similar thing is playing out in West Asia at present. Israel’s plan for “Greater Israel” involves displacing something like 100million people from their traditional lands, to be replaced by 10million Zionist Israelis. Somewhere along the line, what started as a socialist dream of a safe national home for Europe’s Jews mated with Kabalistic Judaism to produce an endlessly expansionist clericalist-fascist state. How they expect to hold this vast area isn’t clear. Swedish-Iranian political scientist Trita Parsi said: “Israel believes that the only way it can be secure is for everybody else not to be secure.” That way lies madness as there can be no security in a landscape filled with people who hate you. Do Netanyahu and Ben Gvir and Smotrich and all the rest know this? No, they have managed to convince themselves that they can do to Palestinians what they hated when the Nazis did it to their grandparents, and that there will be no repercussions because God and the US are on their side, backed up by The Bomb. Macht hat Recht noch einmal. Might is right recycled. All this is human, none of it has anything to do with the rights or wrongs of any political or economic system, or of any religion or the superiority of any race or such like.
Now we can look at the state of Aboriginal society 200 years ago, with the population of a small modern city scattered thinly across a vast continent, and smile indulgently at their pointless squabbles and posturing “wars.” However, they had one thing that we just can’t seem to get our heads around: everybody had enough to survive but nobody had enough to dominate the neighbouring tribes. Their totemic structure forced the tribes to stay apart, to stay in their land and not try to take over the neighbour’s place. Yes, the old men were a bit greedy but don’t overlook the modern habit of old white men taking young “trophy wives.” Trump, of course, took three wives from a different tribe as well as hundreds of more or less forced dalliances on the side.
Neoliberal economics, meaning monopoly private capitalism, and the collapsing “rules based international order” were specifically designed to create inequality and cement it in place. Monopoly state capitalism, aka Stalinist socialism, does the same. There is a median path, the distributive state, that equalises opportunity while allowing a few to climb a few rungs higher in the hierarchy. Aboriginals managed it, so there’s no reason apart from greed and hubris that we can’t. That, however, is a hard sell to people who can only think in terms of domination as the be-all and end-all of human existence. We need to start before it’s too late.
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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.