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’re all familiar with Orwell’s description of the total state in 1984, how it maintained power by controlling what people were told. Winston Smith’s job in the archives meant constantly revising and rewriting history so that people could only know what the Party wanted them to know:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture repainted, every statue and every street and every building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right … Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
I regard Orwell as the greatest writer of the 20th Century, right up there with Shakespeare in the pantheon, because he was able to pick the important points and put them in clear and unforgetable prose. It’s just over 76 years since he died: what would he make of the present? I think he would look at today’s headlines from London and say: “Didn’t I tell you?”
Britain on ‘collision course’ with Russia, head of Army warns. General Sir Roly Walker says Putin is on a war footing and it is imperative UK continues to rearm (Telegraph, Feb 24).
Britain almost on WWIII ‘frontline’ says Armed Forces Minister. UK is already ‘battling’ frontlines against Russia as the world looks terrifyingly similar to pre-WWII global war build-up, warns Armed Forces Minister and war veteran (Mirror, Feb 24).
Chief of the General Staff warns UK is on a ‘collision course with Russia’. Four years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Britain’s top soldier has issued one of the starkest warnings yet about the future of European security (London Business News, Feb 24).
Russian invasion of Ukraine shares ‘similarities’ with run-up to Second World War, armed forces minister says. Al Carns, a former special forces colonel in the Royal Marines, said Ukraine is on the frontline of Europe’s defences as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale onslaught enters its fifth year (Sky News Feb 24)..
NATO chief warns of ‘inevitable’ war with Russia as ‘relentless’ troop deployment looms (Daily Express US Feb.24).
That’s pretty scary: according to the experts, war with Russia is “inevitable” so should everybody start digging trenches in their gardens and dust off their gasmasks? That same day, we see a report in the Guardian mocking Russia’s military in Ukraine:
Four years into Ukraine invasion, Russia’s gains are small, while Kyiv remains resilient. With the Russian military performing poorly, Ukraine is clarifying strategy and pushing back with modest success … Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth grim year, has already gone on longer than the entire fight on the eastern front in the second world war. The Soviets marched from the gates of Leningrad to Berlin in a little over 15 months in 1944-45; today the Russian rate of gain in Pokrovsk in Ukraine is 70 metres a day, in Kupiansk, 23 metres … The gains are trivial, given Ukraine’s size, amounting to 1,865 sq miles 4,800km2 during 2025 (about 0.8% of the country) …The diplomatic misdirection demonstrates how poorly Russia’s military is performing.
Two totally contradictory stories. One shrieks “TheRussiansarecomingTheRussians arecoming, quick, get more guns and bombers and nuclear subs…” while the other says (equally unrealistically) “The Russians are totally useless and about to fall apart.” Meantime, over in Godzone, the self-appointed “president of peace” and claimant on the Nobel Peace Prize has amassed a “mighty armada, the biggest and most beautiful armada the world has ever seen” and is making noises like “Looks like we’ll have to invade Iran to stop them getting the bomb” because they’re “a week away from getting the bomb” even though (a) Trump tore up the JCPOA to prevent it in 2018, (b) their (tiny) civil nuclear program was “totally obliterated” in the unprovoked and illegal bombing raids last June, (c) the Ayatollah has repeatedly said nuclear weapons are a crime in Islam and they will never pursue them, and (d) they’ve been a week away from a bomb for nearly 25 years. Everything faded into mist, the lie became truth.
In 1945, Orwell published Notes on Nationalism, an essay exploring what he saw as widespread but very dangerous political drives. Writing just as the war against fascism was ending, he saw common elements in Nazism and Stalinism, in religious extremism and in atheism, pacifism and aggressive nationalism, Zionism and in racism. These elements he called ‘nationalism,’ although he was aware it wasn’t a good term. In particular, he saw the struggle to get to the top, to dominate and crush the opposition as a universal human drive which we have to recognise and deal with if we wish to avoid catastophe:
A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige … Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.
Replace his word ‘nationalism’ with ‘Narcisso-Fascism’ and we’re talking the same language. He knew his opinions would be unpopular but that never bothered him much. He wasn’t so much concerned with the recently vanquished European brand of fascism as with what we would now call Little England Fascism, of both right and left wings:
As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort … But you can at least recognise that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes.
Le fasciste, c’est moi. The drive to dominate is universal but why? As Orwell recognised, political theory can’t answer this question. In order to explain our urge to be No. 1, we have to leave politics and move to a more fundamental level. We now know the drive is genetically hard-wired into us, working at the hormonal level to control our behaviour in ways which are so much part of us that most of the time, we don’t even recognise them. Because being on top feels so much better than being pushed down the ladder, we automatically form ourselves into dominance hierarchies. This training starts very early and never lets up. Kindergarten and school, business, sport, religion, police and military, entertainment and above all, politics, are all about competing to get to the top by all possible means. We may say to our children “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, just play the game,” but we don’t mean it. Our child wins a ribbon at sport and we jump up and down and tell everybody. Our team wins the competition and we dance around cheering and laughing. Our party wins the election and we celebrate for days. Winning is ecstasy, everybody loves a winner and wants to join in. It’s exactly the same process in humans, in baboons, in dogs in the street, elephant seals, lizards, birds, you name it, we’re all hooked on the same cocktail of hormones.
Trouble is, winning may be ecstasy but on the other side of the coin, defeat, is misery. For every cheering winner, there’s a sullen and resentful loser plotting vengeance. Just as we will compete strenuously to beat the other side because winning feels so good, so we will also resist because losing feels so bad. In fact, losing and being oppressed feels so bad that, very often, people will put their lives on the line to resist. It’s called war, and it is at this point that politics has to give way to psychology. Readers will be aware that I believe the economic ideology called “neoliberalism” is utter rubbish as it is based on a false model of human psychology. It’s simply a plan to transfer as much wealth as possible from the 99% to the 1% and, from their point of view, it’s been a staggering success. We see the same flaw in mainstream political theories, e.g. Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism and Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamics. While these describe what goes on between nations, they can’t explain it because they are not built on a theory of psychology.
To explain international aggression, we have to drop from the national or macro level, to the individual or micro level. Why are nations aggressively trying to dominate each other, e.g. the US and Israel launching yet another unprovoked attack on Iran? Because individuals like to be dominant, it’s immensely exciting to be Top Dog. Why don’t the Iranians roll over and say “Come on in, take what you want, we’ll manage with the leftovers”? Same reason as you wouldn’t allow a group of strangers to move into your home and shove you out the back. Mearsheimer says: “International relations are anarchic, therefore nations must struggle to gain local hegemony to safeguard their interests.” Unfortunately, because Mearsheimer and all the other “experts” put so much emphasis on nations trying to exert “hegemony,” they fail to see that international relations are anarchic because nations are trying to dominate each other. The drive to dominate comes first, the chaos and anarchy is secondary. His view licenses the anarchy, he justifies it. Well, maybe he doesn’t personally but people grab his ideas and shout: “Look, the expert says it’s all chaos out there so we’d better arm ourselves and get in first.”
Just to complete the story, Turchin says that warfare has turned humans into cooperators. His book Ultra Society from 2015 is subtitled: How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators on earth [1]. Really? We’re cooperating on preventing global warming? Cooperating on restricting arms sales to civil wars? Cooperating on preventing sexual trafficking of women and children? Eliminating the vast drug industry? What crap. We don’t cooperate at all, we just form bigger and more powerful dominance hierarchies and start attacking (I’ve just submitted a paper to Turchin’s journal pointing out the errors in his approach but expect it won’t get far).
All of this counts. In Britain, the government is trying to scare people to stop spending money on their failing social services in order to buy hugely expensive weapons that will never be used but will inevitably provoke an equal and opposite response from this week’s enemy. Similarly, Trump and his busload of clowns are talking themselves into yet another catastrophic war; and Israel announces that it intends to take almost the entire Middle East for itself. Oh, you didn’t see that? Yes, in a carefully stage-managed “slip,” the US ambassador to Israel, the Christian nationalist (racist) and ultraZionist (fascist), Mike Huckabee, gave notice that Israel is dead set on implementing its plan for “Greater Israel,” i.e. to steal any land where, according to their mythology, a Jewish foot may once have trod. This includes most of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, all of Kuwait and Jordan, one third of Saudi Arabia and over half of Egypt. The original Zionist plan for Palestine, from the 1890s, was to force at least half the indigenous population out and keep the rest as agricultural and industrial labourers. As recently as 2010, Rabbi Ovadia Yosel (1920-2013), former chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party said:
Goyim (gentiles) were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world, only to serve the People of Israel … Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.
Great life if you can get it but this time, their plans are a bit bigger. The population of those countries is somewhere about 250million in all; they are supposed to sit passively by while a gang of 7million Europeans takes their prime agricultural land, their oil fields and industries and many of their ancient cities and … and what? The plan, it seems, is to bulldoze all the Islamic monuments and build some sort of theocratic state according to classic Judaism, there to await their messiah. In some branches of ultra-extremist Judaism, when the Messiah arrives, Jews will rule the world for a while, then they will go to heaven and the rest of us will burn in hell for eternity. That’s their plan.
You have to understand that, even though he is a total idiot and therefore very dangerous (Idiot: a person who, coming across evidence that contradicts his beliefs, discards the evidence and keeps his beliefs), Huckabee didn’t make this up. This plan has been around a long time, I probably first heard of it in 1982, in the aftermath of the Israeli-engineered slaughters in the Palestinian refugee camps in Shatila and Sabra. Huckabee is as one with both the Zionist lobby in the US and with his Israeli hosts, and the more extreme they are, the more he likes them. He did not speak out of turn, he simply repeated what he has been hearing for years, possibly decades.
Under the influence of their fanatical religious mania, the extremists in Israel think they can forcibly displace perhaps 150million people and all will be well. The “Arabs” will simply take their donkeys and camels and kids and off they’ll go, because, as the current Israeli minister for national security, one Itamar Ben Gvir, says, “Jews are above the law.” This truly despicable human being is of much the same character as Reinhard Heydrich and must not be dismissed as the buffoon he usually seems to be. He has at least 8 convictions for terrorist activities and is closely allied with Kahane Chai, the only declared Jewish terrorist group in the US. However, he is immensely powerful in Israel and has millions of fanatical followers in Israel and in the diaspora. He meets regularly with Huckabee, who is very close to Trump (not a friend, Trump doesn’t do friends).
If the ultraZionists think the other 850million Muslims in the world, in North Africa, Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in Iran, the Gulf countries, Indonesia, etc. will sit quietly by while this plan is enacted, they are completely off their heads. They should have listened to their first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who said:
Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That’s natural: we’ve taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? [2, p99]
Ben Gurion loathed Palestinians: “Arabs are barbarians ... (they) only understand force.” Nahum Goldmann, one of the prime architects of the modern Israeli state, said of him:
(He was) a very able and cunning diplomat and politician, really one of the best I have ever come across. A promise from him was quite worthless. He did not hesitate to promise one thing and then do the opposite. He was absolutely unscrupulous… he never had his fill of power… he only wanted to dominate [2, p94].
He only wanted to dominate. Precisely. That is the central thesis of Narcisso-Fascism: we love to dominate because it feels so damned good. Sure, we dress it up in high-sounding words, we say God is leading us or the light of democracy or history, or Our race deserves to lead, or We are the exceptional nation, but that’s only window-dressing to make the old ladies at home feel good while their sons and grandsons are being blown to bits on some far distant shore, because the reality of domination is clear. As Orwell said: Ich bin der Faschist. I am the fascist. The fascist is in me. In Hebrew, אני הפשיסט, ani hafshist.
The idea of Greater Israel has been bouncing around in Zionist circles for probably a hundred years but Huckabee has been used to float it in public to see what sort of response it gets. If it provokes fury, they’ll shelve it for perhaps another hundred years but if nobody says much, they’ll press ahead with it. The first step will be to reduce Iran to rubble before moving on to the major Sunni powers, Egypt and Turkey. So far, only the Muslim world has reacted badly, which is progress because they’ve long been enablers of the Zionist project (e.g. encouraging the US to attack Iran, selling oil to Israel, sabotaging resistance groups, financing ISIS, etc). As a group, the West has reacted to this truly insane idea much as they reacted to Hitler’s plan [3, Chap. 14, esp. pp396-98], first published in Mein Kampf in 1925, to invade the USSR and reduce the Slavic populations to helotry: “Ho hum,” they yawned, “there’s too many of them anyway. Do be darling and pass me another cucumber sandwich.” But it won’t work. The Zionists may defeat the Palestinians and Arab armies, they may succeed in driving huge numbers of people off their traditional lands and so on but they’re only setting up trouble for themselves.
It’s usually said that women are more affected by hormonal swings than men but there’s no truth in that. The hormonal drive to dominate is much stronger in males than females; conversely, males are much more affected by defeat than females. If they’re beaten at tennis or cricket, they drop their balls and slink off. But where women don’t usually fight so insanely to get themselves to the top, they have another impetus to resist oppression, called children. Women may not be so obsessed with their football team winning (“Oh for heaven’s sake, calm down, it’s only a game.” “Are you mad, woman? This is the bloody grand final and we’re down”) but they never get over oppression. They’re not so much worried about being oppressed themselves, they tend to find ways of coping but on one point they are implacable: they want their children to reach their full potential. Quietly and without a fuss they will fight any system that prevents that. If you startle a lone female bear, she’ll run off but if you threaten her cubs, look out.
In Gaza today, mothers know that just a few kilometres to the north, happy healthy children wake after a good night’s sleep, have a solid breakfast, dress in clean clothes and walk safely to a free school with sports fields, free lunches, free health care and so on. Then they look at their own children sitting under a torn and flapping tent, their bare feet caked in mud contaminated with raw sewage, whimpering miserably because they had no sleep due to gunfire and bombs dropping nearby, cold and hungry, bitten by insects and weakened by worms, with no schooling for years and no schools left standing, no health care, knowing that even searching for a few sticks for a fire to cook some porridge will attract the snipers, and they will not forget. Maybe they would forgive losing their home, their own health and their future, even their parents and husbands but they will not forgive somebody doing it to their children. Why should they?
So the women of the Muslim world, and the women of the true Christian world (not the dupes in the heresies), and Hindu and Buddhist and everything else, have to come together and speak as one: This madness has to stop. The world can no longer be held to ransom by a few religious maniacs and their vile, corrupt, child-abusing friends in the West who are obsessed with the hormonal rush that comes from crushing people underfoot. Today, there is no place for supremacism. The entire political process in the West has to be turned around but change will not come from the people who think only in terms of competing and fighting to get to the top at any cost. Change will not come from the Trumps and Starmers and Albaneses and Sisis and Putins and Netanyahus and the royals and bankers and industrialists and all the rest of the Epstein class. They’ve been steeped in the idea of competition since infancy, they can’t think in non-competitive terms so they’re a lost cause. As for all the men who feel guilty that they’re not higher up the ladder, there’s hope still but real change will be generational. It will start early in life by teaching children that they can be happy and productive without being on top. The program to flatten dominance hierarchies starts early: get rid of all the competitions in schools, stop pushing children into sport and music competitions, just let them learn to play the game or the piano for enjoyment, without having to win.
Today’s evil and corrupt ruling class, the Trumps and Mandelsons and Epsteins and so many others, have to be shoved aside and replaced by people who believe that humans can live peaceably and profitably together without somebody standing over them with a gun. Be warned: they won’t go voluntarily. Yes, it will require changes in the way we run our lives but if we don’t start this process very soon, we’re finished. If Israel thinks it can push 200million people into the desert so it can fulfill its grandiose mythological fantasies, it needs to be shown in the clearest of terms that it can’t. There is no room in the world today for supremacism, including Zionist supremacism. And if that’s antisemitic, I wear the badge with pride.
References:
1. Turchin, P. 2025. Ultrasociety. How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators o earth. Beresta Books.
2. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.
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.