The Gods of War

Actually, they’re human.

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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Last week’s screed on what may prove to be the fatal flaw of the human species, our biologically-based lust for power and domination, moved some readers to ask: “What’s psychiatry doing about it?” The short answer is – Nothing. 99% of psychiatrists know nothing about it, and the 1% who do have been pushed aside by the stampede of psychiatrists exercising their lust for power and domination. Even if they were told, the mainstream would say “It’s not our responsibility, we deal in mental disorder, not normal function.” That raises an important point: if everybody’s doing it, it’s not mental disorder, and it’s not even personality disorder. When missionaries first arrived in far north Australia, they insisted the locals wear clothes, which led to an explosion of scabies, body lice and other skin infections. In that climate, nakedness had clear survival value and was therefore normal.

Similarly, there are certain villages in New Guinea where, from time to time, all the men dance naked except for their headdresses and a long gourd shell as a penis holder. Everybody in the village comes to watch the spectacle and claps loudly, as in this video (notice how YouTube has discreetly blurred their buttocks). That’s normal, which is the origin of the aphorism, “In the land where men wear but a string around their waists, to go without it is obscene.” The Egyptian pharaohs, of course, married their sisters to keep the blood line pure. That was normal. Normality is what the society says it is, but normality and desirability don’t often cross paths. We saw this last week in the report of a survey of Israelis which showed that 47% of them want their military to wipe out every living Palestinian. That’s not desirable but it’s now become normal: nobody objects to gangs of young thugs rampaging through the streets yelling “Death to the Arabs.” Quite often, even cabinet ministers such as Belazil Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir join in gleefully. Remember that in Nazi Germany, the destruction of Jewish people, Slavs, Romany and other races and groups was kept secret because the government knew ordinary citizens wouldn’t stand for it.

Meantime, back in Godzone, the US president has taken the unprecedented step during peacetime of ordering armed troops to patrol the streets of Los Angeles to enforce his rulings on arresting immigrants, perhaps as a distraction from complaints about his apparently endless corruption. The Health Secretary, Mr RF Kennedy Jr, has sacked the 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, even though he said during his confirmation hearing that he would not do that. The acting head of USAID, also Secretary of State, acting DNI and a few other jobs, Mr Marco Rubio, has completely disbanded all foreign aid programs, including hundreds of medical and public health projects such as polio, HIV and malaria prevention. It is estimated that this could eventually lead to millions of preventable deaths, especially in children but Rubio is unmoved by these criticisms. Over in the UK, the current prime minister, who came from nowhere to get the job, has been exposed as a serial liar while in Australia, all you can hear is the sound of millions of teeth being ground to a paste as the former prime minister, the most devious person ever to occupy the post, has been awarded the country’s highest civil honour for “his leadership during the Covid crisis.” This is the same person who secretly slipped out of the country during the bushfires disaster and broke half a dozen laws by actively concealing the fact; secretly appointed himself to another five cabinet posts without informing the incumbents; engineered the Robodebt scandal which resulted in many suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, admissions to hospital, and so on. Oh, and he messed up the ordering process for immunisations during Covid but, as a devout Christian, he had himself filmed in church so that was OK. His award was approved by the current PM who makes jellyfish look stiff and unbending.

What’s going on? How come our political leaders are so egregiously awful? There was a time when we could grant our politicians a degree of respect. We may not have liked or agreed with them but generally, they had earned the right to sit at the head of the table. I’ve long had the idea that politics has changed, away from the idea of service to where the power-hungry and the venal quietly meet to sort out who gets what in a frantic free-for-all. In the main, politicians start their careers during their teenage or early adult years, spending their university years grinding up the ladder of student politics. By 25, they are firmly enmeshed in a world which has very little contact with rough-edged reality, slipping from one political job to another, perhaps with a brief spell in some white collar job organised for them by wealthy or powerful patrons. All too often, they have been born into political families and really don’t know anything else; their friends are all in the same game; they have very few interests or hobbies outside the world of politics and power; if they study, they study something that will help them get ahead – law, politics, economics – and every involvement is with an eye to future advantages. If they get involved in a club or charity, they quickly slither up the hierarchy, which is also true if they have a professional background, e.g. the AMA. Today’s politicians are political animals through and through, in it for themselves and to hell with the hindmost.

That was the view I gained, having watched (from outside their closed world) dozens of budding politicians at university and ever since. Overwhelmingly, my cynical suspicions proved true so I was interested to see an article this week by one of the country’s most senior and best respected political journalists, Jack Waterford. He studied law at ANU in Canberra, started in journalism at 20 with the Canberra Times and eventually became editor in chief. As doyen of the Canberra press gallery, he has known every significant politician in the country for the past half century, as well as all the lobbyists, movers and shakers and axe-grinders who lurk in dark places in that faux city. In one of his regular columns in a newsletter, he talked about a deeply-entrenched problem on both sides of politics, essentially its detachment from reality (it’s a good article, not very long). Everything he said is true of politics at all levels in this country, but also practically every other country in the world, especially the US and UK: the people who are tasked with running the trains and rubbish collection while we get on with life reside in a bubble of their own making and are deeply resentful of any attempts to question or correct them.

Look at Trump this week: he is absolutely furious that mere citizens could try to interfere with his plan to deport foreigners, so he has sent the US Army to fire teargas and rubber bullets at them. However, he is not alone and he is not an aberration: he is the logical outcome of political processes underway in the West more or less since World War II, a case of more of the same only worse. Speaking on Trump’s latest U-turn (dropping Israel in favour of the Gulf Arabs), journalist CJ Werleman said of him: “…he is a malignant narcissist who lies about everything, cheats on everyone… He has only one ideology, himself… every relationship is about enriching himself” (starts here at 1.03). This term ‘malignant narcissist’ is just a polite term for psychopath but what counts is Trump’s drive to dominate, everybody, everywhere, at all times and in all respects. Trouble is, his countrymen don’t see that as abnormal. For them, after 80 years of non-stop indoctrination, world domination just is the purpose of life.

The problem is that the political apprenticeship described so well by Jack Waterford selects for the 5-10% of people who are intrigued, thrilled and aroused by power, and all the trappings that power brings. Ordinary people are bored witless by meetings or spending weekends in seminars in order to “network,” as they call it, but our budding pollies love it: to them, that’s what life is about. Arguing over trivia such as which pronoun to use (I saw a new one this week: people are to be addressed as Mx, not Mr or Miss or even Ms) or whether to licence domestic cats is only window-dressing, an excuse to indulge in their favourite game, wallowing in the intoxicating aroma of power. While the rest of us are mowing the lawns or taking the kids to the beach, these people position themselves to run the country. The narcissistic element is this: “Look at me, I prove how tough I am by dominating everybody.”

Trouble is, it isn’t possible for everybody to be dominant. Dominance hierarchies are shaped like pyramids, a broad base narrowing to a single spot at the top. For every top dog leading the pack, there’s a lot of other dogs tagging along behind, scared to step out of line or plotting to take over. But nobody, not dogs, not humans, likes bringing up the rear, it isn’t fun, it isn’t intriguing, thrilling or arousing. Definitely not the latter: being submissive is inhibitory of sexual arousal, especially for males, so they fight to get to the top. This is the paradox of hierarchy, that hard-wired into all of us is an urge to get to the top coupled with an equally strong urge to resist being crushed underfoot. The rich man says: “I prove how tough I am by dominating everybody.” The poor man replies: “I prove how tough I am by making sure nobody dominates me.” This leads to all sorts of psychopathology, on an individual level and at the national and international levels.

Using the lens of the dominance hierarchy, we can make sense of a lot of what people do. John Mearsheimer, a widely-quoted American political scientist says international relations are chaotic and anarchic, and therefore countries must struggle and fight to gain regional hegemony or be crushed. Mearsheimer is completely wrong, he has it back to front. The correct view is that international relations are chaotic and anarchic just because countries are all fighting for hegemony. If they all stopped snarling and biting, peace would reign. Why are they fighting to dominate each other? Because Homo sapiens. Now psychiatry’s role in this becomes clear: they have no role, for a clear reason.

Readers asked: “What’s psychiatry doing about it?” The answer is that psychiatry doesn’t deal with normality. If fighting and murder is normal, they don’t deal with it. They may deal with the consequences, now called PTSD, but they don’t deal with causes just because they have no theory of mind or model of mental disorder to tell them what to do. This is important. Psychiatry is the only specialty in the expanding field of medicine that doesn’t start with a clear picture of normality in its subject matter. In every other field, we study normal before we look at the abnormal – normal anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, immunology and so on – before starting on pathology. We spent a long time on normal neuroanatomy and physiology before we started on physical diseases of the brain and nervous system (neurology).

Psychiatry doesn’t do that. In the first lecture in psychiatry, the professor walks in and immediately starts talking about brain chemistry, neurotransmitters, genes and all that stuff. Students are given absolutely no grounding in what the mind is, how it arises, how it relates to the brain, how it interacts with the outside world to cause behaviour, and so on. Now that is not education in any sense of the word as universities (should) use it, which is about carefully looking at the evidence and coming to a conclusion. As it stands today, education in psychiatry is not about an education in the science of mental disorder, it is an indoctrination in an ideology of mental disorder as biology. So normality, as far as it exists in the world, is a closed book to the great majority of psychiatrists. And if violence is normal, psychiatry has nothing to say, doesn’t even see it. If lying among politicians is normal, don’t ask psychiatrists for advice. This is because they have no theory of mind, so we can forget them.

Trouble is, we can’t forget the rising mayhem and wickedness throughout the world, otherwise it will engulf us all. Fortunately, we can move beyond the dead-end of, say, Mearsheimer’s perception of world relations. As mentioned, his view is that our understanding of the anarchy in the world today stops at the point of saying “Oh well, that’s just how international relations are, anarchic.” That’s no explanation. All it does is give licence to the violent and wicked people who want to dominate everybody to be as violent and wicked as they like because, in Mearsheimer’s account (I won’t say model because it isn’t), that is the only conceivable way to peace in their country. If all the neighbouring countries are either cowed into submission or smashed into rubble, then there will be a sort of peace, albeit militarised, for the victor: “Oh, goody, we can go and smash those shits because Mearsheimer said we have to.”

So they impose a peace but it won’t last, of course, the victors will become corrupted by power and the victims will get their breath back, reorganise and try to knock the imperialists off their perch. That’s inevitable. This is because Mearsheimer’s view of international relations is wholly descriptive, with no explanatory power. He observes the scene as anarchic, but when it comes to the very obvious questions: “Why is it anarchic?” he has nothing to say. He is stuck in the observational dimension without a more fundamental model to use. In simple terms, he has no model of individual human psychology to explain mass human behaviour. He may as well invoke gods of war to complete his account (worse still, he can’t actually stop anybody else who wants to use gods of war to explain the anarchy).

The biocognitive model, on the other hand, is explanatory. It starts with the observations (countries constantly arguing and fighting) and then offers an explanation which is one dimension removed from the observations. It jumps back to the more fundamental matter of humans always wanting to dominate because that is what their biology dictates. To give a reductive explanation of mass human behaviour, such as wars and exploitation, we necessarily move down the explanatory chain to individual psychology, specifically the concept of a testosterone-fuelled dominance hierarchy.

The good news is, we aren’t just the playthings or victims of gods of war so international relations (and all other relations) don’t have to be anarchic. The bad news is, there are no gods to placate with sacrifices of virgins or cities, so we have to do it ourselves: there’s no control like self-control. Did you hear that, Donald? I hope so, because the thought of his pudgy little fingers hovering over the big red button on that desk while what’s left of his tiny mind is wondering if he can grab that reporter’s privates, that keeps me awake at night. I really would like my grandchildren to have a decent world to live in, but while men who think only in terms of wars of domination (that’s you, Mr Hegseth) are running the show, I seriously doubt they will.

The world watches aghast as Trump II degenerates into self-parody, dragging us closer to the edge but don’t pray to Ares or Mars for peace, peace depends on humans giving up the urge to dominate each other and, instead, working together. Change is up to us. Don’t think it will come from the rich or powerful as they’re incapable of ordering a change in the world that will reduce their power. The biocognitive model says nobody ever gives up power willingly. It might make ethical sense but it goes against biology. The good news is that biology can be trained but only when people realise they don’t have to be Number One. It doesn’t have to be this way.

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