The Number One Game in Town

Same as it’s ever been.

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 these sorely troubled times, we have to take our fun where we can, and possibly the only fun we’ll see this week is watching Mr Trump as he twists and turns in the steady gale blowing from the Epstein files. There’s no doubt Trump’s losing it as he struggles to control his narrative that he hardly knew Epstein who was a boring nobody and everybody should forget him. Even his favourite ploy, which we parents call “Oh, look at that pretty butterfly” to distract the little ankle-biters, or in his case “Watch us bomb them (fill in the space) to oblivion,” even that’s not working. People are demanding to know what went on, and that includes a lot of the self-righteous religious right who voted for him. Now, after his attorney-general, the ridiculous Pam Bondi, told everybody there was nothing in the voluminous Epstein files, they’ve decided they’d better talk to the one person who knows exactly where every body is buried and every disgusting old man is quaking in his boots, Epstein’s pimp and co-rapist, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Despite her airs and posh accent, Maxwell herself comes from the background of total skullduggery known as the British establishment, which was good training for her to act as procurer-in-chief for Epstein’s underage sex-trafficking racket. However, they’re not going to take up her offer to testify before Congress, where she answers live-to-air a bunch of questions they can’t control. Instead, they’re going to interview her in her prison, which means they control the interviewer, the questions and the transcript they’ve already written. In fact, just to be safe, Trump’s lackey in the House of Representatives, the speaker and sinister evangelist, Mike Johnson (R, LA), adjourned the current session and sent the “lawmakers” home until September, when another crisis may have replaced this one.

But hang on: those of us who remember the Nixon drama recall that (a) one burglary at the DNC office in Watergate was pretty small compared with this drama with its cast of thousands of the most influential men in the world and a dozen governments (and quite a few woman in minor roles); (b) Watergate was only one incident, not tens of thousands spread across thirty years and dozens of countries and (c) rather than hanging on like a demented mafia capo and threatening everybody who asks questions, Nixon resigned when he was told by Congressional leaders that he had lost support. Partly that’s because Trump is in fact a dementing mafia capo whose crime family are busy making hay before the cyclone hits them. First son-in-law J Kushner, for example, featured in this week’s Economist (paywall) as investing US$1.65billion to “develop” a pristine beach in Albania even though it’s a protected area and there already isn’t enough fresh water for the farmers, let alone swimming pools for the rich. For the rest of it, his loyal toadies in his cabinet know they’re on the road if he goes.

Anyway, we lesser mortals must wait to see which of the Great and the Good are laid low. Lots of them, we hope, but the big question is: How come all this stuff goes on? It seems there’s one world, the ordinary world, where people drop the kids at school and go to work and mow the lawns or take the dog to the vet, and there’s another, somewhere up and out there that seems to be very active and lively but we only hear snippets of gossip or the occasional sound of distant, drunken laughter. This is the world of wealth and power, of the 1% and their hangers-on, the world of travelling by private jets or huge yachts between $50,000 a night luxury hotels in Monaco and Dubai, of $2million Bugatti Veyrons and $5million weddings in Venice, where those baubles are simply distractions to amuse the mewling common herd and keep them in their place.

From early childhood, we are trained to believe that hard work delivers its own rewards, that by diligence and self-sacrifice, we too can leave our parents and schoolmates behind and reach a higher social plane. Good. All power to you but don’t forget your parents and schoolmates when you get there. However, there’s an important point about people who aspire to great wealth and power, that they don’t know when to stop. As they go up the golden ladder, so their sense of privilege and entitlement grows. Novara Media have an excellent commentary which shows how the entanglements grow and fester. It’s often said that people get sucked in by the thought of wealth and status but they don’t, they jump in. They’re drawn to this glittering world like flies to a dead cow; for years, they wait eagerly in the anteroom, grinning and tugging their forelocks. As soon as they get the nod, they’re in and never look back unless it’s to slam the door on somebody behind them. A colleague, who has more experience than most in the netherworld of family breakdown, trauma and abuse, saw the Novara video and asked:

How does your model of Narcisso-Fascism account for the male sex drive, the drive that manifests in this way at the highest levels of the social hierarchy, including paedophilia in the church, and active at the lowest level as wife beating and child abuse.

This reaches to the core of the concept. Recall that testosterone has a number of important roles. In the foetus, it shapes the male brain in vital but poorly understood ways, as the tragic case of David Reimer shows. He was a Canadian twin whose penis was mutilated during circumcision and who was subsequently raised as a girl. At 16, after a very troubled childhood, he learned the truth and reverted to male. He later married but this failed and, at 38, he killed himself. A few years later, his twin did the same. His case was a massive rebuttal of the notion that the brain is neutral and sexual roles are simply learned via what is called “social conditioning” but everybody seems to have forgotten that.

During childhood, testosterone levels in boys aren’t much different from girls but, at puberty, they rise rapidly, producing the typical primary (spermatogenesis etc.) and secondary sexual characteristics (bone and muscle development, hair, enlarged larynx, etc.) of adulthood. At this stage, the differential effects of testosterone are obvious: it’s a powerful “feel-good” hormone. It has a wide range of physical and psychological effects including a sense of power and a need to exert domination over the social and physical surroundings. Rising up the dominance hierarchy produces higher levels of testosterone, which feels fantastic, but being pushed down into a minor role inhibits it, which feels lousy.

A challenge produces a surge of testosterone which is necessary to meet the challenge but (a very big but) it also increases the likelihood that the individual will perceive more challenges and will want to respond aggressively. Testosterone is inherently destabilising. Moreover, and highly significantly, everybody knows this from direct experience but it’s implicit knowledge, on a par with riding a bike. How do you ride a bike? Nobody can say, we can only do it. How do we know testosterone is destabilising? We feel it, we love it. Nobody, however, will admit this. Everybody says “Of course I had to punch him, constable, he looked at me,” or “It’s rational to attack Iran, they’re, um, psst, just remind me? Oh yes, they’re probably developing nuclear weapons.”

In nature, of course, the sexual drive and the drive to dominate are intimately interwoven as a submissive male will not be able to find a partner to reproduce. However, in order to understand human behaviour, we need to separate the two drives, the drive for sex and the drive to dominate. In practice, they’re not the same. Human males don’t fight to get to the top just because they can pull in more chicks, they fight for dominance just because it feels good. They like it because the thought of fighting produces a surge of testosterone which is its own reward; any extra sex after the event is a fringe benefit that becomes available as they rise up the ladder. They will still struggle to be dominant even when there’s no possibility of a sexual reward. I’ve even seen it in a male orthopaedic ward where the men were all in plaster casts and traction, yet they were still trying to dominate each other! They were overtly friendly about it but it was a stationary battle to see who would be boss of the ward. In politics, finance, religion, the military and in criminal gangs, the man at the top feels better and more confident than his underlings and it is that sense that encourages him to dominate the women – or the choir boys – and take his pick. Men don’t, however, join any of these organisations believing this is the best way to get lots of roots (a vulgar Australianism; has nothing to do with cheering at football). They join an army to become a general, join a bank to get rich, or stand for parliament in order to become prime minister, all so they can be dominant.

This is universal, it is part of the human condition but hardly anybody sees it for what it is: the chief cause of the violence and chaos in the world today. International relations are only human relations writ large. And let’s not mince words: women like it. They all look toward the dominant man in the room, not at the shy bloke to one side, they laugh at his jokes and talk about him while ignoring the submissive little wallflower pressed against the back wall. There are plenty of good-looking, intelligent, polite men who, for personality reasons, are unassertive and retiring, and they get nowhere. They end up in chatrooms telling each other how horrible life is as an incel. Of course, they don’t blame themselves, they blame women, becoming increasingly resentful until the anger spills over into violence.

The crucial point, as I mentioned in yesterday’s Critical Psychiatry post, is that the whole deal of dominance and sexuality is self-reinforcing, it is non-linear. There is not a direct or linear relationship between testosterone and sexual activity, or aggression, or dominance as the processes are self-reinforcing – or self-destructive. As a man (it’s also women but we’ll leave them out of it for a while), as he goes up the hierarchy, he feels better, more expansive and more assertive; as he feels better, he sees more challenges, including attracting women, and responds more assertively (read: aggressively); if he succeeds, he gets another squirt of joy-juice so he gets louder, pushier and more dominant. If he fails, he shrinks back into his boots, hangs his head, mumbles something and slips away. Success breeds success, which is the basis of the phony “affirmation therapy,” where people tell pleasant lies to themselves, hoping they will come true: “Money comes to me effortlessly and easily. Wealth constantly flows into my life. My actions create constant prosperity…” I wish. All they are doing is trying to give themselves a bit of an artificial boost of testosterone: “Oh boy, I’m really gonna give it to the boss tomorrow, he’ll be sorry.” Next evening: “Well, dear, did you sort the boss out?” “Um, no, I er, decided against it” (when affirmation therapy gets into bed with religion, we get the heresy of prosperity gospel).

All this is bad enough, especially as we have vast industries built around the idea that dominance is the only game in town, but as people get richer and more powerful, they start to believe their own propaganda:

I worked hard for this, I deserve it, people who don’t have much are obviously lazy and should be punished, my feelings count but theirs don’t, why should I subsidise layabouts, drunks and junkies? We need workhouses, that’s what we need, and no death duties either, my children are entitled to inherit what I earned by hard work and self-sacrifice…

The mechanism of this change is just that the individual’s sense of territoriality grows. My territory is simply the area in which I feel safe to act dominant, and includes the things I am able to dominate. As the sense of power grows, so too does the knowledge of what can be dominated. A small, powerless person isn’t going to lay claim to much as he knows a bigger person can come along and take it, and there’s nothing he can do. A person who is feeling sick or battered by life can’t stand and argue with an aggressive, self-righteous person and will lose territory. However, as he gets stronger, he realises he can repel intrusions, so that’s what he does. Territoriality is just another aspect of dominance.

Crucially, the biological mechanism of dominance is self-reinforcing. The higher people get up the hierarchy, the more they believe their good fortune is justified; and if they get a bit of sex on the way, that’s a side-benefit, droit de seigneur, but it’s not the primary reason for taking the first step on the ladder (it’s interesting how modern French uses the expression droit de cuissage, meaning the right to the thigh). Men don’t fight to become a lord so they can bonk the peasant girls, they fight to crush the other men and take their castles. The peasant girls come with the castle. Same with the Harvey Weinsteins of the world (including the ecclesiastical world). They start their careers for the usual reasons kids start careers but somewhere, they get a bit on the side and decide “Well, that was no effort, I wonder if I could do it again? Ooh, that’s so easy, I must be a really attractive person, I’ll just get a little bit more. And quite a bit more. Oh, stop complaining, you’re enjoying it as much as I am.” Our ideas change with our opportunities. Weinstein may even have been a nice teenager who helped old ladies across the street, although I doubt it.

It’s important to remember that, with testosterone and similar hormones, we are talking of psychobiology, not of personality. Hormones exert direct, powerful effects on the mental state but their effects are also heavily influenced by personality factors. While our psychobiology is inherited, personality is acquired through life experiences. The actual mechanisms involved are at different descriptive levels of the animal but they merge and meld in unexpected ways to produce different outcomes in apparently similar people. Again, the interactions between personality and psychobiology are self-reinforcing. Purely by chance, a mildly anxious teenager can learn that by acting dominant, he can dispel his anxiety. An equally shy boy who always tries to be polite and courteous will fail to set limits on people acting aggressively around him, and thereby gets trapped in a self-reinforcing loop of social anxiety. This is not rocket science. We can sort all of this out without a single GWAS (which are brought to you at staggering expense and zero results by people who have no theory of personality, but that’s just my quibble).

The notion that men are only after sex has an element of truth, but not much more. Trump is a good example. In between ripping off investors, he spent his earlier years chasing every woman he could just for the pleasure of being able to dominate and humiliate them. Now that he’s too old and too fat to get it up, what does he do? Go home and play with the grandkids? Like hell, he wallows in the power. Gore Vidal said: “As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.” For Trump, it’s the exquisite delight of torturing people by forcing them to grovel, all without the strain of wriggling out of his IncontiPants. Finally, he’s got what he really wanted all along, the idea that he can make everybody kiss his arse. Sex is a surrogate for power but it’s not as good as the real thing, and he’s loving it: “Do as I say or we’ll slap tariffs on you/bomb you to oblivion etc.” It’s all about power, mafia power, and it’s only ever been about power. Detumescence is a bog but power is the gift that stays up all night and next day. Power twists the mind although, since their personality factors have already done much of the heavy lifting, a lot of greedy people don’t need either much power or much twisting to become seriously deformed human beings.

The cure is to prevent accumulations of power and wealth. The world can get by perfectly well without Musks and Bezos’s and oligarchs and peers of the realm, but that’s another story. Remember that nations are no more rational than the most irrational person who has clambered up the hierarchy. Trump’s tariff policy, which is wrecking American agriculture, is totally the product of a few stupid men who firmly believe they’re totally rational because God and history are on their side. They’re only pretending they don’t think with their balls. Trouble is, Trump and his cabinet and 99% of the politicians in the world today are so dumb that every time they count their balls, they get a different number.

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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.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.