To Catch a Monkey

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. If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers.

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There are two ways to catch a monkey. You can chase him through the trees but that probably won’t be very successful. It’s said that indigenous hunters in South America have a much better way of trapping monkeys, they use the monkey to catch himself. They take a vase with a long, narrow neck, put some ripe bananas inside it and then tie it in a tree. A monkey comes along and smells the fruit. He puts his hand inside and grabs some bananas, then can’t get his hand out. The monkey has been trapped by his greed. Keep that in mind.

I recently spoke with Dr Pascal Lottaz, of Kyoto University, a renowned researcher in international relations. The interview is posted on YouTube, with a summary and link on the publisher’s site which bears the fairly provocative (AI generated) title: The FASCIST Core Of The Euro-Atlantic Regimes: A Psychological and Societal Analysis (also, that photo is years old, must still be lurking on the internet). Pascal churns out an enviable number of informative videos and is definitely worth watching.

After seeing the video, a reader in India commented:

What makes a politician a politician and why would they choose that path and career? I thought they are all power hungry narcissists, hence they choose that path … Human behaviour is same across the world. … we are just separated by some skin colour, food habits and some behavioural habits specific to region. underneath human behaviour is same.

A similar comment came from a retired biophysicist who worked mainly in IT:

You described the human being as either striving to become more dominant or sinking in the hierarchy.… I, and many of my friends … are independent enough not to worry about sinking and have no desire to dominate other people. It takes effort to dominate and, when dominating, one must devote effort to prevent competitors from dominating and pushing one down. Thus, this would prevent full time study and teaching. My question is: Is this not a possible alternative that many people might seek?

International relations (IR) looks at mass human behaviour. If we want to explain IR, as distinct from describe it, we have to drop down a level to look at the individual humans who make up the mass. Mass behaviour is simply the product of all the individuals except that, at the international level, decisions are made by a small group vested with a great deal of authority by the rest of the population. They alone are authorised to negotiate deals, sign treaties and, of course, commit the country to war. The rest of us have to tag along, with an opportunity every few years to throw the scoundrels out and give the other lot a run. Democracy isn’t the right to choose the government you want, it’s the right to throw out the government you no longer want. That difference counts.

We therefore need to look very closely at this system and ask: “Who are the people who get into power?” In a hereditary system, leaders are born to power and, as a result, have a gigantic sense of privilege and entitlement. Their sense of entitlement is so big and so deeply entrenched in their sense of self that we had to invent an aphorism, Noblesse oblige, to remind them that with entitlement comes duty. They, of course think only that la noblesse, elle mérite plus, nobility always deserves more. This is part of human territoriality, the notion that says “This is mine so keep away.”

In democratic societies, we would like to think that sort of thing has all gone but of course it hasn’t. So many of our politicians come from powerful families, where politics and wealth go hand-in-hand, and all of them have an over-developed sense of what they’re entitled to, as in “Qu'ils mangent de la brioche,” Let them eat cake. Many people born to riches feel drawn to politics and some of them are even quite nice people but the one thing they will never do, because it goes right against millions of years of evolution, is vote to give away what they feel is theirs by birthright. They may work to give more to the poor but they will always make sure they get their cut, too. Discreetly, of course.

However, not every child of a powerful family goes into politics, while many politicians come from nowhere to grab the prize, so what sets them apart? For any field, to start nowhere and get to the top takes a huge amount of talent, energy and determination. Race, religion, wealth, opportunity and so on, these don’t count in getting to the top and staying there. What counts is their determination to pursue power at any cost, and leave everything else behind. For a committed politician, everything else in life can be sacrificed. In particular, values such as integrity and honesty get in the way so they are among the first to go. But this is also true of practically anybody who wants to get to the top in any field. If you want to be a top actor, or artist, or athlete, a general, musician or businessman, a scientist, surgeon or preacher, getting ahead has to be all that counts because if it doesn’t, you won’t get there.

The difference between politicians and all of the others is that while the goal in golf is hitting a ball or music is singing a song, the goal in politics is power. It’s nice to win the F1 cup but all drivers know that in a year or two, some young bloke will come along and take the prize from them. The difference between racing drivers and politicians is that racing drivers know when to stop (mostly, a lot of them can’t handle life without the adulation and turn to booze and drugs, à la Maradona, Georgie Best and so many other tragic figures). The sportsman or scientist or novelist is in that job because they like it, it’s fascinating and exciting but the politician is there for the power – and all the perks, of course. Why do they want power? Here, we move from talking about humans in general to a smaller sample of humans, from the broadest human drives to individual motivation. In other words, we’re talking about psychopathology.

People are attracted to power because it feels good: Power is the goal and power is the reward because, of all possible drives, it alone is biologically rewarding. There are plenty of people who, through no fault of their own, grow up in families or environments where they can never feel good about themselves. From early childhood, through adolescence and into early adult life, they feel terrible. When interviewing patients, the last question I always ask is: “How do you rate your self-esteem, how do you feel about yourself as a person?” Because these were generally people from the poorer side of town who had had a pretty miserable start in life, the answers were very revealing. Over and over again, the answers were:

Shit. I feel I’m a fat piece of shit.

I’m ugly, stupid and hopeless.

I’m a total loser, I can’t do anything without stuffing it up.

Nobody could possibly like me, even my own mother never liked me.

If you wake in the morning and your first thought is “I have to spend another day with that stupid loser,” and you’re the stupid loser, then your day is off to a bad start and will only go downhill. If something good actually happens, you don’t celebrate, you just sit there waiting for something else to go wrong.

But if at some stage it happens that you realise that by getting up the ladder a bit to where you can look down on somebody else, you feel better, a bit more powerful, then you will want to get higher, you want more power. It stands to reason: if a little bit of power feels good, then more will feel better. Very quickly, people learn that being up the ladder beats being at the bottom, so they force their way up, then they look for a bigger ladder. One day, it dawns on them that there is a gigantic and endless source of power called politics, so that’s where they head. Underneath, they still feel shit about themselves except now, by wielding power and pushing people around, they can forget about it. If they can fool everybody into believing they’re hot, then they start to believe it themselves. So it becomes like a drug, they have to have their daily fix of being in charge and dominating people. Without it, they crash and burn so they do everything they can to make sure that never happens, that they make other people crash instead. One day, they get to the top, then they have the power to get even with all the people who got in their way, even that big kid at school all those years ago. Poor self-esteem never forgets. And so, from the kid who had no self-esteem, is born an adult with no integrity, otherwise known as autocracy.

That can also happen to wealthy children, of course. Ignored or treated badly by parents who are too busy having a good time or drunk or ripping arms and legs off people, these kids end up with a double dose of psychopathology: a gargantuan sense of privilege and terrible self-esteem. That’s a bad psychological cocktail. Combine that with intelligence, a well-developed sense of stealth and an ability to follow instructions, no matter how bad, to the letter, then that person will very quickly slide up the hierarchy. When he gets to the top, his first move will be to eliminate all competition but he will never feel safe because he doesn’t have that inner sense of knowing he is a decent human being.

People who get into politics are rarely there out of a sense of duty for others. If they are, they won’t get far. The people who survive in the political jungle are mostly of completely the wrong character to be acting in the broader interests of the community and nation – look at Boris Johnston, Scott Morrison, the bunch of self-serving fruitcakes in Trump’s cabinet and the oligarchs surrounding Putin. Once they’re in, they can’t stop. They are trapped by their greed and hunger for power. Young Mr Smith decides a life in politics would be just right for him, so he joins a party, does lots of boring jobs at night and weekends, mostly in the rain or on blistering hot days, but he is always helpful and never complains. Before long, he starts to go up the ladder and offers himself for preselection for a seat (primary). The party gives him the nod, puts their resources behind him and then he’s in. And trapped. He knows that if he goes against the party, he’s out, so he never does. He becomes a good party hack and soon rises up the ladder in the parliamentary party, then he gets a junior cabinet post and the runway is clear for take off to the stratosphere. But he’s trapped. The party owns him body and soul, or what passes for his soul.

Or maybe he’s already in parliament but he’s struggling, there’s some very good candidates standing against him and he could easily get the flick. One day, he’s approached by a very well-organised lobby group with apparently endless money who offer all the support he needs to keep his seat. Eagerly, he accepts and that’s it. He is then owned by the lobby group who keep him in power so he can get the daily fix he desperately needs. Whatever choices he may once have had are gone, forever. The more he accepts, the deeper he goes until one day, only his feet are sticking out of their maw but it’s a double-whammy. If he does as they want, he gets a life of fun and ease, frolicking with all the other powerful people, but if he tries to be independent, he’s out on his arse with nothing but his personal demons for company. That’s when people start to drink. This, of course, is exactly how the Israel-Zionist lobby operates throughout the West and how they come to wield such power. They have huge numbers of grinning monkeys sitting trapped in trees, too greedy to stop reaching for the bananas their smiling benefactors are handing them. They’re not the only corrupting lobby, of course, they just do it bigger and better.

To pull this together, central to the idea of Narcisso-Fascism is the principle that humans are the same all over the world, any differences are only skin-deep. First and foremost, we are social animals, we like to get together rather than wander off alone but we also fear the unfamiliar, especially other people (xenophobia). We want to be dominant, which leads to the paradox of hierarchy, as we also fight against being dominated; and we are intensely territorial and acquisitive. These are common psychological factors with a strong biological basis; they incline us to act in a certain way but they can’t compel it.

Obviously, that’s a recipe for tribalism. Tribalism defines us. We are aggressively tribal creatures who have never worked out how to live in peace with other tribes. The reason we haven’t mastered this elementary skill is because the people who get to be at the top of each hierarchy, the people who have to negotiate peace with the next tribe, are incapable. They are entirely the wrong people to go on peace negotiations. The process of getting to the top of the hierarchy selects the wrong people. Of course, they don’t tell us that but they all know that anybody at their level is a scoundrel.

The fact that they fought their way to the top is proof of their unsuitability because nice, placid people with a strong sense of self-worth don’t get to the top. If by some stroke of luck, they do, then they won’t last long. As soon as they sit on the winner’s seat, some dark souls in the audience will be plotting how to take them out and grab it themselves. That’s what humans do, that’s what we are, which is why the psychology of a mass of human beings is aggressively tribal, exactly the same as the other great apes, of course. Which brings us back to the poor little monkey trapped by a banana in a vase somewhere in Amazonia: under all our cleverness and our wordplay and technology and glitter and drama, we’re no different, so easily trapped by greed.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

1. The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon (also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

2. Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

3. Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

4. 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.