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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Danny Haiphong is an author and journalist who runs a popular channel on YouTube in which he interviews mainly leftist writers and activists. Mercifully, he lets his guests talk without trying to impose his views on them. Recently, he interviewed a Prof. Jiang Xueqin but I can’t find much on him apart from he was in Canada for years and is now back in China as deputy principal of Tsinghua University High School. Is he now a professor? I don’t know, but he was asked about the huge US naval force hovering menacingly off the coast of Venezuela. He thought it was pretty stupid, if the US wants their oil, it’s much cheaper to buy it. Also, a direct invasion à la Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq would be much, much worse for the US than even those disasters.
At 3.45, after running through and discounting possible reasons for the US to attack Venezuela, he concluded: “Attacking Venezuela doesn’t really make any sense, it’s not going to get you anything …” That’s correct. It doesn’t make any sense, but who said sense has anything to do with it? If it made sense, it wouldn’t be politics because the people running the show don’t have an ounce of sense between them. In particular, they don’t have any sense of right or wrong, any morality because, and despite anything they will tell you, morality has nothing to do with invasions. For example, in 2001, an article in the NY Times in 2001 argued that Saddam Hussein was driven by “hatred intensified by a tribal culture of the blood feud,” and that the US had a moral duty to attack Iraq to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction. There was no threat, it was all a lie; it was actually about oil, maintaining the petrodollar and keeping the Zionist lobby happy. Instead of sense or morality, what our politicians have is either an insatiable urge to dominate everybody and everything in sight, or an irresistible lust to get rich, or both because they’re not so different.
With Venezuela, the excuse is illegal drugs, even though everybody in the world knows that Venezuela has practically nothing to do with the rivers of drugs flowing into the US. The “Cartel de los Soles,” supposedly a huge international drug gang headed by Venezuelan president Maduro, is entirely a figment of Trump’s palsied imagination. His policy of blowing up speedboats in international waters far from the US is nothing other than piracy and murder intended to whip up domestic support for an invasion. But why invade yet another country when all the other invasions have failed? Firstly, “This time is different,” he says, “so don’t believe your senses, believe me.” Second: oil. Venezuela sits on the world’s largest reserves of oil, specifically sour heavy oil, rich in sulphur, precisely the sort that all the refineries along the US Gulf coast were designed to process. At present, the US has to buy it from Canada, which is expensive; but they could buy it cheaper from Maduro himself if they lifted their sanctions, so why go to all the fuss and bother of an invasion? Third, because Venezuela is an associate of BRICS and is starting to sell oil to those countries outside the dollar system which, for the US, is a mortal threat. That’s why the US seized a Venezuelan tanker this week (aka piracy). The country that has the world reserve currency is sitting pretty in so many ways but if they lose that status, they’re cactus. Just ask Britain.
That’s why the talk of invading Venezuela. Not for the oil itself, although that would be nice, but to maintain status as the Numero Uno in the world. It’s all about domination and always has been. Now, it’s starting to crumble but there’s no way a US politician is going to say: “We need to stop all this World Policeman business and accept that we’re no better than everybody else. We should drop the reserve currency, stop all these wars. Remember Matthew 7: 3-5, all you supposed Christians, and let’s clean up our own mess.” If one did say that and put up some figures, I’m fairly sure that two thirds of the population would nod and agree, and he would be dumped at the next election. The bizarre brand of money politics in the US would see to that. This points to the preeminent question in modern life: Who gets power? Alternatively, why are all the people with money and power such complete shits?
Looking at the last 80 years since WWII, if we take any statistic or measurable parameter and project it forward another 80 or 100 years, what is the picture that emerges? In 1964, the world population was about 3.2billion; 60 years later, it’s nearly three times that. That level of growth and the consumption it entails is unsustainable. It cannot get to 30billion, the very thought is madness. Project forward the destruction of forests, fishing grounds and aquatic populations, loss of wetlands, loss of prime agricultural land, of insect species and other pollinators, of potable water, or the accumulation of plastic waste, toxic industrial wastes, greenhouse gases, nuclear waste, anything, it doesn’t matter. All we have to do is get the graph for the past 80 years and work out where it will be when our great grandchildren are running the show, and ask ourselves what they will think of the job we’ve left them. I don’t think they’ll be happy at all. If we can’t perform this simple test, if we can’t work out where our actions are heading, then we shouldn’t be doing whatever we’re doing. Be sure of one thing: Donald Trump does not have the intellectual capacity to project a graph forward, or the emotional capacity to do what is better for everbody else and not himself, yet he is making most of the big decisions. If that doesn’t keep you awake at night, it should.
Whatever you do, don’t shrug and say “She’ll be right, he’s not going to live much longer,” because there are fifty or a hundred wannabes in DC right now who are plotting to inherit his grubby mantle. But they’re not the ones you have to worry about. When it comes to politics, it’s like what fishermen say about crocodiles in the North of this country: “Don’t worry about the crocs you can see, worry about the one you can’t see” (estuarine crocodiles are the supreme stealth hunters). Same goes for the wealthy. Don’t worry about the stuff you see on TV because, as the Epstein business shows, the real worry is what they’re doing when they think nobody’s watching. Dropsite News is running a series on the cache of previously hidden Epstein emails that show how the real corruption is hidden behind layers of foundations, offshore accounts and connections that nobody even suspects. The most recent (long) report shows how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been moved here, there and everywhere, carefully avoiding scrutiny by tax authorities, banks, police and so on – many of whom were bribed anyway.
This is just one leak about one individual: there are millions of similar set-ups around the world. We are talking of almost cosmic levels of adroitly concealed corruption and criminality, often hiding in plain sight, which, unfortunately, you and I will never know about. But then if we did, what could we do about it when the people charged with overseeing our affairs are greedily feeding at the same trough themselves? A week or so ago, I mentioned a local politician called Graham Richardson who had finally flapped his wings and begun the long glide downstairs. They buried him yesterday, a state funeral in fact, and the prime minister who, even on his sternest days, makes jellyfish look stiff and unbending, gave the eulogy. “A man of many facets,” Albanese called Richardson, which is politician-speak for ‘a prick of the first order,’ because he was.
How could anybody so deceitful and self-interested get anywhere near the heart of the state? Well, that’s just it. That’s who gets close to power, and that’s how they get there. They are drawn to power because it’s oxygen to them, they need it to survive. They don’t need squishy things like affection and doing the right thing, those things don’t even rate. Once they have slithered through the door, they protect each other and, most importantly, they make sure nobody gets through the door who can’t be corrupted. The political process is a self-selecting and self-reinforcing process that sorts newcomers into “one of us” and “one of them, get rid of him/her.” Nearly thirty years ago, there was a huge Royal Commission into police corruption in New South Wales (the Wood commission). A reporter close to the action published Confessions of a Crooked Cop, an insider account that showed how new recruits to the police force were tested to see if they could be bent. Those who could were given favoured posts and advanced rapidly; those who couldn’t were sent to the bush. That system writ large is exactly what we have built and fine-tuned over the years. It sorts the sheep from the goats, sends the sheep to the abattoir and lets the goats loose in the vegie garden. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
One of the sleazebags exposed by the Epstein emails is the very well-known politician and economist, Larry Summers, who was born in 1954. According to a recent article based on the emails, in the mid-1990s, Summers was worth about $400,000 in all. Today, he is reputedly worth about $45million although he has worked almost entirely in government, education and administration. His family background was one of immense privilege and connections; he has never sweated in his life and has never gone without. In 1982, for example, aged 28, he was appointed to Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was later chief economist at the World Bank, Clinton’s treasury chief, president of Harvard, a key advisor to Obama during the GFC, on and on. He is an ardent neoliberal and bitterly criticised Biden’s recovery plans following the Covid economic slump. In 2005, he remarried and spent his honeymoon on a Caribbean island called Little St James, which has been in the news lately. A month ago, he was forced to resign most of his many posts following exposure of his long-time links to the late owner of the island, one Jeffrey Epstein.
I’m sure Summers never shot at another human or dropped a bomb on a tent full of refugees but those events don’t take place in a vacuum and it doesn’t excuse his culpability. There are no wars without enablers such as bankers, industrialists, oil majors, miners, secret lobbyists, and young Larry was right there in the thick of it. It will take years, if ever, for the full extent of his corruption to emerge but the damage he has done to economic systems around the world has been enormous and in full view. He got lots of medals and honours for it, of course. The GFC itself was very much the result of policy changes he convinced Clinton to enact. The World Bank’s brutal “austerity policies” for debtor nations have his thumb prints all over them. He opposed policies to prevent climate change. He supported arms sales to Israel and other countries, knowing they would be used illegally and immorally. How did he get to be in such a position? No doubt he was clever and could talk his way out of a death sentence, he was born into connections which he worked non-stop, but mainly he was able to sell the idea of “trickle-down” economics to people who stood to benefit from it. Without the neoliberal doctrine of “free market, small government, austerity for the poor and beneficience to the wealthy,” he wouldn’t have gone very far.
Half a world away, the political movement Epstein and Summers supported so diligently is hard at work building a brutal apartheid state. Their latest move is to mandate the death penalty for certain race-based offences, in a country that has only used it just once in 80 years, when a special law was passed to execute Adolf Eichmann in 1962. During the debate, in case anybody misunderstood their intent, supporters of the move led by the National Security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, wore gold lapel badges in the shape of a noose. Ben Gvir is a depraved human being but don’t let anybody mislead you: he is most emphatically not mentally ill. He simply wants to kill or otherwise remove from the landscape up to ten million people who, for thousands of years, have lived where he and his followers want to live in a repressive and patriarchal, race-based theocracy. He doesn’t hear voices, he is not manic-depressive, he is just full of hate for the “human animals” who won’t do as he tells them. If they fight back, as humans do when faced with brutal repression, he wants them labelled as “terrorists” and put to death. He suggested a noose but he isn’t fussy, lethal injections will do. When he announced this, his office phone ran hot with doctors wanting to press the plunger. That the whole thing, from A to Z, is illegal under international law bothers him and his followers not one iota. God’s on their side, who is this damned UN to tell them otherwise?
How did he get there? He is a seriously unlovely character in every respect. When a gang of Israeli troops were arrested earlier this year after they were videoed raping a Palestinian prisoner, Ben Gvir led a mob to the army base where they were being held to force their release. That’s just one of hundreds of similar incidents in his career. He is now banned from entering Australia and half a dozen other countries, so how did he get there? It’s very simple: like Summers, he sells the politics of domination to people who want to hear it. The reason he is so successful is because of the passion with which he broadcasts it. He is passionate because he believes it body and soul, because he needs to dominate in order to feel good. Granted, he sells it dressed as religion but the message is the same: We are going to drive them out and if they resist, we will kill them all, men, women and children. This is as old as humans because the urge to dominate is coded into our DNA, as is the drive to resist. All primates show it, we’re no different from baboons on the veldt, or even dogs in the street. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Baboons can’t say: “Well, in the interests of a peaceful life, I’m going to ignore those silly apes from the next tribe.” If they don’t resist, they get pushed out and they will die.
Domination and resistance are opposite sides of the same coin. We can make the decision to live peacefully but we rarely do. Ben Gvir and his evil mates could negotiate a settlement with the indigenous people if they chose. They could say: “Hmm, if we keep pushing this Promised Land for the Chosen People stuff, everybody else is going to despise us so we’d better pull our heads in and try to live peaceably.” They could say that but, because the political process selects for inflammatory extremists, people Prof. Eva Illouz called “Jewish fascists,” they would rather cut their legs off with a rusty saw than back down. Backing down would force them down the dominance hierarchy, which they experience as humiliation. Since they have welded their self-esteem to being on top, they will resist. This is the paradox of hierarchy. On one side, we have people who tell each other that God gave them the land so if they don’t clear it of non-believers, they are going against God’s will and will suffer eternal punishment. On the other, we have people who, as Ben Gurion said, don’t worship the same God but, by virtue of the same DNA, will fight to death for their rights.
The issue at present, the question that will determine whether humanity continues in recognisable form or is reduced to struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, is how we manage our common urge to dominate. Do we give in and let the very worst people take control, people who would sooner destroy the world than stand back and let everybody have a share, or do we push back? Remember that with very, very few exceptions, people who hold power do so for the wrong reasons. As we are seeing every day, they are terrible people. If they’re not entirely terrible themselves, they’re certainly happy rubbing shoulders and taking favours from people who are. The corruption is everywhere.
If you would like a little more on the unspeakable grubs who worm their way into power, watch this and read this, they’re not long. And now I’ve run out of space but we haven’t even started on the Trump mafia. Oh well, watch this short clip instead.
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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.
You have a great turn of phrase, Niall.