Why Fools Rise to Power: Psychologist EXPOSES Western Elites | Dr. Niall McLaren

## Niall McLaren and Narcisso-Fascism The conversation centers on a provocative psychological diagnosis of contemporary power: elites who rule through a cocktail of entitlement, dominance drives, and mutual reinforcement. Drawing on his book Narcisso-Fascism and decades in clinical practice, Dr. Niall McLaren frames political behavior as an extension of individual psychology — not merely metaphorically but as a causal engine that propels imperialism, policy choices, and institutional rigidity. The claim is straightforward and unsettling: if we want to understand why kakistocratic elites so often govern Europe and North America, we should begin by examining the human urge to dominate, the social mechanics that magnify it, and the clinical forms it can take when reinforced by institutions. McLaren situates this diagnosis within a broader intellectual lineage. Trained as a psychiatrist and critical thinker about psychiatric science, he has developed a biocognitive model of mental disorder that emphasizes psychological processes grounded in bodily realities. He then tests this model in politics, insisting that an accurate account of extremist or authoritarian tendencies must start with what drives individuals. The video’s discussion does not abandon structural analysis — rather, it seeks to re-order explanatory priorities. Structures matter, but they are composed of people whose aims, insecurities, and desires for status shape how those structures form and operate. ## Dominance and the paradox of hierarchy At the heart of McLaren’s argument is what he calls the paradox of hierarchy: humans have an ineradicable impulse to form dominance hierarchies and to climb them, yet they also possess a lasting, deep aversion to being subordinated. This duality produces constant tension. When people compete to rise, they elicit resistance from those who are kept down; when some finally reach the top, their increased sense of entitlement tends to harden into exclusionary practices designed to prevent rivals from rising behind them. The psychological mechanisms McLaren emphasizes are familiar from evolutionary and developmental psychology — the social drive, in-group loyalty, xenophobia — but he stresses their potency and pervasiveness. Small, everyday dynamics from schoolyards to boardrooms instantiate the same competition for rank. The result is not merely personal ambition but a social ecology where institutions become instruments of status preservation. In this frame, politics resembles an extended social contest whose rules are often justified after the fact: meritocratic narratives, divine rights, national exceptionalism — all function as retrospective legitimation for a prior scramble for dominance. ## Entitlement, wealth, and imperial expansion The conversation links individual entitlement to systemic expansion. McLaren argues that oligarchic appetites for land, resources, or influence are not merely structural outcomes of capitalism or geopolitics; they also reflect the psychology of those who profit. Wealth amplifies a sense of deservedness and removes everyday constraints on domination. This produces insatiable demands — yachts multiplied, territories coveted, influence hoarded — that then find institutional expression in colonialism, empire, and interventionist foreign policy. Importantly, McLaren does not reduce imperialism to mere avarice. He highlights how entitlement operates as a moral and cognitive framework: actors come to believe that their elevated status entitles them to exceptional prerogatives. Cultural scripts — monarchy, manifest destiny, civilizing missions — feed on this. When entitlement is shared among the social elite, reinforcement becomes structural: elites legitimize one another, punish dissent within their ranks, and institutionalize privileges that make upward mobility for outsiders rarer and more costly. The psychological explanation offered here complements, rather than cancels, economic or geopolitical accounts: it supplies motive, affect, and a micro-foundation for macro-expansion. ## Human nature versus offensive realism A key intellectual flashpoint in the video is the debate between psychological reductionism and systemic theories like offensive realism. Offensive realism claims that an anarchic international system compels states to pursue hegemony; the structure, not the individual, explains aggressive behavior. McLaren flips the causal arrow. The international system appears anarchic and competitive because its constituent human actors — elites, generals, policymakers — are driven by dominance motives. In his view, states do not act like predators because the system forces them; the system embodies human predatory tendencies because individuals, motivated by status and entitlements, assemble institutions that mirror their psychology. This is not a wholesale denial of systemic constraints. Rather, McLaren insists on a layered causality: individual psychology shapes institutional preferences and strategic choices, which then create systemic equilibria that feed back into individual thinking. The critique of offensive realism thus becomes a call for methodological humility. Understanding why states seek hegemony requires attending to the people who live inside states and to the psychological logics that predispose them to see offense as the best defense. Seen this way, international competition is less an impersonal law of nature and more a coordinated expression of human appetites given bureaucratic form. ## Can democratic reform restrain power? If the diagnosis locates trouble in psychology, the obvious policy question follows: can democratic reforms blunt these drives? The video explores this with healthy skepticism. McLaren recognizes that democratic institutions can channel competition into less violent forms, provide accountability, and legitimise distributive claims. Yet he warns that formal mechanisms alone are insufficient when the cultural and psychological scaffolding of entitlement remains intact. Democracies can be captured by elites who have learned to harness popular loyalties, manipulate narratives, and normalize their dominance. Two practical implications emerge. First, reforms should not only redesign institutional games (term limits, campaign finance rules, stronger oversight) but also cultivate civic cultures that inoculate citizens against narcissistic myths of exceptionality. Second, democracy’s capacity to restrain power depends on psychological realism: it must account for human susceptibility to groupthink, status-seeking, and charismatic authority. For McLaren, reform without reshaping social incentives and cultural narratives risks empowering cleverer elites to maintain dominance within new rules. The remedy therefore combines institutional safeguards with sustained cultural work — education, pluralistic discourse, and practices that temper entitlement. ## Western decline and enemies within The conversation extends the diagnosis to contemporary anxieties about Western decline. McLaren suggests that a significant part of the West’s strategic overreach and cognitive brittleness arises from the same elite psychology: a conviction of deserved global stewardship, an intolerance of rivals, and a reflexive need to punish dissent. This inward projection of insecurity — identifying internal enemies, conspiracies, or ideological threats — becomes a self-fulfilling cycle that accelerates decay. Perceptions of decline often intensify dominance drives rather than attenuate them. Rather than adopting a defensive humility, elites may double down on expansionist or interventionist policies as a way to assert control and regain status. At the same time, the emergence of enemies within (political dissidents, alternative intellectual currents, minorities) becomes a convenient scapegoat that justifies further concentration of power. This dynamic produces a brittle political order: expensive external co

Psychologist EXPOSES Western Elites | Dr. Niall McLaren There is a psychological explanation for why Europe and North America is governed by kakistocratic elites. Psychiatrist Niall McLaren joins Pascal to explore how the urge to dominate shapes politics and international conflict. Drawing on his book Narcisso-Fascism, McLaren argues that hierarchy and entitlement help explain elite behavior, imperial expansion, and resistance to oppression. They debate individual psychology versus structural explanations, challenge assumptions about human nature, and examine propaganda, group loyalty, and Western decline. The conversation also considers democratic reform, intellectual conformity, and McLaren’s distinction between socially reinforced beliefs and delusions in the clinical sense. Niall's Links: Critical Psychiatry and Narcisso- Fascism Substack: https://www.niallmclaren.com/ Narcisso-Fascism (book): https://www.lhpress.com /store/Narcisso-Fascism-p626958531 Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Niall McLaren and Narcisso-Fascism 03:16 Dominance and the paradox of hierarchy 11:51 Entitlement, wealth, and imperial expansion 15:46 Human nature versus offensive realism 25:17 Can democratic reform restrain power? 31:53 Western decline and enemies within 44:28 Elite rivalry, group loyalty, and social delusions 53:26 Questioning orthodoxy and explaining human nature #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies, today again with one of my favorite individual psychologists or psychiatrists. You will actually tell me which one it is, Dr. Neil McLaren, who has a long history of actually working in the field of psychology and psychiatry. And we want to discuss a particular topic that he's been exploring. He is the author of Narcisso-Fascism, in which he goes into how narcissistic behavior, disorder, or whatever you want to call it, actually then influences politics. And he also now has a very enlightening Substack called Narcisso-Fascism, on his book and on his thesis of Narcisso-Fascism, in which he recently wrote an article, "Betting on Horses." And there he also mentions Glenn Diesen. And a recent talk I had with Glenn Diesen was the reason why Neil reached out and said, like, look, there's something to discuss about human nature. And that's what we want to do today. So, Neil, welcome back. #Niall McLaren Thank you. Yes, so I'm a psychiatrist. I'm actually retired now, fortunately. And I had a lot of military experience, a lot of experience in isolated Australia, working with Aboriginal people, cross-cultural experience in southern Thailand, and very broad... But I've always been on the critical side right -- 1 of 21 -- from the beginning. And that hasn't won me any friends among the psychiatrists of this planet. But that's life. You know, we cope with that. And so over the years, I've published a lot of philosophical work on critical psychiatry and pointed out that modern psychiatry is not a science. It lacks the most fundamental element of a science, that is, a model of its field of study. There is no model of mental disorder. It doesn't matter what anybody says. It doesn't exist. And that left this big vacuum. So I've published a book called Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder, which introduces what is called the biocognitive model. So it's biological and cognitive. And it says that mental disorder is essentially psychological. It is not biological. But we have to take cognizance of the body because that's what we are. We are human animals. And then I thought I'd test that model, the biocognitive model, in a completely unrelated field. And I chose politics because I've always been interested in history and politics. And it's terribly important in understanding politics, human affairs, and in military psychiatry, you just can't get away from it. So I chose politics. I wanted to know, how well does the biocognitive model describe what goes on in extremist politics? And that's led to this thesis called Narcissofascism. And it says that one of the most dominant elements in human behavior is the urge to dominate. One of the strongest elements of all in our behavior is this urge we all have to dominate, and we want to dominate. It is biologically very reinforcing. And the opposite side of that is that being oppressed or pushed down the dominance hierarchy is very, very, very unpleasant. People will resist it to death. So we've got this that leads to what's called the paradox of hierarchy. We have an urge to form dominance hierarchies and go up. And at the same time, we have an urge to resist being pushed down. This causes trouble straight away. It's like a car that wants to go to the right and it wants to go to the left at the same time. It's going to cause trouble. And so the whole thing is to, you know, the whole principle behind narcissophagism is seeing where dominance hierarchies are active. And the answer is everywhere, absolutely everywhere. Practically everything we do is based around getting ourselves higher up a dominance hierarchy or making sure somebody else doesn't push us down. And it starts very young. It starts in kindergarten when children are taken out and they have their little sports day, and the parents are there clapping and cheering when little Johnny comes first and he gets a medal, and little Billy, or whatever her name is, Samantha, who didn't come first, doesn't get anything and nobody cheers for her. And this goes through school, university, work, the workplace, everything. Politics is all about dominance—the military, police, everything we do, finance. It's all about getting up that ladder and making sure once we get up the ladder, of course, the first thing we do is push the ladder away so that nobody else can get up. And this is universal. It is biologically mediated. It is immensely powerful. And it is not understood at all. #Pascal -- 2 of 21 -- And I mean, part of your work is that you apply it to the larger political developments, right? Which a lot of psychiatrists try not to do because they root their work inside the individual and not in the group. And actually, I've had on this channel other psychologists, like Matthias Desmet, who then argue that, look, there's something called mass psychology, and it's like how masses, how individuals then adjust behavior depending on how others behave and so on. And then they try to root or analyze problems that we're seeing on the political level in these kind of mass psychological phenomena. If I understand you correctly, you would say that's the wrong way to go. We need to always look at the individual and what this drive for dominance does to the individuals that then rise through the ranks, if I remember correctly. #Niall McLaren Yeah, and my work is preliminary to his. That's what I would say. It comes before his. So he cannot understand, or we cannot understand, what drives mobs of people, groups of people, political parties, churches—you name it. Football teams, it doesn't matter. We cannot understand what drives them until we understand what drives individuals. #Pascal Hmm. #Niall McLaren And this is where I think international relations is falling down very badly. So if you go back to Durkheim, Émile Durkheim, who was called the father of sociology, he died in 1917, I think. He said that sociology cannot be reduced to psychology. He's quite emphatic about this. He wanted sociology to be a separate discipline from psychology in its own right. He did not want psychologists moving in and taking his territory. Of course, he was trying to exert his independence, make sure nobody dominated him. #Pascal Can you put the microphone a little bit up? #Niall McLaren Oh, sorry. Yes, I knocked it with my hand, I think. Okay. I tend to wave my hands. #Pascal -- 3 of 21 -- Hey, just a very quick note. The best way to support this channel is by signing up for my free Substack. You can also help with a paid subscription there, or you can get some of our new merch on neutralitystudies.com. Links below. See you there. #Niall McLaren So you have to start somewhere, and you have to start with the individual. And the individual human has got a biological basis. It's very strong. So, for example, the first and most powerful drive in humans is the social drive. We want to get together in a group. We don't like being isolated. We don't like being alone. If you want to punish somebody, you put them in solitary confinement. If you want to punish somebody permanently for life, you exile him, get him out, send him away. So it's very, very powerful. Once we're in a group, there's two urges. Number one is we don't like the other groups. So xenophobia kicks in. We have a fear of strangers. We like our familiar faces. We don't trust. We're not comfortable with unfamiliar faces. And the more unfamiliar, the less like us they are, the more we dislike them intuitively. That goes back to childhood. Children can be trained out of this very young, that's for sure, but unfortunately that generally doesn't happen. And it's not until they become teenagers that they have to start to meet people of other races, religions, cultures, etc. By then it's a bit late for a lot of them. So there's the social drive, the xenophobic drive, and then once we form these little groups, the first thing we do in there is we form dominance hierarchies. And the urge is stronger in males. It is mediated by testosterone, which is a very powerful anabolic hormone. It's not just a sexual hormone. It's very powerful, has many effects right throughout the body and in the brain. So it's a very real thing. And so the first thing, we want to get to the top of the hierarchy. We don't want to be down the bottom. And if anybody's getting up the ladder and then gets pushed down, they go into a grief stage. And so they will fight it. They will resist it. And humans resist oppression very, very strongly. The difference is the dominance urge doesn't last as long. Once a person gets to the top, they get lazy, they get fat, and they get comfortable. But the urge to resist being oppressed never goes away. It's there forever, and that lasts hundreds of years. And the other thing about people going up the dominance hierarchy is, as they go, their sense of entitlement grows. And it just grows and grows and grows and grows as they go up. And so you get a person who's close to the top of the hierarchy, they have an immense sense of entitlement. And it doesn't occur to them that they need to share. They say, "No, no, no, I've worked hard for this. You know, I've earned this." There's one of these Russian oligarchs who, you know, they're just crooks. He has eight of these gigantic private yachts, you know, these eight of them. What are you going to do with eight yachts? #Pascal -- 4 of 21 -- In your view, what about the people who literally, by the definition of their position, did not earn it? Like, I'm thinking of the King of England right now. By definition, he didn't earn that position, right? He was born into it. How do you think these people rationalize themselves into believing that they earned this or deserve it? #Niall McLaren Well, the answer to that would be to ask his brother, Andrew, who to this day absolutely firmly believes he has rights that other humans don't have and that anybody who interferes with those rights needs to be punished. And this, you know, I think Charles probably is more sensible about, and the younger one is a complete idiot. There's no question. But, you know, Charles would say, well, you know, I'm the king, and this comes with being king, and I'm entitled to this palace and that palace and this private plane, Air Force plane, to fly me around. You know, that's part of the job. And he would feel very comfortable, I'm sure. I've never spoken to h