The West is Collapsing Psychologically | Therapist Benjamin Schoendorff

The unraveling of Western power is not only geopolitical and economic; it is psychological. The conversation examines how five centuries of imperiality built a moral and psychic architecture—an identity system rooted in narcissism, extraction, and a denial of interdependence—that is now crumbling under the pressures of global resistance and ecological limits. What makes this collapse particularly perilous is that it is not merely a shift in policies or elites but a crisis in collective meaning: the narratives that sustained a civilization’s sense of itself are losing their grip, and with them comes a surge in anxiety, rage, and a retreat into destructive fantasies. The conversation foregrounds a clinical framework—one that joins materialist political analysis with a concrete theory of how human minds form identity—to explain why empires fail when their psychosocial foundations rot. ## Psychology and world violence Violence on the world stage cannot be fully understood through strategy charts and balance-of-power models alone. The discussion insists that psychological processes create the subjective scaffolding through which systems of power reproduce themselves or unwind. For five centuries, a white imperial project turned people and nature into resources to be valued only insofar as they produced profit. That process generated not only structural inequalities but also collective forms of meaning: beliefs about worth, exceptionality, and entitlement. Those beliefs became embodied in policy, law, and technology, and they animated leaders and institutions with a readiness to dominate. At the same time, the conversation warns against reducing geopolitics to diagnoses of individual pathology. Labeling leaders “mad” or “narcissistic” without connecting those traits to broader material and social dynamics risks floating psychological concepts in the air. Instead, psychological variables must be held together with political economy. What allows cruel and erratic figures to ascend is both an environment that rewards ruthless competition and a cultural repertoire that provides ready-made narratives of superiority. The violence of states and the violence of minds are reciprocally constitutive: systemic extraction shapes identities, and those identities sustain further extraction. ## Benji background and core theory 00: 13:47 Identity and mental suffering The conversation’s psychological core is a developmental, behavioral account of how human meaning and identity arise. Drawing on decades of clinical practice and research in contextual behavioral science—specifically work related to Relational Frame Theory and acceptance-based therapies—the speaker outlines a model in which humans learn to relate events symbolically. From early infancy humans form relational networks—connecting sounds to objects, experiences to labels—which then proliferate into language, symbolic thought, and the very sense of self. Three formative distinctions are critical: spatial (here vs. there), temporal (now vs. then), and interpersonal (I vs. you). When these relations are learned, a qualitative shift occurs: a stable perspective of “me here now” emerges. That vantage point, the conversation proposes, is the seedbed of both suffering and liberation. Identity becomes an attractor in a dynamic system: a set of meanings that organizes attention, emotion, and behavior. Individuals develop layered self-structures—an emotional core (fundamental worth or shame), a character layer (patterns formed in adolescence), and a manifest layer (current dominant states like anxiety or anger). Clinical practice reveals the variety of these systems. Many who seek help live in meaning-systems that render them unworthy; others—those who resemble narcissistic figures—are organized around compensatory claims of superiority, often masking a deep emptiness. The crucial move of the theorist is to link these individual configurations to collective ideologies. If personal identities are sculpted by relational patterns learned in context, then a civilization’s dominant narratives—about race, progress, property, and human exceptionalism—become collective identity schemata that shape countless individual psyches. ## Narcissism and imperial power Narcissism in the conversation is not reduced to a personality disorder located in a single person. Rather, it is described as a structural feature of imperial power. The imperial imaginary trains people—and institutions—to see themselves as central, entitled, and separate from the rest of humanity and the living world. This identity of exceptionality justifies extraction and violence. Narcissistic forms of meaning insist that some lives matter more, that the planet is a backdrop for human mastery, and that technological escape (transhumanist fantasies, colonizing other planets) is a valid response to planetary limits. When the psychic architecture of a civilization becomes organized around such grandiosity, crises produce pathological reactions. Loss of legitimacy, exposure of crimes, and resistance from formerly subordinated peoples threaten the identity of superiority. The conversation links contemporary phenomena—populist authoritarianism, loud securitization, and apocalyptic rhetoric—to a culture whose self-definition is cracking. Instead of adapting, imperial narcissism lashes out or doubles down: scapegoating, militarism, and retreat into fantasies of dominance become defensive strategies to shore up a failing self-concept at civilizational scale. Importantly, the conversation treats narcissism as a collective vulnerability rather than merely an elite vice. Public culture that normalizes superiority, teaches children to measure worth by conquest, and disavows grief and interdependence produces populations susceptible to anxiety, denial, and aggression. The lament is not simply moralizing: it is analytic. Systems of dominance are maintained because they generate identities that are reinforced by institutions; when the reinforcement frays, the system fails psychically and materially. ## Liberation psychology and resistance If the problem is a collectively organized identity of entitlement, the solution lies in reconfiguring meaning at both personal and social scales. The conversation turns to liberation psychology as a framework that allies clinical work with collective struggle. Liberation psychology rejects the individualist, pathologizing lens that treats distress as an isolated malfunction. Instead, it reads suffering as often produced by unjust social conditions and offers therapeutic strategies that are both political and emancipatory. Clinically, this approach foregrounds processes: teaching people to notice how language and stories trap them, developing psychological flexibility to hold painful facts without being driven to destructive action, and cultivating relational capacities that recognize shared vulnerability. Politically, it emphasizes solidarity, collective action, and the rebuilding of narratives that honor interdependence, repair, and reciprocity. Resistance, in this conception, is therapeutic: joining struggles for justice can be a way to reform identity systems, enabling people to move from shame or entitlement toward dignity and mutual recognition. The conversation also stresses that liberation must be material as well as symbolic. Psychological work that ignores the distribution of resources, the reality of structural violence, or the mechanisms of extraction risks becoming an anesthetic. Real liberation integrates policy, economics, and culture: dismantling oppressive institutions while fostering practices that create more humane webs of meaning. ## Civilizations capital and identity Civilizations run on capital of many kinds—economic, symbolic, moral. The dialogue reframes that capital as intimately tied to identity. When an empire’s economic base is built on expropriation, its symbolic capital—stories about superiority, progre

The West is Collapsing Psychologically | Therapist Benjamin Schoendorff Clinical psychologist Benjamin Schoendorff explains why the 500 year old (white) empire is now rapidly undoing itself in the face of unsurmountable global resistance to its narcissistic colonial nature. Links: Resistance is Fertile Substack: https://resistanceisfertilepodcast.substack.com Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Our Shop: https://neutralitystudies- shop.fourthwall.com Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:07 Psychology and world violence 00:05:57 Benji background and core theory 00: 13:47 Identity and mental suffering 00:20:25 Narcissism and imperial power 00:42:08 Liberation psychology and resistance 00:49:01 Civilizations capital and identity 00:53:28 Treating the West 00: 59:04 Follow Benji and closing #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. My name is Pascal Lottaz, and I'm joined today by Benjamin Schöndorf from the Resistance is Fertile podcast. Benji, welcome. #Benjamin Schoendorff Thanks very much for having me on your show, Pascal. I think I started listening to you about three or four years ago, and I just love the breadth of your guests and how perceptive your questions are, and also the fact that you have an interest in psychology. And when I saw you invite a few guests to talk about psychology, I thought, oh, I just need to write to Pascal and maybe we can have a conversation. So here we are. #Pascal And you wrote a very good email, actually, a very long one. And I thought, well, this is so extensive, we actually need to discuss this. And just as a little bit of background, actually, let me try to show what you've been working on. That's this one here. Here we go—your Resistance is Fertile podcast. And I hope that we can develop the discussion towards what you call the psychology of liberation. And you actually reacted to the podcast that I did with Dr. Neil McLaren, and in the best sense possible, you had kind of objections to what he was saying. And in the best sense possible, what I mean by that is that, of course, in academia, when we criticize each other's work, we don't do that in order to one-up each other. What we are trying to do is we're trying to get closer to an understanding of how stuff works. And in this spirit, in this dialectical kind of conversation, I'd like to hear maybe your criticism about this -- 1 of 19 -- approach of Dr. Neil McLaren, and then how you, as a clinical psychologist, would try to understand what we tried to do in that podcast, which is: how can we make psychological sense out of the nonsense of the international violence that we are seeing, right? Is there a psychological explanation for these goddamn wars that are going on? And I'd like to hear your take on that. #Benjamin Schoendorff Yeah, it's, you know, I don't actually want to do a critique of the conversation with Neil McLaren so much. My criticisms were more of a general point, like there's always almost a division between, you know, more material analysis, geopolitical analysis, political-economic analysis, and then psychological analysis. I believe to understand the world, we need to really hold both of those dimensions in our hands. And psychology, which is still a very new science, has missed a good grounding in material reality in terms of what processes we're talking about, what they emerge from, how they emerge, and how they lead to what we call psychological phenomena that go from meaning, language, human consciousness in a way, and also identities, both individual and collective. And the conversation, to me, you know, had a lot of echoes of what I've seen in the past—people trying to kind of, you know, you have old books about the pathology of world leaders, and then you have Hitler, and you have Stalin, and you have Mao, and you have Pol Pot, and you have Richard Nixon, and you have all these people. But it's kind of detached from what is really going on. What makes it so that at this particular point in time, these kinds of individuals rise to the top? Dr. McLaren was talking about scum rising to the top. What makes it so that at this particular point in time, scum, as he calls it, rises to the top of what I call white empire, which is this 500-year shape- shifting plague that has been, you know, pillaging, raping, extracting, and really destroying life on this planet and destroying human life and human experiences—even the most precious of our experiences, our spiritualities, our connection to the land, to our ancestors—and also destroying, of course, nature itself, to the point that their dream today, as expressed by that vanguard in Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, is to literally get out of humanity because they deeply hate humanity. So that's the transhumanism—an effort to leave this planet and go and colonize another one. And the word itself is very loaded, you know. And that, I think, when they say it, is to express the essence of what this thing, you know, that we call capitalism—but imperialism also—is, which is to turn every single living thing and human experience into this dead stuff that we call profit. And so, you know, I start from a very materialist analysis, Marxist in many ways, but then I go and look, okay, so how about the psychological dimension? And the two go together. You can't detach one completely from the other. So that was my main general criticism—not, you know, particularly of Dr. McLaren himself—but this kind of bringing psychological concepts wholesale to political analysis, and then they kind of float up in the air. #Benjamin Schoendorff -- 2 of 19 -- Yeah, it's quite interesting. #Pascal You know, we always have this problem, right? Either we dive very deep into the particular, including its psychology, into the individual psychology of, you know, Mao, Hitler, Trump, and so on, and then try to explain from there. Or we stay on the system level and we try to say, no, no, no, look, the system is what produces these people. And actually, we have that in international relations too, right? We have people like Brian Berletic who are saying, look, it's not Israel that is driving U.S. foreign policy; it is the U.S. empire that is driving the camouflage of Israel driving U.S. foreign policy, because it all builds into the system that has been built. And we are always somewhere in between there. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about your approach to this and mix it maybe a little bit with your biography? I mean, how did you come to clinical psychology, and how do you look at this at the moment? #Benjamin Schoendorff So I used to be a student Marxist activist back in my days at Oxford University, where I did my undergrad thesis on Marx. I was recruited to a very small anti-imperialist Trotskyite group I was running there. I won Keir Starmer, who has now become the prime minister, as a testament to my appalling abilities in long-term political education, of course. And then neoliberalism kind of took over, and I became very—I lost hope in change, if you like. Like, I'm literally an anti-imperialist since I was 10 years old, in 9-11, 1973. I had a communist Vietnamese uncle, and he said, "This was the CIA," and I believed him. And lo and behold, it was the CIA. And from that day, I just hated the empire. And so, you know, it was very hard for me to not see any way to bring this thing down. And I had my own struggle with mental suffering, and eventually I became a clinical psychologist about 20 years ago. I got interested in an approach known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that is based on a theory known as Relational Frame Theory, which I've studied for 17 years, and I've started to see as kind of the missing link in providing a material analysis of that very special quality of human mental experience, right? There's this very interesting thing that I believe the world is made of one thing. It's less messy than those dualist notions that there are two things, because then you have to connect them together. And so everything arises out of this one thing. You can call it spirit, you can call it matter, doesn't really matter to me. But something happens with humans. We learn to relate things with one another, right? This is kind of a basic process, which you see in other animals. Like we see with Pavlov’s dogs, when you ring the bell, then the dog will relate the sound of the bell with the food. -- 3 of 19 -- And some of what the food makes the dog do, like salivating and moving towards the food, the bell will now carry, right? So it's a very broad process that we can observe. But with humans, we learn to relate things like this when we are very small, when we are babies. And then one day we do this thing that only some humans can do — the vast majority, but those who can eventually speak — we start what we call deriving relations that are not trained. You can't do this with animals, right? And then suddenly, if you train that this is the same as that, you will derive that that is the same as this. And as you do this, the functions — what it makes you feel, how it activates your body — also change, right? Something that was neutral, like the bell or a sound, or later on a symbol, a concept, will start acquiring some functions, which we call emotions, and will make you move towards it or move away from it, right? It's very basic stuff. But once you have this, then you start doing this activity, this behavior of deriving relations — increasingly complex behavior. It gives rise to meaning. It gives rise to language. And at one point, it also gives rise to human consciousness because you are trained three relations of distinction: a spatial distinction between here and over there, a temporal distinction between now and then, and a third distinction, which is kind of spatial but also interpersonal — the distinction between you, me, and others, right? And that third distinction is very important. We'll come back to it later because, in a way, when we make this distinction, we have this very, very special experience of recognizing ourselves as being in some way the same as other humans and also different in the sense that I'm here and you're there. #Pascal And that one actually takes quite long, right? Children take until about two or three years old before they understand the difference between you and I, because they're always referred to as you. They then start speaking about themselves as you until they understand, oh, no, wait, the I is the I of the other, so I should use the I for myself. But that takes quite a bit of time. #Benjamin Schoendorff Wow. And this is such a good point to make, Pascal, because what is very special about this approach is that, you know, in contrast with, say, psychoanalysis, which just imagines very complex mental processes in newborns, or cognitive approaches that do a factor analysis and then imagine that the factors you see on questionnaires are actually things in the mind, it starts from the beginning in developmental, experimental, psychological labs where we see that this, you know, deriving relations happens around 13–14 months of age. Multiple relations happen around 23 months of age. There is this explosion of language at one point. It's almost like those networks happen — they're just an ongoing activity. A lot of it is below the conscious threshold, and it's automatic. And yes, those three relations take a very long time to learn. And the minute they are learned, those three distinctions, basically what happens is something suddenly emerges. And I believe the best way to talk about it is dialectically, because you have a lot -- 4 of 19 -- of quantity of relations that are learned and trained, and suddenly this new quality emerges. And the quality is this perspective of being me here now, as distinct from you there then. And this is when this very specific form of consciousness we call human consciousness emerges,