Psychiatrist EXPOSES the Sickness of Collective West Leadership | Niall McLaren

## The biocognitive model of politics The conversation with Niall McLaren reframes geopolitics not as a cold ledger of interests but as the overflow of our biological wiring. McLaren’s biocognitive model starts from a deceptively simple premise: humans are animals first, political actors second. Once basic survival needs are met, a narrower set of optional drives comes into focus—sociality, territoriality, xenophobia, and the formation of dominance hierarchies. These drives, he argues, are not incidental to politics; they are its engine. Viewed this way, international conflict becomes an extension of everyday human competition. Dominance is rewarding: it elevates status, cajoles social standing, and, crucially, stimulates neuroendocrine feedback loops such as rises in testosterone that feel subjectively good. Politics, therefore, entrepreneurship, sport, and war share a common currency—the adrenaline and hormonal payoffs of being “on top.” The biocognitive model does not reduce political life to biology alone; rather, it integrates cognitive patterns and social structures with embodied incentives. It gives an account of why tribalism and coercive ambition emerge so readily from otherwise ordinary social life. This perspective shifts where we look for causes. Instead of asking whether a particular foreign policy is rational in interest-based terms, McLaren invites us to ask which actions supply the experiential rewards of dominance, and which actors are systematically incentivized to pursue them. Once the pursuit of dominance is seen as a primary motivator, many otherwise puzzling political behaviors—territorial grabs, performative threats, and electoral theatrics—become intelligible as attempts to generate that internal biochemical high. ## Psychology versus offensive realism The exchange in the discussion pits the biocognitive lens against a staple of contemporary international-relations theory: offensive realism. Offensive realists describe an anarchic system in which states, compelled by the absence of a higher authority, will seek hegemony to ensure security. McLaren's revision is subtle but consequential. Where offensive realism treats state behavior as a response to structural constraints, the biocognitive model locates the origin of those structural consequences in psychological drives. International anarchy, in this telling, is not just a condition that produces competition; it is the resultant pattern of many actors chasing dominance because dominance itself is intrinsically rewarding. This comparison does not render offensive realism wrong; instead it reframes the causal arrow. Structuralists explain what states do; McLaren asks why individuals and collective identities are so ready to internalize and act on hegemonic impulses. In practice the two accounts overlap—both predict competition and insecurity—but their interventions differ. Structural approaches favor systemic checks and balances (alliances, deterrence, balance-of-power mechanisms). The biocognitive approach suggests additional levers: reducing the attractiveness of dominance as a psychological reward, restructuring institutions so they no longer disproportionately reward narcissistic energy, and finding cultural means to uncouple national identity from the emotional gratifications of supremacy. The conversation exposes a paradox both accounts must face: dominance-seekers can bring peace by imposing order, but dominance also generates resistance. The combination of a drive to dominate and an instinct to avoid domination creates a perpetual dynamic of escalation and counter-escalation. For McLaren, any plausible theory of international order has to reconcile both sides of that paradox rather than privileging one. ## How hierarchies attract the wrong people One of the sharper insights from the discussion is the structural magnetism of hierarchies. Whether in politics, business, academia, or local civic boards, hierarchical structures systematically select for people who enjoy power and are willing to do what it takes to keep and expand it. This is not a moralistic claim about elites; it’s an institutional logic. Positions that confer status, privilege, or visible authority inevitably attract those most motivated by those perks. The system then amplifies their influence: reward structures confer resources and publicity, which in turn attract collaborators and further opportunities for dominance. McLaren’s argument pinpoints a path-dependent problem: hierarchies not only concentrate power, they biochemically reward the tastes and temperaments most likely to pursue further dominance. That explains why political life often privileges performative narcissism—leaders who thrive on attention and status are those who rise. The result is a feedback loop: systems designed to allocate authority for governance instead become circuits that circulate and enhance the personalities best suited to competition, not to deliberation. This explains the dissonance many citizens feel when leaders pursue grand external adventures that most of the public would prefer to avoid. Institutions engineered to settle disputes and deliver public goods instead operate as proving grounds for personality-driven dominance. The sociology of selection is harsher than simple talent-sorting; it is a cultural and physiological sieve. Fixing the problem requires more than replacing individuals. It requires redesigning incentives so that competence in negotiation, modesty, restraint, and long-term thinking become more rewarding—socially and biologically—than the rush of domination. ## The fatal flaw of human competition If competitive drives are so deeply embedded, why does competition repeatedly produce catastrophes or systemic breakdowns? McLaren frames this as a fatal flaw of human competition: the same drives that produce coordination within groups—shared rituals of identity and dominance hierarchies—also produce intergroup escalation that is extremely hard to stop. Two complementary instincts pull in opposite directions: the pursuit of dominance and the horror of subjugation. Dominance feels good; being dominated feels intolerable. That asymmetry fuels cycles of provocation and retaliation. The fatal flaw is epistemic and normative. Epistemically, dominance-seeking blurs judgment: symbolic victories can substitute for strategic gains and short-term hormonal rewards can supplant sober calculation of costs. Normatively, societies create narratives that sacralize dominance as moral righteousness. It is one thing for a team to win a match and celebrate; it is another for a state to translate that celebratory energy into coercive foreign policy, territorial claims, or permanent military interventions. The psychological hunger for victory can eclipse the moral and practical calculus that should govern politics. Moreover, competition has a zero-sum bias in our cognition: victory for my group often feels like existential vindication, which hardens positions and diminishes willingness to compromise. In this light, global crises—Ukraine, the Middle East, great-power rivalry—are not merely geopolitical puzzles but manifestations of psychological dynamics that have outgrown the regulating institutions designed to manage them. The fatal flaw is that human competition is both intoxicating and corrosive: it rewards escalation and punishes restraint. ## Setting limits on global power struggles If the problem is partly biological and partly institutional, solutions must be both humane and structural. McLaren’s conversation suggests several practical arenas for reform. First, design institutions that reduce the symbolic benefits of dominance. This means cultivating democratic and civic cultures that prize stewardship over conquest, that decouple national prestige from performative power, and that elevate restrained leadership as a form of moral and political excellence. Second, introduce selection mechanisms that disr

Psychiatrist EXPOSES the Sickness of Collective West Leadership | Niall McLaren What if the world at the moment seems insane because the people running its conflicts are in fact clinically psychotic? This is what I discuss today with the retired psychiatrist Dr. Niall MacLaren. We talk about his biocognitive model and how a craving for dominance dictates the actions of modern empires. His book, Narcisso-Fascism, explains why nations act like playground bullies and why we keep electing narcissists who love the rush of power. It is a deep dive into the testosterone economy and the biological reasons why peace is so hard to find in a world obsessed with being number one. Links: Niall MacLaren Substack: https://niallmaclaren.substack.com Niall MacLaren Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K89UYC Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop. fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 The biocognitive model of politics 00:03:14 The testosterone economy and dominance 00:07:22 Psychology versus offensive realism 00:14:10 American psyche and the colonial mindset 00:21:30 How hierarchies attract the wrong people 00:28:00 Treating the narcissism of a nation 00:36:50 The fatal flaw of human competition 00:51:30 Replacing elections with random lotteries 00:54:30 Setting limits on global power struggles #Pascal Welcome back, everybody. Today we’re joined for the second time by Dr. Neil McLaren, a retired psychiatrist with an extensive publishing record in the field of critical psychiatry and the application of the philosophy of science to psychiatry. Neil, welcome back. #Niall McLaren Good morning. How are you? #Pascal Very good. And I'm very glad you reached out to me again, because you reacted to one of the videos I put out the other day—and you complained about it. I thought that was very interesting, so I wanted to have you back. Can you maybe tell us first a little bit about yourself? Why is a psychiatrist so interested in world politics? And then take it from there. #Niall McLaren -- 1 of 19 -- Well, there's always that saying that you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. We just can't escape it. My background is in psychiatry, and a lot of that work was in the north of Australia, in remote areas. I've always had an interest in the philosophy of psychiatry, and one of the important things about the field is that it doesn’t have a clear model of mental disorder. People are often astounded when they hear that—but it doesn’t. So I actually wrote one, called the Biocognitive Model, and I thought I’d test it in a completely separate field to see how generally it applies. And I just thought, well, you know, politics—why not? That’s a good field. And I think it applies very well. But out of that came the book I titled *Narciso-Fascism*, because it's about the psychopathology of right-wing extremism—which I have sitting here on my desk. That’s the one. And that’s a 1930s Italian fascist poster we used—very elegant art deco—and it fits very well. So, taking the psychological point of view allows us to see political turmoil in a different light, because the biocognitive model says that humans are very competitive animals. It starts very basic and builds up. We’ve got the basic drives to stay alive—eating, drinking, breathing, shelter, that sort of thing. Once those are out of the way, we have four essentially optional drives. We’re social animals. We can turn these drives on and off. We’re social, we’re very territorial, and we’re xenophobic. We fear strangers, and we form dominance hierarchies. So once you've got those four drives in place, that’s the recipe for tribalism. Once they’re operating, tribes will emerge—that’s how we get tribes. I’ve put a lot of emphasis on this question of dominance: that humans, especially males, like to dominate. And there’s a very powerful biological reason for this. The reason is that being dominant stimulates testosterone production. Testosterone, as you probably know, is a feel-good hormone—it feels great. People love it. So we do all sorts of things that stimulate a surge of testosterone, and 95 to 98 percent of them have nothing to do with sexuality at all. It’s all about dominance. That’s why people go to football matches and scream and shout and, you know, wave noisy things and wear silly hats—because it gives them a surge. And after the match, one side wins and one side loses. The side that wins gets a further surge. It’s not just the players—it’s the audience. That’s why they go. Then they’ll go out and party that night and have a good time. Somewhere along the line, they might pick up a sexual partner, if they’re lucky. But most of them don’t care. The side that loses, their testosterone levels plummet. They go home and hide. They don’t party. And this is across the board. This testosterone economy is the basis of human competitiveness. It doesn’t matter which area of human life you look at—we’re competitive. Look at schools. It starts in kindergartens. Schools are very competitive. Sport—I mean, that’s what sport is. Academia is incredibly competitive. Business, the military—oh my God, you know. And so we like to form hierarchies, and the higher we go up the hierarchy, the better we feel, and the more we feel we’re entitled to what we get. We have this expanding sense of privilege and entitlement. It’s a bit like Parkinson’s rule—you know, the amount of work will expand to fill the available time. Well, there’ -- 2 of 19 -- s a similar law, which I haven’t given a name yet: the higher you are up the hierarchy, your sense of entitlement and privilege will expand until it reaches a limit, until it hits a firm limit. And this is universal. As people go up the hierarchy, they fight to get up it, and as they go up, their sense of entitlement and privilege expands. And there’s no better example of this than Mr. Trump. His sense of entitlement now is global. He believes he can do what he likes, anywhere, to anybody, for any reason, without recrimination. That’ s the position we’ve reached. And he’s only one—there are lots. All politicians are the same. So this is incredibly important, and it tells us what’s going on in the world. If you look at international relations—and I’d really rather not have to—but again, they’re looking at us. We try to make sense of what goes on between nations. You have different schools of thought, and one of the most prominent at the moment is the school called Offensive Realism, whose main exponent, I suppose, is John Mearsheimer. I think he’s in Chicago, isn’t he? Yeah, somewhere around there. And he says his basic principle is that international relations are anarchic. It’s chaotic. Therefore, nations must struggle to exert hegemony—local hegemony—to protect their interests. Now, the biocognitive model says that’s actually back to front. The biocognitive model says international relations are anarchic and chaotic because nations are struggling to gain dominance. Why do nations struggle to gain dominance when common sense says, “Be satisfied with what you’ ve got”? Because humans want to be dominant. All humans like to be dominant—it feels better. And this is a different way of looking at international relations: it’s the constant struggle to gain dominance that’s creating anarchy. Therefore, if we can rein in this brawl—this constant, almost universal brawl to gain dominance—somehow rein it in, we may be able to live reasonably peacefully. #Pascal May I just add one thing? Because I believe there’s one point about Mearsheimer. I don’t think he says states must strive for dominance—I think he says they will, as in, that’s just what they do. So if that’s what they do, then everyone else adjusts to that, and the logical thing to do is X. So I don’t think there’s an inherent incompatibility between what you’re saying and Mearsheimer. But we can go there, I mean—please. Yeah, yeah. #Niall McLaren Yeah, much of a muchness. But I'm saying that this is the drive. Now, he doesn't offer an explanation as to why international relations are chaotic. I say it's chaotic because of the human drive for dominance. And you could say, well, that's okay, we just let somebody be dominant and we'll live in peace. No, because the other side of the dominance drive is our abhorrence of being oppressed. So that's the paradox—what I call the paradox of hierarchy. We have two drives built into us: one is the drive to be dominant, and the other is the drive to avoid being oppressed and subjugated. And this just produces chaos. -- 3 of 19 -- So wherever you look in the world today, you don’t look at it from the point of view of which country is in the right, which country’s got history on its side, which country’s got God on its side, or—I don’t know—rock and roll on its side, anything like that. You look at which group of people is trying to dominate another group. And it always becomes clear. This is what goes on all the time: one group decides, “We’re going to dominate those people there,” and they just keep at it until one of them wins and the other loses. We can see this happening all around the world. So Trump says, “I want Greenland. I just want it.” Why do you want it? Well, I think we should have it. It looks better. I don't want that silly European flag. This is part of the Western Hemisphere—you should have an American flag on it. That’s the only thing; it’s got nothing else. He knows—well, he probably doesn’t know—but his military know perfectly well they don’t need Greenland. They’ve got bases there; they just put another one there. They’ve closed eighteen bases since the end of the Cold War, and they used to have about twenty-seven, I think, something like that. So he just says, “I think we’ll have Panama. We’ll have the Panama Canal, thanks very much. Just hand it over. And what about Cuba? Yeah, we’ll have Cuba and Venezuela.” Don’t worry. Give us that. He’s just walking around with a grab bag saying, “I want that, I want that, I want that.” And the people on the other side don’t say no—“No, you can’t. You can’t do that because we don’t like it, and we will fight you.” And that’s what goes on all the time. At the moment, we’ve got chaos in Ukraine, and we’ve got chaos in the Middle East. In each case, it’s one group saying, “We are going to force you to do as we tell you,” and the other group saying, “No, no, thank you. We’re not going to do it. We will fight you to the death, because being alive and oppressed is not worth it. It’s not worth living.” So—sorry. #Pascal This is a very old question in international relations: is the chaos—or the drive toward chaos— embedded in human nature, or is it embedded in the systems that humans build? On the one hand, this is an old one, right? Thomas Hobbes talks about the Leviathan and about violence in the streets. And then we come up—we clever apes—with ideas about how to structure society in order to manage that, right? At the local level, we’ve managed to do that. We invented really great ideas like the separation of powers, the balance between creating systems that check each other, and the concentration of power within the state so that not everybody can exercise it. So this is very refined, and we’ve managed to curb these kinds of violent tendencies on the local and national levels. But on the international level, it all breaks down. We don’t have those mechanisms. Yet you would still look for it—not in the system—but in the inherent psychology of the individual. #Niall McLaren Yes, because we’ve grown up—now we’ve got nations. We’ve moved from families to tribes, to little nations, and now to big nations and alliances. And people just want to think, “Nobody can tell me what to do.” In particular, there’s one nation on Earth that says, “We are in charge. You do as we -- 4 o