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| Morlocks herd Eloi into cattle pens for cannibalisation. The Time Machine (1960) |
There’s method in the madness of the relentless pursuit of profit in late capitalism but it’s not for your benefit
By Anna Chen. First published at Substack as Psychology or Machine? Are our leaders insane? 25 October 2026
This is a response to Nel Bonilla, who has written another insightful analysis. This time, she develops BettBeat Media’s critique of psychologism wherein we clutch our pearls at the horror of leaders rocking the Titanic as we get turfed out of steerage and into the briny deep.
Are our leaders mad? Or are they pursuing the relentless logic of the system?
Here we have both what appears at first glance to be madness, and then there’s method. But one serves the other, following a malign logic. To use another of my astro-political metaphors, the mad decision-making we are witnessing is like the speed of light and gravity embedded in the space-time structure of the universe. This insanity is not something separate that can be measured against the structure: it is a feature of the structure itself. It is determined by it. Changing the drivers of the clown-car-to-oblivion and hoping their good graces win out might offer a swerve. Perhaps even a slow-down in the way that light passing through the medium of water can be bent, interrupted by interacting with atoms. But it still retains its speed between atoms.(Perhaps sensing this is what, in earlier times, was known as fate or destiny. Or karma.)
A respite buys us time — for Palestinians being wiped out in the Gaza genocide, that’s urgently needed and must be fought for. But the cycle still has its inherent quality, so said respite offers no place to stop and relax because the cycle always revs up. Our challenge, should we wish to take the red pill, is to realise we cannot delineate which is madness and which is method. And hopefully, realise in (space) time to do something about it. Oh, that’ll be root and branch revolution.
The system is a machine, ultimately a war machine: a juggernaut that exists to expand and hold on to power. This is how my late father used to define imperialism, which he drummed into me from toddlerhood. Everything it does feeds that objective, like a great white shark forever moving forward or it dies. Different wings of the political class dress it up differently to render it palatable, but it always moves with the same relentless underlying ruthlessness. Sometimes that ruthlessness is disguised as soft power. Sometimes, when necessary, teeth are bared and jaws snap away. As we are seeing now. (Actually, there’s alwayssomeone outside our pampered delusional west who’s seeing it directly.) It’s Very Late Capitalism.
At core is the dynamic of the board game of Risk, as anyone who plays it knows. I love that game and recommend you make it your game of choice during power cuts as we await the Apocalypse. That is, if you’re not already actively involved in juggernaut stoppage.
The presidential managers of the cycle line up
The start of the current wave of American imperial expansion can be located in 1992 with the fall of the USSR and the Paul Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guide, which identified China as the next rival to be preemptively contained. Asserting military dominance over China, and keeping check on a resurgent Russia, Germany and Japan and a unified Europe (see Brexit), would justify continuing massive investment in the Pentagon war machine now that the Cold War was officially over. You could actually take it all the way back to the 19th century Opium Wars, which capitalised western industrial revolutions and created a slew of banks and East Coast dynasties, but let’s start with the cycle rising in a crescendo towards a climax right now.
We knew President George Dubbya Bush and his neocon flying monkeys were Patriot Act-level awful but if you’re looking back nostalgically at the cuddly Clintons and Obama, ask how sane were their actions? Yes, Clinton brought China into the WTO. But this was less from the goodness of his heart and more about having its huge scales of production function as the West’s factory of cheap goods, placating domestic populations being steadily stripped of their post-WWII gains. Clinton also dismembered former USSR ally Yugoslavia within Europe, launching the round of box-ticking as the serial-killer state scythed its way through its rivals now that the Soviet Union no longer stood in the way. The 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade served to remind them who was boss despite flattery as a “strategic partner”.
Then we were given sophisticated, charming Barack Obama. His muted response to his fellow black people struggling in resistance was shown up in sharp relief when he crumbled over the grand jury’s failure to indict the police for killing unarmed youth Michael Brown in the troubled community of Ferguson, in 2014. However, African American solidarity was not his purpose, no matter what hopes had been pinned on the first Black president. He was more eager to be seen as “America’s first Pacific president,” as he grandiosely called himself, foreshadowing the line of destruction to come. Following Bush’s demand at the Bucharest conference in 2008 for Ukraine and Georgia to be drawn into NATO, Obama did most to kick off current conflicts: his Pivot to Asia to “contain” China and setting up Ukraine for the “proxy” war against Russia. Such sanity!
Smite and spite – sanity, insanity or something structural?
Which brings us to Trump, who is indeed unhinged. He’s the best wrecking ball the state ever had. The world waits on tenterhooks for his attempted destruction of a 5,000-year-old civilisation of 90 million Iranian people, even if he takes down the global economy with it. But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. There’s a tiny elite that will do very well, whether from the Military Industrial Complex, fossil fuels or the massive pile of assets they’ve accumulated. The top one percent own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, but even they are poor by comparison with the apex billionaire oligarchs and their ambitions to carve up the planet.
Why so little pushback from a Congress packed with tools? How on earth did Biden do so badly that he ushered in Trump’s second term? Maybe it’s because our orange overlord does the elite’s dirty work so fast and furiously, easily manipulated by Deep State when he gets out of line. And he’s rewarded with his cut, billions to date.
I’ve been yelling warnings that there are trajectories and objectives at work, but dearest friends have had two replies: it’s only “sabre-rattling” and “they’re stupid”. Head. Meet brick wall.
Subordinate to the uber-objective
There is no debate about any of this in the mainstream. On social media, algo-boosted commentators have been late, for example, only realising this year that China was the ultimate target in a seemingly disparate raft of targets. Another pundit belatedly observes that China is trying to save the world from America’s current excesses. Yes, China has been firefighting all along, providing our cheap stuff when underpaid workers couldn’t possibly afford American-made goods made on decent wages. China floated us out of trouble after the 2008 crash. In doing so, it also recharged American capitalism which can be seen directly in the longest bull-run ever.
We shouldn’t rule out entirely the psychology that adds grace notes and potential shifts to the dynamic being played out. There is a human, psychological aspect to the subsequent betrayal by the US in that there was a responding period of paralysis when Vice Premier Liu He attempted to negotiate Donald Trump’s trade war in his first term as shock sank in. What an insane move for the new President Trump to make when China had saved the world from US folly and Wall Street was hogging down on a profit bonanza from China’s exploding middle-class: at 550 million, bigger than the entire population of the USA and still growing. Screw domestic sales, we’re gonna need a bigger wallet. The logic of self-interest would prevail — well, that depends on your ultimate aim.
Illustrating the internecine warfare among American capitalists, Gary Cohn — Trump’s chief economic advisor from Goldman Sachs — wailed, “Peter Navarro ratfucked us into a trade war with China by taking advantage of Trump’s very small brain”. Navarro, with his anagram creation ‘Ron Vara’, had been a much derided China-hating wing-nut on the fringes, but he was soon to be drawn centre-stage by Trump: welcome, the New Normal.
China then pinned hopes on a “sane” Joe Biden who had promised cooperation in dealing with the existential global threat of climate change. Surely he would see that China was a Good Thing for the US and the world? Once in office, Biden promptly placed a $1.6 billion dollar propaganda bounty on China’s head and continued Obama’s conflict wherever China was heavily invested. Chiefly the Ukraine where Crimea was earmarked to be a key BRICS hub — well, fancy that! We do all realise by now, I trust, that US military pollution is one of the key contributors to environmental damage, not to mention from the destruction of the Russia-Germany Nordstream pipeline as threatened by Biden.
According to the UN, the Nord Stream pipeline explosions resulted in the largest human-caused release of methane, with up to 485,000 tonnes of methane escaping into the atmosphere, contributing significantly to global warming. This release was nearly five times larger than the previous record holder for methane emissions.
Oops, there goes the neighbourhood. So much for climate change concerns.
The snake eating its own tail
Insane, desperate and shortsighted. But the war in Ukraine functioned as pursuit of the longer-term goal. Although it stirred up a hornets nest of conflict, it was a major step in trying to defeat Russia, keep the Europe bloc under wraps and halt a peaceful Eurasia prospering. The logic of the machine is that Europe needed a spanking after it began successfully emerging from America’s crash through Russian energy and BRICS trade, and leaving the malfunctioning US on the naughty step.
That European leaders succumbed to US-induced self-harm just as the Eurasian landmass was consolidating through peaceful trade might undermine my argument and prove that insanity does indeed have its part to play. However, our own slow, clumsy, cloth-eared vassal insanity is not necessarily the same as the hegemon’s overriding drive in the twists and turns of a writhing snake: the machine exists to continue existing. The snake may well be eating its own tail.
Europe initially resisted America’s proxy war on Russia. Angela Merkel stated that pulling Ukraine into NATO on Russia’s doorstep would be seen as a declaration of war. And she was right. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy resisted and was punished for it when his own crimes of corruption, which would normally be overlooked in someone of such power, sent him to jail: pour encourager les autres, to quote Voltaire. Prime Minister David Cameron was too busy forging a Golden Age with China to embroil us in a return to 19th and 20th century warfare.
Unfortunately, in 2016, Old Etonian Cameron, none too bright, was manipulated into granting the non-legally binding EU referendum to placate Farage and his own right-wing in the Conservative party. Fending off an intra-party bunfight would have the severest of consequences for the UK and the world.
The Brexit vote provided the trigger and lit the fuse.
Whose finger is on the trigger?
Europe, weakened by Britain jumping out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, was soon caught in the increased gravitational pull of a reviving hegemon stripped of all niceties and going for broke. It eventually mounted the bucking serpent only to be thrown off with the next writhing coil of Trump 2’s Ukraine machinations.
Piling in on a Gaza breakout armed with Kalashnikov rifles by the occupying US-armed Israel on Biden’s watch less than two weeks after Netanyahu threatened Iran at the UN general assembly, opened a second major front in the Middle East. The resulting genocidal wipe-out violates every code of the New Testament, the Enlightenment, the Geneva Convention, and every decency we thought the horrors of World War II had taught us about humanity. Trump fantasises aloud about destroying a 5,000-year-old civilisation with his MOAB bombs and maybe nukes. Israel has its (unacknowledged) nuclear weapons at the ready. The Hormuz Strait, which was open to free passage of the world’s shipping, is now closed, threatening the entire global economy. But actually, it’s America that has its finger on the trigger. And the rest of the world — including perceived US rivals China and Europe — is held to ransom, not just Iran.
Now, there’s method in that madness.
Read how this was unfolding in Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China.
The western Left snatches defeat from the jaws of victory
How did we get to this point, as a US-compliant UK, with so little resistance and a depleted consciousness in a country that once had a proto-bourgeoisie powerful enough to remove the head of a king?
The Left allowed a 20-year vacuum to suffocate political consciousness since the proletarian classes flexed their muscle in the biggest protest ever seen in the UK, in the anti-Iraq war march of February 2003. Demobilising for the crucial day of Blair’s vote in Parliament the following month, which he had a real possibility of losing, was a Sliding Doors moment that stripped the movement of confidence. Failure to harness the public’s protest power built up over two years and mount a protest on the big day emboldened the hawks and shredded MP’s willingness to follow through with a dissenting vote: the result was 412 to 149.
Opposition to war within the political establishment had collapsed. British parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq against the public wish shocked the movement. It created a lengthy hiatus in which the Right, largely marginalised throughout the post-war liberal period, has regrouped and consolidated. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, with millions displaced.
The 2017 general election was our one chance to take some sort of power when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn verged on winning in a landslide. I said at the time we’d better win. If it failed, the forces of reaction who’d been taken by surprise, would power-up and ensure that it never happened again. And they would be vicious and pitiless.
General Election Sliding Doors, 2017
The Labour Party was the biggest in Europe, with 564,443 full members. The nation was waking up from the non-legally binding referendum with a hangover and a surge of regret that 37 percent of the population was about to destabilise the economy just as we were emerging from America’s Great Crash of 2008 and its recessional austerity. Campaigning in 2016 on his Remain and Reform agenda, Corbyn said, “We, the Labour Party, are overwhelmingly for staying in, because we believe the European Union has brought investment, jobs and protection for workers, consumers and the environment.” But then, in March 2017, he used the three-line whip to get Labour MPs to vote to trigger Article 50, overcoming the final hurdle against leaving.
Despite massively confusing contradictory messages, a lingering hope remained that, with the Tories ousted, we might not have to complete the Leave process. A second less febrile referendum leading to Remain but Reform from within was mentioned as a possibility and was likely to reverse the result. Pro-Labour voting intention soared in the polls. But then, with 70 percent of Labour voters supporting Remain, along with the majority of youth who saw their future being destroyed, and ethnic minorities far from enamoured of Brexit’s anti-immigration emphasis, Corbyn’s office leaked to the press that our triangulating leader was actually pro-Brexit.
It was almost as if someone in his office didn’t actually want to take power. Labour canvassers reported support on the doorstep draining rapidly after that. Another hint in the press that Corbyn was listening to Remain halted the outflow for a moment but another pro-Brexit leak set it off again. Attempts to staunch the wound failed and Corbyn lost by a whisker, even though he did manage to deny Theresa May a resounding majority. That was it. That was our chance. As predicted, the state’s vicious blowback saw Corbyn labelled an anti-semite as were Jewish progressives in the party who were critical of Israel.
The western Left snatches defeat from the jaws of victory
How did we get to this point, as a US-compliant UK, with so little resistance and a depleted consciousness in a country that once had a proto-bourgeoisie powerful enough to remove the head of a king?
The Left allowed a 20-year vacuum to suffocate political consciousness since the proletarian classes flexed their muscle in the biggest protest ever seen in the UK, in the anti-Iraq war march of February 2003. Demobilising for the crucial day of Blair’s vote in Parliament the following month, which he had a real possibility of losing, was a Sliding Doors moment that stripped the movement of confidence. Failure to harness the public’s protest power built up over two years and mount a protest on the big day emboldened the hawks and shredded MP’s willingness to follow through with a dissenting vote: the result was 412 to 149.
Opposition to war within the political establishment had collapsed. British parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq against the public wish shocked the movement. It created a lengthy hiatus in which the Right, largely marginalised throughout the post-war liberal period, has regrouped and consolidated. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, with millions displaced.
The 2017 general election was our one chance to take some sort of power when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn verged on winning in a landslide. I said at the time we’d better win. If it failed, the forces of reaction who’d been taken by surprise, would power-up and ensure that it never happened again. And they would be vicious and pitiless.
General Election Sliding Doors, 2017
The Labour Party was the biggest in Europe, with 564,443 full members. The nation was waking up from the non-legally binding referendum with a hangover and a surge of regret that 37 percent of the population was about to destabilise the economy just as we were emerging from America’s Great Crash of 2008 and its recessional austerity. Campaigning in 2016 on his Remain and Reform agenda, Corbyn said, “We, the Labour Party, are overwhelmingly for staying in, because we believe the European Union has brought investment, jobs and protection for workers, consumers and the environment.” But then, in March 2017, he used the three-line whip to get Labour MPs to vote to trigger Article 50, overcoming the final hurdle against leaving.
Despite massively confusing contradictory messages, a lingering hope remained that, with the Tories ousted, we might not have to complete the Leave process. A second less febrile referendum leading to Remain but Reform from within was mentioned as a possibility and was likely to reverse the result. Pro-Labour voting intention soared in the polls. But then, with 70 percent of Labour voters supporting Remain, along with the majority of youth who saw their future being destroyed, and ethnic minorities far from enamoured of Brexit’s anti-immigration emphasis, Corbyn’s office leaked to the press that our triangulating leader was actually pro-Brexit.
It was almost as if someone in his office didn’t actually want to take power. Labour canvassers reported support on the doorstep draining rapidly after that. Another hint in the press that Corbyn was listening to Remain halted the outflow for a moment but another pro-Brexit leak set it off again. Attempts to staunch the wound failed and Corbyn lost by a whisker, even though he did manage to deny Theresa May a resounding majority. That was it. That was our chance. As predicted, the state’s vicious blowback saw Corbyn labelled an anti-semite as were Jewish progressives in the party who were critical of Israel.
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| Parliamentary Brexit advisory referendum briefing document for MPs |
Not that I’m advocating a return to the EU. We should never have left the EU bloc, (whatever its faults at the time, of which there were plenty), and destabilised the geopolitical equilibrium that was peacefully uniting the Eurasian landmass through cheap Russian energy and Chinese trade. But the damage has been done and Europe has been yanked rightward by the shock of Brexit. As an entity blatantly fashioning itself into the US elite’s battleship to fight Russia and China using our public money, it does not fill me with hope for a better future.
What now?
Since Corbyn’s chance was lost, there followed as Prime Ministers: New York-born Boris Johnson; lettuce-longevity wassername; US Green Card-carrying Rishi Sunak; Keir Starmer, now working for “international affairs including defence, security, trade, and technology in a fast-changing world,” having boasted of setting up war as “the next generation of good, secure, well-paid jobs”; and Andy Burnham and his Friends of Israel cabinet all pursuing the same goals. Burnham offers headphones and car park power while continuing to drag us into war, poverty and climate warming. He tells us to gather three days-worth of food for the coming storm but no word of what happens after that.
Any glimmers of hope? An awakening working and middle-class on both sides of the Atlantic in the process of ditching their liberal Democrat managers and realising they have more in common with the global south. Interest in Marxism and hopes for socialism on the rise. America running out of armaments and unable to wreak further mayhem. China declining to provide its rare earths to make the weapons that will be used on them and other nations.
Last thoughts: it’s a race against time. Sanity is relative and depends on which class you belong to. None of this is mechanistic — there’s still room to stop the maniacs furthering their selfish goals. Don’t succumb to nihilism. Americans and Europeans need to stop oscillating between two malign wings of the same deep state and create a better system that serves humanity, not the bottom-feeding apex predators. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, the choice is between socialism and barbarism.
We are social animals. Love, peace and understanding are actual things worth fighting for when they come under attack. Like now.
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| BRICS First China freight train to Barking, east London, UK, 2017 |
Further reading
How the press was done: The Iraq War protest 2001-3, from race war to 9/11
How the US wrecked Britain & China’s “Golden Age”: The Brexit trigger
Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China, Page 1: 1997-2010 — Hong Kong handover & WTO to President Obama’s Pivot to Asia
Shakedown Timeline, of America’s 21st Century War on China, Page 2: 2010-2020 — Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Donald Trump’s first presidency
Shakedown Timeline Of America’s 21st Century War On China, Page 3: 2019-2024 — Joe Biden’s presidency, Covid and Ukraine to the rise of BRICS and Donald Trump’s second term
Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st Century War on China, Page 4: The Opium Wars on steroids. 2024 to the Present — President Trump’s 2nd term turmoil
How the Covid Pandemic was weaponised: Covid-19 Timeline — the politics, the science and the timing of the pandemic
