What’s Wrong With The World Part XIII—More Barbarism—Paranoia
Paranoia
Let us look at the fourth question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:
(4) Why so paranoid?
This question was brought to my attention in 2000, when I realized that none of my liberal friends, not one, knew about the persecution of homosexuals in the Middle East, even thought all my liberal friends knew about the death of Matthew Shepard. The Islamists throw gays off rooftops, whip, stone, and murder gays. The Naughts (as we may call the decade now ending) came after the information revolution, so all my liberal friends, by typing into Google the words “Islamic persecution of Gays” could get about 23,200,000 results in 0.50 seconds. But apparently half a second of research is too much to ask.
Oddly enough, none of my liberal friends are afraid of any Islamic terror-masters, who will both announce that he wants to torture and kill them and theirs, and also boasts when he and his accomplish the same; but my liberal friends are all afraid of the Catholic Church, the 700 Club, or President Bush (who neither say they will perform, nor perform such atrocities).
My liberal friends are terrified, for they think the Inquisition and the CIA are poised to swoop down on them like enormous, blood-drinking, black-winged bats.
Again, the reason why the self-righteousness of the allegedly outraged is always directed at the authorities here to protect us, and never against the enemies those authorities protect us against, flows from the same cause as the anger itself: guilt. The guilty flee when none pursue: the guilt-ridden flinch when no hand is raised against them; the guilt-haunted are paranoid, and see a sinister conspiracy against life and liberty in trivial or symbolic things.
I still recall with a Vulcan crook of my supercilious eyebrow the ear-splitting shrillness of the shrieking hysteria surrounding the idea that the PATRIOT Act and only that act would be allowed sinister government agents to subpoena your library records to see what books you might have read (a misstatement of the law—any pertinent records are vulnerable to subpoena upon the signature of a magistrate). The hysteria was purely symbolic and purely trivial, having no relation to reality, prompted by no examples of misuse, and possessing no application to real law enforcement, and hence was meaningful only to those who cannot distinguish between symbolic gestures and reality: a group that, without breaking a smile, calls itself the “reality-based community.”
The mental disease of paranoia has the added feature that it urges the persecuted to make a common cause with everyone and anyone else it sees as persecuted, even enemies. Hence, the totalitarian regimes in the Middle East and Far East, who stand for nothing the Moderns say they stand for, and who oppose with fire and firearm and pulpit and rack and gallows everything the Moderns say they want to promote, somehow become the mascots and allies of the Moderns.
Some moderns are willing to expose their own persons to discomfort, danger and death to protect their own ruthless foes, willing to act as human shields to stop air raids, willing to lie down in front of bulldozers.
A similar selfless love, nay, adoration was paid by Moderns of the previous generation to the Soviets and Maoists: the Moderns did everything in their power to aid their destroyers and hinder their defenders.
Question: Why? Why such paranoia? Answer: Because the Modern men are more afraid of the Theocracy, that all-powerful and utterly imaginary world-girdling conspiracy of Jews and Capitalists and White Christians, than they are of either international Communism or international Terrorism, which were and are very real world-girdling and highly effective conspiracies.
No one is actually afraid of McCarthyism, whose very shadow sends the modern rhetorician into epileptic paroxysms of self-righteous terror. The number of people jailed, tortured and killed by the attempt in the 1950’s of the American government to find and expel paid enemy agents in the State Department or among airheaded Hollywood entertainers still hovers at around zero. Had McCarthyism been a real persecution, it would be ranked as the least effective and least noticeable in history: the drunk driving of Senator Kennedy is responsible for more deaths than the anti-Communism of the McCarthy era.
Likewise, no one is actually afraid of the Theocracy. The concept is ridiculous. Any who were actually afraid of the Church would not dare insult her, any more than they insult the Mohammedans. When folk such as this are actually afraid, they flatter, apologize, and self-righteously defend the people that frighten them: see the Danish Cartoon Riots and their humiliating aftermath for details.
If their fear is make-believe, what do they truly fear?
They are afraid of their conscience and the persecution of their conscience, and so anyone who says the same kinds of things their conscience says, even trivial or symbolic things, instill in the paranoiac an exaggerated overreaction of fear and hatred.
Civilization is the art of quelling factional dissent and calming natural the lusts and avarice of Man, and replacing those wild passions with the institutions and traditions, the social mechanisms, whose operation maintains peace and order. These institutions include deliberative bodies (from councils of tribal elders to moots to parliaments), include leaders in war and peace, such as veterans or sages, worthy of the loyalty of their followers, and include a sufficient respect for law and custom that the duties, rights and liberties of subjects or citizens are sufficiently clear and fair to allow for the preservation of order and the encouragement of private and civic virtue. Civilization is civility; civilization is trust.
In contrast, anger and paranoia combine to dismantle civilization.
Paranoia requires a mistrust of public institutions, whose operations can always be interpreted as sinister, and a trust of enemy factions, who are regarded as allies against the danger posed by sinister public institutions.
Anger halts deliberation, and overthrows both loyalty to leaders and piety toward ancestors. Paranoia is innately factional, and dismembers the society into non-reunifiable and hostile camps. Anger does not seek to preserve the peace: it seeks short-term advantage over enemies with an eye toward the long term goal of their humiliation, their damage, their defeat, their extermination.
Anger feeds paranoia; paranoia feeds anger. Both discourage civic virtue and encourage the return of barbarism.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
