Paranoia Anecdotes.

I thought I would just include anecdotes about paranoia and comment on them as a way of getting information across.

Update!  One of the other social workers told me today that she thinks C19 is all just a coverup for all the damage from 5G.

Paranoid people also project.  What they think their persecutors or opponents are capable of doing is often a mirror of what they themselves would do.  The recent political example is the FBI and other agencies being so sure that Trump is dangerous enough to democracy that he would disregard the rules and protections for others that they dangerously disregarded the rules and protections for others themselves.

My uncle tells me that my grandfather, when he heard that Joe McCarthy claimed there were 300 communists in the State Department said “Is that all?  I would have thought it was more than that.” I believe that was a common sentiment in NH at the time. McCarthy played his cards poorly, partly because of his personality, and partly because there was a supportive culture that didn’t mind if accusers of communists didn’t bother with the niceties of actually nailing the information down.  However, it turns out in retrospect that the right-wing crazies didn’t know the half of it. Communist penetration of federal agencies was worse than even they thought. Alger Hiss was in fact guilty. The Rosenbergs were guilty. Venona confirmed a great deal of speculation. I don’t know how things would have been different if a savvier player than McCarthy broke the news, but it can hardly have been worse. He played for drama. Maybe that would work today. It didn’t work then. (Compare also to the paragraph above.)  Paranoid leftists were able to accuse anticommunists of paranoia for years. In DC politics I think that some paranoia is always justified.  People are conspiring all the time. Exactly who, and for what reason, is the issue, and determines how reasonable one’s paranoia is.

Secrets are hard to keep, and people rat out conspiracies every day. Whether a particular conspiracy is real can sometimes be estimated by how many people would have to be in on it, and what their motivation would be. 9/11 conspiracies that involve preinstalling something in the buildings fit that. Who, and how, exactly, put flammables and explosives in years ago?  Thinking Mossad or Cheney orchestrated it is also paranoid, but less bizarre.  A smaller number of people would have to be in on the deal.  Still too many for credibility, but closer. The idea that there are inexpensive natural cancer cures that “doctors” or “Big Pharma” don’t want you to know about because it hurts their business is hugely unlikely. An oncologist who broke the secret could write books, go on lecture tours, and be universally admired – not to mention quite rich.  What would be anyone’s individual motive to keep quiet about it?  To protect The Lodge? Really?   Attempts at conspiracies are frequent.  Governments, businesses, agencies, parties – these sometimes do try to suppress information.  How many would be required?  What is the motivation of each as an individual to go along?

*******

The following is part of a Facebook post by a Scientologist who until recently was a Trump supporter.  Now she thinks Trump is in on the game as well. Paranoia tends to expand, not shrink.

1.      1.  The other day he tweeted whoever is making the va((ine for Coronavirus needs to “speeden it up.”

2.      2.  Not one word about the gov boosting your immunity or taking high amounts of Vitamin C which is curing people in the east

3.      3. …more and more va((ine complaints from parents and 4 billion paid out in injuries

4.       4. He applauded the federal reserve the other day – said they “have our back” by lowering interest half a percent. Meanwhile JFK was murdered for saying we have to get rid of the federal reserve.

5.      5.  …he didn’t protect Julian Assange…

6.       6. No mention of halting or slowing down 5G like Switzerland did after finding it is definitely injurious to human health.

7.       7. Trump’s uncle, John Trump was in charge of checking out Tesla’s research … and for the next 30 years came out with findings similar to Tesla. Trump went to Freemason Jesuit school for a time.

8.      8.  Three countries who are not owned by a Rothschild bank: Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

9.       9. Robert Kennedy is great and has a website about the environment, pestisides, va((ines and are suing against 5G!

1     10. There’s ID2020 to make a “digital” ID which has all your info in it including your vax records. Total gov overreach. Bill Gates funds this partly. Bill is working on the digital ID with other worldwide groups. Bill was involved in a simulation of this virus in Oct 19. Bill was ALSO on Jeffrey Epstein’s list of people who went to his island. No lie.

1    11. If this isn’t a very obvious new world order agenda to people, I don’t know when it’ll be more obvious

So, half a moment.  If Vitamin C successfully treated C19, you don’t think the PRC would be all over this with immense relief, passing the stuff out like candy? Also, how long would it take to do a good clinical trial on that to show that it worked?  Less than four weeks, you think they can do that? The anti-vaxxers have this standard phrase about people educating themselves, don’t they?  It seems to really push a button for them. That precise wording captures what they want to believe about themselves than other, similar phrasings. The inclusion of not only modern Jews like Soros but the Rothschilds and Rockefellers of 50-100 years ago catches the eye, doesn’t it?  This particular antisemitism has come down in a long chain, not 21^st C BDS.  Is that typical of Scientologists? Kennedy and the federal reserve would seem like old news as well.

******

My patient Bill was in Desert Storm. He was not in Special Forces of any sort, but he eventually concluded he must be somehow, because he knows things that other people do not, perceives and understands things that the rest of us can’t, and it started a few months after getting back.  He eventually concluded that someone implanted a computer chip in his brain that tells him things, and this was supervised by Special Forces at some point while he was asleep in Iraq. He thinks they still control the chip, or someone in the government does. He believes this is un-American and all patriots should rise up and protest things like this happening to decent citizens. He usually arrives irate and threatening about something. When someone is admitted, I call family and agencies to gather collateral information, a sort of detective work to figure out what is true and what is not. I knew I was in for a long hard slog on his first admission when I called his mother, who said in a German accent “Billy was fine until the government put zat chip in his brain.” She had been part of some resistance in Nazi Germany, and was brought to America immediately after the war because of the danger she and her husband would still be in if there. Details aren’t clear.  One would think this sufficient explanation for anyone to be paranoid, and make it likely that any children are paranoid as well. But that’s not what’s happening.  When Bill is on medication, part of the paranoia vanishes very quickly.  He no longer thinks there is a chip, or communications into his brain, or any connection with Special Forces. His more general paranoia remains.  He thinks that un-American people staff all areas of government, including the DMV (he can’t get his license back), the VA doctors, Social Security, county Sheriffs, the judges in Strafford County, massage licensing, and even Fish & Game are unpatriotic at best, and possibly communist or jihadist sympathisers. This is clearly a different type of paranoia.  I myself think there are likely unpatriotic people scattered about the government, and more likely to have wormed their way into places of influence than the regular card-punchers.  I just think that it’s nuts to believe it’s all of them.  Incompetence, yes. Personality-disordered arrogance or sadism, possibly. Concerted effort to bring down the republic via the Bureau of Land Management, unlikely. That half of Bill’s paranoia is more gray area.  Personality structure?  Illness?  Upbringing? The ongoing trauma of succeeding at nothing? I think the extreme rigidity part is illness.  The rest…I can’t say.

I worked peripherally with a Vietnam vet in the late 70’s who was paranoid. He was afraid we were putting psychiatric medications in the water, so he wouldn’t drink any, nor would he take any of the bottled water, soda, milk, or juice we offered.  All were suspect.  He would not even take a shower, where he could have snuck some water without us seeing, because he thought that tainted as well.  Yet he did not dehydrate. This made it harder for us to get a guardian for him, as we had to wait for the lack of food instead of water (abetted by his poor hygiene at court) to show dangerousness sufficient to deprive him of so many of his rights. We didn’t get the whole story until after he was treated against his will and became nonpsychotic.  He explained that he had pretended to be a smoker (we gave out rolled cigarettes for free in those days) in order to have something to trade.  Then he would get other patients to secretly get water for him from the tap he had identified as the one staff used to make its coffee. So despite his paranoia, other cognitive functions worked.  He did not have insight into his lack of hygiene, and he was deeply ill, but seven out of eight cylinders were firing just fine.

We do get people suspicious of the water, food, or the medicine they are being given.  A majority of them will relent if we offer these items from sealed packages.  As it is at least plausible that we could find some way around that it we wanted to poison or medicate the person, I don’t know why that works as often as it does. They may apprehend that distant companies are more likely to be uncaring than antagonistic to them, while folks directly involved with their care may have been influenced or bought off.

*****

What about living in places where paranoia would seem to be the only sensible attitude? I am thinking of the Bloodlands, or post-Yugoslavia – of the French Revolution or Great Leap Forward. I think it is still possible to distinguish between functional and nonfunctional paranoias. Specifics matter. With overlapping categories you might get the opponents only half right, and the wrong half. Paranoia as an illness is rigid.  Retaining some flexibility in figuring out who is dangerous to you is likely important. I used to kid with a fellow commenter at the old blog “No Oil For Pacifists” that he was too worried about what the federal government might do to him, when it is the local government that is far better placed to ruin his life.  We were able to laugh about this, where a nonfunctional paranoia would be rigid.

Note to survivalists – people who have been in societal meltdowns come to the conclusion that your best survival is a network of trusted people, not constant hardening and extending your own supplies.  There is much greater danger of any of a hundred smaller emergencies than the One Big One where we’re all shooting each other and secretly planting corn deep in the forest.