1 Boring Old Man

Paranoid people often spend their adult lives filled with delusions [defined as fixed false beliefs] – moving from one conspiracy theory to another. Underlying it all is a conviction that something’s wrong, that there is some group of people [the pseudo-community] who are at the bottom of things, who are out to get me us you somebody. If you inquire about these provocateurs’ motivations, the paranoid person often doesn’t know how to answer – the summary conclusion being because that’s what they do, they’re bad guys, they’re evil. We all know about such characters. They’re in our movies, our literature, our dreams. But for most of us, the split between good guys [white hat] and bad guys [black hat] remains confined to our private mental life and the stories we read, while for the paranoid person,- they’re part of everyday living [it’s just hard to find them because they’re so deceitful – they’re tricksters].

Characters that embody the qualities of the provocateurs in paranoid delusions make it into our real lives – people like Hitler and Stalin. They truly do seem evil, the stuff of reality shows like Dateline or 48 Hours – sexual predators, serial killers, con men, etc. At the core, they are themselves paranoid people who become like the provocateurs and tricksters rather than fearing them – who scare and overpower others rather than remain frightened and terrified of being overpowered. But these people [the evil ones] have the same axis of suspicion and the same unshakable convictions as their cousins – the frankly paranoid.

There’s something kind of addicting about paranoia – the absolute conviction about being right. In everyday life, we don’t get to be absolutely right very much. We spend our days in the muddle of real life – a world of relative truth and confusing reality. So it’s nice to come home to a ‘relaxing’ mystery book or a crime drama on television. What’s relaxing about a violent action movie, the apprehension of a serial killer, a documentary about the Nazi rise to power or the human sacrifice of the Aztecs? It’s the sensible world of childhood, the world of princesses, trolls, wicked stepmothers, fairy god-mothers, and charming rescuers. It’s just a lot easier than the everyday world of complex people – husbands, wives, neighbors.

There’s a joke, "You’re not paranoid if people really are out to get you!"  If you’re not aware of how prevalent the paranoid dynamic is in each of our lives – just read the letters to the editor in your paper, or the blogs [including this one], or the political emails that fill your in-box, or watch Fox News. The paranoid dynamic is ubiquitous in our group life – particularly our political or religious lives: us and them. We‘re right. They‘re wrong. We‘re good. They‘re bad. I mention the blogs because this very one you’re reading was started because of a belief that is either true or a delusion, and it has been sustained almost daily by that conviction for five years.

The conviction started the day President Bush began to talk about the Axis of Evil on January 29, 2002 in his SOTUS and was sealed on September 8, 2002 when the whole cabinet hit the airways in their campaign to go to war with Iraq. At first, I thought is was just a wrong idea. The notion that it was a "fishy" idea came more gradually – Powell’s UN Speech, no WMD’s, Mission Accomplished. But it moved to the front burner when Judith Miller was jailed and I started reading about her pre-war articles and her association with Laurie Mylroie – the flagrantly paranoid darling of the neoconservatives.

Well, I wasn’t paranoid after all. My intuition was shared by lots of people and over the years, it has been born out repeatedly. I thought that I could stop blogging once I resolved the issue of whether or not I was delusional or simply right, but Obama’s election didn’t free me as I had planned. There remains a piece of my own Conspiracy Theory that just will not go away. And, to be honest, I’m not completely sure I’m right about it. So, if I’m paranoid, I’m not a good paranoid because I have some doubts, and I don’t enjoy it. It’s about the Torture Program. My delusion/intuition is that the Torture Program was instituted specifically to extract a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, whether it was true or not, in order to justify invading Iraq.

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.