Racism And Other Paranoid Delusions

The dissatisfaction of disenfranchised Americans has often taken the form of grandiose paranoia, but that reliable pastime seems to have reached unprecedented levels since the election of President Obama. Why?

Can it be that more Americans than ever are feeling diminished and powerless, and so turn to caricatures of group identities to explain the workings of the country and world?

Can it be that business interests have not taken responsibility for their central role in the punctured economy, nor have they stopped purchasing excessive influence in government -- and that people increasingly mistake these inherent flaws in the "free-market" system as externalities, intruding upon "their" world?

Can it be that any events, big and small, near and far, current and past, can be endlessly and shallowly associated with only a Google or two, that discernment has declined as access to all grades of information has exploded?

All of the above probably apply.

Given today's favorable environment for lazy summarization, it can be tempting to look at the domestic extremism of the far right and presume a whole raft of xenophobic ideologies and motivations apply to each within the group. That would be unfair, yet, as time goes on and as domestic extremism becomes starker, some things do become apparent about it.

One aspect that has become clear with this week's murder by a racist paranoiac of Stephen Tyrone Johns, security guard at the Holocaust Museum, is that paranoia and racism have more in common than we might have guessed.

For racism is itself a paranoid delusion: an ethos of ignorant, unqualified presumptions, made at a distance, based exclusively on identity.

And it's this same ethos -- distance, ignorance, lack of qualification, and obsession with group identity -- that fuels the modern paranoia ecosystem from conservative talk radio to Fox News pundits to skinhead websites to bizarre email forwards from gullible, credulous family members.

What gives pause is the degree today to which the disenfranchised themselves now seem to be in a race with business interests to pollute the cognitive landscape and trample the public interest. In the same way mass marketing and advertising allures with sensational promises of happiness condensed into a purchase or a vote, paranoia allures with sensational promises of broad understanding condensed into summary conspiracy theories.

And that's a tragedy not for what it creates but for what it obscures. There are truckloads of legitimate reasons to inquire into the nature of our economic system, to question the roles of its components and challenge the institutional secrecy thrown up around the public's bailout of the banking system. The legitimacy of these inquiries couldn't be more badly damaged than when they become associated with delusional paranoia, as James von Brunn, Federal Reserve opponent, managed to do this week. It was the least of his crimes to be sure, but the most sadly indicative of our discourse.

Comments

[rickreuben]

That you think that no conspiracy theorist has tested his theories on the JFK assassination as they relate to ballistics or the human anatomy or that you think that no conspiracy theorist on 9/11 has performed real world tests related to steel, fire, gravity, or aeronautics is beyond funny.

The reason why people pay attention to conspiracy theorists ( much to your dismay ) is this: every time the protectors of the official myths attempt to rehabilitate their flawed theories after they've been exposed as technically deficient, the guardians of conventional wisdom always end up resorting to ad hominem attacks against the conspiracy theorists, because they know that a debate on the science is one they will progressively lose. Any conscious person knows a gatekeeper when they see one, and those who try and drag debates on the physical evidence into the realm of psychoanalysis are classic examples of the gatekeeper species.

So you better yell about racism and paranoia a little louder, because you'll never successfully prove that JFK was killed by a shot from the rear, and you'll never prove that three steel skyscrapers are supposed to explode into dust and chopsticks from small, cool, dispersed fires.

[rickreuben]

Warmowski: "the institutional secrecy thrown up around the public's bailout of the banking system."

What would it take to enforce this institutional secrecy?

Would it take the form of a conspiracy?

If we tried to figure out who had the power to spread disinformation regarding the banking system, would that be treading too closely to the 'dangerous' world of conspiracy theories?

Man... so many rules.

And they all seem to work in the favor of the powerful.

Rule 1: "You may only investigate the Federal Reserve in *this* prescribed manner".

Rule 2: "Should your research lead you to answers that expose the banking system as a classic example of a conspiracy by well-connected insiders acting in concert to achieve goals at odds with the best interests of the citizens, return to Rule 1 and begin your investigation over."

Did you ever notice that the people who make all these 'rules' about 'How' one can investigate a conspiracy and about 'Who' can be investigated never seem to offer any answers about how things like 'institutional secrecy' are enforced, and by whom?

I have.

Did you ever notice that the people most obsessed with the methods of 'conspiracy theorists' are always reluctant to detail actual conspiracies?

I have.

I'm convinced that there's a wide-ranging conspiracy to silence conspiracy theorists.

Comment #1.

[Rob Warmowski - Huffpost Blogger]

Speaking of paranoid delusions.­..

Sure, there's plenty of silence on behalf of conspiracy theorists: when it's time to prove the claims.

Which speaks to a huge problem with the misuse of the label "theorists". The problem with that is conspiracy "theorists" never do the work of testing or falsifying any "theory", which means that it's an improper, aggrandizing use of the word.

What they mean is conspiracy "conjecture", which is easy n' fun to throw around anonymously to pass the time. Yawn.

-r