It is generally accepted that conspiracy theories, apocalyptic fantasies, and other paranoid phenomena are adesperate flight from the temporality, relativity, and contingency of existence. The flip side of that is that the yare a search for intelligibility and meaning. The ideas and beliefs of neurotics, including those who are paranoid, are not downright delusional. They are, rather, distortions of consensual reality. Our purpose in stating this is not to lend credence to the cliche that "sometimes paranoids are right." For there is a catch, which is where the distortion enters in: the conspiracy and apocalypse do not exist in the outer world, but belong to a different ontological realm - to the realm of psyche, mind, or spirit. For a variety of reasons, paranoids mistake the symbolic and mythic for actual events in the spatiotemporal world. That is the fundamental source of their folly. Here, one finds the defense mechanism intrinsic to paranoia: projection.
To arrive at the truth of the paranoid vision requires de-literalizing paranoid narratives, deciphering their symbolic language so as to extract their true import. Disillusionment is generally considerred one of keys to psychological change, but when people begin to suspect that the ontological foundations of their life are hollow, it can leave them feeling disoriented and anxious, and then depressed. What we are proposing, though, is disillusionment of a different order than that in psychopathology. In this case deliteralization and disillusionment need not involve a loss of one's beliefs, but rather a transcendence of the level on which one had held them to be true. More specifically, if those under the sway of the paranoid vision are to be disillusioned, it is healing if they can see that their worldview is essentially true, when raised to a "higher level."
The reason for the distortion that is indigenous to the paranoid vision, is not only because the high-level representations of the paranoid vision are being "seen through a glass darkly," i.e. inadequately grasped. It is also because the psyche is censoring those high level insights, for they are too ontologically un-grounding in their raw form.
Those negative personality traits have, though, a function in the psychic economy of the paranoid. They are a defense mechanism, a bulwark against insight's dangerous assaults. Insight is dangerous because it corrodes one's beliefs, creating psychic instability. In any case, those under the sway of the paranoid vision may be off center to varying degrees, if not downright crazy, but they are not dullards. They are intuiting something true about life, even if it enters their conscious mind distorted beyond recognition.
Just about every religion, both East and West, has a comparable notion of cosmic conspiracy. For example, Mara, the deceiver, seeks to distract the future Buddha during his meditation, and thus discourage him from awakening. Similarly, in Christianity, the devil tries to tempt Christ while he is praying in the desert. Of course, it is true that a conspiracy, by definition, requires more than one person, or being, and there is only Mara in the Buddha story, and only the devil in the Christ story. All the same, the key element that all such stories contain is the deliberate effort on the part of some power in the universe to deceive. That is why it would still be fair to call them metaphysical, or cosmic, conspiracy theories. Cosmic conspiracy theories can be found in a secular context as well, for example, in popular films as The Matrix (1999).
In The Matrix, the rulers, machines possessing artificial intelligence, enslave humans in an illusory world because humans supposedly are able to furnish them with energy. The hope, in anthropomorphizing the forces of darkness or positing a utilitarian motive, is to render the situation intelligible. But such flimsy accounts fall to convince anyone who, like the proverbial detective of film noir, is too skeptical to accept pat answers that bespeak a cover-up. Thus the mystery remains uncanny and metaphysicaily unsettling.
For most people, conspiracy-infused novels and books provide adequate outlets for their metaphysical suspicions, and even then they indulge these suspicions only on occasion.
Those with paranoid proclivities seem to lack the ability either to repress or to adequately sublimate such deeper suspicions into more innocent channels, such as artistic or philosophical endeavor. One might think of a person under the sway of the paranoid vision, indeed any neurotic for that matter, but , paranoids may be more intuitively aware than are other people of life' s metaphysical mysteries even though these insights come to them filtered through a grossly distorted lens. For the paranoid, literalizes the intuition of a metaphysical conspiracy and the intuition of a cosmic force of evil, imagining that what is at issue is an actual conspiracy involving real people - the Trilateral Commission, the Jews, the Illuminati, or some other group.
Even better than acquiring "understanding" through uncovering conspiracies would be the ability to control events, indeed to create events. Then one' s onmipotence will be put to the service of creating a world that is congruent with one' s image of intelligibility and meaning. That is why, then, psychotic paranoids are tempted to become Caesar, Napoleon, or "The One and Only God."
But there are actually two reasons for this. First of all, reification or objectification is the mind's effort to represent this intuition to itself, and thus understand it. The problem is that, in doing so, the mind distorts what it seeks to represent. But this mistake cannot be avoided.
Socrates with his ‚ ladder of love’ motive, suggested one must go through the educative dialectic, from puerile lust, and through many other, increasingly clarified, objects of love, before one knows that it is really the Form of the Good that one has been seeking all along. Religion offers other examples of this phenomenon. Here, too, there is a ladder from the usual anthropomorphizing of deity to such rarefied notions as Spinoza' s "intellectuallove of God." We might add that when the un-illuminated mind hears a high-level notion, it misinterprets it such that the high-level notion ends up sounding like something on the beginning rungs of the ladder. For example, it has made little difference that some Sufis have elevated the notion of Jihad, or holy war, to mean a war against one's baser nature. The baser mind will continue to construe Jihad to mean a war against other people. Now this is the point: there is, similarly, a kind of Socratic ladder in regard to the paranoid vision. There are, indeed, many levels on which the mind can represent to itself the sense of cosmic conspiracy and deception. Furthermore, on some levels it might not even regard the deception as evil. Hegel, for example, believed that Reason was the grand schemer, as evidenced by his notion of "the cunning of Reason." Simply stated, it means that people think that they are acting independently, but Reason exploits their passions and beliefs to advance history towards Reason' s telos. Optimist that he was, Hegel believed that Reason' s cunning was something good, for its telos was the selfrealization of Spirit. Ironically enough - standing the usual notion of conspiracy theory, with its fear of loss of autonomy, on its head - the cunning of Reason is all about the emergence of freedom! Adam Smith, similarly, had a notion of a relatively beneficent force, one that rules the economic sphere, which he called the "hidden hand." The idea here is that everyone acting out of self-interest ended up advancing the economic wellbeing of society as a whole, and advancing social progress.
The first reason for the paranoid's literalization of a conspiracy has to do with the dialectics of coming to know anything, the second reason is not so innocent: taking what is really an inner sense of conspiracy for an actual outer event is a form of projection, which, after all, is a defense mechanism. But grandeur is delusional when it consists in attributing ultimate significance to oneself alone. One regards oneself as a king or a queen, towering above other human beings, who are relegated to the position of admirers, servants, nonentities, or obstacles in the way to happiness. Ironically, nothing is more common, and more indicative of a pedestrian soul, than the claim to ultimate importance, not to a superiority in a particular area, but to a universal superiority. Delusional grandeur is akin to hubris, or overweening pride, in so far as it consists of a refusal to acknowledge the finitude intrinsic to the human condition.
It begins with an apriori claim to grandeur, the assumption that one, or one's group, deserves everything, all the benefits that heaven and earth have to offer. The second proposition encapsulates the bittemess of the paranoid vision: If one does not have what one deserves, it is because others have stolen it. Envy' s resentful finale is that if one cannot have what one deserves, then no one deserves to have anything.
That conclusion has had a great variety of manifestations, from the woman in the King Solomon story who would be willing to see the contested baby die, as long as the rightful mother did not get her baby, to the suicide bombers who would gladly destroy themselves to deny -other people the possibility of happiness. It is also not surprising that the envious long for the apocalypse. After all, if the world goes up in flames, then no one can have anything.
Those who are under the sway of the paranoid style in politics, may have delusions of grandeur not simply about themselves, but about the group with which they are affiliated. When groups have delusions of grandeur, it often leads them to an antinomian disdain for rules, laws, and morality in regard to people outside the group, or even outside the group's inner circle. Not surprising, this double morality is endemie to utopian organizations. We might recall Orwell's nightmarish novel Animal Farm, with its murderous ruling pigs. The same ruthless exceptionalism, which one might call"group Raskolnikovism," has existed in a variety of groups, including cults, terrorist organizations, ruthless and repressive political regimes, rogue business management teams, and bumptious jingoistic nations, all who eventually go the way of Ozymandias.
Group delusions of grandeur are seductive, for they promise those who feel unhappy and unworthy that they can attain the power and prestige of the group, or so they imagine. Furthermore, such groups offer opportunities for ambitious true believers to attain immortality by sacrificing their life for the group. As Schopenhauer has been attributed as saying, Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability." Invariably, group grandeur is premised on a lie, for what seems like transcendence is but an extended egotism, and what seems like grandeur is really narcissistic fantasy. In essence, delusional grandeur is founded on a hubris that impotently rebe1s against the finitude of the human condition. But most important, when finitude is denied, it leads to envy, bittemess, the worship of death, and just plain misery. It might ofcourse be advisable to employ a different word than "grandeur," when considering its transformation to a new key. After all, "grandeur" often connotes an egotism that is intrinsically delusory. There is no ideal word for this new key, but "dignity," "nobility," or "greatness" would be preferable. Sometimes, we shall use those words, but on other occasions we shall stick with "grandeur," so as not to lose the connection that we are trying to establish with the delusions indigenous to the paranoid worldview.
The millenarian fantasies that are a product of utopianism contend that finitude is not intrinsic to the human estate; they promise, in essence, "Ye shall be as gods.“ The manifestations of that worldview have included sanguinary revolutions, ideologically-caused famines, totalitarianism, political oppression, terrorism, and genocide. Why these dark consequences? First of all, the possibility of the millennium now provides those with an instrumentalist ethics a justification for any atrocity.As for totalitarianism, Isaiah Berlin draws out the intrinsic connection between utopianism and the loss of liberty, as suggested by the ideas of Saint-Simon who said people should be governed un-democraticly.
Furthermore, the disappointment that inevitably arises from utopian expectations is paranoiagenic. It leads to bittemess, hostility, blame, envy, and all the other malevolent feelings associated with the paranoid vision. The utopian vision has clearly left something out of the human equation, namely the fact that human beings are, as Kant said, "twisted timber", from which nothing straight can grow.
How ironic, then, that the utopian vision, with its uneonstrained affirmation of humanity's godlike possibilities, leads to bitterness. But those visions of life that recognize the amphibious nature of human beings, and which are eonstrained in their hopes for humanity, lead to the affirmation of human grandeur, greatness, and nobility. Furthermore, the tragie vision leads to an optimism - not one founded on shallow hopes, but on ennobling endurance of suffering and triumph over adversity. It is paradoxical that the aeknowledgement of finitude is aprerequisite for the realization of true grandeur.
Spiritual evolution of those who are under the sway of the paranoid vision would, to a large extent, consist in learning what it means to be an amphibious being; i.e. elevating the grandeur to a new key. This elevation would require a person - not just those who are under the sway of the paranoid vision - to learn to endure the anxiety intrinsic to the task of mediating incommensurate realms. But this need for self-renewal, self-transformation, a radically new mode of existence, is being mistaken for an event in the outer world,one that has not yet happened. Raising apocalyptic fantasies to a new key consists, therefore, in recognizing what has been motivating them an along: the need for an apocalypse within.
Like nocturnal dreams, apocalyptic fantasies are a kind of psychic feedback system, expressing what one needs to undergo inwardly. But the fascination with apocalyptic fantasies ends up subverting the forces of innerchange. One looks out-there when one should be looking in-here, which is, of course, what happens in all psychologicalliteralization. Apocalyptic fantasies are but one of many modes of flight from selftransformation. The result of this refusal is a sclerosis of spirit, a malady that is so common that it is generally assumed to be normal.
It is true that there has been a great deal said and written about „growth.“ Thousands of books on the subject can be found in the self-help sections of bookstores. Thus human beings in the modem age may be more prone to the narcissism that retards inner-development. This resistance to coming to terms with life's fundamental realities is evidenced by the fact that the prophets, both ancient and modern, need to eontinually remind their flock that life is about death and transfiguration to a higher plane of existence. Angelus Silesius implores, "Die before thou diest, so as not to die when thou diest, or indeed must thou perish" Similarly Zen master Bunan Zenji said, "While living be a dead man." Socrates' statement, in the Phaedo, that "Philosophy is the art and practice of dying," indicates that dying is not something that only happens at the very end of one's life. Agknowledging the truth that one suspects - that one' s efforts to achieve happiness and fulfillment have no foundation.
Invariably, one will only seek a new life at the point of despair, which is the result of having achieved clarity regarding the impossibility of achieving happiness and fulfillment through one's present mode of being.
The September 11th suicide terrorists were obsessed, as are many fundamentalists, by the dread of impurity. The paranoid's sense that the world needs to be purified, through an apocalypse, is a distortion of a fundamental inner need - the need to attain purity of heart. Martyrdom through suicide is far easier than years of difficult struggle to obtain true purity.
A second inner requirement that is being symbolized by the apocalypse is transcendence. What it would mean to experience the world, apart from the subject/object duality, is unintelligible in the way in which a mystical insight is unintelligible. And a third inner requirement that is also being symbolized by the end of the world, is the need to awaken, conscious of who one is and what life is really all about. In Calderon de la Barca' s play Life is a Dream (1636), awakening from one's egocentric dreams is viewed as the death that is aprerequisite for self-renewal. One of the characters in the play states, "Out of the ashes of my self-extinction...A better self revive" (Act ID, Scene 2, line 120). It is not surprising, therefore, that if awakening has this selfextinguishing aspect it would be symbolized by apocalyptic fantasies.
The fate of the awakened person is illustrated by Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He goes back to the cave to awaken the prisoners to their plight. They do not appreciate his claim that they are prisoners of illusion. Indeed, they try to kill him. Plato was, of course, making an allusion to the death of his teacher, Socrates who, as "gadfly of the state," saw awakening people as his mission.
Many of the manifestations of the paranoid vision - including religious fundamentalism, fanaticism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, witch-hunts, antiintellectualism, anti-secularism, and a fear of "conspiring" secret societies – are reflective of this fear, hatred, and yet secret fascination with people who are thought to possess knowledge. More ultimately, it is a dread and fascination with knowledge itself. Knowledge is indeed dangerous, for it corrodes beliefs, superstitions, and unexamined ideas. Thus it can precipitate the end of one' s world, in a very real way. One is also reminded, in that context, that there was a time when explorers, like Columbus, set out on a journey to what was regarded - as was indicated by ancient maps - as the end of the world. Thus that which lay beyond the limits of (geographical) knowledge was viewed as the "end" of the world.
Apocalyptic fantasies reflect the ambivalence, within most people, towards the choice of continuing to dream the dream that is their life, or awakening from it. More than most people, those who are under the sway of the paranoid vision have an unconscious intuition of the requisite inner apocalypse, but they distort what they intuit, for all of the reasons suggested. The fantasy images of a literal apocalypse are testimony to what is still inwardly required of a person.
Raising the paranoid vision to a new key would, therefore, consist in deliteralizing conspiracy theories, delusions of grandeur, apocalyptic fantasies, images of the millennium, and other products of the paranoid vision, so as to extract their essential truth. Raised to a higher key, paranoid suspicions lose their malevolence. Instead, they invite one to journey into life's profoundest mysteries. It is sad that people turn down the invitation, instead investing their precious time in pseudo conspiracies and pseudo apocalyptic fantasies, which take the form of fictional novels and films, or supposedly real conspiracies, such as those involving political intrigue. Thus it is that they miss the real thing - the real conspiracy, the real apocalypse, the real grandeur, the real mystery, and the real adventure of life.
