Seeking to Understand the Fears Leading to Paranoia

As I detail some comments and associations to Ken Fuchsman’s “The Paranoid Style” paper, I also pose open-ended questions to the readers. Let me refer to the paragraph in his paper starting with “These phenomena appear in the revolutionary period….”  If I understand correctly, the discussion that follows refers to the “comprehensive conspiracy” that historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood claim some American revolutionaries had about the British crown’s intent. Was conspiracy what the revolutionaries were convinced of and lacked evidence for, or were they consciously propagandizing?

In my ignorance of the historians, I find the statement in the Declaration of Independence one of fact. Fuchsman sees it differently: “This quote is characteristic of the paranoid style with its projection of evil onto malevolent political authorities and assigning virtue to the rebels.”  Might the statement in the Declaration perhaps instead be understood as a generalization about a political situation, possibly exaggerated because of the necessity to be brief, at least in the first place? If not, how do you think the Declaration writers could have phrased it better?

I agree with Bessel van der Kolk’s view that our “emotions tell us what we value” and therefore are where we should look to understand minds’ beliefs and individuals’ actions. When what we value is threatened, we feel in danger of great loss, and if we do not experience ourselves as having the power or means to prevent that great loss, we fear and—under certain circumstances in the outside world—our fears run away with us. So when I see fear, I am interested in learning about its source in the real world and how it’s constructed by the speaker.

Fuchsman’s analysis finds White supremacists claiming and protecting various forms of superiority such as entitlement to absolute freedom, great material wealth, unchallengeable sexual potency, and being a majority in their country. Underlying all the claims, isn’t the fear associated with losing that superiority real, even if

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some of the fears are way off target?

Fuchsman speaks of Hitler and Trump. During the earliest days of Trump’s presidency, if not before, Michael Moore likened Trump to Hitler because of his threat to our democracy. I was frightened and enraged by Trump more deeply and earlier than my less-Left-leaning husband. If Trump had won in 2020, I spoke of going onto the street to fight. If the Right-wing becomes widely active on the streets, then what? Were and are my fears paranoid? How are we to judge?

One implication of this is that it seems to me to be less pathologizing if pathologizing at all. It normalizes what the mind does to the threats and fears as natural results of extreme external threats and events. The implication also seems to support Richard Hofstader’s claim that he was not using paranoid “in a clinical sense.”  To me, labeling individuals or their thinking as “paranoid” imposes a negative, pathologizing judgment in ordinary parlance. Hofstader’s work emerged in 1964 well before trauma psychology became a dominant approach.

In general, I do not wish to pathologize others. Apart from being able to find some extreme fantasies and thoughts in myself or at least an understanding of them, my primary reason for wanting to understand them and for wanting to understand them as I do is because I work to change the minds of people who hold political values that I do not support. The two primary values I take a moral stand on are human rights and the processing of difference productively or constructively. My whole background leads me to commit to understanding peoples’ anti-human rights (e.g., White supremacy) and anti-productive, anti-democratic rule of law (i.e., non-violent), processing difference while sometimes simultaneously judging. At the same time, I advocate that those who act to violate the human rights of others should be held accountable.

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