Navigating the Maze of Fear and Suspicion
“A woman gets nervous. She begins to suspect that her husband is trying to make trouble for her. She doesn’t like to let him into the house. He tries to get into the house, proving that he’s trying to make trouble for her. He gets a friend to try to talk to her. She knows that it’s a friend, and she knows in her mind, which is going to one side, that this is only further evidence of the terrible fright and fear that she’s building up in her mind.”
That is how famed Physicist and thinker Richard Feynman depicted paranoia during a lecture in 1963.
He was talking about the Cold War and its effect on the nation’s collective psyche. He continues the example — the woman calls the police, who respond. But then she remembers her husband has a friend on the police force…they must be in on it too.
According to DSM-IV (1994), those diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder have “a pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such as their motives are interpreted as malevolent.”
Feynman’s description of Cold War paranoia gave me goosebumps. Almost 60 years later, the United States is still paranoid. The Cold War may have ended in the early 90s, and perhaps for a bit, the paranoia eased — but it’s returned with a vengeance. Now, partisan lines have replaced the iron curtain.
How do we become less paranoid and more rational? Can solutions for individual paranoia shine a light on large group resolutions? The Cold War paranoia didn’t subside until the Cold War ended (and even then, not entirely)— but how can national paranoia decline without the collapse of the United States? I’ve grappled with these questions since reading Feynman’s transcript several months ago.
If a citizen believes the President of the United States is compromised and serving as an agent for another country, it’s impossible to disprove. Even if the President were to act contrary to the accusation, the accuser is likely to say, “they have to make it look like they’re going against their interests, else they’ll be caught.” Any evidence the accused presents to demonstrate their innocence must be “fabricated” — after all, no compromised agent would willingly admit their true motives. To the paranoid, the evidence further proves the effectiveness of “the agent’s” manipulation of the population.
The current paranoia is more alarming because it’s occurring on both sides — people on both ends of the spectrum vehemently declare the other side is composed of traitors plotting to destroy the country.
How do we overcome this condition? Feynman’s answer when it came to Soviet-focused paranoia was to point out the following:
“They’re right…the Soviets are very ingenious and clever indeed.” He goes on to explain that paranoia itself was a Soviet weapon. “What they want us to do is to lose faith in the Supreme Court, to lose faith in the Agriculture Department, to lose faith in the scientists and all the people who help us in all kinds of ways, and so on and so on.”
If the Soviets were weaponizing paranoia to destroy faith in American institutions — who (if anyone) is doing the weaponizing today? Are foreign actors like China and Russia looking to usurp the United States? Is it the American political parties, each vying to dominate the world’s most powerful nation? Is the mass media or corporate giants purposefully dividing us to generate more clicks and revenue? Or have we become so used to being paranoid that we merely replaced the Soviet suspects with our fellow Americans?
Why do people become paranoid to begin with?
In individuals, it’s believed that such thoughts occur to help explain experiences — to make sense of the world (Maher, 1988). Daniel Freeman and Philippa Garety add that anxiety may play a principal role — “anxiety may be especially important in the generation of persecutory ideation. This is because anxiety and suspiciousness have the same cognitive theme of the anticipation of danger.” According to Freeman and Garety, the final piece is biased reasoning: “persecutory ideas are more likely to reach a delusional intensity if there are accompanying biases in reasoning such as reduced data gathering (jumping to conclusions).”
Can entire societies be paranoid? I doubt it’s prudent to apply diagnosable psychiatric disorders to observed societal behaviors, but perhaps understanding individual psychology can help comprehend this dangerous flavor of groupthink.
Dr. Ronald Pies explored the idea, noting, “psychiatry already has its hands full, dealing with pressing problems of untreated serious mental illness; a fragmented non-system of health care; and limited access to psychiatric services. Should we not focus on these urgent matters before getting tangled up in the ambiguities of paranoid government disorder? Aren’t such issues best left to fields like sociology and cultural anthropology — and to professional diplomats?”
He concludes, “I think psychiatry does have a constructive role to play in the understanding of societal paranoia and how it may lead to violent conflict on the international stage.” Thus, in examining the beliefs and behaviors of groups of people, I believe it’s helpful to consider individual psychology and behavior.
Making Sense
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the primary treatments for patients with paranoid thoughts. In beginning such treatment, clinicians typically seek answers to questions like:
On what evidence is the person basing their thoughts?
How do paranoid thoughts build on the patient’s ideas about the self and others and ordinary worries?
How do the thoughts make sense given previous life events?
Is the person reacting to puzzling and confusing experiences?
How is the person reasoning about their experiences?
What behaviors are keeping the thoughts going?
According to Freeman and Garety, the goal is to develop a formulation — “a multifactorial account of the development of the paranoid thoughts.”
It’s not feasible to sit the entire nation on a couch and conduct a joint therapy session, so we’ll have to rely on the backbone of American democracy — the individual. We often seek top-down answers for our most challenging problems, but solutions are usually developed from the bottom up (despite what your representatives would have you believe).
It’s up to me and you to ask ourselves these questions and work intently to avoid falling victim to crowd-induced paranoia. This is made difficult because there are mal-intending participants around us. Most false information contains nuggets of truth. These bits of truth provide the canvas upon which layer upon layer of misinformation can be added, acting as an escape valve when irrationality is called out. But we must look inward to understand our subconscious mind and the reasons for our beliefs, actions, and thoughts.
Open-Mindedness
We must battle the urge to blind ourselves to the other side of an issue altogether. John Stuart Mill beautifully pointed this out, saying:
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
A crucial part of Mill’s point is to seek counter-arguments from people who believe them. I’ve often found myself in a group conversation with people who largely agree, sloppily constructing opposing arguments (paper tigers), only to decisively destroy them with premeditated assertions. This haphazard target shooting is disingenuine and is only meant to look and feel open-minded. As Mill suggested, hearing these arguments from people who believe them (preferably real people seeking honest dialogue) is more valuable, as the strengths of the point of view will be put forward rather than the weaknesses.
Exposure to evidence is beneficial, but only if it’s not automatically discarded. Author Adam Grant explained that we should think more like scientists, actively challenging our beliefs, and less like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians:
I think too many of us spend too much time thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. [Phillip] Tetlock made a very compelling case that when we’re in preacher mode, we’re convinced we’re right; when we’re in prosecutor mode, we’re trying to prove someone else wrong; and when we’re in politician mode, we’re trying to win the approval of our audience.
Evidence
Paranoia is rooted in false beliefs. But assassinations, scandals, collisions, and cover-ups occur regularly in the world, making the existence of other conspiracies seem plausible. So, how do we find the truth? Evidence.
There is no shortage of conspiracy theories, and I won’t attempt to judge the validity of any particular theory. But resisting information that undermines one’s beliefs while accepting insufficient evidence that supports pre-existing beliefs is a recipe for biased assimilation. This sword cuts both ways. Ignoring evidence moves you just as far from the truth as believing misinformation.
Biased thinking, if unchecked gives way to deluded thinking and reduced data gathering. Recognizing that conspiracies have and do occur is important; otherwise, you’ll believe anything presented by any authority, legitimate or not.
Anger
Author Donald Robertson is an author and expert on Stoic philosophy. He’s written extensively about such figures as Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and his background in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) makes his work especially compelling. He frequently calls anger the “royal road to self-improvement.” If dealing with anger is the royal road to self-improvement, it may also be the path to improving mass paranoia.
Seneca argued that anger and rationality are not compatible, making anger too dangerous an emotion to indulge in, saying:
“It is easier to exclude the forces of ruin than to govern them, to deny them admission than to moderate them afterwards. For once they have established possession, they prove to be more powerful than their governor, refusing to be cut back or reduced.”
If anger destroys one’s ability to reason, it’s easy to see how being angry makes one more susceptible to paranoia. And since the antidote for anger is reason, anger then can become a vicious cycle, where anger defeats reason, which begets more tremendous anger.
When I become angry, I recall the words of slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, “It is not things that upset us but rather our opinions about them.” Remembering that it’s my judgment of things that upset me helps me control my anger, which elevates my ability to act rationally.
If we’re to end the spin cycle of paranoia, more of us must heed the words of John C. Maxwell, “Most people want to change the world to improve their lives, but the world they need to change first is the one inside themselves.” The soviet weapon of paranoia didn’t win them the cold war, and we can’t allow it to eat our nation from the inside. By keeping an open mind, challenging our current views, and controlling our anger, we can prevail against tribalism, extremism, and paranoia and push the American experiment to new heights.
