DgA PLAN FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY? I know not if ’tis true, Yet I, for mere suspicion in that kind, will do as if for surety. Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
Paranoia and the new century
We have followed paranoia’s trail of blood. It already existed when our history began. It seems to have neither beginning nor end, as if its historical essence replicated its psychological essence. It is changeless. Paranoia is disguised as life – in its seeming normality, the way it merges with everyday life – but it is not life. It never bends, never moves, is never healed. It puts on an act, the better to strike anyone who lowers their guard. If it has travelled from the beaches of Troy to our own front door, from Homer’s night to the page torn out of the calendar yesterday, then we must acknowledge that it is primordial and almost invincible. How and when did we enter the twenty-first century? The answer is obvious: not on 1 January 2000, but on 11 September 2001. The date gave psychologists an unaccustomed opportunity to discuss paranoia. More relevant to our theme than the Islamic integralists’ attack itself are the announcements by which it was accompanied. Every terrorist proclamation spouts paranoia. It starts from an underlying assumption, which it does not prove but offers as a revelation. This is followed by megalomania, obsessiveness, rigidity. Impatience. Delusion of reference. Inability not merely to come to terms, but even to enter into dialogue. Radical suspicion of any interlocutor. American politics has for the most part responded with equal inflexibility. But before we go on we must take a step backwards.
The Cold War
The Cold War could have been for the United States a relatively normal experience of the enemy but without the costs in blood and extreme paranoia which are typical of fought wars. It was not. When the Second World War ended, America was still at the height of mobilization and equipped for several more years of war. Reconverting the economy and the armed forces was an immense task. But even more difficult was reconverting the collective psychology. For the mass media and politicians it was easier to continue to project evil into the distance. It is a form of moralism that guarantees very simple consent. so the Fascist Axis, the enemy of the Hot War, was replaced by the Soviet Union, the adversary of the Cold War. In 1948, it came into possession of nuclear weapons.