THE PARANOID STATE

[Triton]

THE PARANOID STATE By James Hillman



We may read the conventional descriptions of the paranoid soul (which
I have extracted mainly from the standard Diagnostic Manual used by
practitioners in the United States) as also descriptions of the soul
of the paranoid state.

"Pervasive and unwarrented suspiciousness and mistrust."
"Individuals are hypervigilant and take precautions against perceived
threat." "Perceive an unusually wide range of stimuli." "Tend to avoid
blame even when it is warrented." "Avoidance of depression." "Question
the loyalty of others." "Insist on secrecy." "Severe and critical with
others." "Tendency to counter-attack." "Unwilling to compromise."
"Intense, but supressed anger." "Driving, amitious, aggressive and
unusually hostile and destructive." "Generate uneasiness and fear in
others." "Often interested in mechanical devices, electronics, and
automation." "Avoid group activities unless in a dominant position."
"Avoid surprise by virtually anticipating it." "Dread... passive
surrender." "Friends are constantly tested… until they withdraw or
actually become antagonistic." "Inordinate fear of losing power to
shape events in accordance with their own wishes." "Transformation of
internal tension into external tension." "Continuous state of total
mobilization." "Giving in to external domination and giving in to
internal pressure involve a threat." "Fear of being tricked into
surrendering some element of self-determination." "Generally
uninterested in art or aesthetics." "Rarely laugh." "Lack of a true
sense of humour." "What looks like comfortable familiarity… seems like
an imitation… It is not friendly; it is only designed to look
friendly." "Keenly aware… of who is superior or inferior." "They
disdain people seen as weak, soft, sickly, or defective."

We need to hear these descriptions as pertaining to politics and
government as such so as to recognize the inherent paranoia in the
soul of the state as such. The deepest problem of statecraft is how to
govern the inherent paranoia of government so that its symptoms not
exacerbate into corrupt tyranny and byzantine paralysis, symptoms such
as secret police, loyalty oaths and lie detection, electronic
surveillance, fear of weakness, systematized defenses and predictions
(domino theory), and the absence of those soul qualities, humour,
aesthetics and softness replaced by grand eschatological ideals:
order, peace, humanity, fraternity, rights of God.<o:p></o:p>

Given this inherent unconscious paranoia, there will be a need for
a projected fantasized enemy and fantastical defenses against the
fantasized enemy. Situations will always be evalued by constructs of
strength and weakness, winning and losing. Demand for unconditional
surrender and the fear of it will be paramount. Treaties based on
compromise will be all but impossible to negotiate. A nation in league
with others will be forced -whenever it becomes unable to dominate the
group- to veto or withdraw. The potential for open hostility is ever-
present and will be denied. Official denial will be essential to
maintaining a government 'above suspicion' and true to its
idealizations. There will be little interest in art or aesthetics, and
when the government should intervene then the aesthetic tends to be
suborned as state art in service of national resolve. Even the most
solicitously conducted foreign relations will tend to generate
uneasiness and fear in others. Defense against depression will
motivate ever-increasing defenses. The disdain for the weak, sickly
and defective will bring to the fore that contemporary, though ever-
recurring, conflict between security and compassion (guns vs. butter,
swords vs. plowshares), between the burden of armaments for defense
and the burden of welfare for the failing. Owing to the fear of
dependency, self-sufficiency will be idealized into an isolation
called "splendid."

Above all else will be mistrust and expectations of deceit between
the governed and their government, requiring watchdog committees,
bureaus of investigation, advocacies of every sort of reform, since
paranoid suspicion is inherent to the very soul of state. Not only
will the state mistrust the foreign (xenophobia), but within its
borders also the alien, the sub-culture and the minority - unless it
be 'strong', thereby necessitating minority pressure-groups and
division of the body politic into rivalrous single-issue or monomanic
constituencies. The more rigidly demanding government is of the
governed, and vice versa, the more suspicions of corruption abound,
particularly suspicions regarding 'security', and the more information-
gathering and information-storing becomes prized and litigation the
mode of decision. For, the negative relation with mercurious results
in that basic proposition of all paranoia: whatever is hidden is
harmful (hence revelation equals security), requiring continuous
scanning, hypervigilance toward the food we eat, the reports we hear,
the contracts we sign. Expose' and cover-up become the modus operandi
- our theological paradigm of revelation and concealment in the
political sphere.

Despite the promulgation of the nation-state by the nation-state,
its inherent paranoia fosters mistrust in the very institutions which
are its pillars including the validity of the city and the calling of
politics. The welfare of the citizens and the institutions which serve
the common good become secondary, owing to the primary confusion of
welfare with security, the common good with national strength, or
"military needs." (It should be evident that I am referring not only
to the contemporary world, but to the nation-states from Assyria
through Rome, and others analyzed by Toynbee.) When the noble
institutions of political life, such as political rhetoric, the
providential role of leadership, public office and public service,
fall prey to paranoid systematization, then the great images of
justice, prudence, equity, community, and the like, dangle down from
heaven unreceived, the containing shapes for the archetypal powers in
disarray. All the while, obsessed by its delusional need for security,
the paranoid state takes recourse in defense mechanisms of projection
and reaction-formation, that is, increased scanning for enemies,
terrorists and defectors (defectives), with policies sponsored not by
initiative which is paralyzed by ambivalence (immobility combined with
bellowing), but which are rationalized as 'purely' defensive reactions
to threat.

Threat belongs to what Jung calls the end of the aeon (CW 9 ii: p.
ix); The book of revelations announces apocalyptic catastrophe. We
live in a Zeitgeist of threat, in a soul state and political state of
paranoia. This has been scripturely revealed and is being confirmed
politically in the Soviet state of mind (ever-homaging the twenty
million who died defending against the last Western invasion) and the
American (ever-defending against penetration into the body politic by
emissaries of the Evil-Empire [and now 'Axis of Evil'] - colored
pinko, terrorists and spies). Threat of catastrophe justifies the
measures taken against threat, thereby making the menace ever more
literal. "…the fear of catastrophe is most likely to elicit the
syndrome." Worse: the syndrome requires catastrophe to fulfill its own
prophesy. The vicious circle of paranoid psychology is the present
political reality.


[From 'On Paranoia' by Spring Publications]