There is a guy out here that is basically flipping out and having these complex paranoid delusions about secret agents that are out to get him. Don't want to get too involved in it, but it is unsettling to say the least. Paranoid delusions can be pretty scary, because they seem very real to the person suffering them, and in the right contexts they can be difficult to separate from reality, even from the perspective of an outsider, since oftentimes they are based off of interrelated nuggets of truth in the first place. I can run through a quick scenario to show what I mean.
Let's say you have a community of activists, and you introduce the specter of government agent infiltration. These activists are doing something the government doesn't like, and there is a real fear that the government will try to scuttle these efforts. Now you get to thinking: well, there is a history of infiltration in which various government agencies have used downright heinous and diabolical methods of psychological warfare, political fear and terror, and violence to disrupt activist networks, and this is all empirically verifiable.
Today you can point to a variety of cases in which whisteblowers have been prosecuted, activists (even peaceful and passive ones) have been put on terror lists, and there have even been charismatic individuals who have been chased to the ends of the earth and destroyed - Edward Snowden got away for now but Chelsea Manning is in prison and Aaron Swartz killed himself from the pressure. Plus there is at least one case I know of where people simply expressing political opinions and agitating had their house stormed by SWAT or some such company of storm trooper.
Now of course all of this is always happening, but activists still have to do their thing. So they do their thing with this fear in the back of their minds that there could be agents among them, or that the hammer could come down at any minute. These agent provocateurs know cutting edge techniques in psychological warfare, and there are things that can be done to manipulate this fear and infiltrate and fragment activist networks and the activists know this.
So what if you have one of these activist people who is susceptible to paranoid delusion? This can cause very serious problems. Who is genuine and who is an agent? Can agents blur these lines between the genuine and false? How far can this conspiracy expand? How sophisticated are governments now? What if governments can build entire activist ecosystems to suck activists in and disrupt their activities? What if everyone you meet is a potential agent? How do you neutralize a delusion that has a basis in reality without drawing slippery arbitrary lines?
And so the paranoid mind starts from the premise that there is a threat present, and builds its arguments off of that premise. With such a premise, a paranoiac can tell him or herself pretty much anything, so long as the interrelated facts strung together are coherent and provide a plausible explanation for the threat. The more agitation, the more baroque and malevolent the paranoid delusion.
It is fear that is the common denominator in all of this. Fear transforms the mind into a police state in miniature, putting the brain's powerful logical and symbolic systems to task to build a profile of the threat and develop means of neutralization. Every new source of information could be connected to the threat. No unknown could be too suspicious. As the paranoiac seeks to preserve his or her security, he or she generalizes protocols of threat neutralization, provoking and agitating those whom neutralization is attempted on, which thereby feeds the fear even more; the police state makes replicas of itself, which situate themselves into each other and interface. This can cause endless divisions if it is allowed to run away. Social networks bifurcate along those sympathetic and antipathic to the paranoiac, generating new paranoiacs, who inspire further bifurcations.
The fear creates its own reality. It alters the social landscape on which one interacts, or the social logic with which one proceeds to interact with others. What is so convenient for the police state and its little miniatures is the fact that fear, when directed towards its object, can induce sympathetic behavior in the object itself. If one is feared, one fears the source of fear in turn, as the corollary to fear is the elimination of the object of fear. Fear produces interlocking relationships which amplify each other.
The only way to solve this problem is really quite simple and very demanding at the same time: the fear has to be ignored. Activists have to live with constant threat, with the possibility that there are agents present. There are of course precautions that many activist practitioners have learned, some of them very sophisticated and well-worn over old traditions of political dissidence, but a certain amount of risk has to be accepted as well. Easier said than done of course. The more you fear disintegration or fragmentation, prison or death, and the more you do to attempt to prevent those outcomes, past a certain point of practicality and effective action, the further you tend to advance towards just those ends.
Of course, the paranoid types have trouble with just this sort of thing and I guess that's the point. Social ostracization and isolation can produce unstable modes of thought in which the brain is always on alert. It really isn't clear what comes first: the fearful modes of thought and abnormal functioning and behaviors, or the isolation and discord which feed them and are fed by them, though of course the answer is usually that they grow together. And then if the mind is already in this fearful state, it tends to respond more faithfully to the logic of fear, spreading the logic in turn.
This could be part of the reason that totalitarian governments only form amidst atomized populations, or why they seek to create them as they consolidate power, as Hannah Arendt observed. Totalitarian governments practically run on fear and terror, to put it crudely.
Admittedly, the more something is in danger of disintegrating, the more it fears. Our security state apparatus is gradually transforming into a totalitarian entity because it is protecting something that is in danger of disintegration, because that something is essentially an abomination. The towering and obscene concentration of material power that is global capital is highly unstable and it knows it. Further, down to the individual paranoiac, the loss of social support is comparable to a form of death in a complex society in which the division of labor has become so essential.
Things continue to come apart, and if you wish to preserve what once was but will never be again, well fine. Have fun. Preservation is still possible, but it isn't going to look like anything we're used to. So ah, go with the flow. One gazes on and blinks. Interesting times, needless to say.
