December 9, 2022
A month after the midterm elections, it is beginning finally to seem as if we can afford to exhale. Extremism was decisively, if not completely, repudiated. We have for the moment avoided catastrophe, avoided the inauguration of a fascist state. The question, of course, is why we faced this crisis in the first place. It is the question we have been asking, in various forms, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Why has this happened? As recently as the Obama years, there were predictions that Republicans would soon be unable to win another election because changing demographics are against them. The predictions were perhaps not quite as naïve as they now seem. The far right maintains itself in power in large measure only through various forms of manipulation: through gerrymandering, through arcane pseudo-procedures like the filibuster and raising (or refusing to raise) the debt ceiling, through stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing hacks by means of unethical and at times outright illegal procedures (the refusal to confirm Merrick Garland, the willingness of candidates to lie during the confirmation process), and by the brazen political partisanship on the part of all the right-wing members of the Court. The power exercised by the far right is greatly in excess of its actual popularity.
The bad news is that nevertheless the extreme right comprises tens of millions of people, people whose worldview has accurately been described as a form of paranoia, which is the subject of this newsletter. Every once in a while a scholar or social commentator is seized by something deeper and more powerful than normal scholarly analysis and produces a vision so intense that it deserves to be called prophetic. Richard Hofstadter’s justly famous “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is an example of this phenomenon. Passages quoted out of context, such as the following, sound so contemporary that it is startling to remember that the essay was originally published in 1964:
But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
In an often-quoted passage, Hofstadter goes on to delineate the dark mythology upon which such a surface ideology is grounded:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse…. | As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
The current Republican party does not consist entirely of paranoids. There are any number of crooks and con artists who merely smell an opportunity, and there are others like Mitch McConnell who are willing to make deals with entire legions of devils for the sake of holding power. But it is the paranoids who drive the bus.
Certain complaints about Hofstadter’s liberal bias are disingenuous: Hofstadter explicitly states at the outset that the paranoid style can be found on the left as well as on the right: in 1964, it could be found “in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.” A few years later, leftist paranoia produced violent insurgents such as the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army and the non-violent yet borderline-nihilistic mood of a good number of post-structuralist philosophers and literary theorists. There was a widespread feeling that Western culture was nothing but a death machine, that its end was near, and that the task of the intellectual was to subvert its theoretical underpinnings by a relentless “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Current woke extremism, the more or less blanket condemnation of most white culture as nothing but “white supremacy,” is similarly paranoid, and in fact seems to descend more or less directly from the earlier “theory wars,” perhaps in conjunction with the more intransigent kind of race theory typified by Malcolm X, as opposed to the liberal hopefulness of Martin Luther King.
The main catalyst of Hofstadter’s article was clearly McCarthyism, only a decade in the past, but it is mainly concerned to demonstrate how present paranoia is like herpes virus—a permanent and apparently ineradicable infection, lying dormant until catalyzed by some new perceived threat. In the past, right-wing paranoia has been anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-homosexual, anti-integrationist, anti-federal government and at times anti-government in general, all of which it still is today. The rhetoric has changed surprisingly little, all the way back to the birth of the nation.
And in fact much further than that. To get ahead of ourselves a little, paranoia sees everything as connected in one vast conspiracy theory, and in doing so reveals itself as what it is: the demonic shadow of the imagination, which sees all things connected creatively and positively. Perhaps Hofstadter understood paranoia so well because for a scholar he had a powerful faculty of intuition, of seeing connections across time and space. In a leap of insight, he connects his own findings with those of Norman Cohn’s celebrated book The Pursuit of the Millenium (1957, revised and expanded 1970), a study of millenarian cult movements in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, leading him to his greatest insight, that paranoia is a permanent tendency of human nature:
Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies . . . systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”
This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population.
Hofstadter does omit mention of one important type of paranoia, presumably because it was in a sense domestic rather than political: the persecution of witches as a result of a particular misogynist brand of paranoia. What happened in Salem was a homegrown version of the witchcraft hysteria that drove King James I in England to write a book called Demonology and Shakespeare to curry favor with his king and patron by writing Macbeth. It was one thing to persecute some half-crazed crone from the edge of town, but the deeper fear was that the witches would turn out to be men’s wives and daughters, sneaking out the back door to become the devil’s child-sacrificing lovers. The protagonist of Fritz Leiber’s fantasy-horror classic Conjure Wife (1943, 1952) finds that not only his wife but all women are witches, a notion that was played for laughs in the 60’s sitcom Bewitched but is in fact a standard element in the imagery of male anxiety, as in Peter Green’s “Black Magic Woman,” the famous version of which is Santana’s, on Abraxas (1970): “she’s a black magic woman / She’s tryin’ to make a devil out of me.” The imagery of witchcraft hysteria is close to that of QAnon’s Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
We may trace the paranoid vision back, as Cohn himself notes in his opening chapter, to a period far earlier than the eleventh century, to the period of apocalyptic literature that can be roughly dated for convenience from the period between its two Biblical examples, that is, from at least 165 BCE, the date of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, to about 95 CE, the probable date of the Book of Revelation. Apocalyptic literature is persecution literature, and the persecutions were not delusional but rather all too real, first of the Jews and later of the Christians. But the persecuting political powers (the Seleucid dynasty, the Roman Empire) were seen as puppets of larger demonic forces. As Ephesians 6:12 puts it, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” While there were many fringe groups who thought in terms of a final battle between good and demonic forces, such as the desert Essenes who may have influenced John the Baptist, in the first two centuries paranoia came to possess the developing Church itself in the form of heresy-hunting. In his Against Heresies, Irenaeus saw heresy everywhere, as McCarthyism saw Communism and as the Communists saw “deviants.” The obsession with “orthodoxy” in modern Christianity is a rebirth of such paranoia, which is not to say that it cannot form the basis for literary works of some power, such as That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, itself influenced by the novels of Lewis’s fellow Inkling Charles Williams.
One of the groups most vociferously attacked by Irenaeus was the Gnostics, rivals of the institutional Church in the first two centuries. In linguistics, there is always a question about the moment when a dialect diverges so far that it becomes a new language. Similarly, there is a question about whether Gnosticism is a dialect of heresy that can occur in many religions—there were, after all, Jewish, Christian, and pagan Gnostics—or is it what the title of Hans Jonas’s famous study calls it, The Gnostic Religion? Indeed, what has been called Gnostic is so various and conflicting that some scholars question whether the name has any meaning at all. In quite a number of Gnostic texts, however, Gnosticism out-paranoids apocalyptic literature in seeing an aspect of God himself involved in the Fall. The role that orthodox Christianity projects onto Satan and his fallen angels is often (though not invariably) identified in Gnosticism as a split-off portion of the divine nature, sometimes called Ialdabaoth. He rules a demonic oligarchy identified with the signs of the zodiac. Despite its frequently bizarre symbolism, Gnosticism’s perceptiveness about the psychology of evil is at times impressive. Ialdabaoth is a meglomaniacal tyrant, the model for dictators and would-be dictators down to the Putins and Trumps of our own time. Like all such narcissists, he has no sense of reality outside the bubble of his own obsessions, and thinks he is the sole power in the universe. But there is a still-unfallen aspect of God beyond the fallen time and space ruled over by Ialdabaoth and his archons.
So the ultimate form of paranoia is the Gnostic feeling that the entire universe is ruled by, and was indeed created by, a demonic power. Some authors have written entire books to condemn this idea as “pessimism” and “nihilism.” They should get out more. To say that God himself fell, even if only in part, is not so perverse as it may sound. Of all the forms of Christianity, it was only Gnosticism that was able to give a coherent answer to the question of why an all-powerful, all-good God allows evil, and in particular allows the suffering of the innocent. The answer is that God is not in fact all powerful, and, in working to redeem the universe, is actually healing himself. I am not impressed by the orthodox who profess to be outraged by the idea of an imperfect, struggling God. What is actually outrageous is the attempt to justify the unspeakable suffering that goes on in this world as a perfect God’s plan. That position is only tenable by those who are lucky enough to be privileged and cushioned from that suffering, so cushioned that some of them are not even aware how hard life is for most people. Moreover, it lands orthodoxy in the quagmire of predestination. If God is all-powerful, then he is truly inscrutable, granting grace so that some people are made capable of repenting and thus being saved, denying grace to others so that they are damned. Predestination is a paranoid vision nightmarish beyond anything that so-called pessimistic Gnosticism ever dreamed of.
The diagnostic symptom of paranoia, so to speak, is a feeling of threat, not just local or occasional but systemic threat. The real threat is the whole system in which we are caught. Where does such a feeling come from? Yes, from life itself: paranoia is a kind of universalized PTSD. There is no doubt that a kind of perpetually latent paranoia bursts out into conspiracy theories and neo-fascism during times of social upheaval, when a normal sense of stability and security vanishes and many people feel they are in free fall. That is the kind of situation we are in right now, the kind in which millions seek refuge from their precarious lives by dissolving into the collective consciousness of a vast mob giving itself up to the reassuring power of an authoritarian cult leader. But what of that part of the feeling of threat that is endemic, not merely situational?
My explanation of that anxious, alienated, threatened feeling was the foundational argument of The Productions of Time. Animals are conscious, but human beings are, or by maturing become, self-conscious. We develop an ego, or “I,” that comes into being by defining itself against all that is not-I, that is Other. That dawn of consciousness entails the loss of a previous sense of connection, of non-separation: it is what mythology means by the Fall of humanity, repeated in every individual. It is a fall into paranoia, because what is Other, what is non-self, is by definition unknown and potentially threatening. What mythology always knew was recreated in philosophical terms by Descartes in the 17th century. He posited the cogito, the “I am,” of the ego, but recognized the problem of what has been called the “Cartesian split” between the ego and the rest of reality. Descartes went even further, exacerbating the sense of Otherness into an actual conspiracy theory: what if the Other is a malicious demon, not only lurking outside my frame of reference but actively creating that frame of reference? What if what I call reality is merely an illusion summoned up by a demon? We are not far from Gnosticism here.
That split is the central problem of modern philosophy, and various schools of thought have been trying to surmount it ever since. In the 18th century, Kant said that, empiricism to the contrary, the data of the senses are not imprinted upon a mind that is a tabula rasa, a blank slate. Rather, the mind constructs sense data into a coherent picture according to various a priori categories such as time, space, and causality. We can never know what reality is in itself: the “thing-in-itself” is unknowable, and therefore in Kant’s view can simply be dismissed. But there is a difference between lived experience and a logic problem. Kant tried to bring the construction of reality in house, as it were, rendering the human mind potentially creative. But Kantianism is not able to say where the a priori categories came from: what if the thing-in-itself really is Descartes’ demon puppeteering the mind through the categories? The potential for paranoia remains.
Modern literature has fully realized that potential. An entire history of modern literature from the great Romantic turning point could be written in the paranoid tonality. In British Romanticism, paranoia gave birth to the figure of the brooding Solitary, most famous as the Byronic hero. In American literature, it produced Ahab’s mad desire to “strike through the mask,” the mask being a white whale signifying an unknown Otherness. Melville’s friend Hawthorne explored the paranoid implications of predestination in stories like “Young Goodman Brown.” Needless to say, there is nothing of Poe that is not paranoid, and from Poe descends the tradition of modern horror that is based on the primal feeling of underlying threat. In his novels, The Trial and The Castle, Kafka dramatized the helpless feeling of being caught up in a labyrinthine bureaucracy, a “system” so vast and incomprehensible that we cannot tell whether it is hostile or merely indifferent. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus calls history a nightmare from which he is trying to awake, and Joyce’s next work, Finnegans Wake, is that nightmare: all of history as a dream from which no one ever quite awakens.
Paranoid skepticism entered science fiction at least as far back as Robert Heinlein’s “They” (1941), in which the main character realizes his reality has been created by a Cartesian-style demon called the Great Glaroon. The novels of Philip K. Dick have come to command a central position not merely in science fiction but in American literature, despite their lack of literary polish, because they express the terror of paranoid doubt with an intensity that Poe himself might envy. Where other writers play intellectual games with epistemological uncertainty, Dick gives us the experience of losing one’s grip on reality, no longer knowing what is real and what is not, feeling oneself slowly slipping into insanity, his power to dramatize this descent into the solipsistic state that Blake called Ulro expressly drawing upon his own repeated psychotic episodes. While their content draws upon autobiographical experience, in terms of literary convention his novels fall into a Romantic and post-Romantic genre of first-person descent into madness that includes Nerval’s Aurélia and Rimbaud’s Un Saison en Enfer, Rimbaud’s title clearly indicating that such narratives are a new kind of psychological journey into the underworld. Samuel R. Delany’s monumental Dhalgren, whose hero cannot remember his own name and who cannot awaken from a circular, dreamlike mode of experience again informed by the author’s experience of temporary psychosis, falls into the same genre.
Dick spent his last years writing the so-called VALIS trilogy, of which the first two volumes depict reality in terms of a political and spiritual conspiracy theory that is explicitly Gnostic, only to have the main character of the final volume renounce all such theories as pathological. Similarly, in what is perhaps the greatest modern fantasy, John Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy, also modeled explicitly along Gnostic lines, the main character renounces paranoid obsessions in the final volume like an addict renouncing a drug. Crowley’s other brilliant fantasy, Little,Big, is full of references to Lewis Carroll, whose Alice books are at once satirical and nightmarish, an experience of life as one mad tea party. Even science fiction and fantasy writers typically more grounded in realism have felt the power of Dick’s reality-dissolving spell. Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, about a man whose dreams change reality, seems to be in dialogue with him; the characters in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt repeatedly return to the state between rebirths that Tibetan Buddhism calls Bardo. They are such things as dreams are made on, identified in each incarnation by names that always begin with the same letter, and they spend their time in Bardo wondering about the point of it all. The Years of Rice and Salt is alternate history: underlying the current popularity of the convention of a multiverse is the feeling that reality is not stable and foundational but rather a labyrinth of forking paths, constantly shifting and in flux. The same feeling accounts for another recent form of fiction, often called slipstream, in which a story eludes categorization into any single genre. Paranoid delusions are constructs that desperately try to give experience some kind of order and meaning. They are a defense against what is perhaps the deepest of all terrors: the feeling that reality has no meaning at all.
Which brings us to the author whose treatment of the theme of paranoia is the most thoroughgoing and, perhaps, the most profound. The protagonists of both of Thomas Pynchon’s most famous novels, The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, attempt to unravel conspiracy theories, and in doing so eventually become haunted by a feeling that either everything in life is in some way part of the conspiracy—or that nothing is, that they are merely delusional, even if a lot of the people they encounter are delusional as well. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas pursues knowledge of a secret organization called the Tristero whose beginnings may lie in the 17th century but whose traces she pursues across the mad tea party that was southern California in the 1960’s—a party that served a lot more than tea. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop pursues the secret of a Nazi V-2 rocket whose serial number was all zeroes across the vast panorama of World War II, a rocket that is hanging in mid-air at the novel’s close, describing a parabola of death that is also the rainbow of the novel’s title, that title being a promise, however ambiguous, that there is a possibility of something beyond the labyrinthine prison of paranoid obsession.
Generally considered one of the most important novels of the second half of the 20th century, Gravity’s Rainbow fascinated Northrop Frye, who referred to it with some frequency in his late books and notebooks. In an article called “Culture as Interpenetration” he provides an incisive summation of a novel that is 760 pages long:
One of the most remarkable works of fiction in our time, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, suggests that the human instinct to see humanly intelligible pattern and design in nature is a form of paranoia. That is, man cannot endure the thought of an environment that was not made primarily for his benefit, or, at any rate, made without reference to his own need to see order in it. Man describes his total environment as a “universe,” something that all turns around one centre, though often mentally suppressing the fact that that centre is himself. He clings to the argument of design as long as he can, projecting the notion of a man-related universe on God: when he is forced to give that up, he plunges into a mathematical order, the animated algebra of technology. As he goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that his “rage for order,” in Stevens’s phrase, is linked to a death-wish—Pynchon’s symbol for it is the V-2 rocket bomb of the Second World War.
However, to live without the sense of a need for order, Pynchon suggests, requires an inhuman detachment that is not possible nor perhaps desirable. What fights effectively against the destructive impulse can only be a “counter-force” or creative paranoia, a unifying power that works towards life and the fulfilment of desire instead of towards death. Such a creative power would naturally be allied to the work of the dream. (524)
The only cure for paranoia is another kind of paranoia. Pynchon’s phrase “creative paranoia” occurs fleetingly in the vast text of Gravity’s Rainbow, but it is what keeps the book from being the expression of postmodern nihilism that some of its earlier critics saw it as being. What is creative paranoia? Another name for the imagination itself, which, as Duke Theseus complains in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is paranoid: the imaginations of the lunatic (or religious visionary), the lover, and the poet see things that are not there.
Pynchon is on Frye’s mind in one of the Late Notebooks. Notebook 50 was discovered in a bedside table after the death of Frye’s second wife in 1997—just the right paranoid touch. In its later entries, Frye is wrestling with what became Words with Power, about which he says, “there’s an apocalyptic ascent from the deep, which is the process of creative or positive illusion, the power of love & imagination which is its own reality” (LN5, 380). Three paragraphs later, he says: [Chapter] Eight has to do with the interpenetrating of negative and positive illusion. At the negative end is the assumption of design....Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the very few works of literature to deal with this theme seriously. Yet it combines with positive illusion to form the paradisal model.” (LN5, 381). Later still, he notes that “The poetic cosmos has a lot to do with the creative paranoia of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a contemporary statement of original sin as a condition we cannot live without and yet want to get rid of” (LN5, 402).
Why is the imagination paranoid? Because it sees all things as connected in a double vision of both order and love, as I try to lay out in The Productions of Time. This is an “illusion” in the sense that it is a construct of the imagination, not a given: it is not “there” as an objective reality. But it is a positive illusion because we are part of that vision of interconnection, or, to use Frye’s usual word, interpenetration. It is not something Other, some “system” set over against us. We belong to it, and it belongs to us, because we have made it. In the 17th century, the philosopher Vico said, Verum factum: the truth is what we have made.
But how do we know it is true and not just one more piece of magical thinking in a society that has far too much of it, all of it lethal? We make a vision of life and self, and then we commit ourselves to it in an act of faith. How do we know it is not some hallucination? How do we keep from being Don Quixote? The giants are only windmills—everyone says so, and anyway, there are no giants. Blake said that everything possible to believe is an image of truth. He also said, “If the sun and moon should doubt, / They’d immediately go out.” But we want some guarantee that the myth we have committed ourselves to is not a concoction of the Great Glaroon.
There is no guarantee. There is only trust, based on whether the myth we are tempted to believe in seems to fulfill primary human concern, or whether it is, like Macbeth’s witches, one of night’s black agents, summoned up by fear and the lust for power. As Frye saw, this is a major theme in Shakespeare’s late romances. In The Winter’s Tale, a man suddenly, in a fit of violent jealousy, accuses his wife of having an affair with his best friend. There is no rational reason for it, and we are left to infer that the irrational reason is that Leontes cannot bring himself to trust that the happiness he has in love and friendship can possibly be true. There must be some dark, dirty secret underlying the harmony. He can only believe in the negative, in the conspiracy theory that he is being not merely deceived but made a fool of. It is clearly and deliberately a replay of the plot of Othello, though Othello’s paranoia is projected as an external character, Iago. Othello believes Iago’s ugly insinuations about his wife despite a complete lack of evidence and, in fact, much evidence to the contrary, out of a strange kind of self-protectiveness. If we believe the worst, we cannot be disillusioned, for the worst is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doubt is often portrayed as a heroic virtue, by a certain kind of scientist and, in the humanities, by theorists advocating a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In a world of fake news, many things are worth doubting: that is why we teach “critical thinking.” But there comes a point at which we must learn to doubt doubt itself. There are stories so good that we are afraid to believe them. Nevertheless, as I say when teaching the Odyssey, be careful of what stories you believe—but also be care of what stories you do not believe. Your skeptical refusal may come at a price.
The imagination creates visions of order and love and invites us to identify ourselves with them. It also creates paranoid visions of cruelty and terror and invites us to repudiate them and fight against them. Without that active commitment, the imagination is stuck in mere aestheticism. But the primary moral act is one of trust. When I teach Dante’s Inferno, I ask students why the ultimate sinners at the bottom of hell are the traitors. Are they worse than the rapists and serial killers? But my students often understand that in one way, they are indeed worse, for what every betrayal really betrays is trust. Nothing hurts worse than being betrayed by someone we trusted, because it makes us wary of ever trusting again. And yet, not just individual relationships but society itself depends on trust, which is why those who are presently trying to destroy trust in democracy are so evil. And who knows? Maybe Blake is right: maybe even the sun and moon depend on trust. Maybe the beauty of the stars at night is just too good to be true. If we doubt them hard enough, they may blow out like candles. Just ask any paranoid. If we doubt everything, what we are left with is Nothing. When we reach that point, there is nothing left to say but “Let there be light.”
References
Frye, Northrop. “Culture as Interpenetration.” In Northrop Frye on Canada, edited by Jean O’Grady and David Staines, 2003. Volume 12 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press. 521-30.
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World, edited by Robert D. Denham, 2000. Volume 5 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press.