Paranoia, Reconsidered
13 Jul 2025Praise, condemnation, questions, and comments can be sent, as always, via email
I see now that my previous posts on paranoia (originally here, with response to reader here) made the fatal mistake of making a normative judgement about the status of paranoia. I am now less sure about my previous normative judgements. Today, I’m going to offer some more thoughts on paranoia but largely make descriptive claims about the role of paranoia in contemporary (and historical) American society. More specifically, I’m going to consider the way that what I will call counter-paranoia is related to the general structure of a paranoid fantasy, and the ways we’re seeing the paranoia manifest itself today.
Before I begin, I’ll give a brief restatement of my own model of paranoia. I take paranoia to consist in a paranoid fantasy which has a certain structure. Within this structure is the Master, the person who is taken to be the ringleader or puppetmaster working counter to the paranoiac’s ends; the Master’s creatures, the people who (wittingly or unwittingly) participate in the Master’s plans; and the paranoiac, who is the unfortunate victim of a conspiracy against them.
The paranoid fantasy can be useful in a number of different ways for the paranoiac. For one thing, it gives the paranoiac a way to structure the seemingly random and disjointed nature of history as experience from within history. For another, it can give the paranoiac a sense of purpose, a role in a struggle between good and evil. It may not even give the paranoiac something so lofty as a sense of purpose, perhaps just something that can serve as a distraction in otherwise boring times.
More discussion on paranoia and a record of my thought process can be found in the links above. For now, let’s move forward to considering counter-paranoia, and how it fits into the broader structure of paranoia.
Diagram of a V-2 missile
Counter-Paranoia
Counter-paranoia is not really distinct from paranoia generally, but whether we have a case of paranoia or a case of counter-paranoia is a matter of perspective. If we take, for example, as our frame of reference the hippies of the 60s and 70s who are paranoid about government agents infiltrating their circles via COINTELPRO, then anticommunists like Nixon, who are paranoid about those very hippies and their communist sympathies, embody anti-paranoia. If we invert our frame of reference, then the anticommunists have a case of paranoia and the hippies a case of counter-paranoia.
What spurred me to write about counter-paranoia was an article I read this week in the Atlantic about the ideological purges happening in government security agencies at the hands of Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard. I was particularly fascinated by the situation at the FBI, where Kash Patel seems to be ordering polygraph tests of agents suspected of being disloyal, not to the mission of the FBI, but to Kash Patel himself. I can’t speak to the specifics of Kash Patel’s psychology, but it seems clear that there is some sort of paranoid fantasy operating here. Whether Patel is worried about communists, Democrats, or just anyone who doesn’t personally like him, is not for me to say.
What is so notable about the existence of this paranoid fantasy is that it seems to run contrary to my own. I have written before about my own paranoia about this particular government and the broader movement it represents. From my perspective, the Trump administration appears to be a highly coordinated assault on many of the political virtues which make America a nice place to be a political subject. But, evidently, from Patel and Gabbard’s perspective, this isn’t the case. In their counter-paranoia, there are enemies lurking within the government, seeking to undermine their plans, and undermining the efficacy of their efforts.
What this seems to evidence is that part of the paranoid fantasy is viewing one’s allies as disjointed, or being able to parse the nuance between the various ideological allies who might be in your political neighborhood, but viewing the opposition as a united front. Whereas, in reality, the opposition is rarely a united front. Case in point the current administration. Though Trump has filled his cabinet with loyalists there are still plans within plans, competing interests and court politics to consider. Where I see a united front, someone on the inside (or just on the ideological right) will see many different viewpoints standing in a loose alliance.
I have a temptation here to label Gabbard and Patel’s paranoia as unjustified, in virtue of their powerful status, and my own paranoia as justified. Of course, as with all paranoia, neither my paranoid fantasy nor the counter-paranoid fantasy are true to reality. There are reflections of truth, maybe shadows of truth in the paranoid fantasy, but there is not truth simpliciter. We could, if we felt compelled to, divide the paranoia under consideration into two camps. In one camp, we have the paranoia of largely powerless people about the largely powerful people. This is, ostensibly, how my paranoia would be classified. In the other camp, we have the paranoia of the largely powerful people about those who would threaten their power.
I think these distinctions are largely unhelpful, if only because they still seem to smuggle in the idea that the paranoia of those out of power is justified and the paranoia of those in power is unjustified. Maybe this is my own bias towards those out of power showing. Nonetheless, I’ll maintain that the only distinction worth making here is that between the paranoid and the counter-paranoid, and that neither polarity carries any inherent weight to it. The existence of the poles themselves is only useful to mark a distinction between two (actually or only apparently) opposed camps.
The paranoid and counter-paranoid model seems to be a consistent theme in American politics since at least the 50s. Up until the end of the Cold War the paranoids and counter-paranoids are largely leftists and conservatives (respectively or vice-versa). Post-Cold War, pre-Trump it’s a bit tougher to pin down but still largely divided on left and right if not leftist and conservative lines. Post-Trump we seem to be back to hard ideological divisions between paranoid camps, but with shifting ideologies in play, especially on the right, and with more pathological paranoia everywhere.
Octopus vulgaris - Yūshi Ishizaki
Paranoia for All
One way to phrase the question of why we’re here is something like “how did we come to distrust each other so thoroughly?” That sounds like a better question for a New Yorker piece, so I’ll try attacking from another angle. The question I want to consider is: what purpose does paranoia serve in contemporary American culture? What is it insulating us from? What is it providing us? How and why does paranoia persist?
I’m not going to be able to answer these questions here, and you should probably expect more blog posts on paranoia as I puzzle over the concept (especially with a new Pynchon book coming out this fall). I suspect I have given part of the answer in the introduction. Paranoia can help us make sense of the world, it can give us a sense of purpose, it can just give us something to do. I don’t think that this tells us the whole story. There are other ways to make sense of the world, other ways to get a sense of purpose, other things to do; people are generally paranoid in concert with some way of making sense of the world or some vehicle for providing purpose.
I suspect that paranoia is partly the result of a world that is no longer entirely within our understanding. We lack the confidence of early modern thinkers who were adamant that underlying everything is some rational, logical order. Sometimes it’s easier to invent patterns than to make peace with the strangeness of it all. I’m not entirely convinced of this, but the train of thought merits further inquiry.
For now, that’s where I’ll leave it. As a reminder of where this all started, here’s Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids:
- You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
- The innocence of the creature is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
- If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.
- You hide, they seek.
- Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
If you liked this post, please let me know! If not, also let me know! Thanks for reading!