Proverbs for Paranoids
08 Jun 2025My original plan for today was to write something about travel, given that I am in Italy for the week. Unfortunately I have been inspired to write about current political events, thereby alienating at least half my audience and placing me in the historically dangerous position of having my political opinions known, in the public forum, to the powers that be. I’ll be centering today’s discussion around Thomas Pynchon’s “Proverbs for Paranoids” which can be found scattered through his 1973 magnum opus Gravity’s Rainbow. Praise and/or condemnation can be sent, as always via email
Thomas Pynchon’s “Proverbs for Paranoids” are designed for those among us who live life on that delicate edge between trying to understand the bigger picture and yelling on a street corner in a tin-foil hat. The current political situation in the United States seems to have blurred the lines between the two. There are some on the right who would prefer we take the President “seriously but not literally,” and those on the left who take him literally, with all the insanity that entails, and are sometimes even right to do so. Every day it seems that a previous norm of conduct or a previous standard of government restraint is thrown to the wind, which I find pushes me more and more towards the tin-foil-hat camp.
I find some measure of paranoia to be a virtue. It seems that paranoia is the force that motivates people to enter a brave new world prepared for the most exotic catastrophes imaginable, whereas a lack of paranoia can incline one towards assuming the status quo will continue indefinitely. In the spirit of promoting paranoia as a virtue, I’ll be presenting my best attempt at interpreting and contextualizing the five Proverbs for Paranoids in my own paranoid voice and in the present political moment.
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
A key aspect of paranoia is that the Master, the puppeteer controlling things behind the scenes, is largely imaginary. When I engage in paranoid thinking about Trump or Vance or even Curtis Yarvin I am not thinking about the men themselves. That would require a cold, rational, understanding of the ins and outs of their political influence, motivations (both conscious and subconscious), and their day-to-day moods and dispositions. I don’t have that. What I do have is an idea of someone out there, with more power than myself, who seems to be acting in a certain way that is contrary to my own ends.
I cannot, in my paranoid mind, get close to Donald Trump or the whole sick crew around him in any meaningful way. I cannot align his ends with my ends, I cannot touch him, unless I start politicking hard for the next 4 or so years. Furthermore, The Donald Trump in question is, again, largely imaginary. It is hard to get close to someone in real life who is mostly the product of one’s own imagination projected onto a public figure. The Master’s creatures, however, are touchable. You’ve probably met them (or been one of them, or are one of them) yourself. They are the people wearing MAGA hats on election day, or the ones with a TRUMP 2024 sticker on their car. They’re Trump voters, they’re about half the country.
Not all of them are considered the Master’s “creatures” by the paranoid imagination, however. I generally think of the Trump voters who are “in on the scheme” as the ones that (1) I have interacted with very little if at all and (2) I feel are unwilling to change their position on the relevant political issues. Again, this classification and evaluation is imaginary. It is part of the paranoid fantasy. It is an idea of a MAGA adherent which is projected from the paranoid imagination onto the everyday people who fit the profile. They can be “tickled” in the sense that they can be interacted with, riled up, discoursed with, or just observed out in the world.
A good example of this is what comedian Jordan Klepper does as a Daily Show correspondent when he goes out to Trump rallies. He goes out among the MAGA-adherents and effectively, tickles them. He asks them questions, usually trying to point out some inconsistency in their views or, more charitably, try to understand why they have aligned themselves with the Master of the paranoid fantasy.
Sometimes tickling the Master’s creatures is an attempt to gain some kind of power over the whole situation, especially when they are treated as less than capable epistemic agents (more on this in the next section). Other times, it can serve as a reminder that there is still a real world out there, in which there are real people for whom there are real consequences to the somewhat abstract political reality of government in the information age.
The construction of the paranoid fantasy is ultimately an attempt to deal with this reality. History, by my lights, is ninety-nine percent the result of sheer dumb luck playing out at a massive scale. In the construction of a paranoid fantasy, one can eliminate chance and attribute the day-to-day happenings which make up history to either the Master’s nefarious grand plan or the frustration thereof.
2. The innocence of the creature is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
As much as the paranoid fantasy allows one to attribute the ills of the world to the Master of the grand plan, it also makes it impossible for those working on behalf of the Master to be capable of the evil intentions and ill will that one attributes to the Master. This aspect of the paranoid fantasy seems to manifest itself at scale in the dismissal of Trump voters by the mainstream intellectual establishment as ignorant, uninformed, and victims of a grand con by Trump. In this way, one can attribute the same ends as oneself to those who align themselves with the Master, but explain away their alignment by them being as much victims of the Master as anyone else.
I don’t want to absolve myself of responsibility for this. I find myself unjustly picturing the average rural Trump voter as a barely literate yokel. I take a perverse joy in stories of Trump voters experiencing regret when Trump’s policies end up backfiring on them. I’m writing a blog post centered around some quotes from Gravity’s Rainbow, I’m not sure how I could get any more pretentious. I’m working on it. The first step to recovery is admitting you’ve got a problem.
Anyways, the interesting question is not what I do but rather why I do it. I think, ultimately, it comes down to not wanting to admit that the majority of the country doesn’t share the same ends as I do. I study, primarily, metaphysics. That is an extremely esoteric field, the practical applications of which are not immediately apparent. I do maintain that there are practical applications and public value to studying metaphysics, but that defense is better left for another blog post.
If I want to continue studying metaphysics and philosophy, I need there to be a robust university system at which I can study and teach. The existence of a robust university system requires substantial public investment. But not everyone will be on board with a substantial public investment in higher education. If you live in a town where the majority of work is in manufacturing or farming, it probably doesn’t make sense to spend tax money on philosophers when you would more directly benefit from investment in public infrastructure or corn subsidies.
It’s a hard pill to swallow to admit that the field I currently dedicate my life to requires public investment that other people simply don’t find valuable. It’s much easier to assume they in fact would find the same things valuable as I do, if only they hadn’t been misled and seduced by the charms of the Trump campaign.
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3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.
Here’s a good question: what’s important right now? Is it whether transgender troops should be allowed to serve in the military? What about whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13? Maybe what’s important is our trade deficit with our allies, maybe it’s the war in Ukraine or Gaza. Maybe it’s whether you have food on the table and a place to sleep at night.
Politicians in the information age have become adept at using the ease of distributing information to spread focus. The important issues can be undermined by trivial, but engaging, issues. The paranoid fantasy tends to interpret any information coming from the powers that be as a distraction, as a way of diverting attention from the (real or imagined) actions of consequence. The Master and his creatures are not attempting to engage in good-faith discourse, they are trying to distract, to deflect, to make you ignorant of the real items of consequence that you really should be focused on.
The wrong questions seem to be the ones that either attempt to engage with every piece of information that comes from the Master and his creatures, or that attempt to totally ignore every piece of information coming from the same. I tend to aim towards a middle path. The first question, for me, is almost always “what do I find ultimately important?” This is an extremely difficult question to answer.
To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever really determined that for myself. Do I find philosophy important, or could I be just as happy doing intellectual labor in some other area? Sometimes I even wonder about more fundamental rights. Do I really need freedom of speech? Would I be happy to just shut up and read the classics for the rest of my life? What about freedom of movement? Could I find happiness locked in a prison cell my whole life, meditating on the big questions?
Perhaps these are the wrong questions anyways. The phrasing of this proverb seems to indicate that the wrong questions are the ones that don’t led one to frustrate the means and/or ends of the Master. Since the means and/or ends of the Master are, like the rest of the paranoid fantasy, largely imaginary, it’s not clear what could actually frustrate them. I think the questions one asks should, insofar as it is possible, attempt to determine what is ultimately of consequence for oneself. What do I find worthwhile? What do I not want to change, what do I want to change? The sort of questions that help one focus on the long run, rather than the present moment.
4. You hide, they seek.
Part of the paranoid fantasy is lacking power in some way. The Masters of the paranoid conspiracy have the majority of (if not all of) the power, and the subject of the paranoid conspiracy is, in some important way, at their whims. It is the role of the conspirators to seek out the subjects of the paranoid conspiracy to squash dissent, eliminate competition, or take people out of the equation just because that’s what conspirators do.
Engaging in the paranoid fantasy means playing the role of the subject of the paranoid conspiracy. You’re being hunted, you’re being victimized, the people in power have your name on a list and are just waiting for the right moment to take you out. You have to find ways to stay out of the spotlight, or do something to appease the agents lurking in the shadows so that they might take mercy on you. Maybe you’re already in the spotlight and you just need to make the right moves to hold off the firing squad.
I find myself engaging in this sort of dealmaking constantly. The administration threatens universities? Just keep your head down, don’t make waves and you’ll be fine. Philosophers fleeing from Yale to Toronto because they’re afraid of the Trump administration? Well just don’t make a fuss about politics and you won’t have to flee.
Why try to make deals about something that hasn’t happened yet? I think it’s a way of, again, making something inherently unpredictable and volatile into something that can be negotiated with. It makes the whims of the paranoid conspirators less central to the chain of cause and effect than some sort of rational process by which those who want to be exempted from campaign promises of retribution can do so by making a solid argument for their excusal.
It’s the same reasoning that keeps me thinking about ways to flee the country, should threats to academics continue to escalate. I’m a subject of a paranoid conspiracy, therefore I must find ways to hide. Again, engaging in the paranoid fantasy requires that one play the role of the paranoid subject, and playing the role of the paranoid subject means playing the role of someone whom someone else is out to get.
5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
Thus far I’ve been describing this whole system as a paranoid fantasy. That description has been intentional. The paranoid fantasy is something that an individual builds up in order to deal with the, perhaps uncomfortable or perhaps unacceptable, facts of reality. Paranoids are not paranoid because there actually is a cabal out to get them, paranoids are paranoid because they build up a paranoid fantasy in order to deal with reality. That paranoid fantasy places its subject into paranoid situations.
The paranoid fantasy is not necessarily reality. The reactionary boogeymen I have constructed as the architects of a grand scheme to make, particularly, my life harder are, largely, the product of a strong background in history and a brain wired to find (or invent!) connections between pieces of evidence. That’s not to say that the paranoid fantasy should be discharged or ignored. There’s still a real world out there with people who want to achieve things that might be totally contrary to my own ends. It’s just that they might not be part of a cabal whose stated purpose is to bring down Adam DeDobbelaere. More on this later.
The important thing is not to let the paranoid fantasy run away on its own. Interrogate it. Check its work. Make sure there’s something substantial underlying the paranoid reasoning and not just imagination run wild. To have backup plans, to be ready for a disaster, to take the steps necessary to protect what’s important, these are all useful actions which can be motivated by paranoid thinking. If one lets the paranoid thinking get out of hand, you could find yourself having built an ark in preparation for scattered drizzles. If one ignores paranoid thinking, you could find yourself without a lifeboat while the Titanic goes down.
None of this exists in isolation. The paranoid fantasy is a construction to deal with reality, but reality influences the fantasy and the fantasy influences how one interacts with reality. I have a paranoid fantasy about the current government. However, I’m not going to sell all my possessions and apply for asylum in Switzerland. That would be letting the paranoid fantasy run too far. I am, however, in possession of an active passport and carefully watching the headlines.
Lessons?
I want to emphasize again that just because I’ve been calling this whole system a paranoid fantasy doesn’t mean there aren’t real world events that can affect my life, or the life of any other paranoid. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Sometimes the wrong people get in power, and sometimes they do horrific things to the citizens that they perceive as disloyal or undesirable. Even the people in power have paranoid fantasies, and when those fantasies are unmoderated that’s when you can expect the purges to start.
Again, aim for the middle path. Try to focus, to the extent that such a thing is possible, on what’s real. Let your paranoia motivate you to take reasonable measures against catastrophe. If you’re not paranoid at all, maybe let your imagination run a little more wild. There’s really no perfect balance. If the unthinkable happens, it’s hard to see how one could possibly think of it in advance. The best we can do, it seems, is to be paranoid enough to buy home insurance, but not paranoid enough to don the tinfoil hat.
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