rational paranoia

There's a saying around the world of common sense--fringe ideas are held by mentally unstable people. Mental stability is a generic (read, 'genre') argot for labeling those who oppose elements of society: its institutions, its authority structures, its power, its scope, its secrets. Their writings are labeled as conspiracy theories, and their precipitating mental conditions are often labeled as paranoia. We see this label affixed to those who attempt and sometimes succeed to assassinate political figures even as early as the 19th century. This madness is nothing new; it's a feature of our rapidly mobile modernity and the scale at which communication travels. It's best to have a way to carefully snuff oppositional opinion by placing it below the bar of civil discourse. And what better way than to pathologize the persona and diagnose the writing or actions as symptomatic of their particular mental pathology. After all, how crazy does a person have to be to face down some of the most powerful figures in some of the most powerful countries?

That crazy if one were to set some kind of empirical bar to it.

But there's something inherently lopsided in a triad between an agent, his agency, and the scenery against which he acts. The bias cuts along common sense, better judgment, and the authority that these uphold in a society that has created some powerful people, powerful positions, powerful institutions, and powerful weapons to administer and sustain them for generations: the law, the gun, surveillance, knowledge infrastructures, and of course the lies that sustain a lopsided use of these for the sake of a democracy. An essential lie of any democracy is that we are free to choose who best represents our interests. Yet in that very democracy we are not free to choose how this freedom gets expressed because the minds that sustain these ideas and the subjectivities they inherit are formed prior to us having a choice. America is a nation of immigrants with assimilation anxiety--an overwhelming desire to fit in. Feel as an outsider wanting to get in, you concede to the mindset that you think represents an insider. The lack of information between outsider and insider creates the space that nourishes a mythos and a mystery to the other. That enhances the difference in a specific way; it grants a sense of power and privilege to the insiders as perceived by the outsider. The insider has legitimacy, access to power and privilege, something that the outsider lacks. One alternative is to create another power structure out of networks of outsiders; mafias and labor unions are but one way that alternative power structures have emerged from a unified attempt to make a social organization apart from those that are institutionalized into the legitimate business and legal community. Yet what we fail to recognize is that the most powerful operate much like these alternative social organizations, outside legal structures with an express emphasis on self-policing. The short lesson one draws from this unfinished narrative is that modern democracy purports to grant people power through their influence upon electoral politics, but power and influence have long been locked into very well-guarded channels. Any chance to break into these requires something akin to a solemn oath to the interests of the people who guard those channels, and so nothing outside gets in without the express privilege or consent of the guardians.

An assassin circumvents democracy with the vote of one. The assassin establishes a new access point to the powerful office--the gun sight. A dissident voices an opinion into a hypermarket of ideas that expressly encourages people to chase fame. Those that seek to level a critique and register this critique through a manifesto or a gun faces several legitimacy challenges, and common sense encourages one to see the very act itself as lunacy. To stand against the powerful is ineffective. To stand against the powerful is insane. To stand against the powerful is to unravel the official story, and in this unraveling so go a number of assumptions, values, and common senses about an average individual's subjectivity and beliefs about one's power to bring about change. Editorials have length requirements, and by their nature attract ridicule and amusement over racist screeds or delusional thinking. The web's commenting function, owing to its visual economy, bury posts to a Precambrian stratum, lost and forgotten, making either recent posts or highly rated ones visible. And fame chasing strategies abound. One's ability to run for office is limited by the two party branding scheme, which brings with it the attendant desire to fit in by voting along party lines. Running outside the system invites normally one kind of label--left and radical are among them. Political demagoguery has narrowed the spectrum of legitimate issues to those labeled patriotic to those labeled as socialistic. Within the high-walled canyon carved by this rhetoric few tenable political positions exist.

To abruptly shorten my narrative again the point is that legitimate sources of discontent are continually shifting away from truth production like the news into a marginal space of flashing banners and poorly edited and maintained web backwaters. There, people with little, no, or the wrong credentials attempt to shed light on power only to have their marginal status work against them. One man's sane and rational analysis of steel gets placed alongside another man's report about Lizard People. A measure of credibility by association gets implied in this kind of positioning. A professor discussing dissent gets his report aired next to a man in a ski mask discussing how to address police. The effect is one that immediately strains the credulity of the professor. It's as if the Jesus of his day were found to have an illegitimate message to spread based on the fact that he associated with both the potentates and dregs of society. This lack of consistency is one of many tactics used to discount the messenger.

Rational paranoia is not intended to add pun to a psychological ailment, nor is it meant to water down either of the juxtaposed entities. It intends to frame the conditions under which some kinds of unpopular or 'alternative' views on official events raise the specter of mental fitness. That fitness becomes the mode of questioning to presume without saying that the world as we know it through official narratives is not a fiction, a human construction, but in fact the real world.

Discussing how knowledge gets formed and accepted does nothing to forward either cause. It is the very understanding of this process that can be used to manipulate the outcome of one's mindset and opinions on any number of issues. Conspiracy labels start here, and what follows from such labels are attempts to make a science of studying why this form of paranoia happens.

To question power and authority should be sane. I have no truck with it. But power and authority have no domain over reality. Given how much of our reality is mediated by experience in two spheres our ability to establish an independent reality is compromised. We go to work for the majority of our days, and that world is a highly regulated public space. Our thinking and action are shaped by the merits of productivity. We engage in a specialized form of activity known as 'labor.' When we come home from labor we engage in any number of home-based activities. Primary among these is media consumption. And who's media is this? It could be any number. But if we were to limit our menu--for the sake of argument--to entertainment, news, and Lizard people updates how equipped are we to engage in a democratic society? We are very poorly equipped. We lack the chops as average Joes to even purport to speak for our constituents. That's the domain of the specialist and the well-networked individual, both of whom are quite synonymous in contemporary America. One reason we lack the chops to represent constituent interests is because we have the choice of consuming marginal news sources. One fitting definition of the internet by Richard Kyanka explains it as a place where weird people find like-minded others in order to feel that they're normal. Our freedom to consume what media and information we please contribute to our decidedly non-catholic worldviews. We're all partisans in this fight. We lack a worldview in the literal sense because so much of our life is consume by work and media consumption. Both of these decisively narrow our worldview to one framed by interests. And to stand outside of that worldview and to call those interests by their names leads to a suggestive semiotic domino-effect whereby one presumptively topples the world as such. The only recourse to those who are beholden to this world as such, and that goes for the average Joes, is to question the sanity of those who do such things. And so oppositional figures will remain marginal figures because they denounce more than just a political system but a reality system that is tied to a symbol system and a logic system. Simply put, power and authority have staked their claims on something more expansive than politics and government. They're in the business of reality management.

And so we don't question reality while we watch dramatizations of humans in reality show drama. And we don't question reality as we 'clock in' at our 'real' jobs. Meanwhile we pray to all our lesser gods of stock markets and finance. Some of us still believe in luck as we play lotteries. All of us carry around paper deities of worth, and all of this seems rational and sane. And that's because we all do it.