Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

The stock market, with its irrational vicissitudes, is another ideal locus for paranoid feelings. If I had waited, anticipated, held on, bought more, sold sooner, like—whom? Some unknowns who are presumed to have been wiser or luckier. It is the very possibility of winning—the upward mobility that promises so much—that feeds general feelings of exclusion from the ranks of the lucky. Those poor souls who deny statistics by buying lottery tickets beyond their means with the statement “someone has to win” refuse to accept the fact that, by definition, the one winner must be accompanied by hundreds of thousands of losers. One out of a million is the statistical equivalent of nobody winning.

In a competitive society such as ours, there will always be sources of anxiety and insecurity—a sense of entitlement unfulfilled—that can lead anyone to the occasional feeling of paranoia. But some people feel this all the time, in all manner of odd places. These are people who can be categorized as having a paranoid personality. Their paranoia defines their lifestyle.

The Paranoid Personality

At one time most psychiatrists drew a sharp distinction between neurosis and psychosis. The neurotic had difficulty adjusting to the real world. The psychotic was operating outside the real world. His perceptions of where he was and who he was were askew. We label this disorientation as to time, space, and identity a difficulty in reality testing and a hallmark of the psychotic. With the increasing awareness that we all are more inclined to credit the authenticity of the world of our perception than any actual world, the distinction between normal and psychotic has become somewhat obscured.

Strong elements of the paranoid psychotic are present in people who are said to have a paranoid personality. Nevertheless, when we talk of a “break” with reality, we mean that some border is crossed that transcends the normal distortions of perception. The psychotic may not know the date, the day of the week, or what century he is living in. He may not know whether he is in a hospital or a prison. And he may think he is Elvis Presley or Christ. There is a confusion of time, space, and person that introduces an element of the impossible into his thinking process.

Granted that none of us experiences reality directly. We all accept the distorted evidence of our perceptions as a true representation of the real world. Still, there is a difference between the normal boundaries of distortion and the gross break from reality required in delusion formation. Many a person obsessed with weight may feel fat when she is well within the borders of normalcy. But when an anorexic teenager who is hovering dangerously near emaciation and cachexia thinks she is fat, a line has been crossed into the area of delusional thinking. Similarly, the classic teenager who says to himself, “No one likes me,” is profoundly different from the one who is certain that he is surrounded by a cadre of enemies acting in concert to destroy him.

The cultural level of distortion and the direction of that distortion differ remarkably. Some cultures set normal standards of wariness and suspicion that would be labeled paranoid in other cultures. Privacy standards vary within cultures. The threshold level of what is considered “normal” in an individual’s behavior must account for the cultural standards under which he has been raised. Even with such similar countries as France and the United States, the level of openness and trust differ. The French view American openness as a sign of our ingenuousness. In contrast, Americans moving to Paris for business purposes are often shocked at the Frenchman’s lack of hospitality. Executives are now often advised by industrial psychologists to be aware that an invitation to a French colleague’s home is not as likely to be proffered as it might in the American Midwest. What Americans might view as aloofness would be judged as a proper sense of reserve by the French.

The line between more diverse cultures such as Afghanistan and the United States will be even more extreme. Whether a terrorist, or even a suicide bomber, may be considered mentally deranged will depend in great part on how far he has strayed from the norms defined by his culture. In a culture that will accept stoning a woman to death for infidelity, stoning an enemy’s child to death may not seem so aberrant.

Further, the kind of an individual who will become a terrorist will differ from culture to culture. In the culture of modern America, we find a disproportionate number of psychotics among our homegrown, native terrorists. Optimism, a passion for life and the things of life, so dominates our society that when an American terrorist appears, like Ted Kaczynski—the infamous Unabomber who terrorized American academics in 1993—who turns his back on our culture, we are not surprised to find him a characteristic paranoid schizophrenic.

On the other hand, there seems little evidence that the terrorists who executed the 9/11 bombings were psychotic. They were probably not typical of the population from which they came, but their peers did not view them as deviant or sick. And the terrorists, prior to their suicidal acts, were not that different in their day-to-day behavior from the general population from which they emerged. They were students and civil servants, construction workers and professionals. There may have been some truly psychotic individuals among them, but the evidence at hand seems to suggest that the majority were not. They were, at worst, the paranoid extremes in a generally paranoid culture.

A paranoid population is not a population of paranoids. Rather, it is a group led by psychotic individuals who encourage paranoid elements endemic in the culture and in their individual personality. For example, the Turks who participated in the slaughter of the Armenians in 1915 could not have all been psychotic, any more than the Polish citizens of Jedwabne. We