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

Conspiracy theory demands enemies, thus completing the worldview of the paranoid. A tragedy does not just happen; someone makes it happen. And if they make it happen to us, they are by definition our enemies. All that remains is to locate the enemies and deal with them.

Grievance Collectors

The paranoid personality is sentenced by his own psychology to go through life with a constant sense of deprivation. Something to which he is entitled has been taken away from him. An actual state of material deprivation is not a necessary condition for paranoia or hatred. Since a feeling of deprivation goes well beyond material things, it will always at heart be seen as love and respect that has been denied.

Grievance collecting is a step on the journey to a full-blown paranoid psychosis. A grievance collector will move from the passive assumption of deprivation and low expectancy common to most paranoid personalities to a more aggressive mode. He will not endure passively his deprived state; he will occupy himself with accumulating evidence of his misfortunes and locating the sources. Grievance collectors are distrustful and provocative, convinced that they are always taken advantage of and given less than their fair share. They are often right. There is something about the defensiveness of the paranoid personality that invites just such behavior. People are more likely to treat them ungenerously and even unfairly in response to their churlish hostility. But even if they are not given less, they will perceive that which they have been given to be less. And they, like the rest of us, accept their perceptions as reality.

After a while they begin to seek out their own injustices. They are unhappy with success. Actual deprivation is preferred. It confirms their most profound and paranoid suspicions, thus confounding their critics. They have been accused of being paranoid—overly suspicious, cynical, and mistrusting; so be it. They will embrace this position. Each event in which they have been taken advantage of becomes a triumph for their bias. They are truly grievance collectors.

Underlying this philosophy is an undeviating comparative and competitive view of life. Everything is part of a zero-sum game. Deprivation can be felt in another person’s abundance of good fortune. It is essential for the maintenance of the grievance collector’s view of life not only to feel deprived but also to see evidence of his own deprivation in other people’s good fortune. Envy is the accompaniment of his chronic state of anger. It supports and encourages it. All the evidence he so diligently collects only confirms that he is unfairly and inequitably served at every turn. Grievance collectors have constructed a world in which they choose to live where there are always winners and losers and they are always one of the losers. So, all winning diminishes them, and the only source of joy is schadenfreude.

It is my contention that it is never exclusively the deprivation of material goods to which grievance collectors are sensitive. The generosity of spirit and amiability that can be found in some of the poorest of cultures is tribute to the human spirit. Paranoids are sensitive to lack of respect, not lack of things. They are particularly sensitive to slights and abuses, which they see everywhere. They are constantly being diminished, or in modern terms, “disrespected.”

Grievance collectors are the children of emotional poverty. So bruised and damaged is their self-esteem that they no longer hope for love, luck, or privilege. To hope for the good is to court disappointment and thereby compound their pain. To protect themselves from further disappointment, they anticipate the negative event. Traditionally, psychoanalysts have rooted such feelings of deprivation in a feeling of unlovability, a diminished sense of self-worth, fostered in early childhood. Many paranoids were indeed less-favored children. Family dynamics are complex. Some children are preferred to others for reasons that are not always apparent to outsiders. Compounding this felt injustice is the fact that all children raised with paranoid parents are likely to have paranoid tendencies. Children are more than ready to accept their parents’ views of the world. A paranoid parental atmosphere, like an anxious one, is highly contagious.

This paranoid tendency can extend outward from the family and become the nucleus for a paranoid community. The paranoid community will then assure that the families within it have a culturally determined heavy dose of paranoia. Each enlargement from individual to family to community serves to lend greater and greater credibility to the paranoid ideation. Those who share the paranoid’s environment now confirm the world as the hostile place that he perceives it to be. The Palestinian refugee camps are ideal environments for nurturing a paranoid view of life and a culture of hatred. Deprived of what they perceive as their proper homes by their enemies, the Jews, and unwelcome in the general populations of their “friends” in the Arab communities, the refugees are ripe for manipulation and exploitation.

For the most part, typical paranoids will not go through life in a constant state of overt rage. They will nurse their anger. They may even embrace it, living out their lives in a steady state of sullenness and anger with those others who may not yet be identified, but who have, by the paranoids’ lights, deprived them of that which is rightfully theirs. They are like coiled springs waiting for opportunities to release the latent powers of their tension.

Paranoid ideation can thus be seen as being present in a spectrum from modest to severe, in this way no different from such character traits as generosity, affection, or narcissism. The final stage—the ultimate and most extreme expression of paranoid thinking—occurs in the fortunately rare form of a paranoid psychosis. The true paranoiac is the prototypic “lunatic,” as expressed in popular literature and as perceived in the popular imagination. The condition is part of the recorded annals of almost all civilizations and is recognized in almost every culture as aberrant. The psychotic is a key player in the world of terror.