PARANOIA PARTY
Iona Miller's CONSPIRITUALITY SERIES --
THE PARANOIA PARTY - Counterpoint to the Delusional Madness in Society
WILD CARD PLAYERS: Studies on Lying, Dogmatic, and Creative Persons, by Paul R. Henrickson, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, 1970) suggest that 4% of the untrained, uneducated and unsophisticated judging population are as perceptive as experts in a field. If consensus could establish truth and point out the beautiful there would be no reason for the loftier concerns of rarer persons. The perceptive individual is capable of responding, intuitively perhaps, but still effectively, and with insight, on a level of excellence comparable to the specialist. Therefore, it is not surprising the perceptive person loses interest in inept and misguided exercises that reduce intelligent behavior while encouraging mindless intellection and conformist thought processes. Such people resist group pressure to conform with consensus reality. This segment of the population is more creative than the majority and includes a small group who have not been professionally trained yet clearly demonstrate the ability to make professional level judgments that are more perceptive. Yet, this is a society, that is ruled by the non-creative lying conformist. (Henrickson, http://tcp.com.mt) NowHere - The Paranoia Party In the world of New Speak, where black means white and white means black, many have lost their capacity for trust and optimism in the political process, realizing the omnipresence of hidden forces in that realm and others. Adherents of the Paranoia Party Party know both traditional parties are controlled by elitists and corpoglomerates. Other members enter the paranoia portal through willing or unwilling experiences of High Weirdness - what they take as otherworldly or supernatural occurances. Even a popular election has not lessened the need for "Conspirituality" work. Appointments from among the "usual suspects," policy pieces by CFR, and many other indications point to Business As Usual for big money globalizers. The sociopolitical platform of the Paranoia Party doesn't accept glib promises of "hope" or "change" and continues to "look behind the curtain" for the usual controllers of calculated meta-transition, beyond the predictable oscillations of the political left and right. Political paranoids follow the money, watch every appointment with skepticism, and never forget the erosions of civil rights that have already taken place and are yet to be rolled back. The esoteric PARAnoids have unthinkable explanations, difficult for the uninitiated to wrap their minds around. For them, either the plutocrasy is in control, or no one (chaos) is in control, or the Aliens are in control. More likely, there are numerous contending factions in complex dynamic interaction. Ideosyncratic Beliefs The PARANOIA PARTY has no leaders and no official followers. This is not a unified party; sometimes it is a party of one with strictly ideosyncratic vision. Such beliefs have many variables, so eclectic approaches proliferate. Those that attract others, grow. Deductive reasoning, influenced by fear or anxiety, leads to adoption of reasoning paradigms. Often, there is a mismatch between believability and validity. Some people have belief bias, a general tendency to confirm rather than falsify prior beliefs. When the process is unconscious, confabulation takes place. We invent without realizing we are inventing, "filling in the gaps." Confabulation is the formation of false memories, perceptions or beliefs about yourself or the environment. It is a confusion of imagination and memory. Some confabulation is fleeting, but it can also be provoked by persuasion, resonance, channeling, bizarre ideas and firm convictions. Actually, we operate in a variety of programmed trance states most of the time. They reduce or critical thinking and judgment while stimulating strong emotions and associations. Much of our self-knowledge about how we work is tacit knowledge, not articulated even to ourselves. Contaminating Expectations We confabulate to some extent all the time but sometimes the beliefs or narratives become fixed, true of not. Spontaneous confabulation is common in hypnosis and it can easily be induced. Pseudomemory often comes up in regressions. Under hypnosis, the confabulating subject proceeds with utter confidence. We confabulate when we don't know the answer, in the face of Mystery. How we know what we know is always expressed as a metaphor. Personal beliefs, desires, scripts, and worldview are involved. Self Affirmation We can not only believe our own confabulations, we are prone to buy into those of others or traditional belief systems. In today's spiritual supermarket, there are myriad forms and rites to chose from for a personalistic eclectic mix. When it comes to beliefs are we seeing truth or building confabulations? Often, it is impossible to distinguish. Confabulations can be subtle or bizarre. We are never sure what is actually real so we confabulate and reality-check all the time. Denial derails our conscious reasoning and is related to compulsive behaviors. Confabulation is virtually indisinguishable from genuine metaphysical experience. Preconceptions We can mistake our vitual reality for consensus reality or metaphysical Truth. This feedback works beter in some some indivduals than others. Beliefs emerge unconsciously from reality-based fantasies, the search for answers to eternal questions or gut-reactions to survival or existential crisis. Self-Deception or Spirituality? Ideas lead to beliefs based on symbol construction, simile and metaphor. For those who hold them, these virtual beliefs seem real and parts of them may be reality-based. Archetypes appear and reappear, assuring we rediscover the same core myths, over and over. But when mythemes are unconsciously activated, it is almost impossible to see through them. Only parts of them are irrational, and in some cases we don't have enough information to know. Rituals reinforce beliefs. False memories, alien abductions, ritualistic satanic abuse, reincarnation reports and retrospective falsification are labelled confabulation. But the jury is certainly out within the Paranoia Party on these subjective experiences and self-activating DNA, as it is on Targeted Individuals, chemtrails, and other social and political conspiracies. Wishful & Fearful Reality Distortions Paranoia is contagious in essence if not in content. It produces its own memes, its own propaganda, and its own analysis. Candidates for the Paranoia Party range from free-thinking Libertarians to Disclosure advocates, who insist that not only does the OILogarchy dictate all that transpires, "they" are in cahoots with one or several ALIEN NATIONS, from other dimensions or worlds. Naturally, that agenda is indecipherable under any circumstances [if it exists at all] but curiously some welcome it, and consider what they call "Ascensionism" an ultimate evolutionary goal. It's tough for those not enraptured by this New Age meme to ascertain its philosophical difference from Christian fantasies of the Rapture. The tenets of Ascensionism are a mash up of warmed-over Theosophy and mis-appropriations of New Physics. They qualify for the Paranoia Party, even if they think they are heartful ot fearful, because they are wildly distracted from the daily business of the Here and Now, already "alienated" from the mainstream. The Paranoia Party would call any attempt to dismiss or reduce their beliefs debunking, disinformation, or lack of first-hand experience.
See: "The Rise of the Creative Class", published in 2002 by Richard Florida the book underline the role of the creative class in the changing scenario of production for enhancing the contemporary economical new uprising. They are closing the gap between science and art, grasping their entangled character.
What's New with My Subject?
High on Suspicion
By Iona Miller, CHT, September, 2008
"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power." (Lao-Tzu)
“The conflict between the opposites can strain our psyche to the breaking point, if we take them seriously, or if they take us seriously.”
(Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections).
“To struggle against paranoia is to defend multiplicity and differences as founding conditions for the exercise of the cultivation of the Soul, the love for images. It is an ethical imperative in the name of the image’s freedom of speech and the free exercise of thought and ideas. This is the battle. This is the combat.”
(Marcus Quintues, Jungian)
Guerilla Info War
These days everyone is just a little bit paranoid. In fact, paranoia is the only sane response to the current sociopolitical situation. We are faced with full-spectrum dominance surveillance and continual erosion of our Constitutional rights. What other informed response is there in light of the fact that things seem to be getting worse in terms of lockdown rule. Many feel even a change in parties won't roll back recent legislation nor reverse poor policy.
Hi tech has become a double-edge sword revealing every nuance of our character and desires to government and advertisers. We give them the ammo to do it when we engage in social networking and online purchasing. Gone are the days when they might profile you; now we do it ourselves by living out loud. Even those not online can easily be tracked by their credit cards, phone calls and banking activity.
All that is paranoid is not delusional, just as all that is delusional is not paranoid. What we are really talking about is a field of relative points of view (POV). The tyranny of the One is that of the official, spin-doctored version of past and current events, and future potentials – the fabricated consensus. Society expects the church to bring soul back into everyday life, something it should rightly do for itself. But we love to be prime time victims and play the persecutor/persecuted game (kick the dog).
Collectively, the dynamic field of paranoia is the unconscious shadow condition of mass institutions. Cognitive dissonance dwells somewhere between the ideal and the actual. Paranoia has become the background of our experience – the experiential ground. Is there any greater monomania than globalization at any human cost?
Our government is paranoid. It's tinfoil hat, HAARP, sits in Alaska on its crown. Trapped in its own greedy delusions, leadership is caught in the first trick of the collective unconscious: acting out its Shadow as The Shadow Government, the cryptocracy. The light and the dark meet in the Twilight Zone of liminality, which has its own Uncertainty Principle. Truth always hides just around the corner. Nothing is real in the imaginal world, or everything real is illusory. Things are not what they seem.
The idea of an unconscious brings opponents to see the other's unconscious as a screen for their own concealed intentions. We project our machinations onto others. Statements about the other become self-reflexive.
As a paranoiac you don’t trust; you watch. Our nation has extended its obsessive surveillance to its own citizenry. We have institutionalized Watchers, watchers of watchers, and watchers of watchers of watchers. And watchdogs to keep them all in check. Inexplicably, they call it intelligence but isn’t it paid paranoia?
Confusion of Understanding
Anyone not complacent or apathetic should be interested with natural curiosity in all aspects of the world around them. Politicians and history have taught us to be mistrustful and suspicious of the official “truth,” which means lies in Newspeak. What used to be called fringe conspiracy theory is now just common knowledge of the middle class about clandestine operations by shadow government, operating for its own interests and agenda.
In Washington D.C., paranoia may be essential. Maybe the “paranoids” are just not content with political delusion. Personal investigation is the means of forming one’s own critical point of view. The ability to do so is inherent in our Constitutional rights and arguably is the antithesis of self-absorbed narcissism – the hallmark of paranoia in the clinical sense.
Disordered Spirit
Paranoia is invasive – it intrudes and worms its way through the psyche like a computer virus. Alienation in extreme cases disturbs relationships and ability to function in daily life. Authority feeds on fear. Yet, paranoia could be the basis of our collective shadow, including our unlived potential for the good.
There is no final correct reading of Reality – a final, definitive, unequivocal one. Not even tyrannical unification. Reality is too wiggly, too mercurial for that. The tyranny of the one, that single-minded thought, demands struggle on behalf of the ethical imperative to find ways to love together in our differences.
The highlight of any great drama is "the reveal." When we speak poetically, we hint gently at the proposed nature of reality, neither hidden nor revealed. Freedom from desire's materialism and denial's formalism is to be found in the middle earth of the poetic, the fantastic, the numinous, where things are not “one way or the other.” Things are not meant to be taken literally. Facts have nothing to do with it.
Paranoia is a defense through mobilization, against suppressed anger and depression, the malaise of our age. Giving in to external domination and giving in to internal pressure are threatening. More than delusions of persecution, who doesn’t fear being tricked into surrendering some element of self-determination?
Unseen Order
Can we out-trick the Trickster? Can we use our imaginations to cure the imagination? Can we elude our own delusions? Maybe the veils themselves are delusional. Does meaning hinge on our individual view? It may depend on our worldview, our reality filter: do we serve the gods (religion), or become one (New Age), or eschew that in the name of science? Is there a clear distinction between delusion and revelation?
The fervor of “conspiracy freaks” can take on quasi-religious dimensions: it is revelatory, salvific. Spreading the word takes on a missionary quality. And at the core is the eternal mythic “quest for the Holy Grail”: “What do these things mean and whom do they serve? When life is perceived in the context of tyranny, meaning and freedom are lost, and rebellion is aroused. We may feel we are personally targeted, but aren’t we all the target in the psychophysical (psyops) war that is 21st Century life?
Spirit at the Edge of the Abyss
Paranoia might be seen as a disorder of the spirit. In his masterwork, ON PARANOIA, James Hillman presents paranoia in the context of the liminal edge where "psychology cannot be fully separated from religion--religion as relation with divinity and as relation with community ... where psychology is drawn to consider theology and politics." “Conspiracy theory” is inherently revelatory, potentially salvific – but what constitutes “correct” and “incorrect” revelation? And who is the arbiter of that consensus?
Hillman defines paranoia as a true disorder of interpreting the meaning of things: the presence of "incorrigible delusions." Hillman draws upon the analogy between the soul of the state and the state of the soul in Plato's Republic to find the remedy for the paranoia of the state in the remedies proposed by individual paranoid souls for their own recovery, the return of the poetic and Jung's idea of the unconscious. He then proceeds to demonstrate how paranoia has engaged and intrigued philosophical inquiries as well as medical psychology.
Hillman defines paranoia as a disorder of meaning. Hillman lays the blame for our collective misanthropy and social irresponsibility at the feet of the anomic archetype of individualism, one that wears a Protestant face. That worship of individualism in its most narrow sense underlies many of the new religious movements whose adherents hold that they can dissolve the thin boundary between the God within and the "wholly other" God without -- if they're only self-actualizing enough, only a little more enlightened, a little more ethical, a little more good-hearted. Just tear away one more veil, peel one more layer of the onion. (Nostrand)
Systematic Paranoia
Hillman identifies characteristics of paranoia that include:
- an "incorrigibility" in the delusions that attests to an impersonal, noetic factor that intimates that the disorder of mind rests in a prior disorder of spirit,
- "literalization" of ideas. Succumbing to a seductive search for meaning, and
- "concretization" of words into events.
He examines and rejects the following as criteria in determining "incorrect revelation":
- content,
- mission,
- societal acceptance,
- context,
- harmfulness,
- in-character.
Weighing the Evidence
Suspiciousness based in experience is not paranoia. Paranoia is only unfounded or exaggerated distrust. In today’s volatile world, hell-bent on globalization, paranoia may simply be prudence – care, caution and good judgment. It is foresight, sagacity, insight, and informs us what appropriate actions are in any time and place. It is a survival mechanism – sound judgment in practical affairs. Prudence also implies caution (risk-mitigation), an understanding of first-principles and open-mindedness.
This is the paradox of our time – those accused of being paranoid are the only ones who are fit to judge certain issues, having bothered to acquaint themselves with all sides of each issue (circumspection). The problem with burdensome knowledge is, what are you going to do about it? That answer determines how radical you are, from depression to militancy.
Whether or not “they” are out to get YOU is only one of those issues. The sense of betrayal is real enough, unfortunately. From many perspectives, you have already been “gotten” – from the cradle to the grave through vaccination, dumbed-down education and social conditioning, media manipulation, poor nutrition and contaminated water, spectacular distractions, drugs and electronic dope, disinformation and spiritual programming.
Any kind of declared “war” is suspect for not being what it seems and a cover for covert operations – war on drugs, war on cancer, war on terror.
Pointless Paranoia -- Presuming Delusion
Paranoid personality disorder is a non-psychotic compulsion – a generalized projection of fears and anxieties onto the external world. It includes hypersensitivity, hypervigilance and ideas of being followed, monitored, poisoned, infected, externally controlled or chosen by God for a special mission.
The term pure paranoia describes a condition where a delusion is present, but without any apparent deterioration in intellectual abilities. Clinical use of the term has been used to describe delusions where the affected person believes he is being persecuted and contains two central elements:
1. The individual thinks that harm is occurring, or is going to occur, to him or her.
2. The individual thinks that the persecutor has the intention to cause harm.
Today’s ‘paranoia’ is neither irrational nor delusional. Political paranoia is not phob ic. It’s a fact of life. It is the only congruent response to the modern environment.
©2009 Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, hypnotherapist (ACHE) and multimedia artist. She is a participant, not just commentator. Her conspirituality work is an omni-sensory fusion of intelligence, science-art, new physics and emergent paradigm shift, melding many social issues into a new view of society. She is interested in the effects of doctrines from religion, science, psychology, and the arts. Website: http://ionamiller.iwarp.com
