The Paranoid Style in American Ideology
On a first pass, it might seem that paranoia has undergone a distasteful memeification in recent internet history. It doesn’t take much, though, to see that at least in the American context, modern paranoia is old wine in new (digitized) bottles. Indeed, as the mighty Richard Hofstadter noted half a century ago when diagnosing the paranoid style of American political thinking, “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Americans have long been a paranoid people. But what does that mean in today’s terms?
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Of course, neither Hofstadter nor I are thinking of the clinical form of paranoia. In this, I follow Luigi Zoja in seeing paranoia as a universal style of thought; it’s a manner of thinking. Paranoia is a ditch that all thought can fall into. Of course, that manner of thought can come to constitute (or at least be characteristic of) a psychiatric condition if taken to an extreme. By the same token, depression is a universal human experience, but it can become a psychiatric disorder when prolonged in duration or excessive in intensity. Paranoia is similar in that way.
Just as a tendency toward paranoia can be more or less characteristic of an individual, it can also be more or less characteristic of a society. This is Hofstadter’s point about American political thought. Societies and epochs can encourage universal human traits to greater or lesser degrees, which can lead to a psychiatric outcome on the individual level or the cultural equivalent of a psychiatric outcome at the societal level.
Definitions of paranoia have been largely consistent and intuitive: something along the lines of a “disorder characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur” will get us in the ballpark. This central thrust doesn’t change much across the definitions given in modern psychiatry or by Jaspers, Freud, etc. More specifically, Zoas gives us the following central characteristics of paranoia: suspicion, persecutory projection, rigidity, megalomania, secrecy, meticulous obsessiveness, etc. (14-16). Again, likely nothing too surprising there for the casual reader.
A key facet of paranoia is its close connection between logic and delusion: paranoiac thinking is based on a single overarching flawed assumption, but it is otherwise internally consistent and rational. That key assumption goes unquestioned, but that’s not because logic is absent—on the contrary, rationality is often hyperactive in paranoiac thinking, though within narrowly constrained bounds and with an irrational core. It’s a bit like Locke’s famous example of a man who mistakenly believed himself to be made of glass (obviously inaccurate) but who was able to properly reason based on that flawed assumption (“It is reasonable for one made of glass to do the following…”).
Paranoia enlists reason to shore up its flawed assumption. It does this in a few ways; one is by clamping down on competing explanations. There’s a fundamental conservatism to paranoia insofar as it resists alternative explanations and silences competing narratives. Part of that is the inevitable result of its myopia, but paranoia also engineers an interpretive inversion. As Zoas puts it, “Thus paranoid interpretation proceeds by accumulation: anything that might contradict it encounters an inverted logic and becomes confirmation … [of its flawed thinking] … once set in train, paranoia is self-nourishing” (10). Put differently, paranoid reasoning frames inconvenient facts in a way consistent with the underlying assumption(s) of the paranoid belief system. What doesn’t fit objectively is made to fit through interpretive legerdemain. This is what leads paranoia to be self-perpetuating or “self-nourishing”: channeling all interpretation through the prism of this central flawed assumption leads every fact, regardless of how inconvenient, to appear like further evidence of the paranoid interpretive framework and thus reaffirm that belief system.
Because paranoia relies on a type of persecution complex, it can be easy to overlook how violent and hostile it can be. Paranoia is an aggressive way of thinking: it assumes enemies and threats, as can be seen in Hofstadter’s example of McCarthyism. In my view, the result is yet another way that paranoid reasoning engenders self-perpetuating circularity: anger-ridden metanarratives can lead one lost in the throes of paranoiad reasoning to lash out at one’s (imagined) enemies, which can in turn lead those victims to engage in retaliatory violence. This violence can make the initial paranoia that kicked off that cycle in the first place appear justified.
Paranoia’s bellicosity combined with its discomfort with competing narratives can lead to struggle regarding messaging and knowledge, encouraging social conflict around definitions, meanings, and interpretations. One can see in paranoid reasoning a stubborn refusal to accept definitional multiplicity in a way that can become violent in its intention to reaffirm simplistic, outdated terms of social relations. This might start with an initial refusal to tolerate competing messaging, followed by a characteristic inversion of facts to reorient them to one’s simplified overarching narrative, which may in its last form become increasingly violent if and when oppressed social groups continue to advocate their perspective, values, or terms of existence.
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Paranoia’s inverted logic can start to sound a lot like Marx’s camera obscura from The German Ideology. Marx famously uses the camera obscura as a metaphor to explain the concept of ideology (with the term used in a technical sense here). As commentators have pointed out for generations, Marx was never all that clear on exactly what ideology is on his account, and many thinkers have done little to make the problem better. Still, in the classic Marxian version of ideology, the conditions of modern capitalism set in motion a type of confusion whereby the observer comes to misapprehend the terms of material and mental production. The complexities of capitalist production lead people to confuse causes and types; they get them backwards in a way similar to how the mechanics of old cameras would invert an image when capturing it.
Tommy Shelbie provides one of the more useful and systematic reworkings of ideology. In “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory,” Shelbie defines an ideology as a type of belief system that is (1) widely shared, (2) forms a coherent normative and/or descriptive system of thought, (3) shapes a group’s self-conception and/or normative outlook, and (4) has a significant impact on social action/institutions (158). An ideology is a belief system that is both distorted in a way that reinforces social relations of oppression (172) and whose acceptance can be largely or partially explained by a society’s class-structure (183). Thus, an ideology is not just any form of distorted thinking prompted by any type of confusion. Rather, an ideology is a social belief system that preserves an oppressive social order through distorted/distorting thinking that is reflective of a society’s social hierarchy, which it (the ideology) legitimates (181).
Shelbie’s account is a much more workable definition of ideology than we often get in Marxist commentary, though it’s obviously far from the last word on the topic. Still, it would be a distraction for us to dig into the interminable debates surrounding that hoary concept. A (very) rough sketch is all we need today, and Shelbie’s account nicely provides that.
Ideology obviously isn’t paranoia: an ideology is fundamentally social while a paranoid system need not be (and in its more clinical forms is almost defined by its idiosyncrasies). Furthermore, at least on Zoas’s definition, paranoia is an inherent human trait and thus certainly broader than the social terms of any given ideology, though on some accounts, I suppose the potential for ideological thinking in general could be thought to indicate an underlying universal human trait (similar to the way ideology’s sibling hegemony has undergone so many twists and tweaks that we see it crop up in the most unexpected of places to do the most unexpected of work).
Nevertheless, the overlap between paranoia and ideology is clear: both paranoia and ideology entail distorted thinking that inverts a subject’s understanding of social conditions. Both are about the subject misinterpreting social affairs in such a way as to inaccurately apprehend the nature of the conditions at hand for reasons that are often self-serving or at least undertaken in false consciousness (in the sense given to us by Engels of one adopting a belief without being fully aware of why one is adopting that belief). Both leave unquestioned their fundamental assumption(s) and engage in acts of hermeneutical inversion to substantiate that unquestioned assumption(s) in a way that rests on an irrational core and fosters delusion. Both have a certain conservative thrust in discounting or silencing competing narratives or inconvenient facts (or at least refusing to recognize those facts or narratives on their own terms).
The two concepts have a certain affinity, and we could blend them in various ways. For example, from one vantage point, as Shelbie rightly notes, ideologies are shaped by or draw from the broader cultural repertoire of the society in which they arise. In that sense, one way to understand the relationship between the two is to think of ideology in the American context as drawing on the widespread societal terms of paranoia, which would in turn be an underlying human trait that American society would foster. Depending on how we choose to read that, we could conceive of paranoia as the cultural garb of ideology in this context, or as a constitutive facet of ideology in general, or as a reflection of a distinct variety of ideology regardless of cultural context (i.e., it might be that paranoia is a constitutive of ideology in general—rather than ideology in this particular place and at this particular time).
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All of this on ideology, hermeneutical conflict, and paranoia brings us to the door of John Carpenter’s They Live(1988). We’re hardly reaching here: They Live is often interpreted as an allegory for ideology, including in Slavoj Zizek’s wonderful reading of the film in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Director John Carpenter has acknowledged the film as a statement on Reaganomics and consumerism.
They Live does not have a complex plot. The film follows protagonist Nada (“nothing”--not the first time the film lays it on a little thick), a homeless drifter played by the wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. Nada wanders Los Angeles, California, in search of work until finding a stash of sunglasses in an abandoned building. Wearing the sunglasses allows him to see the hidden subliminal messages in modern marketing, as well as perceive the real appearance of the alien elite who in disguised form manage American society. With this knowledge, Nada collaborates with friend Frank Armitage (Keith David) on a quest to spread the truth by publicizing the “true” narrative of alien control and thus freeing the human masses from the servitude in which they unwittingly collaborate.
I’ve always been of two minds about They Live. I love it as a symbol, and I’m as likely as anyone to fetishize its place as a “wink and a nod” gesture in the counter culture. The critique of neoliberalism, consumerism, and 1980s yuppie culture is certainly in line with my own beliefs, and a fair amount of ink has been spilled on unpacking those themes in the film. It has its appeal and a certain unexpected depth. The film is, for example, superbly attuned to the pleasures of ideology. The characters in They Live are as much collaborators with as dupes of ideology. It’s not just that the alien overlords trick them.
Indeed, as Zizek’s quirky Lacanianism rightly points out, the thing about ideology is that it feels good. I would argue much the same could be said of the gentler forms of paranoia, which can serve a certain theodical function of explaining suffering in simplified, narcissistic terms. To return to Hofstadter for a moment, paranoid thinking is generally simpler than reality and often comforting in making the person experiencing it an interesting enough target to warrant the excessive attention and focus of being persecuted. Similarly, They Live links ideology to self-indulgent consumerism, and Zizek’s reading of the film’s hilariously protracted fight sequence in which Nada wrestles his partner when the latter refuses the anti-ideology sunglasses is a potent metaphor for how hard and uncomfortable it can be to leave the delusions of ideology (or, on our account, pop paranoia) behind. It’s a brilliant point.
Still, one wonders if They Live doesn’t provide grist for the ideological mill—in form if not in content. I admit I wasn’t shocked when the film was briefly picked up by modern reactionaries a few years back. This isn’t to say that was Carpenter’s intention—it obviously wasn’t, and people are right to point that out. The film was clearly intended to communicate a critique of unfettered capitalism and hedonistic social conservatism, and it’s certainly on the mark on that point. More specifically, its emphasis on messaging and popular media is arguably more relevant and satisfying in our hyper-technologized era of social media than even at the time of the film’s initial release.
But maybe too satisfying? One wonders if They Live’s celebratory account of a somewhat generic sense of paranoia, willfully cartoonish quality, and self-congratulatory focus on “others” like the (literal) alien might not flirt with the self-indulgent form of paranoia we’ve woven into the American vernacular of childish “fight-the-powerism.” Naturally, we’ve put on the glasses. We know better. We’re the stars of the show. Our bullshit detectors are turned up to 11. All of this can start to sound a lot like the simplified, persecutory thinking of mainstream American paranoid ideology. This would be true regardless of Carpenter’s (laudable) intentions or Zizek’s astute account of the film’s nuanced treatment of ideology.
Then again, in our era of regressive McCarthyism intended to fix meanings through force (one official language, two genders, one triumphant national history, etc.), we do often find ourselves at odds with a clearly identifiable aggressor. Jason Stanley rightly emphasizes the importance of messaging, education, and hermeneutical warfare in fascistic movements—both our own and in general. To return to the point about paranoia’s self-perpetuating bellicosity, dissident signals are indeed being silenced in this crazed modern iteration of the Red Scare.
In that sense, They Live might be the best of all metaphors for our modern ideological era. It’s possible that the film’s mirroring of the structural form of paranoid ideology might be justified precisely because people are acting aggressively based on paranoid ideologies. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t guard against getting too comfortable with such a simplified rendering, but it might make sense to operate at least partially on paranoia’s terms because those are the terms on which other people are acting. There is occasional legitimacy to paranoia when shorn of its ideological excesses precisely because of its ideological excesses.