Paranoid Worldviews? Perception and Self Perception in Politics
It you are open to the lush growth of alternative viewpoints and different sources of information available in the Internet, you are, sooner or later, going to have to ask yourself whether some of the stuff in the Internet is, perhaps, rather paranoid. At the moment, for example, there's a lot of information about the existence of 800 unused and unoccupied Guantanamo Bay style camps in mainland America, developed by the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which many see as future concentration camps for American dissidents.
Maybe..... what have been built as prison camps could be used for all sorts of different groups of people under different evolving scenarios - for example, they could also be used as isolation and quarantine facilities in a SARS epidemic...
Of course, what makes paranoia really blossom are governments that are routinely known to lie and, as in the USA at the moment, largely take their most senior personnel from the secret services with a track record of law breaking. (Some of the personnel in homeland security were actually convicted in the Iran Contra affair). This, and the knowledge that public perceptions are manipulated by the mass media, working hand in glove with the PR industry, makes it well nigh inevitable that powerful paranoid tendencies will emerge to explain what is happening in society.
If a government says "if you are not for us, you are against us", and decide they are striving for "full spectrum dominance" in military, social and information matters, then it is hard to prevent the subsequent evolution of events having the character of a foregone conclusion and of a self fulfilling prophecy. Humanity has been down tracks like this before - several times - where no one is allowed to be innocent or neutral:
"Today there are far more evil and unruly people than there used to be. I punish them as soon as I have the slightest suspicion or presumption of their rebellious or traitorous intention, and the slightest act of disobedience I punish with death. I will continue to do this until the people start to behave decently and give up rebellion and disobedience....I punish the people because all of a sudden they became my enemies and opponents" said the Sultan of Delhi, Mohammed Tughlak illustrating this style of thinking (as reported by the scholar Ibn Batutta in Elias Canetti's Macht und Masse - Crowds and Power).
Despite this sort of crazy logic, indeed because of it, it becomes even more important to counter paranoid thinking and interpretations when we meet them - at least when they are other possible ways of understanding things.
So what is a paranoid viewpoint?
In my view a paranoid interpretation of events has essentially this form: (a) "Bad things" happen because (b) "bad people" (c) intend them to happen.
However, often enough each one of those terms can be rewritten and rethought. For example sometimes we can replace the words: "Bad things" with (i) "Blessings in disguise" or (ii) "Botched and mismanaged transitions" or (iii) "painful readjustments."
Or we can replace the words: "bad people" with (i) people who are misinformed or (ii) misled or (iii) misconceived or (iv) people who are rushed and hasty in the decisions and judgements because of time pressure. Then there are people who are (v) out of touch; people who are (vi) too arrogant to look at other approaches but see themselves as (vii)well meaning and knowing better. Sometimes it's also the case that people we think of using the word "bad" might be better explained as people who are (viii) lacking in self awareness. Perhaps too it is more explanatory to say, not that they are bad but that they are (ix) pursuing different agendas for (x) different vested interests.
Also things do not always happen "because they are intended to happen". Some bad things happen largely without direct human agency at all - like storm damage, though you can always blame the greenhouse effect for that I suppose. Also some things happen as (ii) unintended by-products of other actions or (iii) because they were intended not to happen - but the pre-emptive preventative measures taken to stop a course of events actually serves to trigger the very processes feared.
At the moment, for example, it looks as if the Bush administration is doing a very good job fostering fundamentalist Islamic sentiment in Iraq. Although their mission was supposed to have been turning Iraq into a modern, post Islamic state, they are having exactly the opposite effect. This is because people tend to resist when anything is foisted on them - and even adopt the very beliefs and systems under attack yet more fervently.
As for the FEMA camps I doubt whether many people in the US government have intentionally planned to incarcerate America's dissidents and see themselves as like the Nazis. Rather, instead, they are very likely to be thinking in terms of "contigencies" in which they would incarcerate dissidents ('terrorists') if social and economic tensions rise further in the US. Having said that it has to be feared that this sort of contingency policy thinking may well turn out to be part of another self fulfilling prophecy if and when, several years from now US society keeps on polarising in response to its paranoid government....
So other interpretations of the world are possible. And these different ways of understanding things are important because they help us get closer to how issues are thought about by large sections of the population, as well as closer to how key actors in national and world politics think about themselves.
For example, I very much doubt that Tony Blair thinks of himself as a bad man who is pursuing a money agenda with lies. Like virtually all leaders he appears convinced he knows better than others what is good for the world, not what is bad for it. If we merely denounce him as a bad person pursuing a wicked (capitalist) agenda we do not fully engage with his ability to influence people - which is rooted in his ability to articulate what are clearly inner convictions. For many millions, unable to make up their mind about confusing realities, the apparent conviction and clarity of people like Tony Blair is reassuring, much as it makes me personally want to vomit. People write endlessly about his sincerity - so I think we have to accept that this is part of what gives him personal influence.
The editorial writers who make reference to Tony Blair's sincerity perceive that him as a person who believes in himself very strongly indeed. Thus, when he says he is prepared to meet his maker over Iraq, and answer to God for what he has done, then I think this is something he says from this great belief in himself. As usual with such people there is an ends justify the means logic to their thinking - including the justification for cover ups and lies. As they know better, and as there are higher ends that they are pursuing, they calculate what costs are worth paying - paid for by other people, of course. And they are still able to sleep at night - indeed the tougher the decisions that they impose, tough for other people that is, the more grown up they feel.
When Bush was complimenting Blair it was with the remark, if I recall correctly, that Blair was "grown up". The importance of feeling grown up, I guess, marks out the psychology of both these men. In this compliment of Bush about Blair we have a very telling statement of how Bush thinks, and how he judges others. Clearly if someone sees being 'grown up' as their form of praise then being grown up is an issue for them - it matters to them. And you can bet that for people like this being grown up means knowing what is in everyone elses' best interests - being grown up means taking responsibility for other people, it means treating others as requiring protection and control. Naturally this is for their own good - and includes the use of force if necessary.
This mind set also helps us understand better what probably happens when people like Bush and Blair tell lies and bury things in official secrecy. In their minds such maneovres are probably thought of in a way very similar to the condescending lying to, and hiding things from, children - in order to prevent the children worrying unnecessarily about things that mummy and daddy consider should be their own exclusive business - and which they feel they (ought to) have fully under their control. In their own minds they are not doing it out of malevolence but because it is in our best interests. These are white lies. They are in the pursuit of the higher purposes that our betters have identified - they are not disgraceful things to do. Politics is a dirty business. It is grown up to operate outside the rules too, probably. Indeed, operating outside the rules just shows how important that one is - it's not disreputable. We still deserve them as leaders because they are the sharpest and clearest politicians on the block and can be trusted to understand when the rules are to be broken. The cover ups too are lesser evils, because being discredited would mean we would be losing their benefit of their leadership. Indeed in many cases lying even makes them sexier. Wasn't it true for example, that Edwina Currie got really horny with former Prime Minister John Major, because of the intimacy that their shared lie and secrecy created over and against everyone else. His deviousness really gave her the hots.
Unfortunately at the higher reaches of American and British society many people are playing the same game. In US society the government is based on the secret services and some have even been convicted of lying to Congress. In Britain the people who run our society have training in this lies right from the start of lives. Late in 2000 former Rugby school teacher Hywel Williams wrote an article about public schools in the weekly magazine New Statesman.. It was under the headline of "Schools that teach children to lie" . According to Williams "the public school mind still shapes English institutional life. Their most characteristic product is the bullshitter - sometimes amiable, sometimes just a shit, but always purposeful and a good liar."
So in British an American politics there are many people who regard it as self evident that they should be calling the shots, whose agendas are self evidently the right ones, or whose personal agenda is to prove that they are sharper than anyone else - and who lie, who are economical with the truth and who cover up to get what they want. Cheri Blair discovered that.
When a politician is quick to make a judgement because of arrogance and over estimating themselves then they can easily be taken in by the many people like this that they attract - and it might have happened that Blair was taken in himself, by the fabrications of British military intelligence, as well as by the Bush government with their own agendas and falsifications. It seems possible to me that the Blair initially supported an Iraq war because he was taken in and then was so arrogant that he didn't see the need to investigate the issues again in depth.
All of which requires a modification of the picture of bad people intending bad things to happen. People who live in a culture of corruption, secrecy and untruth cannot see it any more and can be manipulated, misled, misinformed, and misjudge things too - and walk away with their self esteem unscathed, feeling good about themselves. They can stand in front of us without embarrassment and present themselves as quite wonderful.
Of course, the people with a straight paranoid viewpoing do not see it like that at all - they can sometimes turn up a lot that the power establishment would rather that the rest of us did not know about - but we must be careful about over simple presentations of these things - lest the the things that are uncovered are presented in ways that are not recognised and which are discredited too easily......
Brian Davey
May 2003