On Paranoia

Psychotic & Neurotic Origins + Cultural Causation of Paranoia, Pegasus Spyware, Waco, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Depo Provera, COVID-19, Collective Betterment and beyond…Plus an art piece by Amity Moon!

Dear Reader,

This piece will need to be opened in your web browser or Substack app in order to view and enjoy it en full. Amity Moon’s art piece, titled “Rat Man,” is located about half-way through this post.

Thank you, and I hope you’ll be fond of this entry. I certainly am!

Best,

Ash of Brain Worms and Big Fish

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While at a party a few years ago, I struck up a conversation with a social worker who had spent most of her career treating patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. She had not used this term, but instead uttered the sequence delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia. I asked why she had used “positive symptoms” (symptoms which are additional instead of “negative symptoms” like disinterest and isolation) rather than “schizophrenia” to describe the type of clients she helped. She said that her practice, along with many others, seldom diagnoses people with schizophrenia anymore. This is, of course, not to say that people are never diagnosed with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder these days—different regions, modes, levels of access, and the practitioner’s style all impact how and what we are diagnosed with—but in her experience, the frequency of shelling out this diagnosis had greatly diminished compared to when she had started practicing twenty years ago.

I then asked if this was because of the poor health outcomes that came as a result of a schizophrenia diagnosis, to which she said Yes, and there’s some more to it. One does not need data to imagine the associated detrimental effects—a doctor can easily disregard a patient’s anxiety over their physical health and cast them as paranoid because of this label, which causes the development of physical disease to progress. [Something similar happens to patients with an anxiety disorder listed on their charts; physicians simply chalk their health worries up to something of psychological origin.] Due to the surrounding stigma, discrimination towards schizophrenic people is rampant and obvious, which is likely internalized by some schizophrenic patients, causing them to hesitate when in need of help in order to avoid unneeded dismissal. The life expectancy rate is drastically lower for schizophrenic patients due to inaccess to care and unstable living conditions (typically found amongst the unmedicated and impoverished), and antipsychotic medications, which save lives, but come with risks of developing diabetes, elevations in blood lipid levels, and cardiac issues.

I dug further, and inquired if the hesitancy to diagnose was additionally related to cultural causation and the DSM-5’s failure to account for this, as well as its inability to provide nuance and continuity between paranoia of neurotic and psychotic origins. Her face lit up, and I knew I had found someone after my own heart (and mind). We slammed the incomplete and callous nature of diagnosis as a whole, discussed social phenomena which surely causes paranoia, and shared our mutual grievances towards the modern condition which promotes the unease and internal dysfunction that most are afflicted with (whether they are conscious of it or not). I spoke of Marshall McLuhan, “electric media” and how it distances us from ourselves and one another, and the poison of social media on the self and society. She spoke of the uptick in anxiety related to the COVID-19 pandemic, how ordinarily mentally healthy people lost their grip on reality and whatever sanity is, and why the field of mental health will be booming as long as people are suffering, which is evidenced by the barrage of BetterHelp ads and perpetual pop-psychology proselytizing. Do you sleep in the fetal position or walk with T-rex arms? You’re probably autistic! said the doomscrolling 20-year-old, who has never read about nervous system dysregulation or proprioception issues.

Origin and Maintenance of The Traditional Forms: Psychotic and Neurotic

For most, paranoia is associated with psychosis or substances. It is seen as something of organic origin or something which is drug induced (from meth, or booze, or psychedelics, or coke, or inappropriately intense spacecake, though any form of cannabis can put you over the edge). While paranoia of a psychotic origin is certainly a real phenomenon, it is far more likely to experience paranoia of neurotic origin if psychologically rooted. Paranoia of neurotic origin—which I am defining in a loosely Freudian and binary sense, meaning not of psychotic origin, resulting from past experiences and stress without a complete detachment from reality—does not necessarily mean that the experiencer suffers from a mental health disorder, but those with bipolar, BPD, PTSD, OCD, and other anxiety disorders are significantly more likely to experience this kind of paranoia.

Many with neurotic tendencies have such an elevation in anxiety and paranoia that they believe themselves to be psychotic, when in fact they suffer from the plague of overthinking and overanalyzing. In reality, a trained and nuanced mental health practitioner can tell between the neurotic and psychotic, regardless of the patient’s mask or degree of self-convincing. For myself—a mere neurotic with a penchant for analysis and many mentally ill friends and family members—this difference can be seen through an individual's speech, memory and frequency of repetition, openness, interpretation of a shared reality, and their logic (or lack thereof). The memory issues of a pot user or long-term depressive differ from that of one with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder; the logic of the latter is likewise decidedly different, and not solely in an impulsivity or poor decision-making kind of way. Some may cheaply rely on the identification of an associative thinking style to pin a paranoid-leaning person with a psychotic disorder, but those with ADHD and autism can also exhibit this, as do neurotics and those who do not meet any diagnostic criteria.

In Sigmund Freud’s “Rat Man” case study, the patient suffers from an intense fear that his fiancé and dead father will be tortured by a rat that will eat its way through their anuses in order to escape the heat from a flame on the other side of a pot. Prior to his father’s death, he believed that if he wished to see a woman naked, his father would die. After his death, he began to open his door between 1 and 2 AM in order to let his father’s ghost into his home. He thinks that if he performs the correct actions—which includes routine praying, making situations “right,” and avoiding thinking about things he believes he isn’t supposed to—he can ward off the torment and deaths of his loved ones. He is so plagued by his irrational thoughts that the layman would interpret him as suffering from paranoid delusions and some form of psychosis, when in reality, the Rat Man was afflicted by what we would now call OCD. Many with OCD fear or believe themselves to suffer from a psychotic disorder both before and after proper diagnosis, whereas many with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and those in active psychosis do not question if their thoughts and experiences are unreal at all. It is an especially cruel and painful disorder that I know a thing or two about…

Cultural Causality

But paranoia that is of psychological origin is not the realm I ponder or analyze most of the time. Rather, I find the paranoia of the masses—that which is culturally or socially caused—to be far more intriguing. It should not surprise anyone that things which we intake from our environment cause paranoia, but I’m not talking about catalysts like carbon monoxide, which tends to make people pretty delusional and anxiety-ridden. Rather, the onslaught of information we intake breeds a nasty degree of fear that causes the sufferer to take on an affliction that can very well mimic psychologically birthed paranoia. Hell, many—dare I say, most—disorders featuring an abundance of paranoia probably begin this way (outside of PTSD, as this flavor of paranoia is rooted in physical experience).

Hallucinations and delusions involving religious themes—typically demons, angels, and instructions or messages from God—are common for schizophrenic patients, but the prominence of Christianity in our country and culture inspires this uptake even for patients who were not raised in devout environments. Who wouldn’t fixate on a supreme force that is equally capable of performing life-saving miracles and smiting hundreds-of-thousands at a time? Additionally, being that our most notable export is entertainment media, and that we are a land addicted to film and television, a concentration on paranormal and evil entities also causes this kind of paranoia to manifest because of the degree of input we subject ourselves to. Horror movies are abundant, but are best unwatched for some.

Many depictions of schizophrenic hallucinations in popular media include bugs crawling under the skin. While there is a named disorder for this—delusional parasitosis—the initial fear is of rational origin, as imagining this is unnerving to anyone. I grew up watching “Monsters Inside Me” and developed a fixation with parasites that resulted in prompting dinner guests to play NAME THAT PARASITE! at the table. What grows inside the intestinal tract and can rip out your gut should you pull this bug out of your butt? TAPEWORM! What parasite is frequently found in cat scat and causes depression and sometimes psychosis? TOXOPLASMOSIS! [I was not a very socially appropriate child, if you struggled gathering that.] But my awareness and interest did not spur paranoia, even after battling a gnarly C.diff infection (which is a bacterial illness, but a nasty and intrusive one at that). Many health conscious, naturopathic folk veer into the range of parasitic paranoia. They perform parasite cleanses and ascribe every health issue to internal invaders when they most likely fall ill due to Americanized diets and exposure to unregulated environmental havocs (the chemical and heavy metal laden water supply, poor air quality, etc.). They also may simply be unlucky, or have developed chronic inflammation as a result of chronic stress (something I, again, know a thing or two about). But for those outside of developed countries, a parasite paranoia may be life-saving.

Guinea worm, which may be unfamiliar to the Western reader, is a particularly painful parasitic infection that is primarily found in West and Central African countries. While cases have fallen over the years—largely due to efforts in disease tracking, access to clean drinking water, and education programs—the bug remains a horror out of a Cronenberg film or an Alien spinoff. The worm squirms around under the skin, but seeks eruption when it senses water so it can reproduce. Once the worm springs from the flesh of its host, it must be wrapped around a stick and slowly spooled out. Awareness of this disease—as well as of botfly, ticks, fleas, and bedbugs—can easily form the bedrock for bug-centric delusion and hallucination manifestation.

The same applies to gangstalking, which arises from a persecution delusion. The phenomena of gangstalking has trended over the past years, with YouTube videos posted by the supposed stalkee showcasing his alleged stalkers being the main cause for the rise in awareness. Genuine persecution, of course, exists. The Chinese government persecutes the Uyghur Muslim population. The Belgians spurred a mass persecution delusion in Rwanda and caused the actual persecution and eventual genocide of the Tutsis. The Nazis persecuted and slaughtered the Jews during the Holocaust, as the Russians did during the Pogroms, as the Egyptians did back in the days of Pharaoh, which has caused an epigenetic fear of persecution, which most of us would term as “multigenerational trauma.” The same applies to any group which has been enslaved or persecuted, which in turn breeds hypervigilance and reactivity. But gangstalking is not rooted in this kind of fear. Rather, it is rooted in the paranoia of surveillance.

Schizopolis: State-derived Paranoia

A friend of my sister, who will go unnamed, once pissed off and publicly humiliated a politician. Soon after, they began to notice State Troopers tailing them, until they were eventually encircled by a dazzling display of DPS vehicles. They recorded the incident, which did not result in any form of verbal or physical confrontation. The troopers remained in their vehicles, stalled for a while, and then all drove off in unison. This friend then uncovered police records detailing the surveillance they underwent. If they had not documented the incident, and had the incident not been mandatorily documented by the troopers, it would be easy to discount this occurrence as paranoia, as a persecution delusion. Similar stories are found everywhere, but most touch on fear of surveillance by the feds, which is a lot harder to definitively prove due to the inaccessibility of records.

A fear of tracking at the hands of the government is not the most irrational paranoia to harbor. While the NYPD has not directly admitted to harvesting data on individuals who have posted their support of Luigi Mangione on social media, Journalist Ken Klipperstein has reported that the NYPD released tracking reports to law enforcement agencies around the country, and private security firms have calculated that the likelihood of CEO slayings becoming a trend is not very likely, which means that federal intelligence agencies and others have performed risk assessments based on social media posts as well. Unfortunately, this is but the visible tip of the iceberg, and much can be done in the name of national security. The birth of The Patriot Act— which was implemented in reaction to the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon—surely caused fear, hysteria, and paranoia for the American masses, as did the reason for its institution. Some may claim that it’s only an issue for those who have done something wrong, but this is a shortsighted perspective. The Patriot Act opened the floodgates for the utilization of far more invasive surveillance programs with far less oversight.

Pegasus, the spyware developed by Israeli cyberarms company NSO Group, has been utilized by the Spanish government to keep tabs on Catalonian activists, their friends and family, and those who have brought awareness about the spyware to the public. Pegasus—which grants access to device’s cameras, microphones, and anything saved or searched for—is utilized by countless nations to combat terrorism, and while many of these countries necessitate a warrant for its use on paper, there is no way that it is being legally implemented most of the time, especially by countries like Saudi Arabia and Mexico (which has used it to target anti-corruption journalists reporting on cartels, as well as health scientists who supported a soda tax to combat obesity). Most of the proven instances of Pegasus infiltration have been against pro-democracy activists, journalists, and those who criticized their respective government, though Jeff Bezos also had the spyware found on his phone, and Israeli police have used it on so many walks of life that the known implementations cannot be listed here without taking up a page.

And what about us? While President Biden blacklisted NSO Group and signed an executive order banning commercial cybersecurity applications like Pegasus, U.S. intelligence agencies have been found to purchase Pegasus for other countries. In 2018, the CIA purchased Pegasus for Djibouti, which our State Department designates as a country ripe with human rights abuses, including state-sponsored human trafficking and politically motivated killings. The FBI purchased “Phantom,” a spyware application that is an extension of Pegasus created specifically for U.S. law enforcement, but claims to have never used it in an investigation. Meta sued NSO Group after finding Pegasus’ code within WhatsApp and won their case in December 2024. Apple likewise sued, but ended up voluntarily dismissing the suit after determining that targeting NSO Group was essentially useless amidst the ever-growing sea of spyware options. In 2023, NSO Group offered the California based company Mobileum “bags of cash” to access global communication networks. Had the deal gone through, Pegasus would have had the ability to infiltrate any device in the world, though it seems like it already can, given that U.S. diplomats, business leaders, and civilians in a slew of countries have had the spyware found on their phones and computers. Unfortunately, Pegasus is but one example, and spyware implemented under the guise of counterterrorism is surely utilized to track civilians in our own country, by our own country.

More concerning for Americans is the Main Core database, which contains millions of names of “potential troublemakers.” Those on the list have engaged in protests, sent private messages that criticize government policy, and posted dissenting opinions on social media. While reports state that eight million are on the list, this number is pre-COVID, rendering it inaccurate. The list is certainly larger after the BLM protests, January 6th infiltration of the U.S. capitol and gatherings at other state capitols, pro-Palestine protests, vocal support of Luigi Mangione, union strikes, and the elevation in criticism towards the government that is posted online and seen physically. There is minimal reporting on the Main Core due to the secrecy and security of it all, but the thought of being tracked by intelligence agencies is enough for many to spiral into paranoia. This, unfortunately, gives vindication for their fear.

While Reagan instituted the Main Core database, it has been refined in recent years, and most likely utilizes Palantir, a pre-crime software created by Trump funder and friend, Peter Theil. The software is used by intelligence agencies for predictive policing and ushers in the image of the horrors seen in Minority Report. Thiel is anti-democratic and explicitly states that he does not believe in the potential fruitfulness and protections of democracy. While his criticism is based in distrust of our government and elected officials, he, also, is not to be trusted. Thiel and Patri Friedman’s (the grandson of Milton Friedman) vision, instead of our current government, is a country filled with corporate owned micronations (though their earlier ideal was an autonomous floating nation in the ocean, a plot they flirted with through their nonprofit, The Seasteading Institute). Theil & Co. wish to be architects in a dystopian reality that few of us can conceive. If you thought the state of the nation was bad now, the future under Thiel and politicians like J.D. Vance who follow the musings of Curtis Yarvin—the “dark enlightenment” accelerationist writer, computer engineer, and pro-despot-pseudo-philosopher-podcast-prince-of-darkness—is far more frightening than anything written previously in this piece.

Distrust of our government is just. The Declaration of Independence stated revolutionaries' justification for toppling the tyrannical governance of Great Britain. The Constitution aimed to prevent our government from abusing its power through a system of checks and balances. Distrust of government was within our founding fathers and is seen within our founding documents, but the avenues that follow from this distrust can range from rational paranoia to a desire to induce doomsday. Figures like Vance, Yarvin, and those infected with the Q-Anon brain-worm-slash-mind-virus would use the founder’s cries and writings as justification for reshaping America in their image, toppling the bloated bureaucratic system which is bound together by band-aids, but ordinary Americans and leftists could just as easily utilize the same script. Our founders would certainly contest the current manifestation of surveillance and overreach—in fact, they would probably render our system as tyrannical, being that it is ripe with corruption and abuse—but they would shit their grave-rotted pants at the thought of an anti-American, anti-democratic, doomsday-oriented corporate oligarchy ruling the masses, which is on the horizon, if not already here.

“Rat Man” by Amity Moon (February 2025). Ink, pen, colored pencil, collage & digital alteration.

Paranoia Beyond Political Binaries

Those on the far-right and far-left are often criticized for their paranoia towards the government, but as stated earlier in fewer words, bedrocks birth belief systems. In 1992, when Randy Weaver failed to make a court appearance after he was given the wrong court date for his federal firearms charges, United States Marshals showed up to his cabin in Idaho and began a surveillance operation which turned into an 11-day standoff before they shot and killed his dog, son, and wife. Weaver and his friend (who killed the deputy on scene) were brought up on charges. Both of them were acquitted and filed lawsuits, which both of them won. Referred to as Ruby Ridge or The Ruby Ridge Standoff, this event cemented a paranoia towards the government in the minds of right-wingers and libertarians throughout the country.

Religious cults in America have a storied history. Seeking answers and explanations for suffering that cannot be found within mainstream avenues and typically fronted by an egomaniacal, delusional man who yearns to provide deliverance to a congregation and himself, the prevalence of and fanaticism towards cults is by no means something that should be unexpected. The paranoia of cult leaders stems from a complex sludge of cultural, religious, psychological, and personal experiences, but few cult leaders are as remembered in the cultural consciousness as David Koresh. Though the gun arsenal and end-of-days focused beliefs are elements to the story, the 51-day standoff, shootout, and intentionally-set fire that claimed four ATF agents and nearly 80 Branch Davidians at their Waco, Texas compound set a ball rolling down a far more dangerous hill. The Waco Siege and Ruby Ridge are cited as two extreme and harrowing examples of government overreach by many, but for Timothy McVeigh, they directly inspired the most deathly domestic terrorist attack in U.S. History.

Timothy McVeigh, better known as the Oklahoma City Bomber, was a Gulf War veteran and an incel-esque shy guy with an affinity for guns and survivalism. He was an edgelord that went septic—first buying White Power t-shirts, then studying The Anarchist Cookbook. He plotted for a few years after Waco, where he happened to distribute pro-gun literature to other onlookers before the fire and mass death. Anyone, regardless of political beliefs, would be horribly affected by such a thing, as I’m sure all Waco rubberneckers were, but our subject is not your average man. Later, in April 1995, McVeigh and a co-conspirator drove a truck up to the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, lit up a bomb he made, and killed 168 people. The act shows how a sense of alienation while developing—whether that be caused by others, the self, or is merely an individual's internalization of the alienation that festers in our culture—combined with experiences of violence and exposure to fringe politics breeds a degree of paranoia and hatred that can turn lethal. While most who suffer from abnormal levels of paranoia will take it out on themselves, some will project their animosities onto others. There was a definitive absence of logic in his targeting of federal workers in Oklahoma City, besides inspiring intense fear—and reasonable paranoia—amongst low-level bureaucrats and ordinary civilians.

For the left, paranoia can be traced back to at least the days of The Red Scare, which eventually led to McCarthyism. Suspected communists, socialists, and anarchists like Emma Goldman were deported during the first Red Scare, while The Rosenbergs were executed during the Cold War for allegedly spying for the Soviet Union and handing off top-secret information on the atomic bomb. Most of those who faced dire consequences were Jewish, and some were indeed communists who continued fighting for the political philosophy birthed by Marx.

While one could argue that abolitionism could be the start of left-wing paranoia, those who fought against slavery were not exclusively slanted, and the political landscape of the country looked too different to compare to the politics of modern America. More recently in our history, the Philadelphia MOVE bombing and killings of Black Panther members haunt the left-leaning consciousness, spawning distrust and loathing towards the current system and state. It is too simplistic to cast the opposition of left-wing activism as the right-wing government, as the main issue here is a government which seeks total control and fails to listen to the grievances of its population, though the state was indeed indisputably racist and conservative. Zealous, unyielding right-wing individuals, on the other hand, are mere manifestations and maintenance men of the paranoia that intelligence agencies, politicians, religious dogmatism, and conservative media networks and influencers (pundits) sow. The divide is ample for a reason, and the origin of this animosity should be questioned rather than blindly internalized.

While predominantly white left-wing groups like The Weather Underground have faced extensive surveillance, there is no comparison to what Black Americans, regardless of political slant, have endured from the government and the American medical system. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments have been regarded as an American public health atrocity for some time, but most non-black laymen hadn’t been aware of it until the COVID-19 pandemic and concurrent Black Lives Matter movement. At the time the experiments were conducted, it was known that syphilis killed and was spread person-to-person. Treatment options were available, but the “study” continued, and the infected men spread the disease to their families. They were never offered treatment by the doctors, and many died miserable deaths. While this may be the most known case of medical abuses on the Black population, other instances of experimentation add to a multi-generational manifestation of justified paranoia towards the government and medical system.

The case of Henrietta Lacks and the harvesting of her cancerous cervical cells—now referred to as HeLa cells—for biomedical research paints a picture of systemic unethical treatment of Black women, but the prescribing of Depo Provera, as well as the now banned Norplant device, to Black and Native women is especially egregious and obscured. American women in general are not well-educated on the dangers of certain birth control methods, but non-white women in particular have historically been downright tortured when it comes to gynecology and pregnancy prevention. While white women gained access to daily hormonal prophylactics, non-white women were pushed long-acting injections and sterilization. Depo was not initially approved due to cancer-causation in laboratory animal subjects, but from 1967 to 1978, the Grady Clinic in Atlanta, Georgia prescribed it to its study pool anyway, half of which were Black women. Women in this experiment were sterilized, developed cancer, and some died. The drug was denied approval by the FDA two more times before being approved in 1992 when labs began testing on rats and mice instead of dogs, which did not form the same degree of tumors that the Depo-jabbed beagles had.

The consensus amongst prescribing doctors was that Black women could not responsibly utilize barrier or daily pregnancy prevention methods, but even as women complained about the horrific side effects of the drug, their doctors continued to push. The data shows that of those prescribed Depo post-approval, 84% were Black women and the vast majority of them were low-income. The government, through USAID, sent out millions of vials of “the shot” to primarily African countries, where, again, women supposedly could not prevent pregnancy any other way! Unfortunately, the abuses of Depo do not end with our programs and doctors. In Zimbabwe, the white-led Rhodesian government pushed the shot onto Black Zimbabwean women before it was outlawed by the new government in 1981. More recently, the State of Israel has forcibly and continuously jabbed Ethiopian Jewish women with Depo since their immigration, effectively sterilizing the population. In the states, litigators and class action firms have sought Depo patients who developed brain and liver cancer to participate in ongoing lawsuits that will hopefully force the hands of Pfizer and the FDA to recall the dreaded shot.

This is all to say that paranoia towards the medical system is reasonable for Black Americans. Even for non-black populations, skepticism alone is not irrational. While many who were pro-MRNA vaccine during the pandemic criticized those who did not want to take their Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson vaccines, criticism slightly crept back from Black Americans from some groups of white liberals, though greater attention was put on Black communities and focused efforts to vaccinate ensued. Past medical abuses have unfortunately dissuaded many from seeking routine vaccinations and preventative or timely medical care, increasing costs of treatment and putting a wedge between doctors and Black patients (this wedge is likewise often present between doctors and women in general, as well as non-black POC).

The push for vaccination during the pandemic and the associated paranoia of spread was also reasonable due to the atrocious death toll of the COVID-19 virus, loss of loved ones, and constant media intake during periods of isolation. However, the paranoia of viral contraction spread another disease: fear of interacting even with personal protective equipment (PPE), contraction accusations (a real WHODUNNIT? conundrum that should always be answered with “the government’s failures to contain and corporations’ desire for endless profit” instead of finger pointing at neighbors), hypersensitivity to sniffling and the look of malaise, and self-imposed isolation after vaccines were readily available and the spread was largely contained.

Contraction and associated negative health impacts in 2025 are still a cause for concern for many, but with vaccines and PPE available, the risks that come with isolation and self-alienation outweigh contraction worries for those who are not immunocompromised and at risk of death. COVID-19 still kills hundreds to thousands of Americans every day, though the daily death tolls are less accessible now due to diminished media coverage and the general public’s inability to read beyond a Google AI overview. In comparison, around 2,000 die of heart disease daily in our country, but there is little-to-no paranoia or mass prevention of heart disease due to the lack of contagion, sudden onset of mass death, media coverage, and discussion, as well as the different timeline of disease progression between pathogenic and chronic inflammatory killers.

An additional form of paranoia related to the pandemic seeped into other realms of American life and furthered the animosity between politically opposed groups. Polarization increased, and so did extremist beliefs. Ordinarily conservative Americans became full-blown conspiracy theorists with an ax to grind and a government to demolish. This was obviously influenced by President Trump, who diminished COVID-19 risks through bleach-injection jokes and riled up his base, but this radicalization and general sense of anxiety also skyrocketed on the left, as it naturally would during such a horrendous period. The trends of radicalization and paranoia are not going anywhere any time soon on either side of the split. There is a bedrock that has fostered this animosity towards the system—much of it is rational, and can be seen through the Saint-ification of Luigi Mangione and politically united support of drastic change, though few can agree how this transformation should take place. A lot of the observed animosity and paranoia is, however, symptomatic of mass hysteria, sprouted from seedlings of genuine concern within soil absent of logic—like in the instances of Pizzagate or the Wayfair human trafficking conspiracy—and though there is an awareness of state and corporation spawned corruption which plagues our body politic, we take our loathing out on one another, transferring our anger to the individual or group(s) with minimal power. This stance that so many seem to occupy fails to bring about any form of enlightenment or betterment; it is foolhardy and misplaced, yet we continue to sow.

Hopes for Recovery in Schizopolis-ville

Most of us are paranoid in a cultural sense, and some of us develop neurotic or psychotic paranoia, but the bedrock is formed by our intake, country, and culture. There is much stigma surrounding paranoia—which is surely a pushback by good ‘ole cognitive dissonance—despite its abundance. While cultural paranoia blossomed in the 60s and 70s—largely due to shifts within the economic system, televised coverage and video footage of the unjust war in Vietnam, upticks in activism and subsequent crackdowns, and developments in awareness and thought—the flower has died and has led to social rot with little hope for rebirth in the near future.

This is not to say that the paranoia of the boomers is the central point for American paranoia whatsoever—if it was the prime cause for today’s cultural sickness, I would focus on it more. Cultural paranoia is and always will be something that develops over time, with multiple points of origin and acceleration. However, the similarities between the boomers and Gen-Z, as well as the similarities between the two eras, are fairly evident. The astrologically inclined would point to The Age of Aquarius as a connection point, but I would hone in on developments in technology and access to media (TVs in nearly every household by the early 1960s; iPhones and laptops and iPads and touch screen watches and AirPods for all today), which causes an influx of information intake, but also a lack of knowledge due to the absence of the need to seek out information that is not spoonfed. There is also the parallel of the rise in activism and revolutionary thinking, but GenZ is too quick to claim this revolutionary spirit that the flower children had, as we are less likely to go out and enact change due to the simultaneous comfort and crippling anxiety that is caused by constant screen time. We are a generation of posters, not protesters. There is also the shared generational desire to form communities and communes, but GenZ is stifled due to increased property taxes, costs of living, a stagnant minimum wage, and the social anxieties caused by social media access and the pandemic, which has hurt our ability to connect and build with one another. While the paranoia of the flower children drove them to innovate, to try and fail, to push forth projects that sought to better relationships and the environment, the paranoia of today, which has continued as a bitter humming from that place of hopeful renewal, is cumbersome, isolative, and fatalistic. And though that bygone era is so often romanticized by our generation, we must not forget that those eager, passionate young people turned into a rather conservative generation who, by and large, stood silent during the Reagan and Bush administrations. It is important to remember that we are all susceptible to the paranoia that our leaders prey upon and that we must combat the narratives we intake, even if they are digestible and agreeable with our individual fears and desires.

We must make changes to how we interact with others, as a few degrees of trust are vital for our survival in times of chaos, destruction, and crafted confusion. Distancing from social media and combating our technological addictions is the first step; nervous system dysregulation must be challenged and our social skills must be grown. We must seek out and practice good faith communication with others, even if we have disagreements, as learning how to navigate small conflicts is vital for survival and communion building. We cannot allow ourselves to believe that we are the generation and era that will spark drastic change in this country when so many of us have the attention spans of goldfish, though this lack of focus is a problem that most Americans, regardless of age, are afflicted by. We must realize that we are all susceptible to distraction, to anxiety-driven actions and beliefs, and self-glorification; the most accessible ideas and avenues for change in this country have not worked and continue to not work, largely due to a failure to appeal to collective grievances in combination with the individual’s desire for betterment. If the individual is not being benefited by the ushering of collective change, how will a population that is handcuffed by individualistic gains ever unite? If the individual is not removed from the turmoil caused by constant intake of anxiety and paranoia causing material, how will he be motivated to change on the individual and collective level? How will she be energized and inspired to fight for something worth fighting for?

It is up to us to save ourselves and our collective. No one is coming to offer an alleviation of our suffering, and the current avenues for numbing are only making our cultural ailments worse. We have been tricked into false self-soothing, false self-care. We have been instructed to scroll, to binge, to indulge in what are, in actuality, self-harming behaviors. True self-care begins on the individual level, sure, but it doesn’t look like primping and watching entire seasons of a show in one sitting. Rather, it requires reflection and reaching out; we aren't a species that can survive without the help and love of others, even if asking for and accepting that help and love is painful or uncomfortable. We are simply not equipped for that isolationist ideal, as much as we try to deny our beingness and yearn for an alteration of our animalism. Trust within the self and between others dampens paranoia, but it must be nourished and grown; the soil must be tilled, and the seeds must be watered, for it sits atop cold stone that seldom sees the sun. The work is tough and tedious, especially when not taught and not practiced, but the result is often fruitful.