Enough Paranoia for Us All

Over their morning coffee, readers of the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago were likely to have encountered a full-page “open letter” advertisement signed by Matthias Rath MD. Under the banner “Prevent World War III -- Now!” this self-proclaimed “conscience of the world” argued that:

* the Bush administration allowed the attacks of Sept. 11 to proceed in order to divert media attention from “the deadly side-effects of cholesterol-lowering drugs”;

* mounting revelations of deceptions by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney about 9/11 and the Iraq war backed the U.S. “regime” into a corner, from which it can now escape only through the “detonation of weapons of mass destruction -- either provoked or in battle” and a subsequent proclamation of martial law;

* John Kerry has failed to take up the “powerful arguments” offered by Rath’s previous ads (most of which appeared in the New York Times) because Kerry, like Bush, is influenced by the “Rockefeller-financed oil and drug industries.”

Readers of Richard Hofstadter’s seminal 1963 essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” will instantly recognize that style -- with its “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose and apocalyptic” modes of expression -- in Rath’s campaign. No self-respecting teacher of writing would allow students to indulge in the argumentative leaps, megalomaniacal pronouncements and pseudo-documentation that are all too common in these letters.

Indeed, Rath’s insistence that the war in Iraq grew out of the worldwide “pharma cartel’s” efforts to restrict consumer access to “lifesaving” natural supplements is singularly uninformed by what Hofstadter once spoke of as an intuitive sense of how historical events both do and do not happen.

Consider the way Rath’s website explains the recent drop in public support for the Iraq war: “One need only look at the polling numbers at the beginning of Dr. Rath’s Open Letter campaign to see how strongly the war in Iraq was supported by the American public. But as Dr. Rath’s Open Letters continued and he produced evidence to back up his charges, people started to worry about the veracity of their own points of view.”

I daresay most of the L.A. Times’ readers dismissed Rath’s May 25 ad as the work of a quack. Yet this self-satisfied faith in the strength of our judgment misses a crucial point. Although we consider ourselves immune to such paranoia, as a culture we endlessly consume narratives in which normal folks like us, in the face of an alleged conspiracy, renounce skepticism in favor of full-blown belief. Think of “JFK,” “Twelve Monkeys,” “Conspiracy Theory” or “Terminator 3.”

How can we confidently dismiss Rath and yet with all-too-predictable regularity thrill to the exploits of a deeply suspicious, ultimately insightful hero as he takes on the evil of a rogue corporation, intelligence agency or computer network?

The answer lies in our emotions, psyche and traditions. As Freud recognized long ago, paranoid fantasies are a wonderful balm to His Majesty the Ego, which they restore to its seemingly rightful place at the center of the universe. But we also revel in paranoid narratives because they allow us to believe that we can precisely locate and ultimately defeat our adversaries -- the “Rockefeller-financed oil and drug industries,” for instance -- despite the increasingly diffuse reality of sociopolitical and economic power.

Who among us, for example, is wholly insensitive to that moment at the end of “Terminator 3” when John Conner, having realized that the Skynet computer network cannot be located, and apocalypse averted, answers the radioed query “Who’s in charge there?” with a simple “I am,” assuming his destiny as humanity’s savior.

So who’s paranoid? Not us? Us? All of the above.