(Fwd) Re: Trust-Love, Paranoia-Chaos, Leni

[Meg Larson]

>Albert a dit, in response to Monsieur Mariner: 
> 
> Somewhere in the record I have Jules saying that P.s views on 
> paranoia need to be examined against the light of his holding a 
> drivers license and credit cards in his own name. I don't think you 
> have to be clinically suspicious to realize that these are data bits 
> that can ultimately be used for a lot of purposes, only some of them 
> benign. I ultimately believe that paranoia really is only a device 
> not a personal credo.

One thing I never hear mentioned in the discussions re: paranoia (and not
just on the list) is that paranoiacs do tend to "function" in society to
some extent.  I know a guy who recently got pulled over by the State
Copppers and freaked, pulling a gun and shooting a trooper in his stomach. 
This guy went into a deep funk @ 10 years ago, when his wife left him, blah
blah blah.  But for the past 10 years, he went to work every day, did all
the things he needed to do to subsist, and pretty much lived in his room. 
He wasn't weird-acting, he was just quiet.  He also exhibited classic
paranoia symptoms.  But he had a driver's license and a credit card, and a
phone card, and a video membership--for all intents and purposes, he was a
normal guy.  Having a job and a driver's license, etc., were the tools that
hid his paranoia; paranoiacs are great liars, b/c they feel they have to
be.

I tend to believe that paranoia can be a good thing; it's a reflex like the
others we humans are supposedly wired with (humans don't have instincts,
according to the psych people--we have reflexes).  I have had my own
paranoid moments that, in a couple of instances, saved me from great harm. 
One could say that that doesn't constitute paranoia, but paranoia was the
first reflex to kick in, followed by "fight-or-flight."  Paranoia is, on
one hand, a heightened sense of awareness and an incredibly fine-tuned
attention to detail.  There has been talk lately of writers as
spys/observers and paranoids in general are a lot like that--they eavesdrop
and window-peek not so much b/c they think they're the object of a
conspiracy, but moreso, that IN CASE there _is_ a conspiracy, they can
protect themselves.

And ultimately that seems to be what Pynch's paranoiacs are
after--self-protection/preservation.  And although they tend to exhibit a
lot of the same symptoms, paranoiacs are not necessarily sociopaths.