paranoia in the world of spies, lies and secrets

[Joseph Tracy]

Very few people have been the specific subjects of immoral human experiments. A larger number have been spied on. And almost everyone in any society where information matters has been lied to by their government about important things.  The resulting effects on civic trust or mistrust vary a lot- from unwavering support for the authorities to delusions about secretive cabals of freemasons and Jewish bankers  in charge of the whole planet. Sometimes the most extreme polar attitudes coexist: Glenn Beck. GR examines all these possibilities  from cruel experiments to generalized lies, largely through  a variety of personal responses from his characters. 

Slothrop in some ways represents the reality of victims  of weird experiments like Canadians subjected to CIA shock treatment, black americans and Hondurans dosed with syphilis, people unwittingly exposed to radioactivity, Nazi experiments etc. Slothrup  is that rare individual who is a subject of  such experiments. His suspicians toward authorities are not delusions; they are basically correct. What might be a delusional form of paranoia is in his case perceptions and clues about some patterns that are not only abusive, but  a direct reflection of the patterns of  fascists. He can't fully know this but it could be known with access to all the relevant information-information that Pynchon provides the reader.  The mindset that predisposes him to the possibility of paranoia despite the fact that he ives in a supposedly democratic reasonably comfortable society and family is his Puritan family and the whole idea that someone( God) is in charge of everything and that there are also vast evil plots against the divine will.  Because of this we don't fully know why Slothrop is paranoid and to what degree that fear is the result of conditioning. 

My own reaction is that part of Pynchon's  point is that once a society establishes patterns of conspiracy, secretiveness, deception, and spying there is no way of knowing how bad things are, how far toward the assumption of Godlike or demonic powers those in positions of power have gone. Under such conditions, paranoia becomes logical to some degree, and the point where it becomes delusional is never fully known. Reading Machiavelli tells us this is nothing new. 

Doubling down, Pynchon also places Slothrop at the crux of a split between presumptions of randomness/ behaviorist conditioning/logical rational science  on one side and the possibility on the other side that there are paranormal/ spiritual forces that can't be fit into rational science yet which directly affect physical reality. Neither can be disproved in Pynchon's world and both have good evidence so it reminds one of the paradox of light which can appear to be both particle like and wave like.   

I don't know if these thoughts are leading anywhere too specific,  just trying to grapple with the issues among the dingleberries and rainbows.