Dystopia always means paranoia

[Joseph Tracy]

What follows is  emended from an earlier post of mine which questions the notion that dystopian visions and dystopian social realities are merely delusional states, and asks whether they are not also states cultivated with expertise and skill and which  constitute cultural patterns  that continue from Zoroastrian type religions to Calvinism, The cult of Caesar, Fascism, and Americanism( whatever the hell that is):

  Is  the word paranoid exclusively referent to delusional states, to madness, to false fears?  Is it just another scientific sounding greek word that seems like a medical term, but  like most words is inherently metaphoric and ambiguous? 

 Regardless of how you answer there is a lot of money in fear.  All my life I have lived in a culture that was obsessed by exaggerated geopolitical fears and has spent billions of dollars and  rivers of blood on "enemies" that were as human and rational as any other human group and posed no reasonable threat  to our society. Those on the forefront of these obsessive fears almost inevitably became as cruel as their imagined foes and willing to dispense with law, reason and moral restraint to contain the spread of the very thing they had invited into their own thinking and behavior. Those who followed them into battle became more likely to commit suicide or suffer fro extreme PTSD than any other group - victims in body and soul of the conspiracy theories of US politics, their memories of service a source only of self loathing. Don't ask why. 

Sadly, these paranoid traits have become part and parcel of political leadership in the US.  Paranoid conspiracy theorists are not just in the NRA or KKK or the black block, they set the policy of the worlds largest military  empire. The  terrorists they conjure have been summoned from their own minds and actions, a resource of infinite devilry currently obsessed with the pre-emptive punishment of imaginary crimes . The thing they hate and fear most is not terrorism but whistleblowers who expose the fact that they behave at least as badly as those they call " the enemy".

To label anyone who poses questions about this arrangement as "paranoid" seems to me an intellectual dishonesty that can easily label the sane, the ethically honest, and the well-informed as sick, dangerous and misled.
On Aug 21, 2014, at 6:18 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> 	Guardian Books (@GuardianBooks)
> 8/21/14, 5:03 AM
> J by Howard Jacobson review – the British dystopian novel of our time? ow.ly/2M8RMh
> 
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> 
> Sent from my iPad

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