Paranoia As Culture

It's part of the mystery of human existence that hate can be an energy, useful to accomplish things but also too easily a force of wanton destruction, and that paranoia is a comfort. Knowing that everybody and/or everything is out to get you defines your place in the universal pecking order. Finding out that all your theories about how the deck is stacked against you are true, even if you are manufacturing the evidence yourself, only confirms the superiority of your thought process. A little paranoia can go along way.

American had been a relatively young and naïve country until after the Second World War. Even then, the government was ten steps ahead of the general public in manipulation and dirty tricks, using blacklists and committees to keep the average citizen too frightened to notice the really bad things that were starting to happen on a policy level. Here in the land of the free and home of the brave, paranoia tends to be an 'all or nothing' proposition. Everything is fine until everyone is against you. Perhaps it would be healthier to have just a touch of that European skepticism.

There are three great writers of American paranoia, although in some cases it might not be obvious. Curiously, all three became academically approved literary figures in France first, as had Edgar Allan Poe a century earlier. H.P. Lovecraft found paranoia in knowledge. Philip K. Dick found paranoia in reality. James Ellroy found paranoia in history. By tracing the trend of paranoia in popular American fiction, I think you can see how the culture here in the United States developed a more mature world view over time.

Lovecraft, especially early in his career, was so steeped in the Gothic that comparisons to Poe were inevitable. Despite superficial similarities, Lovecraft really owed little to Poe, who was a pre-Symbolist using pre-psychology, 40 to 60 years ahead of his time. Lovecraft had no use for psychology, considering it a 'decadent' Jewish fad, an unfortunate hangover of his Aryan Race xenophobia. Poe was always exploring motivation, why people were doing horrible things against their best interest. Lovecraft's protagonists were always searching for knowledge, plain and simple.

It was when they learned whatever they were after - ancestral secrets or interconnecting cosmic consequences - that the trouble started. Ignorant was bliss for Lovecraft, because scientific facts had a nasty habit of biting you in the ass. Whether it was finding out your ancestor was a cannibal, a white ape, or a sea creature, or uncovering secret cults, or gaining extraterrestrial knowledge, it spelled your doom. It was a horrible world out there, and you just found out that you were either the worse part of it or completely inconsequential.

The image of Lovecraft as this lank, pale, horse-faced creature trembling while he writes out his worse fears is also wrong. Read his very learned essay, 'The Supernatural in Horror Literature', written strictly to clarify his own thoughts after extensive reading, and you can see a craftsman dissecting other writers to find out how they manufactured shivers. What HPL didn't realize is that, around the time of 'The Call of Cthulhu', perhaps his best piece, he was moving resolutely into science fiction territory. Only vague hopes of selling material to 'Weird Tales', virtually his only market, kept him pumping out horror.

Ironically, 'Weird Tales' stopped publishing HPL because the stuff was too scientific and too long. Lovecraft did sometimes seem like a passive character right out of his own fiction, but he had a practical mind. Many of his tales have a new key scientific discovery leading to horrifying revelations at the end. It is the material aspects of life, such as your DNA, the ocean, or the stars themselves, which will reveal the horror, betraying the self. His protagonists could not remain ignorant, thus sealing his own fate.

Philip K. Dick, in direct contrast to Lovecraft, was seeing a psychologist by the age of six, when HP was still alive. Dick's personal life could kindly be called a mess, with continuous poverty, five marriages, drug addiction, and a couple of suicide attempts. Yet his books, written fast for quick money in cheap science fiction paperbacks, are full of startling revelations, reality constantly peeling back on itself. Considering the circumstances, Dick's body of work is a string of masterpieces made under the most unlikely of conditions.

For thirty years, from 1952 until his death in 1982, Dick worked as a grossly underpaid author in the science fiction ghetto, usually in complete isolation. He wrote about a dozen mainstream novels, all of which were firmly rejected. Other science fiction authors were starting to break out of the genre; Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov. It would literally take death for Dick to join them, although there was plenty of controversy before then.

The science fiction community post-World War II was mostly science nerds working in the fast-growing Military Industrial Complex, conservative and hawkish by nature. Dick, growing up in uber-liberal Berkeley, California, was the polar opposite. He had (infrequent) communist affiliations, having among his five wives at least one who was a card-carrying member of the party. The couple were even frequently visited by the FBI, being asked to spy on fellow travelers.

You cannot understand the rampart paranoia in Dick's fiction without understanding how against the grain his thinking was for the Eisenhower era. All the secret things that the CIA was doing, all the dirty tricks of MK-ULTRA, were imagined even larger in his fiction. Nothing is neutral or what it seems. Your toaster may be a robot designed to go through your papers after you leave your house. One of his more famous quotes, "There will come a time when it isn't, 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. It will become, 'My phone is spying on me'.", has in fact predicted with amazing accuracy the world we all live in today.

No doubt about it, Dick was one paranoid son-of-a-bitch. Problem is, what he was thinking about was actually happening in the most hidden parts of our bureaucracy during his lifetime. Eventually turning to amphetamines in the 1960s to produce a staggering amount of literary output to keep the wolves from his door, he probably was chemically pushed over the line into outright psychosis. His string of novels between 1960 and 1970 are a series of weakly written pot boilers full of amazing philosophical discussions about the nature of reality, backed up by plot points to drive it home. It was existentialism for the mass market paperback.

Fellow writers, even those in direct opposition to his politics, recognized his talents. He won the Hugo award in 1962 for 'The Man in the High Castle'. Robert Heinlein, as pro-military as any SF writer ever, kept slipping Dick money on the side just to see the next book or story appear. It was still complete poverty, only Dick was sinking into the emerging drug culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s as a way to supplement his income. That's when it really got weird.

I won't talk much about the VALIC visitation of Philip K. Dick in 1974; it's pretty much the stuff of legend. Check out Robert Crumb's comic book adaptation instead. Whatever happened (or did not happen) profoundly altered Dick's life from then on. Off drugs, his output decreased, most of his time spent filling reams of typing paper with his 'Exegesis', ramblings about the meaning of his experience. When he gave a speech at a French science fiction convention and confessed all in public, exactly the kind of stuff he had been writing about all these years, it seemed like professional suicide. He didn't actually believe any of these paranoid thoughts, did he?

The world finally caught up to Dick just as he died, at the age of 52. Popular culture, moving into the digital age, suddenly grasped the implications of what he had been talking about for all those years. Major motion pictures by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott were made, ensuring that his legacy solidified as the future he had predicted became our reality. We do live in a world where every electronic object is capable of spying on us. Worse, we willingly feed these monsters data, making it easier for the forces of evil to exploit us.

James Ellroy has never written a word of science fiction, and I doubt that he has ever bothered with a psychiatrist. While he had a troubled childhood, his mother murdered when he was ten, he eventually emerged from years of self-abuse to become a highly disciplined novelist. Almost always writing about the past, he joins the great triumvirate of paranoia by what he reveals concerning our shared history. People look backward to imagine a simpler time, when things were good and all was right in the world. Ellroy works overtime to cure you of that misconception.

Ellroy's life work has been to show that our collective fathers were working hard to conspire against the future, corrupting everything they could systematically. Apple pie, the flag, motherhood; nothing is sacred in Ellroy's world. The problem is that he so fills it with detail and research that it begins to look more like real history than what you were feed in government-sponsored textbooks. Gone are the fuzzy warmth to be found in the past. Our world blossoms forth from the wormy crime-ridden mulch of our ancestors.

Seen in that light, it sounds similar to some of the themes of H.P. Lovecraft, except we're not talking about future knowledge, but historical accuracy. For instance, in Ellroy's greatest work, 'American Tabloid', you know by the end of the first chapter that 700 pages later this will all lead to the Kennedy assassination. The glory of the book isn't the details, but the big picture. Oswald isn't the patsy, Camelot is, a false flag of hope to cover up the horrible deeds done around the world for the profit of a few, yet perpetrated by the many.

His theme is the construct of the Big Lie; patriotism, love of country, freeing the world from tyranny. Our fathers are convinced to be vicious fascists while not given the real motivation for their deeds, killing any and all for fun and profit. It is, in retrospect, the harshest and most paranoid of the world views. In both Lovecraft and Dick's outlook, there is a shrinking but small hope that this may be all wrong, that everything will be all right in the end. With Ellroy, that boat has left the dock a long time ago. We are left to deal with  the consequences of the sins of our fathers, a grim reality indeed.

It also shows a trend in American thinking, away from a naïve fear of what might be towards a more healthy (perhaps) distrust of what is actually occurring to a very sobering realization of what really had happened already. It also helps explain why our current American political situation has been reduced to complete dysfunctionality; not everyone wants to accept this worldview. In fact, alternative facts and politically incorrect actions are soothing when the world seems stacked against you because of how your ancestors accumulated their wealth.

For instance, imagine that your father had been a Klu Klux Klan organizer in, of all places, the borough of Queens in New York City, then a slum lord, taking advantage of minorities to gain great wealth. You are his son, never having really earned a dime on your own, better at publicity than wealth accumulation. Would you want to flagellate yourself in public for crimes you didn't commit? Wouldn't it be easier to see it all as a giant conspiracy aimed directly at you?

In the end, paranoia begets paranoia, a self-perpetuating cycle. The fact that some in American society have realized that the worse angels of our nature have lead us to the modern world doesn't mean that all will be willing to accept this. Being white is still a privilege in this country, except the priviledge is to be accused of crimes you didn't commit but inherited. It's the new Original Sin. The only cold comfort is watching minorities do equally dumb and unethical things in their scramble for equality.

After all, we're only human. Or are we?