| | |
|
IrisAikateriniFrangouFirstEssay 7 - 18 May 2021 - Main.IrisAikateriniFrangou
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| | | An offshoot of such complex collective personality states are the ones that embody the “paranoid style” in politics (as Richard Hofstadter coined it)– an enduringly universal psychic phenomenon that uses paranoid modes of political expression (namely, polemic hyperbole, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy) by normal people (Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics). In the context of American politics today, this paranoid style is expressed by the contemporary right wing, as is most emblematically manifested for instance, by the far right QAnon conspiracy theory. | |
<
< | Ironically, through the incorporation of Putnam’s multiplicity of self, the paranoid style organization (or spokesman) can be seen as playing on the multiplicity of social psychology but manipulating it to forge a worldview to its members that denies that very multiplicity – that reduces the world to a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, rejecting the ambiguity, conflict, and fallibility of the self. To make such worldview credible, the paranoid style spokesman goes to great lengths to give it coherence (often by imitating the tools of his sworn ideological opponent), but such successful coherence is premised on a completely personal interpretation of history, turning “every accident or incompetence into an act of treason” (Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics), that is magnified through the effects of mass media. Hofstadter suggests that the enemy of the paranoid style spokesman is in many ways a projection of the spokesman’s self in both its ideal and unacceptable aspects. Through the lens of Putnam, this can be seen as the paranoid style organization/spokesman (and thereby the paranoid style member) attempting to deny its own (and its enemy’s) multiplicity of self, by disciplining their mind to viewing reality through the absolutist, dual lens of good and evil. | >
> | Ironically, through the incorporation of Putnam’s multiplicity of self, the paranoid style organization (or spokesman) can be seen as playing on the multiplicity of social psychology but manipulating it to forge a worldview to its members that denies that very multiplicity – that reduces the world to a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, rejecting the ambiguity, conflict, and fallibility of the self. To make such worldview credible, the paranoid style spokesman goes to great lengths to give it coherence (often by copying the tools of his sworn ideological opponent), but such successful coherence is premised on a completely personal interpretation of history, turning “every accident or incompetence into an act of treason” (Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics), that is magnified through the effects of mass media. Hofstadter suggests that the enemy of the paranoid style spokesman is in many ways a projection of the spokesman’s self in both its ideal and unacceptable aspects. Through the lens of Putnam, this can be seen as the paranoid style organization/spokesman (and thereby the paranoid style member) attempting to deny its own (and its enemy’s) multiplicity of self, by disciplining their mind to viewing reality through the absolutist, dual lens of good and evil. | | |
Perhaps, an explanation for the emergence of this phenomenon of the paranoid style organization can be attempted by regarding its members as having been afflicted by certain circumstantial shifts in society (e.g. economic depression) that in combination with certain well-established conditions (e.g. religious traditions) are conducive to the formulation of such “psychic energies” as Hofstadter puts it (or to a heightening of man’s “neurosis”, to go back to our reductive analogy). The irony of it all of course, is that it is the very multiplicity of social psychology that ensures the survival of the paranoid style embodied in this type of collective personality state. It is only through the existence of the multiplicity of social psychology that the paranoid style organization is even able to coherently (albeit erroneously) express its denial of such multiplicity. |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |