Paranoia: Is it Always a Bad Thing? -

Todd Hayen

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Kurt Cobain

What is paranoia? Usually the condition is coupled with another mental malady: schizophrenia, due to the psychosis brought about by that particular mental illness.

Psychosis is described as a departure from “reality” and being a “paranoid schizophrenic” typically means the psychosis takes the form of paranoia—a departure from reality that has the afflicted constantly looking over his or her shoulder for people, or other things, “after them.”

The disease can also manifest in other ways, always pointing back to the individual much like a hyper form of victim consciousness. Everything in the person’s experience is “out to get them,” conspiracy theories, aliens, ghosts, monsters, governments, authorities, police, bosses, partners. Everyone and everything is focused on the person who is paranoid. Always.

A medical website describes paranoia this way:

Paranoia is characterized by the experience of feeling threatened, persecuted, or conspired against. It can also loosely refer to beliefs of general suspicion regarding the motives or intentions of others.

And goes on to say:

Paranoid ideation is not the same thing as delusional paranoia, which involves beliefs that are false and fixed.

Another form of paranoia would describe a person who immediately jumps to a certain conclusion regarding a situation, and always the same conclusion regardless of any causal element present. An example would be someone who thought anyone who died of just about anything, died due to the vaccine. And also putting that event through a paranoid ideation that says the government, or certain other authority, was intentionally trying to kill people with the vaccine.

We have heard “paranoia” being blamed for much that we, on this side of the fence, are experiencing. “Conspiracy theorist,” in this current context, is really just another name for “paranoid.” It is someone who “makes stuff up” to fit a certain narrative.

But what if all this stuff we are supposed to be making up is actually real?

I know over the past few years I have stopped cold a few times and wondered if I was indeed going insane. When people are constantly telling you that you are insane, you do start to question yourself. The strange thing about our current situation is that someone has got to be nuts, either the sheep or us, it is all too weird to be able to say, like in most disagreements, “well, we can both be a little right, and both be a little wrong.”

Nope. Don’t think so. Sure, there are some things that are still questionable—the details—but one side or another must win, and be “right,” about the whole enchilada. There really is no greyness here.

For me, this has been difficult. The whole situation is by nature elusive and strange. Although when I peruse all of the information, it becomes unquestionably clear what is happening, at least from a broad perspective. But if I don’t have all of the information at my brain’s fingertips, then the questions start to niggle away at me. I snap back into clear realization when I coerce myself to again look at the whole picture.

For example: I will hear of someone in the news who has died some unexpected death. Everything points to the vaccine: a heart condition, died in their sleep, the succumbed was an otherwise healthy person. But then, bang, it is confirmed they were NOT vaccinated. What happened? Then someone suggests that they actually were vaccinated, and the media lied about their vaxxed status. Is that paranoid or what?

When I regroup, and look over the big picture again, I realize that one death doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things. One person dying mysteriously and being unvaxxed doesn’t make or break the big picture—of course not, that is obvious.

As our friend George Orwell said in 1984:

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, does not make you mad. There is truth, and there is untruth, and if you cling to the truth even against the whole world, you are not mad.

Thank God for Orwell, clever man. But wow, is it lonely. But we really are not alone, we are more than one! Far more! This is the primary reason why we must constantly be building community. Here on Off-Guardian we must comment, discuss, hold each other as tight as we can. And certainly we must look for community locally so we are in physical touch with one another. We must wipe away that illusion that we are crazy, or paranoid, or wrong, or delusional. We are none of these things, and we must keep reminding ourselves of this fact even if we have to ask each other over and over again, “am I ok? Am I real? Am I believing the right thing?”

There is an awful lot at stake. Some of you super activists out there have been struggling with the “big lie” for quite some time. It is probably quite easy for you to see all of this bull very quickly without much thought. But there are many of us who do find it quite difficult believing that nearly everyone we used to trust are evil liars. And unfortunately, that is exactly what we have to do to make any of this that is going on make any sense.

If you think about it, most evil villain characters in books and movies are a single person—one demented mind that has a bunch of minions supporting his or her evil ways (like the Wicked Witch of the West and her Winkies and Winged Monkeys). Once that singular person is defeated the world then relaxes and returns to its previous goodness.

That isn’t the way it is now. Things are absolutely rotten to the core. The entire system is messed up and everything and everyone that goes with it: politics at all levels, education at all levels, laws and law enforcement, medicine and medical education, economy and the world money system. If believing all this doesn’t seem paranoid, I don’t know what would.

But it is true. At least true enough to say it is true. Yes, there are details, and often the details can be outliers and not fit with the general ugliness. I have yet to believe that everyone in “power” is an “evil liar” or that all of the people engaged in these systems, such as education and medicine, are evil minions of the devil. There are many good people intertwined in all of this, “just doing their jobs, taking care of their families,” all with good hearts.

This is one very important reason why many of us think we have gone mad. Everything sort of just rolls along. People can do just that, do their jobs and take care of their families, and not a lot gets in their way. But is that really true? Can we really just roll along and not be affected by the rot our entire lives sit on? All this that goes on over our heads, all that is mentioned above, is not going the way it should be going. Much of it is downright evil.

No, I don’t think we can just roll along. Maybe many of us are just realizing that for the first time. And everywhere we turn we see it—they are indeed after us. No doubt about it.