Sometimes paranoia is the right feeling

Paranoia has a stigma to it. If you feel that people are working against you there is something wrong with you. There are conspiracies, sometimes they are grand and consist of many conspirators. To believe that you are the object of widespread hatred is not always narcissistic. Learning to recognize camouflaged hatred is an important life-skill.

Somebody hates you (1)
That's without knowing you, too. They hate you for being one of a gender or a race or a religion, or a sexual preference, or the lack of a religion. They might hate you for not being easily identified or for not overtly siding up with them. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do somebody, will hate you.

Somebody hates you (2)
They hate you, specifically. You. I don't care how lonely you are, how reclusive you are, somebody somewhere has noticed you and hates your guts. Everybody has enemies is not some cynical myth it's true. They hate you because of the way you wear your pants, the fact that you get Chinese delivered one night more a week than they do, the fact that your car is newer, or that you had an Obama yard sign a year ago. Odds are they know your name and that they search through your garbage weekly for some reason to make an anonymous call to the police.

The hatred is profound
It is an expression of any one of a number of issues they have. You are an excuse, a scapegoat, an outlet for all the emotions they have pent up and held inside them. You are the high school teacher who humiliated them in front of the class, the girl who pointed at the tiny penis and laughed, the father who subtly undermined their confidence in their teen years. You are a substitute for all the people they want to hurt and you never know why.

They will likely be sneaky about it
When people hate you for no reason they know that to just come out and tell you or to be overtly hostile would not be well received. They would look like an asshole (possibly racist, sexist, or xenophobic) to everybody and possibly crazy as well. No, they will keep it hidden behind a smile. They will then spend a lot of time looking at you, trying to find a reason they can use to legitimately hate you and to get other people to hate you as well.

You can't read minds
The fact is that there is always a fair chance that any given stranger will be hostile. It's far from a certainty, but the odds are pretty good that they don't like you or your kind. You can gamble that they are not, or you can bet that they are and act accordingly. If you are wrong in the first instance then you might get hurt. Wrong in the second and only they get hurt. Which sounds better to you? Bad people exist. Nobody disputes that. You know that there is always a possibility of evil people working to cause you harm. They exist. If they exist then that guy over there might be one of them. It's possible, if it's possible then you

People are interested
All of them. That's why TV is popular, that's why porn is addictive, it's the joy of getting to see into the private places in other people's lives. It doesn't matter how boring or unattractive you are, if there is a hole in your wall somebody will spend a lot of time on the other side of it just to be able to see you without being seen.

Fear, anxiety, and general insecurity are what make leadership effective

Fearful employees work harder, case in point: slavery, and basically every workforce in history prior to the invention of labor unions. Fearful children are not so much of a pain in the ass. Basically, fear has very broad applications across the spectrum of life. Once people are afraid of you, they become more useful.

A fearful populace has to be the most desired thing for men in political office. When the people you govern are consumed with their terrors you don't have to be smart, they won't care about your intelligence, they won't care how corrupt you are, they won't care if you choose young virgins from among the peasants to fuck in your castle. They just want safety, or the illusion of it. Pissing in their pants they will give you the money, the weapons, the approval for anything you want to do if you can tie it to making them safer. Nobody is careful when they are panicking, they don't look closely they don't think clearly, they don't pay attention, they just want to stop being afraid, they have no other goals.

The more you know about the way governments operate, the art of manipulating the masses, the less susceptible you become to fear and the cattle-prods leaders use to motivate. It takes the desire to learn, however. People don't have much of a desire to do anything when they aren't afraid. You can't really motivate a whole population with anything else, definitely not the desire for knowledge. Greed is a close second but there are too many people whose identity is built on resisting it. No, fear is the key to the crowd.

Fear thrives on ignorance an everybody is ignorant of something, on some subjects most or all people are ignorant. This is what you use, this is your kindling. You make up stories about monsters hiding in the dark, under the bed.

You trust people all the time…

On the topic of anxiety and cowardice, there are things that people, however “cynical”, seem to forget or take for granted. Everything around you involves some kind of trust, or some kind of ignorance. Since this blog is here to enlighten, here are some things you probably want to think about.

To stay in a hotel-room you need to trust your fellow guests to not be rapists or robbers, not to accost you in the hall and force their way into your room. You have to trust them not to be perverts, running little cameras through the ventilation system or through the wall to spy on you as you shower or have sex. You have to trust the staff too, as they have easy access and control over the rooms before you have checked in. To eat at a restaurant you have to trust that the cooks are not bigots, whether racist or homophobic or religious. I find it fascinating that people will eat food prepared by people they openly loathe and are known to loathe. American slave-owners used to eat food cooked by slaves, in the present day Conservatives eat in restaurants whose kitchen staff is almost consistently Latin American.

Most worshipers trust that their cleric is telling them the truth and not taking advantage of their ignorance. To take the news seriously you have to trust that the journalists are not lying to you. Corroborating information using other sources is not a reliable means of determining truthfulness as they could all be lying to you, or all be equally ignorant and apathetic.

To drive you trust your car-makers, your mechanic, and the other users of the road. You trust your bankers to keep your money safe. You trust food and drug companies and farmers to not tamper with what you put into your bodies. You trust condom makers to make a reliable product, you bet your life on that. Most people trust their spouses to not sleep around every time they leave the house. You place a lot faith in your fellow man.

You live your lives trusting, expecting goodness from the future, your faith is in the unseen future whether or not you believe in a deity. You still believe in blessings from that which you do not know and have not seen. There is no reason that you should. You rely on strangers who have no reason to look out for you. Your inability to imagine the worst, your belief in “luck”, is seen as courage. For people who are largely fearful (and most people, everywhere, are fearful, fear-motivated), the lack of consistency in the things feared is glaring, almost to the point of being absurd.

Cowardice: a logical point of view

Pessimism, anxiety and fearfulness get a bad rap. The fact is that there are tons of things out there that can make your life bad and pretending that they don’t exist or won’t happen to you is just naive. It’s best not to live in naivety. So, yes, being a pussy is sometimes a practical way of dealing with life. Not necessarily the best way, but there are good reasons that people live in cowardice. Let’s look at some of them.

1) Death- It's going to happen no matter what 
All kinds of things in life can happen to you. May happen to you. You may get cancer. Your plane may be hijacked by terrorists. You may live long enough to see your youthful looks fade. You may lose all your money and wind up living on the street. They are all possible. This one, though, this one comes to everybody and you can't run, you can't bribe your way out, you can't do anything to change it's mind. The sheer certainty of it, is what makes it more important than anything else you fear. Your whole life, every second, every problem, every good thing, all of it has to be taken with this in the back of your mind. You are here, you are reading this, and just as surely, you will be a memory soon enough, dead meat to rot or burn.

2) Tomorrow- Nobody knows for certain 
It's an unknown factor. In fact, it's the ultimate unknown factor. No amount of intelligence or computer power can solve the riddle of the day after this. We are all agnostics here. We think it's possible but we cannot be certain. It's like reaching down into a dark hole where something bad might live. You know that you will feel things tomorrow, euphoria, disappointment, maybe horror, but you don't know which. If the unknown is scary then when you wake up in the morning you should be terrified. You choose to hope for the best, you choose to think that it will be like every other day, but you don't really know. If you are smart you will make that same choice for all the things that scare you.

3) The police- They can kill you
Think about it this way: they are armed, are held to a different standard when it comes to killing people, are not chosen for their smarts, and most people trust them. Change the meaningless word "police"  the equally vague "gang" and you will see what I mean. An armed gang patrolling your streets at night, looking for a reason to stop somebody and take their money or to torture and kill them. Only morons believe that they actually have to do something wrong to get in trouble. Human beings are random, subject to error, prejudice and emotion but these are armed and have the authority to make your life miserable.

4) Rich people- Another set of rules 
The fact that a rich person can do the same things that a poor person can do is an accepted part of life. Everybody sees the bias, nobody cares, they just want to be rich too so that they can take advantage of the status quo. Some rich kid driving drunk could run into you tonight in his 350z  and never have to suffer a moment's discomfort. The newspapers and TV stations wouldn't cover it, and the district attorney would not ask for any kind of serious punishment. That's just the way it is and has always been. You live at their mercy. Just be happy they have not taken to openly hunting the rest of us for sport.

5) Food- There is something wrong with all of it 
It's either too fatty or lacking in something. Everything you enjoy will kill you and/or make you poor if you eat as much of it as you want. What you can afford is mediocre, but you need it so you buy it anyway. You are dependent on eating. You have to acquire food or you die. It's like a drug for which there is no rehab, to which you are bound by the chains of being human. You are stuck in addiction until you die.  Grocery stores are just dealers, restaurants are like shooting galleries where you go to get your "high".

6) Women- Fickle, dangerous 
Do you have any idea how different they are from us? If you are a straight guy you are stuck to them forever, forever interested, forever loving of vaginas and breasts and moans in the night. And yet they are so different from us that they might be of another species altogether. You want extraterrestrials? You want to see some weird, surreal intelligent organism before you die? Check women out. Insecure, emotional, vicious, amoral, and yet incredibly attractive. You respect them as equals and yet you cannot stop thinking about their asses. You fall in love and your happiness is at their disposal.

7) Men- When will the posturing end? 
A creature completely obsessed with status, with domination, competition and thrusting their viewpoint on other by using whatever means are at hand. You have to work with them every day, assholes who bring their egos into every little discussion about everything. Minor office-tasks become territory to be pissed on, defended for no reason other than symbolism. Projecting status to the pack. Manhood comes with slavery to the penis, and a dumb trust in women no matter how cynical you imagine yourself to be. You always fall for it. Lucy and the football. Your dumb maleness keeps you kicking and falling and kicking and falling.

8) Popular religion- They will stop at nothing 
Nor would you if you believed that your eternity depend on you doing something weird. You can get people to reduce themselves to animals on national TV to win a few hundred thousand dollars. Promise an eternity free of suffering and you can pretty much get them to do anything depending on the strength of their belief. Imagine an army of soldiers who would do anything they were told to with no hesitation and passionately, as if they had a personal stake in the outcome.

9) Kids- Annoying parasites 
While they are still children they have little of importance to think or to say, but they don't know that. They think that everything that passes through their mind is as new to you as it is to them. Some never grow out of the habit, never acquire a sense of not being smart or important. They are greedy, wanting everything while having no sense whatsoever of the value of money or the ignorance of youth until they have lost both. You think that being yours, having your genes makes them special, and maybe they are to your ego, but the pragmatic part of you sees that you just burdened the world with more average assholes.

10) Aging- It's like a disease 
Time's sewing machine embroiders death in your flesh. Every morning you wake up and look at the mirror something has changed you lost another day, another day that you won't ever be able to use, that you wasted doing something to make somebody else rich. You also died a little. Lost something that you won't have to day, a little quickness in your step, perhaps, ease of breathing, some little imperceptible thing is gone forever every 24 hours. Your wrinkles and your birthdays are like signs of how little you have gotten done, how much time you have wasted.