The Paranoid Style in Twitter Moderation

Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style and Group Narcissism as Complementary Metaphors

If you’ve read my blog, you know that I’m skeptical of conspiratorial styles of reasoning, so it was with enormous difficulty last night that I tweeted that there was a conspiracy among Twitter, corporate media, and American domestic secret police in the FBI, CIA, and DHS to interfere with a democratic election for partisan purposes.

Owing to the unfortunate facts that Twitter CEO Elon Musk permitted former FBI counsel to review the source documents, and that he has chosen to trickle information out to journalists, we may never know the true extent of this conspiracy against American democracy and political expression in the public sphere.

With that being said, I am still critical of conspiracy theories in general. What I mean by this is that I am critical of a certain style of “reasoning” which stems from a lack of cognitive discipline, which I ultimately attribute to deficiencies in public education.

Creative people are apt to confuse their brain’s ability to generate models that could explain connections among data points with proof of the accuracy or necessity of those models, because they were never encouraged to discipline their minds.

The ancient tradition that the phrase “Let none but geometers enter here” was recorded at the entrance to Plato’s Academy underscores the importance ancient philosophers ascribed to analytical discipline as a prerequisite for qualitative thinking about social and political phenomena.[i]

As an example of the conspiratorial style of reasoning in my own thought, I often suspect that our educational deficiency is itself a conspiracy to render ordinary citizens beholden to superstitious and paranoid styles of thinking, which in turn renders citizens open to manipulation (as we’ll explore in future posts on group narcissism). The institutional abandonment of numeracy, philosophical logic – even the Catholic Trivium – support this conclusion. Yet the fact that I can think of psychological motivations for a conspiracy to effect this educational change doesn’t entail that there is such a conspiracy.

Recent examples of the conspiratorial degradation of political analysis can be found in historically fringe and radical political positions like scientific socialism and scientific anti-semitism. In the case of Marxism, we’ve seen the wholesale abandonment of Marx’s explicitly anti-psychological, reductive economic model of class conflict in favor of historical exegeses that focus upon uncovering conscious conspiracies by “capitalists” against “workers.” Similarly, we see putative supporters of Kevin MacDonald’s evolutionary reduction of Jewish social psychology recoiling into psychological conspiracy theories that deviate little in substance from medieval Christian conspiracy theories about Jews.

The Paranoid Style and Group Narcissism

In the 1960s, a history professor named Richard Hofstadter published a now-famous book entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which identified a “style” of thinking in American politics. Hofstadter stressed that in adopting a psychiatric concept, he was not “speaking in a clinical sense” but rather “borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.” Hofstadter explains that the paranoid style should be understood by analogy to other historical styles like “baroque” or “mannerist,” meaning that the paranoid style is “a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.”

This is analogous to the purpose of my metaphor of group narcissism. Consistent with how I’ve distinguished my metaphor from clinical conceptions of narcissism developed in individual psychology, Hofstadter says that it is possible for the political thinker in the paranoid style to be “rational” and “disinterested” to the extent that he does not perceive himself as being “singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy.” And yet such a rational actor can still participate in the paranoid style.

The paranoid style captures “qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” in a pejorative sense, with the feeling of persecution being central. This feeling of persecution is, however, experienced at the group instead of individual level. These qualities affect “the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.” The paranoid style results in abstract political engagement with reality being “systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy.”

As with group narcissism, grandiosity becomes central to Hofstadter’s metaphor, although Hofstadter focuses the grandiosity on history. To explain, Hofstadter begins by acknowledging that conspiracies do exist:

One may object that there are conspiratorial acts in history, and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them. This is true. All political behavior requires strategy, many strategic acts depend for their effect upon a period of secrecy, and anything that is secret may be described, often with but little exaggeration, as conspiratorial.

But what distinguishes this wholly rational and empirical position from the paranoid style is

“not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms – he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point [like Charlie Kirk] : it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out.”

The grandiosity of this intentional conspiracy entails that it can only be resisted and defeated by an equally grandiose and absolute form of militant activism. Thus the paranoid style cannot permit compromise. However, much like the difficult paradoxes that stem from the omnipotence of the group self-image in my metaphor of group narcissism (most recently discussed in the Why We Remain Blacks series), the paranoid style’s “demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals.”

Since these goals are by definition unattainable, recurring failure “constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration,” and “partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began.” As with the group narcissist and the relationship between his group self-image and the omnipotent outside world that persecutes that image, the feedback loop between the unrealistic omnipotence of the paranoid’s conspiracy on the one hand and the unrealistic conditions of omnipotent victory on the other reinforce his “awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”

Consequences

The consequences of the paranoid style are often similar to the consequences of group-narcissistic thinking. As we recently surveyed, group narcissism lends itself to theories of systemic oppression when, instead of evidence of the persecution it needs to sustain its self-image, it finds an absence of oppression or evidence of charity and tolerance toward the group by its historic oppressors.

In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, historian Bernard Bailyn quotes the American revolutionary and founding father John Dickinson on the paranoid style that dominated the crisis of Charles I’s reign:

“acts that might by themselves have been upon many considerations excused or extenuated derived a contagious malignancy and odium from other acts with which they were connected. They were not regarded according to the simple force of each but as parts of a system of oppression. Every one, therefore, however small in itself, became alarming as an additional evidence of tyrannical designs. It was in vain for prudent and moderate men to insist that there was no necessity to abolish royalty. Nothing less than the utter destruction of the monarchy could satisfy those who had suffered and thought they had reason to believe they always should suffer under it. The consequences of these mutual distrusts are well known.”

It's Mueller Time!

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[i] http://www.antiquitatem.com/en/platonic-academy-geometry-nepotism/