Hatred (14 page)

The line between more diverse cultures such as Afghanistan and the United States will be even more extreme. Whether a terrorist, or even a suicide bomber, may be considered mentally deranged will depend in great part on how far he has strayed from the norms defined by his culture. In a culture that will accept stoning a woman to death for infidelity, stoning an enemy's child to death may not seem so aberrant.

Further, the kind of an individual who will become a terrorist will differ from culture to culture. In the culture of modern America, we find a disproportionate number of psychotics among our homegrown, native terrorists. Optimism, a passion for life and the things of life, so dominates our society that when an American terrorist appears, like Ted Kaczynski—the infamous Unabomber who terrorized American academics in 1993—who turns his back on our culture, we are not surprised to find him a characteristic paranoid schizophrenic.

On the other hand, there seems little evidence that the terrorists who executed the 9/11 bombings were psychotic. They were probably not typical of the population from which they came, but their peers did not view them as deviant or sick. And the terrorists, prior to their suicidal acts, were not that different in their day-to-day behavior from the general population from which they emerged. They were students and civil servants, construction workers and professionals. There may have been some truly psychotic individuals among them, but the evidence at hand seems to suggest that the majority were not. They were, at worst, the paranoid extremes in a generally paranoid culture.

A paranoid population is not a population of paranoids. Rather, it is a group led by psychotic individuals who encourage paranoid elements endemic in the culture and in their individual personality. For example, the Turks who participated in the slaughter of the Armenians in 1915 could not have all been psychotic, any more than the Polish citizens of Jedwabne. We know that even
those who enthusiastically carried out the massacres of the innocents under Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot were not all psychotics. Two brilliant, but somewhat contradictory, studies about the same group of professional Nazi killing groups known as “Order Police” insist on this very point, as is evidenced by the titles given to their books:
Ordinary Men
³⁶
and
Hitler's Willing Executioners.
³⁷

The paranoid personality shares all the elements we will observe in the paranoid psychotic, while still holding onto a modicum of reality, that is, without shattering his hold on a plausible world. There have been many terms coined to characterize the paranoid character, but they all tend to include the following personality traits:

 

Negativism.
Paranoids display a negativism that underlies their view of life and colors their expectations. This is an extension of the “just my luck” assumptions previously described. Since attitudes influence judgments and expectations influence outcomes, the “unluckiness” of the paranoid becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

Suspicion.
Paranoids are universally suspicious and wary. Since nothing good is ever expected, nothing new can be anticipated with joy or hope. Every unopened door leads to danger or disaster; every messenger comes bearing bad news; every stranger is a potential harm doer. The unknown is always a harbinger for, and an extension of, the paranoid's familiar and expected feelings of deprivation. Hopelessness, being trapped in an unrewarding environment, facilitates acts of desperation. The
abandonment of a life of frustration and humiliation is by definition less irrational than leaving one of hope and opportunity. If, in addition, there is a certitude—an assurance by those who know—that death is not a terminus, void, or end, but a portal to a new and better life, even a reasonably rational person may elect to become a suicide bomber.

 

Chronic Anger.
Chronic anger becomes a way of life with paranoids. The anger is not always expressed but can remain dormant, awaiting an opportunity for excessive and often explosive expression. Rage, even misguided rage, is an empowering emotion, particularly when it is used as a substitute for fear, guilt, or shame. When rage is sustained over time, and when it is attached to an enemy who has been designated as the cause of their misery, paranoids enter the realm of hatred.

 

Self-Referentiality.
All paranoid personalities are extraordinarily self-referential, like their more seriously damaged counterparts, true paranoiacs. Group inconveniences or misfortunes are always dismissed. Paranoiacs insistently focus their attention on their own misfortune. Beyond seeing unfortunate events as happening only to them, they see those events as happening because of them. A paranoid is enraged that
his
plane is always late, never mind that everyone's plane is always late. The storms that disrupt his travel plans are designed to deprive him. Even when there is no tangible person to blame, simply the winds and the rain, a metaphoric unnamed agent will be inferred.

 

Narcissism.
A paranoid is the quintessential narcissist. It isn't that it always rains on his parade—an indication of his bad luck. Rather, it is that it rains
because
of his parade. This suggests that he feels—even without the formulation of a delusion—that he has been selected for misery by some unnamed and invisible forces.

At its extreme, these perceptions are referred to in psychiatry as “ideas of reference
.
” The term is used in relation to a set of symptoms that are halfway to delusions. While not yet hearing voices, the paranoid with ideas of reference has the uncomfortable sense that people are looking at him, noticing him, or even closer to delusion, whispering about him. This explains the care with which New Yorkers avoid eye contact in close public spaces such as subways. “Whad'ya looking at?” from a paranoid stranger can be a prelude to an assault. In this context, looking is never interpreted as a glance of admiration, since the paranoid sees nothing in himself that others would admire. The paranoid personality's perspective always subsumes there is purpose and intent in all events, large or small, and the plan is always designed to deprive him, not just of goods, but of respect and love.

 

Paranoid Shift or “Projection.”
Finally—and most crucial—a paranoid shift always occurs in paranoid thinking. I use this term as an alternative to the more ambiguous word “projection,” which is the hallmark of paranoia. Projection is the process of attributing one's own impulses, feelings, or desires to others. The classic example is in Freud's attributing sexual jealousy to a projection of the jealous person's own desire to philander. Modern abnormal psychology places greater emphasis on the self, interpersonal relations, and adaptation than on instinct and impulse. In this frame of reference, it is more useful to see the paranoid mechanism in broader terms. It is not just our unconscious desire that we shift or project. It is the total responsibility for our failed existence that is transferred. In the process, rage supplants guilt.

 

The result of a paranoid shift is almost inevitably a conspiratorial view of life. “It”—whatever disaster or disgrace that stands for—didn't just happen, it was done to him. The paranoid always feels he is the victim of someone's machinations. He is denied
promotion because he is old, obese, black, a Jew, not because he is less competent. The readiness to accept conspiracy theories in the modern American culture is a testament to the rising insecurity in our society.

Conjuring up a conspiracy is an alternative to being forced to accept the fragility of existence. It can extend, beyond paranoia, to relatively normal segments of the population. It relieves them of facing the randomness and chanciness of their own existence. It is too much to accept that something as precious as life can hang by a thread in the hands of a disinterested fate. Someone must be to blame for the tragedies that fill the evening newscasts. Accidental tragic events that arbitrarily choose one and spare another must be a product of some design or purpose. The randomness of life is a burden too great for many to endure.

Conspiracy theory demands enemies, thus completing the worldview of the paranoid. A tragedy does not just happen; someone makes it happen. And if they make it happen to us, they are by definition our enemies. All that remains is to locate the enemies and deal with them.

The paranoid personality is sentenced by his own psychology to go through life with a constant sense of deprivation. Something to which he is entitled has been taken away from him. An actual state of material deprivation is not a necessary condition for paranoia or hatred. Since a feeling of deprivation goes well beyond material things, it will always at heart be seen as love and respect that has been denied.

Grievance collecting is a step on the journey to a full-blown paranoid psychosis. A grievance collector will move from the passive assumption of deprivation and low expectancy common to
most paranoid personalities to a more aggressive mode. He will not endure passively his deprived state; he will occupy himself with accumulating evidence of his misfortunes and locating the sources. Grievance collectors are distrustful and provocative, convinced that they are always taken advantage of and given less than their fair share. They are often right. There is something about the defensiveness of the paranoid personality that invites just such behavior. People are more likely to treat them ungenerously and even unfairly in response to their churlish hostility. But even if they are not given less, they will perceive that which they have been given to be less. And they, like the rest of us, accept their perceptions as reality.

After a while they begin to seek out their own injustices. They are unhappy with success. Actual deprivation is preferred. It confirms their most profound and paranoid suspicions, thus confounding their critics. They have been accused of being paranoid—overly suspicious, cynical, and mistrusting; so be it. They will embrace this position. Each event in which they have been taken advantage of becomes a triumph for their bias. They are truly grievance collectors.

Underlying this philosophy is an undeviating comparative and competitive view of life. Everything is part of a zero-sum game. Deprivation can be felt in another person's abundance of good fortune. It is essential for the maintenance of the grievance collector's view of life not only to feel deprived but also to see evidence of his own deprivation in other people's good fortune. Envy is the accompaniment of his chronic state of anger. It supports and encourages it. All the evidence he so diligently collects only confirms that he is unfairly and inequitably served at every turn. Grievance collectors have constructed a world in which they choose to live where there are always winners and losers and they are always one of the losers. So, all winning diminishes them, and the only source of joy is schadenfreude.

It is my contention that it is never exclusively the deprivation of material goods to which grievance collectors are sensitive. The generosity of spirit and amiability that can be found in some of the poorest of cultures is tribute to the human spirit. Paranoids are sensitive to lack of respect, not lack of things. They are particularly sensitive to slights and abuses, which they see everywhere. They are constantly being diminished, or in modern terms, “disrespected.”

Grievance collectors are the children of emotional poverty. So bruised and damaged is their self-esteem that they no longer hope for love, luck, or privilege. To hope for the good is to court disappointment and thereby compound their pain. To protect themselves from further disappointment, they anticipate the negative event. Traditionally, psychoanalysts have rooted such feelings of deprivation in a feeling of unlovability, a diminished sense of self-worth, fostered in early childhood. Many paranoids were indeed less-favored children. Family dynamics are complex. Some children are preferred to others for reasons that are not always apparent to outsiders. Compounding this felt injustice is the fact that all children raised with paranoid parents are likely to have paranoid tendencies. Children are more than ready to accept their parents' views of the world. A paranoid parental atmosphere, like an anxious one, is highly contagious.

This paranoid tendency can extend outward from the family and become the nucleus for a paranoid community. The paranoid community will then assure that the families within it have a culturally determined heavy dose of paranoia. Each enlargement from individual to family to community serves to lend greater and greater credibility to the paranoid ideation. Those who share the paranoid's environment now confirm the world as the hostile place that he perceives it to be. The Palestinian refugee camps are ideal environments for nurturing a paranoid view of life and a culture of hatred. Deprived of what they perceive as their proper
homes by their enemies, the Jews, and unwelcome in the general populations of their “friends” in the Arab communities, the refugees are ripe for manipulation and exploitation.

For the most part, typical paranoids will not go through life in a constant state of overt rage. They will nurse their anger. They may even embrace it, living out their lives in a steady state of sullenness and anger with those others who may not yet be identified, but who have, by the paranoids' lights, deprived them of that which is rightfully theirs. They are like coiled springs waiting for opportunities to release the latent powers of their tension.

Paranoid ideation can thus be seen as being present in a spectrum from modest to severe, in this way no different from such character traits as generosity, affection, or narcissism. The final stage—the ultimate and most extreme expression of paranoid thinking—occurs in the fortunately rare form of a paranoid psychosis. The true paranoiac is the prototypic “lunatic,” as expressed in popular literature and as perceived in the popular imagination. The condition is part of the recorded annals of almost all civilizations and is recognized in almost every culture as aberrant. The psychotic is a key player in the world of terror. And he must be distinguished from that antisocial menace, the psychopath.