Paranoia is one of the least appreciated yet most significant emotions in the United States today. As Richard Hofstadter explained decades ago in his book based on an earlier article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, paranoia is the basis of one of the things that is undermining the country as it reinforces conspiracy theories. America is a fearful country and that fear manifests itself in many strange ways.
What is paranoia? It is unreasonable fear. We all have fears and many of us also have unreasonable fears. Disaster can flow from unreasonable fears if they are not constrained. America has experienced this repeatedly. It experiences it now. There are many examples of the power of unreasonable fears. This morning we drove near to one of them
An ancient Titan missile site is located near Salina Kansas close to the Nebraska border. It was one of two such sites in North America during the Cold War. The other was located in Green Valley Arizona where Chris and I lived for a month a couple of years ago when we first enjoyed an extended stay in the American south in winter. That missile site was turned in to a museum. We toured it with friends John Wiebe and Margaret Daley-Wiebe.
The second site near Salina where we drove today, is being developed as a security haven for the super-rich of America. It is astonishing, but these are among the most fearful people in America. You would think they had nothing to fear. After all, what can harm the super-rich?
As Evan Osnos said in an article for The New Yorker, “Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization.” Sometimes the practitioners of this art are called survivalists, because they hope to survive what they see as the inevitably impending doom. They hope to survive something that is intuitively unsurvivable. Full disclosure I fear the same thing but have not invested a fortune is finding a way to survive it.
As Osnos said,
Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.
I am fascinated that this is being developed by the very rich. Why is that? I don’t know, but I have a theory. I think the rich in America live in fear. They fear that their wealth will crumble and they will be left to their own devices among drug crazed hooligans out to get them and their families and their wealth. In fact, I think (entirely without evidence of course) that this fear emerged out of a sense of guilt. Guilt is the existential edge of unreasonable fear. American society–and American wealth in particular–is based on 2 ultimate horrendous injustices. The first was the genocide of Indigenous peoples that the first European settlers encountered in the New World. The second was the astonishingly long imposition of slavery on African-Americans. Immigrants from Africa as Ben Carson famously called them. That injustice leads to guilt, which leads to fear. Many rich Americans are incredibly fearful.