Participation in spying-and-hiding transactions will eventually produce the classic symptonms of clinical paranoia
In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police gameâeven as a victim, or a citizen being monitoredâwill eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia. The agent knows who he is spying on, but he never knows who is spying on him. Could it be his wife, his mistress, his secretary, the mail man, the birds? If there is a secret police at all, in any nation, every branch of the government, and institutions which are not even admitted to be apart of the government, all become suspect in the eyes of cautious and intelligent people as a possible front for, or tunnel to, the secret police. That is, the more shrewd will recognize that something bearing the label of HEW or even inernational Silicon and Pencil might actually be the CIA or the NSA in disguise.
In such a deception network, conspiracy theories proliferate. Rumor is necessary, it has been found, when people cannot find âofficialâ news sources that can be trusted to tell then what is really going on. The more omnipresent the secret police, the more likely it is that intelligent men and women will regard the government with fear and loathing. The government, on discovering that a growing number of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size of the secret police in order to protect itself. The Infinite Regress of reappears (Every secret police agency must be monitored by an infinite regress of other secret police agencies to prevent infiltration or the aquisition of too much power). The only solution was suggested sarcastically by playwright Bertolt Bretch. âif the government doesnât trust the people,â Bretch asked innocently, âwhy doesnât it dissolve them and elect a new people?â No way has been invented yet to elect a new people, so the government will instead spy on the existing people with increased vigor.
Every secret police organization is enganged in the collection of information and the production of misinforation, euphemistically called âdisinformation.â That is, you score points in the secret police game both by hoarding informationâhiding facts from competatorsâand by foistering false information on other players. This creates the situation Robert Anton Wilson calls âOptimum SNAFU,â in which every player has rational reasons for suspecting that any and all are trying to decieve him, gull him, con him, dupe him and generally misinform him. As Henry Kissinger is alleged to have said, anybody in Washington who isnât paranoid must be crazy. Such is the neuro-sociologoical âlogicâ of the Disinformation Matrix. It is the logic of schizophrenia.
References
- Wilson, A., Robert. (1983). Prometheus Rising Chapter 16 The Snafu Principle (Location 3016). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press.