Snowden and the Paranoid Empire

The simplest definition of paranoia is a mental illness that makes a person suspicious of everyone else. According to psychiatrists, those most prone to this disease are individuals who show a certain narcissism and who have been exposed to serious frustrations, and are thus consequently endowed with low self-esteem. Beyond the veil of rationality, self-control and safety projected by American leaders and mass media, starting with President Obama, a simple examination of America’s acts of massive global spying reveals not only the existence of a mass paranoia but also the existence of a psychotic state. The primordial soup of this collective insanity is, of course, the same modern, industrial and technocratic society, based on individualism, competition and a sense of national superiority built on the idea that God is on our side, the counterpart to Muslim messianism. If paranoia is a psychiatric term that describes a mental state characterized by the presence of self-referential delusions, the distance between the ideology of many leaders and their own delusions is almost imperceptible.

Faced with a constant fear and fed by delusions, the equally pathological solution is one of control, because only by controlling the threatening forces does the state of insecurity disappear. It is well-known that at the level of households, the control of external forces is achieved by acquiring all kinds of weapons. A U.S. congressional report found that in 2009, there were about 310 million firearms in the possession of citizens. But at the state level, distrust of others generates a reaction that, when taken to the max, means knowing what 7 billion human beings think, decide, plan and act. And for this you have to spy on them. Thus the paranoid state arises, settles in and takes advantage of three fundamental resources: scientific, economic and technological.

The obsession with knowing everything comes from the bowels of conventional science, namely the industrialized science in the service of capital. But it also is present in the pathological events of everyday life. The Monster sex maniac in Vienna* and the Cleveland predator** tried to control their objects of desire — young women — by locking them up for years. Absolute scientific obsession is expressed by a desire to accumulate and collect information. If knowledge is power, science in its anomalous form seeks to understand, classify, quantify and collect everything obsessively. The computers of many research centers in the U.S. and Europe have worked for years to accumulate global inventories of plants, animals, fungi, languages and knowledge. Something similar happens with genes, genomes and seeds, such as rice, corn and wheat, which are collected and frozen in giant refrigerators. As for quantification, a group of American economists proposed to calculate the dollar value of nature — and succeeded, despite its pointlessness.

Also famous was the Biosphere-2 project, a $200 million experiment to create a second nature in the Arizona desert. The artificial ecosystem under human control was designed by a group of scientists in a giant bubble. A few years into the project, an unanticipated detail shut it down.

The control of information has followed a not so different path. In addition to the CIA and the Pentagon, in 1952 the U.S. government established the National Security Agency, which has become the largest, most expensive and most sophisticated instrument of global espionage. The main facilities of the NSA, located near Washington D.C., are made up of an impressive technological and military complex, constantly monitored, with copper walls (to prevent leakage of electromagnetic signals), electrified fences, anti-tank barriers, motion sensors and hundreds of cameras. The agency also has a mega complex in the Utah desert to store trillions of bytes of information from around the world in four sheds that house servers and supercomputers, a complex that cost $2 billion.

Staffed by about 35,000 employees, mainly mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists, thousands of minicomputers and dozens of giant computers work day and night to receive, collect, sort, process and analyze millions of pieces of data captured worldwide, including those about you, dear reader, and this very article that you are now reading. The reported flow is amazing: The NSA intercepts about 1.7 billion telephone conversations, emails and similar communications daily. It employs not only translators, engineers, analysts, designers and experts in cryptology, but also hackers working in cyberwarfare units to penetrate computer systems and steal information. Paranoia combined with rationalism results in this: Reason turns into madness, and the United States becomes a cyber dictatorship.

“Are we sane?” This is the question with which Erich Fromm starts one of his major works, “The Sane Society” (1955), a snapshot of American society. Half a century later, the question is not only current, but remarkably necessary. As we have noted elsewhere, the world’s fate is increasingly in the hands of the thinking monkey (Homo sapiens) or the mad monkey (Homo demens). This dilemma will become essential as ecological risk and the advances of the human species create immeasurable and irreversible challenges. Today, Edward Snowden represents sanity, universal rights, the freedom to disobey and human dignity in a society that is moving toward a new kind of dictatorship, as paranoia is taking over more and more in the lives of its leaders. It is, in short, a crucial battle between common sense and the pathology of normalcy: Snowden, and the sane portion of the species, against the paranoid empire.

* Editor’s Note: This refers to the case of a serial rapist who attacked a large number of women in the metro in Vienna, Austria.

** Editor’s Note: This refers to Ariel Castro, who is charged with holding three women in captivity for over a decade in Cleveland.