On Paranoia and Fear

[Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In recent weeks, I have made some attempts to bring a personal
dimension to this list, coming from the working hypothesis that
Marxists generally must achieve a higher level of integration of the
personal and the political in order to be successful.  Some of you
have teased me because of this, which I am taking in good humor;
as I wrote in my fable, you were throwing eggs and tomatoes,
not rocks and bullets.  I have learned a lot from this experience
and want to report some of the results of my thinking.


Excuse the length of this posting; it is an involved issue.
It would have been preferable to write several posts in a dialogue
with you; but until the beginning of June I am fully booked with
teaching and research.  I am teaching 3 Marxian classes right now, the
Capital class on email which I announced on this list, a class on
capitalism and socialism (co-taught with Al Campbell), and a graduate
seminar about Marxian, Postkeynesian and mainstream monetary theory
which requires a lot of my time.  Therefore I will not be able to
sustain an intensive dialogue on this list at this time.  Consequently
you get it all in one portion.  (I am thinking of the Nietzsche
phrase here: the one who is tired is trying to do it all in one step.)


When I wrote last Saturday that I thought I was afraid, because I
noticed that I had acted like someone who was afraid, Carlos
immediately asked back what exactly I was thinking I was afraid of.
This is not the right way to explore one's feelings.  Coming with an
interpretation of a feeling, before the feeling has even had a chance
to assert itself, is like squatting a fly with a fly squatter before
it ever gets airborne.  First I have to ask: do I have this feeling,
and assert my right to have this feeling, before I can explore the
reason of this feeling - because it is axiomatic that feelings do not
arise from nowhere, every feeling has a reason and needs to be taken
seriously (and it should not be suppressed by drugs).  And to parody
Marx, feelings don't have it stamped on their foreheads what their
reason is.


The question whether I was indeed afraid, or whether I was just
imagining something, was resolved for me Saturday night due to a
dream I had.  In this dream, I was working in my office, and it
had become late, indeed it was already 2 am.  Then someone knocked at
my door with a loud knock.  It happens all the time that students
knock at my door, and sometimes they do knock loudly, therefore my
first impulse was to say: come in!  But then I realize: no, it is 2
am!  No student would talk to me at 2 am!  Next I find myself
calling NO, NO, jumping up from my seat, scrambling towards the door,
in order to press the button in which makes it locked, at the same
time knowing how futile this is, how easy it is to break this lock,
and that I was exposing myself since they may be shooting through
the door at any moment.  Then I woke up, intensely in fear.


The next question is: what was I afraid of?  Prompted by the reaction
of all you on this list, I could see much more clearly than before
that the PCP was not the reason.  I also discovered that I had had this
fear for a long time, and that a number of my actions and decisions of
the past obviously bore its stamp.  I also realized that I had known
that there was something fishy about these actions, but until now I
had never scrutinized them.

More importantly, I could make a connection to certain situations in my
childhood.  I have known intellectually about these situations,
without being able to remember how I felt when these things happened.
Now I realize that I had lots of reason to be afraid then (something
which would be obvious to everybody knowing the facts, but somehow I
had never thought about it this way), and lots of reason to repress my
fear.  What you call my "paranoia" had therefore some justification on
this level, and only by re-experiencing my fear (or perhaps even
experiencing it for the first time -- there are some beautiful
depth-realist aspects in Alice Miller's thought: she claims that one
can have feelings which greatly influence one's life and which one has
never ever experienced), will I be able to free myself from the effect
of this fear.  This is a long process, I will have to think about it
and work through it again and again, and mentally confront those
responsible for me being in this danger, etc.  But by getting access
to these feelings I have taken a major hurdle.


So much for the roots of my paranoia in my own biography.  But this is
not the full explanation.  I was not the only one on this list who was
afraid.  People have written to me privately that I should not
tolerate Adolfo on this list because he was dangerous.  There is more
going on than an accidental meeting of several independent paranoiacs.
What is it?


There is one and only one person on this list who has reason to be
afraid.  Who is this?  Adolfo.  Not because he is a traitor, as some
jerk wrote, but perhaps because of his social background, or
because of the fact that he suppresses most of his feelings most of
the time, which may make him suspicious in the eyes of some.  (Despite
the fact that he made some of his most hilarious and also moving
blunders when he came out of his shining armor and followed his heart,
it is my conviction that he will be trusted more if he continues on
this path of opening up his heart -- those blunders were only a sign
that he does not do it often enough and does not know well enough how
to protect himself.)  I personally am convinced that Adolfo has the
best of intentions.  Nevertheless I can easily imagine that he has
reason to be afraid.  And all those tender souls on this list who were
also afraid, simply picked up Adolfo's fear.


This means, Adolfo somehow communicated his fear to the list.  Before
explaining how he did this I will try to explain why.  Because this is
the much more important question.  It is an important part of human
nature that we need to communicate even those things to each other
which we ourselves are not aware of.  All our face muscles have this
purpose, and many of the illnesses we succumb to or crimes we commit.
Louis Proyect's song and dance in response to my question was a very
apt communication of the fact that (a) he was afraid, and that (b) he
was not aware that he was afraid.  He did not know that he was afraid,
but he nevertheless communicated to us both his fear and his
unawareness of it.  The self-referential paradox he brought up on this
list the next day was his way of saying: "I was not lying.  This was
the only way to tell you that I was afraid without knowing that I was
afraid."  This giving away of one's feelings is not a weakness, but
this is a genuine human need.  Often we are more honest to each other
than we are to ourselves.  The oracle dance I talked about in my fable
is something every human does all the time.  And it is something the
gods have to be afraid of, because it allows us to collectively
overcome the limitations our own repressions and defenses impose on
us.


Finally, *how* did Adolfo communicate his fear to us?  By treating us
the way he was treated.  Adolfo has been acting on this list as if he
could continue the debate with other means outside this list.  He did
so not jokingly, but consistently and deadly seriously, de-emphasizing
his threats when he was in the defensive, and escalating them when he
felt more secure on the list.  And the death warrant also spread fear.
Tactically he should not have done this.  He was not bluffing, as
someone suggested.  Adolfo is not the kind of person who bluffs.
Tactically one might say that it was plain stupid of him to advertise
to this world wide audience how repressive the climate of discussion
is within the PCP.  Gina tried to cover up his mistake by emphasizing
how harmless the PCP is to *us*.  She did not explain why Adolfo acted
as if he had killers lined up everywhere.  It is my conjecture that he
did it out of his human need to let us know about the fear and stress
he stands under day in and day out.


I apologize for publicly making conjectures about some very intimate
thoughts of some persons on this list.  I am doing this only for the
sake of the argument.  My objective is the general nature of the
mechanisms rather than the specifics.  I am divulging my own inner
thoughts to this list too, so to say as my apology: "I am doing it to
myself too."

Hans Ehrbar.







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