the.com/paranoia
the conviction that the universe organized a meeting and you weren't invited but you're the topic.
means An irrational and persistent feeling that others are out to harm, deceive, or conspire against you, often without real evidence.
from From Greek paranoia, meaning 'madness' or 'derangement' — literally a mind (nous) gone alongside or beside (para-) itself. The Greeks used it broadly for being out of one's mind; it was revived by 19th-century psychiatry, especially in German medicine, to name a specific delusional disorder, narrowing 'madness in general' into 'the particular madness of believing they're all after you.'
- survival edge
- Anxious early humans heard predators others ignored
- clinical line
- It's delusion only when no one's actually after you
- word origin
- Greek for a mind beside itself
- crowd effect
- Shared paranoia builds cults, panics, and conspiracies
mccarthyism — senator joseph mccarthy's 1950-1954 campaign accusing hundreds of government officials of communist sympathies without evidence
salem witch trials — 1692-1693 massachusetts hysteria resulting in 20 executions based on unfounded accusations of witchcraft
operation northwoods — 1962 u.s. joint chiefs of staff proposal to stage false flag attacks to justify invading cuba