Prophets are Paranoiacs
Brian.Milnes@CENTRO.SOAR.CS.CMU.EDU
Sat, 30 Jul 88 02:33:58 EDT
Thirdly, paranoic delusions bear a disconcerting, embarrassing
resemblance to the beliefs held and propagated by founders of
religions, by political leaders, and by some artists. Such people
often make claims on behalf of themselves, their religious ideas,
their country, their art, which would be regarded as grandiose and
delusional if their ideas did not harmonize with the needs of their
contemporaries and thereby achieve recognition and endorsement.
Nowadays anyone who claimed to be the Messiah, who addressed God as
his personal father, and asserted that 'he who is not for me is
against me' would be at risk of being referred to a psychiatrist and
diagnosed a paranoiac. But presumably in the first century AD His Word
spoke to many - as indeed it continues to this day to do.
Similarly, any politician who asserted the innate superiority of his
own race and claimed that his country was the victim of an
international conspiracy would today raise doubts as to his sanity,
but in Germany in the 1930s Hitler found all too many people prepared
to agree with him. There must, it seems, be some as yet unformulated
relationship between the psychology of paranoia and that of prophets
and leaders.
Excerpted from the entry on Paranoi, p577.
"The Oxford Companion to the Mind"
Editor, Richard L. Gregory.
The Oxford University Press, 1987.
That evil old space alien, Jehovah I, sure did a fine job of fooling
everone in the first century. Too bad there were no psychiatrists back
then; they would have given the future and psychology some slack by
locking up all who heard his slackless jive.
-Brian
