Archis's Blog

One of the many memorable quotes by the famous lawyer, Perry Mason, should apply to a lot of us. “Murder”, he says, “requires a powerful motivation. The murderer is more often a person who knew the victim intimately, than not. A person does not simply wake up one day, and decide to kill another human being.” We should all be the wiser, if we understood this.

I come across plenty of paranoid people. Some more annoying than others (for various reasons, the least of which isn’t that they are massive wastes of your time.) The difference between annoying paranoia and just general fear, is assertiveness. The paranoid love the feeling of being in fear, in much the same way many love the feeling of heartbreak (just read “Man and Superman” already, and save me the need for elaboration.)

As a child, I grew up near some farmland on the outskirts of a major city in India. Plenty of visitors to our home were afraid of “animals” attacking them (). If you’ve been shielded from the forests, you probably know the feeling. They were remarkably afraid of snakes – which is stupid because not every jungle (a farm isn’t a jungle) comes with a stock crew of snakes, tigers, lions waiting to specifically to bite/eat you; the difference between being afraid of lions, and just loving the feeling of being afraid of a suburb and thus inventing lions. This is not to say that snakes aren’t dangerous. So can our dogs be. They’re huge, and they’re highly protective. You especially don’t want to mess with one whose jaw can cleanly cut off a human limb in one bite when necessary.

What was amusing about the fear is the reassurance of self-importance they derived from it. Our dogs, while quite dangerous, were also quite lazy. Same with the snakes. They had comfortable lives, and it was a damned inconvenience for them to even be bothered to get up and do something, unless it involved eating a juicy rat. The idea that a snake is struggling to survive, doesn’t harm a human soul for over five decades, to secretly build up the trust of larger society, all the while waiting for this specific person to walk out of the city limits, and then bite him! We’re not talking about the Australian outback here.

I frequently feel the same paranoia when suggesting anything out of the ordinary. You really are tempting me at times, if you want me to seriously believe that someone went out of their way to invent an entire sport (snowboarding, skiing, etc.) or a restaurant, run the business for many years, build up a reputation, exactly so they could tempt YOU to walk in one day, and that would be the specific day they try to kill you. I’d say if you were really that important, more than likely that industry of choice is the automobile business and commercial flight.

For the paranoid few, I have four words: Nobody gives a damn! Face it. Yes, it sucks, that nobody goes out of their way to build strange webs of conspiracies around you. That doesn’t make it untrue. To cause harm requires effort. Unless causing you harm is of any gain (in the Outback, the gain is ‘tender free-range human’), very few will even think about it. Those who try will do so lazily (causing you harm is the same as going to work – they want to get it done with and hit the bar.)

I understand it sucks to live life knowing nobody’s going to “hack into your accounts” because you have nothing in them that others want. It sucks to know that all that whispering you do in plain visible sight does get attention, but for the amusement others derive out of it. Important secret things aren’t whispered in bars with conspicuous sunglasses. You never know such things are being said – that being the entire point of secrecy. It sucks to know that the products that piss you off, weren’t built to piss you off, but rather because nobody cared that you existed.

The temptation to feel victimized is certainly great – because then you get instant importance. Someone is taking the trouble to victimize you. The reality, I’m afraid, is much much worse than that!